Episode 13: Customer advocacy at the digital shelf

Transcription

1 Episode 13: Customer advocacy at the digital shelf profitero.com/the-profitero-podcast Reifenberger BzzAgent, by dunnhumby Anderson VP of Strategy and Insights, Profitero Anderson Hello and welcome to another episode of the Profitero podcast. I'm Anderson, VP, Strategy and Insight for Profitero. Today I'm really excited to welcome Reifenberger of BzzAgent, by Dunnhumby. BzzAgent is a pioneer of word-of-mouth marketing. Of course, at the digital shelf, word-of-mouth is captured in product ratings and reviews. While there are many strategies and tactics for influencing ratings and reviews, today we dive in on product sampling as a way to put products in the hands of actual shoppers. Encourage them to leave authentic and transparent reviews. It's a great conversation, very insightful and we'll start, just in a minute. In the meantime, if you have feedback for us, we'd love to hear it. You can reach us at insights@profitero.com, with comments on past episodes or thoughts for what you'd like us to cover in the future. If you're enjoying the podcast, we always appreciate it when you leave a rating or review, pertinent to today's topic, at itunes or wherever you discover podcasts. Thanks again, for joining us. Now, let's hear from. I'm really excited to welcome Reifenberger, Global Client Solutions Manager for BzzAgent from Dunnhumby., welcome. Thanks a lot,. Happy to be here. Thanks so much for joining us. If you don't mind, just tell us a little bit about your background and what you do with BzzAgent? Absolutely. Throughout my career, I've actually held a breadth of roles. Generally, the common thread is where I've helped develop data-driven customer strategies, and Episode 13: Customer advocacy at the digital shelf 1

2 also media solutions for leading global brands. That's what I really enjoy. I started my career, actually in the financial services industry and then later joined Procter & Gamble as a Consumer Market Knowledge Manager. I've been with Dunnhumby since 2008, and really leading client relationships for analytics and insight solutions across a variety of key accounts. Panera Bread and Coca-Cola are some of those. Since 2012, I've contributed to BzzAgent's strategic and tactical media initiatives. Most recently, I actually built and launched a solution called Buzz Reviews, which is where we help clients generate product reviews and really bringing authentic consumer opinions to the digital shelf and beyond. What that means is that, we run end to end advocacy campaigns where we place product samples with a targeted audience of volunteers within our network, and ask them to write a review. Then we have partnerships set up with syndication companies. Bazaarvoice is actually our lead partner there, who helps get the content out to the places that matter most, within their retail network and also brand sites. Very helpful. Of course, that's what brought us together. At the digital shelf we think, ratings and reviews are among the most important types of content that brands don't have direct influence over, the way they do product titles and images and descriptions and so on. In the broader context of social media, the half-life of a product review or a product rating, compared to Twitter or Facebook is just immense. One of the questions, I think, a lot of brands are asking, as they get more deeply entrenched in e-commerce and supporting their brand online is, "Where do we start? What can we influence? How we do it authentically?" Just tell us a little bit about the way you think about that, and how brands can and should approach it? Absolutely. I might start by taking a step back and just making sure we're all on the same page of, why reviews are really important in this space. I know we both have a lot of passion around it, but just making sure our listeners do, too. Nielsen, annually publishes a study called, The Trust in Advertising. In that study, consistently over the past years, it has produced that the top, trusted form of media is recommendations from friends and family, from people who consumers know. I think we can all relate to that. Secondly however, I think on a regular basis, it has also shown that consumers regularly trust opinions posted online, to guide their own decisions. Certainly, with the increased prevalence of mobile usage and people just getting used to researching products online, that's becoming increasingly important. At the digital shelf, when your family and friends might not be sitting right next to you, it's really those opinions that are published below on the product page, that are going to be the online peer group of influencers for people. Yeah, totally agree. If you're looking for a community of people that you know, have purchased whatever product you're researching, an online retailer site is a pretty compelling starting point. We trot this statistic out, probably too often at this point. Bloomreach, last October I think, updated research that has held true for the last few Episode 13 profitero.com/the-profitero-podcast 2

3 years, just as the Nielsen data that shows Amazon is the primary product research destination. More traffic even, than Google. I think, not only the selection that you find at Amazon, but the content on those product detail pages, especially reviews is, a key part of that. I'm glad that you emphasized the importance, upfront. Absolutely. I would also add that, it's not only the trusting nature of that content. Historically, I think a lot of companies treated product reviews as a form of consumer research. It's still good for insights. We should absolutely be mining the reviews for insights. They were also, maybe secondarily used as the public relation's alert mechanism. If there was ever a negative review, the company's all over that and aiming to respond. Again, that should still be happening. Increasingly I think, companies are seeing the value of product reviews in actually, impacting sales. Many studies have proven that actual sales conversion impact. I know, Bazaarvoice released their conversation index report, where they've noted that there's about a sweet spot of a 30% conversion lift, when you go from having 0 product reviews on a page, to about 50. There's a sweet spot there. Even beyond that, there's still a positive correlation of review volume to the number of orders, even at higher volumes. It's all good, getting that consumer opinion posted in that relevant place. Yeah. We work with a lot of brands, benchmarking their starting position versus specific competitors or again, some of the bestsellers or outperformers in their category. Some of the things they pay attention to, or review count, their average star rating. The questions that quickly follow are, "If we're behind, what can we do?" How do you think about the options that brands have, for influencing in an authentic way, those types of metrics? Wow, that's a great question. I would say, before you even get to that point, and let's focus even on the new product launch. That's a great place to start in terms of making sure that you're seeding some reviews, even advance of the launch, with people who are going to write great, quality content for you. Generate the content, ahead of launch and work with your syndication partner to get that content out to the product page, as soon as it goes live. When you do it in that order and then have all of your other national media go live around the same time, those consumer opinions are already there and visible as the reference point, as new consumers are becoming aware. We've seen a lot of clients look across the year, and at all of their new product launches and just say "Okay, I'm going to build a calendar for my product content generation and line it up, initially with the new product launch, or just slightly ahead of a new product launch." From there, you can absolutely look across your product coverage, not only across the breadth of your product line, but then the depth of review coverage. Whether that is the depth of coverage, compared to a competitor or the depth of coverage, compared to, maybe your company's general goal for a number of reviews you might Episode 13 profitero.com/the-profitero-podcast 3

4 want to have on every product. That's where, then you can be more surgical around using a variety of tactics to achieve that goal. We've had some clients coming to us saying, "Gosh, our company is"... Rather, "Our competitor, really has a strong presence of review volume out there." They come to us saying, "Gosh, how can we get to that similar volume, very, very quickly?" I would strongly recommend that you still use that tactic of looking across a reasonable duration of time, in which to generate that volume. Certainly, there are tactics out there, where you can achieve a very, very high volume of product reviews in a short period of time. You can do that through a sampling mechanism, but we've become increasingly aware of just really, how that can come across as looking rather inauthentic at the destination site. I think retailers are becoming a bit more sensitive to that sudden surge in very high peaks of volume as well. If you think about the consumer just reading the reviews online, if they see that all of the reviews have the same time stamp. That, all of the shoppers are articulating a similar kind of context of how they're writing the review, then they probably will just be a bit less valuable for you because they're not going to come across as, quite as authentic. What we've helped our clients do, again is, take that overall goal of volume that they want to achieve, and then plot that out in, maybe running some various pulses of campaigns over a longer period of time, so that you get a more reasonable flow of content to your site. That approach actually helps boost SEO as well because with SEO... Actually, a lot of retailers' algorithms, the notion of recency is one that's important. You don't necessarily want to achieve all of your volume at one point in time. Yeah, you beat me to it. You mentioned 2 really critical concepts; recency. We see the same thing you just shared. Certain retailers' search algorithms seem to be evolving to account for review velocity and recency. That's one of the metrics that we're starting to analyze in our data. Then the other, that I think is really important that we can probably spend another minute on is, authenticity. Of course, Amazon has now sued third party sellers, a couple of times, for inauthentic reviews. If you think about the way they've positioned themselves as a source of trusted content, it makes perfect sense. How should brands be thinking about authenticity in the context of these various tactics for prompting reviews and some of these types of campaigns? Absolutely. Authenticity is one of the main factors of how we structure our campaigns. It's really important. The root of BzzAgent is really, all about making marketing better. The root of Dunnhumby is, having the consumer at the core of everything that we do. We would never want to be a part of something that isn't authentic. It's just not a good proposition in this industry. I think, as your audience is thinking about who to engage with, in either a sampling tactic or other mode of Episode 13 profitero.com/the-profitero-podcast 4

5 generating review content, really emphasizing the importance of authenticity is absolutely critical. I have a couple of areas that they might want to focus on, when having those types of conversations. I think the first is, really understanding who is writing the review and how they are being engaged. Who is it? Are they actually experiencing the product in a way that can be guaranteed? Some content generation programs that I've seen, don't actually have that as an assurance. It's not ours, but I don't actually know how the review itself can be proven to be genuine, if we're not even sure that the person has sampled the product or purchased the product. A lot of the best sampling communities out there, have a managed community of people who are writing their reviews. They're targeted, so that the product that they're sampling is actually, extremely relevant to their everyday life. Again, that's where the power of the content that is generated, is coming into play. You want to be sure that the reviewer can articulate their experience with the product, in a way that's relevant to the people who are going to purchase it. That element of targeting and just making sure that you're not sampling to the masses, but really you're sampling to people who would be most like your buying audience. Then back, more to the topic, directly of authenticity is just making sure that there is disclosure of some sort, that's present in the content, when it's out there. That can happen in a variety of ways, depending on how the content is getting to the destination site. We love working with syndication partners because really, regardless of what our reviewer actually says in the body of their review, in terms of whether they got free product or whether they got a sample. When that content runs through the pipes of the syndication partner, it's automatically badged as having come from a product sampling community or badged as the reviewer having received a free product. That disclosure's already there and present. Sometimes, if we are stimulating reviewers to just go directly to the product page, like Amazon and write a review, then we do have to rely on the reviewer, to write that disclosure. Saying that they tried the product for free. We've done a lot of research around this as well, just to understand how that disclosure statement impacts credibility. How the audience actually receives that element. What we learned is that, review content, when it's badged. When that automatic badging is happening or being applied from the syndication source, that content is actually perceived as, equally as credible to a native review. Furthermore, it was a bit surprising to me, but every now and then, our reviewers are so trained to always disclose and just acknowledge that they've tried a free sample. When that disclosure is happening in the body of the content, and it is also badged by a syndication partner, that review is even seen as being more credible, by people who are reading it. That was really interesting. I think it just comes to the notion that consumers out there, just want to know what they're reading. They just want to know the context of Episode 13 profitero.com/the-profitero-podcast 5

6 how these people tried the product. It's not necessarily a bad thing, if someone admits that they tried it for free. That can usually help give that added context and credibility to the review. Yeah. I recall a counter-intuitive study that's tangentially related that showed that, negative reviews can actually increase the overall perception of credibility because a product that's got only 5-star reviews. Especially, a lot of very recent 5-star reviews, just doesn't seem credible. In other words, ratings and reviews sometimes have a tendency to attract, polarize people. The haters and the lovers. If there's not any haters that have been attracted, then something seems fishy. That's exactly right. Even within a sampling tactic, you're likely to have reviews. We just ask for people's honest and unbiased opinions. When that happens, you're certainly going to see some reviews that come through that, have some critical feedback. I think the best practice there is, just to be sure that your brand or your e- commerce team has a way of monitoring what's out there, and a way to respond and reply, and show that they care about consumer feedback. Yeah, a lot of our customers have actually set up accounts for the customer service teams, who tend to be the most knowledgeable about the products. They get daily alerts, "Hey, we got a new rating below, X-stars or negative review." They respond from a credential brand account, where the retailers enable that. You've got to do it. Just to take a quick step back. We've talked about sampling, a little bit. If you don't mind, first, can you just share, in addition to sampling, some of the various tactics that are out there, that a brand might consider when they're starting to focus on ratings and reviews? Then specifically, how does BzzAgent use sampling in this context? Sure, absolutely. There are a lot of tactics out there, to generate product review content. Certainly, just making sure that your site is accepting of negative product reviews is probably, just a first and very basic step, but that's critical. Having a mechanism where there's that post-interaction is also a really good way to signal to the consumer that, you really want their feedback. I am not an expert in that tactic, but I believe that you can even be fairly surgical, to direct the post-interaction to certain skews. That's a nice way to do it as well. I would say, there's a lot of clients use, maybe a sweepstakes type of approach or they might try to write up their own CRM community and ask them to write reviews. All of these are good. I think they have varying amounts, some pros and cons are related to, probably the predictability of the volume that might come out of those tactics. When you don't necessarily have a community that's ready and willing to write reviews, so you're just asking random people to write reviews. People are busy. They just might not be interested in writing reviews, just might not have time. All of those tactics are important, to have a healthy mixture of, for again, various reasons. I think, especially the native reviews and the post-interaction s are just Episode 13 profitero.com/the-profitero-podcast 6

7 a really important way for a brand to show their openness to feedback, for consumers. Quite of other best practices that clients have shown is, just placing that review call to action in every possible place. Working across your organization, to be sure that your packaging is asking consumers to write reviews, that your social media is encouraging consumers to write reviews. Just really positioning your brand as being open to that type of feedback. Where sampling really comes into play and works nicely within a mixture of tactics, again is, knowing that the community you're going out to or asking for reviews from, is likely to be a community of skilled product review writers. You all have, maybe seen it, that if you make a broad ask of the masses to write a review, you're going to get people actually, probably like me, who are busy. Maybe working people, parents who, unless I'm really a raving fan of your product or unless I'm a real hater of your product, I don't know that I'm going to be willing to take the time to write a thoughtful, balanced, nice paragraph of a product review. Sometimes it just takes a little bit of that social currency, to encourage someone to take time out of their life and write a nice review for your product. That's where the sampling comes into play. Again, there's a distinction between sampling and incentivizing someone. The notion of just truly giving someone free product with the expectation of getting their honest and unbiased feedback in return, is quite different than, let's say, paying someone to really write a positive review. Again, that authenticity is really key, very critical there. Within the sampling ecosystem, essentially what we're doing is, we're tapping into that community of engaged reviewers. We're targeting to attract the most relevant folks there. Then we certainly have the software and the central management, in order to let them leave a review with us and then send it off to our syndication provider or to direct that reviewer to the right place, to write their review. We also manage the fulfillment. We try to make it really easy for our clients in, just sending the right amount of product samples to a central fulfillment house. From there, we get it to our reviewers. Then again, the syndication network. I would say, within the sampling ecosystem, there's really 4 big components of making this process happen, just to review them. It's having that community of skilled reviewers. It's having the software or the central management of this whole review request, and the outcome. There's the fulfillment of the product sample itself, and getting that to the reviewers in the right way. Then the content distribution. Either letting the reviewers go to the right destination or point of influence sites where they should leave their review, or taking the content and then distributing it across the syndication network. Did that answer your question,? It did, yeah. I think you mentioned sampling and drawing on a community of experienced reviewers can give you a little predictability and influence over the volume and the pace of reviews. I also think it's helpful for improving the quality of Episode 13 profitero.com/the-profitero-podcast 7

8 the reviews. If you just scan a typical product detail page, you'll find all kinds of reviews that are a single sentence, where they talk about the issues with the seller or the experience of buying the product, instead of the product itself. I do think, having a community of folks that are experienced and high-frequency reviewers has got to improve the quality and the helpfulness of those reviews. That's exactly right. Looking into the future, right now there is so much emphasis on generating just the right volume of reviews per product. A lot of our clients are very focused on a certain goal of volume. Certainly, everyone wants their product's star rating to fall nicely around a 4.7 or 4.6. Having a nice balance of some negative reviews and positive. There's only so much you can do, by the way, to actually balance that. In any case, what I'm saying is, I think at some point, as our e-commerce industry evolves and as consumers become even more savvy over time, of the product review space, most products will likely have a certain volume of reviews. Even again, as you're seeing it, some brands are playing off of each other and trying to have a race of, who can get more volume on a product page. That's where we are, right now. I think over time, volume and star rating are actually going to become a little bit less important. Things like, as we see Amazon really going toward, recency and even verified reviewers and also helpfulness. Those things are going to help make that quality content, bubble up to the top. I really believe that the substance of the review, the length which ultimately contributes to how much substance can be in the review. That's what's ultimately going to inform the purchase decision. You can play all day, with generating a high volume. Unless those reviews are actually substantive enough to answer that consumer's question when they are trying to make a purchase decision, then they're only going to be somewhat limited in the amount of true value that will come in impacting sales conversion. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Just a quick question. I'm thinking a little bit about, the sampling tactic. I think, as there's been so much growth of these subscription boxes. I've started to note that retailers, including Amazon are now piloting or maybe rolling out sampling boxes that'll combine a handful of brands within a category, for a price point around, call it $10. Sometimes, for the credit to apply towards future purchases. If I were a brand, how would I think differently about a sampling program like that, versus a sampling program that's intended to generate review content? I'm really glad you asked. I think there's, it's really all about what is your objective as a brand. The sampling boxes are really a conduit to trial, mainly. Unless they have clear calls to action of those consumers, where you're asking them to advocate, essentially, for your product. To not only try it for yourself, but actually talk to your friends about it or pass along some samples to friends. Then again, it's no better than direct marketing. It really is direct marketing, just with a sample. Episode 13 profitero.com/the-profitero-podcast 8

9 At the same time, even if you're asking those consumers to write a review, they did not necessarily sign up to receive that sample, with the expectation of leaving a review. The conversion rate of how many sampling boxes you might need to send, in order to get any reviews. Hopefully, they're quality reviews. I don't know exactly, who the audience is, who's receiving these boxes. Again, if they're the busy working parent such as myself, I probably will try the product and enjoy it myself, and may or may not buy it. Probably won't leave a review because no one's asked me to, and I don't really have a lot of time. I think it's really the key of the sampling tactic, if you want a strong outcome in writing reviews, is just knowing who you are engaging and how you're engaging them and making sure that, that community who you're engaging, is the right one who's going to give you that quality content. Got it. 2 topics that we spend a lot of time thinking about and working with clients on are, how to define success and how to measure success? Our analytics around ratings and reviews, a lot of the things we've covered are, front and center, review count by product and by brand. Average star rating by product and by brand. You mentioned mining review text itself for consumer and shopper insight. All of those are things that fall within the scope of the way we help brands analyze their rating and review landscape. How do you define success, and what should a brand be measuring? Yeah, absolutely. A lot of sampling campaigns, ours included, but I believe others that are out there as well, really do structure their campaigns to yield a certain volume. Now, you have to understand when you're working with a network of volunteers, where we're not actually paying them to write reviews, we're asking them to write reviews. Even that volume, there's really a range of results that end up happening there, just because they are volunteers. Usually, if you have a pretty engaged network, you should have at least 65% of those respondents actually writing a really good review for you. I think that general engagement is an important one. Secondly, again, you should be asking for honest and unbiased reviews. We tend to not emphasize the star rating a whole lot. It's interesting that, within the sampling tactic, the star rating really does tend to be very similar to your native rating. I would say that they're not excessively positive, again, because you've really tried to emphasize the honest nature of that content. You do want critical feedback coming from it as well because as a consumer, if I'm reading a review, I would want to know what's some critical feedback. To me, in my world, one consumer's point of critical feedback might actually be a good thing and actually sway my purchase decision in a good way. Anyway, so we're not measuring on average star rating. What we do try to measure and hold ourselves accountable to, is actually the helpfulness rating. In the past, as we were starting to think about review content generation, we were really thinking that the Holy Grail of measurement was sales conversion impact. Certainly, we want our content to be impactful. At the end of the day, certainly a key piece of sales Episode 13 profitero.com/the-profitero-podcast 9

10 conversion is actually, just overall sentiment about the product, and that's something that's out of our control. If a product is not so engaging, consumers will write that in their reviews. Then ultimately, we will not be impacting sales conversion. What we can look at is, I think the helpfulness rating. We've really seen that the helpfulness rating is very strongly correlated with purchase intent, and certainly even with actual sales conversion impact. We try to look at helpfulness rating. I would say that right now, we are specifically limited, in access to that data. A lot of times, that helpfulness data is actually owned by the retailer or by the brand. As a third party to those, we don't have a lot of access to that number, but we're very open to any partners who might want to work with us and aim to measure that more closely. Yes, hint hint. We absolutely are working more and more, to build on some of the data points we collect about reviews. We already collect the review text and when it was left and the star rating and so on. There's no question that some of these meta data, like Verified Purchase, Vine Voice or just the text in the review itself, disclosing that a sample was received. Things like helpfulness are all on the table. I agree, I think that what matters is, evolving a little bit. As you look at the page structure at Amazon and elsewhere, and how reviews are presented, I do think some reviews are going to be disproportionately influential. We definitely want to help identify and analyze those reviews. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, well I hate to be self-serving, but as I understand it, itunes actually services podcasts based on ratings and reviews. I've taken a lot of notes. Sounds like, I need to ask everybody to leave us a rating and review, in social media, everywhere I go. While I've got you, what else should we be doing to incentivize these ratings and reviews? I would just say, to absolutely consider making the ask, everywhere you can, of your consumers. Look to sampling as a means to really support your new product launch, and to help be surgical at different times in your product's life cycle, to get some really good surges of really quality content. Then be sure to use the content in other places. That's something I'm not sure I touched on, earlier. Just some of our clients that are really getting the best value out of reviews, are not stopping at the product page. They're taking, not only the insights, but also taking the content and using it across media channels, using it online, offline, everywhere possible. Just making that consumer-generated content, really present within their brand's overall media presence. Awesome., thank you so much for joining me. If people want to reach you, how can they find you? My LinkedIn profile is the best place, Reifenberger. Thanks so much for the conversation,. Episode 13 profitero.com/the-profitero-podcast

11 Yeah. Yeah, I really enjoyed it. Thanks again. That does it for another episode of the Profitero podcast. I think a lot of people don't realize, just how much you can influence ratings and reviews or how important it is, to remain transparent and authentic. It was great to have an expert like and BzzAgent, join us and share their insight. As always, we really appreciate your feedback. Please us at insights@profitero.com. Of course, after an episode on ratings and reviews I have to ask, if you're enjoying the podcast, please leave us a rating and review at itunes or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks again, for listening. Until next time, I'm Anderson for Profitero. Episode 13 profitero.com/the-profitero-podcast