by Kristen Sullivan | June 5, 2009
This week AP News reported that Melissa Garcia wielded her power as a popular “mommy blogger” to convince Old Navy to start offering more coupons.
How’d she do it? She complained about Old Navy’s stingy coupon offerings on her blog, Consumerqueen.com, which gets about 30,000 unique visitors a month. Soon after Garcia complained, Old Navy started offering several coupons a week.
This is just one more example of the web allowing consumers and retailers to communicate with one another and improve their relationships as a result. Consumerqueen.com and her deal-hungry fans received the coupons they wanted, Old Navy gained an unexpected marketing opportunity.
But what if only your mom reads your blog? How can you get corporate America to hear your voice? Well there are a few ways to do it…
1.) Tap into the brand’s online community. Many brands are creating community spaces for customers to interact with one another, ask questions, and report problems. Dell is a great example of a company that developed an online space, Direct2Dell, for its customers to interact and is now listening to comments to improve their products. More companies are following suit. Guy Kawasaki recently published ten tips on how to build a successful brand community. His advice to brands? Engage.
Take advantage of this trend by joining a retailer’s online community and complaining, demanding, and praising there.
2.) Recruit a blogger with influence to champion your cause. Think your favorite retailer should offer better deals to its loyal customers? Pitch your idea to a popular blogger who writes about deals (ahem consumerqueen). Or have a major complaint? Let consumerist.com know.
Who knows, the blogs might agree and make a stink for you. A publication with thousands (or millions) of readers will likely grab the attention of brand more quickly. (Try compete.com to get a sense of how much traffic a blog is getting.)
3.) Start a Twitter Revolution. Tweet your issue and ask people to retweet. Sound crazy? Not these days. Comcast (@comcastcares) and Southwest (@SouthwestAir) were early Twitter adopters. Now it seems like much of the corporate world has jumped on the Twitter bandwagon. Companies have customer service reps, PR peeps and marketers monitoring their Twitter profiles.
4.) Stay tuned to Dukky. The Dukky team is working on some cool tools that let consumers request the deals they want. Just wait.
Anyone else have an idea? Let us know in the comment section. We’re all ears!
Image Source: Flickr
Whole Foods use to give a 10% discount on Wednesdays to Seniors.
They discontinued that practice and I sent an email to corporate requesting that it be reinstated. They blew me off with a corporate “blah-blah-blah” email. How do we institute change?
The article is usefull for me. I’ll be coming back to your blog.
Thanks for sharing Sumangala. Here’s a cool example of how consumers are using new media to band together and loudly demand that Outlook improve its product: http://fixoutlook.org/
Kristen
I liked dukky.com a lot. It has lots of useful info. This article is very professionally written. dukky.com I will be back for sure.