Reputation Management Services

There are not many undisputable truths in the world. But one of them is that we all want our business to grow.
There is a dark side to it too. Growing faster than your competition attracts all the wrong attention to your company.

Imagine your very particular marketplace niche shows a 5% growth a year. In an ideal world that means all the businesses sharing that marketplace are making 5% more money or selling 5% more products every year.

However, let’s say your own business is growing 20% this year due to a great marketing campaign or just because you have a superior product. That 15% difference has to come from somewhere. If the market remains steady, it would mean that 5% comes from new sales. Now, the other 15% comes directly from your competitor’s client pool.

You’re winning and they’re losing. You’d have to be naive to think they will sit on their hands. It’s only natural that once they realize how bad it is they will start to devise ways to stop the bleeding.

Many start by writing negative reviews, giving their competitors one-star comments, or even writing reports that put them under a really nasty light. All with the hopes of driving customers away from you. They don’t even bother trying to make customers like them. They’re happy by just knowing you’re not doing better than them. This is war, and it is always bloody.

Customers always see negative reviews as a signal that they should probably move on to the next business that offers similar products and services and who feels more trustworthy just because they have a better reputation.

This feeling is so strong that customers are willing to pay even 30% more for a product or service if the provider shows a better input from their customers. This means that offering a better price is not the silver bullet we all thought it was.

This is a phenomenon that has been studied for more than 50 years. It explains the different stages through which every consumer goes when making a transaction.

The process goes like this: problem recognition, information search, evaluation of alternatives, purchase decision, and post-purchase behavior.

Most marketing efforts are aimed to affecting the first three stages.

Ideally, when we design a marketing campaign, we want to start the problem recognition, cover the information search stage as much as possible and make the customer skip the alternative evaluation part. However, this is extremely difficult to do.

What actually happens when we start a marketing campaign is that you stir the customer’s curiosity. But customers nowadays want to go online and see who else is offering the same products or services and what people are saying about them. They want to make a rational choice and get the most for their hard-earned dollars. It is not uncommon to see someone getting excited about your promotions but then they end up buying from your competitor. So essentially, your competitors benefit from your marketing efforts.

What we want to do is to stop the shopping process at your doorstep. A negative review might prevent you from doing just that. A potential buyer, seconds away from making the purchase, might check his telephone for a final inspection of your product and find that negative comment that google wanted to show him. That could set the shopping process in motion again, making the customer move forward to the next best alternative.

The one provider able to stop the shopping process will make the sale or secure the contract. You might be able to excite the minds of your customers, but you could be actually sending them directly to your competitor’s doorstep if you are not taking care of your reputation. A negative review does not extinguish the need for your product, it just continues the search and drives people away from you and closer to other providers.