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For almost two decades now, I’ve been working with companies of all sizes to help them create customer-centric marketing strategies. And the person I most enjoy working with is Jessica.
Jessica is the customer’s champion. She is the one, often the ONLY one, person in the marketing department who is focused on making sure the customer has a voice in all decision-making involving marketing and communications.
And unfortunately, she is a dying breed.
In meeting rooms all around the country at companies of all sizes, marketing strategies are being hatched. Teams are figuring out how to hit their sales numbers, followups on strategy execution are planned, and the team begins to get up to leave.
“Just a minute”, adds Jessica. “What about the customer?”
An audible groan floats over the conference room as middle-aged men begrudgingly sit back down.
Jessica has a brilliant marketing mind, which is why she is almost always elevated in the corporate hierarchy to a position where she can consult directly to the CMO or VP of Marketing. Who will often take her ideas and pass them off to the CEO as his own, but that’s another harsh corporate reality for another day.
Yet Jessica is rarely, if ever elevated to a position to actually implement all of her brilliant marketing ideas unchecked. Because the reality is, most companies simply do not prize their customers once they have crossed the initial purchase threshold and actually become customers.
“A Brand Ambassador Program sounds amazing! What is it?”
In 2010, I began working on the manuscript that would later become my book Think Like a Rock Star. Whenever I discuss marketing concepts, I try to incorporate real company case studies to illustrate the concept in question. In late 2010, I started planning a trip the following Spring to Austin for South By Southwest. This was before South By Southwest turned into ‘Spring Break for Nerds’ and you could go there and actually get some business deals done.
So in planning my trip to SxSW in 2011, I set up over a dozen meetings with marketing decision makers at agencies and companies. I wanted to interview them to learn more about what they and their clients were doin to better engage directly with their customers. I wanted to find some loyalty program, customer advisory panel or similar examples that I could incorporate into my book in the form of case studies.
Over 3 days of interviews with key marketing people, some at huge brands that all of you have heard of, I learned the same thing: None of them were doing ANYTHING to directly connect with their customers.
I was talking to one person, and I asked her “Does your company have a brand ambassador program?”
“No!” she replied. Then she added ‘But it sounds interesting, can you tell me about it?” She had no idea what a brand ambassador program was.
This isn’t a sign of her marketing ignorance, it speaks more to corporate priorities. The average company isn’t concerning itself with how to better connect with and develop relationships with current customers. Because the average company views a customer as something to acquire once, then find another.
Back to Jessica for a minute. I talked to her last year and she told me about how a previous employer (another big brand that you have definitely heard of) rolled out a new mobile app. The entire focus of the app launch, the marketing to support it, the KPIs that the marketing team was tracking, was entirely focused on signups. The app team was judged, and bonuses were dealt out, based on number of signups.
And the signups were spectacular. Media gushed over the big brand’s app relaunch, and the company pointed to a massive surge in signups as a sure sign that the app was a hit with customers.
Less than 2 years later, the app had crashed so badly that it had to be completely redesigned and relaunched again.
I asked Jessica why. “Zero focus on the customer and customer experience.” She explained that the brand just wanted to get signups, customer experience was an afterthought. So they offered a nice coupon to get customers to download the app…then nothing. Customers downloaded the app, cashed in the coupon…then left. The churn rate went through the roof faster than the signup rate.
Jessica was over the customer service at this brand when the app launch happened. She explained that she tried to tell them to invest in customer experience in order to keep those customers after they signed up, but the app development team was only interested in the KPI that impacted their salary: Signups.
Several years ago I worked with another Jessica at a startup. This Jessica also had a brilliant marketing mind and she totally understood the value of creating an amazing experience for customers. She truly valued her customers as if they were rock stars. She was the definition of a customer champion.
But she was also becoming increasingly frustrated with her CEO. He saw customers as numbers on a balance sheet, nothing more. Once they had signed up for his SaaS, that’s all he cared about. Ongoing customer experience and service? You might as well be asking him to discuss ancient advancements in mathematics during the Persian empire.
My friend Jessica was about ready to move on from the SaaS company, but she genuinely did love its users and had connected directly with many of them over the years. She saw the enormous potential of building a better community-focused experience for the users, even if the CEO didn’t. And she loved working with me (who wouldn’t???), so she came up with a plan: She decided to pitch her boss on she and I creating a comprehensive customer engagement strategy for the brand. A strategy that would drive signups, then build out a complete experience to keep them engaged and growing. The CEO said fine, and we got to work.
Over the next few weeks, we created a comprehensive customer engagement/experience strategy that was a masterpiece. We went into the plan with a few criteria that we set for ourselves:
First, every element we included had to have a clear benefit for the company AND the user. If there wasn’t a clear benefit to BOTH parties, then that element was refined until both the company and user benefitted, or it was scrapped.
Second, every element had to have a function that helped support the other elements. Every part was necessary to the larger structure, or it got cut out. No wasted movement, no wasted resources.
As we worked on this plan, our minds raced at the possibilities. We could see how the users would benefit, we could see how the company would grow as a result. I had so much fun working with Jessica on this project, and it was so good to see her happy about her work again.
So we presented our plan to the CEO. He looked at it, all the components, all the moving parts, and he was pretty indifferent toward the whole thing. Until, he heard that one of the elements we wanted to add was a referral program for users. THAT excited him, because again, MOAR SIGNUPS! He told Jessica to get started on the referral program, and scrap the rest.
Completely deflated, Jessica turned in her resignation a week or so later. Less than 2 years after Jessica left, the company folded as there was no one left to serve as a representative of smart, customer-focused marketing. Left to his own devices, the CEO’s pursuit of MOAR SIGNUPS with no focus on ongoing customer satisfaction led to the company’s collapse under its own indifference toward its users.
Masterclass - How to Create a 250,000 Member Brand Ambassador Program
Happy Monday, y’all! Today we are going to cover the story of how one of the most successful brand ambassador programs ever was created. As with most good stories, there’s some trickery, some shenanigans, and a whole lotta whisky involved.
I go back to the Maker’s Mark example of how they were able to create a brand ambassador program with over a quarter of a million members. That means Maker’s Mark has a volunteer salesforce of over 250,000 customers who are actively acquiring new customers for the bourbon brand.
CEO Bill Samuels was asked why it was so hard for most companies to replicate such levels of success when it comes to customer engagement. His response was frank, and realistic: Samuels explained that if your brand doesn’t want to connect with its customers, then they won’t. It’s a part of Maker’s Mark’s brand DNA to connect with its customers. The brand WANTS to connect with its customers, and actively LOOKS for opportunities to do so.
Most brands do not. Most brands want very little to do with their customer after they are ‘acquired’ and they don’t want to hear Jessica tell them to invest more in customer experience or customer engagement. Given this, it will perhaps come as little surprise that the CMO is typically the position at most companies with the shorter tenure and the highest turnover rate.
The coming years will see many changes to all areas of society, and business will be no exception. Let’s hope that one change most businesses make is spending more time valuing Jessica’s smart advice. Until that happens, I will continue to look forward to working with Jessica every chance I get!
I hope you have a wonderful weekend!
Mack
This sounds sadly familiar. As odd as it sounds, I feel like Jessica and myself have a lot in common. I left my first corporate job for some similar reasons, and although I had a greater impact at an agency startup, the client goals were the same as the internal corporation.
More signups. More customers. Higher conversion. Higher UPT.
Bring up the word 'retention' and you'd get a uncomfortable silence and maybe a: "oh right... well... that's important but we need more customers to retain".
What a joke. Sometimes I just have to laugh now that I'm back inside other corporate beasts (as a consultant this time). The names on the security gate out front and the names on the leadership masthead will change, but the illogical business objectives never seem to.
Such a sad but familiar cycle - watching companies push out their best advocates for quick metrics wins, then act surprised when it all crashes without real user focus. Thanks for capturing how these short-term plays always backfire. Hoping more leaders start seeing beyond next quarter's numbers to build sustainable value that actually serves customers.