How do you win new customers?

Ask your extreme

loyalists
marketingweek.com/how-do-you-win-new-customers-ask-your-extreme-loyalists

18 May 2023

Opinion
Those who spend more and buy your brand more often have unparalleled insight into
what makes it special – and into what appeals to new customers too.

By Mark Ritson

Juan Rodriguez was born in Colombia. He worked hard, married and had two children. In
his early 60s, Juan (not his real name) retired. His retirement was not a healthy one. By
70 he was experiencing the kind of mild cognitive impairment associated with Alzheimer’s
disease. And as each year passed Juan increasingly struggled with verbal fluency and
short-term memory loss. At 72 he was diagnosed with dementia and from that point his
decline was swift. He passed away aged 74.

It’s a sad story and all too common, given the prevalence and severity of Alzheimer’s in
modern society. But Rodriguez was an extraordinarily lucky man. He carried the PSEN1-
E280A mutation, one of the more serious Alzheimer’s precursors. It’s a gene mutation
common among a group of Colombians who all trace their origins back to the Basque
region of Spain. Carriers of the mutation start to experience cognitive decline in their 40s
and develop severe dementia by the time they turn 50. Yet none of this happened to
Rodriguez. He enjoyed two decades of dementia free life that his prognosis would have
suggested impossible. Why?

The intriguing answer to that question is Juan had a double mutation. First, because he
carried PSEN1-E280A in his genetic code and was therefore incredibly vulnerable to
Alzheimer’s. But second because he also carried a mutation in his production of Reelin –
a protein that plays a pivotal role in regulating brain function. That mutation formed a
protective barrier in Juan’s brain preventing the harmful proteins that usually form
Alzheimer’s pathological connections. Juan’s second mutation trumped his first and
granted him more than two decades of extended life as a result.

By studying a few abnormal humans, scientists discover unexpected insights that

might eventually shed more generally useful light on the rest of the population.

The story of Juan Rodriguez was published in Nature on Monday (15 May). He was
identified by a team of scientists led by Harvard Medical School investigators studying a
large group of Colombians susceptible to early onset Alzheimer’s and who – in some
cases – appear able to avoid its severity for unexpectedly long periods of time. The hope
was that by following these special patients the secret of their longevity could be
understood and eventually replicated to progress the global cure for Alzheimer’s.

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“Extraordinary cases like this one illustrate how individuals and extended families with
Alzheimer’s disease can help advance our understanding of the disease and open new
avenues for discovery,” Yakeel Quiroz, an associate professor of psychology and member
of the research team, explained to the New York Times this week.

“The insights we are gaining from this case may guide us on where in the brain we need
to look to delay and stop disease progression.”

It’s an amazing discovery and one that could eventually improve the fortunes of the
millions of people expected to suffer from Alzheimer’s in the decades ahead. But it’s
interesting to note where this great insight originates. Not from initial work in the lab or
grand theory construction or the latest application of AI. It comes from Mother Nature and
a cluster of unusual Colombians. By studying a few abnormal humans, scientists discover
unexpected insights that might eventually shed more generally useful light on the rest of
the population.

It’s not as unusual an avenue for scientists as you might think. It was a similar story with
Stephen Crohn, ‘the man who could not catch AIDS’. Despite losing his partner and most
of his friends to the disease in the early 1908s, Crohn remained uninfected. He became
convinced of his immunity to the disease. And sure enough, when scientists tried to infect
a sample of his blood with the HIV virus, even at concentrations thousands of times
greater than normal exposure, Crohn’s blood remained impervious to it all. He was indeed
immune to HIV.

Like Rodriguez, scientists eventually identified the mutant root of his immunity. Crohn had
a genetic abnormality – known as delta 32 – that made the receptors of his white blood
cells impossible for HIV to latch onto. And research on his ‘defective’ blood cells
eventually led to the development of Maraviroc – a vital drug that limited the HIV infection
and saved thousands of lives in the process. Crohn died (tragically from suicide, not
AIDS) in 2014 and was widely hailed as a medical hero for his bravery and commitment
to finding a cure for the disease that killed almost all of his peers.

The value of extreme outliers

Market research is a tiny, pointless pursuit when contextualised against proper scientific
endeavours like these. For all our talk of purpose and societal impact, we are a pimple on
a pimple on the backside of disciplines like medical research. My PhD earns me the right
to call myself Dr on my credit card. My appreciation for the pointlessness of my
contribution to society ensures I would do no such thing. But there is a striking lesson to
be learned from these gigantically important clinical studies when imported back into our
own relatively minor endeavours to understand brands, consumers and the relationships
between them.

Often the best approach to understanding and identifying something is not to hypothesise
and deductively work towards a conclusion. Sometimes it’s better to scan the extreme
horizons of a population for outliers. Those who by luck, nature, or some other strange

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circumstance find themselves in a different subset from the main population. By studying
this strange, obtuse minority we can derive answers that can then be more generally
applied.

When it comes to understanding brands it is possible to completely give oneself over to

quantitative data and deductive reasoning. To try and work out what makes a brand
special by working through various scenarios in the office or testing the market to see
what a brand stands for and how those proportions compare to other alternatives in the
market. I see a lot of that. Brand managers staring at bar charts and PowerPoint decks
trying to impute the best position for a brand or the assets that will generate the highest
degree of distinctiveness.

There is nothing wrong with that. But there is a short cut. Or at least a second path to be
also taken in parallel. The kind of unusual path even proper clinical researchers doing
important medical analysis sometimes follow. Look for loyalists. The lovers. Advocates.
The consumers that know your brand better than anyone in your internal team. Every
brand of any standing has a few of them. And they offer a potential perspective that we
often dismiss and overlook.

In the list of great resources for brand diagnosis, qualitative time with loyalists should be
at the top of your list of activities. Not because they are representative of the broader
market but because their very unrepresentativeness makes them a fantastically important
resource.

They are nutters for the brand! Crazy for it! And they see and feel and think about it with
such extreme commitment that they can, in some circumstances, allow marketers in on
the secret of their passion and with it offer a potential route to attracting other consumers.

These new consumers won’t become as addled and infatuated as your super loyalists.
But just as AIDS research sought an artificially replicable equivalent to Stephen Crohn’s
mutated blood cells, marketers can use the insights from extreme consumers and brand
loyalists to inspire and inform their efforts to recruit others.

I’ve done it my whole consulting career. Looked for the lunatic fringe at the far reaches of
the consumption threshold.

When I worked on wine brands we would always include the input of the two or three
restaurants that served 10 times the expected amount of our wine and ask the proprietors
to tell us about our brand.

In a net promoter survey for a brand of women’s jeans, we invited as many ‘tens’ as
possible to HQ and asked them to talk more about their extreme satisfaction and where it
came from. It became probably one of the most fascinating focus groups of my career as
12 New York women got emotional about asses, the 1990s and feeling good again.

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For a surgical glue, we found the dozen surgeons using more of the product than the rest
of the country combined, and asked them to show us when, how and why they used our
product. In each case we looked for people that would have been immediately discarded
from most research on the grounds of bias and then listened to them.

Watch Video At: https://youtu.be/sfGtw2C95Ms

And I’m not alone in my love for an outlier. When the mighty Clayton Christensen was
hired by McDonalds to increase milkshake sales, he ignored the company’s deductive
attempts to devise a better shake. Instead, his team stood outside cafes and
apprehended early morning shake buyers. The kind that turned up at 8am, bought a
shake, nothing else, and then drove off. And who did it almost every single day.
Christensen and his team asked these consumers the same question: what ‘job’ is this
milkshake doing for you?

Each consumer told a similar story. They had a long and boring drive ahead of them.
They would eventually get hungry. Usually in the middle of nowhere. The shake was for
then and the occasional boring moments along the way. Their shake would sit and stay
cold for hours. It could be sipped, easily and without mess or distraction, for the whole
boring drive. Its job was to be convenient company and eventually brunch. These
consumers had ‘hired’ doughnuts and bananas for the same job in the past but found
them to be miserable failures in comparison.

These strange, wonderful early-morning drivers explained the essence of a good shake
and one of its prime jobs. Christensen reported back to McDonald’s that there were some
obvious ways to improve milkshakes. Make them thicker so they took even longer to
consume. Add pieces of fruit, not for health, but for some interesting unpredictable
moments. Move the dispensing machine to the front of each café so consumers could
come in, fill up and get on with their drive.

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Your best source of ideas
Consumers are key to a brand’s success. Not just because they deliver sales and
hopefully profit, but because once they have made a purchase they become marketing’s
victory. The creation of a customer, as management expert Peter Drucker called it. And
by studying that creation and how it was created, marketers can usually devise better
strategy.

The dirty secret of most marketing work is that we marketers rarely come up with
anything using just our own intelligence and ability. Anything good, that is. We cheat and
consult consumers. If you know where to look, your next great product, winning ad
campaign or category entry point has already been created. Just not by you, but
someone out there in the market. The biggest marketing teams number in the hundreds.
Most markets are made up of millions. Do the maths. Guess where the best ideas are
located.

With loyalists and advocates we encounter an even more flagrant and rewarding
resource. They provide an even more concentrated source of insight into our brands. Find
out why these consumers love the brand so much, why they forgive us our sins so readily,
why they would pay double or triple what we currently charge if we asked them, and then
distil this down into a marketing strategy and execute it to bring others into the brand. If
general consumers offer us a key to understanding our brand, loyalists provide us with a
much bigger, more obvious version.

Often these drivers of love and loyalty look nothing like the purported strategy the
marketing team in charge of the brand want to execute. The distance between the real
reasons consumers buy a brand and the ones that marketers promote in their plans has
always stunned me. If you had to choose between an hour with the brand manager or a
rabid loyalist to learn about a brand, there is only one right answer.

I still encounter brand managers who have never talked to loyalists as part of their
diagnosis.

And I’m as bad as the rest of them. When we launched the Mini MBA in Marketing, I
remember having this vision of the ‘virtual classroom’, which was shiny, all-encompassing
and immersive. Then, I listened to loyalists who had taken the class and loved it. They
had cats. Kids. More cats. Holidays. Partners. A messy kitchen. No time to learn. But the
course had been convenient enough to fit into the tiny spaces of their busy lives and
allowed them to learn and evolve.

The Mini MBA was not about being all-encompassing and flashy. It was about being
convenient and easy. Our virtual classroom isn’t something out of Star Trek. It’s a
thousand different places, each more chaotic and messy than the next, and each with a
marketer in the middle of it learning nonetheless. I would never have planned that
positioning in a thousand years. My loyalists taught it to me. And we’ve used it ever since.

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Despite all this massive potential, I still encounter brand managers who have never talked
to loyalists as part of their diagnosis. Part of the problem is our obsession with big data
and representative samples. Both are important parts of the marketing puzzle. But there
is also a time and a place, usually in the early stages, for small samples of outliers and
learning from extremes.

Yes, you often need to recruit a representative sample of consumers with the appropriate
confidence level and confidence interval – every good marketer knows how to do that.
But other kinds of sampling exist too. Purposive sampling challenges a researcher to
seek out specific consumers that exhibit specific traits, which often fly in the face of
general representation. Such sampling can also be very fruitful.

The other problem is the emphasis marketers now place on penetration. For a decade,
we have been harangued into accepting that a brand can only grow if it focuses on
acquiring new consumers and avoids engaging with loyalists at all costs. Heavy users:
bad! Light users: good! True, most of the time. But the argument against outliers only
works when applied to business growth. It’s not such great advice when it comes to
insight and diagnosis. That’s a place where heavy users can light the way for the rest of
the market. A focus on heavy users may not be how brands grow, but it can provide a big
insight into how you can make that growth and penetration happen.

Of course, at some point you need to return from the far reaches of the periphery and test
your new insights on a broader, more typical slice of the market. But in the early stages of
brand diagnosis, listening to and learning from loyalists is right up there with secondary
data and founder research for powerful insights into what the brand offers and why
consumers will buy it.

“These are the kinds of insights we cannot gain without patients,” Joseph Arboleda-
Velasquez, associate professor of opthalmology at Massachusetts Eye and Ear – and
another member of the research team looking for a cure for Alzheimer’s – explained to
the New York Times this week. “They are showing us what’s important when it comes to
protection and challenging many of the field’s assumptions about Alzheimer’s disease
and its progression.”

If some of the world’s leading clinical researchers can learn from outliers and extremes,
surely marketers – minnows in comparison – can do the same?

Mark Ritson teaches brand diagnosis as part of his award-winning Mini MBA in
Brand Management. The next course runs in September.

Recommended

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Cristina Kenz

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What does marketing best practice look like for SMEs?

Comments

There is one comment at the moment, we would love to hear your opinion too.

1.
Simon Hayhurst 18 May 2023
Sam Walton, founder and CEO of Walmart, at the height of his powers used to
spend one morning a week working the tills in a random store in his empire. He
didn’t do it to help out: as he scanned each item. would quiz every customer on why
they shopped at Walmart, where else they shopped, what Walmart needed to do to
get more of their shopping spend, where the store needed to improve etc.

At the end of each session he’d summon the store manager and tell him exactly
what his customers said the manager needed to do to increase his footfall and
takings.

Walton did this relentlessly for years, and for many years was also the richest man
in America. I’ve often thought these two facts might be related.

More here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/secret-sam-waltons-billions-simon-

hayhurst

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