Public reviews have been one of the most effective factors influencing consumer purchasing decisions. It gives them a general overview of what they should expect if they purchase your business.
According to BrightLocal, more than 70% of online shoppers positively review their purchasing decision.
One can then safely say a public review system not only influences consumer decisions but also give more credibility to the company. Many companies like Payoneer, Grammarly, Uber, and several others are leveraging this every day. And that is why you will always see them put their Trustpilot rating under all email, websites, and everywhere. 5 and 7 stars hotels get this marketing insight and other marketing theories they use from this idea.
Table of Contents
What is Marketing Theory
Marketing theory is how a brand or company induces voluntary change by selling ideas or lifestyle changes that influence the target audience or society.
According to Kotler (1967), every product has three levels: the core level—the benefits; the actual level—the main product, referring to the packaging and design; and the augmented level—measures taken to help the consumer put the product to use.
Marketing Theory simply states that for sales to be maximized, a company must position its products or services in such a way that consumers need those particular products or believe that they can benefit from the product.
Businesses employ several marketing theories to influence buyers in making purchasing decisions. These include buyer behavior, marketing insights, and market segmentation.
How Public Review Influences Consumer Buying Decision
Buyer behavior, also known as consumer behavior, basically has to do with factors that influence consumers in making a purchasing decision. Consumer behavior is often influenced by many factors, such as emotions, situations, psychological, environmental factors, personal preferences, societal influence, and several others.
Businesses using excellent public reviews can easily wow consumers into patronizing them. Public review plays an effective role in consumer behavior. People will most often patronize a brand that their friends have used before. Likewise will a great public review influence people to want to patronize your service.
Businesses can easily leverage this by incorporating different marketing theories into their operations to reach their target audience and generate more sales.
Read also: How to get customers’ reviews and feedback in business
Impacts of Public Review on the Distribution of Market
Market segmentation divides a company’s or brand’s target into approachable groups. According to Mark Anthony Camilleri, many companies often adopt target marketing techniques in their market segmentation. The strategy involves dividing the market into segments and developing products or services for those segments.
Public review can also come in handy for market segmentation. For example, everyone knows 5 stars hotels are very expensive and this helps them to niche down to their target audience, who are the rich ones who like the life of luxuries. One can also make reference to booking a first-class flight instead of regulars.
Apple relatively targets American first class and that is why iPhone appears like a luxury product in most other countries, especially the developing ones.
The new generation is more into online shopping than patronizing bricks-and-mortar shops. An excellent reason for this may be because of the ability to rate the online store they use based on their star rating.
Simon Crawford 1997 talked about Market Segmentation’s effects on consumer buying behavior. He mentioned that segmenting a market is likely to produce several possible customer groups; the enterprise then has to evaluate the relative attractiveness of the market segments identified and select the target segments (s) that it will seek to serve (Crawford, 1997).
A targeting strategy aims to understand the consumer’s needs and wants. Market Segmentation can be divided into several parts:
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Demographic Segmentation
This is the division of consumers into groups based on age, gender, income, education, social status, family, life stage, and occupation. Understanding the age group and other demographic factors helps you know better about the consumer.
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Geographic Segmentation
It is the division of consumers based on their country, city, density, language, climate, area, and population.
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Psychographic Segmentation
Consumers’ segmentation is based on their purchase, usage, intent, occasion, buyer stage, user status, and engagement.
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Behavioral Segmentation
It is the division of consumers based on their purchase, usage, intent, occasion, buyer stage, user status, and engagement.
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Impacts of Public Review on Market Research and Operation
Market Insights is not complete without any effective understanding of what people think about your business. What are people saying about your business? Do they consider it an amazing experience or something terrible?
Market insight means making adequate research into things that can influence consumer behavior positively. Marketing insights are the more reasoned thoughts and conclusions supported by an analysis of data and information established from marketing research, surveys, etc.
For marketing purposes, insights result from applying human thought and reasoning to analyze data, sorting out and producing a directional change in the way we expect or act. Insights begin as data, filtered through layers of analysis, acted upon by thought and reason, and eventually become a directional change agent (What are marketing Insights?)
With public rating, companies can check out how they rank against their competition, understand what they can improve on, and identify what their customer like and don’t like about their services. To achieve this, businesses should first start by identifying the purpose first, learning more about the company’s outlook, comparing the competition, gathering enough data, analyzing their findings, and finally, implementing your analysis can help influence consumer buying behavior.
How businesses can combine these three marketing theories with Public Reviews for business growth
Businesses can easily use the three marketing theories for effective growth. This can begin with first making effective marketing research through market insights.
Target the most effective market segment that works for your industry and adopt the most effective strategy to influence consumers into purchasing decisions. Positive general reviews are beneficial to a business because they improve the brand’s reputation, increase sales and traffic, enhance ranking on search engines, and boost profitability.
Customers are more likely to purchase from a website with custom reviews than a website that doesn’t. Displaying reviews gives potential customers more confidence in purchasing decisions and reduces doubts, influencing consumer behavior.
Read also: Online and offline business reputation management for business owners
Zan Mo, Yan-Fei Li, and Peng Fan (2015) wrote, Consumer Reviews are reviews given by consumers related to information from evaluating a product about various aspects; with this information, consumers can get the quality of the product they are looking for from reviews and experiences written by other consumers who purchased products before from online sellers.
For instance, looking at the 5-star hotels as a case study, most customers would want to patronize the 5-star hotels more than a 3-star one because of previous customers’ positive and convincing reviews.
The primary goal is customer satisfaction, and it can not be derived if previous customers leave bad or negative reviews.
A good case study is the use of a public review system like the case of Uber, where consumers can order different classes of cars and can back up their purchasing decision with comfort, display of class, satisfaction, and others.
Read also: How to handle negative comments on social media as a Nigerian business
Wrap it Up
Positive reviews help build brands’ reputations, increase sales and traffic, enhance search engine rankings, and boost profitability. Customers are more likely to purchase from a website with custom reviews than a website that doesn’t. Displaying reviews gives potential customers more confidence in purchasing decisions and reduces doubts, influencing consumer behavior.
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REFERENCE
Actionable(2017) “What are marketing Insights?” retrieved on April 2022 from http://www.actionable.com/blog/what-are-marketing-insights
Barmola K. S. K. Srivastava “The role of consumer behavior in present marketing management scenario” published October 2010.
- A Camilleri (2017) “Market Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning” published December 2017.
DOI:10.1007/978-3-319-49849-2_4
Crawford S. (1997) Mora Cortez, Roberto, “Marketing Insight: The Construct, Antecedents, Implications, and Empirical Testing.” Dissertation, Georgia State University, 2018.
https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/marketing_diss/46
Mo Z. Li Yan-Fei Fan P. (2015) “Effect of Online Reviews on Consumer Purchase Behavior” published January 2015Journal of Service Science and Management 08(03):419-424
Philip Kotler(1967) “Marketing Management: Analysis, Planning, and Control”
About Author
- Taiwo Sotikare is passionate about helping small businesses grow through the power of effective content marketing. Via SEO, Taiwo helps small businesses generate more monthly income. He creates content that hit Google front page, where thousands of targeted customers can access your business swiftly.
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