Customer evangelism - another manifesto
August 17th, 2004 by Bill
I’ve just read The Customer Evangelist Manifesto by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba (one of the six initial manifestos released by ChangeThis). It’s a pretty good, if lengthy, overview of the failures of traditional marketing techniques (i.e., mass marketing). This part could be more briefly summarized with a quote from a Nobel prize-winning American economist (his name escapes me at the moment). It goes something like this: a wealth of information leads to a poverty of attention. In other words, traditional marketing’s effectiveness has been diluted by the sheer quantity of it. (The quote can be found in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point.)
The second half of the manifesto gets to the meat of the matter: how do you create customer evangelists? Where do you find them? How do you facilitate their evangelizing?
The manifesto has six tenets that help to highlight and identify what needs to happen. And they’re a pretty good summary. You may want to print them off and pin them close to your desk. (Read the manifesto to find out what they are.)
The manifesto focuses on reaching customers. It has an external focus. My issue would be internal. To implement this customer evangelism approach, a company has to buy into it. And as the manifesto indicates, this isn’t easy to do when the culture that has developed around marketing, and business generally, is short-term focused and internally focused.
By short-term and internal I mean that marketing activities often have more to do with covering your bum. A problem is identified - throw money at it. An opportunity is spotted - throw money at it. It’s primary intention is show the next monkey up the ladder that you have been doing something.
This is hard to do with customer evangelism since the next monkey usually has no idea what it is and no patience for anything that doesn’t show immediate results. Besides, the next monkey above him is pounding on his head asking, "So what cha doin’, huh?"
For customer evangelism to take hold, a significant cultural shift is required. I think this may be happening already but there is still so much old school thinking impeding it that it will be some time before we see the mind set more broadly adopted. The traditional approach appears to be the safest approach (though the opposite is usually true).
And by that time we’ll probably be looking for something new to replace customer evangelism since broad adoption will lead to dilution. It won’t be because too many customer evangelists will be around but because there will be too many activities happening to facilitate them.
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