Brands have spent years building customer communities, loyalty databases and social audiences. But Dr Mike Haywood believes marketers may be asking the wrong question about their value.
Rather than simply measuring a community’s size or engagement, the BrandPay co-founder and CEO argues retailers should increasingly consider how economically active that community is, and whether customer participation can contribute to acquisition, retention, content and reach at the same time.
“Community has traditionally been difficult to place on a performance marketing plan,” Haywood says. “Its value is often expressed through engagement, followers, sentiment, loyalty or anecdotal advocacy.
“These are important signals, but they can make the community difficult to compare with channels where marketers can see impressions, clicks, customer behaviour and return.”
That distinction matters because marketers have traditionally treated their existing customers primarily as an audience.
“Brands have spent years building audiences: followers, databases, loyalty members and customer communities,” says Haywood. “Most marketing channels treat those people as recipients. They receive an email, see an ad, click a message or make another purchase.
“But customer media introduces another role: Participant.”
Measuring an active community
Haywood says that shift opens up a different set of questions about what a customer community contributes.
“Customers can become part of how the brand grows, creating and distributing advocacy through their own social networks. That distinction matters. An audience gives a brand people it can communicate with. A participating customer network gives the brand potentially hundreds or thousands of individual points of distribution.”
Early BrandPay activations, he says, suggest the collective impact can be significant. “Rather than relying on a small number of high-reach individuals, brands can see hundreds of customer voices collectively generating content and distribution, sometimes within days of activation.
“It raises a broader question for brands that have invested heavily in building communities: are we measuring their full value?”
For Haywood, that requires moving beyond the traditional measures of community size and engagement.
“Brands can begin asking different questions. How many customers actively advocate? How much content does that participation create? How much organic distribution follows? Does it generate traffic? Do customers participate again? What happens when the value they earn comes back into the brand?”
In one recent BrandPay activation for a popular brand, customers created more than 1800 pieces of content in six weeks, generating 2.59 million impressions. That’s a new piece of customer advocacy roughly every 33 minutes, showing how quickly an existing customer community can become a meaningful distribution network. And that behaviour extends beyond a single activation: Across BrandPay, customer content has now generated more than 74 million impressions.
When acquisition and retention collide
Perhaps the more significant implication is that activating existing customers potentially blurs one of marketing’s most established divisions.
“One of the most interesting implications is the relationship between acquisition and retention,” Haywood says. “These have traditionally been treated as different marketing problems.
“Acquisition investment finds the next customer. Retention investment brings the existing customer back. Customer Media can potentially do both within the same interaction.”
The principle is relatively straightforward. An existing customer advocates for a product or brand, potentially exposing new consumers to it. Instead of the marketing investment ending with that exposure, however, the customer receives value as brand credit.
“An existing customer creates advocacy that reaches new people, producing an acquisition opportunity. The reward for that activity goes back to the existing customer as brand credit, creating another reason for them to return.
“The same marketing investment can therefore work outwards into a new audience and back into the existing customer relationship, which potentially changes how marketers think about the destination of their performance budgets,” he continues.
“Much of digital marketing involves paying an intermediary for access to attention. That remains an essential part of the marketing mix.
“Customer Media creates another model in which part of the marketing investment is directed into the brand’s own customer community.
“The customer receives value for the media contribution they create, and because that value is held as brand credit, it creates a pathway back to the brand,” Haywood continues.
“We are seeing that value flow back into the customer relationship too. In one beauty community, participating customers returned to shop in under three days on average, generating $7.20 in customer spend for every $1 invested in rewards. More broadly across BrandPay, 52 per cent of customer spend sits above the value customers earned through BrandPay, showing additional customer spend flowing back into the brand.
Beyond the campaign
Haywood believes another consequence could be a shift away from treating customer advocacy as a succession of discrete campaigns.
“A creator campaign has a beginning and an end. A media campaign has a budget and a flight period. A customer community is always there, growing and changing as people discover, purchase, advocate and return.”
That potentially creates a continuing performance cycle rather than one that stops at conversion.
Haywood describes the trail thus: “Customer – advocacy – distribution – reward – return – further participation.
“Rather than ending at conversion, the system has the potential to continue.”
Content becomes another output from that activity. At sufficient scale, Haywood says customer participation can produce “a continuous stream of real-world creative across different products, customers, locations and use cases”.
“The content itself can also provide creative learning and, with appropriate permissions, potentially be reused across the wider marketing ecosystem.
“This is where ideas such as content yield and creative intelligence become interesting. They are additional returns from the performance channel rather than the reason the channel exists.”
Ultimately, however, Haywood’s argument is less about adding another metric to marketers’ dashboards than reconsidering the economics of a customer base they have already paid to acquire.
“Together, those examples can help explore whether Customer Media behaves less like an isolated campaign and more like an ongoing growth system.
“The long-term opportunity is a loop in which existing customers help create the next wave of reach and acquisition, while the value generated through their participation strengthens their own relationship with the brand.”
That leaves marketers with a potentially more consequential question than how many people sit in their customer database.
“Over time, the question for marketers may become,” Haywood concludes. “How much of our performance budget should buy attention, and how much should activate the advocacy already sitting inside our customer base?”
