The new consumer chooses your brand (product or service) if they believe what the brand is saying is true. It’s a selective—and an emotional—choice. Marc Gobé, author of Emotional Branding, Citizen Brand, and Brand Jam (www.emotionalbranding.com) discusses this historical shift and how your leadership style must change to accommodate different expectations. 

Brand & Strategy: We’re awash in brand clutter from the last three or four decades. How does that clutter shape the way people make buying decisions?

Marc Gobé: We are back to reality and normal branding, not excessive branding. The past six or seven years, there was an uncontrolled rush towards money with no principle whatsoever. I don’t think I saw any real branding for a few years. The money was there for the taker. Business upheld a ‘grab it’ strategy rather than trying to make an effort to bring consumers towards their brand.

One of the expressions of the excess was the illegal billboards in New York and L.A.

Is there a fundamental shift in the minds of consumers in how they approach spending?

As Baby Boomers head for retirement, they are going to be spending less. Right behind them is Generation X, comprised of 47 million, which has lost the buying power that Boomers had. The millennial generation brings a whole new set of values. Their concerns are going to be the environment, and they are clearly looking to conserve energy and buy less; they’ll be a lot more sensitive to the impact of their buying options.

People are choosy; they are not free-spenders. The challenge for businesses will be to give them freedom to buy their brand. That’s real branding. The biggest revolution, though, is people being able to talk to each other about brands.

How is that different from a generation ago?

The new media technology has made it so that the success of a brand is based on how open they are with these consumer communities. Consumers have a personal relationship with the brand; they have to believe what is being said.

In reading about the founders of Google and Twitter and Facebook, I found that these people all have one thing in common: They aren’t Jack Welsh – the iconic former GE leader! They got rid of the emperor complex. What’s interesting is that most colleges still train under the Jack Welsh theory.

What makes them different?

The new leaders expose themselves to criticism. They are open to dialogue. That is a new culture, which is the social media culture.

Take the CEO of Zappos.com, for example. At 31, he makes one dollar a year, even though he heads a large company. When he Twitters, he exposes himself: This is who I am, these are my finances, this is my business, and these are my values. He creates an open dialogue. He makes you feel like he knows you. He’s with his consumer. It’s a model of fairness, personal accreditation, and personal engagement.

Brands, then, are defined by authentic leadership?

Yes – where the reputation of the brand is strongly connected with the owner and how much people like them as individuals. It’s about humanizing the brand. That means a leader of the company Tweets: I’m locked out of my hotel room because I closed the doors behind me and I cannot get back into my room. That’s human, and we can relate to that.

The new generation seems to crave that, but what about the Boomers?

The Baby Boomers were trained to believe in any kind of dream that was offered up. They were told there were no limitations to dreams. It was about limitless opportunities. And they were willing to compromise their integrity for the acquisition of material goods, because those material goods defined who they were.

Now we are at a point of finding out that there are limits and that some of the dreams that were referred to us are unattainable. Hence, leadership has changed. People don’t want to hear that you’re going to take them to the moon. They just want you tell them who you are.

In a sense, brands have been lying to us for a long time.

Of course. But to be fair, everybody was on the same page. Somebody tells you, “I love you,” it’s not exactly true, but it’s kind of nice to hear. The game was played, and accepted–and it was good. And why not? Because really, there was not a lot of risk playing that game…until it got out of control. Think of the movie Wall-E: The younger generation is like robots trying to fix the mess. And consumers don’t want to be deceived anymore.

If you promote your company as green but at the same time you’re suing the state of California because you don’t want to abide by their emission standards, people are not going to buy your brand.

So how does an ordinary organization apply this shift to their marketing?

The new media technology has made it so that the success of a brand is based on how open they are with these consumer communities. Consumers have a personal relationship with the brand; they have to believe what is being said.

Who of us hasn’t heard employees and co-workers murmur, whine, or even holler, “Work sucks!”? 

To rally morale as well as results, consider a Results-Only Work Environment (or ROWE). In this environment, people can do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as the work gets done. Work isn’t someplace you go to, it is something you do. And it doesn’t have to get accomplished from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Sound too good to be true?

Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, authors of Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It, successfully led the Corporate Headquarters of Best Buy, a Fortune 100 corporation, through just such a change, which resulted in improved employee satisfaction, increased productivity, lower turnover rates, and greater efficiency.

In the last edition of Brand & Strategy, Ressler and Thompson discussed the benefits of – and the objections to – a Results-Only Work Environment. Click here to read the first interview.

Here Ressler and Thompson share how to face the challenges of adapting to a new work foundation–and why this radical system actually works.

Brand & Strategy: Why deconstruct the old foundation of work?

Ressler and Thompson: The old way doesn’t work.

With ROWE, we’re setting up a new foundation that actually fits with technology advancements and the demands of people’s lives in the 21st Century. The rules, guidelines, and processes in office environments today are relics of the 1950s. We’re holding onto them hard and fast, at the cost of people’s health, families breaking apart, stagnant business results, etc.

And for what? To ensure that people are following the rules and we can keep the paternalistic leadership structure in place.

Time to break it apart and create the new game.

How have organizations with paternalistic leadership responded to your “13 Guideposts for a Results-Only Work Environment”?

Upper management generally freaks out. And rightly so: the Guideposts were created to intentionally provoke this response. The statements are extreme and buck the status quo like nothing management in Corporate America has ever seen.

We like to say that ROWE is the litmus test for leadership in organizations. They’ve been talking until they’re blue in the face about how much they trust employees, want to support their work/life balance, set the right foundation for them to innovate, and on and on. Then when ROWE and the 13 Guideposts come at them, they back down and say they’re “not ready.”

It’s about “walking your talk”–and most leaders aren’t up for the challenge.

Who is up to the challenge?

It takes a strong, courageous, progressive leader to say yes to ROWE and the 13 Guideposts. We’re working with some of them now, and we know there are more out there. And they will be the leaders of the future.

Why doesn’t ROWE work for some organizations?

Anxiety and fear.

During the process of converting to ROWE it is possible for leadership to make the decision to not move forward. They let their anxiety about giving employees autonomy get the best of them, and they call everything off. This is a very poor decision.

Why?

The message to employees is loud and clear: “I don’t trust you.” Once employees know about ROWE and that they’re moving toward this liberation and freedom, you can’t rip the rug out from beneath them without serious consequences.

It can be extremely detrimental to morale, productivity, and ultimately the bottom line for a company.

However, for those teams that commit to the entire ROWE process and fully embrace it, there’s no going back to the old way. Brains are rewired, and it would decrease productivity to return to the old way.

How long does it take for an organization to adapt to ROWE?

The process for this adaptive change is very important. Each step is carefully timed to allow the culture to evolve at the right pace. Going too fast or too slow can have significant ramifications on the work environment and productivity.

So the timeline for this change really depends on the size of the organization.

Organizations of less than 100 employees can go through the ROWE migration process in two months. Organizations of 500 employees can go through the process in about four months. Larger organizations take an approach where they go department by department; it can take between a year and three years for organizations of 1,000 or more to go through the process.

Once teams have gone through the change strategy, it can take anywhere from 6 months to 18 months for individuals to feel like they are “ROWE.”

You talk about “Sludge” – the caustic comments made by coworkers when you walk in late or skip a meeting that reinforce old ideas about how work gets done. How do you eradicate Sludge?

The biggest hurdle to eradicating Sludge is actually fighting the internal Sludge we all have.

Surprisingly, the Sludge that exists among employees – “Can you believe John came in at 10:00 this morning?” or “There goes Nancy to pick up her sick kid – wish I had a kid!” – is the first to leave the environment as we implement the Environmental Sludge Eradication Strategy.

The Sludge that lingers feeds off the internal guilt people have about the way they should be working, where they should be at certain times of the day, and how they should be letting co-workers know where/when they’re working. We call this “should-ing on yourself.”

Why do we hold on to this “should-ing”?

Because of the years and years of work beliefs that have been drilled into us, it’s very uncomfortable to behave in a way that’s counter-culture. To go grocery shopping on a Tuesday morning goes against everything we’ve learned about how work needs to happen. To leave the office at 2:15 p.m. and not tell anyone is scary to most people. To sleep in and intentionally skip rush hour traffic (and not tell anyone) is very odd.

The internal Sludge of “I should be working right now” or “I should tell someone where I am right now” goes away slowly, but it takes time.

It’s another short book by Seth Godin. It’s called Tribes: We need you to lead us. 

 

I love Godin’s sass and overstatement. I did not resonate with the book, however, because I have never had a problem in being a leader or innovator. But if you need inspiration to step up and out, and make a difference, Tribes is for you. —Dave Goetz

Brand & Strategy: Most folks who are risk-takers don’t need the motivation to lead. Does your experience show that many folks want to lead but aren’t, currently?

Seth Godin: This is a false connection. There’s nothing about leadership that has to do with risk-taking, and vice versa. If you want to make change, to sell something, to market something, to improve something, you must lead. The good news is that this is now easier than ever.

The only thing that keeps a zigzag from being a straight line is the “zag”…the departure from the stasis. 

“When everybody zigs, zag,” says Marty Neumeier, president of Neutron LLC, a San Francisco based firm specializing in brand collaboration and author of ZAG.

Neumeier spoke with CZ about why organizations need both compelling and different ideas to be heard and seen in today’s noisy, cluttered marketplace.

Brand & Strategy: How do you define differentiation?

Marty Neumeier: I call it zag. When everybody else zigs, you should zag. Zag should be your mantra. You can’t be a leader by following another leader.
What makes differentiation so critical today?

Because of so many customer choices. Customers have control. Customers now have to eliminate choices because there is so much market clutter.

You argue that customers control the brand. How?

A brand isn’t what you say it is (as the brand owner); it’s what the customer says it is. That’s a new idea. Businesses think they are in control of their brand and that they are managing their brand…that it’s their property.

I think it’s their responsibility. But the owners of the brand really are the customers. They build the brand inside their heads and their hearts with whatever materials you give them.

How do you build a brand you’re not in control of?

You don’t stop at the strategy level. You keep zagging all the way through to the customer experience. It’s not just differentiation; it’s also execution and innovation. Start by asking a series of questions: Who are you? What do you do? Why does it matter?

In the beginning, most leadership teams answer those three questions simply and in a compelling way. However, they soon can’t yield simple answers. You need to get answers to those questions, and at the end of that process you’ll have what I call a trueline…the one true thing you can say about your brand that makes it both different and compelling to a tribe of customers.

Uh, what’s a tribe of customers?

We’ve had a hundred years of mass production that has fractured communities. People long for community. Making decisions within a community simplifies things. It’s a quick way to sort through your choices.

For instance, if you need to buy a car, you think, I need to buy a car. All my friends are buying Jaguars, so I have to have a Jaguar. Boom! Done! That’s what you get in your tribe…Jaguars, not Cadillacs.

Your choice links you to your community so you get respect from it. People can belong to more than one tribe so you have overlapping tribes. Thinking in terms of tribes is a better way of looking at things than is “How many people can we sell to?”

This is a scary proposition for most companies: How do you manage something that is in someone’s mind?

Can traditional marketing research identify tribal thinking?

Not yet. The emotional part is too complex for most formulas. However, while not quantifiable, there are patterns that signal whether you’re on the right track. So, pattern recognition becomes more important.

Can you create a clan for your brand?

It’s like my mother told me: “If you want to be a leader, find a parade that has no leader and get in front of it.”