Customers as friends
Noah Brier and his friend Tad were over at my house yesterday. Noah was showing us his new phone, the Blackberry Pearl. No surprise: like everyone else on the planet, he loves it.
The thing is, he didn’t just love his phone, he started showing us all its cool features, and without even trying to, he sold me on it. I’m off to T-Mobile in a bit to buy one.
This started us talking about how Blackberry couldn’t buy this kind of marketing if it tried. People have talked about “finding your product’s evangelist.” But just as you don’t pay your friends to do you favors or say nice things about you, companies can’t pay customers to promote their products. It’s too artificial.
But companies can tap into research about social markets. What if Blackberry’s makers, Research In Motion, called up Noah and genuinely made him feel special? Maybe they’d send him a product sample. Or give him the inside scoop on a new launch.
The more genuinely warm the relationship between Noah and Research In Motion, the more likely he’d be to tell friends like me that he loves their products. The trick, of course, is to do this in a way that’s authentic. In other words, Research In Motion would really have to consider Noah a friend.
This got us on an interesting discussion about viewing your customers as friends. It changes your thinking about everything from customer service to marketing to long-term relationships.
March 7th, 2007 at 11:57 am
hah–funny, i just bought one too, and have been made more comfortable in my decision by noah b’s evangelizing!