Show Notes

• Disparity between expectations and customer experience
• Brittany’s entry into the entertainment business
• Starting ZeenPak
• Pitching to sharks
• Lessons from entrepreneurship
• Creating Superfans
• The SUPER Model
• One of the most powerful ways to create a “wow” experience
• The importance of turning employees into lifelong advocates

Connect With Jerry Meek

✩ Website – https://brittanyhodak.com/
✩ Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/brittanyhodak
✩ Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/brittanyhodak
✩ LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/brittanyhodak

Additional Resources

✩ Book: Creating Superfans: How To Turn Your Customers Into Lifelong Advocates

Summary

Brittany Hodak is an award-winning entrepreneur, author, and customer experience speaker. She has worked with some of the world’s biggest brands and entertainers, including Walmart, Disney, Katy Perry, and Dolly Parton, and she is the author of the bestselling book, “Creating Superfans.” Brittany discusses what it was like to compete on Shark Tank, and how we can all turn our customers or clients into lifelong advocates.

Full Transcript

Brian  

Welcome to another episode of LifeExcellence with Brian Bartes. Join me as I talk with amazing athletes, entrepreneurs, authors, entertainers, and others who have achieved excellence in their chosen field so you can learn their tools, techniques and strategies for improving performance and achieving greater success. 

Brittany Hodak is an award-winning entrepreneur, author, and customer experience speaker who has delivered keynotes to audiences and organizations across the globe, including American Express, Compassion International, Sony Music and the United Nations. She has worked with not only some of the world’s biggest brands, including Walmart, Disney, and the Boston Red Sox, but also with some of the world’s biggest entertainers, including Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Dolly Parton, KISS and Motley Crew. Among her many accomplishments, Brittany founded and grew an entertainment start-up to eight figures before exiting, and she is the former chief experience officer of experience.com. Britney has appeared in print publications that include Forbes, Ad Week, and Success Magazine, and she has been featured on shows for ABC, CBS, CNBC, Fox News, and many more. Brittany is widely regarded as the go-to source on creating loyal fans for your brand. She is the author of the bestselling book, “Creating Super Fans:  How to Turn Your Customers into Lifelong Advocates.” Forbes said of her debut book, “If you have customers, you need this book – period.” And after reading her book twice, I couldn’t agree more. It’s an honor to have her on the show today. Welcome, Brittany, and thanks for joining us on LifeExcellence. 

Brittany  

Thank you so much for having me, Brian. And thank you for reading the book twice, you get bonus points. I’m so glad that you enjoyed it enough to visit with it some more. 

Brian  

Oh, absolutely. Some would say I’m a slow learner but I actually like to – when I find a really good book – go back immediately and read it a second time. I find that that really helps with retention and hopefully that’ll help with the interview today.

Brittany  

Something that I’ve heard from a lot of people since the book came out is people telling me they will read it and listen to the audiobook at 1.25 speed, so that they can read along as they hear the audio book narration and that is something that I never would have thought of. But I’ve heard it from so many people so it must be a popular thing that some people do. I’ve started doing it myself. Now after I’ve heard it like the fifth or sixth time…somebody saying that they had done that with my book, now I will do that sometimes. I have found that it really does help seep in and it keeps you from getting sidetracked and paying half-attention. So that’s a pro tip. If you really want to learn, listen to the audiobook a little bit sped up while you’re reading the physical copy or an electronic copy of a book.

Brian  

That’s great advice and a great recommendation for listeners and viewers and for me too. Brittany, I’m a student of success, and in the customer experience space that means turning customers or clients into lifelong advocates, or super fans, as you call them. Why is it though, at a time when expectations around customer experience are higher than ever companies seem to be delivering what – on average – is a mediocre experience at best? I don’t know if you find this, but I’m noticing it in restaurants, retail stores, and even with companies that have historically delivered an amazing customer experience. Do you have any insight on that?

Brittany  

Yes, I do. This is a huge pet peeve I have with society in general; there’s not one answer to your question. But in general, I think it falls into two camps. With small to midsize businesses, I think oftentimes it comes down to poor management, because employees are never going to treat customers better than they are treated. A disengaged employee who does not feel appreciated is not going to go out of their way to super serve a customer. So, if your team is apathetic, your customers stand no chance at picking you amongst your competitors consistently. So that’s the one side. For bigger brands I think a huge reason is because of the short-sightedness of people maximizing quarterly earnings, quarterly reports, putting the interests of the shareholders above the interests of customers and employees. And what’s really interesting is there have been a lot of long-term studies that have looked at the performance over periods of years, and even decades, of companies that regularly over-index versus their competitors using tools like NPS, since that’s one of the easiest to look back on. Because people have been doing it for a few decades now, the companies that are consistently seen as outranking their peers always perform better long term. But it takes somebody in the CEO seat or in the board of directors who stands up and says, you know what, I don’t care if I’m getting pressure to do this, to maximize what’s happening this quarter, we’re going to make this investment or we’re going to spend this money or we’re going to say no to this thing, or we’re going to not take the temptation to create this other business unit that makes no sense, whatever it is; we are going to stick with what’s right for our employees and our customers, because that’s ultimately what is right for our business. I think we’re all living through this time where there’s a lot of stress, because what is best for customers and employees is not always what’s best for shareholders, especially when you have private equity coming in and doing things. It’s a really interesting time, I mean, it’s a really interesting time, in general, for a lot of reasons, but especially from a capitalist standpoint; there are ways to do this the right way, if you put people first the profits will follow. Putting profits first does not always mean putting people first as we’ve been on the unfortunate receiving side of that as customers.

Brian  

That’s very true. And for me, everything you said is accurate. The disappointing thing, especially…I mean, I understand that we live in a world where mediocrity has sort of become the norm and when we do have – and we’ll talk more about companies and individuals, entertainers who are doing a really good job of creating lifelong advocate super fans – but for me, what’s especially disappointing is when companies have done that, they’ve built their brand and they’ve created super fans, and then they ruin that. Not to blame private equity but that’s an example where a company is bought by private equity and things change and there is more emphasis on profits today versus long term valuation. We could talk about that, probably, the whole show. But for me, that’s disappointing when companies have that; they’ve invested a lot of time and money and energy to create that and then for whatever reason, that gets lost. It could just be leadership change or not being quite as committed from a training standpoint. You mentioned employees and the importance of team members being super fans so that they can create customers and clients who are also super fans. Anyway, you’ve invested most of your life’s work into this area, into studying fandom, working to understand why some products brands and companies experience exponential growth, like we’ve talked about, while others fail to launch. How did you first get started in the entertainment business and is that how you first became interested in customer experience?

Brittany  

I got started in the entertainment industry in what I think might be the most entry level entertainment job; I was a radio station mascot. I was a radio station mascot in a town called Fort Smith, Arkansas. I got to dress up as Sting the Bee, the beloved face and stinger of B-98, the local pop station. I learned so much in that first job. It was funny because one of the things that I talked about in my book, one of the things that I truly believe, is every employee is the “acting chief of experience.” Because of the way we organize, categorize data in our brain, when we see an employee, they represent the company. It doesn’t matter if they’re the CEO or somebody who’s on their third day there, that – in our mind – represents the company. We’ve all had the experience of walking into a restaurant or store and because of an experience that you have with the way someone looks at you or maybe they ignore you, or maybe they say something, you leave without purchasing anything. And when you do that, you very often are thinking negative thoughts, not just about that particular employee, but about the entire company, because of the way our brains categorize information. Corporations are very new in the scope of human history, we’re more much more tribally minded, so we see an employee and we assume that’s the whole company. I was quite literally that as the mascot for the company. So in my first job, I was experiencing that; oh everyone thinks I’m the brand and wants to take pictures or wants to have me hold their kids and I was going to every parade and car dealership sales and grand opening ribbon cutting ceremony. It was this really interesting experience of being a teenager and being treated as a celebrity when I was inside this costume. People were legit excited to…this again is pre-social media in 1999-2000…people would hear on the radio that we were somewhere and drive to that place to take pictures and hopefully get a free CD or free concert tickets or whatever. So that was very much an introduction to this idea of fandom. A few months later, I started writing for the radio station website, reviewing concerts, going to all of these shows and that’s where – not in the bee suit, just to be clear, just as me Brittany, a teenager – I really started to become fascinated with why some acts had these massive followings and others didn’t. It wasn’t always about the quality of the music, the amount of marketing money that went into the single, the amount of effort everybody around them – whether it was at the label or the management company or the publicity company – was putting into the artist. What I started to see again and again and again, was that there seemed to be a direct correlation between the artists who had the most authentic connection with their fans and success. It was those artists who weren’t afraid to hang out in the merch booth after the show or wait two hours after they played signing autographs and taking pictures and doing all of the things and saying, thank you for coming out to Tulsa to see me, I appreciate you doing it. Wow, you bought a shirt, that’s awesome. Please tell your friends, please keep calling the radio station to request our songs, we’re going to be back in four months, I hope to see you again. And because of those experiences, those fans would then go tell their friends and then bring their friends when the bands came back to town so you had this sort of grassroots growth. I think the exact same principles are true for every single category. If you want to go from being a commodity provider to a category of one, you’ve got to connect your story with the story and the lives of your customers, you’ve got to show them why you’re not just a solution to whatever it is they’re trying to solve, you are the best possible – and maybe the only – solution that’s going to fit into their lives in such a unique way.

Brian  

That’s great. I really appreciate hearing about you being a mascot. I have a hypothesis about mascots; that you can sort of sense the kind of person that’s inside a mascot by how a mascot operates and engages with whoever is around them, whether it’s people coming to a car dealership, grand opening, or ribbon cutting or ballgame. I bet you were a great mascot; I can just tell because of your smile and your positive, upbeat personality. I’m sure you were smiling inside – maybe not on the hot days, it probably gets hot in there – but I bet you were a great mascot. How wonderful that you…I think we all have experienced the phenomenon that you described but how cool that you became aware of that and observed that and thought about it a little differently and then actually invested most of your career and your life in that field, studying it, and now helping people to take what you’ve learned and to integrate that into their businesses. Brittany, I mentioned in your intro that you founded an entertainment company and grew it to eight figure annual revenue, which is pretty significant. What was the opportunity that you saw? You were a mascot, you worked at the radio station, and then at some point saw an opportunity in the music industry that motivated you to start a company that was called ZinePak, I think, at the time that you started it.

Brittany  

It was, thank you for asking. Yes. So I, from the time I was little, I knew I wanted to work in the entertainment industry. I thought, that’s my dream job. If I can go to New York City and work at a record label or music magazine, that would just be the best thing ever, which is how I ended up job shadowing at the radio station and got that job as mascot. I said, please hire me, I’ll do anything. And they said, well, you look like you’re about the right height for our mascot costume. I said I’ll take it. So fast forward a few years and I was doing everything I could. Every time I met a band I was asking, is your label hiring summer interns or do you need anybody to help you with PR – just anything I could. I had all these different internships throughout college and I found myself in my first paid record label position as what was called the college rep for one of the big three distribution companies for Warner Brothers. I was paid to hang up posters in record stores and give out concert tickets and just try to get excitement for all the bands that were coming to town. Every couple of weeks we would have these calls with…there were 50 of us across the country, I was in Little Rock at this time going to college. The idea was that over the course of three, four semesters, however long somebody was in the program, they would get to hear from people that worked at a bunch of different departments, so A & R one week, and legal another week, and finance another week. This is, I don’t know, 2003-2004 and every single executive that got on the call was like, you are still in college, there is time to do something else with your life; go be a doctor, be a lawyer for the NBA, don’t get in the music industry, it is collapsing. At the time, there were billion plus dollar losses year over year because of things like Napster and Limewire. This was right around the time that iTunes debuted, there was finally a way to monetize digital sales. But there was still all of this fear around [the idea that] people are never going to buy physical music again, because they can just steal it on the internet, they can just trade it with their friends. As a naive 20, 21-year-old, I said, well, if you want people to buy music, why don’t you just make the physical thing better than the digital thing? Like if you packaged it in a way to where it would actually need to be owned people would want to own it. What about making a coffee table book? What about actually making vinyl or something cool like that? What about putting photos in it? What if you could replicate that concert experience in a package that people could go buy at Walmart or Target? What about that? I think everybody thought it was cute that a college kid had an idea. There was a lot of like, oh, yeah, good for you, keep working on that. I actually wrote a business plan for how I would start and run a company as part of my college thesis project and was not able to get much excitement at all from any of the major labels even after I graduated. I spent almost five years in New York City working for various labels and finally, after having the opportunity to work as the director of retail marketing for a division of Sony, I reached out to the buyer at Walmart – a dear friend named Jenny Radio, who is honestly the reason I ever became an entrepreneur – I said to her, I tried it at Warner, I tried it at Sony, I’ve tried it at this third party company, I guess I’m going to have to go get a job at Universal because nobody understands this. She said, you’ve been talking to me about this for years, just start your own company, I’ll give you a vendor number and if you can get labels interested, you can just sell stuff to me directly. I was like, what? I was 26 at the time. After the call I Googled how to start a business, went home, told my husband, hey, I think Walmart just agreed to give me a vendor number to try this idea that I won’t shut up about. Fortunately, my husband was the head of sales at a record label that had the Kids Bought brand and I was like, please tell me that we can try this with kids, Bob. And he said, I mean, yeah, if you can convince the partners of the company, let’s do it. So less than three months later, we launched with 50,000 units of this product that we call the ZinePak, short for magazine pack, in Walmart stores nationwide, which was the Kidz Bop CD packaged with stickers and temporary tattoos and coloring book pages and these really fun bracelets, and it sold like crazy. That was the test for me to then go to record labels and say if this works this well for Kidz Bop imagine what we can do with Justin Bieber, imagine what we can do with Katy Perry. And oh, by the way, Walmart told me to call you. So having the weight of Walmart behind behind me made it much easier to get executives to take my call. All of a sudden people who were like, oh, that’s a cute idea, were now like, let me write you a six-figure check. Let’s do this.

Brian  

What a great story. The company was phenomenally successful. You even went on Shark Tank to pitch an investment in your business.

Brittany  

We did. We went on Shark Tank and at the time…it’s hard to believe, I was thinking about it. It’ll be ten years ago this fall that I filmed that episode, which just, I mean, it feels like a hundred years ago, but it also feels like not that long at all. But at the time, in season six when I filmed, the offers that I got were the highest ever valuation for a female founded company. So that was really cool. Overnight things changed, like literally overnight. My business partner and I – who was another friend who was even younger than me and happened to be able to help bankroll the company and I was like, great, let’s do this together, let’s, let’s figure it out – we had said that we were on the show to expand into other entertainment verticals; sports and movies and video games, which was true, that was something we were interested in. Walmart had said, this is working so well in music but the decline of music sales is not something we’re going to change so let’s look at video game releases, let’s look at DVDs, let’s look at some of these other entertainment categories. We were invited to be on the show; a casting producer had read about us in a magazine and said, hey, come be on Shark Tank, that’s the storyline, which absolutely was true, we did not go seek out Shark Tank for this reason, to work with all those categories. Over the weekend – Shark Tank aired on Friday night, by Monday – the owners of three different professional sports teams had emailed saying, hey, my wife and I were watching TV and we saw you, why don’t you fly down to meet us, come hang out on the field, come hang out in the suite. So it got very fun, very quickly. I started to see, again, that that fandom was the same; it didn’t matter if we were talking about sports or Hollywood or even consumer packaged goods brand. If you could make a customer care, if you can make them feel like you cared for them more than anyone else, that you were so lucky to have them as a customer, they were going to return that loyalty, and not just by continuing to shop with you but in many cases by telling their friends, advocating on your behalf, they were creating more customers. As I saw it in every vertical across every age group, I was like this has to be something everybody knows how to do. There are dentists who need to know this, there are realtors who need to know this, there are accountants who need to know this. That’s when I really got focused on diving into how can we replicate this across any industry? How can anyone create super fans regardless of what their day job is?

Brian  

There’s so much packed into what you said – and what an amazing story by the way – but the thing that stands out for me is that you created superfans who were prospective investors without even really trying to do that. I think that’s really instructive. I mean, we’ve been talking about customers and clients and really being intentional about creating superfans but you think about the buzz that you described that was created from appearing on Shark Tank. Those people really became superfans, they wanted to do business with you. They wanted to be connected with you, the owners of the sports teams who invited you to go on the field and to talk about how you could do business together. It’s interesting how that dynamic got created. Really sort of accidentally, it seems.

Brittany  

It really was. I love the way you framed it. It is, I think, one of the things that I talk about sometimes; whatever your industry is you’re trying to be Waldo in a sea of people wearing red and white striped shirts and hats. You imagine the Where’s Waldo poster from many decades ago and how hard it is to find Waldo. But then once you see him, you’re like, I got him, that’s him. That’s it. The challenge is, whether you’re talking about trying to stop somebody’s scroll online, whether you’re talking about trying to get somebody to be loyal to you instead of your competitor, even if that means they have to drive further or wait longer or pay more, it’s all about how you do just that. How you go from being a commodity provider to that category of one. What is it that you’ve got to do to make someone stop when their finger gets to you and be like that’s it, that’s the one that I’m looking for. 

Brian  

What were your takeaways from being on Shark Tank? I didn’t see the episode but I watched the trailer, it was about 90 seconds I think. It seemed incredibly intimidating. What were your takeaways from being on Shark Tank and then more broadly, what lessons have you learned that you can share and help our listeners and viewers to glean as an entrepreneur from your entrepreneurial experience?

Brittany  

Well, I think one of the lessons was [that] I thought we were thinking really far ahead of time. We filmed in, I think September, and I had summer interns in their run up to when we were filming the show. So I built this crazy spreadsheet and had my interns watch every episode from the first five seasons, and analyze all of these crazy things like, did the likelihood of getting a deal matter if somebody was wearing a shirt with their logo versus just wearing nice clothes? What about if there were two people versus three people? How many times did they go to an extreme closeup of someone’s face and was it only when somebody was scowling or looking upset – all of these crazy things. So my plan going into it – and this, Brian, I know I’m going to sound like a crazy person when I say this, but it worked – so anybody out there who wants to be on Shark Tank, my strategy was that I would never stop smiling, even if I was in an argumentative exchange, even if I was sharing something that I had no business to smile, like where normal person would not smile. I thought, I know that we’re going to film for about an hour and they’re going to cut it down to about eight minutes. If I never stop smiling, they’ll never be able to cut to me making a face to try to add drama, to edit it to look negative or look like it was worse than it was. Because that was something that I had heard from a bunch of people who had been on the show, it actually wasn’t that contentious at all and they edited it to make it look like there was all this fighting and all this drama. So strategy number one was to never stop smiling. Strategy number two was anytime I didn’t want something to air, like if they were asking about profit margins or anything that I knew was confidential, I tried to say something that I thought they would be like well, that just blew the allure of being on TV. So something like:  well, I was just telling the producer, or I said to Josh from casting. I would introduce the idea or close to right after; it was something that I was like, well, that’s going to be really hard for an editor to use that sentence. I knew at the time that it would either work really well or backfire spectacularly and maybe they would just never air that episode. But thankfully, it worked really well. I thought that by doing that and by prepping for a bunch of traffic on the website, I was thinking really far ahead of time. But what honestly never entered my mind – and I’m so glad it didn’t because it probably would have freaked me out – was the fact that that episode would live forever. It’s like a time capsule. I told you, it’s been almost ten years since we filmed it and I still get thousands of people every single month on my website and it’s always in a spike. I can see it, it’ll reappear on CNBC and 7,000 people or 5,000 people, or 9,000 people will be instantly on my website, because they go to Google and they search ZinePak Shark Tank update. Of course, I have all of the SEO to get the people in. It happens around the clock and around the globe. I was just looking at my Google Analytics a couple days ago and I was like, oh, I guess it aired in Bolivia because on one day there were 700 people from Bolivia on my website; just like that all around the world and it’s been ten years. So I would say that was something that I learned as an experience. I think probably the biggest takeaway for entrepreneurs is talk to people who’ve done it before, but not only people who’ve done it immediately before – again, I thought I did my homework because I talked to people who were on it the season before us – if I had talked to people who had been on the show two, three years earlier, I think I would have had even more of a timeline of like this is not going to end a month after the show airs.

Brian  

That’s great. The two takeaways I got are if you have the opportunity to be on Shark Tank, do it and don’t stop smiling the whole hour or however long the taping occurs. That’s a pretty good start.

Brittany  

And know that your audience isn’t just in the room, that’s the other thing. We were like, yeah, we’ve got these five sharks, but what we really care about are the eight million people that are going to be watching this when it airs on ABC. Then like I said, that’s now turned into tens of millions of people. Remember when you’re doing…even something like this, since I love this conversation you and I are having, Brian, but we both know that this conversation is really about the third person which is you listening right now or watching right now. So thank you for spending time with me and Brian.

Brian  

That’s well said. So not to keep moving but eventually you got out of that business and focused your full time and attention on keynote speaking and writing. Tell us about that transition.

Brittany  

It was honestly something I had not predicted. I was given several amazing opportunities. I had been invited shortly before we were on Shark Tank to start writing for Forbes and with that came a lot of invitations and higher profile things that I was being asked to do. I told you that I got very interested in the psychology of understanding why people buy so I went back to school to get a master’s degree in consumer behavior. I started getting asked to speak to board meetings and groups of customers and teams who had hired us. Eventually people started saying, what’s your keynote fee? The first couple times I was like, do you want me to pay you to talk? I’m sorry, I thought I was doing this as a favor to you. No, I’m not going to pay you. And like a dummy, I quickly realize they meant they were asking what I would charge. Once I realized that I could make a living getting to go on stage to talk to people about how to become more customer-centric, why to put their customers at the center of every decision that they make, and spend my time writing and researching and studying this, that became even more exciting to me than working in the entertainment industry had ever been. It’s funny, I remember when I was…I ended up selling the majority of my equity in the company that I founded. At the time, my friends were like, are you crazy? You’re working with Dolly Parton and Katy Perry, why do you want to walk away from this? And I was like, because I have the ability to teach people how to become the Dolly Parton or the Katy Perry of what they do. How do you not understand that that’s more exciting? I joked to my husband that I will stop speaking so obsessively about customer experience when other people understand how fun it is because right now, I feel like I’m still the flag bearer of saying, this is so fun and so exciting. If you get it right, you can create customers for life, who then create more customers for you – you have to be excited by this.

Brian  

Well, and if that’s your criteria for not speaking about customer experience anymore, then I think you’ll be speaking forever. Especially today, like we talked about earlier, there is a propensity for mediocrity, and so that presents an opportunity for you. This is evergreen, it’s timeless. I remember years ago reading a book that you’re probably familiar with called “The Experience Economy” and that was the first time I really thought about a business transaction not as a transaction, but as experience and then started to be exposed in a different way to companies like Disney. I would go to Disney World prior to that, and enjoy the rides and enjoy the experience but now every time I go to Disney World, I’m looking at it through the business lens. In fact, I attended the Disney Institute’s Business Excellence Program which was a five day program, behind the scenes insight into every aspect of how Disney does business. It’s fascinating to me – Disney does it really well, they’ve always done it really well, they continue to do it really well – but most people, most companies, people in the companies and the companies themselves aren’t even thinking about creating this customer experience. They’re thinking about how to sell more product. Maybe there’s an overlap between the two but certainly you, being being on platforms around the country and around the world, help people to understand, help companies to understand the importance of that.

Brittany  

Well, thank you, I am trying and I love that you included Disney. When I talk there are a few brands that people always think of like Disney, like the Ritz Carlton, like Apple or Harley Davidson or even Amazon. And what’s interesting in a lot of those categories is not only are they charging a lot more than their direct competitors, they are not always objectively the best. If you were to look at…we’ll take Apple for instance because that’s an easy one to look at. The technical specs, whether you’re talking about a computer or a watch or a phone, there is very likely something that is technologically superior and also costs less money. But try selling that to an Apple fan, because it’s not just about the product. It’s what the product represents and it’s the idea that someone identifies as a Disney adult or as a Harley rider or as an Apple superfan. Once you can harness that, things get so much more fun because while a fan buys what you make or what you do, a superfan buys into who you are and that is a much harder bond to break.

Brian  

That’s a great distinction. Brittany, I love your book “Creating Superfans,” I mentioned that earlier. It really is a how-to manual for turning customers into lifelong advocates, which is in the title of your book, creating lifelong advocates. I think everyone listening to or watching the show has some sense of what it’s like to be a loyal, enthusiastic customer because we all have…whether it’s products or services…you mentioned the Apple companies, or maybe even individuals, actors or entertainers that we absolutely love and are loyal to. A superfan, though, seems like the next level of being a fan or an advocate. What exactly is a superfan? How do you define that?

Brittany  

Well, I define a superfan as a customer stakeholder who was so delighted by their experience, that they become an advocate. There are three parts to that, number one is a customer or stakeholder. This is someone who has actually done business with you, either directly or in very close association in like a B2B2C sense where maybe somebody has been really involved but wasn’t the one who did the transaction. The reason that distinction matters is because we all know we take feedback from someone who has actually been a customer much more seriously than somebody who’s like, oh, yeah, I saw an ad on Instagram for this thing, check it out. So that’s the first part, they’re a customer. The second part, they were delighted by their experience. I love that you just said everyone can relate to being a superfan. If you think about the last recommendation that you made to someone in your life; anywhere you want, could be a restaurant, could be a pair of jeans, could be a show. You, very likely, described not just the product or the service or the show, but the experience; how you felt, what it meant in your life. Because, as you mentioned in the great book “The Experience Economy,” it is harder to delineate those things. Now the experience is everything wrapped up together. So that’s the second part of the definition, delighted by their experience. The third part, they become an advocate. And simply what that means is when given the opportunity to recommend you, they do. We’re living in a world where because of how interconnected we all are, everyone is an influencer. Every single person – I don’t even care if you’re not on the internet, you are an influencer. There are people in your life who will make a decision to work with a company or not work with a company based solely on what you say about your experience. So every customer is an influencer. To turn the customer into a superfan, they need to be delighted by their experience and willing to advocate on your behalf. So that is the long definition of a superfan. In shorter terms, a superfan is really just a customer who creates more customers, someone who is loyal enough to come back and bring their friends.

Brian  

That’s great. Thank you for sharing that and thank you for defining superfan just so we’re really clear about what we’re talking about. You describe in the book, and I want to ask you about…just forgive me for asking about something really specific. It was interesting to me, you describe in the book an ascension ladder of fandom, I think you call it a rope ladder, that starts with not knowing anything about a product service or person – that’s on the bottom rung of the rope ladder – and then rises all the way up to advocacy. We’ve talked about advocacy, advocacy is at the top rung. The level, the rung right beneath advocacy is affinity. To me, and it’s – again, not to get into the weeds on this – but to me, affinity is a pretty high level of connection. That’s something that’s always resonated with me; the idea of affinity when you talk about…whether it’s a car brand like BMW, or you mentioned the Ritz Carlton hotel brand, that’s a pretty high level of connection. What’s the difference between affinity and advocacy?

Brittany  

Thank you for asking this, Brian. Ultimately, the difference is the amplification of the voice of the customer. So you may very well have an affinity for a product but if you aren’t telling people about it, that is a very clear indicator that you do not identify strongly enough to want to recommend that thing. You like it, but you’re not like this is something that I’m on the record telling people that I love. The reason that’s important is because, from a psychological level, we’re all built to crave social connections and community and feel a sense of belonging – this is my thing. So there are lots of things that I like and I will likely continue to buy, however, it would be much more likely for me to defect to try something else, either because somebody said, hey, there’s this other really great option or maybe somebody offered me a really great deal or sent me something to try for free or did something. It’s much easier for competitors to steal away those customers who just have an affinity for something, rather than are truly, what I call in the book, an advocate. The rung right below affinity is adoption. I define adoption as you’ve used the product or service or experienced the thing multiple times. So it’s not just like, oh, I tried it. It’s like, I tried it and I was back again, and where it really starts to get fuzzy is from adoption to affinity and then from affinity to advocacy. Because honestly, a lot of people stop at affinity for a very long time, because maybe like 30, 40 years ago, that was enough. But in today’s world, it is so simple for competitors to go from upstart to real challenger very, very quickly. Technology has made the ramp so much shorter and the barriers to entry so much smaller for challenger brands to come and disrupt every industry. That’s why trying to make that emotional connection so that somebody isn’t just like, oh, I like it, but oh, I like them. Again, going back to a fan likes what you do, a superfan likes who you are. So you want to try to bridge that gap. This is possible in every category, I have people all the time say I don’t know if this would be possible for the industry that I’m in. Then I also have people who read the book…this is a true story. A gentleman named Bill from Canada who was in the funeral services industry and he was like, I feel like you wrote this book just for people in funeral and death service preparation; he was like, you absolutely wrote this book for me. And then I had, the very same day, an email from someone who is in – and I did not know this was a thing – industrial concrete polishing business. There are apparently companies who polish the concrete in factory floors and hospitals and schools to make it look nicer. And she was like, this is exactly what I needed to read, this is how my business is going to differentiate ourselves from all of our competitors. Honestly, I was like, wow, there are competitors? It’s not just one company that polishes all the concrete because I’m just completely ignorant to that space. But every single industry right now is feeling the competition and the pressure of can you get me better deals, can you do this faster? Can you make this, XYZ, whatever it is, for your industry. The more that you can take somebody from just affinity to advocacy, the more you can loosen some of those constraints, the more you can make price less of an issue – it’s obviously never going to be not an issue at all – but like those brands I mentioned before – Apple, Amazon, Ritz Carlton, Disney – you can begin to charge a premium and make people think less about price, when they already know they’re going to choose you. They will use rational details to justify the decision that they made emotionally rather than the other way around.

Brian  

That makes sense. And the other thing that stands out for me is if you have a customer who has an affinity, then we need to go out and get more of those customers; we need to move them up the ladder to affinity. But every time it’s us as a company going out and getting those customers, whereas in advocacy, our customers who have an affinity or have moved to the next rung of advocate, they’re out there selling us on our behalf. They’re sort of unpaid salespeople, right? Because they’re out there doing the marketing, they’re out there doing the selling; we’re not paying them to do that, that’s just happening through their Instagram account or TikTok or wherever they’re communicating some of those messages.

Brittany  

Absolutely, and it’s so much easier now to identify those people who feel affinity towards your brand to try to make them advocates. Every brand can really define what that looks like; what are the metrics and the KPIs that you’re looking at to define somebody as a superfan. Whether it’s the lifetime value, the frequency with which they’re purchasing, how much they’re sharing, how much they’re talking about you, and understanding that it’s not always the same. There might be someone who has only spent what you would consider a small amount with you, but has referred people who’ve spent millions of dollars with you. One of my favorite companies that helps track this sort of thing is called Mention Me. They’re based in the UK and they just put out some new research looking at referral marketing. Things like the fact that a customer who is referred to you by an existing customer, on average, is going to spend twice as much in their lifetime as someone who was not referred. So if you talk about somebody who’s not referred, you’re very likely paying to acquire that customer, you’re doing something, whether it’s advertising, marketing, whatever, to get someone to choose you. Then they still are not going to spend as much money and are not going to spend money with you as frequently as if someone else did it for you. One of the things that I say in my book is, when you tell people you’re great, that’s just marketing; every company on the planet does that. But when your customers tell their friends that you’re great, that’s magic, because you now have a very well trusted source who has no skin in the game, who’s saying to somebody, you’ve got to try this, they’re awesome. Which goes back to the superfan definition of why somebody actually needs to be a customer to fit my three-part definition of what a superfan is.

Brian  

I love that. Brittany, you’ve created a system that we can all use, whether we’re entrepreneurs, self-employed professionals, or even large organizations, to create superfans and it’s called the SUPER Model. Tell us about each component, SUPER is an acronym, and how we can use a SUPER model to turn our customers or clients into lifelong advocates and also set ourselves apart from the competition in the marketplace.

Brittany  

The SUPER model is my attempt at taking all of the most important parts of customer experience and showing how they need to exist cross departmentally. I think one of the biggest mistakes that companies make is siloing customer experience or, even worse, thinking that customer experience is synonymous with customer service, which is it is not. Customer service is a department, customer experience is a philosophy that needs to be embraced by every single person across the organization. So the SUPER model is kind of my “here’s where you start.” And I said before that superfans are created at the intersection of your story and every customer’s story. And that’s true for every single employee at the company. You can think of these five pillars kind of like nesting dolls, each builds on the one that comes before. So the S is start with your story and I say start with your story, not lead with your story. But you have to define what makes you better than all of the competitors before anything else matters. If you don’t know why you’re the best possible choice to serve your customers, they have a very small likelihood of figuring it out. So what is your value proposition? What is your origin story? What is it that makes you uniquely positioned to serve your prospects and your customers, that’s the S. U is understand your customers story, getting laser focused on what it is that your prospects or customers are struggling with or what transformation they’re hoping to undergo, so that you can fill that need, connecting your story to theirs. In the book, I talk about all the ways to do this, things like using empathy better before authority, active listening, lots and lots of different tools and tricks that you can use. P stands for personalized, that’s all of the high tech and high touch things that you can do to make a customer feel like the most important customer, even if you’re automating and systematizing a lot of those touch points, they can still feel very individual and unique. E stands for exceed expectations. This is when I get into most of the like what people traditionally think of as customer experience. I talk about things like intentional experience design, bringing more focus to your customers journey and all of the touch points before and after, as well as during part of working with you because what I found from doing lots of consulting and lots of interviews over the years is that a lot of people spend a hugely disproportionate amount of time from “I know this lead exists” to “I sold them something” and they’re missing so much opportunity on both sides of those dots. And then finally, the R stands for repeat. Because customer experience is a lifetime, day in day out obsession with customer-centricity that has to be shared by everyone on your team, has to be embraced. That’s the R, repeat. Of course I talk about things like automation and systems and using technology like AI to scale beyond what you could do without using all of the technology or the systems or processes to help create those repeatable experiences. One of the quotes that I love, that share I in the book, is from Elizabeth Arden almost 100 years ago, she said, “repetition makes reputation and reputation makes customers” and it’s so, so true. 

Brian  

That’s great. I’ve heard you say that the SUPER model is easy and I’m not sure I totally agree with that. I think conceptually, it’s easy. It’s probably a little more challenging to apply. You might fight me on that a little bit but where do companies tend to struggle when implementing or using the supermodel?

Brittany  

Well, I would argue that it is not easy. It is simple, okay, and it is a lot of advice that people have probably heard. But where people get tripped up…I would say the larger the company the more someone gets tripped up with the E, exceeding expectations. Small to midsize businesses often get tripped up with the S, solopreneurs, who are like, I don’t really know why, I did this because I thought I could make money, I did this because it was easy or I’m running this company with these 50 employees because it’s what my parents did and what their parents did. Starting with your story, being able to clearly define what is essentially your superpower, and making sure that everyone on your team also has a version of that story that they can tell that feels authentic to them. Because if they can’t, it’s very obvious to customers if somebody is just there for the paycheck rather than a passion or perhaps even a purpose, depending on what role they’re in and who they are. Then for the larger organizations, I think it’s easy…one of the biggest mistakes that companies make – other than, like I said, prioritizing shareholders over customers and employees – is overly siloing their departments so that it’s very easy for someone to not feel connected to A:  a responsibility for a customer, or B:  for an outcome of well, I mean, I don’t know, I forwarded the email, I forwarded the call, I didn’t do that, this department did that, that’s not me, that’s so and so. Because you’ve got 10, 20, 30 people who are touching whatever the the thing is or interfacing with whoever the customer is so there’s a lot of “not me.” That’s where I think a lot of larger companies, either through training or through lack of identification and execution of what acceptable really looks like, and challenging their employees to feel the ownership and have the accountability that no, you are the acting chief of experience, you are the brand; this is what we expect of everyone at this brand. Because we’re not like most people, this is not a company that’s an average company, we are better than most people, we are better than most companies.

Brian  

I love that. I appreciate you sharing the SUPER model, I just wanted to take a second to…if it isn’t clear that I’m highly recommending the book “Creating Superfans,” then I just want to say that explicitly for our listeners and viewers – go out and get the book. The SUPER model alone is a reason to get the book and Brittany has given you the five steps to creating the SUPER model. We don’t have time to go through is the details of that and that’s all in the book. There’s a lot more in the book. Brittany, I thought it was interesting that you include a chapter in the book on gift giving. This is something that really it’s a little tangential, I was sort of surprised that I saw it. But it really resonates with me because I send hundreds of handwritten notes and cards out every year and I give countless gifts. You wrote – and I want to quote a part from the book – you wrote that “strategic generosity is one of the most powerful ways to create a wow experience for a customer and elevate the emotional closeness of a relationship.” I think that’s so powerful and so true. Share more about how we can use gift giving to build relationships with our customers and clients and why it’s so important to do so.

Brittany  

Hypothetically speaking, of course, someone could send a silver platter in the mail with an invitation to be on a podcast saying look, I’m serving this invitation up on a silver platter with a very kind note to stand out from others. Totally hypothetical example. [Laughter.]

Brian  

I don’t know who would do such a thing. 

Brittany  

Who would do that? [Laughter.] I love that that was my first introduction to you, this very, very kind handwritten note and explanation about the show and a silver platter that, by the way, my three-year-old who was there when I opened the beautiful blue package that you sent it in was like, this is perfect, and immediately took it and it now lives in my kids play kitchen. It’s perfectly sized for all of their little play kitchen stuff. The reason I wanted to include the chapter on gift giving is twofold. Number one, a lot of people do gifting wrong, a lot of people make it about them not about the recipient. I would say probably the most heat that I’ve gotten for the book is something that I stand by and will go down swinging on this – if it has your logo on it, it is not a gift, it is an ad – that is something that I feel very strongly about. I get daily DM hate from real estate people especially, accountants, dentists, all kinds of people. They’re like, I loved your book but I really disagree with you – this is a gift. I’m like, no, no, it’s not. It’s an ad, you put your logo on it. You never once in your life bought somebody a shirt from the mall or a pair of shoes and said, I’m going to just go ahead and write my name on this so that when you’re wearing it, you don’t forget that it was from me, right? Like, before I give you this phone, let me just like scribble my name on it. Part of the reason that I wanted to include the chapter was for that reason. The other part was I wanted people to understand that it’s okay to use gifting to help show someone that you want to be even more close with them, to help elevate their relationship. You obviously don’t have to, I told you I worked very, very closely with Walmart for over a decade of my career. People who work at Walmart are forbidden from taking any gifts, just like people in many industries, you can’t even buy their coke at a vending machine. In the book, I also talk about ways that you can showcase that you’re thinking about someone, that you’re adding value to them, whether it’s through making recommendations for things to read or things to watch or whatever. I think that, again, just from a psychological level as humans, one of the things that we crave is, oh, I mattered to them. Oh, they noticed that thing I said. Oh, they care about me. Gift giving is a very effective way to accelerate and amplify the closeness people feel. I thought it was important to include a list of do’s and don’ts, things that I found to be particularly effective, pet peeves of mine like the logo thing that people do wrong. In addition to the book – because one of the things that I was asked nonstop after the book came out was what are the best gifts, what should I give, what should I do – I actually have a guide on my website that’s totally free, people can go to BrittanyHodak.com and find lots and lots of free resources. One of them is a list with over 75 different gifts that I love in different categories by recipient and occasion and price point, all with links to check them out, plus some really good hacks that you can use to be more efficient, from a cost standpoint, with the gifts that you send.

Brian  

I appreciate that you’ve actually created a list and I hope our listeners and viewers will go and take a look at that list. I also hope that you don’t have cheap pens with a company logo, [inaudible] balls or koozies with a logo because I don’t think any of us need another koozie with a logo of a company that’s trying to get us to buy their product.

Brittany  

Absolutely not, one more ugly cup with a logo said no one ever.

Brian  

Exactly. For me, it’s really about exceeding expectations for existing customers or doing something that that nobody else is doing. I always tell [the audience] we have four children, I always tell our kids, if you can’t think of what you should be doing, just do the opposite of what everybody else is doing. That’s a pretty good starting point. I think that certainly is the case with what we’ve been talking about. Brittany, we’ve been talking about creating an excellent experience for our customers and clients with the hope that they’ll become superfans. Our show, as you know, is called LifeExcellence. I’m curious, what does excellence mean to you?

Brittany  

Well, I love this question. To me, excellence means being in alignment with what you hold to be true and the way you live your truth, your reality. Having everything being in alignment, of espousing values but actually living those values. To me, that is true excellence in whatever field that you’re in and something that I always aspire to do, and hope that everyone listening does as well. I imagine they do or they wouldn’t be listening to your podcast, Brian. I know you’ve got a pretty amazing crew.

Brian  

I appreciate you saying that. I’d like to think so. Brittany, thank you so much for being on the show. It’s great to connect with you and get to know you. I really appreciate all the great information that you’ve shared today. This has been so much fun and just so you know, I’m definitely a superfan.

Brittany  

Well, thank you so much, Brian. It is absolutely mutual. I appreciate you having me on the show and recommending the book. It means the world to me and I can’t wait to come back and talk about it again soon.

Brian  

That’ll be great. I’ll look forward to it. 

Thanks for tuning into LifeExcellence. Please support the show by subscribing, sharing it with others, posting about today’s show with Brittany Hodak on social media and leaving a rating and review. You can learn more about Brittany, as she mentioned, at BrittanyHodak.com. You can also learn more about me at BrianBartes.com. Until next time, dream big dreams and make each day your masterpiece.