BRAND ADVOCACY CYCLE
The easiest way to understand the brand advocacy cycle, shown in the figure, is with an example. Assume that a consumer – I’ll call her Jane – is in the market to purchase a new phone. Jane has never owned a phone, so she has a completely objective viewpoint of every brand in the market. This point in the cycle is the awareness stage.
As Jane begins to learn more about each brand by reading reviews, asking friends, and visiting brand websites, she moves into the understanding phase and onto interest as she narrows her choices. She decides on an iPhone in the trial period, sees what it can do and how powerful the product is, and moves in to belief.
As Jane continues using the product and becomes more enamored with what it can do, she moves into affinity. Next time she needs a phone, she goes with the iPhone without a thought. That’s the loyalty stage. It’s hugely valuable to a brand to get customers to this point. Loyal customers mean greater lifetime value, and it’s far less expensive to keep a customer than it is to convert a new one.
But when Jane begins telling her friends about the iPhone or writing about how much she loves it, thereby becoming a brand advocate, the value increases enormously. And when she goes to the next stage, actually coming to the brand’s defense when other consumers speak negatively about it, that’s when the greatest value can be reaped from the consumer.
Brand defenders are not only loyal consumers who will advocate on your behalf as pseudo-sales agents, but they will also help you handle a crisis if one ever comes up.
One of the best examples of brand defenders in action was evident during Apple’s notorious Bendgate affair when the newly released iPhone 6 phones were bending in owners’ back pockets. Despite a clear issue with the product, Apple’s brand defenders rushed to their side. They insisted that the root of the problem was consumer misuse rather than a product defect. It’s rare that a brand reaches this level of advocacy. But, if you can cultivate brand defenders by identifying and nurturing your existing brand advocates, your long-run success is assured.
Implement an employee advocacy program
Employees are consumers, too, and marketers often forget about the power of activating their Millennial employees. They relay positive experiences with your products and share them with their social circles. This word-of-mouth marketing helps you take advantage of the massive social reach existing right within your organization.
Encouraging and perhaps incentivizing employees to share content is a powerful way to build your presence, foster brand awareness, and prompt adoption from a new user base.
Communicate with your detractors
It’s all too easy to brush off criticism and focus on new customer acquisition. But communicating with detractors shows that you care.
Often, when customers complain, their goal is to be heard rather than to remedy a bad situation. Attempting to improve these transactions goes a long way toward creating new brand advocates and defenders. In addition, addressing an issue quickly and effectively can prevent it from spiraling out of control and becoming a costly mistake.
Millennials see relationships as a significant part of the buying process. The irony of this is that this demographic is more price sensitive than its predecessors, yet Millennial consumers are willing to pay a slightly higher price if they have a relationship with the higher-priced brand. This mindset isn’t one that marketers are familiar with. However, marketing to Millennials doesn’t require a completely new paradigm. It simply requires marketers to dig much deeper into the mind of the Millennial consumer.
Brand familiarity is not the driving force behind a Millennial consumer’s decision to purchase; quality matters considerably more than the brand name or logo. Reaching Millennials requires careful planning.
Here are several ways to nurture a relationship with a Millennial consumer:
❯❯ Personalization: The key to successful relationships with Millennials is personalization. (For more on relationship building, see Chapter 3.) The modern product and service market seems to endlessly expand, which means that there is virtually no product on the market for which there isn’t an alternative. Therefore, after you have the attention of your wider audience, tailoring your content to the tastes and preferences of the individual will help build loyalty.
❯❯ Brand experience: What kind of brand do you want to be? Are you authoritative or neighborly? Is your content factual or conversational? Building a brand persona is an important step in the process because it helps you shape the consumer’s experience with your brand. That experience, which is covered in detail in Chapter 11, will be a driving force behind establishing a relationship and will work toward building loyalty with your target Millennial audience.
❯❯ Cause alignment: Millennial consumers connect deeply with brands that associate themselves with causes. Just because Millennials possess this consumer trait doesn’t mean that you should exploit causes for the purpose of building relationships with Millennials. However, if your brand does support a cause, it’s certainly a means of connecting more deeply with certain segments of your Millennial audience.
❯❯ Responsiveness: Traditionally, a curtain has been in front of the big, powerful brand. Now that curtain has been lifted, thanks in large part to social media. Communication with a brand is easier than ever before. A certain sense of satisfaction comes from receiving a response from a brand. Therefore, responding to your audience members when they reach out can go a very long way toward nurturing budding relationships.
Meeting Millennials Where They Are
Billions of interactions and engagements take place online every single day. Joining a conversation in progress is always going to be much easier than trying to create your own.
Millennials are engaged on various platforms with content, brands, and each other. Your responsibility as a marketer is to find new and creative ways to become a part of those exchanges. To reach these individuals, you need to understand
❯❯ How they communicate
❯❯ How they share content
❯❯ How they decide to make purchases
It may seem like the only way for brands to reach Millennial consumers is via social media. But the reality is that Millennials use a broad number of communication platforms, including traditional media. Familiarizing yourself with these media is going to play a crucial role in communicating with your audience. (Chapter 5 covers the use of traditional media.)
Traditional means of advertising, such as television and print, were once restricted to brands willing to spend the big bucks. Now new methods that meld the digital world with the offline world allow virtually any brand to connect with Millennial consumers. (Chapter 6 covers multiple kinds of new media and details how marketers can take advantage of both organic and paid initiatives to communicate with and convert Millennials into long-run customers.)
Organic initiatives and strategies are those that don’t rely on paid advertising to reach a specific audience segment. Organic engagement is powerful and a key component to the success of a marketing program. However,