CHAPTER 2

Surveying the Landscape

The Essential Components of an Evergreen Organization

GoldieBlox is sweeping the nation. The Super Bowl XLVIII commercial provocatively introduced the company (which has a unique line of girl-focused building toys) to a mass audience in 2014. The ad shows girls using pulleys to lower a pink unicorn “rocking horse” from a second-story balcony, girls loading a pink princess fort onto a makeshift cargo freighter fashioned out of skateboards, and girls pedaling an elaborate contraption fastened to a pink tricycle down a street—this blur of pink snowballs, earnestly and at breakneck speed. Boys, befuddled, leap out of the way of this increasingly boisterous group. Hundreds of girls charge their final destination—a beauty pageant taking place at the park. Beneath an archway of pink balloons, young female pageant participants seem relieved by the invasion, greeting them enthusiastically and then shedding their tiaras. From here, a cascade of the pink toys are loaded onto a pink rocket ship and blown off to space.

The ad is set to the classic rock song “Cum On Feel the Noize” by Quiet Riot. The ad replaces the lyrics with girls chanting, “Come on, ditch your toys. Girls make some noise. More than pink, pink, pink, we want to THINK!” Needless to say, the ad has gone viral.

GoldieBlox is the brainchild of Debbie Sterling, a Stanford-educated engineer who is now the company’s CEO. When Sterling began college she quickly realized that there weren’t many other women in her program. She wondered if it might be because other women her age were given the same toys she received as a child—dolls, doll houses, and lots and lots of cute (but less-than-purposeful) pink stuff. In those days (and it wasn’t so long ago—Sterling is only in her thirties now), toys for building and tinkering weren’t made for girls. They were only for boys. In the intervening years, manufacturers of classic kids’ building toys, such as Lincoln Logs, have “feminized” their product lines by simply adding a pink roof here or pink packaging there.

Sterling decided to change things, and she set out to make the activity of building appeal on a more fundamental level to young girls. During her extensive research phase, she realized that while girls naturally enjoy building, they typically also love to read. In a stroke of genius, she decided to combine the two activities. When girls play with GoldieBlox, they read a story about Goldie and follow along, using gears, pulleys, levers, strings, and other tools to help her build solutions to specific problems she encounters. Pure brilliance! Consequently, Sterling’s company has captured the hearts and minds of millions of girls everywhere. More relevant to our discussion, however, she beautifully implements everything I’m going to teach you in the next three chapters—almost to a tee. And chances are, Sterling herself probably does not even realize that her company embodies the Three Cs.

In the three chapters that follow, I will present a new method for creating long-lasting relationships with your customers and much more effective marketing. It’s a strategic framework that you can use to help your company or organization become Evergreen. This new approach will allow you to better understand customer retention, reduce customer attrition, and enhance the customer experience and customer loyalty. I call this strategic framework the Three Cs of an Evergreen organization.

INTRODUCING THE THREE Cs

For an organization to thrive and move forward in our rapidly changing economy, it must embrace the Three Cs: character, community, and content. By carefully considering each of the Three Cs, and thinking about how these ideas relate to your own company, you will be better positioned to maximize your most important business asset—your customers. You will also naturally develop better ways both to communicate with them and to strengthen your relationships with them.

I had never heard of GoldieBlox until my good friend, the strategic marketing wizard Shawn Veltman (who is familiar with the Three Cs concept), called me one day and said I had to look into this company and what they were doing. “Noah,” he said, “this company has incredible character, community, and content!”

Shawn was right. GoldieBlox has the perfect combination. It has a unique character (one that is tremendously appealing to mothers and daughters, in particular), a strong customer community (where children participate by uploading videos of their favorite solutions to Goldie’s challenges), and incredible content—content that transcends being just a toy and provides incredible value and a dynamic customer experience. It is an inspiring business model.

I’m going to show you a new way to think about approaching your business, your customers, and your marketing. I’m going to show you how to create a company that builds long-lasting customer loyalty through everything you do. This is the game changer that can put your company on a new trajectory unlike any other.

The coming passages serve as introductions to each of the Three C principles. These concepts—and how to apply them to your own business—will be explored in great detail in the three chapters that follow. Stay with me; this is going to be one fantastic hike through the Evergreen forest.

The Principle of Character

Character is the first thing that comes to customers’ minds when they think about your business. It’s analogous to a person. It’s your brand personality. It’s the “who” your customers think you are.

In their classic book, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, published more than thirty years ago, Al Ries and Jack Trout demonstrate that most people can remember only a few things about any given company. When companies (and their brands) try to communicate with a customer they compete with millions of other messages. Those messages create a cacophony that makes it difficult for any single company (or brand) to have anything resonate or stick with either current or prospective customers. You think the noise was bad thirty years ago? Today, it is positively deafening. The main takeaway from Ries and Trout’s book is that organizations can either decide what those few things will be, or they can let the market decide. Incredibly, most organizations choose the latter.

As you probably guessed, I staunchly advocate for bucking that trend. The principle of character is about defining, crafting, and presenting the character traits that you want customers to associate with your organization. Character isn’t just another fancy way of marketing to your customers. It’s about developing an organizational mindset that articulates why you do what you do, and how to communicate your values more effectively to your customers. Much has been written over the years about brand personality. Most authors, however, don’t explain why brand personality is more important than ever for creating customer loyalty, and how to strategically and tactically build your company’s character. We will explore these concepts at length in Chapter 3.

The Principle of Community

In May 2012, Warren Buffett spent $142 million to acquire the majority interest in Media General, which at that time published sixty-three daily and weekly newspapers through the southeastern United States. As part of the deal, he announced that he would also loan the company an additional $400 million. Media critics were incredulous. One opinion columnist wrote a blog with the headline “Is He Nuts?”¹ Why would Buffett invest in an industry that had seen such tremendous decline during the previous ten years? Well, as he noted to a gathering of Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, “I think there is a future for newspapers that exist in an area where there is a sense of community.”²

What Buffett recognized is the often-underappreciated power of the humble local newspaper, the kind of paper that treats the vandalism of a Main Street shop with the same level of gravitas that larger, more globally oriented newspapers give to riots during an international relations summit. These local papers exist, in the words of Hoover Adams, founder of The Daily Record of Dunn, North Carolina, one of the most prominent small-town newspapers ever, “for local names and local pictures.”³ Local newspapers have power because they reinforce a sense of community. When people see their neighbors’ names, they feel the slight thrill while thinking, I know him! When they see their own names, they get excited, knowing that everybody else in town will see their names in print. These are the types of things that strengthen communities, and they are exactly why Buffett recognized that these papers still had value. As Hoover Adams said, “In this day and time, in a small town, everybody knows everybody, and they like to read about everybody.”⁴

Robert D. Putnam’s wonderful book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, published in 2000, was one of the first to point out something that many people have felt for decades—that the Western world is losing many of its traditional communities. The central finding of Putnam’s research is that participation in any number of social organizations has undergone a major decline, even as individual participation in some of those same activities has dramatically increased. (Membership in bowling leagues, for example, has decreased, while attendance at bowling lanes is higher than ever.) What does this have to do with building customer loyalty for your business? The answer lies in a truth that has become somewhat of a cliché:

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.⁵

Human beings, by nature, are prone to seek out others who share similar interests, values, and beliefs. People are attracted to brand communities because they help them find others who enjoy the same products and services, or the utility those products and services provide.

In The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt draws heavily on the importance of community in our evolutionary history. It was not simply being the fastest, strongest, or most aggressive creature that led to the dramatic rise in the human population over the past 100,000 years, Haidt argues, and it’s hard to disagree with him. We are slow, weak, and have few natural weapons. But our ability to work in harmony with others—whether while hunting, building, or defending territory—sets humans apart and allows us to thrive.

The Internet and the rise of mobile communications have both connected and disconnected us. It’s easy to feel alone today. That’s why when we find groups of people who are like us, we want to become or remain a part of that group. Now here’s the most important point: Companies that recognize this need for connection and create structures that allow communities to form have a significant advantage when it comes to retaining customers, building customer loyalty, and maximizing customer value. Chapter 4 is dedicated to showing you how to create a sense of community for and among your customers.

The Principle of Content

Let’s round back and talk about GoldieBlox one last time. When Sterling created the company, she didn’t simply want to introduce another toy in the marketplace. In fact, the actual product was really secondary to her broader goal. Sterling was on a mission to change the big picture and, in particular, how girls are made to feel in the toy department. Her mission was strengthened by her desire to create an emotionally charged customer experience, one that would impassion girls and their mothers to see the world in a new light.

In the fall of 2012 Sterling sought to raise $150,000 on the popular crowdfunding website Kickstarter to create GoldieBlox and launch it worldwide. She met her initial goal in four days, and when she was done, she had raised more than $285,000 with funds from more than 5,500 individual contributors. The product didn’t even exist yet. The only things that existed were a vision and a story. The marketing, word-of-mouth, and passion sold the product before the first drop of plastic was injected into the molds. Now, only a couple of years later, the product can be found in almost every major toy store.

If you read reviews about the actual, physical manifestation of the product, you’ll see many that aren’t entirely favorable. One reviewer wrote, “Poorly made—I don’t know if this is a Q.C. [quality control] problem (it’s made in China) or just a bad design. The figures that you put on top of the yellow wheels do not fit snugly, so with the force of turning the wheels, they always fall off unless you pull the ribbon very carefully and slowly.…. It’s not a Lego alternative.”⁶ Obviously, the quality-control issues should be addressed, but GoldieBlox has already swept the nation with the type of buzz you can’t create without strong character and a story that both fascinates and spreads like a wildfire. Sure, some customers have purchased the product just because of the hype, and they might not be in for the long haul. Complaints about the small stuff, like the quality of the plastic, indicate that a particular customer hasn’t made an emotional connection with the company that transcends the content. However, loyal customers—those who are enchanted by the character and community—will typically brush off a bad content experience, or an experience that wasn’t up to par, simply as an anomaly.

At the most basic level, content is the core of your business. It is a shorthand term I use to describe what your customers are buying from you. In some cases it means products; in others services; and in still others, it’s information. Content is the core “thing” the customer receives in exchange for money. It’s also the final element of the Three Cs. For a lawyer, the base-level content is advice and the handling of legal matters; for an airline, it’s getting a passenger from point A to point B; for a web service, it’s the utility of the product. In Sterling’s case, it was the actual GoldieBlox toy.

Here’s the thing about content: Content is a necessary but insufficient condition for a successful business. Without content, there is no business, but just having fabulous content alone is no guarantee of success. Consider GoldieBlox: The product, what Sterling delivers, is actually secondary to the rest of the equation—the character and community of her company. That said, what she delivers is still immensely important.

We’re all engaged in providing something to our customers. The challenge is helping you understand that what you provide is actually secondary to how you do it, and the experience and feeling it creates within your customers. In Chapter 5 I’ll continue this discussion of content and show you how to position your products and services in a way that creates a sense of value on an unprecedented level, in ways you never thought possible.

ORCHESTRATING THE THREE Cs, SO THEY PLAY IN HARMONY

The power of the Three Cs comes from an organizationwide understanding of how they harmoniously work together. Here’s the thing: If you want to be Evergreen, you need all three principles to be working together. When they do, your business will change tremendously—and for the better. When they don’t, you might not be able to put your finger on it, but something won’t feel quite right.

To thrive during the next decade, which promises to be tumultuous and ever-changing, your business must carefully consider all of the Three Cs. Take a look at Figure 2-1.

FIGURE 2-1

The Three Cs in Harmony

If you have content and community but no character, your company may be perceived as narcissistic, unattractive, and untrustworthy. You have the goods—the products, the services, or the information—but customers recognize that something feels a bit off, they’ll never be emotionally attached to the community, even if you have strong community structures in place. You’ll create a place for people to vent their concerns but not sing your praises.

If you have content and character but no community, your company may seem like a relic of the 1980s. You come across as though you believe things will eventually return to the way they used to be, and that developments such as the Web and mobile are merely fleeting trends. A website? Who needs one of those? Facebook? That’ll pass. Customers probably do business with you because of nostalgia, simplicity, or lack of other alternatives. You have a great opportunity! Get used to the world we’re living in and embrace this wonderful opportunity to connect and engage with your customers like never before.

If you have community and character but poor content, your company is an empty suit. You have great brand personality and the structures in place to facilitate community, but your products and services are typically perceived by customers to be a letdown. Companies like this can succeed transactionally, but this is a challenging place from which to create organizational growth and increase customer loyalty. Your content must always be top-notch. You must continuously provide value, as well as a sense of excitement for the customer.

If you have great content, great character, and great community, you are poised to build strong customer loyalty and Evergreen relationships. This is the “secret sauce.” The Mecca of customer loyalty. This is the recipe used by the most successful companies on the planet. They understand why they do what they do and are able to pass that feeling on to their customers in a way that resonates and creates a genuine emotional impact. They provide the best-quality products or services in the world and pride themselves on both meeting and exceeding the expectations they’ve set for their customers. Finally, they’ve put the appropriate systems in place to allow their customers to connect with one another.

Sometimes the community doesn’t even have to be pronounced. Take, for example, the classic Apple commercials from the early 2000s that showed black silhouetted bodies dancing while wearing iconic white earbuds and dangling cables. Apple used this ad as a symbol of those in its community. Passing another person with the same white earbuds while swimming in a sea of pedestrians on a New York sidewalk served as a psychic handshake, an acknowledgment between two strangers they were part of the same club.

Imagine what would happen if you could create that type of feeling among your customers. You can, and you will, and I’m here to show you how.