After the fifth, tenth, thirtieth email, the same colleagues who thought this would never work began to see the huge potential. Every day after that I shared some little tidbit of a customer insight to my marketing and sales colleagues. That’s when we knew we were on to something. In the first two days we had 100 customers join the Hub-about ninety-nine more than I expected.

We personalized our email invites based on these personas, and on a quiet day in August, we launched our advocacy program. To start, we utilized our persona work and segmented our AdvocateHub into three different experiences for three different personas. I convinced my boss to give me a little money to run a pilot program despite her reservations. And then I wanted them to talk about us! Launching a Pilot Program I wanted to find an avenue where we could talk to customers on a daily basis without doing some big fancy research project that’s put on the shelf after you finish it. Sales people talk to customers all the time, but those of us who sit in corporate headquarters (the ivory tower) talk to customers maybe once or twice a year. I didn’t know if it was going to work, but I needed to try something. We were stuck in our old way of thinking, and I wanted to push our teams to think in a progressive customer-centric way. I’d rather do something than nothing, and up to this point, we were doing nothing to drive word of mouth and peer referrals. A fellow marketing colleague said no one would take it seriously, 'It's just a cute little project.' Great. Even my own staff thought it was a waste of my time. One of our VPs, after listening to my plans- and as if listening to a child rant about a mean teacher-said, “Interesting, that's very nice, but it will never work.” Deflating. To rally support for this potential new Influitive advocacy program, I talked to many sales and marketing stakeholders. So we signed up, engaged our customers, and were off to the races.

And it gave me a mechanism to, quite simply, have our happy customers talk about us by giving us testimonials and sharing our content on their social networks. It would give me a forum to listen to our customers, talk to them directly, and discover the how and why behind their purchasing decisions (which isn’t typically a luxury marketing departments have). Through my research I discovered Influitive, a gamification platform that fit perfectly with what I wanted. From my early days as a sports journalist during an internship in high school interviewing athletes to direct marketing for Bloomingdale’s, I’ve always been interested in people-and customers are actually just human beings after all! Shifting an Institutional Mindset This theme of connecting on a human level has been present throughout my life. I researched ways we could build a strategy that would engage our customers as people and motivate them to share their good experiences with Staples Business Advantage with friends and colleagues. I knew this gap was huge, and my inner journalist kicked in. Of course, we knew that! (How did you hear about the last new restaurant you tried?!) As I stared up at all the initiatives my hard-working colleagues had proposed, I realized not one of our efforts addressed how customers actually made buying decisions-through word of mouth. The research had shown us definitively that customers don’t learn about products and services from ads, sales collateral and emails, but from word of mouth and peer networking. My boss at the time asked me to bring together the strategic plans for all of the different marketing groups-product marketing, field marketing, communications, database marketing, and on and on-and it was when I collated everything and put up notes on my whiteboard, by persona and lifecycle, that I had an 'aha' moment. In addition to the persona research, we had done extensive database modeling and analysis to create a lifecycle strategy. In the product-centered approach, you’d have two different sales people out there pushing two different products with two separate marketing pieces. What we found out through the research was that sometimes they might think about, say, buying a new chair and printer at the same time because they had a new hire.

Staples my time manager