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Articles filed in: Marketing
Relevance Is The New Remarkable
I will never see the taxi driver who picked me up from JFK again. He doesn’t have to worry that he tried to overcharge me and he doesn’t care if it’s me, or one of a hundred other visitors in the back seat tomorrow. Uber, on the other hand, knows when I last booked a car with them. They know who drove me, exactly how long it took, where he dropped me off and most importantly how I felt when I left the car. Uber remembers more about where I was, when than I do myself.
When I return to the same hotel reception for the third time in 18 months, they ask me again if this is my first stay with them. How is it possible in 2014 that the receptionist doesn’t know? She tells me not to forget the ‘wine hour’ with a knowing smile. Free wine for an hour every night before dinner is obviously the highlight of many a trip. So why am I expecting her to know that I don’t drink wine and to understand that her comment is completely irrelevant to me? My Airbnb host meets my oldest son so that she can give him the keys we need to her apartment when we arrive in Sydney. They have a cup of tea together, and she finds out that we are into good coffee and might use the local gym, so she plots the great coffee places on a map, stocks up on Nespresso pods and her gym membership card is there for us when we arrive, just in case we feel like using it.
I can roam the floors of Barnes & Noble for hours on end, and no assistant will make a recommendation to me because they have no clue what I might be interested in. Amazon’s whole business is built on understanding exactly what I want and giving me as many shortcuts to that as possible.
When I was growing up, our local butcher knew which cuts of meat my mother would buy on any given day. He knew when we had visitors from England and when money was tight because of how my mother’s shopping habits changed. He took that kind of information in so that he could use it to serve her better and he did that for every one of his customers. Ironically progress, growth and innovation led us not to expect that same level of personalised service for a couple of decades. Now technology is helping to take us back, but it’s the humanity that drives the entrepreneurs and business owners who build the technology that enables meaningful experiences and not their platforms and functionality that is driving this new wave of relevance.
Technology is not just taking us forward—it’s taking us back. It’s giving us back the ability to better understand our customers so that we can be not only useful, but also meaningful to the people we serve. Upstarts like Uber and Airbnb are stealing a march on their competitors not because they have information about us, but because of how they intentionally build organisations that use that information to create better experiences—ones that make us feel good and give us a story to tell.
What we crave more than the commodity we think we are paying for is to be understood. What we want more than being driven to our destination, a comfortable bed for the night, or even a book we can get our teeth into, is to really be seen. What people want more than responsive organisations is personal relevance. The value isn’t just in the data we collect. It’s how we use it to make people’s lives better that counts.
And the flip side is you don’t always need an app for that.
Image by ChrisJL.
Empathy Is The Killer App
One of the reasons that upstart companies like GoPro have been able to steel a march on their much better resourced competitors like Sony, has been their ability and efforts to develop products for their customers by truly understanding who those customers are and what they want.
It’s not possible to create products, services or innovations that fly without understanding people first. Google can leverage access to all the money, data and expertise in the world, but the company has struggled to make Google Glass resonate because of lack of empathy, according to one of the product’s first evangelists Robert Scoble, who recently stopped wearing his because of how Glass wearers are perceived. Now ironically, one of Google’s biggest challenges is teaching Glass users how to be empathetic while they are wearing it.
It turns out that there really is no substitute for standing in your customer’s shoes. You can have the best product in the world, but if people don’t buy into the story you’ve got a uphill struggle on your hands.
Image by Erica Joy.
Who Decides What Wins?
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
The app developer will spend hundreds of man hours writing lines of perfect code in the hope of making his final product the best in the world. The cafe owner could pull thousands of shots in order to create the perfect cup every time. The entrepreneur might invest months agonising over design decisions to launch with a more compelling website. The author can labour for years crafting perfect sentences that will surely make his book worthy of a slot on the bestseller list.
And yet—they have less control over what the people who buy their end product believe, feel, think and say than they would like to imagine. When Cadbury ‘improved’ the shape of their chocolate bars (a decision a behemoth brand would not take or implement lightly), customers pushed back.
We might know that our product really is the best in the world, but it isn’t us who gets to decide. What we do and what we ask customers to believe is only part of the story. It’s humbling to realise that the people we serve, not our technologists, publishers, innovators, designers or marketing departments decide what’s worthy and what wins.
Image by Joe.
How To Write Your Mission Statement And 20 Great Mission Statements To Inspire You
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Have you ever noticed how we tie ourselves up in knots and overcomplicate things when we put our business hats on? Your mission statement doesn’t need to be long and complex, it’s simply a promise—your statement of intention.
A mission statement needs to clarify the answers to the following two questions:
What do you do? What happens because you exist?
As you can see from the examples of mission statements below you don’t need to be long winded, often a single sentence is enough to say what you need to say.
20 GREAT MISSION STATEMENTS
WARBY PARKER
To create boutique-quality, classically crafted eyewear at a revolutionary price point.
TED.COM
Spread ideas.
INSTAGRAM
To capture and share the world’s moments.
PATAGONIA
Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.
TWITTER
Instantly connect people everywhere to what’s most important to them.
UBER
Make transportation as reliable as running water, everywhere, for everyone.
ADOBE
Move the web forward and give web designers and developers the best tools and services in the world.
GOOGLE
Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
GO PRO
To help people capture and share their lives’ most meaningful experiences with others—to celebrate them together.
STARBUCKS
Inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighbourhood at a time.
NEST
To keep people comfortable in their homes while helping them save energy,
AMAZON
To be Earth’s most customer-centric company.
NIKE
To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.
AIRBNB
To build a community-driven hospitality company.
INNOCENT JUICES
We’re here to make it easy for people to do themselves some good (whilst making it taste nice too).
LEGO
Inspire and develop the builders of tomorrow.
FACEBOOK
To make the world more open and connected.
JAMIE OLIVER
Help as many people as possible eat better food and live a better life.
VIRGIN ATLANTIC
To embrace the human spirit and let it fly.
OCADO
To establish the first new supermarket in a generation.
So, why does your business exist?
Image by Bjørnar E.
Marketing Is About Giving Your Customers A Story To Tell
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
We’ve been stuck in a time warp for the past fifty years with a marketing model designed to sell things to our grandparents. A model that’s kept media buyers in jobs and many media outlets afloat. Marketing used to be what we told our customers to believe about us. What matters more now is how your customers perceive themselves and how they want to express that.
It’s not good enough to start with the product anymore. We have to start with a greater understanding of the people we serve.
Image by Bart Heird
What Is A Brand Story?
filed in Marketing, Storytelling
Brand story has become the new black of marketing. Once upon a time you had to have a campaign or ‘the line’, now you’ve got to have a story. The word story causes confusion because we think of stories being told and heard, a bit like other traditional advertising messages. But brand stories are experienced and felt. When someone hands you an Apple product they don’t have to say a word—you just know. And yes, the glass staircase and the capital ‘g’ Geniuses are part of the story too.
So, what is a brand story?
“A brand story is more than a narrative. The story goes beyond the copy on your website, the text in a brochure, or the presentation used to pitch to investors. Your story isn’t just what you tell people. It’s what they believe about you based on the signals your brand sends. The story is a complete picture made up of facts, feelings, and interpretations, which means that part of your story isn’t even told by you.
Everything you do, from the colours and texture of your packaging to the staff you hire, is part of your brand story, and every element of it should reflect the truth about your brand back to your audience.
If you want to build a successful, sustainable business, a brand that will garner loyalty and, if you’re lucky, become loved, you have to start with your story.”
From The Fortune Cookie Principle
I thought it would be helpful to create a graphic that illustrates the 20 keys to a brand story which I outlined in The Fortune Cookie Principle. Perhaps I should have included this in the book—but here it is for you now, better late than never. If you’d like to print the PDF you can download that here 20 Keys To A Brand Story.
Now go bring your story to life!
How Disruptive Innovations Happen At The Edges
Think of any business that’s succeeded over the past two decades and especially the upstarts that have left incumbent brands on the back foot. Kodak vs. Instagram, Sony vs. Go Pro, Hilton vs. Airbnb, cab companies vs. Uber, banks vs. Paypal, Borders vs Amazon, Blockbuster vs. Netflix, Chubb vs. Canary and on and on and on.
Now think about how they innovated and their path to market.
What you’ll notice is that world changing innovation stems from understanding the problem that needs to be solved for a particular group of people. The best innovations don’t create a need or a want—they tap into a need or a want that already exists, one that hasn’t yet been fulfilled.
Great innovation, and thus products and services people care about, lies at the intersection of the customer’s latent desire and your solution. Innovation then is not always about giving people a slightly better version of what they’ve got, or have demonstrated that they need, even if that is what you’re equipped to deliver and how you profit today. Sometimes it’s about rewriting the future for a customer who doesn’t know what will matter to him in five years time, in a market that doesn’t yet exist.
Image by Dave.
The Purpose Of Brand Storytelling
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Every September while my son was growing up there was a ritual to be upheld. Of course we had the usual beginning of school year things to do and a checklist to follow, but what Adam really cared about more than all of that, was choosing the football boots he would wear for that season. Football is more than a sport in England, it’s a badge of belonging. It’s also a shortcut to mattering to your peers. The boots are a part of the story the young player tells himself about what he’s setting out to achieve that season and how he’s going to matter.
I’m not sure how or when the adidas Predator brand of football boots became part of Adam’s story, but these were the boots he rationalised were ‘the best’ and only they in turn would make him be ‘his best’. He never, ever wore any other football boots. These weren’t just boots though, they were months of hopes and dreams about goals that might be scored, or games that could be won with a single accurate cross, wrapped up in red leather with three sliver stripes down the side.
It’s easy to get caught up in the ‘how to’ of telling your brand story and even easier still to believe that the primary reason to invest in telling it is to sell more. But brand storytelling should primarily be the driver of participation, not sales. The way we enable our customers to attach meaning to our products and the reason they want to belong.
Because when people feel like they belong—that they are part of the brand story and can own it, they become loyal customers. It turns out that the best brands in the world are a set of co-dependent shared stories, a two way experience between the customer and the brand.
The brands we really love are the ones that create difference for us, they make us feel like we belong, that we are part of their story and they are part of ours. Just like adidas became part of my son’s story when he was growing up.
Image Tito Perez.
3 Essential Marketing Questions
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
As marketers we invest a great deal of time and money working out how to tell the story of our products. But if we can agree that marketing is giving people something to talk about, why aren’t we using resources in equal measure to do that. What if we began with a new set of questions?
3 Essential Marketing Questions
1. Who exactly do we want talking about our product or service?
2. What do we want them to say?
3. How will we make sure it happens?
If this sound simple and obvious, the fourth question is—why haven’t we done it?
Image by Agnieszka Bernacka.
Thinking About Marketing As A Strategy For Growth Not Just Sales
Mostly we market to sell more.
The restaurant owner who tells his staff to remember to ‘push drinks and bottled water’ is marketing for increased sales today.
The alternative is to be the marketer who bakes growth into his business by delighting customers, giving them a story they want to tell (and a way to share it).
The modern marketers at technology startups call this growth hacking. Growth hackers optimise their businesses to acquire new customers by first delighting one customer and then making it easy for that customer to share the story with their friends. They win by delivering on a promise, by connecting customers and having a plan not just to sell more to each customer today, but to give every person more to talk about and an easy way to do that.
Last year hotels in New York lost out on a million booked nights because of Airbnb. The hotel’s strategy has been been to maximise revenue from each captive guest, while Airbnb’s has been to facilitate a real travel experience one guest, one host at a time.
It turns out that growth hacking is really the practice of creating and leveraging word of mouth with intention and it’s not confined to technology businesses. When we market for long term growth and not just sales we adopt a different posture. We’re in the business of doing the right thing by every customer over time and we begin each day by asking a different set of questions.
The salesperson asks, “How much can I sell?”
The gifted modern marketer asks, “How much difference can I create?”
Image by Lady K.