All Posts By

BJ Bueno

How to Get the Conversation Started

Recently, I was consulting a CEO on strategic presentation skills, they tended to keep talking without stopping and needed some work to better connect with the people in the room. We talked about the importance of pausing during the presentation and asking a question to engage the audience. With this small adjustment, speaking became more impactful, and the message connected.

One of the best ways to achieve engagement is by using open-ended questions, questions that encourage your colleagues to share ideas and opinions, and by carefully listening to what they say you will kindle mutual respect.

Here are some of my favorite opened-ended questions:

What inspires you?

What is the most meaningful part of your job?

What do you value most in life?

Would you tell me more about ___?

What’s the most important priority for you with this?

Who benefits from your vision?

Try finding opportunities to ask questions and see how quickly you engage people when you listen to what they have to say.

March 23, 2018 by

Know Thy Customer

This could be called the first law of Cult Branding.

Know thy Customer better than they know themselves.

This could be called the Secret Law of Cult Branding.

Customers Don’t Know Why They Buy.

This might be deemed the problem with the conventional market analysis.

Don’t Ask Why, Observe!

If customers don’t know why they buy then how do we discover why? Jane Goodall became a primate expert. She permanently moved in proximity with a troupe of chimpanzees and lived with them for years. She watched chimps grow up, grow old and die. She unraveled the vibrant social life of chimpanzees and how it affected their behavior. Humans are vastly more complicated than chimpanzees. It takes more than an anthropology study to grasp the mechanisms at play when it comes to human behavior.

Most of the Human Experience is Below Conscious Radar.

The Landscape of the Subconscious is much, much bigger than the Conscious realm. Human behavior is a dynamic interplay of the conscious/subconscious. This is one critical reason that Cult Branding has become well versed in the science of the subconscious.

Human Behavior is Primarily Social.

The evolution of human beings is fundamentally the story of social systems.   Virtually all human behavior is socially driven or has social implications.

Where We Live Matters, and it is Changing!

Cult Branding understands that human behavior is complex and highly reactive. They also know that the world is in a state of flux and the old rules don’t apply. To understand the customer, you have to look at the environment they operate in.

Why is Cult Branding Different?

To know thy customer requires a profound grasp of human behavior, the subconscious mind as well as the marketplace. Taking this information and extrapolating the more profound memes and themes of the mind of your customer and using it to create a more compelling customer experience is what Cult Branding is all about.

Do you Know Thy Customer?

February 23, 2018 by

How Mindfulness Improves the Workplace

“The best way to capture moments is to pay attention. This is how we cultivate mindfulness. Mindfulness means being awake. It means knowing what you are doing.”
Jon Kabat-Zinn

The truth is that many of us spend most of our time in the office. Think about how you can transform the lives of those around you by becoming more aware.

This shift toward more humanistic management practices doesn’t merely improve productivity, creativity, collaboration, loyalty, and profitability; it can also help the people around you become better spouses, better parents, and better citizens.

You can invite your employees to grow by finding ways to make the workplace more engaging (less static), more inspiring (less mundane), and more open (less fixed). As Abraham Maslow put it, “We must try to make a particular kind of people, of personality, of character, of soul one might say, rather than try to create directly particular kinds of behavior.”

When we practice mindfulness, we are training our brains to examine internal and external cues rather than react to them, so we can better manage emotions and develop into our full humanity.

February 16, 2018 by

Serve a Social Purpose

The letter BlackRock’s Larry Fink sent CEOs highlights ideas that are familiar to our readers. Here’s the insight:

“Society is demanding that companies, both public and private, serve a social purpose. To prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society.”

But here is the twist, if you want to improve the organization, you have to develop yourself.

Chief executives invest an average of 30 minutes in personal development each day. The goal is to lift the organization; this is the drive of relatedness, or what authors like Dan Pink and Tony Hsieh have called purpose.

This universal need to connect and care for others doesn’t just motivate individuals—it translates to bottom-line profits too.

Wharton organizational psychologist Adam Grant ran an experiment with call center employees who were tasked with calling people to ask for donations. He randomly separated them into three groups. Each group had the same conditions except for a five-minute story each group read before their shift.

The first group read stories from other call center agents about how their job helped teach them transferable sales skills (a personal benefit).

The second group read stories from university alumni who benefitted from the donations raised by the call center and how the scholarships helped them (a purpose that connected the agents with something greater than themselves).

The third group read stories that had nothing to do with personal gain or purpose (the control group).

Grant couldn’t believe the results of this study.

He replicated it five more times to be sure: while the personal benefit group showed no change in their performance, the purpose group more than doubled their dollars raised.

The call center employees in the purpose group couldn’t identify what exactly was driving their behavior.

They merely doubled their productivity!

Could helping others and making a difference in people’s lives be a factor in motivating people to higher performance?

It certainly appears so.

January 19, 2018 by

Trust is built in unscripted moments

Building a culture of trust is mostly one-to-one in nature.

Over time, simple interactions accumulate and help create rapport and friendship, which are critical ingredients for a high-performing workplace.

Try to be present in the small moments; this will lay the foundation for a more significant purpose—to create a culture built on trusting your colleagues.

Are you paying attention to those small moments where you can affirm your interest in those you work with?

January 12, 2018 by

Here’s the best of 2017

As the end of the year quickly approaches, we want to say thank you for being our reader. You represent the best in your industry and we look forward to bringing you insights on building brands that both employees and customers love in the coming year.

Below we curated the most popular, shared, and discussed articles from the Cult Branding blog in 2017. Please enjoy these three fantastic blog posts as a way to reflect as we enter 2018.

We wish you and your family a happy, healthy, and fantastic New Year.

Happy Holidays!

The Cult Branding Team

Bringing Your Brand Image To Life

Why do images have so much power?

Our logos and marks are symbols. Symbols are triggers of archetypal images—energy patterns that rest in the unconscious. These primordial images are not personal to each but are aspects of the “collective” of all of us. Read more about bringing your brand image to life.

Cultivate Workplace Passion

In today’s rapidly changing business environment, you need passionate people because such people can drive extreme and sustained performance improvement.

What does a passionate person look like? Find out more about creating a passion-driven workplace.

The Downfall of Sears: Why You Need To Compete In The Future, Not The Present

Anyone that’s done any retail research in the last decade will have noticed the growing importance consumers place on convenience. The rising importance of convenience isn’t a new trend—marketing scholar Eugene J. Kelley wrote about it in 1958. But, what is new—and what will continue to be new—is the ways retailers can satisfy it. Learn more about the importance of convenience and how to compete in the future.

December 29, 2017 by

Apple’s Archetype

Archetypes are at the core of effective marketing. They provide the most powerful way to attract the right customers. But archetypes are often misunderstood. This week, we examine the archetypal power of one of the world’s strongest brands.
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December 8, 2017 by

Building Brands Through Archetypes

 

Cult Branding was founded on Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs.

Maslow’s hierarchy offers a simple framework for understanding consumer behavior: Humans have inherent needs (physiological, safety, love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization) that they try to fulfill. And, consumer behavior is motivated by the fulfillment of some combination of these needs.

Although Maslow’s hierarchy offers significant explanatory power, it does not provide a complete explanation of brand loyalty.

A more comprehensive understanding of branding involves placing Maslow’s work in the context of the works of biologist Antonio Damasio, psychiatrist Carl Jung, and psychologist Ivan Pavlov.

Don’t worry, it’s not as complicated as it reads. We created a presentation so you can absorb the info quickly. Check out our Archetypal Branding presentation.

What is your companies primary archetype?

December 1, 2017 by

52 Marketing Strategies To Inspire Strategic Thinkers

You know it, it takes a lot of time and effort to develop and maintain marketing that resonates with your audience. As a strategic thinker, however, the development of cult brand takes even more consideration.

After all, we’re always searching for ways to gain the oh-so-important competitive edge. If you find yourself in that situation, then you may want to check out these fifty-two marketing strategies that will ignite your strategic thinking, and with over 1 million views for our SlideShare, we know that these marketing tactics will spark your creative energy.

Onwards!

November 24, 2017 by

Cultivate Workplace Passion

“At Zappos Adaptive our passion is to make our customer’s life easier, we completely focused on a market that has been underserved, all because of one amazing customer interaction.”
– Saul Dave, Senior Director of Enterprise Systems, Zappos.com

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October 20, 2017 by