Empowerment of Consumers
Discuss about the Impact Of Social Media On Consumers.
In this era of digital revolution, traditional ways of doing businesses and influencing the customers are getting disrupted and the power is shifting to customers from the hand of companies. With access to huge information on social media, constant influx of information about the product and services from the sources like independent blogs, forums and communities that are not in control of company, consumers are pulling the information from the market. In the traditional way of marketing, corporations used to push information to the customers to influence their decision (Zhou, Zhang & Zimmermann, 2013).
There is not an iota of doubt that Social media has really empowered the consumers in terms of how, when and where they want to engage with brands. Today, they also have more power not only in making their purchase decisions but also in influencing what others can buy. Most common social media sites are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat, Google plus with Facebook being most dominant of all. Apart from this, there are large number of forums, blogs, YouTube channels, e-commerce channels feedback and reviews sections, podcast available that are empowering the consumers and giving them a platform to raise their voice against a company if they feel cheated or promised not met by the business. Amazon is expanding at a rapid rate worldwide and its consumer community is also global in nature with large number of reviews from the consumers across the world (Mangold, & Faulds, 2009). Consumers share their views about their experience with the product, interact with each other and influences each other decisions. Moreover, it just takes a moment to for an American customer to share his bad experience with an Australian customer. Customer’s power is constantly consolidating with easy access to huge information, wide choices of goods and services and a chance to share the experiences with large number of people through social. With globalizations, customers has access to large number of products and services and thus are spoilt for a huge choice. As a result, customers’ uses different ways like social media reviews, brand followers, celebrity endorsement, and price comparison to make a decision. With a huge bargaining power over the companies, customer expectation is constantly rising and businesses are finding it harder to match their expectations. Moreover, consumers have also become very much aware about their rights and they have already made up their minds about which brands to buy whenever they visit shopping complexes. They prefer to do the independent research about the brands from the comfort of their home or wherever they want using their smart phone devices.
Social commerce has become a buzzword these days, which refers to interaction of consumers at social media. Take simple example, Suppose any brand has started a campaign on its Facebook page, all those consumers who have liked the page of the brand or following the brand will get notification about the campaign. These consumers can then interact with each other about their experiences with the brand and this is what is referred as social commerce (Labrecque, et al., 2013). It is one of the form of e-commerce. Similarly, Amazon page for any product will have large number of reviews about the product where the consumers are interacting with each other, asking direct questions from each other and creates a content that will be quite helpful for anyone making the decision about buying the product (Huang, & Benyoucef, 2013). No doubt, there are also negative reviews and brands or organizations has to respond to the customers complaints as quickly as possible because it is visible to the entire world. Organizations are providing freebies, replacements and also using to different ways to woo the customers so that they can change their feedback or have positive experience during after sales service. The way brands are building the relationships and responding to the queries of customers is a basic building block of trust. Hajli (2014) stresses on the importance of trust among the members of social networking sites as it plays a significant role in influencing the intention to buy the product. When customers start trusting each other in their network, they start believing the reviews and feedbacks about the product that influences their opinion and attitude about the product. Trust also plays an important role in increasing the PU (Perceived usefulness) about the product and as per the research the PU influences the customer attitude about the products and buying decisions much more than the trust. Thus, it is important for the organization to manage the perceptions of their brands in the minds of the consumers.
Role of Social Media
There are some sites that makes the reviews and ratings look more authentic by only allowing those consumers to review the product who has actually purchased the product from that site and have first-hand experience with the product. This will not only filter the fake and paid reviews but also able to build the trust of the potential consumers about the authenticity of the reviews (Malbon, 2013). As a result, consumers will be able to make better use of reviews in order to make the decisions. The organizations and brands do not have any control on such type of conservations and this is how the social media has empowered the consumers. Bloggers have also become very important and as a result, it had become profession that influential bloggers charges money from the organizations in order to write a positive feedback full of hashtags so as to come in top results during google search (Chaw, 2015). This is the power of social media consumerism that organizations are now paying influential bloggers to highlight their products however brands has to be very careful about that because fake reviews can harm the reputation of the company to a very large extent in an irreversible manner (Hunt, 2015).
Organizations these days no not consider social media strategy as an option but a necessity. Every leading brand has a dedicated social media strategy. The risk of ignoring the growing consumer power can be very damaging for the brands. Apart from the reputational risk, consistency and transparency are other aspects throughout the supply chain. Businesses have to develop the social Customer Relationship Management where the activities should be customer-centric. With the help of large number of software, organization should develop a dedicated strategy for each consumer by developing collaborative relationship style, focus on developing a community of consumers with positive experiences, content management, content creation and the response strategy at social commerce, real time and targeted response. Organizations should define key performance indicators for their social media strategy like turning the interactions into sales, increase in sales and many other. Also, if the company is having effective social media strategy, it can also reduce its marketing expenditure at other places.
Also, as per the study conducted by Deloitte in UK (“Digital Predictions”, 2018), 1 in every 2 consumer watches video from other users; refers to customer reviews and ratings, read online forums for making their purchase decisions. These stats are quite powerful in explaining the growing power of consumers in influencing the buying decisions of their peers by ratings and reviews. Apart from passive consumers, there are also active consumers who create the content by posting videos, publishing blogs, contributing to forums, editing articles at Wikipedia about their experiences. Thus, the challenges for the business is to match the expectations of large number of consumers. Businesses need to develop the CRM system that can track the journey of each consumer and should use targeted content and real time response to increase their customer base. In short, 81% of the consumers in UK refers to online content before making decisions and thus if any company is not present in social media or managing their social media strategy, it can lose its business to the competitors who are maintain the robust social commerce strategy (Hunt, 2015). This research shows consumers have become powerful and professional shoppers aided by social media content and huge information and also have the increased ability to take the actions against the companies. They also become much more aware about their rights as consumers and there are increasing incidences where customers have sue the brands for misleading advertisements. As such information and cases gains more popularity, more consumers become aware about their rights however brands make the best efforts to keep such news out of media.
This is a reason many leading organizations like Coco-cola, Unilever, Hilton hotels, Zara, Volkswagen, IKEA, McDonalds, Nike, Starbucks encourages their customer base to share their photos wearing or using the company’s product to win attractive prizes (Zhou, Zhang & Zimmermann, 2013). By using such strategies, organizations are creating the rich content which will then be used by the other customers for making their decisions. It will also help in improving the perception of the organization.
References
Chae, B. K. (2015). Insights from hashtag# supplychain and Twitter Analytics: Considering Twitter and Twitter data for supply chain practice and research. International Journal of Production Economics, 165, 247-259.
Digital Predictions 2018. (n.d.). Retrieved April 19, 2018, from https://www2.deloitte.com/uk/consumerreview.html
Hajli, M. N. (2014). A study of the impact of social media on consumers. International Journal of Market Research, 56(3), 387-404.
Huang, Z., & Benyoucef, M. (2013). From e-commerce to social commerce: A close look at design features. Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, 12(4), 246-259.
Hunt, K. M. (2015). Gaming the system: Fake online reviews v. consumer law. Computer Law & Security Review, 31(1), 3-25.
Labrecque, L. I., vor dem Esche, J., Mathwick, C., Novak, T. P., & Hofacker, C. F. (2013). Consumer power: Evolution in the digital age. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 27(4), 257-269.
Mangold, W. G., & Faulds, D. J. (2009). Social media: The new hybrid element of the promotion mix. Business horizons, 52(4), 357-365.
Malbon, J. (2013). Taking fake online consumer reviews seriously. Journal of Consumer Policy, 36(2), 139-157.
Zhou, L., Zhang, P., & Zimmermann, H. D. (2013). Social commerce research: An integrated view. Electronic commerce research and applications, 12(2), 61-68.
Order an Essay Now & Get These Features For Free:
Turnitin Report
Formatting
Title Page
Citation
Outline
