• @kencamp – I would love one in reply to kencamp #
• @SherylBreuker @kencamp – thank you both! #
• (for me too – we need an insomniac community) RT @jhagel: Hope for me – drugs may save memory of sleep deprived http://tinyurl.com/yg4fug6 #
• funny how I have been anti-social while finishing a book on hyper-sociality….happy Halloween everyone #
• @SherylBreuker – just got the invite, thank you! in reply to SherylBreuker #
• lurking is a style of participation in communities that has value – http://bit.ly/3pmK4P #
• @mbjorn fascinating, how "active" lurking is the dominant form of participation in communities in reply to mbjorn #
• @thebrandbuilder @WesternUnion @bdengland @ariegoldshlager – thanks for RT, that was actually a real fun CMO 2.0 Convo http://bit.ly/4udtTL #
• do we still need messaging and positioning? #
• Ouch…I now have 66666 unread emails in my inbox…isn't that an evil number? #
• do you know of b2b product examples that were launched with a particular positioning only to have users change it and use it differently? #

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My CMO 2.0 Conversation with Gail Galuppo, the CMO at Western Union was both fun and refreshing. Talk about the challenge of being in charge of a legacy brand that totally had to transform itself, with the added complexity of serving 15,000 distinct customer communities. Not an easy task, for sure, but one that Gail and her team seem to enjoy thoroughly.

As usual we started off with Gail giving us some context by describing her background. In her case, she learned to put the customer at the center of all decision making while being trained on Six Sigma at GE Capital. She then had a career that took her from financial services to retail and back into financial services and which allowed her to experience various places worldwide. At Western Union, she deals with offices in 202 countries and 400,000 retail locations – six times as many retail locations as McDonald’s, Wal-Mart, Starbucks, and Citibank combined. Talk about a challenging footprint to deliver a consistent brand experience worldwide. As mentioned earlier, they serve 15,000 distinct customer communities, who behave very differently from one another – from Ghanaians in France, to Kenyans in the UK, Filipinos in Dubai and Guatemalans in the US – just to name a few. Their customers are work emigrants who send money back home.

The first marketing challenge we talked about was that of international marketing – how to operate as a global brand, while being relevant to your local communities. The job gets further complicated by the fact that even within their distinct customer communities, there are fundamental differences in needs, expectations, and lifestyles. A migrant from Puerto Rico who immigrated to the US 30 years ago has a very different lifestyle and other needs than one who’s in the country for 3 months or 3 years. And if you thought that was it – think again. They also need to appeal to both senders and receivers of money. With this many permutations and message requirements, nobody could blame you for having a marketing conniption. The way they resolve this seemingly insurmountable and massively expensive problem is in two ways – through a hyper-national brand campaign based on common consumer tribe attributes for all immigrants worldwide combined with a hyper-local set of programs focused on the separate customer communities within each country. Worldwide, their research found that the common attributes that binds all immigrant customer tribes together are pride, sacrifice, adventurism, dreams for their family members, positivity and can-do spirit. Based on that they created the Yes! campaign, the first global brand campaign for Western Union. At the same time they also continue to celebrate the differences between their consumer tribes by having hyper-local programs (like concerts with bands from their native country) that are led by people from those consumer communities – so for example, they have Chinese, Kenyan, and Togolese employees leading the local marketing efforts for those groups in France.

It would be interesting to see if you could harness this consumer tribal behavior into a true global online community. Members would be attracted to the community by what unites them worldwide and would remain in the community by what makes their own tribes unique. They could hang out in sub-communities with their own people and help one another get adjusted. Western Union could strengthen the relationship with their customers by recommending community-specific products, and services, and by providing advice. From a technology enablement perspective it certainly would work as 90% of their customers have cell phones and are over-indexed on the Internet – the community would have to have a strong SMS component to it.

Another interesting aspect of the Yes! campaign is that the primary audience for the campaign was not the actual customers, but the employees and the Western Union partners who operate the storefronts.The effort, called “Project Galvanize,” was actually meant to change the culture from one where people were thinking of customers in terms of transactions into a much more customer-centric culture. When you have 400,000 customer touch-points worldwide, it’s hard to deliver a consistent brand experience if you focus on the transactions rather than the humans and their motivations.

We also talked about the role of social media in the marketing mix. While Western Union is in the early stages of leveraging social media and communities as part of their marketing – they do have a initiative on FaceBook called World In Motion – they definitely intend on expanding that. They are monitoring what is being said about them in social media, but here too they want to take this to the next level.

Lastly we talked about growth – and whether they focus on expanding the array of services for existing customers, or look for new markets first. The answer for Western Union is both. They are coming out with a series of new mobile applications for existing customers and are also getting into the small business market – not just the generic small business market, but that part of the small business market operated by immigrants. A new consumer tribe that probably would thrive online as well.

I can totally see how Gail thinks she has the best job in the world.

Other things that we talked about include:

• The details of the Yes! campaign and how they measured progress and success
• The importance of a values-based system in managing all the possible agent scenarios worldwide
• The role of customer analytics in marketing
• The importance of integrating marketing with customer service
• The challenges related to recruiting a true diverse workforce worldwide

As usual, you can listen to the podcast on the CMO 2.0 site.

• @iceman65 – thanks for the comment on my blog in reply to iceman65 #
• Really interesting discussion on whether brand communities exist or not – what do you think? http://bit.ly/1Zx8hK #
• @prem_k @mlees – thanks for the RT, I am interested in your opinion… #
• @dc2fla – great point…I am familiar with the Ben & Jerry, I interviewed the Mother of Inventions there…not familiar with Nutella comm in reply to dc2fla #
• @dc2fla – I just noticed that, but Nutella is also known for a vibrant community in Europe in past – looking it up and emailed CMO for intvw in reply to dc2fla #
• Writing a book is much harder than I anticipated…doing it in the face of family adversity does not make it easier << sounds obvious #
• @ConversationAge @dcarli @ariegoldshlager thanks for the RT – it is an interview I really enjoyed #
• @natanyap @BillFanning – thanks for pointing to my blog post on brand communities do not exist – hope you can contribute to discussion #
• RT @yourcustomers CMO 2.0 Influencer Conversation with Alan Webber, author and co-founder of Fast Company http://retwt.me/1y9pR #
• always fun to chat with you @elsua – hopefully we can do it again soon #
• @BethHarte – let me know what you come out with…I am curious and getting more set in my thinking in reply to BethHarte #
• @TheCR @ColbyWG @chttrbx99 @TomOB @dc2fla @Talmadge – thanks for the RT #
• @AClarkson – let me know how you disagree, I am really interested in reply to AClarkson #
• @BethHarte – thank you Beth…I am doing good…a bit overwhelmed but I am sure I will get over that too in reply to BethHarte #
• @AClarkson – approved/will comment back…I clearly think product =better than brand but not sure if can work without a lifestyle component in reply to AClarkson #
• @AClarkson – hi Anastasia, I added my thought to yours on brand ocmmunities here – http://bit.ly/wFt64 – thanks for a great convo! in reply to AClarkson #
• @sbendt @garykoelling – thx 4 RT on brand communities and comment. We should catch up re: BSN –> Mix for upcoming book http://bit.ly/3YeYx in reply to sbendt #
• portrait of a twitter user (Pew) – http://shar.es/a7dh4 #
• @BethHarte – Us and Them is a good book http://bit.ly/1TgNHF in reply to BethHarte #
• @BethHarte – same way as it affects traditional media in reply to BethHarte #
• amazing how many people who claim to be social don't follow the elementary norms of sociality – be polite, answer when asked a Q, etc #
• @dc2fla – SM users who speak on behalf of the co are bound by the same rules…what others then say is also bound by the same rules in reply to dc2fla #
• A new crowdsourcing ad agency is born – Victors and Spoils, led by John Winsor, a friend who I truly respect http://bit.ly/4pQvYl #
• @jmcgee – SAP developer community, Kodak's (60% B2B) Chief Blogger, Tibco's internal sales community, Cisco iPrize, Autodesk comm, FFW blog in reply to jmcgee #
• @jmcgee – let me know if you get others, I am interested as well in reply to jmcgee #

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One-to-one marketing was supposed to be the holy grail of customer relationship management.

Companies would no longer have to isolate us from the rest of world as a group to sell to us; they could actually do it on an individual basis. Problem is that we are hyper-social beings who prefer to operate within our tribes. We do not want to be isolated from our group so that sales people who know more about us than we feel comfortable with can give us the hard sell. We want the buying process to be a social process. We don’t trust companies to be on our side and prefer to get the information that will let us make sound buying decisions from our peers. The good news is that those hyper-social tribal peers cannot wait to help us and warn us about bad products and services.

As a team we may want to customize our group workspace, the tools we use, or the T-shirts we wear, but we don’t want one-to-one product customization. In fact we do not like too many choices. Research  has shown that it significantly reduces our willingness to actually buy something. Even mass-customization leads to “mass confusion.”

Forget one-to-one, it never worked and never will because we do not want to be unique, we don’t want to have one-to-one conversations with companies, and we do not really want customization.

Now, wait – don’t throw that CRM system out just yet. While we may not like to have you try to sell us on a one-on-one basis based on all that rich data you have about us, we love it when we are actually ready to buy your product, or when we have a problem with your product and we call your call center, to feel super special by having you recognize us and treat us as if you were a long lost relative trying to help us. We also like it when “the system” (your ecommerce site or your online community) recommends content and people for us that is highly valuable because it’s based on what you know about us – much like Amazon will recommend us books, or the Apple Genius music.

Remember this – when we are ready to buy or when we have a problem with your product or service we want to be treated as an individual, when we are in the process of making a buying decision, we want to be treated as a member of our tribe. And yes, the logical extension of that thinking is that all your behavioral and contextual targeting campaigns are in fact a colossal waste of time and money. During the sales cycle you need to target our tribes!

Do you buy this argument? Please let me know.

Having been a customer of Fast Company since the first release and having been an early advertiser in the magazine, I truly enjoyed having my CMO 2.0 Influencer conversation with Alan Webber, the co-founder of Fast Company, and most recently the author of a great book called Rules of Thumb.

As usual, we started by having Alan give us some context about himself – incidentally, one of his rules of thumb (#32 – “content isn’t king, context is king”). I had forgotten what the first cover of the magazine said: work is personal, computing is social, knowledge is power, and break the rules. Talk about being ahead of your time – that was 1995! That was a true manifesto which led to Fast Company becoming one of the fastest growing publications and the second largest acquisition in U.S. magazine history.

Rules of thumb pulls together 52 core lessons that Alan learned during his 40 years of working in government, academia and publishing at the Harvard Business School, as an entrepreneur at Fast Company, and as a globetrotting, global “detective,” as he describes himself, trying to make sense out of all the changes that are currently going on in business, politics, and society all over the world.

Next we touched on Alan’s Rule #15 – “every start-up needs four things: Change, Connections, Conversation, and Community” – and how that happened at Fast Company. Fast Company, of course, was one of the first companies to successfully leverage communities as part of their business model. Readers of the magazine formed a real tribe – one that wanted to hang together in the context of ideas and conversations about the trajectory of change in business, work, competition, and in individual’s careers. The tribe, as you may recall, was called Company of Friends – and like most successful communities it became a true movement, one that the company would have been hard-pressed to close down.

Bouncing around a bit we next talked about rule #42 – the survival of the fittest is the business case for diversity. Not only did they have tremendous diversity within their employee base, with people coming from all over the world, with different backgrounds, different educations, race, color, etc. , they also had a lot of diversity among their readers. The diverse employee gene pool allowed them to be very innovative – for example making them one of the earliest magazines to turn their customers into co-marketers by giving away their web content for free with the first “send this page to a friend” feature.

Next we spoke about a number of rules related to talent and leadership, including Rule #19, “memo to leaders: focus on the signal-to-noise ratio,” or Rule # 21, great leaders answer Tom Peter’s great question: “How can I capture the World’s Imagination?”, or (maybe my favorite) Rule #26, “the soft stuff is the hard stuff.” Alan sees a shift from leaders who have all the answers to leaders who know the best questions to ask. He thinks that in the wake of this economic crisis, many of us feel like we’ve been let down by those leaders who were supposed to make sound business decisions. The problem is that they did not ask the right questions and in many cases did not ask any questions. Good leaders, he explained, are those people who start out thinking they are not necessarily in positions of authority to give everybody answers. They’re in a position of authority to ask really tough questions that make their organization think very hard about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. Good leaders in this period of economic retrenchment should have a mix of intelligence and humility – they don’t need to be the smartest person in the room, but they do have to be the person who’s willing to ask the hardest questions and insist on really good answers. As a leader you need to have clarity about your purpose, honesty about your values, and focus about your metrics.

Next we talked about the importance of knowledge flows and how you absolutely have to have trust within organizations for knowledge to flow. We also touched on talent being one of the key drivers in successful business and the irony associated with the fact that while most leaders will agree to that, they will also promote CFO’s before HR VP’s, and at the first signs of trouble ditch the talent in order to get their stock prices up.

Alan then spent a fair amount of time talking about a new movement he sees emerging, that of social entrepreneurship and social innovation – a topic he covers in his book as well. People are no longer waiting for governments to come up with solutions to small and big social problems – they are assembling the best of business practices with a strong social mission to tackle the problems as for-profit, non-profit, or hybrid organizations. They are baby boomers as well as young people right out of college. He believes that social entrepreneurship, which is a true global phenomenon, is changing the world.

In a way, Rules of Thumb is very much a book on leadership. It tries to get people to be leaders on their own terms, and to mint a new group of people who don’t look to others to provide the rules.

Other things we talked about include:

• The need to match left brain people with right brain people
• How most successful magazines mobilized a community that didn’t know it was a community until the magazine came out and gave it the organizing principles so people knew they belonged to a community
• How leadership is a test of character
• How you need metrics to show people how they are doing but how you cannot have too many metrics

As usually you can listen to the podcast over at the CMO 2.0 Site.

A lot of people are looking for a good classification system for communities, or some sort of community hierarchy. Most of the ones that we have seen so far (including some we tried to develop as part of the Tribalization of Business and our upcoming book, the Hyper-Social Organization) are rather lame – descriptive at best.

We finally came up with a high level distinction between communities and tribes based on how they deal with diversity – and would love to hear what you think. We believe that understanding this distinction is key in determining the value that a community or tribe can bring to your business.

On the one hand, you have communities and tribes that are populated with people who share a common belief. They prefer to hang out with people who share that belief. We call them defenders of belief. They frown upon diversity and operate much like a religious group would. Business communities and consumer tribes that fall in that category can be found everywhere – think of the Apple zealots, who would not want to be caught anywhere near a PC owner,  or the Ducati motorcycle riders, who certainly don’t want to be confused with Harley riders.

On the other hand you have communities and tribes that embrace diversity – within certain limits. We call them Seekers of the Truth. They realize that the best solutions come from diverse groups of individuals, and not from groups with a common sense of belief – let latter often causing an echo-chamber effect or groupthink. Commercial communities and tribes in that category include cross-industry professional affinity groups, like IBM’s global CIO community, and software developer communities, like the SAP developer community that we discussed in chapter 1 – where people are willing to help one another and share even with competitors in order to find the best solution in a timely manner.

Why is it so important to understand this distinction? For starters, if you are looking for input into your product innovation process, a community full of defenders of belief would yield pretty poor results. If your goal is to involve customer tribes as part of designing new products, you need a community of people who are seekers of the truth, embrace diversity, and enjoy a good difference of opinion. The more diverse your community is the better the products they will co-design with you. Some companies, like Intuit, will go to embrace what many would consider extreme diversity – inviting not just their customers and prospects but also their detractors as part of the process.

If on the other hand your goal is to increase word of mouth through communities and tribes or leverage the power of the crowd to help you with customer service, then having communities full of defenders of belief can work – and in some cases will work even better than with seekers of the truth.

What do you think? Please let us know as we refine our thinking…

• RT @ariherzog: Hi! Do you mind sharing http://cli.gs/notscary with folks in MA/NH/ME area? #
• Just got a message from Slideshare "http://bit.ly/33mEFZ is being tweeted more than any other document on SlideShare right now" coolio #
• @MarkYolton @ariegoldshlager @rotkapchen – thanks for the tweets…let me know if you need more information on it #
• @chrisflanagan – thanks Chris! in reply to chrisflanagan #
• @pgillin @annanten – thanks for the RT #
• someone in Air France Mktg should go back to school, I have no planned travel with them and they send me msg saying "2nd bag fee as of 11/1" #
• About to start CMO 2.0 Convo with Gail Galuppo from Western Union, fascinating company – http://bit.ly/24BAZg #
• @thinkdavid – thanks for the tweet in reply to thinkdavid #
• (so true) RT @jhagel: "No one has the right to exist in business." – Martin Nisenholtz, New York Times #w2s #
• differences between B2B and B2C communities? See comment on own blog post (is this kosher?) and let me know ur thoughts http://bit.ly/Atff9 #
• @elsua – that is funny in reply to elsua #
• @dc2fla @t_de_baillon – thanks for tweet and for making for a good conversation on brand communities at http://bit.ly/Atff9 #
• @t_de_baillon I would like there to be an outcome but maybe you are right in reply to t_de_baillon #
• @YourCustomers – thanks for the tweet in reply to YourCustomers #
• book buying on Kindle is a dangerous thing…but an enjoyable one #
• @MorrisTed – I agree with that… in reply to MorrisTed #
• @jtwinsor – thanks for tweeting my blogpost link #

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There is a lot of research on Brand Communities, defined by Muniz and O’Guinn as “a specialized, non-geographically bound community, based on a structured set of social relationships among admirers of a brand.” (Muniz and O’Guinn 2001).

But do brand communities really exist?

Brand communities imply that the brand is at the center of the community. So in the Harley community it would mean that the Harley bike is at the center, in the Jeep community the Jeep Wrangler or the Cherokee, in the Mini Cooper community the Mini, and in the Fiskateer community, the Fiskars tools.

Is this really what is happening? I don’t think so.

For communities to work, the members need to be at the center of the community, and so the motivations have to be different from the pure hedonistic pleasure of owning a brand/product. The Fiskateers may be the people who come up with most of the new Fiskars products ideas. And they may be their staunchest defenders when the brand comes under attack. But the reason they form a tight-knit community, one that some members say changed their lives, is because they share a passion for scrap-booking. The reason that Harley owners get together is because they share a riding lifestyle passion. Jeep owners, probably because they have a shared aspiration for being adventurous by “off-roading” their cars. Mini owners? Not sure, but according to ethnographic research even people who no longer own a Mini Cooper stay with the community, so it cannot be that the car is at the center of the community.

So why Jeep and not Ford, why Fiskars, why Mini, why Harley ? Because in all those cases the companies have provided environments in which those member communities can operate and thrive. Jeep marketers are providing training camps, and are organizing the barbecues around which members can share their passion. Fiskars provided an online environment for their members to thrive and connected those with offline events as well. But in all cases they are enablers of a shared passion that exists within a tribe or community.

The result of that is what I described in a recent blog post – people use the Jeep, the mini, the Fiskars scissors, or the Harley as symbols to associate with others who share that passion. In some cases they take that a step further and create rituals around those brands, which make the brands more sticky. But at the end of the day, these are not brand communities, they are passionate rider communities, scrapbooker community, adventure seeker communities.

What do you think? Do you buy that, or do you think I am missing something?

• jpim04.pdf (application/pdf Object)

• @pauladrum – my thoughts are with you and your family in reply to pauladrum #
• @rhappe – just make sure it happens outside…that way you avoid costly paint jobs in reply to rhappe #
• @dc2fla and probably 3 minutes making retirement decisions in reply to dc2fla #
• @MarkYolton – I am super excited he won the Noble Prize in reply to MarkYolton #
• RT @johnniemoore: Chewing over @robpatrob's latest posts on emergence at FASTForward. highly recommended brain food. http://bit.ly/NJkZc #
• funny RT @CommunispaceCEO: Blaming short CMO tenure on dysfunctional companies rather than CMO ineffectiveness? hm.. http://bit.ly/1l056h #
• Anyone has a google wave invite so I too can play in the sandbox? email is francois at emergencemarketing dot com #
• wow – almost 30K downloads of the cmo 2.0 conversations so far – http://bit.ly/csFfW else should I talk to? #
• why are people making it so hard to leave a damn comment…does it not dawn on them that nobody comments #
• just read a blog post saying that in social media the world is flat… hmmmm looks rather spiky to me #hsi #
• @pauladrum I hope the operation went well… in reply to pauladrum #
• @pauladrum – oh boy, good luck to you all… I know the feeling of having an ailing parent… in reply to pauladrum #
• @thebrandbuilder lucky you in reply to thebrandbuilder #
• I can't believe criticism of Obama's Nobel Prize – who else could have changed the tone of the debate worldwide so fast after Bush? #
• @sourcepov – I like that – fitness landscapes in reply to sourcePOV #
• @jacobm – sorry I missed that, the correct link for the CMO 2.0 Convos, which got almost 30K downloads is http://bit.ly/4udtTL in reply to jacobm #
• @sourcepov (with tags)- I like that – fitness landscapes #complexity #hsi #
• @dlane001 – will you post some of the rest of his speech, I thought it was brilliant in reply to dlane001 #
• @Halley – there you go, he should have gotten it for economics and medicine as well…a grand slam in Nobel prizes! in reply to Halley #
• @jesskry @NealWiser – thanks for the RT #
• @cosmond – I did not mean to disagree just wondering how to get more out of them as well…if you know some Europeans let me know… in reply to cosmond #
• making gr8 progress on the hypersocial organization book, good thing as it will be heavily promoted at the Frankfurt book fair next week #
• Just got an email "A call for all Women on the Edge of Evolution" – that could be interpreted in many ways importance of titles in comm! #
• anyone knows of a product that was co-created with customer communities only to fail when brought to market #
• argh…they are the same link, sorry #
• here is tge other one http://bit.ly/frIFl #
• @ariegoldshlager – thank you Arie in reply to ariegoldshlager #
• @essene – I am not there, our editor from McGrw Hill is pitching our upcoming book this week in reply to essene #
• LinkedIn is really spammy these days and you cannot even report spam in the Answer section #
• Ugh…listening to news and hearing bozos talking about social contract and high reputation that life insurance cos have…hello?? Earth to. #
• Join us for a Tribalization of Business Study review this afternoon at 1pm – http://bit.ly/3URVqT #
• @CatherinVentura @ludozone – thanks for the RT #
• (funny) RT @amcafee: French sages debate the translation for "Cloud Computing" – http://bit.ly/5rIB4 – "I put a cloud of milk in my tea!" #
• @elsua – lucky you in reply to elsua #
• @elsua – thank you – I appreciate that in reply to elsua #
• @hylton – thank you partner… in reply to hylton #
• @prem_k I would love to…I have some new thoughts on CRM that I want to write up on my blog too in reply to prem_k #
• just put up the slidecast and the presentation for yesterday's webinar on Tribalization – http://bit.ly/4vHQuJ #
• @jobucks – that is a good idea… in reply to jobucks #
• RT @jhagel: History doesn't repeat but does rhyme – if you can, guess dates of photos of Iran w/o looking at text http://tinyurl.com/ycuhely #

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