Chris Lawer of the OMC group has just published what looks to be an interesting and relevant academic paper on the topic of “Customer Advocacy and Brand Development“. The blog post gives a bit of a summary on what the paper is about, but unfortunatly you can’t download a copy of the paper unless you want to buy it from this academic paper merchant.
Here’s a couple of bullet points that highlight the main points:
1) Build a branded advocacy network of partners and stakeholders
2) Align brand values with empowered customer value drivers
3) Focus on customer transparency and trust and,
4) Co-create a customer and partner brand community
The only think I would ask Chris to elaborate on in his blog post is how he defines a “branded advocacy network” and “customer value drivers”. Anyway, it’s good to see work being done through the “official channels” to build real discipline around customer experience management, co-creation, and ‘new’ marketing.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
I would venture that the following is true:
“branded advocacy network†= partners, affiliates, and good old word-of-mouth
“customer value drivers†= compelling marketing offers
Good guesses I think. I guess the branded advocacy network idea gets into customer created content, citizen media etc. I find an awful lot getting lumped under the heading WOM nowadays.
Here are the definitions and explanations of the terms used in the paper:
First, we start with a definition of advocacy which is a “Support Economy” style strategy that firms we identify are experimenting with. We define customer advocacy as a form of market orientation that seeks to assist customers to find and execute their optimum broader solution in a given market. Rather than just selling the firms products and services, advocacy is a way for the firm to put their products and services into the broader context of what the customer needs to do to get a given job or activity completed.
To do so successfully, firms must build a branded advocacy network of customers and partners to help them identify, deliver and adapt the broader context of their offering, e.g. Cisco has an advocacy network of hardware installers, repairers, load balancing and testing firms etc. Each of which is expected to adhere to Cisco brand values and is rewarded for doing so (Annual Customer Advocacy Awards). Together with their partners, Cisco regards its overall purpose as helping customers improve their productivity, reduce operational costs, and get their applications and services to market as quickly as possible. Customer knowledge and competence is a vital component of the advocacy network.
We suggest that advocacy is one way for firms to align with the empowered customer and their changing drivers of value. We identify three of these – which are the customer’s drivers, not the firms…
1. Value-for-Choice
People are overwhelmed with choice and options.
We suggest that by devising new approaches to delivering superior value-for-choice (helping people make smarter decisions, reducing their time and effort, assisting them to navigate through available choices and limiting uncertainty and risk), some organisations will be able to better meet the needs of their customers.
2. Value-for-Involvement
In an era where spam, pop-up ads, telemarketing and other types of targeted advertising and marketing communication are increasingly unwelcome, brand management must find new ways to support word-of-mouth and other customer-carried forms of promotion. We call this shift in marketing emphasis, value-for-involvement. Again, certain firms recognise that by injecting greater openness, context and relevance into their communications efforts, they are able to better align with the new forms of empowered consumer behaviour.
3. Value-for-Knowledge
This is about how firms must find new mechanisms to reward customers for their contributions and knowledge-sharing (co-creating activity)within the advocacy network.
I forgot to say, thanks for picking up on the article!
Kick ass Chris, I love the “customer value drivers”, value for involvement and value for knowledge are great examples of the higher value relationships that customers can form with companies through value creation.
I would really appreciate your thoughts on the models i’ve proposed around customer “motivation” to engage more deeply with companies: Exponential Marketing through Customer Experience