Your brand can learn from Prince

The fun part now: a few days before the concert in Antwerp, Prince gave a small pre-show for an audience of a few hundred people. In a small club in Brussels, these people had the night of their life. Rumors are that people were actually dancing on stage, next to Prince. The stories are heroic and the ones present will remember it for the rest of their life.

And the real fun part: there were more conversations about the pre-concert and their impact was so much higher. After hearing their great stories on Twitter and other media, I felt really sorry that I didn’t go to any of the Prince concerts. I even decided to buy one of his albums right away. So, the stories of the pre-concert resulted in some sales from my end.

Question is: what can your brand learn from this? It’s pretty amazing to do something really special for a limited group of people, preferably your biggest fans. If your brand does a kinda ‘Prince’ act with your key brand fans, think of the effects in terms of conversations. Think of the impact they will have on your existing clients and your non-clients.

I say it’s time to learn from Prince and give someone in our organization the mandate to start a REAL brand fan program. By the way, I’m not talking about some sort of frequent flyer program; no it’s about creating a strong emotional bondage between your brand and your fans. If you succeed, you have the guarantee of business growth.