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- Caroline Mercer via MarTech
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- Business·6 min to read
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Chewy's 'Wow Team' Shows How Small Gestures Build Customer Loyalty
ReChewy's 'Wow Team' Shows How Small Gestures Build Customer Loyalty
A viral story about flowers sent after a pet's death illustrates a broader marketing principle: referred customers are more valuable, and the best returns come from spending a small slice of the budget on unexpected, story-worthy gestures.
When Anna Brose contacted in 2022 to return an unopened bag of dog food after her dog Gus died, she expected a refund. Instead, a box of flowers arrived at her home in Madison, Wisconsin, from a Chewy representative named Jordan. Brose posted about the gesture, and her post drew more than 681,000 likes. The replies proved even more revealing: thousands of customers shared their own stories of sympathy flowers, handwritten cards, and hand-painted portraits of pets that had died. One commenter captured the sentiment in three words: «Customers for life.»
That kind of public, unpaid advocacy is one of the most underrated assets in marketing, and it is not the product of luck. Chewy says it has sent similar gestures since its earliest days. When a customer cancels because a pet has died, the company typically refunds the order, suggests donating the food to a local shelter, and often follows with flowers or a card. It is not a guaranteed policy but the regular work of a dedicated «Wow team.»
The mechanics behind that loyalty matter because every recommendation functions as a reputation loan. When someone recommends a company, they put their own judgment on the line. If the person who receives the recommendation has a mediocre experience, the recommender gets silence or an awkward «Yeah, I guess it was fine.» The loan defaults, and they are less likely to stake their name again. If the experience is great, the recommender gets thanked, looks smart, and their value increases. That is a compounding mechanism, and it means the most important person in a growth model is not the next customer but the current customer who will introduce the next one.
Evidence that referred customers are worth more comes from a study published in the Journal of Marketing in 2011. Philipp Schmitt, Bernd Skiera, and Christophe Van den Bulte tracked roughly 10,000 customers of a German bank for almost three years. Referred customers had higher margins and better retention. Overall, they were at least 16% more valuable than comparable customers acquired other ways, and at any given point they were about 18% less likely to leave. The margin advantage faded over time, but the retention advantage did not. In other words, referred customers do not just start better; they stay better.
The bank gave customers a €25 voucher for every new customer they brought in, raising the question of whether such incentives are just grease for the gears. The answer is partly yes. The voucher got people to make the introduction, but it did not buy the reason the new customer stayed. The researchers point to two likely causes: referrers tend to send people who are a good fit, and having a friend at the same bank strengthens the new customer's bond with it. An incentive starts the conversation; the recommended company must compound that investment with a story worth sharing.
That distinction separates prompted advocacy from compounding advocacy. «Use my code, and we both get $20» is a transaction between two people. «You won't believe what they did for me when my dog died» is a story. Only one has an emotional core and makes the storyteller look good, and only one gets retold by the person who heard it. Incentives can fill the top of the funnel, but stories keep it filling itself. There is a quieter risk, too: when the listener knows the recommender gets a cut, the recommendation is worth a little less.
Will Guidara, who took Eleven Madison Park from No. 50 to No. 1 on the World's 50 Best Restaurants list, lays out a related rule in his book «Unreasonable Hospitality»: «Manage 95% of your business down to the penny; spend the last 5% 'foolishly.'» He puts «foolishly» in quotes because it is not foolish at all. It is spent with great intention. That 5% paid for one of his most famous gestures. When he overheard a table of tourists lamenting that they had never had a New York street-cart hot dog, he bought one. Chef Daniel Humm cut it into four precise pieces, plated it with a swoosh of mustard, and sent it out as a course. The restaurant eventually created staff roles called dream weavers, whose job was to help the team create moments like that.
Consider what that hot dog cost and what it produced: a story those guests could tell for years, one that made them the people who know where to eat in New York. The same principle applies to setting aside 5% of a media budget for «win or learn» efforts. One spring, a client approaching its 75th anniversary wanted a fresh way to celebrate. The suggestion was to start by having employees write and send thank-you notes to customers, an expense any chief financial officer could get behind. Better still, it launched a summer of 75 nontraditional, unexpected acts that earned appreciation and kept the story going.
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