Bazaarvoice’s Zarina L Stanford on the importance of identifying organic user-generated content; along with community building

With AI-generated content becoming increasingly sophisticated, how is Bazaarvoice ensuring the authenticity and trust in user-generated content (UGC) on your platform? Are there any plans to implement new methods for identifying and filtering out potentially deceptive content?

As we are in the user-generated content business, which has communities along with influencers and creators, I believe consumers trust other consumers more than anything else. From the standpoint of brands, I consider that protecting brand equity and brand safety is the number one priority for those involved in the business of brand, retail or selling. At Bazaarvoice, as we continue to identify user-generated content, we aim to first ensure that it’s authentic or not. If there is a piece of content that is labelled as organic, we have to ensure that it has been created organically by a shopper or a creator. We also need to authenticate that it’s a person, as opposed to a bot or a machine. Moreover, I think that we focus on commenting about a product which is in the context of what we’re looking for in the marketplace, which helps with referencing. We also focus on whether the product description is contextual and appropriate. So, we apply authentication and moderation for all those purposes. In terms of ensuring authenticity, we also offer a trust mark which customers can apply for a particular product, to show our authenticity research results. Lastly, through the same research work, we highlight the responsibility of protecting that authenticity,  ensuring that consumers can count on the brands and the retailers.

The customer journey is constantly evolving. How is Bazaarvoice helping brands leverage UGC to personalise the shopping experience at every touchpoint, from awareness to post-purchase engagement? 

What you’re talking about is something that we have done as part of the Shopper Experience Index, which asks at what point of the shopping journey do shoppers use UGC? Interestingly, I’m going to give you two dimensions to it. The first dimension stems around the purpose, in terms of awareness, consideration, or purchase loyalty. Approximately 70-79% of people, who belong to Gen-Z, use UGC for all stages of selecting a product. They watch product videos, with 59% of the people ending up buying something. Consumers utilise UGC, found typically in a social environment which has made social media critical, leading to solidified conversions. Social media is a critical part when it comes to discoverability of products, surpassing how search engines used to be three to four years back for Gen-Z and millennials. We also look at the possibility of a generational gap. I think social media and the availability of information exchange have made this area more transparent. 

How do you plan to expand your platform to foster a sense of community around brands and products? Are there any plans to integrate social features or interactive elements that encourage deeper customer engagement?   

About seven to eight years back, I believe we realised the importance of creating communities. So we acquired a company called Influenster, which’s a community of everyday shoppers. Here customers expressed their willingness to try things, and while trying things, they would express their thoughts and what was their experience with a particular product, which we describe as a community called Influenster served through an application. I think the most common use case of this community when we work with brands on particular campaigns, is that if there’s a new product, it is good to know what people are thinking about it. Many of our brands, particularly those in spaces such as beauty, food and beverage (F&B), CBG, and home improvements, among others, serve up the content, which is what we call a campaign-based service.  This is tied back to the foundation of a software platform, which could help syndicate the kind of content that the brands have. If you can make things shoppable, by providing visual user-generated content available at product detail pages (PDPs) and at affiliated marketplaces, then it helps evolve the form factor. Last year, we acquired a company called Affable, which is prominent in Asia. This allows them to follow an authenticity practice to leverage their solutions in video spaces. About three to four months ago, we expanded our capability to provide contextual commerce, using things such as social proofing, which helps shoppers get information about the products they are looking for.

How do these acquisitions fit into your overall strategy, and how will you integrate their functionalities to create a more comprehensive customer experience management (CEM) platform for brands?

For businesses such as ourselves, I believe there’s a way of looking for organic growth, along with acquisitive growth. In either case, I think it is really important to understand what are the needs of brands and retailers. Our primary audience and primary customers are brands and retailers, and retailers could include marketplaces. As the industry continues to evolve, we focus on looking at gaps and growth opportunities, with the case in point being the entire creator economy. At the macro level, as a company in this space, we always intend to look at what are the adjacencies that could expand our capability over what we can serve. As an innovative partner and as a technology provider, we have to innovate and look ahead to what might be coming. So, with that in mind, acquisition has become a part of that area, along with the need to continue innovating in our capabilities. From a product side, there’s a portal which uses a single user interface, which is meant for our customers, brands, and retailers, among others, to be able to reach different areas. As far as Affable is concerned, we were a customer of the platform, when we began to see the platform’s potential in terms of technological synergy. The same thing happened with Granify. Within seven months since we acquired Affable, we’ve seen many of our customers, both brand and retailer sides, adding the platform to their portfolio of Bazaarvoice.

With numerous marketing channels competing for budget, how is Bazaarvoice helping brands demonstrably measure the return on investment (ROI) of UGC-driven strategies?

I believe there’s a need to have a relationship of value demonstrated with our customers, on which we try to work together often. The basics of it stem from the key performance indicators (KPIs), which revolve around ways to increase revenue generation and improve profitability along with shortening the sales cycle. The other thing that we also focus on, especially about retailers and brands who have shopped with us, is towards them maximising their cart and minimising their returns. Sometimes, it’s all about helping brands increase their product awareness, which is why we also do awareness campaigns. Previously, we undertook a study with Forrester Research. As part of this  we deep dived in terms of the total economic impact of our solutions, and in that case, nine of our customers, both brands and retailers, worked with us because it was an independent study. Lastly, I would say it is always important for me to look at the lifetime value as well. 

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