Itâs common to talk about the customer journey: the important steps the customer takes when interacting with your company. But, many companies forget to pay attention to the journey their business is on. And, itâs through this journey that we can not only become heroes to our customers but also help them become the heroes in their own journeys.
At the center of the most successful brands that we have worked with is a management style that can be described as servant leadership. This is a people-first approach.
But can you build your brand this way in a competitive industry?
As the year comes to a close, we'd like to thank all of you for continuing to support our blog with your readership.
We'd especially like to thank our friends that contributed blogs in the past year: Tyler Williams, Lead Link of Brand Aura at Zappos, wrote about what it takes to build a great brand without engaging in practices that would disappoint your mom; John Bunch, Lead Organizational Designer at Zappos, wrote about the journey to Zappos' 20th birthday this year and what the future looks like for the company; and Greg Breeding, President of Journey Group, wrote about what it took to create the Love Stamp for the United States Postal Service.
Taking into consideration opens, shares, and clicks, below are our five most popular blogs of 2019.
We wish you and your family a happy, healthy, and fantastic New Year.
BJ, Salim, and Aaron
The relationship between Cult Brands and their Brand Lovers is mutually beneficial.
Brand Lovers enjoy a real sense of satisfaction, accomplishment, and belonging from the relationship. Their self-image is enhanced significantly: these customers feel better about themselvesâand they feel strongly that others view them more positivelyâbecause of the brands they openly embrace.
Few established organizations set aside time to come up with game-changing ideas. Most meetings are designed to produce incremental changes or strategic shifts.
Rarely do you find an established organization trying to create a future that is radically different than what exists as their current day-to-day reality.
This is why most organizations are blindsided by disruptive competition: they couldnât see them coming because they didnât come from the competition they were monitoring.
When we coach clients on their branding and marketing strategies, we like to marry best practices with customer data. Although some clients want us to use our research methods to do a deep dive into their customers, most companies want us to use their existing dataâeither collected by themselves or an outside companyâas the source of customer knowledge. Over the years, I've noticed some common pitfalls in the ways customer insights are collected and used across companies of all types and sizes.
Here are five ways to avoid some of the most common ones.
When Aeschines spoke, they said,âHow well he speaks.â But when Demosthene spoke, they said, âLet us march against Philip.âDavid Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising
âDamn, Daniel! Back at it again with the white Vans.â
Remember that meme? It took the internet by storm in February 2016. What started on February 15th as a video on Twitter of Josh Holtz commenting on his friend Daniel Laraâs clothing skyrocketed Josh and Daniel to recognition, landing them on Ellen DeGeneres and being crowned one of the 30 most influential people on the internet by Time Magazine.[1. Time Staff, âThe 30 Most Influential People on the Internet,â Time.com, 2016.]
Seeing its popularity and its ability to break through the clutter, many brands started appropriating the meme: Clorox suggested to âget back at it with Cloroxâ and Axe attempted to link its popularity to their #findyourmagic hashtag.
As in the case with the Damn Daniel memes, companies often try to hijack memes in an effort to gain borrowed visibility. But, all too often they release their memes after popularity has peaked or they misunderstand the meme.[2. Adam Pierno, âHow Brands Can Use Memes to Connect With Consumers in a New Way," AdWeek.com, 2018.] [3. RenĂ©e Millette, â15 Times Big Brands Did Memes and It Got Weird AF,â TheThings.com, 2017.]
I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.Gilbert K. Chesterton, A Short History of England
As we get ready to celebrate Thanksgiving next week in the US, reflecting on what weâre thankful and grateful for over the last year is the norm.
But, itâs important to regularly reflect on gratitude and thankfulness as individuals and as organizations. Too often we take employees and customers for granted. Yet, it is those employees and customers that we owe our success to.
What is a good advertisement? An advertisement which pleases you because of its style, or an advertisement which sells the most? They are seldom the same. Go through a magazine and pick out the advertisements you like best. You will probably pick those with beautiful illustrations, or clever copy. You forget to ask yourself whether your favorite advertisements would make you want to buy the product.David Ogilvy, Ogilvy on Advertising
Does this sound familiar: you hire an agency for a campaign, but what you get back doesnât fully capture your brand or it isnât in line with what you thought you made clear during preliminary meetings? And, you end up running the ad anyway because thereâs no time or budget to do anything else.
This isn't out of the ordinary.
Many agencies try to convince their clients that they have unique expertise and creativity that the client doesnât have access to without them.
Yet everyone should be cautious not to make something impossible that nature would not allow, unless it would be that one wanted to make a dream work, in which case one may mix together every kind of creature.Albrecht DĂŒrer, Four Books on Proportion[1. Translation from: Peter Parshall, "Graphic Knowledge: Albrecht DĂŒrer and the imagination," The Art Bulletin, 2013.]
When people think about creativity, they typically think of it in terms of three Ps: Person, Problem, and Product. A person solves a problem in a new way and creates a new product.
The problem with thinking about creativity in this way is that it ignores the fourth and most important P: the Process.