Flip the Funnel: How to Use Existing Customers to Gain New Ones

REVIEWS

The tendency to distrust governments, corporations, and brands is increasing. In fact, people are more frequently turning to one another for advice in the wake of a void of credible advice. The simple ability to review a possible purchase on a site like Amazon.com is the difference between ignorance and informed decision making. Whereas a handful of reviews are directional at best and unrepresentative at worst, a critical mass of reviews creates the perfect vetting process to help prospective buyers make a decision that’s the result of considerable help from the community. It might be a chicken-egg debate in terms of whether Amazon.com’s installed base of customers helped scale its ratings and reviews’ competitive advantage or whether the customers’ ability to rate and review helped Amazon.com grow its customer base. Regardless, there’s no debating how powerful this functionality is in terms of integrating a powerful system of inside-out buzz.

With more than 61 billion reviews, stories, and answers generated through their system and various products, consumer response site BazaarVoice (www.bazaarvoice.com) is at the center of this customer-driven phenomenon. They’ve witnessed firsthand the power of both positive and, in particular, negative personal accounts, endorsements, and testimonials.

As a fun yet extremely pretty powerful demonstration of this point in action, take the Three Wolf Moon T-shirt phenomenon.

A while back, manufacturer The Mountain Company uploaded ...