Creating Customer Evangelists: Another Take

Here is another take on my previous post. This take on creating customer evangelists is from a marketing web site that can be found here. I think the examples and explanations are better than the web site of the authors.

According to McConnell and Huba, who co-authored the book "Creating Customer Evangelists," the number one indicator of growth is whether a customer would recommend a brand to a friend or colleague. They demonstrate that the best sources of information for customers interested in new products and services is word of mouth.

Customers who make recommendations for such things to their circle of friends and colleagues are considered evangelists -- customers with a true loyalty to a brand.

The authors define loyalty as the willingness of someone -- a customer, an employee, a friend -- to make an investment or personal sacrifice in order to strengthen a relationship.

An evangelist will often take responsibility for the brand's continued success. They will support you, defend you, help you improve your products and services, recruit new customers for you, and spread the word.

So, how does one gain evangelists? The authors list six steps:

1. Customer plus-delta. The point here is to continually gather feedback. One way the authors suggest to do this is by creating a customer advisory board. One business, for example, created such a board, asking select customers to find areas where improvement was needed. Their comments and suggestions resulted in a 30 percent increase in revenue for the company.

McConnell and Huba suggest you make it a voluntary system, but provide the board members with access to leaders and principles, and keep them in the know with what's happening at the company.

2. Napsterize your knowledge -- Make it a point to share knowledge freely -- even if you think it's secret or proprietary. "The value of an idea increases in value as it reaches more people," said McConnell.

Another way to share knowledge is through a blog.

3. Build the buzz. Evangelism is a long-term strategy -- buzz is the fodder that keeps the evangelists talking. To stimulate buzz, the authors suggest disclosing information to those widely connected, go beyond the obvious, make your "behind the scenes' visible and be a little outrageous.

Of course this requires identifying your network and the hubs that supply the most connections.

4. Create community. Don't think of customers as transactions. Think of them as a community of like-minded people. Then, address the community, not the transaction.

Tactics can include creating calendars of events in which your community would be interested.

5. Make bite-size chunks. Do you have a service that is complex? Devise specialized, smaller offerings to get customers to bite. For example, consultants can create workbooks or seminars to provide a piece of what they have to offer.

6. Create a cause. Think about what your organization stands for. How are you trying to change the world?

Every organization can have a cause in which it's passionate.

Among the benefits of a well-defined cause:

• It embodies a vision
• It makes people better
• It generates big effects
• It catalyzes selfless actions
• It polarizes effects.

Of course, we are talking about the church, and not a business, but if you read between the lines, I see a few places where these suggestions can help the church accomplish its mission to reach people. Actually, much of this is stuff that the church should have been doing all along.

Let us look at a few examples. One of the purposes of the church is to create community. It is more than Sunday morning, and more than pot lucks.

Or, create a cause. What does the church stand for as the body of Christ. Are we not called to change the world, called to carry the crucified and resurrected Christ to a dying world?

The idea of gathering feedback and sharing knowledge is an area that is tough to work around in the church. If the church sees itself in the country club mentality, then it will offer people a professional wait-staff to take care of their needs. This also means that often the workings and information of the church remains a mystery meat. Most information is not privileged, but we guard it like a government secret.

Creating Customer Evangelists

I am not necessarily a proponent of bending and manipulating business methods to the mission of the Church, but I found some of this very interesting.

I came across this website on Creating Customer Evangelists. The premise is that the best way to grow a business is to create evangelists out of customers who will spread the word about your product and recruit new customers. I've been reading Rodney Stark's Cities of God and The Rise of Christianity. Stark makes the point that (see especially the The Rise of Christianity), the role of friends is important in the process of conversion to a religious group. We are wired by God to seek community, and interpersonal attachments are an important factor in bringing people into contact with the church. As they develop stronger attachments to the members of a group, the more likely they are to join the group.

The authors of the web site start with an obvious fact: we are evangelists. We tell others about a movie they should see, which computer to purchase, what restaurant to visit, which books to read, and so on. Our recommendations are sincere, and often passionate.

Perhaps we do not realize that we are evangelists, but look at our sphere of influence. It is made up of friends, family, colleagues and other communities in which we participate.

So, most of this is not a big stretch, it seems to reflect the reality of how we are wired.

Here are the basic ideas of Customer Evangelists.

1. Customer plus-delta: Continuously gather customer feedback.
2. Napsterize knowledge: Make it a point to share knowledge freely.
3. Build the buzz: Expertly build word-of-mouth networks.
4. Create community: Encourage communities of customers to meet and share.
5. Make bite-size chunks: Devise specialized, smaller offerings to get customers to bite.
6. Create a cause: Focus on making the world, or your industry, better.

1. Customer Plus-Delta - Listen to our Customers

The lesson is that we need to listen to our customers, and this is a key component to creating customer evangelists. Many of the organizations that the authors profiled receive hundreds or over 1,000 emails a day from customers, filled with suggestions, complaints, and praise.

2. Napsterize Your Knowledge

A 19-year-old programmer and college dropout wrote a program in 1999 to help his roommate find and share MP3 music files, it allowed Web surfers to open their hard drives to other people and do the same. He named his program Napster, a nickname given to him years earlier. In 18 months the world of computing and knowledge sharing changed.

The concept is to share your knowledge, to communicate with your customers, which will help you to develop them as evangelists.

3. Build the Buzz

In the customer evangelism model, buzz is the pathway that helps shepherd new customers into your company's front-row pews.

Each wave of buzz provides your evangelists with another reason to extol you. Buzz helps people discover your business faster than traditional marketing programs. It helps you to develop relationships because prospects already have some knowledge of your product.

In some cases, buzz sells the product by itself.

4. Create Community

Encourage your customer evangelists to meet one another and build relationships. the approach to community that it should be an experience -- a happy and memorable one, not a frightening and forgettable one.

5. Bite-Size Chunks

How do you eat a cow? One bite at a time. It's how companies recruit new customer evangelists, too. Instead of selling customers on the whole kit of products, entice them first with a steak dinner. If they love the steak, they'll be back for the rump roast and later, the whole side of beef.

Break your product and service portfolio into bite-size chunks. They are small, easily consumed pieces of what makes your company valuable.

6. Create a Cause

Apple Computer borrowed religion-based evangelism and took it to work.

Apple Computer's secular evangelism launched a new computer that suffered from insufficient software, a lack of storage capacity, a small screen and a price point higher than its competition.

Yet the Mac could compete with lower-priced, richer-featured models made by IBM because Apple was selling a dream, not a computer. Apple sold the Macintosh dream, which was to improve everyone's productivity and creativity. It created an evangelism department and hired marketers to evangelize, evangelize, evangelize.

This is just an overview. I want to address these concepts in forthcoming posts, but I think some of the concepts are obvious.

At the least, it makes one think about "how do we do church."

Kierkegaard Carnival

Take a stroll over to The Cynic Librarian and take a look at the Kierkegaard Carnival III. Whether you are a fan of Soren or not, there is some interesting reading on this site.

For those who don't know, a carnival is a web article that contains links to articles found in other blogs covering a specific topic.

This site at the Cynic Librarian covers blogs that focus on Kierkegaard, while the Fourth Stone Hearth specializes in anthropology (see the latest here), as well as the Biblical Studies Carnival (most recently here), all of which are a movable feast.

And if that isn't enough, here is the Philosophers Carnival and the History Carnival (see here).

These carnivals show us some serious work being done in these fields that are not pedantic, fundamentalist, or pushing some agenda. I find some interesting info on these sites.

Is God more successful if there are other gods?

It may be that the very thing that we attempt so hard to achieve may be the one thing that causes religion (Christianity) to go stale.

Evangelicals in the United States believe that society is losing its moral moorings, that the family is under attack, and that the traditional consensus on (read American) religious values is being lost or at the least sublimated by competing forces (e.g., pluralism, secularism) in culture. The spiritual environment in Europe is often painted as the next step for the United States in the journey away from faith in God and the loss of religious values in society.

Most of this picture is now being called into question by practitioners of sociology of religion. The traditional view is, sociologists of religion say, that the relationship between religion and American society resulted in a postwar America as settled in a period of industrialism. The widespread assumption was that the social order was underpinned by religious values, which not only preserved the status quo, but promoted the well-being of all.

This view of religion and America was derived from the normative functionalism of Talcott Parsons, who stressed above everything the integrative role of religion. His view was that religion was a functional prerequisite central to the models of social systems and social action that Parson's elaborated. American society was shaped by the focus on what people believed in the various churches, and that religion's role was in the integration of society and in promoting or discouraging social change.

However, sociologists such as Rodney Stark, Roger Finke and others are discovering a different picture.

“The natural state of a religious economy is pluralism,” Stark said. “Typically, pluralism has been repressed in favor of religious monopolies.”

For example, Stark contends in his book Cities of God that contrary to popular belief, Christianity flourished in cities in the Roman Empire that had a sizable plurality of religions. The rural setting proved to be resistant to the new religion long after the urban areas of the empire had become predominantly Christian.

Stark maintains that the same is true of the United States. The colonial era was a time of low religious fervor. This did not change until the colonies became more tolerant of religious traditions. Eventually the U.S. Constitution opened up the religious marketplace, making it easier for new religious groups to flourish. This religious freedom impacted the rising fortunes of such groups as Baptists, Methodists, and Catholics, but also saw the rise of such religions as Mormonism and Jehovah's witnesses. It was also the time when evangelism and the missions movement grew in importance.

The reason for this, says Stark and others, is that the religious mind is rational, and religion is the behavior of rational, well-informed actors who choose to 'consume' various commodities. Thus the choice of religious affiliation is made in a rational way, with the potential member weighing costs and benefits of each possible choice before choosing the one that maximizes rewards, although not necessarily that it minimizes costs. This model is referred to as an religious economies view (see Stark's The Rise of Christianity, p193-195).

A religious economy consists of all the religious activity going on in any society, and consists of a market of current and potential customers, a set of religious firms seeking to serve that market, as well as a line of products to serve those customers.

An open religious economy is a religious pluralism that forces each religious body to appeal successfully to some segment of the religious market, or to slide into oblivion. When various religious bodies specialize, it becomes easier for religious "consumers" to find the best product for them.

In other words, it seems that God likes competition. He has never necessarily been the guarantor of the status quo; after all he is especially concerned about the welfare of the widow, orphan, and alien in the land.

A another point that Stark and others make is about the modern view of secularization. The traditional view is that modernity was caused a decline in religious behavior and belief, caused by an increased emphasis on science and rationality that leads people away from supernatural explanations. Proponents of this view point to the low rates of religious adherence in northern Europe as evidence of the process of secularization.

However, Stark and other proponents of the religious economies perspective disagree. They believe that the religious condition of northern Europe is largely a supply-side problem rather than a lack of demand. That is, lack of religious participation in much of Europe reflects highly regulated [religious] economies dominated by state supported churches, and that these are inefficient firms who do nothing to create demand.

To put it another way, the choice is either a state supported church that offers little to the people, or, a general lack of belief and apathy toward religion.

What does this mean to us? Basically, people here in Europe have no real alternatives or choices. Christianity gained ascendancy in the Roman world because it could offer answers and alternatives to the questions of life that people faced day to day. Zeus, Thor, and Isis couldn't help, but Yahweh could. It is almost a remake of the conflict between Ba'al and Yahweh on Mt. Carmel (1 Kings 18). God seems to like competition.

It would seem, then, that our task is not to make Christianity the ascendant religion or the guarantor of the status quo. Instead, we should proclaim to others that Christ offers some real alternatives to the life they live now, to the questions that they face, and the hope that they need.

Following Christ as a Journey

I came across this video by Bill Lizor, who works with young adult ministries out of the general board of discipleship of the United Methodist Church, entitled Prodigal Son vs Joseph & Jacob Paradigms. The focus of the clip is how do we view our journey of faith as we follow Christ. The clip is 15 minutes long, but worth a view...




This is not the first time I've encountered this theme. The best picture of this metaphor of biblical discipleship is explicated very nicely in James W. McClendon, Jr.'s Ethics, volume 1 of his Systematic Theology. (See a nice narrative about McClendon here).

McClendon's goal is to find the "momentum that carries Scripture's story forward." He captures this in three motifs: The Way, Watch-care, and Witness.

The Way focuses on the idea that the earliest motif found in Scripture is the idea of a band of travelers, e.g., "My father was a homeless Aramaean who went down to Egypt..." (Deut. 26:5). This carries through Scripture with the idea that the people of God are refugees and wanderers, looking for their home.

The journey continues in the New Testament. The incarnation of Jesus in the gospels understands Jesus as the way, the truth, and the life. Seen in this light, God's command becomes highway directions for life, and the journey of Jesus to the cross is one that every disciple must follow.

McClendon ties in the remaining two motifs of Watchcare and Witness by saying that:

Watch-care is the awareness of fellow travelers on this way who need our watchful care over their own journey,...

and...

The divine gift of Witness is to those who are not (yet) on the Way.

That is why the clip above resonates with me.

We've too often seen the journey of faith from the aspect of the Prodigal Son, with the focus on the younger son as someone outside (the other) the church, marginalized, without God. What McClendon posits, and Lizor points out, our story (or journey) is marked continually by the presence of God in our midst. The stories of Jacob and Joseph show this very clearly; the story of the Prodigal Son does not.

I think we need to rethink our approach to the Christian life. For example, how would this approach affect our evangelism? Our approach to spiritual formation?

Unity or Swarm? (Musings on a thought in process)

I recently wrote a post dealing with the idea of Swarm Theory (see here), and how it pertains to the body of Christ.

The idea of Swarm Theory is that the sum total of the individuals is greater than that of the whole. Individuals all have a function, but it is understood in the context of the need of the whole colony.

It also appears that the interaction of the individuals in making a decision is key to the well-being of the colony.

I made the suggestion that maybe we need to think of the body of Christ less in terms of modern management theory, managing a bunch of people meeting together in one place, and more as a colony. With all the emphasis that the writers of the New Testament put on the collective that is the body of Christ, the current mindset about leadership in the church seems a little thick-headed. Most of it is centered on the individual, and not on the group (or swarm).

What got me thinking about this topic again was this blog, Daily Reflections, by Al Fritsch, S.J. It is written from an ecumenical perspective, and is fairly typical of the ecumenical mindset, especially as it pertains to the goals and purposes of Christianity. It is not that it is wrong or liberal, it's just that I don't think they get it.

The reason I say that is, I attend an Ecumenical church here in France. We have people from the UK, US, Nigeria, Kenya, Canada, China, Germany, and France (and elsewhere). The common thread is that we all seek to follow and worship Christ. I don't know if there is any other common thing or sense of unity that would bind us together as a group as we are now.

This is what Fritsch has to say:

A sense of unity is needed everywhere in the world, from the unity of family, to that of citizens working together, to our country and to our world. Division is part of the breaking away that began in the departure from the Garden of Eden. On the other hand, God is One, yet there is diversity in unity. We are being challenged to recreate that unity in our broken world while respecting our individual uniqueness. It is all the more reason to have a mission of ecumenism where conflicting and divided factions can overcome their differences and, while diverse, can be united. This is a far greater challenge than that of hoping to be monolithic, or only allowing one person to speak for and be the "family" or the "country." We do not want the autocrats or the domineering type, only those with a singleness in purpose and yet distinctness in person. Is this not the need of a healthy democracy, a cooperative team, and of a functional family all wrapped into one?

I can appreciate Fritsch's sentiments, but what is he saying in his post?

The concept of unity is prevalent in Fritsch's post, but he doesn't say much about how we achieve that unity. Rather, is the unity of the body of Christ what we are to focus on? This theme assumes that we can achieve an organic unity, and if people turn their minds to the task of unity, we will soon have a bunch of people that are moving toward a common goal through related and relevant tasks. I am not convinced.

The point with Swarm Theory is that the focus is not on the goal (e.g., unity), but on the process of how that goal is achieved. We are not called so much to achieve unity, but to have unity. The focus is on the process and not on the goal.

In fact, I don't think unity is the right word. Which is why I like the word swarm. A swarm can have a life of it's own, but at the same time it is made up of individuals, acting on their own volition, in concert with the community.

What does this process look like in the life of the church? The process is, then, that as the life and ministry of Christ is spread out through the community of Christ's people through and by the sought-out presence of the Spirit, we become a group of people who act responsibly, which then brings wholeness and Shalom to the group (swarm). The focus isn’t on me, it is on the body of Christ. The life and ministry of Christ, as evidenced by the working of the Spirit through the gifts and fruit of the Spirit, works itself out through the lives of the individuals in the body of Christ (colony).

We become more conformed to the image of Christ, and as we are transformed, we seek to act in concert with the community to seek the goal of the body of Christ. The goal is eschatological, but lived out here and now.

What I've Learned (at least from Tom Peters...)

This is what I’ve learned from Tom Peters, or at least from his web site.

Know Who You Are.

Know Why You Are Here.

Know How You Are Unique.

Know How You Can Make a Difference.

Know Who Cares.

Know Whether Or Not You Care.

Not a bad place to begin. Of course, as Ben Witherington says, remember that you are unique --just like everyone else.