BJ Bueno

Marketing used to be fairly straightforward: Throw money at advertising in order to influence people to buy your products and services. If your advertising campaign was decent, the resulting sales outweighed the cost of advertising. If your campaign was excellent, your business grew like a wildflower.

Fast forward to today: The customer is now in control. Media fragmentation from hundreds of cable networks, millions of Web sites. mobile devices in every hand, and social media make it more difficult to reach the general market. And even if you do reach your potential customers, they don’t have to listen, and probably won’t. What’s an intelligent marketer to do?

Five ways to tap into your most profitable customers

1) Understand what branding is really all about.

Management guru Peter Drucker explained that the purpose of business is to create a customer.¹ In contemporary marketing, your job is to create a repeat customer who is likely to build a relationship with you and buy from you year after year. In order to accomplish this magnificent feat, you must develop what’s called a brand. A brand is an association that a customer has with certain feelings and images represented by a company, not simply a company name or a logo. You cannot create a brand by yourself because branding is a co-authored experience between you and your customers.

When a group of customers has strong associations between your brand and a desired feeling, the brand has “equity” it can leverage in order to grow.

2) Focus on your best customers.

The secret ingredient to a sustainable enterprise is called Brand Lovers: The customers who love you the most. Brand Lovers emotionally connect with what you do and they want to celebrate who you are. Their connection with your brand is so strong that they often don’t consider doing business with anyone else. Apple’s Mac users, for example, don’t consider purchasing a PC. To them, there is no alternative.

At the very least, your Brand Lovers choose you more often than your competitors. For many companies, the best customers drive a significant part of their profitability—both through purchasing and by acting as evangelists to convert other people into customers—and yet the business generally knows very little about them. Basic market research does not offer you insights into your best customers. The true drivers of choice for your best customers are emotional connections to your brand.

Certain brands have a legion of Brand Lovers – we call them Cult Brands. In a Cult Brand like Apple, CEO Steve Jobs knew he was selling a unique way of life that’s intelligent, creative, and special—he wasn’t just selling computers, digital music players, and mobile phones. Oprah turned herself into a Cult Brand by being is far more than just another talk show host: real, honest and loving, Oprah radiates hope and the promise of a better tomorrow.

3) Identify your Brand Lovers.

Perhaps your enterprise doesn’t have Brand Lovers like Apple or Oprah, but you do have your best customers – customers who give you repeat business and who may tell their friends and colleagues about your brand.

So how do you find your best customers? Actually, they often find you. They congregate at your stores. They send you e-mails and call you from time to time to tell you how great you’re doing. Some customers might even blog about your products or services or create videos and post them on social media.

On the financial side, if you maintain a customer database, you can sift through and determine who purchases from you with the greatest frequency – and for the longest time span.

What if none of the above helps you locate them? Then get creative. Carefully crafted surveys might point you in the right direction or you may need to hire a firm to help you identify who your best customers are.

4) Get to know your Brand Lovers.

Talk to them. Find out why they keep doing business with you. Don’t be afraid to ask. But listen carefully.

Look for the intangible clues that make you unique in your customers’ eyes. Uncover the emotional effect you have on them.

5) Serve your Brand Lovers better than anyone else.

There are always ways to grow your business by embracing your best customers. The answers don’t have to be complex. For World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), offering free meatball subs before the show increased the love among participants. Skaters were ostracized by most businesses, but Vans listened to its customers and gave them what they wanted. Harley-Davidson developed leather jackets for its riders.

The role of marketing is to create the future today, which requires you to know what your customers will want tomorrow. The only way to anticipate the future needs of your customers is to understand who they are, talk to them and listen. Then, you can create the future together.

Onward

A final word of advice: Don’t try to be all things to all people. You don’t need everyone to like you. You only need your Brand Lovers who already love you. Remember, your best customers are the lifeblood for growing a sustainable business. By learning to understand their needs and serving them better than anyone else, you can build a legion of brand loyalists that catapult your business growth without throwing more money at directionless advertising campaigns.

Welcome to the New World of Marketing!

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 Why do people love this brand? Why are they so loyal to it? What does this brand mean to them? Why? Why? Why!

An interesting thing starts happening after you’ve asked a lot of questions for a long enough period of time. Not only do you start getting some really good answers, but you begin to see patterns and similarities between the responses that you receive.

This was exactly what happened in the dozens of interviews conducted. Clear patterns emerged. Although each of the nine brands was clearly different, their individual formulas for Cult-Branding success shared many of the same core ingredients.

These seven points won’t tell you everything there is to know about Cult Branding, but they will give you a nice overview and practical framework to utilize in your own marketing endeavors. Think of this list as your indispensable “Cult Branding Cliff Notes.” Here they are. Read them. Use them!

#1 – The Rule of Social Groups
Consumers want to be part of a group that’s different.

#2 – The Rule of Courage
Cult-Brand inventors show daring and determination.

#3 – The Rule of Fun
Cult Brands sell lifestyles.

#4 – The Rule of Human Needs
Listen to the choir and create Cult-Brand evangelists.

#5 – The Rule of Contribution
Cult Brands always create customer communities.

#6 – The Rule of Openness
Cult Brands are inclusive.

#7 – The Rule of Freedom
Cult Brands promote personal freedom and draw power from their enemies.

Learn more about each of the The Seven Rules of Cult Brands.

Brands fail for one primary reason: instead of building a brand some people love, companies build brands no one hates.

Most marketers live in a world where they are constantly searching for the flashy, the instant—in short, the trivial.

We must recognize that brands don’t belong to marketers. Brands belong to the customer. The customer’s embrace is the only vote that counts, yet it is constantly ignored by strategies that place our products and services as the “goal” rather than the means to satisfy our customer’s needs, wishes, and fantasies.

Successful brands embrace their customers by anticipating basic and spiritual human needs.

Success creates magnetic brands—Cult Brands.

Why Cult Branding Works

Cult Brands aren’t just companies with products or services to sell. To many of their followers, they are a living, breathing surrogate family filled with like-minded individuals. They are a support group that just happens to sell products and services. Picture a Cult Brand in this context, and you’ll have a much better understanding of why these brands all have such high customer loyalty and devoted followers.

That’s how Cult Branding works.

Society only helps to accelerate the drivers behind its success.

Why are certain brands so important and meaningful to some customers that they feel compelled to tell the world about them? What makes them go that extra mile?

Understanding human behavior—what motivates people to do certain things and act certain ways—is at the very core of successful marketing.

This is where the work of the late, great psychologist Abraham Maslow comes in.

Maslow postulated that we humans have an ascending order of needs and used a hierarchy of needs to prioritize them. At the bottom levels of the pyramid are our physiological needs, which include basic things like food, shelter, and clothing that we all need to survive.

At progressively higher levels in Maslow’s Hierarchy are the needs for safety and security, social interaction, and self-esteem. At the very top is self-actualization, a term Maslow coined to describe the ultimate human need to learn, grow, and reach one’s full potential as a person.

We all desire on some level to self-actualize, both to be at peace with ourselves and to try to be the best we can be. As humans, we are drawn to people, places, groups, causes, companies, and, ultimately, brands that we believe can help us towards our ultimate goal of self-actualization and total fulfillment.

Why the Hierarchy of Needs Is a Crucial Tool for Branding?

Perhaps the most important thing to take away from Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs is his theory that all human beings start fulfilling their needs at the bottom levels of the pyramid.

In short, we fill our low physiological needs first. Higher needs like safety, social interaction, and esteem basically do not exist at this point. Logically, survival comes first.

However, once an individual has satisfied his or her lower level needs, the higher level needs become influential in motivating behavior.

As Maslow notes time and time again in his work, “Man is a perpetually wanting animal.”

Maslow’s writings break down the underlying drivers of human behavior and decision making. Maslow never mentions the phrase “brand loyalty” in his books, but his Hierarchy of Human Needs and concepts like self-actualization are key to understanding why consumers consistently choose one brand over another and enjoy such strong relationships with them.

So, why is fulfilling higher level needs so integral to building strong customer loyalty? What’s the connection, you ask? The answer is, higher level needs influence future human behavior much greater than lower level needs. It is the brands that can fulfill human needs on the higher levels of the hierarchy that become irreplaceable in the mind of the consumer.

That’s what customer loyalty is really all about: being irreplaceable.

True customer loyalty is not only about getting a customer to consistently choose your brand over another. It’s for that same customer to always believe (and then go tell the world) that your company’s brand has no equal!

This article is an excerpt from The Power of Cult Branding.

Most companies try to build brands that no one will hate instead of brands some people will love. Most marketers live in a world where they are constantly searching for the flashy, the splashy—in short, the trivial, often-meaningless brouhaha that has very little to do with the core of the brand.

Cult Brands understand that their brands belong to the customers. Only the customer’s voice counts. A successful Cult Brand embraces its customers by anticipating their basic human and spiritual needs. As a consequence, Cult Brands achieve a level of customer loyalty unprecedented in traditional business.

To help illustrate, let’s map various brands on The Loyalty Continuum:

No Brand Land: No Brand Land is wrought with challenges, and this is a place most small businesses find themselves. Companies in No Brand Land are often stuck working in their business rather than on their business, and they don’t ever develop a solid idea of who they are, what they offer or stand for, or how they can improve their customer experience. These companies tend to change what they offer—and who they are—at the first sniff of a new or different (often perceived as “better”) opportunity, and they don’t have any goals related to the customer relationship; their business is typically “all about them”—their service offering, the “extra buck” they can make, or the new challenge they want to conquer (without regard for how it affects their niche in the marketplace.

Leaky Brand: These companies have set up the basic identifiers: they have a name, a recognizable logo, a tagline, and perhaps a few other pieces of business collateral (brochures, etc.), but ultimately, they haven’t discovered ways of being distinct, memorable, or necessary to their customers.

Average Joe Brand: Here we enter the world of large companies who have marketing departments that actively advertise and sell to their customers. They often take their brand messages in too many directions, which dilutes their brands because of inconsistency and confusion to their customers.

Iconic Brands: Iconic brands are all around us. We shop them and love them—they are part of our culture. They’re easily recognized by their logo. These brands usually spend a lot of marketing money and are constantly monitoring their image and public perception. These iconic brands are top of mind brands and often dominate market share of a category: McDonalds, Microsoft, Dell, Coke, Pepsi, and American Airlines. Many national retail chains have loyal customers, but they don’t occupy an irreplaceable position in the consumers’ hearts.

Cult Brands: Cult Brands are in class of their own as they have mastered the art of building lasting and meaningful relationships with their customers. In the world of Cult Brands, the customer is not only king, but is part of the family. When you buy a Harley Davidson motorcycle, you are not just getting a bike—you’re getting a membership into The Club. These brands have no competition. They rule their customer-defined category. There are no substitutes for Oprah, Vans, Linux, Southwest Airlines, IKEA, Harley-Davidson, Apple, Star Trek, Jimmy Buffett, and Volkswagen Beetle. These brands are profitable even in the most adverse market conditions because of the powerful relationships they’ve forged with their customers.