Looking at consumer decision making is always illuminating; consumers basically hate choice and they prefer the least mental effort in the buying process.
Buying a well-known brand is just one way to ease the choice and satisfy the need for the instant satisfaction of ´having made the right choice´.
If a product comes recommended by trusted people the actual brand is less important. What social media contribute is that the number of ´expert´ friends close to you grew by a magnitude so following trusted recommendations became a lot easier.
With the crucial positive feedback on consumer choice taken care of by social media, the future will see more chances for newcomers without brand recognition.
If choosing what to buy becomes easier, the real key will be the ease offered for instance by Amazon´s one-click purchase or the availability and ´findability´ in the local store. Quality and ease of distribution will become the new battlefield in commerce if social media succeed in replacing brand recognition and salesmen.
What do you think: will brands still dominate the next decade or will we buy nameless products recommended by social media trusted friends, distributed by Amazon or carried by our local shop?
#FutureOfCommerce #ConnectedEconomy #MaxMusings #SocMed
This is the 64 billion dollar question, +Max Huijgen .
I'm thinking big brands will have there upper hand as it takes a lot of resources and expertise to create great experiences that customers like.
Part of the problem with brands today is they have lost their "promissory note" experience guarentee that consumers used to be willing to pay for, over the odds.
Today, most brands take the "what minimum can I do to gouge the most money out of my gullible customers" approach. What, then, is the point of a brand?
I go for the product that has at most 1:1 ratio between
gouging, er price and supplied product quality i.e. value for money.poor brands….
Well said, +dawn ahukanna .
I might be the only one here thinking that brands will have no problems surviving. I agree that the way marketing will be performed will have to change completely, but if it would be more likely for consumers to buy a product someone in their circle has good experiences with, I believe you can be sure that marketers will play on these needs.
Therefore brands will still dominate the next decade and we will still buy products recommended by social media trusted friends, distributed by Amazon or carried by our local shop… This will just be another shift in marketing the same way people switched from offline to online marketing. Brand targeting will simply change.
I generally agree with you, +Florian Jouanel . There are more than a few wrinkles to this that will determine which brands survive (and grow), which new ones will emerge, who will play nice with whom, how important the role of customer engagement will play with regards to brand endorsement, but overall, I believe brand naming will increase in importance, not decrease.
+Gregory Esau I agree … however whether brand naming will increase in importance or not… I believe it will merely change a companies strategy.
E.g. larger Parent companies might sell their products by using the names of their subsidiary companies.
This is just a simple, basic, example on how this might happen, but unfortunately (for the consumers) money is still king, which means that big brands will be able to invest in their marketing budget according to the changes of the market.
+Florian Jouanel, even with large budgets, if your recommendation channel (social recommendations) don't recommend, people won't buy. The brand just becomes a vehicle for identity, not the purchasing decision.
+dawn ahukanna it´s not directly about having a large budget, it´s more about what has this budget been spend on. I am quite certain that plenty of investments can be made to receive recommendations…
e.g. contests…
if you recommend our page, you´ll have the chance to win the newest SONY tablet
+Florian Jouanel I´m aware of the gaming of recommendations that´s why I added ´trusted´.
People will lose trust in the ´paid for´ recommendations and likes.
Brands still have (and spend a lot of money supporting) signaling properties, and sometimes even "religion", and should carry on doing fine in generic competition fields.
Social recommendations will probably still reinforce major brands, but might make more room in the long tail, so if a lot of your friends get into (small local indie product) it could boost new product into a full cultural niche with less resistance. Kickstarter and Indiegogo seem to be hitting this sort of concept currently.
Products that need to solve a specific problem will probably have better hits from Amazon than social Google/FB. If I'm looking for a new vacuum, I care more about what other people with the same kind of pets or floors or dirt patterns like than what my friends in general like.
Another in this class – music discovery engines don't need to know your friends to be good as much as they need to know the patterns of what you like to listen to, they get more from matching on that. The exception might be in the youth (and some niches) where music signaling and getting on board with the media "everyone" in the group consumes is important – but there seems to be less, not more of those niches these days and with cable and Internet the old "water cooler staple" shows are becoming a relic, with major sporting events still holding a strong place.
A lot of this might apply only to USA?
It might be hard to generalize across all brands, markets and products. In some cases, the brand is the product, like in 'designer' goods or possibly commodity goods, where the differentiation is largely contrived. Services may have a different consumer choice mechanism.
I think an important effect of social recommendation in purchase decisions may be volatility. Fads tend to rise and spread and decline more quickly in the 'viral' age and attention tends to focus on the here and now.
It may be that social effects on marketing are stronger for lower-priced, smaller-commitment items, for example, and brands remain dominant for high-priced items.
Excellent points +Angyl Bender +Joe Repka but apart from ´problem-solving- products I would venture that both electronics (computers, mobile stuff etc.) and clothes f.i. are typical products for trusted social recommendations.
The first because most people have no clue if a Sony phone is a good one, in spite of knowing the brand well; the last because it´s either ´in´ or out-of-fashion and your peers decide.
I would argue that phones and laptops are VERY MUCH about signaling, especially phones. An iPhone "says" something, as does a generic android versus the Google flagship, or a BB or a dumb phone – and we're constantly making it seen, in hands, on the table, even "sent from my iPhone" in email sigs. iPods and other music players did this before the phones – and ringtones did it on dumbphones. Laptops on the go – I love playing "what is the prominent brand at this coffee shop?" Desktops much less so – and they're in decline. Cameras very much so – just watch DSLR peole eyeball each others' gear at a "photowalk" – and they have "religious" devotees as well.
These are – very focal – minorities +Angyl Bender
Well, in contrast (heh), I've never seen anyone asking for recommendations on which brand of plastic baggies or toilet paper or soda or antihistamine to buy. For stuff like that people seem to inherit brand loyalty from parents etc or they grab whatever is on sale.
but asking for recommendations is not key; it´s getting them. Like you say you can inherit brand loyalty or learn it from a house mate. There are many ways in which you get ´choice confirmation´ by what I call #LinkedTrust