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BJ Bueno

How To Push Your Brand In Positive And Productive Ways

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.Mark Twain1

Growing your brand can be challenging, but we don’t experience the growth we ultimately expect if we don’t take on new challenges. So here are three dimensions and three sets of questions to help you and your teams discover new ways to build a stronger brand.

Three questions to discover your customers’ motivation:

  1. Why did you choose to purchase from us?
  2. How delighted are you with our product or services?
  3. What is your perception of our brand?

Three questions to find your brand’s style:

  1. Why do your customers trust you?
  2. How are you different?
  3. What tensions (pain points) do you solve?

Three questions to improve your brand strategy

  1. Who is your dream customer, and how do you speak to them?
  2. What brands do you admire?
  3. What is the purpose of your brand in today’s society?

Cult Brands outperform their competitors because they have a deep understanding of these dynamics. For best results, answer these questions continuously, and your brand will gain an edge that you can take to the bottom line each day. 

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September 15, 2021 by

What Businesses Can Learn from Conspiracy Theories

customers need something to believe in. They need a group to belong to.

“America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy,” John Updike once said, and it was with this in mind that I took in an old debate between journalist Johnathan Kay and conspiracy theorist Webster Tarpley on the 9/11 attacks.

I’m not particularly interested in the substance of conspiracy theories really, beyond a rock-solid conviction that Han shot first. However, this conversation went in a particularly interesting direction, examining in some depth why people are drawn to and choose to believe in conspiracy theories.

Johnathan Kay came to the question when he began researching conspiracy theories in general.  He started by asking people what they believed and found himself overwhelmed with stories. Really long stories. So he shifted his question and began asking people when they started believing in their favored conspiracy theory.

This was a significant paradigm shift. 

Instead of an infinite number of individual narratives, Kay was now hearing one tale. People were sharing the moment that they lost faith in the government, in media, in traditional social structures. 

This was a pivotal point for people: from the moment they began to believe whatever they chose to believe (that 9/11 was an inside job, that JFK was killed by the mob, etc) they no longer perceived themselves as a member of the society they once belonged to. They’d joined another group entirely; the society of people who ‘knew’ the true facts about any given society—and by extension, according to Kay, a larger society of individuals defined by their skepticism, unable or unwilling to trust without independent verification.

Webster Tarpley was right there with his own thoughts on the subject. “Why are hegemonic institutions no longer hegemonic?” he asked. His answers include the fact that many people are experiencing a significant decline in their standard of living at the same time that these behemoth cultural institutions are being discredited directly as a result of their own behavior.

When you have documented systemic failures, it’s not hard to understand people’s reluctance to believe.

People Want to Belong

We’ve seen the same thing ourselves.

The loss of faith in institutions changes people’s self-perception, whether they’re consciously aware of this or not. We’re all hard-wired to belong to a group; it’s a fundamental biological driver that’s part of every human’s experience. 

When we no longer believe as our peers believe, we no longer fit into the group in quite the same way as we used to.

This creates an internal tension that we can not abide by. It’s too uncomfortable psychologically and emotionally. To remedy this tension, we gravitate toward other groups where we feel that we can belong—especially those groups that overtly, openly welcome us and value our participation. 

Kay and Tarpley see this manifesting through participation in the conspiracy theory culture, which is valid but only accounts for a relatively small segment of the population. More pervasive and prevalent is the public’s tendency to elevate other organizations, namely commercial brands, into that position.

It’s important to note that it has been bad behavior and the failure to perform as expected on the part of these larger cultural organizations that have created this paradigm. 

As business leaders, we must be aware of the many nuanced levels of customer expectations and understand, in depth, what our customers are turning to us for.

It’s more than our products or services or even the experience we provide.  Customers want—customers need—something to believe in. They need a group to belong to.  Companies that provide that well are rewarded with fanatical customer loyalty.

It’s as simple as that.  No conspiracy theory required!

September 7, 2021 by

The Neuroscientist, The Storyteller, and The Power of Brand Imagery

Understanding the human customer means respecting the body and the mind, addressing your messaging to both.

What makes art art? Why is art so important to humanity?

These are big questions and not ones that come up often in the context of connecting more effectively with your customers. That’s a shame. Understanding what art is and why recorded imagery has such a powerful impact on human behavior is a fundamental aspect of successful brand building.

Through the Eyes of the Neuroscientist

To answer these questions, we need to take a two-pronged approach.  The first investigation considers our customers simply as the human-animal: we’re biological organisms, influenced by the way our nervous system and brain respond to external stimuli. 

Here we see research that measures brain activity when viewers are exposed to different types of art. It’s clear that certain patterns evoke more brain activity and stronger positive emotional responses than others. For example, the two eyes and a smile of a human face pattern is so appealing that we try to find it everywhere—in the clouds or in the dappled colors of an Impressionist painting.

Being able to recognize this pattern pre-disposes one toward survival suggests neurologist V.S. Ramachandran.1 That may be why we find the experience of viewing this pattern in artwork an enjoyable experience. Experiences we enjoy are experiences we repeat, and thus the best imagery—artwork—comes to occupy an important place in our culture.

This type of information is good to have. It helps us understand the mechanics of the human experience. However, just as a car is far more than the motor that propels it, we are far, far more than our biological responses to external stimuli.

Nurture, it turns out, is just as important as nature. Our education and experience lead us to prefer particular patterns over others. Cultural influences play a powerful role in shaping our opinion of what is attractive and what is not.

The impact of artwork on human beings can be divided into two parts: the way the image affects the human bio-mechanically, and the way the image resonates and is received within the individual viewer’s personal frame of reference, generally measured in terms of an emotional response. We’re happy to know the car works, in other words, but what we really want to know is: Is it fun to drive?

For that, we need less of the neuroscientist and more of the storyteller.

Through the Eyes of the Storyteller

Every image tells a story. Sometimes this story is told overtly. Sometimes the tale-telling is more subtle. 

Look at the image above. This painting is The Letter by Gerard ter Boch. We can see two layers of storytelling here. At first glance, it seems simple enough: a messenger is delivering a missive to two young ladies. Delving deeper, we examine the expression upon each of the two ladies. They are quite distinct, and we wonder what might have provoked them.

It is that sense of wonder that interests us. When something makes us wonder, we’re curious. We want to learn more. A spirit of inquiry arises.

The search for wonder is always with humanity: we scan imagery constantly, incessantly, and almost completely unconsciously in the search for the visuals that speak completely and concisely to us. We are seeking our own experience, our own emotions, our own worldview, delivered via someone else’s vision.

When many people find that wonder in one image, that image is shared. It becomes part of the collective experiential framework.

When an image is shared, it is transformed. Individual appreciation of art takes on a new dimension when others enter the conversation.  Having one’s opinion validated or repudiated, explicitly and enthusiastically embraced or violently rejected, shapes the perspective one has in relationship to the artwork. Maybe the painting you adored really isn’t all that awesome if everyone you know hates it.

How tenaciously we hold on to our opinion of individual images as we become aware of other people’s opinions is a way we demonstrate our comfort with our position in that group of people.

Imagery has become a tool of the culture, a way for individuals to express themselves (both through the production of artwork and the consumption of it!)

Imagery builds bonds between individuals, and connections between cultures.

Choosing the Right Imagery for Your Brand

What does all of this mean for the brand manager? We can use the understanding of what makes artwork and imagery more appealing to humanity in general to connect more concretely with our customers. But we have to be smart about it.

The emerging science that is slowly accumulating into the discipline of neuro-aesthetics (and already packaged as neuro-marketing at an agency near you!) has definite value. Knowing definitively what shapes, colors, and patterns provoke the strongest biological responses in the viewer is good information to have.

This good information becomes better when it is coupled with an understanding of the experiential framework most common to your customers.

It’s safe to say your customers are all human, but what type of human are they? The stronger your ability to answer that question accurately, the easier it becomes for you to select imagery that will resonate strongly within your customer’s experiential framework.

In other words, you’ll be able to build a car that’s mechanically superior and a lot more fun to drive.

Understanding the human customer means respecting the body and the mind, addressing your messaging to both.

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August 24, 2021 by

Tap into the power of loyalty by serving your Brand Lovers better than anyone else …

Don’t try to be all things to all people.

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

Fast forward to today: The customer is now in control. Media fragmentation from hundreds of cable networks, millions of Web sites. mobile devices in every hand, and social media make it more difficult to reach the general market. And even if you do reach your potential customers, they don’t have to listen, and probably won’t. What’s an intelligent marketer to do?

Five ways to tap into your most profitable customers

1) Understand what branding is really all about.

Management guru Peter Drucker explained that the purpose of business is to create a customer.1 In contemporary marketing, your job is to create a repeat customer who is likely to build a relationship with you and buy from you year after year. In order to accomplish this magnificent feat, you must develop what’s called a brand. A brand is an association that a customer has with certain feelings and images represented by a company, not simply a company name or a logo. You cannot create a brand by yourself because branding is a co-authored experience between you and your customers.

When a group of customers has strong associations between your brand and a desired feeling, the brand has “equity” it can leverage in order to grow.

2) Focus on your best customers.

The secret ingredient to a sustainable enterprise is called Brand Lovers: The customers who love you the most. Brand Lovers emotionally connect with what you do and they 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. Apple’s Mac users, for example, don’t consider purchasing a PC. To them, there is no alternative.

At the very least, your Brand Lovers choose you more often than your competitors. For many companies, the best customers drive a significant part of their profitability—both through purchasing and by acting as evangelists to convert other people into customers—and yet the business generally knows very little about them. Basic market research does not offer you insights into your best customers. The true drivers of choice for your best customers are emotional connections to your brand.

Certain brands have a legion of Brand Lovers – we call them Cult Brands. In a Cult Brand like Apple, CEO Steve Jobs knew he was selling a unique way of life that’s intelligent, creative, and special—he wasn’t just selling computers, digital music players, and mobile phones. Oprah turned herself into a Cult Brand by being is far more than just another talk show host: real, honest and loving, Oprah radiates hope and the promise of a better tomorrow.

3) Identify your Brand Lovers.

Perhaps your enterprise doesn’t have Brand Lovers like Apple or Oprah, but you do have your best customers – customers who give you repeat business and who may tell their friends and colleagues about your brand.

So how do you find your best customers? Actually, they often find you. They congregate at your stores. They send you e-mails and call you from time to time to tell you how great you’re doing. Some customers might even blog about your products or services or create videos and post them on social media.

On the financial side, if you maintain a customer database, you can sift through and determine who purchases from you with the greatest frequency – and for the longest time span.

What if none of the above helps you locate them? Then get creative. Carefully crafted surveys might point you in the right direction or you may need to hire a firm to help you identify who your best customers are.

4) Get to know your Brand Lovers.

Talk to them. Find out why they keep doing business with you. Don’t be afraid to ask. But listen carefully.

Look for the intangible clues that make you unique in your customers’ eyes. Uncover the emotional effect you have on them.

5) Serve your Brand Lovers better than anyone else.

There are always ways to grow your business by embracing your best customers. The answers don’t have to be complex. For World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), offering free meatball subs before the show increased the love among participants. Skaters were ostracized by most businesses, but Vans listened to its customers and gave them what they wanted. Harley-Davidson developed leather jackets for its riders.

The role of marketing is to create the future today, which requires you to know what your customers will want tomorrow. The only way to anticipate the future needs of your customers is to understand who they are, talk to them and listen. Then, you can create the future together.

Onward

A final word of advice: Don’t try to be all things to all people. You don’t need everyone to like you. You only need your Brand Lovers who already love you. Remember, your best customers are the lifeblood for growing a sustainable business. By learning to understand their needs and serving them better than anyone else, you can build a legion of brand loyalists that catapult your business growth without throwing more money at directionless advertising campaigns.

Welcome to the New World of Marketing!

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August 17, 2021 by

Stop Trying to Put the Square Peg into the Round Hole: What It Means To Understand Your Customers

psychological and social forces are at play every single moment of every single day of our lives. These forces shape our customers' worldviews.

In our book Customers First, we looked at some of the world’s biggest brands—companies like Apple and Nike—to discover how they connect so effectively with their customers. To build powerful, profitable connections, it helps to understand that customer behavior is driven largely by a combination of psychological and social forces that are at play every single moment of every single day of our lives. These forces shape our customers’ worldviews. 

Once you understand what those forces are, it becomes much, much easier to craft messaging that resonates effectively with the customer.

That sounds easy enough, right? There’s only one little problem: these forces that are so pivotal and compelling are also largely unconscious. The customer is often wholly unaware of them.

Customers don’t understand the real reason they started shopping at Nordstrom’s more and Bloomingdales less. They don’t know why a burger and fries at Wendy’s seems more appealing than a burger and fries at Burger King.

If you ask customers directly about their purchasing decisions, they’ll likely have an explanation to share with you.  Maybe they’ll show you a 20% off coupon or cite a location’s convenient, pleasant atmosphere as the reason they opted for one business over another.

Listening to those explanations and hearing the reasons consumers give about their shopping preferences is important.  It’s a practice that every good business should engage in. Companies that are interested in transitioning from good to great need to take the process one step further. They need to dig a little deeper and understand why those reasons matter to the customer.

Let’s look at that coupon for a moment: On the surface, the appeal of a coupon is easy to understand. The customer enjoys getting a discount. They like the fact that they save money when they make a purchase.  It’s kind of a no-brainer. Everyone likes to save money.

Yet, not all discounts have universal appeal.

What It Means To Listen To Your Customers

In 2012, JCPenney made headlines with a new marketing strategy that included eliminating both coupons and sales events while slashing merchandise prices significantly—in some cases, up to 40%. Forbes called the Fair and Square approach refreshing and daring. They said that J.C. Penney would be “the most interesting retailer of 2012.”1

If by interesting, you mean a 20% sales drop in the first quarter (and a 19% drop in same-store sales—ouch!) then Forbes was right on the money.

If those aren’t the types of results you’re interested in for your brand, it might be worth considering why the Fair and Square approach wasn’t a good fit with Penney’s customers.  That involves examining discounting, and especially coupons, with an understanding of how these retail tools are perceived by the customer’s unconscious.

One type of unconscious psychological force is known as a biological driver. Biological drivers have played a critical role in humanity’s survival as a species. When we think about early humans, it’s easy to imagine them working hard, scouring their environment for nourishing food and natural resources they could capitalize on to make their lives easier. 

The person who did the best job at identifying and acquiring resources generally turned out to be the healthiest, wealthiest, and strongest in their society. That means those people were more likely to wind up in a position where they could safely and effectively raise families.  When this cycle plays out over hundreds of thousands of generations, we wind up with a competitive drive hard-wired into our collective psyche.

Today, not many of our customers are worried about where they’ll find their next meal or some shelter from the elements. Ye,t the compelling drive to seek out needed resources—more efficiently and effectively than anyone else—remains.

When a customer uses a coupon, they’re doing more than saving money: they’re using their skills and savvy to fulfill a deep abiding need to search, gather, and acquire in the most effective and efficient way possible. They gain social capital from this process as well. 

The woman who brags about getting a great outfit for $89 because she has shopping smarts (and a great coupon!) is the sister of the woman who countless generations ago knew that if she stood in stream-side shadows she could spear more fish than anybody else.

Just saving money isn’t enough.

When JCPenney focused on the Fair and Square approach, they ignored the why behind their customers’ decisions and failed to support their psychological needs to feel like they’ve made the effort to provide and to feel like they’re gaining social capital by being savvy.

Good companies succeed because they give their customers ways to fill deep, compelling, unconscious needs. Great companies take market leadership positions because they understand why it works.

Great companies don’t waste any time, money, or resources trying to pound square pegs into round holes. They just get a round peg—the combination of messaging and operations that customers find both relevant and compelling—and then they win.

Watch out tomorrow morning for a special announcement from The Cult Branding Company.

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August 10, 2021 by

How Gratitude Can Turbocharge Your Culture

you can’t express genuine gratitude and appreciation to another if you don’t feel grateful within yourself.

How grateful do you feel each day?

To what degree do you express your gratitude and appreciation to others around the office?

If the answer is “not a lot,” you’re not alone.

The Blessings of Gratitude

We’ve previously discussed negativity bias—the brain’s predisposition to favor negative experiences, thoughts, and emotions over positive ones (we’re wired to survive, so anything that can potentially harm us commands more attention than things that don’t pose a threat).

One of the biggest challenges with negativity is that it constantly pulls our attention out of the present moment. When this occurs, we lose focus. Our energy gets directed in unproductive ways. And we lose sight of the bigger picture.

Gratitude is an antidote to negativity. It can increase our sense of well-being. It can charge us with energy and heighten our level of optimism. Gratitude can also bring us closer together.

Gratitude in the Workplace

Gratitude can be contagious just like smiling.

A genuine “thank you” is an inner acknowledgment to another human being that they matter. It’s a small act with a big ripple effect that confirms a basic truth: we all depend on each other; we’re all interconnected.

When you give thanks to someone in the office, you open the door to receiving their thanks in turn. Small acts of gratitude—taking brief moments to express genuine appreciation to another human being—can set a new tone in your organization. Each small act moves you closer to fostering a more human and collaborative culture.

The challenge is that you can’t express genuine gratitude and appreciation to another if you don’t feel grateful within yourself.

When we’re experiencing negative emotional states, it’s virtually impossible to feel grateful or appreciative.

The good news is that being grateful is a skill. And all skills can be cultivated and developed through practice.

The Habit of Complaining

Thomas Merton observed, “Those who are not grateful soon begin to complain of everything.”1

Complaining—both to others and to ourselves—is a common habit. This habit goes hand in hand with an ungrateful spirit.

Becoming mindful of this habit and catching your mind in the act of complaining can help break the cycle.

But to get all of the benefits that gratitude has to offer, we need to cultivate it.

How to Cultivate Gratitude

When we’re complaining or feeling ungrateful, our minds are subconsciously asking a question like:

What’s not right about this?

What’s not good about this?

Why aren’t things the way I want them?

What we focus on determines what we think.2 When we ask the brain to access information about what’s not right or what could be better about a particular situation, it will surely provide a plethora of answers.

Cultivating gratitude is a practice of shifting your focus from “what’s not right” to “what is right?” The question may change to:

What am I taking for granted right now?

What can I be fortunate about right now?

What could I feel grateful for right now?

To these questions, too, the mind can formulate many answers. But, because of the negativity bias, it takes more effort to shift your mindset to the positive.

A Scientifically-Proven Method for Improving Wellbeing

Positive psychology offers a five-minute exercise to train your mind to scan the world, not for the negative, but for the positive.

This simple exercise can help individuals cultivate gratitude and increase their level of happiness in less than a month.3

TRY IT: Take out a journal and a pen. Think back over the past 24 hours before bed and write down three to five things you can be grateful for. Do this for 21 days and notice if you feel a change in your well-being.

Invite your leadership team to try it too. Evaluate the results for yourself, and collectively, after 21 days.

Onward

Many leaders have overachieving personalities. They hold a subconscious fear that if they feel or express gratitude it will undermine their constant drive for improvement in themselves and others. The reality, however, is that feelings of gratitude and appreciation don’t compromise progress; they fuel it.

What if everyone in your organization was able to cultivate a little more gratitude each day?

Might your work environment be very different? With greater appreciation and connection, might your corporate culture be on an entirely different trajectory?

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August 3, 2021 by

What Every Marketer Should Know About Brand Tattoos

Brand tattoos can teach marketers about customer motivation.

Harley-Davidson, Nike, Coca-Cola, and Apple logos have been permanently etched into the skins of customers worldwide. Why do they do it?

Why do these raving fans, or what we call Brand Lovers, scorch their bodies with a company’s mark? And what can marketers and brand managers learn from them?

Most acts of unabashed brand loyalty are a genuine mystery to marketers: Why do customers anxiously camp outside IKEA grand openings? Why do bikers brand Harley’s flaming eagle onto their arms?

From over a decade of researching loyalty and implementing it through our consulting business, we have come to identify a brand’s outliers—their most passionate fans—as the people with whom marketers should engage, talk, and most importantly, listen to with the greatest attention if they want to truly understand their brand.

Although tattooing brand logos and imagery may seem too extreme to marketers, these outliers represent a brand’s choir. These radical customers often understand your business on a deeper, more meaningful level than the people working at the company.

Brand tattoos, when understood, can teach marketers about customer motivation.

Tattoos were once considered counter-cultural in America. People branded themselves with tattoos to mark themselves as different and to challenge the societal status quo.

Today, however, body art is a part of mainstream American culture.

Why People Get Tattoos of Brands

Think about what the term “branding” really means and you’ll have a better appreciation for the importance of the psychology of tattoos. We have a biological instinct to mark ourselves. While body art may scar the body, its meaning is branded into us.

There are many psychological reasons customers brand themselves with tattoos of the companies they love. Here are three:

  1. Membership into Social Groups: Brand tattoos help customers bond with others in the same social group who share special interests and common values. Brand tattoos send a message that they belong to a unique, personally meaningful community. You only “get the message” if you’re part of that group.
  2. Finding Meaningful Associations: Brand tattoos remind customers of personal values. The tattoo is a permanent badge with special meaning. It creates a powerful recall cue of the memories, experiences, emotions, and other positive associations they have with the brand. A single image, as represented by the tattoo, can encapsulate a series of complex memories and feelings.
  3. Connecting with Ideals: Brand tattoos are reminders of the customer’s ideal life. The brand becomes associated with specific ideals, as Apple has become inextricably linked to creativity, beauty, and self-expression. Customers see the brand’s mark as a reminder of these ideals, and they draw strength from the image.

Customers instinctively look for meaning; they naturally look for something to rally around; they crave an emotional payout from their interaction with the brands they love.

Brand tattoos create a permanent physical connection between the customer and the brand. In a world where most businesses focus exclusively on growth and sales, the opportunity for businesses to serve customers on a deeper level remains open and waiting. The results can be magical and, yes, growth and sales often follow suit.

Four Qualities Tattooed Brands Share

The most popular brands that people tattoo on themselves like Harley-Davidson, Nike, Coke, and Disney share certain qualities:

  1. Tattooed brands are iconic in nature; they are deeply rooted in our contemporary cultural mythology.
  2. Tattooed brands have strong visual appeal—an iconic image like the Nike symbol is a powerful visual marker.
  3. Tattooed brands are effective at lifestyle marketing. They represent and promote a way of being in the world, a lifestyle philosophy. Vans and Jimmy Buffet are terrific examples of successful lifestyle marketing.
  4. Tattooed brands tend to offer a promise of an ideal experience the customer is seeking. For example, Harley’s blazing eagle image symbolizes freedom on the open road.

The #1 Place Customers Tattoo Themselves

Where’s the most prevalent place for customers to tattoo the brands they love? It’s not their arms, shoulders, or even backs: it’s in their minds.

Customers instinctively create mental tattoos, powerful associations between brands and experiences.

Marketers should focus on creating experiences the customers want. These experiences leave a mental imprint that’s difficult to measure, but undoubtedly present. We can say that a salient mental imprint—a tattoo on the customer’s psyche—is the goal of successful branding efforts.

Marketers should see tattoos as portals from the customer’s personal values to their real-life experiences instead of just a gateway to sales.

The purpose and role of the brand is to open their customers up to a meaningful experience that later becomes associated with the brand.

Again, tattoos represent an intricate web of experiences, feelings, and memories. As marketers, our job is to set the conditions for these experiences, feelings, and memories—not simply sell a product or service.

Create Meaningful Experiences for Your Customers

How do you set the conditions to create meaningful experiences for your customers?

1. Start by understanding your customers.

Ask your customers questions directly. If you operate a retail store with cooking supplies you might ask:

  • What is your ideal customer experience when you enter our store?
  • What do you value most when you’re cooking in your kitchen?
  • How do our products make your life easier?
  • What are the dominant feelings you get when you shop in our store?

Questions like these can provide you with infinitely more useful information about your customers than demographics, psychographics, or focus groups.

2. Brainstorm ways to create the ideal customer experience on a consistent basis.

Think about:

  • How can you surprise your customers?
  • How can you serve your customers better than anyone else?
  • How can you create a consistent experience that your customers will come to expect and enjoy?

Although it’s unlikely that you’ll hit the ideal experience every time, the closer you can get to it with each interaction, the more meaningful—and irreplaceable—you will become to your customers.

3. Develop a framework for your brand.

An effective brand framework should:

  • Highlight what’s most important to your customers.
  • Align your organization to better serve your customers.
  • Help you make better decisions that will impact long-term loyalty and growth.
  • Predict consumer behavior by understanding your customer’s motivations.

An effective brand framework acts as an evaluative tool: something you can use to determine whether or not your marketing efforts will resonate with your customers by connecting to something that they value about the brand.

Onward

The measure of success is not in the number of customers who rush out to tattoo your logo on their bodies. The most important mark will always lie in your customers’ minds.

Creating a brand framework will help you create consistent meaningful experiences for your customers, causing them to “tattoo” your brand’s image in your customer’s hearts and minds.

July 27, 2021 by

How to Start a Cult … Brand

Cult Brands provide insights for building loyalty that can be applied to any business of any size.

Heaven’s Gate, Jonestown, Scientology, Manson Family … destructive cults abound.

Destructive cults manipulate their members and do not care about their well-being. It’s no wonder why “cult” has become a dirty, four-letter word.

Not all cults, however, are destructive. At their cores, cults are groups that demonstrate a strong commitment towards someone or something.

Many cults are benign, harmless. In fact, they can be helpful to their members’ well-being. Some cults even have the power to elevate and inspire their members.

When a benign cult is centered around a brand, we call it a Cult Brand.

Businesses that harness the power of cults—cultivating evangelical customers and cohesive brand communities—possess an uncommon competitive advantage.

These Cult Brands enjoy unprecedented customer loyalty, word of mouth, and profitability.

Is Cult Branding Right For Your Business?

Perhaps you think your business isn’t cult-worthy. Maybe you’re just not ready yet. Or, maybe you’re just not interested in the hard work it takes to develop and maintain a passionate fan base.

But, whether you’re poised to establish a Cult Brand or not, there’s a lot you can learn from the psychological dynamics of cults and how they form that can be applied to any business of any size.

For example, they instruct you on how to:

  • Build meaningful connections with your customers.
  • Be chosen more often than your competitors.
  • Get your customers to build awareness of your business for you.
  • Cultivate customer loyalty that impacts the bottom line.

Clearly, there’s a lot we can learn from cults. Let’s dive in.

5 Reasons Customers Join Groups

Before we lay out a strategy you can use to create a cult around your business, let’s briefly explore five reasons why customers join brand communities and movements in the first place:

1) Humans want to belong

From Abraham Maslow, we learned that love and belonging is a fundamental human need. Customers instinctively look for social groups they can feel a part of.

2) Humans need a sense of identity

Another psychologist, Erik Erikson, pointed out that humans reach a point in their development where they begin to form their own identities.

At this Fidelity stage, as Erikson called it, people develop the capacity to maintain loyalties and allegiances to valued institutions and ideals.

To help form identity, people associate with social groups, including brand communities, that bring importance and meaning to their lives.

3) Humans rally around shared values

Values and ideals are at the core of what people congregate around. Maslow called these values being values. They include ideals like truth, goodness, aliveness, uniqueness, simplicity, justice, playfulness, and self-sufficiency.

Different people resonate with different being values. Brands that clearly express specific being values act like homing beacons to customers who naturally seek out brands who have the same values they do.

4) Humans want peak emotional experiences

Emotions give us a sense of aliveness. Although modern humans tend to rely more on thoughts and reason, emotions give life texture and provide meaning.

People gravitate to groups that provide them with emotional experiences they can’t get on their own. (Try replicating, in the privacy of your living room, the elation fans experience at a Jimmy Buffett concert or a Star Trek convention.)

5) Humans seek hope

Life is difficult. Customers seek out groups that provide relief from life’s challenges.

Cult Brands create movements that provide the promise of a better tomorrow. Star Trek offers hope of a peaceful future. Harley-Davidson offers hope of freedom on the open road. Life is good offers hope and optimism for the good life.

7 Steps to Create a Cult, Tribe or Movement

The main thing you need to understand about customer communities is that your customers create them on their own. That said, here are seven steps you can take to increase the likelihood:

Step 1: Determine what needs your business fulfills

Figure out which human needs your business naturally fulfills. Then, determine how your brand fulfills these needs for your customers in a way no other business does.

Step 2: Identify your symbols

Determine what your business symbolizes in the minds of your customers. These symbols are also called archetypes.

The Harley icon, for example, showcases a flying eagle, a dynamic symbol of power, choice, and freedom.

Step 3: Discover your emotional targets

Uncover how your customers are emotionally connected to your brand. When the symbol enters their mind, what do your target customers feel?

Nike’s swoosh symbol may evoke feelings of determination, competitiveness, and triumph for its customers. Apple’s symbol may evoke feelings of creative self-expression, possibility, or truth.

Step 4: Clarify your brand values

While core values are internal to your organization, brand values are external. Your customers may never know your corporate values, but if you are effective, they will have a clear perception of what you stand for (your brand values).

All Cult Brands have clear brand values that attract like-minded people to their business.

The Life is good Company stands for optimism. Oprah stands for self-empowerment.

Step 5: Design your messaging

Ensure that your messaging promotes the fulfillment of your core needs, highlights your symbol, triggers your emotional targets, and captures your brand values.

That is, leverage these customer insights to develop more effective media.

Consider how companies spend billions on advertising without clearly understanding any or all of these psychological insights that drive advertising effectiveness.

Step 6: Target your messaging

Make sure your messages are in the appropriate market channels. Cult Brands know their customers, which means knowing where they hang out and what they like to do.

Energy drink Red Bull, for example, initially avoided traditional media, opting for grassroots marketing by handing out samples on college campuses. Then, they began sponsoring extreme sporting events where their target market congregated.

Step 7: Set up your environment

Provide people the tools to form their own groups. Whenever possible, create a space where your customers can meet and interact with one another—either in person or online.

Establish social events that reflect your mission. Star Trek conventions, Jimmy Buffett’s concerts, and Harley’s HOG Rallies are excellent examples.

Set up conditions for a fun, playful environment where friendships can be forged. The stronger the bond members have to one another, the stronger the bond members will have with your business.

Onward

Remember, never attempt to control your community. Instead, participate as a co-creator.

Okay, now it’s your turn to go start a movement, establish a tribe, create a Cult Brand.

July 13, 2021 by

How Cult Brands Create a Magical Experience For Their Customers

Turn Shared Values into a lifestyle.

As human beings, we have many different kinds of relationships. The relationship you have with your boss is probably very different than the relationship you have with your romantic partner, and both of these relationships are different from the relationship you have with your favorite baseball player and the kid who was your best friend in third grade.

We not only have relationships with other people, but also with ideas and philosophies. Identifying yourself as a skeptical person or an Evangelical Christian, for example, will impact the way you view and interact with the world.

We also have relationships with inanimate objects, such as cars or roller coasters. You’ve surely heard people proclaiming how much they love (or hate) their cars. Space Mountain, one of Disney’s flagship rides, is so beloved by some people that they have their weddings there.

Brands are a unique combination of a set of ideas and inanimate objects that serve as an ideal platform for relationships.

A Cult Brand is born when a group of individuals rally around a brand’s beliefs and values and the lifestyle that supports those beliefs and values. These brands spark a magical participation with their customers.

When people feel bound to a group or community of shared beliefs, at least part of their identity is tied to the group.

Allowing Customers to Express A Deeper Part of Themselves

You can be a corporate attorney running frantically from meeting to meeting, but when you enter a Jimmy Buffett concert you morph into a Parrot Head; litigation, conference calls, and the stress of daily life slide into shadow.

Now, life is all about taking it easy. The most important things on your agenda are burgers, cocktails, and connecting with friends in the paradise of Margaritaville.

Cult Brands are successful because they allow people to be who they want to be—not the person they’re forced to be to meet the demands placed on them personally or professionally.

Cult Brands provide a route to self-expression that feels natural and intuitive to their Brand Lovers.

Cult Brands provide an experience and a community where Brand Lovers feel like they belong.

Providing The Means for Self-Expression and Belonging

Now, as a result of the pandemic, people are hungry for ways to connect with each other. Bringing customers together has always been important—it’s arguably the hallmark of a Cult Brand—but the need is even greater at the current time.

Keep in mind that finding ways to help customers express themselves is vital to your cause.

Below are a few fun ways to cultivate brand loyalty for your business by helping you attract great customers and build lasting relationships:

Gatherings

Not all your customers have the time or energy to gather together, but some of your customers would actually enjoy gathering together to share ideas, learn, and be together. Apple, in its humble beginnings, hosted Mac user groups where programmers would band together to form small companies to develop software for the startup.

Festivals

Once you have reached a critical mass of Brand Lovers, it might be time for the festivity. Harley-Davidson hosts annual events that bring together over 1 million bikers from around the world. Many people are familiar with event marketing, but if you take that concept to the next level you may be destined to have your own festival, and possibly a unique story will emerge about you in your customers’ minds.

Food

A very interesting fact about Cult Brands is that they tend to share food with their customers. This fact is most likely connected to the idea that if you’re going to have people come together, humans need (and love) to eat. But this simple act of doing what we do each day has a hidden power of influence that makes us like those people that we eat with. Some researchers have shown that judges are more lenient on the offenders after their lunch break. So if it works on those of us with the strongest opinions, it can work for your Brand Lovers who already like you too.

Onward

What beliefs and values do your customers identify with?

How can you build a community to reinforce a lifestyle aligned with those beliefs and values?

July 6, 2021 by

When Branding Works

A major misconception is that only the marketing department is responsible for building and managing the brand.

In 1901, Ivan Pavlov rang a bell and a dog began to salivate.

His famous experiment explains much of the mystery behind branding: connect a product or service with the customer’s need and branding occurs.

Said another way: create an association in your customer’s mind between what you offer and what they desire, and magic happens.

Despite the simplicity of this concept, most businesses fail in their branding efforts for one reason: they assume that branding is created exclusively through marketing efforts like advertising.

When Branding Fails

A major misconception is that only the marketing department is responsible for building and managing the brand.

The core of a brand, however, doesn’t exist in an advertising campaign, but in the company itself. When a brand fails, it means the customers never embraced the whole business, going to the competition to meet their needs instead. Brands fail at an organizational level, not because of a single department.

Customers buy the whole business—not just the pricing, distribution, or even the look and feel of the brand. Branding is only a word used to describe the customer’s experience.

When Branding Works

For your organization to achieve long-term success, the entire organization must be an expression of the brand.

Each member of your organization is either building the brand or weakening it. To ensure positive momentum, each team member must clearly understand how he or she contributes to the customer’s experience.

Four Critical Questions for Brand Building

The key to effective brand building, then, is to align your entire organization with your brand’s vision. Before you do this, however, you must have clarity and direction.

Be sure you know the answer to these four questions:

  1. Where is your business today
  2. Where does your business want to be tomorrow?
  3. How does your business define success?
  4. What has to transform in your company in order for your products and services to embrace your best customer?

While these four questions seem simple, they can be difficult to articulate and can always be refined with greater clarity and insight. These critical questions must be clarified by any business committed to cultivating their brand.

Five Strategies on Selling-in to Your Organization

Here are five ways to help forge a stronger connection between your employees and your customers.

Inspire through conversation. If you want to grow quickly, start having meaningful conversations about your customers with your people—formally and informally. Soon you will find those conversations will fill everyone’s mind with inspiration.

Educate your teams. Some executives write important messages down in a memo and expect their people to do something with them. Every brand needs advocates—people who defend it and teach it. Make sure you are teaching your brand to your people and not just hiding it in the printed word.

Bring the brand to life. Create a video, post pictures of your best customers around your office, pass on compliments from customers to the entire staff, and so on. The more ways you have for bringing your brand to life and illustrating its growth, the more connected your team will be to the brand. When they’re connected, they will know what to do next.

Bring your customers to life. Get in the mindset of your customers and try to understand a day in their lives. Show everyone on your team what it might be like to be the customer. Have everyone imagine this day and how your product plays a part in their day. Next, ask each person to think about how he or she affects the customer’s day, even though oftentimes the customer doesn’t know it.

Create a customer definition. Define the customer your business best serves. By giving your customers a face—with feelings, needs, tensions, and aspirations—your team can have more empathy for them. Once everyone in your organization is consciously serving your customers, much of your branding efforts happen spontaneously.

A Living, Breathing Vision for Your Brand

To be effective at selling in to your organization, you must create a vision to which your entire organization is willing to give their passion.

When you sell in, you are setting up the most important part of your marketing plan: having your people ready to serve your customers and create a brand that means something to them.

June 22, 2021 by