Brand Advocates: Turning Enthusiastic Customers into a Powerful Marketing Force

Chapter 3

What's a Brand Advocate Worth?

You may consider loyal customers—customers who keep buying from you—your most valuable customers. But Brand Advocates—those customers who serve as trusted champions for your brand and influence purchasing behaviors of other consumers—are truly your most valuable customers.

Advocates are worth at least five times more than other customers because they act as champions for your company and products and they spend more than average customers. And Advocates are even more valuable than loyal customers because—unlike many frequent buyers—Advocates recommend your brand and products.

Justin Dorfman, the CDW Advocate you met earlier in this book, has generated hundreds of thousands of dollars of sales for CDW via his recommendations. Other Advocates profiled in this book like George Hamma, a BMW MINI Advocate, and Shelley Symonds, a Lexus Advocate, also have driven hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales with their advocacy.

Depending on the price of your products or services, one Brand Advocate can be worth tens of thousands of dollars.

A single Brand Advocate is worth $2,634 to a computer hardware company. This figure is derived from the additional spend of $203 above the industry average ($1,615) as well as the impact of their positive referrals, which yield roughly half an additional customer year. One Advocate for an enterprise software company is worth $565,000, based on the customer's referral value (Owen and Brooks, “Answering the Ultimate ...