Spotify: The New Frictionless Experience Champion

I've written before that one of they keys to great experience driven brand engagement is the elimination of friction.

My brand new friction fave is Spotify. (Thanks Padmasree for the invite.) Half asleep this morning I downloaded the app from the invite link. I clicked it open. I chose "get started." I typed in my first artist's name, "Lori McKenna," so I could hear her original version of the stunning Keith Urban cover "Luxury of Knowing." Bam, there it was in an instant! (That's a top of the category user experience.)


Now I'm off and running. I'm headed out to the gym for a quick work out, but I'm going with the anticipation (get it?) that when I get back, I will be able to effortlessly create (sounds like "engagement" doesn't it?) my own "afternoon-out-on-the-deck-doing my-homework" playlist, all built from music I haven't had time to download from iTunes or... remember those days now... go out to my favorite local bricks and mortar music hang, Newbury Comics, and buy as CD's. While on the site, I will be exposed to whatever advertising is there, and I won't mind a bit because I will be getting more value than I'm asked to give. (Sound like a leverage principle?)

Check out Spotify with the idea of understanding how the frictionless engagement creates an irresistible user experience, and hold this up as a benchmark against which you measure the creation of all moments in your brand experience marketing work.

It's going to be a great afternoon of music.

Hail to Spotify. The new "Frictionless Experience" champion.

Let's see, I want some Urban, McKenna, Springsteen, Emmylou and Mark Knopfler...

Paul McCartney and Tim Sanders Are Still Right: Love Is the Killer (Marketing) App

Tim Sanders' insightful, best-selling book, "Love Is The Killer App" is written as helpful guidance for individuals looking to advance their own brand, careers and the companies for whom they work. First published in 2002, it’s even more relevant today and just as useful for organizational brands as it is for personal. 

Hopefully we’ve all already accepted that the marketing clutter is deafening and the challenge in cutting through it is enormous. Turning up the volume in pursuit of effective marketing can be a fool’s errand. There are other means much more effective; love chief among them.

Tim promotes three specific ways of expressing love in the work setting that drive results. For the details, you’ve got to read the book, but to simplify the idea, I can tell you that he promotes the concept that those who give love -- in the various forms appropriate to each situation -- often get it in return. If you want to connect with people, love can be the shortest distance between two points, even when we’re not talking about the romantic kind.

What does this mean for brands? If I may put my own spin on Sanders’ guidance and expand it, it doesn’t mean giving the product away for free. This isn’t a product sampling or “tryvertising” concept, although doing that in the right doses, in the right ways, and at the right times, can sometimes be an effective component of this approach. Rather though, this is all about giving away some kind of other value that’s helpful to the prospect and fits to the brand context. For instance, manufacturers of smart phones with video cameras might offer free online modules about taking, editing and posting videos optimized for the third screen. Want to make it even stronger? Provide a way of interacting while learning, perhaps by allowing the user to post their videos with questions that get expert responses.

Through this interactive love sharing, the prospect gets the sense that the brand cares about them, and the experience of mastery the brand provides fosters a sense of potential for self-accomplishment and maybe even a little self-esteem. It offers consumers a chance to engage with and get to know the brand in a non-obligatory, feel-good setting through which the brand builds credibility. If repeated often enough, a bond can be established. Once bonded people are more likely to purchase. This cuts through the clutter like no slogan or funny commercial ever could, because it goes deep and resides in the hearts and minds of the market.

The trick though for marketers is to remember that, just like romantic love, if this expression of caring is  too infrequent, the bond eventually dies. This means that marketing love has to be constantly worked in order to keep it fresh, or the customer falls prey to the seduction of other suitors.

Paul McCartney said it best when he wrote: “In the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.” John Lennon said it was the best lyric Paul ever wrote. Tim Sanders gives us the valuable "how-to" details in his book. I can think of no better gift you can give yourself as a marketer on this Valentine’s Day than a copy of Tim’s “Love Is The Killer App.” Read it and as you do, ask yourself how its concepts can translate towards creating great brands and organizations, and you’ll see that love is in fact still the killer (marketing) app. Thanks Tim, and Paul.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Story Telling or Story Building, McKee has the Keys

Story-telling has been an accepted marketing discipline for a long time. A recent article in Fast Company suggests that the future of advertising and marketing is in "story-building," an activity that unfolds real time in which social media audiences co-create the story with the brand. Wherever you sit on the story marketing spectrum from "telling" to "building," understanding what makes a great story is critical, and one of the best articulations of this discipline is "Story" by Robert McKee. This well-known script writer/doctor and screenwriting teacher offers many keys to the art.

One of the most effective keys McKee gives us is the understanding that the more (and more artfully) we contrast the protagonist and the antagonist and the other positive and negative values, the more compelling the story. (I'm simplifying.)

Sometimes the antagonist in our marketing story is a condition or environmental factor such as duration of time, or distance, or complexity. For instance, a media outlet might emphasize the degree of information complexity and even the ever rapidly increasing rate of it in contrast to its ability to distill all of that into a small number of clear and concise insights delivered on a timely basis. Telling the story of doing that has to be approached artfully, but a basic design can be put in place and then followed repeatedly in a series of advertisements.

Getting your audience to co-tell or co-build that story with the brand (as Fast Company suggests) can take this into a higher level of power. One idea is to provide an online space in which people are invited to respond to a question such as "How has X  Media's insights improved your on-the-job performance?"

In treating this concept with an experience marketing approach this can be pushed to yet an even higher level of power by inviting the authors of the best responses to tell their story live at face-to-face events which also gives the opportunity to stream the experience live and on-demand over the web. While doing so we can put McKee's concept of high contrast to use by putting the presenter on stage in a director's chair, to the left of which can be an ever-building mound of newspapers, magazines, print reports, TV's and computers that builds over the course of the presentation, dramatizing the complexity of information. The contrast between that complexity and the clear insights revealed in the user's story can be further emphasized by projecting those insights onto a screen just to the right of the presenter as she reveals them in her story. The juxtaposition of the spoken and projected clear insights and the mound of complexity provides the kind of visual disparity that puts the positive and negative aspects of the story into high relief, and in this case, also creates a compelling visual that implants in the viewers mind.

There are many other points in McKee's work that are useful in marketing. We will look at more of them over time. And there are other storytelling masters do draw from too. What are your thoughts?

The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem and Their Relevance to Marketing

This brilliant book by the equally brilliant grandfather of the Self-Esteem movement, Nathaniel Branden, Ph.D., is his masterpiece encapsulation of a lifetime of work developing the most cogent understanding of this important psychological concept. The six pillars he mentions are like six keys to life. Get it, read it, learn it, and then apply the ideas in it to the marketing programs you create. What? Well making the bridge between the concept and marketing takes some thinking, and over time you'll find a growing conversation about it here on this blog, consolidated under Disciplines and Dimensions for your convenience.


You can check out the book at Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, but this is why it's relevant:

In the beginning, marketing was about using any means possible to convince people that buying or using the product would endow the owner with qualities they couldn't otherwise hope to posses. In the age of authenticity, marketing is about helping audiences see the real ways in which brands enable people to exercise values they hold dear. One's values form one's self identity. Enabling and reinforcing that identity is a powerful means of building affiliation. In short, it's about authentically helping people become bigger heroes in their own story, a phrase I borrow from Branden.

Branden posits that Self-Esteem is the single most important human psychological need as it both drives and is a reflection of our ability to cope with the challenges of life. It drives all our decisions such as who we choose to marry, what jobs we find worth having, the ways in which we pursue our work and achievements, etc. It naturally follows that our view of ourself also colors our purchase decisions, good and bad. This being the case, it seems there must be an abundance of power inherent in the concept for marketers to wield in service to brands seeking to connect deeply with audiences. The key is in understanding what Self-Esteem is, what principles and actions enhance it, and how it serves as the driving force in our life, and then translating all of that into strategies for unlocking the promise of it in the brands we're serving.

Watch this space for a growing conversation about how the principles of growing healthy Self-Esteem can be purposefully put to work in service to marketing that stays true to the spirit of authenticity. In the meantime, you may be interested in exploring the concepts of Self-Esteem on your own. Start with the book mentioned above. For more information about the man behind it, check out www.nathanielbranden.com