BRAND JORDAN is among the most interesting brand case studies I’ve ever had the privilege of studying.
When we take a close look at most brands one will quickly realizes that most companies lack powerful brand DNA–core brand principles that attracts loyal customers.
BRAND JORDAN’s constitution and magnetism has created legions of loyal followers that celebrate the authenticity of this brand.
Jordan’s Driven from Within offers a wealth of insights on the art of making your brand authentic, real, and powerful. Here is a brief synopsis:
The Birth of BRAND JORDAN
The year was 1984, and Michael hesitantly took a flight to Portland, Oregon. It was the day that he would meet Nike Founder Phil Knight for the first time.
BRAND JORDAN: EARNED
But when the players can’t live up to the expectations, the programs fall apart. You can’t fake out the consumer. To build Brand Jordan, each step would be earned.
BRAND JORDAN: UNCOMPROMISED
Going beyond a fad and becoming a brand takes a real connection with people….
BRAND JORDAN: ASPIRATIONAL
One can never imagine everything that will happen. But dreams are like that. That’s what makes the journey amazing. You have to see your plan and be willing to invest in your vision.
BRAND JORDAN: AUTHENTIC AND BEYOND
But true authenticity is about being true to who you are, even when everyone else wants you to be someone else. BRAND JORDAN took this idea to heart.
BRAND JORDAN: Uncovering The Soul of the Brand
Today Brand Jordan is an international icon. Creating this magic was about getting some amazing people ( Jordan + Nike + Design + Soul) together and allowing each do what they do best.
Michael Jordan was named the NBA MVP five times. He led the Chicago Bulls to six NBA championships. And he helped the ‘Dream Team” the USA Basketball Team bring home the gold medal. Driven from Within, includes vivid stories, anecdotes, drawings and bold photographs that capture Jordan’s exceptional combination of grace, grit, power and artistry. Jordan introduces the reader to some of the people closest to him, including Dean Smith, the former UNC coach who saw Michael’s superstar potential; his mother, Delores Jordan; and Tinker Hatfield, the design genius behind 14 of the 20 Air Jordan shoes. In every chapter, MJ offers examples of his values in action, on and off the court.
Every interaction your brand has with your customer is important. Each point of contact (or touch point) provides your brand with the opportunity to strength your customer’s tie with you. Conversely, if you’re not careful, any touch point can damage your customer relationship.
A blaring example is the growing call center industry. Why invest in full-salary employees with benefit packages for in-house customer service reps when you can outsource to India at a fraction of the cost?
Here’s why: Not only are you going to frustrate your customers and weaken your relationship with them, you are going to lose a precious opportunity to strengthen your customer’s commitment to your brand.
Plus, you make it easy for your competition to steal your market share:
Online retailer Zappos has grown by a staggering annualized growth rate of 7,800% over the past 8 years, growing sales to over $1 billion. Its stellar in-house customer service team provides a powerful competitive advantage.
L.L. Bean has always been known for world-class customer service. I’ve been a loyal customer for over a decade and can attest to the fact that I’ve never waited on hold for more than a few seconds. You automatically get a knowledgeable customer service reps who is also an L.L. Bean Brand Lover.
DVD-by-mail provider Netflix has dominated the industry they invented and their online customer service, rated #1 by Nielsen Online, has helped them grow to almost 10 million subscribers. Realizing that their savvy customers prefer addressing customer service issues online, Netflix has anticipated virtually every potential issue and set up easy and quick ways to solve customer problems.
Every touch point matters. Your call center is just one touch point, but it’s a big one. Your website, advertising and packaging—everything you do either reflects your brand and strengthens your customer’s bond, or weakens it.
If you run your business strictly by the numbers (merchants, I’m mainly talking to you), you will ensure lower levels of profitability and greater levels of competition in the long run.
How is that possible?
Profitability is driven by loyalty. Your loyal customers shop you more often, tell their friends about you and tend to avoid your competitors. Loyalty develops as a consequence of doing something meaningful for people. “The numbers” strip out the human element—it doesn’t help you focus on what’s meaningful to your customers.
A blaring example is the decision to outsource your call center operation for customer support. No question—the cost savings in the short term can be enormous. But what’s the long-term customer attrition rate?
It costs fives times more to acquire a new customer than keep an old one. A high attrition rate means you have to funnel your resources into marketing and advertising in order to continually acquire new customers because you can’t keep your old ones.
Online retailer Zappos has over 75% repeat customers. Yes, they invest heavily in training and supporting their in-house customer service staff, but their 62,000% growth rate over the last 8 years speaks for itself. CEO Tony Hsieh doesn’t run Zappos strictly by the numbers, but instead keeps his focus on loyal customers and innovates around their needs.
Honor the human element in your business. Celebrate your customers. Support your employees. You’ll build more profitable businesses and you’ll also feel better about yourself.
In 1982, a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles, such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them.
It doesn’t matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart. Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein’s long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light.
But to understand this strange assertion, one must first understand a little about holograms.
A hologram is a three dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser. To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first covered in the light of the laser beam. Then a second laser beam is bounce off the reflected light of the first and the resulting interference pattern (Where the two laser beams commingle) is captured on film.
When the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl of light and dark lines. But as soon as this film is illuminated by another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object appears!
Ready for the strange part?
The fact that it is now a 3D object is cool but let’s say you decided to take a hologram of a rose and cut it in half, and then illuminate the halves by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the rose. If the halves are divided again, each snippet of film will always be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the original image. Unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole.
The “whole in every part” nature of a hologram provides us with an entirely new way of understanding brands.
A brand is all the information and ideas associated with your product/service that creates a distinct customer experience. The information or ideas can be:
Real or perceived
Rational or emotional
Physical or sensory
Thought or felt
Form and function
Planned or unplanned
Everything is the brand because all the parts represent the whole. Or in holographic terms, the “whole in every part.”
What does this tell us? If you break any part of your business off and looked at it individually it should represent what you want your brand to stand for in the heart of your customer. If you look at any of your sales reps, they should be what you want in the heart of your advertiser. From the front door of your business to your business cards, each part represents your entire brand.
Is this a lot to consider? You bet.
But is it worth it? There is no question.
Each touch point of your brand tells the whole story. Each touch point should push the brand forward. If a touch point is not pushing the brand forward it’s pulling it down. The reason why a holographic film continues to project the entire picture is because each peace contains the very essence of the whole. Each part of your brand has to do the same.
People “get” what you’re feeling—consciously or not. If you don’t really care about your customers, they’ll be the first ones to know.
Great brands don’t just create meaningless slogans like “Customer Service Excellence”—they champion customer-centric values as a way of operating every aspect of their business.
These businesses excite us and make us happy to conduct business with them. It’s a symbiotic relationship between business and customer. The business provides products and services customers need and, in turn, the customers willingly patronize the business and support its existence.
Have many companies forgotten about the nature of business itself?
Outstanding businesses go above and beyond to better their customers’ lives:
L.L. Bean wants you to be completely satisfied with your purchase. Don’t like the way a shirt holds up after a few years of use? Return it—L.L. Bean has no time limit on customer satisfaction.
Online retailer Zappos offers free shipping both ways and a 365-day return policy.
Along with one-click shopping, Amazon offers a Prime program that gives customers free 2-day shipping on most items and their Subscribe and Save feature offers both convenient and economical shopping.
In addition to creating beautifully-designed products, Apple supports their Mac User Groups (MUGs) and Genius Bar to help educate their customers on how to better use their Apple products.
Harley-Davidson sponsors HOG groups around the world and annual mega-rally events.
Search and online advertising giant Google offers a robust offering of free services that help their customers in their daily lives from Google Reader, Google-411, Desktop Search, Google Earth, News Alerts, Google Calendar and Google Docs.
What does your business do to better serve its customers?
“My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.”
- His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama
Apparently, kindness is also the religion of online retailer Zappos.com.
Companies that uphold Cult-Brand values expect the best from their employees, because as humans, they have the intrinsic capacity to feel, contribute, and most of all, love.
At Zappos, Thursday is Random Acts of Kindness Day. Every week, three people are randomly selected to be the recipient of his or her own hit parade, complete with noisemakers, bullhorns, a royal banner and crown to be donned for the entire week.
Kindness also spreads throughout the corridors of Zappos through song. Take a listen to the Zappettes, Zappos’s female singing sensation, uplifting co-workers’ spirits in three-part harmony.
And when employees are inspired to spread kindness among each other, customers will be touched with the same.
“Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–base functions: marketing and innovation.”
– Peter Drucker
Pretty simple right? Yet how many companies truly “get it” and can execute with such clarity?
In the three and a half decades since Drucker summed up the goal of business and the tools necessary to achieve the goal in one sentence, business gurus have overcomplicated the purpose and processes of business and buried them so deep in heaps of tactical bullshit that’s its not surprising why so many businesses feel lost.
Marketing helps you carve out a unique niche and constantly reinforce your unique offering and the emotional payout customers get from doing business with you (advertising, building brand communities, and social media are just touchpoints that should point to the same overall purpose).
Innovation allows you to develop products that don’t just meet your but exceed the expectations of your customers, showing them that you both know what they want and care. Every time they purchase from you they fall in love with your brand again.
Being able to execute effective marketing and innovation requires a deep understanding of the customer that few businesses have.
Apple excels at surpassing customer needs. In a 1989 Inc. interview Steve Jobs said, “You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new … If we’d given customers what they said they wanted, we’d have built a computer they have been happy with a year after we spoke to them—not something they want now.”
Only by having deep insights into your customers can you look into the future with a crystal ball and know what they want before they can tell you.
And, this is what Apple did with the iPhone. Despite hype that led to bloggers dubbing it the Jesus Phone, Apple was able to escape the pitfalls of disappointment by doing what it always does: excelling on the user interface and beautiful design. The beauty of the design inspired users own creativity and the ease of use enabled them to have an easy path towards achieving their goals. Unlike other multi-functional devices, Apple didn’t play to the business audiences, it played to their core group of customers who consume and create media.
Instead of other brands looking to the hearts of their businesses through the eyes of their best customers—their Brand Lovers—and predicting what their customers would want, they envied Apple, solidifying Apple’s reputation as the John Holmes of the technology industry (for a fun look from Fast Company at Apple envy check out The iWannabe Chronicles). Through their envy, they copied and mimicked what Apple did and attempted to intrude on Apple’s space, instead of carving out their own, leading to a barrage of copycats, the so-called “iPhone killers.” Nearly two years later, everyone is still trying to play catch up and the closest any killer came was to being a kamikaze with bad aim.
The most effective thing any of these phones have done is to create free advertising for Apple: as soon as you see one of the phones, what do you think? My guess is, “Apple iPhone.”
The latest entry into the foray and the one with the “best chance” (like we haven’t heard that before) is the Palm Pre. When the iPhone launched, Palm thought Apple would be hurt by returns. Since those mass returns never happened, Palm decided to hop on the bandwagon. The Palm Pre was released June 6th, 2009, two days before Apple made announcements at the World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC).
The Palm Pre offered a multi-touch interface like Apple, but also using a sliding keyboard presumably because “that’s what people want” (like that’s really helped other “iPhone Killers) and cut and paste (which was released on the next update by Apple). The only unique offering has nothing to do with the phone itself: a charging device that works wireless, but that’s going to cost extra. And, to obviously compete with Apple on price, the phone will cost you $199, but only after a $100 mail-in rebate.
When the buzz of the Palm Pre died down, Apple was still, clearly, the industry leader because it continues to focus on its best customers’ needs with both is marketing and innovations, rather than imitating its competitors.
Next time you make a product or design a new marketing strategy, instead of trying to outdo the main competition look to what you do best and what your best customers love about you and innovate from there.
1999: Selection (of shoes)
2003: Customer Service
2005: Culture and Core Values as their Platform
2007: Personal Emotional Connection
2009: Delivering Happiness
Several key take-aways for smart business people:
A strong brand is constantly evolving, but not changing directions. This is critical. You probably don’t want or need to re-invent your brand, but you also can’t be stagnant. (It’s also interesting to see how a brand’s logo can evolve over time.)
Strong brands tend to move up Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs. Zappos continues to move in a more humanistic direction. They’ve always been about people, but now they are moving upward to a more meaningful connection with their customers and employees. Delivering happiness is a tall order, but simply holding that intention will create new opportunities to wow their customers and employees and lead to greater loyalty.
For anyone interested in the power of brand loyalty and how to build a business for the long-term, Zappos is an ideal company to study. Zappos demonstrates that many of the intangible qualities of business like values, culture and willingness are more important than many transactional-oriented executives care to believe. Otherwise, why would anyone care about a shoe e-tailer? And how could they grow by approximately 7,800% annually for the last nine years?
Here are five more reasons to focus on your Brand Lovers:
1. In The Loyalty Effect, Frederick Reichheld explains how a 5% increase in customer loyalty can increase a company’s profitability by 40 to 95%.
2. Think about what would happen if you turned just 10% of your occasional customers into Brand Lovers. For large enterprises, this shift represents billions in additional revenue and radically higher profit margins.
3. By focusing on your Brand Lovers, your cost of acquiring a new customer decreases.
4. Your marketing effectiveness soars as a result of building a stronger brand presence focused around the needs of your best customers.
5. By focusing on your Brand Lovers you can build a powerful brand that stands for something meaningful to your special customers. This gives you clear differentiation and helps you organically attract more of your most profitable customers.
The bottom line is that serving your best customers is the surest way to grow a profitable business—in any economic climate. To serve your best customers, you must understand them first. To identify and understand your best customers, you need an effective brand model.
In the October 2009 issue of Fast Company, Dan and Chip Heath, authors of Made to Stick, highlight a tactic that is quickly becoming the go-to strategy in the business world: Selling products with emotion.
But, as the Heaths recognize, emotional tactics often fail to measure up to anything other than a sticker put on a bottle.
The companies that will really shine and last will be those that don’t just say it, but also mean it. Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty could have easily been just another marketing campaign aimed at selling soap. But, Dove chose to back up its claim by supporting self-esteem programs for girls and launch a Web site dedicated to helping parents instill self-worth in their daughters.
Emotional appeal isn’t something inherent in a product; every product can be clothed in a wide range of emotional fabrics—figuring out an emotional match to your brand is only the first step.
But, rather than making your brand the emperor without clothes shouting false claims to the public, mean what you say and show it with your actions.
Every interaction your brand has with your customer is important. Each point of contact (or touch point) provides your brand with the opportunity to strength your customer’s tie with you. Conversely, if you’re not careful, any touch point can damage your customer relationship.
If you run your business strictly by the numbers (merchants, I’m mainly talking to you), you will ensure lower levels of profitability and greater levels of competition in the long run.
In 1982, a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles, such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them.
People “get” what you’re feeling—consciously or not. If you don’t really care about your customers, they’ll be the first ones to know.
“My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.”
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