Featured Company: Passenger
Posted: 4/4/07
By Justin Cooper, Co-Founder and Chief Innovation + Marketing
Passenger (www.thinkpassenger.com) has built upon the idea of co-creating by redefining collaboration to bridge the communication gap between businesses and their most valued customers. This rich, interactive experience is about meaningful relationships that turn dialogue and on-demand access to opinions into actionable insight. The ability to capture and gain a clear understanding of the human context in which these collaborative activities take place will drive business innovation and growth while empowering your customers. Passenger’s mission is to make these collaborative relationships possible through an incredibly user-friendly platform.
What is Passenger?
Passenger essentially bridges the gap between technology and everyday brand management by enabling the simple deployment of private brand communities which create collaborative relationships between brands and their most passionate consumers. The conversations within these communities provide companies with timely, actionable insight, while empowering consumers through ownership of ideas and driving positive word of mouth. Passenger’s on-demand technology platform (Passenger®) is designed for those companies and organizations that view their customers not merely as a target, but as an integral part of their business process.
Passenger allows brands to take part in the discussions their customers are already having, and not only provides brands with the who, what, where and when of marketing, but also the most important aspect, which is the WHY! The Why is something marketers have not been able to answer in the past, but now they can with Passenger.
Passenger is delivered “Software-as-a-Service,” which means customers benefit from continuous feature enhancements as well as the flexibility to segment and seamlessly launch additional communities as business needs change.
What are the Benefits of Customer Collaboration?
One inherent benefit of customer collaboration is a brand’s ability to drive advocacy. “Advocates” are those individuals who are fully committed to a brand beyond the typical relationship of brand and customer. They express the greatest level of involvement with the brand by being active, vocal and proud. These people have an emotional bond with the brands that they regularly use.
Their lifestyle mirrors that of the brand and they are proactive in talking about their brand experience with others. By engaging its Advocates, a brand will gain further insight into exactly who these customers are, what motivates them, why they make the decisions that they do, who they might influence and why and how they do it. Marketers that are true to the collaborative approach will consistently demonstrate relevancy to each customer as an individual and will ultimately endure the test of time.
Those who choose to embrace customer collaboration will benefit greatly from customers who feel empowered through ownership of ideas. It gives customers the feeling of ownership which promotes active participation and a desire to accumulate more knowledge about the brand or product. Those customers who feel more informed have the ability to drive more favorable opinions with their peers; therefore delivering the most trusted and effective marketing practice: “Word of Mouth.”
How is Passenger Different from Traditional Customer Relationship Management?
Until recently, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) was the default solution to manage customer decisions. But in reality, the systems only help manage the marketer’s needs, not the customer’s. The fragmentation of traditional media has made it increasingly more difficult to locate your customer, let alone catch them at a time when they’re receptive to listening. Randomly manufactured “opinion leader” teams are not only costly, they also jeopardize the authenticity of the messaging. Marketers who continue to rent someone else’s customers to talk about their brand are simply ignoring their own customers who continue to remain un-tapped.
Unlike traditional CRM, Passenger identifies and collaborates with key customer segments and leverage socially-networked, existing customers to acquire new customers. Passenger drives customer advocacy through ownership of ideas and provides the ability to analyze vital customer and competitive insight. Through this insight we can identify emerging market trends and discover/refine new opportunities in the areas of new product innovation, service ideas and creative concepts.
Ultimately, Passenger can acquire a longitudinal view of customer attitudes and preferences and can analyze how these change over time, something traditional CRM can only scrape the surface of.
Who Is Using Passenger?
Leading brands such as Coca-Cola, ABC Television and Sara Lee are leveraging Passenger to easily deploy private brand communities.
Who is Passenger?
Passenger is a privately held start-up based in Los Angeles, and was founded in 2005 by Andrew Leary, chief executive officer, and myself. The roots of Passenger stem back to early 2002, when Andrew and I met while developing consumer advocacy programs for one of the world’s largest mobile phone companies. Over the next few years, we continued to observe the changing marketplace; specifically the proactive role that consumers were taking in both marketing and product innovation. Identifying a real shift in the consumer dynamic, we brought our collective expertise in customer-driven marketing and pioneering spirit to form Passenger; determined to bridge the gap between brands and their most valued assets—their customers.
Passenger is the leader in on-demand customer collaboration. Passenger® assists companies with identifying and managing an ongoing dialogue with their most valued customers. Fortune 500 companies are leveraging Passenger to engage customers in a collaborative environment that empowers the customer, while driving business innovation and growth.
The company is backed by Shelter Capital Partners. Passenger’s advisory board members include Shawn Gold, SVP, marketing & content of MySpace.com; Daniel Walker, former chief talent officer of Apple; Nelson Gayton, Wharton School adjunct professor; Art Bilger, managing partner of Shelter Capital Partners and Dr. Bahram Nour-Omid, partner of Shelter Capital Partners.
www.thinkpassenger.com
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