What our peers buy influences our own decisions on purchases. What I’m suggesting here is a new way for companies to take advantage of the influence and respect the consumer has for the opinion of his peers.

The idea is, you sign up through a company or web search site (like google) to take part in this program and create a comprehensive profile. Upon purchasing an item, you write a review of it. Now, if a peer (based on analysis of your profile) searches for a similar product, they would receive not only relevant ads, but also their peers’ reviews of the product.

Companies would pay a slight premium to be part of this innovative marketing approach, and the consumer would get points for each review written. Those points could converted to $ and disbursed via pay-pal or some other incentive.

I would certainly pay more attention to a review or rating of a peer than I do to the search based ads one normally gets. Alternatively, a summary of your peers’ ratings could appear for each product. Another option could be weekly updates about what your peers are buying. And, to guard against unscrupulous bumping up of positive reviews, one could require a cell phone number to be eligible as a peer reviewer.

Using this approach, products could be marketed in a very specific and targeted way to different groups of consumers with little added cost to the company hawking the goods.

| Marketing to college students, Marketing to young women, New Concepts & Ideas, Corporate Innovation | Email Article | Share on Facebook | del.icio.us | digg this

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