CREATING CUSTOMER EVANGELISTS: How Loyal Customers Become a Volunteer Sales Force

This enjoyable but hardly essential book offers case studies of eight companies whose customer communities—that is, the base of customers who believe in a particular product or service—are robust and successful: Southwest Airlines, Krispy Kreme, Build-A-Bear Workshops, the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, Pallotta TeamWorks, O'Reilly & Associates, SolutionPeople and IBM. The authors, cofounders of the marketing consulting firm Wabash & Lake, claim that "customer evangelists" are free; they offer a six-step plan for building customer evangelism, but the specific programs they recommend are expensive. They decry "nuisance" advertising, yet praise MSN's infamous Hotmail spam tag line attached to every e-mail Hotmail users send and IBM's graffiti campaign that resulted in criminal fines. They argue against focusing on shareholder value and cost controls, but criticize companies that imploded for ignoring those two things. Although the idea of deepening customer relationships is certainly valid and should be embraced by marketers, there are better and far more balanced accounts of this process available (the first four chapters of Philip Kotler's Marketing Management, the standard MBA text, for example). (Dec.)

Forecast:Without well-known authors or extensive marketing, this entry into an overcrowded field that makes no concession to today's cost-conscious, analytic reaction to dot-com excess is going to need evangelists. It could be saved by a ride on the coattails of a similar book from the Free Press, The Influentials: One American in Ten Tells the Other Nine How to Vote, Where to Eat, and What to Buy, which will be reviewed in the November 18 issue of PW.