Creating Raving Fans for Your Brand

Is it possible to create raving fans for your brand and that too with not too much budget?

Of course. In fact, the more budget you have, the more difficult it becomes to create raving fans.

How does one go about building these raving fans?

“Create One Fan At a Time”.

In all our eagerness, we forget that this is the only way you can make fans out of your customers.

It helps to have a great product/service that adds value to your customers’ lives. As Seth Godin said, people do not buy a product or service. They buy into a promise – a promise you make to the customer.  It doesn’t matter if your product or service is competing in a space as a commodity. You can still make fans of your product.

We need to realize that people inherently want to be a fan. They want to talk about their experiences to their family, friends and their social circles. Now, the only thing that we need to do is to give them something to talk about.

So, some thoughts/ideas that you could consider are:

–       Pick one customer per day per employee to delight. This can be a totally random selection or a carefully thought out selection.

• For example, if you are a sales executive, you can decide to pick one of your customers (individuals) and do something unique and unexpected for them.
  • Send a hand-written note to them thanking for their continued support or
  • Send them a book that you found interesting or
  • Send them a bouquet of flowers or
  • send their boss a hand-written note highlighting something that your customer did that caught your fancy.
• If you are a customer service executive, go out of your way to service the 2^nd customer that contacts you.

–       Make it easy for that customer to share the excitement with his friends, family and social networks.

–       Make it easy for you to share the excitement within your social network. Take pictures, quote, shoot a video or simply record a conversation. Then share this with your network of other customers, suppliers and employees.  Make them look like a “HERO”.

Instill the discipline in every employee to do just this bit; every single day.

Now the question is how do you inspire your employees to do this. Just asking them would not help. Forcing them to do something by way of implementing a policy or a process might work for the short term, but will be difficult to sustain.

This is where you as a leader need to do the same with your customers (employees). Delight an employee every single day. Make it their while to be a part of this wonderful culture.

Send flowers, chocolates, hand-written notes, videos, posters and surprise one employee, every other day.

It takes inspired employees to create raving fans. Do your bit and see them work their magic on your customers.

Do you agree with this approach? Do you think this will create raving fans for your product or service? Let us know your thoughts by responding to this post.

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PS: Ken Blanchard talking about Creating Raving Fan

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7no3478m29k]