Media providers urged to work hard to gain trust of customers

MEDIA AND telecoms firms will need to develop new strategies now to ensure they will survive in the new digital age, focusing on building relationships with consumers and forging strategic partnerships, a new report has said.

The report from software giant Oracle said current cultural, economic and technological trends were already affecting consumer behaviour, and identified a number of trends such as the rise of “freemium” – where the service is offered free but add-ons are charged for – and convergence across TV, mobile and PC platforms.

It said companies would have to engage consumers and build relationships with them if they wished to distinguish themselves from rivals.

Gordon Rawling, Oracle Communications’ senior marketing director, said this interaction was becoming crucial to consumers, who were accessing media at a time and place that suited them, and on a range of devices. “But that engagement is really going to be important to differentiate a media or a service provider in terms of how they do that.”

The report said media providers would have to work hard to gain the trust of consumers.

“Trust is seen as the key to gaining access to more profitable relationships with customers and competitive differentiation. Users will need to feel comfortable enough to enter the new type of relationship needed for personal, contextualised experiences.”

This will also provide media companies with access to another resource – the personal information of its consumers.

This is expected to become part of a new economy for digital media distribution, where consumers will trade private details for customisation.

“There’s a growing recognition that we do have a lot of information out there and today broadly speaking it’s provided free by individuals,” said Rawling.

“People are recognising that there’s actually value attached to that, and there’s an aspect of privacy for sale, but there needs to be the appropriate agreement as to what I get recompensed for offering part of my privacy.”

The popularity of Facebook and other social networking sites had already made this acceptable to a certain degree.