What is Product Badging?
What are the limits of Product Badging?
Using Social Proof Attribute Messaging for Product Badging
What is Product Badging?
Product Badging is used by eCommerce brands 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 itself 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 useful 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 Attribute Messaging for Product Badging
One way to elevate badging is to use social proof Attribute Messaging based on both product details and real-time customer behavior 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 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 attribute 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 Attribute Messaging, and it is a way to take Product Badging to the next level. To the untrained eye, the two might look similar, but take a closer look next time you see a badge and see if it is actually a Social Proof message.
