Jackie Huba

It’s not just crazy outfits, over-the-top performances, and catchy tunes that have made Lady Gaga one of the most successful pop stars of all time. Marketers have also been awed by her unconventional customer loyalty strategy. With 41 million Twitter followers and 63 million Facebook fans, she blows away her peers on social media. She has methodically built a grassroots base of what she calls her “Little Monsters”—passionate fans who look to her not just for music but also for joy and inspiration.

Marketing expert Jackie Huba unpacks the method behind Lady Gaga’s success and isolates the seven strategies businesses can apply in an engaging and interactive presentation based on the research from her latest book, Monster Loyalty: How Lady Gaga Turn Followers into Fanatics. They include:

• Focus on your “one percenters.” Gaga spends most of her effort on just 1% of her audience, the highly-engaged superfans who drive word of mouth.
• Lead with values. Gaga is consistent in her message of being yourself and loving others for who they are. That display of values creates a deep emotional connection.
• Give them something to talk about. Whether by wearing a meat dress or ‘dying’ in a pool of blood onstage, she knows what will get people talking.

Key takeaways:

• How Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta became the Queen of Pop
• Gaga’s philosophy on how to build a long term customer strategy
• The 7 lessons of how Gaga engenders customer loyalty
• How to build a “monster loyalty” in your own customer base

It’s the holy grail of marketing: customers who evangelize your product or brand to friends, colleagues and family with authentic emotion and conviction. They are customers who put their own reputations on the line and have nothing to gain except, perhaps, happiness from helping someone discover the joy of your brand. Recognizing and finding these elite customers who power your sales is a challenge for almost any organization. The cultural meme of “customer evangelism” that authors Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell conceptualized in their best-selling book Creating Customer Evangelists has spread to hundreds of organizations around the world that use it as a barometer of their marketing efforts. This entertaining and provocative presentation shares convincing evidence of why customer evangelists matter and how organizations can attract more of them using the right strategies and tactics.

Key takeaways:

• The correlation between customer evangelism and revenue growth
• The 7 clues to understanding who your evangelists are
• The 6 strategies to creating more of them create and embrace their evangelists
• Examples of how innovative companies today are nurturing and growing their customer evangelists

Who are the One Percenters? They are a business’ most loyal, most engaged customers. This core group of customers, in general, makes up about one percent of a customer base. This idea of the One Percenters is based on research from Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell’s 2007 book called, Citizen Marketers: When People are the Message. In online forums and social media sites, the One Percenters self-identify. These are the customers who create content, fan art, and organize other customers to collaborate online. One percent is a very small part of the customer base, yet they have enormous influence in helping the business grow and recruiting new customers, online and offline.

Key takeaways:

• Implications of focusing on customer acquisition to the detriment of existing customer loyalty
• Finding your One Percenters
• Best practices for engaging your One Percenters
• Examples of how leading companies are building programs to connect with their One Percenters

Heavy doses of advertising may work for some of the world’s largest brands and their corresponding advertising budgets, but what about everyone else? What about organizations that rely primarily, if not exclusively, on word of mouth as their advertising? How do they compete in a marketplace where the typical American is exposed to 5,000 advertising messages per day? Based on material from her seminal books on word of mouth, Creating Customer Evangelists and Citizen Marketers, author Jackie Huba presents a framework for building a brand or company that’s worth talking about, from having the right purpose and values to developing the kind of story that people will easily understand and spread. Word of mouth that builds brands isn’t based on stunts and gimmicks; it’s based on a company demonstrating its buzzworthy values through the product/service experience. With inspiring and relevant examples, this presentation is the motivation for companies to start doing more of the right things that get customers talking.

Key takeaways:

• The cost of acquiring customers through traditional advertising
• Why word of mouth is the best indicator of revenue growth
• How a well-defined purpose creates its own advertising
• The elements of a brand or company story that spread
• How companies in various industries create word of mouth for their company