All Posts By

BJ Bueno

Solving Retail’s Biggest Mysteries: How Do You Get A Customer For Life?

Here at The Cult Branding Company, we’re always saying that 90% of customer behavior is unconscious. We’ll tell you that customers don’t know why they act the way they do. We’ll tell you that the vast majority of people aren’t aware of the psychological and cultural forces that shape their decision making.

We say all of these things, and for every one of you who nods your head and says, “Yes, that’s true!” there are three or four people out there who say, “Yeah, right. That’s baloney. People know who they are, what they want, and why they want it.”

The people in the second group are giving the masses credit for a level of consciousness and self-awareness that simply isn’t there. But we’re not going to argue with you. We’re just going to sit back and let Dove — a brand that does a superlative job of putting customers first — illustrate that our customers don’t even know what they look like.

Go watch this video. It’s short, work-safe, and guaranteed to make you better at connecting with your customers: Dove Real Beauty Sketches

Your Challenge: Knowing Your Customer Better Than They Know Themselves

Throughout the Dove video, you heard women describing themselves. Did you notice how many of their references came from external sources, rather than their objective perceptions? “My mother said I have a big chin.” “I’m forty, so I’m starting to get a little bit of the crow’s feet thing going on.” In other words, what other people said, or what predominant cultural beliefs dictate to be true, dictate how these women see themselves.

Other people don’t limit their opinions to your physical appearance. They have plenty to say about how you dress, the type of work you do, and the way you raise your children. Cultural beliefs evolve over thousands of years, dictating standards and decrying shortcomings in every avenue of human experience.

What Dove does — and what other successful Cult Brands like Apple, Harley Davidson and Ikea do — is stand up and say, “You know all those voices that say you’re not good enough? That you’re homely? A failure? Ugly? Old? What if they’re wrong?”

Providing Meaningful Belief Systems That Resonate With Your Customers

Standing up to a prevailing cultural narrative is step one. Providing an alternative belief system that resonates deeply and powerfully with your customers is step two. Apple tells their customers that they’re smart and creative. Harley Davidson tells their customers that they’re adventurous and free. Ikea tells their customers that they actually do have their lives together.

Dove tells women they’re beautiful.

It’s important to understand that telling is never enough. Successful brands back up their messaging with action. If you don’t know how to make movies with your new iGadget, Apple will show you how. Harley Davidson HOG chapters take to the open road in explicit celebration of freedom and adventure. Ikea’s catalogs are practically instruction manuals on creating a stylish, organized life.

Dove used a simple, powerful video to show women that they don’t see themselves the way other people see them.

Acknowledging the unconscious forces that shape people’s life experiences and pointing out that there is another way is a proven strategy for creating customers for life. To do this, you have to be willing to accept that unconscious forces exist, and take steps to understand what specific influences are most powerful in your customers’ lives. There’s a way to do this. We know what it is. Give us a shout when you’re ready to learn more.

April 18, 2013 by BJ Bueno

Retail’s Mysteries Revealed: Amazon and the Art of Picking Your Battles

Amazon understands one of the fundamental truths of retailing, and they’ve demonstrated that with their amazingly successful Amazon Prime program. For years, now, the industry bean counters have been looking side-eyed at the program that offers shoppers free two-day shipping and streaming of digital content in exchange for a one-time annual flat fee payment. It looks like a system designed to fail.

An Amazon Prime membership costs $79 annually. Researchers have found that the average Prime customer was using $90 worth of shipping and streaming services per year. The math seems pretty simple; 90 – 79 is 11. Amazon loses, the customer wins.

Does anyone reading these words really believe that Amazon, the company that tracks customer behavior so closely that they can make personal recommendations to each and every one of their 615 million customers, didn’t know this was going to happen?

Of course they knew. That brings us to the next question: Why would you pick a fight you know you’re going to lose?

Cult Branding: Know Your Customers As You Know Yourself

This is the only time you’ll ever see Donald Trump quoted in this space. “Sometimes by losing a battle, you find a new way to win a war.” Amazon, the company named for a nation of fierce warrior women, is performing a classical tactical maneuver. There are times when allowing your enemy to gain ground moves them into position to be surrounded. $11 may be lost, but a customer who is becoming increasingly habituated to choosing Amazon as their default retailer is gained. The average Prime member spends over $1,200 with Amazon annually. The non-Prime Amazon customer spends less than half that amount.

Amazon knows one of the secrets of retail. We may love our customers, but our customers don’t necessarily love us back. There’s an uneven power dynamic inherent in the relationship, and the customer feels like they’re getting the short end of the stick most of the time. Given a chance to even the scales with—or to even get one over on—a business, the customer is going to take it.

Understanding this aspect of human nature allowed Amazon to craft an irresistible offer. They’ve taken on the role of the giant and just handed over a slingshot. In an economic, social environment rife with depressing overtones for the typical buyer—average income growth for 90% of the American population was $59 over the past 45 years—opportunities to come out ahead in the game are few and far between.

We want to embrace our customers, and that can lead us to presume that our customers—especially the best ones—want to embrace us too. But things are more complicated than that. Human behavior is motivated by a wide range of emotions. Not all of these emotions appear attractive or noble at first glance. It’s hard to see the appeal in an adversarial relationship. It can seem counter-intuitive and extremely uncomfortable to consider the entirety of our customers’ perceptions of the brand.

Do we, as retailers, want to do what’s comfortable, or do we want to do what works?

April 2, 2013 by BJ Bueno

Unlock the Power of the Unconscious to Drive Top-Line Revenue Growth

It‘s estimated that over 90% of consumer behavior is unconscious.

Put simply, we as consumers (and human beings in general) are unaware of why we do what we do. We’re not entirely conscious of why we buy a particular product from a particular brand. Even when subjected to direct questioning, people simply cannot describe why they do what they do. But there are reasons—unconscious drivers—behind all of our actions including purchasing behavior.

How Can Consumer Insights Derived From Unconscious Drivers Grow Your Business?

Understanding the unconscious motivations of your customers can help you:

Attract new customers
Cultivate stronger loyalty with current customers and increase top-line revenue
Strengthen your brand positioning
Increase purchasing potential — grow the wallet size of existing customers

Mega brands like Apple, Southwest Airlines, and IKEA know their customers pretty well. It’s not difficult to observe the results.

Psychologically-Driven Consumer Insights Can Transform Your Performance

Just think about all of the ways you can apply the right consumer insights to your business:

Craft more effective messaging strategies
Improve product packaging and displays
Develop advertising that generates higher ROI
Improve performance of promotions, email campaigns, and product pages

Every customer touch point can be transformed and made more effective once you know what motivates their behavior.

Market Research with Results

Businesses spend millions each year to generate market research that often yields zero financial results. But this isn’t surprising: You ask the right questions, but market research often provides the wrong answers. Customers’ responses to market research are rationalizations, not actualities.

From our experience, the majority of market research becomes irrelevant once you understand what drives your customers to do business with you.

Our proprietary research methods and consulting processes go beyond your customers’ rational responses and dig into the unconscious motivators that drive sales. Simply put, our consumer insights into your customers can save you millions annually.

Make Smarter Decisions

How do you determine which marketing strategies to employ? What if you had a way to quickly determine whether or not a strategy will be effective before you execute?

When you know precisely whom you’re trying to serve, you can easily discern if a strategy or campaign will speak to the hearts and minds of your most profitable customers.

Our process provides penetrating insights into your customers that will illuminate the way to sustainable growth and profitability in all market conditions.

These consumer insights also make advertising campaigns more effective, giving marketing executives clear indicators of what will work—and what will not.

You’ll receive actionable insights that you can apply immediately to generate top-line revenue growth and expand your market share.

Start the Conversation

March 27, 2013 by BJ Bueno

Solving the Mysteries of Retail: What Makes Customers Choose You?

Some zaftig mannequins are getting serious love from shoppers all around the world. More than 16,000 people have shared the image you see here, enthusiastically embracing the new profile on display at a Swedish retailer. ““Finally, mannequins showing how clothes fit on real women. I’m changing where I shop!”

What’s behind this enthusiasm?

It’s easy to forget that something as ordinary as a mannequin is a messaging vehicle. Fixtures are, almost by definition, made to be taken for granted. But as retailers, we can afford to leave no aspect of our operations unexamined. The typical mannequin used in America is a size 4 or 6. Some brands don’t even bother with that—they use strategically arranged poles and hangers to display their wares.

When shoppers look at these images, what are they seeing? Women come in all shapes and sizes, with the greatest number coming in at size 14. These women are continually bombarded with images of women who don’t look like them. Between airbrushes and makeup artists, ‘perfection’ is to be found everywhere but their own mirror. There’s a tremendous amount of cultural and social baggage that our customers are carrying with them at all times, an internalized narrative that dictates how they’re supposed to look and in what ways they fall short.

When they come into the store and encounter mannequins that are less than half the size they themselves are, the cultural narrative they’ve come to expect—the one that tells them they’re not good enough, that they’re failing at the ‘be a beautiful woman’ game—continues uninterrupted and unchallenged. It’s a seamless delivery of a negative narrative so ubiquitous that shoppers take it as an inevitability. Inevitable, that is, until they encounter an alternative.

Then it’s a different story.

Giving Customers a Reason to Choose You

Malcolm Gladwell tells a famous story about Howard Moskowitz, the food scientist who discovered for Prego that what customers really, really wanted was a chunky spaghetti sauce. Armed with this information, Prego introduced a chunky sauce, and had some of its most profitable years ever. Part of the reason Moskowitz was so successful in his research was that he was willing to question everything. No variable was fixed. Everything that could be questioned would be questioned.

It was this process—an early analog to the process we call Brand Modeling—that revealed the unexploited growth opportunities available to Prego. Bringing that same approach to retail means objectively analyzing every aspect of a store’s performance to identify what messaging is being shared with the customer, and assess the effectiveness of that messaging. Couple this with an insightful statistical analysis of customer behavioral patterns, thought processes, and beliefs, and the result is a revelation of the operational changes you can make to better attract and satisfy your customers.

In other words, if the mannequins you’re using tell your customers they’re fat failures, you might want to change your messaging. Universally, we’re drawn to images, iconography, and representations of people who physically resemble us. The larger mannequins are in alignment with how many customers see themselves. Presenting this image in a positive, celebratory way makes customers feel that they also are worth celebrating.

As a shopper, which experience would you prefer? We’re not different than our customers. They’re people, just like we are. Remembering that is the key to humanistic marketing and successful retail brand building.

March 19, 2013 by BJ Bueno

Solving the Mysteries of Retail: Is Price Matching the Solution to Showrooming?

Showrooming has dominated the headlines lately. You know what showrooming is—the chances are better than good you’ve had it happen in your very own store. Customers come in, they shop around, they find something they like, and out comes the smartphone. The price is checked, usually against Amazon, and increasingly, it’s the online retailer who makes the sale. You’re left standing there with nothing. To stop the bleeding, many retail chains have adopted price-matching guarantees. Is this a good idea?

It may be, but it may also be a knee-jerk reaction that is being implemented much too soon.

Let’s look at showrooming. It’s not a new phenomenon. All showrooming actually is is the latest technology being used to facilitate human behavioral patterns that have been around since the dawn of time. The media coverage is bringing new panic to an old problem.

Understanding What Motivates Your Customers

Some percentage of shoppers thinks that they will always, without fail, use price as the single most important determining factor in their purchasing decision. This belief is central to their self-image. In their personal value system, saving money is considered to be a very good thing. There’s often a competitive element to this: she who saves the most wins! Good shoppers save money, but they also earn social capital. In some circles, being the person who always knows how to find the best deals commands significant respect.

Part of the reason shopping prowess earns one respect and acknowledgement—validation that comes from one’s peer group or one’s own self—is because making the best use of your purchasing dollar can be incredibly difficult. Think back to the earliest days of human commerce, those first bazaars where buyers and merchants came together to trade. It wasn’t easy to compare prices then. If you wanted to know if the better deal on lemons could be here in front of you or at the stall on the other side of the bazaar, you physically had to journey over there and find out what the prices were. Some shoppers were willing to do that; others weren’t.

Jump forward a few centuries, to the days of printed sales circulars and catalogs. It’s easier for customers to price shop. The cost of comparing went down, the benefit went up. That resulted in more price-driven customers. Then there were radio and eventually television commercials, which were even easier to consume—no literacy required. The ranks of price shoppers swelled again.

Every time those consumers became more adept shoppers, retailers respond with a price-matching strategy. This has happened time and time again, throughout the course of history. Price matching strategies are taken up with great enthusiasm … and then quietly, over the course of years, abandoned totally or in part.

The question we should ask ourselves is not when we should start matching prices, but when we should stop. This is where customer knowledge is key. Not every customer sees saving money as a moral imperative. Others prefer using their dollars to make meaningful social change. That’s why there’s a Tom’s Shoes. There are customers who could care less if they pay thirty percent more for their coffeemaker, if they can be seen buying it in the right store. That’s why there’s Williams-Sonoma.

If you treat every customer as if they’re primarily price motivated, you’re going to lose the interest of those customers—those infinitely more profitable and loyal customers—who choose you for entirely different reasons. Companies that develop a deeper, more nuanced understanding of their customer’s motivations don’t necessarily need to price match. They’ve moved their relationship with the customer to a place where price becomes much less central to the conversation.

Now the use of smartphones has brought the cost of comparison shopping to practically nil. As one would expect, there’s a predictable swell in the ranks of price shoppers. Less interesting than tracking what retailers adopt a price matching strategy is pinpointing those companies that have enough confidence in their identity to choose another road.

March 13, 2013 by BJ Bueno

The Mysteries of Retail: Should You Lower Prices in a Tough Economy?

It’s a tough time to be in the grocery business. Walmart, which derives nearly half of its revenues from grocery sales, recently reported that February 2013 was the worst sales month they’ve had in 7 years — an absolute disaster, according to leaked internal memos. The SymphonyIRI Group, in a report entitled 2012 CPG Year In Review: Finding the New Normal, points out that consumers are shopping fewer grocery stores — 3 rather than 5— and they’re buying less when they’re there. What sales growth there has been is largely attributable to inflation. Customers are very aware that they no longer have the purchasing power they used to.

Given these facts, doesn’t dropping prices seem like a smart strategy? When things cost less, people buy more: it’s not a complex equation here.The answer seems obvious.

Obvious, that is, unless you’re Whole Foods. Whole Foods is facing the same problems as the rest of the grocery industry. Droughts and extreme weather anomalies have negatively impacted the supply chain while transportation costs have increased exponentially at the same time customer confidence in a better tomorrow is lower than a snake’s belly. Nearly 3 out of 4 subjects in the SymphonyIRI report feeling that their financial situation will deteriorate or remain unchanged in the coming year.

And Whole Foods has one problem that’s uniquely their own. Ever hear the phrase “Whole Paycheck”?

Brand Modeling: Who Does Your Customer Think You Are?

Whole Foods, understanding the heightened value customers are placing on value given the current economic situation, has begun dropping their prices. Despite some initial success, the move concerns financial experts, who fear that too significant a price drop will negatively impact the Whole Foods brand identity. Can Whole Foods continue to offer what makes them unique—namely high-quality, healthy, organic food—while successfully competing on price? Will the changes that must inevitably come in the wake of lower prices disrupt the Whole Foods experience so significantly that their loyal shoppers will take their business elsewhere, or will the move draw in new customers?

These are some pretty big questions to leave to trial and error. Preserving brand integrity and promoting growth during difficult economic circumstances don’t have to be mutually exclusive goals. Finding the sweet spot that allows you to accomplish both simultaneously requires the use of modeling.

A model for your brand should identify the range of beliefs your best customers have about your store. By determining how important a role each of those beliefs plays in your customer’s relationship with you, it becomes possible to predict the outcome of any operational changes you make. A mathematical analysis of the behaviors and beliefs of your customer base eliminates the need for trial and error. You won’t have to guess how much to lower prices. You’ll know.

In this instance, we’d examine how central Whole Foods’ high prices are to their brand perception. Is paying top dollar an essential of the Whole Foods experience, or is there room for those prices to come down?

What percentage of customers will be alienated by embracing a different pricing strategy? How much new traffic will you attract? An effective Brand Model can provide these answers. Armed with this information, you can weigh the costs and benefits of many different pricing strategies objectively. Choose the option that best meets your company’s needs, with the confidence that every move you make will appeal to your existing customer base.

You can strengthen existing relationships while attracting new business, even in a tough economy. Sometimes that means lowering prices, and sometimes that means keeping your prices high. What strategy is right for your company? We’ll help you figure that out.

March 8, 2013 by BJ Bueno

Solving the Mysteries of Retail: Why Do Some Salespeople Sell More Than Others?

As a retailer, your success is almost entirely dependent upon how successful your sales team is. Not all salespeople are created equal. There are tremendous variations in personability, physical attractiveness, and understanding of human nature as well as the sales process to take into account. Some of these factors can be controlled for with hiring practices and training, and that is what good retailers do.

True brand dominance becomes possible when a retailer takes things to the next level. The reason some salespeople sell more than others is due to the way the salespeople appear to the buying public. This is an external factor that is easy to control, yet the potential here is woefully underutilized by most retailers.

Foot Locker is one step ahead in the game. The athletic footwear chain has 3,400 stores in 23 countries, and has earnings that put them far ahead in the race with their closest competitors, Finish Line and Shoe Carnival. The brand does have a preferential relationship with Nike, a superior brand in and of itself, but that is not the only reason the chain does very well.

Foot Locker’s sales team sells more sneakers than other shoe salesmen. Why is that? Take a look at the way they’re dressed.

Retail Genius: Archetypal Images

When Foot Locker has their sales team dress as referees, they’re harnessing the power of archetypal images. Obviously, the sight of a referee is familiar to the athletically-inclined – Foot Locker’s primary market – but the referee is also symbolically powerful. Throughout the world, a referee represents authority. They stand as a person who should be listened to.

Through generations of human experience, our collective symbolic understanding has grown and evolved. Our conditioned response to show respectful obedience to referees manifests not only when we encounter them on the playing field, but subtly extends to referees outside of the expected setting. Additionally, you don’t need an actual referee to bring out that conditioned response – it can be provoked by distinctive elements of the referee’s appearance, such as a striped shirt.

In other words, while a Foot Locker customer is in the store or even on the brand’s website, they are continually being supplied with the visual cues that tells them how to respond to messaging they receive. When a Foot Locker employee suggests a certain pair of sneakers — or perhaps a second or third pair, or a T-shirt to go with the new kicks — that customer is primed to agree, and make the purchase.

What Archetypal Images Will Help Your Sales Team Sell More?

What your sales team wears, as well as the colors, imagery, and iconography they’re surrounded by, has a tremendous impact on how much merchandise they’ll sell. Yet if you do a quick survey of the retail environment as it stands right now, you’re going to find that the vast majority of retailers have their sales teams in some variation of black pants, white shirt or khaki pants, primary colored shirt — combinations customers have been taught they can disregard without consequences.

Nobody ignores the referee.

A Brand Model can help you identify which archetypal images will command the attention of your target market. The most appealing archetypal images are those that embody the vision our customers have of themselves at their very best. These images draw customers in. They internalize and reflect upon these images, searching for the identifiable factors they can emulate or adopt to become more like the person they admire – the idealized version of themselves.

Having the right archetypal imagery in your store, whether that be through your messaging, marketing, employee apparel, signage or other visual elements, attracts attention and assures your customers that they’re in the right place.

It works for Foot Locker. It can work for you. Transform your sales team into the one that can’t be ignored. Help your sales people sell more. It all starts with a Brand Model. You can get yours here.

February 26, 2013 by BJ Bueno

New York, New York: What Makes Duane Reade’s Rebranding Efforts Work

Duane Reade was facing an invisibility issue. The drug store chain was struggling in a crowded marketplace, surrounded by legions of Walgreens, CVS, Rite Aids, and Health Marts. With competition on every side, Duane Reade wasn’t giving their customers a reason to choose them—and they weren’t.

At the NRF show last month, there was a lot of buzz around Duane Reade’s rebranding. In an effort to give customers a reason to choose their drug store, Duane Reade began positioning itself as an iconic New York brand. The new tag line is “New York Living Made Easy.”

What is it going to take to make this approach work?

A Heck of a Town: Understanding the Power of Place

At the heart of Duane Reade’s rebranding efforts, we find the passionate relationship New Yorkers have with their hometown. There are at least 8.2 million people living in New York right now. Every single one of them has their own unique, complex, nuanced relationship with the city.

When we start examining this relationship, we have to begin with a discussion of animism. Animism is an ancient, universal, and persistent tendency among humanity to attribute inanimate objects with the traits, abilities, and behaviors of people. As David Hume explains it, “There is a universal tendency among mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object those qualities with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious.”

In other words, if you want to know your customers, you want to know the places that they hold dear. The reason this is important is because people see these locations as an extension of themselves. If you know what they love about their town, you know what they love about themselves—and you can deliver that in your store.

Duane Reade began their rebranding with a bold, colorful new look, as well as private label products featuring New York-themed packaging, such as Morning Rush Coffee. That’s a good beginning, but in order for this approach to work, the chain needs to demonstrate that they have an authentic, genuine right to claim status as an iconic New York brand, things need to go further.

One way in which Duane Reade demonstrates they get what it means to be a New Yorker is demonstrated in their store design and layout. When New Yorkers are getting to know each other, one of the very first questions they ask is “What neighborhood are you from?” It is understood that a person from TriBeCa is going to be a very different person than a person from Red Hook, and both of them are going to be very different than someone from Liberty Park.

Neighborhoods are a fundamental form of social organization in New York. Rather than putting stores into neighborhoods, Duane Reade brought the neighborhood into their stores. Traditional category organizations went out the window, replaced with three distinct product zones: How I Look, How I Feel, and What I Need Right Now. This set up demonstrates an understand of their customers’ worldview and life experiences; a tangible demonstration of why they are a store for New Yorkers.

Will the approach catch on, or will we see this campaign losing steam in a New York minute? We think it’s got legs, provided Duane Reade remains committed to maintaining a deep understanding of their customer base. Putting their customers first is going to make it easier for Duane Reade to stand out in a crowded field.

February 20, 2013 by BJ Bueno

The Mysteries of Retail: Why Aren’t My Customers Interested in This Great New Merchandise?

It’s one of the most common, frustrating, and expensive mysteries of retail. You start carrying a new line of merchandise—products that you’re genuinely excited about, high quality stuff that you can offer at a competitive price—and your customers just don’t care. They walk right by your carefully designed displays, not even slowing down long enough to give them a second glance. They ignore the line completely, yet your competitor is having a hard time keeping the exact same merchandise in stock.

What’s going on here?

This is more than an rhetorical question. Being able to predict how your customers will respond to merchandise ahead of time is one of the Holy Grails of retailing. If you can, with a reasonable degree of confidence, consistently identify the merchandise your customers really want and will actually buy—well, then you’re on the way to being Walmart. You’re on the way to being Target. You’re on the way to being Trader Joe’s, or AutoZone, or Amazon.com.

If you can’t? Well. You know how that story ends.

Solving Retail’s Mysteries: Choosing More Appealing Merchandise

When a particular line of merchandise isn’t moving in your store, the almost universal and immediate reaction retailers have is to try to identify what’s wrong with the stuff you’re selling. Is the quality in alignment with the rest of your offerings? Is there some external reason, not directly connected to your store, that impacts the appeal of the brand? Are your price points completely out of whack?

These are all good questions to ask, and answering them can, sometimes, solve the mystery of why a particular line of merchandise just isn’t moving. However, there are going to be times when there’s absolutely nothing wrong with the merchandise—if you can set aside the fact that your customers just don’t seem to care about it.

It’s at this point that far too many retailers stop their investigation. They throw up their hands, caution their buyers to avoid that manufacturer like the plague in the future, and move on. If it takes deep, deep discounts to get the duds off the sales floor, so be it—that space needs to be freed up for more profitable, appealing merchandise.

That doesn’t really solve the mystery. Worse than that, you have no guarantee that it won’t happen again. You have no methodology or mechanism in place to prevent your buyers from choosing another non-starting line. You could be in the exact same spot six months from now.

Unless, of course, you have a Brand Model. The truth is that your customers don’t really know why they don’t like your great new merchandise—or why they’ll happily buy the exact same item from your competitor but turn their nose up at it when they find it in your store. Up to 90% of all customer purchasing behavior is unconscious. Your customers shop on auto-pilot: they move through your store guided by deeply ingrained habits and steered by collective cultural pressures that they’re not even fully aware of.

When merchandise sells for your competitor, but not for you, it’s because your competitor is presenting that merchandise in a way that is in alignment with the ingrained habits and cultural pressures of their customers. Your customers might have a completely different set of ingrained habits and cultural pressures influencing them. You won’t know, until you do the hard work of delving into your customer’s psyche and discovering what drives them. Armed with this information, you’ll make better buying decisions, and your customers will buy more from you.

Mystery solved!

Want to learn more about how this works? See how all the pieces come together here.

February 12, 2013 by BJ Bueno

You Can Get There From Here: L.L. Bean’s Sure Footed Approach To Social Media

L.L. Bean has been very successful in the mail order business for one hundred years. Founder (and namesake!) Leon Leonwood Bean would be proud — and probably absolutely dumbfounded by the latest role the familiar catalog has taken on in the marketing and promotion of his business.

Earlier this month, Liz Pride, who hails from Leon’s neck of the woods, took the L.L. Bean catalog and used it as the basis of her creative endeavor, a quirky Tumblr called “Your LL Bean Boyfriend.” On the site, Pride pairs images from the catalog with short snippets of copy that could have come directly from the pages of your favorite romance novel.

For example:

Nathan quietly opened the door and brought in a tray with a bowl of chicken soup over to me. “Let’s kick that cold you have,” he said, “I know how much you want to go skiing next weekend.”

The combination has been in a hit. In a little over a week, Pride has collected over 7,000 followers, including the L.L. Bean team. Carolyn Beem, a spokesperson for the sportswear and outdoor gear retailer, told AdWeek, “We’re just going to watch it like everybody else,” she says. “We think that it’s a load of fun. It’s well written, and it’s funny.”

L.L. Bean has done more than watch the popular Tumblr. They’ve even participated, adding their own comment to the site: Elizabeth- we at LLB are loving this. Most of us never thought of LLB and sexy in the same sentence. It is the talk of the office!

A Humanistic Approach To Social Media: Joining The Conversation, Not Controlling It

We have to applaud L.L. Bean for skillfully navigating one of the emerging challenges of social media: the brand-centric conversation in which the brand itself is not the driving nor primary voice. If Clay Shirkey’s right about the cultural and social changes we can expect to see in an environment of cognitive surplus (Not familiar? Watch Clay’s TED Talk on the topic here!) there will undoubtedly be more and more of these types of creative projects being developed by Brand Lovers.

The challenge we have as brand managers is complex. Becoming aware of conversations, assessing them, and determine what role, if any, we have in their progress, is not a process that we, as an industry, have articulated particularly well to date. It is unsettling for leaders who believe they have the ultimate control over what their brand is all about to discover that that’s not true at all: it is customers who build brands, not brand managers and marketing departments.

If one were to speculate on the reason’s L.L. Bean’s leadership believed that their customers chose them before any other brand, it’s not unreasonable to expect that the values of high quality merchandise, rugged outdoor aesthetic and trustworthiness (backed by an almost legendary guarantee) would rank very high on this list. What Liz Pride’s work is doing is revealing another layer of psychological associations Brand Lovers have with L.L. Bean. In Liz’s world, the L.L. Bean customer is sexy, caring, and nurturing. It’s an expansion of L.L. Bean’s key marketing message that evidently has great appeal and the brand didn’t have to lift a finger to benefit from it. The fact that they did, engaging in the conversation in good faith and with good humor, has further endeared the company to those drawn in by the hunky models and romantic prose.

The tenets of Brand Modeling remind us that listening to the customer, completely and on a number of levels, is the route to success. LL. Bean, by abandoning the all-to-common typically litigious, controlling response to creative endeavors with a more humanistic, welcoming, and responsive approach, has gained access to new insights about what their customers value most about their brand. We’re sure they’re going to capitalize on those insights.

Your organization can do the same thing if you’ve got the vision and courage to commit to putting customers first.

January 29, 2013 by BJ Bueno

Older Posts

Newer Posts