Happiness spreads: Stimulate it to grow customer tribes

According to the British Medical Journal (BMJ) article: Dynamic Spread of Happiness in a Large Social Network, happiness is a fundamental object of human existence.

The intent of the study was to go beyond the well known contagious of emotions between people in close proximity and over short periods of time (such as mirroring a smiling when another person smile).

Researchers were interested in “how happiness might spread by a diverse set of mechanisms, over longer periods or more widely in social networks. Researchers were particularly interested in whether the spread of happiness pertains not just to direct relationships (such as friends) but also to indirect relationships (such as friends of friends) and whether there are geographical or temporal constraints on the spread of happiness through a social network.”

This type of research is intriguing, although difficult to measure and quantify. For example, the study doesn’t attempt to account for the effects of digital social media, which I believe dramatically expand social networks and deepen interpersonal connections.

That said, this clinical study offers some insights for planning the social dimensions of marketing programs, and reasons to look for ways to stimulate stronger positive connections with customer tribes. Here are some starting points:

• Tap the positive impact of happiness in your tribal marketing. Humor has long been understood by advertising professionals as the most effective way to communicate messages, and is the reason for so much humor being used in consumer advertising. It’s a lesson that could well be applied to business marketing as well. Happiness stimulates behavior leading to favorable interaction with a business, brand, product or communities where such organizations are investing to connect to their customer tribes.

• Make your content appealing by considering the context of the environment. In today’s economy, weighted down by anxiety, marketing scare tactics are unlikely to elicit much response. Organizations with positive, actionable content and messages will be much better received.

• Use messages that are clear, focused and easy to talk about. Positive, vivid and otherwise easy-to-remember messages become “contagious” and more likely to be shared.

• Use the best media to communicate positive emotions. Written text is informative. Visuals are illustrative. Web-based video can create the sense of actually of being with other people.

• Use media that enables conversations in the context of your product or business. This includes platforms that allow social interaction and easy sharing. Web-based content moves quickly with RSS links, comments enabled, favorites and other sharing tools. Easily accessed and detailed online content also magnifies the effectiveness of speaking events, panels, press coverage or other offline marketing.

• Enable social community. Facebook, MySpace and other communities are ready platforms for marketing campaigns that allow the transfer of ideas and the addition of user content. Or your business may have critical mass or a substantial captive audience to warrant investments in building your own social media community or private network.

Doubtless more such studies on the spreading of emotions will add to these concepts. In the meantime, developers of social media marketing platforms will continue to lead informal research initiatives using the solid marketing practices of testing, measurement and refinement.

Brand Tribe

We develop over fifteen corporate and product logos for clients each year. But seldom does an organization embrace their new mark and sense of identity as completely as BOMA Chicago, the Building Owner and Manager Association, Chicago chapter.

Now over 100 years old, the association is clear about the need for change, from staff and services provided, and across members and the many other constituent tribes they serve.

Making the transformation physical as well as cultural, the association also moved to new offices, designed and fitted out to demonstrate their leadership stance and advocacy for green building. To announce all of these changes, and their vision for the next 100 years, BOMA Chicago produced the following video, shown at the unveiling ceremony at their annual member luncheon, held at Chicago's Palmer House hotel.

We're proud of having designed this logo. And we're in awe of how BOMA reflects and embraces the mark, giving it such central meaning to their brand.

Video courtesy of Reputation Partners.





























BOMA Chicago 2008 Annual Report

eTribes and organizations

We all know more and more people out of work these days, and so the number of people building their personal networks is up dramatically. So is participation in associations, turnout at networking events and attendance at seminars. People are rethinking their careers, whether they’ve lost their jobs or if they expect they might.

I’ve heard people say they’ve let their networks atrophy during their last job. Now they’re under pressure to re-connect with friends, colleagues and resources. But they’re behind and often in panic mode.

It’s become important for all of us to build networks. But the term ‘network’ doesn’t begin to cover it. Professionals need to build eTribes— social media communities, while on the job, between jobs and throughout their careers.

Although they may go to work for companies, people are members of tribes. The influence and social capital people bring to an organization comes from their tribes, and is one of the most valuable assets they have. People hired to develop sales or new business are expected to bring tribes of contacts or leads. Specialists turn to their tribes for information on best practices as well as for people of similar skills, who may become candidates as contractors or future hires. I’m scratching the surface here, but these ideas are accepted wisdom about the value of the tribes to which the people who work in the organization belong.

Everyone can see how tribes spring up within the organizational structure. People within departments, age cohorts and work function will bond as tribes and often stay connected for years after they leave the organization. What’s less obvious their tribes outside the organization, which dramatically expand their reach, resources and value they bring back to the organization. New, social media is allowing people to connect faster, farther and more richly to their tribes, making eTribes an accelerating phenomenon.

Companies would be wise to enable their people to cultivate eTribes outside as well as inside the organization. It fosters good will and human connectivity, which make a culture that people want to keep coming to work to be a part of. It also brings talent, knowledge and resources to the organization in dynamic new ways. People do business with people.

So how to make time to connect with eTribes when the pressure and obligation of work already so demanding on people? The following is an approach to linking with your eTribes, while keeping it manageable.

You can’t join everything, and you don’t need to. Pick three. The top three social media communities today, in terms of popularity, are LinkedIn, Twitter and FaceBook. Each has different advantages and uses, and you may prefer others. If you’re not familiar, see the following discussion about the different uses of LinkedIn, Twitter and FaceBook. http://blog.mrtweet.net/how-are-you-using-facebook-linkedin-twitter-differently. People often get passionate about which to use, which not to.

Set up your profile to establish your personal brand. Use your real name and location, so that others will take you seriously. Beginner guidelines abound online. The time invested in setting up and maintaining your personal brand online will dramatically increase the size, reach and relevance of your eTribe. I’ve been delighted by the number of connections I now have, from countries around the world, as well as within industries and markets where I do business.
But the point of cultivating your eTribes is not to spam them with resumes and requests for introductions to potential hiring firms. It’s to set yourself up as an expert with a valuable point of view and certain expertise. The way you make that happen is to write about what know and are passionate about. Read and comment on Blog posts. Contribute to conversations on a given topic. Share your point of view and expert insight. Share what you know, what is interesting or valuable to people. Demonstrate the skills and the knowledge you expect to get hired to use.

Consider starting your own Blog. Many companies hired top-notch experts and enjoy the visibility and connectivity generate by the personal Blogs of their star employees. Insightful companies realize that Blogs posted under the personal brands of their experts are more credible, interesting and more widely red than corporate Blogs. They also open the opportunity to dramatically extent the reach of the company, through the networks of its staff. While this serves the company during their tenure, when they leave, the Blog stays with them.

Individual Blogging isn’t for everyone. Corporate CEOs may have a different priority. It may be more impactful for the company and the executive to focus on using traditional PR (Dec. 12 post: why CEOs shouldn’t Blog).

If your organization doesn’t already support employee Blogging, it may not be easy to persuade your boss to open up the gates and let social networking happen. Companies have a fear of losing people, and of controlling information, with good reason. However, there are many creative ways to connect with your eTribes.

OK, so some people just want to cut to the chase: how do I find a new job? Think differently about your long-term approach to developing your personal brand and your eTribe. 

Consumer tribes don’t do tradeshows

Apple announced late last year that 2009 would be the last year it would participate in Macworld Expo, a show built around Apple’s own brand aficionados. Apple is one of the world’s most loved companies, often cited as a leader in everything from brand cachet and product development, to revenue generation and stock price performance. Why did they take so long to shut down their participation at Macworld Expo, a worldwide tradeshow?

That is of course a rhetorical question. Although the show bears the name of Apple’s own brand, it needed to be cut from Apple’s marketing program. It simply doesn’t show a return on marketing dollars spent. Although Macworld is a thriving show in its own right, Apple does better dollar-for-dollar with its marketing efforts in numerous other areas. Sure, consumer tribes go to tradeshows. But it’s a small cultish subset of the overall tribal community. Apple is acknowledging that it can stay closer to its consumer tribe by pulling out of its own tradeshow.

And to us it seems an overdue decision. But as we’ve seen over and over with our corporate clients and colleagues, traditional marketing beliefs and behaviors are hard to change.

My agency has been working for years to extend the reach of tradeshows through the Internet. Although this makes good incremental use of digital media, it misses the point, and the opportunity. Today there are much better ways (and uses of marketing budgets) to connect with customer tribes than tradeshows.

Tribaling says it simply: the job of a brand is not to sell products to consumers, but to support the links between consumers, as they connect to each other within social tribes. How can it be relevant to stage a huge event, once a year, inconveniently located in one city, and expect your consumers to attend in market-meaningful numbers…even if they do blog and twitter about it for weeks afterwards?

But here’s what’s really going on with Apple’s consumer tribe. They are creative and hard-working people who delight in details and elegant design, solving real problems, meeting real needs in the context of their daily lives and communities. Apple touches hundreds of millions of consumers around the world in a variety of ways. Their retail presence is second to none, a place to get genius technical support, discover new products, and develop enthusiasm for the badge brand. They are newsmakers with their iTunes community and countless other digital forums, worldwide. In the context of these tribal communities, Apple’s tradeshow is no longer a justifiable expense.

So for this company, so often lauded for its insight into consumer needs, and its innovative way to deliver the next great thing, it’s about time to stop the symbolic and traditional tradeshow exercise. It’s time for Apple to focus on connecting in more meaningful ways with their customer tribe, helping them connect to each other, and to enjoy the business growth that follows.

It’s likely Macworld Expo won’t continue for much longer without Apple. And it’s very possible other big shows will see the exodus of their most savvy (and largest) marketers, as they follow suit, to pursue their own consumer tribes in relevant ways.

Torque Gets an Online ReFresh - Come Visit

Re-inventing, then re-presenting a business to keep pace with changing markets is important, especially now. Given the economy, perhaps most held down by general fears and a concern for how to compete, it’s a good time to shake things up and refresh a business’s value to its customers. Obama says this is the new spirit for the American people. We’ve taken it to heart.

The trend these days has been significant – use the digital media to stay competitive and in touch. We’ve seen just about all our clients make a concerted move to leverage the efficiency, economy and reach of online marketing: converting catalogs to online, implementing Content Management Systems that enable them to stay truly current, and active in dialog with their customers. And it’s making a difference.

Torque’s new web site is a simple demonstration of taking on a business refresh and restating the value we bring. Add to that some new ways to make a Flash site searchable and visible online, and we’re well on our way to having better tools for the new economic condition. Our site is also a testimony to our belief that businesses need to communicate simply and uniquely. Being big, bold, and different gets you remembered.

Come visit, drop us a line and share what fresh things you’ve been doing online.

A Healthy Tension: but are we taking it far enough?

Businesses are structured around departments with differing functional concerns. Tension between these functions is complementary, as it challenges stakeholders to do their best, and also meet the needs of the opposing disciplines. However the tension between Sales and Marketing takes on a more ideological tone, becoming more charged than tensions between other disciplines.

All business operates in a state of change. There have been dozens of management philosophies in vogue over the last several decades, and the acronyms are familiar: TQM, Six Sigma, MBWA (thanks to Tom Peters, marketers can relate to this one!). In the financial area, the jury is out as to best accounting practices for healthy profits. We’re still smarting from the rigor of the corrective practices imposed during the last economic downturn, Sarbanes-Oxley. And now Mark to Market vs. Generally Accepted Accounting Practices are a hot debate in the current downturn.

But Sales and Marketing best practices are different. In the fast-morphing customer marketplace, both Sales and Marketing practices evolve at extraordinarily rapid rates. Both of their domains extend further into emotional, psychological, tribal, behavioral and sensory experience areas. It’s no wonder the sparks of debate are flying.

Why is it important to engage the debate about which are best, which should prevail? In part, it’s because these are complex and crazy times. You know it when appliance marketing looks like fashion branding. In this downturn, the business community has come out strong in support of rethinking—not cutting—marketing: see Marketing your way through a recession. And yet we are far from consensus—not that we have to agree, but the contradictions can be enormous. Let’s not lose this opportunity to demonstrate the critical importance of marketing!

To find clarity, I prefer to ask questions, and let the best answers flow from the debate. And that’s exactly what’s in store at the next MENG Marketing Leadership seminar, coming up on Thursday, January 15. I hope you’ll attend the event.

MENG will host top sales officers, responsible for the sales function in their organization, to participate in a lively panel discussion. This program will offer an open, earnest dialog about the differing views and dynamics of Sales and Marketing, and explore how to bring out the best in both. By sharing their experiences and perspectives on leadership, panelists will promote greater understanding and collaboration between these business functions. Please join our panelists for networking and a thought-provoking discussion.

• Kurt Anderson, EVP Government Markets, Viant
• Tim Bennett, SVP Sales, Recycled Paper Greetings
• Eric Miller, former VP of Sales, Tropicana Division of PepsiCo


Event details
Date: Thursday, January 15, 2009
Location: IIT’s Institute of Designm 350 N. LaSalle Street
Event start: 6:00pm
Panel discussion: 6:30pm-8:00pm

A light buffet with beverages will be provided.

Register online:
MENG member registration
MENG guest registration

MENG is the Marketing Executives Networking Group, a national organization of senior marketing leaders. Our After-Work Marketing Leadership Seminars raise discussion and debate among top marketers on critical leadership issues. Sessions are offered exclusively to MENG members and their guests. www.mengonline.com/chicago

Micro Marketing

In the space of one day (yesterday) I had three meetings in which clients told me: no, we don’t want to do all of that [proposed marketing]. We do want everything, but less of each. In one case, the client is just looking for 100 leads. He has developed such an efficient selling process, designed to close exactly the number of new clients he’s targeted, with far lower volume of marketing outreach.

This trend of “less-is-more” Micro Marketing is a distinctly new phenomenon, and an alternative to past economic cycles, when businesses tended to cut costs by eliminating entire segments of marketing.

Business managers have changed, gotten tuned in to the times. It’s no longer all-or-nothing. Businesses that shut down marketing altogether are the big losers. Mass media is giving way to targeted and customized media. Similarly, mass handling of big clients has evolved into careful attention paid to more clients with smaller incremental activity. The result is that business moves on, rather than folding up.

Micro Marketing is in parallel with micro business practices of all sorts. One example is Micro Lending, a critical “bottom of the pyramid” component in emerging market economic strategies.

Similarly, Micro Philanthropy is emerging as a means to continue raising charitable donations during tightening times. The opportunity: humanitarian causes are attracting increased contributions, in the light of difficult economic times.

Even the Tom Searcy, the guru of big business hunting, is prescribing a balance portfolio of prospecting in his Blog post: Rebalance Your Portfolio, invest 30% in new, small deals closing within 60 days. No doubt, he believes the big deals are still to be had, but creative approaches are needed during challenging times.

Consumer brands that have long promoted ‘right-sizing’ against their bloated competitors, are deepening their Micro Market positions. Perhaps none could be more quietly conspicuous than Mini Cooper with their very proportionate campaign: MiniMalism, Do More With Less against the goliath US car products.

There are a million ways to apply Micro Marketing to your business (that’s the whole idea). Here are ten points to get in the Micro Market Mindset.

1. Slim down rather than cut marketing tactics off entirely (see: “diversify”, below).
2. Don’t expect the ease of one-stop (or few, large shopping cart) customers. Find ways to profitably serve more, smaller customers.
3. Pay attention to details. Focus on your business fundamentals in order to profit from larger numbers of small accounts.
4. Mass marketing is generic. Understand your customer tribe, and specialize your communications, with 1-2-1 marketing, community building and interactive marketing.
5. Mass media is expensive: emphasize targeted, measurable media and compelling response mechanisms.
6. Win one client at a time.
7. Diversity your marketing activity—there are no silver bullets.
8. Diversify your customer base. Categories (both industry and customer) are being hit disproportionately. If your portfolio is predominantly in a challenged sector (i.e., building materials) expand into others.
9. Investments today will lead to big returns as the market rebounds.
10. If you run a mid-market or small business, be excited!