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Justin Cooper is Founder and Chief Innovation + Marketing of Passenger Inc. He is a subject matter expert and thought leader in customer collaboration. As an innovator in this space, he has been responsible for managing customer-driven initiatives for many Fortune 500 brands.

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Pump Up Your Brand, Empower Your Customers

Written on
July 6th 2007
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by Justin Cooper  |
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topofworld.jpgMost forward thinking marketers are talking about engaging their customers in a collaborative process, but few have actually taken real action toward doing so.

It’s time that marketers stop viewing the customer as merely a “target,” but as an integral part of the process, with the end-goal of transforming meaningful dialogue into actionable insights. Whether you like it or not, customers are out there talking about their experiences with your brand every day. It’s up to you to align your organization with this reality in order to benefit from these discussions.

Drive Brand Advocacy & Positive Word-of-Mouth

Marketers who embrace customer collaboration will benefit greatly from customers who feel empowered through ownership in ideas. It gives your customers the feeling of “I helped build that” and “I’m part of this brand.” Ownership promotes active participation and a desire to accumulate more knowledge about the brand or product. Those customers who feel more informed not only have the ability to drive more favorable opinions with their peers; they are more likely to do so in a compelling fashion.

An inherent benefit of customer engagement and customer collaboration is the power to drive brand advocacy. “Advocates” are those individuals who are fully committed to a brand beyond the typical relationship between a brand and its customer. Advocates express the greatest level of involvement with the brand. They are active, vocal and proud. These people have an emotional bond with the brands that they regularly use. Their lifestyle mirrors that of the brand and they are proactive in talking about their brand experience with others. By engaging and collaborating with its Advocates, a brand will gain further insight into exactly who these customers are, what motivates them, why they make the decisions that they do, who they might influence and why and how they influence others. Marketers that are true to the collaborative approach will consistently demonstrate relevancy to each customer as an individual and ultimately endure the test of time.

On-Demand Accessibility of Information

We live in an on-demand world and just like you; your customers want information when they want it — right now. The Web has dissolved boundaries separating brands from customers thereby enabling a much deeper, personalized, “on-demand” relationship. Through the Web, customers have an on-demand platform to more easily and candidly talk about their brand experiences, good and bad. In most cases, these conversations are not happening between the brand and customer, but among customers. These conversations among customers are taking place out in the ether, which means they are difficult to keep a pulse on and often times impossible to tie to actionable insights. It isn’t until you know “who” is talking about your brand, that can you better understand how to influence what they are saying. By identifying and directly engaging these active customers, marketers will unveil and be able to tap into an entirely new on-demand world of insight.

Customer Dialogue and Empowerment

Up until recently, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) was the default solution to manage customer data, customer decisions and communication with customers. However in reality, CRM systems only help manage the marketer’s needs, not the customer’s. The fragmentation of traditional media has made it increasingly more difficult to merely locate your customer, let alone catch them at a time when they’re receptive to listening or to engage in a genuine conversation with them.

Randomly manufactured “opinion leader” teams are not only cost prohibitive, they also jeopardize the authenticity of the messaging. It’s nonsensical that in this day and age, marketers continue to rent someone else’s customers to talk about their own brand, while ignoring their own customers who continue to wither away in some far off database. Your customers want to be heard. A little input can go a long way. Who better to discuss your brand or products with than the customers who are most vocal and passionate about them? It’s time to stop telling your customers what you think they want to hear. It’s time to ask them what they’d like to talk about. If marketers simply take the time to ask your customers what they want, they will tell you. If it sounds simple, it’s because it is.

The New Customer Dynamic: Bottom-Up Collaborative Innovation

Many have written about “bottom-up” innovation and the role of the customer in the diffusion of those innovations. The new customer dynamic invites the customer into the process.

Forging a collaborative relationship with your most valued customers is critical to the efficacy of your brand. The most successful brands are engaging their customers in a collaborative relationship to understand how to respond to changes in behaviors and market trends without giving-up control. It’s not about letting go; it’s about getting a handle on where things are, and where they are headed.



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