FreshNetworks Blog

Last week Helen and I had lunch with Richard Sedley from cScape; they work in similar areas to FreshNetworks and have similar views on customer engagement. Today I was at the launch of the book he has written with his colleague at cScape: Winners and Losers in a Troubled Economy. The book’s a great (and very timely) read and highlights six theses on digital customer engagement in a troubled economy. The slides below show what all of these are, but one overall message that I left with today was that customer engagement cannot be bought, it has to be built.

The conference presented a number of case studies about good (and one, anonymous, bad) examples of engaging customers online. From the ways in which Martha Stewart retained her strong online presence and customer loyalty despite her conviction and prison sentence to the ways that Greenpeace was able to run a campaign criticising Apple, a brand with a highly loyal customer base. In all of the examples cited, customers were engaged and remained loyal (even in difficult circumstances) because the brands had made an active and definite decision to build their engagement over time and deeply.

Martha Stewart had built a long and loyal customer base over many years and in the mid 1990s was running a brand that successfully engaged customers across print, TV and online. When things became more difficult and Stewart was convicted her there was much discussion about how this would imapct he highly successful media portfolio. In the end the strength of the relationships, built over time and across multiple platforms proved strong and her site continues to grow and have some of the most active forums and blogs of any corporate site.

Greenpease worked differently. They leveraged the strength of Apple’s customer base to build a positive campaign that empasised this strenght: We love Apple like you do. Help us make it green (see their campaign site: Green My Apple). Their research had shown Apple to be a very un-green manufacturer of computers and wanted to change this. Their approach was different to the traditional Greepeace one (summarised as Join us because we kick ass). This time Greepeace wanted to get Apple’s loyal customer base to do the campaigning for them. To use the fact that they were strongly loyal to Apple to get then to help change Apple’s approach (this could be summarised as Join us because we want you to kick ass!) The impact of the campaign was huge. The customer base Apple had spent ages to engage were campaigning with Greenpeace and Steve Job’s announced the arrival of a Green Mac by the end of 2008. See more details of success of Green My Apple on Nick’s blog, here.

These examples show the benefits and power of engaging with customers over time rather than on a one-off basis. They show how investing this time and effort to build customer engagement is much more powerful than just buying it in would ever be. Online methods allow both simpler and more creative ways to build such engagement, although not everybody gets it right; as those of us who were there today learnt!

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