Who Do Your Customers Think You Are?

What does your business stand for? Who do your customers think you are?

If it’s largely to make as much money as possible, don’t count on customers, prospects and employees to believe in you.

Businesses driven solely by quarterly sales figures and stock price increases demonstrate they’re in business largely for themselves and little else.

Businesses with a cause, for example, how they’re making the world a better place, often create emotional connections with customers. Those customers in turn tend to become its advocates and biggest supporters.

A cause is not always the same as a mission/vision statement.

A cause is simple yet meaningful.

It is something to believe in and rally around, A well-defined cause usually:

  • defines a businesses vision
  • makes people better
  • generates big effects
  • catalyses selfless actions

A cause is a bit like a ‘grand plan to change the world’.

It’s a piece of someone’s soul and gets people talking at a deeper level, using emotional constructs.

Richard Cross and Janet Smith outline how “identity bonds” are formed between customer and company.

In Customer Bonding: 5 Steps to Lasting Customer Loyalty they write, “Identity bonds are formed when customers admire and identify with values, attitudes, or lifestyle preferences that they associate with your brand or product.  Customers form an emotional attachment based on their perception of those shared values.”

Emotional attachment is at the heart of creating customer loyalty, that volunteer force of customers and prospects who spread the word and convince friends, family and colleagues you’re your products and services are the best.

Adopt a Charitable Cause

American Express is credited with coining the term “cause-related marketing.”

Business in the Community, a London-based organisation focused on corporate social responsibility, defines the term as “a commercial activity by which businesses and charities form a partnership with each other to market an image, product or service for mutual benefit.”

Now more than a short-term tactic to spike sales, cause-related marketing has evolved into a positioning discipline to enhance corporate image with significant bottom-line and community aspects, says Carol Cone, CEO of Cone Communications, a strategic marketing firm that develops and implements cause programs.

Her research in the Cone/Roper Cause Related Trends Report has found that American consumers consistently support cause-related programs.  The 1999 report found that given a buying choice between two products of equivalent price and quality:

  • 78% of adults said they’d be more likely to buy a product associated with a cause they care about
  • 66% said they’d switch brands to support a cause
  • 61% said they’d switch retailers to support a cause
  • 54% would pay more for a product that supported a cause they care about.

The Cone/Roper survey found that 80 percent of Americans prefer companies that commit to a specific cause for a long time period rather than those who opt for multiple, short-period causes.  Cone calls the former companies “cause branders,” companies that take a long-term, stake-holder-based approach to integrating social issues into business strategy, brand equity, and organisational identity.

Companies that support causes for the long haul win the hearts of customers.  Companies synonymous with their causes include:

  • Avon: supporting breast cancer research and treatment
  • Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream: environmental and social issues
  • The Body Shop: environmentalism, human rights and no testing of products on animals