Discovering Your Big Idea

Big ideas, when they stick, can guide an organization to an extraordinary future. It helps you determine when to move and where. It provides a shared vision that creates cohesion within your organization, which can lead to superior execution over time.

To discover or refine your big idea, consider the following questions:

End Picture: What will your business look like when it’s done?

Passion: What does your organization love doing? What are your collective strengths (based on employee passion, past performance, and available resources)?

Leadership: What will your organization be a leader in? What are you committed to being the best in the world at?

Impact: Where can your enterprise have the most significant impact? Who are you committed to best serving?

As with any discovery process, be sure to start with a Beginner’s Mind. Pretend that you don’t know the answers.

Be open-minded.

Be receptive to any idea, even the most outrageous ones.

Stay curious my friends.

March 9, 2018 by

Know Thy Customer

This could be called the first law of Cult Branding.

Know thy Customer better than they know themselves.

This could be called the Secret Law of Cult Branding.

Customers Don’t Know Why They Buy.

This might be deemed the problem with the conventional market analysis.

Don’t Ask Why, Observe!

If customers don’t know why they buy then how do we discover why? Jane Goodall became a primate expert. She permanently moved in proximity with a troupe of chimpanzees and lived with them for years. She watched chimps grow up, grow old and die. She unraveled the vibrant social life of chimpanzees and how it affected their behavior. Humans are vastly more complicated than chimpanzees. It takes more than an anthropology study to grasp the mechanisms at play when it comes to human behavior.

Most of the Human Experience is Below Conscious Radar.

The Landscape of the Subconscious is much, much bigger than the Conscious realm. Human behavior is a dynamic interplay of the conscious/subconscious. This is one critical reason that Cult Branding has become well versed in the science of the subconscious.

Human Behavior is Primarily Social.

The evolution of human beings is fundamentally the story of social systems.   Virtually all human behavior is socially driven or has social implications.

Where We Live Matters, and it is Changing!

Cult Branding understands that human behavior is complex and highly reactive. They also know that the world is in a state of flux and the old rules don’t apply. To understand the customer, you have to look at the environment they operate in.

Why is Cult Branding Different?

To know thy customer requires a profound grasp of human behavior, the subconscious mind as well as the marketplace. Taking this information and extrapolating the more profound memes and themes of the mind of your customer and using it to create a more compelling customer experience is what Cult Branding is all about.

Do you Know Thy Customer?

February 23, 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.

February 16, 2018 by

It May Be Time To Do Less

Are you busy? Isn’t that a stupid question to ask? Of course you are. You have a lot to do and it all NEEDS to get done.

That’s the way it seems.

But, truthfully, a lot of what you’re doing is probably getting in the way of what really NEEDS to get done. And, you may be so busy that you haven’t stepped back to distinguish between what truly NEEDS to get done what you believe needs to get done.

We constantly get projects—large and small—and rarely give them the evaluation that our sanity and our business’s future deserve.

Look at everything you’re doing and ask: does it push you closer to your ultimate vision? Also ask: if you didn’t do it could you still get to your ultimate vision. If it fails one of these tests, why are are you doing it? The reason should be better than because you “have to”—although that’s often the reason most of us do the things we do at work.

Eliminating everything that isn’t essential to achieving your ultimate vision gives you the time to focus on everything that is essential to taking a step toward that goal.

And, it’s likely to cut down on the uber-bane of every business person: meetings. Instead of having meetings for updates or just because that’s the “culture” of the business—I’m sure you know that’s a bad culture to have—only schedule meetings that are required to make a step toward the ultimate vision. If a meeting doesn’t have an essential goal that’s clear and achievable at the meeting, then that meeting only hurts the company by taking people’s attention away from what really matters.

If it’s not essential, it’s not moving you forward. And, it’s probably driving you crazy.

February 9, 2018 by

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