John Winsor

Tools For a Building a Community

Here is a set of tools from Spark that were inspired from my conversation with Jake McKee and I hope will help you build a community around your brand:

1. Let Everybody Go Home Happy – I love Jake’s motto! It’s all about getting everyone involved in the community, from customers to suppliers, but ensuring that everyone is excited to be involved and their needs are being met.

2. Be a Guide – Jake’s distinction of letting go of the management paradigm is an important one. As we all learned in navigating the waters of dating in high school, you can participate in and perhaps guide a relationship, but you certainly can’t control it. Instead of managing the relationship with customers, think about being their voice inside the walls of your company. Allow for members of the community, both inside and outside the company, to take self-guided explorations.

3. Form a Community – While lots of companies think about and even say they have formed a community around their products, many times this “community” resides in boxes of warranty cards that have been unopened for years. Think about ways you could form a community of customers and suppliers. Focus on personal relationships. Think about how you could support your community by sharing information and building space, both online and off, to facilitate gathering.

4. Form an Advance Warning System – Once you have steps in place to form a community around your company, think about it in terms of a strategic advance warning system. How can you use the community, whether it’s 10 people or 10,000 people, to give you a strategic competitive advantage?

5. Define the Relationship Between Company and Community – For many companies, like Lego, it is impossible to start the journey of building a community in the confines of the current company structure. Try taking a small group of people, and allowing that small team to engage and start to build a community with customers without the usual corporate pressures. Only after the community gains some momentum should you reintegrate it back into the company itself and make it a part of the organization. Remember that community is about establishing long-term relationships, not just creating a new marketing campaign.

6. Keep Your Customers Engaged – The one thing I’ve learned from writing a blog is that it’s relatively easy to get people excited and engaged initially, but it’s another thing to keep them engaged over the long haul. Once you start the process of community building you have to be committed to creating new reasons to stay engaged. Run contests, connect customers to other customers, and create fresh content.

7. Experience the Good, Bad and Ugly – I like Jake’s analogy that engaging in a community is a lot like dating. At first, people are giddy to be involved. After a while, the humanness of relationships begins to emerge, including insecurities and disappointment. That’s all part of the game. To gain the most from a community, you’ve got to be committed in good times and in bad.

Building a Community, Part 2

Here's the Part 2 of my Spark interview with Jake McKee:

A Dating Relationship

What we really have here – when I talk about the relationship that I have with the fan groups and they have with me – is a dating relationship. If you show up on a date and you’re absolutely perfect, the person doesn’t think, ‘Wow, this is so great – he’s perfect!’ They think, ‘What’s wrong with this guy?’ Their defenses immediately go up and they assume you’re hiding something. When companies do that same thing you immediately think they’re just spinning it, that it’s just marketing crap and you don’t need to pay attention to it. But when you actually start to have an interaction with them, that back and forth, then you have a relationship.

Sometimes it’s bad, sometimes it’s good, but at the end of the day, as long as it’s more positive than negative, that’s what it’s all about. That’s what people really believe; that you’re not just messing with them, trying to get them to buy something. Part of what LEGO.com is, it’s not really an overt sales thing. Of course all of our content, at the end of the day, goes to supporting sales because that’s what we’re here to do. But it’s not about bashing people over the head; it’s about getting them to experience in some way the idea of building with LEGO, or it’s about playing a game where you’re using bricks to do a certain thing. But it’s definitely more than just a glossy brochure in the form of a game.

I talk about this “dating relationship,” even though it may seem kind of weird at first, because it works so damn well. If you’re trying to form a relationship of some sort, whether it’s a product purchase or a consumer to company, long-term interaction, you’re hoping to form a bond of some sort between two parties. Again, everybody has to go home happy. If the fans I’m working with are constantly coming away with the feeling that they’re being used, then I’m not going to be able to tap into them very much longer. By the same token, if they’re not delivering much to me, then I’m not really going to be that interested in working with them. There’s that give and take, just like in any relationship.

If you said to me that your company had really decided to form a bond with your customers, to break down that wall between the outside and inside, and you asked, “What do we do?” – I’d say most companies don’t understand that the way they approach things with their customers is incredibly poor. For instance, you have call centers getting outsourced to India, which is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard. For most companies, that’s the only point of consumer contact they have, and they’re outsourcing it. It’s like if you brought in an intermediary to hang out with your wife, so that you could go bowling. And when you did that, you said, “Oh, by the way, while I’m gone bowling, can you really work on our relationship for us?” It just doesn’t make any sense. You wouldn’t do that in your personal life. Why would you do it in your business life?

Bring Passion to What You Do

It’s also really important to find employees who love what they’re doing, whatever that particular thing is  – in my case, I didn’t necessarily need to come from the LEGO community and be an adult fan first, but it certainly helped. You need to get somebody who really understands it. You can’t just take one of your standard marketing people and throw them in the mix, and say, “All right, have fun.” That seems fairly obvious, but you always hear people talking about just transferring another brand manager over to fill a position. I probably wouldn’t go that way. I’d get somebody from outside the company, or I’d get somebody in the company who’s not part of Marketing or PR, someone who just loves what they’re doing and can’t wait to get a shot at the big time, so to speak.

Interaction vs. Marketing

So once you have the right person, how do you actually make it work? So many people get in this mindset – like from an ad agency standpoint – of trying to start up a campaign, do something on a short-term basis, and it really bothers me, because it really doesn’t work in this sort of thing. You need personal relationships – both on your teams and with your customers – to inform what you’re doing.

The difference between community interaction or marketing (or whatever you want to call it) and traditional, “sit up in your office and throw out a campaign” type marketing, is that relationship. There’s also this belief that way too many marketers have, that consumers are incredibly stupid. Marketers have absolutely zero respect for the consumers. There’s an assumption that unless they just bash people over the head with something, there’s no way they’re smart enough to figure it out on their own. It’s not that consumers aren’t smart enough, it’s that they’re not interested.

It’s like people talking about “building” word of mouth. You can’t build it; you can only set up the right environment for it. What should be happening right now, and what is happening with the companies who will do well in the next five or ten years, is that they’re reducing the barriers between the people inside the company and the consumers outside the company. A lot depends on what your definition of ‘community’ is. Really it comes down to a social connection – it’s so much more than just throwing open a message board or a blog and saying, “Okay, it’s there. Now what?”

Building a Community, Part 1

A couple of days ago I mentioned how inspiring my interview with Jake McKee was when I was writing Spark. So, I thought I'd bring you the interview. Here is Part 1 of 2:

I recently changed my title to be more appropriate. I had the word ‘Manager’ in my title, which just didn’t make any sense in a community. The company’s community interaction isn’t about management, because I can’t manage it or control it. I can encourage it, and maybe guide it or add some influence, but I certainly can’t manage community. I don’t think anyone can.

So I am (was) the Global Community Relations Specialist. My responsibility specifically is the company’s relationship to the adult enthusiasts. Some of these people have grown up on LEGO; some have come to it as adults. All of them use LEGO bricks as a creative medium, so instead of doing woodworking or painting, they’re building sculptures and models and all kinds of stuff.

My specific role is to act as a bridge between the company and them, for a number of reasons. Obviously they’re a good group of people to pay attention to, because their average spending per person, per year, is so much higher than the kids’ would be. But, relatively speaking, the numbers are much, much smaller than the overall buying audience of LEGO products.

Connect With Key Voices

In the early days, we got a lot of questions about, ‘If the adults are only maybe five percent of our market, why are we paying attention to them?’ There were a couple of answers to that. Number one, obviously they do spend five percent of the money, which can be the difference between a great year and a bad year. But also, while it may be only a small percentage of adults spending a certain amount, the number of people who they tell about this stuff, and the brand ambassadorship that they carry out to the rest of the world through their public events or just through putting things on their cubicle wall, is pretty significant.

They’re also carrying a really interesting message in a way that we could never, ever carry it. When we say you can build anything with LEGO bricks, the whole consumer base really says, “Sure you’re gonna say that; you’re LEGO – that’s what you do.” But if 10,000 people go out to a LEGO train show, walk through a local mall and see a 30’ by 30’ train layout; every time they stop and say, “Wow, this is great. How long have you worked for LEGO?” and the adults say they don’t, that they just go to the store and buy it, like anyone could – that’s the kind of thing that gets the consumers interested. It’s a pretty powerful message in and of itself.

Establish an Early Warning System

We’ve also learned that these people are our early warning system. There was a lot of questioning up front about whether we should really listen to their feedback – even though they were good, and it was good that they were a market for us – because they’re really not our target audience.

People wondered how much overlap there would be because they had their own sets of issues and interest levels and things that they really liked and didn’t like that were significantly different for kids. And there are certainly times when we look at what they say they like, but what the kids say they hate, and that’s the stuff you filter out. But 60% or more of the time, the adults are saying the same thing as the kids, they’re just saying it six months in advance.

Lately, as we’ve gotten other colleagues interested in working with the adult fans and really believing that the “early warning system” is true, we’ve had a number of different projects where we’ve gone to a small group of the adult fans and said, “We’re interested in having you participate in the product development cycle.” Right now there are three active and ongoing projects with a small group of adult fans as part of the development team for that particular product. It’s pretty amazing.

An example from last year is the LEGO Factory product. It started out as a concept of doing a product line based on the idea of micro-scale buildings. We worked on this internally with our design team, and our designers are brilliant, world-class artists, but we weren’t sure if it was going to actually work. So a guy from our Concepts Department, which is set up to look at product development in the one- to three-year time frame, came to me and said, “We need some input from outside the company but we need it quickly – in like three weeks.” We knew that this kind of time frame would never work with the kids, so when he asked if the adult fans would be interested, I said, “Absolutely.”

Guide the Community

I knew a guy in the community who built this type of micro-scale stuff all the time. I said, “Hey, I’ve got this project going on; I can’t really tell you much about it except it will be really cool. I’d love to have you lead it.” And he said, “That’s great. Let’s do it.” So he found ten of the right people to participate and contacted them on behalf of LEGO Then we decided on the final group together, and he was responsible for moderating the group. These guys were spread all over the U.S. and Europe. Some of them had posted online before but had probably never met. They conducted the whole group online without ever physically sitting down together.

In three weeks, that group generated more content than any of us imagined was possible, just by us saying, “Here’s this concept. What can you build in micro-scale?” We didn’t show them any of our stuff; we didn’t give them any details other than a very short half-page description of the concept. They generated a huge amount of models that they gave to the guy in the Concepts Lab. He was able to make his presentation with all this content and say, “This is a concept worth pursuing, and this isn’t just us. Your worries about whether or not normal consumers are going to believe in this – boom, here’s your answer.”

Having this kind of consumer-driven group gave us the benefit of a hands-off approach. What I didn’t want to do was jump in myself – the moment I enter the room, everybody turns to me and says, “Well, what do we do?” So having a consumer group working through the problems was part of the answer set, as much as the result itself. What they were discussing and the ideas they were driving, what they were all agreeing to, was a part of what was interesting to watch.

Jake's Big in Japan

One of the best interviews in Spark was with Jake McKee. At the time, Jake was Global Community Relations Specialist for Lego. Jake's interview contains many of my favorite quotes from the book:

“The company’s community interaction isn’t about management, because it can’t be managed – it can’t be controlled; it can be encouraged and can maybe be guided or possibly influenced here and there.”

and

“You can’t build word of mouth, you can only set up the right environment for it.”

Well, now Jake has become Lead Samurai for Big in Japan, a social media consultancy and toolset.

Good luck, Jake!

Tools for Being More Innovative By Having More Fun # 2

Here is the second part from a list of tools I included in SPARK:

Live Your Products – Don’t know your products only from the P&L statement or market research data. Go live your products. If you’re in the restaurant business, eat all of the meals available on the menu. Then, eat your competitors’ selections. Know firsthand how your product does – or doesn’t – work.

Spend Time with Teammates – Get to know the people you work with, as people. You are on the same team, with the goal of innovation, so knowing your teammates more intimately has a real upside. Spend time with them outside of work. Catch dinner; meet their families. But most of all, share experiences that can bring you closer together as a team.

Co-create with Your Competitors – Innovative companies with a broad vision tend to want to change and influence not only their customers but also the market and industries in which they work. Think about how you could work with competitors and suppliers, creating an environment where a rising tide will increase everyone’s fortunes.

Tools for Being More Innovative By Having More Fun # 1

Many people have written me about the Rob Bon Durant interview and asked me how they might use the idea of having fun to be more innovative in their business. Here is the first part from a list of tools I included in SPARK:

Develop a Broad Corporate Vision – What is your corporate vision? Is it a financially based mission, or one that could be found on the door of any company in the world? (For example, “We provide solutions for our customers.”) A corporate vision needs to be big. It needs to have a message that is bigger than just satisfying customers’ goals or increasing shareholder value – it’s hard for someone in the trenches of the company to get excited about that.

Remove Barriers – Think about how you can develop a more open and sharing office environment. Can you move people together? Focus on creating an environment that increases visibility, accessibility, and interaction.

Be Honest – Patagonia’s voice message says,  ‘Everyone might be out of the office, if the surf’s good.’ While that might seem silly to a lot of people, it is honest. Can you and your company be more transparent in an honest and positive way?

Focus on the Work – Great innovation happens at Patagonia. But it doesn’t always happen between 9 and 5. Focus on the work itself, not when it is happening. The fact is that many innovative people work best during nontraditional hours.

Spark Interview - Rob Bon Durant, Patagonia #2

Have a Human Face

When people envision Patagonia, I don’t want them to envision our logo; I don’t want them to envision our type font, or even our catalogue. I want them to envision a face or a person that they actually met – a living, breathing human being that they had an enjoyable interaction with. That should be the face of Patagonia. That should be the voice of Patagonia. I think that is very much a philosophy that is embraced by all of us.

We don’t work here for the money. We work here because we’re in business to inspire solutions, primarily to environmental crises that are occurring everywhere. The company doesn’t exist to make money; the company exists as an environmental action corporate model. We joke all the time that we’re this grand experiment, and if we can make this thing work then hopefully we can be a model to inspire corporate change.

Everybody Can Do It

We’re in a sort of unique position working here, because it’s easy to be passionate about what we do. But I think that even if you worked for, say, General Mills – it’s not so much about being passionate about the cereal; it’s about being passionate about the lifestyle that you’re living, and that obviously includes the professional element and existing in a corporate culture that supports creativity. Because let’s face it, even cereal needs to be creative.

Spark Interview - Rob Bon Durant, Patagonia #1

I was thinking about the importance of passion and fun when it comes to the effort of innovating today. My interview with Rob Bon Durant, the VP of Marketing, from Patagonia for Spark really captured the power of fun.

Have More Fun

I’ve had a couple of different roles in the company. I have a marketing background and was the marketing director for five years and then switched over to the sales and brand development side. Previously my responsibilities primarily revolved around brand marketing and product marketing, and I worked with our design and development teams on both the product and collateral marketing sides to develop brand messaging and do research and development for line building.

If you look at Patagonia, we have a variety of different sales channels. It’s a pretty unique opportunity because we sell online, we have our catalogue and mail order business, we have our own direct retail stores, and then we have a very robust wholesale business.

Open and Fun Environment

As far as our physical environment goes, Patagonia has no offices. We have office buildings but we have no doors that close except for the conference rooms. Basically, what you’re dealing with is an open and very sharing environment, which encourages communication – maybe sometimes too much – but it absolutely fosters that type of interaction.

The overall theme of the office, that it’s very open and fun, happens in a variety of different ways. When you call Patagonia and the machine picks up, it says, “Thanks for calling Patagonia. We’re usually open if the surf’s not up.” So it’s very much a ‘Let my people surf’ philosophy. That’s the philosophy that Yvon established thirty-five years ago when he founded Chouinard Equipment. We were not business people before we came here.

We were pretty much climbers and surfers and skiers that found our way through serendipity or otherwise to Patagonia – because Patagonia was an extension of the lifestyle that we all supported and lived. We have a boardroom here, but it’s not a typical boardroom – it’s actually a board room, filled with surfboards. We have communal bikes with board racks attached that can be taken down to Surfer’s Point.

We’re very much living on the fly in terms of professional versus personal endeavors – but I want to reiterate that we do cover for each other – the work gets done, but it doesn’t necessarily get done on a nine to five time table. We’re very nontraditional in that aspect. That in and of itself makes the work environment very unique and very dynamic – if we wind up staying until 7:00 pm it’s probably because we took a two-hour lunch because there was a big swell coming in.

Lead, Don’t Follow

I can’t remember what the statistics are, but we get something like thirty thousand applications a year for an average of thirty positions. We don’t tend to hire industry professionals or MBAs. It’s been a firmly held belief here that it’s easier to teach a fun hog to be a businessman than to teach a businessman how to be a fun hog. It’s always been the philosophy that we supported, and if we have had to do that extra work, we do it willingly because it improves the quality of our professional life. There is no place like Patagonia that I’ve really run across, especially for a quarter billion dollar company – a company this size that can maintain this sort of corporate culture and still stay in the black year after year.

I think much of our success comes from the fact that we clearly understand and know the product that we sell – we live it. When we start our design cycle each season we don’t start it in a boardroom, we don’t start it in a conference room under fluorescent lights. We start it in Hawaii if we’re designing for the spring; we start it in Colorado or Alaska if we’re designing for the winter, and we usually go pretty deep into the backcountry to start that process. We drag everything with us that we’ve made over the last year. We bring our athletes – our ambassadors – out with us and we talk about the product. We ski in it, we climb in it, we rough it up and figure out what’s wrong and what needs to be improved and what’s perfect. So we come back with a very clear and rich understanding of what it is that we’re up to.

Play and Work Together

Most of us are very close; we have a tendency to work together and play together. My closest friends sit a few feet away from me, and I’m with them all the time – on Fridays we hit the road at four o’clock to spend the weekend climbing or skiing. If we’re going skiing for the weekend because of the company that we are, because we supply so many outdoor professionals, I might call a ski patroller and say, “I’m coming up for the weekend” and go out and sweep with them in the morning.

Basically what you’re getting is sort of this continuation of a lifestyle that’s both professional and personal. When I go out skiing with a patroller, it helps me professionally because I’m experiencing what they experience – I’m seeing firsthand the challenges that they put their clothes through and I’m taking that information back and going, ‘Okay, we need more durability on the knees’ or, ‘We need to extend a zipper three inches so it can fit a communication device more appropriately.’ And all of this happens via the relationship itself – it’s not a questionnaire, it’s not an online survey; it’s very much hands-on, experiential contact.

I think for us the end of the workday on Friday is the opportunity to really go out and live the lifestyle that we’re building professionally during the week. For me, heading out on Friday with a bag full of samples to go climbing is probably the most exciting way I can think of to start a weekend. That may sound kind of corny or trite, but if I’m going to go up there and spend the weekend climbing, I want to try out a bunch of different stuff and see how it performs – and I want to take that information back to the office and be able to speak from a position of experience – not supposition.

That doesn’t mean it feels like I’m working on the weekend – hell, no. We’re playing, having fun, and having a great time. Sometimes people tell us to stop talking about work – and we’re not talking about financial statements; we’re not talking about meeting budgets; we’re really talking about whether or not a particular piece of apparel performed to our expectations on that given climb or that given ski or whatever it might be. For us that’s a joy – we’re pretty passionate about what we do.

Take Risks

Everybody’s interested in what we’re doing, and everybody roots for us. Let’s face it – we’re a company that’s doing the right thing, that’s walking the walk and talking the talk, and everybody looks at us with a fair amount of curiosity. We’ve made significant steps toward swaying the corporate cultures that exist both within and outside of our industry. We do it primarily on the environmental front – ten years ago we made a very strategic decision to move all of our sportswear to organic cotton, which at the time was pretty risky because basically our sportswear division represented sixty percent of our sales. And obviously in order to make that switch to organic cotton, we had to subsidize some of our organic cotton farmers so they could afford to grow for us.

That basically raised our retail prices by two or three bucks, which is significant. Our fear was that our customers wouldn’t embrace that. But we came together as a company and decided that we were willing to go out of business if it didn’t work, because this was important enough to us to make the switch. Basically you know how the story winds up – not only did our customers support us, but our competition came to us via an invitation and learned how to do it as well.

We now have more clothing companies than ever looking at us. If we could only get someone like the Gap or Levi’s to make the switch to organic cotton, it would destroy the conventional cotton industry – there would be no reason to grow conventionally. So we have an organic cotton symposium every year, and we invite our competition to come to Patagonia to learn how to do it. They share with us and we share all the dos and don’ts of growing and maintaining a sustainable business. We’re going to do this – and we’re going to keep doing it.

Tools for Creating a More Innovative Environment #2

Here is the second part from a list of tools I included in SPARK:

1.       Focus on Open Communication – One of the stumbling blocks to which many innovative teams fall victim is a feeling of disconnectedness from the rest of the company. Many times, it feels like nobody really cares. Likewise, others in the company might feel the special group is full of dreamers doing nothing to achieve the goals of the company. The key is to appoint a co-creation evangelist on the team whose job is communicating with the rest of the organization about what the team is doing. Invite others to participate in the team’s co-creation.
2.       Support Varied Innovation – Innovation is a messy business. Mark’s experience at Nike proves it is critical to try lots of different avenues to birth successful innovation. Look at an innovation problem from many different angles. Support different efforts in pursuing co-creation with different stakeholders. One team might pursue co-creating new innovation with a supplier while another team gains the customer perspective.
3.       Identify Generalists – Often the strongest person in the innovation process is a generalist inside the company. Early in Mark’s career, one of his bosses recognized that he was a generalist who knew a lot about many different aspects of making shoes. Mark’s broad knowledge gave him a unique ability not only to work with others, but also to see connections that others might not. Identify generalists that can benefit the innovation team. They will bring a new perspective to the co-creative process.

Tools for Creating a More Innovative Environment #1

Many people wrote me about the Mark Parker interview and asked me how they might create a more innovative environment in their business. Here is the first part from a list of tools I included in SPARK:

1. Create SWAT Teams – Does your company use hothouses or SWAT teams currently? If not, consider assembling a diverse team around a specific innovation issue. The key is to insulate them from the day-to-day demands of the business.
2. Think About Team Chemistry – Mark has a real talent for understanding how to put together a dynamic team. When constructing your teams, bring together a group of personalities that work well together. They will probably outperform a team with one or two big egos.
3. Create Organic Teams – When you need to tap into innovation quickly, put together the kind of team that makes sense for the situation. Sometimes it can be one person charged with figuring out a problem through getting out into the marketplace and exploring options. Other times it takes a highly skilled team. Constantly experiment with the kind of teams you assemble to innovate.
4. Find the Balance Between Structure and Creativity – To stay innovative, it is critical to constantly seek out balance between structure and chaos, especially for the teams trying to innovate. Change things up if necessary to keep people focused on the main goal of co-creating innovation.