How brands create high-performance customers
This is another installment in our continuing series to breathe new life into brands. We start by flying right off a wave.
The brand goal: create high-performance customers
Yes, the goal of every brand is to create high-performance customers. Since your brand mission is to create the customers that will drive your business forward, the more active, high-performance customers you create, the farther your business can go. High-performance customers are just as important to your business as high performance employees. Strategically, they’re far more important to your brand than identity elements and media campaigns.
They add value back to the brand
Brands create high-performance customers so those customers can lead rich lives and add value back to the brand. We enable them, and they enable us. Together we ascend a delicious upward spiral, one that competitors can’t match. Creating high-performance customers thus becomes a strategic objective of the brand. The return value they contribute is the ultimate brand payoff.
In contrast, a brand that creates passive, low-performance customers is effectively creating a boat anchor for its business. Eventually, the business stops dead in the water, chained to a static base.
Defining “high-performance customer”
A high-performance customer is a customer who pushes the envelope of the product or service offered, and drives it to new applications and new uses. He or she is a customer who often creates new forms of meaning with the product or the brand, extending it and transforming it as they extend and transform themselves. This process can lead to a new brand context, or to an extended brand culture—and to additional levels of brand growth.
High-performance customers often interact with other customers and with the company, for feedback, tactical help and camaraderie. As they add new dimensions to the brand, they potentially create wider and/or deeper markets. Software mashups are a case in point, especially in the way those using Google maps have advanced the Google brand.
The high-performance customer is a close cousin to the “lead user” concept developed by MIT’s Eric von Hippel.
Competitive Advantage
Brands can use high-performance customers to help build competitive advantage. When a brand creates high-performance customers, the product gets better faster through customer initiative and innovation. These initiatives can translate into competitive advantage, especially as they uncover new product uses, under-served markets, or specialized market segments. (See the history of mountain bikes.) High-performance customers can be a source of real-time market research.
Brand Innovation
What you want from most from high-performance customers is brand innovation, new brand concepts and applications that you can assess and build back into your brand as structured platforms and programs. These will come from the edge, not the boardroom. While a skateboard maker would certainly want a major presence at championship events, the real fuel for its brand is found at the street.
High-performance customers differentiate your brand
High-performance customers can also help differentiate a brand. They can create new brand contexts, from the ground up. That’s what designers in desktop publishing did initially for Apple, and from that platform Apple now uses the arts as creative drivers for its brand. (Of course, a brand has to manage this process; it’s not a matter of brand laissez faire.)
Examples of high-performance customers
The best way to create high-performance customers is to help them create themselves. Give them the tools and the parts and the freedoms to create a free-flowing culture around your product or service. It will be their culture, not yours. Your brand is the catalyst and enabler. The goal is brand diversity, not brand homogeneity.
Some examples of high-performance customers:
Harley Davidson. Yes, biker dudes are high-performance customers. Since World War II they’ve torn into Harley bikes, reshaped and remixed them to fit their own nefarious suicidal glorious needs, and created a vibrant “chopper” culture in the process, almost all on their own. It’s this culture that buoys the Harley brand—and probably a few cable channels. The key elements: cheap, available parts, the freedom to tinker (and bend, smash and torch), and a basic product platform that just begged for individual flair. For a taste, start here.
Moleskine. The pricey carnet is another case of a simple platform that inspires customer interaction through its sheer portability, flexibility and utility. It enables its owners to record their thoughts, impressions, ideas and visualizations wherever they go, at the point of epiphany. You can see the Moleskine culture here and here. And here’s an incisive customer critique of a possible marketing misstep. (High-performance customers can save brands from marketing miscues; they’re good insurance.)
Flickr. Flickr didn’t start out as a photo site; its customers led it there. Now it’s much more than a photo site. It’s the global eye of a million visual contexts, with hundreds (thousands?) of angles, slices, accents and cultures embedded. The Flickr brand is a platform for universal visual expression. The more tools (such as tagging) that it provides for its customers, the more they thrive, and the more Flickr grows, in quality and scope.
To see what Flickr’s high-performance customers are doing, it’s often best to scan through the famed interestingness series, or the various pools, such as these on Italy, Rome and the Ancient World. Or visit someone like smallcaps who pushes photographic boundaries. High-performance customers are highly visible—and attract new members.
Creating high-performance customers
What kind of approach should a brand follow to create high performance customers? In general, if you give them the opportunity, they will come to you. They want the tools to enhance the product, and the experience. When a brand is structured as an innovation platform, the elements of a program to cultivate high-performance customers often fall into place. These include:
- Consider your brand as a team effort, with customers as partners and value co-creators in a shared mission.
- Ask the question: What is holding our customers back? (Your brand has the answers to move them forward.)
- Review the brand interactions that can help your customers (and your brand) develop new capabilities.
- Design and create your customers so they’ll have the freedoms to return maximum value back to the brand.
- Establish appropriate collaborative tools such as blogs, wiki’s, forums, user groups, workshops and conferences. (You can see what Dell [a late-comer] is doing with its Direct2Dell program.)
You’ll also need to shape your brand agenda with the freedoms for customer growth. For a long-term view of how high-performance customers fit into your brand strategy, see Brand evolution: from mark, to media, to means.
