According to The Nielsen Company’s 2009 Global Online Consumer Survey, consumers’ overall trust in brand marketing messages has actually increased since 2007. This is primarily because major marketers realize more and more consumers are double-checking marketing messages that interest them with those they trust. Thus, backed by mega marketing budgets, the world’s largest brands have started integrating user feedback and actual user-generated content into core brand marketing efforts.
“The explosion in Consumer Generated Media over the last couple of years means consumers’ reliance on word of mouth in the decision-making process, either from people they know or online consumers they don’t, has increased significantly,”– Jonathan Carson, President of Online, International, for the Nielsen Company.
We believe this study marks the end of unilateral brand development. It shows that engaging with consumers in a meaningful way through new online tools is the best way to become more relevant to consumers, gain greater influence over purchasing decisions and add credence to outbound marketing messages. However, to truly be effective in a more socialized marketplace, brand marketers must understand the fundamentals of influence.
The Hierarchy of Influence
1 Personal Experience
The most important component in defining what a brand actually is to a consumer is an individual’s experience with a product or service. It would be incredibly difficult for a shoe insert company to convince anyone that its products were good at reducing foot pain if wearing them were painful. Many brands had forgotten this in the last decade and are in the midst of various “customer first” efforts. Do not underestimate the power of personal experience in determining a brand identity. It may be hard to believe a brand promise, but it’s impossible to ignore a brand experience.
2 Reputation
The second and most increasingly important factor in how consumers define a brand is reputation. The experiences shared by friends, family or even strangers in web forums or commenting on blogs have more clout in defining a brand’s true identity to a consumer than a billboard or TV ad ever will. Whether you want to call it reputation marketing, advocacy marketing or plain ole word-of-mouth, appealing to the opinions of key influencers will continue to be a rapidly evolving segment of brand development. Whereas your power as a marketer to alter or improve a consumer’s personal experience with a product or service is limited, the broadband web provides many opportunities to enhance a brand’s reputation.
Social tools like blogs, forums, Facebook and Twitter allow for increased interaction with customers and are an attractive option for marketers looking to influence a brand’s reputation. According to Nielsen[i], 90% of consumers trust recommendations from people they know. 70% trust the opinions of other consumers posted online – even if they are strangers. By comparison, only 62% of consumers trust messages delivered via television advertising and only 54% trust a brand’s messages delivered via opt-in emails.
3 Brand Messaging
Marketing messages hold a distant third place in the hierarchy of influence. Meaning, just because you say your product is faster or tastes better, doesn’t mean people will believe it. In the face of a consumer’s personal experience or the trusted opinions of others, the power of your marketing messages as agents of persuasion or attitude change has been significantly degraded over the last few decades.
Lance Shields of Fast Company sums it up in his November 2008 blog post, What is Social Branding[ii] when he says,
“Our brand is not our’s to control. It’s our customers, our employees’ and all the other people who think and talk about us behind or in front of our backs.”
The potential for social tools to enhance a brand’s reputation is clear. The problem for most marketers, even those who have embraced the value of social marketing, is that using these tools has been primarily tactical and experimental thus far. For social marketing to truly make a difference, it has to be integrated into the formative stages of a company’s branding efforts. If a person’s experiences don’t match up with a brand message or if a consumer receives two different messages from TV and Facebook, they’ll get confused. And as John Scully of Apple Computer once said, “minds ignore confusion.”
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