Video: Chrysler Creates a Common Enemy

Posted on April 3, 2011 by Scott Gould

Never underestimate the power of having an enemy to unite people. And certainly never underestimate how much the underdog brings people together.

Chrysler did this really well at the Super Bowl with this now famous advert featuring Eminem. Watch it.

One commentator on this video, seeing that 1,586 people had disliked the video, wrote “1,586 people have no soul”. It’s such an evocative video, and this is because it unites people in their oppression, their story of “going to hell and back”. Being the underdog and having a battle to fight unites us.

The key line? When discussing the stories being written about by them “in the newspaper by people who haven’t even been here and don’t know what we’re capable of.”

Boom. That’s it. If you ever want to get people’s juices running, use the word we and get the infamous they to question our abilities.

I knew this would inspire you today because you’re also someone telling a compelling story, and we need you not to quit telling it. And I say this because the Friends here know that we’re in the habit of creating stories when others say we can’t.

(See what I just did

How to make Meaning

Posted on March 3, 2011 by Scott Gould

Yesterday we asked whether our brands are making meaning after examining the progression of brands from functional, to aspirational, and now to meaningful.

Today: how on earth do you make a brand meaningful?

Guy Kawasaki, when he discusses the Art of Innovation (exceptional videos – 10 minutes long), says that you must make meaning with your offering. He explains that products that go deeper than entertainment and touch at purpose at the ones who are making meaning – that their existence in the life of their customer is one that helps the customer define their world.

There are two core parts here for me that I would say we could distill “making meaning” down to:

Help people understand and define their life through your offering. Deliver offerings that empower people to make sense of where they are today, and where they were yesterday.
Move beyond entertainment to purpose. Provide people with direction, help them to discover their reason for being, where they want to be tomorrow. Make your brand something that people can derive identity from.

So we’ve got yesterday and today, and tomorrow. Understanding yesterday and today, and directing tomorrow. I believe that offerings and brands that do this are meaningful to me on the most fundamental level.

For example, my church, The River, is a meaningful brand to our community. We help people through teaching resources understand where they are and where they’ve come from. And our events, our community, and our strong emphasis on life application and living life on purpose provides direction.

Labs

So how do we go to the lab and make meaning? If our two key words are understanding and directing, then we must take what our offering is and adjust it to provide these two. Some ideas:

Deliver tools that help people categorise themselves. This categorisation helps them define the world within them. Note that this isn’t boxing people in. For example, the book “Now Discover Your Strengths” by Markus Buckingham was meaningful to me because the large set of skills that it assigns you with via the online test helps you better understand yourself. The label increases self awareness with restricting me. Apple do this with their product types – “Are you a MacBook Air or a MacBook Pro – or are you an iPod Nano?”
Deliver tools that people can build on. The idea of building platform is what Apple did with the App Store. Because of it, other developers have an income, therefore Apple is meaningful to them. Guardian also did the same with their Open API.
Deliver tools that help people define the world around them. The power of faith is that it gives people a decision making framework through which they can understand their life. Decisions are powerful and when we help people make them and define their worlds, we are meaningful to them. Consider here how powerful youth tribes are in that they provide slang that defines what is part of their tribe, and what isn’t. That slangs defines their world.
Deliver tools that help people direct their life. Or perhaps more pertinently, helps people make their next step. If your offering is making the next step for someone easier, then you matter to them. I’m doing courses with my wife on how to breastfeed, change nappies, give birth, etc, and the fact that these courses are preparing us and helping us make decisions about our life is meaningful to me. They are helping direct us.
Deliver tools that people can use to help others. The power that I’ve seen in affiliate and networking marketing programs is how they give their distributors all the tools in the world to get others on board. And guess what? That type of assistance directs people to do it more, and the original distributor draws value and direction out of this.

More?

For a more in-depth and academic approach to making meaning, read this article that I found on “developing meaningful brands“.

Otherwise, I’d like to hear your thoughts: how do YOU make meaning?

Your Brand: Is it Making Meaning?

Posted on March 2, 2011 by Scott Gould

Most brands don’t compel people. Today we’re going to look at shift in the consumer mindset that demands that brands who want to go somewhere must compel them.

Robin Wight said in his insight at Like Minds that brands exist to make the purchasing process easier. This was an eye opener for me because I realised how it is indeed the case that a brand reduces my need for original critical thought and makes me rely on what Robert Cialdini calls fixed action patterns – fixed ways of reacting based on certain mental shortcuts.

Certainly for the majority of brands that you’ll see at a supermarket, that’s their role. But what most of the Friends reading this will be in the business of doing is moving beyond brands that merely make it easier for us to purchase or align with. We are interested in making maning, in aspiration, in purpose, in challenge. Our ideal brand is one that people derive identity from.

The brand on three levels

In an exceptional video entitled Rethinking the Idea of the Brand, Umair Haque talks about three levels of brand. (Thanks to Brian Driggs for emailing it to me.)

Functional brands seek to differentiate one product from another by targeting a particular demographic. This is what Umair describes as the base level of branding.
Aspiration brands emerged as status symbols: I don’t buy a Samsung MP3 player, I buy an iPod. This is where Umair says we’ve been for the last 3 decades.
Meaningful brands are, paraphrasing Umair, where a brand has a tangible output on the consumer’s life in terms that matter for them. He says furthermore than meaningful brands are the opposite of egocentric demand, which he calls alocentric. The general thrust is that a meaningful brand contributes to the human race, not just me as an individual.

(Side note for another discussion another day: I would understand Umair’s description of meaningful brands to be highly linked to community and we could also label them as social brands.)

Overcoming indifference with purpose

The power of the meaningful brand is that is overcomes indifference. With functional and aspiration brands saturating markets left, right and centre, a meaningful brand taps into something deeper than a brand meeting my immediate functional need.

In actual fact, I see meaningful brands as tapping into Maslow‘s top hierarchy of self-actualisation - or as I say – purpose.

Recently I was talking to someone who unites a community of people around an event. They wanted to know where to take the event, and my response was that they needed to go beyond entertainment (uniting people around a good time) and instead unite people around purpose. In other words, make meaning by helping the community make meaning.

As a church pastor, community builder, mentor and with Like Minds, I’ve always seen the direct benefit of basing the orgnisations purpose in the helping of others find their purpose.

How can you be indifferent to something that has helped further you on your quest for purpose and meaning?

Making your brand meaningful

We’ve covered enough ground for today, so tomorrow we’ll discuss just exactly how we make a brand meaningful. And what we need to discuss that is your feedback on this post now. The conversation has begun – now add your thoughts:

How do you move a brand from aspirational to meaningful?
What the meaningful brands in your life?

Want a great experience? Create an alternate reality

Posted on January 26, 2011 by Scott Gould

It was many years ago when I first heard the statement “People don’t remember what was said, they remember how they felt”, and since then I’ve continually found how true this statement is.

Whether it’s the tiny experience of meeting someone for the first time, or the heights of being immersed in three hours of theatre, we have come to know that these experiences don’t just happen and require design and preparation in order to increase their effectiveness.

But just how do you create a great experience?

Whilst we could talk through framework after framework, I have found the simplest way to begin creating great experiences is to create alternate realities.

This is what Pine and Gilmore say in their seminal book, The Experience Economy, when describing what an experience as an economic offering is. And I think an alternate reality is a pretty good description, because when it comes to an experience:

we want something out of the ordinary
we want something exceptional
we want to experience what we normally don’t

The easiest way to get an overall perspective to this is delivering an alternative reality. For instance, if you want to deliver really great customer service experience, then ask yourself how do you create an alternate reality when it comes to service and support? Well, if most service and support is reactive, than one way to create an alternative reality is to have proactive support. Apple, when creating their Genius Bars, or the Geek Squad and their PC repair stations, have both created alternate realities to the usual “send your PC off to be fixed and see it again in 6 weeks” of customer service, and instead made 24 hour turnarounds in your local store.

Breaking down how we create an alternate reality is another thing, but the general mindset is very useful for beginning to build experiences that are remarkable and in turn, are talked about.

The Application Lab

What help do you need to apply this to your situation? Ask and let the Friends here answer it for you.

Photo thanks to Andy Castro

Are You That Person? And What To Do About It

Posted on January 4, 2011 by Scott Gould

I’ll admit it if you will – many times I’ve been the person you don’t want to meet at the cocktail party.

You know, that person, the one who talks at you the whole time about their job, dropping names like they are going out of fashion with an exciting story that always trumps anything anyone else says, and finally topping it off by getting your name wrong, if they are able to remember any of it that is!

Whilst most people who are reading this are now recalling the last experience they had with that person themselves, it might well be the case that – shock, horror – you are that person to those around you at cocktails, and the digital drink that we Twitter.

Are You That Klingon?

As I sit here, I’m watching an episode of Star Trek in which a Klingon is asked to be the first officer on the Enterprise for an intergalactic exchange programme. (It is related – stick with me!) The tension and the moral of the story is that the Klingon assumes that is disciplinarian leadership style is just what the humans on the Enterprise need, and thus struggles to adapt himself in a way that will get the crew behind him. In short, he’s expecting his environment to adapt to him, without any thought to adapting himself to his environment.

So let me make my not so subtle point: when you don’t adapt to your relational environment, you’re that person. Some call it having a low EQ, some low emotional intelligence, others self-consumed, and others just call it anti-social or plain due.

Whether online or offline, when someone disproportionately talks or tweets about themselves it leaves them appearing as self-centered. Yesterday we discussed the “horns and halos principle” in which the tiny sample that someone sees of you in 140 characters or with a handshake is used to ‘fill in the blanks’ and give your horns or halos based on the sample.

Our Self-Centric World

If I try to work out the reasons why I’ve been that person, especially online, it’s because we’re so crowded that we feel we have to beat our chests in order to get heard. And in our content-driven online world, it is the easiest thing to get sucked into the gospel of me, me, me, me.

But when we feel we have to ‘big ourselves up’, what is it we are really trying to achieve? It’s actually an incredible simple human motivation that we all share and is right for us to feel:

How To Really Be Remebered

If we really want to leave an impression – whether it’s a re-visit to our website, another tweet to engage us, or a phone call after you left someone your number – the trick is in engaging the feelings of the beholder.

Making someone feel special is the most powerful way to have someone remember you, and when it comes to making someone feel special, it’s not even necessary to speak a word. I’ll tell you how I’ve learned how to do it:

To make people feel valued, talk to them about themselves.

Use Twitter to ask people questions and find out more about them. Ask people what their interests and passions are rather than just what their jobs are.
Use Facebook to ask questions that people can comment on, allowing people to engage with each other and add to each other’s ideas.
At dinner and cocktail parties, seek to be interested rather than interesting. Hint: people remember you better if they find out what you do by asking you, rather than you volunteering the information yourself.
Use your blog to add value to people rather than just push content. The master of this is Robin Dickinson, whose Sharewords post and the comments that follow are a revelation in actually helping people.

Your Leading Thoughts

I’m keen to hear from you: how have you learnt to not be that person? Do you have any tips to share with the rest of us? (We could all use your help!)

Scott

Why I Don’t Complain On Twitter, And Why You Could

Posted on January 3, 2011 by Scott Gould

It’s hard to resist having a good moan on Twitter, especially when something or someone isn’t doing their job and we hope that our moaning, combined with our perceived influence, will get us special attention.

The trouble is that your complaining, whilst seemingly resolving your current short term frustration, might be causing you long term brand damage.

The reason why lies in understanding how people form impressions of you – both at a first glance, and also over time.

Horns and Halos

In First Impressions (aff link), Ann Demararis and Valerie White discuss the “horns and halos effect”, which is a phenomena related to when people first meet you. A first impression is a retained remembrance of a small sample, a tiny percentage of what a person is really like. However it’s the only sample that someone has and they use to to fill in the blanks and the rest of my life to created this remembrance.

Whilst I have 27 years of life, when I meet someone I might only be able to impart 2 minutes and 27 seconds of who I am – say 5% of who I am – and the psychological fact is that this short representation will be used by the person I am meeting to inform their opinion of the other 95% of my life.

If this 5% contains negative traits – such as being angry, distracted, moody, or a complainer – the person will add “horns” to you and consider those traits to be a small sample of a greater amount that is is present in your life and might take you for someone who is far moody than you are, simply because you, for example, had just heard some bad news. Likewise, if someone encounters positive traits such as appreciation, smiling, encouragement, then they will add “halos” to you and imagine you to be an all round nice person – possible even nicer than you actually are!

Complainers and their Horns

The problem with complainers online is that in just 140 characters they create an impression that they are a complaining person. Even the fact that I am calling them “complainers” now shows that they have put themselves in a category of people who predictably moan about a lot, even though they might have only complained once on Twitter or Facebook.

This is particularly important if you represent a brand. I have tried to hold the conviction myself that I will not be a complainer online because if I do, I am representing Like Minds and therefore make it to be a complaining organisation. I am also quick to ask people not to use the #likeminds hashtag to complain on (of course, if they want to, they will), but through my relationship with everyone I encourage them not to in order to keep our hashtag and thus our brand complainer-free.

Complaining also says “I’m not in control”, a brand value that none of us would want to have associated with us. I’ll be honest, when I see people complain, I normally make a decision to step back from them because complainers are not normally the type of people who solve problems, they are the ones who wallow in them.

The Two Times When Complaining is Human

It’s important to not overlook the fact that there is a side to complaining which is human. There are times when a complaint can benefit your brand. In fact, there are two approaches:

The first is when we are frustrated with a situation that it can endear us to our community because it revelas our wounds and shows we aren’t perfect.

What is essential here is that you must acknowledge the complaint in such a way that you safe proof yourself from being labelled as a complainer. So rather than saying, “OMG Vodafone Network down again. When will they learn #FAIL”, one should rather say “I hate to moan, but Vodafone’s network being done is really delaying me today.”

Someone who does this well is Chris Brogan. If you follow Chris on Facebook (not Twitter) you’ll sometimes see him vent off on a particular struggle, but done in a way that endears his community to him and presents him as a non-complainer who is frustrated at this moment in time and needs help.

The second time when complaining is beneficial for your brand is if you polarize people based on your position. Take my friend Olivier Blanchard who regularly calls people out. When he tweets or writes a blog post that complains about a situation, he does so in a polarising nature that means you love him or hate him, and this means those who follow him do so more vehemently.

The safety catch here is that you must offer solutions to what you are complaining about. Olivier is an incredibly intelligent person and his passion overflows in calling people out – but his intelligence always wins because he paints the picture of how things should be instead. This means he is being objective and offering solutions, this demonstrating his expertise. Be warned however this polarising people is tricky business and not always the best long term strategy.

Your Leading Thoughts

Are you a complainer? Have you ever considered that the digital impression you are leaving is giving your horns rather than halos?
Do you have a brand strategy on complaining and using it to your advantage?

Photo courtesy of B Rosen

Video: Steve Jobs on Apple and Value, in 1997

Posted on January 2, 2011 by Scott Gould

Has your brand lost power in an over-saturated market? With thanks to Trey Pennington, this short little video from Steve Jobs back in 1997 provides exceptional insight into using values in marketing to multiple the power of your brand.

I found it’s been valuable for me to watch this because in some instances when we talk so much about content online we forget about the power that design has. I’m always telling people that design matters but feel I’ve lost a bit of way, so I needed this:

If you can’t see the above video, click here, or watch directly on YouTube.

This video has reminded me to focus on the gut emotion that people feel when they see the logo of Like Minds or The River Church, or the feeling that they will feel when they hear those words mentioned.

Associating Value

The issue is that it’s noisy, and perhaps we are thinking, “If only I were Apple, I could have time to influence people”, but even Steve doesn’t take this for granted. Steve’s opening paragraph in particular which sets out the dilemma:

“This is a very complicated world, it’s a very noisy world. We’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is.”

So surely the process begins with asking, “What are the values that the market associates with our brand name and logo?” I wonder, how many of us know the three values that our brand must communicate? Do we have that kind of crystal clarity and diamond focus about WHY we are and WHO we are?

Likewise, do we know what we are not? When we ran the Like Minds Summit with Visit Finland last year (the tourist board of Finland), in creating their social media strategy we were given their brand book that said what Finland WAS and what Finland WASN’T. It was a great help, and certainly clarified the direction that we must not go in with reagards to a social media strategy. However it lacked the final piece:

Knowing your benefits. I mean, do we really know what value we add? What is the product that people immediately associate with us? (Apple = iPhone, Microsoft = Windows) And do we know how that offering benefits them at the lowest level. I’m not talking about some crazy concoction of “it empowers people to do this and this and realise this”, I mean the once, two word benefit that cuts through the crap. The trouble that we had with Visit Finland was finding what their primary offering is, considering New York = Empire State Building, Paris = Eiffel Tower and so on. Without knowing this, you’re stuffed.

Your Leading Thoughts

So I would say to associate value we need to know 1] what values we are, 2] what values we are not, and 3] what benefits we offer.

Can you answer all three for your brand? Or where are you stuck so that we can help?
Alternatively, can unwrap more of how you have learnt to associate value?

Under Promise, Over Deliver

Posted on December 18, 2009 by Scott Gould

When I started working at my Church in 2003 I quickly learnt that the largest part of my work, both in the office and on Sundays (game day), was one of managing expectations.

Thus when I repeatedly failed in delivering expectations, I learnt the further lesson that expectation is closely linked with communication – or the lack thereof.

Yesterday, out of the blue, I received the package pictured here. When I opened it was I both surprised and excited by the gift of Thorntons chocolates sent to me by Optix Solutions. I was surpised because, of course, I wasn’t expecting it – it hadn’t been communicated to me. So therefore when I received the chocolates, my expectations (which were nil) were delightfully over-delivered on. Continue reading →

Solving Not Selling

Posted on October 14, 2009 by Scott Gould

I read this awesome article, Stop Selling and Add Value on Monday from the N2 Growth Blog. Mike Myatt, and his awesome moustache, writes:

Call me crazy, but I don’t want to talk to someone who wants to manage my account, develop my business, or engineer my sale. I want to communicate with someone who wants to service my needs or solve my problems. Any organization that still has “sales” titles on their org charts and business cards is living in another time and place while attempting to do business in a world that’s already passed them by. It’s time for companies to realize that consumers have become very savvy and very demanding. Today’s consumer (B2B or B2C) does their homework, is well informed, and buys…they are not sold.

This is right in line with what we’ve discussed on the subject of ‘Making It Personal‘, and in the ‘PR 2010 Framework‘. By making your product or service an experience by actually solving the problem (of course, the user may not see the problem until you highlight it) rather than providing the tool to do it, you are engaging far deeper with your customer, and can also charge a higher markup.

In fact it’s not just Mike and I thinking about it. Jeremy Epstein (have you seen his client list?) wrote an article yesterday entitled “your value = your relevance“. What a title. Your value to your customer is equal to your relevance to your customer. Beautiful. But also very conceptual. Let’s break it down:

The History Of Economic Progression

A hundred years ago, tell a commoner that they’d paid £50 for a haircut and dry, and they’d laugh at you – why pay when you can do it yourself? 10 years ago, tell average Jane she’ll pay for shopping to be home delivered, and she’d reply she’d rather save the cash and pick them up herself.

The history of economic progression is one of paying for someone else to do what you used to do yourself, for free. My examples are rather peice-meal and conceptual, but there are very intelligent people out there writing about this is hard cover books. My simple understanding is that as technology enables us to become better specialists, and as we culturally have more responsibilities and roles, we are more willing to pay others to handle the things that we don’t have time to.

Of course, we don’t pay them just for their labour. We pay them in accordance to their expertise, their relevance to our needs, the results – the value they impart. Quite simply taking a book, we know that we aren’t paying merely for the product in our hands, but the time and effort that produced the intellectual property that we are reading and receiving value from.

An excellent example is Nike+. Consider the fact that to measure your running day on day, you can simply use a map and a stop watch, and then a some paper to graph it out. But Nike solve a problem by removing the map, watch and effort of drawing by simply giving you something to put in your shoe, and watch in amazement as it charts everything online for you. In fact, what Nike have done is lifted restrictions and just made everything easier by doing all the work for you.

And the happy catch is this: you are paying far more than the free DIY version. But you are getting greater value through expertise, technology, and the reduction of your time, effort, and in some way, the stress of having to do it. As I often say to clients “make it one less thing your customer has to do.”

Solving Not Selling

All this stuff appeals deeper than fiance. It gets down to advocacy, passion, experience, change. Sure, there are inventions that are cheap and cheerful, but the majority of these game changers are lifestyle products and/or services in some shape or form. And very often, they are ahead of the curve.

I’m sure right now that you can think of plenty of ways to solve problems, rather than sell stuff. But as is the nature of innovation, only certain people buy it – early adopters. Many times I thought I had a great idea and everyone would swoop at it, only for it to flop. So I have realised that the need to 1. know you target market, and 2. grow by trial and error, is significant when solving problems. Some tips:

The best place to start, in my opinion, is with Guy Kawasaki’s ‘Art of Innovation‘. It’s helped me no end, and continues to.
Sound the depths. Segment some clients and experiment. Use social media to test the waters, as it is very cost effective and quickly helps you draw conclusions.
Continually re-think and re-write to get down the core of your ‘solution’. I’ll be honest with you, I still haven’t got mine down to a single phrase. If you can only describe it using examples or a paragraph, then you know that you have too much of ‘you’ in mind, and not enough of your customer.
Draw on others. Pass it round the office, bounce it off your friends. Their perspective with save you lots of time, and open new paths to explore.
Adapt in public, rather than perfect in secret. This way you gather a following while you are growing (even if things are unclear), you pick up people who do get it, and you also get criticised and challenged which will sharpen you and help you cut out the rubbish.

I trust these points help you solve a few more problems this week!