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Building Customer Loyalty |
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Wednesday, 08 August 2007 |
Fundamentally, it must promise only what it can deliver and then deliver exactly what it promised – or more. Today, customers expect that promise to be met instantaneously. Public relations can provide tools to help companies determine what they can deliver and convey their promise to the customer.
What's a customer?
Enlightened companies understand a loyal customer is not just a customer. He/she is an advocate. Companies that want to create customer advocates take the time to know their customers very well. What does he care about? What does she believe in? What strikes a chord with him?
Creating customer advocates requires a company to do something unique that reaches directly into the customer's heart. Customer loyalty increases the propensity to buy, removes barriers to purchase and encourages word of mouth.
Understanding the process
Think about the brands you are loyal to and how that came about. What keeps you loyal? Is it a product that is totally unique? Is it how the company treats its employees? Is it the causes the company supports – an end to hunger? Programs to reach the working poor? Support of local soccer teams?
The process is circular in nature. It looks like this: Someone tells you about a product – you buy it and use it – you like it – you tell someone else about it – you continue to use it – the person you told about it likes it as well – you learn more about the company through packaging or a Web site – you find that the company supports a cause you care about – you like that – you tell more people about it. As long as the quality is sustained and the service is good, you continue to buy and you continue to tell.
Public relations firms build customer loyalty by emphasizing grassroots efforts. While many companies try to be all things to all people, the more successful ones know who they are, know who their customers are, know what those customers want, and cater to those preferences. They understand the value of catching consumers by surprise rather than hitting them over the head with a big advertising campaign.
Turning a story into a campaign
Sometimes, a product is so unique in its category that it must create a new category altogether – a perfect use of PR's loyalty-building capacity. My firm took a meat producer in Denver and helped the company create the category of natural beef, which then turned into organic beef.
To put the new category on the country’s radar, we worked with a variety of grocery stores and mainstream retailers. We met with meat buyers and worked to introduce the category while maintaining productive relationships with existing customers. We worked with chefs to build third-party endorsements. A whole category of people became advocates of this company and now would never eat anything but organic or natural beef. Public relations educated these customers, making them smarter and enabling them to make the choice to buy Coleman Natural Products.
This was a small piece in the early days of the organic movement. Today, the organic meat market is growing at a rate of 50 percent a year. And the whole program was launched without advertising.
PR and modern business
Because public relations communicates on a one-to-one basis in a way that advertising cannot, it is particularly effective in online communication and highly effective in achieving customer loyalty. A company's Web site is the focal point of all the information about it. The Web can help manage customer relationships, allow customers to talk with each other, alert customers to company news and answer customer questions.
These all-important online activities can fall through the cracks when it comes to old-school public relations measurement. Many PR teams claim they can measure customer mindshare by how much non-advertising media attention a company gets, as compared to the competition.
But what about all those activities the public relations group did beyond publicity and media relations? How about the spokespersons they found who could endorse the product and appeal to a particular audience? What about the philanthropic philosophy of the company and how it is attracting consumers? Do they know exactly how to measure that inescapably effective word of mouth? Who you are and what you do really matters, and it all goes to creating mindshare – positive or negative.
Into the future
In the future, the use of PR to gain positive mindshare will increase. More and more, companies are seeing the value of one-on-one marketing and PR. With a up-to-date, modern view of communications, PR people understand social media, online communications and other social phenomena. When companies capitalize on this peer-to-peer communication to develop mindshare among greater audiences, they can get across who they are, what they believe and what their customers want. There's no greater way to build customer loyalty – and build a thriving business.
Gwinavere A. Johnston is the CEO of JohnstonWells Public Relations, a leading public relations firm headquartered in Denver, Colorado. This year JohnstonWells celebrates its 35 year anniversary. |
