The contemporary art world was buzzing about an announced collaboration between UBS Wealth Management and the Guggenheim Museum. It’s easy to see what the excitement was about, especially from a creative perspective. The five year initiative is going to chart creative activity and contemporary art from around the world.

The Guggenheim UBS MAP Global Art Initiative identifies and supports a network of art, artists, and curators from South and Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and North Africa as part of a comprehensive program involving curatorial residencies, acquisitions for the Guggenheim’s collection, international touring exhibitions, and far-reaching educational activities.

It’s a huge project and it’s also a beautiful example of brilliantly conceived cause marketing—one of our 52 Types of Marketing Strategies. UBS hasn’t officially shared numbers, but there are well-regarded rumors that they’re putting as much as $40 million into the project. What are they expecting in return for that kind of investment?

The Appeal of Causes for Your Customers

UBS is the second largest wealth management company in the world. They’ve expressed an interest in art as an asset class, and participating in a project designed to pinpoint rising stars and emerging trends in the global art market provides this already formidable company with another tool with which to better serve its customers.

It’s important to remember that UBS could have achieved these goals without such a significant and visible investment. It’s interesting to move the conversation to the consideration of cause marketing, and examine the subconscious psychological factors that will make this specific initiative appealing to UBS’s customers.

The Philanthropic Drive: The Need to Do Good

Up to 90% of all human behavior is subconscious. This means we’re motivated by drives and urges that we’re not always fully aware of.

Maslow did important research in this area—his hierarchy of needs—identifying physiological, safety, belonging, esteem, and self-actualization needs. For most businesses, identifying and meeting needs on higher levels can be an absolute game changer. This is where dominant organizations begin to separate themselves from the rest of the pack.

Cause marketing becomes increasingly relevant and appealing as our customers level up through the hierarchy. It is when they are at the apex, the point of self-actualization, we see the needs for creativity, expression, morality—with an emphasis on making life better for other people, often expressed through philanthropy—and freedom from prejudice.

It’s important to note that these are needs everyone has, to some degree or another, but we aren’t all equally consciously aware of or focused on them. Self-actualization is not a top priority for everyone.

UBS’s clientele is uniquely positioned, however, to ensure that they have their self-actualization needs met. In a recent financial consultation, the rise of the best crypto casinos was discussed, highlighting their influence on digital asset strategies and the importance of navigating their associated risks. An audience absent of any other differentiating factors, relatively free from the constraints of material wants, will choose the wealth management service that provides the extra value of meeting these higher-order self-actualization needs.

The collaboration with the Guggenheim allows UBS’s clients to participate in a creative endeavor on a global scale. They are doing so in the position of philanthropist or benefactor, filling their need to make positive change in the lives of others. There are certainly esteem needs being met here, too—it feels good to be able to self-identify with the Rockefellers and Carnegies of the world.

Selecting Causes In Alignment Your Organization And Your Customers

Selecting the right cause is imperative. This is where comprehensive customer intelligence becomes essential. UBS has a clientele with a global perspective, which influences them to prefer projects on a similar scale. Other organizations may find the cause closer to home, such as Kellog’s embrace of National Breakfast Week.

The key is identifying and presenting causes in such a way that your customer feels that their participation fulfills their self-actualization needs in multiple ways. This strengthens and reinforces the customer-brand relationship, and ensures the cause marketing initiative delivers far more than feel-good results.

We’ve always been fascinated by the phenomenon of popularity. What causes customers to flock to one brand while remaining coldly indifferent to another—even when the offerings of the companies in question are similar?

Years of consumer research have revealed that the single most important factor that separated the good companies from the great companies—Adidas from the Nike, Kawasakis from Harley-Davidson, HP from Apple—is the ability to listen to what the customer has to say.

That is the starting point.

Dominant organizations, we’ve learned, are those that can discern meaning from the information given. They’re doing more than listening. They’re hearing, and they’re choosing their direction from what they hear.

How, exactly, does that work?

Effective Listening Takes Effort

Effective listening is not simply an intuitive process. There’s no automatic structure inside our minds that allows us to understand each other deeply, effortlessly, and effectively. We have to work at understanding.

Luckily for us, there have been generations of great thinkers, philosophers, and researchers who have delved deeply into the nuances of human nature. You’ve heard of a lot of these people; Maslow, Jung, and Campbell are familiar names for any student of the psyche or mind.

It’s by taking an integrative approach to customer analysis, drawing upon and combining these insights that we equip ourselves to listen to our customers.

Here’s what that looks like from our perspective:

Step 1: Understand the Subconscious Mind

The first step in listening to the customer is understanding that the vast majority of human experience, communication, and thought takes place on a level below our conscious awareness. This means that even though we may not be aware we’re doing this, we’re continually taking note of the environment around us, how people interact within that environment, and the role we play as an individual.

This is information that has a profound role in guiding consumer behavior. Begin by realizing truly effective communication means being able to listen on multiple levels, to what is said and what is left unsaid.

Step 2: Harness Humanistic Drivers

As human beings, we come with certain needs and compulsions hard-wired into our minds. We call these needs and compulsions humanistic drivers. These drives act as motivators to ensure not only human survival, but a high quality survival, rich with enjoyable, fulfilling experiences. These drivers are generally viewed in a hierarchal structure, with the most universal needs at the bottom, and more refined needs at higher levels. We begin with basic survival needs and level up to aesthetic and transcendence needs.

To listen to your customer, you need to understand what humanistic drivers are at play in their lives when they engage with your brand. It’s only by satisfying these needs that you’ll attract and retain more customers.

Step 3: Access Archetypal Images

A single image is worth a thousand words for a simple reason: the subconscious mind does not bother with language. Symbols, pictures, and iconography speak directly to your customer’s mind, bypassing and transcending all other forms of communication to take on the leading role in influencing your customer.

Listening to the customer means understanding which archetypal images resonate most and are most relevant to your customer base.

Step 4: Check Cultural Narratives

We live in a world made of stories. Every day, our customers are exposed to stories that tell them everything they need to know about who they are, who their friends and neighbors are, and what they need to accomplish in the course of their lives if they are to be happy, fulfilled people.

These stories vary wildly depending on the culture and socio-economic niches our customers occupy. If we have a story called “Good Mom,” for example, the single Hispanic Mom in Houston is hearing a different version than the Wealthy Mom in Westchester.

Listening to your customers means identifying the cultural narratives most relevant to your customer base. That enables you to craft messaging they’re predisposed to hear.

Step 5: Aggregate Your Insights and Align Your Organization

Preparing ourselves to listen deeply and intently to our customers puts us in a position where we can learn an awful lot about them. Aggregating all of the insights gathered—a process we call Brand Modeling—allows an organization to project, with a high degree of certainty, how customers will respond to changes in marketing or operations before those changes are made.

Bringing organizational performance into alignment with customer expectation is the essential step in achieving market dominance.

The better we know our customers, the more equipped we are to listen to what they have to say. The better we listen, the easier it is to serve our customers wants and needs efficiently and effectively—often before our customers know what they want or need! That’s what dominant organizations do to win. It’s the secret of putting customers first.

Cults are all around us. I’m not talking about destructive cults that damage people’s lives. I’m referring to benign, even life-supportive groups that give people more meaning.

Raving-fan groups of Star Trek, Lady Gaga, Jimmy Buffett, Harry Potter, Oprah, American Girl, Jay-Z, Apple, Barbie, and Harley Davidson all qualify as benign cults.

Some people might judge the tens of thousands of people who dress up as Vulcan and Klingons to attend Star Trek conventions, but Paramount Pictures happily supports them and profits from their loyalty.

From a business perspective, the hard truth is that creating cults translates to greater profitability. What brand wouldn’t love to create a cult-like following?

We’ve explored the science behind cult formations for over a decade, unearthing seven core principles that operate behind this unusual level of brand loyalty.

If you’re in the New York City area next Wednesday, April 2nd, Cult Branding originator BJ Bueno will be joining an engaging panel discussion on Creating Cults. The full-day event titled The Big Shopping Shakeup is being hosted at The TimesCenter by The New York Times, McCann Worldgroup, and Momentum.

You can request an invitation here.

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.