Legions of Loyalty

by Joze PerezAug 12, 2010

How to build a mass movement behind your brand and unlock the secrets of true customer loyalty.

Five Reasons to Focus on Your Best Customers

by Scott JeffreyAug 10, 2010

Your best customers are your Brand Lovers. Understanding the needs of your Brand Lovers and serving them better than anyone else is critical if you want to outmaneuver the competition and grow a long-term sustainable business.

Here are five reasons why your Brand Lovers are so important:

1. Your Brand Lovers choose you more often than your competitors. To most Mac users, there’s no alternative competitor to choose from.

2. Your Brand Lovers spread the word about your brand and create new customers for you. Basically, your best customers are the source of your word-of-mouth stream.

3. Your Brand Lovers are by nature loyal customers. Customer loyalty is a better determinant of profitability than mass appeal. (Again, just ask Apple.)

4. Focusing on your Brand Lovers and cultivating customer loyalty can help you double your return on assets (ROA).

5. Similarly, serving your best customers can lead to explosive return on investment (ROI). Example: When Apple opened their retail stores they expected to generate $1,000/square foot. They actually generated $4,000/square foot.

Ultimately, your Brand Lovers drive the profitability of your business. A Brand Model helps you attract more profitable customers.

The Birth of BRAND JORDAN

by BJ BuenoAug 03, 2010

“Brand Jordan exists because of what Phil Knight created
before I ever came along.” – Michael Jordan

The year was 1984, and Michael hesitantly took a flight to Portland, Oregon. It was the day that he would meet Nike Founder Phil Knight for the first time. Neither of them could imagine what the next 20+ years would bring.

Realizing that nothing of value comes without hard work, the partnership between Jordan and Nike was born. The idea was so big that it created something no one could have envisioned. By committing to their shared values, Nike and Jordan created an amazing brand that has endured.

Starting Conditions:LOVE for the game. LOVE for Innovation. LOVE for the customer.

The end is determined by the starting conditions. The outcome of our plans follows its own design and patterns. What vision do you see emerging for your Brand?

The Key to Building a Profitable Business

by Scott JeffreyJul 27, 2010

What drives your business? Most executives and entrepreneurs would say sales or revenue.

But where do those sales come from? Customers, right?

Now, are all customers created equal? Of course not. Most customers will remain indifferent to your brand. They will buy from you on occasion—when it’s most convenient—and shop elsewhere when it’s not.

Amazingly, most businesses cater to these nomadic customers. Most executives think mass appeal and believe an untargeted marketing plan that casts the widest net will generate the most sales.

In the short run, they might be right. The fickle, nomadic customer might jump at a great promotion. But they will jump at your competitor’s great promotion just as quickly.

If you try to build your business around these fickle customers, the only way you can show increased profits on your balance sheet is to increase your growth curve. For retailers, this means continually opening more stores. Ultimately, this is not a sustainable model and profits erode over time as your market gets saturated.

The key to growing a profitable business is to build it around the needs and wants of your best customers. We call this special breed of customers Brand Lovers. Focus on serving your Brand Lovers and you’ll naturally attract more of them.

All great businesses—big and small—have Brand Lovers. All great brands learn to cater to and serve their Brand Lovers better than anyone else.

If your Brand Lovers represent your most profitable customers, why would you try to serve anyone else?

Focus on your Brand Lovers as the core of your business. Talk to them. Listen to them. Learn from them. Try to understand them. Co-create your business around their needs. The rewards for doing so will translate to the bottom line. Guaranteed.

Decoding Word of Mouth

by Scott JeffreyJun 17, 2010

Getting customers to talk about your products and services has long been the marketer’s coveted goal. Elusive as word of mouth (WOM) may be, the fruits of positive consumer talk can transform any business.

No matter how great your advertising and promotional strategies are, nothing is more powerful than one real person telling another real person why they should buy from you.

Most marketing initiatives and business plans incorporate some aspect of so-called viral marketing since Seth Godin’s Unleash Your Ideavirus and Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point.

But knowing terms like sneezers, influencers, connectors, and mavens won’t help you create authentic WOM.

What will? Start by understanding why your customers talk in the first place. Then, you’ll be less likely to waste time trying to manipulate your customer’s opinions and more time supporting them with a superior customer experience.

Our latest slideshow, created by Aaron Shields and designed by Melissa Thornton, makes the rules of WOM crystal clear:

If you want to go deeper in your understanding of consumer talk, check out BJ Bueno’s Why We Talk: The Truth Behind Word of Mouth.

The Power of Word of Mouth

by Jenny LeeJun 15, 2010

Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, knows a thing or two about the power of word of mouth. In the beginning, Hsieh made a critical decision to invest the majority of his marketing and advertising budget into the customer experience.

Over 80 percent of Zappos customers hear about the brand through word of mouth or online advertising. Once customers place their first order and experience Zappos’s stellar customer service, they usually come again.

Today, 75 percent of sales come from repeat customers. And it’s those happy customers who gladly share their enthusiasm about the brand with others.

What’s makes Zappos talk worthy? Zappos loves their customers and will go to great lengths to make them happy. Here, “P-E-C” or “Personal Emotional Connection” with the customer reigns.

Customer loyalty reps send hundreds of thank you cards to customers every week—not the automated email variety, but personalized notes handwritten on paper.

While most companies would see this as an unnecessary expense, Zappos understands the value of building relationships with its customers.

Putting the Customer First

by Aaron ShieldsMay 26, 2010

How far are you willing to go to help your customers get what they want?

Zappos will check other retailers for a customer if the merchandise is out of stock and refer them to a competitor. You can be sure that customer will come back to Zappos again and tell all her friends, because Zappos always makes sure she gets what she needs.

In Quest for the Best, Stanley Marcus, the former chairman of Neiman Marcus, descrbes an encounter with a customer he ran into at the symphony: The customer told Marcus that his pipe stem broke, but that Neiman Marcus was not getting anymore for 3 months. The next day Marcus called the buyer, found out that was untrue. When the man got to his office, he found a message that Neiman Marcus was delivering a replacement by noon.

A month later the man purchased a $50,000 diamond ring.

Exceeding customers’ expectations by delivering great service reaps great rewards.

How far do you go to meet and exceed your customers’ needs?

Branding as a Discipline

by Scott JeffreyMay 20, 2010

Few companies are successful at developing solid brands. Branding is difficult and few executives appreciate branding as a discipline.

Effective branding requires clarity, focus, and sacrifice. Effective brands have a deep understanding of what business they’re really in. They know what they promise their customers and continuously focus on delivering that promise. If an existing operation or a proposed idea doesn’t speak to their customers’ needs, they eliminate it.

Effective brands show unfaltering courage. It takes strength to stand for something meaningful and tenacity to do it each and every day. (Courage is one of the Seven Golden Rules of Cult Branding.)

Effective branding takes patience and maturity. It takes a willingness to learn from your customers. It takes resolve not to radically alter course to chase the latest fads, but also courage to innovate in new directions.

Effective branding requires open, honest communication across all business divisions and even with key partners and vendors. Effective brands go through the painstaking effort to cultivate a culture that reflects the brand, rallying their employees and their customers around their brand.

Branding is a discipline. It’s not “airy-fairy” and it’s not about logos or taglines. Branding is at the heart of your business. If you don’t understand what your brand represents, you’ll likely see your market share continually shrink. Business owners who understand the importance of branding and adopt it as a discipline cultivate customer loyalty and will rule the future of commerce and industry.

Help Your Customer Grow

by BJ BuenoMay 04, 2010

A powerful brand helps its customers achieve growth. As people are always evolving, they tend to favor those who help them along their life’s journey to grow and gain what they want.

This is a crucial point: your brand has to give your customers a potential to grow from the interaction with the brand in a personal way.

If the individual does not derive any growth from the interaction with the brand, the business enterprise failed at all levels—they didn’t have the foresight to think through the problem all the way to the customer.

It is important to remember that each of your customers is attracted to your brand for their own reason, not yours. Most brand managers start by looking at their business rather than the customer who is growing from this interaction.

Build-a-Bear is a clear example of how to offer growth potential to each customer. By designing the experience of building a bear as a workshop, each customer is able to create his or her own unique teddy bear, giving it a name, a birth certificate and registering it to the creator’s name. Customers describe the experience as “personally enriching,” as they are allowed to create their new best friend. Build-A-Bear was named the 25th hottest growing company by Business Week in 2005, and earns twice the national average per square foot of mall retail space.

It pays to help your customer grow.