Is our life getting more convenient and more complex at the same time? Research shows that with social media taking the consumer market by storm, companies no longer have the option to stay out of the virtual community. As the power shifts from companies to consumer, companies are scrambling to find means and ways to retain as well as capture new customers. How else should companies know what consumers want? The answer is to listen.
Consumer-generated content (CGC) largely occurs on new media and this new media is a paradigm shift in social media marketing. Although the Internet allows direct communication between consumers and consumers or businesses and consumers (or both), the amount of exposure (e.g., online ads) is not necessarily voluntary for consumers. With the birth of social media, consumers are now in control of what they want to see and what they want to use as valuable information in their decision-making process (e.g., purchase intentions).
The purpose of this book is to organize and clarify key information about CGC. This information is intended to benefit small business owners, marketing practitioners, students, and marketing researchers in understanding the use of CGC as part of a marketing plan.
We begin the book by defining the term CGC. CGC is often linked to electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) as well as to social media. We next discuss the role of consumers as CGC contributors and the changing landscape of marketing communications.
We also review the different forms of CGC (e.g., reviews, blogs, and collaborative content), in addition to looking at why CGC is so popular in the consumer market; specifically, we examine the core characteristics of CGC. The consumer’s motivation to contribute to CGC is also an important element of this book. Since CGC is deemed to be more credible than company-published content, we want to understand how and why companies can motivate their target consumers to contribute to CGC.
In order to look at CGC from a global perspective, three countries were selected, on the basis of their cultural orientations and acceptance toward social media: the United States of America, Japan, and Singapore. The United States, known to be the first mover in major social media, is generally populated with individualistic consumers, whereas Japanese consumers are commonly categorized as collectivistic. Singaporean consumers are often considered bicultural. They may be of Asian descent but their cultural orientation is fairly westernized. The book focuses on how these different types of consumers adapt toward social media and their willingness to engage in CGC.
With the large amounts of information posted online, how do we know which information to trust? This book will focus on trust on CGC. In addition, we adopt a case to exemplify consumers’ opinion about using certain platforms. Research demonstrates that CGC has a great impact on the consumer market. Companies are thus faced with both opportunities and challenges when dealing with CGCs either on their corporate website or on a social media site.
Last but not the least, we present an overview of the future of CGC, the positive and negatives of CGC as well as opportunities for marketers. This book should benefit and share useful information to a broad audience, including marketing practitioners, students, and professors teaching marketing. This book is also a concise read for business managers interested in promoting their business using CGC (maybe even a norm now) with new social media tools.