The enduring brands we welcome into our lives deliver two things: solutions and good feelings. In fact, we will pay more for products and services that have the ability to make us feel good about engaging with them.
Creating a movement around good feelings is a great way to differentiate your business and have consumers championing your brand. In his bestseller, “Tribes,” Seth Godin, a brand himself, talks about how marketing is the act of telling stories about the things we make — stories that sell and stories that spread. He also says it takes two things to turn a group of people into a tribe: shared interest and a way to communicate. Caring is a key emotion at the center of a tribe.
So how can small businesses create movements and tell those stories that pull their tribes around the campfire? Through my network of colleagues who get more than a little giddy about companies who do this well, I recently learned about Sweetgreen salad and frozen yogurt restaurants in the Washington, D.C., area. Sweetgreen was started in 2007 by three Georgetown business majors who created the company as a solution to a problem. They couldn’t find places to eat around campus that were easy, healthy and fast. So they created one.
Co-founder Nate Ru, 26, told me they really wanted to push the brand boundaries of how they marketed themselves from the beginning. “Our brand is so important to our business — we think about ourselves not only as a restaurant but as a lifestyle, the Sweetlife. We focus on two different aspects of marketing: digital, which is everything online including social media, and experiential — our stores, the community, our annual music festival. Where the two meet is the Sweetlife, a cool lifestyle brand that’s a halo around our restaurant and a competitive advantage.” The staff of 10 corporate and 250 hourly employees run six stores — with plans for more.
To keep their brand aligned, Sweetgreen likes to hire people who don’t necessarily have experience but are super passionate. One of those employees came up with what the company calls “Random Acts of Sweetness.” Sweetgreen’s street team randomly hands out gift cards to recognize other people doing good in the community. When it rains, they’ll sometimes put a shower cap over bike seats with a gift certificate tucked underneath. They’ve been known to slip gift cards on car window shields alongside a city-issued ticket — to offset the downer of returning to a parking violation. They handpick the music in their restaurants and their annual Sweetlife Music Festival brings together bands they love and consumers who love them for a brand meet-up that’s as sweet as it gets. Business has grown 300 percent year-over-year since the inception with revenues now reaching $10 to $15 million, and Sweetgreen plans to expand into Philadelphia in 2011.
Atayne, of Brunswick, Me., sells performance apparel from recycled materials; it also sells a story. The company’s founder, Jeremy Litchfield, was running in a race on a hot, humid morning in 2007 and had donned a new red performance shirt. At the finish line he noticed the lower half of his body was stained by red dye. Mr. Litchfield thought, here I am doing something healthy — but what is seeping into my body? Solution? He decided to create a company that sells safe, high-quality performance gear — along with the feeling that people can create positive social and environmental change through their active lifestyles.
Sales for Atayne, mostly online with a few retail outlets in the Northeast, have doubled every two years. “Everything we do for marketing is around telling our story,” said Mr. Litchfield. “It’s more about promoting the lifestyle as opposed to pushing products. And that resonates with our clients. They are very loyal. We don’t manufacture in China. We are priced anywhere from 10 percent to 15 percent higher than Nike and Under Armour. What really draws people in is our values and our stories. Then they fall in love with our product.”
The company’s strongest sales driver is word of mouth. “Over half of our Web traffic is direct, which means people are hearing about us through a friend or reading about us,” said Mr. Litchfield. The company builds online community and sales via its blog and its Twitter and Facebook accounts. It also takes community-building offline. The company has a program called Atayne at Play. Customers can take pictures of themselves wearing Atayne apparel send them to Atayne, which gives them a $10 gift certificate toward their next purchase. Atayne has also launched an initiative called Trash Running. It organizes groups of people — wearing Atayne gear, of course — to run race courses after everyone else has finished and collect discarded cups and bottles in a baby-jogger retrofitted with a trash can.
What can you do to create a tribe around your business? Here are some starters:
1) Put as much emphasis on culture and brand story and the feel-good aspect of what you do as you put on what you sell.
2) Brand from the inside out.
3) Give your loyalists ways to interact with your brand and each other, offline and on.
4) Hire people who get your culture and can help take it to the next level.
5) Show (don’t tell) your tribe that you care and reinforce why they are gathered around your brand’s campfire by sharing new stories.
Any other logs to throw on that fire? Do you know of other examples of small companies that know how to do this?
When executives want to communicate important messages or engage employees, they hold town hall or all hands meetings. Gathering everyone together is meant to convey the importance of the topic and get the biggest bang for your communication buck. Yet, employees often rank these meetings as some of the least effective. Don't give up on bringing everyone together. Instead, give your all staff meeting a makeover. Make your message resonate by explaining what's in it for everyone. Forego the PowerPoint presentation in lieu of a more personal communication. Make the conversation two-way and engage your people in a discussion. 
