Can you imagine a day at the office where you might be asked to shave the head of your co-worker? Or better yet, how about taking a razor to the mane of your CEO? Leave it to the folks at Zappos to create not just a day, but an annual event called the Bald & Blue Head Shaving Day.
Social grooming is a means through which animals, including humans, who live in proximity can bond, build and reinforce social relationships. CEO Tony Hsieh explained that what originally started out as a dare evolved into a fun team building activity. Now every year, Zapponians line up and get groomed, all in the name of team spirit.
The benefits? Research has shown that social grooming is positively associated with relationship satisfaction and trust. For Zappos, relationships built on trust are the bedrock of their organization.
Watch this short clip on social grooming, the Zappos way.
What drives your business? Most executives and entrepreneurs would say sales or revenue.
But where do those sales come from? Customers, right?
Now, are all customers created equal? Of course not. Most customers will remain indifferent to your brand. They will buy from you on occasion—when it’s most convenient—and shop elsewhere when it’s not.
Amazingly, most businesses cater to these nomadic customers. Most executives think mass appeal and believe an untargeted marketing plan that casts the widest net will generate the most sales.
In the short run, they might be right. The fickle, nomadic customer might jump at a great promotion. But they will jump at your competitor’s great promotion just as quickly.
If you try to build your business around these fickle customers, the only way you can show increased profits on your balance sheet is to increase your growth curve. For retailers, this means continually opening more stores. Ultimately, this is not a sustainable model and profits erode over time as your market gets saturated.
The key to growing a profitable business is to build it around the needs and wants of your best customers. We call this special breed of customers Brand Lovers. Focus on serving your Brand Lovers and you’ll naturally attract more of them.
All great businesses—big and small—have Brand Lovers. All great brands learn to cater to and serve their Brand Lovers better than anyone else.
If your Brand Lovers represent your most profitable customers, why would you try to serve anyone else?
Focus on your Brand Lovers as the core of your business. Talk to them. Listen to them. Learn from them. Try to understand them. Co-create your business around their needs. The rewards for doing so will translate to the bottom line. Guaranteed.
Today brands are faced with a new challenge, mainly that of clutter. In a cluttered marketplace of indistinguishable brands, developing a strong position in the heart of the customer is extremely challenging. Brands that don’t actively work to differentiate are generally defined and controlled by their competition.
In the world of Branding, you either grow or die—branding, category leadership, market share, relevance, there’s no in-between.
In most cases, the winner of this game for the customer’s heart takes all, leaving the rest of the competition struggling for minor market share. In order to develop a strong position in the marketplace, CMO’s have to understand three key ingredients for developing brand dominance:
The subtleties of fine food preparation and service suffer from bigness and the all-seeing eye of the proprietor.
- Stanley Marcus
Dining at Trader Vic’s, Stanley Marcus was presented with wet towels by a waiter exclaiming, “Hot towels!” But, they weren’t hot, they were cold.
Trader Vic’s was a pioneer in the American restaurant industry and one of the first to offer the Japanese oshibori (the hot towels) at the end of the meal.
But, expansion without attention to detail reduced the quality of the service and food. It became more important to go through the motions than make sure the original purpose was behind them. As long as the waiter exclaimed, “Hot towels,” his manager was happy.
Settling for going through the motions will dilute the brand and can even kill it.
Is there something your company is doing that lost touch with its original purpose?
Jobs are everywhere. We clock in and clock out, putting in the bare minimum just to get the work done. Sometimes though, we find a career where we have a deeper vested interest in our work, motivated by achievement and advancement. Yet if we’re lucky, we’ll eventually find our calling where work becomes our life mission, and our life mission becomes work.
Online retailer Zappos is on a mission to inspire their family of employees to a higher calling. Since the beginning, they weren’t satisfied hiring people just looking for a job to pay the bills. Under their visionary leader Tony Hsieh, the company made a bold organizational move in 1994, relocating their headquarters from San Francisco to Las Vegas, to align themselves with people looking for a career.
Hsieh wrote in Inc. Magazine, “We were having a hard time finding good customer service people in San Francisco. Las Vegas has a lot of call centers and lots of people who want to do customer service as a career.”
Zappos embraces a singular vision—to provide the best customer service—and attracts people who share this passion. But the folks at Zappos aren’t satisfied knowing that their employees are committed to a career in customer service. They constantly strive to inspire their employees to find their true calling—to find personal meaning in their work guided by a higher purpose.
To achieve this, Zappos employs a full-time on-site personal coach, Dr. Vik, who invites employees to take a seat on the royal “throne” for a one-on-one consultation. He regularly tells his guests, “You are worth a billion dollars. Come have a seat and take your life to the next level!” With Dr. Vik’s guidance, employees are empowered to reach their full potential across their work and personal lives.
How many companies employ a full-time personal coach? Most businesses would view this as an unnecessary expense and immediately reject the idea.
Yet Zappos understands that a company’s employees—their people—are a reflection of the brand itself. When employees find their true calling, work is greatly satisfying and meaningful. Their enthusiasm and passion is infectious. And the customers are first to take notice.
When was the last time you heard someone say, Did you see Random House’s latest book release? Or, That CD by Sony Music really rocks!
Most breeds of publishers—book, music and film—have little brand equity with their customers. Why? These companies don’t stand for anything; they haven’t made any clear declaration or pledge to their customers.
Without a clear brand promise that’s meaningful to us, why would we care about them?
Marketers are hesitant to clearly define what their brand represents. They don’t want to risk alienating potential customers who don’t like their brand.
But with clear differentiation you also attract a special breed of customers who love you.
All customers are NOT created equal. Your Brand Lovers generate more positive word of mouth and stay loyal to you. They are your most profitable customers. Why would you want to cater to less profitable customers?
Businesses that stand for something generally have a balance sheet to prove it. We know what to expect from a Disney film, for example—family fun with a dose of magic and limited violence.
Most publishers, however, are in a precarious position, lingering in No Brand Land.
What happens when the Long Tail fully catches up with publishers and product distribution becomes ubiquitous? Why would an author—any author—publish with a major house when they can just as easily self-publish through Amazon and other digital channels without losing distribution advantages and keeping the lion share of book sales?
The lesson is clear: Make sure your brand stands for something meaningful to your customers and serve them better than anyone else.
“Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals.” – David Ogilvy
Listening to great consumer insight is key to creating a powerful brand.
I am amazed by how many smart advertising and marketing professionals ignore good research. I have found many treasures of insight from “old” and “useless research.”
The key is to dig and connect the dots back to your best customers. It is always important to take these important perspectives before you makes choices for your enterprise. Where will the consumer go next? What should you expect? Simple consumer insights can give you more clarity and direction than ever before. Are you listening to your best customers?
A concise Brand Model synthesizes a diverse range of psychological consumer research into a comprehensive model. Your Brand Model becomes your filter for future market research and a powerful lens to help you make marketing decisions.
I love magic, but I hate watching most magic acts: they lack a point of view. They end up being a collection of tricks loosely designed around a them or a”character” rather than having a purpose–something significant the audience should get from watching.
A recent trip to Vegas reminded me why I like Penn and Teller so much. You may hate their act, it is political, but at least you feel enough to hate it. Penn and Teller clearly want their audience to come away realizing that they don’t know everything about things they think they know everything about, and that they would be better off by more critically examining the world around them.
They are not doing tricks, their doing something. The tricks are merely tactics in service of that something.
When looking to do brand extensions, many brands enter the same predicament that most magicians do: they start doing things that may not be tied to the core of the brand’s purpose. They end up becoming just more places to stick a logo and end up diluting the brand.
Next time you want to extend outward, first look inward and see if those outward extensions realistically extend from within.
Businesses aggressively strive to establish trust with their customers, but oftentimes neglect the need to cultivate trust in their own workplaces. Economist John Helliwell researched the determinants of workplace happiness, and found that trust is the greatest contributor, beating out pay, workload, or perks. A one-point increase on the trust scale can mean the equivalent of the psychological benefits associated with a 40% wage increase.
Online retailer Zappos embraces trust as an essential ingredient in cultivating an enthusiastic and happy workplace. Zappos made its inaugural debut at #23 on Fortune Magazine’s List of “100 Best Companies to Work for,” making them the highest-ranking initiate for 2009. For Zappos, trust is a core business value, established through a steadfast commitment to transparency.
Here are 5 ways that Zappos champions trust within their organization:
The Culture Book: Zappos publishes an annual book, a compilation of employees’ thoughts and reflections on the Zappos culture. Every submission is included and edited only for spelling and typos. The book is given to potential hires for an unfiltered look into the Zappos culture, inclusive of the good, the bad, and the beautiful.
The “Ask Anything” Newsletter: Employees can literally ask anything about the company, even and especially about financials. Answers are compiled and published in a monthly newsletter.
Extranet for Vendors: Vendors can log in and view insider data such as inventories and sales. When asked if Zappos worries whether the information will get into the hands of competitors, CEO Tony Hsieh is not concerned. He is confident that the benefits outweigh the risks, by providing vendors a critical window into their business, promoting a sense of control, and above all else, building relationships based on trust.
Company Tours–Come One, Come All: Zappos has an open door policy and offers everyone a tour of their company headquarters. When reporters visit the headquarters, there’s no official algorithm that dictates who they can speak to and who they cannot. When you have nothing to hide, every employee is authorized to speak to his or her own experience.
Twitter: Zappos actively encourages its employees to join Twitter, and in fact, offers Twitter class as part of their employee orientation. With over 400 employees tweeting, Zappos policy is more of a non-policy: “Be real and use your best judgment.” Hsieh understands the power of Twitter, not just as a way to cultivate transparency, but also to empower employees and strengthen ties within the organization. Hsieh tweeted: “Twittering is like hugging. Just because it’s hard to measure the return on investment doesn’t mean there isn’t value there.”
When employees feel trusted, they tend to be happier. The pay off for companies? Greater productivity and less turnover. And when employees are satisfied, customers tend to be satisfied too. So what do you have to hide?
Getting customers to talk about your products and services has long been the marketer’s coveted goal. Elusive as word of mouth (WOM) may be, the fruits of positive consumer talk can transform any business.
No matter how great your advertising and promotional strategies are, nothing is more powerful than one real person telling another real person why they should buy from you.
Most marketing initiatives and business plans incorporate some aspect of so-called viral marketing since Seth Godin’s Unleash Your Ideavirus and Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point.
But knowing terms like sneezers, influencers, connectors, and mavens won’t help you create authentic WOM.
What will? Start by understanding why your customers talk in the first place. Then, you’ll be less likely to waste time trying to manipulate your customer’s opinions and more time supporting them with a superior customer experience.
Our latest slideshow, created by Aaron Shields and designed by Melissa Thornton, makes the rules of WOM crystal clear:
What drives your business? Most executives and entrepreneurs would say sales or revenue.
