My Perspective - Consumer power 2.0
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- Published on Friday, July 8, 2016
By Kate Jackman-Atkinson
Neepawa Banner/Neepawa Press
There’s a farmer in New Jersey who posts videos to YouTube. A hay producer, his videos usually include reviews and demos of equipment and clips of him farming or fixing things. His channel, onelonelyfarmer, has over 57,000 subscribers and over 34 million views.
This March, he bought a new baler. It was a demo unit and cost about $200,000. It also arrived at his farm with a rotten bale still in the chamber. Onelonelyfarmer posted a video of him pulling the bale and it generated over 37,000 views and 276 comments, most of them not kind towards Messicks, the dealer through which the baler had been purchased.
Less than a week later, there was a new video posted, this one called “Messicks Makes Good”. Representatives from the dealership came out, cleaned his equipment and even put a sticker with his logo on the side of the baler. This video had over 45,000 views and 540 comments, most of which praised Messicks’ efforts to correct the mistake.
The farmer is a large producer, but Messicks has five locations, is a dealer for over 250 brands, including 18 major lines of equipment, and has more than 180 employees.
Now, more than ever, average citizens are finding that they have the power to hold companies, even large multinationals, to account over poor products, disappointing customer service or detrimental business practices.
The media has always been able to generate consumer awareness and affect changes in business practices, but the kind of consumer power we are seeing now is different. Today, we are in an environment where average people can also lead change. Consumers can use social media to call out businesses in ways that weren’t possible 10 years ago.
It’s a revival of sorts. One hundred years ago, most businesses were owned by local entrepreneurs. If they did a bad job, people told their neighbours, who told their friends and ultimately, the business either took action to rectify the situation, or closed down. Then the businesses got bigger and local owners were replaced with local managers. Competition also decreased and consumers found themselves at the mercy of these larger businesses. These large companies didn’t really have a reason to care what local consumers thought– a handful of irate customers, of thousands, in one store, of hundreds, has no significant effect on a company’s bottom line.
From Yelp reviews to Ebay ratings, the average citizen has many opportunities to provide feedback on their transactions. Not only that, but there are many high profile social media users who have the power to throw their weight behind injustices experienced by individual citizens.
This shift has been slowly gaining momentum for over a decade. In 2005, the Economist had a 14 page special issue outlining how the internet has given power to consumers. The piece noted that over 90 per cent of people between 18 and 54 years of age said that they would turn to the internet first for product information.
Each year, the international consulting firm Deloitte publishes the Consumer Review. According to Deloitte’s research, even the most passive of consumers search beyond a company itself for information. They found that 81 per cent of consumers read reviews and check ratings. Nigel Wixcey, Deloitte’s lead partner, consumer business, said in the report, “Empowered by social networks and digital devices, consumers are increasingly dictating when, where and how they engage with brands.”
Today, consumers are better informed and any customer has the potential to create a lot of buzz about a company, positive or negative. In order for businesses to adapt to this new reality, the Deloitte report recommends reinforcing an age old business practice, “staff at each level of the organization [should] understand the role they play in serving consumers and empower them to make the right decision on the appropriate way to respond to dissatisfied consumers.”
It’s a great time to be a customer.
