Advocacy and Loyalty Technology Overview

Most sales and marketing professionals will acknowledge that some of the best-qualified leads and easiest sales to close come from word-of-mouth referrals. There are many studies that confirm how influential and credible this type of customer or brand advocacy is. The old school of thinking about brand or customer advocates and Customer Loyalty was that it occurred organically. A brand would simply strive to delight customers, which in turn produced loyalty and hopefully advocacy.

The new understanding is that far more customers are willing to serve as brand advocates if it is simple enough. Getting customers to serve as advocates on behalf of a brand no longer has to occur only organically. There is now a nice collection of vendors with solutions that help brands create communities to identify, nurture and reward loyal customers, and to encourage their advocacy on behalf of a brand. These solutions – or the collections of widgets, objects and tools for creating custom solutions – are designed to encourage and reward advocacy and loyalty behaviors.

The content presented in this Vendor Landscape are given to provide marketers with an overview of Customer Advocacy and Loyalty solutions. The goal is to enable Modern Marketing Organizations (MMOs) to make effective investment decisions about the Advocacy & Loyalty platforms and tools that best fit their broader Customer Engagement strategy. We are combining our look at Advocacy and Loyalty solutions because they are related and often cornerstones of a Customer Engagement strategy. At present, however, they largely exist as separate solutions in the market. This Vendor Landscape focuses on both Customer Advocacy and Customer Loyalty platforms.

This study covers the following sections:

• Executive Summary
• Advocacy & Loyalty Vendor Landscape
• Evolution of the Landscape
• Analyst Bottom Line
• About the Research Analysts
• Our Technology Overview Methodology
• About Demand Metric