[Music] first thing I want to tell you is that I have hacked the Ted speech you will learn everything you want to know about branding building social communities in the digital age in the next three and a half minutes because I am add2 so the remaining 10 and a half n and a half whatever minutes will be all filler so I wanted to let you know first of all that branding today has evolved and thank God because traditional branding was like molding fog you ask 100 different people what branding is and you get a 100
different answers the first two things I want to tell you about branding today is that it doesn't matter what you tell people about your product or service it matters what they say about it 80% of people don't believe what you say in advertising and so forth and marketing materials anyway so good luck finding the other 20% the second thing I want to point out is that it's not so much the quality of your product that matters it's the quality of the community that you build around that product quality quality of the community not necessarily the
quantity of the community and I'll explain that as we go along so a few years ago I was faced with a problem which today we would call Loosely about authenticity I was I had a client who uh was being inauthentic of course we didn't have that word back then so that alone was a little bit problematic figuring that out but the other thing was that they um people were talking about Apple tribes and the Nike cult Nike drives and the Apple cult and all that kind of thing but they no one had really nailed how
you could do that for yourself and so that's why even today we have Gatorade spots that look like they're 1980s Nike commercials and so I took some time to figure it out and I think that I did and it was really about building a belief system brand communities are a belief system so it's how do you build that belief system that attracts others who share your beliefs and that's the thing that people building new products and service leave out we're so focused on building that product that uh we think of branding as being you know
we we have a logo and we have a website well that's not your brand and that's why nine out of 10 new products fail because you haven't really built the people the cluster of people around your product or service that are going to attract others first of all believe in you but also attract others and so they not only buy you but they buy into you so that's what we're going to learn in the next three minutes so the question you can ask yourself or I ask you is why do these black and white geometric
shapes mean nothing to us other than the fact that they're circle square and triangle whereas these black and white geometric shapes mean a whole lot to us and they are embedded with meaning and that's the whole point you how do we move from being meaningless to becoming meaningful and create a billion dooll Enterprise like these Brands communities are belief systems once you build belief system you attract others who share your beliefs belief systems have are a construct of seven things a creation story a Creed icon sacred words uh rituals non-believers and a leader once you
have that construct created you ping all the points that we need as human beings in order to understand and comprehend you both from a rational level and from an emotional level so you ping these things okay and that's what attracts people the first one is the creation story uh we all know that Apple started in a garage there are Amazing Creation stories out there we're having our talk here in a museum outside of this door there are lots of paintings hanging out there those paintings are worth something because of what they call the provenance right
the provenance is the creation story who painted it where it is where does it come from who owned it before the museum did and that's why the painting is worth a million dollars in instead of 10 bucks there are are several fascinating creation stories but I only have 14 minutes so I'll just share one with you really quickly uh Estee Lauder who created the uh SD Lauder company in her creation her creation story is that she and Charles were living in a kind of CD hotel in Paris France she had a great perfume that she
wanted the local department store to sell she went to the department store buyer he wanted nothing to do with her he kicked her out basically uh she on her way out out the door she spilled the perfume in the perfume department for the next week the women of Paris wanted that perfume they called AE Lauder back in boom once we know where you're from what tell us what you're about your values and your purpose and what you believe in is crucial right whether it's think different just do it umbus Unum seeri it's important the third
thing once we know where you're from and what you're about identify yourself icons are quick concentrations of meaning that let us know who you are and they also tell us if you're safe if we're safe or if we're in danger icons are hardwired to our brains our Primal brains to um let us know if we're safe or in danger icons cover all of the senses sight taste sound smell Etc the smell of your grandmother's cooking uh the feel of a teddy bear and so forth the feel of fine Corinthian leather right right so have icons
work closely with rituals and there can be positive rituals or there can be negative rituals I say if you want a positive ritual get a hug if you want a negative one call Comcast but your brand Vitality comes from the number of positive repeated engagements that you have with your community rituals include selfies they include all the apps you have you probably have like a hundred apps on your phone on your iPhone or your Google and Android and you probably use about seven of them if you have WhatsApp you probably use three of them right
and the reason for that is that the user interface and the user experience is kind of funky in the other ones and so and it's not as pleasant so that's that experience is a ritual shopping is a ritual uh this experience is a ritual so is ComicCon so is buring Burning Man and so forth these rituals are constructed we have certain expectations when we watch walk in if they aren't met we get become disappointed and so on so once we know where you're from and what you're about you've identified yourself we know how how we
use you uh we know how to act this is Jack threads I'm wearing a jack threads shirt right now Jack threads is one of the new hot fashion companies in Manhattan uh they're part of the whole Dollar Shave Club warie Parker Group I'm part of their beta test um and this is online shopping for guys and I noticed that in the uh the payment process there was a little buggy and so I sent him an email well they fixed that bugginess that day within about two hours if Jack threads was part of a large uh
fashion Corporation you know that if they read my email at all it would have been moved to the Monday morning status meeting Monday morning and involved in the whole uh the corporate cluster but the fact that Jack thread solved this immediately is a part of their ritual part of the protocol and this gives them an unfair Advantage once we know where you're from and so forth all Community social communities have special words that they use whether you are a surfer or a coder whether you work in fashion business whether you're a marketer whether you're working
art business we all have our own words uh ice grinded skinny decaf latte the words we had to use if we want to buy coffee at Starbucks it's not just words uh a few weeks ago who heard about the whole Pokemon go thing for about a week hands anyone some of you a lot of you and the rest of us went what the hell is this right so it's not just the words but it's the whole uh feeling of the thing too and then they are non-believers as marketers we always feel that once everyone realizes
our genius everyone's going to buy us and of course that doesn't happen there are people who want to uh buy coffee at Starbucks and there's going to be Dunkin' donuts over there okay there are people who uh like the Cubs and others who like the Red Sox Yankees Mets and so forth Republicans Democrats let's not go there and so in strategy marketing strategy especially figuring out who you're not what you never want to become can really help you figure out who you are and what you do want to become so uh Game of Thrones I
had to thrown that in uh and then finally finally uh yes this is a kind of a spoiler here one of them is going to win um and then finally there's the leader and this is the person who set out Against All Odds and the World At Large in order to recreate the world according to their own point of view and whether that's Oprah Winfrey or Disney or um Steve Jobs Henry Ford whoever that it may be or the presidents Washington through Obama they are responsible responsible for putting together all these pieces of code so
that it's bundled together and resonates with us and makes us relevant so what all this becomes then is a strategic brand narrative it's strategic because it's actionable okay it's not molding fog you can activate any one of these pieces you can decide where these pieces go you can distribute them through all of your media where does the creation story go where does the Creed go um and so forth do we need to redo our packaging do we need to redo our logo like Google Google Uber and everyone else did last year in terms of a
narrative this is what it looks like you break this down for just about any company any person any place any including yourself so this for Apple the United States of America and by the way the longer that something has been in existence the further out these things go whether it's icons or whatever Game of Thrones I had to put that in there you could even suggest that the foundation of our society is based upon the fact that two people believe in each other so much that they're willing to commit the rest of their lives together
so how does that work the creation story where'd you guys meet the Creed I love you I love you back the icons the Rings the flowers the engagement cards and all of that kind of thing God help you if you forget any one of them the rituals the dating the going steady uh a woman once shut it out divorce um the sacred words I love you honey Pooky darling dear uh the non-believers which tend to be you know your ex boy girlfriend boyfriend uh sign ific other uh spouses uh single people uh again someone once
yelled out mother-in-law uh and then and then the leaders uh you know one or both of you depending on who does the checkbook so this is why when you break up with someone it becomes so painful it's like your uh cells are bursting because you have destroyed all of this or most of it right and so now you know Mr Sai we haven't seen him in a long time and the reason is that he was a one hit wonder he was a fad right and this happens a lot in fashion where people start wearing something
and all of a sudden they're not anymore you know red socks or something and so the reason for this is that we don't no pieces of code were built around Sai other than the fact that he had this you know thing that went viral and then disappeared right we knew where he was from from Korea but we didn't really know anything learn anything else and that's what happens in fashion and other things as well is they become uh a fad rather than a brand that lives for a hundred years so this is why we believe
in people whether that's Lady Gaga or you in places whether that is New York City or the United States of America this is how we can keep people from moving from Brooklyn to San Francisco or vice versa and things whether it's products and services or it's Concepts like global warming like civil rights or voting so once you move something from being meaningless to becoming meaningful you also move people from going who cares about that to I care about that to the point where they're willing to believe in something they do believe in something so much
they're willing to stand in front of a tank or in front of a bullet and and it really gets down to what do you um what do you believe in so strong that you're willing to die for so the new mission is how do we create a community around us person place or thing that is so passionate about our success that they're willing to create it themselves and that's it thank you [Music]
