According to the Church of the Customer ‘positioning is a marketing facade that paints a picture idealized by the marketer, not necessarily the customer’. The power of customer evangelism is, according to the author, many times greater then anything dreamed up by marketers.
They use OwenBloggers.com to illustrate their point. Students at Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School of Management found themselves enrolled in a better school than they had expected. They decided they could promote their school better than the marketers of the school itself and started a weblog.
Reading the post of the Church of the Customer I wonder about several things:
- Isn’t customer evangelism simply an extreme form of word of mouth where Web 2.0 makes creates possibilities that customers didn’t have before?
- Isn’t the Vanderbilt example just an example of poor positioning, poor marketing, and poor management of expectations?
- If there is no positioning or no marketing, how does the customer know that there is something to evangelize?
To me positioning is making a choice of what and where you want to be. And subsequently as an organization you give everything within your power to get there. When you do it right, your customers join you and help you reach your goals. Customer evangelists then sing the gospel of your brand and praise the dreams of the marketer. When you poorly execute the positioning, your choir of evangelist will have left before the gospel.
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