During my days in large brand internet marketing, I learned early on that the budgets I was working with in the web marketing world were just the tip of the iceberg. I worked in the web marketing function for both a large brand owner and later for a large multi-channel retailer. In both cases, the web channel marketing budgets were a small single digit percentage of the overall company marketing budget and even in 2008, this is clearly still the case.
Being in the web channel at a large retailer, I received numerous requests/phone calls from brand owners interested in using their marketing dollars to do co-sponsored online marketing projects. I spent many evenings after hours coming up with ways to spend other people's money! These brand owners were eager to show that they "had the whole web thing figured out" and were eager to spend money with us on the web. Recently, Bazaarvoice released an innovative concept that is a great option for those brand owners looking for a place to put their online marketing investment. Its appropriately called Brandvoice and I believe that it will supercharge another round of word-of-mouth marketing in commerce online and offline (for full disclosure, I am a member of the Bazaarvoice Advisory Board).
In the typical ratings and reviews scenario, a retailer collects ratings and reviews on numerous products that are supplied by numerous brand owners. PetSmart for instance may carry 50 different brands of premium pet food from 10 different suppliers. A single supplier may only get one or two reviews of their product because the attention is spread across numerous pet food options. They may get a few more at Petco as well but overall, the quantity of ratings and reviews is under-optimized. Enter BrandVoice which simply moves the ratings and reviews capability one step further up the supply chain. Activity at the brand owner level is robust but many brand owners only manage to gather this voice through customer surveys and call center associates. Unfortunately, much of this marketing intel is lost in the sea of day to day activities. With BrandVoice, the brand owner can now gather quantitative review data as their own marketing and merchandising asset. An example is shown here of Dell computer reviews showing on BestBuy.com. These reviews can then be syndicated out to retailers interested in showing these reviews. Reviews aren't just for retailers anymore!
