The Product Reputation Market Intelligence Reporter was released into Public Beta about twenty days ago, and more than few of you made some very good suggestions for improvement of our overall user experience.
Today we released a version of the home page that includes some of the suggested design improvements. Hopefully we heard you correctly and made it better. In either case, please let us know. In the meantime we’ll continue to work on making PRMIR more useful.
A Spanish saying declares “A bad wound may be healed, bad repute kills.” Yet another proverb found in the Holy Bible reveals “Good reputation is more valuable than wealth.”
Reputation is the perception of your product (or company) based on your customer’s personal views or prejudices. Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, defines reputation as: “What people say about you when you have left the room.” A few dissatisfied customers along the way may create negative reviews, but we all know you can’t please everyone, all the time. It’s the majority that counts most, however it is critical to monitor and analyze what caused the negative Customer Experience, so we can learn and improve.
Corporate marketing plans often include strategies to enhance their reputation, but are they considering customer feedback as a device for measuring reputation? Should these views yield influence on the way you produce and deliver your products?
Lately, social media has emerged as a handy tool for gaining insight into consumer’s expectations. Customers are talking in their own language about the products they are using, voicing opinions and sharing their experiences and disappointments. They are discussing product/brand features in relation to cost and reputation. Perhaps ‘Social Research,’ if you will, is being prepared right before our eyes as social networks display consumer findings of our products.
While many shoppers are using social media to make informed decisions about their purchases, you can take advantage of the same information to modify your marketing plan, find a fix or correct customer support delivery, if necessary. Building and maintaining a good reputation are keys to business success. If positive PR is missing from your product’s character, you need to know about it quickly so you can find a solution to repair the injury.
Turning a deaf ear to the small voices of your Customers can easily turn them into a roar like the one Toyota is experiencing today and Dell experienced 5 years ago with XPS overheating. Being proactive early in the game can prevent tarnish on your reputation and enormous cost of its repair. In reputation management, an ounce of prevention is definitely worth a ton of cure.
We have developed a methodology to consistently measure product reputation. Raw, Customer generated data is used to measure the difference between consumer expectations and their actual experience with a specific product. These metrics, and detailed “Deep Dive” reports, provide effective road maps for product management and delivery.
Reputation beats everything else. But as Rome was not built in a day, reputation cannot be built in a day either. However, one blunder and you could hit the wall, knocking it all down. Learn to listen to what your customers are saying; your reputation is at stake.
You have probably seen examples of data produced from our database using our PRMIR v1.1 in the previous posts of this blog. Well, now you can take it for a free 5-day test drive. There are a few more examples of the use cases at this site.
We are currently monitoring the reputations of over 14,000 Consumer Electronics and Computer products in about 300 categories. Our database is growing at the rate of 25% per month, however there is a lot of work left to do in improving our algorithms to achieve a more accurate distribution of products into proper categories, and enable our data acquisition to harvest information at a higher performance rate. The accuracy of the scores is already pretty accurate and the consistency of interpretation allows for meaningful analysis of market segments.
Please let me now how this service can be improved from your perspective.
Create a Customer Experience that delights them.
I’d love to get my hands on data for comparative analysis of the resources required to design remarkable products vs marketing ordinary ones.
Robert Stephens, the founder of Geek Squad that was acquired by Best Buy, reportedly said that “Advertising is the tax you pay for being unremarkable.” Given the choice, I would always select voluntary taxation such as consumption/sales taxes and/or lottery instead of mandatory, regressive income taxes, however, the governments have the luxury to extract both and don’t give us much room for choice. The reasons companies elect to pay an “advertising tax”, that often reaches 30% of retail price, is because we, the Customers, pay it.
I do realize that advertising is only a part of the marketing budget, and wonder what role the rest of the marketing organization play in maintaining competition based on the price per feature strategy. How much do marketers know what their Customers think about the product they purchased? Have they realized the value they were expecting? If not, what is the best way to close this gap?
Standard Deviation of Average Headphone Reputation.
Based on 64,601 Customer Reviews published before January 26, 2010
When you exceed Customer expectations, just unobtrusively help them to share their experience as much as possible. At this point all they really need is a really tall soapbox.
I took almost a month to recover from my CES2010 and now I can attempt to write something more or less cohesive. The experience was absolutely overwhelming. Bright images on gigantic screens and loud sounds continuously blasting away are to be expected at Consumer Electronics trade show, but my mind could not function very well in these conditions. I have not visited such large, noisy and heavily attended events for a few years and the assault on my senses was very difficult to bear, but I managed.
We are a new associate member of the Consumer Electronics Association and this was my very first visit to this event. CEA offers a terrific Mentoring program to its members and I came to Las Vegas to take advantage of it. It is amazing how much one can learn from truly knowledgeable and generous people even during a short personal meeting. I am very grateful to Bill Matthies of Coyote Insight for sharing his deep knowledge and understanding of the marketplace. I started this company with an idea of converting virgin data into actionable information, and we have almost succeeded – Bill made me realize that the link between our metrics and an action is very obvious to nobody but me, and advised to share that link with others using “stories” and “pictures” like this:
PRMIR – Deviation of Reliability Reputation scores for the Docking Station Product Category
Robert Heiblim of BlueSalve and my CEA Mentor, helped me understand the inter-workings of the CE community better and to meet people in CE product marketing to learn more about how they go about conducting their business. I only wish I could get more of Robert’s guidance and advice.
I need more examples of business processes where product managers have to “translate” data into “information” that suggest action.
Consider the actions a marketing product manager can take based on the data that their product ABC has a low satisfaction score. I can’t think of any other action than to learn more, i.e. to discover more data. Presumably information is created when our marketing product manager (or product marketing manager) compares ABC’s product satisfaction score with the one of a competing product, hence comparison of two points produce information, i.e. higher value.
Correlating the information produced by tracking these two data points over time with sales numbers can create knowledge – “product with an inferior reputation tends to undersell its competition by X%, when sold at competitive (i.e. similar) price”. Now, this is an actionable piece of knowledge as our MP/PM manager can attempt to discount the ABC product to stimulate sales or attempt to improve the customer’s opinion about it.
Can you suggest any scenarios where aggregated customer feedback about reliability of a product XYZ can lead to/suggest an action that protects and/or improves its profit margin? Your help will be deeply appreciated.
This time I played out a different scenario. It is quite common that customers of the products with high reputation for reliability, do not have much to say about support. It is understandable as they have no reason to experience Support Organizations. So I applied an unusual combination of filters to expose very popular and reliable products with negative customer experiences of Support.
This report helps to focus and to research root causes of problem by quickly exposing negative sentiment reviews about support.
I have used the following filters:
Product Reviews>50
CSI>1
PFS>1
PRS>1
PSS>1
Webcams that earned high reputation from their users, but have Support issues
Here are the resulting report
We continue to test and debug the PRMIR (Product Reputation Market Intelligence Reporter), to get it ready for private beta. Original scenarios were focused on use of the Product Reputation data by product marketing managers of Consumer Electronics manufacturers to spot “systemic” failures of the products they are responsible for, and provide them with information to assist in developing corrective actions. However as I test the PRMIR, I keep coming up with new ways to focus and filter the information from different perspectives. The consumer focus (i.e. “what is the most reputable 40″ flat screen HDTV?”) is the most obvious example.
All 30 of very popular Asus netbooks have very high reputation for their functionality and design, but over half of them have some support problems. If I was responsible for Asus technical support or Customer Experience management, I would surely want to look at the source of that information (verbatim). The problem is that these metrics are based on 4,882 customer reviews and any meaningful analysis would take a significant amount of time to locate specific references to the support issues. The Support “filter” below helps to focus on the subject of investigation.
Click on the image to enlarge.
