Real-Time Review/Ratings- Marketing

Wrote this for marketing, but it was because of all that we have been looking through in our last few weeks in this course.


Real-Time Review/Ratings- Marketing

Definition

The use of consumer reviews, accounts and ratings to measure, compare, and facilitate the purchase of items and services.            

History

Real-time reviewing is considered a subset of NOWISM. NOWISM according to Trendwatching the “Consumers’ ingrained lust for instant gratification is being satisfied by a host of novel, important (offline and online) real-time products, services and experiences” (2009). This lust for gratification also impacts the information used for making that instant commerce happen.

The advent of NOWISM and real-time reviewing was limited to locations with a hot spot, mobile devices have now made it possible to for the 1.7 billion internet users, about 25% of the global population, to be permanently online. These online users can now offer positive and negative reviews of their experiences as well as research others postings before making a purchase.

Purpose

There are several layers of purpose here. For the consumer to share their experience openly with a product/service/organization and for consumers to gather information before making a purchase are the larger umbrellas, but within each there are many reasons for real-time reviewing.

Consumers rate or review to criticize, praise, offer constructive feedback, explain alternate uses, share background information, and explain the CSR  of a purchase, item, service, and/or an organization (to name a few). Consumers read these to gather information to assess the social impacts, popularity, price difference, satisfaction, longevity, warranty, future trends, and more before making said purchase.

Consequences

For business and consumers there are tremendous and every chaining consequences of this real-time reviewing. Perhaps the most predominate of these is at the moment price comparison of items.  There are mobile apps that allow consumers to scan items barcodes or take pictures of the item and then search both online and physical retailers for the item and their offered price, Shopsavvy and SnapTell are two of these services. This price comparison causes increased price scrutiny by physical retailers. According to Trendswatch, Shopsavvy has hand more than 1.5million image queries with a 30% click-through rate to its parent company, Amazon.com (2009).

These apps are now being incorporated with the latest in augmented reality. The iPhone equipped with 3GS enables one to use maps and rating programs like Yelp to look around ones surrounding and see restaurant and shops distance, ratings, and information overlaying the physical view one sees through the phones camera.

Aside from price, applications like projectlabel which allows consumers to research and report the health and safety of products otherwise know as “people-powered company nutrition labels”(2009).   This reviewing is happening in every sector and will require more transparency and communication by business. Transparency in that the sheer volume of postings will lead to more accuracy in reviews and subsequently more trust in them. According to the Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey, “ 90% of online consumers worldwide trust recommendations from people they know, while 70% trust consumer opinions posted online" (2009).

Apps such as ShoutIT let individuals link their reviews to Facebook, Delicious, and Digg (Trendwatch 2009) which then is shared on their profile page allowing their social graph to carry the information further and at the level of personal recommendations.

The communication is coming in the form of more direct interaction with consumer. Already  business are finding value in monitoring what is being posted about them on Twitter, Dell Comcast and Southwest Airlines are three frontrunners in this. These include following up on complaints or thanking individuals for compliments.

There is also direct consumer interaction that is monitered by consumers themselves. One recent example of this consumer was on the opening weekend of Bruno, a spoof comedy movie similar to the successful Borat, twetters’ wrote about their displeasure with the movie and its box office sales saw a 40% ticket drop. This is refereed to as the ‘Twitter effect’ and can swing popularity in both directions.

Another real-time review that is still emerging is Google Sidewiki, which allows users that have Sidewiki enabled to write and read comments inline with a webpage. The effects on online retailers, businesses, organizations is yet to be defined but their are implications of transparency and questions inline with ones online presence.

The ability for consumers to now be permanently online has enabled another service, price alerting. Now a consumer can find the item they are looking for and set a price they are willing to pay and wait until that price emerges, airlines have been doing this for years with sites like Priceline.com and Expedia.com, look to Apnoti a Amazon marker and PriceDrop a browser extension for consumer items.

Scale and context

With 1.7 billion people having access to the internet (www.internetworldstats.com) and over 4.6 billion people with mobile phone subscriptions worldwide according to the International Telecommunication Union. With about 18% of handsets currently having online access that is 800million individuals with nearly constant access. The scale is tremendous and with the increasing infusion of access and understanding. Already in younger, more technological accepting, markets the action of real-time review and rating is already fast becoming a habit.


Critique of the concept

The issue of real-time reviews and ratings has game changing implications upon the  transparency in advertising and in practice of how business as usual is done. While advertising has changed with culture and technology, real-time reviewing will cause it to change with individual experiences.

References

(Sep/Oct 2009). “Transparency triumph” reviewing is the new advertising. Retrieved from http://trendwatching.com/trends/transparencytriumph/

(November 2009). “NOWISM” why currency is the new currency. Retrieved from http://trendwatching.com/trends/nowism/

McGiboney, Michelle (July 2009). Personal recommendations and consumer opinions posted onlie are the most trusted forms of advertising globally.  Retrieved from http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/pr_global-study_07709.pdf

Projectlabel.org Retrieved from https://projectlabel.org/ on November 21, 2009

Internet World Stats. Retrieved from www.internetworldstats.com on November 21, 2009


Further reading

Catching-up is the new looking ahead. (August 2009). http://trendwatching.com/trends/catchingup/

FOREVERISM. (June/July 2009). http://trendwatching.com/trends/foreverism/

Doctors consider muzzling patients as online consumer rating expands to medical services. (March  2009). http://blog.cleveland.com/medical/2009/03/doctors_consider_muzzling_pati.html

Additional Apps or Rating Sites

http://socialyell.com/
http://www.3rdwhale.com/