Over 90% of consumers check online reviews before making a decision to purchase a product or service. Additionally, they often trust these reviews as much as the opinions of family and friends. Unfortunately, fake reviews on the internet are commonplace and more and more companies are falling victim to them.

“It’s easier to rebuild a shattered city than shattered trust,” Karol Bunsch, a Cracow-based history writer, once said, and his words echo even in today’s digital business world. For example, a lack of trust raises transaction costs by 40%. It can also prevent close relationships for 80% of employees, and in turn, lack of trust in managers exposes the US economy to losses of more than $300 billion a year!

Daniel Pink, in his book A Whole New Mind, makes a quite bold claim that: “the era of the dominance of scientific minds is over. The future belongs to a different kind of people with a different kind of mind: designers, inventors, teachers, storytellers, in other words, creative and empathy-filled right-hemispheric thinkers.”

Every time you enter the name of your company in a search engine, its Google business card should immediately appear. However, this is not how you check the visibility of your company. Users looking for products and services usually use specific phrases related to them (often adding the location as well). Then they usually check the business that appears most frequently under the map window - the Google business card that is in first place.

Austrian Psychologist, Paul Watzlawick, once stated that it is impossible not to communicate, and therefore impossible not to have an image. We create images of ourselves, companies, or institutions (whether we want to, because, for example, even our lack of presence in online communication channels already indicates something about us), thus we should do it consciously. The key to building customer relationships – using marketing or public relations tools – is to build brand awareness in a controlled and deliberate way.

E-commerce development results in increased competition and thus more options for the consumers, who are harder to convince to choose our store. Therefore, the company must stand out from the competition preferably at the first contact with a potential customers. What can convince them? Reviews about the product they are interested in.

It raises controversy, doesn’t it? If you’re here because you’re actually interested in this headline and you’re hoping to rank your Google My Business well using fake positive reviews, then… I just want to show you that it is not so much weak, unstable and punitive, but simply – not profitable!

How to retain customers? What can be done to make them come back and become loyal customers? The questions themselves suggest that what happens after the transaction is important. Of course, the satisfaction with the purchase is influenced by the store's offer, customer service quality, or smooth delivery, but there are a few more actions that increase buyers' satisfaction and thus contribute to repeat purchases of products or services.

Building brand awareness through positioning in the eyes of consumers, related to national (or regional) branding, is a standard practice that increases the recognition of products and services. By associating a specific brand with the image of a particular country, a kind of "connection" of associations is created in the minds of potential customers (provided that their values are not contradictory). How does this work in the case of marketing alcoholic beverages such as beer, wine, or spirits that burn the throat?

Sometimes you may wonder if it’s even worth asking clients to give reviews on Google My Business, i.e. on your Google business card. Maybe you belief that only good things are said about your company and it doesn’t need to be published anywhere, and that bragging is a bad thing (as the reproductive “education” system in Poland taught us).