Brains on Fire

Igniting Powerful, Sustainable, Word of Mouth Movements

Robbin Phillips, Greg Cordell, Geno Church, Spike Jones

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780470872277
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

Develop and harness a powerful, sustainable word-of-mouth movement

How did the 360-year-old scissor company, Fiskars, double its profit in key markets just by realizing its customers had already formed a community of avid scrapbookers? How is Best Buy planning to dominate the musical instruments market? By understanding the Brains on Fire model of tapping movements and stepping away from the old-school marketing "campaign" mentality.

Brains on Fire offers original, practical and actionable steps for creating a word-of-mouth movement for corporations, products, services, and organizations. It takes you step-by-step through the necessary actions needed to start your own authentic movement.

• Develop and harness a powerful, sustainable, word-of-mouth movement
• Describes 10 lessons to master and create a powerful, sustainable movement
• The Brains on Fire blog is often ranked in the top 100 of AdAge's Power 150 Marketing Blogs

Lesson # 1

Movements Aren’t about the Product Conversation; They’re about the Passion Conversation

Dear marketers: You’ve been brainwashed.

It’s not your fault. It’s the industry’s fault. The four Ps. The unique selling proposition. The out-of-the-box approaches. Jeez. We’ve been preprogrammed to follow the processes that everyone else follows (even though we all call it something different), crank out the same work, enter the same award shows—and then complain about how our clients don’t let us do any good work.

But the biggest thing we’ve been brainwashed to do is talk. A lot. About ourselves, our company, and our product. We talk about benefits. Enhancements. Upgrades—God, the upgrades. How much we care about you, and how our customer satisfaction is the highest around. Talk. Talk. Talk. Blah. Blah. Blah. Me. Me. Me. And then we get turned down and go back to the drawing board to try a different approach.

It’s hard not to talk about yourself first, or try to make it all about your product and service. After all, that’s what you get paid to do. However, talking about yourself won’t make others talk about you. As Tribal Knowledge author John Moore puts it, “Buzz does not create evangelists; evangelists create buzz.”

So you have to ask yourself, is it really all about you? Or is it about others?

“Buzz does not create evengelists; evengelists create buzz.”

John Moore - Brand Autopsy

THE NEW PERSPECTIVE

There once was a local charity golf tournament where a putting contest was held at the end of the day. A dozen golfers signed up and paid to participate to claim the grand prize: two roundtrip tickets to anywhere in the continental United States. To win, you simply had to sink a 50-foot putt. The participating golfers lined up around a huge, undulating green. While one participant tried to make the putt, the others had to turn their backs so they could not “read the green.”

Now, while a lot of people are far from being skilled golfers, one item of fairly common knowledge among golfers is that when it comes to putting, the green can play tricks on you. You can look at the putt from one angle and think the ball will do one thing and then get a completely different read from another angle. Any savvy golfer knows—at the very least—to always look at the cup from behind the ball and then look at the ball from behind the cup. As an instructor once said, “You want to see where the hole will welcome the ball.”

The competitors were all decent golfers. Yet it was amazing to see how, as each walked up to the ball, he took a moment to look at the green and then just lined up and hit the ball. Not one of them ever even came close to making the putt. Not a single one of these guys—who knew better—ever walked around the green or stood behind the hole to get a better read. It was as if the moment there was prize money involved or people were watching, all of the fundamentals were forgotten. Maybe out of the corner of their eye, they could see what the person did before them and just assumed that was the way to do it.

How often do we see this phenomenon occur in business? We are all aware of how critical it is to look at what we do from both our customers’ and our employees’ perspective. Yet how often do we skip that step and instead rush to make the putt? How often do our eyes and minds play tricks on us? Sure, sometimes we’re good enough to get it close, but in today’s hypercompetitive market, is close really good enough?

REFRAME THE CONVERSATION

We’ve already determined that to start a movement, you have to come to terms with the fact that it’s not about you. It never has been, and it never will be. So when you spend your advertising dollars talking about yourself, you are having a one-way conversation that you control (or at least have the illusion of control).

Something that is vital to success in developing both identities and movements is the need to reframe the conversation. Since we can’t build a movement around the company, product, or service, we have to find the passion conversation and ignite the movement around whatever that may be. When we reframe the conversation, we allow people to look at it in a completely different way.

“Your comany is the stories people tell about it

Greg Cordell - Brains on Fire,
Chief Inspiration Officer

EXAMPLES? HERE ARE SOME FROM OUR OWN EXPERIENCE

Rage against the Haze

Ignited in 2002, Rage against the Haze is South Carolina’s youth-led anti-tobacco movement.

In the late 1990s, The Master Tobacco Settlement was an agreement between the large tobacco companies and the Attorneys General of 46 states. In addition to agreeing to abandon certain marketing practices, particularly marketing to youth, settlement money was allocated to each state for tobacco prevention efforts. The nutshell is that the monies from the Tobacco Settlement spent in South Carolina were some of the lowest in the nation.

South Carolina also has the lowest tax on cigarettes, and some of the highest smoking rates. So some of state’s younger citizens led a sustainable anti-tobacco movement that didn’t use traditional media. They merely spread the word through peer-to-peer engagement.

But instead of focusing the conversation on fear and hatred of Big Tobacco, we chose to reframe the conversation. It wasn’t about teens telling other teens not to smoke. It became a conversation about empowerment. We met teens where they were and just gave them the tools and platform they needed to express their opinions—about whatever their passion was: drug prevention, environmental responsibility, teen pregnancy, dropout rates, homelessness.

And as you’ll read in these pages, reframing the conversation comes down to getting personal. Quentin James, one of the first teen leaders for the movement, said it wasn’t about telling his friends not to smoke:

“For me, the moment that sparked everything was reading [a quote] from one of the tobacco industry executives who was asked if he would ever use one of his products and he said, ‘No, I don’t smoke that shit, I reserve that right for the dumb, the poor, the black, and the young.’ And I don’t exactly know why, but at that moment—I remember it—my passion was sparked. And I remember thinking to myself that I have the opportunity to find my voice in this movement.”

Quentin didn’t know anything about tobacco prevention. We met him at a youth government workshop that was teaching people how to debate and present court cases. He attended one of our sessions, he asked questions, and we wrote his name down because he was engaged. Quentin decided to take that step forward to find his voice. Involvement isn’t something we can force on people. No one can make anyone else take that step. It’s the difference between buying a product and being the product. And the Quentins of the world are the ones who make the difference.

The Fiskateers

If you’ve ever owned a pair of orange-handled scissors, then you know what Fiskars is. A 360-year-old company based in Finland, Fiskars has many different divisions—office, school, gardening—but the one we’d like to talk about is their crafting division, in particular, scrapbooking.

The company realized that they were stuck in commodity land with their crafting customers. On top of that, their brand research found that they were seen as the milk and saltine crackers of their industry. They were lacking in both passion and loyalty. After all, scissors and paper aren’t that exciting, right? Do you think that people really gather together to talk about how much they love their scissors? The angle of the blade, and the lovely color of orange, and on and on and on? Yeah, right.

The first time we visited the Fiskars North American headquarters in Madison, Wisconsin, a product engineer told us that he didn’t know why anyone would really care about scissors. “I don’t know why anyone would share their life with us, or share what they do about us.” The employees simply did not see a connection between what they make and what people create.

But how do you reframe a conversation about paper and scissors? By listening to the words that come out of crafters’ mouths. So with some digging, we soon found that it’s not about the paper and scissors. It’s about what people do with the paper and scissors: create amazing works of art that capture memories and are given away or passed down from generation to generation. Fiskars becomes the conduit to their passion. The enabler. And therefore, Fiskars and its products become a natural part of the conversation.

IndieBound

The American Booksellers Association (ABA) is the national trade association for independent booksellers and offers support and guidance on a number of key issues. One of the biggest challenges small stores face is how to compete with the huge volume of marketing and awareness the big-box retailers can generate. For seven years, ABA had been running a marketing program of sorts called BookSense for their members. But BookSense was dated, and most independents were not participating or even seeing value in the program.

The ABA needed more than a program; they needed a movement. A rallying cry. A way to give independent booksellers a voice. And that voice was found in IndieBound.

Do you think it’s easy for your local neighborhood bookstore to compete with the Amazons and Barnes & Nobles of the world these days? Not quite. So the conversation can’t just be about selling books; it has to focus on some kind of distinction between the places where people can buy them. Reframing the conversation for this group meant celebrating the independent, entrepreneurial spirit that made them want to start their own bookstores in the first place. It’s about shopping local and building community—not just for independent booksellers, but for all independent stores.

Chief Marketing Officer for the American Booksellers Association Meg Smith puts it in her own words: “We were able to identify what the missing emotion was. It was this sense of belonging, community and real attraction to independence, and that had evolved over the years,” she said.

This was the idea behind IndieBound, a movement of independent booksellers that Meg calls a perfect combination of time and place and knowledge, the things we learned, the things that were brought to us, and the things that were happening out in the world. “People are able to identify themselves with an emotional concept—and maybe that’s what the movement is. It’s this emotional identification that we didn’t really have the language for before,” she says.

The Park Angels

There are more than 100 public parks in Charleston, South Carolina, a city that simply doesn’t have the funds it needs to support all those spaces. So the Charleston Parks Conservancy (CPC) was created to help.

But when it came time for the CPC to define who they are and what they stand for, the group quickly realized that they couldn’t be just another public service organization in this historic city. And they couldn’t be about picking up trash or planting trees. So they reframed the conversation. Today, the Charleston Parks Conservancy is about connecting people to the past, people to people, and people to their parks. This allows them—and the people of Charleston—to look at their parks in a completely different light.

Mi11

Electronics retail giant Best Buy has recently started selling high-end musical instruments in about 100 store-within-store locations throughout the country. We’re talking high-end guitars, drums, keyboards and mixing equipment.

Now, there are a lot of challenges that emerge for a big-box retailer that attempts to enter this category—like, for instance, how people don’t want to buy a Fender Stratocaster and a kitchen stove from the same salesclerk. So how does a Fortune 75 company reframe the conversation when it comes to selling instruments that they don’t even make themselves?

After talking with the people who work within the Musical Instrument (MI) space at Best Buy, we found out that it’s not about selling instruments. It’s about the everyday life-changing moments that happen when they put a guitar in the hands of a kid for the first time, or meet that 65-year-old who’s falling back in love with music again. So it’s not about selling; it’s about unlocking. Unlocking and celebrating the music we all have inside. And from that, Mi11 was born.

However, talking about the actual products can, in fact, enter into the mix. Jamie Plesser from Best Buy’s Marketing Strategy and Communications explains, “Part of the passion conversation is actually the product itself. People who are really passionate about playing or making music are inherently passionate about the gear.”

“Part of the passion conversation is actyallly the product itself. People who are really passionate about playing or making music are inherently Passionate about the gear.”

Jamie Plesser - Best Buy
Consumer Marketing Manager

IT’S REFRAMING THE CONVERSATION

It’s turning the funnel on its head, giving up on the “me” mentality, and making it about “us.” We’re in this together. People want to be a part of something bigger than themselves because everyone wants to be bigger than they are. So when you have a conversation about how you can fit into their lives—instead of the other way around—you reframe the conversation and give them a chance to own it.

Justine Foo, a kindred spirit, sums it up nicely: “Reframing the conversation is about going from what role does our product play in people’s lives, to what role can we play? It’s from a product role to a social role.”

“Retraming the conversation is about going from what role does our product play in peoples lives to what role can we play? It’s from a product role to a social roel.”

Justine Foo - PhD of Complex Systems and the Brain Sciences

SIMPLE? NEVER. EFFECTIVE? ABSOLUTELY

You might have noticed in each of these cases that we’re not looking for shared passion when we look for people to be involved in a movement. We’re just looking for passion. Period. When you bring people together, then the shared passion emerges. People unite based on the enthusiasm that brought them to the table—which they can now share with one another. The anti-tobacco message is the expression of one group’s passion. Crafting is a...