Shopping Begins Online
More than ever, the shopping process begins online. Average people search Google to find product reviews before ever leaving their home. They go to retail websites, blogs and ask their online friends looking for opinions about the product they are looking to purchase.
The other day I received a text from a friend who is not a blogger and is typically very un-techy. She had gone online to research and read product reviews on a blog before choosing a particular makeup product. She thanked me profusely and said that without my influence she would have not known to do that.
That incident reinforced everything I believe about shopping today; modern consumers value information about products before they purchase and not just information provided by the company. They look for real reviews by real consumers and see bloggers as a trusted source.
Although the consumers reading blogs may not know the blogger personally, the relationship cultivated through the blogger’s product reviews, recipes and personal stories become real to the consumer. Bloggers interact with their readers either through comments, email or social media outlets. (Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest are primary traffic drivers today.) When a consumer connects personally with a blogger, they become loyal to what the blogger promotes because of a relationship built on trust.
Brands have become increasingly aware of content marketing and are scrambling to keep up with this change in consumer behavior. Recently, the Harvard Business Review did a piece on this sharing, “…today consumers are more promiscuous in their brand relationships: they connect with myriad brands, through media channels beyond the manufacturer’s or retailer’s control or even knowledge”.
This market shift benefits the consumer, but many brands have been slow to respond to it. Brands that have succeeded during this change have gotten on board with blogging and the social world, reaching out for honest opinions to be shared with these micro-publishers’ loyal consumers.
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I would ask the writer from HBR and yourself: Why are consumers more promiscuous with their brand relationships now?
Some would argue that people are always looking for the bargain price because of the recession and that the popularity of a brand can be tied to the price of the product. I don’t think so.
I think price is a secondary concern. BECAUSE there is less money to go around people want products that work, will last, and will remain consistent. In order for a consumer to pick up a product and buy it, these three characteristics have to remain in balance. That’s where the bloggers come in, people finding other people to give them the information they need to balance the scales, not companies.
So, here is some food for thought: Who is creating today’s brands? Ten years ago it was companies. Today, I read constantly about how the average joe is the key developer of “the brand”, but, maybe, after we have all been exposed to the extreme quantity of information at our fingertips, we are beginning to whittle those sources back down, to the bloggers that are driving the brand conversation with open and honest communication.