Build Audiences, Not Megaphones

Your new product or service is great. You want to tell people. Why not shout it as loudly as you can to as many many people as you can?

Because, until you have an audience, you have to work exponentially harder to make your message matter. This means more time, more money, and more resources.

An audience gives you their attention, instead of you having to capture it.

Attention is given, not purchased. Yet, that’s just what many businesses do: throw ad dollars at a problem to try and increase awareness and intent to purchase.

Instead of trying to grab attention, make your customers realize that you’re worthy of their attention. This isn’t something that can happen overnight, but it is something you can build towards, rather than just hoping it will eventually happen.

Building an audience starts with consistently helping people solve meaningful problems—small or large—in their lives. And, it is strengthened by building brand communities—a co-authored experience between you and your customers.

Are you solving meaningful problems? Are you helping build brand communities?

February 2, 2018 by

Consulting To Discover Ultimate Profitability

Dominant organizations occupy positions of ultimate profitability.  They do this by providing their customers what they want, even before their customers know they want it.  Whenever Apple unveils their latest iGadget, they already have legions of excited customers eager to buy.

How do they do that?  Those points of ultimate profitability are clearly out there. Apple, Harley-Davidson, and Ikea have all found them. They pointed their telescopes into the night sky of customer behavior and discovered their habitable planets, those consumer communities where their brands can live and thrive.

The tools and techniques that connect astronomers and astronauts with the final frontier can be used to connect your organization with tomorrow’s Brand Lovers.

The result? Organizations that use modeling to identify who their most profitable customers are, what they want to buy, and how they want to buy it enjoy increased—even dominant—market share, greater customer loyalty, and enhanced profitability. Knowing which way to point your telescope is the single most critical step in ensuring business success.

What insights will keep your brand relevant in the future?

January 26, 2018 by

Serve a Social Purpose

The letter BlackRock’s Larry Fink sent CEOs highlights ideas that are familiar to our readers. Here’s the insight:

“Society is demanding that companies, both public and private, serve a social purpose. To prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society.”

But here is the twist, if you want to improve the organization, you have to develop yourself.

Chief executives invest an average of 30 minutes in personal development each day. The goal is to lift the organization; this is the drive of relatedness, or what authors like Dan Pink and Tony Hsieh have called purpose.

This universal need to connect and care for others doesn’t just motivate individuals—it translates to bottom-line profits too.

Wharton organizational psychologist Adam Grant ran an experiment with call center employees who were tasked with calling people to ask for donations. He randomly separated them into three groups. Each group had the same conditions except for a five-minute story each group read before their shift.

The first group read stories from other call center agents about how their job helped teach them transferable sales skills (a personal benefit).

The second group read stories from university alumni who benefitted from the donations raised by the call center and how the scholarships helped them (a purpose that connected the agents with something greater than themselves).

The third group read stories that had nothing to do with personal gain or purpose (the control group).

Grant couldn’t believe the results of this study.

He replicated it five more times to be sure: while the personal benefit group showed no change in their performance, the purpose group more than doubled their dollars raised.

The call center employees in the purpose group couldn’t identify what exactly was driving their behavior.

They merely doubled their productivity!

Could helping others and making a difference in people’s lives be a factor in motivating people to higher performance?

It certainly appears so.

January 19, 2018 by

Trust is built in unscripted moments

Building a culture of trust is mostly one-to-one in nature.

Over time, simple interactions accumulate and help create rapport and friendship, which are critical ingredients for a high-performing workplace.

Try to be present in the small moments; this will lay the foundation for a more significant purpose—to create a culture built on trusting your colleagues.

Are you paying attention to those small moments where you can affirm your interest in those you work with?

January 12, 2018 by

Dare To Dream

You have to live life to the limit, not according to each day but according to its depth. One does not have to do what comes next if one feels a greater affinity with that which happens later, at a remove, even in a remote distance. One may dream while others are saviors if these dreams are more real to oneself than reality and more necessary than bread. In a word: one ought to turn the most extreme possibility inside oneself into the measure for one’s life, for our life is vast and can accommodate as much future as we are able to carry.
Ranier Maria Rilke, Letters on Life

January 1: It’s time to set those goals and resolutions again.

The goals we set for ourselves and our businesses at the beginning of the year usually don’t look any further than the end of the year. These types of goals are good, but they’re not great: they don’t provide us any long-term guidance. They don’t necessarily help us achieve our life’s goals.

This year, when thinking about your goals and resolutions, dare to dream. Dream what you want your life and your business to look like in the future. Ultimately, think about what will make you, your customers, and your employees happy.

Once you know what you want the future to look like, build your yearly goals and resolutions around it.

What do you want the future to look like? What concrete goals can you achieve this year that will push towards your ultimate goals and vision?

January 5, 2018 by

Here’s the best of 2017

As the end of the year quickly approaches, we want to say thank you for being our reader. You represent the best in your industry and we look forward to bringing you insights on building brands that both employees and customers love in the coming year.

Below we curated the most popular, shared, and discussed articles from the Cult Branding blog in 2017. Please enjoy these three fantastic blog posts as a way to reflect as we enter 2018.

We wish you and your family a happy, healthy, and fantastic New Year.

Happy Holidays!

The Cult Branding Team

Bringing Your Brand Image To Life

Why do images have so much power?

Our logos and marks are symbols. Symbols are triggers of archetypal images—energy patterns that rest in the unconscious. These primordial images are not personal to each but are aspects of the “collective” of all of us. Read more about bringing your brand image to life.

Cultivate Workplace Passion

In today’s rapidly changing business environment, you need passionate people because such people can drive extreme and sustained performance improvement.

What does a passionate person look like? Find out more about creating a passion-driven workplace.

The Downfall of Sears: Why You Need To Compete In The Future, Not The Present

Anyone that’s done any retail research in the last decade will have noticed the growing importance consumers place on convenience. The rising importance of convenience isn’t a new trend—marketing scholar Eugene J. Kelley wrote about it in 1958. But, what is new—and what will continue to be new—is the ways retailers can satisfy it. Learn more about the importance of convenience and how to compete in the future.

December 29, 2017 by

Beware The Deadly Customer

Many businesses suffer from catering to deadly customers.

Deadly customers aren’t customers that hate you. They like you and probably account for a large portion of both your current base and target market. Chances are that, collectively, they purchase a lot from you. Playing to deadly customers may seem lucrative: there’s a lot of them out there and they likely contribute a significant portion of your bottom line. And, they’re easy to make happy.

The problem is: they don’t push your business forward.

The deadly customer is happy with the status quo—they don’t ask for anything new; in fact, they may not want anything new. They may make you think you’re doing better than you actually are. Serving the deadly customer encourages stagnation instead of innovation. By focusing on the deadly customer, you hand an unfair advantage to your competition in the future.

Are you catering to deadly customers?

December 22, 2017 by

Apple’s Archetype

Archetypes are at the core of effective marketing. They provide the most powerful way to attract the right customers. But archetypes are often misunderstood. This week, we examine the archetypal power of one of the world’s strongest brands.
Continue Reading

December 8, 2017 by

Building Brands Through Archetypes

 

Cult Branding was founded on Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs.

Maslow’s hierarchy offers a simple framework for understanding consumer behavior: Humans have inherent needs (physiological, safety, love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization) that they try to fulfill. And, consumer behavior is motivated by the fulfillment of some combination of these needs.

Although Maslow’s hierarchy offers significant explanatory power, it does not provide a complete explanation of brand loyalty.

A more comprehensive understanding of branding involves placing Maslow’s work in the context of the works of biologist Antonio Damasio, psychiatrist Carl Jung, and psychologist Ivan Pavlov.

Don’t worry, it’s not as complicated as it reads. We created a presentation so you can absorb the info quickly. Check out our Archetypal Branding presentation.

What is your companies primary archetype?

December 1, 2017 by

52 Marketing Strategies To Inspire Strategic Thinkers

You know it, it takes a lot of time and effort to develop and maintain marketing that resonates with your audience. As a strategic thinker, however, the development of cult brand takes even more consideration.

After all, we’re always searching for ways to gain the oh-so-important competitive edge. If you find yourself in that situation, then you may want to check out these fifty-two marketing strategies that will ignite your strategic thinking, and with over 1 million views for our SlideShare, we know that these marketing tactics will spark your creative energy.

Onwards!

November 24, 2017 by