At Mention Me’s Advocacy Live, we heard from Amy Fullerton, Global Head of CRM at Vivobarefoot, who shared how the minimalist footwear brand is evolving its approach to customer engagement and brand advocacy.

Adapting to meet the fluid and diverse demands of its ‘Conscious Maverick’ customers, she explained how Vivobarefoot is leaning into cross-channel consistency, systems integration and real-time feedback to build trust and deliver authentic, personalised experiences.

Trust comes from cross-channel consistency

When it comes to creating brand trust, consistency remains key, according to Fullerton. “It’s about connecting systems and collecting data across touchpoints over time, but it’s also about consistency, creating and executing sequential marketing from on-site to off-site.”

Fullerton explained how Vivobarefoot had been investing in its community and its advocacy programme, which has grown exponentially for the last 13 years. To date, much of this growth has been created by word of mouth, which she described as “gold dust” – however, the brand is now aiming to integrate its marketing channels more closely.

She explained that the retailer is working to connect referrals across its affiliate, influencer marketing and feedback programmes, creating a seamless customer journey from off-site discovery to on-site engagement.

“When you have paid, organic, ecommerce, content and brand all working together, this is where you can really build trust and authenticity from the get-go,” she said.

Tapping customers with diverse interest triggers

“The way a customer experiences our products or comes into contact with our brand is really diverse,” Fullerton said.

“As a barefoot running brand, our customers’ goals can range from fitness to lifestyle and injury recovery, with interests shifting from cold therapy and trail running one week to sauna sessions and hiking the next.”

Having a customer with such diverse and fluid interests and intent triggers can make segmentation – and surfacing insight around defined consumer cohorts for campaigns – difficult to structure.

Instead of trying to peg its core customers into neatly defined personas or strict ICP segments, Vivobarefoot has adopted a concept for its customers, which it defines as ‘Conscious Mavericks.’

Moving towards a dynamic engagement model

“We have a concept for our customers called Conscious Mavericks. The Conscious Maverick’s interests and preferences are really diverse and fluid, and prone to changing quickly. This makes it challenging when you’re looking for behavioural data or engagement cues that flag intent or interest.”

Previously Vivobarefoot had adopted a more traditional customer journey, with its engagement flow following a “classic” ecommerce programme. However, this meant it was missing out on some of those organic engagement points that come from having customers with a diverse interests.

“By becoming more dynamic with the delivery of campaign content, we can now pivot to adapt and capitalise on these individual moments to the greatest effect. And to do that, we’ve needed to make sure our systems are connected together in a manner that captures changes so we can unlock that personalisation,” Fullerton added.

Extracting value from human connections to drive authenticity

Vivobarefoot is also focusing on improving customer experience – and speeding up the feedback loop to allow it to execute engagement more dynamically – by breaking down siloes within its team structures.

It recently brought its customer services team in-house for the first time in 13 years, ensuring it has passionate and knowledgeable customer service agents who act as frontline brand champions and advocates.

“This means we don’t just build campaigns from known triggers and insights that’s come from our market research – it allows us to factor in on-the-ground, real-time FAQs that our customer service team hears each week, feeding those insights into the community team,” Fullerton explained.

“This ensures the voice of the customer comes through in our campaign content, rather than what we’re trying to message against as a brand, and that’s where things start to really come to life,” she said.

“At Vivobarefoot we always talk about “real feet” and “real shoes” – when we engage authentically and build UGC into our communications mix, that’s where we see the results,” Fullerton concluded.

Vivobarefoot was speaking as part of a panel at Mention Me’s Advocacy Live event, which took place in London on 01 Oct 2025.