"Hero customers" are inexpensive to serve, as well as loyal, gregarious, and willing to try anything their suppliers put out. Sounds too good to be true….

1to1 Magazine: Holding out for a Hero

Cultivating hero customers — that is, identifying, measuring, and growing them — is one part art and two parts science. It requires a company to understand data like customer value and customer profitability. That’s the science. It also requires understanding the behavior of these hero customers, and eliciting those behaviors in other customer groups. That’s the art. A firm may learn through aggressive data mining that its most valuable customers tend to buy products in the store after researching them on the Internet. Then the challenge is to find a way to get more customers to research their potential purchases on the company’s Web site.

The notion of a hero customer is relatively new, but it’s gaining traction as a customer strategy. A recent Forrester Research report, "Identifying the Emotive Customer," showed data and behavior as the two main components of this effort to find emotional, enthusiastic customers. According to the report, 75 percent of senior marketing executives polled are collecting behavioral-based data. But they don’t combine emotional and attitudinal research to build models of their most emotive and engaged customers.