The old rules of business no longer apply. Being great is no longer good enough. To win in today’s world, you’ve got to be SUPER and if your customers, boss, or partner isn’t bragging to their friends about you, you’re in trouble.
Enter Brittany Hodak. She’s an award-winning entrepreneur, author, and customer experience speaker who has delivered keynotes across the globe to organizations including American Express and the United Nations.
On this episode, we discuss how to create superfans for your professional AND personal brand.
Elizabeth:
Welcome to and Transcend. I'm your coach Elizabeth, and today's guest is Brittany Hodak. She is the author of Creating Superfans: How to Turn Your Customers Into Lifelong Advocates. She's a keynote speaker and she is a fan engagement guru, which I love that title. We had such a fun chat today and we talked all about not only how to create loyalty for products and services that you may be selling or marketing, but also for your personal brand. How do you create allies and people who wanna help you and support you, and how do you leverage your stories to deepen these connections with people in your lives? She has worked with some very huge brands. She's worked with Disney, Amazon, Walmart, Katie Perry, the Red Sox, so she knows what she's talking about. We had a lot of fun, a lot of laughs on today's show, so I hope you enjoy it.
Brittany, thank you so much for being on the show and spending some time today to talk about how to create super fans and turning your customers into lifelong advocates. I think that this is huge right now. I think we're living in an age where people are incredibly brand loyal and some people are getting it right, and some people are really alienating not only their existing client base, their customer base, but anybody who was a potential. What are you seeing in the market? I know that you've got this huge extensive background, but as far as the brands that you feel like are winning right now and then maybe brands that have the most opportunity, could you take us through a little bit about why you feel that way and what you're seeing?
Brittany:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so much for having me, Elizabeth. I'm so excited to hang out with you and talk about the subject which I care so deeply about, and there are quite a few brands who are crushing it right now. There are a lot of D2C startups that are doing a great job of really putting their customers at the center of all their decision making and finding ways to weave their brand story into every touchpoint.
One example I really like is a clothing subscription service called Armour, and it's a little bit rent the runway, except they have real personal stylists who will help you that you can email back and forth with and say, “I've got this event coming up,” or “Can you help me with this,” or “Can we jump on a zoom for you to tell me what type of clothes I should be wearing?” So just a real high touch. And my favorite thing about the way that they package their clothes when they come to you is their logo is a little origami looking dress. And when you get a shipment of new clothes, which I think they call a case or trunk or something like that, it's tied up in twine and on top of the twine is this little origami dress that's made out of beautiful paper. It's always a different pattern, but it's just so cool and it's another touch point to really remind you that it's not just automation behind the company. You're not just talking to some algorithm. There are actually people who are working to help you feel and look your best.
Elizabeth:
And it's that personal touch. When we talk about exceeding customer experience expectations, you really like to hit on the fact that it's the before and it's also after the purchase. It's not just what's in the middle, what is maybe the first impression or what it's like once you've already purchased. But I think a lot of people might spend a lot of time on the before—they're trying to get the customer—and then they're just turning and burning and maybe they don't necessarily pay attention to what their experience is like during or after. So tell us a little bit why before and after is such a huge piece to creating these super fans.
Brittany:
Well, it’s because if you think about things through the lens of a customer, their experience is not just the sales process: it's the discovery process, it's the use process, it's the reorder process. And a lot of times companies are really designed around acquisition at the expense of retention and delight. And when you think about not just how much more expensive and time consuming it is to attract new customers versus sell something else to an existing customer, it's also just so much harder.
So there is a real ROI in terms of not just money, but also time and energy on cultivating the types of relationships that make people want to come back and also tell their friends. And regardless of the industry you're in, you absolutely can differentiate yourself and can go from a potential commodity provider to a category of one in your prospects and customers minds by prioritizing their experience.
Elizabeth:
I feel like you're always creating unofficial brand ambassadors or you're creating a sales prevention team. And that was something in my background, we always joked, especially at Coca-Cola where like, Oh yeah, and so it wasn't marketing, but it was some other red tapey type department is the sales prevention team. They were just making it so much harder for us to sell. But I think that some people are doing that too. Even if you just have a Shopify store or Etsy, or even if you don't, you're not a business owner, I feel like you're doing that with your personal relationships too. You're either making people feel really good and feel really valued and seen, or you have the void of that. And the void of that equals them almost not being on your team. Because if I was to ask you about a certain brand and you were like, “Yeah, I don't really know,” to me that's a no, right? If it's not a hell yes, it's a no. And I think that a lot of people aren't really focused on creating those hell yes, type of loyal relationships.
Brittany:
A hundred percent. I am a firm believer that there are only three kinds of interactions in this world. Whether it's one to one or one to many, you are going to walk away from every experience to which you give your time or attention feeling better, worse, or exactly the same as you did when that interaction started. So to the extent that you, as the business person, the ceo, the customer support rep, the marketing rep, whatever it is, everybody is in the experience department. Everybody is in the customer delight department. To the extent that you can, focus on making every interaction a customer has with you a net positive for them, or at the very least a net neutral, you will create super fans. You will have people walking away from interactions saying, “Wow, that was easier than I thought.” Or, “Wow, that was really great.”
And they will tell their friends because we're living not only in this experience economy, but we're living in a time where people are sharing more than they ever have at any point in human history with more people. So people are probably going to talk about you. (If they're not talking about you, that’s another huge problem. Apathy is such a big threat to everyone.) But assuming people are talking about you, you want to, as you so eloquently put it, make sure that they are not in the sales prevention department, but they are in the business of telling people why you're great.
Elizabeth:
And this goes for work too. I mean, if you're a listener and you're like, “Okay, I don't have a widget that I'm selling, I don't have a brand,” anything like that—I mean you do typically, and it's your brand. It's “Brand insert your name here,” whatever your name is. And I think that goes for work. It goes for your friendships. I'm one of those people that always arrive somewhere maybe five to ten minutes early. And some of my really good friends—they know who they are—I can count on to be thirty minutes late. And it really bugs me because I love these people, but it's this one thing. This is hurting their brand. They're basically telling me they really don't care enough to plan ahead. Every once in a while, shit happens. And if you're one of the listeners who's always late, I'll just do you a favor and let you know the other side of it, why everybody's pissed when you finally show up.
But it feels like don't really… your brand is not being managed very well. These are interactions that happen all the time. And even though people love you—so even if you have a brand which everybody uses. And at some point somebody's gonna be at an airport and have no other options but to buy a Dasani—you think you've just got them, but you can always lose them. These can be incredibly supportive friends. These could be allies at work, or it could be this actual thing. If you are in a brand role or marketing, people can always go somewhere else. Right, Brittany?
Brittany:
Oh yeah, there is always another option, even if that option is to take the money they would've given you and put it all on red in Vegas. There is always another option. And when you fall short of a customer's expectations and don't handle it well, what oftentimes happens is that customer then takes what before was affinity and turns it into a little bit of adversarial feelings. It’s like, “Well, you don't care about me? Now I don't care about you,” or “I don't like you, and I'm gonna tell everyone why.”
Elizabeth:
And that's really dangerous, especially for office politics-type stuff.
Brittany:
Oh yeah. Inside the company, outside the company, like everywhere. Because your brand is not your logo. Your brand is every single employee or partner who represents it in every interaction with every colleague, every customer, every vendor, every shareholder, every investor that is your brand in real time, every day being constantly recreated.
Elizabeth:
And in your book Creating Superfans, which is coming out January 10th, you guys really exciting, you really talk about this whole, it's not even a notion, but it's such a critical step, which is to put people first. And so I would love for you to talk a little bit about that too, from both sides: if you're somebody who's actually in an organization and why it's important for your brand and the company's brand and the culture to be one of people first, and then also on the consumer side.
Brittany:
Yeah. Well thank you so much. So in the book, which is available for pre-order now, I talk about something that I call the supermodel. And the supermodel is just a five-step framework for creating super fans in your business. Whether you are the CEO or someone just starting out in your career, whether you are a brand new startup or a brand that's been around for 150 years, customer centricity is critical for every business. No matter how new or old you are, no matter how well known or unknown you are, it is so, so critical. And a super model is a five part framework. I have two little boys, as we were talking about before we recorded, so things need to be easy for me to remember because so much of my brain is now filled with the names of characters on Peppa Pig and when every new Lego is coming out, it’s gotta be easy to remember if I'm gonna do it.
So this supermodel framework is easy to remember, easy to implement, and most importantly, easy to measure. And so the five steps are:
S, start with your story.
U, understand your story.
P, personalize.
E, exceed expectations.
R, repeat.
So that's it. That's a secret sauce. The reason the first two are founded in story is because super fans are created at the intersection of your story and every customer's story. So that could mean you as the boss and someone you're trying to hire or someone on your team. That could mean you as the CEO and a giant prospect that you're trying to get. Wherever there is an interaction between you and someone else, there's an opportunity to create a super fan by showing how you are relevant to their life, why your thing matters to them. Because we're all so busy and stories are one of the most powerful and quickest ways to cut through all of the noise, to take someone from apathy to advocacy to make them say, “I get it. This is why I care and this is why I wanna work with you and not someone who does what you do.”
And the people part of that is so important, especially as you're hiring and training and enabling people for your brands. Someone said to me about six months ago, “Only fat people run on treadmills.” You know who said that to me? The Nordic track guy who was literally building my treadmill for me on the second floor of my house. And I looked at him and I was trying to figure out if he was joking, if it was just some bad joke. And he went on to talk about how people who are in shape run outside. “They know running outside is the best. I run outside five miles every single day. You would never catch me on a treadmill and I could even get a sick discount on one, but it's only ever fat people. You go to any gym, you go anywhere.” And then you stands back and he looks at me and he goes, “You're not fat though. Oh, I bet you got a fat husband, you got a fat husband.”
Elizabeth:
I would be like, “Get out of my house.”
Brittany:
I was like—Well, I was nice until he finished opening the box and setting everything up, because I knew it weighed several hundred pounds and I didn't wanna build it myself. But now, every time I'd seen the Nordic Track logo, I think about that very rude guy who said, “Only fat people run on treadmills,” which is that would be an inappropriate hot take from anyone.
Elizabeth:
He's part of their sales prevention team.
Brittany:
Oh yeah, exactly. A hundred percent. And if you don't have those people, and so part of it comes down to obviously hiring the right people. I am a huge proponent of, if you are somebody who is in a position to hire people, look at every single job description you have right now. If it does not contain the words “to serve our customers by” at the beginning and throughout, maybe you should reconsider that. Because you will make more money and make people's lives better by adopting a mentality and a practice of customer centricity that you hold everyone on your team to. Even if somebody never speaks directly to customers, everyone's job is to be in service of the customer because what you are doing internally ultimately trickles down to affect your customers.
Elizabeth:
But that's why you have to take care of them, right, Brittany? I mean, you're saying if you expect your employees to give a shit about your customers, then they need to feel like you give a shit about them. So you can't mistreat employees, overwork them, underpay them, not be flexible or compassionate, or take a valued interest in them, but then expect them to be these wonderful compassionate customers. I mean all of this stuff are these driven road warriors who are gonna go out and sell and market your product if they don't feel like they're getting it on the back end?
Brittany:
Oh, a hundred percent. Your customer experience will never, ever, ever be better than your employee experience. It can't. It’s impossible. It's like a math problem that will just never work because of—pretend I finished that analogy with the math rules to show how well I do math, which I don't, but it can’t happen.
Elizabeth:
So since story is so important, why don't you give us a little bit about your story? What is some of your background? Because it's very impressive, but I always feel like it's better to ask the guest to tell us that story in their own words.
Brittany:
Well, thank you for asking. So I grew up in a tiny town in Oklahoma and I always wanted to work in the music business. I was just obsessed with the music industry. And when I was 16 years old, I got a job at a local radio station, and that job was as the mascot. So yeah, I was “sting the bee,” I was a six foot tall bumblebee with a giant head and wings, and I would go to every state fair and rodeo and car dealership sale in a four county area.
Elizabeth:
I bet that costume wasn't hot at all.
Brittany:
Oh my gosh. Not only was it the most miserable costume to wear, because it was made out of fur, I had to wear leggings and then fur and these giant boots and giant gloves. I'll find a picture, I'll give it to you. You can link to it in show notes for anybody who wants to see how sexy it was in this bee costume.
The one thing that was good though is I had an ice vest, so it was like a veco vest that I would put sixteen ice packets in that were basically all around my whole torso. So when it was like 120 degrees outside and 150 degrees in the suit, it was not the greatest thing. But usually the rule was I only had to do it for 15 minutes out of the hour, so I would be to bee for fifteen minutes and then I would go take a forty-five minute break, which I was like, I don't know who designed the schedule, but I dig it.
So anyway, I was working in the radio station and I had the very good fortune that my maiden name was Brit Jones. And the station manager came in one day and said, “I keep seeing ads on TV for this movie called Bridget Jones, something like diary or something. It seems like everybody's talking about it. And we have a Brit Jones, so what could we do and call it Britney Jones diary?”
Now mind you, no one on the planet knew they had a Britney Jones because I literally wore a bee suit, that was my job. But with all the bravado of a 16 or 17 year old kid with nothing to lose, I was like, “Well, why don't you have me interview all the bands that come to town? And then my diary can be like, ‘what happened when Brittany went bowling with Blink 182 or whatever.’”
And the safety manager said, “Oh, like that other show that just won an Oscar, that Almost Famous movie. Yeah, that's a really good idea. Let's do that. Call it your diary.” And so all of a sudden, as a 17 year old kid, it became my job literally to hang out with rock stars and brag about it on the internet. Which was so fun. So for three or four years, through the rest of high school, and for the first couple years of college, I did this. I would go to shows all over— I lived in a small market, but we were an hour and a half from Tulsa and two hours from Little Rock and three hours from Oklahoma City and four and a half hours from Dallas. So I would drive to all these shows and interview these bands and go to these radio festivals, and I would audio content to play on the stations to promote the fact that people could go read Britney Jones diary.
And this was in the year 2000 ish, 2000, 2001, something like that. So there wasn't a lot of website content. And so even though I was this scrawny gawky high school kid with braces, these publicists and artist managers were taking me seriously because no one was doing anything online. And so I would get copied on these label marketing reports and it would be like, “This artist is on SNL and then there's gonna be a feature in the New Yorker magazine. And then, oh, check out this link to the kzbb.com blog where this girl wrote about their show.” It was so funny that people were taking it seriously, which was amazing. So anyway, that completely spoiled any chances of me ever having a real job cuz I was like, “Oh, you can get paid to hang out with rock stars. I should do more of this.”
So after college, I moved to New York, I got a job at a label. I'd had this idea for a product that would sort of merchify recorded music, because by the time I graduated college in 2005, iTunes was just barely a thing, but everybody was really worried about piracy and file sharing. And as a college kid, I was like, “Why would anybody get in the car and drive to the store to buy a CD when there's nothing that makes that CD better than music they can get at home in seconds for free from a friend? Of course, people are stealing music, you've gotta give them an incentive.”
So I had this idea to create a coffee table book version of an album. I said, “If we can make the music almost like the value add to the package, people will want to own whatever we make, whether it's got vinyl in it or a CD in it, or a digital download or whatever, people are gonna wanna buy it for the content.”
And I kept trying to get people to rally behind this idea, and all of the labels I worked for were basically like, “yeah, we're not a media company. That sounds like a lot of work.” I kept pitching and pitching and pitching this idea to everyone. And finally a buyer named Jenny at Walmart was like, “I really like this idea and if you can get some labels to give it a shot, I'll just give you a vendor number and we can try to sell them and let me know what you need.” And so she and several other partners in the entertainment industry were amazing.
I launched a company called Zine Pack, which in hindsight was a really stupid name, but it was like magazine pack. The first ten names I wanted were all unavailable. Actually, what's really funny is I wanted to name the company from the get-go, I wanted to name it the super fan company—and this was late 2010–and all of the partners that I talked to were like super fan has such a negative connotation. That's like when you see super fan people think like an adult gamer living in somebody's basement or Justin Bieber fans, 12 year old girls. It's so crazy how in a decade's time the word super fan has evolved so much and become seen so differently in mainstream pop culture.
But anyway, so I started a company called the Super Fan Company. I did that for a while, had a ton of success, sold millions and millions of products for some of the biggest artists on the planet, not just with Walmart, but with other huge partners all around the world. And from that had a lot of fun opportunities come my way, including I was recruited to go on Shark Tank because a producer had read an article about me in some magazine. That led to a keynote speaking career, which was also something that I never in a million years would've thought about doing, but found that I really, really love.
Because the thing about super fandom is that it exists not just for pop culture, but in every single vertical, in every single industry. The same things that make someone identify as and fall in love with an artist or an actor or a sports player: All of those things are true for brands and services and products. So teaching people how to harness some of that magic to use to build their own brands, to create their own loyal fans is something that has been a completely unexpected and yet so enjoyable obsession of mine for the past several years.
Elizabeth:
Before we got on, Britney's already giving me— You know when you're in the presence of genius, people can just spit things out and they're like, “Oh, it's just a thought.” And you're like, “No, that's actually incredible.” So you're definitely the real deal.
But I think too, some people could be saying, “Well that could take a lot of money. Maybe I don't have a lot of money to create these certain things.” But I think what I'm hearing too is that it doesn't have to be material things. It can be just being kind. I mean, maybe you create super fans around you for you as a person by being the person that always texts back right away. We all have some of those people in our lives who will just immediately get back to you. And I'm not shading the ones who wait three days cuz I'm falling into that category. But I think that there are people in your life that you really can count on that you know they're thinking about you even when you're not there. There's things that you can do with text messages or free coffee here or there, or sending somebody a note. I mean, it doesn't have to be some big, huge, expensive, bold gesture.
Brittany:
Not only does it not have to be, it almost never is. The best marketing doesn't cost anything because you can't pay someone to love you. Even in Aladdin, one of the things that the genie was like, “Sorry, I can't do that,” was to make Aladdin or to make Jasmine fall in love with Aladdin, right? He was like, “I can't make anybody fall in love.” Even in Disney movies, you can't pay someone or bribe someone to love you. They don't become a super fan because you're like, “Let me do this thing for you.” It's all about the way that you make them feel. People wanna feel seen and heard and validated and important to you.
And exactly as you said, Elizabeth, the way you do that is by the way, you show up and you treat them. Super fans are created one interaction at a time. Every one of those interactions is going to be a net negative, a net neutral, or a net positive. And the way that you create those super fans is by making those net positive things happen. We all have those friends that after we hang out with them, we just feel drained, or we know they want something cuz they only call or text when they want something. Don't be that friend, don't be that person.
Elizabeth:
And it can be so easy, and sometimes it's a give and a take, but I know I've got some friends that sometimes when I get back, my husband will be like, “How did it go?” And I'm like, “Oh, it's great.” And then I'll rattle off the cliff notes of what my friend's up to. And then he says, ‘So did you guys get to talk about you?” And sometimes I've been like, “Huh, no we didn't. I have a book coming out. Nobody brought it up.” Things like that.
But it's a pendulum. As long as it's swinging back and forth, sometimes friends are gonna need more of you, right, at certain times. But we just wanna make sure that it's going back and forth. And I think sometimes it's just very simple self-awareness. And that can be with colleagues, it can be with your partner, it can be with family members.
I know as a child, I'm still a child, but to my parents, I'm like, “Well, they should wanna know what's going on with me, but I don't have to care what's going on with them.” And it's like, no, actually, you do need to ask them what's going on with them and actually care and take interest and take note and then treat them with that sort of value. I think at the end of the day, everybody just wants to feel valued. And if you can not only use that as your North Star, but also pick up incredible books like Superfans, which will not only, you've got it chock full of exercises and all sorts of stuff in the book, right?
Brittany:
Oh yeah. There's so much stuff. And because I'm a little extra and because it's all about the experience, the whole book is not only hard cover, but it's full color throughout. Really just for no reason other than I thought it would be fun. And I wanted people to be delighted when they were reading it and think, “Oh my gosh, this page is so beautiful. I have to post it on Instagram right now.” So yeah, it's really fun to read. Every chapter is a song title too.
Elizabeth:
Well that's the Nashville coming out.
Brittany:
Yeah, it's really fun. I love it.
Elizabeth:
Well, thank you so much for spending this time with us, Brittany. I know that there's so much more. We're gonna try to get Britney to come back in January. You can pre-order the book right now, but when the full official launch of creating Super fans comes out, we would definitely like to have you back and dig a little bit deeper into some subcategories.
I think this was a great discussion to give these wonderful overarching tools and strategies behind making people feel like you're somebody they wanna hang out with. They wanna help because you wanna do that for them. So thank you for your time today, Brittany, and I look forward to talking to you again.
Brittany:
Thank you so much for having me, Elizabeth. That was great, and I can't wait for round two.
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