Last week, a new company called Zuberance unveiled its service, which aims to harness and encourage customer advocacy as an aid to sales.
"By transforming highly-satisfied customers into a volunteer sales force, we're offering a unique value to our customers," says Rob Fuggetta, Zuberance's CEO.
The customer advocate is an interesting phenomenon in marketing. Ever since commerce began, word-of-mouth has been one of the most effective forms of marketing imaginable. Its success comes down to a single factor: trust.
Before the Internet came along, word-of-mouth was pretty much always based on personal relationships, however fleeting. But on the Web, people are often prepared to trust individuals they've never met, provided they seem genuine. And many businesses or products seem to attract genuine advocates — people who want to talk about the positive experiences they've had with the product or service. In the physical world, think of Nordstrom for example ... or Apple (even an inveterate Windows user like me is a passionate advocate for the iPhone).
What Zuberance does is provide an infrastructure that supports and encourages those natural advocates. Techcrunch described it succinctly:
"Zuberance offers a suite of SaaS applications that enable companies to identify and track customer advocates, and mobilize them to automatically publish authentic content like reviews and testimonials to specific locations within shopping and review sites like Amazon.com, YouTube, TripAdvisor and Facebook. This effectively turns customers into a volunteer promotion workforce that shares offers with their friends and colleagues."
The only trouble with automating the individual passion of advocacy is that it could somehow dehumanize it. There's a thin line to tread here. On the one hand, customer advocates will enjoy the extra attention they can win from more easily reaching a wider audience of converts. But their testimony may be devalued if they seem to be spreading it too widely purely to get noticed. The success of Zuberance will depend on how subtly it handles this balance.
Phil,
Thanks for the post. I agree that striking that delicate balance is key. That's why Zuberance focuses on enabling compelling, balanced value for all three key players involved in the advocacy value chain: Authentic Advocates; In-Market Buyers; and Brands. If any one of these three players don't get compelling value (according to what matters to them) the advocacy value chain unravels and players opt-out or rebel. Case in point: Facebook's failed Beacon initiative, which served brands only. A "better Beacon" would enable balanced value for brands, advocates, and recommendation seekers. That's the Zuberance approach.