What are the characteristics of an effective customer engagement-increasing initiative? They include:

• Dialogue. Participation by all parties, emphasising flexibility, interactivity. The Domino’s ‘Pizza Turnaround’, an active listening and testing initiative to improve their product and experience used social & direct feedback channels. It helped take Domino’s stock price from $9 to $160 between 2009 and 2016.6
• Facilitation, not instruction. Effective marketing programs avoid leading, and instead facilitate participation, involving consumers in creating and carrying out the initiative. Sephora’s Beauty Insider encourages customers to work with beauty advisers on their ‘look’.
• Authenticity. The program must be genuine and not simply a ploy to sell products. Patagonia encourages direct customer to customer experience sharing, Decathlon offers a second-hand marketplace for customers to recycle products, at a real cost to their own sales.
• Relevance. Information which is useful or pertinent to the decision-making process. Trip Advisor popularised the rating and comments of peer travellers, heightening the relevance of their service.

And look for individuals who have;

• High interest in new experience-seeking.
• Are looking for meaningfulness in an organization’s program(s).
• Believe the program is psychologically safe, they will not be made to look foolish.
• Are psychologically available to your program, have an interest in what you have to say.