Like resellers of any other items, Indian IT, Electronics and Telecom resellers (as a community) too can reap benefits from open forums on internet-based discussions. Even Blogging is a nice tool today for resellers; however, it may not be very effective for small resellers.
The customers are much more informed these days, they keep lot more items of information on the products which they wish to buy in near the future. However, the stored information contains both ‘pros and cons’. Now, if the resellers become active through open forums to drive away the ‘cons’ about the products which they (the resellers) have already sold and experienced their (the products’) usefulness, efficacy, etc., from the minds of the prospective buyers, definitely the reseller community will be benefited.
Contextually, it may be asked why resellers have to take this initiative, instead of the vendors becoming active? Well, it’s much more effective as the majority of the buyers bear a psychological prejudice against the vendors’ statements. The end-users often consider the vendors’ statements as exaggerated ones on the effectiveness or capability of their products. In other words, if the reseller quotes an experience, that’ll have a much more strong impact on the buyers as they are more closely attached.
Resellers’ combined promotional effort can change any product’s fate in the market this is an acid-tested truth. Thus, the factual case-study reports, generated by the resellers through post-sales’ enquiry is very important at this juncture to influence the customers. Unfortunately, in India a majority of the resellers don’t put any effort on keeping track of the products once they are sold. Those who do it, they too don’t make any effective utilization of the data thus generated.
Such data may be published through open forums with relevant factual information with the consent of the end-user. When other potential buyers get the opportunity to know the items of information like who purchased the product (to establish the genuineness of the case study), what was the expectation (cost versus performance), which brand was selected (selection criteria) and how is it serving the desired purpose (usefulness or drawbacks), obviously they will be benefited in making their purchase decisions.
The days have gone when people used to decide suitability of a product based on its price, brand, and even sales statistics. Now, although those may be some of the influential factors in purchase decision, the ultimate determiner is how much effective is the product as far as the purposes are concerned?
Resellers’ associations may take interest in conducting this type of case studies. Genuine efforts will benefit new customers to arrive at the right buying decisions. Also the resellers will find increased sales volume, and it will gradually be an effective marketing tool to predict or influence the future movement of the brands.