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Adriana Sanchez
Regional Marketing Director & Regional Activation Director
Unlocking Customer Value: The Role of Relationships and Advocacy in a World of Changing Consumer Behaviour and Generative AI
About Adriana Sanchez
Adriana Sanchez is a Regional Marketing Director and Regional Activation Director. In this role, she connects national messaging and initiatives with local franchisees and partners to bring branding, marketing, and activations to life on a local level. She serves as a conduit between the national and local operations.
As consumer behaviors rapidly evolve, how are you adapting relationship-building approaches to resonate across diverse audiences and demographics?
We've made significant efforts to get back to foundational community building and thoughtful communication across all consumer touchpoints. Regardless of platform or channel, we aim to lead with genuine human engagement and experiences that foster personal connections. Rather than just slapping logos everywhere, we strive to create interactive brand experiences, contests and activations that actually get consumers excited about engaging with us. For example, with major sports sponsorships, we focus less on passive advertising and more on designing creative fan experiences and promotions that organically spark interest and participation. We work to drive that authentic human factor into every consumer interaction in order to build real relationships through relevant, meaningful conversations and outreach.
Beyond spending and sales data, how do you define what makes a customer truly valuable for a brand, and how do you focus on encouraging organic advocacy?
While purchasing metrics and behavioral data are certainly useful for segmenting audiences and personalizing messaging and promotions, quantitative data points don't fully define the inherent human value and potential of every customer. Groups like very frequent purchasers and loyal repeat customers who actively and consistently engage with our brand provide huge value by not only driving sales revenue, but also by providing referrals, reviews, first-party data, and organic word-of-mouth advocacy. These brand champions and supporters definitely warrant our focus and our efforts to tailor experiences aimed at sustaining their engagement and meeting their preferences. However, less frequent occasional shoppers also have value; we aim to understand all customers' unique needs and intentions, not just those who purchase often. Every consumer segment drives incremental value for our brand in its own way when we take the time to communicate with them effectively and authentically.
Where does driving authentic brand advocacy through word-of-mouth fit into your overall marketing and customer relationship strategy?
Driving brand advocacy that is fueled by authentic and organic word-of-mouth recommendations and referrals from passionate customers is hugely important for our organization and our marketing strategy. So much of that advocacy hinges on being able to spark genuine excitement and establish mutually engaging social media conversations that facilitate authentic discussions about our products and our brand. As consumer behavior continues rapidly evolving alongside emerging technologies like AI and automation, we realize there is some risk that data-driven automation and AI could hinder some of those traditional advocacy-building behaviors over time by eliminating explicit human-to-human relationships and natural interactions that help build such strong connections and affinity. However, we believe that if applied thoughtfully, data analytics and insights can also help us identify and craft the types of special offerings, experiences, messaging, and platforms that our diverse consumers will actually want to share and recommend through word-of-mouth.
What are some of the biggest risks but also the biggest opportunities you see when it comes to emergent technologies like AI and the future of customer relationships and engagement?
Adopting AI and advanced automation technologies definitely carries risks, like the risk of losing the intrinsic value that comes from real human-to-human connection and one-on-one conversations as machines, algorithms, and bots take over more and more of brand-customer engagement responsibilities. However, AI and automation also present opportunities for brands to gather more detailed data and gain richer insights into their customers' habits, preferences and needs in order to deliver more relevant, personalized messaging and offerings at scale. While the lack of consistent direct human relationships and conversations is certainly a tradeoff, implementing AI thoughtfully can help mitigate inefficient, ineffective, and repetitive communication through continual optimization and customization powered by data. Essentially, for brands the promise of AI is less about having optimized generic broadcast messaging capabilities and more about enabling hyper-targeted, human-focused relationship-building between brands and audiences.
How do you plan to continue evolving your marketing approach to further optimize impact from brand advocacy and organic word-of-mouth?
My goal moving forward is to get better at quantifying, tracking, and measuring the downstream impact and ROI of organic social conversations, unofficial influencers, and hyperlocal community connections. If we can get precise in identifying and valuing the revenue and exposure driving power of authentic word-of-mouth advocacy, I would eagerly shift more of our budget away from traditional paid media and towards initiatives aimed at organically engaging our biggest brand fans and converting them into advocates. I believe there remains so much untapped potential among our most loyal customers that is waiting to be unlocked. My focus is on identifying those high-potential brand advocates and putting greater resources behind activating and empowering them to spread our brand story within their
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