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BJ Bueno

Lady Gaga as a Role Model?

Do business leaders have a lesson to learn from Lady Gaga? At first glance, it might not appear so, but that’s until you learn that the 25 year old singer is well on her way to earning over $100 million in 2011.

Forbes Magazine recently ran a piece detailing Gaga’s multiple revenue streams. Praised for being as shrewd and decisive as she is fashion-forward and creative, Lady Gaga has done some things exceptionally well. There’s wisdom in her approach that can be emulated by business leaders across the board.

Besides, she’s a snappy dresser.

Loving Her Little Monsters

Lady Gaga has, throughout the course of her career, made an explicit point of reaching out to and celebrating her fans. Calling them her little monsters, Gaga connects with her fan base regularly, via Twitter and other social media platforms. There’s a continual emphasis on community, and when Lady Gaga talks to her fans, she makes a point of addressing them en masse.

This same sense of community, of belonging, of being part of a larger whole, is echoed in the success of some of the world’s most dominant brands. Harley Davidson, through gatherings and events of the Harley Owners Group, takes much the same approach, albeit with marginally more chrome.

Apple aficionados revel in their sense of community, defining themselves as much by their choice of technology as their worldview, personal philosophy, or profession.

Let Your Best Customers Know They’re Your Best Customers

Lady Gaga uses every touch point to let her fans know she values and appreciates them. She shouts it from the stage, she says it when she’s accepting awards, it’s written in the liner notes to her CD, and her website is loaded with messages of appreciation and gratitude. Fans are told that coming albums are polished versions of what they got to see first at live shows and concerts, before the world was watching every note. There’s an overt message of inclusiveness and celebration.

More than that, Lady Gaga’s messages are crafted and delivered in a way to resonate uniquely for her very best fans, many of whom think she’s speaking directly to them. This connection underlies their fanatical loyalty. Business leaders who want to duplicate the same type of connection with their best customers need a way to find the same point of emotional resonance, delivering the messaging that buyers will find not only compelling, but meant exclusively for them.

“I am doing this all for you,” Lady Gaga pronounces, and her fans cheer with total abandon—because they believe it.

Can your organization say the same thing to its customers? Would it be believable? Can you, right now, point to three things that your organization has done to let your best customers know not only that they’re appreciated but that they’re the core, driving force behind every aspect of what your company does?

If you’re committed to growing your business and growing your profitability, all of your marketing and branding efforts must be discovering why your best customers love you. Like Lady Gaga, you must use constant, overt appreciation and celebration of your best customers. If for no other reason, treating your best customers better than anyone else creates more people who want to be your best customers. And that’s music to anyone’s ears!

January 27, 2011 by BJ Bueno

What Makes A Subaru A Subaru

2010 was not a great year for many car manufacturers. The phrase underperforming analysist expectations has been bandied about quite a bit. Projections for the auto industry’s growth invariably include the words slow and steady.

Except, of course, for Subaru. Sales of Subaru’s offerings, which includes the Legacy, Outback, and Forester, are up over 22% in 2010. Look back two years, and it’s a staggering 50% increase in sales.

While this has been happening, the US economy has been in rough shape. People who don’t have jobs or who no longer have easy access to credit aren’t shopping for cars right now. Consumer confidence may be returning – but it’s taking its sweet time getting here.

And Subaru has their best year ever.

Not only are they having their best year ever, they’re having their best year ever while running the Share the Love campaign. In this wildly popular incentive (now on its third year) Subaru gives away $250 to one of five pre-selected charities when someone buys a new car.

Subaru’s doing extremely well with a campaign that urges people to give away money during one of the toughest recessions this nation has ever seen. In a world that seems overrun with anxiety and financial stress, Subaru is making significant strides finding people who have a need to share what wealth they have.

Most companies will tell you they’re after companies who want to save money. Subaru chose to focus on the ones who want to give it away. And look – it seems like they’re winning!

How Did They Know To Do That?

Subaru is doing what successful, dominant companies do. They’ve learned who their customer is – and not just on that easy, surface level. Demographic data provides valuable insights, to be sure – but there’s no ready way to enumerate the ranks of people who would be moved to purchase one model of car over another when the differentiating factor between the two is the chance to donate $250 to help homeless cats find new families. To get that, you have to go deeper. You have to understand on a profound and fundamental level what makes your customers tick.

Brand Modeling begins with the premise that we have to know who our customers think they are. How do they see themselves in the world? What type of person are they – and what type of person are they when they like themselves the best?

Subaru hit it out of the park when they hit upon the concept of almost effortless altruism. Even a cursory examination of their target market – or a quick conversation with one of the growing legions of Subaru loyalists, who are happy to ‘share the love’ with you – reveals a strong tendency toward social and environmental activism. These are people who like to give, who like to contribute to the world around them and leave the place better than they found it. These are traits they value highly – and when they see a car manufacturer espousing those same values?

They’ve been given a reason to buy that no other car manufacturer has given them.

That’s why Subaru has had the best sales year ever, pure and simple. They’re giving their customers what their customers value most – and a pretty good car, besides.

January 18, 2011 by BJ Bueno

The Magic of Mystery

Have you ever heard of the city of Atlantis, the Loch Ness Monster, Big Foot, or the Bermuda Triangle? Of course you have. Why? And why have so many people spent lifetimes exploring these so-called myths, trying to uncover their validity? The common factor woven through all of these stories is that they are endowed with mystery.

Mystery is a key element to all great storytelling, and people love to tell great stories. Hundreds of archaeologists have searched for the lost city of Atlantis, movies have been inspired by it, documentaries continue to be developed, and even psychics have gotten in on it. What is the mystery of their people? Of their lost culture? Of their way of living? Why are we so entranced by something that arguably does not have significant relevance to us? Although our psyche fears the unknown, that fear is balanced by the innate drive of curiosity: we want to uncover the wizard behind the curtain.

Without this element of mystery, our curiosity wanes. When you hear someone say, “I saw the ending coming,” you’re fairly sure they didn’t enjoy the movie, and odds are you probably won’t want to see it either. Mystery is the difference between a Sixth Sense and a Stir of Echoes.

The same principle holds true in business. Bad car dealerships apparently don’t understand the power of mystery. Everyone has heard the car dealership advertisement where nothing is left untold: “No credit, no problem. Every car, every model.”

Great companies, however, find ways to hide certain elements and let their customers discover them on their own. These companies show the tip of the iceberg, but their loyal customers love them because of the depths, which lie beneath the surface of the water.

Not every benefit that your company creates needs to be directly presented to your customer. Even though hiding some of your best attributes may go against conventional wisdom, by allowing your customer to discover certain positive qualities on his or her own you’ll increase the chances of the customer talking positively about you.

Mystery helps provide meaning to your brand; it allows people to learn something about your brand they didn’t know before. If we learn something new about a company that no one else knows, we are more likely to talk. However, if everyone already knows about a particular benefit, there’s no reason to talk about it. We talk and gossip about products, services, and brands because it benefits us; we gain status by providing new information. This basic, biologically-rooted drive helps explain why people naturally talk about that which is mysterious and unknown.

Just look at the word-of-mouth sensation that was (and still is) generated by Dan Brown’s best-seller The Da Vinci Code. This fictional story is chock-full of mystery and controversial talking points. The book tapped into a lot of unknowns and fed our innate drive for curiosity.

Pepsi introduced a dose of mystery when they launched Mountain Dew Code Red. They didn’t start with a full-force, our-ads-everywhere-you-look style campaign, or one anywhere close to it. Instead, they introduced the product into convenience stores, a primary destination for their teenager market, And 1 Mix Tape Tour, and the X Games, allowing teenagers to discover the product for themselves, in their own environment. And, they shared it with their friends, who didn’t get there first.

There are two things sure to kill word-of-mouth: (1) everyone knowing the secret or (2) no one caring about the secret. An almost cliché example would be the popular book/film The Secret, which again plays on the basic human need of curiosity. What is the Secret? Because the movie seems to have a secret that appears to be useful and beneficial, people continue to talk about it and we hear about it in the media. If the film was without substance (i.e., no secret), then people wouldn’t have even started talking. Because there was something of substance, Oprah and her weekly 49 million viewers spent a show talking about the practical applications of “The Secret.”

Three Ways to Create Mystery:

So what are some ways you can add mystery to your brand’s efforts?

Don’t say every benefit about your business in every business communication. If everyone already knows everything about you, they won’t have anything to tell their friends that their friends don’t already know, aside from how you may not have fully met their expectations.
Break a standard rule in your industry. Think back to the standard airline attire that flight attendants used to wear. Then Southwest Airlines breaks the rule and let’s their flight attendants wear shorts, a trademark feature of the airlines.
Steal one from your customers. Listen in to what your customers are suggesting and surprise them by actually doing it.

So if you want your customers to talk about you, surprise them. Delight them. Let them discover you on a totally new level. In essence, give your customers a reason to talk about you.

Learn more about the principle of surprise and the other six principles of Talk in Why We Talk: The Truth Behind Word-of-Mouth.

March 27, 2009 by BJ Bueno

Beware of “Word-Of-Mouth Marketer”

Talk is cheap. Gossip is priceless. And while manipulated talk can be useful if you’re selling a film or a novelty that doesn’t need any staying power, it’s practically worthless if you’re hoping to build a brand.

Yet Word-of-Mouth (WOM) Marketing has become all the rage, with “water- cooler talk” becoming a barometer companies use to judge the success of their marketing and advertising campaigns. What were our numbers yesterday? How can we improve them today? If we can’t meet the short-term goals, who cares about the future? Unfortunately, these companies haven’t stopped to consider how driving short-term numbers may be killing their opportunity for long-term success.

Word-of-mouth is like any other form of media. Television is favored for its combination of sight and sound. Billboards are revered for their stopping power, print for its permanency. All forms of media, including word-of-mouth, disseminate information. Word-of-mouth is different from all other forms of media, however, because it is owned by the consumer. They control its content.

Some word-of-mouth marketers claim you benefit from word-of-mouth during specific windows of opportunity. That’s nonsense. Promotions and events have windows; brands have permanence. As long as consumers are benefiting from a relevant experience with the brand, they will talk. Consumers don’t need to be given a marketing cue card; they need an environment that allows them to draw their own conclusions and to define their own experience.

The problem with modern marketing is its overwhelming urge to quantify everything. If it can be measured, you can charge for it, and yes, size does matter: the bigger the measurable impact, the larger the monetary compensation for generating the result. The newest playground for metric maniacs is word-of-mouth marketing. The Word-of-Mouth Marketing Association declared in 2005 that it was now using word-of-mouth units to measure the effect of word-of-mouth on ROI. This is further proof that, to its own detriment, marketing has evolved into an industry more focused on making short-term money than on making long-term sense.

Numerous books on poker have been written to teach players the best ways to behave in certain situations, based on available statistics. However, watch any game and you’ll see that even experts stray from these rules. Why? Because the players in the game aren’t playing statistics, they’re playing other people. The best way to play isn’t always revealed by statistics.

Statistics reveal a glimpse of where people are, but they don’t tell you where people are going or how they will get there. It’s one thing to know what movies are making the most money, but that’s not the same as predicting which ones are going to make the most money. If someone could forecast that, the movie studios would be a lot happier.

Look at what’s happening: Big brands are paying big money to create “buzz” about their products. These companies then insist they don’t pay people to talk, which technically is true—they only give their “buzz” agents free products, coupons, and “points” if they do their homework and report back to the mother ship.

What do you think happens when the buzz campaign ends? Do you really think consumers keep yakking about a product when the incentive to do so disappears? Worse yet, the next product sample shows up in the mail and they’re asked to buzz on a new client’s behalf. That’s not pure word-of-mouth. It’s promotion attempting to use word-of-mouth as a media vehicle, which is no different than using radio, television, or direct mail. Ultimately, it runs into a dead end and is enormously risky for companies wanting to build lasting brands.

Promoting products is a totally different discipline than creating brands. True word-of-mouth is totally different than word-of-mouth marketing. Marketers are in control of communicating a message, but consumers are in control of building brands.

So pick your poison. If you want to sell product in the short term and aren’t worried about building a brand, if you’ve exhausted every other medium known to mankind, pick up the phone and call any of the self-proclaimed word-of-mouth marketers and buzz practitioners. They’ve got the metrics on their side.

But be cautioned: Once you pollute the word-of-mouth pipeline, there’s no turning back. If you’re marketing movies, selling novelties or liquidating books, have at it—these things are not likely to become brands and you will not need the power of word-of-mouth in its purest form. If you are relying on the consumer to turn you into a brand that is embraced by a legion of loyal evangelists, however, don’t pollute the best marketing tool ever to roam God’s green earth.

March 27, 2009 by BJ Bueno

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