Advertising shifting hands

So we thought advertising about products and services was the sole discretion of the brand managers. Not any longer.
To reach to your consumers meant that marketers had to part with huge amount of money. Today reaching your customers has definitely become easier. A viral campaign is all you need. Create some videos and post on Youtube, Facebook and many other social networking sites, that’s all. If the customers like it they will make sure it reaches all.
So it means the life of the marketer has become easy. Well I guess on the contrary it has become very difficult.
We are facing a big shift in the way products and services are being advertised. The uncomfortable truth is that today what is being told about your product or service is no longer under your control. In fact the customers can advertise about your offering at no cost and much more effective way than the marketers can think of.
So even if one of your customer service executive puts down the phone over an unreasonably demanding customer, in a matter of few minutes all the social networking sites would be trashing your image as an ardent service provider. So should we call this customer empowerment, certainly yes! The sad part is as someone said, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely”.
The first time I heard about twitter, I shrugged it as yet another social networking tool which would die its natural death. But the way it has made our voice heard to thousands and millions of people within moments is giving sleepless nights to many CEOs worldwide. So a flight of Jet Airways getting delayed by 30 minutes, the whole country knows within minutes the quality of service has gone down.
As a customer I feel truly great because the internet has given so much of power to my voice and certainly the companies have to answer to my reasonable problems because even I have paid for it. But the problem is that it will not be long when these reasonable problems would become unreasonable. That’s no rocket science to predict! We all know that whatever you offer today as customer delight becomes the expected tomorrow.
The other thing is that its normal human tendency to exaggerate our problems. And we all love to criticize, don’t we? And being customers we would always side with the side we belong to; isn’t it?
Even though we Indians today are slow in buying products online, we surely browse ten websites to read what others say about the product. It’s the virtual word-of-mouth. While the real word-of-mouth was believed because it came straight from someone’s mouth that we trusted, over here we tend to trust people whom we don’t even know exist.
It would be interesting to see how this virtual word-of-mouth would tread in future. Surely the problem of credibility will arise and then the customers would listen to may be a few trusted online sources.
But the problem that the marketers would increasingly face in future would be of control. It would be out of their control on who talks what about your offerings and that would make a lot of difference to your brand image. As the marketing head of Colors, Mr. Rameet Arora says, “There's no way great advertising is going to sell a bad product or bad advertising is going to sell a good one”.
You have to make sure that you give a consistent brand experience at all the touch points to customers. Just saying it won’t help because your customer’s voice has become stronger than yours.
The marketers have to learn how to face these new challenges and be consistent, so that your customers also speak your language.