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.”

It’s a simple experience that drives the droves back to Starbucks.

We all have our signature drinks—double tall vanilla skinny latte, easy on the foam.

It’s replicated day after day. Baristas even concoct our daily quenchers as we walk through the doors.

In Tribal Knowledge, author and former Starbucks marketer John Moore attributes Starbucks’ success to three basic truths:

• Building a business, not creating a brand;
• delivering remarkable customer experiences; and,
• creating a workplace that fuels its employees’ passion.

Moore calls these truths “tribal knowledge,” and recently spoke with B&S about how to integrate them into your business strategy:

Brand & Strategy: How do you convince an organization—especially one with a small budget—to redirect money from advertising/recruiting to improving the customer experience?

John Moore: You need to be willing to focus on the quality of customer connections and not the quantity. Nowadays, most people are looking for a direct conversation with the companies with whom they do business. I suggest businesses find their happiest customers and work to develop stronger relationships with them.

If you work on developing meaningful connections with them, in turn they will evangelize your business to their family and friends.

To make this ideal real, imagine the kind of surprise and delight you would generate if your top executives each phoned five customers per week. And if you’re scared to make those phone calls because you’re not sure what you might hear—you especially need to make those calls!

Is “word of mouth” really a marketing strategy?

Word-of-Mouth happens whether you’re aware of it or not. And if you’re not thinking about what your customers and prospects are saying about you, you should be. Remember, word-of-mouth happens online, too. People go right to the Internet to research everything from a purchase decision to a job opportunity to potential college choices.

If you want to spark positive word-of-mouth, you must earn opinions from people. Even seemingly small details earn opinions—good and bad—in the minds of your customers. In Starbucks case, just call your drink sizes different names. Some people like it, some don’t. Either way, it earns opinions from people and that results in word-of-mouth.

How do you get your employees on board?

I advise companies to think less about branding strategies and more about “being” strategies. Develop a business testimony about who you are, what you do, and why you deserve to exist.

Every organization must have a mission. And it shouldn’t be one of those gobbledy-gook corporate-speak platitudes. It must be memorable, motivational, and actionable. Every member of your organization should be able to articulate what you do and why. Purpose and passion are what attract people—both customers and employees.

How do you increase high-touch interaction with your customers, especially if you have thousands of prospective customers with limited opportunities for face-to-face interaction?

High-touch treats customers as relationships, not transactions. The bigger your organization becomes, the smaller you must act in order to develop and maintain those relationships.

Social media, like blogs, actually helps small organizations appear bigger, and helps large organizations act smaller. Having a blog will force a company to have a conversation with its customers. You can learn a lot from interacting with and listening to your customers—both their positive and negative feedback. But if you’re not confident about who you are and what you do, don’t do social media.

Why is it so important that every employee sees their direct connection to the customer?

David Packard of Hewlett-Packard said, “Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.” The truth is marketing is happening every time your employees interact with your customers. A happy employee will, in turn, make customers happy.

Your business has two audiences: your customers and your employees. How you communicate with each indicates how much you value them. Employees believe in a company in which they know what’s going on and feel they have a say.

In the end, a business really has just three goals: to make money, to make employees happy, and, to make customers happy. If you are able to do those three things, your business and its brand will grow.