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.
When was the last time you heard someone say, Did you see Random House’s latest book release? Or, That CD by Sony Music really rocks!
Most breeds of publishers—book, music and film—have little brand equity with their customers. Why? These companies don’t stand for anything; they haven’t made any clear declaration or pledge to their customers.
Without a clear brand promise that’s meaningful to us, why would we care about them?
Marketers are hesitant to clearly define what their brand represents. They don’t want to risk alienating potential customers who don’t like their brand.
But with clear differentiation you also attract a special breed of customers who love you.
All customers are NOT created equal. Your Brand Lovers generate more positive word of mouth and stay loyal to you. They are your most profitable customers. Why would you want to cater to less profitable customers?
Businesses that stand for something generally have a balance sheet to prove it. We know what to expect from a Disney film, for example—family fun with a dose of magic and limited violence.
Most publishers, however, are in a precarious position, lingering in No Brand Land.
What happens when the Long Tail fully catches up with publishers and product distribution becomes ubiquitous? Why would an author—any author—publish with a major house when they can just as easily self-publish through Amazon and other digital channels without losing distribution advantages and keeping the lion share of book sales?
The lesson is clear: Make sure your brand stands for something meaningful to your customers and serve them better than anyone else.
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:
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.
Motivating customers to talk about your brand isn’t about providing incentives. Incentives only drive short-term talk, and talk fades away after the incentives disappear.
Driving long-term, positive talk requires innovating around what customers love about your brand and exceeding their expectations.
Exceeding expectations and taking into account customer needs is why the original Apple iPhone dominated post-release buzz when compared the the release of the recent Palm Pre.
Apple knows that a central component to what its customers love about the Apple brand is an easy user experience. Despite levels of hype leading to the iPhone being dubbed the Jesus phone, the iPhone exceeded everyone’s expectations on its ease of use, leading to a plethora of blog posts proclaiming its virtues and even YouTube videos of toddlers working the intuitive user interface.
In contrast, the Palm Pre was positioned so that at best its interface could match the ease of the iPhone, but not exceed it by noticeable degrees. Even if the Pre matched the iPhone, meeting expectations is not enough to generate a viral spread of positive word of mouth.
Palm would have been wise to head the advice that helped Ed Colligan, Donna Dubinsky, and Jeff Hawkins to turn Palm into the giant it once was: Underpromise and overdeliver.
Brands that treat customers with love and respect create Brand Lovers. Brand Lovers are the most valuable customers because they buy from the brand more often and create new customers through positive word of mouth.
Brands like Southwest Airlines embrace their Brand Lovers and take every opportunity to show them respect and Love. By not following the airline industry trend of baggage fees Southwest Airlines demonstrated respect for their customers. Southwest let their brand lovers know they were not going to get nickel and dimed.
But not all brands have Brand Lovers. In fact some brands treat their customers so bad they create Brand Haters. Brand Haters are not afraid to talk negatively about your brand. In fact if you upset your customers enough they will go out of their way to rally against your brand.
Recently in a meeting with Salomon Sredni, Chief Executive Officer of TradeStation Group the topic of Brand Lovers and Brand Haters came up. He shared with the group an awesome example of what happens when you treat your customers with no love or respect.
Dave Carroll has every right to be angry. As a musician his guitar is not only his livelihood but his love. When United Airlines decided to throw around guitars and other bags they stopped treating their customers with love and respect. Dave Carroll’s song “United Breaks Guitars” has gain popularity not only because it is a catchy tune but because other people have had a bad experience with United Airlines.
The song has been viewed more than 7.5 million times in the past month on YouTube. Web2.0 has given customers a bigger bullhorn and they aren’t afraid to use it. There are over 25,000 comments on the video with customers who also feel like Dave Carroll about United Airlines. Here are some of my favorite comments.
Comments on United Breaks Guitars
Customers take note of how you treat them and they will speak up against you. If you break their heart they will break yours.
When was the last time you heard someone say, Did you see Random House’s latest book release? Or, That CD by Sony Music really rocks!
