Growth Potential: Help Your Customer Grow

A powerful brand helps its customers achieve growth. As people are always evolving, they tend to favor those who help them along their life’s journey to grow and gain what they want. This is a crucial point: your brand has to give your customers a potential to grow from the interaction with the brand in a personal way. If the individual does not derive any growth from the interaction with the brand, the business enterprise failed at all levels—they didn’t have the foresight to think through the problem all the way to the customer. 

It is important to remember that each of your customers is attracted to your brand for their own reason, not yours. Most brand managers start by looking at their business rather than the customer who is growing from this interaction.

Build-a-Bear is a clear example of how to offer growth potential to each customer. By designing the experience of building a bear as a workshop, each customer is able to create his or her own unique teddy bear, giving it a name, a birth certificate and registering it to the creator’s name. Customers describe the experience as “personally enriching,” as they are allowed to create their new best friend. Build-A-Bear was named the 25th hottest growing company by Business Week in 2005, and earns twice the national average per square foot of mall retail space.

It pays to help your customer grow.