Psychology has Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, marketing now has Agent Wildfire's Hierarchy of Evangelism.
With Maslow's pyramid it was about 5 progressive levels of personal satisfaction and fulfilment. With our step ladder, it's about increasing brand passion, intimacy and influence.
The cold hard reality of how businesses spend their marketing today is that the bulk of it is spent on tactics aimed on customers at the the first 2 or 3 steps. It's simple math, if those places are where the most eyeballs are, then let's go where the most eyeballs exist.
And it makes perfectly good sense...for 1955, 1975 and even 1995. Having been trained at one of the leading Tier One packaged goods marketers, we were taught the AIDA consumer decision-making model - you take a customer through stages Awareness-then Interest-then Desire-then Action.
However, old world marketing text books leave out two very important letters - A for Advocacy and E - for evangelism...and as it becomes much harder to burn our way onto the first 3 steps, these last two rungs and letters become very important.
Investing in the top two rungs of advocates and zealots (safely less then 10% of your audience) through word of mouth and community building warrants consideration - why?:
1) most of your competition is not currently incubating this audience, has no process to profile who their evangelists are and has even less of a chance putting a plan of action against them - Advantage You
2) because they care enough to be involved in your brand, you can deliver a wide spectrum of benefits through them - a sounding board for research, a stimulus for innovation, a word of mouth advocate group, a grassroots ambassador club or a consumer generating marketing hub
3) you can narrow your message with more impact to a group that likely welcomes your 'take a stand" message - don't worry, they'll use their own personal influence to convince the others
4) effective marketing should not be a democracy - by treating your best customers and prospects like your best customers and prospects, they'll reciprocate and act like an unpaid word of mouth army
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