Marketing Profs

In our last column, we described how TiVo largely ignores its extensive community of fervent customer evangelists.

In the United States, TiVo enjoys a passionate customer universe that rivals Krispy Kreme's, yet TiVo still hasn't made the leap to the mass-market phenomenon of customer evangelism.

Why?

We contend that it's due in part to the company's focus on sales, not evangelism. Sales is about what's good for a company; evangelism is what's good for customers. TiVo's big-picture marketing primarily focuses on promotional sales tactics versus embracing enthusiastically outspoken customers who influence sales on the company's behalf.

(If TiVo is foreign to you, it's best described as a personal video recorder for television shows. It can skip over ads. You can record individual or season-long shows easily using an intuitive on-screen menu system. Based on what you record, TiVo will recommend other shows or movies to record. Even better: the box lets you pause live TV to make a sandwich, use the restroom, answer the phone, etc.)

As a company, TiVo faces several tall hurdles. Prices for the recorder start at $199 and top $549. A monthly subscription fee of $12.95 makes already-expensive monthly cable bills more daunting. If TiVo were to remove or lower these barriers, adoption rates would likely improve, but we wouldn't bet on it.

For a product with such fervent customer evangelism, a unified and concentrated focus on word of mouth would surely increase sales. Krispy Kreme understands this well; it spends no money on mass media advertising, and its April 2000 initial public offering on Nasdaq remains the best-performing IPO three years later, with a 545% return, according to Dealogic.

If only TiVo were to focus on embracing its customer community the Krispy Kreme way….

If our mailbag from the previous column is any indication, some TiVo customers fear that if the company doesn't “get it” soon, TiVo's future could be bleak.

Brodie Keast, TiVo's senior vice president and general manager, disputes this. (His email responses are too long to include here, so we've posted them to our blog.)