Jackie Huba

It’s not just crazy outfits, over-the-top performances, and catchy tunes that have made Lady Gaga one of the most successful pop stars of all time. Marketers have also been awed by her unconventional customer loyalty strategy. With 41 million Twitter followers and 63 million Facebook fans, she blows away her peers on social media. She has methodically built a grassroots base of what she calls her “Little Monsters”—passionate fans who look to her not just for music but also for joy and inspiration.

Marketing expert Jackie Huba unpacks the method behind Lady Gaga’s success and isolates the strategies businesses can apply in an engaging and interactive presentation based on the research from her new book, Monster Loyalty: How Lady Gaga Turns Followers into Fanatics.  They include:

• Focus on your “one percenters.” Gaga spends most of her effort on just 1% of her audience, the highly-engaged superfans who drive word of mouth.
• Lead with values. Gaga is consistent in her message of being yourself and loving others for who they are. That display of values creates a deep emotional connection.
• Give them something to talk about. Whether by wearing a meat dress or ‘dying’ in a pool of blood onstage, she knows what will get people talking.

It’s the holy grail of marketing: customers who evangelize your product or brand to friends, colleagues and family with authentic emotion and conviction. They are customers who put their own reputations on the line and have nothing to gain except, perhaps, happiness from helping someone discover the joy of your brand. Recognizing and finding these elite customers who power your sales is a challenge for almost any organization. The cultural meme of “customer evangelism” that authors Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell conceptualized in their best-selling book Creating Customer Evangelists has spread to hundreds of organizations around the world that use it as a barometer of their marketing efforts. This entertaining and provocative presentation shares convincing evidence of why customer evangelists matter and how organizations can attract more of them using the right strategies and tactics.

Key takeaways:

• The correlation between customer evangelism and revenue growth.
• The 7 clues to understanding who your evangelists are.
• The 4 strategies to create and embrace your customer evangelists.
• Examples of how innovative companies today are nurturing and growing their customer evangelists.

In this session, bestselling author Jackie Huba will share her insights on how to achieve your goals through building confidence, letting go of your fears, and becoming your most fierce self based on her latest book, Fiercely You: Be Fabulous and Confident by Thinking Like a Drag Queen. Her RuPaul-endorsed book is a creative, playful approach to the serious problems that people face regarding confidence and risk-taking. Drawing on her own experiences doing drag and interviews with the world’s top drag queens, Huba will details the Keys to Fierce that will help people ignore criticism and live life more fearlessly. Jackie will detail the psychological research that supports each of these Keys. Audience members will leave inspired with new insights on becoming the amazing person they see inside their heads and feel in their hearts.

Who are the One Percenters? They are a business’ most loyal, most engaged customers. This core group of customers, in general, makes up about one percent of a customer base. These are the fanatical customers who spread the word about your product, create online content  and fan art, and organize other customers to collaborate online. Customer loyalty expert Jackie Huba will explain how this 1% may be very small part of the customer base, yet they have enormous influence in helping the business grow and recruiting new customers, online and offline.

Key takeaways:

• Implications of focusing on customer acquisition to the detriment of existing customer loyalty.
• Finding your One Percenters.
• Best practices for engaging your One Percenters.
• Examples of how leading companies are building programs to connect with their One Percenters.

In a world where obscurity is the enemy, smart businesses must stand out to be noticed. The most successful and creative brands take risks to create products and experiences worth talking about. Th bold, fierce brands inspire legions of loyal customer evangelists to spread the brand gospel to everyone they know. The problem is that most brands take a safe approach, trying to appeal to everyone, and exciting very few.

To truly innovate our brand building, to truly learn how to be fierce, we must look beyond the obvious sources and role models.  Jackie Huba has dedicated her career to finding inspiration and lessons from the most unexpected places. When it came to building fierce brands she dove head first into a world fully committed to creating fierce personas:  drag queens. Yes, drag queens! Jackie found that the art of drag is all about creating a fearless, unique character, or persona, and living that out on a stage. As Jackie immersed herself in the culture, she began to see how brands could learn a thing or two from drag queens on how to create bold, fierce brands personas that take risks, get people talking, generate loyalty, and stand out from the crowd. Jackie is a bestselling author, customer loyalty expert and (now) a female drag performer (yes, women can do drag!) She spent four years researching how drag queens build personas for her new book, Fiercely You. The unexpected lessons on building fierce personas will help you think differently about brand building.

Key takeaways:

• Be authentic: find what is unique about your brand and triple down on it.
• Create shareable moments because obscurity is the enemy.
• Take creative risks and don’t listen to the haters.