Energizing Your Audience With the Groundswell

Imagine that you're a marketing specialist at a company and you are looking to spread brand awareness. Some organizations spend heavily on traditional television advertisements while others utilize social media to listen and speak to their consumers. All of those options have their benefits and drawbacks, along with this next strategy which I am going to tell you about in detail. . . . 

Energizing

This strategy is a marketer's dream! Companies can tap into the groundswell to energize their fans to start spreading the word of their products and services. Once their consumers are energized, the job falls on them, rather than the company, to market the brand. Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff claim in their book, Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, that when political candidates get their supporters riled up and spreading the word, they are successfully "energizing their base" (p. 130). Believe it or not, this same concept can be applied to companies and their customers. Energizing a customer base is a powerful way for companies to use the groundswell to boost their business. 

Photo: Google Play

Brands should try to energize their most enthusiastic customers since they are most likely to "spread the word" without even being told to do so. There are several techniques companies can use to energize their enthusiastic customers (see below). 

1. Use ratings and reviews: These can tap into consumers' enthusiasm greatly. This strategy actually works best for retail companies and other companies with direct consumer contact.

2. Create a community to energize your customers: This works best if your customers are truly passionate about your product and have an affinity for each other, especially in business-to-business settings.

3. Participate in and energize online communities of your brand enthusiasts: this strategy worked particularly well for Lego (see below) as it energized its most enthusiastic adult customers.

Photo: MY-PV

Tormod Askildsen, the senior director of business development at the Lego Group, sought to entice consumers to view Legos as creative building tools, not just toys. The consumers he chose to focus on were the adult buyers, who made up 5-10% of Lego's business. Lego decided to create a program called the Lego Ambassadors, which built relationships with the most enthusiastic adult fans of Lego (AFOLs) while helping Lego learn whats going on in the highly connected AFOL world. Currently, the Lego Ambassadors get information from the company on products coming out and then spread that information to their personal networks. There are only about 25 Lego Ambassadors tasked by the company to spread brand awareness. This limited number of people energizes Lego fans to step up and become spokespeople for the company's message. Lego even pays its ambassadors in legos which saves the company money while pleasing the spokespeople greatly. The initiative has a tremendous impact on the company's business. It increases sales by $500,000 due to all of the interactions the ambassadors are having with enthusiastic consumers who spend around $1,000 on Lego products each year. Ultimately, the case of Lego shows the impact energizing can have on an enthusiastic fan base, as it allows companies to utilize the groundswell in a way that does not require them to market their products themselves. 

Photo: YouTube

Energizing is a more powerful, but at the same time riskier technique than the traditional listening and talking strategies. This is because it involves dealing directly with the people who are going to talk about your brand and hopefully "spread the word." Lee and Bernoff provide five techniques to help brands create the most effective energizing strategies (see below).

1. Figure out if you want to energize the groundswell: 

Energizing works well for companies with customers who are enthusiastic about the company and its products. If you are a company that sells commodities like copier paper or memory chips that are available from multiple suppliers and don't have emotional connections, your customers will most likely not want to talk about your product. Instead, you might be better off trying some listening strategies to figure out your customers' attitudes towards your products. 

2. Check the social technographics profile of your customers: 

You must research to determine how active and in what numbers your customers are participating in the groundswell. If you're selling smartphones, a technology-savvy item, then your customers are likely to be heavily involved in the groundswell. Meanwhile, if you're selling mattresses, then your customers may not be as heavily involved in the groundswell so it may not be worth starting a community after all. 

3. Ask yourself, "What is my customer's problem?"

Communities generally don't form around the products themselves. Take Lego as an example: the customers weren't talking about Legos, rather, they were talking about building Legos and, in turn, provided the company with feedback about the products. Additionally, the Harley Owners Group is a community created by Harley-Davidson (see below). According to Pat Hong, this group of Harley-Davidson riders bonds over the brand as being a way of life and part of their culture. Harley-Davidson built this brand community for their riders to connect and engage with people online. The creation of this community energizes the members to share their experiences and feelings about the brand to others who are curious about their membership in the Harley Owners Group. 

4. Pick a strategy that fits your customers' social technographics profile and problems

Ratings and reviews make sense for retailers and other direct sellers. Communities make sense for other companies such as Lego. When deciding, companies must take into account the costs of community design, moderation, as well as marketing. All of these things can easily run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. 

5. Don't start unless you can stick around for the long haul

Communities require constant adjustment to grow and become more rewarding. So, if you seek to start one, be sure that you are prepared to dedicate the time and effort to manage it for a while. 

So, I'm going to ask you once again to imagine yourself as a marketing specialist at a company. Let's say you already have several enthusiastic customers who are active on the internet. If this is the case, then energizing might be the best strategy for you to use to spread brand awareness. There is nothing more powerful than the thoughts and opinions of consumers, and organizations can take advantage of this phenomenon to utilize the groundswell to its full potential.