• Lesson 11: “Are your palms sweaty?”

    Posted on September 14th, 2010 by and currently 2 commenting.

    Lesson 11 - Justine Foo, Ph.D.

    Over the last ten years, I’ve had the privilege of talking to people in a lot of different kinds of organizations – from global consumer products companies to leading academic institutions, from c-suite executives to the long-tenured “keepers of the culture”, from marketing directors to plant foremen. I’ve asked about purpose, vision and guiding principles. Heard more than my share of employee frustration about bureaucracy, uniforms, and either lack of, or too much, direction from the top. I’ve listened as people have passionately spoken about the entrepreneurial spirit that founded their company. And as they have endlessly extolled the virtues of transparency, discipline, trust, loyalty…

    But there’s one thing that never seems to make it into the lexicon.

    One thing that is utterly critical to an organization’s ability to grow, to innovate, to develop the kind of relationships every brand says they want – but is all too often overlooked when organizations develop their vernacular around values, train employees to be leaders, or decide what kind of performance gets rewarded.

    Courage.

    Not the kind of daredevil courage it takes to jump out of a plane, or scale El Capitan.

    But the kind it takes to give up control. To say the unpopular thing. To open yourself up to criticism. Or push yourself or your organization to try new things. Recently someone told me they had asked the CEO of a multi-billion dollar construction company what was the one thing he wanted his employees to have. His answer? Sweaty palms. If his guys didn’t have sweaty palms, they weren’t pushing themselves outside of their comfort zone enough. And a company that’s stuck in their comfort zone is, by definition, not entrepreneurial, and more likely to be a “me too” than a pioneer.

    If you believe in the power of word of mouth and are looking to ignite an advocacy movement – your organization is going to need courage. And a lot of it.

    Is your organization courageous enough to:

    • Speak up. Would your employees be advocates for your fans and fight for them if the company was doing something that looked good for the brand on paper, but could seriously damage the relationship with its fans?
    • Give up control by letting your customers speak for the brand.
    • Listen and take in what they say about you – the good, the bad, and the ugly (yes indeed, listening takes a lot of courage – remember your last 360 review?)
    • Invest in quality not quantity and to think about the long-term return on inspiration, not just the near-term return on investment
    • Be disliked. Standing for something distinctive and meaningful means that some people are not going to like you. That’s okay. Better than okay. You can’t be everything to everybody and hope to ignite a movement.
    • Break down the silos. To EN-courage marketing, R&D, and customer service to ingetrate and, as the book says, nurture the passion for your brand wherever it exists. Because the people who can market your brand best don’t necessarily exist in the marketing department. And the people who have the best ideas don’t necessarily work in R&D
    • Not just tolerate, but embrace failure as part of growth. Building relationships is hard – and risky. You have to put yourself out there and there’s no guarantee that people will want to engage.
    • To spend real face to face time with your customers on their terms, or invite them to your hallowed halls, instead of looking at them behind a one-way mirror. Or through the facebook-lens.

    I could go on – but instead I’ll suggest that you open the book to just about any page. It’s full of ways that igniting a movement will require you to be courageous.

    One of my favorite quotes is from C.S. Lewis:

    Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.

    Whatever your virtues when it comes to marketing and building meaningful brands, ask yourself whether your organization has the guts to live up to them when the going gets tough. Whether your leadership is brave enough to make the unpopular decision. Whether your employees are brave enough to take a risk and fail. Or whether “market research” has really become an exercise in “i’ve covered my bases in case this doesn’t work”.

    Ask yourself whether your palms are sweaty enough when it comes to reaching out to and embracing your customers. If they’re not, don’t be surprised if your customers aren’t willing to be loud and proud on your behalf.

  • Lesson Eleven | Movements Move People to Believe

    Posted on September 7th, 2010 by and currently 5 commenting.

    Today’s Lesson Eleven is written by John Moore, our dear friend and a part of our amazing extended tribe. Enjoy. BTW, check out John latest project, Tough Love, a business book masquerading as a screenplay.

    Lesson 11 - John Moore

    Let’s face it, BRAINS ON FIRE is an odd name to call a company. Odd that is until you understand what it means. As an outsider who has been embraced by the Brains on Fire family, I’ve come to understand what their oddball name means.

    The Brains on Fire name is best explained from their internal company manifesto, creatively titled, Tequila Shots…

    “Brains on Fire is not about us. It is about what we do. We create brains on fire. It is a state of mind, an attitude. When you work with brains on fire, you understand who you are and what you stand for. Your work, your passions become a calling. Brains on Fire is not a company. It’s a condition. Brains on Fire is a Movement.”

    The company, Brains on Fire, is a movement and not just a place to work because it moves people to believe.

    Whole Foods Market is of the same mind and same tribe.

    Whole Foods is less a company and more a movement. The Whole Foods cause is to make the natural and organic foods lifestyle more approachable, enjoyable, and attainable. The company’s roots began over 30 years ago and for most of those years, the conventional grocery laughed at Whole Foods Market. No one gave this oddball company selling whole grains, organic produce, and natural beef a chance to make it in the cutthroat world of grocery stores.

    Whole Foods Market has made it, no one is laughing now. They are the world’s largest natural/organic grocer with a reputation for being conscious capitalists. In many ways, Whole Foods has changed the grocery industry with every major grocer, including Walmart, mimicking elements of the Whole Foods Market movement.

    However, the Whole Foods Market movement wouldn’t have happened if it didn’t first move people to believe.

    By always being clear and consistent about what it stands for (natural and organic foods), customers learned to BELIEVE in the company.

    By taking time to educate its customers about good food that’s good for you and good for the earth, Whole Foods customers learned to BELIEVE there is a better way to buy groceries.

    By encouraging people to live a more natural life and thus, a healthier life, Whole Foods enabled customers to BELIEVE in themselves.

    Any brand can ignite a movement with its customers, so long as the brand can move people to believe in the company, to believe in a better way, and to believe in themselves.

  • Lesson Eleven: The First Post – It’s About People, Stupid

    Posted on August 31st, 2010 by and currently 7 commenting.

    It’s good to be back on the blog. You know, I really miss being here when things get busy – but you’re looking good, as always, and we’ve got some exciting stuff happening around here. And with that, we’re off:

    If you’ve been following the Firephere over the last few months you might have heard that Brains on Fire has been furiously thinking, typing, editing, sketching and publishing a love story. And that story happens to be inked on the pages of a book we’ve named after the state of mind we seek for ourselves, our clients and our kindred spirits: Brains on Fire.

    You can learn plenty about the read (and where to get your hands on one) over at the Brains on Fire book website (1), but today I want to talk about how the love story is going to live beyond words and letters on a page.

    When Robbin talks about writing the book, she is adamant about saying that ‘we’ wrote it – not her and the other people with last names printed on the binding – but all of us:

    When I say “we,” I don’t just mean the four authors you see listed on the cover. “We” represents an army of believers. It’s the people who comment on our blog. It’s the courageous clients we serve. It’s their customers. It’s everyone who sends us a resume or a love note. It’s our employees and extended tribe. It’s people who catch a vision and inquire about our services. It is all of us who are learning and changing the way we think about the work we do in the world. (Phillips, Cordell, Church, Jones ix)

    - Robbin Phillips, Courageous President

    And because so many people inspired the book, we want to continue to re-write the way we do marketing, together. From page 169:

    Igniting movements is hard work. It’s building with people, not tools. Our belief is simple…we’re all in marketing grad school. We’re not experts. Frankly, there are no experts yet. And that’s why we’re all in this together. There are more lessons to learn, more stories to share and more movements to ignite…So join the Brains on Fire movement at www.brainsonfire.com/lessoneleven. Let’s write the next chapters together. This is the beginning, not the end. (Phillips, Cordell, Church, Jones 169)

    So what is Lesson Eleven? It is a collection of real life stories – a movement-maker’s journal. Real stories from you, real stories from other marketing do-ers, real stories that we discover, share and hope will change the way we think about marketing.

    Lesson Eleven Sketch

    So here it is – the first story of Lesson Eleven. And it is based on the opening line of our love story:

    It’s about people, stupid.

    ——————–

    While the medical issues that define our age are many, leading physicians say that childhood obesity poses a gigantic threat. (2) This isn’t the place to discuss the many causes or many proposed solutions, but I ran across a story the other day that serves as a wonderful example of why people are so important. (3)

    Dr. Maureen Black and her associates at the University of Maryland School of Medicine have studied childhood obesity and the ways that people are targeting the problem. They discovered that group health education for inner city Baltimore kids is easily found in school and church settings, but noticed that learning in the place where a majority of health knowledge should come from, the home, is rare.

    Their solution? Pretty simple. Build one-on-one relationships between healthy college students and overweight children, facilitating life learning and mentorship that takes place in the child’s own home. Says Dr. Black,

    These were very active sessions. The mentors were not just talking to them. In every session they had food, and they often made the food together in the child’s home. The mentors took the children to the corner store or to a nearby fast-food restaurant to learn about healthy choices. They visited the skating rink or went hiking in a state park to learn the importance of being physically active. (3)

    The results are pretty remarkable. After only 12 mentorship sessions, the children in the study who were paired with a mentor (there was a control group) experienced a 5% decline in rate of obesity, while those who weren’t experienced an 11% increase. After two years. That’s right – the lessons that the children learned in a personal relationship of only 12 meetings produced changes that lasted two years.

    People are so important, so central, because they are the main ingredient of what makes a movement long-lasting. How?

    It comes down to trust. And people don’t trust your company; people trust people. People they know. People who’s recommendations they seek out and have faith in. People don’t buy your company, product, or service first, they buy people first. (Phillips, Cordell, Church, Jones xiv)

    The childhood obesity example shows that while lots of factors can help (group education, removing soft-drinks from schools, etc.), the hard work of actually getting involved in someone’s life can produce extremely compelling results. Relationships are the lifeblood of any marketing effort that is going to last. And they make the work you do in the world truly meaningful.

    ——————–

    Stay tuned – we’ll have another edition of Lesson Eleven next Tuesday and some great stuff coming up on the blog.

    • (1) You can learn more about the Brains on Fire book and where to get your hands on one at www.brainsonfirebook.com.
    • Phillips, Robbin, Greg Cordell, Geno Church and Spike Jones. Brains on Fire: Igniting Powerful, Sustainable, Word of Mouth Movements. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2010. Print.
    • (2) You can read CDC coverage of stats and consequences of childhood obesity here.
    • (3) You can read about Dr. Black and the mentorship study here.

  • The book is here! The book is here!

    Posted on August 30th, 2010 by and currently 5 commenting.


    For the last year in addition our wonderful day jobs, we have been working overtime @brainsonfire —I mean triple time — to craft a book of lessons learned in igniting powerful, sustainable, word of mouth movements. And geez, we hope you like us enough to want to read it.

    So guess what? TODAY August 30, 2010 is the official release date of Brains on Fire; Igniting Powerful Sustainable Word of Mouth Movements.

    We’re so excited and I am frankly a little bit nervous for some reason. It reminds me of my college days in art school. When we’d put our finished art work up for critic.

    Makes me feel like I’m standing naked in room of fully dressed people.

    Anyway, it’s Sunday, and I am at a book store right this minute. Sitting and writing this blog post at one of the Barnes and Nobles in Greenvegas. The one on Haywood Road to be exact. It’s a relatively cool, sunshiny day in our neck of the woods. I walked in — got some chips, one of those IZZE sparkling grapefruit drinks and I am forcing myself to hold off going back to the business section to see the book on it’s shelf until later. Some of us from Brains Fire are meeting here at 4pm to do it together. Along with some of our friends who live close by.

    So here’s a couple of things I want to share with you:

    Lots of you have been talking and tweeting about the book and sharing photos. We LOVE that. We are going to aggregate and capture them all on brainsonfirebook.com. So keep going. We REALLY do want to hear from you.

    Connect with us anytime.

    On email. On Facebook @ facebook.com/BrainsOnFireBook and on twitter @brainsonfire. With questions and comments. Good and bad. We want to hear it all.

    We’re big believers in practicing what we preach. When we wrote this book we made a solid commitment to share everything we’ve learned in an open, honest and meaningful way. (Lesson #5: Movements Empower People with Knowledge). We hope in doing so that you will find a desire to join our cause in finding meaningful ways to connect organizations and their advocates through shared passions.

    Let’s do this together.

    I saw one recent comment that made my heart sing — I think it was you @hughweber that said, “I am taking notes while I read this one.” We seriously hope you will SHARE your takeaways and ideas with all of us, Hugh. And that brings me to…

    Lesson Eleven Tuesdays.

    One way we want to make sharing easier is every Tuesday we will post a blog that will in a way, continue the book.

    We would like Tuesday’s posts to come from you – our courageous clients, readers and friends and advocates. Maybe you can share other examples of movements you’ve seen in action. Or just your key takeaways. (I shared the Bare Escentuals story with John Moore from Brand Autopsy. He asks good questions. We’d love to see other examples beyond the work we have done from you guys.)

    Send a relevant post and photos if you like to me and we’ll start collecting and sharing them on Tuesdays.

    Do you like that idea? I hope so.

    Okay. Here we go.

    Stay close.

    This should be fun. And remember, if you are reading this blog. If you get that “same tribe feeling” with Brains on Fire…remember…this is OUR book.

    Be proud.

    It took an army of true believers. Please know it is hard for me to write that line without tearing up. It’s been quite a year.

    Okay. Sappy as it sounds. I hope you know. I love you all very, very much.

    OX,
    Robbin

Newer Entries »