Building Customer Loyalty is About Telling the Story

Building customer and constituent loyalty is not about how many pieces of mail, creative campaigns, or Facebook fans you can muster to make THEM more loyal to your brand. It is about creating campaigns that tell the story of the organization from the mouths of the people who are touched by what YOU do.

There are times when marketing professionals, companies, and organization get caught up in the “industrialization complex.” How can we send more postcards to get a higher level of response? How can we get 300,000 Facebook fans in order to ask for donations?

The problem is that marketing is now about two things:

1. Figuring out what makes that individual loyal to your brand. This is not what you THINK makes them loyal by demographic studies and random focus groups. It is about asking them and taking them through a process of the story.
2. Building platforms to not only make people loyal to your brand but for YOU (the company) to become more loyal to your customer.

This is a huge shift in the away from how communications professionals were taught to sell an idea or campaign. From the amount of cold calls to the mass mailing list… we have destroyed the idea of personalization… or the TRUE reason why people buy your product.

Now… however… we are shifting back to the land of people centric process where the idea of the personalized model is king… again.

Here is a presentation I gave on the art of personal branding and telling your story to the Canton Advertising Federation last night.