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 elements of success in this business do not differ from the elements of success in any other. Competition is keen and bitter. Advertising is as large an element as in any other business, and since the usual avenues of successful exploitation are closed to the profession, the adage that the best advertisement is a pleased customer is doubly true for this business.”
—Madeleine [Blair], U.S. prostitute and “madam.” Madeleine, ch. 5 (1919)
“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)
“I am heartily tired of this life of bondage, responsibility, and toil. I wish it was at an end.... We are both physically very healthy.... Our tempers are cheerful. We are social and popular. But it is one of our greatest comforts that the pledge not to take a second term relieves us from considering it. That was a lucky thing. It is a reform—or rather a precedent for a reform, which will be valuable.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“If you could choose your parents,... we would rather have a mother who felt a sense of guilt—at any rate who felt responsible, and felt that if things went wrong it was probably her fault—we’d rather have that than a mother who immediately turned to an outside thing to explain everything, and said it was due to the thunderstorm last night or some quite outside phenomenon and didn’t take responsibility for anything.”
—D.W. Winnicott (20th century)