Fangelic Host

A blog about marketing and fan building.

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Supporting Customers In Crisis: Mental Health, Emergencies and Living Your Brand Purpose

At Pushpay, our brand purpose is to do whatever it takes to help faith-based organizations advance their missions. Primarily that means making great software. But that purpose also gives us room to move outside the 'what we do' box, and also lead with empathy to help our customers in other ways as well. Here are a couple of examples of how we reached out to the community to amplify their stories and provide helpful resources.

Mental Health

During Covid, one of our customers recognized that Mental Health was going to be one of the biggest challenges facing their community. They developed a campaign called, Press On, which allowed anyone to contact them and be put in touch with a mental health counselor and receive 10 free sessions. The response was overwhelming. We partnered with them to amplify their story, sharing on social and email campaigns.

Press On | Christ's Church of the Valley

https://share.vidyard.com/watch/nYcbpFJjzzf7dnrPHZaCLJ?

Mental health challenges aren't just something that happens in communities, those who serve those communities can experience mental health challenges as well. To support those leaders, we created resources for them to help them address their own challenges, including leveraging our podcast to spread the news.

‎Pushpay's Moving Mountains Podcast: Ep. 18: Avoiding Ministry Burnout: How to Navigate Difficult Seasons - Pete Briscoe on Apple Podcasts

‎Show Pushpay's Moving Mountains Podcast, Ep Ep. 18: Avoiding Ministry Burnout: How to Navigate Difficult Seasons - Pete Briscoe - Sep 30, 2

Crisis Hub

With so many disasters and tragedies filling the headlines every day, we struggled with how to respond in ways that showed we cared, but didn't make the story about us. The solution developed is our Crisis Hub.

The crisis hub consolidates how-to videos, guides and other resources all in one place for our customers to turn to when there is a crisis in their community. It allowed us a place to link to in a series of social posts showcasing the resources. And when a big event does occur, we can send communications to our customers and on social that link to the hub, fulfilling our brand purpose in a timely way.

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Wanna See More?

Contact me at [email protected] or check out my resume.

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CASE STUDY:

Entering A New Health and Wellness Market With A Start-Up SaaS Platform

Challenge

Simply Be Well, a new health and wellness platform in Australia, was to be marketed to both users and corporate benefits managers. They needed a plan for driving awareness at launch to gain more users over time as they built case studies and credibility.

Approach

In putting together the plan, I spent time sitting with their key segments - exercise and health enthusiasts as well as benefits managers - and analyzing the competitive set, developing a competitive assessment and SWOT analysis that was instructive for messaging. With limited resources, the plan recommended a phased approach, focusing first on the higher-priority segments - health enthusiasts and benefits managers. With two very different audiences, it was important to draft messaging and experiences that were specific to their needs.

For health enthusiasts, that meant targeted high-value content and a free health assessment promoted via sponsored content and in paid and organic channels to fuel viral sharing and SEO. For the benefit managers, I focused on a free trial and digital ad channels. PR and key events rounded out the plan, with some ABM promotions targeted to top prospects as well.

I delivered this high level plan to be executed by the client's small team, with recommendations for future phases.

Outcome

Thumbs up from the client!

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CASE STUDY:

Using Primary Research and Data For Both Brand Awareness and Driving Demand

Challenge

We were often forced to use third-party data in our content, which created interest in the third party rather than our solution. We also needed a big lead driver that was evergreen.

What We Did

We conducted our own research, making sure we could do cuts for key segments, and packaged up the data to use as a thought leadership tool and demand gen driver. 

Results

Two weeks post launch, our press release garnered 300 million impressions, and ad promotion had already delivered more MQLs and SALs than we had estimated for the quarter. This led to a year of coverage opportunities leveraging many of our senior leaders, and resulted in the report being the largest lead driver of the year. The report has now become an annual deliverable that continues to set us up as a thought leader while continuing to drive strong demand.

In the report's second year, I was also able to negotiate a sponsorship with Visa, which gave us even more reach and cache.

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CASE STUDY:

Using Current Events As A Hook for Problem-Focused Coverage

Objective

We wanted to use media outreach and placements to demonstrate Pushpay’s leadership in our market by showcasing how we are helping customers solve problems.

What We Did

We built on media coverage we were seeing about the challenges churches were facing due to Covid. We pitched a story about how tech was helping them weather the storm, and even accelerating digital transformation. We also provided two customers who were willing to talk about their experience.

Results

The resulting article in Wired delivered more than 20 million impressions. We promoted it in social and added it into our 7-email nurture stream where it garnered the highest CTRs and influenced multiple deals.

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Tips for Effective Corporate Rebrands and Acquisition Integrations

Pushpay before in red tones. And Pushpay after in purple tones.

Early in my career, I had the great opportunity to work on an international rebrand project while at BMC Software - traveling the world conducting market research and developing new positioning, naming, brand architecture and campaign activations to integrate several acquisitions that piled up over the years. At Pushpay, I've worked on a couple of corporate rebrands and website rebuilds, as well acquisition integrations. Every brand situation or acquisition is a little bit different, but here are a few key tips I've learned along the way.

Leverage Data

If you are able to conduct market research and brand health research to help shore up your plans, this is ideal. Doing so provides you with data to help you make the case for your recommendation. For example, at Pushpay, we are able to show that the Pushpay brand enjoyed a higher level of awareness and favorability than the product brand, and that helped when we were making the case to phase out the acquired company's name and centralize our marketing efforts and GTM budget around the master brand.

Example of aided Awareness Results

Similarly, when I worked on the rebrand for BMC Software, which included a product renaming proposal for the acquired companies, we conducted market research around the world to determine preference for brand names vs descriptive names. Our audience preferred descriptive names and we used those data points in our recommendation.

Let Your Target Audience Say It For You

The words of your prospects and customers can have an outsize impact on decision making. You can get these by conducting qualitative individual interviews or focus groups, or by adding open-ended questions to quantitative surveys.

They bring a human element to discussions about sunsetting brands or product names and help people feel more comfortable with the change.

Bring People With You On The Journey

Change management is a key part of any strategy. If you drop a big change on your organization or your customers, it can backfire.

Internally, make sure to include key constituents in the discovery process. They can become another key data point for your recommendation. And if they feel part of the process and decision making, they are more likely to be an ally.

Internal Research Output

For customers, give them time. Let them know a change is coming and when. Share some of the reasoning. Give them room to have their voice heard. When we sunset the CCB product name at Pushpay, we conducted an Ask Me Anything in our community group. Overall, they were more concerned about changes in the product or support than they were the name. Since none of that was changing, it gave us an opportunity to engage with them on a more personal level, and hastened acceptance of the change.

Expect Emotions and Plan Accordingly

Brands are emotional things. Despite all the data and best laid plans, people can get really squirrelly about changes. That's ok! We want people who are passionate about our brand. But that means that coming to decisions can often take more time than anticipated, so be prepared for a brand change to take longer than anticipated and work that into your plan. Additionally, be empathetic. Change is hard. Listen to your internal stakeholders. Plan some surprise and delight moments into the change. For example, the CCB brand had a mascot that we integrated into some of the communications and brand experiences to celebrate and pay homage to that beloved character.

Make It Easy To Adopt

Once you've gotten alignment on the changes, make it easy to adopt. At Pushpay we created a Brand Hub and invested in a content management system to make using the new assets a breeze.

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Anatomy of a Brand Turnaround Campaign: #TogetherWe

The Challenge

After a decade in business, Pushpay was the leading brand for giving and engagement SaaS software for faith organizations and non-profits, with a vision for growth fueled by innovation and acquisitions. However, in a market built on relationships and congenial startups, it was easy to call out the New-Zealand-based publicly-traded company for being too corporate. Additionally, faced with some customer support challenges and increased competition, negative customer feedback and reviews were becoming more commonplace. And since the company's strategy historically had been not to talk about themselves, their leadership, or efforts to support the community, only one side of the story was being told.

The Strategy

With new leadership on board, there was more openness to focus on the corporate brand. After conducting a baseline brand awareness and perception survey, as well as workshops with employees, I started putting together a proposal for a corporate campaign that addressed three critical areas:

focusing on the company's humanness to counteract our growing reputation as a cold corporate entity

leaning into our technology bonafides to shore up the brand against the growing competitive threat

showcasing the voices of our many happy and satisfied customers to change the narrative that was building steam

The resulting campaign was called Together We and enabled us to demonstrate the ways we are making a difference for our customers and in our communities - Together We are generous, Together We build community, etc. This fill-in-the-blank approach gave us the flexibility to tell many kinds of stories.

We kicked off the campaign with an internal launch with employees, including a Together We slogan contest and customized t-shirts and stickers. We then launched the Together We program externally by partnering with one of our customers and their efforts to provide meals for families at Thanksgiving.

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We worked with a second customer at Christmas to showcase how our products enabled them to provide toys for the children of incarcerated parents.

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We leveraged the videos and testimonials across our social media accounts.

Our paid media investment focused on content sponsorships showcasing our customer outreach, and ads focused on customer problems that together we help our customers solve.

To round out the campaign, we unveiled a new website design that coordinates with our brand look and feel.

To engage more closely with our community, we're kicking off a Together We bus tour to visit our customers and lend a hand in their community outreach efforts. We'll capture all of this for meaningful moments to share on social.

Results

In the first six months, the campaign exceeded forecast on owned social, where we saw a more than 30% increase in engagements and link clicks, and increased our audience by 38%.

In an ad recall survey, the campaign had 20% recall of our audience despite its very small budget, delivered a paid social CTR 136% higher than the prior campaign, and exceeded overall MQL goals by 112%.

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Case Study: I Decided To Start A DTC Fashion Brand. Here's How I Did It

In 2017, I got a crazy idea. I decided if I couldn't find the quality, clothing pieces I was looking for, I would just make my own. So I set about figuring out how to do that.

Audience Research

Who doesn't love an oversized, cozy cashmere sweater? This boyfriend-style staple is key, but I couldn't find one anywhere after searching for more than a year. Same for a washed denim shirt. I surveyed my target audience and found many having the same struggles. This helped to solidify my idea to create a line of boyfriend-style clothes with high-quality fabrics. My plan was to call it boyfriend.

Validation

I put together a business plan and product roadmap, working with an artist I found on FIVRR to conceptualize the designs.

Then, I got an unexpected opportunity: I joined Diane von Furstenberg's Fashion Brand Masterclass. She chose my business plan to discuss with the group, and thought my idea had legs, if a difficult to trademark name (she was right).

Design Team

With that positive reinforcement, I plowed ahead, hiring a design team in New York to bring my visions to life. I hired a fit model, conducted numerous fittings, riffed on the designs, and kept improving until I had three pieces I was confident in to roll out in a mini-collection - The Maxwell Cashmere Sweater, The Joey Pocket Tee, and the Cody Denim Workshirt.

Brand Building

The tenets of my new brand were the boyfriend style, quality materials, sustainability, and being US-made. I began with a tagline of "Menswear-Inspired. Made to Last." But after determining I couldn't trademark "boyfriend," I changed the name of the brand to "boyette," a diminutive play on my last name. I decided that gave me more brand freedom too, should I want to expand into dresses, for example, so I dropped the "menswear-inspired" from the tagline.

But then, how to present the brand? While I was making fine pieces, I didn't want the brand to be too precious. I wanted it to be soft, but also have a little edge and be pro-woman.

Over time, I honed that tone into my social presence, with a juxtaposition of soft photography, diverse models, and edgy copy.

Store

My business plan outlined some unique customer experiences I wanted to build into my store to make it more like shopping with friends - easy ways to share items with friends (the Should I Buy? button), more stories and content baked into the buying journey to drive engagement, and showing suggestions for styling right on the buy page to help customers see how they could personalize these basics. In the end, though, I chose to start with a shopify store as my MVP experience.

Marketing

My marketing strategy was to leverage a strong, memorable social presence, a partnership with a pro-woman organization (1% of revenues go to Running Start), and PR. I worked with a brand agency for brand look and feel, and conducted several photoshoots to build up my photography library - often acting as my own photographer and sometimes model. I opted for a combination of photos and text-based posts to give my Instagram greater interest, playing around with different post designs.

Putting all the pieces together, I tested different social strategies and paid advertising combinations to drive site traffic (the holiday ads targeting husbands and boyfriends worked really well during the holiday season). And Running Start and I co-promoted each other. All those efforts paid off, putting me in the top 20% of shopify websites for traffic volume after just a few months. Two of my pieces also appeared in Tatler magazine, and I was featured in a sustainable fashion podcast.

The Future

Next steps for the brand: investing substantially in PR to land more fashion mag placements, and experimenting with influencers, as well as some guerilla tactics. In addition, I'm beginning to think about my next mini-collection. I'm looking for the perfect wool coat.

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Instead of going to business school, I started my own company. Here’s what I learned.

Maybe you’re sitting in your home office/closet/bathroom dreaming about going back to school while trying to look alert during the…

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This hustle? I got it from my Mom

My childhood memories of my mother include short skirts and tall hair. We were in Texas, after all. But what she taught me was…

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Use Case: Brand Building Using Metrics To Optimize Every Point In A Buyer's Journey

The Challenge: F5 has dozens of products. After more than 20 years in business and multiple acquisitions, their story had gotten complex. The world of our target audience, cloud architects, had also been changing. We needed a simpler way to talk about what we did and why it mattered, and to drive awareness and interest in our solution.

The Approach: Through market research and sales feedback, we began to solidify our messaging around a category of solution we called Secure Cloud Architecture. We also focused deeply on our audience and their challenges through persona deep-dives and worked those insights into our messaging. Working with my team, I created high-level, SEO-friendly thought-leadership blogs and podcasts, as well as several problem-based microsite experiences nested within our website, fueled by content for every part of the buyers journey. Those sites become our showroom destination for paid media and organic search, and the content helped drive interest and conversions. I connected content to the needs of our buyers in the awareness, education and consideration stages, and used a novel metrics construct to measure page engagement and leads on the site.

First, we looked at something we called an Extremely Engaging Content (EEC), essentially a stickiness score which was a complex GA measure that combined scrolling, clicking, downloads, video views and time on site into one measure that was easy to track and communicate to leadership. We also looked at web form conversion rates. While we looked at a lot of detailed performance data, those two measures were easily communicated to leadership over time about our progress at top of funnel.

The Results: Focusing so deeply on our target persona and their challenges resulted in content that truly engaged them and drove more site visits, engagement and increasing conversions. Those two metrics became my bible, and I tracked and optimized for over a year. I growth-hacked the campaign, improving EEC by 30% and web form conversion rates by 70% over 9 months, which drove sales pipeline that was 10% above forecasts and reset expectations for all campaigns. Eight months post leaving the company, I heard that my campaign was still a major driver of awareness and leads for the division.

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Use Case: Humanizing A Brand With An Egg-cellent Easter Campaign

Challenge

Pushpay had a reputation as very corporate (some called the brand “pushy pay”). Indeed, the company had never invested in corporate outreach and the result was that our brand perception needed improvement. Worse, amongst customers acquired when the company purchased a competitor, brand perception was vitriolic. We needed a strategy to demonstrate our human side.

Approach

With a company strategy of being the #1 software provider in our space, I developed a corporate brand strategy designed to 1) show our human side 2) demonstrate our technology leadership and expertise 3) provide opportunities to amplify our customer's voices. To kick off this effort, I worked with my design team to create and roll out a new look and feel for the brand that was more approachable. We began using the new brand externally in promotional email campaigns and social. One of the first uses of the new brand in a Corporate campaign supported our Easter outreach and was designed to both show our human side and amplify customer voices.

The concept was simple: Use email and social to promote an online scavenger hunt contest with answers hidden on our website. The winner would get 10 Easter feasts for their community.

Outcome

We drove great engagement on social, but the real winner was in email. Our email open rates and CTRs were well above our historical average. As a result, we began looking for opportunities to optimize our email outreach with more fun, quirky and human interactions.

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Use Case: Building Brand Awareness With A Guerilla-Style Multi-Channel Campaign

Challenge

Visual IQ was a small player in the marketing attribution space. Their goal was to increase brand awareness, interest and leads. They also knew that in addition to raising awareness about their brand, they also needed to educate about marketing attribution.

Approach

I conducted brand awareness research to understand their aided and unaided awareness and perceptions, and devised a multi-channel campaign around the theme of Revolutionary Marketing. Reviews of available research yielded insights about marketers being competitive and also being unclear about the emerging field of marketing attribution that I leveraged in the design of the campaign. I also knew that we needed something eye-catching to get attention from the small budget we were working with. Some guerilla tactics were needed.

Campaign Overview

The cornerstone of the campaign was a microsite, with a dual goal of education and conversion. The site had content for marketing attribution newbies as well as more experienced pros (the two kinds of marketers we needed to reach). The media mix included videos, infographics checklists, reports, giveaways and other content that were promoted via social and paid media. I worked with our design team on the theme and creative for the campaign, and directed the build of the microsite. I wrote and produced all the content and ad copy, managed the scripting and video creation, and managed the ad buys and reporting. 

I had seen successes with quizzes, so a quiz around the types of revolutionary marketers became the nexus of the social and paid media campaign. From there, an origin story about a league of Revolutionary Marketers was born. That story was incorporated into a booklet that came with 3D bobble head dolls that we gave away on twitter and at conferences. 

Outcome

The campaign’s success on social overdelivered against forecast. Quality visitors to the site resulted in 100% more newsletter signups than forecast, driving up Visual IQ’s lead pool. Ultimately, the combined efforts across channels resulted in increased unaided awareness from 1% to 3% in one year.

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Does brand experience matter? You decide.

During the recent stay-at-home order here in Seattle, during which I was lucky enough to both keep my job and be able to work from home, I decided to try a couple of food delivery services. Which would you choose?

Option 1

The first food delivery service offered many options to mix and match the offer features. I could do 3 or 5 days a week. I could choose all my foods or they could choose for me, etc. The menus looked appetizing - beautiful photography. And they had great customer references. The food arrived as expected, invoice inside, and I enjoyed the meals. 

Option 2

The second food delivery service offered the same kinds of options. The menus looked delightful and the photography was inspirational. They showcased many satisfied customers. They had a lifestyle newsletter, offered several add-ons to the meals (teas, chocolates, powders, etc). They even offered a cookbook. When the meals arrived, a packet including a guide to the lifestyle, a calendar with suggestions about how to approach each day, and a piece of Palo Santo wood was inside. The wood was to burn in order to “shift your energy” as part of the new lifestyle practice you had adopted, along with your food subscription. Oh, and the food was incredibly tasty. 

Which would you choose?

Option 1 - Utilitarian

Option 2 - Comprehensive lifestyle

I equate these two options with how companies sometimes approach their brands. Some focus on features and functions (utilitarian). They subscribe to the  “build it and they will come” philosophy. They want to show your their value. Ad nauseam. 

Others, lean in deeply to what their brand is about. They make the customer experience more than it has to be. They make it meaningful and memorable IN ADDITION to providing a great product. 

For me, all things being equal, I choose the comprehensive lifestyle brand. I appreciate all the special touches, and it makes me feel special. I think there is a lesson here for any brand trying to engage with their customers. 

Which one would you choose and why?

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Don’t leave your customers hanging

As a marketer, I strive never to do the thing that sometimes happens to me as a parent – drop off in the middle of a robust conversation and never pick it up again.

But I still see instances of brands who disappear somewhere in the ‘conversation’ with their customers across communications, touchpoints and experiences. Is there a toddler tugging at their trousers?

The answer is no, of course. Businesses, particularly more established ones, have gotten complicated and siloed, and that results in a disjointed customer experience. But brands are trying. New research from OnBrand reports that 52% of global brand managers and CMOs believe that the most important component of a successful brand is user/customer experience.

Harrah’s and Stitch Fix have both famously used their data to deliver outstanding brand experiences that have increased loyalty AND revenues.

But going back to those global brand brand managers and CMOs surveyed - only 19% say customer experience is a main focus for 2017. And that’s a shame. That is tacitly shutting down the conversation with your customers. When technology and data are table stakes for every product out there, it is the experience and how the brand makes you feel that sets it apart (and I would argue, is at least as important as acquisition or loyalty).

Think of the technology or software company that woos you in the store but sends you stilted, impersonal emails or the online shopping experience that makes it challenging or painful to buy.

Here’s a real-world example. I recently got my hair cut and colored at a Vidal Sassoon salon. I didn’t consider them a relevant brand, but they are near my office and I was having a hair emergency. Their staff was great. After my services, they blew dry and styled my hair, and I left there looking and feeling great, in line with their former tagline of “If you don’t look good, we don’t look good.”

On my second visit, I just had a color service. If you aren’t aware, a color service is about twice the price of a cut. When it was done, there was a bit of awkward confusion. There was no blow-dry included with my service, which has been the norm at the dozens of salons I have used around the country. At Vidal Sassoon, a blow dry is only included with a cut (remember, half the price of a color service). My options were to blow dry myself, or leave with a wet head. So the company who used to be about making you look good, was about to send me out into the world looking like a drowned rat. It didn’t make sense.

When I inquired, the reasoning had something to do with margins. I can only guess that someone in finance probably decided that since their margins were lower on the color service, they would cut the blow dry and make a few extra bucks. They were neither focusing on the complete customer experience or even looking at the issue from the customer POV (since from my standpoint I was spending more, so should get the benefit of ‘extra’ services). Who’s gonna care, right? Customers will. There’s enough choice out there that, all other things being equal, I’ll go to the salon where I get full-service service, and they don’t leave me hanging in the middle of our conversation with wet hair.

***photo credit Hernan Sanchez https://unsplash.com 

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Why not just give customers what they want?

Have you been to a business conference recently where you were offered pencils and fly swatters and all kinds of tchotchkes that were left in the trash bin of your hotel room because they had no value? 

When I worked trade shows early in my career, I always tried to ensure that anything we gave away had SOME value - otherwise it was a waste of money, right?

It’s the same thing with digital marketing and content today. Most marketers focus on telling potential customers what they want them to know. Me, me, me, me. It’s like being on a terrible date with someone who won’t stop talking about themselves. And it’s not effective marketing either. 

The 2017 State of Inbound Report states that generating traffic and leads is the most significant challenge for marketers in 2017. 

With so much at stake, why not give potential customers what they want rather than just what you want to tell them? In this case, it’s like going on a date with someone who listens and engages with you.

How this relates to marketing is thus: As I said, most marketers focus on what they want to tell you instead of helping you solve their problem. In marketing parlance, it’s in the Action stage. But what about the Awareness, Interest and Desire stages? There is a huge opportunity for marketers to create compelling and engaging content at those points in the buying cycle, so that once someone is ready to take action, they’re ready to take it with you.

This goes for fashion or electronics - the rise of social media influencers is an obvious place where marketers have taken notice of how to engage and inspire. Pinterest and Instagram have helped lead the way in this space. 

Net-A-Porter.com, the luxury clothing retail site, has taken this idea even further by creating a fashion magazine - Porter - that can inspire shoppers out in the world, but is also shoppable online in the digital version. They aren’t just retailers, they’ve become publishers and they are owning more of that relationship with their consumers and stoking sales. They aren’t just relying on display ads. They are creating an end-to-end experience for their customers. 

It works in B2B as well - lots of companies from behemoth Microsoft to smaller ones like F5 and Visual IQ are focusing on content to engage their customers with helpful knowledge, and owning more of that end-to-end experience. And since cmo.com says becoming an experience-led business is one of the big challenges for 2017, that’s a good thing. (By the way, cmo.com, a content marketing hub for Adobe, is one of the best examples of content marketing out there.)

So in 2017, don’t be a bad date. Stop talking about yourself and focus on giving customers what they want.

*photo credit Henry Lorenzatto, unsplash.com

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What Your Business Can Learn From A Crazy Super Fan

I recently read this story in the New York Times and had just one thought: This girl is crazy. 

She saw American Idiot 146 times during it's Broadway run. She's seen her current Broadway obsession, Once, probably more than 100 times now. She travels hours twice a week and has spent $3500+ so far on this show alone.

What drives someone to act in this manner?

Fandom. 

That kind of obsession is the holy grail for businesses. Let’s break down how her experience with Broadway is delivering the elements that create an exceptional consumer relationship and super-fan behavior.

Superior Product - First of all, this isn't a choppy local production or cheesy made-for-TV-movie. These are highly-acclaimed musicals with loads of talented professionals who are knocking this chick's socks off every night. Just like any other business, these shows have to deliver the goods or no one will be standing in line to see them.

Engagement - In addition to the energy and enjoyment of the show itself, the "company" engages her personally.

"All of the actors know her by name and some invite her to gigs and keep in touch on social media." 

"Almost all the actors greeted her by name."

Wow. A brand that knows your name and connects to you in a meaningful way ("Why of course I'd like to come see your folk band play. Thanks for the offer!") Talk about feeling special. I'm still waiting for Living Social and Groupon to realize I don't want diapers and camping trips. And for my local barista to greet me by name or just acknowledge my existence now that I've been there like 3000 times.

Recognition - Autographs, guitar picks, shout outs from the stage - All these things say you are special to me. A part of me thinks "Broadway" could do something even more relevant for these super fans, but I'm sure they save their grand gestures for fans who spend a lot on boxes or something like that. However, I'd wager that there aren't many big spenders who spend as much on a single show as these super fans are throughout the year. And as a different kind of thought leader (didn't a little part of you think you should check out these shows since they are driving such obsessive behavior?), maybe they should.

The bottom line is that all businesses should be trying to develop and cater to super fans. Those meaningful relationships mean more sales, more profits and more goodwill.

What are you doing to engage your super fans?