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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
by Jenny LeeApr 30, 2010
A customer returned a wallet she ordered from online retailer Zappos, but unknowingly left $150 in it.
Her search for the missing cash was resolved when she received a letter from the warehouse staff saying, “Thanks for the return! We found $150 in your wallet and thought you might want it back.”
Integrity runs high at Zappos where employees are guided to look beyond personal gain and act in service of the greater good.
CEO Tony Hsieh tells a story about a woman who ordered boots for her husband who was soon after killed in a car accident. She called the customer service line for help with the return and received a bouquet of flowers the next day.
The customer loyalty rep made the decision to order the flowers on company credit, without needing to consult with a supervisor. “At the funeral, the widow told her friends and family about the experience,” Hsieh recounted. “Not only was she a customer for life, but so were those 30 or 40 people at the funeral.”
Zappos doesn’t have specific guidelines to deal with customer service situations. Employees are encouraged to trust their judgment. Most of all, they’re empowered to make decisions from the heart.
Hsieh explains, “We’re not trying to maximize transactions. We’re trying to build a lifelong relationship with our customers.”
Now that’s an insight worth spreading.
by Jenny LeeMar 31, 2010
“A company is stronger if it is bound by love rather than by fear.”
-Herb Kelleher
Great brands understand the importance of culture and aren’t afraid to take risks to build them. At Southwest Airlines, former Chairman and CEO Herb Kelleher made it a personal trait to hug and kiss his employees. With fears of harassment lawsuits lurking in the shadows, it’s all too easy for a company to dissuade public displays of affection.
But to Herb and other executives at Southwest, being openly demonstrative and affectionate could not come more naturally. It’s a simple yet powerful way of expressing respect, friendship, gratitude, and most of all, love.
Like Southwest Airlines, love abounds at the offices of online retailer Zappos.com. As an employee, you might visit the office of personal coach Dr. Vik, not just for career advice, but also for a hug to help you get through the day. At Zappos, employees connect to one another, first and foremost, as people.
When companies are constrained by fear, culture building is thwarted. When companies foster an environment bound by love, the culture thrives and prospers. No two companies live by this principle better than Southwest Airlines and Zappos.
by Scott JeffreyMar 09, 2010
Do you think it’s possible to go from under $2 million in sales to over $1 billion in less than a decade? What would it take? How would you do it?
You can’t do it if you use common thinking. You can’t do it by throwing gobs of money at an advertising budget. (Anyone remember Pets.com?)
You have to be smart, strategic and visionary. You have to adopt core values and live by them. You have to cultivate a culture that perpetuates those values. Most importantly, you have to excite your customers and cultivate loyalty to your brand.
Online retailer Zappos, led by CEO Tony Hsieh, went from $1.6 million in sales in 2000 to over $1 billion in sales this past year. What started out as an online shoe retailer is quickly morphing into a mega-retail clothing powerhouse. How did they do it?
Zappos’s tag line “Powered by Service” says it all. Zappos’s commitment to provide the best online shopping experience has led to a series of unique decisions designed to foster customer loyalty:
- To execute hyper fast order fulfillment, their fulfillment center operates 24/7.
- To ensure consistent fulfillment execution, they house all items in their warehouse (no drop shipping from outside sources).
- To take the risk of shopping online away from their customers, Zappos offers free shipping both ways. (To my knowledge, they were the first to do so.)
- To wow their customers and add the element of surprise, (Principle #7 in Why We Talk) they upgrade most orders to overnight or two-day shipping for free.
- To meet their customers’ diverse needs, they offer a staggering selection of over 1,000 brands and over 200,000 styles.
- To truly be “Powered by Service” their customer service staff goes through a five week training on the Zappos culture, core values and customer service protocol (including sending customers to their competitor’s websites on occasion).
- To ensure friendly, helpful staff aligned with the Zappos culture, they offer new hires $2,000 after the first week of training to leave the program if it’s not a good “fit.” (According to Hsieh, this saves them money in the long run.)
- To fulfill their customer’s higher human needs, Tony Hsieh is committed to delivering happiness to his customers.
I can keep going with this list. Zappos does a lot of things right (which helps explain why Jeff Bezos/Amazon.com just bought them). All of these attributes contribute to 75% of their sales coming from repeat customers.
What are the benefits of loyalty? Retention, more repeat business and positive word of mouth (customers create new customers for you). These are the ingredients needed to achieve a 62,400% growth rate.
by Scott JeffreyFeb 22, 2010
Ever wonder why some companies have brands that attract raving fans? It doesn’t happen by accident. These businesses understand who their best customers are (their Brand Lovers) and figure out how to serve them better than anyone else.
Last year our team put together this deck to illustrate the seven steps to cultivating customer loyalty:
If you’d like step-by-step instructions on how to apply the seven steps, you can download a free ebook version of BJ Bueno’s Cult Branding Workbook here.
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