Page 161 - Marketing Management

138 PART 3 CONNECTING WITH CUSTOMERS

Burger King’s “Subservient
Chicken” marketing campaign
reinforced the brand’s core
promise of putting the customer
in charge.

one another. No boring PowerPoint presentations here, just customers talking about their telecom-
munications challenges and their unfiltered experiences being PAETEC customers. Prospects are
sold on the company by other customers. 62
Although much has been made of the newly empowered consumer—in charge, setting the di-
rection of the brand, and playing a much bigger role in how it is marketed—it’s still true that only
some consumers want to get involved with some of the brands they use and, even then, only some of
the time. Consumers have lives, jobs, families, hobbies, goals, and commitments, and many things
matter more to them than the brands they purchase and consume. Understanding how to best mar-
ket a brand given such diversity is crucially important.
CUSTOMER REVIEWS AND RECOMMENDATIONS Although the strongest influence
on consumer choice remains “recommended by relative/friend,”an increasingly important decision
factor is “recommendations from consumers.” With increasing mistrust of some companies and
their advertising, online customer ratings and reviews are playing an important role for Internet
retailers such as Amazon.com and Shop.com.
Online pet food retailer PETCO actually started using consumer product ratings and reviews
in e-mails and banner ads, finding the click-through rate increased considerably as a result. 63
Brick-and-mortar retailers such as Staples and Cabela’s are also recognizing the power of consumer
reviews and have begun to display them in their stores. 64
Despite consumer acceptance of such reviews, however, their quality and integrity is always in
question. In one famous example, over a period of seven years, the cofounder and CEO of Whole
Foods Market reportedly posted more than 1,100 entries on Yahoo! Finance’s online bulletin board
under a pseudonym, praising his company and criticizing competitors.
Some sites offer summaries of reviews to provide a range of product evaluations. Metacritic
aggregates music, game, TV, and movie reviews from leading critics—often from more than 100
publications—averaged into a single 1 to 100 score. Review sites are important in the video game
industry because of the influence they wield and the product’s high selling price—often $50 to $60.
Some game companies tie bonuses for their developers to game scores on the more popular sites. If
a major new release doesn’t make the 85-plus cutoff, the publisher’s stock price may even drop. 65
Bloggers who review products or services have become important because they may have thou-
sands of followers; blogs are often among the top links returned in online searches for certain
brands or categories. A company’s PR department may track popular blogs via online services
such as Google alerts, BlogPulse, and Technorati. Firms also court the favor of key bloggers via free