Review or be damned
It may come as a shock to marketeers who believe the best way to convince a consumer to buy into a product is to hunt them down on Twitter and Facebook but AdAge is running a story about the power of customer feedback.It seems that perhaps customer reviews (and reviews in general) are actually, wait for it, useful. Well wow. All this talk about starting a conversation with your customer seems to have missed out the most important bit – listening. And maybe because 140 characters doesn’t tend to give a whole lot of insight then it’s to more detailed reviews that people are turning.
Remember the UK government’s “Big Conversation”? I didn’t either until sitting down to write this. It struck the cynical masses (me incuded) as one-sided. Political disengagment, or the perception of it, has resulted in the feeling that we just aren’t being listened to. Well the big no-suprise prize goes to the realisation that this extends to products development and marketing. I’ve been involved in a fair amount of research over the years and the one consistent element is that people love being listened to.
We all have our ideas about how a game, a company, a government might work better and the shock is – some of these ideas are really good. They are worth listening to.