I think the company should focus on the feedback/ customer review online that will be extremely valuable for a simple reason: opinions of customers are more influential than advertisements by the company. There is an important reason why customers’ opinions have so much more convincing power. Going inside the customer psychology or creating the persona types(as we have learned in class), I believe that the shoppers feel more secure to trust these opinions since they are the potential buyers of the product and these comments are left by the other customers. In other words, they share a “group” mentality in which shoppers look after each other by reading and commenting on the products. To them, the sales company is an outsider whose advertisement can be seen as biased and not thorough which is true in many cases and thus adding even more value to the customer opinions.
If company can quickly respond to the critical reviews, for example by fixing the problems of a product that are often mentioned on the rating websites, then it can create a bridge between the shoppers and the outsider(company). If the shoppers know that the company can back up the problems, then its product will gain more trust and the sells of this product will increase as a result. Furthermore, reacting to the criticism indicates two things; first, the company has an good customer service and second by fixing the problems, the commentators can now tell other potential buyers on the web that now there are no more shortcomings of the product.
To summarize my point about the dynamic and direct communication between the shoppers and the company (which is creating an experience), first I stated that customers' opinions have strong influence on potential buyers. To turn this into positive for marketing and sales, the company should create communication experience for customers by actively reading the reviewers opinions and try to respond as quickly as it can. The effect is that it will make company more trustworthy and less of an outsider in shoppers' eyes, as well as allows negative opinions to be corrected.
This can also help company gain insights since it will know clearly what the users like about the product and what do they not like about it. It is impossible to predict all the advantages and disadvantages of a particular product; therefore reading the reviews by common users give company a better idea on how to improve.
One type of social media that comes to my mind is Amazon; it has such a variety of items that even people who do not shop at the website go there to read the reviews. The reviews on this websites are really powerful (since Amazon is widely used and give readers a sense of objectivity and legitimacy) for they are read by so many people. I would recommend a company to read the reviews on widely used shopping site like Amazon, and try to build a communication with those who leave the comments.
Personally, I wanted to buy a Sony TV in Best Buy since it was on a special price that was cheaper than in Amazon. However I went to Amazon to read the reviews to see if this will be a good product or not. When I started to go down the reviews, I was initially inclined toward not buying it since many users complained about a auto-brightness adjusting feature of TV that made coloring of TV rather strange. But as I read more and more recent reviews, people were saying that the Sony have fixed this problem and the TV is an excellent item. This helped me make up my mind to buy the TV.
Often times what common people think is more important and powerful than opinions of experts since experts' reviews are excessive in amount and too technical in terms used. A lot more often, the shoppers simply want to know what is good about the product and what is bad about it.
I used the google blog to search Nike and I really liked it a lot. I felt these blogs just right in length, neither too long nor too short and I was able to go through a lot of them. Considerable amount of blogs did not look too organized on appearance but unlike the selling websites that has low quality design, I trusted more on what the bloggers said since I believe these reviews are objective. When I just typed in the word “Nike” most of blog at the beginning of the list was about the product on the list, which is nice since it will keep me updated and would let me know what is coming from the brand that I am interested.
I was not too sure how to exactly use the ZIietgest website. When I typed in Nike on each of the option links, I got statistical graphs and data. I assume this has to do with financial aspect of the company…? Not sure. But so far I like the google blog search better.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Smarter than Computer
I believe that War-Mart is making the successful conversion on its data. I am actually impressed by their data gathering in that they not only collect enormous amount of data, but more importantly they can make connections between different data. The article talked about how Wal-Mart can “predict” the demand and I believe this is possible largely due to the fact that its reseachers can relate random data and identify a trend or a general personality of the shoppers.
The excellence in Wal-Mart data gathering is that it has both width and depth.
Width for its technolgy enables the collection of large amount of data needed and depth in its researchers’ ability to accurately analyze and string these data into trends. As a result, it can predict the future demand of the customers and supply the demand faster than other retailers, giving them a competitive advantage.
For example, during Hurricane Katrina, Wal-Mart was able to predict the servere damage of Hurrican and insufficient government rescue resource and tie these two with Lousiana’s low income population. The result was that during the first few weeks when the hurrican hit the state, the company was able to send off trucks with sufficeint food supplies to the refugees since it has prepared for this moment long before. All the other retailers, such as Target or K-Mart, as well as nation’s rescue teams had ran out of food supply and Wal-Mart is the one that actually sold its supplying materials to them so that they can go sell foods to refuges
Less dramatic but similar experience also happened to myself approximately 4 to 5 years ago when Hurrican Rita hit Houston area. I remember walking down the store and comapred to Target and Kroger that I went, Wal-Mart had the most amount of supplies. In addition, it was having sale on the items that were appropriate such as board games, cards, and other products which can be used to kill time when electricity runs out and the only soucre of light is ran by batteries.
Regarding the privacy in collecting data, I can not say that what Wal-Mart is doing does not completely bother me. I think the biggest issue is not so much about your privacy in life, since it is big deal to let the market researcher know what type of daily purchases you make or what type of location you would like to go, etc. These are not top-secret information and therefore I would have no problem in sharing them. However, it is rather a uneasy feeling to have someone else track down the record of you without you even knowing. The action Wal-Mart is taking can be essentially regarded the same as that of a stalker among many people's minds.
But there is important fact to remind ourselves. Behind the actions of perhaps controversial data-gathering, the intention of the company is to serve us better by studying us in details. If someone is trying to do something nice to me and he is putting a lot of effort in learning what I like, I do not have problem with him not reporting his actions to me. This is essentially what Wal-Mart is doing; studying our life habits or purchasing patterns so that they can provide more useful material to us at the same time making benefit off of our purchase. We should consider Wal-Mart's extensive data-gathering as more of a mutual action rather than stalker, who usually gathers information for the benefit of himself and potentially uses it against you.
Therefore if we look the intentions beyond those actions, the data-gathering of Wal-Mart, although it can raise a few eye-brows at times, can be approved. More specifically and as we have learned in class, the Wal-Mart is trying to create accurate persona of its customers. The company wants to know more than just what is selling well and what is not; it also wants to know the general personality drives these purchases so they can provide more items that they belive will be favored by the same personality as well. I feel as if Wal-Mart wants to get to “know” its customers by creating the real-life image of me and people like myself. If the company is taking actions on its own to make my shopping life better, I, as a male especially, have no problem with it.
The excellence in Wal-Mart data gathering is that it has both width and depth.
Width for its technolgy enables the collection of large amount of data needed and depth in its researchers’ ability to accurately analyze and string these data into trends. As a result, it can predict the future demand of the customers and supply the demand faster than other retailers, giving them a competitive advantage.
For example, during Hurricane Katrina, Wal-Mart was able to predict the servere damage of Hurrican and insufficient government rescue resource and tie these two with Lousiana’s low income population. The result was that during the first few weeks when the hurrican hit the state, the company was able to send off trucks with sufficeint food supplies to the refugees since it has prepared for this moment long before. All the other retailers, such as Target or K-Mart, as well as nation’s rescue teams had ran out of food supply and Wal-Mart is the one that actually sold its supplying materials to them so that they can go sell foods to refuges
Less dramatic but similar experience also happened to myself approximately 4 to 5 years ago when Hurrican Rita hit Houston area. I remember walking down the store and comapred to Target and Kroger that I went, Wal-Mart had the most amount of supplies. In addition, it was having sale on the items that were appropriate such as board games, cards, and other products which can be used to kill time when electricity runs out and the only soucre of light is ran by batteries.
Regarding the privacy in collecting data, I can not say that what Wal-Mart is doing does not completely bother me. I think the biggest issue is not so much about your privacy in life, since it is big deal to let the market researcher know what type of daily purchases you make or what type of location you would like to go, etc. These are not top-secret information and therefore I would have no problem in sharing them. However, it is rather a uneasy feeling to have someone else track down the record of you without you even knowing. The action Wal-Mart is taking can be essentially regarded the same as that of a stalker among many people's minds.
But there is important fact to remind ourselves. Behind the actions of perhaps controversial data-gathering, the intention of the company is to serve us better by studying us in details. If someone is trying to do something nice to me and he is putting a lot of effort in learning what I like, I do not have problem with him not reporting his actions to me. This is essentially what Wal-Mart is doing; studying our life habits or purchasing patterns so that they can provide more useful material to us at the same time making benefit off of our purchase. We should consider Wal-Mart's extensive data-gathering as more of a mutual action rather than stalker, who usually gathers information for the benefit of himself and potentially uses it against you.
Therefore if we look the intentions beyond those actions, the data-gathering of Wal-Mart, although it can raise a few eye-brows at times, can be approved. More specifically and as we have learned in class, the Wal-Mart is trying to create accurate persona of its customers. The company wants to know more than just what is selling well and what is not; it also wants to know the general personality drives these purchases so they can provide more items that they belive will be favored by the same personality as well. I feel as if Wal-Mart wants to get to “know” its customers by creating the real-life image of me and people like myself. If the company is taking actions on its own to make my shopping life better, I, as a male especially, have no problem with it.
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