How to Learn From Your Brand’s Biggest Fans

This expert opinion by James Richardson, author of Ramping Your Brand, was originally published on Inc.com.

Repeat purchasers hold the secret to accelerating a consumer brand toward exponential growth.

If you want to double your sales each year, you’ll have to steadily add new consumers and retain a lot of them as you do, at least early on. Enthusiastic repeat-purchasing behavior from fans is like compounding interest on an investment: The monetary value compounds over time as long as you retain enough consumers each year. A greater than 50 percent repeat purchase rate every 90 days is the classic sign that your brand has crazy fan engagement. Moderate to heavy users are not only wildly more profitable for you, but they may also see something special in your brand that others do not.

This something may be the secret to further acceleration.

Validate Your Brand In Your Fans’ Eyes

Traditional consumer research often samples the opinions of one-time triers and repeat-purchasing fans together. This methodological error may not mean much for brands with straightforward use cases like Dude Wipes, but it matters a lot to any consumer brand whose more modern attributes could have vastly different audiences.

For example, is a fast-growing new cookie brand generating repeat purchases primarily because it is gluten-free, low in calories, superior in flavor, or all three in equal measure? If you are going to accelerate your marketing activities, you need the right strategic insights for a strong positioning and creative brief. You do not want to rely on your personal guess—not when you are about to spend $1 million or more on marketing campaigns.

You can and must do fan research. But how?

Get Scrappy And Ignore Traditional Sample Design

There is a horrible misconception floating around in entrepreneurial circles: “I’m too small to do research on my consumers.” Many public firm alumni working at startups for the first time promote this false idea. Traditional consumer research firms also promote it because of their dogmatic approach to sample design.

The truth is that you can learn just-what-you-need information about your fans by designing a concise survey aimed only at your repeat-purchasing consumers. How? Hoover up all the e-mail addresses, SMS numbers, and social media followers the brand has accrued by sheer enthusiasm over the years (even when your organic content is average). These contacts are now your research panel. You just need to screen them for folks who have purchased more than once in the past 90 days.

With tools like SurveyMonkey and guidance from experienced freelancers, you can do scrappy research on the motives, consumption rates, lifestyle behaviors, and shopping patterns of your fans. You can profile your fans brilliantly. This helps with communications, package design, and even your sequencing of distribution.

Most early-stage consumer brands can pull this scrappy research off for a 10th of the cost of hiring a research firm. Even tailored consumer panels cannot “find” your consumers when you’re at less than $20 million in sales. And this is dangerously late. Owning your fan insights stream is one of the cheapest investments you can make early on, which will give you an edge over peers who pay no attention to their consumers—which is most founders who sell mostly through retail.

Start With Fan Interviews, And Then Survey At Scale

The key to all good surveys is knowing what items to place as responses to each question. For consumer demographic questions, this is not too hard. SurveyMonkey and other firms will hand you vetted questions for many of these topics. When it comes to fuzzier topics like the outcomes your fans believe your brand delivers on well, you need to ensure you test a good range of outcomes that logically apply based on your product design.

The way to gather this good range is to do live Zoom interviews with eight to 10 folks from your now-polished list of contacts. Screen for repeat purchasers and ask them a simple question: What does our brand deliver on well for you when you use it?

Once you have this qualitative data in hand, you will be ready to work with a survey designer to ask key questions of 500 to 1,000 of your repeat purchasers. Those sample sizes will guarantee that any large variation you see between answers is meaningful. A traditional research firm using a national sample will often find only 150 or fewer consumers of your brand, let alone fans. That’s borderline worthless.

With Fan Data In Hand, Look Only For The Big Patterns

More and more founders of consumer brands have strong analytical backgrounds, often in finance. Very few founders of consumer brands have a background in market research. High IQ and analytical confidence can cause you to overanalyze consumer research datasets very easily. I see it all the time.

When you ask repeat-purchasing fans of your brand to tell you which outcomes matter to them, you may get measurable results for every item. What matters strategically are the outcomes that at least 50 percent of your fans strongly agree you deliver on. Ignore the long tail. In fact, ignore the long tail for every question, because there is no gold to be found there in most cases. It’s just noise. You have simple analytical goals, so keep them simple.

This all comes with a warning, though. You must be ready to learn that the outcome that matters most to you is not the one that matters most to your fans. If you want your brand to grow, you must be willing to listen to the data.