Abraham Maslow, one of the founding fathers of humanistic psychology, taught us that human beings have a higher, transcendent nature, which he visualized most eloquently in his Hierarchy of Human Needs.

This simple pyramid gives us a framework from which to understand the essence of Cult Brands and how they inspire their most loyal and devoted followers.

The bottom four layers of the pyramid are what Maslow called Deficiency needs or D-needs. Nothing is felt if these needs are met, but in their absence, anxiety ensues.

Intrinsic Values of Being

When the top level of self-actualization is reached, D-needs are transcended, and Being values (or B-values) are realized. These “intrinsic values of Being” when fulfilled, motivate and inspire humans to grow and reach their fullest potential.

B-values includes:

Simply stated, individuals who are more self-actualized tend to embrace more B-values than those suspended at lower levels.

How Cult Brands Celebrate B-Values

Just like self-actualized individuals, Cult Brands are those self-realized companies that encompass more B-values than other businesses. These brands galvanize others towards greater fulfillment, wholeness, and integrity.

Let’s see how Cult Brands actually do it.

The principles of Cult Branding tell us that consumers want to be part of a group that’s different. Here, Star Trek, Apple, and Volkswagen lead the pack, in their wholehearted embrace of the B-value of uniqueness. These brands are not afraid to go against conventional wisdom, and celebrate their differences.

Cult Brand loyalists happily congregate together on common ground, proudly declaring their  “be weird together, be weird no more” mantra.

When Cult Brands listen to the choirs, and take consumer feedback to heart, they uphold the B-values of truth and perfection.

Apple’s commitment to their Mac User Groups serves as the perfect example. By interacting with these groups and constantly integrating their feedback, Apple honors and ultimately relies on their Brand Lover. Through this dynamic process of uncovering the truth about consumers’ experiences, they continually strive for perfection in their offerings.

What other Cult Brand than Jimmy Buffett, the King of Fun, and his loyal following of Parrot Heads could better personify the B-values of aliveness and playfulness? Cult Brands like Star Trek and Harley Davidson are also aligned with these B-values, in that they create consumer communities that celebrate lifestyles filled with youthful fantasy and adventure.

Cult Brands promote personal freedom and draw power from their enemies. No other Cult Brand has accomplished this with more grace, style, and ease than Oprah. Oprah drew power from her backwater competitors and aligned herself with more positive, uplifting stories rather than succumb to the ubiquitous drama of catfights and bar brawls.

Oprah wanted to showcase people at their best, unlike other talk show hosts who exposed the darkest sides of human behavior. Her intention to do good in the world is magnetic and irresistible, as evidenced by her loyal fans and ever-expanding media companies.

Cult Brands like Oprah, through their devotion to charitable causes, their mission to improve people’s lives, and their commitment to promote freedom personify the B-values of goodness, beauty, and justice.

Improving the Lives of Your Customers

In more simple terms, Cult Brands want to improve the lives of others. By harnessing the power and magnetism of B-values, these brands tap into our innate reservoirs of self-actualization.

We are drawn to Cult Brands because they make us feel good about ourselves, but on a deeper level, they lift us higher up the hierarchy to illuminate our Being needs. This drive towards self-actualization is intrinsic to our nature. Maslow understood it, and Cult Brands do too.

Now it’s your turn: How can your business tap into B-values to improve the lives of your customers? What are you doing to express these values? What can you be doing differently?

Perhaps the most important thing to take away from Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs is his realization that all human beings start fulfilling their needs at the bottom levels of the pyramid.

In short, we fill our lower physiological needs first. Needs like safety, esteem, and social interaction are insignificant when one’s drive is to survive.

What is important to keep in mind is that these needs do not emerge in an all-or-none fashion; the majority of people in modern society have all of their needs partially met, with the lower needs having a greater level of fulfillment than the higher needs.

The higher needs are, therefore, greater generators of desire than the lower needs. As Maslow noted, “Man is a perpetually wanting animal.”

The Drivers of Human Behavior

This quick refresher on Maslow and his Hierarchy of Human Needs is helpful because many of Maslow’s findings reveal what makes companies with Cult Brands so successful.

Maslow’s writings expose the underlying drivers of human behavior and decision-making. He never mentions “brand loyalty” in his books, but his Hierarchy of Human Needs and concepts like self-actualization are key to understanding why customers consistently choose one brand over another and why they build strong relationships with particular brands.

Moving Beyond Feature-Benefits

The makers of Cult Brands aren’t like mainstream marketers whose focus is largely on selling “feature-benefits” from the bottom of the pyramid to their customers. Rather, Cult Branders enjoy incredible loyalty because they work hard to connect with their customers at the very highest levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy.

Cult Brands all have products and services with great “feature-benefits,” but their products and services also fulfill the higher-level needs of esteem, social interaction, and self-actualization found at the top of Maslow’s Hierarchy.

The Key to Customer Loyalty

So, why is fulfilling higher-level needs so integral to building customer loyalty? The answer: higher-level needs influence future human behavior much more than lower-level needs.

Businesses that can fulfill human needs on the higher levels of the hierarchy become irreplaceable in the mind of their customers. This is the key to customer loyalty.

True customer loyalty is not only about getting a customer to consistently choose your brand over another—it’s for that same customer to always believe (and tell the world) that your brand has no equal!

As Peter Drucker noted, marketing and innovation are the two primary drivers of any business. Developing marketing intelligence is vital for organizational leadership.

Knowing the various marketing weapons at your disposal will help you explore new ways to approach your customers.

We put together a list of 52 different types of marketing strategies you can use to build awareness and attract new customers.

Take a look at this deck to spark new ideas for your marketing efforts >>

In our visit to the National Retail Federation’s Big Show last month, we had the opportunity to hear Ginni Rometty, the CEO of IBM, discuss the technological trends that are shaping the future of retail.

Thanks to the explosion of new data, the business landscape is shifting. Rometty sees data as the world’s vast new natural resource. She describes how big data and changing expectations are intersecting with a confluence of major technological shifts—cloud computing, analytics, social, and mobile—to fundamentally reshape commerce.

Following Rometty’s remarks, she and Terry Lundgren, Chairman, President, and CEO of Macy’s, engage in an in-depth dialogue on the implications of these shifts for retailers everywhere with Macys promo code.

If you’re interested, you can watch this thought-provoking talk here.

You understand that the game of modern business isn’t won by capturing the next transaction. You’re passed that. Now you’re learning how to relate to your customers.

Look at any of your personal relationships to see how difficult relating to another human being can be. Here, you’re tasked with relating to a customer—someone you don’t know and probably will never know personally. This challenge is so formidable it dissuades many business leaders from even trying.

The task of relating is made easier by knowledge and understanding. You may not get to meet all of your customers face to face, but the better you understand who they are, the easier it is to relate to them through every interaction they have with your brand.

So we begin our journey with customer intelligence. We often start in the obvious places: market and consumer research.

Understanding the Outer Life of Your Customers

We acquire a lot of data on our customers’ purchasing behavior: their likes and dislikes, their social groups, their web habits, and a host of other easily trackable forms of “big data.” We come to know their age, income level, level of education, occupation, marital status, how many kids they have, and where they go to dinner on Friday nights.

All of this information is useful, and in the hands of a competent marketer, this data can be used to help win market share in the short term. But does it really help you relate to your customers? Is it enough to forge a meaningful bond? Unlikely.

Customer intelligence starts with knowledge of our customers’ outer worlds (all of the metrics listed above). But forming a meaningful relationship with our customers require us to go deeper—to probe the hearts and minds of the people we are trying to serve.

Exploring Your Customers’ Subconscious Mind

True “consumer insights” reveal what’s below the surface. To explore the inner lives of our customers we must ask a different set of questions, including:

• How do our customers feel about us?

• What do they believe we stand for?

• What do they value above all else?

• What are their hopes and dreams?

• What are the dominant images they associate with us?

• What needs are they striving to meet? How can we help them meet those needs?

• What tensions are they wrestling with each day? How can we help resolve these tensions?

Try answering these questions for yourself and for someone close to you to appreciate the complexities of our inner lives. These are not easy questions to answer and yet this is the task of today’s inspired business leaders looking to know their customers.

Forging into this arena is certainly not for everyone. You might have to let go of many cherished beliefs about your customers. You might come to realize how little you know about the people who give your business existence—the very lifeblood of your enterprise.

But if you’re brave, if you dare to discover, and if you’re excited about the possibilities this new customer intelligence can bring to your business, give us a ring. We love helping businesses see their customers as human beings rather than statistics. It’s why we exist to serve you.

Building analytic muscle to learn about your customers is a top priority for today’s outperforming chief executives. Big data is an unquestionably powerful tool to improve your knowledge about your customers.

Many executives are talking about “big data” these days. Another popular term associated with big data is “consumer insights.” The implication seems to be that statistics garnered through massive consumer data will yield consumer insights. Not necessarily.

Genuine insight is a deep, intuitive understanding into a person or group of people. IBM’s SPSS and other exciting technologies provide us with tremendous analytical prowess. But they don’t tap into our intuition. And they can’t interpret the meaning behind the numbers.

To truly unearth consumer insights we must go deeper than analytical tools can go. We must access our shared humanity—our deeper nature—that binds us together as human beings. We must endeavor to peer into the hearts, minds, and souls of our customers if we are to mine for authentic consumer insights.

I know, this might sound a little too “soft” or abstract; it might sound like a lot of work too. But it’s meaningful work that translates to hard results. It helps us connect more deeply with the lifeblood of our businesses—our cherished customers. It can also influence our company’s culture as it too is made up of human beings with dreams, feelings, desires, and needs.

There’s another unspoken reward that comes from taking a humanistic approach to customer intelligence: In endeavoring to understand your customers as individual human beings you may learn a thing or two about yourself.

Analytics is a tool, not an answer. Get genuinely curious about learning about your customers. Connect with our shared humanity. It will bring your consumer insights to life.

Couldn’t make it to this year’s National Retail Federation’s Big Show in New York City? No problem.

The keynote opened with SAP’s SVP of Retail Business Unit Lori Mitchell-Keller’s discussion of the millennials and how the new socially-conscious consumer has been wired since birth and is comfortably connected through social media.

In their keynote address, marketing strategist BJ Bueno explains the vital role core values plays in today’s business. He highlights three humanistic core values that are trending high among successful enterprises like Google, Coca-Cola, and many others: compassion, joy, and optimism.

Life is good CEO Bert Jacobs shares the inspiring story of how his $100 million lifestyle brand came into being and the ten core values that drive their business.

Watch BJ Bueno and Bert Jacob’s keynote address on NRF’s website >>

Recorded at Retail’s BIG Show on January 14, 2014.

In walking the massive floors of the National Retail Federation’s Big Show in Jacob Javits Center last week, we noticed the same themes and language echoed throughout the great halls of exhibitors serving the retail industry: analytics, big data, and other research tools—services and technologies for improving your customer intelligence in an effort to better compete and serve your customers.

With retail’s major shift toward statistical analysis and improvement of data-gathering technologies is important, its easy to arrive at the belief that all business decisions need not be made, but rather analyzed.

This important shift toward objective data and statistical analysis isn’t just happening in the retail industry but virtually every field of knowledge and inquiry. And this, ultimately, is a good thing. The more reliable objective data we have, the more accurate knowledge we have. The more accurate data CEOs have about their customers, their competition, and the overall marketplace, the better informed decisions they can make.

Armed with big data, chief executives have a powerful form of intelligence to access and mine in their pursuit of market dominance, brand loyalty, improved ROI, and greater profitability. What better way to become obsessed and knowledgeable about your customers than to have access to reports that highlight customer interests, activities, perceptions, behaviors, and beliefs associated with your brand.

The Dark Side of Consumer Research

All good things, however, can be taken to extremes. Objective data and statistics is one form of information. It is the kind of information technology can provide as well as the kind our logical, rational minds love. But we (and our customers) are not purely rational beings.

Humans often behave irrationally and any customer intelligence that doesn’t address our irrational side is incomplete and can lead us astray. And with raw analytics alone it is difficult to penetrate our customer’s psyche, to mine the unconscious motivations and less rational aspects of our customers.

This means that we can’t exclusively rely on technology to inform us about customers and markets. We need to tap into our innate human faculties as well.

The Missing Ingredient in Consumer Intelligence

Intuition and feelings are doorways to our customer’s irrational perspectives. When we learn to access these functions in ourselves, big data and market research can become an empowering servant instead of a dominating master.

Big data needs human assistance. We must learn to access our left brain (logic and reason) AND our right brain (intuition and non-rational) in our interpretation of consumer data.

Then, magic can happen. Statistics begin to dance and our customers come to life; our understanding of them (and perhaps even ourselves) finds new ground.

The Future of Market Research

Our experience shows us that CEOs who adopt a more humanistic understanding of their customers will become better leaders of their organizations and will be better equipped to interpret the massive amount of data companies will continue to generate about their customers.

These well-informed chief executives will lead their business to market dominance by better addressing the needs of their customers and their employees. They will be able to make superior decisions and spot consumer trends before their competitors.

We’ll discuss ways humanistic psychology suggests we can open up to these non-rational functions in an upcoming post.