Leveraging Emotions To Create Communities Of Fanatic Customers

Ten thousand people around the globe in 2007 were asked about portable devices - digital cameras, cell phones, MP3 players, and so on. It was part of a massive study conducted by the global media company Universal McCann. One of the hottest topics at the time was the first iPhone, which was announced in January but hadn’t yet been released. Once the researchers who conducted the study tallied the results, they reached an interesting conclusion: convergent products like the iPhone are desired by consumers in countries such as Mexico or India, but not in affluent countries. “There is no real need for a convergent product in the United States, Germany and Japan,” the study stated.

As reported by Guardian in an article of the 29th of June 2007 - the same day Steve Jobs presented the iPhone - “Universal McCann concluded that Apple's goal of selling 10mln iPhones by the end of 2008 is too ambitious”.

In the Universal McCann study people were asked to say how much they agree with the statement “I like the idea of having one portable device to fulfill all my needs”. Indeed, there was a significant difference between the percentage of people who completely agreed with this statement in Mexico (79 percent), in the United States (31 percent) or in Japan (27 percent).

So, based on the McCann’s study, people in the United States and Japan were much less excited about the idea of a phone that’s also a camera and a music player.

But it was a different story when consumers got closer to making a decision to buy the new mobile phone launched by Apple.

In October 2007 Apple announced to have sold 1,19mln of devices till September, and at the end of 2008 Apple had already sold 17mln devices.

Consumers bought the new iPhone because they heard about it in the media, they saw reports on TV of people standing in line all night to get their hands on the first iPhone, and they started reading blogs and reviews from real users. As iPhones started rolling into the marketplace, the abstract idea of “having one portable device to fulfill all my needs” was replaced by actual reports from people who used it. Users started to experience - and share on the web - the advantage of having 24/7 access to a camera, or not having to carry an iPod in addition to a cell phone.

That’s all.

It’s very easy to blame the market research firm for its mistake, but this is not my point. My point is that assessing consumers’ preferences in our new era is totally different than it was in the past - even only 10 years ago.

Marketers are used to predict consumer preferences asking questions to them. Questions, questions and again questions. Some marketers will continue to chase the dream of figuring out the true preference of consumers and then giving them exactly what they want. They will continue to track slight changes in brand perceptions, segment migrations, and so on. As remarkably reported by I. Simonson and E. Rosen in their book “Absolute Value”, consumer preferences and perceptions tend to be vague. So the idea that if you only dig deeper by asking more and more questions, you will find out the consumer’s true preferences, usually leads to findings that are not particularly meaningful or reliable.

For example - as reported by Simonson and Rosen - some companies practice the “laddering technique”,-- which promises to get at people’s core values and preferences using a sequence of pre-specified questions. This approach essentially assumes that the true values are hidden deep inside the consumer’s mind, and to find them you have only to ask patiently the right questions.

In my opinion this approach is hugely questionable. Indeed there is a va---st amount of evidence which shows that though consumers and people in general do not know the reasons why they prefer something, they usually claim that they know the reasons why they prefer something.

For instance, recently I personally conducted a couple of experiments in a retail store. In both experiments, female shoppers were invited to evaluate 2 different types of products positioned in store displays - ten different pairs of shoes in one experiment and ten different pairs of gloves in the other. Then I asked shoppers to say which article was the best quality and - when they announced a choice - I asked them why they had chosen that article. There was a pronounced left-to-right position effect, such that the right-most object in the array was heavily over-chosen. For the gloves, the effect was quite large, with the right-most gloves being preferred over the left-most by a factor of almost three to one. When I asked about the reasons for their choices, every shopper gave his own reason, but nobody mentioned spontaneously the position of the article in the display. And, when I asked directly about a possible effect of the position of the article, almost all shoppers denied it - usually with a worried glance to me, suggesting that they had misunderstood the question or …that they were dealing with a strange person doing stupid questions. Do you think I'm a strange person? It might be...??

So, such techniques do not uncover any truth, but largely create answers to questions which give marketers the feeling to know consumers’ preferences.

But…it’s only a feeling, nothing more than a feeling.

Consumers have always had the ability to vote for a certain brand, moving their legs and using their money elsewhere. While the digital revolution has handed additional power to consumers, including more information and more choice, it has also increased the complexity of consumers’ decision-making. Consumers use social media, forum, review sites or price comparison sites, to finalize their choice and exert their influence on other consumers

Indeed the ability of consumers to distribute information using a variety of networks, digital media devices and platforms not only lets them connect with their peers, it also helps enrich the information shared.

My researches - like many others - show that almost 80 percent of consumers read reviews and check ratings, before a purchase. Almost 35 percent contribute to online forums or comment on other people’s blogs. Online consumer reviews are the second most trusted source of brand informations and messaging, with almost 70 percent of consumers that trust this source of informations. The only source that is trusted more is recommendations from friends and family.

Apart from reviews sites, forums and the like, new technologies may enable consumers to evaluate products and services before a purchase, in ways that are still hard to imagine. Imagine, for example, that after you have paid a maintenance service to repair a durable good at a repair center (like a mobile phone, a TV, a washing machine and the like) you click a button that forwards the invoice to a central database that collects all the repair data of the different types of durable goods. The aggregate data from such a database give consumers a very accurate picture of the reliability of different brands’ products, which erodes the value of brand as a quality proxy. This is hardly science fiction. It is possible that more disruptive innovations are on the horizon, and that they will affect our lives the way that mobile phones, GPS or search engines have had.

When consumers can predict their likely future experience without having to rely on often-unreliable proxies such as brand names or marketers’ advertising messages, everything changes. Marketers’ ability to influence consumers through branding and positioning will be dramatically reduced

In the current information-rich environment, influencing people is a bit like trying to sell a bike to a rock rider during his climbing of a rocky vertical wall. Buying products or services in the twentieth century was an experience that was by far more influenced by marketers. Consumers stood in a store in front of a limited number of dishwashers, or looked at a catalog that came in the mail and focused on a few items on the page. They were usually confined to a small set of products.

Things work very differently in today’s shopping malls and certainly online. If for instance you are planning to buy a cell phone online, Amazon’s “Cell Phones & Accessories” category alone contains over 82 million products.

And the proliferation of options is not limited to retail. Anyone purchasing a car insurance or any financial product is inundated with choices and uses the internet to collect informations aimed to chose the brand and the product.

Therefore, marketing as we knew it is not needed anymore. Those marketers who will keep their primary focus on persuasive advertising, building brand equity and measuring customer satisfaction and loyalty, are likely to stay behind

So, what companies should do in this direct-to-consumers environment characterized by consumers’ unlimited choice and control?

As consumer behavior rapidly evolves and the extended purchasing journey occurs across an ever-expanding universe of digital environments and platforms, companies should be focused in creating not only a customer-base but a fan-base, or in other words they have to be able to create a community of fanatic customers. Avid fans cannot get enough of the content they love. They binge on it. They share it. They talk and post about it. They create more of it.

Unfortunately, a small minority of companies are leading their people and organizing their processes and technology to foster those positive emotions that are necessary to drive communities of fanatic customers.

So, the question is, how companies can create a community of fanatic customers? Or, in other words, how companies can stimulate such positive emotions in their customers so that they become super-loyal customers?

Here are the guidelines to be followed.

• Putting the brand second, consumers’ belongingness first

Executives often forget that consumers are actually people or, to be more precise, human beings, with many different needs and interests. A community-based brand builds loyalty not by driving sales transactions but by helping people meet their emotional needs.

Contrary to marketers’ assumptions, the needs that brand communities have to satisfy are not just about gaining status or trying on a new identity through brand affiliation. On the contrary, companies have to leverage a basic emotional need all humans have, that is the need to affiliate with other humans and be accepted by members of a group, a need that social psychologists call “belongingness”.

In Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, belongingness is part of one of his major needs that motivate human behavior. It involves more than simply being acquainted with other people. It is instead centered on gaining acceptance, attention and support from members of a group as well as providing the same attention to other members. By belonging to a group, we feel as if we are a part of something bigger and more important than ourselves. The emotional need to belong is an intrinsic motivation that can also lead to changes in behaviors, beliefs and attitudes of the customers as they strive to conform to the standards and norms of the group.

That’s the simple reason which explains why thousands of people around the world are willing to stay in line for an entire night - even if it rains - to buy a mobile phone. Oh, sorry for the mistake, an iPhone, not a mobile phone!

• Build communities with strong interpersonal physical connections

Decades of brand management theory have instilled in executives’ heads the idea that to emotionally connect consumers with a brand it’s necessary to identify and consistently communicate a clear set of values. Unfortunately, a community that is based only on some abstract beliefs delivers to his members only limited benefits - compared with a community where there are interpersonal physical relationships. Unless the affiliation to a community is supplemented with human connections, community members are at risk of dropping out. Strong affiliations among humans are - usually - based on strong one-to-one and one-to-many physical connections.

The Harley-Davidson Museum, for example, builds webs of interpersonal connections through features such as walls around the campus decorated with large, custom-inscribed stainless-steel rivets commissioned by individuals or groups.

As museum visitors read the inscriptions on the rivets, they reflect on the stories and people behind them. Harley riders who meet at the rivet walls soon find themselves comparing interesting inscriptions, and before long they’re engaged in conversation, planning to stay in touch and perhaps even share a ride someday. Through rivet walls and other means of fostering interpersonal connections, the museum strengthens the Harley-Davidson brand by building webs within it.

• Build communities which embrace conflict

Most leaders prefer to avoid conflict. But communities are inherently political, and conflict is the norm. “In the group” needs “out of the group”, against which to define itself.

Steve Jobs, for instance, used conflict skillfully to his advantage. As Walter Isaacson has reported in his authorized biography, throughout his life and career, Steve Jobs represented himself as a warrior against the forces of evil - who, of course, were his rivals in the marketplace.

When IBM launched its own personal computer in 1981, Apple placed a newspaper ad that said, “Welcome, IBM. Seriously.” Jobs skillfully positioned Apple against IBM when there were many other companies in the fray. He went so far as to say, “If for some reason we make some giant mistakes and IBM wins, my personal feeling is that we are going to enter sort of a computer Dark Ages for about 20 years.”

Smart managers know that singing around the campfire will not force warring tribes to unite. Communities become stronger by highlighting, not erasing, the boundaries that define them.

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Harley-Davidson - as reported by Susan Fournier and Lara Lee - provides a quintessential example of a company that has been able to create a community of fanatic customers. Following the 1985 leveraged buyback that saved the company, management completely reformulated the competitive strategy and business model around a brand community philosophy. Beyond just changing its marketing programs, Harley-Davidson retooled every aspect of its organization - from its culture to its operating procedures and governance structure - to drive its community strategy.

Harley management recognized that the brand had developed as a community-based phenomenon. The “brotherhood” of riders, united by a shared ethos, offered Harley the basis for a strategic repositioning as the one motorcycle manufacturer that understood bikers' emotional needs. To reinforce this community-centric positioning and solidify the connection between the company and its customers, Harley staffed all community-outreach events with employees rather than hired hands. For employees, this regular, close contact with the people they served added such meaning to their work that the weekend outreach assignments routinely attracted more volunteers than were needed. Many employees became riders, and many riders joined the company.

Executives were required to spend time in the field with customers and bring their insights back to the company. This close-to-the-customer strategy was codified in Harley-Davidson’s operating philosophy and reinforced during new-employee orientations. Decisions at all levels were grounded in the community perspective, and the company acknowledged the community as the rightful owner of the brand, not viceversa.

The result? Everybody knows how strong is the Harley-Davidson brand and how fanatic are the Harley riders!

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Community is a super-powerful strategy that if correctly implemented can deliver outstanding results. A community strategy can dramatically increase customer loyalty and lower marketing costs. It requires leaders with authentic interest in the customers’ basic emotional needs and the ability to use conflict to strenghten the “boundaries” of the brand.