Consumer Reports
Redesign and Content Strategy
As Digital Editor-in-Chief for Consumer Reports, I redesigned the online service and re-shaped content and information strategy from the ground-up to grow the subscription business.
The Challenge and Objectives:
Launched in 1997, Consumer Report’s early web service was a close, digital replica of the popular magazine. Based on CR’s peerless reputation and valued product information, it saw great success as one of the web’s first subscription businesses (Consumer Reports does not take ads). But by the time I came on, “free” online competitors had started to take away market share.
I was charged with redefining and evolving the online service to meet the needs of online product researchers and grow the business. We needed to do this while supporting the brand’s strong reputation for independence and accuracy.
Pushing for “currency and completeness”
Our content strategy for the site focused on meeting online customers’ urgent demands for more immediate and comprehensive information about current products. No simple feat. To deliver this, CR’s product testers would have to re-engineer their well-established batch testing process that had been designed for cost-efficiency and quality control. We needed them to embrace an agile testing model that would allow us to provide testing results for new models as close to retail release dates as possible.
CR testers also typically waited for results from a full battery of tests before releasing the final score for a particular product. But the risk of “getting it wrong” was outweighed online by the need to show-up in early conversations about high profile products (particularly in the auto and tech space). We successfully advocated for “process journalism” and reporting on what CR new about high-priority products like cell phones as soon as we knew it.
Incorporating valuable user insights
CR had been wary of including user reviews due to their “unscientific” and corruptible nature. But audience insights about product usage were potentially an invaluable new data-point for our testers. We advocated to find statistically relevant ways to include them and began to experiment with new ways to mine large volumes of user feedback to identify significant brand trends and insights.
Though we were in the early stages of these experiments, it was ultimately user-generated insights on our message boards and passed along to our testers that led to one of CR’s biggest news coups during this period, focused in the iPhone-4. See below.
“But things only got worse for Apple. On July 12, Consumer Reports announced it could not recommend the iPhone 4 to customers because of the antennae issues.”
Business Insider
Results
Customer satisfaction scores for “currency and completeness” improved by double-digits over a two year period.
Despite the “free” competition, customers continued to seek-out CR’s valued testing information, and annual online service revenues continued to grow by double-digits during this period to over $90 million.