The problem is, they did not come away believers.

When your customers finally finish the transaction, sign
off, shut down, wrap up, peace out, pay the check, walk out the door and go
back to their busy lives, here’s powerful question worth asking:

What did the experience you offer make
people believe in again?

What did your company restore people’s
faith in? What idea, that customers were convinced was dead, did your brand
bring back to life? What experience, that people avoided as a badge of
honor, are they now obsessed with? What feeling, that people had lost contact
with, did you reignite inside of them? What possibility,
that people had long since given up on, did you made real once again?

Search a few review sites, and you’ll
find this question answered in spades.

A tortured soul who goes to hypnotherapy
believes in herself again. A jaded couple who takes a romantic excursion believes
in romance again. A cynical guest who stays at a bed and breakfast believes in
the service industry again. A terminated employee who flawlessly relocates
across the country believes in humanity again. A cooking snob who dines at an
amazing restaurant believes in eating out again.

Sell that.

Because when people believe, it’s really
hard to leave.

John Jantsch is a marketing consultant, speaker, author, dad, yogi, guitarist and good friend of mine. The ideas in this post are drawn from his
most recent book, The Commitment Engine.

* * * *  

Strategy, purpose, and passion are integral to success, but
none of them really matter without clarity.

Clarity is the strong and unwavering sense that our daily
choices are grounded in an authentic sense of purpose. Clarity is how we create
a sketch of something worth asking others to complete. Clarity forces us to
form the right questions.

Without clarity everything we do is either an attempt to
gain it or a stab at the hope that we are moving in the right direction.

Almost every business I’ve ever worked with, including my own,
struggles with this idea. But, until we are really clear and inspired by why we
do what we do, whom we do it for and how to do it with complete and utter
honesty, little else matters.

Clarity does not emerge by simply switching on some beacon
in hopes of throwing a clear and guiding light. It comes when we discover a
rusted but sturdy lamp in the basement of an old house. Then, only through
careful tinkering and polishing this lamp begins to cast a flicker of light.

And, as we continue to polish and tinker, something truly
brilliant begins to evolve.

With clarity comes control. With clarity comes grace. With
clarity comes joy.

Finding and keeping clarity takes work. It takes an
unbending willingness to see things for what they really are. To filter
decisions based on what might be best for others. To understand how to create
the products and services our customers really need.

Clarity is both a feeling and a direction. It can be
experienced and seen. It is at the same time perfect simplicity and obvious
complexity. Clarity inspires us and those

around us.

But what is it exactly?

Clarity is turning purpose to profit, leading with stories,
asking what to leave out, meeting the whole person, amplifying without hype, doing
more with less, embracing the truth, anticipating needs, measuring one perfect
thing, forming decisions out of beliefs and making a potent brand promise.

Clarity is the most important idea in any business.

Thanks John.

Smart companies take something out of the equation for people.

Not immeasurable elements like friction, time, energy, work,
risk, taboo, fear, embarrassment, inconvenience, complexity, stress, guesswork,
legwork, hassle, frustration, pain and mystery.

They actually delete something measurable, visible and
tangible. Something annoying and big enough that customers wouldn’t just notice
if it were gone, but would be delighted to find out it’s gone, excited to tell
people it’s gone, and inspired to come back, again and again, just for the
experience of not have to deal with it.

                                                           

What if your bank took deposit envelopes out of the equation?
What if your restaurant took ordering out of the equation? What if your store
took waiting in line out of the equation? What if your product took instruction
manuals out of the equation? What if your software took installation out of the
equation?

Instead of wasting resources to marginally improve something
that customers are always going to hate anyway, why not scrap it from the
process entirely, then spend your money bragging about how you’re the only
company around who doesn’t have it?

Cut through the tradition that’s getting in the way of the
product. 

Break a few rules that don’t exist.

Shatter a cultural taboo and send some shockwaves through
society.

Interaction is the agent of human decision.

If someone decides to pay attention to, press the like
button for, buy something from, become a follower of, or tell others about your
brand, it’s likely because of an interaction they had with another human being.

Namely, not you.

Real marketing isn’t about what you do to people,
it’s about what you enable people to do each other. It’s about creating social
meaning above and beyond your product or service.

If your brand is the instrument that connects the
disconnected, gets them joyfully interacting with each other, persuading each
other to step out on the dance floor, influencing each other on your behalf,
telling each other about what you do, and ultimately treating each other as the
final authority of trust, you’re the hero.

Because it’s not who you know. It’s not who knows you. It’s
whose life is better connected to other people because they know you.

I wonder what would happen if, in addition to selling a
great product, your brand helped satisfy the underlying social need within each
of us to belong.

It’s not a product, it’s a platform.

When your brand builds something that makes people famous,
recognized and part of something cool that matters to them, they will love you
forever.

Threadless
is the perfect example. They reward their designers with significant financial
prizes, public kudos and coveted community awards. And as a result, their users
are the most engaged in the world, their shirts are the most amazing in the
world and their brand is the most beloved in the world.

How is your product a stage for customers to stand on?

The freemium model is finally working.

Give the product away to your tribe for free, let them use
it until they’re blue in the face, then, once they realize the value of
the product – and the increasingly important role it plays in their lives – you
make money via micro transactions along the way like upgrades, paid
subscriptions, cheat codes, level walkthoughs, feature unlocks, removing ad
content, premium versions, more space, complementary products, technical
support and connecting lonely users at live events.

Piece of cake.

But first, it all starts with making the free product great
enough that everybody will take it and use it forever. That’s the big secret of
technology, it’s not about what the product can do, but how enjoyable it is to use.

Because if you can make something people enjoy using,
they’ll use it more. And once you skyrocket the number of people aching to
stay, eventually, enough of those people will be willing to to pay.

In the words of Phil Libin, “The easiest way to get a
million people to pay for non scarcity product is to make a hundred million
people fall in love with it.”

Information used to have a supply and demand issue.

But now that it’s free, ubiquitous and accessible, its value
has plummeted. If
you’re a generalist, your competitors are Google and Wikipedia.

If you want move people’s eyebrows and catapult their
thinking into profitable new directions, your job is to deliver perspective.

Here are my latest examples. Don’t forget to read part two!

Las Vegas wasn’t built on winners. Are you smart enough to
see the evidence when the odds are stacked against you?

Howard Schultz visited five hundred espresso bars in Italy. Are you willing to out research the
competition?

The founder of JetBlue flew his own airline at least once a
week and blogged about his experience. Are you willing to be your own customer?

Liverpool had a lot of good bands. Have you accepted the
face that talent isn’t as important as timing?

Obama’s speech had four times as many tweets per minute as
Romney’s. Is your brand betting
against the web by not believing in social media?

Facebook pays programmers thousands of dollars to hack into
their site. What will you invest to uncover your company’s vulnerabilities?

Chew on that.

 

The weird thing about the web is, nothing happens if we try.

Only when our guard is down, when our intentions are neutral
and when we’re operating out of our purest, most instinctual nature, do we see
the greatest results.

Last
year, I wrote my manifesto.

I’ve
never worked harder on anything in my life. From researching to drafting to
writing to editing to marketing, the amount of sweat that went into that project dwarfed
anything I’d done before.

And
when it was done, I couldn’t have been prouder. The project challenged my
creativity as a human, exploded my growth as a writer and reconnected me to my
idealistic roots that had long since been buried under the burden of business
obligations.

Good for me, I thought.

So
I decided to publish it.

Not
for money. Not for attention. Not to prove anything. And not to make my way to
the top of some bullshit bestseller list.

Just
because.

And
to my delight, the manifesto blew up. It gained tons of traction, got insane
amounts of traffic and even won a few awards. Apparently, more than any other
book, speech, video or interview I’d published in the past, there was something
about this particular piece of work that hit a nerve.

Which
is interesting to me.

Because
if I would have tried, it wouldn’t have happened.

It’s not about getting people to care about your brand.

It’s about getting your brand to care about people.

Here’s how.

Shift the focus. Instead
of marketing around what people buy from you, market around their interests. Try
not to take your brand so seriously. It’s not because they like your brand,
it’s because they love their friends.

Enable personal
expression. People almost don’t know how to react when they are treated
like human beings with ideas, feelings and dreams. Build a platform where
people can share their emotions and win them forever.

Offer a welcome distraction. Instead of beating your
chest, try keeping customers entertained. People just want to feel, laugh, cry, play, gasp and have
their imagination captured, so they can forget about life, even if only for a
moment.

Enough with the
projecting. Instead of selling something that’s important to you and
disguising it as something that’s important to them, listen to people in their
natural habitat. Take advantage of ordinary conversations and normal discourse.
They will tell you exactly what to sell to them.

Try caring.

Simulated compassion has a short shelf life.

Profero is a digitally-led, global, marketing & advertising agency.

I had the chance to sit down with CEO Aaron Reitkopf to talk about their culture of curiosity, competitiveness and collaboration.

 

1. You talk about ideas people can belong to. From a culture perspective, why do you think your employees join your company? 

We believe our external mission is the same as our
internal mission: Creating ideas people can belong to. It’s the most important
metric in the world. The core metric marketing has always been about.
Belonging is a fundamental need, so we take the same thing we create for our
clients and create it for ourselves.   This idea you can belong to
internally is a culture people want to belong to, defined by clear values,
and each of our eleven offices around the world have their own distinctive spin
on these values. For instance, you have to be globally curious. If you don’t
have a passport, that might make us alarmed about you.

2. The great workplaces of the world have soul. What do
you do to humanize your culture?

First, we work very hard on making sure there’s no
“me, I or my,” and more “we, our and us.” We’re pushing towards a common goal.
You can’t only be about yourself and your point of you. Our brainstorms are
about the third idea, which is yours plus mine to make ours. That makes
the idea more powerful. Third, bring yourself to work. You. The real you. Not
the business you. Not the you that you thought you were supposed to be. Be you.
Share your ideas, don’t just play the role you’re assigned. Be present.

3. Belonging is a basic human craving. How do employees
know that they’ve found a home? 

We have offices all around the world. And at our New
York office, almost nobody is from New York. We’re all from somewhere else.
Everyone brings a unique point of view, many from countries around the world. We
never tried to be diverse, we just have the values about global curiosity, and
that’s what creates a diverse culture organically. Diversity isn’t an
imperative you just create. We recruit in such a way that, even if get the
culture fit wrong, we always get the mindset fit and the value fit right, and
that’s what brings in the best people. Great culture isn’t constructed. There
are guardrails, but the culture comes together on its own, nobody really
controls it. And we love it that way. 

To learn more about Profero’s work, click here!