Creating Superfans: How To Turn Your Customers Into Lifelong Advocates

by Brittany Hodak

Overview

Superfans aren’t just for pop stars and NBA teams.

What if your customers loved your brand the way Swifties love Taylor or Drake loves the Raptors? What if they came back again and again…and told their friends to do the same?

In Creating Superfans, award-winning entrepreneur and keynote speaker Brittany Hodak shares a powerful framework for transforming your business from a commodity into a category of one.

Brittany has helmed fan-engagement campaigns for brands including Walmart, Disney, Amazon, and dozens of other global brands. Creating Superfans combines sharp business insights with entertaining stories from work with stars like Taylor Swift, Dolly Parton, and Mötley Crüe.

Memorable case studies from businesses of all sizes illustrate that customer experience, or CX, is the battlefield for wining – and keeping – customers. Brittany’s game-changing CX system, the SUPER Model, is simple to learn, deploy, and measure across every organization.

Whether you’re launching a new business or running a hundred-year-old brand, Creating Superfans gives entire team a shared playbook for tapping into the unmatched power of superfandom.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781774580783
Publisher:	Page Two Books, Inc.
Publication date:	01/10/2023
Pages:	296
Sales rank:	13,442
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Brittany Hodak is an award-winning entrepreneur, author, and customer experience speaker who has delivered keynotes across the globe to organizations including American Express and the United Nations.

Brittany is unapologetically obsessed with helping businesses turn their customers into superfans. She has worked with some of the world’s biggest brands and entertainers, including Walmart, Disney, Katy Perry, and Dolly Parton. She founded and scaled an entertainment startup to eight figures before exiting and is the former Chief Experience Officer of Experience.com. Her debut book, Creating Superfans: How To Turn Your Customers Into Lifelong Advocates, is in stores on January 10, 2023.

BrittanyHodak.com

Table of Contents

Foreword Shep Hyken 1

Enterlude 5

Part 1 The Super Model

1 Where It's At 13

2 I Don't Care 23

3 Brand New Set of Rules 37

4 This Is How We Do it 43

Part 2 Start with Your Story

5 Who Are You 57

6 My List 75

Part 3 Understand Your Customer's Story

7 The story of Us 93

8 Read My Mind 107

Part 4 Personalize

9 I Want You to Want Me 123

10 You Get What You Give 135

Part 5 Exceed Expectations

11 All the Small Things 153

12 Hanging by a Moment 171

13 Back 2 Good 179

Part 6 Repeat

14 Here I Go Again 195

15 Everybody Talks 203

Part 7 Supercharged: Putting It All Together

16 Pet Sounds 211

17 Come as You Are 225

Part 8 Supergroups: Breakdown

18 Ain't No Stoppin' Us Now | super Teams 233

19 With a Little Help from My Friends | super Social Media 243

20 Show Me What You Got | super Marketing 249

21 Money, Money, Money | super Sales 255

22 I'll Be There for You | super Customer Service 263

23 All Together Now | super Glue 269

24 Never Really Over | super Future 273

Exitlude 275

Thank Yous 277

Credits 281

Editorial Reviews

01/02/2023

"If you do your job correctly, your customers will talk about you" writes entrepreneur Hodak in her accessible debut. Created as a practical yet inspiring template for readers to launch their business to new heights, Hodak fills the pages with eye-catching graphics that back up her tried-and-true methods to increasing customer satisfaction. Contending that “you can’t buy superfans, you can only create them,” she lays out a how-to blueprint for readers to develop their existing customer base —through shrewd tweaks to advertising campaigns, employee interactions, and more—and level them up into superfans—those “loyal, enthusiastic customers who will keep buying from you again and again.”

Hodak’s star player is the customer experience, and she notes that regardless of what a business says about its brand, the customers’ word of mouth is the most efficient way to spread brand awareness, even in the social-media age. Hodak continually emphasizes that a brand is molded “in every interaction with every customer,” debunking, in persuasive examples, the notion that it’s the end products themselves that speak the loudest. She writes with the authority and enthusiasm of a coach. Practical tools include her Ladder to Superfandom, which clearly lays out seven key steps businesses should endeavor to guide their customers through: apathy, awareness, attraction, action, adoption, affinity, and finally advocacy.

Organized for clarity and quick reference, and boasting a host of graphs, diagrams, and catchy acronyms, Creating Superfans is an easy-to-follow guide packed with general knowhow, real-world examples, and telling personal anecdotes relating to customer experience and brand building. Hodak closes each chapter with a bite-sized, comprehensive overview of that chapter’s information in the "Superquick! Rewind" infographic, offering snapshots for quick reference. Readers will be entertained by this aesthetically pleasing, informative reference guide that they will be able to refer back to for multiple uses, plus a motivational refresher when branding and growing their businesses.

Takeaway: A savvy guide to turning customers into loyal advocates.

Great for fans of: Raving Fans by Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles; Heart and Hustle by Patricia Bright

Production grades Cover: B+ Design and typography: A Illustrations: A Editing: A Marketing copy: A

BookLife Reviews

Exceptional customer experience is the goal of every smart businessperson. Creating Superfans gives you not just the playbook for making it happen, but also the playlist. The smart, simple advice and pop culture references put CX into terms your team will relate to, remember, and—most importantly—really use.”
Jon Acuff, New York Times-bestselling author, Soundtracks

“These pages are filled with powerful stories, specific examples, and a complete framework for turning customers into the engine of your business. I particularly love the section on understanding customers’ stories.”
Jay Baer, bestselling co-author, Talk Triggers

“I know firsthand what it means to have loyal, dedicated fans. Whatever your ‘thing’ is, you’ll find advice in Creating Superfans to help you go further, faster, with a loyal tribe cheering you on.”
Bobby Bones, New York Times-bestselling author; TV and radio personality

“Creating Superfans contains the secrets your business needs to stand out in a crowd and to attract, engage, and retain your own raving fanbase.”
Dorie Clark, Wall Street Journal-bestselling author, The Long Game; executive education faculty, Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business

“This is the customer experience soundtrack that you’ll want to play on repeat for months on end until the ideas, stories, and principles are so embedded in your psyche that creating raving fans will be as easy as 1, 2, 3…”
Joey Coleman, Wall Street Journal-bestselling author, Never Lose a Customer Again

“Maybe you prefer to spend countless sums on advertising, and countless hours constantly chasing and attaining new customers. Or maybe Brittany Hodak’s masterful guide will help you flip that relationship on its head—instead of selling to people, you’ll create advocates and superfans who do the ‘selling’ for you.”
Jeff Haden, contributing editor, Inc.; author, The Motivation Myth

“Creating Superfans is the must-read manual for turning your customers and employees into superfans. If you have customers, you need this book—period.”
John Hall, senior contributor, Forbes; serial entrepreneur

“There is nothing stronger than third-party advocacy. It’s what every marketer wants! But how do you create the elusive ‘superfan’? Start with this playbook; fun, accessible, and full of practical ideas you can implement right away. A must-read for any marketer in the digital age.”
Shama Hyder, bestselling author, The Zen of Social Media Marketing; CEO, Zen Media

“When your marketplace is crowded, the ultimate catalyst to conversion is the creation of an army of supporters, fans, and ideally superfans. This book delivers the formula to achieve exactly that!”
Phil M Jones, bestselling author, Exactly What to Say

“Brittany Hodak is a master at helping brands connect with their audience in a way that creates deep loyalty and meaningful, authentic bonds. The strategies in Creating Superfans are priceless!”
Rory Vaden, New York Times-bestselling author; cofounder, Brand Builders Group

From the Publisher

2022-12-22
A strategy guide for turning casual customers into ardent fans of one’s company.

“Too many businesses fall into the trap of becoming something lots of people ‘sort of’ like instead of intentionally creating an experience the right people can’t stop telling their friends about,” writes Hodak in her colorful nonfiction debut. “Don’t be filler; be unforgettable.” It’s a tall order—and the implicit goal of every marketing book ever written—and she lays out a program for achieving it that’s intimately connected with a phenomenon that most of her readers will have experienced: fandom. Hodak looks at organizations, such as Disneyland, Amazon, and Ritz-Carlton hotels, which have generated “superfans”: customers who, on their own initiative, create other customers. She then attempts to distill how these organizations manage to do this (and are able to continue doing it). By looking at a range of businesses and drawing on the insights of their leaders, she boils down this type of success to its essence: a focus on caring attention to detail. “The quickest way to get someone to care about you and the things you care about,” she writes, “is to demonstrate that you care about them and the things they care about.” Using well-designed graphics and bulleted key points, Hodak effectively takes her readers through the important components of improving their customer relations. Readers may find her organizing mnemonic to be a bit hokey (“SUPER,” with “S” standing for “Start with Your Story,” “U” for “Understand Your Customer’s Story,” and so on), but the concept behind it is conveyed with consistent can-do energy and an appealing lack of pomposity, with relatable personal touches, such as the author’s confession that Rocky IVis her favorite Rocky movie. Her emphasis on the core value of customer service as the key ingredient of superfan creation will likely be of use to many readers.

A high-energy series of pointers for building customer enthusiasm.

Kirkus Reviews