A prediction from Jupiter’s Gary Stein: feedback marketing is the wave of the future:

Marketing deparments exist in data vacuums; they are constantly asked to make decisions about both products and communications with data that is out of date or gathered under artificial circumstances. The use of the Internet to open up that data feed is my pick for most innovative use of the Web, 2005.

I don’t think there’s anything particularly groundbreaking about using customer feedback as an integral part of marketing and product development decisions. The proof is in the pudding, so to speak: can company reps pull the right information out of the pudding of impressions, opinions, blog comments, and other minutiae floating in the ‘net ether? And can they properly analyse it to guide their decision making?

After all - everyone who was asked seemed to like New Coke.

But what about another variant of feedback? Rock n’ roll feedback? Jimi Hendrix feedback? The distortion of the marketing message as a result of consumer anger and hatred of a company?

How are companies preparing for that feedback? Have they created “dashboards” to measure negative emotion by product, line, region and brand? Or are they just waiting for letters of complaint from the BBB and the local newspaper’s agony aunt? Even worse - are consumer complaints piling up, unattended, in the webmaster@brandname.com mailbox?

And how is your PR firm ready to help them?

Thanks to PC4Media for the pointer.