What techniques can business leaders employ to build their business into a legendary brand, with a cult following like Chick-fil-A?
Scott Wozniak, a leadership consultant who has helped build brands for more than two decades, including nearly a decade of working with the founding family and executive team at Chick-fil-A, will provide advice for creating a cult brand as the keynote speaker at the annual BizExpo event on May 22.
BizExpo is BizTimes Media’s annual daylong business-to-business education and networking event, the largest of its kind in southeastern Wisconsin. It will be held from 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday, May 22, at the Brookfield Conference Center.
BizExpo 2024 will begin with a keynote presentation, called Elevate Your Leadership, from Wozniak, a leadership consultant, CEO of Atlanta-based Swoz Consulting and author of the book “Make Your Brand Legendary: Create Raving Fans With the Customer Experience Engine.”
“When we talk about raving fans, it’s a fundamentally different customer relationship,” Wozniak said. “It’s stories of their customers doing unusual, exceptional things.”
A 2019 BizTimes Milwaukee cover story highlighted cult brands in Wisconsin including La Crosse-based convenience store chain Kwik Trip, Milwaukee-based motorcycle manufacturer Harley-Davidson, and defunct Oak Creek-based airline Midwest Express.
Wozniak has studied how iconic brands have achieved cult status and turned their customers into raving fans. He demonstrates his formula for creating raving fan customers with a “Customer Experience Engine” diagram, showing an engine powered by customer insight, powering gears for operational excellence, personalized service and memorable moments, all held together by a healthy leadership team.
“It starts with customer insight,” Wozniak said. “(Cult brands) find ways to get to know their customer. They don’t just know facts about them, they know their story.”
Operational excellence gains customer trust, he said.
“This is about consistency, reliability and quality you can count on,” Wozniak said. “It’s the fundamentals, not the fancy stuff. Those guys actually show up on time and deliver good stuff. We can count on them.”
The personalized service and memorable moments are smaller gears in the Wozniak raving fans engine.
“You don’t do them every day, every week,” he said. “Once or twice a year you do something, and it makes a big difference. Little things like a surprise gift or a personal note.”
Personalized service is how businesses show their customers they care about them, and provide a human touch, he said.
“Do you guys care about me? Do you see me? Do you get me?” Wozniak said. “(Personalized service) is how companies show up and say, ‘I care about you.’”
Memorable moments create a story that customers can tell other people.
“Just because they love you doesn’t mean they talk about you,” Wozniak said. “The key to this is you make a moment when you celebrate the customer. You make the customer feel like the hero. These are like celebrations, parties, events or things you do that make a big deal out of your customers. Those moments are what create viral brands where everyone talks about them. You might be doing good every day, but until you create one of those cool moments, there’s nothing to buzz about.”
And, without a healthy leadership team, the whole model falls apart, he said.
In his book, Wozniak tells numerous stories of how top brands, including Apple, Disney and Chick-fil-A, have followed these principles.
Kwik Trip also is a good example of a company following this formula, Wozniak said.
“They do operational excellence when nobody else does,” he said. “The power of, can I trust you? You don’t trust any other gas stations. Not to overstate this but (at Kwik Trip) holy cow, the bathrooms aren’t nasty. The power of the fundamentals is there.”
Wozniak’s book makes two notable references to Wisconsin companies, one flattering and one critical.
He points to Milwaukee-based motorcycle manufacturer Harley-Davidson as an example of a company that has customers who are raving fans.”
“I could have organized this entire book around Harley-Davidson,” Wozniak writes. “When your customers tattoo your logo on their body, you might have raving fans!”
On the other hand, he is critical of Menomonee Falls-based retailer Kohl’s Corp.
Oversimplifying business strategy, Wozniak says there are two basic ways to win: either be the cheapest option and go for lots of volume or become the premium player, offering products and services that are different and so much better than the competition that customers are willing to pay more.
“If they truly love you, raving fans pay full price,” he writes. “Discounts work too well. The more you offer discount pricing, the more you erode your price in the mind of your customer.”
Wozniak cites Kohl’s as an example of that.
“Kohl’s has trained its customer to shop only when they offer 30% discounts in their monthly mailer and when Kohl’s Cash (their rewards points) can be used. Why would customers shop at any other time?”
