How to drive brand advocacy

Because word of mouth advocacy is of critical importance in driving business success, a good case can be made for arguing that everything coming out of a marketing department should be focused on increasing advocacy rates. Whether it's advertising campaigns, promotional offers, PR, or any other marketing initiatives, the overall strategic goal of marketing should be to optimize the likelihood of people recommending your brand to each other.

But how do you create campaigns that generate word of mouth advocacy? The majority of word of mouth initiatives involve targeting a special segment of a target market: opinion leaders (variously called 'alphas','hubs','sneezers', or other proprietary jargon).The logic is that if you can create advocacy among the 10% of your target market who tell the other 90% what to think, say and buy, then you can kick-start an epidemic of demand. If you can convert opinion leaders to your cause, as opposed to the cause of any of the other brands chasing them, then this is no doubt an excellent strategy.

But there's another group of influencers that brands can harness to drive demand through word of mouth: brand advocates. Brand advocates are regular clients, customers, or consumers with no special opinion-leading powers, but who like your brand so much they recommend it to others. Brand advocates, sometimes called brand evangelists, are different from opinion leaders because they derive their influence not from the fact that they frequently offer or are consulted for category-related advice (the definition of an opinion leader), but because, as highly satisfied adopters, they are enthusiastic endorsers of your brand.

One way of looking at brand advocates, is through the brand advocacy pyramid. Any existing client, customer, or consumer base can be segmented by degree of satisfaction with the brand experience. At the bottom of the pyramid, where most people in your buyer base will be

Figure 3.1 Brand advocacy pyramid

found, are your basic brand adopters - people satisfied enough with the brand experience to have become regular users. Some of your current buyers, however, will be particularly satisfied with your brand and display a high degree of affinity and loyalty to it. These are your brand adorers who lie in the middle of the pyramid.Then, at the apex of the pyramid lie your brand advocates: clients, customers, or consumers so satisfied with the brand experience that they are prepared to proselytize about it.

Very few people recruited into any brand franchise will be brand advocates; most will be brand adopters, a few will be brand adorers and fewer still, brand advocates. However, since it is brand advocacy that drives brand growth, it is in every marketer's interest to boost the proportion of advocates in the brand pyramid whilst encouraging existing advocates to advocate more often to more people.8

A number of tools and techniques exist to transform brand adorers into active advocates and help existing advocates evangelize about your brand. The most basic is perhaps the classic referral programme (variously known as introduce-a-friend, member-get-member, or customer-get-customer schemes) which rewards brand advocates for their advocacy, but should also reward the people they advocate to, if those people become adopters. For example, eBay, the online personal marketplace, invites members to introduce friends to the service, in return for which both parties receive a US$5 voucher.9

The gold standard in referral programmes is perhaps MCI's 1991 'friends and family' scheme. The US telecom company offered its customers a 20% discount on calls to friends and family whom they referred to MCI. If someone who had been referred to MCI by a current customer became an MCI customer themselves, they too would be invited to refer their friends and family and enjoy a 20% discount on calls.This friends and family initiative kick-started a cascading chain of referrals, which generated 10 million new customers for MCI in less than two years.

Although referral programmes are most often used as a cost-effective customer acquisition tool by banks, service providers and clubs, they have also been used to harness product recommendations. For example, in 1999, Unilever ran a brand advocacy referral programme to recruit new users of its Dove soap brand. Called 'Share a Secret', the campaign involved transforming brand adorers into brand advocates and using that advocacy to recruit new adopters into the brand franchise. To do this Unilever invited Dove users to send in proof of purchase, with the contact details of a friend they thought might like to receive a gift certificate for a Dove Gift Pack of two free bars of Dove soap, or US$2.29 off the purchase of Dove Ultra Moisturizing Body Wash (redeemable in store). When sending in their friends' contact details, Dove users were encouraged to include a personal message to their friend, which would be included with the gift certificate when it was sent out. Finally, as a thank you for participating, the Dove user was also sent a gift certificate for the gift pack. The campaign was a success for all concerned: friends received unexpected free gifts with a personal message, Dove users were rewarded for advocating Dove, and Dove boosted product trials, generated a database of names and addresses, and most significantly, boosted market share by 10%.10

Another example illustrating how it's possible to turn brand adopters and brand adorers into active brand advocates is the 'Share the Love' initiative from online retailer Amazon. When making a purchase online, Amazon customers could enter email addresses of friends who would be automatically emailed a 10% discount voucher for whatever it was they had just bought. If the emailed friend used the discount voucher within a week, the Amazon customer would be sent a credit to the value of the 10% discount redeemable on future Amazon purchases.11

More examples of how to create brand advocates can be found on the website of Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba, authors of Creating Customer Evangelists: How Loyal Customers Become a Volunteer Sales Force, where there is a free ebook of case studies called 'Testify' that can be downloaded (http://www.creatingcustomerevangelists.com).

Continue reading here: Creating advocacy with Icecards

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