The key to creating a powerful brand is having very vocal brand ambassadors for your company. Looking at it from a traditional marketer’s point of view, this is one of the toughest things to achieve. Well, that is what formal education does to you. We, at Zomato, have a good number of loyal customers who talk about us whenever there is a conversation around food and restaurants. To create such a brand, we have made our fair share of mistakes, but have learned quite a bit about the best practices to get it done. And none of us here have any marketing background, we are all engineers who tell it like it is. There are four ways in which you can create powerful associations with your customers:

Put customers first

A lot of times, under various pressures, we make changes to our product/service which are not received well by our customers. For all these changes, always measure the short term gain vs. the long term loss that you will incur. Most of the times, the potential loss will be bigger than gain. In all such cases, put the customer in the middle of your decision making process and then take a call. Here at Zomato, there is a constant tug of war going on between the sales team and the product team. The sales team wants to plaster advertisements all over the website. The product team doesn’t, and it always wins.

Get personal with feedback

Feedback is give by those who care. So please don’t insult them with automated email replies. So, when a customer writes in to your company for feedback, have a real person write back, saying that you value their feedback and also tell the customer whether or not you are going to address what they suggested. All this while, do remember that the customer is always right. And end the email with a thank you like you mean it (you should!). Lazy marketers always come up with an excuse that they cannot handle all the volume of feedback/queries that they get. The truth is that they just don’t care.

Treat customer service as your core strength

Great customer service builds the strongest brand ambassadors. Make sure that you put your best foot forward while creating the customer service department. We, at Zomato, did this top down. For the first month, all our business heads were taking care of all emails/queries directly. Understanding the effort and business intelligence that goes behind customer service, they now have their best people manning the department. And they still get copied on each and every email that goes out to any customers. We all really love our customers, and can clearly see that they love us back.

Be emotional

Your customers will only care for your product if you do. Show people that you love your product from the way you create your product as well as market it. For example, in your product’s tagline, simply saying what your product does will not muster any support for you. You have to tell people why you created what you created. If that resonates with someone, you have created a loyal user before that person even uses your product. This is something we believe in very strongly. To this effect, we changed our product tagline from “India’s #1 online restaurant guide” to “Discover more places to eat around you”. No one must have visited our website by learning that we are India’s biggest online restaurant guide. But a lot of users must have used our product to discover more places to eat around them. Which is why we built it in the first place. What do you think? Anything we can add here?