Now that everyone has a mobile phone in their pocket and is always connected to the network and social networks, giving an opinion is easier than ever and talking about the things that are being consumed is easier than it ever was. Consumers have become commentators and everything brands do in material for a tweet, a complaint on Facebook or a comment on the specialized website of the moment. Companies are increasingly dependent on what consumers think and are increasingly driven by what they say, do and feel, as an Influitive study shows how consumers are changing the epicenter of marketing. Brands are beginning to give more and more importance to what consumers think and what they do Cayman-Islands Mobile Database. According to the data collected in the Influitive study , 60% of business leaders put consumer engagement on the list of their priorities and 84% of brand managers consider that consumer engagement in the future it will become more important than productivity in generating growth.
The data is explained for several reasons. The first is in what the consumers themselves do. Consumers engaged with brands spend more money on its products and stay with it longer. The second is in the effects that these consumers have on others. These consumers not only spend more but also have a direct effect on what other consumers do. The more connected consumers are to a brand, the more they recommend it and the more they talk about it. In a market where consumers have become one of the main prescribers, this is increasingly important. Past vs present (and future) And the thing is that things have changed and they have done it a lot, especially in terms of how to reach the consumer. In the past, the strategy of brands was different. The campaigns were the key element to reach the consumer (or, as the study points out, “the campaigns were the king”), since they made it possible to connect with consumers and send them massively the messages they wanted to share.
To that we had to add that the salespeople were the ones who really controlled what was happening and what was being done. They were the ones who marked the message and the ones who decided how it reached consumers. The way in which consumers interacted was also somewhat closed and limited, something that was marked by what the brands imposed. Consumers interacted with brands wherever they decided they should interact, and they did so in a way that the brand controlled at all times. In the present everything is much further away from these points than it was in the past and now brands depend more than ever on the consumers themselves. As they explain in the study, from an environment in which the brand controlled everything and in which it could mark practically everything that was done, it has moved to one in which in reality the brand does not have that much power and in which now she has become the one who depends on the power of others.
Power is now in the hands of consumers , who are the ones who generate critical content, who interact with brands and who decide who to listen to or not. To this must be added that not only have the focus of interest changed, but so have the information focus. Consumers no longer trust large campaigns Brother Cell Phone List and the messages that brands put in their path, but prefer to stay with the information generated by people like them. Consumers value the opinions of others more than ever and that is why brands are more obsessed than ever with what consumers are saying. From traditional marketing to a new format, and one in which brands have much less control and much less power, it is time to welcome the customer makerter. The customer marketer boom The consumer has thus become a source of messages and an increasingly important element in terms of the fate of products. Their opinions are taken into account and their recommendations shape the purchasing decisions of others.
Thus, brands have begun to dedicate resources and staff to enhance the role of consumers within their marketing strategy and to encourage consumers themselves to ‘sell’ the products. According to the study data, 63% of those surveyed assure, in fact, that in their companies they are already assigning professionals to treat this area. What is it working on? The workers who are dedicated to this (and that the study calls ‘customer marketer’, that is to say, the consumer marketers) work in diverse areas that have the consumer as a common link. They are those who are in charge of managing online referrals or the presence of brands on the internet, via, for example, community management efforts, but they are also the ones who create consumer groups and events, who work on user experience, who create programs. loyalty, retention or ‘advocacy’ (the advocate is the main protagonist of the strategy of many brands) and who make sure that engagement is being created.
These workers are integrated into the marketing area and their main objective is not only to make consumers happy but rather that that happiness becomes a profit for the company. Their work is not easy, as they not only have to position themselves to achieve better results in an environment that is volatile and very difficult to control, but they also have to face a series of inherent challenges that make things difficult. be anything but simple. On the one hand, measuring the results of their work and demonstrating how they are turning what they are doing into value is very complicated, since there are no reliable metrics. On the other hand, the resources that they usually have, as the study shows, are very limited and, moreover, they are in an environment in which there are many players and many voices (“many hats”, as they say in the analysis). which makes it very difficult to decide who wears what and how. The change in model forces companies to make much more profound changes and requires re-educating the brand’s workers so that they understand that today, more than ever, the customer is king. And that is far from simple: brand employees tend to get carried away by what they have always known and what they have done for years and getting them to change habits and routines requires time, effort and a lot of internal education.
