McD’s innovative and integrated marketing campaign; Your questions. Our answers made me think of customer relationships and ways to include customers in brands. Transparency and hence customers’ true perception of the brand is essential when building and maintaining a strong and solid brand. At the end of the day it’s the consumers who hold the key to your success so why not listen and learn?

I came across this singer’s Facebook page the other day. Now you might ask what John Legend has to do with building a strong customer relationship? To be honest I am not quite sure myself. I know that he has won nine Grammy awards and was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people. And then he managed to transform himself into an ordinary guy just like you and me (or maybe not me, I am a girl though), after starting to care for his fans and communicate with them in “eye level”. I guess Sandy brought some good. The hurricane was the trigger point that started conversation. On one of the roughest nights John Legend posted the following on his Facebook profile;

Within a few hours he got 440 answers and more than 4000 people liked his post. During the last couple of weeks I have been following his profile and throughout the week John Legend himself has begun to do these Q&A’s where he answers questions from fans.

If John Legend equals company this is an example of how consumers can leverage a message. Legend makes the consumers articulate their favorite piece of music, which singer they want to see Legend performs with and so on and hereby he creates this appealing down-on-earth personality. This is an example of a flipped funnel, and I wonder how even more popular this man gets in the future. He surely captures essence of SM that great companies haven not figured out yet. He is listening and his “customers” are in return transformed into committers. What would you do with 1.876.465 fans?