Francesco Tamburella, ConsumerLab Manager
Consumers want more attention and are asking for the customer experience to be upgraded by reconciling three factors: real needs to address interactively, non-invasive supporting technologies, and benefits deriving from products offered.
Enterprises that have a friendly and constructive dialogue with consumers (based on mutual trust and continual sharing of experience) are seen by the market to be more successful than those that don’t.
All enterprises should facilitate the sharing of non-financial information regarding their business. Sustainability oriented communication is proving increasingly interesting to consumers and with its stimulating content it facilitates interaction, which is crucial to the reputation of all production activities.
The future requires wide-reaching vision with which to trigger positive loops in which sustainability becomes a basic criterion for both industrial policy and consumers’ choices, with measurable outcomes and repositioning people at the centre to eliminate inequalities and address the market’s critical issues.
We must hold up enterprises that are guided by the values of sustainability; formulate proposals that integrate the experiences of consumer associations, the expertise of the scientific community and third sector independence; and then share these proposals with businesses to provide a constructive response to the changing ways consumers want to be listened to, understood, helped and satisfied.
The basic task is to respond to the change in consumers’ sensibility and their evolving way of needing, desiring, dreaming and, therefore, choosing.
ConsumerLab (a study centre promoted by Markonet.it) has embraced these objectives. It wants to create an immediate and continuous communication channel to assert the value of the future in the marketplace transparently and legally. Basing itself on the analysis of continuously collected proprietary data, it is assessing best practices and governance to be able to guide intelligent choices. This objective is complementary to the mission of the associations that protect consumers against critical situations and explain how to avoid them.
Given that businesses are capable of analysing models of consumer behaviour, we want consumers to be able, in turn, to assess the behaviour of businesses and acquire knowledge that will increasingly influence their choices.
The sustainability reports that businesses publish to communicate their non-financial activities are largely unknown to consumers: only 0.7% read them, while 82.4% don’t even know they exist and 9.9% do know but don’t read them! ConsumerLab is working to simplify them into informative summaries that will help spread the word of sustainability among consumers.
