1.5 Marketing through the Eyes of Brand Champions

Know the Reasons Why Your Brand Champions Love You

Perhaps two of the most important questions a marketer can ask are, “Why did someone buy?” and “Why do they make repeat purchases?” Smart marketers tap into the knowledge and emotions of their best customers–brand champions. That is, they discover the reasons these customers love the company’s products then they leverage the information. So, an easy rule of thumb for putting together a marketing mix is to market products through the eyes of brand champions. Consumers who are unaware of a company's products or who are considering a purchase are most persuaded by seeing the reasons other consumers (who are like them) love the company's products. One thing we have noticed from working with advertising agencies is that none of the agencies try to sell to a statistic; advertising agencies build messages around their understanding of real people. We might know that our customers are 52 percent female, are on average 36.8 years old, have an average of 1.8 children living at home, spend $105.43 on the product category each year, are predominantly Caucasian, have an average household income of $78,242, and tend to vote Republican. However, even if we know all of that, we still wouldn’t know enough to build an effective marketing campaign. We need to put names and faces to our brand champions. We need to know the reasons they love us. Only then can we build a marketing campaign that shows the world why people repeatedly buy our products.

Coca-Cola Friendship Machine: Showing Off the Product through the Eyes of Brand Champions

Coca-Cola effectively implemented this idea of brand champions by running a promotional campaign to highlight the experience of bringing people together in a fun and joyful way. Coca-Cola vending machines were placed in theater lobbies in seven different countries, but these were not ordinary vending machines. These vending machines offered two bottles of Coca-Cola for the price of one. The catch was that the vending machines were twice their normal height, and people had to work together to put in the coins and operate the machine. On Friend’s Day, friends got together to buy Coca-Cola from these Friendship Machines. Eight hundred bottles (per vending machine) of Coca-Cola were sold in nine hours, which is 1,075 percent more than are sold from a regular machine on average. Thousands of comments and video clips were posted on blogs and social networks around the world by individuals who had an experience with one of the Friendship Machines. However, the best result was that the product had been shown through the eyes of brand champions in an engaging, compelling, and memorable way. Marketing through the eyes of brand champions doesn’t answer every question about the marketing mix, but it does give insight into many decisions regarding product development, advertising, sales promotion, public relations events, points of distribution, and merchandising.

Riding a Wave versus Filling a Gap

The concept of marketing through the eyes of brand champions provides some guidance for growing a business. Traditionally, marketers have looked to fill gaps in the marketplace when developing products and services. If one believes the statistics, this is a high-risk approach. Fewer than 1 out of 10 new products succeed in today’s increasingly competitive marketplace.

We recommend riding a wave as an alternative to filling a gap. Riding a wave means looking at an existing product or service and coming up with a complementary product or service you could introduce to the market, thus riding the wave of interest created by the original product or service. Brand champions will be interested in enhancing their consumption experience of products they love by using complementary products.

Jibbitz: Riding the Wave of Crocs

Crocs are foam clogs made in a variety of styles and colors, and millions have sold since they were introduced in 2002. One of their brand champions, Sheri Schmelzer, looked for a way to make the Crocs worn by her family more personalized. Schmelzer started making decorative buttons to fit in the holes of the Crocs. The product, Jibbitz, sold by the thousands and was later acquired by Crocs for a $10 million up-front payment with an additional $10 million bonus for meeting earnings projections. By learning to see products through the eyes of brand champions, marketing managers can identify dozens of ways to ride waves of brand champion interest.