Brands grow from the inside out starting with the first innovators who are willing to try something new and moving on to early adopters, the early majority, the late majority, and finally the laggards. What may not seem immediately obvious is that brands need to continue inspiring the innovators and the early adopters even after they’ve crossed into the larger adoption segments. I will explain why this is necessary to grow, or even to maintain existing, community. The first important because brands naturally lose some customers due to shedding.
Shedding
Brands naturally lose some customers due to shedding. Shedding occurs because of normal market fluctuations and because people’s circumstances change. For your community shedding is also a simpler and easier process than adopting. And simple math explains that if you’re shedding more than you’re adopting, your community will shrink. It is generally accepted that the cost of reducing shedding (attriction of community) is less than the cost of acquiring new customers (or supporting new adoption). That said, many companies focus on preventing shedding and neglect something that has more damaging and significant long-term costs, brand rot. It happens when companies forget about their core community after building a solid the late majority. While this might improve the experience of the main stream community for a while, and increase sales, it will eventually result in less engagement and greater shedding.
Rot
Unlike shedding, which happens at the periphery of your brand, rotting takes place at core. Products and services are constantly changing to reflect changes in the market environment. With change comes the need to learn about new features, interactions, and experiences a brand offers. It’s the core community that understands the legacy of development for the product/service best and who are positioned to share it with the next circle of the community/influence. If you stop paying attention to your core community, you won’t be able promote the perfusion of new stuff to your community. This is especially important if you’re extending existing lines, or introducing new ones.
Two Models
First, let’s look at a standard representation of community adoption. What I find a little misleading about this curve is that you might think that the x-axis represents time. In which case, it’s hard to capture the idea that it’s possible to continually grow from this inside out. In other words, once you’re through the early adoption segment you can focus entirely on the early majority.
Everett Rogers Technology Adoption Lifecycle model
Which I why I created a representation of my own:
With this representation, I’ve tried to show how brands grow from the inside, while still preserving the information about the size of each segment of adopters. Here the size of the circle represents the size of the adoption segment (in the chart above the area under the curve does this). I’ve alse added shading to indicate the emotional engement the segment has with the brand. On the left is a representation of a healthy brand and on the right there is an example of an unhealthy brand. In the healthy example, the arrows show a flow of community moving outward from each segment to replace loss at the periphery due to shedding. In the example on the right, however, the center communities have been neglected and are no longer emotionally engaged with the brand. This results in a lack of movement from innovators to early adopters, and from early adopters to the early majority, thus the arrows have been removed.
Thanks for reading, and I look forward to your feedback.
I created this short video to share some of what I think distinguishes Marketing 2.0 from traditional marketing. I’ve also created a personalized version that talks more specifically about my consulting practice on the About Page of this site.
Thanks for watching and I look forward to your feedback!
I’m writing to share two tools that I use when developing marketing strategies. I hope these will come in handy and I’d be delighted if there are other tools that you use that might compliment these.
A Word About Strategy
Different people mean different things by strategy, so I want to be clear about what I mean. Strategy originates from a military context and focuses on linking engagements together to advance progress towards a specific goal. In other words, in the military context, strategy would guide decisions about whether or not to engage in a particular battle (there are many battles in war), as opposed to tactics which guide how each specific battle is fought.
One key to developing a solid strategy is understanding that resources set the limits to what can be accomplished. Thus strategy is about making choices regarding how to allocate limited resources over time. I would say that the best strategies are characterized more by saying “no” than saying “yes.” In other words, there are generally many options that you could pursue, but only one that you will pursue. The hard part is sticking to your decisions! The first tool will help you prioritize your options and make a decision about which one to pursue. The second tool will help you stay on track once you’ve set your strategy.
A Prioritization Tool
This tool allows you to visualize potential strategic steps based on their feasibility and importance. You start by listing out all your potential strategic steps, or short-term goals, in the left hand column of the table. From there you assign each a feasibility and importance rating. The key is to setting a budget for these ratings. In the example below I have seven potential steps to be considered and I’ve allotted each a budget of five points. Thus, my total budget for each column is 35 points (7 items x 5 points = 35 budget). Once I have the table filled out, I plot the steps on the chart to the right. This allows me to place them within three priority zones. At the end of the process, I’ve identified the two steps to pursue. Click on the image to enlarge it:
A Management Tool
This tool allows you to lay out the short-term strategic goals that advance your long-term strategy. It also allows your to visualize the tactics that support each strategic step, understand how they are dependent on each other, and the relative resources required to complete them. The arc is essentially a time-line for managing projects, like all time-lines it can be very helpful to work backwards from your long term goal. Each way-point along the arc marks the completion of a step towards the ultimate goal. Each step is tied down to a set of tactics, and the dotted lines connecting the tactics show how some tactics are dependent on others being completed first.
By using size to estimate the resources that are required by each tactic, it is possible to visually understand where you’ll need to staff up or down. For example, at the least step in the example below the need for resources is less than half of the need at the second step. By visualizing tactics it is possible to move their placement along the time-line to even out work flow and resource requirements.
Thanks for reading, and please send me info about any tools you use for strategy projects.
The amount of trust people associate with networks depends in large part on the value of what they put in and get out. This also impacts the vetting process involved in extending your network to include new members. For example, I take “connecting” on LinkedIn very seriously. I do not connect with someone that I don’t know, have not met in person, or have not had a significant exchange with. Perhaps I’m more cautious than most, but I was once burnt by someone who was connected to a connection of mine (2nd degree, pun intended) … and it turns out that my connection didn’t know this person very well at all and should not have vouched for them.
Stepping down from LinkedIn, social networks such as Facebook and Myspace are less trust oriented. Here I’ll become friends with people who I know, or know of. Thus, I accept invitations from slightly random people that I meet at parties. My logic is that there is little downside in this context. Worst case scenario, I go to a lame party. That said, I do use these networks to get stuff done occasionally, and I don’t want complete randoms in there.
One step further is Twitter. On Twitter I will allow anyone to follow me and I will follow anyone (barring complete stupidity or offensive behavior). I view this as a completely public forum. That siad, I have considered setting up a family only account … but then I remember that I prefer to interact with my family in other ways. Here’s how I see all this represented graphically:
Any excuse to make a drawing, especially if it’s a graph/chart. Ok, one more:
The Agile MarketerTuning Customer Experience Into Your competitive advantage
"Roland is a student of the game and his book hits on all the right notes.Practical,witty The Agile Marketer should be on your shelf if you aspire to be a modern marketer."-JASCHA KAYKAS WOLFF,CMO at Mozilla
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