Influencer? CGC. Three trends for consumer-generated content

Digitization has brought about many changes in the retail sector, among others, but consumers' desire for product recommendations that are as authentic as possible has remained the same. The Internet has brought with it many new opportunities to seek out these recommendations online. Above all, consumer-generated content (CGC) - content generated by other users, such as ratings, test reports, photos and videos of products - is regarded as particularly trustworthy and thus represents a major opportunity for brands.

Consumer-generated content must not only be collected by companies, but also made available again to other consumers and thus integrated into the overall marketing mix. Ratings, reviews and customer photos can thus be integrated into print and digital advertising. A product with five or more reviews is 270 percent more likely to be purchased than one without reviews; advertising with CGC has been shown to be twice as effective as that without consumer-generated content. Visual CGC especially offers a great change to bridge social media and e-commerce. CGC should also be integrated more by companies into e-commerce as well as social media platforms in the future because influencer marketing is coming under increasing criticism and is perceived as increasingly untrustworthy. 66 percent of consumers are more likely to buy a product if the website has social media posts with content from real customers.

More difficult than the task of attracting new customers is turning them into returning regulars. Here, too, consumer-generated content can be useful, because it not only provides help in making purchasing decisions, but is also a resource for customer feedback. Successful brands and retailers are responsive to the opinions of their customers. When a change is made based on customer feedback, the customer feels valued, which provides good conditions for a stronger bond between customer and brand.
Increasingly these days, brands and retailers are introducing a product exclusively to their existing customers before it is presented to the wider masses. Traditionally this has been done in laboratory or test environments, but now these new products are often tried out on an existing customer base before launch, allowing brands to get feedback in advance and fine-tune the product or marketing strategy while strengthening ties with regular customers.

The digital transformation continues to merge the physical and digital worlds. Many online functions, such as chatbots or personalized homepages, nowadays largely simulate or replace the in-store employee. However, brick-and-mortar retailers can serve these digital expectations by integrating them into physical environments. This can be even more effective if they include CGC elements such as displays for "best rated" and "most popular" products. This points to the importance of the online world influencing the offline experience, as well as demonstrating once again the importance of consumer-generated content.