The 10 Key Principles of Marketing without Marketing

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10 Key Principles 1 Let go

Let your brand be market-driven rather than marketing-driven. The only way you can do this is if you visualize your brand as belonging to the marketplace rather than to you.

The best brands find their own place in the market. They grow and develop in response to the needs of users rather than as part of a preordained program dictated by a marketing company. In fact, the very big brands often have an instigator who is willing to get out of the way and let the user community add their own meaning and do their own thing. This is the way “killer apps”emerge in the marketplace.

A great example of this principle was Napster. Shawn Fanning was a college freshman when he wrote a computer software program that would help him search for music on the Internet. He named it “Napster” because that was his nickname. He then e-mailed it out to a few friends, asking them not to share it with anyone else. Fanning then let the marketplace do its own thing. He didn’t engage a brand consultant or an ad agency to manage the brand. Nor did he try and influence how Napster evolved. Instead, everything was left to the user base to add meaning. Within 18 months, Napster had eighty million users, all for a marketing expenditure of $200,000.

Why did Napster go from a start-up to a global mass brand and then to a nostalgia brand within the space of just two years?

It provided users with a blank canvas: something people could take and use any way they wanted to.

Napster had a non-financial incentive: users felt like they were helping others by making their music libraries available rather than being paid a finders fee or anything like that.

It made people feel wanted: the more people that used Napster, the better it became.

Napster created a sense of community: because it applied to music, a very personal and emotional topic for many people. People who used Napster also believed they were helping to liberate music from the clutches of the recording industry, a very noble cause.

Napster was well managed: in that Shawn Fanning wasn’t worried about making money or in trying to influence the direction Napster went.

Of course Napster isn’t the only brand that has succeeded by allowing itself to be hijacked by the marketplace. Dr. Marten’s boots, Pabst Blue Ribbon beet, SMS text messaging and In-N-Out Burger (a Californian burger chain) have all prospered as brands even in the face of white-hot competition. Thy key to the success of these brands have been their willingness to let the market dictate what the brand should mean.

10 Key Principles 2 Co-create

Invite the people who make up various subcultures to have a say in the brand’s ideology, use and persona. If you can do this well, instead of ending up with a niche product, you lay the foundation for a product that the mainstream will accept because it feels authentic rather than manipulative.

Great brands ooze authenticity. They don’t feel like they’ve been developed by the suits in the marketing department. Instead, a good brand will ring true, and the only way you can achieve this in practice is if you let customer actively participate in shaping the brand’s meaning.

Consider, for example, the success of the movie: The Blair Witch Project. This film was made for $35,000 and ended up grossing $241 million at the box office. As a product, the film was mediocre–a horror movie with no big name stars, on real scary parts and no distributor. Despite the fact the film itself was ordinary, however, the way the film was released was exceptional:

For two years before the film was released, the film makers created a new urban myth about three students who go missing in the forest while making a documentary about a witch. A website was launched which discussed this myth and which featured excerpts from footage apparently shot by the students before they disappeared.

Interest was generated in the fringe crowd–internet junkies, horror freaks and film buffs. Once the website caught on, discussions about the project spread to cable TV, then to radio and the weeklies and finally to broadcast TV and major newspapers.

Instead of being released with fanfare in typical Hollywood style, the movie was pre-screened at forty college campuses for students to watch, not the film critics.

This growing interest in The Blair Witch Project didn’t go unnoticed. A distributor acquired the rights to the film and released it commercially in a limited number of theaters, maintaining the sense of exclusivity and being in on the secret that had been fostered throughout the film’s history. Eventually, The Blair Witch Project would become the next big thing of the summer 1999 movie season.

The real success of The Blair Witch Project was built on the participation of its most loyal fans. They actively co-created the spirit, look and feel of the Blair Witch brand. They generated the buzz that eventually took Blair Witch from the fringes to the mainstream. The only reward these fans gained was they felt like they had privileged information before the general public caught on–and that made them feel like insiders and not just faceless consumers.

Another company that has been extremely successful in collaborating with its customers is Red Bull, the energy drink maker. Its entire go-to-market strategy was based around seeding early markets (hip bars and taxi drivers in the United States and truck drivers in Britain) and then getting those people to recommend the drink to their peers. Red Bull works hard to weave itself into the lives of its customers. As a result, these same customers are prepared to pay a huge premium–about eight times higher Coca-Cola–for a drink that nutritionists are still debating whether it’s good for you or bad for you. The brand’s ultimate success has been in large part due to the fact customers have participated in shaping the brand.

10 Key Principles 3 Scrap

Forget using focus groups to try and figure out what’s cool and what’s not. Fire all the people who claim they can chase what’s cool. Hire your audience instead and genuinely take notice of what they want.

Orchestrated brand hijacks always take advantage of genuine and substantial cultural opportunities rather than something superficial. Or put another way, genuinely cool brands get to be that way because there is a need they meet, not because they do something superficial. It’s up to you as a marketer to figure out what this opportunity will be.

The key characteristics of a cool brand are:

Cool brands are imperfect: they aren’t entirely politically correct but have all sorts of quirks and character traits. People like these traits because they make the brand seem more genuine and easier to relate to.

Cool brands are visionary: they challenge the norms of society and push people into seeing things differently.

Cool brands are self judging: they try and do things that impress themselves rather than being prepared to do whatever is required to make a buck. They can never be accused of selling out.

Cool brands feel like they have nothing to prove: and therefore they stand up for what they believe rather than changing to try and suit the mass markets. Cool brands are trying to create an experience they feel good about.

Cool brands fill a cultural need: they do the things society needs, even if those requirements are normally kept well hidden.

Note that being cool isn’t necessarily equivalent to being a great commercial success for a brand. By definition, a cool brand will appeal only to a minority of consumers, not the mass market. Attitudes about what’s cool and what’s not change regularly, so this month’s big thing can quickly become old news. Since most people won’t be able to put into words what it takes to be cool, deciding what’s cool and what’s not will be very much dictated by each individual. And finally, cool is impossible to measure or quantify. Brands will have anecdotal evidence that will suggest they are perceived as being cool it will be difficult to measure progress in this area at all.

The rules of the cool game itself also change regularly. Some marketers enlist the aid of different groups (”cool hunters”) who supposedly can state what’s cool and what’s cool and what’s not, but these results tend to be quite shallow and superficial. When it comes to being cool, these are no simple answers or techniques to use.

10 Key Principles 4 Facilitate

Make it easy for your most passionate and influential customers to tell their friends and associates about you. Create an ongoing conversation that you facilitate and help. Get the market involved intimately in building your brand.

Most marketers have an aspirational mind-set when in reality they should focus on becoming more inspirational. Their job is really to be a facilitator, to ensure an ongoing conversation occurs between engaged consumers and a distinctive brand. Hijacked brands offer consumers greater meaning in their lives. This is typified by co-created brands like Harley-Davidson that offer customers a way of life rather than just a product per se.

The ideal approach with a co-created brand is to look for ways to build and enrich the folklore that surrounds your brand. This will have a level of complexity that goes far beyond selling a product or service. Instead, look for a deeper purpose. Empower customers to interpret your brand their way. Good co-created brands mean different things to different people.

Note there are actually two different types of brand hijacks that can occur, one being completely serendipitous and the other being a conscious act of co-creation. The differences between these two hijack scenarios are as follows:

10 Key Principles 5 Be patient

When dealing with brand hijacks, it’s impossible to predict how long it will take. Sometimes it will take no time at all; at other times, years and years will pass before anything noteworthy occurs. You just have to be patient.

Since most hijacks will involve a seeding campaign within target groups, you have to be prepared to demonstrate your commitment over an extended time period first. If you attempt to short-circuit the process by going mainstream too early, you risk ruining all the careful groundwork you’ve put in place.

In essence, a good brand hijack will be more of a social movement than anything else. Positioning and all the other usual marketing tools won’t have much impact. Brand hijacks are orchestrated for a number of years before they can ever be launched formally or have attention drawn to them with mass-marketing tools. Selling a new way of life always takes more time than influencing someone to buy a product or service.

Most brand hijacks happen by accident rather than as a result of great planning or good design. There must be a willingness to let go and let events unfold at their own pace rather than attempting to impose an artificial timetable. Some of the most successful brand hijacks in history have happened by accident rather than by design, so you have to be prepared to give up the driver’s seat. The very nature of a brand hijack, involving the seeding of early markets before the mainstream markets really come on line, means that progress will be determined by events beyond the direct control of the marketers.

You do have to allow enough time for your seed markets to fully run with anidea first. If you limit this development time and try to force the pace unnaturally, what you’ll end up with is something that is only a shadow of what it could have been. Patience is a key to an effective brand hijack.

10 Key Principles 6 Be flexible

Carefully plan each step of the process in advance, but be totally open to having someone come along and replace your ideas with much better ideas at any time. If you can master this, what you’ll end up with is an idea that is more robust and far-reaching than anything you could have conceived yourself.

The main reason why brand hijacks of any kind are so unpredictable is it’s the consumer that’s in charge, not the marketer. Or to be more specific, brands are not hijacked by individuals. Instead, they are hijacked by groups of consumers with shared interests who effectively form what can be described as a “brand tribe.”

Hijacked brads allow individuals to feel like they are part of something big, like they have an opportunity to do something noteworthy. Sizable brand tribes have grown up around eBay, Starbucks, IKEA, Lexus, ESPN, Krispy Kreme donuts, Harley-Davidson motorbikes, Nike, Red Bull, iPod and Apple Computers to name just a few. These tribes are in a constant state of flux forming, dissipating, re-forming and so on. When companies learn how to foster and encourage these brand tribes to flourish, they find themselves with a valuable resource. In effect, by learning how to market to the members of the brand tribe, companies learn what will appeal to the broader mass consumer market as well.

Brand tribes, just like cults, offer members a greater sense of purpose and belonging. Brand tribes develop their own initiation rituals, rites of passage and different levels of status. To go from a casual consumer to a brand fanatic, there are usually four steps you have to take:

1. Gey your foot in the door: by passing some firewall that separates the true believers from everyone else. For example, when the Linux community was in its early days, you had to be a computer hacker to know where to find the bulletin boards where all the Linux software developers hung out. Members of brand tribes have privileged and confidential information they guard jealously. Communication within this group one-on-one rather than broadcast far and wide.

2. Become indoctrinated or initiated into community: by doing something which establishes you’re “worthy” to belong. For example, IKEA has a large brand tribe. To belong, you have to be willing to write down complex codes, search a giant warehouse to find your items, endure long checkout lines, load heavy items into your car and then take your purchases home and assemble them yourself yourself following usually very cryptic instructions. Members of the vibrant IKEA brand tribe all consider these badges of honor rather than rationale for shopping elsewhere.

3. Start living in a parallel social universe: which has rituals, relationships and experiences that are far removed from day-to-day life. For example, eBay (founded in 1997) has loyalty tiers where frequent users are rewarded with greater power and insider status. To move up the tribe’s own organizational ladder, the average eBay user spends more than 3.5 hours a day checking the status of their bids, rating other parties in transactions, reading the bulletin boards and generally doing tribe homework. Members of the eBay tribe do newsworthy things like auctioning off unusual one-off items all the time.

4. More from a casual interest to near obsession: or in effect drink the tribe’s own unique blend of kool aid. When people fully buy into the brand tribe’s ideology, they then start working towards helping it evolve further. A great example of this Adbusters, the Canadian magazine that has sponsored some high profile anti-consumption campaigns like Buy Nothing Day and Turn Off TV Week. Adbusters has become the focal point for anti-consumption crusaders. It has its own jargon, vocabulary and distinctive way of thinking. Adbusters has a strong view of the world of commerce, namely that all advertising is evil. The community also has a manifesto and value system.

Brand tribes form as a result of seduction rather than through mass coercion. Hijacked brands deconstruct old barriers that prevented people from using them while at the same time putting in place new and different barriers. Membership in the brand tribe has its privileges and corresponding responsibilities. Use this to your advantage.

10 Key Principles 7 Lose control

Free yourself to be able to seize the new ideas that will come bubbling to the surface. Don’t be so constrained by your positioning statement or other marketing trappings that you can’t head off in an unanticipated direction as soon as it opens up as a possibility.

Most marketers instinctively believe there are a set of immutable laws of marketing that must be obeyed. This causes all sorts of problems for a brand hijack. Ideally, you want consumer groups to feel so passionate about your brand they will hijack it themselves. There are basically three ways you can achieve this:

Creating a hijack:
1. Let consumers discover you.
2. Get appropriated for commentary.
3. Go on a mission to change the world.

1. Sometimes people fall in love with the brands they stumble across at random and can’t wait to tell their friends about them. One way to get your brand hijacked is to come out with something innovative and then let customers reach their own conclusions. To pull this off, you’ll need to under-promise and over-deliver. Delight your customers and then step back and let events take on a life of their own.

2. The second way to earn customer devotion is to allow your brand to become a statement for some group or another. Make it possible for customers to make their own political or social statement when they use your product or service. A great example of this approach is Dr. Martens, which was hijacked by youth consumers to make a social statement about defiance and nonconformity.

3. The strongest approach, however, is to develop a brand religion or a cult following. This requires your brand to have strong and distinctive characteristics or beliefs. Apple is the best example of this approach. Apple afficionados passionately believe they are on a mission to rid the world of faceless computers and replace them with more innovative machines.

The real challenge for a brand is authenticity–that the brand is doing what it believes is important rather than what it believes will appeal to the greatest market niche. Hijacked brands take on a personality of their own which is not dictated by purely functional benefits or product features. Hijacked brands are the genuine real deal, and not just some creation of the suits in the marketing department.

To create the conditions for a brand hijack, let go of more rather than attempting to control more. Hijacks always follow their own path and trajectory. If you try and restrict them to what you anticipate will happen, you’ll miss out on all the benefits and possibilities that actually exist. The trick is to lose control and let the hijack happen at its own pace and under its own conditions, not yours.

10 Key Principles 8 Resist

Resist the corporate urge to make everything consistent. Instead, be more authentic. Embrace the value of doing things that are surprising and interesting, even if done imperfectly. Although the new idea may make you feel squeamish at first, pause and consider whether something noteworthy is lurking in the background.

In a brand hijack, it’s not the quality of the product that’s critical. Instead, it’s the quality of the brand experience that counts. A brand hijack requires that product developers put to one side their engineering qualifications and think instead about how their product can actually benefit the community. From this perspective, the best designed products are carefully fine-tuned to deliver just what the customer wants.

Big companies are often hindered in their attempts to pull off brand hijacks because:

They fail to understand how brand hijacks actually come about in the real world: and assume the magic behind some of the most successful brand hijacks was all a matter of luck rather than good planning.

They feel uncomfortable seeding early markets rather than using mainstream marketing vehicles.

They rely on “proven” managers: who have earned their reputations managing static brands rather than doing something revolutionary and noteworthy. Brand hijacks require a whole new skill set.

They look at the wrong metrics: meaning they try and measure brand awareness, sales volume and market share. These metrics are irrelevant during the early stages of a brand hijack and therefore most hijacks are judged as failures prematurely by corporate managers.

10 Key Principles 9 Respect

Respect the consumer’s judgement. This will be quite a paradigm shift for most marketers. Instead of attempting to influence the consumer, pick up on the little signals you receive back. Replace intrusive marketing with collaboration on the next big thing. Customers will love you for your open-mindedness.

Consumers, by and large, are dramatically demonstrating an increasing immunity to conventional marketing approaches. Why is that?

Most consumers instinctively distrust marketers: assuming they will say whatever they are paid to say, not what genuinely believe. They assume marketers are ready to manipulate things in the background to suit their own purposes rather than respect what customers genuinely want.

Consumers are exposed to so many marketing messages each day they become jaded: their attention is elsewhere. For this reason, most marketing is considered intrusive rather than beneficial.

Classic advertising has become less authentic: and therefore consumers are looking for greater meaning than is typically served up in the mass media. Consumers want to engage in a conversation rather than having messages force-fed to them all the time.

Consumers know they live in a world of parity products: with most consumer goods actually being pretty good quality. Therefore, consumers know they have leverage and can decide which products do well in the marketplace and which will fall by the wayside.

In all, consumers want to be active participants in shaping brand meaning rather than a faceless entity to be marketed to. They want to help create the brand and have some input into what it stands for.

10 Key Principles 10 Hijack

Hold on tight for the ride, but be willing to let the market hijack your brand. For most products and services, this is the only way you can earn genuine consumer devotion.

When Procter & Gamble decided to launch its range fo teeth-whitening toothpaste called Creat Whitestrips, it decided to try a brand hijack approach. This was smart because less than 5 percent of the population had ever undergone a teeth whitening treatment. If Whitestrips had been launched the conventional way, it most likely would have fallen flat in the marketplace.

Therefore, P&G did some unusual things:

Dentists were recruited to sell teeth whitening kits from their offices.

P&D launched a PR campaign in health and beauty magazines stressing the benefits of white teeth.

P&G started selling Whitestrips on the Internet a full eight months before its retail launch allowing word-of-mouth recommendations and buzz to grow. The company spent more than $2 million to get people to visit the Whitestrips Web site. Many of these early customers became very enthusiastic about the product.

P&G’s other early marketing initiatives targeted gay men, brides, teenage girls and young Hispanics–demographic groups who had become the product’s most ardent online purchasers.

P&G didn’t just rely on one marketing vehicle but had numerous small initiatives underway. Consumers were offered a three-dollar discount for each friend they referred. Gift boxes were given to the Academy Award nominees, resulting in several mentions on the show itself. A contest was run on the website let people show how their smile had improved over time using the product. All of these small programs built momentum.

In is extremely 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.

–Alex Wipperfurth

The real insight as to what drives successfully orchestrated hijacks is this: These brands take advantage of a significant cultural opportunity, a need that they realize they can fulfill. It’s up to the cultural marketer, and not the cool hunter, to figure out just what that opportunity is.

–Alex Wipperfurth

In today’s world, consumers’ decisions are driven more often than not by their memberships in loose social groups that form in a manner similar to the way ancient tribes used to form. However, whereas geography and survival were the common threads that bonded together ancient communities, modern tribes are bound together by common hobbies an value systems. Consumers are influenced by a complex web of interpersonal interconnections.

–Alex Wipperfurth

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. It’s a new brand era. It requires a new mind-set.

–Alex Wipperfurth

The concept of ‘brand’ has evolved from functional product and personal experience to tribal tool and cultural symbol. The simple fact is brands represent something more meaningful within a tribe setting.

–Alex Wipperfurth

Non-traditional marketing tools, brands with a higher purpose, consumers who want to help create the brand: We are indeed at the dawn of a new marketing era, one that will require us marketers to make some fundamental changes to our behavior and approach.

–Alex Wipperfurth

By the time of the retail launch in May 2001, P&G had already created a 35-percent awareness level of Whitestrips. Sales of the product reached $200 million in its first year. Within two years, Crest had turned the teeth-whitening category from a $50 million business to a $600 million business. P&G was also able to democratize a previously costly and inconvenient personal care regime and in so doing, create a whole new category in the dental care industry.

–Alex Wipperfurth

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 values scores. Building genuine loyalty is not about conniving gimmicks, but about developing an up close and personal bond.

–Alex Wipperfurth