On Purpose Read online

By ‘force it’ we mean imposing your communication on people whether they want to hear from you or not. In the good old days the only choice viewers had was to go and make a coffee when your ad came on TV; now we can tune out at the click of a mouse on the ‘unsubscribe’ button. You have to earn the right for people to consume your marketing and you do that by being entertaining, educational or empathetic. So the rule is to whisper, not shout, and, if they are like all good whispers, they will be passed on.

  When Innocent introduced their quirky tone of voice a number of other brands followed suit. When Robert Stephens started the Geek Squad and made a feature of his people, a number of computer repair firms tried to copy his model. They failed. Why? Because infectious communication only works when it is authentic and stems from your purpose. So don’t ‘fake it’.

  Don’t ‘fudge it’. When your actions fail to live up to your brand purpose or marketing promises you are fudging it. Anyone can create great copy, but your customers will soon find you out if your deeds do not match your marketing. You only need to look back at the huge losses suffered by BP as a result of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in 2010 and its failure to deliver on its promise of being the environmentally friendly energy company to see that fudging is a short-sighted option.

  When Tony Hayward gave his final press briefing shortly before departing as chief executive of BP he said that BP had shown itself to be ‘a model of corporate social responsibility’ but it was ‘not a great PR success’. On the face of it BP had done most things right: they managed to cap the worst of the spill, they managed to keep most of the oil from washing up on the beaches, they paid millions of dollars in compensation to the US locals whose livelihoods were affected. So why, then, the furore and criticism heaped on BP and its CEO?

  We believe that the failure was one of authenticity; a failure on the part of BP leaders, past and present, to be authentic in their delivery of the brand purpose. BP, although embracing ‘green’ credentials and purporting to be the fuel brand most closely identified with sustainability, when put to the test drilling for oil off the Florida coast seemed to act first and foremost as an energy company concerned with maximizing its profits rather than concerned with sticking to its purpose.

  Let’s look at an example of a brand that not only sticks to its purpose but one that has used infectious communication very successfully.

  Stick to your purpose

  In the ‘Stand up’ part of this book, Part One, we advocated that you ‘stick to your purpose’. In a photo shoot for British Airways High Life magazine, Sugru inventor, Jane Ni Dhulchaointigh (pronounced nee-gull-queen-tigg), managed to combine (and dramatize) both of these principles at once by sticking herself to the ceiling of her offices in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of her product.

  So what is Sugru? In its own words, ‘Sugru is the world’s first mouldable glue that turns into rubber.’ The brand says on its website: ‘Our dream is to make fixing, modifying and making things easy and fun for anyone, and Sugru is our solution.’

  The name, Sugru, is the Irish word for ‘play’, which seems appropriate when you see some of the wild and wacky uses that its 1 million users in over 160 countries put it to.

  Image 3.2 Jane Ni Dhulchaointigh

  Source: Image by Charlie Clift

  A quick browse through the many videos and photographs uploaded by customers to the company website (https://sugru.com/about) will reaffirm your belief in the ingenuity of people when they buy into an idea. But lest you think that Sugru is just a toy, the product was named as number 22 of the 50 greatest innovations of 2010 by Time magazine… the iPad was ranked 34.

  It starts with insight

  It was while Jane Ni Dhulchaointigh was studying for an MA in Product Design at the RCA in London in 2003 that she had an idea: ‘I don’t want to buy new stuff all the time. I want to hack the stuff I already have so it works better for me.’

  That notion led to experimenting with various substances, culminating in a mix of smelly silicone caulk and wood dust called Formerol – but it worked. It would stick to anything yet remain as flexible as rubber when dry. It was waterproof, dishwasher proof and heat resistant and could be moulded into any shape. It was high-tech and even more useful than the ubiquitous Duct tape.

  Have a bold purpose

  This was when Jane got excited:

  ‘This was bigger than just me. I got out my sketchbook and started imagining a world where this material existed. I knew that, by tapping into people’s innate creativity, all kinds of products could be transformed and improved. I knew that we could adapt and improve almost anything mass produced.’

  This book is about those brands that have a ‘purpose beyond profit’. They are all commercially successful yet this is not what drives them – they exist because they are passionate about making a difference in their world.

  It was Jane’s purpose that led to her putting a team together to develop the product, finding funding and setting up distribution channels. Discussions quickly followed with major glue manufacturers, because Jane’s assumption at that time was ‘a small company can’t build a household brand’. She was wrong – because with infectious communication you can.

  Don’t force it, fake it or fudge it

  The pace of development with the large partners was very slow and Jane felt that her vision and sense of purpose were being compromised. She began to question her assumptions:

  ‘I started to feel that maybe we could build our own brand. A friend told me “Start small and make it good.” The dream started coming back.’

  That dream led to three years of effort and 8,000 hours in the lab to perfect the user experience so that the product smelt good, looked good, felt good and worked great. This effort meant that the company nearly went bust several times over but eventually, in November 2009, working night and day for a month, the company made its first 1,000 packs commercially and shipped them. Then their world changed.

  Infectious communication

  They sent a trial pack to the Daily Telegraph magazine and columnist Harry Wallop gave it 10/10 in his article. Wired and Boing Boing magazines picked up the story and linked it to their websites. The first 1,000 packs sold out in six hours. Sugru had arrived.

  One of the remarkable things about the brand is the way that customers have embraced the idea of hacking their stuff to make it better and have contributed hundreds of stories, photos and videos from all over the world to show other users how they have done so. The user community has expanded to over 500,000 customers who subscribe to the brand purpose, ‘The future needs fixing’. But it isn’t just about fixing, it is also about improving and making things better. Much better. James Davis, the youngest member of the British Olympic fencing team, used Sugru to personalize the grip of his foil handle before competing in the 2012 London Olympics.

  http://sugru.com

  https://www.facebook.com/pages/Sugru/118586600911

  If you look at the Sugru website or Facebook page you will find hundreds of ideas contributed by customers showing the power of infectious communication when customers really embrace an idea. Increasingly, brands and products will be ‘owned’ by their consumers who will contribute towards product development, promotion and technical support.

  For example, Jane received hundreds of e-mails asking for the product in other colours. In April 2012 Sugru was launched in all the primary colours and in 2014 a further five new colours were added to the mix, so some customers are now using it to model things and create works of art – not just to fix things.

  Purpose driven

  Jane Ni Dhulchaointigh started with a clear vision of what Sugru could be: ‘I pictured it as a kind of space-age rubber – super easy to shape, sticky and durable. I knew it needed to feel gorgeous and that, if I cracked it, it would have a million uses.’

  Her purpose has sustained her through the bad times as well as t
he good, and it was that purpose that persuaded her to build her own brand and to do it in her own way. It seems to have worked. In September 2012 she was awarded ‘Design Entrepreneur of the Year’ at the London Design Festival and CNN voted her one of seven tech superheroes to watch in 2015. In July 2015, Sugru set the record for attracting the largest single investment of £1 million and raised £3.5 million in just six weeks through crowdfunding via 2,700 investors. Such is the power when people buy into your purpose.

  giffgaff

  Another brand that has really embraced infectious communication is giffgaff. In Part One we showed how the brand was built around a purpose. It was also built from a basis of enthusiastic advocates in the target customer base.

  Mike Fairman, the ‘Gaffer’ (an old English term meaning the ‘boss’), tells the story.

  On the day that we launched giffgaff, we turned the website on at midnight. By 5 am the next day we had ‘super-users’, two or three of them, who had spent the night reading our terms and conditions, got to know the site, and were there at 5 am answering questions that had been posted by other people who had come across the site. We were just blown away by that and to this day we’ve never had an issue with getting people interested enough to help contribute.

  We pay cash to contributors in the community. If you’re on the top rung of involvement in the community, you might earn £100 a month. But it is not just about money, they do it because they believe in what we’re doing; they believe that giffgaff is a movement, as do the people who work at giffgaff, because what we do is, I think, quite special. They do it for the love of it. My big learning is that if you genuinely set out to do something different and you are customer focused, then people will cooperate with you in a way that you might not think they would.

  ’s infectious communication

  This mutuality is what makes giffgaff different. It’s a belief built around working closely with the member base and offering them ways to help the business run and operate and grow. We were very conscious, however, that it’s very easy, when you start a community, if you get it wrong, for the community to die very quickly. In our case if we had launched with a community that died very quickly, then the business would die along with it, so we came up with the idea of launching the community before we had a SIM product to sell. It was based on a promise to say we’re going to do mobile differently, we’re going to do it working with our members, and we want to involve you early to get your views on what we should be doing.

  We went to look for help in other communities, such as Yahoo Answers, where people were helping each other with mobile phones. We said, look, here’s another thing that’s going to come along, are you interested in just having a look?

  We were able quickly to get a community of interest going, and at that point we realized we would need resources to manage it. We hadn’t thought that it would take a huge amount of time. We realized that there would be some discussions going on in there and we would need to be involved and contribute – but not to the level that became apparent. I remember, we had one lady who was our CRM person, who was busy trying to design the entire customer communications programme for the business, and we just gave her this job on the side. Very quickly it started taking up half of her time as well as her boss’s. So, we employed a community manager from the gaming industry, because gaming businesses have huge community management teams.

  You don’t really see much of the community managers publicly; they make the odd contribution, and they will start some threads, and then listen to the discussions that go on, but a lot of their work goes on in the background, private messaging between them and the individuals in the community that make it tick, making sure that they are kept happy and have the information that they need.

  Through a combination of that management and the super-users themselves, the community becomes self-policing. The antithesis of that is YouTube and Facebook, which are free for all communities, in which it is very difficult to have a positive atmosphere largely because there is no way of communicating privately with the less friendly members and to educate them how to contribute in a more positive way.

  We work with our members, and we believe that we are better off working together, and if we do that, every time and through every decision that we make, then it just turns you into a very, very, customer-focused business. It makes you laser-focused on the community all the time; it’s like having about 10,000 community members watching over your shoulder and looking at what you are doing; and if you get something wrong, or make a decision that they don’t like, you just know about it instantaneously.

  For example, we took a finance decision, which we thought was a very low-level inconsequential decision – Maestro cards are being phased out, and our payment provider needed us to do quite a lot of work in order to keep them going on the website. We had very few people using Maestro cards, so we said, ‘We’re going to stop supporting and taking payments from Maestro cards.’ And there was an uproar in the community because we hadn’t consulted them on it, as we thought it was too small an issue. So, we went back to the payment provider and we switched back on Maestro cards, until they naturally just expired. When the last card runs out of its date, then that is when Maestro will disappear from giffgaff. When we reversed the decision, the community were absolutely delighted because they said, ‘Wow, that’s an example of a business that actually listens to its members.’

  We are a budget brand and so the principle behind our pricing strategy is we get help from our members to keep our cost base lower and we plough that back into our products and have keen prices as a result. So pricing is a critical activity for us. For example, we were in a position where we had to raise our pricing because we had made some wrong initial assumptions about how many minutes, text and data would be used by customers in the bundle that we were selling. People were using more than we assumed. So, when we looked at the costs, obviously the inter-connect costs and all that stuff for those minutes, the profit and loss (P&L) wasn’t shaping up in the way that it should, so we had to change the pricing. These decisions come along at mobile companies all the time; you go through a big research process, you have a pricing manager that works out what the price should be, what the advantage is of putting it up, how many people you’re going to lose, you work out what the financial impact is going to be, and finally you tell your customers that you’re going to put prices up. What we did is very different. We said, ‘Okay, we think we know what we need to do; it’s a case of putting up the price for the minutes and texts that you use outside your bundle.’ But instead of actually just doing it we went out to the community and we explained to them why we needed to do this. We said, ‘Look, if you want giffgaff to survive in the long term then we need to be profitable – because we are a business, we’re not a charity. You’re using more of the free minutes than we thought – which is great for you, but it’s not great for our P&L, and if we carry on like this then we won’t achieve our numbers and that will threaten the future of the business, therefore we need to put our prices up. We’ve thought about it, this is what we think we need to do, but there are other options – tell us what you think.’

  We’ve done this twice now; the first time we had a good response in the community, something like 5,000 people contributed towards the discussion. What is really surprising is that you get very mature conversations taking place. You get some people saying, ‘Oh, you’re awful, you can’t put prices up, that’s terrible, you know, we want more stuff for free’; and then other people will come in to the community and say, ‘Well, hang on a minute, be sensible about this; they are a business, we want them to be around next year and the year after that, they’ve told us that they need to do this, so what do you want: do you just want to make a quick buck now and then they disappear, or do you want them to be around?’ Then you start seeing contributions that are more practical, such as, ‘Have you thought about doing this… have you thought about doing that…
?’

  So we had a proposal as to what we were going to do with the price, and actually, we ended up amending our plans a little bit; some prices went up a bit, some prices went down a bit; and we were able to say, ‘Okay, with your help we’ve now decided that we’re going to do this…’ And the remarkable thing is that when we did that we had 55 per cent positive sentiment, which was just remarkable.

  Purpose creates true advocates

  The thing is, this community may only represent a relatively small proportion of your base, 20 per cent, say, so that still means that 80 per cent of people don’t know about what is going on. But when you do actually put your prices up, more of them visit the website, and if you have consulted beforehand, then what happens is you’ve got advocates already in the community who will be able to explain ‘They consulted on this; this is the reason why they’ve done it, don’t be so upset.’ And of course those people, those same people, are also active on external communities; Facebook, Twitter and whatever else, and will just as readily jump in and defend you there as well as on your own community. So you get double benefit – a community that will communicate complex or unpopular messages, but also will defend you in public spaces where you haven’t got the tools to do it otherwise.

  An interesting example of this is the handling of outages. In 2012 we had two major outages: one was a complete service outage for 12 hours; the other was for six hours. Not good at all, and on the second occasion we decided that we needed to offer a gesture of goodwill.

  Now, what O2 did, on the first outage, which had also affected them, is they offered a 10 per cent rebate on the monthly bill and free accessories for everyone. What we did was to say it’s fair that we need to make a gesture of goodwill, but actually, we want to offer our members a choice of how that money is used. So, we made our apologies and said, ‘Look, we want to make a gesture of goodwill, there’s a pot of money that we’re going to put up for doing this. If you were affected by the outage, because obviously not everyone was, then you can come to us and you can say, “Right, I want a share of that”, or, you can say, “Keep the money and do something good for the business in order to improve the customer experience.”’ We didn’t tell them how big the pot was, we didn’t set expectations about how much they would get, but we actually had a pot of £350,000.