Not Just Preaching to the Choir: Marketing expert Ben McConnell

Marketing expert Ben McConnell shares tips on how to get customers to spread the word.

By Christine LaFave, Associate Editor -- Restaurants & Institutions, 6/18/2007

On the Church of the Customer blog he writes with fellow customer-loyalty researcher Jackie Huba, Ben McConnell muses on everything from customer-created-advertising contests to the science behind brainstorming in the shower. But the underlying message—one he has sermonized to Starbucks and Microsoft, among other big-name corporations—is that companies must learn to make customers their best marketers. “Customer evangelism” is the term McConnell and Huba coined for the idea.

Having recently wrapped up a tour promoting the pair’s book “Citizen Marketers: When People are the Message” (Kaplan Business, 2006) and now preparing for a move from Chicago to the warmer, possibly weirder atmosphere of Austin, Texas, McConnell shares thoughts on generating buzz, blogging and the all-important customer conversation.

What is a customer evangelist, and why is he or she so important?

A customer evangelist is someone who not only buys from you on a regular basis or attends your restaurant regularly, but they believe in the restaurant; they believe in the proprietor so much that they become a volunteer member of the sales force and do everything in their power to ensure the continued success of the restaurant. And they’re important because they are probably in many cases leading authorities or opinion shapers of their networks—their friend networks, their family networks, people at their jobs—and can be pretty influential buzz-spreaders about what makes a restaurant great or what makes a business great and why people should actually go there.

What do you think was the tipping point in the move to “citizen marketing”?

I don’t think that it’s easy to specify a point in time other than to say there’s so much competition now. There’s competition for time in everything, whether it’s sporting events, whether it’s kids’ time and all their activities that they’re involved in, [or whether it’s] television. Because there’s so much competition now for people’s time, what people are saying about your business is now becoming even more important than it ever was before. And that’s due also in part to the explosive growth of the amount of media out there, so whether it’s cable TV or radio, now the Web and YouTube and MySpace, this niche-ification of media is fractionalizing people’s attention spans, so word of mouth has never really been more important than it is right now.

Where do restaurants trip themselves up in terms of customer-driven marketing?

I think word of mouth is probably the lifeblood for almost every restaurant in the world. Where I think restaurants often fail or fail to recognize what they could be doing better is [in not] focusing on one particular aspect of their business that will cause people to talk, that will get people buzzing about something. So for instance, a restaurant that has an eight-page menu of food, you’re diluting, probably, an opportunity there for something for people to talk about, whether it’s a particular dish, or the décor, or the service or something like that. This honing in on something that is going to be so remarkable to cause people to talk is really the missing aspect for so many restaurants. And then the second thing that restaurants, I think, very often miss out on, and I can say this from being a 5-night-a-week restaurant patron, is that especially for restaurants that I go to on a regular basis, they don’t know who I am. They don’t say, “Hey, we’ve seen you here before,” whether or not they keep my name in the database. But just recognizing me, and making just that extra half-step of effort, saying “What was your name again?” “Well, it’s Ben McConnell.” “You know, yeah, that’s right, I thought I recognized you, welcome back!” And then making a note to then say my name or remember me or remember my party, remember something about me. And establishing that emotional connection is critical to creating customer evangelists because customer evangelists believe in people, not just brands.

Should everyone be blogging?

McConnell: I think everyone who’s looking for an advantage in some aspect of their business [should blog]. [There are] huge advantages for someone who’s blogging. And what blogging allows you to do, first of all, is to establish relationships, kind of one-to-one relationships, if you will, with people who are interested in what you do. I know that some of the food blogs [on the Web] are monstrous—100,000 subscribers, people who are doing recipes or people who are blogging about their food experiences … People who read blogs are typically early adopters, they’re buzz-spreaders, so there can be a real advantage of blogging about your life as a restaurant entrepreneur, or as a chef, or as somebody in the business. I think there was a while back somebody who was blogging about their experiences—they were blogging anonymously—about being a waiter in New York City, and, I mean, people were talking about that everywhere … Blogging gives you that advantage to really build a platform, the platform of your fans, the people who want to go to the restaurant on a regular basis, people who are fans of the chef, people who are fans of the entrepreneur, and that, again, goes back to building those evangelists, establishing the relationship, that emotional connection, because the person who is blogging is sharing something of themselves. … People are talking about you.

Who are the bloggers who are doing it right doing?

They are blogging regularly. And regularly means at least two or three times a week. They are writing from an authentic place, which means that they are not writing promotional copy; they’re not writing marketing copy; they’re writing as if they’re writing a letter to a friend. So that makes it more authentic, and of course letters to friends may have typos, and they’re not perfect, and so there’s another level of authenticity. And then I think what they’re also doing right is that they’re very passionate and focused around a specific subject matter. They’re not blogging one day about politics and the next about business and the next day about the new gadget that they bought. They’re pretty focused on a very specific subject matter. So it’s this niche-ification mentioned earlier, this very kind of keyword-focused writing if you will, that makes the blogger’s work that much more findable by Google. And then I think the last thing that they do is they reference a lot of bloggers who are blogging about similar stuff, so that they are kind of establishing a network of kinship and camaraderie and knowledge-building, and then those people kind of support one another and help rise everyone’s boat in terms of ranking and findability.

What do you think of McDonald’s Corp.’s launch of the Moms’ Quality Correspondents blog?

I just came across that. And from what I saw about it, it looked pretty good. Inviting moms to kind of be quality correspondents and citizen consumer reporters? Yeah, that I think is a really good example of the fifth “P” [of marketing] of inviting customers to become participants, become these volunteers. It’s not really secret shoppers; it’s not-so-secret shoppers … It’s not this one-way media anymore. It’s really more participatory, back-and-forth, and so, yeah, really good on McDonald’s part, I’m glad to see it.

You’ve said on the Church of the Customer blog that sometimes when negative comments are posted about a brand online, other people will rally to a brand’s defense. So, particularly in looking at the McDonald’s blog, even when negative comments are made, blogging is something that pays off—this isn’t something that hurts a brand?

People are smart enough to realize when things go wrong, or that, you know, McDonald’s is not exactly making the world skinnier. I mean, everybody knows that. It’s really now up to McDonald’s to establish stronger relationships with people who believe in it, and then also to work with these people and listen to them—especially moms, moms are huge purchase influencers—and for them now to be listening to these core members of their audience and now to kind of have a greater level of participation [in] their future’s strategic direction, whether that is in dietary habits or the way that they advertise to kids or whatever the case is. It’s no longer just in the hands of the advertising agencies or the marketing agencies of what a brand or what an organization should do. Now they have a much greater voice from the customers coming in and influencing their future decisions. And that’s powerful.

For further reading, Jackie Huba posted this foodservice-focused reflection on competing with a brand at the top of its game.