Bad Reputation Spiral

In any economic market in the world, whether it is for corn or for iPods, there is supply and demand. The customers demand things from the businesses, while the businesses try to make as much money as they can. When there is more than one firm in a market though, such as all the different fuel providers in the petroleum market, winning a bigger market share becomes an important part of business strategy – i.e. getting an ever-larger percentage of consumers to choose your brand instead of the brands of your competitors. This is a big deal, and a tricky thing to achieve, since once one company starts to get a slight advantage it can use the extra income to make its advantage bigger. The fact that a company with a larger market share will find it easier to grow is the reason why monopolies happen (because it makes it increasingly hard for new firms to compete with the fast-growing businesses that already exist, while the largest company enjoys all the benefits of being large). Eventually, if no intervention is made by the government, there will be no more competition, since one company has become unstoppably powerful.

Even in internet business, monopolies can occur. Take for instance Google, with their iron hold on the web search industry. More people use Google than any other search engine, and they got to this position gradually over a number of years. Now that they have achieved such a huge percentage share of their market though, it is extremely difficult for any other company to compete. Most search providers that are able to compete are only able to do it because they are offshoots of other massive firms. Other examples of internet monopolies include e-bay (as an internet auction site) and twitter (as a micro-blog).

Although you may not be able to imagine a monopoly occurring in your own business sector, making your business successful should still be about obtaining a larger market share and establishing consumer loyalty. That is what business is all about. If your business is on the internet, then a big part of winning more customers will be the process of monitoring your online reputation. A strong online reputation, coupled with a good overall presence, can actually do more to bring paying customers to your website than a traditional marketing campaign. In other words, if you make sure your business is talked about all over the internet, and in a good way, you can be sure that people will start to investigate what you are about.

Don’t lose business. If you need help with reputation management, help is at hand! Click here to talk to us today about how you can make money out of a great reputation.


Also, if you found this article interesting, you may also want to take a look at "Are you losing Employees?" and "Are you losing Sales?"! You can find lots of other great articles about reputation management on this site – or, if you are interested, you can contact us now for some more information. Let us see how we can make your business more successful with a better online reputation.