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IBM/NRF 2009
FRED BALBONI AND MARTIN LINDSTROM - VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Title:
“Shopper Advocacy
Building consumer trust in the new economic environment”
Teaser segment – running time: 1:52
FRED BALBONI: So Martin, we have this notion of advocacy, and we define this technically as a shopper that'll recommend your store to somebody else, their friends or their family, a shopper that will shift their spend to you as their primary retailer if you expand your range to include something, and they will also keep their spend with you if one of your competitors expands their range or price matches. So how does that play when you think about the psychology and physiology of shoppers?
MARTIN LINDSTROM: What's so fascinating, Fred, around this is that this is just a trend which is going to be extremely important in the future, because what is happening is, think about this: the consumer today actually has more power than the brand. In the good old days, the brand was trusted, the brand had the media access, and the brand has the message. Well, now the people don't trust the brands anymore; people, they actually have the media station in their backyard because that's the computer and the internet access, right? And finally, they actually 500,000 new blogs appearing every week with people listening to. That's the message. So the whole trust level has moved over to the consumers. So now, people not trusting brands, they're listening to their best friend, and that is the advocacy idea you're coming up with. So, in the future, this will be enormous, and that means smart retailers are starting to interfere in that dialogue, and that's the reason why the 'clicks and mortar' idea is going to be so prominent in everything we're seeing right now.