It’s slowly draining the attention of every human on the planet.

It plays into almost all human needs — as they are defined by the Maslow Hierarchy.

It’s the rectangular status-seeking device in your hands. That’s right. It’s your smartphone.

Maslow’s needs start with the basics. Starting at the bottom of the pyramid, we all need food and water. Then safety. Next up is belonging, then esteem, then self-actualization.

The hierarchy was first introduced in a research paper by the psychologist Abraham Maslow in 1943. He had no idea that 64 years later, the invention of the smartphone would supercharge the famous pyramid.

Here’s why: We now check our phones the equivalent of one day a week, and 20 percent of adults spend 40 hours a week on it. The stats suggest we check our phones 80 to 150 times per day, on average.

That’s not new news after a decade of the smartphone’s existence, but one of today’s biggest marketing mistakes is underestimating what people are doing with those phone checks.

With Maslow’s guidance, it’s clear we are reinforcing our need to belong, checking our status, and ultimately building our esteem toward self-actualization.

So, what can brand marketers do about it?

Marketers Marketing To Marketers

This amplified need to belong and check status has turned into hundreds of millions of personal advertising campaigns, all competing against brands for attention.

It is much more likely for people to adopt a brand based on friends and family sharing content than TV, Facebook and YouTube advertising combined.

They’re not just looking at friends and family content all day. They’re making it. Millennials might spend two hours a day creating and posting. Plus, there’s important time spent checking the metrics and seeing who liked their posts.

The sheer weight of personal messages from friends and family minimizes the “cut through” ability of advertiser-paid messaging. Literally, everyone is building status in real time, 24/7, with instant gratification of shared photos and videos traveling at lightning-fast smartphone processing speed.

If you multiply personal posts by the total number of friends on everyone’s contact list, you have a lot of ground to cover to join the conversation. The world of organic reach is a nonfactor for brands, leaving engagement as the affordable metric of choice.

Going forward, your job as a marketer is not just to engage one audience group. You also need to engage friends of friends.

That means, stop focusing on just your target market. It’s your target’s target you need to reach.

So, what to do differently in 2019?

Create A Brand Community

Fans sometimes love the identity of a brand so much, they brand themselves with it. Why is this important? Because whatever they’re doing ultimately will be the formula for building organic participation. When there’s enough participation, a community forms around the brand. Once that happens, creating friends of friends is no longer insurmountable.

Logically, if people are talking positively about your brand to reinforce their status, the marketer-to-buyer barrier is broken. You are one of them. In the friend set.

“Superfans” are those who feel a true sense of identity in their chosen brand relationships and are able to say that their friends would agree. Superfans are more likely to share content and brand themselves with the identity of their favorite brands than other fans. They “mentally smile” when they see others using their preferred brands.

Brands have achieved success in cultivating this type of following by following a formula:

1. Ignite the Fire
2. Fuel the Flame
3. Pass the Torch

This is the path for competitive brands going forward. The cost of finding that moment in the world of “friend posts and shares” as an outsider is a price tag that few can afford.

Ignite The Fire

Brands that have a unique story easily can get past “advertiser” and move to “friend” status. What’s true about your story? What’s likeable about it? Can you tell it in an inviting way?

Fat Face is a European clothing chain that got its name when its founders didn’t want to get off the French mountain they were skiing on. They were from the UK, and the name of their favorite slope translated to “Fat Face” in English. They started selling “Fat Face” t-shirts out of their VW van. Those original t-shirts amplified into a line of clothing and stores, and a style all their own. It’s a real story. And people want to brand themselves with it.

Organic Valley calls itself the “un-corporation.” It started as a group of independent farmers — and though the farmers themselves haven’t changed, they now they bring more than US$1 billion worth of dairy goods to stores throughout the U.S. They have videos with their CEO barefoot, and they show an organization chart with him at the bottom. Packages with cows kissing farmers just makes it a great brand and a believable story.

Fuel The Flame

Driving involvement in your brand can take many forms — from unique lingo and secret menus to co-creation concepts and gaming. The point is to give the consumer a connection point. Xbox allows users to custom design its own game controllers. It’s personal. It’s virtual. And it’s tactile. All in one idea.

Starbucks has a simple form on its website entitled “My Starbucks Idea.” This began in 2013 — and the company has created 277 products from more than 150,000 suggestions, including free WiFi, splash sticks, cake pops and pumpkin spiced lattes.

Designing shoes, playing games and interacting all lead to real conversations and entertainment, and allow brands to meet consumers where they already live and play. Joining them before they join you is the groundwork that all marketers need to do.

Pass The Torch

Appointing loyalists to tell your story builds reputations organically, as long as the tone is sincere and the rewards are fulfilling.

Southern Tide is a clothing line that targets a college market. It does so by recruiting college reps and benchmarking their status with trendsetters who are selling their credibility every day. For some, getting chosen to rep the brand has as much status as getting into the school of choice.

TheSkimm is a daily newsletter targeting a female audience. Advertisers can participate — not by submitting ads, but by providing rewards for Skimmbassadors. How to become one? Get 10 of your friends to sign up for the service. There are now 12,000 of them and more than 5 million readers.

Taco Bell created a wedding chapel in Las Vegas. The package includes memorable (and shareable) moments and a taco 12-pack for guests. It’s joining people where they are and having fun with them. By the way, there’s a four-hour notice required in case you get the marriage fever.

Consider the economics of owning versus renting. Much like any other equity, it’s better to own. Own your data. Own your audience. Don’t be beholden to social networks. Email and e-commerce are far more affordable than paying for reach.

So, the lesson for 2019, is to move past just asking consumers to buy the brand. Instead, ask them to join the brand.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Norty Cohen, CEO and Founder of Moosylvania and author of Join the Brand, 2018, and The Participation Game, published in 2017.

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The principle driving more choice in interactions is straight-forward. Savvy digital consumers want/expect greater access to brands in every way. But does building out channels to engage with consumers actually work? Or does it just bewilder a complex environment even further?

Two pieces of research by McKinsey point to the learning that more channels are needed to a point, but also that co-ordination between interaction points is critical to success.

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The first piece of McKinsey research looks at interactions pre-sale. When a regional bank mapped its customer journeys, they found that 80% of prospective loan customers started at the website, but from there they sought answers in a range of ways. About 20% stayed online, another 20% called, 15% went to a branch, and the remainder abandoned. Of those that stayed with the process, more than 20% of those who went to a branch took out a loan, underpinning the point that for all the talk about digital convenience, human-to-human interactions are still highly effective. Of those who stayed online, less than 1% took out a loan. In fact, almost 80% opted out rather than fill in a form. Of those that called the contact center, only 2% even requested an offer and just 0.1% ended up with a loan.

The bank quickly recognized that the ways they had historically organized their interactions had led to customers pursuing a channel of interaction without the rest of the bank knowing that they had done so. To close this gap, the bank looked to match customer interactions with interactions between channels within the bank. That meant simplifying forms, revising policies to allow different channels to take the lead and forging new links between online and contact centers to allow personal follow-up when customers left forms unfinished.

Once these gaps were closed, successful fulfillment on inquiries increased considerably.

In the other study, which focused on interactions post-sale, McKinsey looked at the channels consumers value in the health sector. The results revealed that while access to interactive options absolutely matters, more access is not always better. In fact, the research showed that interactions out-ranked brand as a consideration factor, and that consumers were willing to pay more, and at a margin that exceeded cost to supply, to gain more access to more options. But there were limits.

Consumers wanted to be able to speak with a ‘real’ person at a service center rather than receiving back an anonymous response online. Specifically, they wanted to be able to interact through a combination of phone and mail as well as digital channels such as online, apps or video, and that combination was much more valuable to them than digital service alone. However, when more services were added, the inclination to pay more flatlined, suggesting that customers only recognized added value to a point and not beyond that.

Four key take-aways for those looking at how they organize their interactions to deliver more effective customer experiences:

1. Access is not conversion – it’s easy to get caught up in throwing a wider net when in fact, as the bank example shows, that may only lead to a higher cost-per-serve overall. I suspect that’s because while digital interactions are easy, they are not necessarily as ‘sticky’ as when people invest the time to seek out face-to-face help. Investment bias would suggest that the more people invest, the more likely they are to stay. And therefore, counter-intuitively in this age of convenience, one option that brands should look at is how they can offer interactions that require greater consumer ‘investment’ in exchange for greater experiential returns for the shopper and higher margins for the brand.

2. At a time when everyone is struggling to find ways to stand out, value-adding interactions offer opportunities to elevate brand interest – the McKinsey research shows a clear distinction between the helpful and timely interactions that customers now just expect to be delivered to them vs those that they see as value-added and worth paying more for. It’s important that brands distinguish between these different levels of interaction, keep the choice set limited and be clear about what interactions customers will pay more for, and why. In other words, match channel options with clear value propositions.

3. Convenience is convenience – Marketers may see new technology such as chatbots as a significant opportunity to inject automated personalization into their interactions. KLM Royal Dutch Airlines for example use a chatbot to text a full range of flight details. But while such software has a high convenience factor and meets consumers’ needs for quick digital interactions, chatbots are still automated tools and have some way to go before they could be considered a replacement for the human-to-human value-adding interactions identified above.

4. While most brands will want to keep their channel initiatives within their own ecosystem, the option to partner between brands may be one worth exploring. When my colleague Chris Wren looked at the take-over of Whole Foods by Amazon, he noted that both parties stood to gain from what their different backgrounds would bring to the ability for customers to interact. “What’s most interesting about all of this is the convergence of traditional brands and digital brands along an axis that is focused on utility, not merely expansion or acquisition. In order to be more strongly competitive in the growing food delivery segment, Amazon needed that crucial supply-chain piece that Whole Foods provides. And in order to stay competitive, Whole Foods needed technology infrastructure that could take the brand deeper into the digital space.” Other brands may also find they have much to gain from pursuing greater interaction together.

As expectations continue to rise, brands will naturally be tempted to respond by trying to do more. But more is not necessarily the answer and within the interactions that they do choose, there are clear baselines and ceilings. Baselines are the absolute minimum interaction points that customers expect – often digital, often free. Ceilings are where interactions hit critical mass. You can add more if you want to, but doing so may just incur cost rather than securing greater engagement.

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Over time, the product hasn’t changed much at all. Even Lars Silberbauer, Lego’s Senior Global Director of Social Media and Video admits, “It’s just a plastic brick.” What did change though was the mindset of the brand leaders at Lego to realize, “We [Lego] may own the copyright but we co-own the brand with adults and children.”

At this year’s Cannes Lions, Silberbauer shared the two pillars upon which Lego’s social strategy is built, and it’s pretty simple because they revolve around some fundamental human needs: the need to play and build together, and the pride of creation. Each of these human needs map to the relational motivations that are essential to building a strong network and also show the brand recognizes the creative power found in its customers.

As Jeff Beer shared in Fast Company, “By facilitating, supporting, and promoting the efforts of its fans, Lego amplifies their passion to a global audience, further fanning the flames of fandom everywhere it goes.” Beer further recounts some examples Silberbauer shared of how Lego’s strategy comes to life:

• First Lego League is a robotics competition that isn’t run by the brand. Up to 70,000 kids around the world compete against each other to build Lego robots that solve problems.
• Lego Ideas is essentially a branded version of Kickstarter, in which aspiring Lego designers must get 10,000 supporters for their project to be considered. And support isn’t a simple “like” it’s a survey!
• The Kronkiwongi Project famously used Facebook to encourage customers all over the world to share their creative interpretation of “What’s a Kronkiwongi?”

Silberbauer continues to say, “At the end of the day, no matter what we do, there’s always going to be creativity within the fan community. And all of our outgoing stuff and brand messaging may just be obsolete when fans come up with some really cool stuff.”

He makes a good point. Brands that understand modern storytelling is porous, and make investments to harness the power of regenerative listening and tap into the cognitive surplus unleashed by the global network society, will be in stronger and more relevant positions than those that continue to adhere to strict brand rules.

So, what can your brand do right now? For starters, provide a platform for fans and customers to engage. In too many decks, whenever ‘brand’ and ‘social media’ appear on the same slide, you see something about conversations. Lego, however, gets specific about what they want social networks to do. Engagement for Lego means feedback from customers, product research, competitions and user-generated content.

For some brands or those just starting out, existing platforms might provide everything you need. But notice how Lego also “remixed” the familiarity of Kickstarter into a branded platform to solicit new product ideas, and collect valuable customer data in the form of surveys. That’s the level of creativity that truly sets Lego’s definition of engagement far above most brands. Oftentimes, a remix of a technology, platform or concept is all that’s needed to raise the bar and may prove more compelling than something entirely new.

And to that point, Silberbauer’s Cannes presentation ended with a fan-made Lego recreation of Red Bull Stratos – user generated branded content based on branded content. How very meta.

But, sadly, Lego is in trouble again – likely over-extended between films and new product lines. Hopefully, via their robust social infrastructure and highly involved customers, the brand will quickly find its way back to profitability.

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Think about the almost coarse way in which airlines greet their frequent fliers – with a bunch of features dressed up as privileges and a tiered recognition system that allocates them a color.

It’s almost as if brands can’t help themselves. Informed by the mountains of data they have collected, many seem compelled to flash this knowledge under the noses of buyers, and to deliver “experiences” that are framed around that knowledge. Even customer-centric organizations like Amazon let you know what they know. So does Google. So does Facebook. In the cases of Google and Facebook, the ad placements are so blatant that everyone with an ounce of awareness recognizes that what they are being served up is no coincidence.

And that’s my point. Perhaps brands should be a little more circumspect in how they frame what people get. Not to be deceitful or opaque – but because happenstance is a powerful motivation for anyone. Coincidence turns the everyday into the extraordinary. And that sense of surprise – that unexpected but fulfilling encounter – is an opportunity too often missed it seems to me.

The experiences we remember as consumers are not the manufactured moments that everyone else got too. The times we remember are the ones that were special to us, that seemed to arrive with perfect singularity and that transformed something that was otherwise uneventful into an instance that we love to replay – even years later. In a world where so much is expected and too little is spontaneous, perhaps it’s time brands found ways to design for surprise.

The urgency for this rethink shouldn’t be underplayed. The Customers 2020 Report is predicting that by 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key point of competitive advantage for brands. Customers will dictate the experiences that they want, and they will want those experiences to be more personal, faster to the point of proactive and anticipatory, and across the many platforms they feel comfortable using. To respond effectively, companies will need to source all the market intelligence they can gather in order to know the people they deal with better. But knowledge alone won’t be enough.

Nor will innovation. In his article on why, Patrick Newbery describes the need for a new playbook: one where experiences are designed around the brand’s values; that recognize the different behaviors and priorities of people at different buying points; and that present the brand in ways that add new meaning to the perceptions customers already have of the brands they interact with.

The coincidental opportunity it seems to me lies at the nexus of these ideas: knowing as much as possible, and at the same time, orchestrating things based on that deep pool of knowledge that just seem to happen, as if by magic, for consumers.

The designer Dries van Noten once described coincidence as the convergence of different ideas. To me, that’s exactly how brand experiences should be fashioned – they should bring together something that someone did expect with something they didn’t in ways that expand and elaborate the brand and make it more interesting. Disney does that through a combination of people, absolute commitment to their core promise, listening to guests, putting those guests in control of the experiences they have, and technology.

Brand coincidences can occur as extended offers, astute additions, perfectly timed gestures that (happen to) correspond with what people didn’t realize, or were just realizing, they wanted right about now. Big data makes that possible. But deft touch makes that magical. And it’s that feather light control of the serendipitous, delivered with discretion and perfect timing, that brands need to get much better at.

As a brand you know so much. But the real challenge in transforming that into moments that are unforgettable stems from a different question altogether: where are the quiet little delights that prove the brand and happen to make experiences truly personal?

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“Historically, our media plans have focused more on exposure and broadcasting than engagement and response…,” writes Levy. “We focused on reaching as large an audience as we could and hoped or planned that of that 100%, we would eventually whittle down to the, call it 5%, of people who actually cared and mattered for our brand. We focused on reach because our ability to measure engagement…was lousy.”

Not any more. Instead of opening the jaws of the sales funnel as far as they will go, Levy calls for an engagement pyramid that flips the funnel on its head. Start with what has always been seen as the end of the filter – the 5% who will be most interested  – she says, engage them, get them talking and let the growth begin. Her thinking directly echoes that of Joseph Jaffe whose book of that name some years back first drew my attention to the need to pay attention to the “right” end of the funnel and use commitment as the multiplier.

The thing all brands with a social presence need to be paying attention to, Levy says, are the dynamics of Gen C (the content generation). For this tribe, content is the basis of conversation. It’s the prompt everyone in this generation is looking for in order to have something to share. Gen C are using social networks and content platforms to define their sense of self. They are what they see, what they make and what they distribute. Here’s a great insight: “When they share a video or an image, they’re not just sharing the object, they’re sharing the emotional response it creates.”

And this selfie generation don’t just define their lives this way, they record them as well. One in four upload a video every week and nearly half upload a photo every week. The way I see it that makes almost every Gen C participant a potential media company because so many people are now documentary makers. They are documenting their lives in words, pics, tweets, opinions and shares.

So the future for technology brands, at least in a content world, seems to lie very much in helping that happen or in being a product placement in everyone’s personal suite of content. The future lies in catering to the Gen C question, “What can I tell the world now?”

Levy cites GoPro as a classic example of a brand that has drawn directly on Gen C’s proclivity for content. At first glance, the success of the little sports camera is an enigma. In a world where phones are ubiquitous and Flip failed, how did GoPro go public? The answer, according to this article in Wired, is that GoPro didn’t try to sell technology. Rather, they sold the memories and emotions that GoPro literally captured, and they have flourished because the thrill of capturing those memories talks to everything that Gen-C is about. “GoPro has sold consumers not on the camera, itself, but on something the smartphone can’t easily replace: the experience of using the camera.”

Once captured, of course, experiences must be shared – content – and through sharing, the brand’s reputation has literally been spread. In 2013 alone, according to Wired, GoPro customers uploaded 2.8-years worth of video featuring GoPro in the title and in the first quarter of 2014, people watched over 50 million hours of videos with GoPro somewhere in the title, filename, tag, or description.

My take-away. Scaling is no longer just about expansion, in the sense of adding more and being in more places to reach more people. Scaling, at least for lifestyle brands, is about acquiring a greater and greater sense of identity. But not the identity that brands talk about and know how to do. Rather the identity that consumers have – the sense of self that they gain in seeing progress and achievement for themselves and that they are then motivated to share. GoPro works not so much because of what it does but because of how well it enables people to put more of themselves in the world. They enhance their footprint through the brand as much as the brand enhances its footprint through them. Jawbone Up’s done something similar. Redefined how people document the lives they have and want, using their screens and social media buttons as the playback and sharing mechanisms.

Roll camera. Life…Flipping the funnel is about building brands through granularity, not reach. Start with personal experiences as the critical beach-head. Build small communities. Encourage each of them to grow. Look for ways to knit them together. Rinse and repeat.

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