Consumers are Talking: Is Your Brand Listening?

We all know our brand is a symbol of our company - who we are, why we're here, what we believe in as an organization. But is your online brand speaking to your customers' emotions? A new article on Clickz says during this holiday season, it's a question we all should be asking as we continue to evolve how our brands are presented online.

The article, by Pete Blackshaw, cites a recent study his company conducted that analyzed the link between consumer emotion and consumer generated media (CGM). These emotions, whether positive or negative, are the core catalysts to consumers engaging message boards, forums and review sites.

CGM provides an opportunity to be heard and validated, which impacts self esteem and provides an outlet for consumers to express emotions that are too often ignored or ineffectively responded to by marketers, customer care reps and the like.

"Despite our suffocating rhetoric about consumer control and power, we're not even close to managing three core drivers behind CGM creation: being heard, creating a dialogue with others, and finding a sense of community," Blackshaw says.

So take a step back from the every day pressure to answer what the consumer did when they visited your Web site, called your 800-number or walked in your store. Instead, look at why they did it.

Here are a few steps recommended by Blackshaw to help answer that question by getting tuned in to consumer conversations:

- Listen: you can’t speak their language if you don’t know what they’re saying. Online brand monitoring is key, as are internal mechanisms analyzing consumer touch points.
-First Impressions: they count, always. Is your customers first touch point – oftentimes your web site – speaking to their emotions?
- Feedback loops: do you have a recovery strategy for different levels of consumer emotion? Where are you getting the information to formulate the strategy? Call center transcripts and CGM are good places to start.
- Advertising: is yours intruding or including – in the minds of your customers?

Setting up a framework to capture, analyze and understand your customers' emotions will help not only drive your brand's performance, it can have real impact on the bottom line and your company’s reputation.