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BJ Bueno

Seven Golden Rules of Cult Branding

 Why do people love this brand? Why are they so loyal to it? What does this brand mean to them? Why? Why? Why!

An interesting thing starts happening after you’ve asked a lot of questions for a long enough period of time. Not only do you start getting some really good answers, but you begin to see patterns and similarities between the responses that you receive.

This was exactly what happened in the dozens of interviews conducted. Clear patterns emerged. Although each of the nine brands was clearly different, their individual formulas for Cult-Branding success shared many of the same core ingredients.

These seven points won’t tell you everything there is to know about Cult Branding, but they will give you a nice overview and practical framework to utilize in your own marketing endeavors. Think of this list as your indispensable “Cult Branding Cliff Notes.” Here they are. Read them. Use them!

#1 – The Rule of Social Groups
Consumers want to be part of a group that’s different.

#2 – The Rule of Courage
Cult-Brand inventors show daring and determination.

#3 – The Rule of Fun
Cult Brands sell lifestyles.

#4 – The Rule of Human Needs
Listen to the choir and create Cult-Brand evangelists.

#5 – The Rule of Contribution
Cult Brands always create customer communities.

#6 – The Rule of Openness
Cult Brands are inclusive.

#7 – The Rule of Freedom
Cult Brands promote personal freedom and draw power from their enemies.

Learn more about each of the The Seven Rules of Cult Brands.

March 22, 2012 by

Do you know why customers buy from you?

Why spend millions on research that doesn’t help grow your business?

Market research provides the wrong answers to the right questions. Over 90% of customer behavior is unconscious. Customers rarely articulate their true motivations even when directly questioned—people simply cannot describe why they really do what they do.

From our experience, the majority of market research and customer focus groups become irrelevant once you figure out what motivates your best customers.

Predicting customer Behavior

Most successful brands understand the value of a brand model: To predict customer behavior.

The Brand Lover Model® provides the right answers to the questions that drive growth.

Our unique approach to brand modeling provides accurate predictions of customer behavior. BLM unlocks customer loyalty and helps you attract profitable customers who create new customers for you through word of mouth.

BLM gives you the psychological insights into the motivations behind your customer’s behavior—how they think and feel about your brand. The Model uses humanistic psychology, archetypal imagery and cultural mythology to identify the patterns your best customers share.

We employ in-depth customer interviews with your best customers, customized psychological assessments, market surveys, and quantitative and qualitative analyses.

Why Build a Brand Model

But how we get to the answers isn’t as important as the answers themselves. Your completed Brand Lover Model offers insights you can use right away:

  • Drivers of Choice: Why your best customers buy from you instead of your competitors. BLM uncovers the conscious and unconscious psychological motivators driving your customer’s relationship with your brand.
  • Drivers of Differentiation: What makes your brand stand out in the eyes of your customers. BLM tells you how to differentiate and be chosen more often than your competitors.

Brand Lover Model® 2.0 provides critical customer insights that can help you better evaluate marketing strategies, advertising campaigns, and product innovations.

Marketing executives often make up what they want to hear. The Brand Lover Model helps you determine if what you’re doing is actually working. Instead of going exclusively with gut emotions—or with just doing what you’ve always done—our effective model can more accurately tell you what’s really going on with your business, with your customers, and in your industry.

Hire the leaders in Branding Research

Many consulting research firms and advertising agencies are trying to mimic what we do, but this process isn’t just about interviews, polls, and statistics.

Led by Cult Branding expert BJ Bueno, our team of thought leaders, brand strategists, psychologists, writers, biologists, photographers, technologists, and business philosophers brings fresh perspective to our creative process. To predict customer behavior and create your Brand Lover Model®, we combine analytical prowess with intuitive finesse.

Our clients include Kohl’s Department Stores, Turner Classic Movies, Scheels, Thomas Nelson Publishers and LA Lakers.

After completing our Brand Lover Model and learning who our best customers are, BJ Bueno and his team helped us construct an entirely new, innovative merchandising system based on the needs of the customer. Sales rose 26% over the previous year after book retailers installed the new system.
— Wayne Hastings, Sr. Vice President at Thomas Nelson, Inc.

Let us help you build a powerful Brand Lover Model® for your business. Review our frequently asked questions or fill out the form below for more information.

Ready to create your ultimate marketing plan?

Let’s get the conversation started >>

 

March 22, 2012 by

What is Cult Branding?

Brands fail for one primary reason: instead of building a brand some people love, companies build brands no one hates.

Most marketers live in a world where they are constantly searching for the flashy, the instant—in short, the trivial.

We must recognize that brands don’t belong to marketers. Brands belong to the customer. The customer’s embrace is the only vote that counts, yet it is constantly ignored by strategies that place our products and services as the “goal” rather than the means to satisfy our customer’s needs, wishes, and fantasies.

Successful brands embrace their customers by anticipating basic and spiritual human needs.

Success creates magnetic brands—Cult Brands.

Why Cult Branding Works

Cult Brands aren’t just companies with products or services to sell. To many of their followers, they are a living, breathing surrogate family filled with like-minded individuals. They are a support group that just happens to sell products and services. Picture a Cult Brand in this context, and you’ll have a much better understanding of why these brands all have such high customer loyalty and devoted followers.

That’s how Cult Branding works.

Society only helps to accelerate the drivers behind its success.

March 19, 2012 by

Ace Hardware: Putting Customers First in a Quest to Double Market Share

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Normally, when we talk about watching paint dry, we’re referring to something tedious or boring. But for the leadership at Ace Hardware, paint is pretty exciting.  According to this New York Times article, a new product line (coupled with an insightful marketing approach) may be what it takes to allow the 4,300+ hardware and home improvement store chain to double their share of the domestic paint market.

Brand Modeling and the Search for a New Growth Strategy

Dominant organizations are engaged in a continual search for growth opportunities. What are the best ways to increase market share, raise a brand’s visibility, and connect more effectively with their customers? Many companies, particularly those in the gaming sector, are targeting international markets by adapting to local preferences. For instance, identifying the beste online casino for norske spillere has become essential for casinos aiming to attract Norwegian players, as catering to specific preferences and regulations can significantly boost engagement. While it’s easy to generate potential strategies that should create growth, it’s remarkably difficult to assess ahead of time which strategies will succeed, especially in a competitive landscape.

Which brings us to Ace Hardware.  This well-established brand has numerous options available to it. Ace Hardware has the resources and ability to pursue growth in any of several directions.  We think that Ace’s leadership team has made a smart decision by focusing on the paint portion of their business. Their approach shows that there’s been a concerted effort to understand and better serve their customer.

Know Your Customer To Build Your Brand

What is the power of paint? Some analysts have compared painting the house to the famous lipstick effect—a quick and affordable way to lift the spirits when it’s not economically feasible to make larger, more indulgent purchases.  Ace Hardware’s customers may not be in a position to renovate the entire kitchen or do over the bathroom. Yet they’re still driven by the need to make positive changes in their environment.

Painting a room delivers a powerful visual and emotional impact for a relatively small financial investment. Ace is demonstrating superior customer knowledge by providing a way to fill a significant emotional need while being sensitive to the current economic tensions and challenges their customer base is facing.

At the same time, Ace has used a very gender-specific, romance-oriented approach to marketing their new line of paint. Color choices are overwhelmingly made by women, according to Dana Larsen, an Ace Brand manager. The new campaign is based around the need for strong, satisfying, loving relationships—finding the perfect shade, color, or hue is referred to as finding your “soul paint.”

This recognizes and capitalizes on the biological driver that urges us to form lasting bonds. Couple it with some visual humor (after all, there’s something inherently funny about a line-up of 8 purple people) and you have a message that appeals to Ace’s customers on a number of levels.

Will Ace be able to meet their goal of doubling their market share by 2015? Appealing to their customers through multiple psychologically-appealing channels is not a bad start.  Understanding the tensions and pressures facing their customer base, providing an economical means to satisfying compelling emotional needs, and honoring the underlying unconscious drivers of customer behavior are all steps dominant organizations use when they want to grow.  That’s the value of putting customers first.

March 19, 2012 by

Meet Mr. Maslow: The Father of Cult Branding

Why are certain brands so important and meaningful to some customers that they feel compelled to tell the world about them? What makes them go that extra mile?

Understanding human behavior—what motivates people to do certain things and act certain ways—is at the very core of successful marketing.

This is where the work of the late, great psychologist Abraham Maslow comes in.

Maslow postulated that we humans have an ascending order of needs and used a hierarchy of needs to prioritize them. At the bottom levels of the pyramid are our physiological needs, which include basic things like food, shelter, and clothing that we all need to survive.

At progressively higher levels in Maslow’s Hierarchy are the needs for safety and security, social interaction, and self-esteem. At the very top is self-actualization, a term Maslow coined to describe the ultimate human need to learn, grow, and reach one’s full potential as a person.

We all desire on some level to self-actualize, both to be at peace with ourselves and to try to be the best we can be. As humans, we are drawn to people, places, groups, causes, companies, and, ultimately, brands that we believe can help us towards our ultimate goal of self-actualization and total fulfillment.

Why the Hierarchy of Needs Is a Crucial Tool for Branding?

Perhaps the most important thing to take away from Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs is his theory that all human beings start fulfilling their needs at the bottom levels of the pyramid.

In short, we fill our low physiological needs first. Higher needs like safety, social interaction, and esteem basically do not exist at this point. Logically, survival comes first.

However, once an individual has satisfied his or her lower level needs, the higher level needs become influential in motivating behavior.

As Maslow notes time and time again in his work, “Man is a perpetually wanting animal.”

Maslow’s writings break down the underlying drivers of human behavior and decision making. Maslow never mentions the phrase “brand loyalty” in his books, but his Hierarchy of Human Needs and concepts like self-actualization are key to understanding why consumers consistently choose one brand over another and enjoy such strong relationships with them.

So, why is fulfilling higher level needs so integral to building strong customer loyalty? What’s the connection, you ask? The answer is, higher level needs influence future human behavior much greater than lower level needs. It is the brands that can fulfill human needs on the higher levels of the hierarchy that become irreplaceable in the mind of the consumer.

That’s what customer loyalty is really all about: being irreplaceable.

True customer loyalty is not only about getting a customer to consistently choose your brand over another. It’s for that same customer to always believe (and then go tell the world) that your company’s brand has no equal!

This article is an excerpt from The Power of Cult Branding.

March 15, 2012 by

The Sweet Smell of Success: How Understanding Your Customer’s Unconscious Motivations Can Help Build Your Brand

There is a great article in Forbes discussing how P&G revived the Febreze brand, bringing it back from near-death status to one of the company’s leading money makers.  It illustrates very well how critical it is to understand the unconscious factors that motivate customer behavior.

Febreze, if you’re not familiar, is a specific kind of air freshener that can be used to treat upholstery, carpeting, and other items that can’t be washed.  P&G tried to market Febreze as an odor eliminator. That effort failed, in part because there were not many customers who thought that their lives were all that smelly.

When P&G changed their efforts and marketed using Febreze as a rewarding experience after you’d cleaned a room, sales went through the roof.  When we stop to think about it, this makes a lot of sense.  Who are P&G’s best customers? (The people we call Brand Lovers?)  By and large, they’re people who do a lot of cleaning. A clean, tidy home is important to them. They’re not people who are going to eagerly proclaim  that they have bad smells in their home—in fact, many would find that type of admission very shameful.

Positioning Febreze as a reward for something that P&G’s best customer’s were already doing (cleaning the room) was a transformative exercise.  No longer was using Febreze a tacit admission that your housekeeping efforts just didn’t cut the mustard.  Instead, using Febreze was a sign of a job well done; a pleasant sensory experience that you could enjoy as a reward for your efforts.

Unconscious Factors That Guide Customer Behavior

If we were going to reduce the Febreze situation to it’s simplest terms, we have this: in one mode, using Febreze made the customer feel like a failure. In the other situation, the customer feels good about using Febreze—it’s a treat to be enjoyed and savored. The emotional impact of the two scenarios are very different.

We gravitate toward emotional experiences that make us feel good.  We want to be happy. We like to be rewarded. To be told we’re doing a good job—especially in scent form, for olfactory cues are some of the strongest emotional triggers—is a powerful thing.

Identifying the Emotional Experience

It’s essential to identify the emotional experience that your customers are seeking. P&G initially marketed Febreze in a way that provoked a negative emotional reaction: no one enjoys feeling shamed and inadequate. By identifying a different emotional reaction that is more in keeping with what P&G customers were seeking—a feeling of pride, satisfaction in a job well done, the sense of being rewarded—it became possible for the customer to enthusiastically embrace the brand.

Up to 90% of customer behavior is unconsciously motivated. Many times, customers are oblivious to what leads them to choose one product over another.

You’re not going to see people standing in the cleaning product aisle saying, “Hmm, this provokes deep, uncomfortable feelings of shame in me, while this one makes me feel good about myself, virtuous, and hard-working.”  But that conversation is happening on some level in your customer’s mind.  Companies that understand that can position their products to occupy the more desirable position, and that’s why they win.

March 6, 2012 by

Success by the Slice: Does Being “Flawsome” Work For Domino’s?

PhotobucketPerfection isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Just ask the folks at Domino’s Pizza.  In 2009, the company’s pizza came in last in a national taste test—tying with Chuck E. Cheese, an eatery known more for the presence of video games and children’s amusements than anything on the menu.  At that point, (and after bringing on a new CEO, Patrick Doyle) Domino’s launched a new marketing campaign, admitting that they weren’t perfect.

In fact, they were pretty far from perfect.  This campaign featured images of horrendous looking pizzas and consumer panels admitting, on camera, that they didn’t think there was any actual real cheese to be found on a Domino’s pie.  The company vowed to improve, and made a very public spectacle of their efforts to fix things.  They even posted a live feed of customer Tweets in Times Square: a highly visible, real-time response to their improvements for all the world to see.

As a result, Domino’s has seen their sales numbers improving steadily. Investor confidence in the brand has skyrocketed. In 2011, Domino’s stock prices rose 110%. Being “Flawsome” appears to be a smart strategic decision for Domino’s.  But why did it work?

Understanding the Brand Lover

The relationship between a consumer and a brand is a complex and nuanced one.  There are many, many factors that lead a person to order pizza from one restaurant rather than another. When we start delving into what the underlying appeal of what a marketing message of “We weren’t very good, really, but we’re trying to get better!” might be, we have to examine not only how the customer views the pizza restaurant in question, but how they view the world in general, and their place in it.

We are dealing right now with a consumer base that has been trained to be skeptical about everything. Having faith or trust in an institution is viewed as a nostalgic form of naivete; we’re sure that there’s going to be a fly in our bowl of soup. Reaching this market with a message of perfection or idealism isn’t going to work. This audience is not capable of believing such things. They know nothing in this world is perfect and they prefer to do business with a company that is honest about their imperfections.

Organizations that can acknowledge their own shortcomings, while putting forward a reasonable plan to remedy the solution with a sense of humor and maturity, appeal to these customers. The customer can identify with the brand—after all, they know they’re not perfect people. They’ve screwed up themselves, once or twice, over the years.  They may have had to go through their own process of rebuilding. There are common points of experience between Domino’s and the legions of customers driving the brand’s turnaround. The brands that are the easiest for customers to bond with are the brands that are most human—and haven’t we been told that to err is human?

There’s a lot to learn from Domino’s. Organizations that move in a more humanistic fashion, understanding and embracing those traits that bring them closer into alignment with their Brand Lover’s experiences and world view, are those that are going to dominate, even in a crowded marketplace. There is value in being “flawsome.”

February 27, 2012 by

Rotten at the Core? Apple’s Alignment Problem

Work hard on the job today or work hard to find a job tomorrow.

That isn’t the message most of Apple’s Brand Lovers would expect to find hanging on the wall of their favorite tech company’s manufacturing facility. It seems a little too Dickensian in sentiment, a world removed from the sleek gadgets tailor made to empower and encourage the creative spirit.

But there it is, right in the middle of a NY Times investigative report: In China, Human Costs are Built into an iPad.  Reading this, we learn how Apple’s supply chain is fraught with difficulties. Safety and environmental concerns top the list. People have died. There have been multiple explosions at manufacturing facilities—blasts, experts say, that were completely avoidable. Toxic materials were used in the production of iPhones, driven by what Supply Chain Digest calls “aggressive procurement practices.” Allegations of child labor, punitive practices in the workplace, and high rates of suicide round out the list.

There is a culture of secrecy and silence around Apple’s manufacturing practices; vendors sign confidentially agreements so sweeping that they’re barred from disclosing they’re working for Apple at all.

Customers First: Understanding the Pillars of Belief

Of all of the challenges that Apple has faced over the years, this situation holds the most potential to break the brand.  There is an obvious and fundamental disconnect between the way Apple is conducting business and the way that Apple’s Brand Lovers would expect Apple to do business.

Now, until this point, it’s probably fair to say that the vast majority of people who use and enjoy Apple products never once thought about how all of that iTech was actually made.  But if those same people were asked asked about how they thought their iPhone or iPad was made, we’d hear a range of responses based on the beliefs and assumptions that those customers have about Apple as an organization.

The Pillars of Belief articulate the beliefs that our best customers have about our company. This can be a simple but all important question, such as “Are they honest and fair? Are they the type of company I want to do business with?” Questions like these can help uncover the beliefs customers hold about your company that influences their buying decisions.

Brand Lovers strongly prefer to do business with companies whom they believe reflect their own personal belief system. They’re seeking those points of familiarity, of personal resonance, where their perception of your brand meshes closely with the cultural stories they hold most dear.

Problems arise when an organization’s performance, in any sphere of operations, gets out of alignment with the Pillars of Belief.  The Apple Brand Lover has expectations based upon their belief that Apple is a company that empowers and elevates people’s existence. The discovery that this product is made in a nightmarish sweatshop environment is out of alignment with that belief.  This disconnect introduces a tension into the customer-brand relationship; a tension that customers may resolve by abandoning their once-beloved iGear.

Apple has been making moves to remedy the supply chain issue, but as both the NY Times and Supply Chain Journal have noted, those efforts have been perceived as lacking and entirely secondary to the need to produce the new iGear as quickly and profitably as possible. Bringing Apple back into alignment with their Brand Lover’s expectations will require greater efforts to remedy existing problems, as well as increased visibility and transparency.  Only then will Apple be acting in a fashion that their Brand Lovers expect. That’s what it means to put Customers First.

February 15, 2012 by

Driving Into the Future: Rolls Royce, China, and Brand Lover Expectations

The Rolls Royce Special Edition Year of the Dragon Phantom comes in a distinct maroon color.  There are ornate golden dragon details. You can, if you can foot the bill, have your Phantom fully customized, with special embroidery on the upholstery, drinks cabinet, and on an optional picnic basket.

The price for the Year of the Dragon Phantom? $1.2 million.

Don’t bother saving your pennies, though. You can’t get one of these beautiful cars to park in your driveway.  They’ve all been sold—Rolls Royce’s entire production run—in less than 2 months.

Connecting with the Chinese Market: The Rolls Royce Approach

The success of the ultra-luxe Rolls Royce is only one of the many signs that the Chinese market should no longer be considered emerging.  It has emerged, flush with the power that relative economic stability conveys in this turbulent world.  Luxury brands are actively pursuing this market. We see Estee Lauder, Harrods, British Airways, and Hilton going to tremendous lengths to court the Chinese consumer.

What are the determinants of success here? Is there a way to tell which brands will be welcomed with open arms by the Chinese? We’re going to see these questions dominating our national discourse now, and for years to come.  To find the answers, we must begin by deconstructing the myth that there is a monolithic Chinese market.

The Chinese market is vast.  There’s no doubting that. We’re talking about 1.3 billion people, who have recently transitioned from a largely rural existence to a more urban way of life.  This has been a significant period of cultural change within China, with a tremendous impact on how individual Chinese people view themselves, each other, and the world beyond their borders.

With this change comes a great curiosity.  The Chinese, it seems, are fantastic travelers.  In the first six months of 2011, Chinese people made over 30 million overseas trips—approximately twice the number Americans are likely to make. While on these trips, the Chinese tourist is spending.  Research tells us that a Chinese tourist will spend up to 8% of their annual disposable income while on a vacation. It’s important to note what types of products, and more importantly, what types of experiences, the Chinese are buying.

This data will reveal that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to the Chinese market. Instead, the companies that will be most successful in China are those that do what dominant organizations have always done: identify the pivotal emotional and psychological factors that choose the brand’s best customers (Brand Lovers)  to favor one brand over all others, and deliver products, services, and especially experiences that satisfy the consumer’s emotional and psychological needs. Doing this allows an organization to connect quickly and meaningfully with their customer base, enhancing overall profitability and increasing market share.

This is a challenging endeavor when we attempt it with consumers who have a common cultural background with ourselves.  When you consider a consumer base that has been raised with markedly different experiences, iconography, cultural narratives, values, and mores, it becomes more complex.

Context matters.  Rolls Royce did an admirable job connecting with the Chinese marketplace, but that doesn’t mean that Toyota can start painting golden dragons on all of their Highlanders and see sales go through the roof. We need more than a surface level understanding if we’re going to reach and compete in China effectively. This will be one of the greatest challenges—and the greatest opportunities—that we ever face.

Are you ready?

February 8, 2012 by