Long-term benefits will be gained by incorporating high levels of customer participation in your brand’s DNA. The best time to start thinking about how to position your company for customer success is when you’re in business creation mode.
Before we get into the details of how to increase brand participation, let us first learn a few economics lessons.
- Awareness is key to marketing your brand. Marketing your brand requires awareness. This is usually achieved by spending money on different connections channels. Customers acquisition requires a coordinated effort. This is an ongoing expense on your balance sheet.
- Math is the key. If you create a model that encourages your fans to refer their friends, it makes no sense to pay more for awareness.
- Marketing requires that you spend money and time every time you communicate with your customers. This can be very costly.
Six years ago, we started a series annual studies to find out how and why people choose brands. For several reasons, we focused on the millennials: They are early adopters and are digitally savvy.
We ask our clients each year what their top three brands are. Then, we ask them where and how they connected with these brands. Our database has grown over time to include more that 20,000 responses.
It is called the “share effect” and it leads to people choosing to be part of brands, rather than consume advertising.
We started to see super fans as people who are passionate about their favorite brands and take part in the community. To find out how these loyal fans become part of brand communities, we launched several studies. We did a deep dive into the formation of communities to get a better understanding.
We reviewed hundreds of case studies to find three steps that can be used to build a brand community.
- Initiate the fire
- The flame must be stoked
- Transmit the torch
