How to Make Your Customers Love You

We all know it’s easier to keep an existing customer than it is to win a new one. But too often, that insight gets forgotten as businesses focus obsessively on new customer acquisition – a pursuit Noah Fleming, author of Evergreen: Cultivate the Enduring Customer Loyalty that Keeps Your Business Thriving, likens to a sex addiction. “No question about it, the ability to stimulate immediate sales is sexy,” he writes, calling it a form of “instant gratification.” But, he adds, “I’m not convinced it is doing us any good in the long run – especially when those same organizations aren’t focused on keeping the customers they just spent Fort Knox to get.”

Indeed, early in his book, Fleming cites the example of one British bakery owner whose use of a Groupon GRPN +0.00% promotion led to 8500 new customers. That might seem like a miraculous success, but the unexpected swarm of new business overwhelmed her store, forcing her to make emergency hires and deploy poorly-trained new employees, and wiped out nearly a year’s worth of profits. When it comes to new customers, you can have too much of a good thing. So how can we prevent these problems and build a successful, sustainable business? Fleming says we need to reconceptualize our definition of marketing.

Most companies, he told me in a recent interview, “view marketing as the thing they do to win a customer, and customer retention as everything that happens after sale. But they’re wrong. Marketing is equally about keeping a customer as it is about getting them. Loyalty is a function of marketing on a day-to-day basis with new and existing customers. Focusing solely on customer acquisition is a wasteful, myopic, and arrogant business strategy.”

To retain customers successfully, he argues that businesses should follow a set of core principles he calls the “Three Cs of Evergreen Organizations”: Content, Character, and Community.

Know Your Content. It’s obvious that your business won’t succeed if what you sell isn’t up to snuff. That’s why most companies focus 99% of their attention on their “content,” Fleming’s term for their core product, service, or offering. That’s great – but it’s insufficient to thrive in today’s competitive economy. “Just having a fabulous product or service is no longer enough for long-term success,” he says. You have to go beyond by creating a genuine relationship with your customers, and enabling them to connect with one another.

Know Your Company’s Character. To keep a customer over the long term, you can’t treat the relationship as transactional; i.e., they give you money, and you give them a product or service. Without a deeper connection, there’s no reason for them to continue to choose to do business with you. Fleming says you have to show them who you really are as a company. “Character is the first thing that comes to the a customer’s mind when they think about your business,” he says. “It’s analogous to a person. It’s your brand personality, and who customers think you are.”  The best companies in the world conduct business in a way that’s congruent with how they want to be seen, perceived, and understood by their ideal customers.

Knowing your character isn’t about having a mission statement on a wall plaque. It’s about developing your story in a way that’s both meaningful and memorable. What’s your origin story? Why were you founded? What stories exemplify how you live out your values? (For years, the vision of Hewlett and Packard toiling away in their garage inspired employees to embrace “The HP Way.”) The character of your company needs to resonate with your customers and give them a reason to choose you.

Know Your Community. The best companies in the world are building a strong sense of community with their customers.  Says Fleming, “Humans desire and crave connection. The Internet has simultaneously connected and disconnected us. The companies who recognize this and create structures to allow for communities to form will have a significant competitive advantage in the future.” Citing examples like CrossFit and Harley Davidson, which have created passionate fan bases, Fleming argues that when companies bring adherents together, they cement loyalty because customers build relationships not just with the business, but with each other.

Keeping customers loyal can mean the difference between a successful company and one that wastes its time, energy, and money endlessly chasing new prospects. Fleming’s framework allows us to ask: are we merely “adrenaline junkies” chasing the high of the next customer acquisition, or are we cultivating a sustainable business?

Dorie Clark is a marketing strategist who teaches at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. She is the author of Reinventing You and Stand Out, and you can receive her free Stand Out Self-Assessment Workbook.