Facebook, blogs, communities and forums. Social networks that are born for sharing but which also have a significant impact on consumer decisions. Even in banking services. A study by the School of Management of the Milan Polytechnic, in collaboration with the media monitoring company Mimesi, reveals that 8 million Italians change their purchasing choices following the information retrieved through social media (the survey used a sample of web users between 18 and 65 years old made up of 1.184 people). The new media are thus stably joining the traditional media as authoritative sources of information in the purchasing processes with consumers who have totally changed the mechanisms for searching and selecting information.
In other words that means that all the comments, opinions, information that travel on the net are a buzz, as it is defined in jargon, by the unstoppable advertising force. A phenomenon, however, that must be managed by companies that cannot afford not to be part of this conversation on the web: whether they are present on Facebook or not, whether they organize forums or not, the buzz about their products goes on regardless. “One of the challenges and opportunities for our companies to get out of the crisis - says Giuliano Noci, full professor of marketing at the Milan Polytechnic - will be to read the changes in purchasing behavior and appropriately supervise all channels not only to promote but also to listen and dialogue with the market”.
At the same time, the marked sharing of the network must push companies towards information reliability. Playing on this can turn out to be a boomerang rather than an advantage. In fact, it is the same network that moves to correct false and tendentious information. An example? On Twitter in the days of the tremors in Emilia Romagna there are those who used the word "earthquake" to launch commercial offers. And the network rebelled with hundreds of insulting messages. A negative brand that will remain online forever.
Who is the consumer attentive to new media in purchasing processes? The identikit that emerged from the study speaks of a aware consumer, who attaches great importance to finding information on the products and services he intends to purchase using different information channels throughout the process. Socio-demographic variables such as income and level of education tend not to be discriminating factors in identifying the segment but it is age that today represents a distinctive factor, on average we are dealing with 32 year olds.
In any case, the consumer's use of different media appears to be strongly linked to the product category involved in the purchasing process. In banking services for example (one of the four product categories taken into consideration by the study together with baby food, health foods and mobile devices), the study finds that the consumer tends to rely on company sites to gather information and details, especially with regard to current accounts. 30% of the interviewees answered that they very often or always learn about new products or offers thanks to company websites or that they learn more about a product here after an advertising campaign on traditional media. The result is that 21,2% have very often or always changed their mind about a product. 42,7% of the interviewees declare that they have great trust, if not total trust, in the information they find on company websites.
Banking services are in fact a product category in which the consumer trusts less what he hears, wants to see clearly and goes directly to the company website because he expects to find correct information: since it can influence the judgment of the product, the consumer assumes that the companies do not play on this aspect. But for banking services, consumers do not disdain blogs/forums/communities either, which often come before traditional media or Facebook and Twitter: 32,4% of those interviewed place great, if not total, trust in these channels too (28,6 .20% in the traditional media), 19,3% of the interviewees here too very often or always sought further information on a banking product they were already familiar with (17,3% in the case of the traditional media) and 15,8% of the interviewees changed their mind very often after reading the information here (16,2% after reading information in the press and XNUMX% in the case of radio or TV).
