Creating Customer Evangelists - Book Review & comment

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Repeat customers are NOT customer evangelists. Evangelists are customers who extol your products virtues and your company they: Purchase you products as gifts, ignore small dips in customer services, but let you know. They provide unsolicited feedback and suggestions. They love you!

The following are the tenants of Creating Customer Evangelists:

1. Customer + Delta – continual customer feedback


2. Napster-ize your knowledge – give away your knowledge


3. Build the Buzz – Spreading the word


4. Create community – Bring customers together


5. Make bite-size chunks – Make smaller products to get customers to bite


6. Create a cause – make your company about more than your revenue
   

Traditional marketing (the 5Ps: product, placement, positioning, price and promotion) is changing and the idea of needing to beat a customer over the head 9 times or more for a message to be heard, just annoys people. This is marketing from the 1960s. The 5Ps and the 9x advertising message assault are ancient and outdated approaches to marketing.

IN CONTEXT
Take this in the context of The Long Tail. The old 5P approach is an approach is designed to build blockbusters not create niche market winners. Niche marketing follows the tenants above for Creating Customer Evangelists.