Review: Creating Customer Evangelists by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba

I bought Guy Kawasaki's book Selling the Dream in 1991, after falling in love with the Apple Macintosh computer. Kawasaki, who had been instrumental in getting Macintosh off the ground, had written an earlier book called The Macintosh Way, and while I wanted to buy that one, it wasn't in the bookstore. Selling the Dream was. (Remember, this was before the Internet was available beyond governmental usage, so ordering it "online" wasn't an option.)

Kawasaki's Selling the Dream introduced me to a marketing concept that I have been sold on ever since: customer evangelism. The principle is basic: borrowing from the Church's concept of evangelism as "telling of good news," customer evangelists tell the good news about whatever they really believe in as a product or service. In short, if we evangelize when we tell others what we believe, then the idea carries pretty well - if you believe that a product, service, or store is the latest great thing, you will share this belief with your friends and family.

Flash forward over a decade, and Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba take the baton from Kawasaki with Creating Customer Evangelists (Kawasaki even wrote the foreward). Looking at the contemporary world of marketing, retail, service, and corporate competition, McConnell and Huba lay out a case for customer evangelism as the paradigm to embrace as you market your product, service, or business.

The authors do a great job of dissecting modern customer evangelism into key parts (again, picking up where Kawasaki left off - his book outlined the steps in building an evangelistic model in the corporate world too, but McConnell and Huba bring a freshness to this rubric). They walk you through the ideas of:

the "Customer Plus-Delta" in listening to feedback from your customers

Napsterizing your knowledge by giving it away

Building the buzz by getting the word out

Creating community through bringing customers together

using "Bite-Size Chunks" to more from sampling to evangelism

Creating a cause by making your company more than just a business

Through these steps (with a chapter dedicated to each) McConnell and Huba define how a company moves from a traditional marketing approach to the customer evangelism model.

Then the fun really begins: the authors take seven amazing companies of different sizes and talk through how each utilizes the different principles of creating customer evangelism they described. The seven companies - Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, SolutionPeople, O'Reilly & Associates, the Dallas Mavericks, Build-A-Bear Worshop, Southwest Airlines, and IBM - each apply them differently, but it is clear that they are all present in each case.

The authors are good writers, and the material they discuss is fun to read about. Since I was already sold on the concept, I was easily won over; however, I loaned the book to a friend who was skeptical (and, as a Christian, a little bit offended by the appropriation of the concept of evangelism), and she reported that she, too, was sold on the concepts. And the statistics tell why the idea is so compelling: from McConnell and Huba's research, they found that one study revealed that, when asked what "generated excitement" about a particular product or service, the responses were: 0% from radio, 1% from billboards, 4% from TV ads, 4% from print ads, 15% from magazines, and 46% from referrals by colleagues or family (pp. 8-9, emphasis mine). Clearly, the idea of customer evangelism is alive and active already.

What is more, I think the Church has a lot to learn from Creating Customer Evangelists. Ironically, what McConnell and Huba describe is much closer to the evangelism prescribed in the Bible than much of what is practiced today. So much "evangelism" in the Church is ineffective and awkward, because it feels like a sales pitch rather than genuine evangelism. McConnell and Huba describe something more like New Testament evangelism, yet they manage to do it in a rubric that is easy to follow and measurable. The Church would do well to read Creating Customer Evangelists as a new training manual for Christian evangelism.