DRW'S TMBLR

Twitter-Effect on Consumer Decision Making

I was initially going to write a post on Twitter Tools. There have been a lot of different lists, rankings and round-ups made of Twitter Tools recently but since I haven’t made one myself I figured there is still a hole to fill. Halfway in I started branching out to Brand Affinity. As the writing progressed I saw the text being way more about Brand Affinity rather than Twitter Tools. Also, when I was a mere keystroke from finalizing this post I managed to delete the entire thing. In other words I’ve been really struggling with this one.

There are a lot of tools for Twitter. A lot. Some have more utility than others, but there is arguably something out there for everyone regardless if you’re a PR professional that eat, sleep and breathe Twitter or if you’re the casual social media novice just getting your feet wet. To me personally the most exciting tools are the ones that let you identify topic trends and monitor brand dialogue about your own company or about your clients company.

It’s exciting to see that once you have leveraged the power of a tool like Twitter to nurture relationships with existing customers and to create new relationships with prospective customers the community can really do you a lot of good. How and why you do this are two obvious questions that come to mind. A big part of the answer is called Brand Affinity. I would define Brand Affinity as the state of mutual liking that emerges between a brand and a consumer as a direct consequence of the interactions and relationship building efforts put down on, for example, Twitter.

I have borrowed the visual below from a Swedish blog called Mindpark to further explain this concept. Once you project a message out to the Twittersphere chances are someone else will find it appealing. With that message working as the catalyst converter to striking up a conversation a relationship is starting to emerge between yourself and this other individual. If you are a socially competent person the inevitable outcome of a positive conversation will ultimately be the state of high Brand Affinity.

Now let’s put this into context. Let’s imagine for a second that you are Gary Vaynerchuk, AJ Vaynerchuk or Joe Stump of tshirt search engine/aggregator PleaseDressMe. You do a lot of interacting and relationship building on Twitter and have managed to achieve Brand Affinity with a large portion of the Twitter community. These guys have a significant edge over their competition by being favorably positioned in the consideration set in the minds of the consumers all due to the continuous relationship building they previously engaged in. By having a much more personal connection to all the tshirts buffs on Twitter chances are that PleaseDressMe is the tshirt reseller that comes to mind when a consumer identifies the need for a new t-shirt and rolls out the information search/pre-purchase evolution to decide which one to go with.

The ultimate bi-product coming out of this is Brand Loyalty, which is gained once the consumer receives his new t-shirt. He then does his post-purchase evaluation to come to terms with whether or not the service of PleaseDressMe were up to his expectations. Ideally his decision will be positevly reinforced and he will keep going back to PleaseDressMe for shirts. This last process obviously depends heavily on being able to deliver on promises made to your customers as a company. I’ll cover the last bit in another post. Now it’s time for lunch.

Leave Note / Reblog
brand affinity social media marketing twitter conversational architechture