Customer Engagement As A Social Phenomenon
Online inter-customer engagement is a recent social phenomenon that came about through the wide diffusion and adoption of the internet in western societies during the late 1990s. Although offline CE predates online CE, the latter is a qualitatively different social phenomenon unlike any offline CE that social theorists or marketers are familiar with.
People also engage online in communities that do not necessarily revolve around a particular product, but serve as meeting or networking places, for instance on MySpace. The people in one's MySpace friend's list do not necessarily all share a single consumption habit, although they often do.
People's online engagement with one another has brought about both the empowerment of consumers and the opportunity for businesses to engage with their target customers online. A 2011 market analysis revealed that 80% of online customers, after reading negative online reviews, report making alternate purchasing decisions, while 87% of consumers said a favorable review has confirmed their decision to go through with a purchase.
Read more about this topic: Customer Engagement
Famous quotes containing the words customer, engagement, social and/or phenomenon:
“The customer is the immediate jewel of our souls. Him we flatter, him we feast, compliment, vote for, and will not contradict.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Pardon me, you are not engaged to any one. When you do become engaged to some one, I, or your father, should his health permit him, will inform you of the fact. An engagement should come on a young girl as a surprise, pleasant or unpleasant, as the case may be. It is hardly a matter that she could be allowed to arrange for herself.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“The more the specific feelings of being under obligation range themselves under a supreme principle of human dependence the clearer and more fertile will be the realization of the concept, indispensable to all true culture, of service; from the service of God down to the simple social relationship as between employer and employee.”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
“Culture relates to objects and is a phenomenon of the world; entertainment relates to people and is a phenomenon of life.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)