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BJ Bueno
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.
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.
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.
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 leveraging this crash guide, they were able to shift their strategy to identify a different emotional reaction that aligns with what P&G customers were seeking—a feeling of pride, satisfaction in a job well done, and the sense of being rewarded. This approach made it 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.
Perfection 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.”
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.
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?
During the Florida Republican Primary Debate, moderator Brian Williams asked the audience to refrain from applauding or booing anything they hear the candidates say. While this is the norm for presidential debates, the request drew mixed reaction in this instance.
There are those who praised the silent format, claiming that it reduces the theatrical aspect of the debate, forcing the focus onto the actual content of the discussion. There are those who criticized the move, claiming that the audience’s free speech was being stifled. Additionally, these critics asked, isn’t the theatrical aspect of the debate part of the point?
This conversation raises larger questions. They transcend politics. The question of applause is relevant to every sphere of life, but most especially in the area of the relationship we have with our customers. We need to talk about the power of applause, the many roles applause can take, and the impact applause has on several parties: the person (or organization) being applauded, the person clapping their hands, and perhaps most important of all, those who observe the applause.
Why We Talk: Applause As Social Currency
To understand why applause is powerful, we have to take a look at the underlying psychological motivation forces that guide our behavior. We’re all influenced by these forces whether we’re aware of them or not. The need to belong to a group is very strong. Just belonging isn’t enough, however; we need to have a comfortable position in the group, one in which we understand our role, feel we receive an acceptable amount of support and validation, a place where we’re respected.
Part of the way we gain position in a group is by the exchange of what social scientists call social currency. Applause is a form of social currency. When you clap for someone, you’re signalling your approval and admiration.
This has benefits for the person being applauded. They feel better, obviously, fulfilling the esteem needs. Applause attracts attention: other people want to see what’s so interesting. Increased attention boosts social status, which can result in an extension of influence.
Clapping has its own reward. Applause can be used to declare elements of identity: you can tell who a man is by paying attention to what he claps for. To find people who like the same things you do, follow the clapping. You can gain social status by being among the first to applaud: there’s always been a special cachet associated with being in the know.
Applause strengthens the relationship between both parties. There are many benefits and expectations woven into the nuanced dance of the celebrated and the celebrator. It’s only when those expectations are understood and met that you see the applause continuing on an ongoing basis. Do a superlative job, and the applause grows in volume and intensity. It’s a cyclical pattern that begins with that first tentative clap.
Applause takes many forms. There’s hand clapping, but there’s also reviews and ratings. Any grading system is a specialized form of applause: if you meet these standards, we’re going to applaud your performance with an “A.” (Good to know if you’re in the restaurant business!) It’s important to be aware of how your best customers are likely to applaud you, as well as what type of applause they pay attention to. That awareness is fundamental to forming deep, meaningful connections with your customers.
And that’s a fact no one will debate!
Arthur Brisbane has been having a rough week. On January 12th, the NY Times‘ public editor (a position created, you may remember, in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal) used his high-profile soap box to ask the most amazing question: Should the Times be a truth vigilante? Was it incumbent on reporters, he went on to ask, to challenge public figures when their statements were less than accurate?
In itself, it’s not a particularly difficult question. Most NY Times readers answered it quickly and succinctly. No duh, the collective wisdom went. Of course it’s the NY Times‘ job to verify that the facts they print are actually facts—not politically-motivated spin, egregious falsehoods, or just plain old nonsense.
NY Times executive editor Jill Abramson joined the conversation, pointing out that fact checking is central to what journalists—and by extension, the NY Times—do.
The conversation quickly moved from there into a more complicated inquiry. NY Times readers wanted to know why Brisbane was asking the question at all. It’s impossible to get even approximately accurate numbers on reader response, as the paper closed comments within hours of the editorial posting, but it’s not hard to discern the emotional tone of the conversation. Extremely high levels of anger, hostility, and frustration are easy to see.
Where is this emotion coming from?
It’s important to note that Brisbane did more than write an uncomfortable editorial. That in itself would not have been so noteworthy. Instead, he did something far more disruptive: he questioned a fundamental aspect of the NY Times‘ mythos. The mythos is the shared cultural narrative, composed of beliefs held often unconsciously, in common by the NY Times, the NY Times readership, and the community at large.
The Mythos of the NY Times
As a legacy brand, the NY Times has a long and storied history. The “Old Gray Lady” built a reputation as the paper of record. The NY Times brand was more than credible; it was strong enough to serve an editorial role in the national conversation simply by deciding what was included in “All the news that’s fit to print.”
The NY Times has a personality, a history, a known editorial slant and, despite some very well publicized mishaps, a reputation for adhering to rigorous journalistic standards. All of these elements combine in the brand’s mythos, and all of these elements are essential. For any organization, the mythos plays a strong role in defining the brand’s appeal. When an organization’s mythos is as strong and robust as the NY Times, you play with it at your peril.
So Mr. Brisbane has learned. By questioning one of the fundamental aspects of the paper’s mythos—the story that the NY Times is a dependable source of reliable information—he has introduced a tension into the customer/brand relationship. Doubts have crept into a space reserved for certainty.
This isn’t the first time there’s been mayhem in the NY Times‘ mythos, but it’s one of the most troubling. If the leadership at the NY Times can’t believe in and articulate the fundamental aspects that define the paper as something different, special, and remarkable in the media, why should anyone else?