Consumers migrating to online editions from conventional media

By Bob Wheatley

In the recent W&T Media Trends consumer survey, consumers voted their preference for receiving news and information about products and services from online sources vs. conventional broadcast and print media.

Marketing PR strategies grounded in traditional print and broadcast media may fail to reach their intended goals to inform and engage consumers who increasingly prefer to get information from digital sources.

Online More Important Than Ever

•    61% of survey respondents said they prefer to receive news and information on new products online rather than through conventional platforms.

•    Importantly, 61% also said over 80% of their daily consumption of product news and information resides in the digital world.

•    The survey also revealed 73% of respondents believe editorial media (ie. newspaper and magazine web editions) is the most trusted source of new product information over blogs (16%) and brand-produced content (11%).

Media Adapts to New Consumer Behaviors

Importantly traditional media understand the migration to online is moving ahead unabated — and to retain audiences, more investment is being made in their digital presence and editions. As testimony to this development, TIME Inc. recently announced plans to publish online tablet versions of 21 of their top titles before the year is out. And 53% of survey respondents indicated they either already own a tablet computer or have plans to purchase one.

Implications for New Product Success

Digital convenience, comfort with screens, technology improvements and daily interaction with devices is changing the pattern for how consumers prefer their daily diet of news and information.

New product launch strategies weighted too heavily on media outreach to print versions of magazines and newspapers, or conventional broadcast, may miss the mark to interact with consumers where they are increasingly spending their time and attention.

Earned media outreach plans and programs should be optimized to push greater time and investment towards digital media platforms and editions.

Blogs and other “citizen journalist” outlets remain a vital part of the marketing mix, but should be viewed in context of their audience reach and should operate as an extension of media activity, not a replacement for online editions of mainstream editorial media. The cachet of the professional journalist/reporter still retains relevance and value.

You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

By Robert Wheatley

Where does superior work come from in the PR and marketing communications field? Ok, so you say the work comes out of the heads of talented people. To be sure. But what separates the players from the posers? How do some people take their careers and business solutions to higher levels while others just mark their time “executing the project”?

We all think of super successful professional athletes and musicians or actors as people with incredible talent. Born that way maybe? Physically designed for success in their chosen field in some way? Lucky even? Maybe not. Read on.

The Brains Business…

In the PR and marketing game, we live in an intellectual property world informed by big ideas and remarkable insights. Certainly at the academic level there’s specific training in communications, public relations and marketing that helps fill the brain with understanding how these tools and disciplines work. But as said earlier some will succeed on higher levels down the line.

How can PR people achieve at the top levels? What separates the best from less than that? Is it luck? Ingrained talent? IQ scores? Contacts and relationships? No truer words were ever spoken on this earth than “You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know.” And therein lies the start of understanding the path to better performances. And nowhere is this better illustrated than by example from one of the most successful rock bands of all time, The Beatles.

Fab Four Fame an Act of God, Force of Nature or Sheer Luck?

In his fabulous book, Outliers, author Malcolm Gladwell dissects success and achievement, blowing away the myths of fate and born-with-it talent that seems to pave the way for superstardom in one’s chosen field. The Beatles it turns out were a living example of what Gladwell calls the 10,000-hour rule. The band, formed in 1957 in Liverpool, was unremarkable in its early days. Until, a club owner in Hamburg, Germany signed them up to play over a period of years in a setting that is absolutely remarkable for one thing: the Clubs were open 24 hours. The band played seven days a week, often for 5 to 6 hours a day or more.

Over a two-year period, The Beatles played 1,200 times. Most bands don’t even secure that much on-stage performance experience in the course of a career. They played non-stop thus having to learn extraordinary amounts of material. They played, and played, and played. Outcome: the enormous amount of work put in forged a band with incredible skill sets. Gladwell’s conclusion: what separates the major winners from also-rans is at least 10,000 hours of focus and dedication to learning, growing and doing in ones field. Mastery is achieved when the effort put in is exceptional and extraordinary. Anything less and mastery is virtually impossible to secure.

How does this play out in PR?

Study, study, study and then study some more. Know everything about your client’s business and category. Read every publication you can get your hands on related to our field and practice generally. Feed your head through a continued effort to draw from the best minds in the marketing and communications field.

How do you leap ahead of “You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know”? By making the communications and brand-building world an avocation as much as it is an occupation. Study, absorb, listen, read and focus your efforts on learning. Write and publish in our field – writing by the way is an essential practice (we’re story tellers) and one that you get better at only by doing. The more you know about a business and the competitors and the consumer who buys, the more creative and strategic the solutions get.

Out-sized ideas are not accidents, they are the outcome knowing, studying, digging deep to get your arms around the grist of what drives a business and what stands in the way of its growth.

As you work to expand what you know and understand about communication, human behavior and brand creation, the more clients will believe you have something special to offer. Programs get better, more creative. Your ability to help solve more problems grows exponentially.

How can you get to your 10,000 hours more quickly? Sorry there’s no way around it. Hard work followed by more of the same.

What’s your ambition?

Barilla’s Brilliant Family Dinner Focus…

By Robert Wheatley

Last Sunday was Father’s Day. And for the third year in a row, the family took me to Tabor Hill Winery’s great restaurant near our weekend home in southwest Michigan for a wonderful afternoon. It’s becoming a welcome ritual. A repeat performance – or in my case three-peat – as part of this annual Daddy Day celebration.

Can your brand and business benefit from working in and around, adopting or creating rituals? I think so.

A ritual is really a deep dive into repetitive behavior. What is it about rituals that are so satisfying? Perhaps most important of all are the good feelings, emotions and memories surrounding these experiences. In an uncertain age when all about us is in a state of constant upheaval, rituals can bring comfort, familiarity and satisfied expectations to life experiences. They are known, understood, predictable and perceived as events that consistently deliver a reliable outcome.

Rituals can be a force of habit. They can spring from activities we hold dear or enjoy in some way and thus are welcome additions to life’s routine.

Rituals come in various forms and flavors…

• There’s the morning visit to Starbucks for a better coffee experience prior to tackling the day
• Dieting and January
• The annual beach vacation my close friends take every year on Nantucket
• Spring cleaning season
• Fourth of July family gatherings
• Summer yard and gardening care
• Thanksgiving at Grandma’s or holiday events generally
• Fall fashion introductions and wardrobe makeovers
• Super Bowl parties

Events, seasonal occasions, family, experiences, hobbies and personal passions – all reflect a sense of added value we place on ritual behavior – which many people hold in high esteem.

Barilla mines family time around the dinner table…

Barilla Pasta reveals a shining example of this principle at work in a brand’s effort to build added relevance, meaning and value to their core users. What’s the ritual? Family dinner together.

There’s real substance to go along with the concept. Food and conversation are like Oreos and cream filling – they belong together. Taking time to slow down and interact over a meal is a useful goal with a value proposition attached to it.

For a brand to creatively adopt this ritual-in-the-making shows insight and strategic thinking at its finest in a project that puts their product at the center of a mission to help family members get closer to one another.

The engaging voice this gives the brand on relevant topics is compelling. Sustainable. Campaign-able. Emotional. Relevant. Interesting. Intrinsically important.

At home I am the family chef. I enjoy cooking. I have a passion for it. And my four-year old daughter Peach is getting interested in helping Daddy do his thing at the counter top. I can think of nothing more satisfying than getting her involved with me, with food. Maybe a ritual in the making? Who knows.

So what’s going on here? Brands that work to help enable these lifestyle events and interests create a path for constructing a closer relationship with their users. Of “mattering” if you will.

Sure you can go along and operate without making the effort and keeping the relationship down at the transactional level. But think of the possibilities over time when you interact with consumers at a deeper place where emotional ties and fabric are formed? More exciting, more effective I think.

You agree?

Pet Food Forum presentation challenges industry to consider new pet ownership paradigm

By Robert Wheatley

If anything our agency has a long-standing love affair with the pet care category. It’s a business we have a passion for. And that comes out routinely in our efforts to position ourselves as thought-leaders and public relations/social media experts in generating pet care brand growth.

This week I had the wonderful privilege of presenting at the Pet Food Forum convention here in Chicago. Delightfully, the folks at Watt Publishing (Debbie Phillips in particular) who produce Pet Food Industry magazine and this annual conference for pet food manufacturers, allowed me to collaborate on a unique presentation with David Lummis of Packaged Facts research.

Both David and I share a personal interest in emerging evidence that there is a tangible, demonstrable, documented connection between pet ownership and human health and wellness benefits. This is a transformative idea for pet ownership and may well be for the pet care business generally.  Bottom line: successful brand communication springs from relevance of the message to the consumer. And what could be more relevant than your pet supporting your own health?

Dr. Marty Becker, perhaps the nation’s most well-known celebrity vet and pet care advocate wrote a book called the “Healing Power of Pets” where we describes pet ownership as a “Human Life Support System.” Marty deserves credit and a big thank you for helping me gather data for this presentation.

Human health — virgin territory for pet brand building…

Right now the go-to-market platform for most pet care brands is focused on celebrating the emotional bond that resides at the center of the relationship between pets and their two-legged parents. More recently there’s been an avalanche of pet food brand communication centered on superior pet food ingredient story telling. A phenomenon we call “premiumization” has taken root and drives the entire industry. The massive 2007 pet food recall opened the doors to public discovery of what pet food ingredient terms mean and ushered in a new era of redefinition and re-staging of higher quality pet diets. That said, the focus on ingredients breeds too much similarity (we call this specsmanship) in brand conversations with consumers.

No one has really moved as yet to expand their brand voice to address the connection between pet ownership and improved health and wellness for the pet parent. Hence our goal at the conference to get this on the industry’s radar screen…

See it here…

Below is my Forum presentation.

“Human Life Support System”

What rich territory to mine for engagement when you consider the chance to expand the pet care value proposition to include protecting, elevating your own health. The pet and pet parent relationship is an amazing story of emotional bond in itself. The symbiotic nature of this – one protects the health and wellbeing of the other – is just exciting. Brands that get this right can redefine the conversation and drive a wedge of differentiation in how they go to market.

What’s your take on this??

YouTube functionality supports converting engagement to sale

By Robert Wheatley

Scanning the recent edition of Google’s recent self-published e-zine Think Quarterly, I ran across an article on functionality improvements at YouTube that permit viewers to buy items they like within the production via a point/click hotlink to another web platform.

Video is an engaging and entertaining medium. With high involvement categories that naturally attract an enthusiastic fan base, you can immediately see the business-generating opportunities when taking advantage of viewer interest and converting “in the moment” to a purchase opportunity.

The site above, You-Tique, is a great example of a fashion business aggregating a series of trend videos around everything from “What’s New for Spring” to occasion based ideas, such as what to wear for a hot date. The use of a Stylist expert helps set the credibility and value equation at the right level right out of the gate.

From there viewers can watch a model wearing the products and click to buy while viewing the video. It’s easy, pretty painless and, in my opinion, way more effective than looking at still photos of a product with narrative information alongside.

Zappos has figured out that online e-tailing gets compelling when you combine the right products with exemplary service. So who knows if the folks behind You-Tique have similar policies for returns and friendly live support. That said, the concept of watch and buy is just plain captivating.

You get richer story telling, context, validation and other benefits that outshine static web site galleries by adding the flavor of video production to the whole proposition. May not be right for every product category but this peek at the future is exciting none-the-less. Think Quarterly says the click through rates for You-Tique have been stellar…

What do you think?

Connections to key lifestyle interests invoke openness to engagement

By Robert Wheatley

“The problem with communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished.” — George Bernard Shaw

Business growth opportunities abound for brands that fully understand the conditions and events that set in motion openness to communication – as in “I’m listening.” Much of the time consumers are not. The presence of brand communication at any given moment is not nearly as important as the audience’s willingness to pay attention. That may feel a bit like saying water is wet. But hear us out: lifestyle interests and events drive the readiness to listen. There’s an optimal time and place when consumers will be primed to engage.

Our point: brand communication gains a whole lot more traction when it occurs in tandem with relevant consumer behavior than it does randomly. Yet all too often, brand outreach is showered broadly as a form of messaging rain, timed to coincide with retail distribution or promotion period considerations more so than consumer lifestyle connection. In effect, brands remain ever hopeful that consumers will simply collide with the message storm or will be magically lured into engagement through its ubiquity, entertainment value or sheer novelty.

Lifestyle events prime the pump of openness…

Brand communication and PR strategies anchored to a foundation of real insight about the consumer’s relevant lifestyle concerns and passions will help crack open the door to hyper-targeted communication that conveys the right thing at the right time to the right person.

Getting Alignment With Target Audience Interests

Here’s a living example — Nesties – as defined by market research firm OTX and on-line retailer The Knot – are a unique segment of 25 to 32 year old female consumers. They represent the low hanging fruit for an array of household and lifestyle products. When these women become engaged to be married it triggers a period of three to five years devoted to wedding planning, new household creation and starting a family. These events in turn motivate an array of purchases.

It is the events and changing conditions in their lives that activate a behavioral response. Collectively Nesties are long-range “planners” who feel they have primary responsibility in setting up their new households and take responsibility for decorating, cooking, social activities, household chores, caring for children and pets.

This group shows evidence of predictable purchase behavior. And offers brands an audience already receptive to establishing a relationship that could continue beyond these formative years. So investments should be made in carefully crafted dialogue focused on this unique tribe — and grounded in positioning the brand as helpful and involved with her changing lifestyle needs, concerns and aspirations. This will lead to business growth.

Finding The Optimal Moment

Strategic timing and location of communication can also yield added engagement value. Meaning if it occurs when a person is actively doing something germane. A simple example of this is what we call leveraging a food brand’s kitchen footprint or in effect building its “share-of-countertop.” There is increased receptivity to brand messaging when the delivery timing coincides with related consumer’s behavior – in this case when working in the kitchen space. An obvious starter is to provide useful meal ideas, entertaining suggestions, tabletop recommendations, recipe preparation hints and serving suggestion guidance. It is an optimal environment for having a conversation — because the consumer is naturally open to it and their brain is switched on to the subject matter.

Nailing The Best Message

Messaging gains power when it is configured around the consumer’s lifestyle interests. Finding this sweet spot of alignment is what we call identifying a brand’s Higher Purpose. When the brand positions itself as an enabler, facilitator and supporter of a consumer’s personal passion, you’re able to forge powerful outreach tactics from this base. Consider the strategic possibilities that could fall out of sharpening your focus on consumer groups devoted to specific lifestyle interests such as fashion, travel, music, art, pet care, food enjoyment, cooking, child rearing, fitness, sports, home decorating or improvement, self-improvement, gardening, outdoor recreation, entertainment, entertaining, relationships and socializing. We could go on. The point is: the days of the hard sell, transactional style relationship are over and that form of messaging is out the window with it. So you want the consumer to understand some of the unique functional benefits in your product. Ok. And the path to getting their ears switched on springs from your willingness to be generous and unselfish — and thus play a role in their passions. It’s a richer, deeper and more personal relationship you want to construct.

The end result will be increased brand relevance, preference and sales.

By Bob Wheatley

Photo credit: Sharon Dominik

Forever and a day I’ve seen this concept play out in various categories from beverages to food, travel services to floor care and cleaning products, that 80% of your profits can routinely come from 20% of your customers who constitute the most engaged, heavy users in your business. Call them your best fans.

Yet routinely we focus our efforts, strategies and spending on casting a broad net. We try to be appealing to everyone because we keep telling ourselves that our brand and business not only deserves high household penetration, but “we can’t ignore the volume opportunities.” To be sure, but the 20% that’s mainlining your brand and paying attention to your messaging with a little help and “enabling” can become a more productive core of real-world ambassadors. People who can help spread the word effectively to those who are not as fully invested and who don’t buy as often.

Take cheese and pet food for example. Cheese is one of the most popular food categories in supermarkets. We like cheese, so it’s a big volume business. Yet a closer look reveals that consumers who are more emotionally engaged and devoted to cooking represent a “heavy user” profile that purchases more cheese products, more often and in many cases will go for higher priced items when they feel the value proposition is credible. So paying closer attention to this group of emotionally charged ‘kitchen commanders’ can yield incremental benefits in talk value and word of mouth, once they’re fully embraced, recognized and rewarded by the brands they love.

Or in pet food: a dynamic audience combination we refer to as indulgers and doters consists of a high percentage of higher income households who treat their animals like family members — and will even go as far as cutting back on some of their own discretionary purchases in order to keep Fido in tip top shape by feeding him a super-premium pet food diet. Industry statistics show this group continues to fuel an incredible growth track record in the emerging natural and organic segment – even though the tough economy has weighed in heavily in many segments to compel “trading down” behaviors.

Your call to action…

Think of it this way, your PR communications ROI outcomes will improve when communicating with an audience that’s really, genuinely paying attention. Those who have emotional, personal lifestyle connections to a brand are listening — first at the category level. A brand that works over time to mine relevance with this audience has the opportunity to build a unique relationship and bond. Conversely broad awareness tactics can perform as a “reminder mechanism” for the larger audience segments out there who may buy less often but who have ties to the franchise through their habit behaviors.

1. Consider for a moment the opportunities from investing more fully in courting your heavy users. What would you do differently? What efforts might you undertake to help create a community around these groups and empower them to interact with each other – especially important for home chefs and pet parents who want to share tips, ideas, experiences and insights with each other.

2. What rewards and recognition can you offer to your most devoted followers that surprise and delight – and thus are often the triggers to generating strong, credible and organic word-of-mouth communication.

3. What sponsored experiences can you create and deliver that bring your brand as close as possible to your best fans and allow them to interact with you and each other. In food this could include unique culinary experiences that reward your best customers with an opportunity to learn from the food heroes they respect like celebrity chefs. For pets it could be local dog park events and contests that allow pet parents to engage in shared experiences with their animal and with each other.

But wait there’s more…

Today, excellent blogger and thought leader Sonia Simone has an interesting post at Copyblogger that talks about the personal side of the Pareto Principle and how it impacts you and what you do. Her observations:

“…Which means that 20% of your customers provide 80% of your revenue. 20% of the time you spend behind your computer provides 80% of your best work. And 20% of that great meal you had last night provided 80% of the pleasure. (It was the chocolate mousse cake, wasn’t it?)

Because of the Pareto Principle, there’s always a “20%” you should be spending your time on. And in just about every discipline, it’s known as the fundamentals.”

Have you sat down to think about your day, your activities and to reflect on this idea – that 20% of your efforts will produce 80% of the great results and accomplishments you’re looking for? So what do the fundamentals look like for you? Maybe it’s a good idea to start by putting more energy and investment into courting your biggest fans…

Customers are not targets

By Robert Wheatley

If you think about it, words really matter. How we say things can lead to clarity or disagreement. The tone of a conversation can incite or inspire. What we say is a reflection of how we think. Our words may indeed inform our actions. What we believe is usually born out in how we verbally characterize our roles, jobs, priorities and actions.

Robert Passikoff wrote a great article on how we see customer relationships at Marketing Daily.

My point? It may be time for some honest introspection, a tune-up of sorts in how we truly, honestly view the relationships with those we wish to sell to. After all, businesses exist to serve the needs of customers and hopefully grow as a result. However is it possible that the wrong brand attitude could invoke behaviors that impede the one thing most organizations pine for – profitable growth?

The answer is yes. And it’s worth talking about. Why? Because of the seismic shift in the rules that govern how brands build customer relationships in the age of consumer control around markets constructed entirely on foundations of self-interest. The Mad Men era of “pushed” story telling worked because the power curve was aligned differently. Outbound messages could instruct consumers because they lacked the resources to learn “brand news” from other transparent sources. Business held all the cards.

Now the onus is reversed: organizations must divine the right role and pathway to gain “permission” for a brand/consumer relationship.

The entire brand/customer paradigm has flipped and so the language of business should adjust.

“You can no longer speak of your customers as faceless targets…”

The consumer is in charge and she looks for tangible and emotional value from the brands that matter to her. Mattering means important to, inspiring, connecting, worth listening to. And what’s at the foundation of mattering? It’s when what you do and say consistently and credibly conveys, “I understand your lifestyle needs and here’s how we can help.”

Brand language and behavior has to match the ethos of this new form of customer relationship building or the whole thing (your marketing plan) won’t work the way you want. Here’s how it shapes up:

Transactional relationships are about:

• Talking “at”

• Overt selling

• Persuading

• Interruptive forms of communication

• Aggregating eyeballs

• Consumers are targets to be targeted

• Message repetition

Trust based relationships are about:

• Two-way conversation

• Perpetual listening

• Pursuing lifestyle meaning and relevance

• Building rapport

• Reciprocity – big word meaning to do something unselfish

• Respect

• Authenticity and honesty

Ironically, the best brand relationships now start to take on the persona of human friendships. The language of the marketing and communications plan should reflect this awareness and understanding, lest we tempt old behaviors to return. So, treat your customers like you treat your best friends. You care, you’re interested in their lives, you want what’s best for them and it shows. Is this how you talk about your customers?

What do you think?

Social media marketing evolves to social business strategy

By Robert Wheatley

We’re standing at the edge of an entirely new business model born of the Internet age. For generations brands have made plans to target their consumers and move messages at them through various paid and non-paid media vehicles. A sort of “push button” model that would appropriate spending down different pipes of communication aimed at informing and persuading.

The Internet and social media have helped activate consumer control over brand relationships and interactions. This requires a seismic shift in thinking from command and control to mining paths of relevance and value to the consumer’s lifestyle.

Underneath the theories behind word-of-mouth marketing and social media platforms and communities is a simple but profound truth: we trust people more than we trust organizations and institutions. And trust is critical to building any kind of lasting bond between a brand and its user.

The next great leap will be the humanization of brands…

In the days of mass marketing, brands were more about their predictability and reliability. Now what matters more is uniqueness and craft. These two points alone favor giving brands a face. Literally.

Our challenge now is to humanize the interactions, communications and experiences people have with brands. This kind of intimacy breeds rapport and leads to trust. So the question we should be asking ourselves is this: how can we put a human face on the brands we guide?

First and foremost, by focusing on the people behind the brand and business. Employees, customer service reps, brand stewards, product development experts, senior management and others behind the great corporate wall should come out to participate openly in the communications process.

Why bother? A humanized brand can more meaningfully and effectively connect with consumers. What better example of this idea than agencies themselves. Sure agencies may attempt to position themselves along the lines of proprietary planning models and other methods that portend a form of “secret sauce” in the creation of effective communication. But in the end, agencies are defined by their people and the qualities, expertise and know-how these individuals bring to the table.

So too, its time for organizations to think about putting real faces in front of consumers to engage with. New media such as blogs and Twitter enable this kind of interaction. So its time now for brands to go LIVE. This approach recommends the development of social business strategy as a method of formalizing the concept and adapting the organization to this kind of change.

What do you think?

By Robert Wheatley

Can happiness build a better brand?

Granted it feels a little wishful and maybe even goofy to say happiness can be linked to business success, but hang in with me, and you’ll see how this pays out.

You have to love the story of Zappos. In less than a decade it’s gone from idea to around $1 billion in sales. Not bad. You’ve probably encountered the hall-talk and legend of extraordinary customer service and devotion to culture which grounds most word-of-mouth about this Internet e-tailer.

After browsing through some of the Tweets at Zappos’ CEO Tony Hsieh’s Twitter page, I discovered a link to a podcast from a recent presentation he made at a conference in Austin, Texas. It’s worth a listen. The talk goes on for a while… it remains engaging due in part to Tony’s affable, informal story-telling style. And helpful because of the insight he conveys around the “magic” ingredients that have helped propel Zappos from shoe seller to multi-category storefront.

His presentation hits a crescendo near the end when he moves beyond storytelling to advising, translating the powerful Zappos experience into some specific and focused direction that can benefit other businesses and brands. So here it is without further set-up:

Happiness

That’s right. Businesses and brands can find a path to success through a happiness strategy. Hang with me here before you conclude this is going to be psychobabble. The infrastructure that supports extraordinary service at Zappos, the investments made there to enhance the service experience and outcomes involves clear dollar and cents decisions and allocation of assets.

But underneath you can see the point emerge: it is their single-minded focus on culture and hiring the right people to fit within that world, that helps create traction with consumers. In relating this success to other businesses, Hsieh says that in the end happiness lies at the core of engagement, brand building, and business success. In customer interactions, employee attitude, longevity, turnover and, the feelings consumers have towards his brand.

He confesses to having studied happiness carefully and the triggers that bring it to life. Not surprisingly he relays that research studies consistently confirm that happiness sought-after and thought to flow through better jobs, relationships and money prove fleeting. In the end, it turns out human beings have a structural need to be a part of something larger than themselves.

Bingo: The Higher Purpose

As if he had been quoting chapter and verse out of the Wheatley & Timmons belief system about brand development, he talks about the compelling need for businesses and individuals to define a mission and higher purpose that transcends the daily balance sheet concerns of commerce.

Brand relevance springs from forging connections to a consumer’s lifestyle aspirations, desires and wants. What kind of vision, community and purpose can we craft for our brands that achieves higher purpose, meaning and therefore systemically delivers the recipe for happiness with those we wish to sell to (happy = satisfied = loyal = potential heavy user = brand ambassador)?

We all crave happiness as human beings. It is a fundamental driver in our lives. The notion of higher purpose and mission is linked to this sense and certainly fits strategically with how brands can earn a valued place in the lives of their best users. Hsieh says he’s been able to move the path in his organization for employees from job to career and then on to calling. And within the concept of calling he’s unlocked a reservoir of happiness internally that translates externally into the grist that authenticates the stories of incredible service experience.

For brands, a higher purpose becomes an enabler of relationship with core users. The unselfish acts of a brand that are intended to help facilitate lifestyle passions is a powerful vehicle to differentiate and elevate the entire strategic conversation about go-to-market strategy. Appropriate we think in the age of consumer control. Makes me happy.

What do you think?