James Cherkoff tells us a nice little story about how tight marketing programs, the nice shop in a nice part of town, well trained sales people, the glossy leaflets and the good reputation of certain type of kitchen brand has been made obsolete by one single search on the web about what other customers of this brand had to say. The opinions were mostly negative and James ended up cancelling his order.
Of course, you would always have consulted other sources – most of all your closest peers – about opinions on any high involvement product or service. But the chances that you find many sources with the same brand of kitchen (car, dishwasher, etc.) in your closest range of peers was and is rather limited.
With todays possibilities to find opinions on anything on the web (even stuff you didn’t want to know about), it is ever more important for brands to keep their promises. People are fearing the moment of the totally transparent consumer, but hey, brands already face this complete transparency!
Wo ich sonst so bin...
As a search marketer myself, I fear the day when a negative result under one of our brands will come up in the top 10.
As a search marketer, what are you supposed to say to product marketing and product management? „Stop sucking!“ Like that’s going to be received well, even if it is the truth in a lot of the cases. 🙂
*lol* Don’t know either. May be it will be a fierce battle for you to keep the top 10 at Google clean of any bad reviews, by pushing good 3rd party reviews up the rankings…
Right, that’s all a search marketer can do really. As the algorithms are becoming increasingly harder to game, this will become even harder to do. Looks like the sloths in business will be held accountable soon, finally. 🙂