Creating Customer Evangelists [Hardcover]

This enjoyable but hardly essential book offers case studies of eight companies whose customer communities-that is, the base of customers who believe in a particular product or service-are robust and successful: Southwest Airlines, Krispy Kreme, Build-A-Bear Workshops, the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, Pallotta TeamWorks, O'Reilly & Associates, SolutionPeople and IBM. The authors, cofounders of the marketing consulting firm Wabash & Lake, claim that "customer evangelists" are free; they offer a six-step plan for building customer evangelism, but the specific programs they recommend are expensive. They decry "nuisance" advertising, yet praise MSN's infamous Hotmail spam tag line attached to every e-mail Hotmail users send and IBM's graffiti campaign that resulted in criminal fines. They argue against focusing on shareholder value and cost controls, but criticize companies that imploded for ignoring those two things. Although the idea of deepening customer relationships is certainly valid and should be embraced by marketers, there are better and far more balanced accounts of this process available (the first four chapters of Philip Kotler's Marketing Management, the standard MBA text, for example).
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Harness the power of evangelism marketing to increase customer loyalty, sales, and profitability of your brand. When customers are truly thrilled about their experience with a product or

When customers are truly thrilled about their experience with a product or service, they become outspoken "evangelists" for a company. Savvy marketing professionals are discovering that this group of satisfied believers can be leveraged as a potent marketing tool to increase their customer universe.

Authors Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba know how to take a company’s best customers and turn them into influential, loyal, and enthusiastic evangelists. Readers of Creating Customer Evangelists will learn how to develop evangelism marketing strategies and programs that will create communities of influencers who can expand and drive sales for a company.

The authors outline and explain the six basic tenets of creating customer evangelists:

• Conduct ongoing customer research.

• "Napsterize" your knowledge.

• Build the buzz.

• Make bite-size chunks.

• Create community.

• Create a cause.

To illustrate these tenets and show how solid customer relationships can build and sustain companies through good and rocky times, the authors offer several case studies. These in-depth company profiles provide real-life examples of evangelism marketing at work, including the opportunities and pitfalls of specific campaigns.

Readers will learn how organizations as diverse as Southwest Airlines, Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, and The Dallas Mavericks successfully built their customer base and created targeted marketing programs to involve their biggest fans. These programs have produced legions of unofficial salespeople and a cost-effective and powerful marketing force.

By deepening customer relationships, successful companies create customer communities that generate grassroots support and value for their products and services. Creating Customer Evangelists focuses on this personal and emotional marketing approach. As McConnell and Huba demonstrate, this approach can convert good customers into exceptional ones who willingly spread the word.

Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba, authors of Citizen Markters and Creating Customer Evangelists, popularized the term “customer evangelism.” The Seth Godin-edited New York Times bestseller The Big Moo featured them among 33 of the world’s smartest business thinkers. They live and work in Chicago.