Chris Kneeland | Cult Collective
What’s the secret behind the success of brands like Harley Davidson, Jeep, State Farm, and Salesforce?
All of them have built cult-like brands with strong followings that have reduced their customer acquisition cost, driven up their valuation, and attracted new customers, employees, and fans.
Cult Collective co-founder Chris Kneeland has literally written the book on what it means to build a cult brand, and advises some of the world’s top brands (yes, Harley is a customer) on how to do it. In this week’s episode of The Inbound Success Podcast, he shares the 8 things that cult brands do, along with advice and insights that any brand - large or small - can use to build a cult like following.
Check out the full episode to hear more.
Resources from this episode:
Visit the Cult Collective website
Check out The Gathering event
Connect with Chris on LinkedIn
Chris and Kathleen recording this episode
Kathleen (00:02):
Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth. And today my guest is Chris Kneeland, who is the CEO of Cult Collective. Welcome to the podcast, Chris.
Chris (00:23):
Well, thank you very much, Kathleen. I'm thrilled to be here.
Kathleen (00:25):
Yeah. I'm excited to have you, and we need to give everybody a disclaimer. Chris has got, Chris has got a little cold going and so you may hear some coughing in the back.
Chris (00:33):
I just popped a Hall's into my throat. So hopefully that will help stymie the the terrible chest cough that I have.
Kathleen (00:42):
I was going to say it's, it's not the cherry Ludens, which is what my 15 year old prefers. And I think it's because it, it, it is candy. It's really not a cough drop. They're marketing it as a cough drop, but it's candy.
Chris (00:55):
I, I really, I think one of the greatest ad slogans of all time was around and it shows you, it's not that great because I don't remember the company, but it's, it has to work. It's "something this bad has to work because" Buckley's, I think it's called. Something this bad has to be good for you.
Kathleen (01:11):
That's kind of like the Avis, we're number two, so we try harder. I always loved that campaign. Well, I'm really excited to talk to you. Cult Collective does some really interesting work for well-known brands. And you have some, some viewpoints on kind of what's working and what's not in marketing today, including, you know, this trend towards mass media and discounting. So I want to get into all of that, but before we do, can you just take a minute and tell my listeners a little bit more about yourself and your background and also what Cult Collective is?
Chris (01:46):
Yeah, sure. So I am a kind of a classically trained marketer. I've got a, both an undergraduate and a master's degree in marketing communications. I started my career in big, large marketing organizations like John Deere and The Home Depot. And somewhere along the way, I think I got very discouraged at how many real business problems were being superficially addressed with an overemphasis on just advertising and discounting. And, and I viewed organizations that became increasingly dependent upon advertising and discounting as a, as a defect, rather than a feature. I remember early in my career as a, as an agency guy working with geek squad and the founder of geek squad said that advertising is a tax that brands pay for being unremarkable. It really literally changed the trajectory of my career, where I said, I've got to stop being part of the problem here, which is pretending that more creativity was going to fix the issue and help businesses and literally become remarkable. And what I've learned is that the synonym for remarkable is not exceptional. The synonym for remarkable is buzzworthy or noteworthy, literally giving people things to remark about. And I, they just kind of goes back to the oldest and most effective form of marketing has always been word of mouth. And I just don't think enough businesses think about that and know how to do it. And instead, they're so busy talking that they're, they're not giving customer stuff to talk about.
Kathleen (03:29):
I just want to like say amen and clap and cheer, because this is something I've been talking a lot about lately and maybe from a slightly different angle. But I think we're, we're saying many of the same things, which is that one of the things I've been a B2B marketer, very focused on demand gen for a long time. And one of the things that that I've observed is that, you know, for a long time we were taught, oh, buyers have a problem, and they go to Google for a solution. And, and I think that that used to be somewhat true, but more so I think than ever now, partly fueled by COVID and by technology and platform changes. I just see buyers going to these walled gardens. If they don't already know the brand that they, that they want to use when they need a solution.
Kathleen (04:19):
Like if, if it isn't a remarkable brand, that's already top of mind for them. They go to these walled gardens, like slack groups and discord groups, and they ask their peers, who are you using? Or what should I be using? And the answer they get is very often a reflection of who does have a remarkable brand. Those recommendations are the brands that are top of mind for their peer community. And, and then they go to Google and they're just doing due diligence on the short list that their peers have given them. And so I totally agree with you brand is so, so important.
Chris (04:50):
Yeah. I think the, probably the most active thing my wife does on social media is this neighborhood chat group about, you know, who knows a plumber garage door, painter guy who knows a babysitter like, and in most cases she doesn't even know the neighbors that are responding, but she still trusts their experience more than all of the polished advertising that people are spending millions of dollars trying to get her to pay attention to.
Kathleen (05:18):
That's so true. So, okay. This is a huge problem because most marketers are pouring their money into like traditional full funnel marketing campaigns and ad strategies. And you mentioned discounting and things like that. You know, I think it's one thing to say that your brand needs to be remarkable. It's entirely another to like break that down and make that actionable and understandable for somebody because let's be honest, most brands are not. And so most marketers haven't figured out how to do this.
Chris (05:52):
Wow. Well, that's why we didn't even know what to call our agency. When we stopped being an ad agency. Like if you need advertising, it makes a ton of sense to go to an ad agency. They have creatives and copywriters and designers, but if you need to become a remarkable, do you go to a remarkable agency? Like people like who's the practitioner that even knows how to create that. So when I remember the press release that we launched, when we birthed Cult, we referred to a new species of agency where we referred to it at the time as an audience engagement firm. I think today it's more synonymous with like a customer experience agency, but even just the acknowledgement that there wasn't the right type of professional is what helped us win Harley Davidson right out of the gate. So within the first three months of our agency being formed, Harley who spends 80% of their discretionary marketing dollars on retention, not on acquisition, which I think right there is a clue to your listeners.
Chris (06:50):
If you want to have the kind of brand that Harley Davidson enjoys, spend more money on people who are already buying your stuff than people who have yet to be converted into the fold. Because the best person to get me to ride a bike is not a Harley print ad. It's my buddy that just bought a bike and he wants me to hang out with him on Sunday, right? So the peer pressure that he's not going to exert on me to go get a bike so that we can hang. And then once we've got the bikes and the desire to get outfitted and the apparel and the desire to upgrade the muffler or to replace the handlebars, or just start retrofitting the bike, it all starts to grow. So I think the HOG, Harley ownership group, is one of the greatest loyalty programs on the planet. And it's not lame points like your grocery store is giving you, it's not a plastic card in your wallet. It's a group it's about being part of a tribe and a community. And so I think that there's just these to be more people who are thinking that way. And when you see it done, right? Like I look at somebody like Yeti, Yeti is this brand that came out of nowhere and they came out with a $400 cooler.
Kathleen (07:52):
Right. If you had said that to somebody in your pitch, they'd be like, you're sweating, smoking.
Chris (07:56):
The next closest competitors, like a $60 styrofoam Coleman at Walmart, right? It wasn't 20% better. It was 200% different, but they started creating these tribes of followers and growing through that word of mouth. That again, I just look at that and saying, wouldn't everybody prefer that. And why aren't you just doing that playbook as opposed to devolving yourself into what I call a mark downing department, as opposed to a true marketing department
Kathleen (08:25):
That resonates so deeply with me. And it's funny, I was listening to you talk about Harley and I am not a motorcycle rider, but I do drive a Jeep Wrangler. And Jeep has an interesting dynamic. That's very similar and Jeep. Even once you buy your Jeep, you learned that there's like the secret wave that every Jeep driver gives any other Jeep driver that passes them on the road. And like, that's so freaking powerful. When, you know, you can go anywhere in the world and you pass another huge driver, you give them this little wave and they're going to wave back to you like that kind of community is it's, it's crazy how impactful it is in terms of that flywheel and getting people passionate about a brand. I know it's like, it's worked for me for sure, to the point where it's funny. I find myself driving my husband's Hyundai and I pass a Jeep and I go to give the wave and I'm like, oh no,
Chris (09:15):
I thought you were going to say that. I thought you were going to say that he tried to create a Hyundai wave.
Kathleen (09:21):
It's so second nature to me to give the wave. And then I feel like a fraud because I'm doing it from a Hyundai.
Chris (09:27):
You know, Jeep is the very first automotive brand that we honored at The Gathering. The Gathering's an event that we do every year that tries to recognize the most cult-like brands in north America. And we had looked at several, we looked at the Ford Mustang, we looked at the Mini Cooper. We've since honored Porsche and we've honored Land Rover. But what I'm really fascinated about with Jeep is I've actually just bought a Ford Bronco. I think Ford Bronco has come out with a piece of equipment that will now legitimately rival Jeep as a product. But what Ford has to try to now replicate is the community and the tribe and the legacy that Jeep has also enjoyed. And some of that deals with just the customization, some of that has to deal with just the, the community of outdoor enthusiasts and off roaders and ATVers. So there's other ingredients in there besides just the car. But I, I, I love my new Bronco, but it doesn't have any, I need another 10 years of fostering, you know, to even begin to make a dent in what Jeep has, you know, really spent 50 years sort of perfecting, which is the membership experience.
Kathleen (10:35):
Absolutely. Now earlier, when you were talking about this, you said, why wouldn't everybody follow that playbook? So what is the playbook like? I think that's, I that's, I think what most marketers sit there and, and in their heads, they're going, yeah, I get it. Like if it was that easy, wouldn't we all be doing it. So how do we make it a little bit more actionable for them?
Chris (10:58):
So I'll challenge you a bit on that because I started this journey, thinking that all marketers needed to know was the playbook. So we literally wrote it. We put it into book, it's called fix. We hosted this conference, we'd go on podcasts. We'd host workshops. We do consulting. Like we did everything we could think of to expose people to the eight proven principles that Cult brands excel at that their mediocre peers don't excel at. And I got very discouraged because even after reading the book, attending a workshop, going to The Gathering brands, didn't change and the best metaphor for what we were witnessing Kathleen is I believe most people know how to lose weight.
Kathleen (11:46):
No, 100%.
Chris (11:48):
Yeah. Over 50% of Americans are clinically obese. And you know, most people know smoking is bad for you. You had 40 million people still smoke cigarettes, right? So it's not knowledge anymore. I used to think, let me just teach people the playbook and there'll be good. And instead it deals with courage and fear and insecurity and false paradigms and bad habits and all these other things where my, my practice has evolved over the past decade from being that of a teacher to that of a personal trainer, where we need to like go to the gym with you every morning at 6:00 AM, and we need to help you eat healthy. And like, if you're going to lose that 20 pounds, you don't need more intellectual information. You need the willpower, you need the friend, you need the confidant, you need the trusted advisor, those types of things.
Chris (12:40):
So it's a much more psychological. I think the failures and the shortcomings isn't from lack of knowledge. I do think people need better role models, which is why we did The Gathering is let me show you, let me expose you to what good looks like as the, the advertising industrial complex rewards, the wrong thing, the easy to take, take the cons lion. The pinnacle, the, the, the academy awards of advertising is the cons lion. But even they say, this is a celebration of creativity. It's not a celebration of great brands. It's not a celebration of great business performance. It's just a celebration of fun ideas, which I'm not against a fun idea. Just don't call it an ad because an ad is not art and ad is supposed to have a commercial outcome that, that has an ROI associated with it. Right? So I didn't see our industry, our craft wasn't honoring the right stuff.
Chris (13:30):
And so we tried. That's what we're trying to do is say, what if, what if Costco was your role model? Cause Costco's achieved a hundred billion dollars of success and you don't see them on television. You don't ever hear a radio commercial on Saturday afternoon and not annoying you with a bunch of digital display ads.
Kathleen (13:48):
That's like Spanx.
Chris (13:48):
There's another one. Spanx is a brilliant example. I mean, they just got, they're a unicorn now, and they're not dependent upon these quick fixes that I think end up having more negative side effects than what we normally take it. That's why we called our book Fix as we were using these metaphors of drugs, because there is a high, there is a stimulant that is introduced, but you know, the problem with drugs is you have to keep taking that drug in greater and greater volume in order to achieve the same level of high.
Chris (14:18):
And that is why we've gone from a hundred billion in paid media when we started this journey to now 300 billion in north America on paid media, it's just in 10 years. Like to me, that's like the opioid epidemic. Like we were abusing these channels expected to get more and more. And yet customer promiscuity is at all time, high brand affinity is at all time low and all the engagement metrics that we measure about how people truly feel emotionally with brands are pathetic. And so I just think we're taking the wrong prescription to cure the wrong problem.
Kathleen (14:51):
Well, and I would argue to diminishing returns because when you think about iOS 14.5 and you know, all the changes with cookie deprecation coming down the line and the difficulties with retargeting, like all I'm hearing from, from people who are doing a lot of performance advertising is that their cost of customer acquisition is going up. Their results are horrible. So it's like, it's not just a drug, it's a bad drug that leaves you with a terrible hangover.
Chris (15:22):
Amen sister. Amen. And that's where we say, why don't you take some of that money and get it out of programmatic advertising and put it into customer experience and then trust your customers have the means. This would not have been true maybe 20 years ago, but they now have the means to become your greatest megaphone because of their own social followers, the mobile devices we carry. You know, when you look at something like Yelp, right, I'm going to trust a complete strangers review of your restaurant more than I'm going to trust anything that you put out into the marketplace. So why aren't you doing more things to give more people an excuse, to say something positive and it doesn't have to be like bribery, doesn't have to be like, we'll give you a $5 coupon. Just literally give them something to talk about. That was unexpected.
Kathleen (16:09):
So, all right. You said it earlier, you, you challenged me on, like, it's not a knowledge issue. It's a, what I would say is like a behavior change and a consistency issue. But I want to cover both. So I do want to quickly kind of recap, like what are those eight things? Just so that we're all on the same page about what we're talking about here. And then we can go into like, affecting that.
Chris (16:32):
So, I mean, just to run through them, we've given them kind of pithy headline. So the first deals with remarkability being remarkable and identifying deliberately and consistently what you're going to be best at because we've never, in 10 years, Kathleen is interviewing C-suites when we asked individually, tell me what the most remarkable part of interacting with your product or services have gotten the same answer from all members of the team. So if, if your executive team is not crystal clear about where we are the most desirably and distinctively different than you've got a massive problem, because that means your managers and your employees, aren't going to have clarity and certainly your customers and prospects. Aren't going to understand how you are choosing to compete to win. Second would deal with purpose. I kind of cringe a little bit because purpose is so vogue right now, it's kind of being abused, but like brand purpose has been around for over a hundred years and Coke brands have been perfecting it.
Chris (17:30):
Simon Sinek came out five or six years ago and drew three circles on a whiteboard and all of a sudden everybody's gotten into purpose. And so we've got a lot of bad brand purpose stuff that's going on right now. We have, I shouldn't say bad, I should say artificial brand purpose where they're, they're, they're, they're creating a faux purpose, but it's not actually what they stand for. So I think it's be careful with brand purpose, number three deals with relate-ability cult brands find a way to feel and act like your friend more than a faceless corporation. And again, I think brands sometimes fake that through say spokesman. It's not about, you know, Flo from Progressive as much as it's like State Farm, like a good neighbor and personifying the attributes of what a good neighbor is and how their business model is, you know, State Farm can't compete with Geico because State Farm is a high touch company.
Chris (18:24):
Geico is a high-tech company. And so you're going to have to pick, what do you want? Geico, can't deliver a high touch. So they're going to deliver 15% or more on auto insurance, right? And they're going to have fun geckos and weird cavemen in their ads versus State Farm is going to be about 15,000 or however many thousand agents across north America. Number four is my favorite. It's called picking a fight. A lot of elements of challenger branding exists here. But cult brands are as defined as much by their villain as they are by their hero, their heroism. And that there's a whole science. And again, that can be easily abused. Look no further than bad us politics as an example of demonizing. So villain versus demonizing and mudslinging. So a good pick, a fight is Snickers fighting hunger, not in a third world country, kind of a way, but in a humorous you're not yourself when you're hangry kind of approach and redefining it.
Chris (19:21):
It's not even really a candy bar anymore. It's almost like a meal replenishment snack at 3:00 PM.
Kathleen (19:26):
Wouldn't it be nice if that were really true? I'd be like, "I'm on the Snickers diet. Sign me up for that one."
Chris (19:33):
And then you've got things like congregate. Cult brands create excuses for their fans to get together and rebel and their togetherness. So that could be in the B2B space. I think Salesforce does it best with their Dreamforce conference. I mean, thinking about the brilliance of that, Salesforce went from spending tens of millions of dollars at other people's trade shows and conferences for lame 10 by 10 booths or 20 by 20 minutes to now creating something that people pay. They, I think they're making a couple of hundred million dollars just on the week long event where over a hundred thousand people descend upon San Francisco for essentially a Salesforce commercial for five days, right?
Chris (20:12):
The, the jujitsu that happened there and that's, that's a B2B company taking a page from Red Bull and figuring out how do you create something so desirable that people would pay to show up for it? So we're a big fan of congregate. There's a really, really fun one called the creation of rites and rituals. So you mentioned the Jeep wave as an example, the, it could be the McDonald's happy meal. It's how are you? It could be you know, Apple's use of you don't video chat, you FaceTime, you don't download music, you go to iTunes, like the creation of, of language. And the ritual is what religions and cults have been doing for thousands of years. How do you bring that into your business and create something that makes people feel like an insider? I think AOL was around for five years longer than it should have been because AOL just created such an ecosystem of that.
Chris (21:06):
That's how people were introduced to the internet. And yeah, I mean, all of this stuff kind of just became synonymous with that's what I thought going online was. So even though people were talking about this weird thing called Google people were so hesitant to give up on, on the rites and rituals that AOL had created. Boy, I feel like I'm forgetting one. I think I only gave you seven, but it's things like that. So it's little it's little strategic directions where I just don't think enough brand leaders are sitting around answering those questions. Oh, the last one is building from the inside out, which isn't even a marketing problem. That's an HR issue that that's the idea of how you converting employees into evangelists. And what role does marketing have in that journey within cult brands? It plays a huge role. And within mediocre brands, it's like not my fault, not my problem. And yet, particularly right now, I can't think of a more topical topic than recruitment and retention because of this whole great resignation business and that some of businesses, some of our clients, biggest hindrance to growth is not brand confusion or competitive threat it's talent. They don't have the people that they need to actually run their businesses. So that's where I think marketing should help.
Kathleen (22:22):
Gold. I love everything you're saying, you know, I, if I had to put myself in the shoes of the listener, I mean, I have listeners who come from very big companies and some who come from very small companies. One of the questions I imagine people are asking is like, how realistic is it for a smaller company or a mid-market company to do something like this? Like, do you need a giant budget and a huge marketing team? Or is this something that you can be scrappy about?
Chris (22:51):
Yeah. I need to figure out something about my delivery. I get that question probably more than any other sounds great. And I think it's maybe because of the examples,
Kathleen (23:01):
I think it's just the examples, because they're easier to see.
Chris (23:03):
I mean, if I was to tell somebody about my dry cleaner, nobody would have any frame of reference, but man, I would say the smaller, the better. And I say that for two reasons, one, usually the bigger a business gets, they have more bad behavior that they have to unlearn. Versus if you're just starting out, just learn the right things from the beginning and you don't have to deal with this legacy and these bad false paradigms. And then secondly, necessity is the mother of invention. And when you don't have big marketing budgets, then you don't, you're not tempted to do that super bowl commercial to stroke your ego or to do some ridiculous expenditure for some ill, you know, some bad advice. Like you just have to create. One of my favorite stories. Kathleen is when I go to LA, there's a really crappy crap is a strong worker is a pretty mediocre hotel that is 50% worse than the courtyard Marriott down the road.
Chris (24:02):
And yet it's a hundred dollars more a night it's called the Magic Castle in and they have in their pool. It kind of reminds me if you remember Melrose place, no restaurants was this kind of outdoor apartment complex. It's like that, that they converted into a hotel, but next to their pool is a red phone and like a homemade sign that says Popsicle hotline. And my kids can swim over to that phone, pick it up. And somebody will say what flavor? They love it. And somebody walks out from the lobby with a silver tray and hand delivers them a cherry Popsicle. And my kids will each eat $8 worth of popsicles in our stay. And I pay a hundred dollars more a night. And I have to go to that hotel every time that I'm in LA, it does not take a lot of money to give kids a free Popsicle. It just takes an insight that if I can't compete with rooms, service, and amenities, and all of the, you know, I'm not going to rebuild the hotel, I've got to create something that makes in my family, at least the influencers or the kids, right. People say, happy wife, happy life. No, I would say if the kids are driving me crazy.
Kathleen (25:12):
Quiet kids, happy life.
Chris (25:13):
Happy life that I did. I think it takes thoughtfulness more than it takes budget to create something that people would talk about.
Kathleen (25:21):
I imagine that now, as people are listening to this, there are many people who are, who have gone out to Google and learn more about this hotel.
Chris (25:28):
Well, you know what, it's become so popular. They've written a book on it and they actually now do a speaking series about customer experience kind of like the way Disney does.
Kathleen (25:37):
Wow. That's amazing. Another brand that I think does a really good job with that, that's smaller is and they also are now teaching others how to do it as a company called Zingerman's out of Michigan. They own a family of businesses. It started out as like a, a deli, and now they have a bakery and a coffee shop and they they have all these different, they have restaurants, they've opened this training center, an actual training Institute and they teach other businesses how to build along that model and just deliver great experiences. And, and it's a lot of, like, what you're saying is Zingerman's Z I N G E R M A N S. Yeah. I got to go to one of their seminars. And a big piece of it was what you said, which was building from within it's very much about the employees and getting them bought in. And, and anyway, you'll, if you, if you look them up, you'll, you'll find it. And it's really, it's great. And he's written the, the owner's written a ton of books on it.
Chris (26:36):
It was probably the single biggest surprise when we started our research 10 years ago, I think our bias was around external because that was where we had grown up thinking about, you know, how do we solve business problems? And to look inside, say an Airbnb, and to see how much energy and time their CMO was spending on what others would consider operational or HR type issues really surprised us. And then we started seeing that again and again and again, and that's where we were able to say, maybe that maybe in fact, there's a really good correlation. There's other organizations that will benchmark best places to work. That's not a bad list to start to say, do they also have other attributes of cult-like branding? Because it's very difficult to have an external audience love you more than the internal audience. And if you do it right, like if you're Zappos or Chobani the ultimate sign of fan adoration is can I work for you? So the number of unsolicited resumes that they get, in fact, when we, when we score brands to see who's going to be honored at The Gathering, we talk about how much money are they spending on recruitment, headhunter kind of fees versus those are unnecessary. Those have been rendered moot because of the number of employees that are begging for jobs, for their friends and family. Because if you love people in your circle and you love your job, you're playing matchmaker.
Kathleen (28:04):
Yeah. Another company that I feel like falls in that vein is HubSpot. I was a HubSpot partner for many years. I used to own an agency and it was crazy to me, the agency partner community that they built, we would go to their annual conference and people would have dyed their hair orange or bought orange sneakers. And you'd hear people say, I am drinking the orange Kool-Aid. I bleed orange. Like, dramatic statements. And it was just like the, the, the level of brand loyalty was off the charts. And, and the same thing I think was true for their employees. They have very loyal employees.
Chris (28:40):
Yeah. I remember you, you made me think of another anecdote where at the very first gathering Harley Davidson got up and spoke and they, they use sort of that fairly traditional adage about do people love you enough to tattoo you onto their body? Harley is the third, most tattooed tattoo in the world. I, number one is mom. I love mom, but number two is, and then you get.
Kathleen (29:04):
Moms have a better brand than Harley. That's a good thing.
Chris (29:08):
But then the speaker after Harley was the head of brand and marketing for Greenpeace. And she said, no offense to Harley, but people who love Harley tattoo their brand on their body, but people who love Greenpeace go to prison for 20 years. And it was this really sort of fascinating demonstration of how bought in can you actually get to a cause or to a movement. And in her case, people that are willing to make those types of sacrifices, it really got everybody's attention to say, yeah, maybe I can learn something from Greenpeace. And that, and that's really, that's how we started. We read a book in the early two thousands called The Culting of Brands, which was the first time we correlated to things that most people would not have put together. Like cults are usually bad and brands are usually good. But to start to understand that the Marine Corps has cult-like adoration, your fraternity in college has a cult like adoration and, you know, teenagers that get off on, you know, the sneaker generation, whether it's Converse or Jordans or something, cult-like, that's going on there. Certainly Harley Davidson has something cult-like going on. So I, if you can suspend your, your bias towards those things are all bad. And instead realize that there might be principles that those brands that those cults are doing, that we can learn from then I think you're, open-minded enough to benefit from it.
Kathleen (30:34):
It's the whole use your power for good and not evil thing. You, you know, as you were talking, it made me think of another thing you talked about because, and this is something that I've been fascinated by when it comes to like how marketers think like traditional marketers think about attracting buyers when they're in their moment of need, versus like, I always look at media brands that are more about audience development and creating like a following. And one of the things I've noticed with the best media brands is they do incorporate almost cause like marketing. Like, and the example I love to give is the Washington Post. I subscribed to it years ago when I lived in DC and I wound up canceling my subscription. Cause I wasn't reading it all the time. And then recently they added their tagline, "Democracy dies in darkness" and they started doing more marketing around like this cause of journalism as something that you should support. And I resubscribed and I barely ever read it because I have no time, but I'm not giving up my subscription because it's about a feeling of belonging and support for a cause. And it's not this transactional relationship of I'm subscribing to get something out of it.
Chris (31:47):
Amen. I mean, I was fascinated. So the author of the book, The Culting of Brands, his name is Douglas Aiken. He's become a dear friend of ours. He was hired by Airbnb in the early days. And excuse me, one of Douglas's muses was Barack Obama's, whatever it was, 2008 presidential campaign, which was very grassroots, very cause marketing centric. And it was like, they had to not only get you and I to decide that sleeping in somebody's house, wasn't weird. They had to get laws changed. They had to get, you know, communities to allow this sort of behavior to happen. And so they, they absolutely thought about building a movement more than they thought about it as marketing. And that's why to this day, you see so little price, an item, Airbnb advertising, right? It's not about get this house this weekend for 1 99. It's about imagine a world where you can belong anywhere.
Kathleen (32:49):
Yeah. Or like you're staying in this tree house, it's the experience.
Chris (32:53):
Yeah, in some cases they use these hyperbole experiences to elevate and inspire. But again, I look at something Airbnb does about $4 billion a year in sales. And when they just went public this past year, they were valued at a hundred billion dollars. That's a 25 X multiplier only tied to the brand equity in the brand goodwill. If I'm a CEO, I'm going to stop what I'm doing and say, I need to understand that I want a 25 times multiplier on my valuation. And therefore that might mean I do less retail flyers. That might mean I don't do a Superbowl commercial. It might mean I stopped sending three emails a week, harassing my customers, because those are not the tactics. Those are desperation tactics to try to compensate for the fact that you're failing to create cult brand followers.
Kathleen (33:41):
I love all of this. This is so interesting. And the timing is great. I just feel like with so many marketers thinking about, you know, 20, 22 right now, this is the time to question all of your assumptions around, you know, how you should be spending, on what you should be focused on. So I love that we're having this conversation at this particular point in time.
Chris (34:00):
Thanks for having me.
Kathleen (34:01):
Now you talked about being a coach these days and being a personal trainer for, for brands that are kind of like bought into this idea but are needing that extra help or that push or what I like to call their accountability, buddy. What do you often see are the mistakes they're making at that stage in their journey?
Chris (34:26):
A couple of things. The number one complaint that we get after The Gathering this event that we host every year is I wish I brought my boss. It's very difficult to fix this from the bottom up. We don't have a lot of positive case studies of sort of these mutinies that have happened where maybe an enlightened marketing manager rallies the team, and they persuade the upper levels to think and behave differently. It's it usually has to be top down. And so there has to be some way for a C-suite executive to say enough is enough. Our number one clientele is newly appointed, oftentimes board appointed CEOs demanded, mandated with create change. Like we're, we're sinking. The ship is taking on too much water, fix it at all costs. And that's a shame because oftentimes in that case, the patients are already in cardiac arrest.
Chris (35:22):
It's too little too late. You wish that that change would be more proactive and not so reactive. So the first thing I would say is you gotta find a way for the powers that are really the people that are actually making the decisions. It's not, we're not selling a quick weight loss diet pill, that there is not a quick fix. This is wholesale. This is going to impact or charts. This is going to impact compensation structures. This might impact temporary stock price. So you're going to have to understand that you've, that you got into this mess over a series of years of bad decisions. It's going to take a little bit of time to to fix it. And that'd be the second point is do it responsibly. The most notable example, people love to throw in our face is what Ron Johnson did with JC Penney, where, you know, Ron Johnson was the target and the Apple genius that tried to apply those principles to JC Penney's and it failed.
Chris (36:17):
But I would argue it failed because it was too much too soon. He didn't understand the level of addiction. And so you have to like be under a doctor's care again, using the drug metaphor, a gift to wean yourself off of this. You can't just start the next day. He said, yeah, you have to, we sometimes refer to it as operation Nicorette, where you have to kind of get off of cigarettes with the patch where you don't just go cold Turkey, kind of a thing. And so you've conditioned your employees, you've conditioned your franchisees or the marketplace, your shareholders, the customers, to a certain level of behavior, and you have to decondition them or recondition them over a series of months or years. And so don't expect it to be an overnight trip.
Kathleen (36:59):
Yeah, that makes sense. Well, I could talk about this forever because this is actually a topic that I'm passionate about. If you couldn't tell, I love it. But we don't have that much time left. And so I want to just segue over into the questions. I always ask my guests at the end. First one, being that most of the marketers I talk to feel pretty overwhelmed by the amount of information they need to consume in order to at least feel as though they're staying current. Whether that's tech changes, platform changes, what have you, you have a really different outlook on all this it's, you know, you're not as focused. It seems on those things as you are on the enduring values behind what makes a brand sticky and what makes people passionate about it. So I'm, I'm interested to know what your approach is to continuous learning. Like what are there certain sources that you really rely on or love to, to, to keep learning as a marketer?
Chris (37:56):
I mean, certainly me as a practitioner and a coach or an advisor, I have to, I think, study different things. If your question was, if, if, if your listener is the head of a marketing department, what should they be listening or reading to? I would argue, spend a little bit less time trying to keep up with channel management and spend a little bit more time, trying to keep up with customer insights, particularly coming out of this recession or this pandemic. And I don't even know if we're coming out of it. I thought we were.
Kathleen (38:27):
We might be going right back in again.
Chris (38:28):
Now the African variant popped up. I'm shocked. Candidly, how many marketers says little actionable insights on who their audience actually are. They have a ton of data, but not a lot of insights. And the, they there's this false sense of security with something like a net promoter score, which I think has done more harm than good by it best. It's an, it's a casual indicator of satisfaction. It is not an indicator of audience engagement. So I think that first and foremost, they should be spending more time understanding their audience to what we call audience engagement scoring. But it's the best metaphor is like a career aptitude test coming out of high school. Like my son just took one. Right. And they don't ask you, do you want to be in the army? Yes. No. Do you want to be a truck driver? Yes. No. Do you want to be a teacher?
Chris (39:15):
Like they, don't. The survey questions that we're used to asking is so literal when you have to do is infer based on attitudes and values and belief systems that if my son has these types of desires and attributes and characteristics, maybe he'd do well in architecture or maybe he'd do well in construction. Right? Good audience engagement scoring does this is based on your audiences, what they're thinking, feeling, and doing, not just how they're responding to, you know, how likely are you to refer. That'd be the first thing is really understand your, your customer segment. And then secondly, to the point of role models, I don't think that enough brand leaders even know what good looks like. They they're looking at what their competition is doing. I'm going to look at like what Tesla is doing. I don't care if you're not in the automotive or the energy space. Tesla has built a multimillion dollar business with not one paid ad. Like I'm fascinated by how that happened. And I want to figure out, is there something that I can learn and apply to my small a hundred thousand dollars bakery? Or my small $500,000 dog grooming business, right? Like you have to have a little bit of imagination and creativity to say, can Lego or Porsche, or the Dallas Cowboys teach me something about creating irrational levels of fandom that could be applied to whatever humble business I may be working on.
Kathleen (40:33):
That's a great takeaway. All right. Last question. And then we'll wrap up, which is, this podcast is all about inbound marketing, which I just define as anything that kind of naturally attracts the right kind of buyer to your business. I think everything we've talked about falls squarely within that. Is there a particular company or individual that you think is, is setting the bar for what it means to be a great inbound marketer today?
Chris (40:57):
Well, I'm wondering, let me bounce this off because I'm wondering if our definitions would be similar. I think of inbound. So about a decade ago, right? About the time that we started Cult, Harvard and McKinsey partnered up together with a, to answer the question is the purchase funnel still viable? Is that as a marketing paradigm, still an appropriate way to think about building a business? And the answer was hell no. Like no aspect of the purchase funnel was popularized with the Sears and Roebuck catalog in the late 18 hundreds right now with all of the inbound opportunities. One of the most pieces of their research was that the exact opposite of a funnel actually happened. So a funnel sort of implies I have a few brands in my consideration set and over a series of steps, I whittle it down to a choice and they showed it actually bows out.
Chris (41:49):
So if you start say, for example, shopping for a car, you might start with, okay, I'm looking at a Lexus, a Mercedes or a Hyundai, but through research, you actually say, holy crap, I didn't even know about Subaru. And I didn't even think about what Jaguars come out with and that your consideration goes from three or four to eight or nine. And that to me is the role of inbound marketing to say, if I'm not in the initial consideration set, can I introduce new variables or considerations that will introduce me to say know, yes, they may be the category leader, but did you know, whatever my return policy, my warranty, my price point, my customer care, my post-purchase experience may, may be greater. So I think of inbound is everything that needs to help a person make a decision other than just, Hey, I'm here. But if it's the more rational facts and figures about how to do so. Yeah, go ahead.
Kathleen (42:47):
So I'd love to hear who, based on that definition, you think is really kind of the standard setter.
Chris (42:55):
Yeah. For some reason I'm thinking of Terminex this pest control company that's sort of known for both they've gotten into like home sprayng, but also you can go to Home Depot and buy, you know, pest control stuff to keep rodents out. But that's an example of at some point I just, I don't care about your, your chemical formula versus the other guy's chemical form. I don't understand what these ingredients are. I want it to be kid-friendly pet-friendly and I want the bugs to go away. Right. but yet they spent, they spent money on creating over a hundred different micro sites around different aspects of pest management, so that you don't even know when you're on that page, that it's by Terminix. And, but it's a wonderful sort of inbound strategy. They actually did it when Google changed some of their algorithms about how to determine relevance and linking strategies became really paramount.
Chris (43:55):
So they kind of created this proliferation, but then the amount of content and copywriting that they went into and like super niche stuff about black widows or spiders or mice or whatever it might be, but they became experts and, and, and not experts like in a Del chemical kind of way, but experts in like, this is the kind of stuff that homeowners are dealing with, where all their content became so empathetic. And it felt just like this just natural endorsement that if this website is talking about how to, you know, manage mice in your attic is recommending the Terminex, mice, whatever, you know, then maybe I should go. And that brand became elevated. Not because it was the cheapest, but because it had that sense of of credible.
Kathleen (44:39):
That's so interesting. I've never heard anybody talk about that one before. So I love that example. All right. Well, before we wrap up, if this has been super interesting, if somebody wants to learn more about you or your work, or has a question and wants to somehow connect, what's the best way for them to do that?
Chris (44:57):
Thanks for asking it's I'd suggest two thoughts. If you're curious about how capable your business or your category may be, you can go to cultideas.com. There's a scorecard where you can answer some questions and it will rank you there's loads of free content. You can get a copy of our book, or you can engage us to come in and do some custom consulting. If you're curious how other brands have done it, and you want to be inspired or more importantly, you want your boss or your board to get inspired about what good actually looks like, then send them to The Gathering. Tickets are on sale now for that event, it takes place in April and that's at cultgathering.com.
Kathleen (45:36):
Oh, awesome. I'll definitely check that out. All right. Well that is it for this week. If you are listening, and I know you loved this episode as much as I did, head to Apple Podcasts and consider leaving the podcast a review, that's how other folks find us. And if you know somebody else who's doing amazing inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork, which yes, that is my Twitter handle. And I would love to make them my next guest. And in the meantime, Chris, thank you so much. This has been fascinating.
Chris (46:06):
Oh, Kathleen, I really enjoyed the conversation. I can't believe the time's up already.
Kathleen (46:10):
I know. We needed longer, but that's all we've got. So thanks for joining me. You're very welcome.
