Today, Advertising Age broke a story about the new Yelp! for consumer packaged goods (CPG) that launched today in beta: Consmr. Want to know which detergent is best for you? Which brand of microwave popcorn you’ll enjoy the most? What type of glue will hold your art project together best? Other consumers will answer all of your grocery/drug store questions.
Packaged goods account for $12 billion in e-commerce, which is why Zagat’s former head of mobile Ryan Charles and entrepreneur Noah Zitsman put together Consmr.com.
“Product discovery hasn’t really changed yet because of the social web,” said Mr. Charles.
Apart from hastags, twitter followers and facebook fans, it can be argued that this is the first information source of it’s kind in the social world to organize brand affinity in a way that translates to consumer reccomendation and behavior changes in the consumer packaged goods category.
The site provides benefits for brands and journalists: brand profile pages, allows magazine sites like Men and Women’s Health to provide brand reviews, incentivizes bloggers to cross promote their reviews wtih them. And the site provides benefits to fans/consumers: it borrows from the old Facebook idea of “flair” and allows brands to distribute badges of sorts and reward consumers for checking into products. Consumers can also share their purchases, reviews on twitter and Facebook — in case you REALLY want people to know how much you love your brand of toothpaste.
Consmr provides the soapbox — that didn’t exist in the social world — for people who like to voice their opinion and share their brand experiences, in one place. It’s like the Google of consumer packaged goods (currently with a catalog of 50,000 products) with Bing’s feature of telling you what your friends like.
They plan to open their API in the future so developers and third parties can tap into Consmr’s data. And, with Charles’ past in mobile, brands can expect to be a part of a mobile app soon.
The makers are counting on self-population and consumer reviews to get off the ground, so get to starring.
Originally posted on http://fwd.mbooth.com/. Can also be seen: http://theli.st/post/6527010824/consumers-give-cpgs-stars.
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