Leverage Social Media
Most companies have cottoned on to social media as tools for engagement and collaboration. Marketers at leading companies have created lively exchanges with and among customers on sites such as OPEN Forum( American Express), Beinggirl. com( Procter & Gamble), myPlanNet( Cisco), and Fiesta Movement( Ford), tapping into participants’ expertise and creativity for product development. Of course, social media can also boost brand awareness, trial, and ultimately sales, especially when a campaign goes viral. More important for most companies, however, is that through social media they can gain rich, unmediated customer insights, faster than ever before.
This represents a profound shift. Historically, market research was product- rather than customer-centric: Marketers asked questions about attitudes and behaviors relevant to their brands. More recently we have seen the rise of ethnographic research to help them understand how both a brand and its wider product category fit into people’ s lives. Social networks take this a step further by providing powerful new ways to explore consumers’ lives and opinions.
Procter & Gamble was an early adopter of social media; now all its businesses have sites aimed at specific markets and communities. Its feminine care group, appreciating the need to listen to rather than talk at customers, made sure that Beinggirl was less about its products than about the tribulations of 11-to-14-year-old girls— embarrassing moments, hygiene concerns, boy trouble. The site’ s main value to P & G is not that it drives product sales but that it illuminates the target consumers’ world. Similarly, Amex uses OPEN Forum to learn about small-business owners, and Cisco uses myPlanNet to better understand the new generation of developers. These sites work because participants are
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