No money? You can still create loyal customers!
Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba coin the term "customer evangelism" as they combine to create a manifesto about how to gain an enthusiastic following for your company. This is a great quick read that I would highly recommend to anyone trying to gain insight into your customers and how to make loyal advocates to your business.
Why not let your customer do the work by spreading your company for free? They are after all some of the most influential people to your business and this book teaches you this and give you the tools to harness the power of word of mouth, build loyalty, and you will grow. Converting good customers into exceptional ones who will spread the word of your company is what you want?
McConnell and Huba try to cram consumer evangelists into 6 principle components.
1. Customer Plus Delta: (understanding what your customers love, want, and hate through direct feedback and interaction)
2. Napsterize Your Knowledge: ( make intellectual property available to customers and transmittable)
3. Build the Buzz: (use networks to get people talking)
4. Create Community: (create a way for a sense of belonging for you customers)
5. Bite-Size-Chunks: (offer small pieces for consumers to try before they buy)
6. Create a Cause: (rally customers around something bigger than you)
You can create evangelists for little cost, you need to listen to your customers and learn about what they love, hate, and want improved. This book teaches you how to do this and even provides in-depth examples with companies such as Southwest airlines, The Dallas Mavericks, IBM, and more. The internet has shaped consumers to easily badmouth companies so it is important to understand how to address these problems in a proactive manner and improve your business before it fails.
Although the book is good at effectively targeting ways to involve customers and to get them to evangelize your products it does lack some uses of technology. I think this is partially due to the books being out of date as it was initially published in 2003. The book fails, by not address the blogging world very much. There are some mentions such as [...] but it doesn't hone the concept that everyone has control over a large say on the internet now. There is some insight into web lurkers. There is address to social media sites at all as a means to create evangelists, which I was surprising. I suppose some of the concepts could be transferred to social media programs but it is not explicitly highlighted in this book, you will have to go elsewhere.
The book clearly defines these 6 pillars with in depth case analysis of big companies such as Southwest, IBM, Build a Bear Workshop, and The Dallas Mavericks. Although there is strong evidence and support for clearly achieving evangelists it seems that it may not be easily applied to all businesses, especially smaller businesses.
I think this book is especially beneficial to those who are trying to accomplish a lot with little financial backing. Utilizing the 6 tenets as a framework to improve your business and helping to create the best experience for customers is the top priority and doesn't always revolve around money.
It is apparent that McConnell and Huba are well known and are the gurus of consumer evangelism. They bring valid points to the table and present it in a fun text which is a super fast read! I enjoyed this book and found that I can apply it to my band in many ways. I am applying some of these principles by trying to create great experience for fans, interacting and getting to know what products people want to see, honing a society of followers, and embracing them to improve our overall product.
There are list like approaches with statistics and examples to encourage you. It even offers an ending chapter on entitled the "custom evangelism workshop" which does an excellent job tying the entire book up and showing examples for you to apply what you learned.
Overall I would highly recommend this book if you are having a hard time retaining customers, want to become more motivated to listen to customers, or are just interested in consumer evangelism. This is great read and a great value!
Has little to do with Creating Customer Evangelists
Creating Customer Evangelists has little about how to create Customer Evangelists. Lots of stories of lucky companies.
Great Information on Customer Evangelism that is Ahead of It's Time
This book is incredibly insightful and clearly ahead of it's time at original publication. Jackie and Ben take you through, not only learning how customer evangelism works, but why it works, and what's coming across the frontier of getting your customers to basically do your marketing job for you. There are plenty of real-life examples and they cover the topic far beyond theory. Great, great stuff for all marketers looking to market in the Digital 2.0 age, especially those attempting social marketing (blogging, social media, etc).
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