Corporate blogs- A web 2.0 approach to increase consumer brand knowledge

As economic challenges and pressures for businesses mount, marketing teams are faced with major decisions. While widespread consumer anxiety results in dwindling businesses, marketing budget allocations are hit by cutbacks and marketers face the challenge of better market performance in a restrained economy.

Investments and organizational objectives have been reframed. While retention of market share appears the biggest thought, equally important is to continue to build the product or service's customer base and avoid losing brand value during constrained times. The need of the hour is to reorganize brand portfolios, rethink spending approaches, generate more fine-grained customer insights, overhaul pricing and segment management and restructure sales, service, and channel strategies. Better brand positioning and appropriate use of technological tools enables shrinking the budgets for marketing resource allocation.

In this context, brand positioning gains importance as a strategic marketing function. It further becomes vital for organizations to recognize the consumer as a significant dimension in evaluating and positioning organizational brands. This can be achieved through adoption of appropriate brand management strategies. Our previous studies, as part of our research in the domain of Branding have indicated that building customer centricity in a brand is a significant strategic thought which organizations can explore in the wake of the rising vulnerabilities of brands, in the face of rising consumer empowerment. It creates new opportunities for brand-customer dialogue, knowledge creation, and, critically, provides a new context in which the interests of a corporation and those of its customers can be more closely aligned. Our research further shows that Consumer Brand Knowledge is an important contributor in the customer centricity of a brand. In this paper, we explore the use of organizational blogs for increasing consumer brand knowledge.

The collaborative version of the internet, termed Web 2.0, as coined by Tim O'Reilly in 2005, has altered the manner in which information is published, consumed and utilized on the internet resulting in a paradigm shift in the way interactions take place within the organizational workspace as well as between the organization and the external customers. Web 2.0 is a collection of opensource, interactive and user-controlled online applications expanding the experiences, knowledge and market power of the users as participants in business and social processes. Blogging is shaping into a useful organizational tool for brand propagation and interaction with consumers with several corporates having effectively launched Corporate Blogs, thereby shaping consumer perception, by adding to consumer knowledge about organizations, brands and products. Blogs are no longer a subculture of the Internet; they have become a mainstream information resource.As blog audiences grow and persist over hundreds of posts, more of the ‘back story’ is contained in an archive or across conversations throughout the community and more and more is taken for granted as known.

In this paper we analyse the improvement in Consumer brand knowledge by exposure of the consumer to a corporate blog. A simulated lab environment is created where a set of consumers are exposed to a brand blog for a period of ten minutes. The variations in levels of consumer brand knowledge are calculated. Future scope of work is outlined in measuring the variation in consumer sentiment pertaining to a brand before and after increase in a consumer's knowledge pertaining to a brand. Subsequently Brand knowledge maps will be developed to measure the results empirically.

In the era of consumer empowerment, the average consumer is faced with numerous product and brand choices. In a fiercely competitive environment, organizations who want to retain their consumers and increase consumer-brand loyalty need to focus on increasing the consumer's knowledge about the brand. Increasing consumer-brand knowledge contributes to increased consumer perceived value in the brand, which is directly linked to greater consumer-brand loyalty.