The best way to make your customers feel a connect with your product / service offering is through a community that educates about what value the product adds to their life.
For the community to flourish, user participation is a must. To achieve good participation, companies need to create initial content that is really engaging and entertaining. This at times can be hard for product/services that add value to a customer’s daily life but may not be very exciting to use.
In such cases companies need to be innovative about their content and create a good blend of educative content along with content that create a sense of excitement and triggers initial participation.
A great example of this was the campaign run by Blendtec for promoting their line of blenders. Blending is an activity that we may all do in our homes, but may not be really exciting. What Blendtec did was create a show called “will it blend” which involved blending crazy things like iphones, matches, camcorders, etc to get viewers excited about the possibilities of what all could their blenders blend. They also made this show participatory and allowed users to put up a challenge of what they wanted to be blended.
Along with all the crazy items that were blended on the show ( for which they had a label “dont try this at home”) and put up on the campaign site , they also have a category called “try this @home” where customers were educated about some real use cases of their blenders.
This result was great adoption of the campaign. Blendtec series of videos collected a total of 83,238,033 views (an average of 967,884 views per video )
To read more about this campaign visit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_It_Blend%3F
