In response to the Canadian Marketing Association’s blog, Crowd Sourced Couture: How Social Media Redesigned the Shopping Experience, I would have to say first and foremost it was an interesting read. The blog post diligently focuses on the effects of consumer trends displayed through social media as being the newest (and most influential) factor in personal purchasing decisions.

“A new layer has been added with the ability to see how popular a product is in-store according to what people are saying via social media.” This strategic analysis of consumer behaviour towards products when shopping in-store, both positively and negatively correlates an individual consumers response to a particular product based on how that product is perceived on social media outlets such as; Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter. Stores, like Nordstorm, advertise how many “pins”, “likes”, and “retweets” an item receives on the virtual social world by hanging the statistics on clothing hangers, or displaying them by the products of subject.

What I guessed from reading this far into the blog, was that those products with more “likes”, and “pins” would be more likely to attract the buyer to want to purchase it. Why? Well simply (at least I thought), the more a product of any sort is liked and shared amongst peers, role models, and friends on social media, the more that particular product is more accepted. Therefore, the safer and more confident the customer would feel in purchasing that product. And although some results supported this automatic assumption, there were also negative correlation in sales to number of likes the product received on the internet.

In a world where individualism is becoming a prominent trend, and active factor in purchasing decisions, it should have been obvious. The more likes and tweets that a product receives – ultimately declaring the level of the product’s popularity – the less certain individual consumers saw that product as desirable. In fact, the more virtual likes the lesser in sales that item had, strictly due to the fact that people purposefully try to find ways to set themselves apart from what the majority of society views as “likeable”.

This blog by the Canadian Marketing Association, was definitely interesting, along with insightful. We always think of using social media to encourage online purchasing, not necessarily the other way around. Like in this article, where companies utilize social media for in-store purchasing encouragement. A new new layer of the purchasing cake that I’m sure, whether we know it or not, have all had a taste of.