← The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#569: Building a brand that customers can't get enough of with Jon Davids
00:23:30
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- [00:02]
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Greg Kilstrom
Welcome to Season six of the Agile Brand where we discuss marketing technology and customer experience, trends, insights and ideas with enterprise and technology platform leaders. We focus on the people, processes, data and platforms that make brands successful, scalable, customer focused and sustainable. This is what makes an agile brand. I'm your host Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on martech, marketing operations and CX, best selling author and speaker. The Agile Brand Podcast is brought to you by Tech Systems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world application. For more information go to teksystems.com now let's get on to the show.
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Podcast Host
Welcome to today's episode where we're going
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Greg Kilstrom
to explore the magic of branding with John Davids, branding expert and author of Marketing Superpowers.
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Podcast Host
Build a Brand so Good that Getting
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Greg Kilstrom
Customers Feels Like Magic. John's book promises methods to transform marketing
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Podcast Host
into a natural byproduct of a beloved brand. We're going to dive deep into his strategies and frameworks that turn attention into
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Greg Kilstrom
sales and strangers into fans. John, welcome to the show.
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John Davids
Greg, thanks for having me here today.
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Podcast Host
Yeah, looking forward to talking about this with you. First, why don't we get started if you don't mind giving a little background as well as what inspired you to write the book.
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John Davids
Yeah, I've been figuring out different ways to arbitrage traffic on the Internet since college started my first business when I was about 18 years old in college and really figuring that out was about figuring out where the traffic was on the Internet, how to capture it, how to monetize it. I did that with the early Internet portals, then I did it with YouTube back when that was just getting started. And I've been doing it ever since. Influencers, podcasts, et cetera. And now with marketing superpowers, I've sort of put it into a playbook so that businesses small and large can take these same strategies and put them to work in their business.
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Podcast Host
Great. Well, yeah, let's dive in here. We're going to start with talking about turning attention into sales. In the book, you have a framework for converting every click into a revenue opportunity. Can you talk a little bit about this framework, outline the approach and explain how businesses can implement it to maximize revenue from every interaction.
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John Davids
The main framework in the book is called the movement formula. And essentially what I put forward is that the best brands in the world create movements. And a movement can actually be distilled down to a fairly straightforward three step formula. It starts with a unifying belief. So what is that core belief that everybody can rally behind or that at least your believers can rally behind? Then you've got your faith builders. And that's everything from the experts who back you up, to the books that are written to back you up, to the testimonials, the reviews, the rituals, all the things you can do. I go into a lot of details on faith drivers in the book and how humans connect to movements. And then the third step is action. If people believe in you, they're rallying behind you, they have faith in the movement, they want to take action. And in the case of a business, and we've seen this time and time again, it is sales, subscriptions, sustainable business growth. And so the key to turning the movement into action is really just making it a obvious choice. Hey, if you believe this and this is how you feel about it, then the action is kind of a natural conclusion to that whole process.
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Podcast Host
Yeah, yeah. One powerful tool to be able to do that and to really get people hooked is using stories, right, to help. Very powerful tool and marketing, as many probably know. Can you describe the critical story that brands need to tell to turn strangers into fans and sometimes their biggest fans? You know, what elements does the story need to include to ensure it resonates deeply with the audience?
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John Davids
The most important story, and I think the one that a lot of brands miss large and small, is the origin story. So the most powerful movies, for example, the most powerful stories, the characters that we remember and feel closest to, we know how they started, we know how they turned into who they are. And the origin story is what a lot of folks miss. The example I give is, if I'm selling pasta sauce in a grocery store, I'm just selling pasta sauce in a grocery store. But if I tell you a story about how I was growing up on a farm and my grandma used to make this delicious pasta sauce, and I have memories of music playing, and we'd all play in the backyard, and then we'd come in for dinner together, and I want to bring that same pasta experience to your home. That's a much more powerful story. And so in the book, I go into this formula. I call it the originate formula, the eight steps to the. The perfect origin story. And you can turn anybody from something that's very, very simple to maybe you're offering plumbing services or a travel agency all the way to the most exotic, fun things. You can create a very powerful origin story. And making that happen is critical, because if you don't have an origin story, you've kind of missed the opportunity from the very beginning to create that bond with your customer.
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Podcast Host
Yeah. And to dive into that just a little bit more. I think there's some listening out there probably that are like, yeah, you know, that I. I know some great origin stories, and that's for somebody else. But you know, what. What would you say to. To those that are, you know, kind of skeptical about that and be like, well, I don't really have that kind of story.
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John Davids
So in the book, I give the example of I. So my favorite origin story. I don't know about yours, Greg. My favorite is actually Batman. I love the origin story of Batman. Christopher Nolan's movie Batman Begins. Phenomenal origin story. And every superhero has one. And then in the book, I basically go through the formula, the originate formula, and I put Batman in there. And then in the very next chapter, I say, hey, let's take the most boring person we can think about. Let's take this character who's a travel agent. She just books travel to go on your vacation. Let's make her origin story as good as Batman's. And I go step by step and. And I make it happen. And the point of that is, the more boring the product, or I should say, and I use boring in a loving way. The more simple the product you're selling, the more you need an origin story to decommoditize and actually stand out. Small businesses, actually, especially in, like, you know, you go to a farmer's market, or you look at the back of a package, somebody who's making something in their basement and selling it with love and care. They actually have fantastic origin stories, but a lot of people want to sort of bypass that step. And the reason I called the book Marketing superpowers and not Average marketing is because I want people to have a superpower and to go into the market and just have this incredible relationship. And without a story, you just. You have nothing.
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Podcast Host
Yeah, yeah, no, that's. That's great. Another thing you talk about in the book is this idea of, I mean, essentially charging more for the. For the same product, but, you know, enhancing product value perception. Can you talk a little bit about this and the strategy behind it?
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John Davids
Yeah, I go into detail on the product ladder and the idea behind that in the action step. So again, we have the unifying belief, the faith and the action. And in the action step, what I try to get across is when people are really in love with your brand and they believe in what you're doing, they actually want more from you. They want more value, and they're willing to open their wallets and. And pay up in return. And oftentimes the act of actually paying for something gives it more meaning, gives it more value. We see this with designer brands and luxury brands, of course, if you think about the example. I just wrote this story on LinkedIn about the cruise industry. So cruise ships, I love going on cruises, and I know that you could go on a cruise for 800 bucks, you could go on that same cruise ship and pay 2000 bucks. You can go on that cruise ship and pay $15,000. And all the cruise ship is doing is. Is they're laddering up the value, and in return, they're laddering up what they're charging you. And it doesn't have to be anything crazy or exotic. Something as simple as, hey, you can tour the galley or you can have a better seat. All the things that the tour industry does. In fact, travel and tourism does this exceptionally well. Airlines do it, hotels, cruises. But a lot of industries kind of have like a one size fits all, or we're going to cap people what they can spend with us. People, if they're really into what you're doing, they're willing to spend more, and there's a lot more value that you can give them in return.
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Podcast Host
Yeah, yeah, well, and I would imagine that also people like to share their experiences with others. Right. So it also gives an opportunity to. It almost seems like a reinforcing kind of wheel there of, you know, you offer people more, they're more likely to share it because they're Sharing something a little more unique than the, let's say, average experience, right?
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John Davids
Yeah. And they wear it like a badge of honor. They experience it, they feel better about it, and they end up buying more from you because they had such great feelings the first time around.
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Podcast Host
Another thing you talk about in the book is just the, you know, building social credibility, which again kind of to that last point is critical and not only getting people to talk about you, but to have true credibility and, and things. Can you talk a little bit about that? I think there's 10 faith drivers that you mentioned in the book. And you know, how, how can businesses apply this to, to build trust and enhance reputation?
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John Davids
Faith drivers are critical because once you have people that believe in you, we see this with social media influencers. A lot of these strategies actually come from my decade plus working with the biggest YouTubers and celebrities in the world, seeing how they do what they do. And faith drivers are a big piece of it. Just reinforcing the same message over and over again. The one big takeaway I would give you from the faith drivers, you could read all about them in the book. But the best faith drivers come from other people. So anything you say about your brand, it means something and it's important. But, but the minute you have other people saying it, you just multiply the effect of it by 5, 10x. Because all of a sudden the bias that's naturally built into all of us to say we're so fantastic when other people say it, it's way more powerful. We see this in reviews. If you can say, honestly, we have over a thousand five star reviews, that is an amazing faith driver. If you can say, hey, this book was written about us or this study was done, those are sort of where you get the most. And we see this also with user generated content on social influencer marketing. When you can have other people expressing your message for you, it goes way further than anything you could say.
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Podcast Host
Yeah, I mean, do you think that. I mean certainly I think a lot of businesses know and understand the value of reviews, but it's still, you know, it's so easy to just post something kind of self promotional and stuff like that. It's a little bit of a hurdle to get people talking about you. Do you think that most businesses are kind of taking the easy route and just kind of posting stuff but falling flat? Should they be focusing more effort on building whether it's user generated content reviews than they're currently doing?
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John Davids
It's the most overlooked part of the DNA of marketing departments that I see. Like easy, easy Mrs. I'll give you an example. We have a client who's a major national retailer and I went into one of their stores to buy something for myself and I looked at the receipt and I noticed on the receipt there was no call to action about going to Instagram, going to TikTok, leaving a review on Google. And so I went to the CMO of the company and I said, why are you're handing out what, three, four thousand receipts a day? Why are you not saying talk about us on social media? Everyone looks at their receipt the minute they complete their purchase. It's such an easy piece of real estate building in into the DNA, into the fabric of your marketing and the operations, the marketing operations, Getting people to talk about your brand is actually not that hard to do. Most brands just completely overlook it.
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Podcast Host
Yeah, yeah, well, and is this, I mean, I think I know the answer to this, but like, you know, is this a solely the responsibility of a marketing team? Like, how does an organization think about this, that that is successful? You know, is it, is it throughout the entire organization? And if so, you know, how, how do you not even necessarily get started? Because, you know, a lot of, a lot of people listening to this are at fairly large organizations. I'm sure they have some kind of components of this, but obviously not nearly enough. So you know, where, where, how do you build a, a better kind of infrastructure to do this?
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John Davids
The toughest job of the modern CMO is actually getting the entire organization to function as a marketing organization. There's a lot of companies out there that are primarily sales organizations, of course, a lot that are primarily technical organizations. And I'm completely biased because I'm a marketer and we work with a lot of the, of the big CMOs. The reality is it is if you can get your business to think more like a marketing organization and do these things, which once you do them, they're done. Like once you get that little template out on your website, once you get that stamp on your receipt that says follow us on Instagram and leave a review on Google, it's done. You set it and forget it. But as a marketer and as a CMO in a large organization, being the advocate for, hey, we need to do these things early and often because time is going to go by and we're going to miss that opportunity. And all of our competitors, especially the small, nimble startups that are going to eat our lunch tomorrow, they're doing all these things because the marketer actually has a chance to speak directly to the CEO, they get something done that afternoon. So yeah, it really is incumbent on a modern CMO to think about how to orient the organization to get this done.
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Podcast Host
Yeah, yeah, well, and you know, to use the startup analogy, it's like startups just don't have the resources they kind of have to do it. Like it's almost, it's almost necessity. And yet, you know, a Fortune 500 company, you know, they've got a marketing budget and they can kind of throw dollars at a lot of, again, talking at their audience and stuff. So, you know, it's almost, I mean, would you say it's almost like kind of going back to, well, what if we didn't have just dollars to kind of throw at a problem?
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John Davids
You know, I'm so sympathetic to folks that have way too much money and not enough time.
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Podcast Host
Right, right.
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John Davids
And I mean that because again, we've been working with these clients for over a decade. So I understand what it's like to say, listen, I could do this and this and this, or I could just take $275,000 and the problem goes away. And I understand that. I do a lot of corporate training these days. I go into big companies and I sort of talk about the book. And the biggest takeaway that I have from the conversations is there are a whole lot of big problems and a big, a lot of big fish to fry. You have quarterly earnings, you've got to worry about market share issues. These things are much more fundamental and foundational. So if you are in the earlier stages, let's say you're a 50 person, 100 person company, you can implement these things early and it becomes part of the DNA. If you're already a thousand plus person company, it's a bit of a harder lift and I completely am sympathetic to that. But it's also something where once you get it done, once you get that special project done and you start implementing some of the strategies and making them part of the way you operate it, the results really over the course of a few months, a few quarters kind of speak for themselves.
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Podcast Host
Yeah, yeah. Another topic you, you highlight in the book, and I like this one, it's, you know, making buying inevitable. Having done more sales than I wish I had to do in my, in my career, I wish this was always the case, but can you talk a little bit about this? And you know, you, you talk about creating a scenario where buying your product is the only logical decision for consumers. So talk a little bit about this and how should an organization approach this?
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John Davids
Something really magical happens when you are or when you become an influencer. And I've talked to enough of them at the highest levels, the biggest podcasters, the biggest YouTubers, the biggest folks in Hollywood. What starts to happen is that you get to a position where. Where all the people that you're trying to sell to already know about you. They've heard you speak at conferences. They've been following you on Instagram and LinkedIn. They sort of know the message. And so then when you come in the room, all the normal selling, that usually has to happen, hey, here's who I am. Here's my organization. Check out my deck. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we already know that. Like, we're talking to you because we want to do business with you. And that actually happens when you create a brand for yourself. You know, a marketing superpower, as I call it. And this is kind of the whole point of the book and the magic pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that I hope a lot of readers actually get to, or at least pursue, is that when you get to that position where a small group of people really, really know who you are and know you and like you and trust you, the sales process totally changes. You can sort of throw your sales books out the window. Here's how I do a discovery call. Here's how I onboard. Like, they already know who you are. They already want to do business with you, and it becomes inevitable.
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Podcast Host
Yeah, yeah. So for those out there that are, you know, it's not at that level yet, you know, but. And even. Even brands that are, I would say, that are well known, but not, let's say, their superpowers are not quite evident to all, you know, where do they get started with this? You know, what's. What are some first steps that they can take to make that. That buying step more. More inevitable?
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John Davids
So the first step is figuring out the. The unifying belief and which is. It's not a mission statement. It's what is it that our core customer really wants to believe in or does believe in or what trend exists right now that we can latch onto? There are plenty of examples of this. Whole Foods did this with the natural and organic movement early on. Tesla did this. There's. There's plenty of examples of companies latching onto a movement and essentially making their brand a part of this larger thing. So the first thing I would say is, why are people actually buying from us today? Is there a cultural piece that we can latch onto, a social movement, a technological movement? And then from there figuring out what are Those mechanisms, the faith drivers, the content cadence, that we can speak to them and actually start to build this community. Ultimately, what you want is a customer community that is believing in you, that wants to do business with you, that wants to advocate for you. But it really starts with a core belief and very, very small steps at the beginning. And then, you know, again, the entire playbook is laid out in marketing superpowers. But you've got to start with something that's digestible and easy to do.
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Podcast Host
Yeah. Yeah. Great. Well, John, this, this has been great conversation and definitely recommend that everybody picks up the book and to learn more. Before we wrap up, though, you know, what are you seeing as far as future trends or just even current trends that brands and marketers should be paying attention to, what's to come in the months and perhaps years to come?
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John Davids
We're seeing a lot happening in AI, specifically influencer AI, the emergence of AI characters that are essentially what I call the modern version of Bugs Bunny and Homer Simpson. These are AI characters. So I would encourage brands to think about influencers and how they interact with AI and how they can create characters and memes for themselves using AI in the influencer space. So that's something we're paying a lot of attention to. And the other thing is really just the continued evolution of Everybody's moving to YouTube and TikTok and LinkedIn and podcasts. So the new cable news channels are podcasts. The new broadcast television is YouTube. And I think that is probably accelerating faster and faster every year. And so we're paying a lot of attention to how we get our clients onto these platforms and make the most of them.
- [22:02]
Podcast Host
Yeah, yeah. One, follow up on that, actually. So, you know, because you mentioned AI and you know, certainly it's a lot easier to create content with AI. Not, not always great content, but it's easier to create it. But, you know, some of, some of the platforms that you're mentioning, you know, whether it's, whether it's podcasts or, you know, making videos and stuff like that, that still takes a lot of strategy and human effort. Where do you see the balance between AI for content generation and good old content strategy and stuff like that?
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John Davids
We're seeing it as a co pilot. So I do. Not at all. And I mean at all. I don't trust AI, any tool out there right now to actually put out a finished piece of, of content representing a brand. It is a copilot. It's there to help you generate ideas, help you think through ideas, help you workshop, generate new concepts, ways looking at things. So I would say that's where it sits, actually getting it to the place where you could create an AI thing and put it out. We're not there yet. I haven't seen it get there, but it's moving very, very quickly. So talk to me and in a year from now and I might have a very different answer.
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Podcast Host
Yeah, yeah, love it. Well, again, I'd like to thank John Davids, author of Marketing Build a Brand so Good that Getting Customers Feels Like
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Greg Kilstrom
Magic, for joining us today and sharing
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Podcast Host
his expertise on building brands that customers not only love, but become evangelists for. You can learn more about John and
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Greg Kilstrom
his book in the show Notes. Thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand brought to you by Tech Systems. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show more easily. You can access more episodes of the show at www.gregkillstrom.com. that's G-R E G K-I H L S T R O M.com While you're there, check out my series of best selling Agile brand guides covering a wide variety of marketing technology topics. Or you can search for Greg Kilstrom on Amazon. The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay Agile.
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Capella University Advertiser
The agile brand. There's a fire inside you you can't ignore. Stand still. Not a chance. You're a lifelong learner who's come this far. Now we are here to help you keep going further. Capella University what can't you do? Visit capella.edu to learn.