A Marketers tips to combat negative posts about your brand, your company

Smart Marketer:  Part 3

Apple has demonstrated through its very effective TV Ad ‘Think Different’ campaign that creating a persona for the brand/company will help target the right audience and build a loyal base of customers, who are willing to spend hours in line for the newest product launch.  Today, live sports events are the only broadcasts where TV ads are most likely to be watched, thanks to technology innovations.  This necessitates the need for companies to build personas via other channels, mainly online presence.   

The savvy customer depends extensively on blog posts, word-of-mouth and search engines to find information when she needs it.  Reads the comments posted by fellow bloggers/customers before considering a purchase.  This leads to an interesting problem for companies…people are more likely to post a message when they are dissatisfied with a purchase than when they are satisfied.  So every consumer searching is more likely to come across negative comments than positive comments.  If I were to hazard a guess, I would say that the buyers/customers are more likely to discount the statements from the company and value the comments of the dis-satisfied customers more.  This is true even when customers have no context on the percentage of buyers with a negative experience. 

The smart marketer has a challenge of not only building a persona, providing content about their product but also framing the negative comments in the right context. Many research studies have shown the consumers are more likely to disregard a negative comment if they have a favorable view based on their experience.     A recent study released by http://www.conecomm.com/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/4008 showed that 4 out 5 buyers changed their mind about buying a product based on negative customer comments.

Here are few suggestions for the savvy marketer to combat negative comments (source: http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/what-influences-customers-online-comments/)

1. Be prepared to act. Monitoring the conversations taking place online can be very beneficial for a social media strategist who knows how to interpret what he or she hears and is prepared to act on it. While product managers have been known to modify their product strategy in light of what they hear online, social media strategists can also respond to the online chatter by managing the social media environment in such a way that healthy social dynamics are fostered.

2. Encourage the less involved to post. Less involved customers tend to be more favorable, while more involved customers tend to be more critical. If you’re trying to foster a positive tone, incentives for posting reviews should be provided to the more casual customers.

3. Don’t be afraid of disagreements. While disagreement among opinions tends to attract more negative posters, it also fosters more discussion. This insulates product sales from a few uncharacteristically negative opinions.

4. Resist the temptation to try to manipulate opinions with artificially positive reviews. An online opinion forum tends to take on a life of its own. While the temptation is high to strategically manipulate expressed opinions, the benefits in terms of product sales are limited — not to mention the steep downsides associated with the legal ramifications and the potential for negative publicity.