Finding your Brand Evangelists
Every product has its fans. Feedback and enthusiasm from people who have used a product/service is what changes a hobby into a business. But today you are a 200 person organization with a sophisticated ecommerce website; your biggest fan is not Uncle Bob anymore. You have 100,000 customers who buy in different ways, some buy more, some buy less, some buy often and others buy only once a year. But who is who?
If you’re a grocery store, you can clearly see which customers are not buying toilet paper. We all hope they are buying it somewhere else. Or do we? For products with such clear utility as toilet paper, it’s easy to see which of your weekly grocery customers is making that quarterly trip to the wholesale club. Your lost sales (and competitive risk) are apparent. But for other products and businesses, it’s not as easy to identify the possible defectors and lost sales.
Asking the Right Questions (About Toilet Paper)
While intuition and supposition have created lots of brands and brought many a start up to stability, businesses of any size (or with any future 
must rely on answering the right questions about their target market, and that starts with asking the right questions about the target audience. In some cases, like toilet paper, the questions are obvious. In other cases…. Not so much.
Do you know which customers are true members of your brand? Who are your evangelists? Who’s there because you provided a discount? Who would still show up if you doubled your prices? Not knowing these questions should drive you crazy.
The right questions come from observations of customer behavior. (“They must be buying toilet paper somewhere, right?â€) But you don’t have the opportunity to see who’s buying toilet paper – or not – if you don’t interact with the customer.
The Answer: Online Retailers Should Host Church Picnics
Unlike Starbucks where the average customer visits 17 times a month, most retailers struggle with is how to create opportunities for interaction when their average customer visits only 5 times a year. Like holiday-only-churchgoers, these customers are waiting to see the light. One way to enlighten them is to spend a lot of money on traditional advertising – telling them “how great it will be†if they would only believe. The other way is to use the web to create meaningful interactions with the customer – interactions that both build their affinity to your brand AND provide you with meaningful behavioral information from which you can adjust your offering to remain in synchronicity with the customer.
Talk to your customers about things that they truly care about. There are many benefits to gaining the trust of customers, use your ecommerce platform to:
- Continuously “re-convert†your customers into new buyers/tryers. What they buy and what they don’t will tell you a great deal about their needs.
- Build brand-focused experiences which drive loyalty and affinity, but which don’t necessarily ask for the sale: events, surveys, contests, and discussions are excellent ways to interact with customers because they reveal customers opinion of your brand simultaneous to demonstrating your commitment to alter your offering in response to customer needs..
- Leverage customer information to promote and cross sell. Everybody likes a deal, but everybody loves a deal that is relevant.
- Gain new customers by modeling what does and doesn’t work for current customers (the loyal, frequent, high margin customers you want) and targeting prospects who behave in similar fashion
- Foster Evangelism by providing a voice and outlet to brand evangelists. Bulletin boards, blogs, and product comments provide a voice to just those customers you want heard..
If you aren’t interacting with your customer regularly, chances are they’re going to find an alternative place to buy. Why is that a foregone conclusion? Because both customer needs and your company’s offerings are in constant motion, so you you either grow together, or you grow apart. The only way to know how customer needs are changing (and therefore change your offering in response) is to interact with your customer. And even for multi-channel retailers, online interactions are far less costly to initiate and measure. Find a way.
Thiel,
As I mentioned in a previous email, I think you are dead-on with the value of connecting with brand advocates/customer evangelists.
Social media opens up some terrific new methods for communicating with and learning from customers. I think most marketers are looking at the opportunity for building buzz instead of the opportunity for building key relationships. Buzz is a manageable bi-product of engaging with your brand advocates. [PM me for specific examples]
Open engagement and interaction with your customers in a public setting [weblog/forum] produces a significant ripple of influence about your particular goods or services. I’ve experimented with a number of different methods of building such relationships. (Interestingly, customers are often more affected by your presence and willingness to listen than anything you might say.) As a result of this experimentation, I have come to believe pretty strongly that your most passionate customers have as great an interest in the success of your brand as you do. Creating interactive opportunities for them to build the brand ‘with’ you, such as interactive new product development from idea to beta to post-product feedback, add value both to your company and to the community as a whole.
[incubate: Open Innovation]