Superconsumers: A Simple, Speedy, and Sustainable Path to Superior Growth

However, it's not just high-profile businesses that attract superconsumers. Yoon, a strategy consultant with over 15 years of experience, has found evidence that they exist in much less glamorous markets. His main premise is that identifying the superconsumers in your industry, and engaging with them, can help you drive sales in a variety of ways.

So keep listening to find out how to identify a superconsumer, why you should involve superconsumers in your strategy, and how a family can become a super community.

The book is a brisk read, at 200 pages long. It's divided into eight chapters spread over three parts. The first part introduces you to the concept of the superconsumer and explains why they're so valuable. Part two gives some examples of companies that successfully identified and engaged with their superconsumers.

The third and final part gives tips on how to build relationships with your superconsumers, and how to create a corporate culture that understands and values them.

Yoon compares these devoted consumers to guiding stars. He believes they can help you to plot a course and define a winning strategy for your organization. They also act as evangelists, spreading the word to other consumers. By understanding and embracing these customers, you can even build super communities around them.

These communities, which Yoon calls "Super Geos," attract other superconsumers, giving them a place to share ideas and inform one another about your product. It's an intriguing prospect: a super community essentially amplifies and sustains the passion of your superconsumers. More importantly, super communities are also great for converting potential superconsumers, those on the verge of becoming personally invested in your brand.

So how does a company go about identifying their most loyal and passionate customers? Yoon recognized his first superconsumer while researching the office supply industry. Her name was Sally and she was the manager of a car rental agency. She had a huge amount of paperwork to process, and needed to be efficient to keep on top of it. As a result, she was passionate about office supplies – things like hole punches.

From interviews and data collection, Yoon and his colleagues discovered there were five million more consumers just like Sally, who were passionate about office supplies. The majority of office supply consumers had zero emotional connection to scissors and staplers, but one-third of them, their data suggested, were fanatics.

Digging further into this data, Yoon discovered that this minority of superconsumers accounted for 70 percent of the profit in the market. By advising major office supply retailers to pitch products at these passionate customers, he helped them achieve startling growth. Their competitors, meanwhile, lost ground.

Yoon realized that superconsumers could be an excellent source of feedback for people trying to develop a strategy. He decided to broaden his research by mining Nielsen's US Homescan database, which consists of approximately 100,000 US households that have agreed to have all of their purchases measured across all channels.

Yoon and his team were surprised to discover that superconsumers exist in almost every market, from kids' toys to nacho cheese. He realized that, by understanding their tastes, emotions and behaviors, companies could build relationships with these customers, and then build super communities around them. This, in turn, allows them to attract and educate a market of potential superconsumers, who may become loyal customers too.

If you're interested in finding the superconsumers in your own industry, it may not take long. Yoon explains that superconsumer behavior stands out clearly in sales data and social media activity. Superconsumers buy more and spend more per item. But what other kinds of behaviors do superconsumers exhibit? Yoon lists five characteristics.

First, they combine big spending with high engagement in a product, often with a deep interest in finding new uses for it. These often include uses that manufacturers have never even imagined.

Next, they exist in most consumer packaged-goods categories, but do feature in other markets as well. Yoon believes just about everyone is a superconsumer of something.

Third, the reason for their high engagement is often based on a life quest that's deeply important to them. This may revolve around enriching the lives of their families, or around strengthening relationships with their loved ones.

Fourth, superconsumers buy more products at higher prices. They're loyal for longer and they tend to be more vocal about what they want. This kind of superconsumer behavior is now more visible than ever, thanks to "big data" metrics and analysis and social media networks.

And finally, they're willing to buy more than they currently do, and they can lead others to follow them. Superconsumers account for at least three times as much growth as other consumers. Yoon believes they have the capacity to influence millions of people, some of them potential superconsumers themselves, through social media and word of mouth.

So, what does this behavior look like in the real world? Well, chapter four of the book features a detailed profile of a superconsumer, and it just so happens to come from within Yoon's own family. His daughter, Miya, it turns out, is a superconsumer of American Girl toys and merchandise.

American Girl toys feature ethnically diverse characters, each of whom has several accompanying storybooks. These stories detail each character's struggle through trials and challenges, and they're historically accurate in theme. The toys teach children about the value of perseverance, and introduce them to the history of America's multicultural society.

Yoon describes how his family became a super-community based on their quest to interact with Miya through American Girl toys. Yoon believes that we each "hire" a brand to achieve a certain goal. In this case, Miya hired American Girl to entertain and inspire her. Yoon's wife, Kristen, hired the brand to teach history to Miya. His sister-in-law, Jen, hired it to ensure a successful gift. Finally, his mother-in-law, Pauline, hired it to bond over shared experiences.

Not all communities are geographically clustered. Social media and sites like Pinterest put people in touch with others in the same life stage or with similar passions. Whether they connect in person or online, the message is the same: superconsumers are powerful, but their power grows exponentially when they're connected to other people with the same interests.

Miya is just one example of how the passion of a superconsumer can spread to create a super community that spends hundreds of dollars on a brand or product, all in the name of what Yoon calls a "life quest." Because superconsumer behavior is usually linked to a life quest, there tends to be a strong emotional investment in the brand or product in question.

To further investigate this aspect of the superconsumer phenomenon, Yoon knew that he'd have to look beyond sales numbers. He decided to cross reference 125 consumer-goods categories, representing $400 billion in sales, with other data, such as demographic information and interviews. In these interviews, participants were asked about the depth of their feelings toward a particular product. They were asked to explain why they valued the brand so much.

This research provided hundreds of statements from households across the U.S. Almost all of them indicated that superconsumers valued a brand because it supported their aspirations.

By cross referencing this emotional data with behavioral data, Yoon was able to get a clear idea of the various life quests that motivate a purchase. Many superconsumers, he found, had become so following a major lifestyle change.

Yoon's wife, Kristen, underwent just such a change when she left her busy job as an oncology and intensive care nurse to become a stay-at-home mom. Following this life change, she found that she had more time to pursue a hobby. She attended a scrapbooking party, which rekindled her interest in crafts.

Before long, Kristen had spent hundreds of dollars on scissors, and had connected with a community of like-minded crafting enthusiasts on YouTube, Pinterest and Etsy. She had become a superconsumer.

Yoon explains that the online community was vital to this. Importantly, it's the one part of the process that a company can influence. As the manufacturer, you may not have a hand in the life changes that cause someone to become a potential superconsumer for your product, but you can help to build and grow the community of superconsumers who'll help to educate them and stoke their passion.

However, it wasn't just her spending that made Yoon's wife an invaluable customer. He believes that Kristen's knowledge and passion was such that she could have helped a company to introduce new services, to understand where innovation was required, and to know where it should be avoided. A superconsumer often has deep knowledge of a market and understands what gives your product the competitive edge. They may even be able to help you create new categories.

So, how should you engage with your superconsumers, to harness this valuable insight? Yoon echoes the advice given by Malcolm Gladwell in his book "The Tipping Point" – to bring about a fundamental change in people's beliefs and behavior, you need to create a community around them, where new beliefs can be practiced, expressed and nurtured.

The tipping point that gives Gladwell's book its title is the magic moment when an idea or trend crosses a threshold, tips into the mainstream, and spreads like a wildfire. The key is to give the members of that community every conceivable opportunity to interact with one another. That could mean that you need a community manager to keep your social media pages active and compelling. It might even mean inviting your most passionate customers to your offices to try out your latest prototypes.

This is where superconsumers can help to inform your strategy. Superconsumers, Yoon discovered, are often more passionate and knowledgeable about a product than the people who are employed to create the strategies. As a result, they can offer your organization clarity. This can be especially useful for a company that's trying to stake out a position in which its customers value what it does, and are willing to pay for the offering because it's unique and can't be found elsewhere.

Because it's based on big data, a superconsumer strategy can reduce the guesswork that's involved with other customer-centric approaches. Superconsumers' value to your business is already clear and calculable, so it's easy to persuade others in your organization that they could form the basis of a successful strategy. By appealing more deeply to the customers who appreciate what you do, you cement your strategic position and make it harder for potential rivals to imitate your offering at a lower price.

Yoon admits that superconsumers aren't the only basis on which to form a strategy, but they are, he believes, a good place to start a consumer-centric approach. A common mistake, though, is to claim to put your customers first, but to exhibit behavior that does the opposite. For example, have you ever had a favorite product suddenly change for the worse? Perhaps key components or ingredients were replaced with a cheaper alternative. If so, you'll know that it's frustrating and can spoil your enjoyment of a product.

It's also easy for companies to be distracted by the latest technologies or trends. Sometimes there's pressure to jump onto the latest bandwagon, even though it may not be in line with what the brand's existing customers value the most. Again, this can cause products to evolve in a direction that the brand's superconsumers don't want and didn't request.

If the superconsumer community abandons the product, the company will have to identify a new group of superconsumers and create a new strategy based on their particular tastes and preferences. A strategy change of that magnitude could be extremely costly and potentially disastrous, especially if it involves establishing a completely new supply chain.

There's plenty more fascinating insight in this book and some truly surprising data. For example, Yoon found that he could, in some cases, predict which products a superconsumer would be most likely to buy, based on their past purchases. Believe it or not, a person who buys a lot of vitamins is more likely to own multiple refrigerators and freezers, is likely to have more life insurance than the average person, and is more likely to own a standby generator.

How are these things connected? They're all signs of a cautious individual on a life quest to protect his or her loved ones from worst-case scenarios.

Although the book is primarily aimed at businesses that want to create growth, there's plenty of food for thought for marketing and strategy professionals too. It could even be a worthwhile read for consumers who are struggling to understand what motivates the superconsumers in their own families.

"Superconsumers: A Simple, Speedy, and Sustainable Path to Superior Growth," by Eddie Yoon, is published by Harvard Business Review Press.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights. Thanks for listening.