Trusting the doing. Being strategic vs executing.

When shifts happen we often want to strategize to have the right approach to deal with the change, but in some ways we likely get further behind by doing that.

Those who assess quickly start executing and iterate along the way will be further ahead of us by the time we finally start executing on our more refined strategic approach.

I sometimes forget that I’m better at connecting a few dots, executing, reassessing and doing it again than I am at pausing to formulate a grand strategy that can be beautifully executed when ready. Even though my urge is to do the latter, that’s not my actual strength.

Trusting those doing instincts is how things develop…

• It is how discoveries are made. 
• It is how progress is made. 
• It is how skills are learned. 
• It is how art is created.

I need to get back to trusting those doing instincts. How about you?

​It’s interesting to me that both B2C and especially B2B marketing likes to overcomplicate how they label and describe marketing efforts.

As an independent artist/musician we label marketing efforts as marketing/promotions, and fan interactions. That’s about it.

The point is: demand gen, ABM, customer marketing advocacy…however you label these efforts, it’s marketing/promotions and fan interactions.
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No need to overthink it too much. Just create the strategy and execute.

We will follow a product or service recommendation of a friend or colleague, but not one from the organization that makes or provides that product/service, why?

Trust.

We have more trust in our friends and colleagues because we have a human relationship with them. Rapport has been built over time with them (the length of time doesn't necessarily matter).

Often with a friend or colleague, there is not an agenda to sell something to each other from the onset of the relationship. That allows some level of vulnerability and/or candor to enter into the relationship building process over time, which helps accelerate and solidify trust.

Brands are often interrupting one's attention and priorities to force an opportunity to build a relationship. This is true even in the most consultative of selling processes.

It often doesn't work because if the desire to build a trusted relationship of any kind is not mutual, the balance of power between the parties is off, and the "interrupted" party will be guarded in their interactions with the other.

A creators' output is subjective.

When a fandom begins to grow around a creator and their output it’s still subjective.

However, when those fans continue to support that creator it’s an objective observation that the subjectivity of the creator/their output has real value.

The following are the elements we need to make a digital customer advocacy program work well.

Strategy
Identify ongoing value for customers so there is a reason they want to participate and it becomes a way to build a relationship with them over time.

Ongoing Customer Recruitment
Have a multi-pronged approach to consistently add new customer members to your program. This means enabling all customer-facing teams to help, create new customer onboarding procedures, and even empowering current members to easily refer their coworkers.

Provide Consistent, Relevant Content and/or Value
Understand your membership, what they find valuable and what will help them in their individual roles and careers. Then keep providing such value and they will come back and engage. Give, Give, Give, before you ask to Get.

Care. Be Human. Find Ways to Help or Connect People
Focus on the individual vs. their org. Help them navigate their roles, their career, the general professional landscape and most importantly, help them network or facilitate connections that can provide real benefit to their role or future career.

Be as Expedient in Responding to People As You Can 
(Self-explanatory)

Celebrate Your Members
Everyone wants to be seen and heard. Recognize the individuals in your membership. Most individuals don't even get recognition for their work within their own companies, which is sad but true. Recognizing someone's hard work and contributions goes a long way toward that individual offering up further discretionary effort.

Easily Empower Customer Members to Advocate for Your Brand
The path for customers to advocate should have little friction, and the benefit to them of advocating should ideally outweigh the effort required to be involved. If you've done the above, this last line item will be made a lot easier, and produce more of the results you're after with your program.

When people buy art, or respond with appreciation to a piece of art, music or writing, what are the factors in play that make that art resonate?

It's a connection, or rather an appeal that leads to a connection.

The art first piques the interest of the viewer/listener/reader and that artistic content -- the visuals/the melody/the words used to describe something -- appeals to that audience's own emotional biases; their own sense of self-expression (how they see themselves and/or how they want to be seen).

There is a lot wrapped up on those emotional biases. A big one is nostalgia -- when the art reminds the audience of a positive or heart-warming past experience. This makes the appeal "stickier" (aka harder to resist) for those whom the nostalgic content (aka the positive memories the art invokes) resonates most.

The point is, for art to effectively connect with an audience to motivate that audience to some sort of action -- share on social promoting the art, click through to learn more, or to buy something -- it needs to appeal to the audience's emotional biases and resonate enough to motivate that action.

How do you actually motivate the kind of action you want your audience to take?

You have to do some research to find out what emotional biases your art appeals to most, and for which people.  This is the hardest part of marketing and promoting anything -- art, a product, a business.

In an over simplified business perspective, this kind of research is called product/market fit. That is, regarding the product you make, who are the people your product could help most? Meaning, that audience has the most demand for and willingness to pay for your product and the solution it provides.

Huh, the solution it provides...that's something to explore in art. What solution does art (visual, music, writing) provide?

Usually, art is providing some sort of emotional connection to motivate action. The art is the product. The emotional connection it creates for the audience is the solution it provides. The outcome to that solution could be to motivate an individual to listen to the song again, to escape into a fantasy world, often to buy the art or a product that is using the art to help sell it.

Art is a communication vehicle. A very powerful and effective one when used well. Art alone, however, leaves that vehicle motionless. That vehicle wants to go somewhere. It wants to drive to pick up some friends. It longs for the attention of others who understand it. That's why art is not only a communication vehicle, but a community cultivator.

As humans -- whether introverted or extroverted -- we long for some amount of community. That could be with one other person or thousands of people (think of a bunch of fans just like you at a concert of your favorite musical act). 

Art communicates to the emotional biases of individuals, but it has far more power and arguably more appeal when those individuals with similar emotional biases stoked by the art that resonates similarly to them, find one another and form a community -- a shared reason for coming together.

When community forms like this, more communication between the art and the community audience exists. The art becomes the connection point or ongoing communication vehicle between the artist and their audience. This is where/when co-creation of the art via communication with the audience gives way to new ideas and possibilities. At this point, the human connectedness is at a critical mass enough to allow the art and the community around it to become something new entirely, but based on the shared emotional bias and appeal from which things started.

The best art is made for the artist, because the artist felt compelled to explore an idea that they fleshed out further into more of a complete work or finished creative thought.

The reason that’s the best art is because it comes from a pure and authentic frame of mind with no hidden agenda (like to sell). However, once it’s created because of its genuine authenticity it is more relatable and tends to resonate better with others (not everyone, mind you, but those who identify with what the art represents and how it makes them feel).

That’s the art that often ends up gaining a following (a community) because it was born out of true, authentic intentions from the artist.

Art that is made for the sole intention to sell often lacks depth — the art’s soul is missing, and people notice that.

That is not to say that people who make art to make their living end up, making soulless art, the true professional artists, typically are able to make money from it because they get into the mindset where they’re creating the art for themselves to scratch the itch of a curiosity that they're compelled to explore to realize an expression that is inside of them first, and then once it's out there, are able to attract an audience for whom that resonates, and that’s why it sells.