Archive for December, 2006

Customer Centricity, Interviews, Marketing Strategy, Ratings & Reviews, User-Generated Content, Word of Mouth, eCommerce

Brett Hurt Word-of-Mouth Wisdom #2: Joan Broughton of Shop.org

December 31st, 2006 by Brett Hurt Founder and CEO

In my second interview for the Word-of-Mouth Wisdom Interview Series (and the last of 2006), I was fortunate enough to get some of Joan Broughton's time.  Joan is a good friend and a former fellow Shop.org Board of Directors member.  I have worked with Joan for many years while at Coremetrics as REI was (and still is) a Coremetrics' client.  While at Coremetrics, Joan and I worked on a project that tracked the success of Google paid search campaigns (SEM) to offline (in-store and call center) sales, and the results were very enlightening.  When I was contemplating launching Bazaarvoice in May of 2005, I asked Joan for her wisdom on the matter.  In short, I have always respected Joan's intelligence, accomplishments, and true partnership. 

Joan is Shop.org's VP of ContJoan Broughton, Shop.org's VP of Content and Educationent and Education.  I remember how excited I was on the day Joan told me she was joining Shop.org's executive team, and she has already had an enormous impact on the quality of the events, new hires (such as Larry Joseloff), and new initiatives (such as the recent blog launch).  Joan couldn't have brought a better background to the Shop.org team.  As I mentioned, she previously worked for REI as their VP of Multi-Channel Programs.  She managed two business units, encompassing over $100 million in annual revenue with a team of 200 people.  Joan was responsible for launching REI's "order online, pick up in store" option for customers, as well as many online services.  Prior to REI, Joan was Office Depot's Director of Web Publishing.  She has spent more than 12 years in the online industry, including working at O'Reilly & Associates and America Online.  In other words, Joan has more online experience than almost anyone I know.

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Books, Marketing Strategy, Research, Word of Mouth

Brett Hurt The Word-of-Mouth Potential of Green Products in 2007 and Beyond

December 30th, 2006 by Brett Hurt Founder and CEO

GM's EV1, the first electric car to be produced since the 1930sI just finished watching Who Killed the Electric Car?, a documentary about General Motors and the failed EV1 car, the first electric car to be produced since the 1930s.  I will not get into the politics of the movie – you should watch it (or read that Wikipedia entry) and interpret the information as you see fit.  But I will say that I think that General Motors missed a phenomenal opportunity to both tap into a new wave of customer demand and create an incredibly powerful positive word-of-mouth movement that they sorely need.  This is important on so many levels, not the least of which is that the Millennials (the next generation of 100 million American consumers) are socially and environmentally conscious consumers (as I wrote about in October).

EV1s getting crushed after being taken back from their leaseesThe most insightful part of the movie, as it pertains to word of mouth as well as green products, is to watch the reaction of EV1 leasees (all EV1s were leased until GM proved the market potential) when they realize that they can not buy their EV1 under any condition.  They organize, they petition, they beg.  Big name actors like Mel Gibson, Tom Hanks, and all other EV1 leasees are turned down.  The organizers get together and offer to buy all of the cars for $1.9 million – their request goes with no answer (according to the movie).  After finding out that the EV1s are being destroyed, they stand outside of the GM parking lot where EV1s are being stored to watch over the cars to make sure that GM doesn't destroy any more.  They literally do this for months on a 24×7 basis.  Talk about love for a car!  It makes iPod owners look downright disloyal.  I guess that is because a car has such a big impact on your life as opposed to an iPod, and the EV1 leasees were so passionately focused on making an impact on the environment.  These consumers were a word-of-mouth revolution waiting to be leveraged by GM.  But, GM being short-term focused like so many companies that are incentivized to think that way due to the short-term nature of making your numbers for Wall Street analysts, completely misses the boat.  [Side note: this short-term focus was really crystallized for me by my friend, Derek Woodgate, who is a corporate futurist and the founder of The Futures Lab, in a discussion we had on why the corporate world needs futurists.  He has a great job, in my opinion, but more on that perhaps later.]

The Tesla is a well designed, fully electric sports carOne of the big critiques of the EV1, from a consumer perspective at that time, is the short distance that the car can travel on a full charge (only 55-75 miles on the first generation model, due to the early generation batteries used; but the movie states that the average American only drives 29 miles per day although it doesn't seem like the car was ever marketed to highlight that this range would be sufficient for some 90% of American drivers).  Another critique is the high production cost of $80,000 per vehicle when the lease payments would net around $34,000 to $44,000, obviously a money-losing proposition for GM.  But a former EV1 employee explains that once economies of scale kick in, from good marketing and availability in large metropolitan areas, the production costs would have fallen dramatically and battery technology would have rapidly improved.  This seems like a logical argument to me, especially considering the recent success of the Tesla, which can travel up to 250 miles on a full charge.  It also helps that the Tesla goes 0-60 in 4 seconds and looks like a well-designed sports car.  Unlike the EV1, which had a failed rollout (only leasing 800 units), the Tesla recently sold out their flagship 2007 model in just four months. 

I guess my point here is that GM could have figured it out if they stuck with it, and the consumer emotion evoked by the product was simply incredible.  And I think it is indisputable that GM missed the boat on the launch of hybrids relative to Toyota (who is projected to pass GM in 2007 as the world's largest producer of autos).  In the movie, one of GM's former Board members talks about his support of the EV1 project more from a R&D perspective, given the shift in consumer demand that he saw coming.  The success of hybrids and the launch of the Tesla prove that demand is there, if the marketing is well executed then word of mouth could have done the rest of the work.

What does all of this have to do with the title of my blog post?  Well, I predict that green products are going to be one of the hottest trends for the next decade.  They are ripe for an amazing level of positive word of mouth ("free marketing?").  Obviously coffee and universal access to global information also need little advertising when the product is great (Starbucks invested in their stores and locations, Google invested in the world's best search, and neither invested in advertising – positive word of mouth did that job for them).

There are more and more people that are accepting the consequences of global warming.  Just today, it was reported that another enormous ice shelf broke away in the Canadian Arctic.  As I first predicted in July of 2006, I wrote that the documentary An Inconvenient Truth would be marked as the most impactful documentary in modern history.  After seeing it a month ago for the first time, I have to admit that is a transformational movie.  You simply can't see it and not be emotionally moved by the implication of the evidence presented – it truly is "an inconvenient truth".  If you haven't seen it and want the quick "cheat sheet", this summary is a good place to start.  And 60 Minutes recently had a compelling report – here is an excerpt.

In August, I wrote about Wal-Mart embracing sustainability (and the rapid impact they could have given their immense scale).  And I recently learned (when having coffee with one of their heads of eCommerce) that they include a video on what they are doing about it with every copy of An Inconvenient Truth that they sell.  Here is an example of one of their recent initiatives, among many. 

From Millennials being more socially conscious consumers to Kleiner Perkins investing huge sums of money in alternative energy, there is something major under way here.  There is a shift in consumer demand that is just beginning to be felt (look at the Whole Foods stock rise that I wrote about when reporting on Wal-Mart and sustainability).  Wal-Mart, the largest company in the world, acting early on this shift is a wake-up call for smaller companies everywhere.

The bottom line is that I truly believe when we look back and assess the long-term economic impact of the events of 2006, it will be that the green movement got underway and rolled like a freight train through the economy for the next several decades.  And sparked consumer emotion and word of mouth that had never before been seen.  The stakes are simply too high and too broadly felt for it not to.

If you don't have a green strategy, I suggest you start moving now.  We'll see a lot more green (both green products and the money made off them) in 2007 and beyond.  We can help you rapidly evolve these products by tapping into word-of-mouth analytics and helping you learn what is really resonating (and what isn't) with your customers.

Update on Jan. 2:
I was just catching up on BusinessWeek while at the gym, and noticed that the "green" trend was highlighted in three different "ideas" for the "The Best Ideas of 2006", specifically:

The only other trend to have as many common ideas is that of user-generated content, a topic near and dear to Bazaarvoice and our clients.  Specifically:

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New at Bazaarvoice

Sam Decker Announcing Dell.com…and Three Reasons why Branded Manufacturers Should Have Reviews

December 27th, 2006 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer

On behalf of Bazaarvoice, I am pleased to announce one of our latest and largest clients: Dell.com.

Last Week Manish Mehta, VP of Global eCommerce posted on the Direct2Dell blog announcing ratings and reviews on their site. Says Manish: "If the printer you ordered gets the job done, let us know. If you were disappointed with your monitor, share that too, and let us know what you didn’t like about it. You can rate both Dell and non-Dell products. As we build up more reviews, our hope is that it will help all our customers make more informed buying decisions based on customer feedback."

 

 

As many of you know, I was at Dell from '99 to '06. For the first four years I managed Dell.com consumer, which grew to a $3.5B online business. During that time (in 2003) I started my Decker Marketing blog, partly for experiential learning. I may have been one of the first bloggers inside of Dell, but largely unknown as I was blogging about marketing topics, not about Dell. The marketing paradigm shift of customer-created experiences, citizen marketing, and customer-centric strategies was crystallizing for me. It was part of the reason I joined Bazaarvoice and helped launch us out of stealth mode about a year ago.  Now, one year later, I'm pleased to see Dell (as well as all of our clients) take another step towards customer-centricity. Our clients realize the tremendous benefits of marketing WITH the customer. Coincidentally, the title of my first book in 1995 was "How to Market WITH Customer User Groups.  Computer User Groups were the computer and software industry’s influencers in the late 80s and 90s. 10 years later, with the spread of Web technologies and ability to write reviews, any ONE customer can be more influential than a User Group.

Dell not only represents one of the largest online electronics retailers, but is also a direct manufacturer of products they make. With Bazaarvoice, Dell currently has review functionality on all third party as well as their branded electronics, such as Dell projectors, printers, and LCD TVs. Many of our clients, such as Bass Pro, Cabelas, HP, Sears, Burpee, and Fair Indigo carry products under their own brand name. We often get the highest level of angst on hosting reviews from direct manufacturers for their own brand.

There are at least three reasons why branded manufacturers need ratings and reviews:

First, if you believe in your products, your company and your people, then customer feedback is an ACCELERATOR to growth. Word of mouth already occurs offline for your products, so enabling online word of mouth enables a few customers to amplify their voice to 95% of the online shoppers who would never meet the influencers face to face.  Burpee is a 120-year old company built on word of mouth. Online reviews are accelerating their growth beyond 'normal' word of mouth.

Second, most manufacturers should be more concerned about not carrying reviews than be afraid of negative reviews. While nearly all clients will receive some negative reviews, they will likely see a similar "J-curve" where positive far outweigh negative reviews 8 to 1. Despite Dell's word of mouth challenges over the past few years (mostly over service and support issues), their products are seeing balanced reviews.

Here's a TV that has rave reviews.

And one that doesn't (perhaps yet).

Third, and most importantly, this direct feedback represents an opportunity to bring customer oxygen into the company to change the culture, to improve products, and to leverage competitive advantages of a direct manufacturer by pushing the customer voice upstream for product development improvements.

Through today’s customer-created online experiences, branded manufacturers realize their competitiveness is largely determined by enabling customer participating, listening to the customer voice, and joining the conversation. More to the point, winning today means leveraging and amplifying the customer voice more strategically than the competition.

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User-Generated Content, Word of Mouth, eCommerce

Brett Hurt The Ultimate Holiday Toy: A Crowdsourced, Word-of-Mouth Wunderkind

December 27th, 2006 by Brett Hurt Founder and CEO

Amazon.com has posted an amazing holiday season, shipping 3.4 million items on its peak day of December 11.  You can learn a lot about "what's hot" by looking at their top sellers in each category (a $19,999 MP3 player?!).  But it was Frank Barnako at MarketWatch who blogged about Radica's 20 Questions being one of their top sellers in toys.  This product has 205 reviews with a 4.5-star average rating on Amazon.com, and it claims to be able to read your mind.

Why do I love this product?  Because, as the title of this post says, it is a "crowdsourced", word-of-mouth wunderkind!  Let me explain what I mean.

Radica's 20 QuestionsFirst of all, I have written about crowdsourcing a few times on Bazaarblog (see my May post introducing the term, August post on Yahoo! crowdsourcing ads – with a nod to GM doing the same, September post on Google crowdsourcing image labels, or early December post on JPG Magazine crowdsourcing photos).  I have also referenced the book "The Wisdom of Crowds" several times.  20 Questions is the wisdom of the crowds.  It is a database of over 46,700,000 (and rapidly counting) individual games played by "the crowd".  The crowd, of course, is you, as in "you: the person of the year" (as you have recently been named by Time magazine).  Yes, 20 Questions is a huge database of consumer(player)-generated content!

You can play the game for free here.  I first heard about it a year ago, from one of Chris Sherman's articles on ClickZ (theorizing what would happen if 20Q was applied to search engines).  If you haven't played it yet, it is quite entertaining.  I recommend "Classic 20Q", which has been built by players' answers since 1988.  It is hard to beat – pretty much guessing anything you can think of by asking you less than 20 questions.

Second, what does this have to do with word of mouth?  Well, everything!  This game was literally built by word of mouth since 1988.  The basis of most great word-of-mouth campaigns is a great product.  This game became great by people constantly playing it.  Once you play this game, the chances are pretty high that you will tell someone about it.  The more people that play, the "smarter" it gets, the greater the "wow factor", and, therefore, the pass-along factor continues to increase.

So, once you get done with all of your returns, pick up 20 Questions for $14.95 at Amazon.com, CompUSA. or Sears.  All of that AI brainpower for such a small price.  And now you have a great story about crowdsourcing and word of mouth to go along with it!  Finally, for more interesting reading on the background of 20Q check out the Wikipedia entry, especially if you want to tell your friends about folk taxonomy, neural network, AI experiments.

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Customer Centricity, Interviews, Marketing Strategy, Ratings & Reviews, User-Generated Content, Word of Mouth, eCommerce

Brett Hurt Word-of-Mouth Wisdom #1: Delightful Deliveries

December 19th, 2006 by Brett Hurt Founder and CEO

Today I am launching the "Word-of-Mouth Wisdom" Interview Series, a joint project with Shop.org.  The interviews will be published at Bazaarblog and Shop.org's new member's only blog simultaneously.  I will be interviewing many of the best minds in the word-of-mouth marketing industry today.  And I will learn from them while you do.  

Today I am interviewing Eric Lituchy, the Founder and CEO of Delightful Deliveries, a new Bazaarvoice client and fellow Shop.org member.  I first met Eric in February of 2005 at Shop.org's first Multichannel Executive Symposium.  We are kindred spirits in that we are both eCommerce entrepreneurs.  I began my online retail venture, a sports nutrition store, in the summer of 1998.  This was one year after Eric started Delightful Deliveries.  I would move on to found Coremetrics, while Eric would stick with it and today Delightful Deliveries does $6.5 million in sales and is #445 on Internet Retailer's Top 500 list.

Eric Lituchy, Founder and CEO of Delightful DeliveriesNow Delightful Deliveries is one of the most well known online gift retailers offering the trendiest confectionary creations and mouthwatering gift baskets from brands such as Mrs. Fields Cookies, Ethel M Chocolates, and Shari's Berries. An expert in both the food and eCommerce industry, Eric has built a successful online business which markets the most delicious eatable arrangements from wine and cheese baskets to giant chocolate-covered fortune cookies.

Eric realized that sugar makes the world go-round and branded himself as the candy man at the wee age of 9 when he started a lucrative business which entailed stocking up at the local grocery for candy and gum to then up-sell to his 4th-grade buddies – turning over a handsome profit.

A graduate of the University of Arizona, Eric began his marketing career at Young & Rubicam in New York City. Utilizing his advertising & marketing expertise, Eric founded Ale in the Mail in 1994; a marketing company specializing in direct marketing via catalog and the internet for Microbrewed Beers. Three years later, Eric started Delightful Deliveries.

Eric currently resides in Port Washington, NY with his wife, Gina, three year old daughter, Janey, and twin "Delightful Deliveries" on the way. As Eric is a local New Yorker, he's easily accessible for discussion on any topic pertaining to the food, consumer / gift, and eCommerce industries.

So begins our interview …

Q1. Tell our readers about your business and how it started.

I started Delightful Deliveries in 1998, with my wife Gina.  We had just sold our 1st company, Ale In The Mail, and were looking for a new business that matched our interests and where we saw a real need in the market.  Delightful Deliveries was originally going to be a traditional direct marketer.  We signed a lease for a 2500 sf warehouse and we were going to manufacturer and sell gift baskets and other gourmet gifts.  We quickly changed direction, cancelled our lease and decided to do everything via drop-ship.  We were really one of the early pioneers, especially online, in this category.

Q2. As the first gifting business to provide customer-driven ratings and reviews of your products, did you have concerns about being a pioneer?

We had absolutely no concerns.  We saw ratings and reviews as a natural fit for our products.  The fact that no one in our category was doing it was actually a plus.  By providing customer feedback we would have a distinct advantage over the competition and we really wanted to capitalize on this fact.  Our philosophy has always been "Do what's best for the customer and we'll benefit from it".

Q3. Given that the majority of your products are gifted to recipients, how are you getting recipients to write reviews?

This is something that is unique to the gift-giving industry and we thought long and hard about this.   If we ask the gift-giver for feedback would this be an accurate and meaningful review?  Maybe, but probably not as detailed as we'd like.  So we thought that we should try to target the gift recipient.  We decided on a multi-level approach. (1) Direct to the Recipient by including a "We Want Your Opinion" card along with each gift we send out. (2) Permission from Gift Givers by asking the gift giver to provide the email of the recipient solely for the purpose of rating the product.

Q4. How are you using or planning to use ratings and reviews in your online campaigns?  Offline?

Online we have heavily promoted Ratings & Reviews and we hope to receive ratings & reviews on 75% of our products.  We are currently doing a promotion on our website and via email where you can win a $500 shopping spree at DelightfulDeliveries.com.  Every reviewer is entered to win and the initial results are very promising.  We, of course, include the rating & reviews on all product pages and will be adding "Top Rated" to our filters.  Within a few months we will also be adding sub-categories for all top rated products.  For example, Top Rated Baked Goods, Top Rated Gift Baskets, etc.

Q5. When you receive a negative review on one of your products, what do you do with that operationally?

Negative reviews are as valuable to us as the positive ones.  We look at each negative review and have a step-by-step process to see where we failed the customer.  Based on the issue we will call and apologize to the reviewer and offer compensation, contact the vendor for a product evaluation or pull the product if we receive even a nominal number of complaints.

Q6. As this is the start of your community initiative, what’s next?

I agree, this is just the tip of the iceberg.  We have just begun staff reviews and I think they are an excellent way for us to connect with the consumer.  I also like the idea of expert reviewers, where a small group of customer are asked to review products for us.  In the future I'd like to be able group reviewers by demographics, thus making the review relevant to each individual.  For example, we sell crunchy chocolate chip cookies that are extremely popular, but, there is one segment of the population, the elderly, that always complains about them because they can be hard to chew.  Wouldn't it be great if we segmented the reviewers so that customer could get the review that relates to them?  Video reviews are an interesting idea and I think they could provide a very powerful testimonial for the product.  It could, however, be a nightmare to have to watch 1000's of videos.  I'm certain the staff at Bazaarvoice is already thinking about this and how to best utilize video for rating & reviews.

Q7. Any projections on how user-generated content is going to impact businesses over the next five years?  What will UGC look like five years from now?

User-generated content, in my opinion, will be the new "mass media".  Instead of 500 channels on your cable box you'll have 100,000,000 users generating text and video that will be readily available via the internet.  While this sounds a bit insane, I do think this is where we are headed and user content will become a major advertising vehicle with the ability to target groups like never before.  Relating to Delightful Deliveries, we see customer content as a driving force for growth.  Merchandising will change from a push to a pull model.  Customer feedback will help to create new product lines and improve on products we already sell.  As I previously stated, video testimonials and consumer generated product demonstrations are going to be the norm in the near future.  I know we can talk about this for hours, as user content is really in its infancy.  How about we can continue this conversation over a cup of coffee sometime?

Eric, I'll see you at Shop.org FirstLook on January 31, and we'll continue our conversation over a cup of coffee!  For now, I would like to invite our readers to ask Eric any questions you want via our comments section.  I will make sure that he gets all of your questions so he can respond.

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Customer Centricity, Marketing Strategy, Research, User-Generated Content, Word of Mouth

Brant Barton Measuring Word of Mouth Volume 2 Now Available From WOMMA

December 16th, 2006 by Brant Barton Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer

Sam and I attended and each had the pleasure of speaking at WOMMA's Word of Mouth Marketing Summit & Research Symposium event earlier this week in Washington, D.C.  Over three days, WOMMA members and industry thought leaders presented on a range of topics and shared pioneering research and WOM case studies.  On Monday, I presented our whitepaper, "Ratings, Reviews & ROI", and on Tuesday, Sam presented tips (supported by several hilarious photos) on how to get your organization to embrace word of mouth, both bottom-up and top-down.   

Having attended WOMMA's first research-focused event, Measuring Word of Mouth, back in July 2005, it is truly amazing to see firsthand how successful the organization has been in bringing executives, marketers, and technologists together to share WOM strategies, case studies, and lessons learned.  WOMMA now boasts over 300 members, and these companies are helping to shape the discipline of word of mouth marketing.  WOMMA's phenomenal growth is definitely an indicator of a larger industry trend, one that we write about often on Bazaarblog – the gradual but inevitable shift of marketing strategies and budgets towards more customer-centric, even customer-generated, messaging and focus.  If you aren't a member of WOMMA, please consider joining.  I would personally love to see more participation from direct marketers and retailers.  

In addition, I also want to bring your attention to WOMMA's second volume of WOM research papers and case studies, Measuring Word of Mouth, Volume 2.  The book is "WOM University" in printed form, containing 20 original papers from WOM practicioners and leading companies in the space.  I'm happy to say that "Ratings, Reviews & ROI" is included!  If you are interested in just our whitepaper, you can obtain a version of it by request from our website at "Ratings, Reviews & ROI" whitepaper but I highly recommend that you read up on what other WOMMA member companies are doing to advance the practice of ethical word of mouth marketing.

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New at Bazaarvoice

Sam Decker 19 Million Reviews Served on Cyber Monday

December 15th, 2006 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer

We had three beta customers at this time last year. So a couple weeks ago was our first Cyber Monday hosting reviews for some of the largest online retail brands. For example, we serve 3 of the top 15 retailers including Sears, The Home Depot, and Overstock.com. Because we host the content through our clients pages, we tracked total number of impressions and reviews served. Through our logs we estimate we served over 19 million reviews to online shoppers on November 27, Cyber Monday.

Frankly, we expected a large number. Jupiter reports 77% of online shoppers seek product reviews and Forrester suggests reviews are the most widely read consumer generated content on the Web. And we learned from BuzzMetrics that 25% of google searches on top brand names bring up consumer generated content — that's where our SearchVoice SEO pages become very useful!

We're pleased that for our first big holiday there were no glitches or downtime. The origin servers and content distribution network are telling us to 'bring it on'! And so we shall.

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Marketing Strategy, User-Generated Content, Word of Mouth, eCommerce

Sam Decker 18 Customer-Created Marketing Merchandising Tactics

December 7th, 2006 by Sam Decker Chief Marketing Officer

The impact of customer-created content is in the strategy of how you use the content and how you market WITH the influencers who are participating.

Forrester reports that 71% of online shoppers seek out ratings and reviews. It is the most widely read user generated content on the Web. Why limit this to the product page? We have worked with clients implementing the power of customer voice in email, navigation, and merchandising. Recently we released Holiday Tips for Merchandising via a press release.

As a reader / subscriber of our blog you get better than 3X the value of that release! Here are 18 ideas and tips for leveraging online word of mouth in marketing and merchandising:

Product Merchandising Selection (Use ratings to select what products get merchandised or for merchandising rules engine)

    Top Seller + Top Rated
    Choose brands or product popular last year, but also have high ratings this year (validates their reputation).

    Margin X Rating
    Choose products appropriate for gifting or have high margin, but also have top ratings. Could integrate into merchandising rules engine with Bazaarvoice feed.

    Top Rated by Product Attributes
    Feature cross-sell or upsell products with high rating in a particular product attribute. (ex: high rated battery life camcorders).

    Rating Velocity X Avg. Rating
    Choose hot products, changed out every week. Hot products = highest rating velocity in category X average rating

Home Page / Site Merchandising Ideas

    Sweepstakes to Write Reviews
    Create a sweepstakes for writing reviews before XX date.

    Top Rated Products
    Merchandise ‘Top Rated Products” as feature on home page. Could be all categories or within a specific category.

    Discounts on Top Rated
    Feature a special, limited time offer of % off or free shipping off top rated products for a week.

    Top Rated Holiday Gifts
    Feature a holiday gift guide of gift-worthy products that are top rated, by category and/or by price.

    Top Reviewer Recommendations
    Feature the products reviewed by your most prolific reviewer.

    Most Talked About Products
    Create a “Most Talked About Products” feature, which are products that have the most positive reviews (similar to Hot Products, different spin).

Online Marketing — Advertising and Email

    Email Sweepstakes Offer
    Email your customer base or recent purchasers with sweepstakes offer, reminding them to write a review before XX date.

    Top Rated SEM Campaigns
    Create an SEM / AdWords campaign for Top Rated Products by category, or a special offer on specific top rated products.

    Rating Icon in Banners
    Put rating icons with any product featured in a banner ad or micro-site.

    Discount off Top Rated Campaign
    Feature % off top rated products. Make it home page, email and SEM campaigns

    Review Text as Copy
    Feature customer reviews text as copy in holiday emails

    Product Ratings in Emails
    Put rating icons next to every product you put in email. Do an A/B Split test!

    Promote Top Rated Products in all Emails
    Merchandise ‘top rated products’ path in email and home page

    Gift Guide Campaign
    Create gift guide advertising campaign of Top 10 Top Rated Products by category.

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Marketing Strategy, Word of Mouth

Brett Hurt Netflix vs. Blockbuster: Round Two

December 6th, 2006 by Brett Hurt Founder and CEO

Because of the power of negative word-of-mouth, and the ability for Netflix to leverage the “bad profits” that Blockbuster had been collecting from its customers for late fees, round one of Netflix vs. Blockbuster was a total knockout. I wrote about this in February (and first referenced the concept of bad profits for this blog) and then revisited the battle in June and in my most recent post on bad profits a few weeks ago.

Blockbuster.com Total Access graphic
Round two is getting a little more interesting, as Blockbuster finally starts to leverage their stores to create a potentially more positive word-of-mouth offering. In today’s Wall Street Journal, Blockbuster announced that they are letting subscribers of Netflix rent movies for free through Dec. 21 by simply walking into one of their stores and redeeming the tear-off address flap from the signature red Netflix envelope for the free rental. This is a promotion for Blockbuster’s new “Total Access” feature, which lets customers return DVDs rented through its online service, which competes directly with Netflix, in their stores. Blockbuster announced Total Access in the November 1 edition of the Wall Street Journal with the following quote from their CEO:

“Customers shouldn’t have to choose between renting online versus in-store, and they should never have to be without a movie,” said Blockbuster Chairman and Chief Executive John Antioco in a statement.

This is a smart strategy as it enables Blockbuster to leverage something Netflix doesn’t have – 8,500 stores located across 29 countries. It will ultimately lead to some positive word-of-mouth for Blockbuster, and a new competitive differentiator against Netflix. I, for one, plan to try this out over the holidays as the only downside to my Netflix subscription is sometimes I don’t plan far enough ahead to have the movie I want when I want it.
Never be without a movie graphic from Blockbuster.com

However, it is hard to imagine that this will lead to a long-term competitive advantage for Blockbuster. The next wave that will hit is movie downloading, which will solve the only real challenge Netflix has (the wait time). And Netflix is planning to lead in that wave. Check out Reed Hastings’ recent interview on 60 Minutes. And don’t get me started on how great of a job Netflix does in creating high switching costs (or “community stickiness”) with all of its great ratings and social networking features. Even though I will try Blockbuster again as a result of this promotion, it is unlikely I will dump Netflix.

What is the lesson learned here? Leverage your multichannel assets, like Blockbuster is finally doing, to earn “good profits”, especially in the face of a competitor acting on your source of bad profits. This will help offset the negative word-of-mouth that your bad profits have generated with positive word-of-mouth. Also, reducing your sources of bad profits now will help prevent disruptive upstarts in the future. This is much harder to do than it sounds, and the book The Innovator’s Dilemma does the best job of any I have read in explaining why.

Update: I just saw that Reed Hastings won the “Innovator of the Year Award” from the NRF (National Retail Federation), the parent of Shop.org.

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Community, Customer Centricity, Marketing Strategy, Ratings & Reviews, Research, User-Generated Content, Word of Mouth, eCommerce

Brett Hurt JPG Magazine, Ego, and Photo Reviews

December 2nd, 2006 by Brett Hurt Founder and CEO

Recently Brant wrote about the marriage of user-generated content (UGC) and print (Gannett and “citizen journalism”), and in a comment to his post I referenced the same movement with UGC and TV (CNN and iReport). So, I guess it was no shocker to me when I read TechCrunch this morning and learned about the relaunch of JPG Magazine. The new JPG Magazine is a little bit of Flickr, digg, and the old JPG Magazine rolled into one. Users upload their photos, the community votes, and the winner’s photos show up in the print edition and they win $100 and a one-year subscription to the magazine. I spent some time voting this morning, and it is actually quite addictive. Why?

JPG Magazine

Well, the answer to that question is something I have been thinking about ever since launching Bazaarvoice with Brant. Why do people take the time to write reviews? [We will announce next week that we served over 19 million reviews on Cyber Monday!] Why do people take the time (like I did this morning) to vote on community photos for JPG Magazine? Why do people take the time to label images Google has crawled? [Google's top contributor, "wordgirl", has labeled 1,335,500 images since they launched this only three months ago - that is a staggering 14,839 images per day since launch!]

The answer is actually more complex than you may think. It is a combination of ego, social connection, and good karma. Let me explain:

1. Ego – At Bazaarvoice, we know that a reviewer comes back to our client’s site three times, on average, after submitting a review to see if it has posted yet. When people take the time to share their opinion, they want to know the world heard it. This fact alone gives our clients three opportunities to resell a customer. In a recent report, Patti Freeman-Evans researched these reviewers.

2. Social connection – Why do you share your favorite movie with an acquaintance? Do you care if they watch it? Why do we talk about our favorite music? The answer is linked to human nature. We all care about connecting with each other as humans. This is what drives the creation of culture.

3. Good karma – A universal truth is that if you help someone, it makes you feel good. When reviewers help each other shop, it saves time. Saving time is one of the most important things we can help each other do, especially in the manic, multitasking world we live in today.

Now, if you apply these three elements to JPG Magazine, it all begins to make sense.

Obviously, we are thinking about the power of photos in customer-generated content at Bazaarvoice. A while back, we added Photo Reviews to our feature set. Wayne blogged about this recently. If you think about the three elements above, photos are a very strong component. Experts believe that the advent of the digital camera is one of the keys to why MySpace took off versus its predecessors (Geocities, etc).

How should you leverage photo reviews? With contests and multichannel recognition. Don’t just run a contest for a gift certificate give-away for customers that write a review and include a photo, post the winning photo on your home page! Use it in an email campaign. Use it in a circular. Use it in an in-store display. If your community of customers sees that all three elements – ego, social connection, and good karma – are maximized by you, then it will spark customer participation unlike anything you have seen before. Threadless’ entire business model is based on this, and I think it is a brilliant application of the three.

For fun, here is a photo we recently moderated that you won’t see on one of our client’s site because it came from a rejected review. Alas, it added no obvious value, there was no text review associated with it, and I think this person was just bored (they were thinking about element #1 above only – ego). But, it does grab your attention!

Attack Fish!

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