For a few days now an important essay has been in bookstores (also available online) for those involved in management, business communication or marketing and not only those. This is Brand Bravery. the ten commandments of courage by Paul Kemp-Robertson and Chris Barth (GueriniNext with goWare for the ebook).
It is an important book not only for the experience that the authors have gained in the field since 2004 and for the quantity and variety of cases and situations it analyses, but also for the underlying thesis that it advances. A thesis that does not only concern the world of companies and business, but also society and individuals themselves. The thesis is that courage is a contagious tool to get out of the comfort zone and the logic of the silos and give space to creativity.
An increasingly strategic resource in a world undergoing profound transformation. A resource which, however, can only be deployed by breaking down the barriers between inside and outside, target and people, employees and customers.
From the book we have selected four excerpts that concern generosity, the target of technology and the power of word of mouth. Enjoy the reading!
Generosity as a mindset
Do you remember the parable of the Mexican Huichol tribe that we told you in the Introduction? They were the only ones who believed that birth pangs should be shared between women and men. This had resulted in the custom that women, during labor, gave tugs on the ropes knotted around the testicles of their partners.
While this may sound bizarre, and even a little vengeful, it was actually meant as an act of generosity. It allowed the male to share in the spirituality of childbirth. In short, an act of extreme empathy and affinity.
We certainly don't intend to incentivize marketers to sacrifice themselves to extreme physical pain. We simply suggest that they find ways to express generosity towards their customers' pain points. Just to make things clear, be present at the birth, but don't feel the need to lasso them, that's all. Show that you understand what they are going through and that you take charge of it by caring about their lives.
Do it for free, without expecting anything in return: you will reap great benefits. Generosity leads to dialogue, and increases PR. Generosity increases employee happiness and engagement. Generosity grows a brand's reputation. And above all, it makes the world better.
The two exceptions to generosity
There are two meanings of the term "generosity" in the dictionary: kindness/understanding and scope/value. Either way, it's about giving more than is due or anyone expects. From the point of view of the marketing industry, this translates into generosity of purpose and creative generosity. Of course, you don't have to give it all away.
It doesn't have to be vain acts of reckless generosity that could bankrupt your business. Conversely, a generous, customer-first mindset will generate services of creative pragmatism, shared resources, and unexpected experiences. In turn, they will elicit reciprocity and an excellent reputation.
If this talk about trade karma sounds sugary or worthy of a die-hard environmentalist, consider the statement released in February 2018 by Laurence D. Fink, founder and CEO of the $6 trillion investment firm BlackRock.
In an open letter — described by the New York Times as a "firestorm" and "watershed on Wall Street" — Fink warned the leaders of the world's largest companies that in the future BlackRock would only invest in companies that take their responsibilities seriously social.
"To thrive over time, any brand must not only deliver financial results, but also show what positive contributions it makes to society." People pay attention to you.
It's a fact: generosity increases happiness
According to authoritative sources, it would have been Jesus Christ who coined the adage "There is more happiness in giving than in receiving". Two thousand years later, scientists from the University of Zurich proved him right.
In fact, they published a neurological study entitled The neural connection between generosity and happiness in the July 2017 issue of "Nature Communications".
And research has established just that: there is a connection between the synapses of generosity and those of happiness, proving that altruism changes the activity of the human brain, and that the resulting feelings of happiness cause further motivation to be more generous.
The generosity experiment
In this experiment, fifty adults were asked to complete a questionnaire about their current mood. Then everyone was given 25 Swiss francs a week for a month. Half of the participants were asked to spend that money on themselves, while the other half was asked to spend it each week on someone of their choosing.
The volunteers then underwent an MRI scan while watching what-if scenarios on video about spending one's own money on behalf of others. Their brain reactions were recorded to track how they evaluated the benefits of spending money on others rather than themselves.
The study showed that participants in the experimental group — those who had received the input to spend their money on others — activated reactions aimed at making more generous decisions, when tested under the MRI.
Not only that: these people showed a stronger growth in the sense of happiness than the control group. It seemed that the areas of the brain associated with altruism and gratitude had made a connection.
Beyond the experiment
"Even in a tightly controlled laboratory environment that involves making decisions under the MRI scanner, dedication to others produces generosity and increased happiness," the study authors commented. By committing to being generous in the near future, you increase the likelihood that you truly are and that you will receive a happiness boost as a result. […]
In late 2016, luxury chocolate brand Godiva launched a special gift box during the holiday season to encourage generosity. From the outside it looked like a normal box of chocolates. Once opened, however, it revealed a striking Chinese box packaging. In fact, each box contained two boxes, one with the words "To Keep", the other with the words "To Give", and this happened for all the boxes up to the smallest, which contained a couple of chocolates. […]
The gift box was designed by Godiva to inspire consumers to do an act of generosity to someone else while enjoying the other half of the product. As the
Canadian researcher Elizabeth Dunn, an expert in the psychology of happiness, has demonstrated with a series of experiments that generosity and spending on behalf of others produce concrete positive effects on health.
Participants felt happier psychologically when told to buy a gift for someone else than to buy something for themselves.
Good technology doesn't justify a bad idea
We certainly have no problem with technological innovation. However, innovation must be oriented towards human experience, if it is not to face rejection, or even ridicule.
This probably explains why Google Glass turned out to be a wet firecracker, going from launch to retirement within two years. The futuristic glasses, which housed a miniature monitor, a camera, a microphone, an accelerometer, a voice command, wi-fi antennas and a lot of other gadgets, undoubtedly had their own reason.
They could, after all, have "enhanced" human life by placing the equivalent of a tiny computer with access to the World Wide Web directly above the eyeball. However, what their inventors didn't take into account was the real-world impact.
The impact of the real world
Normal people, for the most part, perceived those early adopters, those tech-bubble freaks willing to pay $1.500 for Google Glass, as aliens. The very physical presence of these nerd glasses automatically became an exclusion factor for those who were not part of the club.
This was the fatal problem: those devices gave people the creeps. Writing in the Guardian, John Naughton, author of From Gutenberg to ZuckerbergSaid:
Those glasses made everyone around you feel uncomfortable. They began to tell you that certain technology was intrusive and invasive of privacy. The bouncers wouldn't let you into the premises, wearing what they called 'glassholes', to mock the 'assholes' who wore them. The maître d' came to apologize, but the table you thought you had reserved was suddenly no longer available. And so on.
Technology columnist and consultant Tim Bajarin echoed this thought, recounting his personal experience with Google Glass in an article on the Techpinions website shortly after the product's retirement in 2015:
It was the worst $1.500 I've ever spent in my life. On the other hand, as a researcher, they have been a great tool to help me understand what not to do when creating a product for the consumer.
Locate the correct target
The end result was that Google lost millions of dollars putting innovation on a pedestal, at the expense of user experience. But, just like with QR codes, once you grasped the experiential side of it, the innovation started to make sense.
Few years later, Google Glass made a comeback, this time as a corporate tool, better suited to functional environments such as factories and industrial design laboratories. By leaving your hands free to work, these glasses are able to offer superior customer experiences. For example, they allow image search and linguistic translation in real time.
This is why they have suddenly returned (albeit in niche use cases) to assume their relevance.
The power of word of mouth
In addition to being cheap, communication entrusted to authentic word of mouth is a very powerful lever to push brands. In the concentric circles of our relationships, the closer the connection the more trust there is.
According to Nielsen data, 83% of global consumers trust recommendations from their friends and family, versus 66% of those who trust reviews proactively posted online by complete strangers.
Consulting firm BCG says direct word-of-mouth advice from friends and family is four to five times more influential than so-called "indirect advice" from print media or TV.
Here's another fact to reflect on: according to a report on Social Media and Brand Advocacy drawn up in 2009 by the Deloitte agency, brands manage to maintain the loyalty of their customers acquired through recommendations from other customers with a rate of 37% superior.
So, not only is militarizing your audience a way to drive brand advocacy and generate new customers, but those same customers will be much more likely to stay loyal than customers courted through other channels. Thus, word of mouth not only improves acquisition, but also reduces churn.
WOM marketing
In an article published in 2009 in “Marketing Science”, the authors David Godes and Dina Mayzlin talk about word of mouth (WOM, which stands for Word Of Mouth) «engineered» or «created by the company»:
We can think of the WOM created by the company as a hybrid between traditional advertising and word of mouth born spontaneously among consumers.
In the first case it is a phenomenon activated and implemented by the company, while in the second case it is a phenomenon activated and implemented by the customer. What instead characterizes WOM marketing is that it is initialized in the company and implemented by the customer.
The article shows how so-called "company-created word-of-mouth" can drive real sales, concluding that word-of-mouth doesn't have to be completely organic to have an impact on the brand's bottom line. Godes and Mayzlin write:
«From a managerial point of view, this result confirms that not only is WOM important, but it is even something that can be managed under the strict control of the company».
After all, advertising is nothing more than a first cousin of word of mouth: the job of marketers is to get people to talk about a particular product or service and, subsequently, to buy it.
