How Competitive Intelligence Lets You Stay Ahead of Your Rivals

Posted on Dec 16, 2022Jan 6, 2023 by Emily Louise Spencer

Businesses don’t exist in a bubble. Competitors always try new tactics to gain market share, leaving you behind. That’s why performing competitive intelligence isn’t optional these days but a must. This guide will walk you through the details of competitive intelligence, from basic definitions to actionable strategies explaining how to perform it and gain the upper hand.

Imagine, if you will, that you’re a baseball player who’s up to bat.

You’ve no idea what pitch the pitcher is going to throw.

You’ve got no clue where the catchers are planning to move to.

All you can do is make your best guess, right?

Well, not exactly. Each pitcher has their preferred throws, and there’s a good chance they’ll use one that they think you’re weak to. If you prepare for such a pitch, you’re more likely to score a home run ????.

In a way, the world of business is just like the game of baseball. Being able to predict what’s going to happen next will give you a huge advantage. You’ll be able to see your competitors’ latest moves to try and squeeze you out of the market and counteract them.

That, quite simply, is competitive intelligence.

What is competitive intelligence?

Competitive intelligence is data collection and analysis by your organization on its competitors. This is done using openly-available sources, such as:

Press releases.
Patent filings.
Whitepapers.
And more, which we’ll cover later on.

Public companies are much easier to gather data on, as they are lawfully required to publish their quarterly earnings. Private companies are a little bit more difficult to examine, but there are methods you can use. Legal ones, that is.

Competitive intelligence vs. industrial spying

When we say competitive intelligence, you might think that you’ll be aiming right for the target and getting ahold of your competitors’ strategies directly.

This is not actually the case.

You see, competitive intelligence is done legally.

Every business has a right to keep its inner workings a secret, especially concerning its information. Stealing that information is highly illegal as it would involve either breach of contract or hacking into their servers.

Information gathered illegally can, of course, be used to make decisions, but that’s not competitive intelligence – it’s industrial espionage, which we strongly discourage.

How do you get competitive intelligence?

Competitive intelligence has many sources.

Which ones you turn to will largely depend on your intentions when performing your research. Nevertheless, all of them can provide valuable data if analyzed correctly.

Blog content

The content that your competitors write about on their blogs is a gold mine of information. Not only does it tell you what type of consumer they’re hoping to attract, but how they’re hoping to attract them.

Just like our blog, you’ll find a variety of topics based around the general market that your rivals are in being written and posted. Some of them might seem to have little relevance, but when you analyze them fully, you’ll find ways in which they link back to your competitors’ game plans.

We wouldn’t be writing about competitive intelligence here at Revuze if our software couldn’t help in that regard, now would we? Our AI can help you obtain competitive intelligence in real-time, so feel free to book a demo if you’d like to learn more.

Social media

Social media often has a news component for businesses, whereby they keep their stakeholders updated with their new and ongoing dealings.

Thanks to this, they’re prime information sources. New product launches, new deals, and customer responses, you can find a lot of data on these platforms.

You might think that a lot of social media information can only be used in reactive responses rather than proactively, and in a sense, you’re both right and wrong.

You can only respond to each individual piece of information, however, they may reveal a trend that shows your competition’s ongoing strategies.

Take, for instance, the example below from Nestle.

Taken individually, each advertisement gives off a different message. The first one showcases the benefits of plant-based food, the second promotes involving children in your cooking.

When looked at together, they tell a different story. Nestle is promoting healthy eating, presumably because they want to boost sales of their healthy eating product lines. This is a bold new direction for a company known mostly for its chocolate and confectionary sales.

Reviews & feedback

Whenever your rivals launch new products or services, the first thing you should look at is their reviews.

Not only will they give you insight into what your competition is trying to achieve, but they’ll tell you the audience’s response to it.

There’s no use creating the perfect egg scrambler if your customers want their eggs fried, after all.

Reviews are useful for existing products too, with any changes reflected in the feedback they receive.

Job boards

While not the most intuitive of places to look, job boards can nevertheless be a valuable source of information.

Imagine for a second that your main rival has suddenly posted a lot of job openings in their R&D department. This is pretty unusual since they typically have a low personnel turnover rate.

So what’s going on? Well, there are several options:

They’re looking to expand their R&D department permanently.
They’re starting an experimental project which they aren’t sure will succeed.
They’re feeling behind on their research and want to hire more staff to catch up.

In the case of the first option, the job listings would be permanent posts. In the case of the other two, they’d likely be temporary.

The second option might also be listed as “temporary with a possibility of becoming permanent.”

Just like that, simply by keeping an eye on the job boards, you’ve gained valuable information on what your rival is up to.

Financial statements

As mentioned previously, public companies have to release their financial statements quarterly. With this data in hand, you can see:

Where they’re earning the most money, in essence, what areas they rely on.
Where they’re earning more money than last quarter, therefore growing their operations.
Where they’re investing their money, what they’re buying, and what they’re not.
Which strategies of theirs are working, and which aren’t.

Press releases

Business news is absolutely full of valuable information. There will be announcements about new products, new hires, expansion moves, and more.

Some businesses even have a News section on their websites or apps, which coalesces all this information in one place.

Local information

If you’re part of an industry that has brick-and-mortar stores, you can look at the local information surrounding said stores in order to gather information.

What times do your competitors open and close? What area of the town or city are they located in? Do they have a decent amount of floor space dedicated to customers? Do they keep their stock on hand in a back room or a nearby warehouse?

All these little details can tell you what might and might not work in your own stores. Of course, copying your rivals exactly isn’t ideal as they might be constrained by circumstances and not able to operate as they would ideally, but it’s a start.

Legal papers

You can look at legal papers filed by your competitors as they are typically publicly viewable.

For instance, a planning permission request for a large industrial building would indicate that your competitor plans to build a new manufacturing plant or similar establishment.

This tells you that your competitor is trying to expand their manufacturing processes, and if it’s in a new location, you can assume that they’re trying to expand into a new market.

Another great source of information is patent filings. These will tell you not only what your competition is doing but what they plan to make legally exclusive.

It’s sometimes said that there’s not an original thought under the sun that someone hasn’t already had at one point. That’s true in R&D as well.

You might have to end up abandoning your projects or adjusting them not to break copyright law if your competitors patent what you’ve been working on.

Industry conferences

Conferences are similar to news reports, except more detailed. They’re designed to showcase all of the best aspects of a business to others within their industry, whether that’s to attract new customers or collect new talent.

Conferences are often the most detailed sources of information on this list, and that’s for one simple reason. You can actually talk to participants and get their opinions and perspectives.

All news, legal papers, and social network content are heavily moderated by those who release the information. When talking to someone face to face, you can often get far more information.

The downside is the unorganized nature of gathering data at conferences. You also have to factor in the ability to get to the conference, accommodation, etc.

So are conferences worth it to attend? It’s up to you, but we’d say definitely. The rise of virtual conferences is also making attendance easier, so keep an eye out for these opportunities.

What are the goals of competitive intelligence?

So, you might be thinking, why use competitive intelligence?

If it’s all indirect information, is it really going to give me an accurate picture of what my competition is up to?

Competitive intelligence is akin to following footprints in the sand. You might not be there to see the person walk it, but you can see which direction they’re going in, and when they shift or double back on themselves.

You can infer a great deal from indirect information. If you want an example from history, look no further than when Kodak accidentally discovered the Manhattan Project, simply by noticing that they were getting reports of radioactively-contaminated film in the area around the test site.

Anticipating your competitor’s moves

“Know thy enemy, and know thyself,” said Sun Tzu in the Art of War.

While not quite a battle between armies, business is no less competitive. If you know your rivals’ moves before they begin, you will be able to counter them with great effect.

Let’s say that both you and your competitor are in the e-commerce business.

You know from experience that your competitor has put on a Black Friday sale every year, thus you can anticipate that they’ll do the same this year and develop a strategy that accounts for this.

There’s also the option to take a look at their past sales, as well as current hot items, which will give you a clue as to which products they might put on sale this year. If you know which categories they plan to target, you can sidestep or counteract them.

All in all, the best way to counter an opponent’s strategy is to never let it get off the ground in the first place.

Driving your innovation

You always need innovation in order to keep your business fresh and on top of things. This goes doubly so for those dealing with the ecommerce market, where trends and habits change faster than anywhere else.

Competitive intelligence can uncover what it is that your competition has, but more importantly, it can also reveal what they lack and what consumers are after. No one can cover all bases, after all, and by keeping an eye on new opportunities, you can really get ahead in the game.

Keeping track of market conditions

Markets change, and you need to change with them in order to survive.

One of the greatest examples of decision-making in business is Netflix, which in 2007 launched a streaming service alongside its video rental one. This proved a huge hit and allowed Netflix to become the giant that it is today.

Netflix saw which way the wind was blowing as music consumers turned more and more to digital media and decided to follow it. It allowed them to survive a major upheaval in the industry, which many, including Blockbuster, did not.

Netflix’s changes showcase a great example of strategic intelligence in action. Video rental was still popular back in 2007, after all, and they could simply have stuck to it.

Instead, they took account of trends that showed a shift towards online streaming and were able to adapt and weather the storm.

Blockbuster, on the other hand, continued to have faith in their traditional methods and failed to take into account the long-term implications. There’s only one Blockbuster left in the US now, and for a good reason.

Growing your brand to customer expectations

Times change, and so do people. Nobody would say that applying the same business tactics that worked in the 1950s is appropriate in today’s world, but few realize just how fast expectations can change in the age of the internet.

This is something that e-commerce-based businesses especially need to be aware of, what with the internet being an ever-evolving pace.

Payment options, fonts and colors, images – especially if you try to use internet humor to sell your brand – links and plugins, all these can have a massive effect on your ability to sell.

If you use unusual plugins, for instance, you’ll turn off most customers who won’t want to install one to use your store.

If you’re given the option between two sites, one of which requires you to download extra features to use while the other is free of such inconveniences, which would you choose to use?

Links can also break or be archived over time, meaning what worked perfectly one day won’t the next. Relying on other websites to grant information is a tricky business.

If a certain brand that you’re displaying prominently has bad press, you may want to decrease its visibility on your store lest you get a bad reputation by association. Conversely, you can increase the visibility of other brands that have a surge in popularity.

Competitive intelligence will help here, telling you what customers expect from you and what you need to do in order to meet those expectations.

A good example of growth meeting customer expectations is Amazon’s adoption of Venmo as a payment option, allowing those who don’t want to use their bank accounts directly a more secure way to pay.

Credit and debit card fraud has been on the rise over the past few years, making more and more consumers wary of using their cards online.

When using Venmo, your bank information is never directly given to the vendor, meaning that phishing attacks or breaches in Amazon’s security are unlikely to put consumer data at risk.

The COVID-19 pandemic showed just how fast brands needed to be able to change to survive, with plenty of businesses not making it through 2020 intact.

While not exactly a typical event where markets are concerned, it does nevertheless highlight how much circumstances can change in short periods of time.

Knowing your position within the market

Another great example of where competitive intelligence can help you is in finding your market position.

You see, it isn’t always obvious from sales figures and other such indirect data exactly where you stand nor how you are perceived by the consumer base.

Data sources such as reviews, ratings, etc., can give you an insight into the consumers’ minds and how they perceive your brand, letting you assess your standing.

Are you seen as a first-pick, top-rate seller? Are you just a reliable alternative when the usual options aren’t available? Or are you seen as someone niche who fulfills specific demands that only a few consumers would have?

By using this information and comparing it to your strategies, you can see if you’ve achieved your targeted market position. If you have, great! If not, you’ll gain insight into why this is the case and how you might resolve that in the future.

Remember, Spotify was able to alter its position from merely a simple music player to a content creation platform in just a few years, proving that anything is possible if you have the right intelligence.

Staying ahead of your rivals

Let’s go back to the baseball metaphor. Your biggest rival has started upping their game by purchasing new players specifically to beat you.

You can’t stop them from doing this as the people selling the players aren’t going to stop just because you ask nicely. So, what can you do?

Well, there are several ways in which you can undermine them, all above board.

For starters, you can either coach your team in strategies that counteract theirs, or you can hire new players yourself to counteract their changes.

If one pitcher they obtain is known for their difficult-to-hit fastballs, you can hire a hitter who’s known for being able to knock them out of the park.

Secondly, you can put in bids yourself.

Not only can you stop your rival from obtaining certain players that way, but by entering into bidding wars with them, you can potentially limit the number of players they can buy.

An organization only has so much money to throw around, after all.

Following on from that, if you take a look at their team and the players they’re placing bids on, you might be able to see dazzling combinations that would work very well together and disrupt them.

For instance, if you split up a pitcher-catcher combination that is known for doing great together, you can disrupt their seamless play by having their players have to adjust to each other.

In short, just because your competition plans for something to happen doesn’t mean that they will be able to pull it off.

Helping decision making

Finally, we get to the main point that underlies most use of competitive intelligence, that it helps you decide what to do next.

All of the previous examples we’ve mentioned today allow you to make better choices, ultimately helping you make data-driven decisions that will elevate you in the market.

The more information you have, the better a decision you will be able to make.

If the British had known that Washington planned to cross the Delaware, they wouldn’t have simply let him slip through their fingers.

Knowledge is power and some would say knowing your competitors is a superpower.

Types of competitive intelligence

Now that we’ve mentioned why you want to use competitive intelligence, it’s time to take a look at what it is in more depth.

We’ll start by defining the two types, strategic and tactical.

Strategic intelligence

Strategic intelligence is all about long-term thinking. It’s information that could affect the business’ direction over long periods of time.

This type of intelligence isn’t something that you need to worry about right away. However, you shouldn’t let yourself be lulled into a false sense of security.

Some examples of strategic intelligence include how consumers use the internet, for instance, which social media sites they use, which plugins are considered essential, and which browsers are in favor.

Tactical intelligence

Tactical intelligence deals with things that alter your plans in the short term.

This type of intelligence demands an immediate response if you’re going to act on it, and in some cases, you may have to act without having the complete picture.

That said, you shouldn’t let that stop you from making a decision.

In business, it’s often best to make a decision with the information that you currently have rather than miss the opportunity.

Examples of tactical intelligence include new product launches by competitors, new government regulations being introduced, new stores being opened in your area, and disrupted supply chains due to road accidents.

How do you perform competitive intelligence analysis?

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably convinced that competitive intelligence is the right type of analysis for you.

So, how do you go about performing it? We’ve laid out the seven crucial steps below that will assist you in undertaking your analysis.

Decide what you want to achieve

The first step, as with many a project, is to determine what exactly it is that you want to achieve with this analysis.

Do you want to know your position within the market? Perhaps you’d like more information on what your rivals are up to? Or maybe you’d like to scour the market for a gap that you can fill?

Your aims will determine everything, from your information sources to your analysis methods. If you don’t make a firm decision here, you’ll be floundering about during the entire process.

Remember, your business will likely have several different markets that it stretches into. By segmenting your analysis into different sections for each market, you’ll be able to collect data that’s relevant to each without muddying the waters.

The narrower your field, the more precise your information will be.

Identify your competitors

Once you know what you aim to achieve, you can then identify your competitors. These are those businesses who are:

Within your market.
Selling similar products.
Aiming to appeal to the same audience.
Able to take away your customers.

This is a fairly straightforward step in most cases since you can simply look at who is selling similar products or services to you. The more similar these are, the more they are a direct competitor.

Determine the data you need to collect

Now that you know what information you want to find, and who you want to find it on, it’s time to determine what data will showcase that information.

Are you looking for information on new products that your rivals are launching? Look to reviews, your rivals’ websites, and unboxing videos.

Do you want to know what your competition is up to with their advertising? You need to look at their campaigns and observe the trends.

You can be more specific too, splitting advertisement into online and offline, email and social media, etc. Remember, the more segmented the data, the more precisely you can guess your opponents’ moves.

Find your data sources

Once you’ve determined the data you want to collect, you can pick your data sources.

Products? Find their reviews, look at their product showcases, and check out the product’s sentiment via sentiment analysis.

You can even go so far as to buy one of their products for more direct comparison and testing, and maybe find a way to get an edge that way.

Pricing strategies? Take a look at price trends offered by Amazon, at past offers and pamphlets, and compare them to your own.

SEO tools such as Semrush and Ahrefs will give you detailed information on a variety of topics, as they’ll easily be able to show you which keywords your competitors are aiming to rank strongly in.

If you know where they’re trying to appear in Google searches, you’ll know what kind of customers they’re aiming to attract.

Analyze your data

Next up is data analysis. There are plenty of methods to choose from, some involving software and some involving doing the number crunching yourself.

Some examples include but aren’t limited to:

Porter’s Five Forces.
Driving Forces Analysis.
Product Life Cycles.
Porters Four Corners.
SWOT Analysis.

Remember, while computers might be all the rage, they’re a little lacking when it comes to the emotional side of things.

Sometimes you can simply look at the information you’re presented with and come to a better conclusion than a computer could ever reach.

Convert your analysis into plans of action

Now that you’ve gained your information, it’s time to convert it into plans of action. Or rather, factor it into your existing plans to make them better.

To take the previous baseball metaphor, you need to adjust your stance once you’ve deduced what pitch you’re about to face. In the case of business, however, the pitch is anything that can alter the ideal outcome of your plans.

The direction that you take is extremely dependent on your situation, so for the most part it’s up to you. Your intuition and experience can be excellent tools here, allowing you to see solutions that wouldn’t ordinarily be obvious.

Repeat, repeat, repeat

Competitive intelligence isn’t just a one-and-done type of deal. Your strategies change, so why shouldn’t your competitors do the same?

Competitive intelligence should be a regular habit that you indulge in, not a one-off project.

After all, markets are volatile, consumer expectations change, and you need to be aware of all of this if you want to get ahead in the game.

When should you perform competitive intelligence analysis?

As we’ve previously mentioned, competitive intelligence analysis is something that’s ideally done whenever possible.

However, there are a few specific times in your business’s life cycle that you definitely need to be performing it.

Let’s take a look at some of the best points in time when you can be undertaking this.

When you’re starting out

Analyzing your competition should be one of the first things you do when you’re planning to start a business. Knowing who you’re up against, what they do, and how they do it is crucial to staying competitive.

Understanding the industry you’re in will tell you a great deal about how you should operate.

Is the market saturated with brands that seem indistinguishable? You’ll need to stand out by having a feature that’s unique.

Shopify, for instance, saw the world of ecommerce and decided to create a platform for small businesses to create their own customized online stores easily, rather than having to rely on pre-existing platforms that would limit their design abilities.

Your investors will want to know about the surrounding market too since it gives them an insight into how well you’re likely to perform and how risky an investment you are.

Very few businesses can get off the ground without funding, so this is a top priority.

When you’re developing & launching a new product

William Henry Perkin isn’t likely a name that you know, since he lived in the 1800s. In short, he’s best known for creating the first cheap purple dye, which until those times had been limited to the extremely rich due to the cost of its production.

He also created a red dye in 1869. However, another company beat him to the punch in patenting it by just a single day!

This showcases why you need to perform competitive intelligence both when developing and launching a new product – your rivals might be thinking along similar lines and get their product out before yours, at which point you may have to abandon the entire project due to patenting.

When you’re considering a change in market strategy

Change comes to us all, whether we like it or not. A crucial part of planning for change is analyzing the current market in order to assess whether or not your planned changes will be effective.

One of the most important parts of this is analyzing your competitors in order to make sure they’re not planning the same as you.

After all, it’s no good to plan a pivot that makes you stand out only for your competition to take the same direction.

When you’re seeing a drop in physical business activity

When business stagnates, there isn’t always an obvious reason why meaning you need to look deeper to find the source of your problems.

Of course, foot traffic and physical sales can decrease for reasons other than your competition, but by analyzing them, you can see whether they are stealing your customers or if there’s a bigger problem that you all are facing.

Are you all seeing a drop in foot traffic, but only within a specific area of your city? It’s probably a transportation issue that prevents customers from being able to reach you easily.

Maybe some of your competitors are seeing a boom, whereas others are seeing a bust also. There will be some correlating reasons as to why specific businesses are more attractive right now compared to others, and you will be able to find them.

Maybe everyone sees a drop in business activity. This points to a drop in consumer confidence, indicating that you should be prepared for them to spend less and spend only on products they really desire.

All this information adds up to an edge that lets you see where consumers are engaging with businesses and, more importantly, why. This enables you to adjust your approach and meet their expectations.

When you’re seeing a drop in online traffic

Getting hits on your website is crucial to ecommerce, and a big part of this is search engine optimization to account for organic searches, which are making up a larger and larger share of online traffic.

In essence, hitting the right keywords within your website and meta information makes sure that you’re at the top of the list when it comes to Google searches in your particular field.

The problem with this is two-fold.

First, the inner workings of search engine rankings are secret and will naturally change over time.

Secondly, the searches that consumers perform will change over time as their needs and wants evolve.

Both of these factors add up to one single outcome – you need to keep on top of your optimization to stand out.

If you see a drop in traffic, you likely need to redo your metadata to upstage your competition.

Hitting a home run with competitive intelligence

With this complete guide on competitive intelligence, you should be able to get the edge your need over competitors.

You’ll understand what competitors are after, their plans, and indirectly – what customers want.

The journey doesn’t end here, though. Once you have customers’ attention, you need to provide them with a show they won’t forget. Check out our ecommerce customer experience guide to get up to speed on the topic.

Customer Perception: Making Consumers See Your Brand Positively

Posted on Oct 6, 2022Nov 1, 2022 by Emily Louise Spencer

The concept of customer perception might seem like a simple thing, but in reality, there’s far more nuance involved than you might think. At its core, customer perception is your customers’ opinions of you and is a key factor in a consumer’s choices.

Being seen positively by consumers is a must to generate new leads while also retaining your current ones. Almost 70% of consumers say they’re more inclined to spend more money with a company they trust to treat them well, rather than go for a cheaper alternative.

And trust plays a big part in how customers perceive your brand.

But where should you start? Customer perception is a big topic, and countless factors influence it.

This guide is a good start. It will help you understand what’s behind customer perception and, most importantly, how to measure and improve to thrive in today’s market.

Let’s get started!

What is customer perception?

Customer perception refers to your customers’ awareness, opinions, and general feelings about the brand and its products or services.

It’s shaped not only by direct experience with your brand but by all surrounding interactions like news reports, advertisements, word of mouth, etc.

It’s important to remember customer perception isn’t the same across sectors. It can differ based on location and demographics.

For instance, Home Depot is very well regarded in the US, but when they tried to expand into China they didn’t consider Chinese culture’s adversity to DIY. By the end of their six-year expansion attempt, they had to shut their stores and deal with a $160 million loss.

Customer perception can be tricky to quantify. It isn’t necessarily directly connected to the overall quality of the products or services you provide but how they see you.

You must remember your customers are human, and emotions and logic mix together. It’s not enough to look at the value proposition.

That’s why you need to dig deeper to measure how customers feel about you. Good places to start are:

Analyzing customer reviews.
Looking at social media platforms.
Conducting surveys.

This NEPA global survey on food habits is a great example of how perception affects our purchasing behavior. When asked about sustainable meat alternatives, only 25% of UK consumers said they would like to see lab-grown meat on their local supermarket shelves.

What is the customer perception process?

The customer perception process is exactly what it says on the tin. It is the process by which customers sense, organize, interpret and respond to anything related to your brand – be it a particular product, the brand as a whole, or somewhere in between.

Let’s break down this process by looking at an advertisement.

First, the ad is seen by the customer.
Then, they organize the information, taking it in and understanding its meaning and the message it conveys.
The customer can then interpret the information based on the current situation and history with the brand.
Finally, the customer responds to the advertisement, forming an opinion and associating emotion with it.

This all happens within a second or so, leaving little to no room for conscious thought to be involved.

But just because this process happens quickly and automatically, it doesn’t mean we can’t predict quite well what will happen.

When running an ad campaign, you don’t just whip up a graphic and run along with it. You try and understand what your target audience will take from it and how it will affect their perception of your brand.

Later, you can collect customer perception data via the previously suggested methods. This will help you better understand your ideal customer and the effects of your latest campaign.

You can find a great example of this if you look to KFC’s 2018 ad, which issued as an apology rather than a simple advertisement.

In early 2018, KFC in the UK ran out of chicken. That’s right, a business that mainly sells chicken ran out of chicken.

Since this naturally grabbed the attention of the local press, KFC responded in a manner that resonated with the British public – posting a full-page ad in the Metro with their initials rearranged to almost form an explicit word. It’s almost as if they were going “FCK, this is embarrassing”, a phrase that struck the bullseye with the British public.

Underneath, the company apologised for it’s failure, promising to do better in the future. KFC’s ability to laugh at itself took classic British humor, owning up to their mistake, and an appropriate form of advertisement to create one of the best responses to a PR crisis in the last decade.

Why is customer perception important?

While a positive customer perception is bound to net you new customers, it can help also drive growth via repeating customers.

By forming long-term, lasting relationships with your customers, you increase loyalty and customer retention rates.

Focusing on metrics such as these is key in ecommerce, as it’s considered much cheaper to retain existing customers than attract new ones.

Customers who have already purchased from you, and have built a positive relationship with you, are far easier to convince to purchase again than those who haven’t. To attract new customers, you need to:

Convince them that their existing brands aren’t working for them.
Show them that your brand can fulfill something their current one cannot.
Overcome the human resistance to change with enough incentives.
Convince them to buy from you.

You skip the first three steps with existing customers, making it a much more efficient and cheaper affair.

The key to customer retention is to align with their values and beliefs. This will depend on your market, who your customers are, and what demographics your customers belong to.

Older generations emphasize different things than younger ones, men on different factors than women. These are all generalizations, of course, and won’t hold for every customer of that particular demographic, but it’s important to keep them in mind.

Customer perception has two particular factors which promote strong loyalty and even advocacy:

Value alignment

A customer who perceives your brand as having the same values as them will intrinsically align themselves with you. Conversely, a brand with lacking or conflicting values will see customers migrate away to greener pastures.

The same Ipsos Global Trends Report 2021 also found that consumers’ three most common expectations of brands are:

Committing to fighting climate change.
Standing up for social issues, and
Paying their taxes.

This is true worldwide, with the report looking at all six continents.

Businesses that are perceived to have outdated or harmful business practices will be met with rejection and even protest, while those who keep an eye on the values their customers hold will be embraced.

But it’s not enough to talk the talk. You also have to walk the walk, with actions speaking much louder than words. Shallow and meaningless gestures will be seen through, yet genuine commitment will be held in high esteem.

Microsoft is an interesting example of a company that shifted its value to keep up with the times. Historically, it was known as a combative and aggressive company. But with the appointment of Satya Nadella as CEO in 2014, it shifted towards more collaborative tactics.

The software giant now provides support for open-source software, PaaS, and IaaS solutions and, in general, is far more open to working with other developers.

Trust

Good customer perception signals to the consumer base that you are a trustworthy brand that will not lie, misdirect or cheat customers.

To build and maintain trust, the best practice is simply to be trustworthy, to say what you mean, and to be honest and open about your business practices.

Costa Brazil, for instance, laid out their Roadmap For Change earlier this year, stating their sustainability targets and their pledge to plant new trees to replace those their products required.

Unlike similar press releases and statements from similar companies which only showed the positive, they were open and honest about the difficulties of building a sustainable brand and admitted that they weren’t experts in the field. Many other businesses switching to eco-friendly means of production haven’t been willing to admit difficulties, leaving Costa Brazil as one of the few who will publically acknowledge setbacks.

At the end of the day, customer perception is about developing positive relationships with customers, which leads to increased sales and success.

Past experiences

It’s no wonder that past experiences can determine loyalty and retention.

As we’re all conditioned by our past, our reactions and knowledge are entirely dependent upon our previous experiences. In this way, good customer perception relies on having consistent good experiences.

A well-known phenomenon is hyper focus on particularly good or bad parts of an experience with a brand, with one bad experience tainting a person’s perception of that brand as a whole.

Thus, consistency is key in building good customer perception.

How to determine & measure customer perception

We briefly talked about the ways you can measure the elusive customer perception. Now’s the time to dive deeper.

It isn’t easy to keep track of all the factors that affect customer perception, but with a little investigation, you can usually find out what customers expect of you.

Using one method of information gathering alone will usually get you part of the story, but not all of it. For example, reviews, by their nature, are only left by those who have purchased from you. Thanks to the human tendency to only leave reviews in the case of particularly strong experiences, whether positive or negative, you’ll tend to get a skewed view of things.

You need to use multiple methods of data collection if you want to get the complete picture. That means complementing review data with other methods such as surveys and social media monitoring.

Collecting feedback via surveys

Surveys are great, as they can tell you the little details that you specifically need to know. You can ask the specific questions you want answered, and those who complete your survey will give you the answers. Sounds simple enough, right?

In reality, things aren’t so simple. Consumers tend to only answer surveys when they’re particularly motivated to do so.

A popular motivational tool is a monetary incentive. While it will get people to answer your questions, some may simply tick boxes randomly to obtain the reward.

That being said, you can somewhat overcome this by placing reverse-scale questions, helping you to weed out such responders.

For example, if marking 5 means an excellent experience in most of your questions, create an item where marking 5 means a terrible one. In surveys where all items are marked with 5, you’ll know people didn’t bother reading the question, and you can disregard their answers.

Another issue with surveys is they’re usually limited to your clients. Would you look at an email from a company you have never interacted with directly and think, “I’m going to complete this survey!”?

Finally, only people interested in answering questions will complete your survey. The issue is that your sample is limited to a specific subset of people that don’t necessarily depict your entire audience.

That said, surveys are still a great tool to gauge customer perception. You just need to keep their limitations in mind.

Once you’ve opted for one, it’s important to know how to read them and what you can get out of them.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The net promoter score is a value that’s based on a specific survey question:

“On a scale of 1 (very unlikely) to 10 (very likely), how likely is it that you would recommend us to someone else?”

Those who answered 9 or 10 are considered “promoters” of your brand, whereas 0-6 denotes a “detractor,” those who will decry you.

The relative ratios of these will give you an idea of how well your product or service is received and help quantify your overall customer perception.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

Similarly, the customer effort score is based on the question:

“On a scale of 1 (extremely low effort) to 5 (extremely high effort), how difficult was it for you to find a solution to your problem with us?”

The CES measures the effort that customers feel like they have to go to in order to get what they want from you, which is a crucial component in a customer having a good experience with you and therefore having a good perception of you.

Analyzing review data

Review data is solid. It’s information on your products or services provided by those who purchased from you and therefore is a reliable data source, right?

Well, not exactly.

First, you have to consider that you’ll get a skewed perspective from reviews thanks to people’s tendency to only leave them after standout experiences.

I’m sure you’ve come across review STAR ratings online and seen a lot of 5-star and 1-star reviews, but not very many in between.

Secondly, reviews can be faked. Whether that’s by competitors, the platform you’re using to sell on, or by people who have nothing better to do than make everyone else’s life difficult, you can’t necessarily rely on review data that isn’t directly linked to a purchase.

The problem then comes that, by only taking into account verified reviews, you might leave out plenty of genuine reviews that simply didn’t bother going through the verification process.

With Revuze’s data collection engines, you can take information in brands, product lines and even individual products, analysing them from every angle in order to pull as much information as you can from that data.

We use sentiment analysis, SWOT analysis, and more to give you a full 360 degree view of your brand, market standing, and competitors.

Social media listening

With the advent of the internet, the things people talk about daily suddenly became recorded and publicly available to analyze.

Using software, you can collect millions of text pieces relevant to your brand and analyze them with sentiment analysis in order to get a clearer picture of how customers feel about you.

Like previous strategies, social media listening is not without faults.

Social media is volatile, and one negative opinion can turn into thousands when passed on, then die out. If you’re not segmenting your data by time, this can give you a much lower figure than you’d otherwise expect.

Furthermore, not everything that people post on the internet is their actual opinion. Influencers get paid to say certain things; some people look to fit in by posting opinions others might hold, and others look to stir up outrage for amusement.

The lesson here? Take everything you get from social media monitoring with a grain of salt. It’s a good indicator, but it might not be reliable.

As you can understand, all data-gathering tactics present challenges. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use any. Quite the opposite. By acknowledging these challenges and employing more than one tool, you’re bound to get as close as possible to the real picture.

And once you have that, you can start working on improving your image.

What factors influence customer perception, and how do you improve them?

Many factors affect customer perception. In fact, almost every facet of interaction between customer and brand that you can name will have an impact of some kind. These can be tangible, measurable things or more abstract ideas.

The key to positively influencing customer perception is to do these things regularly, as it not only will tell you how your actions have been perceived but can tell you if customer expectations have shifted in the time between surveys.

This might seem far-fetched, but large scandals and world-shaking events can shake up the market and shift customer priorities over just a few months.

The top factors influencing customer perception will depend on your market, target demographics, location, etc.

In the previous section of this article, we talked about value alignment, trust, and past experiences as factors that affect customer perception and loyalty. Now, let’s take a look at other common ones.

Pricing/Quality

Pricing and quality often go hand in hand, so let’s discuss them as a pair.

A product’s overall quality strongly impacts customer perception, with certain prices bringing expectations of quality standards. When the quality of your product or service meets or exceeds expectations, customer perception rises.

Prices that are too high will put customers off, and ironically, so too will prices that are too low as they give the impression that your products have some hidden defect.

Setting a price for your products when launching them is never easy, but you can look to the other similar quality products on the market and what they are charging as an indicator of what might be a reasonable price to charge.

This doesn’t mean you should blindly follow your competitors’ pricing strategies. You should always monitor the sentiment around these prices, ensuring that customers are happy to pay these prices.

For an established product, the key is to keep an eye on the sentiment around your products’ pricing, quality, and how they combine.

You can do this with the help of sentiment analysis, text mining, and other forms of social monitoring, which tell you more about the overall picture than a simple survey would.

There is also the factor of brand value: a well-established brand can charge more for its products than an unknown one, owing to the trust consumers have in you.

You should also keep in mind that prices are dynamic. What customers were willing to pay upon initial release won’t be the same as what they’re willing to pay six months afterward, for example.

Customer service

When customers have an issue with your products or services, your ability to make them feel heard, listened to, and have their feelings respected greatly impacts your customer perception.

Good customer service relies on knowing your audience, what they desire and what they expect from you. In general, you should be able to learn a few things about your customer base and what they expect by monitoring reviews, social chatter, and surveys that you put out.

You can go further by segmenting these into demographics, allowing for personalization of customer service to a particular demographic or even individual if enough data has been collected.

The processing power required to personalize customer service isn’t something a human brain can output. However, advanced AI can assist you by analyzing the data and providing recommendations for how to approach the particular customer, problem, etc., based on previous customer service interactions that were successful.

You can take this process even further with hyper-personalization, which takes the philosophy to the individual level, using data and information collected on a specific individual.

Take, for example, the following interaction:

You phone a company helpline, asking for assistance setting up your software.
The person taking your call asks you for information on your software, then redirects you to another person who is more able to help.
You then must explain everything you’ve already explained to the second person, wasting your time and theirs.

You’d feel quite annoyed at the repetition, wouldn’t you? Well, if the company had a database of information on their customers and their problems, the interaction would go more like this.

You phone a company helpline, asking for assistance setting up your software.
The person taking your call asks you for information on your software, enters it into a database, then redirects you to another person who is more able to help.
The second person now has all the information that the first person entered into the database and can take over without wasting time.

In that case, you’d feel like somebody listened to you. The company took your words, kept a record of them, and used them further down the line to help you.

Businesses can also take things a step further by noting down common issues, keeping a record of their solutions, and making them accessible to users. Why bother calling a helpline if you can find the answers on the website?

At the end of the day, speed is key in customer service. Providing a personalized customer service experience can help solve problems quickly and efficiently.

Branding

Your branding sends a clear message to customers.

Your logos, artwork, packaging, and all other visible, tangible factors specific to your brand affect customer perception.

You can think of your branding as an extension of value alignment. You need to position yourself in a way that attracts your audience and aligns with their beliefs.

Brightly colored, shiny plastic packaging will catch customers’ eyes.

However, plain, more recyclable packaging may boost your customer perception with certain audiences.

Usability

The customer’s ability to use your product significantly impacts customer perception.

Placing step-by-step instructions on your products will make use easier, including easier-to-read instructions on boxes or packaging. You can even delve further into the design process by editing the shape of your products so that their use is intuitive even to someone unfamiliar with them.

A highly specialized brand of computer parts aimed at consumers who can construct their own devices doesn’t have to be as simplistic as a brand that focuses on the general public, who aren’t expected to have the computer know-how of the aforementioned specialized customer base.

Further additions you can make include so-called “poka-yoke” or “mistake-proofing,” where your products are made so that misuse is made difficult to achieve to prevent customers from damaging your product while attempting to use it.

A good example of poka-yoke is USB cables, which can only be connected in the correct direction and will refuse to slide into ports the wrong way, preventing any potential damage that could arise to both the device and the person operating it from a backward connection.

How you deliver your advertisements, as well as the contents of them, have a massive impact on customer perception. This is especially true of the former, with different target audiences having different preferred modes of communication.

Choosing the wrong mode of communication for your target demographics will have a net zero impact at best, as customers simply either ignore or do not see your advertisements, and a negative one and worst, as they see you as out of touch.

Gen Z, for instance, rarely pick up the phone if they don’t recognize the number calling them, nor do they answer the door if they’re not expecting someone, so cold calling and door-to-door sales will misfire as communication channels.

Instead, you’ll need to utilize digital and social media to reach this demographic in an effective manner.

Don’t forget the context, though. Knowing when and where to place your advertisements so that they grab attention but don’t distract from the current situation the customer finds themselves in is the key.

You’ve probably come across pop-up ads on smartphone apps or websites, those that cover the entire screen and completely derail any process or train of thought that was taking place beforehand. It’s extremely distracting and annoying.

This is an example of bad advertising, which will hurt your reputation if you allow yourself to be placed in those positions. Picking and choosing where you want your adverts to go is crucial to maintaining a good perception.

Passive advertisement, on the other hand, doesn’t affect the usage of the website or app in question. It’s a term that covers top banners, side adverts, and any other form of online advertisement that goes out of its way to avoid disrupting the user experience.

As you can see in the example above, the Forbes website uses banner adverts across the top of its page. While these adverts catch the eye, they can simply be scrolled or looked past to access the website’s content without interacting with the ad in any way. This makes the advert less intrusive, less annoying, and less likely to be met with a negative reaction.

Furthermore, the quantity of advertisements matters also. While it might seem intuitive that more advertisement equals more customers obtained, there comes the point where this is inverted. Too many advertisements can cause irritation, which is then associated with your brand and puts potential customers off interacting with you.

Customer reviews

Almost all customers who purchase online will take the time to read product reviews before purchasing.

The reviews that have been left, their content, quality, and even their number have a big impact on purchasing decisions. It’s been shown that consumers are weary of purchasing products with few reviews, even if the product in question is newly released.

While having good reviews is important, addressing negative reviews will have a positive impact overall on your customers’ views of you. It shows you are willing to listen and consider your customers’ problems.

Social media listening tools, dedicated CX teams, and sentiment analysis all play a part in keeping up to scratch with your customer reviews.

The key here is speed, with computers doing most of the work identifying and flagging especially positive or negative reviews in order for a human to see and respond in a short amount of time.

Recommendations and advocacy

People listen to the opinions of those they hold in high regard, whether that’s influencers, well-known names in a certain sphere, or friends and family. Your ability to improve customer perception in those people’s eyes can also have a knock-on effect that leads to improved customer perception overall.

By using influencers, promotional discounts for those who recommend your products to their friends & family, and making other forms of advocacy easier, you allow your customer base to do the hard work for you.

Unfortunately, besides paying influencers to advertise your products, the mechanics of recommendation isn’t exactly straightforward to influence, as they rely on nuances and factors beyond your control.

Ultimately, the best way to get customers to recommend your products or services is simply to give them a great experience – from the moment they search for you and buy your product, up until they need your help with it.

Location & shipping services

Convenience is a big factor in choosing a brand, with a location close to your target market’s preferred area of purchase being important. Your location will depend on your target audience, with younger, more tech-savvy customers being far more likely to purchase online, for example.

If you’re already an established business, it’ll be very expensive to move to another place to perform commerce there.

Luckily, shipping networks these days can stretch all across the globe. With the right setup, you’ll be able to reach those distant markets with ease.

So, what is the right setup?

Firstly, you need a good distribution system. By this, we mean that you need to have pre-existing plans for getting goods from one place to another across all options you plan to ship to.

This can be as invested as dedicated couriers, to as simple as knowing the local post routes. It’s up to you to decide what’s necessary, based on what is feasible from a financial standpoint and also what is expected of you.

Secondly, you need to factor in time. Certain borders take longer for goods to cross than others, and some shipping lanes can be disrupted by accidents or by human interference.

Distribution centers, places where you store your goods before the sale, can be dotted about in various places. You can refill stock there as necessary by keeping an eye on what is purchased in specific locations, either directly from the manufacturers or from a central distribution center.

In this way, while the overall distance the goods travel is the same, the distance between you and the customer is much smaller, making for shorter delivery times and increased customer perception.

Wrapping Up

The key to having good customer perception is understanding that customers’ reality is not necessarily yours and that what they see & do will vary from person to person.

There are plenty of factors that can affect how customers see you, from value alignment and trust, all the way to pricing and service.

Collect and analyzing this data is crucial to driving growth. With it, you’ll be able to pinpoint what consumers think of you and how they see you

In the end, though, the best way to gain good customer perception ultimately is to provide them with an excellent customer experience. Not sure how to do that? Check out our comprehensive blog on the topic.

How To Improve Your Star Rating On Amazon

Posted on Jun 6, 2022 by Emily Louise Spencer

Amazon Seller Reputation: Why It Matters

Increasing your seller reputation is never a bad thing. It lets you increase your sales, boosts your reach and lets you track how you’re doing in terms of marketing. Amazon’s star format is one of the simpler ones for customers and those who view you to understand, but it’s slightly more complex when it comes to figuring out how to increase it.

The first thing we’ll get out of the way is this – your seller rating is not the same as your seller feedback. One is determined by the other, but feedback is discarded by the algorithm and doesn’t have an impact after 365 days. Thus, it’s not only important to get lots of good reviews but get them often if you want to keep your star rate high.

The Difference Between Product Reviews And Seller Reviews

Product reviews aren’t the same as seller reviews. One is directly related to the product in question, while one to the seller. One is about the quality of the product, the other the service and experience that the customer had with you. You’ll find both options on your

This might seem unnecessarily complex, but you need to remember that plenty of Amazon stores sell things that they don’t manufacture. It wouldn’t exactly be fair to put the burden of manufacturing errors on those who are just suppliers. It’s important to note that only those who’ve purchased from you can leave seller ratings, and only up to 90 days after purchase.

Seller reviews usually focus on packaging quality, shipping speed and communication by the seller. Anything that involves product description would also count. You might see feedback about incorrectly sized items, misleading photos etc. – these are also seller reviews.

Your seller reputation, in other words your star rating, is concerned only with seller reviews. Given said rating helps determine where you rank in the Amazon search function, it’s important to keep it high.

The Definition – What Are Amazon Product Reviews?

Product reviews are the other end of the stick. They’re reviews that are specific to certain items or groups of items that you and others might sell. They’re written with the intention of helping future customers decide what to buy based on quality, durability etc.

You can leave a product review from the Orders tab just as you can leave a seller review, but it’s important to note that people who haven’t purchased from you can leave product reviews too – they just need to have purchased something from Amazon in the past twelve months. While this is designed to let people who obtained the product elsewhere leave feedback, there’s definitely potential for abuse so keep an eye out for ratings that seem suspicious.

Given Amazon’s feedback system is in the form of comments left on items, you’ll often find product reviews and seller reviews lumped into one string of text. Customers don’t want to write things out twice when once is easier, so you’ll often find product reviews left in the seller review section and vice versa.

Why Are Amazon Product Reviews Important?

So, if product reviews don’t directly impact your seller rating why should you care about them?

Product reviews affect Amazon’s SEO, that is to say that if you have good ratings you’ll appear higher up in the recommended section of searches. They’ll also give you information about your products – quality, potential defects etc. This can be used by you directly if you manufacture your own products, or if you’re simply a supplier, used to decide what products you should continue to purchase from their manufacturers.

Product reviews also help in another fashion, and that’s to do with the psychology of purchasing things online. Consumers are suspicious of products with few reviews, thinking that they might be faked or inaccurate because of their small sample size. In fact, it’s been shown that how recent your reviews are also matters, with ratings from more than six months ago being virtually ignored by consumers browsing your products.

Techniques To Get Reviews On Amazon

So if reviews are that important, you’ve got to use techniques to get them. Most people won’t leave a review out of their own initiative unless they’ve had a particularly noteworthy experience, so a little bit of incentivisation doesn’t actually affect the accuracy of your reviews.

Ask For Feedback

If you want feedback, you can just ask for it! Sending emails to customers asking for a quick review is a good way to get responses, as it’s quick and easy to do.

Consumers are aware of the need for reviews to get good Amazon ratings, and a quick reminder is often enough to motivate them if they’ve had a particularly good experience with you, which will give you the bonus of good feedback.

Include Links To Feedback Pages

If you’re emailing customers, you should include links to feedback pages for the specific items they purchased. Nobody likes having to put effort into something that they’re doing as a favor for someone else, so making the process as easy as possible is advised.

Automate The Process

Of course, sending all these emails by hand is going to be a nightmare. The best way to get around that is to use automated email writing software, which has the added bonus of reducing mistakes made when transcribing links or product titles. The words Bread and Breed might look similar to a human, but to a computer it’s all 1s and 0s.

Amazon’s Vine Program

It wouldn’t be capitalism without a pay to promote option. Amazon’s Vine Program is a paid program that lets you confirm that your reviews are genuine, and provides the option to get your products reviewed by e-commerce experts.

Social Media Campaigns

Social media advertisements are another pay to promote section, but in this case you’re paying to have popups reminding your customers that they’ve purchased from you and a review would be nice. This can border on the level of “knowing too much”, but most consumers these days know all about big data and won’t be fazed by it.