Beware The Social Shopper

The difference between how you react to it as a shopper now – and consequently how brands respond to that reaction – and five years ago is down to the proliferation of social media.

Social media has empowered the consumer. Historically, brands held the power in that relationship. But having a web-enabled mobile device in your hand gives consumers the power to immediately express satisfaction or dissatisfaction with their experience. They are not expressing themselves to the retailer or brand that was responsible for that experience, rather they are talking directly and immediately to the group of people following them on Twitter or their Facebook friends.

Brands and retailers have realised just how enormously influential that dynamic is and the effect it has on their businesses. For example, I can tell 200 people following me on Twitter that the queues in Sainsbury’s are too long. That could deter 10 people from going shopping in that Sainsbury’s on a Saturday morning.

The message for brands, then is Beware the Social Shopper. It’s an opportunity and a challenge in equal measure. So the social shopper can take your brand down by amplifying their own dissatisfaction many times over because they might share their bad experience with several hundred people. But equally, there is an opportunity.

Because if we listen to social shoppers, we can learn that they like certain limited edition packs that you’ve only put out for a month, for example, or they like buying six-packs of a certain product instead of a four-pack. There is so much to learn, and brands and retailers will find they can inform their trade on everything from opening hours to stock availability just by listening.

To take full advantage of the opportunity social shoppers present, brands and retailers need to embrace them and the fact that people are talking about brands online.

There are also opportunities in the way people are happy to associate themselves online with ‘cool’ brands or brands that help them.

If you smoke Lambert & Butler, and you have a picture taken of you and your girlfriend sitting outside a pub enjoying a pint, you are likely to caption that picture on Facebook something like ‘me and Katie enjoying a pint in Camden’. If you smoke Lucky Strikes and drink Guinness, you are more likely to caption that picture with the brand names of Guinness and Lucky Strikes included, because you’re proud of the brands you choose. Why? Because they say something about you.

If you can make people think through traditional messaging that your brand is cool, people will talk about that brand online because it says something about them. If you’re a fashion-savvy girl wearing Houlihans in a Facebook picture, you won’t say ‘this is me in my cargo pants, but you might say ‘this is me in my Houlihans.

Brands also need to remember that the way consumers use social media is completely egalitarian. Social media is the most left wing leader in the world, because it offers parity, equality and a lack of censorship. Social media has created one big socialist democracy. Brands’ social media ‘guidelines’ therefore don’t have a hope of being properly enforced, because brands have no control over what people say about them online.

Social media strategy for brands needs to be so well thought out – and it has to be about what you as a brand are doing in social media. Digital has always been a place where challenger brands or opinion-forming brands like Nike and Apple will always do stuff first. The big multi-brand owners will always wait and see how these opinion-forming brands fair in new areas because they are too wary of the reaction to what they put out there.

So Beware the Social Shopper, because they can take your brand down. But by the same token, if you don’t embrace them, engage with them and – most importantly – listen to them, opportunities might as well be lost in cyberspace.