Just thinking about Nike and other companies whom spend their time understanding the customer and the customer's world. Been thinking about validation marketing and market validation too.
Really drilling into the "problem domain" rather than seeking validation of an already-developed solution. For instance, not asking: "So what do you think of this gizmo's features?" but "What would make you a better runner or basketball player or...?" But more on market validation in other posts.
But what if empathetic understanding (and Lovemarks) wasn't just reserved for your customer relationships but extended to all of your relationships.
I wonder how much a business can be compared to a Self - if the analogy works, then all the philosophers and marriage counselors and mystics advise us in receiving and accepting self-love as a prerequisite to truly loving another.
I ran across this snippet from a Tom Peter's interview with Scott Bedbury (recommend The New Brand World). It's really about intrabranding, as I heard Daryl Travis, author of one of the Emotional Branding books, name it. It's what Hugh views as the future of advertising: The future of advertising is internal.
You have to understand, when we did that [Just Do It] campaign we had no idea it would go beyond August of 1988. It ran for three weeks; it had all of about $8 million of media behind it. But the response inside Nike was instantaneous. And remember, too, this was a company that a year earlier had laid off 25 percent of its work force. You could not give Nike stock away just six or nine months before that. So the survivors and walking wounded found real energy and inspiration in that line. Nike already had an internal line, "There is no finish line"-but it lacked empathy. It also said, "you can never stop" which could evoke depressing images depending on how you viewed it.To Nike employees, the "Just Do It" message was pretty simple: What's past is past. We know what we have to do. Let's just go get it done. Let's kick some ass. It was remarkable what happened. I remember debuting the campaign at a sales meeting in June 1988. A thousand Nike employees stood on their feet for almost 10 minutes clapping. That was a real turning point for not just the brand but the people who made it what it was, and more important, what it would become in the years ahead.
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