The Consumer Transparency Revolution: Marketers Better Be Ready
With the proliferation of camera and video phones,
the posting of real time multimedia will continue to grow exponentially.
An example is the recent Michael Richards fresco.
The former star’s racial tirade went soaring through cyberspace within
hours of the event. Anything that is said or seen by anyone can be recorded
by phone cameras and up loaded to the web within minutes.
How will this trend affect consumer behavior and marketing? Enormously.
It will affect consumer behavior, marketing, product development,
and every other aspect of commerce with a product transparency that
has never been seen before. In the very recent past, for example,
a product or service might have one review posted per month on its website.
As the number of Internet shoppers has increased over the last two years,
on line shoppers have begun to post more reviews of products, services,
and companies on websites. Buying decisions are now made more heavily
on the positive and negative postings by consumers. The posting of
more and more customer’s experiences on websites has created a transparency
of product satisfaction that allows totally transparent reviews of product
positive and negative characteristics.
We are just beginning to see the transparency of product pricing,
features and customer service spread like wild fire. Everything that brands
do or don’t do will end up on youtube.com or any one of a hundred youtube
copy cat websites. As camera-phone content goes on line on a global scale,
consumer reviews will become real time and immediate.
The time gap between a consumer experience and when the whole world knows
about the positive or negative buying experience will narrow.
Web enabled camera phones will create product transparency that will also
be used for greater price comparison shopping.This could lead to daily or
even hourly product reviews.
The rapid development of the transparency revolution in e-commerce will
become the mother of all equalizersin brand comparison and comparison shopping.
Marketers need to start planning strategies now to deal with this revolutionary trend.
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