Back in the day, pricing used to be a confidential and closely guarded secret. Prices were negotiated between sales rep and customer and no one was the wiser. While consistency may have been more common in the retail market, business-to-business sales were controlled and negotiated by sales reps and managers. Often, there were as many prices or special deals as there were customers.
Now, we live in an age of transparency, where everything you want to know about a product or company can be found within minutes and with a few mouse clicks.
The Internet has enabled global aggregating and sharing of information in an open forum accessible to everyone. It’s not just the established review sites, magazines and industry professionals who are commenting — it’s regular customers who are posting their opinions and ratings of your products and your organization.
Twenty years ago, the process of selecting a product was fairly straightforward. You spoke to a salesperson and looked at some product literature. The price was whatever the retailer posted or the salesperson asked you to pay. You might read a review in a trade magazine to gain more information. You might find a friend who owned the product and get her opinion but it was generally hit and miss. If you had the time to trek to a few more stores, you could do some comparison-shopping.
Now, you log on to Amazon and right underneath the product description you find user reviews. These are reviews from real people who have shelled out hard-earned money for the product and are posting their opinions and experiences.
As for price, there are any number of sites that aggregate all of the lowest selling prices for a product and post links to the merchants. You can see everyone’s price at the click of a mouse. In other words, everything is now transparent in the global marketplace.
This transparency has profound implications for sellers. Here are a few:
- Price pressure – with everyone’s price posted, there’s enormous pressure to lower prices and keep them low. In a sense, it’s a like a global fire sale and only the most efficient sellers can survive in this environment.
- Customer support – the cost of low prices is often less customer support or none at all. Something has to give in the race to the basement for pricing and support is the usually the first to go. It’s becoming a self-serve world for transactions and after sale support.
- Advertising – why spend money on traditional advertising when potential buyers are linked to current customers in a global market? Your message is being subverted by user opinions and expert reviews anyway. If your company or product is new, then advertising to create awareness might be an effective strategy. In most cases, companies are turning to viral alternatives to spread their marketing message to bloggers, review sites and opinion influencers.
- Design – ever wonder why all the products from all the companies seem to have all the same features? Transparency has resulted in manufacturers and designers making products that look and operate the same. It makes me long for the quirky, “insanely great” products of yesteryear. Even Apple, one of the best design companies in the world, now makes its computers with the same processing specs and internal components as its Windows competitors.
The bottom line for marketers is this — it’s getting harder to differentiate your products and services, and nearly impossible to control your marketing message. What’s needed are new communication strategies and a stronger emphasis on delivering a positive customer experience before and after the sale. One way or the other, they’ll be talking about you. In the Age of Transparency, one customer’s opinion is now heard around the world.
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