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

Today, the customer is in control. Media fragmentation from hundreds of cable networks, millions of Web sites, and emerging delivery channels like touch-screen phones make it more difficult to reach the general market. Even if you do reach your potential customers, they don’t have to listen. Bolivar J. Bueno and Scott Jeffrey, managing partners at the Cult Branding Company, offer these tips for conquering the new world of marketing:

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• Understand what brand building is all about. In contemporary marketing, your job is to create repeat customers who are likely to buy from you year after year. To accomplish this, you must develop a strong brand identity. A brand is not simply a company name or logo, but an association a customer makes with your business. You cannot create a brand by yourself; branding is a coauthored experience between you and your customers. When a group of customers has strong feelings for your brand, the brand has equity that it can leverage to grow.

• Focus on your “brand lovers.” These are the customers who love you the most, who 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. Mac users, for example, don’t consider purchasing a PC. To them, there is no alternative.

• Identify your brand lovers. How do you find your best customers? Actually, they often find you. They congregate at your stores. They send you emails and call from time to time to tell you how great you’re doing. Some customers might even blog about your products or services, or mention you on their personal Web pages on Facebook or MySpace. You can also find your brand lovers by sifting through your customer database to determine who purchases from you with the greatest frequency.

• Get to know your brand lovers. Talk to them. Find out why they keep doing business with you. 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.”

• Serve your brand lovers better than anyone else. Are you grateful for your best customers? Do they know it? You don’t necessarily have to give them a gift; sometimes a simple thank-you will work wonders. Remember, by serving your best customers’ needs better than your competitors do, you will build a legion of brand loyalists who can catapult your business.

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