Over the past several years, inbound marketing has wildly become the most successful and influential form of marketing. Not that outbound marketing has expired, but brands are becoming more aware that relationships drive inspiration, inspiration drives conversations, and conversations drive brand affinity. The key ingredient in this entire process is understanding how brands inspire their community and how their community behaves with them as a result. We hear all the time that people need to be inspired by your brand, and, in the words of Simon Sinek, "People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it." This idea of inspiring people to believe what you believe is critical for brands to understand and adopt, for their very livelihood depends on it.
Before going any further, we need to answer the question at hand; "What is inspiration?" Oxford Dictionary defines inspiration as literally being "the process of being mentally stimulated to do or feel something, especially to do something creative." (Oxford Dictionary) When was the last time you sat down in a business strategy meeting and, instead of discussing how you're going to acquire new leads or pivot your value proposition, discussed how your brand is going to inspire the way people think, behave and believe? As brands, we tend to get so entangled in the web of forcing new and innovative products and solutions to be first to market, identifying new ways to cut costs, telling our customers how we think they should behave towards our brand, and at the end of the day, we're left exhausted and absent of the results we were expecting. Why? Because we inspired nothing.
Inspiration is the voice that drives change and radically destroys apathy. When people are inspired by your brand, there will be a literal behavioral shift followed by a change in an aspect of their life to conform to the idea that you have inspired them with. Because inspiration is so powerful, it is not simply a new message that can be crafted overnight. Listed below are three key factors for brands of all shapes and sizes to adopt in order to promote a culture of inspiration.
Trust
To truly inspire people to have affinity for you and your brand, there must, first, be a high level of trust built inside the walls of your brand. To quote
Jay Baer "Trust is the prism through which all business success must pass." Trust is the great equalizer for creating a culture of creativity and inspiration. When trust exists within the walls of a business and people feel safe, rather than threatened by their superior, you have given them the permission to think creatively and perform with excellence. The customer is, in turn, rewarded by the response of the joy your employees have in being a part of your brand. Not only does the customer enjoy the experience they had with your brand, but they have inherently developed a trust and an affinity with your brand that will be rare to find elsewhere.
Empathy
Most of us (whether we are willing to admit it or not) engage our community with an apathetic state of mind. We treat our customers as outsiders who should conform to our way of thinking, our employees as our minions, and our partners as ATM machines that should be spitting money at us, while we only have a slight behavioral change towards them. What if we flipped that mindset? Southwest Airlines should be the model for empathetic business behavior. Southwest Airlines CEO, Gary Kelly, believes in putting the employee first in order to sustain an environment of empathetic relationships and inspired growth. In one blog post, a Southwest Airlines employee stated, "Our Culture differs from other companies in that, in our "order of importance," we put our Employees first, then our Customers, then our Shareholders." (
blogsouthwest.com) When our community is pursued the way they long to be pursued, a culture shift happens from the inside out and positive behavior begins to overtake the negative in such a way that the community begins to adopt this new culture, and keeps it sacred themselves.
Authenticity
If you have ever tried to change the way your brand behaves in order to attempt to gain customer approval, you have lost your sense of authenticity. Side note; you can redeem it if willing to put in the effort. The root of authenticity comes from defining your clear set of vision, goals, and beliefs, and sticking to them through all situations. Keep in mind, these values are not variable, for they are outside the boundaries of circumstance. When a brand has a clearly defined vision, and the goal of that vision is to inspire others to convert to it, the vision will be the catalyst that inspires an upward direction of sustainable growth. When your community senses you are working for something greater than yourself, your profits, and your shareholders, they will automatically recognize the authenticity and desire to adopt your vision.