The only path to profitable growth may lie in a company’s ability to get its loyal customers to become, in effect, its marketing department.

—Frederick F. Reichheld

Let’s begin our conversation with a question. What would you want your customers to be: satisfied or loyal to your brand? Some of you may want your customers to be satisfied because they would then invariably be loyal. Others might choose loyal customers because loyalty is a higher-grade benefit compared to satisfaction. If you ask Website Development Silverdale, we want neither!!

‘So, what do you want?’ We hear you ask.

We Yearn For Brand Advocates: 

Customers who are not just satisfied or loyal to the brand, but who shout from the rooftops to everyone who cares to listen about the great brand they are using.

A brand advocate is a loyal customer who creates buzz about the brand at almost every opportunity: both offline, by spreading the good word and online, by posting reviews, ratings and actual experiences.  Also, read “DELIVER A DELIGHTFUL CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE “

They possess the following qualities in varying degrees:

▪︎Strong loyalty towards the brand they    advocate.

▪︎Early adopters of new brands launched by the company.

▪︎Price-insensitive.

▪︎Source for new ideas and can be counted upon to work along with companies to co-create new offerings. ▪︎Unlikely to desert the brand when it faces reputation issues.

▪︎Extend support to the brand for a long period, if not for life

Are Customers Influenced by Brand Advocates?

Many people feel that companies only highlight the positive features of a product in advertisements. But Website Development silverdale believes actual customers have no axe to grind and are likely to post balanced reviews.

Not surprisingly, paid advertisement lacks credibility and pales in comparison to the power of real consumers’ authentic reviews, ratings and actual experiences. Which is why there is a shift away from paid advertisements towards actual customers’ ratings, reviews and experiences. Simply put, buyers are predisposed towards being influenced by buzz: how fellow customers review and rate a brand.

Research Findings

Are there hard numbers to support these hypotheses?

Consider the findings from the Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey 2009 conducted on over 25,000 Internet users across fifty countries .

90 percent of people trust brand recommendations from people they know.

70 percent of people trust customer opinions posted online.

Only 24—62 per cent of people trust advertising.

Since then, this trend has gathered momentum. Nielsen’s 2012 report ‘Global Trust in Advertising’, which surveyed more than 28,000 respondents across fifty-six countries, concluded that 92 per cent of consumers trust ‘earned’ media—that is, reviews, ratings and recommendations from friends and family posted online—above all other forms of advertising.2

No wonder online consumer reviews are the second most trusted form of advertising with 70 per cent of global consumers that surveyed online indicating they trust this platform (an increase of 15 per cent in four years.)

We can sense another question popping up in your mind: Do actual customers show a tendency towards posting online?

Truth be told, older generations give it a miss, but the young adults armed with smart devices have embraced it and are expressing their opinions on anything and everything with fill gusto, watching gleefully as technology amplifies their voices until it reverberates across the globe.