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Editorial: Tech Companies Can't Rely on Consumer Loyalty Anymore
Photo: ZeNahla/Flickr (CC)
By New Media Age
November 06, 2009
How much time can you spend with someone without loving them? From the evidence of this week’s issue it seems quite a lot, at least in online media. We recently took a survey of consumers’ views of new media brands and found only 6% loved Facebook. This compares to ITV, which was loved by one in four people.
The idea of brand love is a thorny one on the internet. As media channels fragment, brands struggle to sustain old-world ideas of a brand/customer relationship. People may not love Facebook but they’re certainly investing a lot of time in it. Research from Nielsen Online on page 24 reveals that Facebook accounts for 75.4% of all time spent on social media sites, with the average heavy user spending more than 125 hours on the site in the last year. This doesn’t sound like a brand people don’t love.
But it’s not really Facebook the brand they’re engaging with, it’s what it enables. Although having never become the “operating system of the internet” envisaged by its founder Mark Zuckerberg, it has, through initiatives like apps and Facebook Connect, become a key platform for the brands people do love to connect with their customers.
Brand love is still of huge concern for ITV, though. It may be loved by one in four people but consumer habits online are very different from how they consume TV offline. Our profile of head of online commissioning and deputy MD of ITV.com Kate Bradshaw (page 18) finds her determined for the site to become the best place for viewers to consume ITV content.
But content is increasingly being set free across the web to connect with consumers wherever they are, Hulu’s player being one of the best examples of this. As our cover story makes clear, providing aggregated online TV content is seen as a key differentiator for all media brands. The love that brands like ITV have got used to is being eroded and digital media is breaking hearts across the board.
The only way to build love with your online customer is, like in real life, to base the relationship on what they’re looking for, not what you’re prepared to give.
Copyright: Centaur Communications Ltd. and licensors
© 2009, YellowBrix, Inc._
