Rohit Bhargava had a great post a few weeks back where he argued that “Customer Satisfaction Doesn’t Matter.”
His basic point was that people expect to be satisfied, but satisfaction alone isn’t going to be enough to light a fire, or as I call it turn marketing from matches to gasoline.
He challenges us to give your brand a “personality” and whether that brand gives people a “sense of belonging and participation” that makes them unlikely to switch no matter what.
As it relates to Community Driven Marketing, there’s a critical idea here, which is when you are in the stage of cultivating your Raving Fans, what can you do to give them that sense of belonging.
This answer that is evolving for me and which may seem counter-intuitive is to make it more difficult for people to join.
Now that we live in a Facebook era where I can easily click a link and “become a fan” of pretty much anything, the actual value of being a Fan can be cheapened.
Besides, you don’t want Fans, you want Raving Fans.
And Raving Fans are willing and ready to go the extra mile.
Plus, they don’t want pretenders in their midst.
They want other hardcore fans with whom they can share their passion.
Put up some barriers, make them work for it. You may get fewer overall, but on the Passion-o-meter, which is really at the core of CDM if you think about it, you’ll get a higher reading overall.
Someday, we’ll come up with a way to measure an individual’s passion for a brand (and maybe Net Promoter Score is the way to do that, now that I’m thinking about it) and we will track the average passion of our community as the metric that matters.
Something like Total Passion Volume/# of Raving Fans.