Product Badging

Solutions

What is Product Badging?
What are the limits of Product Badging?
Using Social Proof eXtended Messaging for Product Badging

What is Product Badging?

eCommerce brands use Product Badging in much the same way that physical badges might be used in a store – to highlight a key feature or selling point of a product. Most commonly this would be when an item is on sale, but it can also be used to spotlight a key feature of the product itself.

The badge appears as a distinct roundel or label around a product image online. It is otherwise known as Attribute Messaging or Product Stickering, and the label can be called a Sticker.

Some common uses of product badging would be to highlight:

  • Whether an item is discounted
  • The materials that a product is made from
  • A new product line
  • Product sizing
  • If a product is sustainable or ethically made
  • A limited edition product

What are the limits of Product Badging?

Product Badging can be a valuable tactic to engage customers with some eye-catching visuals, but with simple badges, the effect can be limited.

This is because, with a static label, there is a limit to the kind of information that a retailer can convey to customers. On top of that, if only a few types of images are overused, they can lose their effect. The combination of limited information that isn’t differentiating the products can negatively affect the customer experience.

Using Social Proof eXtended Messaging for Product Badging

One way to elevate badging is to use social proof eXtended messaging based on both product attributes and real-time customer behaviour to highlight how other shoppers have interacted with that product.

For instance, if a particular product is a bestseller, the retailer can highlight how many of those products have been sold within a certain time window, e.g. “Bought 52 times in the last 24 hours”. Alternatively, if you wanted to highlight the quality of an item, you could highlight the positive reviews that product has received.

These social proof eXtended messages can be deployed dynamically based on certain criteria so that a particular product can display different messages dependent on the customer purchase journey.

Because the social proof messages are based on real-time data from a retailer’s own systems, the exact messaging will change based on what is happening at that exact moment. This breathes new life into product badging – and avoids ‘message blindness’.

At Taggstar we call this Social Proof eXtended Messaging, and it is a way to take Product Badging to the next level. The two might look similar to the untrained eye, but take a closer look next time you see a badge and see if it is actually a Social Proof message.