Empowered Customers

If you can read what is written in the inset picture, then the idea of empowered customers would be easier to understand.

The old proverb says "Pen is mightier than sword" and I believe the maxim is most true in case of irritated, disgusted and frustrated customers who wants to pay back hard to those nosy service companies.

Read this post & also this one too, then you will get a bigger picture where we as customer stand and how can we turn our dissatisfaction into something which these companies will take seriously for their lousy and lame services.

This is what Joseph Jaffe did i.e. made a group of dissatisfied customers and tried to unified their voices into one and give it back to the service companies.

I guess, in the web 2.0 era, we as customers can be more proactive in protesting bad customer service.

So in today's world, if your business model's vision & mission considers customers as core to their processes then be sure to consider them as core and not someone from whom you generate just revenues. Or else once in a while customers will rise from their slumber and knock you down. Ask Dell and many more.

India's Most Trusted Brands of 2008 (A Goofy Analysis)

The report is out. Economic Times' Brand Equity has published the list of India's Most Trusted Brands Survey.

The top ten brands are :-

1. Nokia
2. Colgate
3. Tata Salt
4. Pepsodent
5. Ponds
6. Lux
7. Britannia
8. Dettol
9. Lifebuoy
10. Vicks

The top ten service brands are

1. LIC
2. Airtel
3. State Bank of India
4. Reliance Mobile
5. BSNL
6. Tata Indicom
7. Indian Oil
8. Hutch/Vodafone
9. ICICI Bank
10. Bank of India

Ok. We have reached to this point. Now what? As in what can we infer from this survey results. I somehow see some pattern/trend in the results. First, most of the top ten trusted brands are those which belong to FMCG category. Second, most of them slap those irritating "please buy me ads" on our face every where we go, so recall would be high for them. Third, remember recent IPL (Indian Premier League) where Nokia co-authored the Kolkata Knight Riders story along with endorser Shah Rukh Khan. So visibility is high.

So is there any correlation between ads slapped onto our face and brand recall. Now one suggestion would be please go back to their balance sheets and see how many of these brands are making profits to that extent since quantitatively speaking they should make huge profits since they are most trusted ones amongst consumers.

So last question is do they truly reflect our true trust on these brands remembering the fact that No.1 trusted brand Nokia was in middle of a much heated debate about "Overheating of Battery". So the old marketing adage "Under-promise & Over-Deliver" doesn't work in this context. What a co-incidence?

Anyway congrats from my part to figure in such a list (pun intended!).

Slidepost: Endless Innovation's Trends

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The slides gives a brief overview of 4 major trends that are creating new opportunities in business. Some of these trends are a synthesis of existing developments and ideas, while others are so brand new, they haven't even been named yet.

The slide broadly speaks out about 4 trends:

(1) Social Data

(2) Micro-Payments for Online Social Experiences

(3) Content Mashups

(4) "Live" experiences (that really aren't "live")

Related Posts:

• Slidepost: Branding 2.0 & Social Media
• Slidepost: Innovate to Differentiate
• Slidepost: Global State of Social Media

Social Media Simplified: CommonCraft does it again

Sachi and Lee LeFever of CommonCraft does it again with "Social Media in Plain English".

Oh, by the way, if your are still thinking what the hell is Social Media and why is media and people like us from the blogging fraternity are going bonkers (if I may say so), then definitely this 3:44 minute brilliant piece from CommonCraft will help you.



So go ahead, give yourself and your customers a chance to do something different because "EXPERIENCE IS THE NEW REALITY" and sure social media and its various tools (or I should say cheap yet effective) will come handy.

Till then enjoy this one and full marks to CommonCraft.

Related Posts:

• Video: Twitter Simplified
• RSS Simplified- How *RSS* can make your life easier

Interesting Consumer Behavior Insights (A Study)

It seems like my work schedule has a deep repercussion on my blog posts. Still trying to manage it :-)

Now getting back to this post, found an interesting study from the field of academics. Erik Ottoson from Uppsala University has some interesting insights on consumer behavior. The topic being "Seeking One's Own: On Encounters Between Individuals and Objects" (Download the pdf here).

The ongoing study broadly talks about :

....individuals search for objects. It follows people through flea markets, refuse skips, shopping streets and malls. The aim of the thesis is to study the search for things and how it influences individuals and their relations to objects and the places in which they search.

The thesis focuses on what is termed "SERENDIPITOUS SEARCHING"– i.e. an activity of open browsing for anything that awakens the person’s interest. That means that the people in the study are not just looking for certain things – they are also seeking to come to terms with what they are actually looking for. Ideals of what is beautiful, useful and reasonable materialise in conjunction with the experience of what is available and what is absent or out of reach. It is suggested that this mode of looking for goods is not only about purchase deliberations, but more importantly is a specific way of interacting with the world and making places meaningful. It can be viewed as a way of creating and moderating anticipation, and thereby cultivating affect. Searching for things thus becomes an experiential horizon.

Part I: “Searching and Space” deals with how searching for something becomes a specific way of engaging with the physical surroundings. The landscape becomes a taskscape, i.e. an array of physical structures linked together by a set of related activities.

Part II, “Discoveries and Rubbish” explores how the activities of searching charges objects with qualities. Through two different environments, searching is analysed as a way of elevating things from the status of rubbish to one of discovery.

Part III: “From the Horizon of Finding” focuses on how the searchers’ aims are transformed when they encounter the objects that really exist.