Tag Archives: Curious
With the advent of social media, it has never been easier for consumers to interact with companies. An Experience Matters post a few weeks ago by Jeana Anderson showed how a couple simple tweets turned into an extraordinary experience. However, companies must be careful when using social media, because while good personal interactions can become extraordinary, bad personal interactions can become disastrous.
Curious’ recent research using our online community ShopTalk touched on why people choose to boycott companies. We found that boycotts which stem from bad personal interactions with companies are far more powerful than boycotts that arise from social or political scandals, as the case with BP or Nike.
About half of our members boycotted a company based on the company’s social practices or political views. Members talked about boycotting companies like Wal-Mart, based on their employment practices or Citgo-gas because of its ownership by “enemy of America” Venezuela. The other half boycotted a company based on a bad personal experience, such as terrible customer service. It was the first time I’d heard of Denny’s, Barnes and Noble, and Suave being boycotted.
Anastasia’s post on June 9 (probably unwittingly) hit on a topic close to my heart. (Anastasia, the cheque’s in the mail.)
I lead a consumer research group at Critical Mass called Curious that develops cost-effective and time-effective (but still effective) methods of getting to insight to ensure we’re making relevant and meaningful decisions. One of our methods involves the use of MROCs (market research online communities), which Brad Bortner from Forrester Research has written about over the past year. As you might imagine, I’m all about the use of communities specifically for this purpose. But unlike Anastasia’s post, Curious works to bring the conversation to the brand (in a more controlled environment) rather than monitoring the other conversations that are going on.
Great things can happen when you bring people together. We look for those moments when one of our respondents raises an interesting issue in one of our topics and suddenly the community is ablaze with activity around that topic. It’s something that I personally think of as an extraordinary experience.
One of our communities, ShopTalk, is comprised of a few hundred consumers in the US that have all been screened along various criteria (demographic, attitudinal, behavioral). We have discussions with them every week on topics ranging from buying toothpaste, to how they would define a term like “craftsmanship,” to whether they think the needs of moms are addressed online.
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