Agencies and their clients are in a constant scramble to earn and keep customer loyalty, while customers themselves are surrounded by more competitive messaging than ever. The real question worth asking is not how to win a single purchase. It is how to prevent a loyal customer from drifting toward the next competitor with a louder ad campaign.
Where Does Customer Culture Begin?
Building a customer culture starts with a basic level of customer involvement. Nearly every brand, even the most generic store-brand product on a shelf, has customers who are involved at some level. They get reasonable value for their money, and they come back and buy it again. Some even become quiet word-of-mouth advocates, mentioning the good deal to a friend. Without that baseline involvement, a brand simply does not survive.
Move beyond the pure value buyer and the next tier of customer chooses a product because they perceive real quality behind it, not just utility. Someone paying more for a premium tissue brand because it is softer and gentler is making that kind of choice. It is not cheap. It is a small, deliberate luxury.
Jif's decades-old "choosy moms, and dads, choose Jif" tagline offers a good illustration of where genuine customer culture begins to take shape. That kind of agency-created message shows up everywhere at once: in a friendly debate among coworkers about which peanut butter is actually best, reinforced by an online recipe that calls specifically for Jif, itself surrounded by Jif's own digital advertising and links back to the company's site. The impression that creates in a consumer's mind is not accidental. It is the result of a genuinely well-built marketing ecosystem.
No Brand Too Mundane
Peanut butter is, on its face, about as mundane a product as exists. And yet Jif, the top-selling peanut butter brand in the U.S. for decades, has built something closer to a piece of Americana than a commodity, complete with its own culture of devoted users. That should be encouraging for any agency helping to market a product or service that seems, on paper, fairly unremarkable.
Jif had the benefit of a major consumer packaged goods marketing budget behind it for years, now under The J.M. Smucker Company. Those days of mass-budget brand building are largely over for most companies. What has replaced it is arguably more accessible: with the right targeting, almost any quality brand can cultivate a genuine group of loyal users. The critical factor has always been the same. Reach the right people, in the right places, in the right way.
Customer Culture Matters in B2B, Too
Agencies working with B2B clients face this challenge constantly: helping a brand grow from simple recognition into something closer to a genuine culture. By necessity, very few B2B brands are household names. Everyone recognizes the handful of B2B giants that run broad consumer-facing campaigns. Most B2B brands are niche by design, which makes building a culture of genuine user-advocates a more organic and often more effective path to growth than broad awareness advertising ever could be.
Tightly targeted campaigns, deep customer knowledge, and skilled, consistent outreach all matter enormously here. Paying close attention to customer feedback, and visibly incorporating it into product and service updates, builds real trust. Encourage clients to use every available channel to communicate a simple message: we hear you, your input matters, and we are building something you will want to use more of. B2B companies that genuinely live by that principle tend to be the ones that build lasting, resilient customer relationships.
Consider a manufacturer of industrial communication equipment built for explosive and hazardous environments. Its signature product was, essentially, an indestructible telephone housed in a heavy-duty plastic case, not exactly a glamorous item. Yet the company built a loyal base of repeat buyers across many industries, along with genuinely great word of mouth, especially from users whose phones survived actual explosions and helped save lives. Even in an era of smartphones and wireless everything, that company is still in business, still selling phones in tough plastic boxes to customers who trust them completely.
Cultivating a True Customer Cult
After years of successfully building a genuine customer culture, some companies eventually reach something closer to cult status. That outcome depends on a mix of product quality, creative marketing, longevity, timing, and a fair amount of luck. Customer experience expert Shep Hyken has written about this directly, noting that a group of people who share a deeper than usual passion for something, a hobby, a sport, a type of music, can reasonably be considered a cult. The word cult, after all, is embedded right inside the word culture.
Amazement alone tends not to last. It behaves more like infatuation than commitment. Genuine customer cults, like any tightly bound community, are built on something closer to love, and love translates directly into loyalty, repeat purchase, advocacy, and staying power. Think of the fierce devotion some cyclists have to a specific bike brand, the loyalty gamers show a particular console ecosystem, or the quiet certainty many creative professionals feel about their choice of tech hardware. People in these communities keep coming back, and their enthusiasm is contagious precisely because it is genuine. When they talk about the product, everyone around them can tell they mean it. These are true believers, and their value to a brand is difficult to overstate.
Work with clients to make sure they are using every appropriate channel to connect with customers, direct and remote, social and traditional. Just as important, make sure clients are building real avenues for two-way communication rather than one-directional messaging. That is how genuine relationships get built and nurtured over time. Building a customer culture, and eventually something closer to a cult, starts with sharing something real. The brands that manage it are the ones customers are genuinely proud to be seen with.
