Customers Don’t Always Keep You in Mind (Jim Karrh Commentary)

We can all learn from mistakes. It sure is better when some company other than your own is making those mistakes.

In this column, I’ll report on one company’s effort to build and market through an online community. Its experience can teach us a thing or two about consumer relevance and follow-up.

Late in 2005, my company began plans for an “affinity” Web site. The usual idea in such sites is to create an environment where members (customers who provide an e-mail address) can read unique content, participate in contests or promotions, get special deals, and perhaps post messages to the company and one another.

There can be substantial investments of time and money in building and maintaining such a site. The obvious benefit to the company, however, comes in establishing and mining direct connections to customers.

Always interested in stealing the ideas of others, I began looking at various affinity sites and even joined a few in order to gauge the member experience. Along the way, I noticed a magazine ad for the Striding Man Society, the new affinity site for Johnnie Walker blended whisky. As is the case with most affinity sites, membership is free; members trade a little information and permission for access to the site’s content. Johnnie Walker was even offering a free gift (a small valet tray) as an incentive to join. Being well over the minimum legal age and interested in how the site would be administered, I signed up.

The first lesson is that many companies aren’t particularly good candidates for a member program. The reason is that you need a good enough deal and/or a particularly relevant product or service — really, a brand for which customers have some emotional attachment — and many brands just aren’t that interesting. Here I think Johnnie Walker does just fine; it’s likely it has enough brand-loyals to justify and leverage a true online community.

Here are the other goodies available to Striding Man Society members: exclusive Web content; personalized labels for the five varieties of blends; a downloadable desktop tool; an e-mail function through which you could send an “I owe you one” e-card; and “access to exclusive offers and opportunities.” There is no message board, blog or other unique communication mechanism — either company-to-member or member-to-member.

This is a decent (if not a knock-your-socks-off) collection of member benefits. But note: Every one of them requires the member to recall his or her membership and actually visit the site. The logical response from Johnnie Walker, then, would be regular e-mails or other communication that would prompt a member to come back to the site. The reason for sending the e-mail could be the posting of fresh content to the site, a promotion or contest – anything. In the absence of such a prompt, members are unlikely to even remember having their membership, much less actually revisit the site or recommend it to others.

I’ve been a member of this thing for about eight months and haven’t received a message once — not an e-mail, not a card, — nothing, nada, zippo. The Striding Man has been standing still. That’s a recipe for how not to create and sustain an online community.

I’ve often made the point in this space that “consumers” are just human beings. In fact, you and I are consumers. Nevertheless, it’s apparently easy for businesspeople to forget their consumer mindset when trying to get other consumers to act, think or feel a certain way. I’m sure the folks at Johnnie Walker love their brand and product, appreciate their customers, and believe those customers think about Johnnie Walker almost as much as the paid employees do.

The truth is far different. Most consumers — even repeat customers — don’t have you top of mind very often. Whether you’re building a loyalty or frequent-buyer program, setting up an online community, or otherwise trying to really engage customers, you have to take a hard look at the relevance of your company to customers. You also need a certain amount of repetition and active management of the relationship.

Repetition without relevance is just plain annoying. Relevance without repetition is like, well, standing still and hoping something good will happen.

(Jim Karrh, Ph.D., is chief marketing officer of Mountain Valley Spring Co. of Hot Springs. E-mail him at [email protected].)