Co-creating the future

Understanding why people become brand advocates

At our next Expert Forum, on June 24^th, we will be exploring the idea of consumer advocacy with both marketing and insights experts, and a group of consumers. The format of the Expert Forums is that we bring together 20 consumers and 20 marketing and insights experts for three hours to discuss and develop ideas about a pertinent issue.

We have chosen advocacy as a subject to explore because so much of our work is currently about helping our clients develop and drive successful advocacy strategies. For the brands we work with, it is a smart, effective, cheap way of growing your customer base and it focuses businesses  on delivering their brand experience through the organisation rather than simply communicating it.

At a basic level, some people think of an ‘advocacy/word of mouth/ recommendation strategy’ (I know that some people will say that these are all very different, but until we run the Forum I am going to be generalising wildly!) as incentivising consumers to ‘recommend a friend’. There is nothing wrong with this. It works for lots of different businesses. However, there is a more sophisticated approach to developing customer advocacy that we would like to explore with consumers and professionals from a variety of industries at the session on the 24^th. We will be looking at where brands have worked hard to understand their customer, the customer journey, and at which points, with which consumers they could be delivering a brand experience that inspires people to talk about it.

This second view of advocacy is more difficult to define. It is less about manufactured processes and more about finding the sweet spots across your product and service where you can create such an impact that people will begin to talk about you positively.

Specifically on the 24^th June we will also be co-creating to answer some of the following questions:

-          What are the drivers of advocacy?

-          Are these drivers applicable across all brands and sectors?

-          Which brands have successfully developed advocacy strategies? Which brands do we choose independently to advocate?

-          What is the psychology of advocacy?

-          How do you actually leverage the power of your advocates?

-          In a world of organised advocacy, is online advocacy different to face to face recommendation?

-          Finally, can we co-create an advocacy model to help define the levers for encouraging people to talk positively or recommend your brand, product or service?

As always, we will be putting together a report on the session, which will be available at the end of June. If you are interested in attending the forum, please feel free to contact Louise Dolding on ldolding@promisecorp.com . We are limited to 20 spaces and although most are now taken, feel free to drop us a line if you would like to find out more about coming along to this or future Expert Forums. If we are unable to squeeze you in, we will make sure that we send you a copy of the report when it is produced.

Most importantly though,  if you liked this post, don’t forget to tell a friend!

This entry was posted on Monday, 7 Jun 2010 at 10:32 am and is filed under Branding, Conversation economy, Loyalty, Word of mouth.
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