Erosion of consumer trust in brands
Consumer trust in brands is the lowest it's ever been. According to Y&R’s BrandAsset™ Valuator, average trust levels have fallen by more than 50% since 1997 in the US. There are now unprecedented demands for transparency and responsible corporate ethics. In a recent survey, a staggering 51% of consumers in the US stated that they would boycott products for social, political or environmental reasons (DYG Scan, November 2007). Brands have never been under such scrutiny.
What this means is that customers are trying to read between the lines of marketing messages, filtering out the truth about a brand, product or service. Does the product do what it says it will do? How does it compare to the competition? Where can I find the best price?
Sure, they'll go to a brand site for specific product information and that's an important role, but a corporate sites' influence is limited. For authentic brand truths most people will go to who or what they trust - their friends, colleagues or even Google.
As marketers we have to be much more aware, and ready to take action, in the face of potential damage to brand perception. Today’s challenge is finding a way to engage with customers who are disgruntled about a product or service, because it's now very easy for them to make their voice heard through social media. Ignore bloggers at your peril!
There are a few things we need to do:
1. Listen
We have to
listen – understand the conversations, understand where they are taking place and understand who is influencing them.
The most important aspect to managing brand perceptions is listening first. To assess your brand’s reputation you have to first understand what people are saying about your brand, where they're saying it and who the main influencers in the debate are. There are two ways you can do this; the simple way and the more sophisticated.
The simple way Anyone can track conversations online by:
· Setting up
alerts for brands or people using tools like
Google or
Yahoo Alerts.
·
Monitoring blog posts through sites like
Technorati.
· At the simplest level, by searching for brand names on Google, MSN or Yahoo and seeing what appears. By looking carefully at search results we can check our own properties and keywords are optimised for 'natural search'.
The more complex way of listening
Taking this to another level requires investment in a listening tool to assess what's happening online. Numerous studies show that an increase in brand 'buzz' = greater market share. Consider these two types of tools:
- Corporate reputation management tools
Designed to assess developing problems that might become issues. They are successfully used by brands, such as pharmaceuticals, and the algorithms of these tools are designed to find issues.
- Influencer tracking tools The second type of tool determines both the topics of conversation about a brand and, more importantly, identifies the influencers and agenda-setters in the conversation. At Wunderman, we use this type of tool to develop more impactful conversations for our clients.
Importantly, these track influence rather than popularity. For example, take juvenile obesity. People naturally think Jamie Oliver is one of the key influencers. However, Jamie is actually not even in the top 10 most ‘influential’ people on the subject. Popular, but not necessarily the most influential. The real influencers are the British Medical Journal and National Obesity Forum; organisations that are determining the agenda and influencing the largest audience.
2. Organise
We have to
organise ourselves in a different manner and dedicate staff to monitor and manage social media. A Burson-Martsteller survey in 2008 identified that only 15% of Fortune companies communicate with their customers via blogs.
As Erin Byrne, Chief Digital Strategist @ B-M, says, "I think the reason…why it still isn't higher is that companies are still grappling with how they participate in the conversation when they don't have control over the message."
Brands that are trying to organise in a different way are Pizza Hut, by recruiting a
Summer 'Twintern' – a chance for a regular social media fan to manage Pizza Hut’s output.
Another good example of brands changing their approach is Ford in the US. Scott Monty, Global Head of Social Media, has a role to engage Ford with Social Media sites. He has a blog and a twitter account (
www.twitter.com/scottmonty) with over 19,000 followers. So brands are taking a step forwards – are you?
3. Participate We can build credibility and gain the right to participate in the conversations by being engaging and interesting. Brands should think about developing application, content or conversations that are useful, relevant or entertaining.
Developing interactive content and services is good way of entering the conversation and generating value from:
• Digital services that make life easier – Nike +, UPS desktop widget (
http://www.widget.ups.com/en-gb/index.html)
• Entertainment – virals, games
• Helping consumers become creators of content or ideas. Dell’s Ideas Storm is a great example of this. They have also recently developed even more interesting innovation challenges with Dell Social Innovation Competition, which has developed some interesting social innovation ideas. (
http://www.dellsocialinnovationcompetition.com/)
P&G presented all the submissions and announced winners for each of the categories: Out of the Can (Most creative), Can-do (most realistic), Craft-Can-Ship (best executed) and Final Can-tasy (Overall winner). Whilst all the Wunderman entries were highly commended, we discovered we’d also won the Final Can-tasy category! 
