Engaging Tech-Savvy Consumers to Build Relationships

Two years ago, I met with a group of natural products executives to discuss their sales and consumer marketing initiatives. They talked about traditional support materials for distributors and the trade, Web sites and direct marketing. Most, as B-to-B marketers, left the consumer out of the equation entirely.

Fast forward to 2009, and realize there has been a complete paradigm shift. While the industry is still executing on established communications strategies, the next generation of consumers—the “YouTube® Generation”—have leapt ahead. Not content with being talked to, they are energetically talking about companies and brands on social media sites, such as YouTube, MySpace and Facebook; in blogs; on Twitter; and on countless product review sites.

These conversations are shaping opinions and influencing purchase behaviors. In important ways, consumers and their online viral networks are the ones controlling messaging about a brand or product. Whether a company sells raw materials, produces finished consumer packaged goods or is focused on brand marketing, it’s time to re-think, re-tool and prepare to join in the conversations.

Third-Grade Gurus

To prepare for the future, it is critical to understand the next generation of consumers—people who will be adults in the year 2020. Right now, they are ages 8 to 18. Even the youngest ones make consumer decisions as they grocery shop with their parents and suggest purchases. They model the “green” attitudes they are learning at school and at home. Making “healthy choices” is part of their vocabulary and eating patterns. Not only are they aware of their own health, but also the health of the planet. They are technology savvy and hyper-connected like no other group—it’s built into their DNA. Kids are confident with computer-based learning, at ease online and enthusiastically adopt the latest technology.

The 18-year-olds are moving into the adult world of consumption and work. As a group, they are open to new ideas, information and cultures; they are entrepreneurial and highly collaborative. They share vast amounts of personal information on social networking sites and value transparency and accountability in their peers, their politicians and the companies whose products they purchase.

Taken as a generational force—from the youngest to the oldest—this group will soon be part of a global consumer-driven age that reflects a growing health consciousness around food production and agriculture, and increasing demands around open and transparent knowledge sharing—all in the context of technological advances that will fully enable consumer decision making.

The Future Emerges

In the agriculture and grower world, many independent operations are getting closer to their end-user customers with Web sites and blogs about their products and sustainable business practices. At the next step from “field to plate,” manufacturers are beginning to make more health and nutrition information available online and at point of purchase.

Meanwhile, product review sites, consumer opinion sites and blogs dissect that information for credibility and post results for all to share. It’s important to realize the influence of these sites. According to a recent Deloitte & Touche USA Consumer Market Transparency study, 62 percent of people read online reviews and 80 percent of them said their purchase decisions are directly influenced by them. Customers are happily talking to each other about products with no input at all from the manufacturer.

Consumers are already way beyond looking to a brand’s Web site for information. Emerging technologies will enable some truly incredible new ways to cater to the “on-demand” consumer of the near future. Consider just a few of the prototypes of devices that will enable information sharing anyplace, anytime:

Because of this online bazaar of ideas and opinions, trust issues evolve with company-sponsored information. Therefore, manufacturers or marketers need to be able to answer five key questions about their products with substantive data: What’s in it? How is it made? Who made it? Where was it made and how did it get here? What’s the environmental impact of its production and consumption? Those answers must be shared across many channels: packaging, Web sites, company blogs, comments on other blogs, in appropriate ways in advertising and perhaps even on the brand’s very own Facebook page.

How to Get There

Ideally, these trends would cause excitement in industry enclaves, but Colman Brohan Davis’s recent “Future of Foods Panel™” indicated an unnerving resistance to embracing the changes that are so necessary for a brand’s long-term survival. Talking with a wide range of industry executives all along the food chain—from large growers to manufacturers to food-service companies—many execs still questioned the near-term value of being more transparent and setting in motion changes to fully empower consumer decision making. Most felt consumers did not really pay attention to a company’s business practices.

Time is short to shake off those perceptions. When examining the facts and trend data, it’s clear companies do not control the message anymore—consumers do. A company or brand Web site is only the baseline of information; consumers go way beyond it to get their facts and opinions. Peer recommendations and viral marketing are important and instant. The pace of innovation will increase. In a purchase decision, corporate reputation and brand are less important than peer recommendations and viral marketing.

Colman Brohan Davis recently deployed a “Young Consumers’ Food Shopping Panel™” to young women, asking them to rate 10 criteria they use to make a food purchase decision. All of them rated several healthy eating criteria above brand name as an important influence. The very youngest group—the 20- to 23 year olds—rated brand name dead last, meaning brand name was the least important consideration in how or why they purchased a particular food product. What does that say about the level of resources currently devoted to traditional brand-building message strategies if the value of the brand is so low as a determinant of purchase?

Start Talking

By working now to understand the next generation of consumers, companies can start joining their conversations and adding to the discussion, providing the insights and information consumers want and need. In doing so, companies will add a new dimension to their own market intelligence, a richness to the relationships they build with customers, and clarity and flexibility to brand messaging. Engaging customers where they live, with substantive and truly helpful information, contributes to the transparency and accountability they will demand, energizing them as real brand advocates and energizing the company and brand as well.

Lori Colman is CEO of Colman Brohan Davis, a Chicago-based strategic branding and integrated marketing firm with experience serving national and global brands in the food and ingredients sectors.