Though before I didn’t fully appreciate the impact that bloggers have on product success or failure, I now know otherwise. From reading “The Voice of the Customer” in Blog! and chapter one in “They Say/ I Say” by Graff and Birkenstein, I have concluded that many companies are now facing challenges to do with customer advertising. Happy buyers easily advertise popular products online, but if a product is not enjoyed or found to be faulty in many ways, customers will complain, not to the companies directly, but to blog networks that often yield even better results than direct complaints.
It used to be that companies underestimated the impact customer bloggers had on product success and failure, but according to Blog! that has changed. In some tragic circumstances the results from ignoring the complaints were quite expensive.
While I read, I thought about places where individuals’ opinions have been voiced. On the apple.com site, some products offer room for customers to voice their opinions on products they have bought. This often helps would-be purchasers to decide which product is best. For example, if someone was going to buy a computer case, they could read the reviews and find out that the red ones get red dye all over white computers. Then the customer would decide that another color is better and go with that, making the red case a slow seller.