Integrate social media and product lifecycle management to boost revenue

Absrtact: With the advent of social networks, it seems that the customer is God's cliché and has a whole new meaning. Today's consumer feedback not only makes it quicker to get to the company, but is passed on to a wider range of consumer friends who post comments on social media

With the advent of social networks, the "Customer is God" cliché seems to have a whole new meaning. Today's consumer feedback can not only reach the company faster, but also pass on to the wider population through "friends" of consumers who post comments on social media.

Beijing Time November 10 News, according to foreign media reports, in the former Facebook and Twitter era, sales figures are probably the only way to understand the retail consumer views. But with the advent of social networks, the "Customer is God" cliché seems to have a whole new meaning. Today's consumer feedback can not only reach the company faster, but also pass on to the wider population through "friends" of consumers who post comments on social media. Some companies are actually using social media to differentiate themselves from their rivals. Not only do they listen to consumers ' feedback on their existing products, but they also work with consumers to develop new products.

Leading the trend

Companies in the retail, footwear and apparel industries are facing huge challenges, either leading the trend or losing out on the competition. The power of social media is enormous, especially in the collection of opinions from global or target consumers. Let's look at the world's top fashion boutiques and retailers on Facebook:

No other media can be as quick and cost-effective as social media to make it possible for consumers to actively advise a brand or help develop the products they need. We often see that new products and designs often fail because the product development team is thinking differently than what consumers really need.

Social media is no longer just a platform for communication. It can be combined with digital or entity sales channels, so as to maximize the benefits and create new revenue growth points. Although consumer product companies have adapted to this change, the RfA (retail, footwear and apparel) industry has not followed. Here are the amazing achievements that companies make using social media.

Coca-Cola's vitamin labeled and diamond candles are good examples. (These companies have won the 2011-year Spike Award for Social product innovation.) )

Diamond Candles Company adopt crowdsourcing way to understand the flavor that the consumer likes, and come up with new idea accordingly. In just one months, their project received more than 250 new product ideas.

The Coca-Cola Company's vitamin water (vitamin labeled) is a new flavor drink that is made with the help of their Facebook fans. The taste of vitamin water, connect, was developed by the company's 200多万个 fans on Facebook.

From "Praise" to sales

Research has shown that fewer than 2% of the millions of "praise" users actually end up actively in the conversation. However, many companies are obsessed with the "praise" number on their rivals ' Facebook pages, but have not considered how to actively communicate with their customers. If consumers and companies do not have a certain degree of intimacy, "praise" becomes meaningless. "Praise" must be able to bring a certain amount of traffic, that is, to attract people to the page to publish meaningful comments.

The bigger question is: Does the company have the ability to turn the social media interactions between consumers into practical insights that can greatly influence the success of a new product line or product portfolio? The challenge is whether consumers can see the comments they have posted on social media pages and reflect the new products that are displayed online and offline.

To develop the real potential of social media, companies need to establish a closed-loop ecosystem, creating interaction, structural communication and response mechanisms. This reaction mechanism, combined with the business intelligence engine, provides real-time consumer advice to product designers. By keeping these ideas in mind while developing products, consumers will be able to bring more and more amazing products to consumers, thus bringing them closer to the brand and creating a sustainable competitive edge.

Interacting with consumers through social media is an ongoing process of listening, encouraging participation and monitoring. So the content is king. According to the consumer's response, to guide the dialogue, resulting in effective insights, which we must have to deliberate strategy-this strategy will ultimately affect the success of the product.

Dunelm Mill, headquartered in the UK, is a very good example of a low-level intervention in the product category. Dunelm Mill has successfully created a dialogue with consumers on its Facebook page, using the "War on the blanket" and "towel battles on the floor" and other interesting articles like this. They posted a combination of graphic posts, fully taking into account the interests of consumers, it is not just a gag, but also includes intelligent interaction and guidance, so that consumers always around the material, fabrics, colors and patterns to engage in dialogue.

Integrate social media and product lifecycle management to boost revenue

Advanced social media monitoring and activity analysis tools, such as TipTop, Radian 6, Alterian and nimble, can be found in today's marketplace. These tools are very easy to use to measure and analyze consumer involvement and to produce various insights into consumer behavior. The insights gleaned from these reports can be used to create a social media monitoring dashboard, similar to the emotional monitoring dashboard in apparel retailing-a dashboard that represents a variety of consumer preferences for clothing, including color, size, tailoring, styling, design, and fabric. In fact, tools like tiptop also have interesting semantic search capabilities that can help in some way.

Social media monitoring dashboards are extremely powerful tools because they can also embed demographic and psychological information.

The guessing game for product development should be over.

In the future, companies that use social media effectively should have bigger and more loyal consumer groups. The more a company lets its consumers participate in the development of new products, the more it gives its consumers a sense of ownership and belonging. Companies that fail to do so will continue to speculate on some important issues, such as:

Should I use cotton cloth or should I use blended fabric? What if I replace the nylon zipper with a metal zipper in my jeans? Some styles are popular and some styles are not.

As Enterprise resource planning (Enterprise Resource calculates) and product cycle management (Products Lifecycle Management) systems store large amounts of company internal data, we need a secondary analysis engine to focus on consumer preferences. and social media can just meet that demand. While social media may not be able to answer all of these questions perfectly, it has the potential to help companies make thoughtful decisions and design ideal high-end and low-end product lines.