Marketing used to be fairly straightforward: Throw money at advertising in order to convince people to buy your products and services. If your advertising campaign was decent, the resulting sales outweighed the cost of advertising. If your campaign was excellent, your business grew like a wildflower.

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Fast forward to today: The customer is now in control. Media fragmentation from hundreds of cable networks, millions of Web sites, and emerging delivery channels like the Apple iPhone make it more difficult to reach the general market. And even if you do reach your potential customers, they don’t have to listen, and probably won’t. What’s an intelligent marketer to do? Bolivar J. Bueno and Scott Jeffrey, managing partners at the Cult Branding Company (cultbranding.com), offer these tips:

• Focus on your best customers. When it comes to building brand awareness, the secret ingredient to sustainable business is a focus on your “brand lovers” — the customers who appreciate you the most. Brand lovers emotionally connect with what you do and want to celebrate who you are. Their connection with your brand is so strong that they often don’t consider doing business with anyone else. For many companies, the best customers drive more than 80 percent of profits, and yet, the business generally knows very little about those people. Basic market research does not offer you insights into your best customers. The true drivers of choice for your best customers are emotional connections to your brand — an important point to remember in developing a brand building strategy.

• Get to know your brand lovers. Talking to your best customers is key to building brand awareness. Find out why they keep doing business with you. Don’t be afraid to ask, but listen carefully to the responses. Conducting online surveys can be helpful, but if you have a physical storefront, meet your customers face-to-face. Sam Walton would often tell his executives: “If you don’t know what to do, go ask the customer. If it’s not happening in the store, it is not important.”

• Serve your brand lovers better than anyone else. There are always ways to grow your business by embracing your best customers. Once you understand why your best customers enjoy doing business with you, you will be better prepared to serve them as part of a strategic brand management plan. The answers don’t have to be complex. For World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), offering free meatball subs before the show increased the love among participants. What problem are you helping your best customers solve? What need are you helping them fill? Skateboarders were ignored by most businesses, but Vans listened to its customers and developed products aligned with the skating lifestyle.

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