You just don’t give this to the VP over here that’s been 20 years. How do I create this within my organization? I know there’s going to be a cultural shift, but how do you start? -jd
Excerpt from next week’s Business901 Podcast:
Robbie Baxter: I think you’re right. You don’t just give it to one person and say you’re in charge unless that one person is at the very top, and that person becomes the voice of membership. And then, it’s the attitude. I interviewed several people at LinkedIn for the book, including one of the founders, Allen Blue who is sort of their champion for membership and one of the things that they talk about is when they have meetings, they always feel like — they say the member is always in the room with us. What would the member say if we made this decision? Is this in the best interest of our members? You have to build that kind of culture into the organization, which is why your earlier question about ‘is change possible’ is such a good one. Because while it’s possible — I talked to a venture firm, a venture investor firm recently and they have a couple of companies that are trying to move to a membership model and as I was talking to these investors, one of them said, oh my gosh, we have the wrong team. This group of senior leadership is not going to be able to make this transition. It’s going to be too different in the way that they’re very transactional, they’re not interested in getting to know people, they’re not interested in the messiness of having on-going relationships.
It’s almost like the difference — I don’t actually know your personal life or anything and I hope I’m not offending anyone but it’s the difference between a guy who has been in a committed relationship for 25 years and says, it’s messy and it there are bad days, and there are days when I’m frustrated, but I’m in…” that’s’ a relationship. And there are people who are like, “I just like to date because it’s really fun to go on dates, and there is no stress, there is no muss and fuss…” Moving from transactional which is like dating and dating lots of people to really being in a relationship with somebody which is what membership is about, requires a totally different attitude and there are some parts about it that are hard.
Joe: Membership is much deeper than this loyalty program out here.
Robbie: I think loyalty programs are like the gateway for membership, but I think that a lot of the organizations that have developed loyalty programs aren’t thinking big picture about really building loyalty. All they’re thinking about is electric fences that keep people in by offering discounts. I mean effectively, most loyalty programs are discounts for volume or frequency of purchase. They’re not really about loyalty at all. In fact, you might hate United Airlines but you continue to fly in it, not because you feel loyalty but because you get effectively a discount on your upgrades if you fly consistently on one airline.
Robbie Kellman Baxter is a long-time advisor to some of the most popular membership-based businesses and author of the recent book, The Membership Economy: Find Your Super Users, Master the Forever Transaction, and Build Recurring Revenue. Membership surpasses subscriptions, sharing, and meshing – it’s about appealing to the human needs of a changing population.
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