Engage Your Most Loyal Brand Customers Through Passion Marketing

7|15|2010

We all know them.  The people who don't just buy a product, but enthusiastically embrace it.  These are the same people who don't just go to a football game, but arrive in team-colored body paint from head to toe.  They live and breathe the brand.

Social media expert Jay Baer, who writes the blog ConvinceandConvert.com, talks about this group.  The one percent who love your brand and building programs for them to create a stronger, more engaged community.   Social media gives this one percent a voice.  A very loud voice.

I'd like to go one further.  How about ignoring the other 99 percent and focusing your brand on the one percent that loves your brand already.  This may sound like blasphemy coming from a guy who works at a marketing firm, but we've all been doing mass marketing for years and what has it gotten us?  Think about it.  We create programs to promote our brands and sell our products.  When we connect with a customer, we count them as a loyal user, and then we move on to find the next one.  Mass marketing is always targeting the next prospect.  We love them and then leave them like a jilted lover. We're already falling into this trap with Facebook fans.  As Jay says, "Don't just collect fans like trading cards.  Engage them."

Here is what I've learned about communicating with the passionate one percent -- you introduce focus that is simply not possible when your target is the other 99.  Furthermore, and this is the important part, the one percent can and will engage the other 99, often with incredible results.  In the past, companies expected the passionate one percent to just keep buying the brand.  Maybe they suggested the brand to a friend or neighbor, but once we had them as loyal brand users, we moved on to find others.  Many brands were taking their lovers for granted, but that was before social media, which is a game changer.

The idea of marketing to the valuable one percent only appeals to me because I've seen it work firsthand, even before social media became popular.  I don't believe this idea has a name.  I kicked around a bunch of names like "ONE Percent Marketing" or "Uno Marketing."  But the name that sticks for me is "Passion Marketing," because we're taking a group that loves the brand already and we're giving them marketing Viagra.  We're throwing gas on their passion fires by asking for their ideas and introducing special events and new products to them.  They are then creating an explosion of great content, images, and messaging for us.  Often times so good we could never recreate it on our own.  We let them create the brand content and carry the brand message forward to the other 99 percent.   Their passion becomes the brands'  marketing messages, channel planning and brand activation.  Think about it... the marketing strategy and implementation is self fulfilling.

So what brands engage in Passion Marketing?  Not enough.    But think about Mentos, Starbucks, TOMS , Zappos, and even Adobe; they've let their most passionate fans talk for them, create for them and recruit both casual users and life long members to their brand tribe. Social media enables Passion Marketing to create brand communities.   The content created through Passion Marketing becomes key to public relations and advertising campaigns, which can then engage the other 99 percent.   By engaging the most loyal fans and letting them have fun, they create brand experiences like this.

I asked our team for examples of Passion Marketing and I was amazed how many people mentioned a popular local restaurant that's gaining national attention.  Cleveland restaurant Melt Bar & Grilled has a huge fan base, and unless your cholesterol is as high as mine, you really should stop in for a bite.  They put melted cheese on everything!  How much do Melt restaurant lovers embrace the brand... Would you tattoo their logo on your body?  These people probably receive daily Lipitor I.V.s, but think about what it says about the brand.  Would your customers ever do that?

My personal favorite example of Passion Marketing is duct tape, or more specifically, Duck brand Duct Tape, an LS client for more than 10 years.  Seen high schoolers wearing duct tape gowns and suits to prom?  Or were you part of the nearly 50,ooo this year who attended the 7th annual Duct Tape Festival in Avon, Ohio?  Have you made any wallets, flowers or ties from duct tape lately?

Duck brand Duct Tape and Liggett Stashower have been aggressively promoting an entire duct tape culture to the passionate duct tape faithful for more than a decade.  It's sticky.  It's fun.  It's friendly.  So why not appeal to the masses you say?  Because our sticky and creative brand users give us more content, ideas and endorsements than we could ever create or buy.  Sales continue to go up, every year.  More than half of our traditional public relations placements are the result of these three programs.  We've grown a community,  now more than a million strong, that has helped create new products, find new uses and secure more sales.

Are you ready to engage your most loyal brand followers and put them to work?  It's not a tease.  Passion Marketing is the real thing.  I'd love to know about your brand love affairs and how they are or aren't living up to their part of the relationship. 

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