Digital word of mouth delivers tremendous consumer value, drives measurable ROI, and powers organizational transformation for more than 750 leading brands in 25 languages

Austin, Texas – Wednesday, 03 March 2010 – Bazaarvoice, the market and technology leader in hosted social commerce applications that drive sales, today announced that it has served more than 100 billion impressions of user-generated reviews, answers, and stories since launch. With 80% of consumers now seeking user-generated review content to guide purchases, this new milestone represents a tremendous transformation in shopping behavior and underscores the role of digital word of mouth as the most influential form of advertising today. This record achievement comes as Bazaarvoice prepares to celebrate its fifth anniversary in May 2010 with more than 750 clients operating in 25 languages and 36 countries.

“Literally translated, Bazaarvoice means ‘voice of the marketplace.’ For the first time in human history, word of mouth is a digital medium, representing a shift that is more transformational and powerful than we could have imagined just a few years ago,” said Brett Hurt, founder and CEO of Bazaarvoice. “The ‘hidden’ impact of 100 billion impressions of user-generated content is the way that Bazaarvoice clients are using this content to transform the way they do business – rewriting the textbook on marketing and merchandising, improving products, increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty, reengineering channel relationships, and adopting entirely new processes based on digital word of mouth. I’m very thankful for our partnership with our clients, as well as our passionate culture of employees who innovate constantly and serve them at every opportunity. And while we’ve rapidly grown, we have also scaled the Bazaarvoice Foundation to give back to the communities in which we operate.”

Companies using Bazaarvoice gain a proven and innovative way to market with their customers in the channels where they shop, creating authentic conversations that deliver tremendous consumer value, drive real business results, and power organizational transformation. Bazaarvoice has published more than 40 case studies and numerous blog posts that prove the ROI of the company’s innovative solution suite and chronicle the most dramatic changes the company has seen on the path to 100 billion impressions. These include:

Driving Organizational Change
With the industry’s leading social commerce analytics, Bazaarvoice has amassed case studies measuring how user-generated answers, stories, and reviews can increase sales, improve search marketing, reduce returns, increase loyalty, and enhance multichannel marketing effectiveness . Bazaarvoice was the first to demonstrate how user-generated content can be leveraged within an organization to rework processes and products around customer needs.

Oriental Trading Company CEO Sam Taylor mobilized the entire organization around the customer voice to change products, drive sales, and improve customer service, winning a prestigious Gartner Customer Experience Award for the initiative. Orvis created a Voice of the Customer team – which includes members from customer service, merchandising, and marketing teams – to continually analyze positive and negative customer feedback to dramatically improve the customer experience. Rubbermaid shares user-generated content with internal brand teams to pinpoint the changes that can improve the consumer experience, whether it is adding detailed instructions on how to use a popular product or redesigning an item that doesn’t live up to customers’ expectations.

Innovation in Channel Marketing
Bazaarvoice continually innovates new products and strategies on a six- to eight-week development cycle to make customer-generated content useful for both consumers and brands. In 2009, the company debuted MobileVoice™ to bring the voice of the customer into the in-store experience and also extended social capabilities to include integration with Twitter alongside Facebook and other popular social networks. Sephora and Intuit were one of the first to use the new service, innovating the use of in-store signs to get customers to read reviews through their mobile devices.

Bazaarvoice’s breakthrough BrandAnswers and BrandVoice solutions allow manufacturers to impact and join customer conversations on the world’s largest retail sites. With BrandVoice, manufacturers can share user-generated content in the channel, which is now a business imperative for any supplier considering that 80% of consumers seek this content when shopping. BrandVoice, a winner in the inaugural 2009 Shop.org Innovation Contest, experienced greater than 200% growth in 2009 and is now proven to have a major impact on channel sales. BrandAnswers, another industry first, coupled with Ask & Answer brings in supplier-generated content (SGC) as well as retailer-generated content (RGC) to answer product pre-sell questions from consumers. As reported in The Financial Times, manufacturing client Samsung can reach consumers at the very latest stages of the purchase decision where they need accurate answers quickly. Samsung’s says their ability to be at this point in the buying decision is essential and have even created a branded persona called “Mr. Samsung” to answer consumer questions.                 

Social Network Integration and Social Recommendations
Bazaarvoice continues to introduce groundbreaking new social networking capabilities designed to help companies plug into social networks to achieve greater social commerce results. TurboTax recently partnered with Bazaarvoice to launch the “Friendalyzer”, where users can see TurboTax reviews written by your friends on social networks, including Facebook. Seth Greenberg of Intuit will present the great results on this initiative at the Bazaarvoice Social Commerce Summit, taking place April 19 – 21, 2010 in Austin.

In summer 2009, Bazaarvoice launched Social Recommendations, which allows consumers to link a company’s product to their shared experiences, inspiring new purchases and helping shoppers easily discover new products.

As the volume of consumer stories swelled in 2009, propelled by creative contests by brands and emotional appeals like the Zales Autism Speaks campaign and the V Foundation Stories campaigns, this user-generated content drove increased time on site and engagement. In the case of social commerce innovator PETCO, whose Howl-o-ween contest encouraged pet owners to submit stories and photos of costumed pets, the Stories-based campaign drew over 1,700 submissions, 30,000 ratings, and almost 1,000 social recommendations for various PETCO products – all within a PETCO-branded environment on the company’s web site PETCO.com, where conversion and customer loyalty can be directly influenced.

Expanded Partnership Ecosystem
The Bazaarvoice partner program, Radius, showed more than a 350% increase in number of partners in the last year. Bazaarvoice has now integrated with more than 20 eCommerce platforms, 10 of the leading site search providers, 20 email marketing providers, all of the major Web analytics providers, and 5 of the leading recommendation engines. Bazaarvoice worked alongside leading industry partners in 2009 to power innovative solutions for clients.