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