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How to Create Powerful Brand Rituals

“Before I can tell you the story, you have to try the shot.” – Fred Mossler Co-Founder Zappos.

You mean the one with the scorpion in it?

“Yeah and you should shoot it together, you definitely don’t want to eat the scorpion alone.” – Fred

“BJ, The Scorpion Shot is so popular, that we are now vertically integrating scorpions into our business model.” – Tony Hsieh Zappos CEO

We are celebrating Nacho Daddy’s 5 Year Anniversary in Las Vegas.

Fascinated by all things culture, I am naturally intrigued by the story and the sense of community that taking this shot provides.

Gulp! It’s gone, scorpion and all.

Soon after we are sitting in the middle of T-Mobile Arena where the biggest show in Vegas is about to go off, the Knights take the ice, and the crowd goes wild. Maybe it’s the tequila or the scorpion, but I am vibrating even though I have no clue about the game of hockey, but I understand people can feel the energy and it is electric.

Brand Rituals are All Around Us

Separating Oreo’s and dunking it in milk, or Breaking a KitKat into halves and eating it on a break, Popping the cap of the Pringles tube or if you want to get fancy The Stella Artois’ 9-step pouring ritual. These brand rituals play a crucial role in building a sense of belonging and community around the brands.

Rituals offer consumers the chance to interact with a brand. Because people want more than just consumption – they appreciate experiences.

Over the years I have observed different strategies that work towards creating powerful and emotional experiences. Here are a few questions to consider when building your plan:

Can you create and experience specific to your audience?

How can it be specific to your brand?

Ritualize Your Brand

Our job is to explore the elements of your brand that lend themselves to becoming ritualized. How might you make your product or service part of the daily lives of your customers? Is it even possible?

How might you use brand rituals to create a greater sense of “team” and “family” with your employees, and to fuel their passions for supporting the brand?

Creating a ritual around your brand, whether it’s focused internally or externally, is one of the most useful tools you have to engage people and it’s one of the critical components necessary for building a successful cult brand.

Onward!

November 2, 2018 by

How Mindfulness Improves the Workplace

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

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

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

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

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

October 26, 2018 by

Narrow Your Brand Focus

A brand becomes stronger when you narrow the focus.
Al Ries and Laura Ries, The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding.

Keeping a brand on course is one of the most critical and difficult challenges executives face. A narrow brand focus will help keep your brand aligned with your core business and in tune with your best customers. Below are four questions that can help your organization stay focused on what is most important for the brand.

Why do we exist?

Beyond making money, it is essential to know what purpose your brand serves. Knowing what problems your brand helps solve for its customers is key to building a strong, profitable brand.

What values and beliefs unify our employees and our customers?

Recruiting a high-performance team is vital to your organization’s ability to deliver on its brand promise. Knowing the core values that resonate deep within your organization and with your Brand Lovers is essential for attracting passionate employees and creating customers who love your brand. The more you understand what your brand stands for, the better you will be at drawing in people who love working for you and enjoy doing business with you.

How do we measure success?

If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there. Having a brand promise of what success looks like allows your organization to remain focus on the big picture.

What is holding us back?

Making progress toward the brand promise of a brand is not easy. It does not come without sacrifice and a lot of hard work. To be successful, you have to let go of the norms and embrace discomfort. The solutions that worked to get the brand where it is today will not ensure success in the future.

Now that you’re in the final stretch of 2018, have you done a thorough, top-to-bottom progress evaluation on your brand? Where are the big misses? What’s behind or underneath the numbers? What needs to be done differently?

Which of these challenges will you take into consideration as you plan for 2019?  Pick one or two to bring to your next executive session.

Onward!

October 19, 2018 by

We Need Time with Wonder

How often do you daydream or even allow yourself to get bored?

It turns out there’s a lot of value in letting our minds wander. Daniel Goleman calls this “open awareness” and says when our minds wander we’re free to constructively envision our future—essential for planning and goal setting, and we can reflect on our thoughts and actions—central in making new and creative associations between ideas.

Our brains aren’t designed to go nonstop. When we drop into neutral, ideas flow on their own, memories sort themselves out, and we give ourselves a chance to rejuvenate. If we eliminate this natural rhythm, we won’t be more productive. And we won’t get ahead. We’ll start falling behind.

What could happen to your creativity, energy, and attitude if you took the time to wonder?

October 12, 2018 by

Staying Relevant Requires Learning

“I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.” Albert Einstein

Continuously learning is how you will stay relevant at any level of an organization. Consider stepping outside of your comfort zone, diversifying your areas of knowledge and establishing rituals and habits that support learning.

Lifelong learning has long been understood to be a critical success factor. But today, it’s taken on even greater importance. The pace of change continues to accelerate, and the level of complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty means that what you knew yesterday may be irrelevant today. The half-life of technical skills continues to shrink.

Try the following actions to enhance your growth mindset:

Cultivate Curiosity

Curiosity is a spirit, intention, and skill we can bring to our work, interactions with others and the world in general. It involves a genuine inquisitiveness, desire to understand, and willingness to step into a void with nothing more than questions and a receptive mind.

Stay Social

Traditional learning models rooted in the educational system rely heavily on individual research and study. A growth mindset, however, is based in large part on learning through and with others. Intentional connections offer a range of benefits, including the sharing of knowledge, insights, and experience. Consider the power of dialogue in your business to uncover new ideas.

Illuminate the NOW

While deliberate, scheduled efforts to learn are essential, it’s equally important to recognize that learning frequently doesn’t occur on a schedule. Life offers a range of moment-by-moment opportunities to gain experience, tap wisdom, push boundaries and try new approaches. A learning mindset means being open to and ready for these ad-hoc possibilities. It means mining the routine for richness.

Investing in learning today can help address current day-to-day pressures while building long-term, a sustainable capacity that will contribute to future effectiveness and satisfaction — at work and beyond.

October 5, 2018 by

How to Create a Vision and Build a Roadmap for Success

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where—“ said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“—so long as I get somewhere,’”Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Organizations that last know where they’re going. They know how they want people to perceive their business and they know what they want to achieve.

In short, they have a strong vision.

Creating a strong vision is a key to long-term success: it gives you clarity on what you should and shouldn’t do for the continuing health and prosperity of the company.

The vision, however, is only one of the keys to success, you must also have a purpose that drives the vision; and, you must have missions, strategies, and tactics to achieve your vision.

Continue Reading

September 22, 2018 by

Embrace Discomfort, Create Change

If something is comfortable, it won’t lead to progress.

Growth was seen as an endless series of daily choices and decisions in each of which one can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.Abraham H. Maslow1

If you’re comfortable, you’re not growing. It’s the uncomfortable things that make us grow.

The same is true of business: companies that embrace discomfort as a regular part of business life are more likely to achieve their goals and move closer and closer to fulfilling their company vision than those that don’t.

Companies that stay comfortable—which feels great in the moment—end up losing in the long run, which doesn’t feel so great.

Discomfort is a prerequisite for change.

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August 31, 2018 by

Love The Customers You Have

You’re a better designer if you love the people you’re designing for.
Fred Dust, IDEO Partner, quoted in Bernadette Jiwa’s Meaningful

I’m surprised how many companies don’t love their customers.

They talk about being customer-centric or even customer-obsessed, but they don’t love the customer they have. Instead, they fall in love with the customer they want.

Their customers aren’t cool enough. They aren’t young enough. They’re too weird.

I’ve heard these comments in the back of interview rooms. I’ve seen the look of disappointment in people’s faces when we’ve delivered presentations, looks that clearly said: “That shouldn’t be my customer; my customer should be….”

These companies are all driven by a faulty line of thinking: focusing on what the people are like instead of what the people need—what tensions in their lives need to be solved.

Great brands solve needs; that’s how they attract customers.

A brand that doesn’t solve a need—a tension in customers’ lives—is a weak brand.

Instead of trying to understand their customers and figure out their tensions, these companies focus on trying to attract the types of customers they want. They attempt to create surface-level appeal instead of the type of appeal that drives customer decision-making: appealing to higher human needs.

I think this is one of the reasons you see companies constantly changing their advertising or trying to reinvent themselves: desperate attempts to attract the types of people they want to love them.

No one falls in love with a desperate person. No customer will love a desperate company.

Love the customer you have, not the one you want. Make it about them. Solve their tensions. That’s the only way they’ll love you back.

August 24, 2018 by

Build A Campfire: How To Succeed On Social Media

Today the campfire is called a computer or a television … Drama goes back to the beginning of civilization around the campfire, where the tribe comes together, and they say, “My God, did you see what blah blah did with that mountain lion today?” And the other guy says, “I’ll tell you one better than that.” … [W}e tell stories that unite the tribe. We reinforce our tribal unity. We say, this is how we do things here.
David Mamet, MasterClass.com

If the computer is the new campfire, social media is the biggest campfire ever built.

Most companies invest a lot of money in social media because they know they have to. But, few know what to do with it.
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August 17, 2018 by

Delivering Magic

Magic has long held a special place in the nation’s history. American magicians perform in arenas, theaters, and even backyards. No matter how big or small, a magic show will always inspire wonder.

Today as a member of the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee, I am honored that the United States Postal Service delivered these Forever stamps.

This reminds me, let’s learn some magic for your brand…

Brands are a unique combination of a set of ideas and inanimate objects that serve as an ideal platform for relationships. When people feel bound to a group or community of shared beliefs around a brand where at least part of their identity is tied to the group, it’s a phenomenon known as participation mystique.

These brands spark magical participation with their customers; they embrace a particular way of being, aligned to a specific set of beliefs.

When brands attract customers to come together something magical happens, now let’s make that happen for you and your team.

Creating Magic: A mini workshop

To help you think more magical thoughts try these juxtapositions:

If my company was Zappos how would we WOW our customers?

If our company was Disney how would we give our customers a magical day?

If our brand was Houdini what problems can I help my customers escape?

By thinking like other great magical brands, you will discover magic of your own.

August 3, 2018 by