Compare and contrast customer-managed relationships and consumer-generated marketing

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Today's consumers have more information about brands than ever before, and they have a wealth of platforms for airing and sharing their brand views with other consumers. Thus, the marketing world is now embracing not only customer relationship management, but also customer-managed relationships. Greater consumer control means that companies can no longer rely on marketing by intrusion. Instead, marketers must practice marketing by attraction — creating market offerings and messages that involve consumers rather than interrupt them. Hence, most marketers now augment their mass-media marketing efforts with a rich mix of direct marketing approaches that promote brand-consumer interaction. For example, many brands are creating dialogues with consumers via their own or existing online social networks.

A growing part of the new customer dialogue is consumer-generated marketing, by which consumers themselves are playing a bigger role in shaping their own brand experiences and those of others. This might happen through uninvited consumer-to-consumer exchanges in blogs, video-sharing sites, and other digital forums. Increasingly, companies are also inviting consumers to play a more active role in shaping products and brand messages. One drawback of this process is that harnessing consumer-generated content can be time-consuming and expensive.