Moving Tribes - the blog

Tribes and Parties

In this UK election season, I’ve found myself reflecting on the theme that inspired this blog in the first place. I’m constantly searching for how marketing can make a “tribe” of our customers  and get them to react – to move en-mass to take up a new product or exhibit a new behaviour. Only rarely does marketing deliberately achieve that goal – to set a new trend, define a new category.

Elections demonstrate a very particular way of creating a “tribe”. Political parties are very good at describing themselves by what they are against, and by creating an enemy of “the other lot”. A really effective way to build a tribe is to give them a common enemy to rail against.  Thus many political systems, the UK no less than others, are defined by polarity, by a “left wing” and a “right wing”.

This polarisation works because we seem to be very deeply hardwired to want to join a gang – to define ourselves by who we are with, and who we are against, whether its politics, football teams, academic debates or many other aspects of life.

We’ve seen a very successful, and quite unexpected, bit of tribe-building over the last few weeks in the UK. The third party, the Liberal Democrats, have traditionally polled sub-20% in the UK and been, let’s face it, pretty marginal. Over the last few weeks, since the leaders’ debates started, their poll rating has shot up and (even if it’s only a short term blip) at the time of writing this they now regularly poll second at around 30%.

Only time will tell what actually happens in the election on May 6^th, but in the meantime I think the Liberal Democrats have stumbled on a lesson in tribe-building that we marketers should take note of. I believe that the real under-pinning of their recent poll boost is more fundamental than a good performance by Nick Clegg in a couple of debates. Instead, their success has come from re-framing the “polarity” of UK politics from “left wing versus right wing” into “established parties versus new ones”. Notwithstanding that they are one of the oldest political parties, they’ve managed to create a debate based on “look at those two old parties battling it out with the same old arguments – only we represent real fresh-thinking and change” – and they’ve managed to make it stick, so far.

This has had an amazingly galvanising effect on the public. When the Liberal Democrats were positioned as just “somewhere in between the other two”, our natural tendency to want to join a gang worked against them – they were neither one thing nor the other, and it’s much less satisfying for our “gang instinct” to be moderate and on the fence. As soon as they changed the spectrum from left-right to old-new, and positioned themselves at one end of that spectrum rather than in the middle, they became a gang worth joining – suddenly defined by being “not like the others” - and people have responded in droves.

The election campaigns will now rest, I think, on the Liberal Democrat’s ability to retain the assertion that that spectrum is the one that matters, and to resist being pincered back into being “somewhere in between the other two”.

In the meantime, here is some food for thought for us marketers. How is your tribe of customers defined? What statement are people making when they join with you and use your product? Who are the “others” that your customers define themselves against? Is there a clever re-framing trick like the one the Liberal Democrats have stumbled on that could transform your product or service from being “in the mix” with everyone else to being clearly differentiated from them?

This kind of thinking is not a recipe for comparative advertising, though our politicians would seem to think otherwise; being clearly distinct from your competitors can be a positive position to take. What the election teaches us, though, is that with an effort of will we can choose what that distinctive position is.

Learning from coffee

You can learn a lot from coffee. Or at least from the business of selling it. I was reminded of this during a recent fantastic week consulting to a business in Seattle. When not working, I ended up spending some quality time hanging out in various branches of a global Seattle-based coffee empire that needs no introduction from me, and whilst I was there they taught me a lesson which I’d like to share with you.

Before I get to that, the US experience was not my first bit of coffee-shop based education. Many of the most powerful lessons in sales and marketing are those you can learn if you just look at what’s happening around you, and one of those happened for me a couple of years ago in a service station on the M25.

Picture the scene - a big queue of people waiting to get their foamy caffeine injection in order to make the next half an hour of crawling along the motorway a little bit more bearable. At the front of the queue is a sales assistant taking orders. Each bedraggled business traveler in turn gets to the front of the queue and says “latte, please”. The assistant’s response? “Small, medium or large?” Interesting to note that every single person, without exception, responded with “medium, please”.

I’m about halfway along the queue when the sales assistant is relieved by a colleague. Same thing - “Latte, please”. However, the new salesperson chooses a different, more directive response - “Large?”. Sure enough, every single person (including your intrepid reporter) says yes. And I re-learned a vital lesson for any marketer. If we frame the choices we offer customers carefully, and are brave about asking for the up-sell, we can add huge value to our businesses. If you want to make your eyes pop, spend a bit of time calculating how much extra profit that coffee business would make if every medium coffee was sold as a large, earning an extra 50p or so for a few more ccs of hot liquid. All that, just by changing the assistant's language a tiny fraction.

So back to Seattle. My lesson this time was a different one. Firstly a confession - I have very ordinary taste in coffee. The first time I had to queue behind someone asking for a “double shot half-caff hazelnut mocha with soy milk” I was a bit embarrassed to follow up with “latte, please” but I got used to it in the end.

So ubiquitous is this coffee chain that there was actually one underneath the hotel I was staying in, and so my morning routine was to eschew the expensive hotel breakfast and go downstairs for a coffee and a bun. The first morning was a nice experience - chatty staff who noticed and commented on my accent, and a nice coffee and bun.

The lesson came on morning two, however, when as I came downstairs they started making my coffee before I’d even come in through the door, and picked out my bun for me. It was reinforced on the third day when again my coffee was made for me but I was asked if I wanted the usual bun or to try a different one.

Naturally I put this personal service down to my own sheer charisma and magnetism, but I’m realistic enough and curious enough that I started listening to what was going on, and in the end I noticed an extraordinary thing. Not only in that branch but in every other one I visited I overheard customers being greeted like old friends, asked if they wanted their usual and generally treated like they were just as much a part of the business as the staff themselves. I even heard one customer, who had obviously been away for a while, issue a friendly challenge to see if the staff remembered his unbelievably complicated usual drink, which they did.

The adage that people in the US are more comfortable with delivering a great customer service experience than people in the UK is an old one. The real lesson from my coffee sessions, I think, is a different one. All of these branches, of one of the biggest brands in the world, succeeded in making themselves feel like small local businesses and in making their customers feel like valued regulars - the real “Cheers” experience. For a big business, that’s an incredibly neat trick, and one which even that company has not succeeded in replicating in the UK as far as I can see. A thought provoking challenge for all of us - how close are our big brands to genuinely delivering the local experience that shows individual customers how valued they are? What kind of culture do you have to create in your business to get that to happen? What could we do to transform our businesses to get closer to that wonderful, loyalty-inspiring goal? Something to ponder over your next coffee.