Recently I’ve been reading various articles on brand building strategies and it has been a good review of the basic principals of marketing. The usual discussions are typically about the importance of planning the best marketing strategy.

One of the hottest topics on the internet today is SMM (Social Media Marketing).  Questions are being raised about the role of social media on the infamous 4P’s of marketing.  I think we still have to address Product, Price, Place & Promotion; however, there’s a new sheriff in town and Reputation is his middle name.  Consumers have participated in surveys for decades, but social media is now defining many product’s brand image.

Many companies are looking for ways to harness the power of social media in hopes of building a positive image for their products.  It seems that lack of strategy has been a hindrance for most.  We all know that customer reviews and feedback to our company’s website is a good source for ideas to improve our products.  It’s no surprise successful companies like Pure Digital and Bose use them to monitor and measure their products’ reputation and improve processes based on these findings.

The majority of today’s major companies are now focusing on the importance of social media marketing trends.  It seems that many product manufacturers are also experimenting with ways to exploit it for their own benefit.   Are any of them finding ways to measure social media’s strategic impact on brand value?  I actually wonder if any of them really understand what to do with any of it.

Does collecting bits of data from what all is being “said” without a plan to convert them into action make it worth the effort?  The use of a well developed process to consistently measure your product’s reputation across the consumer market may perhaps prove to be invaluable.

Taking on the challenge with great success, we use raw data from customer reviews and feedback on various social mediums to measure the gap between customer expectations and  their actual experiences with specific products.   Reflecting on functionality, reliability and product support, these metrics provide crucial information that could allow you to increase profitability as well as develop lucrative niche markets.

Successful marketing involves everything that leads to increased sales.  Realizing that social media is defining the reputation (i.e brand/product perception by it’s customer) for nearly every product on today’s market, you should definitely take advantage of this innovative marketing tool.

Product information, broadcasted via different methods and encountered by different means, is processed by potential buyers and creates certain expectations in our minds.

Functionality:

There are multiple “channels” by which an interest in buying a product creeps into our mind, but it is often a desire to experience functions and features of this product, and a promise of making our lives better, that makes us consider to part with our money. Hence if our expectations are not met by actual product experience, we often feel cheated and express dissatisfaction with the product. Sometimes it’s caused by actual and intentional misrepresentation of a product’s functionality, but more often it is misinterpretation of marketing messages associated with the product by a Customer.

Reliability:

No person decides to purchase a product expecting it to be “dead on arrival”, but it happens more often than you think. There is no way to know what is the expectation of every Customer for longevity of a product, but I can bet  that at a minimum it is at least 1 day longer that the length of the product’s warranty.  However, longevity is only one parameter of the Customer Reliability expectation. The other one is availability of the product for use or experience. Consider an example where a product breaks (i.e. is not available for use) during its reasonable life expectancy, and the Customer has to send it in for replacement or repair. Even more troubling are the instances when the loss of use is accompanied by associated damages or losses of perishable products, data, reputation or business opportunities, etc.

I consider Reliability reputation the single most important factor in my personal purchasing decisions as a failure to consider it very carefully can result in the most damage and unhappiness.

Support:

While there are ambiguities of Customer misinterpretations of Functionality messages, and a factor of Customer inexperience that may lead to negative Reliability experiences, there is no excuse for creating negative Support experiences. A Customer, rightfully, expects delivery at the stated time, respect for promised exchange and refund policies, and most importantly knowledgeable help from people who are genuinely interested in helping out. Unfortunately many companies treat Customer Support as the cost factor to be reduced, instead of an opportunity to learn and correct potential shortcomings in the product’s design and its messaging. This unwise strategy leads to commoditization of their markets, destruction of their brand value and profit margins as the Customer starts to look at their products as “disposable”.

Reputation is one of the most valuable assets of any company – It takes significant time and effort to build a good reputation.  Great company reputation provides an opportunity for higher profit margins, as trust in your product improves, and allows less discounting and advertising expense compared to less reputable competition.

Higher sales becomes a result of Confidence in your product’s quality, reliability and support – as opposed to its price.

The only way to build Reputation is to provide your Customers with Experiences that consistently exceed their Expectations.

Very interesting results of the survey:

A Social Media Survey conducted on behalf of PRWeek and MS&L by PRWeek and CA Walker found that marketers don’t make changes to their products based on customer feedback, despite monitoring feedback being one of the most common business uses of social media in the first place.

The survey found that 70% of marketers say they’ve never made a change to a product or marketing efforts based on feedback from consumers on social media sites.

I have to second Larry Malloy’s comment.

I believe there’s two reasons for this.First, we are still in the early stages of social media as a marketing tool. I believe as the technology matures, potentials are stretched, metrics are determined, and processes are developed this will change.

Second, there could be a disconnect between marketing and product management (you said the survey polled senior level marketers). As a product manager, I often used social media throughout the product lifecycle, and the executives I reported to often did not know where the new product ideas came from. And, what I learned through social media, I often further tested through more traditional marketing technologies like surveys, customer visits, interviews, etc.

Most Product Management and Marketing executives I have talked to are interested in listening, but have no strategy, processes, methodologies or best practices to act on customer feedback. Most tools available today are not providing particularly actionable data either. I am not sure what would or should come first, but without these elements you cannot produce any ROI. I attempted to come up with a “calculator” to measure an impact of customer feedback on product profitability, but it is just a rudimentary attempt for discussion and anybody who wants a copy can find it here.