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January 04, 2006
Customer camp
Customers want to connect with the people behind products they love as well as one another.
Plenty of companies do, or have done, this on a regular and successful basis: Apple, Maker's Mark, and Saturn to name a few.
Here's another: German music software company Ableton. In November, it launched the first-ever "Camp Ableton" in Berlin, a weekend-long event for customer evangelists to confab around its flagship product called Live.
Whereas Microsoft deftly brings developers together at its annual Professional Developers Conference, Ableton ups the ante and brings it's own developers and customers together to talk about the future of Ableton,the Live product, and the customer community.
At the conference, customers discussed new features they would like to see in the product. They also suggested educating Live's users with newbie tutorials, launching worldwide independent user groups and podcasts and how to structure future camps.
A customer conference is a simple idea, but certainly complex in its execution. If done well, a conference for true believers plants the roots for the good kind of cult, just like next week's Macworld.
[Hat tip: Martin Oetting]
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