A powerful vehicle for marketing, the Web is proving to be a viral amplifier for consumers. Unheard as long as they use the traditional tools, of letters to companies and petitions to food safety authorities, they quickly get feedback to initiatives conducted on the social media of the web.
An interesting laboratory of such a phenomenon is the U.S., where the wide dissemination of foods of poor nutritional quality and with poor ingredients is clashing with the determination of consumers, who are big users of Web content. The most recent example is the petition promoted on change.org to convince a giant of Kraft’s caliber to eliminate artificial dyes and preservatives of petroleum origin. Similar action directed at Mars to replace the artificial blue dye with one extracted from spirulina algae.
The method works. Companies have agreed to consider reformulating their products for the purpose of discarding undesirable components. A sign of awareness of the viral power of the Web. And of the urgency of moving to marketing 3.0 by abandoning detached one-way communication.
