allaboutadvocacy.com

When does the beguine begin?

I was in a meeting on the West coast this week.  The topic was advocacy (why are you not surprised?).   When the question was posed.

OK, not exactly in the way this blog post’s title suggests.  And, no, there was no rousing Cole Porter-styled big-band score you’d expect to go with it.  Or any fancy footwork a la Fred Astaire.  Just the bland illumination of ubiquitious PowerPoint.  And a spilled cup of H20.

The question was pretty straightforward in fact, and you don’t have to be a fan of the American Songbook to appreciate it: When does advocacy really start?

Here’s what was at issue.  Is advocacy, as the classic purchase funnel has it, the desired end state a marketer strives to achieve with a customer after she’s been acquired and has experienced the brand?  Is it about, then, creating programs that enlist customers to help sell to other ones?  So brand loyalty, ambassador and “friends and family” type programs.  This was essentially the POV of the questioner, and perhaps represents the view of other veteran marketers as, in effect, this is in large part the way advocacy programs have been created heretofore.

The on-the-other-hand was this.  Why not also see advocacy as not solely an end but a means?  For spreading postive word-of-mouth and recommendations on the path to purchase.  When consumers turn to colleagues, friends and family for information and advice as they form opinions and make decisions about what to buy or not to as the case may be.

This school of thought is rooted in some of the big shifts we’ve seen taking place in communications.  How individuals are increasingly looking to each other for advice and recommendations about products, services and brands, and less to  traditional institutions and authorities as a result.  How they tend to make decisions faster.  And how some, who are highly connected to others, are highly influential.  In some cases more so than traditional opinion leaders or influentials.  Full disclosure: yes, this is our POV at Weber Shandwick, and what we’ve seen in our research and work.  But we’re hardly a choir of one here.

So back to the question:  When does and should the beguine–that spirited dance (which is what a beguine apparently is according to wikipedia) between brand and consumer–really begin when it comes to advocacy? 

You should decide for yourself (naturally).   But there’s room enough for both views these days, if not the POV that there’s now a continuum of advocacy activities that are happening from the outset of the purchase cycle, and that we should be seeking to understand and harness.  Social networking research makes clear that you don’t have to be a customer to be an effective advocate, just someone whose advice your audience seeks out and trusts.   In fact, the most valuable customers are no longer necessarily the ones who buy the most, according to Kumar, Petersen, and Leone.  Writing last year in their HBR piece entitled “How Valuable is Word of Mouth?” they showed how consumers who don’t buy much at all can be some of the strongest marketers for your brand. 

Others, like Forrester, have observed that the purchase funnel itself is fundamantally broken, and a new marketing model based on engagement is needed.  Our views on advocacy and the role it plays–and how harnessing it should start earlier today–are more in line with this kind of thinking.

But perhaps there’s only so much the data can tell us about a topic we know really comes down to passion.  And who better than the crafty composer himself to shed some light on the subject.

So in the words of Cole Porter (click here for the full lyrics)…

When they begin
the beguine
it brings back the sound
of music so tender
it brings back a night
of tropical splendor
it brings back a memory of green 

And as for the steps that go along with this tricky ryhme, nobody could make it look easier than Fred Astaire.   Forget making marketing moves so smoothly.  How about just dressing that cool?