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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
In MITSloan Management Review Article “A Plan to Invent the Marketing We Need Today”, Yoram Wind wrote
This world has led to a new breed of consumers. They expect customization (make it mine), communities (let me be a part of it), multiple channels (let me call, click or visit), competitive value (give me more for my money) and choice (give me search and decision tools).
In this post I would like to focus on the combination of the first (customization) and the last (choice) and call it “personalization” for the purpose of this discussion.
As a consumer selecting a product to purchase, I rely on marketing collateral to form my expectations, and on the comments of my peers who already experienced the products I consider to buy. Any decision is made with a relative shortage of information required to make this decision. An unavoidable ambiguity of available information from marketing collateral and product scores from online retailers or advertisers, does not help the consumer to reduce uncertainty of their decision easily. I want to know how likely this product will satisfy me, because while I know that other customers, who described their experiences are my peers, their product scores do not help me to understand whether we share and value the same aspects of a product experience. The only way to figure that out is to read carefully the descriptions of their experience. That takes a lot of time and effort.
The higher number of customer reviews and more detailed their description of a product experience (more data), the more useful and accurate are the results of personalized information to support the purchasing decision.
The key element for me, as a consumer, is the reliability issues of the Garmin product when it is compared to very similar Magellan GPS. These reliability reputation issues are not “visible” looking at traditional 4.5 stars customers gave to Garmin. However for me reliability of GPS device represent the highest differentiator, and allows me to “personalize” my choice.
A very similar problem facing marketeers who want to understand specific, personal characteristics that affect the reputation of their products and brands, and how they influence their competitive position in their market segments. Their problem is multiplied by a number of products, brands and competitors they have to follow and lack of consistent methodology to produce effective output. The technologies are complex to implement and costs are staggering.
Professor Wind continues
Through its maturation as a discipline over the past half century, marketing has emerged as a rigorous field. Tools such as conjoint analysis, economic and econometric modeling, behavioral economics, data mining, and techniques derived from mathematical psychology have raised the level of rigor and strengthened the insights that marketing can contribute to the enterprise. But many of the most rigorous tools were developed years ago. Today’s challenge is how to move from using old tools that are focused on solving problems of the past to developing new and rigorous tools that are relevant to the challenges of today and the future.
I would like to pose that “personalization” is the new “segmentation”, and certain aspects of personal Customer Experience provide a lot more guidance for marketers than demographics, ethnicity, etc. because they are much closer correlate to how your customers use and experience your products in their circumstances.
Marketing is divided between behavioral and quantitative approaches to marketing questions. Increasingly, the recruitment of faculty and doctoral students, and the design of workshops, are focused separately on behavioral and quantitative approaches. Ideally, the
two sides should come together. Markets can be seen through either a behavioral or quantitative lens, but as with binocular vision, we gain more depth when we look through both.
These 29 netbooks are selected from 98 available on the market and the result of sentiment analysis and opinion mining of 16,402 customer reviews.
I used the Product Reputation Market Intelligence Reporter with the following filters:
1. Number of Reviews per product >50
2. CSI >1
3. PFS>1
4. PRS>1
5. PSS>1
Netbooks that earned highest Product Reputation Scores
The resulting report can be seen here. The information can also be downloaded as a Excel file format to produce graphs, presentations and additional analysis.
I wrote this story awhile ago, before we had this blog started, to eventually publish here.
It all started in August 2007, when I had to travel across the continent almost every week and started shopping for a lightweight laptop computer suitable for business travel.
While selecting parameters for my planned purchase in terms of specifications was not too difficult, if you know what you want, predicting the quality of your ownership experience may prove to be much more complicated. I’ve been an online shopper for a long time, but the recent cost of shipping and the hassle of dealing with less and less responsive customer service reps, started to outweigh the original savings and conveniences. As a result I became much less impulsive with my online purchases – in this economy there is less money to spend and less time to waste, so I figured a small investment into initial research would be a good thing.
I found three major sources of information that were quite useful to assist me in making the choice:
Two laptops that I had short-listed for purchase, based on product specifications and editorial reviews, had very similar reputation ratings of 3.5 stars out of 5, which is not perfect, but acceptable. So what is the next step? Toss a coin? Is it safe to assume that these two products have the same reputation and would be equally satisfying purchases?
It turns out that this would have been a very bad assumption.
Usually I lack in patience (those who know me, please stop laughing – “Good men know their limitations”), but this time I decided to assess whether the reasons, that prevented these laptop users from giving the highest satisfaction ratings of 5, are “showstoppers” for me, or not – we all have our own limits of tolerance to different experiences. I ended hunting for and reading through dozens, or sometimes hundreds of reviews and found out that the most negative experiences with laptop #1 were centered around overheating issues and resulting customer service hassles, where negative reports of laptop #2 were focused on order processing and fulfillment problems.
I had invested 8-10 hours of my time in research and spent $120 more than originally anticipated, to purchase the laptop #2 from an online retailer that had it in inventory, to bypass the fulfillment problem and have been enjoying my laptop without any reliability problems. I hear the laptop #1 OEM has finally found workarounds for the overheating problems and is now working to pacify many of their very vocal and unhappy customers.
As smug as I am about this experience, the efforts required to do such research require too much time and patience and I wondered how much easier it would be to have more meaningful product reputation ratings. So I looked, but could not find anything unbiased, consistent and verifiable to make it work for me. That is how my new project, Amplified Analytics was born. Please look around the site and let me know if it makes any sense to you. I would love to hear your experiences related to product reputations and user reviews.