One my favourite commentators on marketing, Seth Godin, has just released a new book; Tribes. The premise is that the most successful companies have tribes that support them. The problem, as always, is how do you attract the tribe? Seth posits that this is accomplished by leadership, not marketing/hype.
This is relevant as I have just returned from Footsey (last Thursday in York) where I was asked to co-host a workshop on Sales/Marketing. First, Footsey was really great this year and appears to be getting better, (I have been 3 yrs running) as it is really starting to attract the special mix of super professional organisations and grassroots organisations.
But back to the issue at hand; Tribes & Leadership. At the workshop, my co-host (Catherine from Reading Matters) and I were quizzed at length on the following:
* What mass email program do you use?
* Where can I get an email list, I have exhausted mine?
* How do I manage my extensive mailings?
See a trend here? Yep, social enterprises are becoming experts at mass marketing. That’s a shame. Why? Because it is poor value, misses the point, and is frought with danger. It is poor value because most of the social enterprises I meet (there are exceptions of course) are selling a service or product that requires a tribe. They need a following that builds because of their unique selling point. They can’t compete with the media expenditure of their private sector competitors (yet). You don’t create tribes on the back of mass marketing, especially if your uniqueness is complex. Therefore, while emailing and direct mail may be compliments to finding new members of the tribe–it should be an extremely small part of what you do to market yourself.
Mass marketing misses the point because tribes are not receptive to unsolicited stories, they follow leaders who have connected with them in some small way. Social enterprises are leading the way to a new economy (some argue that this economy is not new) paradigm that will be realised by leadership. You only have to look at the top social enterprise brands to realise that mass marketing is not useful.
Mass marketing is frought with danger as any error on your part is communicated to alot of people. This lot of people are less forgiving of errors when you are working at scale because they have not bought into your story and are suspicious.
The message is clear: social businesses should be tribe building through their leadership. Leadership in methodology, cause, uniqueness, etc.
Imagine if we all focused on attracting our tribes through leadership; not only would we have more customers/better sustainability but we would also have better run organisations! I know social businesses already gets this on some level…let’s implement it.
*Picture from flickr.com (Huli Tribe of Papua New Guinea, Eric Lafforgue)
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