Tips on helping brand advocates generate shareable stories

Editor’s note: Terry Vavra and Doug Pruden are partners at research firm Customer Experience Partners. Vavra is based in Allendale, N.J. Pruden is based in Darien, Conn.

In a post for our Customer Experience Insights blog earlier this year, we described how a small furniture company in Maine turns 35 customers each year into advocates. It’s a great story but some readers responded that the Moser Cabinetmaker story seemed too small and too involved to be relevant to their businesses. We took that as a challenge to uncover examples at the other end of the spectrum. So, consider how toymaker Lego, with millions of customers and tens of thousands of potential advocates, gets its customers talking and sharing information about the brand. Lego does it all by providing insider information to its most active customers.

Adults and children alike build some incredible structures out of Lego blocks but few can match the scale and scope of the construction seen on the company’s TV commercials. So Lego decided to use the envy of these admittedly grandiose creations to stimulate customer communication. It offered loyal customers and fans a look behind the scenes at how Lego Town has been created and how those commercials are produced. And they spread the word.

But again, this Lego story could be considered just another isolated example that probably doesn’t match the situation in which you find yourself. So, more broadly, what does it take to stimulate advocacy and get your customers communicating more frequently and more positively about your brand? The table stakes certainly include offering a quality product with strong perceived value and providing a good customer experience. But satisfaction is just the starting point. In most cases activating customers requires a brand to:

• create emotional motivation;
• direct potential advocates to, or provide them with, opportunities to communicate; and
• arm the happy customers with stories and content to share – like Lego’s behind-the-scenes videos.

But what kind of content should you give them? There are several different ways to think about content that will stimulate action:

Some suggest customers share content that they feel helps others, entertains those around them, lets the satisfied customer look smarter, allows them to appear as insiders receiving special insights or simply gives the happy customer the opportunity to be the center of attention and own the interaction.

Another explanation of what drives sharing of content comes from Wharton Professor Jonah Berger in his book Contagious. He writes that sharable content must provide social currency; triggers; emotion; a public presence that can be imitated; practical value; and stories.

Put more simply, the process of content-creation is a way to aid your potential advocates in shaping and sharing content that allows them to help others to laugh, to learn or to love.