As a shopper, I sometimes find myself wanting to buy a product but still debating whether its plus outweigh its minuses. In that situation, an outside opinion from a friend is often needed.
The idea of social interaction for retailing can be an effective way to address the needs and wants of customers. According to the article "Social retailing-the Future of Retail Online", companies might need consider building a virtual environment for online shoppers as this will help increase their business growth. I do not think that will easy be the case.
In a real shopping environment, shoppers are at the store and able to judge the product effectively. Therefore, they tend to rely more on an outside opinion and are then persuaded to make the purchase. In my opinion, I will not be persuaded to make the purchase unless the opinion comes from someone with reliable expertise. In a virtual environment, companies will have to establish mutual trust between customers in order for the persuading process to happen. In another hand, the social interaction can potentially backfire the companies as the online "word of mouth" ruins the product reputation.
In the article "Conversational Marketing: Can we talk?", social interaction makes more sense because companies themselves can control and select the expertise given to customers through their own channels. For example, I shop online frequently and I appreciate the help of an online sale assistant when evaluating a product. I also find informative business blogs to be very helpful as it is more convenient to keep track of new merchandise that I might want on my "wish list". I think this marketing mechanism is certainly more effective and will be adopted by many companies in the future.
Regardless of how companies making online marketing more interactive, they will have to find a way to inform their customers. Their target should be the young and tech-savvy demographics because these are key to help online mechanism educational
7 years ago
3 comments:
I agree with your opinion on the virtual shopping environment. A lot of us want to touch and try out products before we walk out of the store with it in our hands, and trust is a big issue to consider as well.
Hey, I think you pointed out important thing that we cannot 100%trust all comment and opinions on the internet. The comments could be from the people who are hired by companies. It is possible, isn’t it?
My roommate recently had an experience like this: a pair of headphone had below average rating on Amazon.com. Everyone was complaining about how uncomfortable they were.
If it were me I would have moved on to the next pair, but my roommate took a chance and ordered them. When the arrived he tried them on and the felt great. He's had absolutely no problems at all. I should ask him if he posted his own review on Amazon.
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