One of the critical success factors for any business trying to embrace consumer empowerment is the active involvement of senior management. All too often, co-creation initiatives, consumer panels or social media enabled forums are simply superfical gimmicks, designed to generate publicity, rather than reshape business strategy. So congratulations to ASDA’s comms people for persuading chief executive Andy Bond to announce a “new era of democratic consumerism.”
The ASDA press release hits all the right buttons – talking about “introducing policies that encourage customer participation and feedback in a bid to involve its customers in the decision making process” – but it is Bond’s personal involvement that suggests that ASDA is serious.
It is also worth remembering that ASDA’s parent company, Wal-Mart, has been something of a pioneer in the use of social media.
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[...] have described ASDA’s democratic consumerism initiative as one of the first mainstream applications of crowd surfing principles. When a [...]