Sellers versus customers

Brand loyalty is earned by meeting and exceeding expectations. The lesser the customer's expectation is, the easier it is for a seller to meet or surpass the target. Today the nearly perfect information age has opened the eyes of the people and expectations are getting higher and higher because they are now more connected than ever before. Here arises the necessity of information technology to expedite the branding job in a much tougher competitive world. Fortunately or not social media have taken some of marketing clout away from companies and given it to consumers and other stakeholders. Now, it is like open source brand management where consumers and others not only converse the branded content, they also create it.
In the past, due to low access to information, customers were largely dependent on information provided by the sellers in the form of marketing. They would make relative comparisons like "Is this Brand better than that?" Since the customers did not have too many alternative sources of information, it made sense to stay loyal to a brand. Buyers also went by the axiom like "you get what you pay for." The brand managers would exercise the power at least to control the perception of their products by beating their own drums in the form of advertisement in mass media. Research shows that only 14.0 per cent of consumers trust advertising and 78.0 per cent trust others' recommendations to make their purchase decisions.
These days we are getting closer to perfect information, which is making us less dependent on relative evaluations. Availability of information and quality of our search and valuation devices are making us smarter customers. With more information availability it becomes easier for us to make decisions. If we have more information, we have an array of products to choose from and there shall be no reason to be blindly loyal to a particular brand. There is a tendency particularly among younger consumers, to try new goods and services frequently switching their loyalties from one brand to another. Consumer loyalty varies with variety of innovations. Once loyal need not be the same on another day.
Unlike mass media where so called one way promotion takes place, all concerned interact with one another in social media. With a happy Facebook post, an angry Tweet, or a parody video on YouTube, the consumers can hold open discussions and dialogue about the brands.
Through social media, it is almost effortless to get recommendations from friends and acquaintances. One will just post a question on Facebook, "Can anyone recommend a camera?" and is likely to get personalised advice from an expert in his/her own network. Similarly, one can use Facebook's graph search to find out what his/her friends or their friends have to say about a particular restaurant or a movie.
Facebook fan page can be one the tools to manage brands these days. These fans are much more likely to come to defend when the brand is attacked for any reason. If anybody starts speaking ill of a popular brand, a group of organized consumers will react. Certainly, this type of defense is much more effective than defending by the brand managers themselves. Brand managers have to focus on story telling and if the customers are satisfied, they will do the story telling themselves in support of the brand.  
The social media platforms foster an easy sense of solidarity, through virtual communities of like-minded people. Now and again, the like-mindedness centres on a brand. Customers choose to boycott or to 'buy-cott' brands they like by buying and promoting them. E-commerce is now turning to F-commerce (Facebook Commerce) indicating the impact of social media on our life.
The transparency has been facilitated by the access to information on the web which has turned millions of consumers into reporters. Now, the world is more open and people are smarter to respond to any brand hypocrisy-when words and work do not match. We know about the beauty campaign of a leading MNC focused on encouraging women to embrace their own bodies, curves and all. The campaign won two Cannes Lions Grand Prix awards. But a few savvy customers promptly noted that the brand also markets skin-lightening cream and dietary aids. They rapidly spread their observations across the web. The situation deteriorated when an employee of that brand revealed that the images in the campaign had been photoshopped-information that also tore across the web. When employees advance their own authenticity against their companies, they use corporate credibility to expose and weaken their brands.
We are now more free to speak out. If we have something to say, we need not wait for any mass media anymore. We do not need to write to the editor of a newspaper for publishing our opinion. We shall just have to open our blog or upload a video on YouTube. In the past, customers with an individual belief would write a letter or call customer service. A customer relationship manager need not be complacent seeing the complaint box empty, because social media are out there to share the dissatisfaction with hundreds of people. Of late, it has been observed that Twitter has become a place for complaints. For example, if one is sitting on board an aircraft on the runway and not allowed to get off the plane, he/she can Tweet his/her disappointment and it will spread like virus among communities. At present smart brand managers monitor Twitter for complaints and ways to solve them. It will not be possible to get to the person in distress before this becomes an amplified problem. If the customers feel that you are not listening or responding to them it turns out to be something ominous. If we can cut down the response time, we can quickly turn the negative events into positive ones. Modern information technologies certainly magnify both the bad and good decisions of the sellers punishing the weak brands faster and more severely than in the past.
Somebody may be (in fact always will be) out there to manipulate this third party oriented marketing influence mix-for example, by planting fake reviews, paid bloggers, fake 'likes' or other schemes. Up until now, manipulators usually have limited impact, and their effectiveness is likely to turn down as rating systems find better ways to deal with them. Reviews are not always perfect, but they offer one solution that consumers are not turning to marketers as the main source for information regarding quality. The irony is that the word of mouth from the customers is much more reliable than word of sellers.
The critics might argue that the wealth of information creates tremendous confusion making decision making even more difficult. In reality, the web provides effective tools for sorting and using the most relevant information. In most real-world buying situations, options are already well sorted. With the steady improvement in information and sorting tools, the overload problem will become even less significant.
The habitual purchases (such as rice) may be dominated by buyers' preference, belief or experience, while someone shopping for a toothbrush is most likely to be swayed by packaging, brand, pricing, and point-of-purchase messages-all components of marketing a product. But in cases like hotel, camera, and car etc. the third party factors have added increasing weight in purchasing decisions of buyers. So, the key challenge for the marketers is to identify the factor influencing the buying decision of a customer for a particular product or service. In line with this, marketing mix, strategy and market research approach are getting rearranged. Hence, in this changing business environment, the way of creating and managing brand is bound to change.
Due to the increasing influence of social media and other choices, creating and managing a brand is not entirely in the seller's hand anymore. The customers are playing a significant role through social media and other third parties are coming forward using the tools of modern information technology. Sam Walton once said, "There is only one boss, the customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his/her money somewhere else." It may sound too hard to believe, but this is going to be the reality in the coming days.
The writer is pursuing Executive MBA at IBA, University of Dhaka. [email protected]