Monthly Archives: April 2009

Seth Godin is one of the most reknowned marketer that I can think of today. His thought process in regards to marketing is not just different but opposite. That’s why he is the best at what he does and that is marketing whether it is with his books or personal brand. He has consulted several companies around the world to take a different approach with their marketing  which has helped them with fantastic  results. His marketing philosophy is very relevant in today’s changing world which is shifting  from mass media marketing to direct permission based marketing. He puts it in 3 simple words and that is Anticipated, Personal, and Relevance.

What is tribe? Why you need tribe?

Tribe as put by Seth Godin is a group of customers that are insiders which belong to your community. This is a relationship between you and your customers  which is built on mutual trust. The leader in the community cares about the tribe, listen to them and provide the best product or service to it’s community and in turn they give the business to the leader. Thus they support each other benefitting both the parties. In your case your unique Greek Restaurant for example, serving only to the Greeks and Greek food loving clients would be the tribe. You as a leader of the  restaurant and your customers, would listen to them and understand what they would like and provide them exactly what they like instead of generic food. For example if your cutomers need Greek goat cheese then they would come straight to your restaurant. They wouldn’t go to other restaurants or look for sale at Costco or Walmart. They know that your restaurant is the best Greek restaurant in the community and no one other than you can provide the highest quality possible. So with out thinking twice they would come straight to you. This is the benefit of having the tribes and most importantly being the best on what you do and providing the best product that  your customers want.

So why do we need tribe? The reason you need tribe or say target clients is to differentiate your restaurants from thousands of other boring restaurants in the crowded space of generic restaurants. Seth Godin calls it Purple Cow. Purple cow is essentially a different cow than most of the regular cow that are generally white or black and sometimes with both mixed colors. He puts it this way. When you drive by a country side in US or in France, you see thousands of cows grazing in the field. All of them are the same color. Nothing is special about them. So you never bother to even notice them because they are simply boring cows. Now if suddenly you see a purple cow in the crowded cows, your eyebrows might rise and you would be curious to find more about it. See the human beings reaction to this. You who were least interested in cows suddenly got your valuable attention. That is exactly what Seth Godin is talking about in Purple Cow. More importantly he recommends your restaurant to be one of that purple cow.

When you have a tribe that is built on trust, over a period of time, it is long lasting for years to come. It makes them the most loyal fans of your restaurant. Once they like your restaurant they even do the marketing for you , most of the time without you telling them. Best of all they do it free. That is the most powerful advertisement or marketing  you can get which you might not be able to buy paying millions to televisions, radio or newspapers. The perfect example of this loyalty is displayed by the tribes at Dell, a computer company. The user base is so loyal fans of Dell computer they paricipate in the forums and connect to each other online and most importantly give feed backs to the company to make their computers and laptops more better in speed and quality. They don’t get paid but  they still do it for the love of the product, the company and the leadership. If you look at restaurant industry, the tribes loyal follower factor is displayed best at Korean BBQ restaurant (kogibbq.com) where their loyal customers chase their taco truck in the middle of the night just to eat their delicious tacos. It boggles my mind to hear that the customers wait in lines for hours just to get tacos or burritos. They do it because they love this unique concept, love this new way of dinning and have built a strong kogi culture that is built on mutual trust, fun and love of the food. The customers shoot  videos of them enjoying tacos on the road and they submit them to Youtube. Some times on the middle of the night they take a pictures of their friends eating tacos in their subconscious mind and they upload them on flickr. They have their own community on the web and share their happy and sometime a little embarassing moments in photos and videos may be in funnier way. No wonder all of the community is so strong and love sharing their stories and moments of their exotic  dinning  life.

Restaurants get sometime get so hung up on the features rather than the  benefits of their product. Instead of focussing on delivering the value and the best customer service/experience possible some time we think that we have to have the best steak. No doubt we have to provide the great products but we have to also go beyond providing just the best steak. Customers come to restaurant not just eat the steak but to enjoy the happiness when they are there which create never forgetting experience in their mind. One should be focussing more on the benefits and that is great experience. For example iPhone is an example of a great product though has great features focuses more into benefits. They have huge fan base including myself. May be there are other phones with tons of features but they don’t sell as much as iPhone. On the other hand though Nokia is a leader in cellphone they never thought of making iPhone in the first. They only focused on making an average mobile phones at the cheapest price possible and making it available to as many people as possible. But Apple took an opposite route. Instead of focusing on average feature creep product they made revolutionary product may be not the cheapest phone available  but  well worth to certain group of people that are the tribes of  Apple’s iPhone. Instead of saying it is availabe on a mass scale they limited to certain quantity making those fans to stay overnight to stand in a line to get the iPhone. I myself had to preorder my iPhone and got it only after a week. This tells how direct selling approach  they are taking as oppose to following the mass selling approach. They are doing the opposite of traditional way of selling a product.

With all the above examples of tribe based company built around loyal customers, it  should have convinced you or at least made you realise  why it is important to adopt a Leadership Marketing based around community that is based on mutual trust.