Online Brand Ambassadors and Online Brand Assassins: Master the New Role of the Chief Perception Officer

Abstract

Resonance marketing (see Chapter 4) is critically dependent upon user-generated content to enable consumers to locate and evaluate unfamiliar products. This allows companies to offer niche-focused sweet spot offerings that delight their target market consumers. These markets are too small to justify the expense of traditional advertising or traditional promotions, and yet the higher prices of these resonance products discourage casual trial. Adoption is largely by consumers who know what to expect. Managing community content is vitally important to the launch of resonance products. Delighted customers serve as Online Brand Ambassadors, posting reviews that create additional demand. Strongly dissatisfied customers become Online Brand Assassins, writing reviews that deter future customers from trying the product and can destroy the perception of a product’s quality. The newly emerging role of the Chief Perception Officer (CPO) is to coordinate all aspects of a product’s quality and manage customers’ perception of the brand. While the CPO cannot control what the customer writes, the CPO can strongly influence what the customer wants to write. When the CPO reduces the operational breakdowns that cause dissatisfaction and designs procedures to fix problems immediately when they occur, the CPO ensures that few customers want to write negative reviews.

Much of the research on brand ambassadors and brand assassins reported here was done jointly with Chris Dellarocas, but never published in English; we did publish it in China Long March to Quality, as “重视消费者评价 提升整体管理质量” in November 2012.