Chin up, chest out, and give yourself a wink. Yea, you’re looking damn sexy.
Let me preface this email by saying, I’m not a football fan and I didn’t watch a single second of the Super Bowl. My interests are thematically guided by participation, not observation. That said, I love dissecting how people interact with cultural events.
On a normal day, I typically consume content on Reddit, Facebook, Snapchat, and (when an @reply draws me there) Twitter. Of all the Super Bowl chatter, there was one thing that stood out — an unmistakable theme amongst the commercials.
Companies aren’t trying to illustrate the benefits of their products, they’re pushing to develop a connection to their brand — they’re focused on relationships, not sales.
Brands aren’t focused on convincing, they’re focused on empowering.
Whatever boardroom bound marketer declared “we should put kittens in some dude’s beard” should get a trophy — you mam / sir have won the internet today.
“Who needs some other thing when you’ve got your thing?”
Damn, AXE. That’s some solid life advice right there. Here I’m hitting the gym every day to look like Isaiah Mustafa, but investing the time in online shopping to land more of Ali Spagnola’s “you’re looking dapper as fuck” compliments.
AXE empowered me to be myself in the same way Ali did… see how that works?
Campbell’s Soup took a similar approach by sharing the journey from pewee to pro and declaring “this one’s for mom” with the hashtag #mompride. I don’t watch or play football, but this one made me want to call my mother (alas it was midnight her time).
Neither of these have anything to do with soap or soup… yet they sell both.
Billee Howard, author of We-Commerce, shares how the economy is refocusing:
…on the power of “we” instead of “me,” focused on the needs of the many over the few. Booming companies such as Uber and Airbnb leverage technology to create platforms that rely on social media and community feedback to facilitate people’s ability to collaborate with one another. Instead of traditional business strategies, companies must now inspire belief and trust in their communities; collaborate with their customers; create business models that are socially responsible; find opportunities for creative collaboration with large, global markets; and become a new generation of innovators—“artists of business.”
When you forge a genuine connection with your audience the things that happen are often as astonishingly profitable as they are impossible to quantify in a report.
Since the beginning of this series, the flow of new members into the Ghost Influence community ($97 p/mo.) have, measuring conservatively, increased by 300%. I don’t to “sell” that offer as I’ve found that allowing people to join organically connects at right time and results in a dramatically higher retention rate (80% after 6 mo.)
Can I quantify the trust built with this email series and show tracking data to tie it to the increase in membership? Not in the “corporate” sense of CPA, but it happened.
What matters to me are comments like Rich R’s, “You’re rather like a contemporary, hip version of Ann Landers or Dear Abby!” and Daniel A’s, “You always make me either smile or think or both.” That’s why I do this — everything else is a bonus.
What’s the last investment you made knowing you could never measure the ROI?