Bill Harriss
With the influx of blogs and consumer social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, companies have a growing wealth of valuable information about how consumers are thinking about their products and services. More and more often, these sites provide in-your-face descriptions of consumer perceptions of your brand. The challenge is to identify usable information and to have the organizational ability to act quickly to improve knowledge, marketing processes and communications in response. Opportunities and risks are hidden in the data thrown off by social sites and both can affect your bottom line!
Suppose you are a consumer goods company selling hundreds of products directly or through e-commerce sites such as Amazon.com and you want to optimize profitability using customer feedback and reviews. In the past this was a labor intensive process to summarize comments and ratings to get the insights you needed to make decisions.
New technologies such as text mining and sentiment analysis are enabling companies to stream and compute the information from e-commerce sites and social media outlets (blogs, Twitter, etc.) and in the process, capturing the key issues and overall positive or negative consumer opinions. Companies can analyze user reviews and product ratings to gauge consumer interest in ways never before possible.
But how many are merging this newfound knowledge with customer interaction from offline channels? Too few!
Many consumer goods and products organizations still think of their channels as distinct, separate silos. Your customer sees you not for the departments that exist (Marketing, Sales, IT, Digital, Retail, etc.), but for your product or service that they can elect to buy with their hard-earned dollars.
It’s time to get out of the departmental mindset and look at your customer behavior, which is multidimensional! The next big thing for marketing will be the breaking down of these online and offline silos to bring customer reaction and customer response together to optimize the opportunity for engagement.
About The Author:
Bill Harris is a Practice Leader in the Healthcare and Consumer Markets for SIGMA Marketing Group. Connect with Bill on , or follow him on .
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
The separate silos you mention are a huge problem that most organizations are unable to change without buy-in from the very top. In fact, most incentives and bonuses encourage the siloed approach, and the two things that suffer the most are the company’s bottom line and the customer experience. Marketing rarely has the power to make the changes necessary.
What have you seen as the most effective way to tear down the silos?
Jon
I like to tell people to “begin with the decision in mind”. Don’t start by looking at the data, start by determining what it is you need to decide and how analytics might be able to help. Perhaps you can use only online data, perhaps only offline, perhaps you need both or even data from a third party. But if you know what decision you are trying to make it will be much clearer.
JT
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