LaunchingBrands

The Tricky Business of

LAUNCHING BRANDS

Organizations often fall short on both the

creation break-through ideas and their

subsequent go-to-market implementation

Culture Shock

Most companies don’t have the right mindset or culture for launching

brands, especially those that deliver a leap in the market place. They

don’t realize that launching brands needs to turn conventional wisdom

on its head.

Some common mistakes:

• Too Much Funding

• Fear of Failure

• Too Much Process, not enough passion

• Fear of Disrupting the Status Quo

Too Much Funding

New brand launches are too well funded

They are supported like a growing business, when it is crucial to keep

resources scarce in the beginning

Limited funding not only eliminates bureaucracy and lavishness, it

requires leaps in creativity

Fear of Failure

Most companies hamper new brand initiatives by “analysis paralysis” and a corporate instinct that delivers marginal increases rather than a home run

They also don’t value failure even though leaps are often triggered by early and repeated shortcomings

Ironically, those teams that celebrate failure as much as success are often the teams that deliver major breakthrough

Too Much Process, Not Enough

Passion A structured planning process actually kills creativity, one of the

major ingredients in new brand development

There is not way around it: Breakthrough is a bit Serendipitous

Companies will have to learn to tolerate inefficiencies and be patient

Rather than focus on a process, companies will have to learn to create the right culture for new brands

The teams assigned to new brands need to believe that they are on a “Mission from God”

More importantly, they need to learn to be imperfect

Fear of Disrupting the Status Quo

Companies often have trouble making breakthrough ideas fit into their ongoing business

Leaps are often considered “category killers” and rejected

The mindset inhibits their pursuit and commitment of the “next big thing”

Companies often don’t know how to deal with their internal revolutionaries

The fact is, innovation needs team conflict

It is sparked by a team that acts and thinks in divers ways and advocates unpopular, if not threatening ideas

Unique Skill Set RequirementsLaunching a brand is not the same as maintaining a brand. A common misperception stems from

companies failing to hone the right talent: entrepreneurs with start-up skills. Launching brands is

one of the most misunderstood talents in marketing. A skill set that is mostly counter-intuitive to

routine “brand management”:

Hence, staffing is often well intentioned but miscalculated. Major new initiatives are Placed in the

hands of “proven” managers, executives that have proven themselves With sustaining or growing

existing businesses.

What they lack is experience and the mind set of launching new brands; so they mostly Pursue

these new brands with a “business as usual” mentality that is doomed to fail.

DIFFUSION MARKETING:

The Next Go-To-Market Strategy Mass marketing is not an effective launch strategy for breakthrough brands

An alternative strategy is to select an early market one that first realizes the potential of this new idea

to help lower the barriers of adoption for the main market

It is crucial to hook this early market with subconscious techniques (vs. broadcasting), so that discovery establishes passion and ownership, before bringing scale to the initiative so that it can “tip”

Brand owners need to learn to let the market participate in their marketing initiatives

In effect, they need to use subcultures as “Creative Director” to co-create buzz ideas on behalf of the brand (voluntarily and enthusiastically, hence credibly)

Diffusion Marketing allows the market to discover, to engage with, and ultimately to help shape brand meaning

The difference to conventional marketing, especially in the early stages of a launch, is how the brand initiative catches on

Rather than use the mass media “airborne” contagion of broadcasting the brand to its audience diffusion marketing uses person-to-person “contact” contagion

allowing trendsetters to “discover” the potential of a new brand idea

This seeding helps lower the barriers of adoption for the main market

The Learning…

Brand owners need to learn to let the market participate in their

marketing initiatives. In effect, they need to use subcultures as

“Creative Director” to co-create buzz ideas on behalf of the brand

(voluntarily and enthusiastically, hence credibly).

Only once a brand idea has hit “next big thing” status will main market

be ready to adopt it. That’s the stage when the brand owner needs to

take back control of the message and switch to conventional above-

the-radar marketing methods.

The Buzz on Buzz

Buzz is slated as “the next big thing” in marketing. And while it’s been around forever (think P.T. Barnum), it is being rediscovered as a major element in launching brands.

Yet, buzz remains one of the most misunderstood phenomena in marketing: Rater than being a tool, buzz is the result of seeding an early market.

It is both the message and the medium in a diffusion marketing campaign. It’s the communication that an early market creates in order to “tip” a new idea to the main market.

As such, it lets the trend-setting 20% dictate what the other 80% think is cool.

The most powerful aspect of buzz is when the early market enhances the original idea by creating a new use, ritual or habit

Diffusion Marketing Candidates

Diffusion Marketing is not the right approach for every new launch. Flankers, line extensions, marginal improvements do not need to be orchestrated this carefully.

But, Diffusion Marketing is right for breakthrough brands (e.g. those that create new markets or have major cultural impact)

Those new initiatives that need to be disseminated across opinion leaders before the main market adopts them (when new = scary = only for the brave and/or novelty oriented) New category

Disruptive technology

Emerging trend

Unexpected benefit

Those initiatives that have some cultural impact. Nothing is more ingrained and harder to change than basic patterns of human behavior and “common sense.” Establish a new habit

Own an occasion or mood

Become part of a particular lifestyle, associate or activity

Change the mental map of a brand or a category

Diffusion Marketing Goes Mainstream!

Just to clarify: Diffusion Marketing is not just stealth.

It does not favor person-to-person over mass media. Instead, it views media sequentially – recognizing the need for different tactics throughout the phased launch

During the seeding phase, diffusion relies on person-to-person media to seduce the early market and make it digestible for the main market

Once the early market’s buzz has reached the mainstream, switching to conventional mainstream media like broadcast is crucial to build momentum and broad awareness

It’s also a signal to the main market that the initiative is legitimate and sustainable

In addition, traditional media allows the brand to take back control of the message

The tricky part during the mass market adoption is to stay true to the early market

Don’t neglect your opinion leaders…the early market needs to be continuously given special treatment in an overt manner

Hence, build in exclusivity to keep their loyalty. Otherwise, the initiative loses its credibility

How To Better Launch NEW Brands

1. Delegate new brands to “intrapreneurs”

2. Go for market innovation, not mere

product innovation

3. Don’t be consumer-centric, but follow your

own intuition

4. Adopt the DIFFUSION MARKETING

template

Delegate New Brands to

“Intrapreneurs”

Ensure the right skill set, mind-se and independent culture

In fact, keep the new brand folks separate from the rest of your

company, even in terms of proximity

Go for Market Innovation,

Not mere Product Innovation

Breakthrough brands are driven by a visionary’s unconventional view

of the market

As such, they are not product-driven, nor are they consumer-driven

Rather they are “thought-leader” driven

Driven by the ability to see things differently and change the rules of

the game

What sets these thought leaders apart is their ability to ignore critics –

and even more to act on their convictions

Don’t be Consumer-Centric,

but Follow Your Own Intuition

There is a lot of focus these days within companies on being customer-centric, to give the market what it asks for

This does not work for market innovators

Consumers cannot make innovate leaps

They cannot imagine what they don’t know…psychologists call this phenomenon “functional fixedness”: By fixating on the way they normally use things, consumers have a mental block to thinking creatively

Hence, they can only provide guidance on what they expect…and there is no breakthrough in that

Breakthrough brands let consumers fine-tune the product, not create it

They envision a step-change in the market, and throw it out there to see if the market adopts their view

Adopt the DIFFUSION MARKETING

Template

Having new brands catch on like wildfire is not just blind luck, it can be orchestrated

Through diffusion marketing, the brand tells a story, but tailors that story to relevant sub-cultures and introduces it to them at a time and place where they will be able to remember that story

Most importantly, the brand facilitates, so that those who hear the story become storytellers, making up and adding parts as long as they get the title right and critical elements correct

Diffusion marketing approaches the market as a journalist, and editor, and an anthropologist

It studies the cultural details and crafts compelling narratives from those nuances; then lets that story find its audience

A DIFFUSION MARKETING PLAN NEEDS TO ADDRESS THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS:

PLANNING Why should this brand (initiative) catch on?

What is the relevant seed idea?

SEEDING Who will co-develop it?

How should they first meet the seed idea?

BUZZ What message do we ideally want the market to create?

How can we facilitate that?

MAINSTREAM Who will be the main user of the initiative?

And how will momentum be maintained? With the “inner circle”

With the mainstream

CULTURAL BENEFIT What larger meaning would we ideally like to create as a

result?

Adopt The New GO-TO-Market Code

People Hire your audience

Keep their ears to the ground

Respect Be totally transparent to your inner core

Draw a line between promotion and manipulation

ROI Invest more time, love and passion

(and less bucks)

Manage expectations; this may take years to take off

Research Fire the cool chasers; you need to lead

Find ways to tag and track the spread of P2P initiatives

Media Stop counting your GRP’s and worrying

about eyeballs

Find media solutions that help seduce your early market

Consistency Only liars need to be rigidly consistent

Lear to be spontaneous, surprising, imperfect

Pacing Diffusion is like hunting; patient long

waits and groundwork

…interspersed with opportunities that only last for moments

Co-Creation Central Scrap the focus groups; learn through

active involvement

Connect with relevant early market talent and fund their ideas

Script your Future Plan every step of the journey even

prior to day 1

But be totally flexible in having the story rewritten along the way

Relax Control is the enemy of spontaneity

Diffusion isn’t just liberating markets, it’s liberating US!

Definitions

Word of mouth: The act of consumers providing information to other

consumers.

Word of mouth marketing: Giving people a reason to talk about your

products and services, and making it easier for that conversation to

take place.

What is Word Of Mouth Marketing?

Word of mouth is a pre-existing phenomenon that marketers are only now learning how to harness, amplify, and improve.

Word of mouth marketing isn’t about creating word of mouth -- it’s learning how to make it work within a marketing objective.

That said, word of mouth can be encouraged and facilitated.

Companies can work hard to make people happier, they can listen to consumers, they can make it easier for them to tell their friends, and they can make certain that influential individuals know about the good qualities of a product or service.

Word of mouth marketing empowers people to share their experiences. It’s harnessing the voice of the customer for the good of the brand. And it’s acknowledging that the unsatisfied customer is equally powerful.

Word of mouth can’t be faked or invented. Attempting to fake word of mouth is unethical and creates a backlash, damages the brand, and tarnishes the corporate reputation.

Legitimate word of mouth marketing acknowledges consumers’ intelligence -- it never attempts to fool them. Ethical marketers reject all tactics related to manipulation, deception, infiltration, or dishonesty.

All word of mouth marketing techniques are based on the concepts of customer satisfaction, two-way dialog, and transparent communications. The basic elements are: Educating people about your products and services

Identifying people most likely to share their opinions

Providing tools that make it easier to share information

Studying how, where, and when opinions are being shared

Listening and responding to supporters, detractors, and neutrals

Types of Word of Mouth Marketing

Buzz Marketing: Using high-profile entertainment or news to get people to talk about your brand.

Viral Marketing: Creating entertaining or informative messages that are designed to be passed along in an exponential fashion, often electronically or by email.

Community Marketing: Forming or supporting niche communities that are likely to share interests about the brand (such as user groups, fan clubs, and discussion forums); providing tools, content, and information to support those communities.

Grassroots Marketing: Organizing and motivating volunteers to engage in personal or local outreach.

Evangelist Marketing: Cultivating evangelists, advocates, or volunteers who are encouraged to take a leadership role in actively spreading the word on your behalf.

Product Seeding: Placing the right product into the right hands at the right time, providing information or samples to influential individuals.

Influencer Marketing: Identifying key communities and opinion leaders who are likely to talk about products and have the ability to influence the opinions of others.

Cause Marketing: Supporting social causes to earn respect and support from people who feel strongly about the cause.

Conversation Creation: Interesting or fun advertising, emails, catch phrases, entertainment, or promotions designed to start word of mouth activity.

Brand Blogging: Creating blogs and participating in the blogosphere, in the spirit of open, transparent communications; sharing information of value that the blog community may talk about.

• Referral Programs: Creating tools that enable satisfied customers to refer their friends.

Word of mouth marketing encompasses dozens of marketing techniques that are geared toward encouraging and

helping people to talk to each other about products and services. Common types of word of mouth marketing are

listed below. This is not a complete list (Not everyone agrees that each of these should be part of word of mouth

marketing, and many marketers use different terms to describe them.)

The Philosophy of Word of Mouth

Marketing

Word of Mouth is . . .

The voice of the customer

A natural, genuine, honest process

People seeking advice from each other

Consumers talking about products, services, or brands that they have

experienced

Word of Mouth Marketing Is…

Recognizing that a happy customer is the greatest endorsement We work to create customer enthusiasm instead of pushing marketing

messages

Giving customers a voice Providing something worth talking about

Providing tools that make it easier for them to share their opinions

Listening to consumers Engaging them in open, unfiltered conversation

Promptly and honestly responding to their concerns

Valuing customer opinion, whether it is positive, negative, or neutral

Engaging the community Finding the right people and connecting them to each other

Helping new communities to form

Participating in and supporting existing communities and conversations

The Only Marketing Based on

Genuinely Passionate People Word of mouth marketing is the most honest form of marketing,

building upon people’s natural desire to share their experiences with family, friends, and colleagues.

Our work empowers peoples and gives them a voice . . . a process that can never be reversed.

If we succeed in satisfying our customers, we will benefit greatly because they will share their enthusiasm and support our brand.

But if we fail, that same voice will hold us accountable and broadcast our failings.

Only honest marketers with confidence in their products dare engage in word of mouth marketing -- because it will backfire if the promise of your marketing message isn’t backed up by reality.

Once you give people a voice, they will tell the true story of your company, good or bad.

Word of mouth marketing is self-policing and pushes marketers to create better products and provide genuine satisfaction.

Organic vs. Amplified Word of Mouth

Organic WOM

. . . occurs naturally when people become advocates because they are happy with a product and have a natural desire to share their support and enthusiasm. Practices that enhance organic word of mouth activity include: Focusing on customer satisfaction

Improving product quality and usability

Responding to customer concerns and criticism

Opening a dialog and listening to people

Earning customer loyalty

Amplified WOM

. . . occurs when marketers launch campaigns designed to encourage or accelerate WOM in existing or new communities. Practices that amplify word of mouth activity include: Creating communities

Developing tools that enable people to share their opinions

Motivating advocates and evangelists to actively promote a product

Giving advocates information that they can share

Using advertising or publicity designed to create buzz or start a conversation

Identifying and reaching out to influential individuals and communities

Researching and tracking online conversations

Positive Word of Mouth Strategies

1. Encouraging communications Developing tools to make telling a friend easier

Creating forums and feedback tools

Working with social networks

2. Giving people something to talk about Information that can be shared or forwarded

Advertising, stunts, and other publicity that encourages conversation

Building WOM-worthy elements into products

3. Creating communities and connecting people Creating user groups and fan clubs

Supporting independent groups that form around your product

Hosting discussions and message boards about your products

Enabling grassroots organization such as local meetings and other real-world participation

4. Working with influential communities Finding people who are likely to respond to your

message

Identifying people who are able to influence your target customers

Informing these individuals about what you do and encouraging them to spread the word

Good-faith efforts to support issues and causes that are important to these individuals

5. Creating evangelist or advocate programs Providing recognition and tools to active

advocates

Recruiting new advocates, teaching them about the benefits of your products, and encouraging them to talk about them

6. Researching and listening to customer feedback Tracking online and offline conversations by

supporters, detractors, and neutrals

Listening and responding to both positive and negative conversations

7. Engaging in transparent conversation Encouraging two-way conversations with

interested parties

Creating blogs and other tools to share information

Participating openly on online blogs and discussions

8. Co-creation and information sharing Involving consumers in marketing and creative

(feedback on creative campaigns, allowing them to create commercials, etc.)

Letting customers “behind the curtain” to have first access to information and content

Part One:

Marketing Without Marketing

The No-Marketing Myth

Corporate America is confused. How else could you explain some pretty weird behavior from the Fortune 500: Nestlé invading blog sites, Sony creating fictitious reviews to promote feature film

duds.

The past decade’s most successful brand launches — most of which shunned traditional marketing templates — have the big guns taking some rather embarrassing stabs in the dark.

In their search for answers, professional marketers found comfort in their ability to revert back to the immutable laws of marketing: Accept branding as the most critical element of commercial success, find a relevant

and compelling connection between product performance and a target audience, and create advertising around an aspirational image associated with the brand.

These fundamentals had always kept marketers on track. But a string of recent successes should be forcing marketers to ask whether these laws are becoming obsolete: How did Starbucks and eBay build billion-dollar valuations without leading with a

quintessential advertising campaign?

How did Palm and Red Bull ignore what consumers said they wanted, yet create new markets?

How did Pabst Blue Ribbon become the fastest-growing domestic beer in 2002 when it tastes like backwash and hardly can be said to offer aspirational benefits? Behind each of these successes is a complex orchestration of activities that only appears inconsequential.

Creating an Illusion

Brands like Starbucks and Red Bull — the leaders of the “no marketing” school of thought — are spending hundreds of millions of dollars in non-advertising each year, creating the illusion for their passionate user base that success happened serendipitously.

The ultimate irony of this phenomenon is that consumers are in on the joke. Meanwhile, corporate America is desperately trying to copy the new marketing template, and in the process proving over and over again that it just cannot get it right.

Why haven’t Coke, Pepsi and Anheuser-Busch been able to make a dent in Red Bull’s business, despite their respective distribution omnipresence and deep, deep pockets?

Why hasn’t a single Hollywood studio been able to reproduce the go-to-market template and resulting runaway success of The Blair Witch Project, despite numerous high-profile attempts?

Introducing the Brand Hijack

When it comes to 21st-century marketing, consumers are more clued in than the professionals. Marketing managers aren’t in charge anymore. Consumers are.

Across the globe, millions of insightful, passionate and creative people are helping to optimize and endorse breakthrough products and services, sometimes without the companies’ buy-in.

Call it brand hijacking: the act of commandeering a brand from the marketing professionals and driving its evolution.

Brand hijacking allows consumers and other stakeholders to shape brand meaning and endorse the brand to others.

It’s a way to establish true loyalty, as opposed to mere retention. We’re not talking about creating hype.

We’re talking about a new template for going to market — a complex orchestration of many carefully thought-out activities.

In order for your brand to stick, for it to have real impact on our culture, you must be willing to collaborate with a group of people with which you’re not used to collaborating: consumers.

Resist the temptation to assume that consumers are a bunch of suckers. They don’t devote themselves to brands because they want to provide free marketing for a corporation.

They do it because some special brands offer up a vision with which people can identify — one with which they want to involve themselves more deeply.

In the end, market involvement brings about a better, richer, more sustainable product experience.

It garners true loyalty from consumers: an investment on their part to build a stronger relationship with the brand on an ongoing basis.

At its best, market involvement creates a cultural benefit, offering meaning in an otherwise chaotic modern world.

Part Two:

The Hijack

Public Property:

The Serendipitous Hijack Hijacked brands do not necessarily have to be great products. It’s all about the killer experience.

A serendipitous hijack is the act of consumers seizing control of a brand’s ideology, use and persona.

It is most often practiced by brand fanatics within subcultures and is largely unanticipated by — and independent of — the brand’s marketing department.

Consider the case of Napster. Shawn Fanning, the founder of Napster, hadn’t been thinking about revolutionizing the music industry and inventing file sharing along the way. He simply wanted to know how he could get music off the Web with the least amount of hassle.

Fanning was a college freshman frustrated by the many dead links he encountered when scouring the Web for rare music. In the old days, it was a pain to search for music in the first place.

But imagine hours of searching and then the link you finally discovered would simply disappear.

So Fanning wrote some code to prove that you could create a real-time online index.

Then he used those fateful and seductive words when he e-mailed the beta-program to several friends in the hacker community: “Do NOT share this with anyone. This is still in a test phase.”

So it was that Napster (Fanning’s childhood nickname) was born. Within months, hundreds of thousands of users were forwarded that e-mail and downloaded the software, making Napster one of the fastest growing technologies ever.

Why was Napster so perfect for a takeover by the market? Consider the following five reasons: It provided a blank canvas. It allowed users to appropriate a neutral infrastructure and make it their own. They created

a community spirit ripe with hierarchies, coded communication and etiquette.

It offered a nonmaterial incentive to participate. Napster’s users had a built-in incentive: The larger the community, the more music that was available.

It made the community feel needed. Napster’s value depended on the behavior and visionary ideas of its users.

It fostered a sense of belonging. In fact, Napster fostered committed solidarity that was strengthened by repeated shutdown attempts by the record companies.

It had smart leadership. Fanning never intended to make money off of his creation. He got out of the way of his own product and allowed it to evolve under the brand leadership of its own community. It’s unusual for a brand to get hijacked to the point of total control by the market, as Napster was. When this happens, the brand essentially becomes public property: It’s defined and led by its user community. Ironically, this sort of full-throttle hijack is often an accident.Rarely is it the result of initiatives or campaigns coming out of a marketing department.

The Marketer’s Guide to the

Serendipitous Hijack Fueling the momentum of a brand driven by its community is one of

the most challenging assignments in marketing.

It requires walking that finest of lines between safeguarding the integrity of the brand’s soul and keeping its legitimacy within the market community.

Success hinges not only on your ability to resist the tremendous urge to do “cool marketing,” but also knowing when to turn the switch to mainstream marketing and brand investment.

Here are three ways to start with the right attitude: Don’t be afraid of your consumers. Your most passionate users will

provide you with critical insights into how to evolve your brand.

Don’t be afraid of a little controversy. Pushing the usual limits of what’s acceptable will serve as a demonstration of how much confidence you have in your brand. Don’t panic about a bit of controversy tainting your brand image. You’ve got more to gain from treating it with a sense of transparency, reality and, above all, humor than from trying to squelch it.

Develop a sense of humor about your brand — especially if the market is hijacking it. Consumers find it endearing when you show that you can laugh at yourself.

Adapt Your Marketing

Figure out why you got hijacked. Too often, brand owners try to identify the drivers behind serendipitous brand hijacks through focus groups, quantitative studies or expensive trend-hunting reports.

But these methods simply do not reveal the real causes. It is better to research the origin of the movement and trace its evolution by putting together a timeline.

Take the time to study what the hijacked brand does for its users and what social factors are driving the brand’s success.

Essentially, you will become a cultural anthropologist.

For example, the word on the street was that people loved Pabst Blue Ribbon because it was retro. But the same could be said of several other brands of beer.

It seemed clear that being “retro” was only part of the story.

Digging into the brand’s history revealed many other factors that contributed to PBR’s rise in popularity: Its mention in the film Blue Velvet gave it credibility, its appearance on the speakeasy revival scene provided visibility, its symbolic value as the anti-microbrew provided meaning, and so on.

Educate the Organization

Establish a code of conduct to stay true to your consumers and your character.

Hijacked brands can become extremely fragile if they stray from the core values and belief system of their markets.

Invest in educating your entire organization about the hijacked brand’s DNA.

What values are most important to your hijackers?

Resist the temptation to do marketing.

The hijacked brand manager’s job is to keep the brand neutral so that the market can fill it with meaning and enrich it with folklore.

In a sense, serendipitous brands are built through anti-marketing.

Stay away from pompous campaigns that try too hard.

Stick with the spirit of the original hijack: Grass roots. Real. Anti-hype. Transparent yet enigmatic. Even a bit imperfect.

Truly cool brands should not say, “We are cool.”

The campaign should feel as though a bunch of normal folks got their hands on a marketing budget.

The Co-Created Hijack

A hijack does not have to be serendipitous. It can be planned.

But it requires the mind-set of allowing the active involvement of the market to discover, to engage with and to help shape a brand’s larger meaning.

A co-created hijack is the act of inviting subcultures to co-create a brand’s ideology, use and personality, and to pave the road for adoption by the mainstream.

Without exception, a hijacking rewrites the job description of a traditional brand manager. The new job is a facilitator.

Successful managers enable an ongoing conversation between an engaged consumer base and a distinctive brand.

This requires finesse, patience and a solid understanding of the brand’s purpose. This is done by leading with purpose.

Conventional Brands Vs.

Hijacked Brands Conventional brands position themselves as providing certain benefits

to their consumers.

The marketing relies on the creation of an aspirational image.

The brand owners try to convince you that using or wearing a certain brand will make you seductive or successful.

Hijacked brands, on the other hand, offer consumers something much bigger — meaning within a broad cultural context.

As a result, they play a far more inspirational role in people’s lives.

A co-created brand like Harley-Davidson signifies a way of life.

The Blair Witch Project invented an urban myth.

Apple sells an entire worldview.

Starbucks stopped at no less than creating new social norms.

Overcoming Conventional

Marketing Many corporations tend to be hindered in their attempts at brand hijacks by the ghosts of

conventional marketing. They discover that it’s not as easy to commit marketing heresy as they originally thought.

Meanwhile, they fall prey to the following mistakes: They misinterpret the reasons for success. While the initiative should begin with getting an

exclusive early market deep into the brand experience through subconscious techniques, the strategy must change over time to draw in the mass market.

They rely on proven managers. Executing a brand hijack requires a whole new skill set. It takes facilitation, an intuitive sense of the early market, a confident patience and a light touch — not the skills taught in business schools or marketing textbooks.

They measure success by the wrong standards. When launching a new brand, most firms typically look at traditional measures such as brand awareness, sales volume and weighted distribution. But these metrics are irrelevant when disseminating a brand idea through early markets.

Letting the market collaborate in the management of your brand may be counterintuitive, especially to conventional brand managers. But the fact is, it builds stronger brands. Instead of communicating — or rather dictating — brand meaning to the market, brand hijacking communes with — or rather guides — the market to a common understanding.

A brand hijack embraces the consumer as peer rather than as “target.” Consumers of hijacked brands are looking for a meaningful connection to the product — a connection established through a common value system rather than a common demographic denominator.

Hijackers establish communities around a brand because they believe the brand believes in them. Marketers therefore need to humanize their targeting efforts.

After all, you can’t collaborate with a statistic. You can’t co-create your brand with a “21- to 35- year-old white, suburban, college-educated professional.” Don’t define audience members. Create them.

The Next Marketing Era

In the days before mass media, heightened superficiality and consumerism, our social roles were handed down to us from previous generations in the shape of norms and respected institutions.

We each had a clear, predetermined identity and role in society that shaped how we lived. But then we rebelled and set ourselves free to choose our own lifestyles and our own identities.

With this freedom came a hefty price tag. According to sociologist Anthony Giddons, we are now threatened by “dilemmas of the self,” like uncertainty, powerlessness and commodification.

We are lost, struggling with a “looming threat of personal meaninglessness.”

And that’s where our consumer culture fits in. Branding has crossed the cultural chasm.

In the past, brands served merely as a form of entertainment. In today’s consumer culture, brands provide an answer to our identity crisis.

Brands create purpose and give our lives meaning. They help us construct our social world.

In other words, in our search for place and purpose in life, consumer culture is replacing tradition.

Part Three:

The Hijacker

Marketing as a Catalyst for

Cultural Development It should come as no surprise that while consumers are increasingly

looking to the marketplace for meaning, the job of the marketer is shifting dramatically.

More than ever, marketers have become arbiters of culture and facilitators in the search for identity.

Consumers are demonstrating an increasing immunity to conventional marketing because they distrust marketers and they’re suffering from media overkill.

They have experienced the decline of trust in tradition. Some of them are old enough to have lived through Watergate. All of them experienced Enron, 9/11, the end of job security and a high likelihood of growing up with divorced parents.

These factors and many others have all but shattered the myth of “middle-class security” — a state of mind that fueled American consumer behavior for decades.

Modern marketing has gone through several stages of evolution during which the relationship between brand owner and consumer has completely flipped.

The Consumer Collective

Today’s consumer no longer acts alone. Brands are not being hijacked by individuals, but by groups.

These social groups form in a manner similar to the way ancient tribes used to form — except that whereas geography and survival were the common threads that bonded ancient communities, modern tribes are bound together by common hobbies and value systems.

Brand tribes are groups of people who share their interest in a specific brand and create a parallel social universe ripe with its own values, rituals, vocabulary and hierarchy.

Part of the reason for the emergence of tribes can be traced to a radical change in the social fabric.

Trust in mass media and religious and political institutions has eroded.

Traditional structures, from job security to marriage, have broken down. Previously rigid institutions have lost their authority.

This lack of stability and a diminished level of social interaction have revived our ancient tribal instincts.

We are seeking ways to reconnect with others. This behavior defies conventional wisdom, which tells us that people are becoming more individualistic.

Yes, people are becoming more inwardly focused and less concerned with what other people think of them.

But underneath this veneer of apparent individualism lies a strong trend toward convergence.

Brand Tribes

Understanding this trend toward tribes as primary social units is crucial for marketers because tribes are now forming around brands. Brand tribes select products differently than individuals.

They seek brands for their social, not functional, value. They want brands that can facilitate group rituals and experiences; products that establish connections and define the group identity.

Members are constantly on the lookout for symbols and signs that will distinguish them from nonmembers.

Brand tribes do not accept brand meaning as dictated by the brand owner. In fact, they actively seek to reconstruct and appropriate brands for their own symbolic usage.

Take Harley-Davidson, for instance. Threatened by the invasion of superior Japanese motorbikes in the early 1980s, the company survived bankruptcy with what was, at the time, a technologically inept product.

The brand’s success was propelled by the sheer will and energy of its community: the HOG (Harley Owner Group), which now claims 400,000 members in about 1,000 chapters.

Harley localized the tribe and made it personal. Rides and rallies have become the social glue of the community, a tribe in which riders know each other by name and establish real friendships.

Earning Consumer Devotion

Brands with a religious following are not the only ones capable of enchanting tribes of fanatical believers and inspiring lasting devotion.

There are three ways to make consumer groups feel passionate about, and hijack, your brand. They are: 1. Create a discovery. When people believe they have discovered a

brand on their own, they feel ownership and want to share it with their friends. They are engaged by either being delighted or by being let in on a secret.

2. Create a commentary. Allow your brand to become either a political or social statement. Once a brand achieves iconic status, it obtains a deeper meaning among its users. Generally, the market appropriates the brand for its own statement.

3. Create a mission. The strongest way to inspire consumer devotion is to develop a brand religion. Brands with clearly defined purposes can develop a cult like following. And these brand tribes will truly act as if they were on a mission to change the world.

Part Four: The Brand Hijack

The Roadmap

The Kick-Off: Hijack Ideation

It all starts with an idea that you seed, nurture and grow over time into a new cultural norm: an idea driven by a major social truth. Napster was appropriated by its community as a tool to rebel against the manipulative record industry.

Southwest Airlines gave everyday people the opportunity to go places only the rich had been able to afford. Red Bull became “speed-in-a-can” for today’s demanding lifestyle.

The ideation of hijack-able brands has to be bigger than a consumer insight.

It needs to hit the sweet spot between product performance and social insight.

The social truth is what engages consumers at a higher level and motivates them to get deeper into the brand experience.

Uncovering social truths does not lead to mere product innovation. It leads to market innovation.

In other words, brands based on social insights make a major leap that dismantles the status quo and changes the rules of the marketplace.

New Market Research

A research discipline that uses in-depth cultural analysis to uncover social insights is emerging.

This cultural research goes beyond individual behavior.

It studies social trends, emerging values or simply how consumers live and act within tribal groups.

It is not about hiring “cool hunters.” Nor will focus groups and ethnographic studies serve to unearth the necessary social insights that drive breakthrough brands.

It’s about diving deep into the cultural context of your early market to identify stable social trends. It’s about projects such as: Analyzing how cults work in order to apply that knowledge to brand tribes.

Researching what values and principles today’s consumers share in order to understand why Pabst Blue Ribbon was chosen as the “anti-brand” badge.

Creating a personal image of what your target community looks like by reading the magazines and books they read and watching the TV shows they watch.

Researchers must investigate cultural details and craft compelling narratives from those nuances.

They must identify the triggers and hooks that help lead the market to adopt new — and most likely oppositional — social norms.

Researchers must become thought-leaders, not mere imitators of pop culture.

Phase I: Tribal Marketing

Innovators and early adopters will be the first to realize the potential of the brand and help lower the barriers of adoption for the main market.

They will define the brand by incorporating it into the very fabric of their tribe.

The early market is often a subculture made up primarily of unconventional thinkers or opinion leaders. They are motivated primarily by one of two drivers — a quest for authentic products or a desire to display their social knowledge.

The following are three specific roles consumers and other stakeholders will play in shaping brands: Product Developer. You have a virtual army of passionate users ready and waiting to help you optimize your product.

And you don’t even have to pay for their services. Why not harness their creative energy?

Brand Folklore Creator. Early markets are your best storytellers. They will add meaning to your brand and help translate its message to a larger, more conservative market by creating rituals and myths around it.

Authenticator. Using peer-to-peer networks to diffuse ideas and brands into the marketplace is extremely powerful because it’s organic, authentic and sustainable.

There’s a common misconception that early markets must be part of a cool subculture. This is, after all, how many guerrilla marketers make their living — by being gatekeepers to the young, the tragically hip and the beautiful.

But it’s not that easy. For an idea to take off, you must choose an early market that has the skills, time and tools to appreciate your brand.

When evaluating whether a subculture is the suitable early market for your brand, consider the following: Is the audience you’ve selected a credible innovator of this brand initiative? Does the main market look to that audience

for innovations?

Will the seed idea resonate with your subculture?

Are those in the subculture willing to participate; are they able to sway the main market; and are they socially connected, knowledgeable and articulate?

Can the brand gain critical mass — either in the user base or cultural influence — for the initiative to succeed within the target audience?

The Art of Seeding

The idea behind seeding is to find an emotional hook that will pull the early market deep into the brand experience.

The idea should make consumers feel ownership for the brand and encourage them to become shepherds for the initiative.

Seeding is not about mass coercion. It’s about giving the early market ownership through subconscious techniques.

The art of seeding is the art of playing into the nuances of human nature.

The following are four of the major seeding techniques: Declare a new worldview. Give your initiative greater meaning and authenticity by

fostering a belief system, perhaps even visible leadership. IKEA is not just a furniture retailer; it is an ambassador of Swedish values — equality, simplicity and community.

Play hard to get. Make only the early market “in-the-know” with an unusually scarce, deliberate and seductive soft sell. Persuade, don’t sell at this phase.

Create brand folklore. Develop specific customs, rituals, vocabulary, relationships and experiences to build a passionate community. Starbucks not only created a new coffee ritual; it introduced an entirely different vocabulary to communicate with its regular customers.

Reward insiders. The social currency of the early market is being part of the Next Big Thing. Keep it exclusive. Don’t make it too easy for people to “get in.”

Phase II: Co-Creation

Once the early market is hooked, it takes ownership of the brand’s message. We generally call that buzz: the byproduct of the skillful seeding of an early market.

Buzz is a powerful medium that allows the market to discover, engage with and ultimately help shape brand meaning.

It occurs when brand owners let the market participate as co-creators voluntarily and enthusiastically, hence persuasively.

Going way beyond word-of-mouth, buzz is the sum of all interpersonal interaction related to a brand.

Buzz commands our attention because it’s fresh and it stands out. Since it works on a subconscious level, we learn from buzz without even being conscious of what we’re doing.

And personal recommendations are three times more credible than messages from traditional media.

When the messenger is a friend, not a manufacturer or marketer, the message is received with more respect.

The end result is that the market perceives your brand as authentic.

Phase III: Mass Marketing

Once an initiative has hit Next Big Thing status, the main market is ready to adopt it.

Hijack marketing is not just about stealth. It does not favor person-to-person interaction over mass media.

Instead, it views media sequentially — recognizing the need to use different tactics throughout the phased go-to-market approach.

During the seeding phase, a hijack relies on interpersonal media to seduce the early market and make the brand digestible for the mass market.

But as soon as the early market’s buzz has reached the mainstream, it is crucial to switch back to conventional, above-the-radar marketing methods in order to build momentum and broaden awareness.

In other words, it is time for the brand owner to take back control.

The mass market is conservative. Rather than being revolutionary, it is evolutionary at best and pessimistic at worst.

It is skeptical that the Next Big Thing really is the new standard. While the early market is excited to be the first to use a brand, the main market is content to follow the tastemakers.

Those in the main market tap into aspiration. They are largely influenced by what others think of them, and so they readily adopt status symbols.

If buzz is the driver of the early market, then momentum is the driver of the mass market.

When momentum is maintained, it sends a signal to the mainstream that the initiative is legitimate and sustainable.

Staying True to the Early Market

Successful brands manage to take back control of the message while still giving their early adopters special treatment by building in exclusivity.

Opinion leaders are — and remain — the lifeblood of the brand.

Mass market participation introduces a new dimension to brands.

Instead of focusing on what the brand is (the functional benefit) or what it does (the emotional benefit), we turn to the cultural benefit or what the brand means.

This spiritual component provides the foundation for the most enduring relationships.

Conventional brands’ benefits are personal, determined by the brand owner after unearthing the right product truths (functional) and consumer truths (emotional).

A cultural benefit, on the other hand, is public property.

It’s co-created with the market and based on a social truth.

Red Bull, for instance, became “the legal rush.”

eBay unexpectedly developed into both a trusted community and socially accepted gambling.

Lowering Resistance

There are several major tactics brand owners can use to reduce the barriers to new habit formation. These include: Make the new habit appear less disruptive by linking it to an existing

one. That way, consumers will see it as a habit replacement rather than a totally new behavior. For instance, eBay provided the necessary link in consumers’ minds between the virtual flea market and the real world.

Reduce barriers by easing people into the experience. Then let the marketplace practice the new habit frequently. Again, eBay caught on so quickly because buyers do not have to pay to use the service.

Reduce social resistance to the formation of the new habit. Foster a community to encourage deeper engagement with the brand. eBay encourages users to solve their own problems with a self-policing policy.

Positive reinforcement is a key driver in any behavior modification program. It’s a great way to get people to try out new things. Even better, to ensure that they turn a single trial into consistent behavior, delight your consumers by exceeding their expectations. The eBay experience has many built-in rewards such as being able to easily track down hard-to-find items within seconds.

The Ultimate Payoff

A brand hijack attempt doesn’t give the marketer permission to cross ethical lines.

While marketing itself is not evil, some people in the trade have developed bad habits over time. And the current emphasis on nontraditional media and seduction techniques may tempt marketers more than ever to cross that fine line.

Marketing needs to stay bold, brave and surprising. It needs to stay effective not by employing deceptive and underhanded tactics, but by genuinely earning consumer devotion.

Marketers love to talk about “loyalty.” Loyalty is their Holy Grail. It is an objective written into every marketing plan.

Every major brand is tracked quantitatively by measuring frequency of use and amount of brand switching.

The problem is that what most marketers think of as “loyalty” is actually “retention.”

Retention is about consumer behavior; loyalty is an attitude.

True loyalty is about something bigger than retention or even the financially driven “lifetime customer value” concept.

It is about authenticity. It is about passion. It leads to ambassadorship and activism on behalf of the brand. And ultimately, it leads to off-the-charts brand value scores.

Retention tactics are Machiavellian. They temporarily keep consumers buying the brand, but they do so without developing an up close and personal bond.

As soon as a better deal appears, consumers will be gone. Building genuine loyalty is not about gimmicks.

Retention, or “pseudo loyalty,” is driven by one of the following factors: Boring old habit. Consumers often choose brands for no reasons other than convenience, laziness or habit. This is

something that market leaders strive for, particularly in mature markets. But it is an indefensible position once a challenger enters the market.

Bogus bait. Mileage programs are proven to lock in consumers. But there’s no evidence that they inspire true loyalty to a brand. People are not necessarily loyal to United or American Airlines; they are loyal to the free flights, earned perks and increased status. Most frequent flyers are promiscuous — ready to hop into bed with whichever company offers the best deal. In contrast, flyers demonstrate real loyalty to visionaries in the airline industry such as Virgin Atlantic, Southwest and JetBlue. These airlines don’t bribe consumers, but rather thrive on delivering a more pleasurable — and less expensive — travel experience. They do constant analysis of every aspect of their services to ensure that their flyers thoroughly enjoy their flights.

High exit barriers. Lock-ins are only secure until a competitor can figure out a way to reduce the exit barriers or offer value higher than the perceived cost of switching.

The Path to True Loyalty

It all starts with you telling a story, but tailoring that story to exactly the audience you have in mind, and introducing the story to audience members at a time and place where they will be able to remember your story.

It’s about telling audience members exactly what they want to hear, but don’t know it until they hear it, without giving away any specifics to allow room for interpretation.

It’s about making those who hear the story become your storytellers and allowing them to make up and add parts to the story as long as they get the title right and the critical elements within the same ballpark.

It’s a hard job with the ultimate payoff: lasting consumer devotion to your brand.