Marketers are known for exaggerated claims and stretching the truth just a wee bit. But most marketers I know truly believe in what they sell. Their aggressiveness is based on a confidence that what they are promoting truly benefits the customer.
But that confidence rapidly wanes when put to the test. Would you be willing to compare your product to your competitors' -- right on your own Website? And would that comparison be accurate?
We all like to think that what we sell is the best, but few of us are ready to put our money where our mouths are. Gradually, however, that is beginning to change. A few companies are starting to compare their product to their competitors' on their own Websites. It might sound dangerous, but the truth is that your customers are doing it anyway. Should you?
It started innocently enough, with Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN) blazing the trail for retailers to provide ratings and reviews of products on Websites. It's now become a common practice for retailers. But, after all, retailers don’t have much to worry about; if one product gets bad reviews, you’d expect customers to simply buy a different product from you.
It started to get more interesting when manufacturers began to post product reviews, as Sun Microsystems Inc. did a few years ago. Clearly, this upped the ante, because the danger in providing such information is that a bad review might send prospective customers into the arms of another manufacturer. Still, Sun decided that it was worth the risk, because their Web-savvy customers were checking online reviews anyway, so why not show them right on the Sun Website?
This openness was taken a step further by Progressive Insurance, which openly displays competitors' prices alongside its own. Now, Progressive doesn’t always have the lowest price, but its willingness to mix it up on price gives consumers a message about its confidence that they consistently have the lowest-priced offerings. If Progressive were known for higher prices, you can bet they wouldn’t be taking this approach.
Recently, I stumbled across another foray into the Web art of product comparison. Have you paid attention to what Toyota is doing? Toyota is showing feature-by-feature comparisons of its vehicles against competitors, listing side-by-side the Toyota Sienna, the Honda Odyssey, and the Dodge Grand Caravan. It lists dozens of features, including price, fuel economy, and just about anything else you can think of. If those two competitor vehicles aren’t enough, Toyota even lets you add a vehicle of your choice from any competitor, and quickly fills in the comparison data.
Now, obviously, Toyota does not win all of the comparisons, line-by-line. They win some, they lose some, but the image they project is one of utter confidence, almost a "Dare to Compare" attitude. Just bring on all comers, they seem to be saying. Given that many customers would be comparing the cars anyway, they come across as the brand with nothing to hide.
Granted, this tactic might not be the ideal approach for every company (particularly if your products stink on ice), but it’s undeniable that openness in product comparisons seems to be coming at us in more interesting ways than ever before, and the Internet's at the forefront of how it’s done.
— Mike Moran, author of Do It Wrong Quickly, is a speaker and consultant on Internet marketing.
This reminds me of the database wars in the '80s and '90s where all the vendors wanted to post the highest transactions per second (TPS) and they spent endless hours tuning hardware and software and then attack the competition for not being sufficiently "real world".
Also Oracle had a habit of posting it's numbers as the highest and at the top of a bar graph and making its competitors' bars disproportionately shorter.
In other words, it's still caveat emptor for me. A matter of lies, damn lies, and statistics which need to be considered under a bright light and careful reading.
Not only did they take our auto industry behind the woodshed, they built factories outside of Detroit—Kentucky that I am aware of—and paid half as much to the workforce but kept the quality that they are known for. I am surprised that Toyota doesn't advertise the fact that some of their cars are built here and the quality doesn't suffer. Believe me, I know JD Power and all of these car surveys say that this brand or that brand beat Toyota for whatever reason, but I drove my 76 Corolla the distance to the Moon and our second 97 Corolla is approaching it. Maybe every car today has better quality, I have a Dodge Ram holding up well at 94k, (made in Canada, though) but if we get another family car, it most likely will be a Toyota.
My company was just bought by a competitor. I always heard the sales guys talking about our great product, though before the sale, our employee turnover caused some inconsistent quality issues. Now I hear the sales team talking to our vendors about how great the new company is. That sounds to me like the Apple switch from the G5 to Intel chip. Apple touted the G5 as a supercomputer and we believed them and the faithful just regurgitated their party line that Intel was the enemy. They switch to Intel, mainly I guess because of the heat issues I read at the time, but I actually felt betrayed! Luckily for Apple, I'll put up with their overpriced machines because I am heavily invested in software. Now that they have made the G5 obsolete with Snow Leopard, I could just buy new copies of everything and start over on Win7, but I am so used to the Mac OS, it would take a job requirement (like my switch to Mac in '92) to really make me go back.
Absolutely true, mhhfive, but what I am asking is what is more factual, the grid from Toyota or one of its 30-second ads? My point is that the Internet is bringing fluffy marketing down to earth. Are they still spinning things? Yes. Is the spin lessening? My argument is that it is.
Sure, Toyota can't publish doctored data... but it can definitely frame the data in a way that is more self-serving. If you look at how GM promotes its upcoming Volt hybrid, GM highlights its "exclusive" feature that the Volt will run 100% electric for short trips.
This type of manufacturer-published comparison also gives rise to the classic "how many checks do you see?" in a grid of features where more green checks are supposedly better than more red X's. Feature-creep is encouraged because if you can't beat 'em... just make a list of every single feature that your product has (no matter how useless) -- and make sure your list is longer than your competitor's feature list.
So there is definitely still a role for Consumer Reports and JD Power... They don't just keep firms honest, these 3rd party reviewers also make sure that the appropriate real-world comparisons are being made. Perhaps there's even a market for reviewers of the reviewers?
Usually, the reality of a comparison is much more nuanced than a side-by-side comparison can be. And marketers have already caught on by making the comparisons ever more complicated so that side-by-side numbers aren't even all that meaningful for expensive products/services.
You have a point, Paul, but because anyone can check Toyota' chart by looking at competitors' Web sites (including those competitors themselves), Toyota is in for a fiasco if they are really skewing things. The Internet has enough watchdogs that I think these comparisons are far less biased than typical advertising.
Shoppers are weary of any claim or comparison that a particular company makes. After all, how does a shopper know if the comparison (the Toyota site, for example) is comprehensive and not skewed in some way to give an overall positive impression about the company showing the comparison?
I believe this is where "badges" come in. They are not perfect either, but it gives the consumer information from an unaffiliated and TRUSTed source. JD Powers is an example. There are growing reputation management tools that help in this too.
Anything can be biased or tweaked to give a desired impression, and consumers are very aware of that. The only way to win the customer is to gain their trust, and that takes time and repetition.
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