If you want to be more marketable, be more lovable.
The more strongly people feel about you, your company, your product or service, the more strongly they will advocate for or against you. If they strongly dislike you, they will avoid you or, worse, actively campaign against you. If they really like or even love you, they will support you, stay loyal to you, spend more money buying from you and, crucially, spread more goodwill for you.
This is not earth-shattering insight, it’s common sense. Which makes one wonder, why do so few companies get it right? We’ve all bitched about banks around the dinner table, we’ve all seen people showing poor service up on social media. It’s much less often that we see businesses being praised. Perhaps it’s easier or more cathartic for us humans to criticise than to compliment, but I suspect that good customer experiences are also just harder to come by.
Very few companies enjoy such lovability that their customers are their best marketers. So instead, it’s become popular to buy what appears to be love. In “influencer marketing”, a so-called influencer – someone with a big following, usually on a blog and/or social media – is paid to write and/or tweet and/or post nice things about your product. Their followers and fans, in turn, find out about the product and the nice things that are said about it. Basically, influencers are a paid advertising medium like radio or TV, just pretending not to be.
The real holy grail when it comes to having people say nice things about you is so-called advocates. Unlike influencers, advocates aren’t paid by you to say nice things. They are genuine, sincere customers who voluntarily say great things because they actually feel that strongly about you. That’s why advocates are far more authentically influential than influencers.
Advocates usually don’t have the following that influencers do, however. So nurturing and finding them is much harder work for the marketing department. But – and this is the point – building this kind of customer love isn’t the responsibility of the marketing department. Well, it is, but no more than any other. It’s the responsibility of every department, from product design to manufacturing to sales to customer service. It’s the responsibility of the people at your reception desk and the people cleaning your bathrooms (you’re not going to hurry back to a restaurant or store with dirty, smelly loos). It’s the responsibility of anyone who ever has anything to do with any of your customers, however indirect. Because love doesn’t grow primarily from what you say about your product (marketing), it grows from every experience every customer has of any part of your company.
The Chief Lovability Officer’s role is clearly not a siloed one. It is to influence the manner in which your call centre people answer the phone, their demeanour, their empathy. It is to instil an ethos into the design and reliability of your products. It is to ensure that promises are kept and commitments are honoured. It is to guide how you respond to crises or bad PR. It is to sink its teeth deep into the company’s culture.
In Firms of Endearment, authors Raj Sisodia, Jag Sheth and David B. Wolfe write about how much money many companies spend on marketing and how much of that spend is wasted and unsuccessful. They contrast that with other companies who spend a fraction on marketing but get a disproportionate return on their investment because they are loved in other ways and don’t need to market as aggressively. These are not fringe brands; they are global household names like New Balance, Amazon, Google. Perhaps the surprising thing about this rather anti-marketing stance is it comes from marketing professors.
I’m not suggesting that marketing departments or CMOs are irrelevant. But their jobs would be much easier, and much different, if companies also employed Chief Lovability Officers. CLOs would be invested in everything from a brand’s values to its marketing tone to the way new products or features are conceived and built to the way support centres operate to the way a store is arranged and furnished. They’d be close to HR, too, because they would recognise that happy employees will do as much good for a company’s lovability as unhappy ones will be bad for it. Ditto for partner and supplier relationships.
Sadly, I don’t know of any company that has a Chief Lovability Officer. I even, amazingly, had the rather rare experience of Google returning zero results when I did a search for the term. That’s surprising. A company could hire a CLO for far less than the cost of an advertising campaign. The all-round benefits and returns could be far greater.