What Engagement Does IRL
Lesson 3 from: How to Build and Market Products That Change People’s LivesTara-Nicholle Kirke
What Engagement Does IRL
Lesson 3 from: How to Build and Market Products That Change People’s LivesTara-Nicholle Kirke
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What Engagement Does IRL
So just as the disengagement picture is very grim, right, if you're not, if your customers are disengaged, it's very difficult to build a sustainable business. The opposite is also true. Right, just like I said, any company succeeds if it consistently engages its customers and its employees. And if you can build that repeat engagement engine into your business, it literally takes the limits off of your business no matter what field you're in. An engaged customer is a customer that cares about your product, opens your emails when you send them, buys something that you make, spends some time on your app. These are the things that it actually takes for a business to survive. Not downloads, someone using the thing, right. A deeply engaged customer is a customer who views your brand as a love mark. So there's a gentleman named Kevin Roberts. He used to run Saatchi and Saatchi, an ad agency. And he created this idea of a love mark, that there are certain brands that actually are so beloved b...
y customers that they sort of escape even being a brand anymore. They have such a high level of love and respect from their customers that, and this is what he used to say, if your company is a love mark, you know it because if something happens and your product is not available to people, they freak out. They outcry, they get in line. They're tweeting, how come I can't get my whatever kind of latte? Or how come I can't, you know, they're outraged. Now I love this concept because I have seen it, I've worked on these brands, I believe it's true. I don't love the idea that you gotta take your product away from them to see if your product's a love mark. There are just many ways that you can actually measure it in your business. When you have a high degree of customer engagement, which is the same thing as saying you have a high degree of customer love and respect for your brand or your business, these are the kinds of results you get in your business. People come back to your site or your store or your service over and over again. Right, they spend time with you. They buy from you multiple times or they tell their friends to. Right, and that promoter score is just sort of the corporate way of saying people are willing to refer their friends to you. They leave ratings and reviews and they say nice things about you on Yelp and everywhere else. When you publish content, they like it or they watch it. If you ask for votes or shares, they do that. And engagement ultimately bottom line just translates into sales. Like people buy what you sell, and they buy it over and over again. And that ultimately creates a higher and ever increasing customer lifetime value. Do you guys in the audience, do any love marks of yours come to mind? Are there like brands that you just love and are die hard for? Yeah, Goop's instant face mask thing made by Goop, but it's incredible. Literally, it's like going to the spa in two minutes. So I love it. Okay, so she just actually was like going to the spa in two minutes. Yeah, give it to all my friends. Someone might have just paid an ad agency for that kind of tag line. (laughter) But she did that naturally because it's a love mark for her. Anyone else have anything? I love Chick-fil-A to the point where I would make sure if I'm traveling that there's a Chick-fil-A on the way. If it's in the airport, I will make my way over there. (laughter) Even if it's not in the same terminal? Exactly, yes. (laughter) What? I do know people, that's not my jam, but I do know people who love it so much, I recently was throwing a party and someone said they couldn't come because it was, they had planned a trip out of town to get to a Chick-fil-A. And I was glad, I actually met the CEO of Chick-fil-A not so long ago, and I was glad they mentioned it to me because they are not open on Sundays. And they didn't know that, so I was able to say oh they don't open on Sundays, and the guy was like oh my gosh I was going to drive like an hour and half. Because we don't have those here. So now you sort of know why engagement is important. Right, you know why it's important to focus on it. What we're going to be talking about is how. How do you actually create engagement? Right, again most executive teams that I've worked with are looking to apps, demographics, data, social media, to try to engage their customers more. This is where I feel like there's just a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of disengagement. So here's what I want to do. I'm going to ask you, we're going to do a little call and response. I want us to read this together, like read this statement with me. Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises, and by eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetic. Okay, so that, first of all I'm obsessed with this quote. I love this quote because you know it's old. Nobody talks like this anymore, right. But the nature of what he's, this person is saying is like advertising is lame and people are disengaged from it, right. So does anyone want to guess when this quote was written or said? Twenties, fifties. 1920? Okay, here's a clue. That guy said it. (audience yells) In 1759. Okay so here's, this is my, I'll just bring the lawyer back for a minute. This is exhibit a for that disengagement is not a digital problem. Disengagement has been around way longer than digital has, right. It is a human problem. And so the only way, you fix digital problems with digital solutions. You fix human problems with human solutions. The only way you fix disengagement is by understanding the undying human aspirations of the people you serve and serving them. That's it. And you know you can serve them also with some, you can serve them with your product, even if your product is high tech. But you can serve them with eternal sort of principles of story and story telling and content. And we'll talk about how to do that today. So there's basically one primal motivation that drives people to make most of their purchasing and brand interaction decisions. And that motivation is the desire for transformation. Right, they just want things to be different than they are right now. And some of the most powerfully motivating transformations that people desire are the desire to be healthier, the desire to be wealthier, the desire to be wiser. This is why every single year of life at New Year's they publish a list of the top 10 New Year's resolutions and they basically all, nine of the will boil down to this. I want to lose weight, I want to exercise more. I want to eat better, I want to you know, save more, invest more, earn more. It's the same things over and over again. The challenge is that our brains work the same way on all of these areas, right. Behavior change is actually really hard when it comes to all three of those areas. And I'm just going to say we can blame that on the dopamine. So there is a dopaminergic reward circuit in your brain that triggers when you take cocaine or scroll and scroll and scroll on social media, or do what we like to call retail therapy. That's why they call it retail therapy because it feels good. You get a hit in your brain. It's the same chemical, the same reward circuit, that happens when you eat comfort foods and when you shop a lot. Right, it's why it's hard to make good habits in these three areas. And it's why it's hard to break bad habits in these three areas. So there's something that I like to call the personal disruption conundrum. I want to share it to you through the lens of this story about this woman. Now not this exact woman, but I thought she was a really good sort of image representation of a nun, so we went with her. I have a friend, he goes by Coach Stevo. He is essentially a sports psychologist who focuses on habit formation. Early in his career he was a personal trainer and he trained people for the Marine physical. So people would come in, they'd say I want to get fit for the physical. He'd be like, do these things, they would do them, they would pass the physical, that was it. He took a civilian client who was a nun, we call her Sister Mary Catherine. And she came in and was like I want to get fit, and he was like alright, do these things. And then she like didn't do any of them. And then they did that again a few times. And she stopped him and said oh, you misunderstand me. I actually know what to do. I need you to help me make myself do it. That's actually the whole reason I'm here. Like the help she wanted was with the behavior change, not just everybody knows they should eat less and exercise more, they need help making themselves do it. And that is what we call the personal disruption conundrum. Now there is one group of customers, one segment of customers, who is very, very focused, aware of the personal disruption conundrum, focused on the personal disruption conundrum, and they are focused on pouring their effort and energy and time and money into overcoming the personal disruption conundrum, much more than other people. That is a group of people we call, I call, the transformational consumer.
Ratings and Reviews
Liz
I thought Tara-Nicholle had some great points, but the class seemed like it dropped off in the middle of developing some ideas. Were there supposed to be more than six lessons? She said she would talk more about certain topics later in the class, but the class ended about when it seemed like she was just getting started. I don't want to down-rate her class if that was a glitch somehow, but I was confused why this didn't go further. There wasn't enough here consequently to really feel like there was much of a takeaway.
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