Is your brand engineered for advocacy? | The Advocacy Maturity Model

So with this, brands cannot hide under slapping advocacy on job titles and not actually delivering on what true advocacy is. Nobody hides from me. This is where a lot of brands kind of trip up, I would say. How can a brand tell where they're sitting on this model? Okay, so I'm going to start again here. I don't think it will come as too much of a surprise to anyone that E L F are like, they're one of our highest scoring brands and there's so many reasons for it. Right? Yeah. Now there's one I've missed here. And. And this is going to be fairly controversial. How many people are in there? A big fat zero percent. Welcome back to Building Brand Advocacy. This week I'm here with Ed, head of Go to Market Engineering at our partner brand Jewel. Today's episode is a special one. We're going inside something that we've built ourselves, which is our advocacy maturity model. And this is a theory we've been working on for a while. It's a framework developed from real experience, real data, and I'm super excited to get into it. Hello, welcome to Building Brand Advocacy. Ed, it is great to have you on this special Mastermind session. Welcome to the show. It's wonderful to be here. Thanks for having me. Before we dig in, let's just find out a little bit more about you and what you do for sure. So you obviously know me quite well. I do work at Joule, and my role at Joule is head of Go to Market Engineering, which you might say, yeah, I mean, you might say that has nothing to do with advocacy. But so what I do at Jewel is I basically engineer systems that work across our kind of customer journey. Well, today we're going to dig into the advocacy maturity model, which I'm super excited about because this is a framework that kind of takes brand advocacy from a fluffy marketing buzzword to something that is actually, this is where brands can start kind of taking it from, like I said, that fluff word into something that's got value and it's got commercial value. If we look at the advocacy maturity mod, we are thinking about one core thing, and that is how well is a brand engineered for advocacy. So with this, brands cannot hide under slapping advocacy on job titles and not actually delivering on what true advocacy is. Nobody hides from me. It's kind of looking beyond what brands are saying and looking at their corporate structure, looking at the things that they do, the loops that they have in place in order for customers, consumers, fans of the brand to get involved, to kind of Repeat actions and repeat getting involved in order to basically lead to compounding growth. Yeah. Visually, then what does this consist of? Okay, so there are five scoring sections. So the first is advocacy structure. Do they have a program? Do they have a home? If I'm a fan of a brand, where am I going to get more involved? To engage with the brand, to talk about the brand, to learn about the brand. The second one is advocate engine and behavioral loops. How does the brand engineer for a continuous cycle of advocacy? The third one, and this is quite an important one, cross functional alignment. This is the biggie, right? This is kind of the biggie. This is where a lot of brands kind of trip up, I would say. So cross functional alignment is how embedded is advocacy as kind of a considered growth lever within a brand. If we look at number four, we have the incentives design. Brands will often fall down here because they have like blanket discounts. The key term here is brand equity. By creating blanket discounts on your products, you are reducing brand equity. And so there's no value when people post and they get the same discount or the same reward that anyone that comes to the website for the first time will get. So incentives design is looking at, okay, do you have a really good way of rewarding those who get involved with you, of understanding the value that they bring to the brand and therefore giving them the value back? And then number five. Number five might be my favorite. This is about experimentation and cultural relevance. So many legacy brands are like so stagnant. They are doing the same thing that they have always done. This scoring is around. Are brands trying to stay at the very, very forefront of culture? Are they changing and switching up their strategies to adapt with technological advances, social advances, and are they experimenting? So I'm a big, big fan of the idea of experimentation. It doesn't have to be big, but you need to learn something. And the brands that are doing really, really well are pushing themselves to do that little bit more each time. Learn something, adapt how they do it and release it again. Yeah, I mean, just to kind of go back on a couple of these, this cross functional alignment. Because when we think about brand advocacy, everyone thinks that it's a function within marketing, but that's not the case. Advocacy as even a marketing channel. Yes, it might be considered by a lot of brands, but I mean the best brands, they are looking at advocacy like it is a core operating function. Basically, if no one truly owns it, then nothing's going to get done. Yeah. And then the incentives design as well. Something that a lot of brands Miss. When it comes to incentives is just that one to one time with the brand themselves or just getting them involved in something. It doesn't have to be free product. It doesn't have to be discounts or anything like that. It could just be like, come and spend the day with us and be a part of like how this product is developed or just something else that is bringing them into that brand in some way, shape or form. Because I know I would love it if the Inkey list invited me in for the day and spent a day with colette. Love it. 100% Victoria's Secret. They invite their top advocates to come to the show. You know, it's one of those classic examples of money buy, can't buy experience. Loop earplugs, they brought people in to help with their development of the products. These moments that really, really mean something to these customers who already have that brand love. Loop is a great one actually, because I think Loop earplugs, with a program that they had, they weren't just asking questions like what color do you like? And things like that. It was more kind of, it was deeper emotional wasn't. It was like, how do you feel when you're wearing our products? How does it fit into your everyday life? And that kind of data is so valuable because a lot of brands just don't ever ask those deeper questions. And the thing with Loop as well is that it's. There are like core use cases for Loop and it's like neurodivergence and Ravers. Yeah. And the difference between those two, you saw this amazing kind of method of like gaining feedback and interest and finding out what advocates kind of thought of the brand within their program. That was really interesting to watch. How can a brand tell where they're sitting on this model? Okay, so I'm going to start again here. We have those five scoring metrics. We have advocacy structure, we have advocacy engine, we have cross functional alignment incentives, and we have experimentation. Once that scoring has happened, it lands them in five stages. Basically at the bottom end we have ad hoc. So ad hoc, this is 10% of brands that we've analyzed. So in this new model, we've analyzed 1600 brands like the top D to C, fashion, beauty, retail brands. 10% live in ad hoc. And ad hoc is, you know, advocacy might exist, but it's not being designed for those 10%. We see a lot of legacy brands there and a lot of brands where the product might be more commodity and less kind of emotive brands that you repeat purchase just because they're kind of useful, they're fairly cheap, you know, it makes sense to buy them. But there's, there's little brand love there. The next stage is tactical. Now this is where the majority brand set this 50%. And tactical generally means campaigns. So these brands they'll be working with, influencers potentially is quite ego driven, maybe in the sense that they're still looking at, you know, follower numbers. They're still looking at working with the biggest influence they can. And they'll run certain campaigns where they might get some, some people involved around the launch of a new product or something like that. We then look at systemized. Systemized is kind of the turning point. 33% of brands are here. And I think that's quite good to think about because that means that there is real progress within what we're doing here. That feels like quite a big jump from tactical to systemized. Well, the idea here is loops. So this is where those repeating loops of generating advocacy and seeing those systems in place kind of starts to come into play. So 33% of brands land there. We then have company wide. These are the major players now. So this is 7% of current brands. And company wide is your top brands who are truly making it cross functional. They are experimenting, they are doing these wonderful kind of cultural moments within the brand. People who are fans of company wide LED brands will feel that they are part of the community and this is where we kind of see the most growth. Yeah. So this is cross functional. Is there any brand standing out to you in the company wide? I don't think it will come as too much of a surprise to anyone that ELF are like, they're one of our highest scoring brands. So I was looking into their color ELF analyzer. Yeah. And the way that they played on like a cultural moment of the idea of, you know, your skin tone has a certain season and you should base your wardrobe and your makeup around that season. And they released this digital tool that allowed you to scan your face. It gave you a season, and then it led you to a curated Pinterest board specifically for you. And they worked with creators to create these wonderful posts on Pinterest. And it's just those moments. And at the time, obviously this summer seasons analyzer thing was trending. And it's kind of moments like that that really stand them out. I think also with ELF, like 8 to 10 times in the last 10 years, the CEO has come out and said something about community being at the very, very core of what they do, being their real core. Value. And you also look at their beauty squad, which is a brilliant way beyond loyalty programs. I think on the surface it might look like a standard loyalty program, but within it are just so many advocacy loops that they are using to keep people engaged, keep people coming back. And I mean it shows what they're up like 400% as a brand over the last five years. Like it's hard to argue as do you think you have to be a disruptive band? Because that's what ELF is, right? I mean the Corey, the cmo, I believe she's cmo. She like, that's what she says. We're a destructive band. That's what they're built for. Do you have to be disruptive? And what takes ELF from the campaign led to this? I think it's the system behind it. To be completely honest, when ELF do a campaign, it's really well thought out within the strategy of the entire business. And the strategy of the business is to optimize for word of mouth. So it's the layer that sits underneath, it's the systems and the processes that sit underneath that allow the brand to elevate that campaign to something more. Now there's one I've missed here and this is going to be fairly controversial and that's Advocacy First. How many people are in that? A big fat zero percent. We wanted to create a model that wasn't just looking at the here and now and was thinking about the future. The idea that AI, automation, all the things that we can do to personalize now at enormous scale will I think completely change how brands speak with customers now. Currently there is no one in Advocacy first because it demands a lot of a brand to operate. I think a company like ELF will be shifting into there in the next kind of 12 months. But we wanted to future proof the model ultimately. Yeah. And we wanted to really see how brands were progressing and what they were doing to get to that stage. So Advocacy first is complete personalization at scale. It needs to feel like it's, it's a complete one to one experience that consumer is having with a brand. Once brands get to that stage, it completely unlocks, you know, amazing, amazing potential. So we're guessing ELF is going to be here first. That's, that's my guess. That's my guess. But you know, 10 years ago you would have said Lululemon would be there first. Why is. We could dig into that. But why is Calvin Klein not. Because, so my take on this, and I have looked at Calvin Klein is that they are quite, they're almost like luxury led. So they're very, very choosy on what they put out, on how they talk about the product. And like, it's great to definitely have a good tone of voice and a solid tone of voice, but the brands who are doing really well are almost like unlocking the gates and putting aside the idea that every post affiliated with the product needs to be in a certain on brand way and almost like giving the reins to the customer. And I think it's really powerful because customers who tell the brand story through their own. I know you hate the word authentic, but you said it through their own lens and how they've experienced the product. If they know the brand story, they know the brand mission. It's a really powerful story to tell. They're going to do it anyway. They're going to do it anyway. And I think this is one of the great cases for that is Abercrombie. Right. When they went through whole transformation, can't remember how many years ago, it was like they knew that they couldn't go out there and say to the world, hey, look at us, we're Abercrombie, we're new. We've changed the different because the consumers are just not going to believe them. Saying you're doing advocacy, saying you're community driven versus actually being it. Yeah. And I think Abercrombie really lent into that. In every action that they took, they showed that they had changed as a brand and the results were incredible. Yeah. So how does this model, how does the maturity model correlate to business kind of results over time? That's my favorite question, this one, because that's what everyone wants to know. Okay, so. All right, so the very top of the tree at the moment is company wide. Yeah. We went out and we analyzed the revenue performance of 60 public brands. So they're reporting publicly and analyzed their score, their brand advocacy score, looked at their last five years of revenue performance and then we wanted to track basically whether there was a relationship between advocacy, maturity and revenue. So within company wide, the average growth of a brand over five years was 64%. If we drop down to tactical, the average growth within that band was minus 12%. The brands in tactical are actively shrinking. And you know, it's been a really tough few years for brands. You know, tariffs, geopolitical stuff, like it's not been easy by any means. But what the maturity model kind of shows is that being advocacy led at least insulates you or it suggests that it insulates you from some of that kind of Economic, some of those economic issues. What I think here between these two, the brands that sit in the tactical stage, they probably think they, they need to because that's where they probably feel they're going to get the gains. Right. That's where the next lot of revenue is going to come from. It's where the next kind of like viral burst is going to come from. Whereas the guys here are thinking more long term. And this is what we always preach, Right. Brand advocacy is a long term play. There are no kind of like short term wins with it. And that is, when you look at those numbers, that's huge. And really kind of represents the difference between those two. Absolutely. One of the things that we also tracked was the correlation between these brands. So if we were to put it on a graph here. Yes. And we've got advocacy score or advocacy maturity down here and then you have growth here. If you imagine that on this scatter graph you just have all the brands kind of going along. Yeah. So at one year and this, that's a short amount of times. A lot can happen in a year, but it is a short amount of time. We had a correlation of 0.3 and what that means is that that's not really a correlation that would be considered to be strong by any means. There is an upward trajectory, but it's not huge. But at five years what we saw was that it really paid off. So if growth was there and maturity was there, this became a much more. They look quite similar, don't they? Anyway, the correlation which is stated in Ask was R equals 0.55. So what we saw over the five years was that this long term strategy of advocacy really paid off. So the average, within company wide over those five years, the average growth was 8%. So nothing at all. But as we mentioned, the average growth of company wide up here was 64%. Yes. So it's those long term plays that those brands at the top are making and you're seeing it reflected in the revenue that they're generating over the kind of a long period of time. But as you said, yes, tactical it's about short wins, it's about bursts of campaigns which may work at the time, but they're not kind of setting themselves up for continued success and actually sustainable growth. What's the difference between, in your opinion, brand advocacy and like loyalty, customer satisfaction. Key distinction here is loyalty is all based around retention and lifetime value. Right. LTV is the name of the game. Someone may have a great experience, have a wonderful time, they might buy again. That's great, but it doesn't mean necessarily that they are going to spread the word or they have the tools to be able to tell other people about the product. So advocacy is looking at the potential for customers, fans of the brand to be able to share the story even further. So there's a real, I'd hate to be the bearer of, you know, a new acronym, but advocacy value definitely is something that I think we will see coming in. So this one person that we know a fair amount about has interacted with the brand, has bought 10 times. We know that if encouraged they will share with 10 people, 15 people, 20 new people coming to the brand. So the difference between loyalty, whether number is just lifetime value is looking at the potential that that person has to be an extension of your brand basically and tell that story. Yeah, I also think it's something that for any brand that is starting out like, I think looking back, like just looking within your brand network and just finding Those first like 10, 20, 50 people that are performing for you in that way. And it's an always like people always think it's like the highest spender. Right. But it's not necessarily, it's the people that are kind of like. And, but they're just, they're just not getting into the weeds of it like people in the CRM or the people that are on socials replying to every comment. They're like, they're in your broadcast channels. They're actively doing that brand love, but for some reason they're just getting overlooked. And I think that's something that every brand needs to start doing is finding that first group of 50 people. Absolutely. And it's, it's hard. Right. That's quite daunting task to look through your entire CRM to find those people. But as you said, it doesn't need to start with thousands of applicants, it can just start with those first 50. Where do employees come into this? You know here where you said like the first year is, is a short amount of time And I'm thinking about, I'm thinking about the free souls and I'm thinking about the salts in this world where salt, the electrolyte drink. I think they've just hit their first year mark and when you look at what they've achieved in year one, it's incredible really. But I'm thinking about the two founders. They put themselves out there before the brand even launched, before there was even a product and now they've kind of got a really cool social media manager who is well loved and she's actively out there talking about what they're doing and how they're building the brand. And the same for Free Soul. So employees are, we score on employee satisfaction, on employee advocacy within the model. And there's a reason for that. It's because it's the lowest hanging fruit for brands. It's also how they portray their company mission and their values. So employees are a really, really credible source of being able to tell that brand story, being able to portray the company mission. They are living it, they are breathing it. Looking through the stages. What holds brands back from moving through to advocacy first? Yeah, okay, so the first one, sadly, is budget. We've all been there, we've all been there. Where does advocacy budget sit? Does it sit in social? Does it sit in influencer? Does it sit in product? There's no one right way to do it. And so brands are saying, okay, if we want to spend 100 grand, 200 grand, just on surprise and delight, whose pot does that come out of? We also think about experimentation. So if brands do not have the systems in place to scale, and a lot of the time this is down to resource as well. People are slammed and they don't have the time to think about, what if we did this thing just slightly differently? What kind of experiments do you think brands should be digging into? And do you think AI will help with that resource bit? Yes to both. Well, yes to the second, what brands can be doing. So I would kind of start off really, really small, interview a group of 10 customers, understand how they use your product, understand how they talk about your product, understand if their friends speak about these products. You know, start small, learn something, document it so, so well, and then just iterate on it. So there may be stuff that was really, really useful. Chances are it won't be a smashing success the first time. But the idea of being able to build something, just getting that first thing out there and just build, build, build, build. And soon you'll have an entire process that is kind of working the way that you want it to. And then AI obviously, the ability to build small products, build basically anything you want now is just absolutely incredible. I obviously use AI a huge amount to test things within Joule, but there's nothing to say. The brands can't be doing exactly the same thing. All right, so the third one is treating community as a marketing asset. I think a lot of people look at community and they talk about community, but it's not really community. It's like we get these people to post about us occasionally when we release a new product, those community members will have a number assigned to them almost. It's like we ship this out, we will get this. Whereas really that's not advocacy, it's all about kind of investment in the group. So the community should be seen as an extension of the brand almost. What do you need to do in order for them to talk about you without being rewarded or paid or, you know, there doesn't have to be a monetary value assigned to it. And it's also giving without expectation. I always think with community and it's a, it's a huge conversation that we're having internally as well at the moment. And I think for a lot of brands, where they go wrong with this is creating those spaces. Another part of this is like a community that's in a WhatsApp group or a slack channel. And I think as soon as it gets to a certain number, it kind of loses the community feel. Because if you think about where community came from in the old days, it's what it's like people on your street. Absolutely, yeah. And like, so if I'm in a WhatsApp group that's got 100 people in it, I start to shy away from it and then people start posting like random questions or random things. I'm like, this has nothing to do with me. So I think it's a facilitation of small groups that get so much from each other rather than from you as the person facilitating it, if that makes any sense. Yeah, it's value first. Right. They have to understand the value of being part of the community. And if they see that value, they will provide value themselves. So when you were looking at all of this data, looking at the results, was there anything surprising to you? Were there any patterns in there? One of the key things was the concentration of brands between tactical and systemized. So within those five stages, ad hoc, tactical, systemized, company wide, and advocacy first, you have levels within those stages that we can see. So halfway through tactical to halfway through Systemized, there were 55% of brands that lived there. And it's almost, it's like at this point where they're about to jump off the cliff and like go for it. And you can see brands are like kind of there, they're like testing the waters. And that was. Is there a CFO behind them, do you think? Yeah. Pulling them back. Yeah. So the concentration there was really, really interesting. The other thing that I found was that size just doesn't matter. And in some ways you talk about freesolve, freecell scored really, really highly. And they are built at the start through community. And you can see that in everything that they are doing now. Another one is Beekman, which amazing, amazing brand. Their advocacy program won an award recently. Like, if you think about the two founders of Freesol and how they started, how they put themselves out there, they were going out to all these different places to meet people with their product. And think about Stripe and Sarah as well, their founders. Like, whenever I think I met one of them and they had a pair of knickers in the bag because they're just constantly giving out product and stuff. And they were just constantly there and being top of mind. And is that a pattern between these brands? Absolutely. I mean, Beekman's program is called the Kindness Crew. It's baked into everything they do. And I think you see that in some of these brands that are being built. And they also have the benefit of not being at the behest of, like, major boards and stuff like that. And it allows them the freedom to build what they want to build. What about the brands? If we go back to budget and the CFO that we just mentioned, what about those brands? This is more of the idea that advocacy right now doesn't really have a line in the P and L. It's hard to immediately prove the benefits of advocacy. Sure, you can look at, like, emv, you can look at if you're sharing affiliate links and stuff like that, but that's not really what advocacy is about. And it's very hard to go to a CFO and say, Look, I want to spend $500,000 on something that is just for the community. You know, you're probably going to get turned down. What's next with all of this? What's next? So I'm going to make it public, I think. Oh, yeah, I think I'm going to make public. So I've been working on this for a long time, but I think it needs to be out there. Yeah, I want to get some great feedback on it. I want to have some amazing conversations with brands about where they sit and what they need to do to kind of move further through those stages. I was going to say there's going to be a lot of brands out there that will want to know their score and what stage they sit at. Yeah. So right now you can come speak to me. And I think is what, like, you just said there in terms of, like, right now, what can brands do? And it's looking at those stages. Right. And being brutally honest. Yeah. With I don't know. Like, just try and get as many people cross functionally in a room. Absolutely. And just. Yeah. Like I said, look at them and be. Understand where you are. Like, do a proper kind of audit on yourself about where you stand. Because, I mean, we see a lot of brands that are doing exceptionally well in four categories, then not so good in the fifth. Normally, it's about stagnation, that experimentation part. If they're not pushing themselves to do better. Every single time, we see stagnation, and it's not good. Yeah. Ed, this has been awesome. Thank you for bringing data and numbers to something more sexy in the brand world, let's just say. Appreciate it. No, no, it's been great. It's been great.