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Steve:
Admit it. You've dreamed of that scenario where the majority of your customers are so impressed with your business that they've become dedicated promoters of your company. But we know that's just a fantasy, right?

Brittany:
When you create superfans, you're no longer just a commodity provider. You are a category of one. You are the partner that your customers will come back to again and again at the exclusion of all others. And when given the opportunity to refer or recommend you, they're going to do it because you've made their lives better.

Steve:
Creating superfans of your company on this episode of The CX Leader Podcast.

Announcer:
The CX Leader Podcast with Steve Walker is produced by Walker, an experience management firm that helps our clients accelerate their XM success. You can find out more at walkerinfo.com.

Steve:
Hello, everyone. I'm Steve Walker, host of The CX Leader Podcast and I'm glad you're listening. It's never been a better time to be a CX leader, and we explore the topics and themes to help leaders like you deliver amazing experiences for their customers. Customer experience pros know that one of the many indicators of a successful CX program includes how many promoters you have among your customers. Often measured using the Net Promoter Score. The more promoters you have, the more likely your customers will be to recommend you to others. Right. And that's it. We typically don't think there's something better than promoters. However, my guest today thinks we can do more. We can create super fans. Those customers that not only recommend you to others, but become serious advocates for your business. Brittany Hodak is an award-winning entrepreneur, author and customer experience speaker. Her new book was just released last month, "Creating Super Fans: How to Turn Your Customers Into Lifelong Advocates." Brittany, thank you for being a guest on The CX Leader Podcast.

Brittany:
Thanks for having me, Steve. I'm stoked to be here.

Steve:
Well, it's a real pleasure to have you on. And again, as we get into the new year here, we're really trying to challenge our CX pros to to think even bigger about what they're doing. And I did get a chance to look a little bit at your book, and it's a really good read. So we're going to make sure that all of our listeners know where they can find it. But just give us a little bit more context and background on your CX journey personally and where you came to and and maybe even what the impetus was to write this book.

Brittany:
Well, thank you for asking. My background is mainly in the entertainment industry. I got my first job when I was 16 years old as a radio station mascot and had several fun adventures in the radio space, Decided I wanted to work in the entertainment industry, worked for record labels and music magazines and entertainment agencies. And it wasn't until about 2010 that I started to realize that what I was really passionate about was customer experience. And I had been asking myself, Why do some of these bands fade away and become one hit wonders and others become huge superstars? And I realized that the ones who cared more about their fans without fail were the ones who had more success. Maybe not out of the gate, but long term there was always a correlation, a 1 to 1. If you care more about your fans, you're going to have a longer, better, more successful career. And so I went back to college. I got a grad degree in consumer behavior and marketing and started applying some of the things that I had learned in the entertainment world for brands and businesses. This idea of customers who come back and tell their friends and what I realized, what there were, there were so many parallels.

Brittany:
I was like, Oh my gosh, everything is the entertainment industry that all of the things that were true for recording artists are true for entrepreneurs are true for brands. So I started digging deeper into the psychographics behind what make us love the things we love. What are the reasons that we want to overindex with some things and not others when it comes to our affinity? So I launched a company in 2011 called The Superfan Company, where I was fortunate enough to work with some of the biggest brands on the planet brands like Walmart and Amazon and Johnson and Johnson, and the list goes on and on and on and huge artists, recording artists like Katy Perry and Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber and Dolly Parton and literally hundreds of others. And again, I was just so fascinated with that intersection with the things that make people really care about those entertainers and also, by extension, really care about the brands that they're sort of endorsing either explicitly or implicitly. So again, a long way to say all of that sort of kept coming back to this experience, like, what is it that you're doing different? What is it that you're doing better than anyone else? What value are you adding in somebody's life? Why do you deserve to have a super fan? So I started writing and speaking a lot about this idea of creating super fans of these experiences that people couldn't help but tell their friends about couldn't help but have again.

Brittany:
I spent a year as the chief experience officer at Experience.com, so this is something I'm incredibly passionate about. And I wrote this book "Creating Superfans" to really try to make customer experience feel like rock and roll and exciting. I wanted to write a business book that didn't feel like a business book, that felt like something fun to read, to make experience accessible to every person in an organization. Because as any good CX leader knows, every single person on your team is in the experience department. And not just your team, but every team, because customers don't see silos, they don't see departments, they just see someone who is exceeding their expectations or not exceeding their expectations. So I wanted to write a book to get everyone on the same team and everyone aligned around the kind of customer centricity that turns a customer into a superfan.

Steve:
Well, we've done over 250 episodes of The CX Leader Podcast, and I would guess, you know, I have had guests who have been on multiple times, but I probably had 150 different guests, but I don't think I've ever had a guest on with your background. And I think that's fascinating. And some of the stuff you just said really resonates with me. You know, one of the things I've loved to say about business in my career is that all business is show business. And and as you were talking, I think even more strongly it hit me that we really could learn more from the entertainment business in terms of creating great experiences. And then one of the most fascinating things you said to me is that, you know, in addition to being great artists or something, you know, some of these people that were super successful are really, really good at creating customer experience. You mentioned Taylor Swift, who is not exactly my genre, but I have such respect for her success and what she's been able to accomplish. But I just think this is a this is an awesome way to think about our business with somebody who's really come at it from the show business side. So let's let's have some more fun with that. Now, I understand you were on Shark Tank, right?

Brittany:
I was on Shark Tank. And before I tell that story, I just want to follow up on something that you just said. Yeah, I love the analogy of all business, show business. That's so true. I think the reason for that is because the number one threat to every business is not awareness, it's apathy. It's not that people know about me. It's do people care? Have I given them a reason to care? Have I connected my story to theirs in a way that is meaningful and that matters? Is it memorable? Do they care? Do they understand? So I always talk about vanquishing apathy. And you mentioned Taylor the very first time I mentioned Taylor Swift, and this is the very first time I met Taylor Swift. And this is one of the stories that I share in the book. It was years before we worked together. She was 16 or 17 and I was 22 and I was working at a record label in New York, and we were together at an after party for the show where she had won her very first ever award. It was for the CMT Awards for Music video, and she was there at the party with an artist who I knew from working at his label. So the three of us were talking and hanging out. And at the time, Taylor was I think she had had like two singles on the radio. And what she was really known for was the way she was connecting with people on MySpace.

Brittany:
And so I was talking to her about that because I wanted to know if that was like authentic to her as a teenager or if that was like coming from the label or somebody else who was doing the strategy. And she said something to me that I'll never forget. That made me think as a 22 year old, Wow, this artist is going to be one of the biggest stars on the planet. And clearly she's proven that to be the case over the past 15 years or whatever it's been. She said, I want to sell a million albums. I want to have a platinum record. And I know that if I want to sell a million albums, I've got to make a million people care about me. I've got to make them care enough to want to listen to my music and want to buy my album. So I'm showing them that I care about them. She knew that if she could connect with someone, then they would be that much more likely to be a fan. They would be that much more likely to spend their money to to care about her and not the other 10 million girls who were trying to be the next superstar artist. So I remember thinking, okay, if she's got this kind of focus as a high schooler, she is going places. And of course that is proven to be true.

Steve:
Yeah, it's a great, great analogy. You know, again, we'll come back to the Shark Tank thing. But another thing, one of the things I've observed from my years in customer experience is that most marketers are much more interested in the customers they don't have than the ones that they already have.

Brittany:
Yes, there's this crazy focus on customer acquisition and no focus on customer retention until they feel like you're about to leave. It's like, Yeah, I care about you. I care about you, I care about you. You sign the contract. Cool. Oh, you're about to leave. I care about you again. And obviously super fandom is a two way street. If you want your customers to love you, you've got to show them the love. You've got to make them feel like they matter to you more than just the dollars their business represents.

Steve:
All right, let's go. We got to hear the Shark Tank story now.

Brittany:
Okay. So I was on Shark Tank several years ago for the Superfan Company. And it's so funny. People always ask me, how did you get on the show? We have like a really sort of anticlimactic story. I got a call from a casting producer who was like, Hey, do you want to be on this show? Because he had read a story about me and I think it was Forbes, Forbes or Ink or some magazine. And he was like, I think what you're doing is really cool. You want to come be on the show? And I said, Yes, that sounds fantastic. And so went on Shark Tank. It was, I think, season six. It's been a while ago. Yeah, I think it was season six and had a blast. It was it was a really fun experience. And we at the time, the valuation was one of the highest ever in the show's history. It was, I don't know, like $4 million or something like that. The offer we got was for about three quarters of $1,000,000, which we ended up accepting on the show, but then not accepting in real life. When we got into the due diligence and sort of, you know, peeked behind the curtain a bit.

Steve:
Who is going to put the money in?

Brittany:
So we got two offers from four of the five sharks. And the deal on the show that we accepted was from Lori and Robert.

Steve:
Good for you. What else came to the point where you started to create the super fan company and anything else that was sort of the the genesis of actually forming the company?

Brittany:
You know, I was a college rep for a company called Willow, which stands for Warner Elektra Atlantic. It's one of the major distribution companies. And so as a college rep for the company, every couple of weeks, we would have these calls where somebody from a different music department would come on and talk about what it was like to work in the accounting department or the legal department or the publicity department. And because this was like 2003, 2004 every single call was executives saying, this is the worst time ever to work in the music industry. You don't work in the music industry, you're still in college. Go do something else. Go, you know, be a lawyer, go work in Hollywood. But the music industry is disappearing because people are stealing music and nobody wants CD's. And this was like pre iTunes. And then iTunes was launched when I was in college and I just kept saying over and over again, if you want somebody to buy a CD, why don't you make it worth buying? Like, why would somebody want to get in their car, drive to the store, or pay $15 for some dumb hunk of plastic that's like wrapped in a bunch of other plastic just to put it in their computer and like, have that music available the same way it's available as if they had just downloaded it.

Brittany:
Like, why don't you make it something that people want to experience? And so that's how I had written the business plan for the company that ultimately became Zine PAC and later the Superfan Company. And, to me it was just obvious like, well, why don't we why don't we turn it into something that fans would want to have? Let's create a physical, tangible showcase of fandom. Let's create a coffee table book to put the CD in. Let's create a commemorative magazine. Let's put some patches in there. Let's put some stickers in there. Let's do something really cool that people would want to have in their house, not just, Oh, we put all these songs on a disk and one little piece of paper in there with a picture that's everywhere in the world and are now charging you all this money for it. So that's really when I sort of started advocating for this idea of like, if you're going to spend money on something, it should feel good, like it should feel like you're getting something for it. So more about the experience and less about just the transaction.

Steve:
And then you actually did sell the company.

Brittany:
I did. Yes.

Steve:
But then that morphed into more of your career as a as a speaker and and consultant and so forth.

Brittany:
Yeah. So I never planned to be a keynote speaker, just like I never planned to be an entrepreneur. I thought I was going to just work at record labels my whole life. But after the Shark Tank appearance, I started getting more and more invitations to speak, and every time I would speak, I would get more invitations to speak. And so it just became too much trying to run the business and speak. And my husband and I were ready to start a family. And once my first son was born, I was like, okay, something's got to give. So I sold the majority of my equity in the company in 2019. It was like late 18 or early 19, something like that, and have just been speaking and writing ever since. So I'm so thrilled that my first book is finally, finally out. I worked on this book for a long time because I wanted it to. I wanted it to feel special. I wanted it to feel different. I wanted to take a CX approach to writing a book. So my favorite favorite compliment is people who say reading this book doesn't feel like reading a business book because it's printed in color.

Brittany:
The whole book is in color, and every chapter title and every major heading section in the book is a song title. So it's like really fun to go through it. It feels it feels kind of like a mixtape. And I wanted to really illustrate the point that you can turn anything into a memorable experience. You don't have to do things the same way your competitors do, and you shouldn't wait for your direct competitors to innovate before you do, because in an experience economy, your competitors aren't just the people who do similar things to you. Your competitors are everyone everywhere, all around you, because your customers are are comparing you to the best experiences they've ever had anywhere. It's like why you don't take your kid to get courtside seats for the first time. They go to a basketball game because then for every sporting event for the rest of their life, they're like, Why are we down there? As my husband and I found out the hard way.

Steve:
Yeah.

Announcer:
Are you looking for a little recognition for your hard work? Well, here's just the opportunity. Applications are now being accepted for the US Customer Experience Awards. Finalists and winners will be named in 18 different CX categories, and you could submit an entry in multiple categories. This could be the chance for your team to finally get the recognition it deserves. To find out more and submit your entry, go to usacxa.com.

Steve:
Hey, my guest on the podcast this week is Brittany Hodak. She is a entrepreneur and businessperson and also now a new author. Her new book, "Creating Superfans" is available, and you can find it either on her website or also on Amazon or other places you buy books. But now let's talk a little bit. And I don't want to give away the secrets of the book because I really want people to get this book and read it. But why should a company want super fans? What's the catch there for for having super fans?

Brittany:
I mean, it's kind of like asking the question, why would you want to be healthy, right? There's so many benefits. So when you have super fan customers, everything gets easier. Your customer acquisition costs go down, your advertising costs go down, your marketing costs go down because all of a sudden you have people coming back again and again and again. It's easier to attract. It's easier to retain not just customers, but also employees, because you go from being somewhat of a potential commodity provider, you know, somebody who's competing in an industry where there are lots of other service providers or lots of other professionals, you know, trying to get that same business and competing on things like price or timing or how close you just happen to be to somebody else physically or virtually. But when you create super fans, none of those things matter. You're no longer just a commodity provider. You are a category of one. You are the partner that your customers will come back to again and again at the exclusion of all others. They're not shopping you, they're not time shopping you. And when given the opportunity to refer or recommend you either to somebody in real life or somebody on the Internet, they're going to do it because you've made their lives better. You've become relevant to them in their space.

Steve:
Yeah, it's again, I'm just thinking like, so this is so fun because you've kind of applied this to, to popular music. I've often had people refer it to sort of sports analogies and, you know, there's fans in sports, but we're also big fans of of pop culture and especially music. But there really is some sort of emotional component here. It's not logical, right? It's and and I guess a lot of marketing is like that and customer experience is like that.

Brittany:
Oh, yeah. Every every good marketer knows that people are making emotional decisions, not rational, logical decisions. And so the more you can appeal to those emotions, the better you're going to perform always. And super fandom is very much an emotional connection. And the thing that I think so many leaders get wrong is thinking that their brand is their logo. Like until you get to the point that you are Disney or Apple or Nike and people will feel something by looking at your logo, your brand is not your logo. Your brand is not what you say it is. It's not the marketing copy, right? It's not the ads that you put out. Your brand is the way every single one of your employees treats every customer in every interaction. Your brand is how easy or hard it is to separate yourself from money, to give it to this company that is doing something to make your life better in some way. And I think companies lose sight of that sometimes and they think like, Oh, our brand is this, Our brand is that they get super precious. Like your brand is what your customers are telling their friends about you, period. Full stop. And if you're not paying attention to that, if you're not training every single person on your team around that reality, you will at some point fail. Like maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but someone will come along and do a better job of taking care of your prospects and customers and your brand will go away.

Steve:
So again, not trying to give away any secrets of the book, but if I'm a company and I've got like a boring product, like for example, I do survey research for customer experience, how would I create super fans out of my existing great book of customers?

Brittany:
Well, I love the question. The first thing that you would do is think about every one of those customers individually and what are you doing for them. What you're doing for them is not providing data, right? What you're doing for them is giving them the confidence they need to make really big decisions, giving them the background, the information they need, like what is the sort of emotional void that you're feeling filling? What is it that you're doing and why are you better than all of your competitors? Like, what's your superpower? What is it? Both from the institutional, organizational level and also you as the sales rep or the project manager or CSR or whatever your job title is? How are you making things better for that point of contact that you have and for everyone at their company? And you know, I'm always amazed when I talk to people and I say, What is your company better at than any other company? And they're like, I don't know, we do. We do market research and it's like, cool. A bunch of other people do market research too. Like, why are you the best. I don't know. Well, if you don't know, how in the world is a customer ever going to figure it out? How's a prospect going to figure it out? And if they can't, what are they going to think? They're going to be like, Oh, they must not be the best.

Brittany:
And if they're not the best, I might as well just go with whoever is the cheapest. Or I might as well just go with whoever is closest to me or the fastest or whatever. So creating superfans is all about identifying what matters to your customers and what your best at and where those things overlap. Like, where do those two parts of the Venn diagram get closest to becoming a circle? And something I say all the time is super fans are created at the intersection of your story and every customer story. That overlapping point, that magical moment where your thing becomes relevant to their needs, that's where you're going to create the super fan customers. And I don't care what you do like, this is 100% relevant to every single service industry on the planet, to almost every product industry on the planet, because we're all living in an experience economy right now. In my book, I tell a story about an exterminator who I've become a super fan of. I talk about somebody who came to fix my sink, who turned me into a super fan, and why now? He's the only person I call any time there's a plumbing issue in my house. So whatever you're doing by showing people that you care, by putting their needs first, by leading with empathy before you get to authority, you can and will create super fan customers.

Steve:
And again, just maybe one more little practical tip here, but and you gave some great examples there with the exterminator and the plumber. But how can I, as a company, kind of lean in or adopt some of what the top performers are getting to with their fans?

Brittany:
Yeah. And so one of the in the book, I talk about what I refer to as the supermodel, and it's my framework for really realigning and refocusing your team around this idea of creating super fans and what it means to have super fans. And the mnemonic device that I use is the word SUPER. It's easy to remember if you want to create super fans, you've got to be SUPER and SUPER is an acronym that stands for Start with Your Story. And that's exactly what you were asking about before. Like, why are you the best? What is it that you're the best in the world? Why do you deserve these super fan customers? You is understand your customer story. So I talk about things like active listening. I talk about the idea to lead with the empathy. Before that authority authority. I also offer a framework to really understand, like what's the transformation that your customer is looking for? Going back to the marketing research example, like it's not they want the market research, it's they want to have the, the confidence and the assurance to spend the money and the time and the resources to make the decisions that are going to impact the world based on what the research is telling them. Right. So what's the transformation that your customer is looking for? What are the other options that they have? The other options may not just be working with somebody who does something similar to what you do. It could be making a decision without any information, which could be a disaster for a lot of reasons. Right. What are their reservations? Why are you the absolute best partner? So that's what I mean when I talk about understanding your customer story.

Brittany:
That's the U in super. The P stands for Personalized, which is where you connect your story to your customers. I talk all about how to do that. Every one of these pillars builds on the pillar before it. E stands for exceed expectations. I talk all about why that's so important, both from a logical standpoint, but also from a psychological standpoint. How to do that, how to understand your customers expectations, how to not just meet them, but exceed them, how to instill that in every level of your organization, how to teach people to take ownership of their little chunk, and how to measure that in a real time way. That's that's valuable and also valid. And then the R in SUPER just stands for repeat because as you know and I know you know it, every great leader knows customer experience is not something that you can just set it and forget. It's not like, Oh, we bought this thing or we listen to this or we did whatever. It's a way of life. It's a culture. It's something that you've got to instill into every single member of your team because it matters in every single interaction. So in the final pillar of the supermodel, I talk about some of the automations and the systems and the processes that people can lean into to help make some of the stuff automatic to free up more of their human capital and human attention, to focus on some of the things that are not yet able to be automated.

Steve:
Britney We've reached that point of the podcast that I ask every guest, and you can be no exception, but I ask them to give their best take home value. You've given us a lot of value today, but again, this is kind of our concept of what's the one thing you would ask for our CX leaders to take away, that they could go back to the office and and immediately start to improve the chances that they're creating super fans at their company. So, Brittany Hodak, what's your take home value for this episode of The CX Leader Podcast?

Brittany:
Well, I'm going to borrow from my son for my take home value, one of the stories that I share in the book, my oldest son, who's now five, who was about to turn three when this happened, he was disturbing me as as kids tend to do a lot. And I kept sort of reminding him like, no, mommy's working on her book. You're supposed to be playing with daddy right now. I'll see you later. And like the third time he came into my office, he said, what's your book about, Mom? And so I tried to explain this concept of creating super fans in a way a preschooler would understand fully expecting him to be like, that is dumb. You should write about velociraptors or something. But he was quiet and I said, Well, what do you think, buddy? And he looked at me and he said, I think you should tell the people to be nice and listen. And then he kissed me and he ran to my office and it was like such a mic drop moment. I was like, Did my three year old just write my book better than I could do in four words? Be nice and listen. Great advice straight from a preschooler. Totally holds up. Whether you're talking to your employees, whether you're talking to your customers, ask yourself, Am I being nice? Am I really listening to them? And if you do both of those things, you're going to be well on your way to creating super fans.

Steve:
The wisdom of a child. Great, great tip and thanks for sharing that. Just in case anybody wants to continue the conversation or get in touch with you, you do have your own website, right?

Brittany:
I do. You can find me at brittanyhodak.com. And if you want to connect with me on social media, I'm at Brittney Hodak on just about every platform because there was not a lot of competition for that name.

Steve:
Well, Britney Hodak's new book, "Creating Superfans" is available, and you can find it at her website or also where other books are found. And we'll also put a link out on our website, cxleaderpodcast.com. And Britney, thanks again for being such a fun and and productive guest on on The CX Leader Podcast.

Brittany:
Thanks for having me, Steve. It was great to be here.

Steve:
And if you want to talk about anything else you heard on this podcast or about how Walker can help your business' customer experience, feel free to email me at podcast@walkerinfo.com. Remember to give The CX Leader Podcast a rating through your podcast service and give us a review. Your feedback will help us improve the show and deliver the best possible experience for you, our listeners. Check out our website cxleaderpodcast.com to subscribe to the show, Find all of our previous episodes, podcast series and contact information. You can drop us a note, let us know how we're doing, or suggest an idea for a future show. The CX Leader Podcast is a production of Walker. We're an experience management firm that helps companies accelerate their success. You can read more about us at Walkerinfo.com. Thank you for listening. And remember, it's still a great time to be a CX leader. So go out there and create some super fans and we will see you back here again next time.

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