Why Active Advocacy Rules In A Divisible Customer, Word-of-Mouth World   by Michael Lowenstein   Trying to determine who the greatest athletes have been over a span of the last 100 years is an exercise best left to the sports pundits (and people with nothing more important to occupy their time). Differences in training, diet, equipment, and facilities make such comparisons almost impossible. Similarly, over the past twenty-five years, so much has changed about the way marketers communicate with, and sell and market to, their customers that comparing eras, media, message content, and levels of effectiveness are pretty much academic.   Today, marketers must be aware that customers are so overwhelmed with messages and the availability of product and service information that they’ve gone, in large measure, to alternative, less traditional methods of helping them decide what and where to buy. At the heart of seeking sources for decision input is trust. This is an era where spam, pop-up ads, telemarketing and other forms of targeted advertising and promotion, indeed most forms of electronic and print advertising, receive low trust scores in customer research. Beyond permission e-mail, brand websites and the like, customer trust is highest for word-of-mouth. How high? Over 90% of consumers, as identified in a 2004 Forrester study, said they trust word-of mouth, compared to less than half of that for most other forms of advertising and communication.   While, since 1977, the aggregate value of advertising as a decision making influence has remained about the same, word-of-mouth has almost doubled in leveraging power to the point where it is the dominant communication device in our society. Through its studies, NOP World Roper Reports has learned that over 90% of Americans, 18 and over, identify word-of-mouth as the best source of ideas and information about products and services, about the same percentage who find it the most trustworthy source. As a result, no matter how well suppliers believe they understand their customers’ needs and their behaviors on a divisible basis, they must have both a strategy and array of tactics which help customers create influence and personal leverage on a peer-to-peer, situation-by-situation level. This is truly divisibility in its purest form   What this means is creation of active advocacy, a state of deep-rooted, emotional engagement between a customer and supplier that goes beyond satisfaction, beyond delight, beyond loyalty, and even beyond commitment. Advocacy represents the highest level of involvement, engaging with suppliers in an emotional bond well past the typical relationship between supplier and customer, and having them actively talk about their experiences to friends, relatives, and colleagues.   Advocacy is not merely a new way of thinking about customers in a divisible context. Arguably, if the name of the game is value optimization, learning about how customers think about suppliers, brands, products, or services, and then carrying their experiences and consideration forward as proactive advocates, this is, or will become, the only way to think about them. It will help companies learn about how emerging trends, image, performance and reputation relative to competitors, problems and complaints, response to new product or service ideas, and even rumors and back-fence Internet gossip can impact customer advocacy behavior.   The following data shows comparisons of behavior over time of customers who gave high ratings on typical satisfaction and recommendation likelihood questions. The top line is the actual performance of consumers who were identified, using a proprietary series of questions, as active brand advocates.   Figure 1 Source: Customer Management Center of Excellence NOP World, 2004   What’s abundantly clear is that, compared to customers who were highly satisfied or even highly likely to recommend (as those who promote this metric as the single number that can be used to understand the drivers of growth), those who were active brand advocates used products more recently, more frequently, and with higher share of spend than either of those two groups of customers. Moreover, even though measurement of word-of-mouth is very much in an embryonic stage of marketing sophistication, active advocates were higher on this measure as well.   In the all-too-near future, having the tools to address and treat customers on a divisible basis in the traditional ways will likely not be enough to assure competitive superiority. It will take active customer advocacy. Advocacy incorporates every link along the relationship chain between suppliers and their customers – from the employees connecting with customers at each touchpoint, to the touch processes themselves (both messaging and individual experience), the corporate structure and culture, and even the way intermediate and senior management considers customers. The percentage of customers who are active brand or supplier advocates will become the new, and most sustainable and reliable, measure of success, guiding all customer-related activities.