Moving Past The Honeymoon, Consumers and Brands Now in a Committed Relationship

eConsultancy came out with a survey yesterday on how unhappy customers are increasingly using social media to voice their complaints.

Here's a good little slideshow from the article:
Brands beware: the social media backlash

View more presentations from Dave Ewart.

While stories about consumers new-found power and ability to 'bite back' -- with The Consumerist leading the charge and even adopting that tagline -- never went away entirely, this is first story I can remember in a long time that quantitatively suggested an increase in consumer complaints through social media (read: the internet) versus focusing on how positive most consumers are in their product commentary. 


Which makes it worthwhile to take a trip down memory lane: how did it come to be that for so many years it was news that consumers actually like the products they use?

If you go back only 10 years ago, customer service, consumer engagement, feedback...these were all bad words with negative connotations. The only time a company heard from its consumers was when they called the customer service department and anyone willing to cross that hurdle (oh, and there were major hurdles even beyond dialing an 800 number) clearly wasn't calling to say, 'thanks for the great job!'  


It was so accepted that consumer engagement was a negative experience that social media guru Pete Blackshaw started a company in 1999 called "PlanetFeedback" (which I was lucky enough to sit on the board of). Read that name again slowly and think about it. Now translate it: "a world of people bitching about everything." No wonder we had trouble selling subscriptions to F500 clients. 


Pete learned, I learned, we all learned that the truth was a lot more nuanced and positive. Fast forward to 2009 and what we do at EXPO. Our open-forum consumer generated content is generally so positive (by which I mean, exactly in line with text reviews across the internet) that we feature the negative reviews just so product researchers can understand whatever trade-offs - or dare I say, shortcomings - are inevitably part of the product. 


So here's my relationship based analogy for the history of brands and consumers: 
Phase 1, 8th grade flirting: pre-internet, consumers and brands used limited tools to flirt in a notably adolescent way. The brands preened themselves around using one way marketing and consumers, although perhaps whispering to their friends about how cute the brand was, made sure every comment directly to the brand was absolutely nasty 
Phase 2, honeymoon phase: consumers started writing text reviews on the internet and low and behold after years of abuse, brands started to recognize, they love me! Gifts (contests, coupons and samples) rained from the sky & odes of love (blog posts fluffery) were written in return as the two lovers finally came together....to the point where the teacher (the FTC) decided to lay down some rules on all of this PDA
Phase 3, committed relationship: now, realizing that there's more to a real relationship than just mutual admiration, perhaps we're on the cusp of an era where consumers are starting to step up their "constructive comments." And brands are listening and taking action (more on that later this week). This is of course, is where the hardest work will be done. But it also smacks of being the most sustainable and rewarding for all parties.