Start With Why

must embody the qualities that already exist at the company. Without clarity of WHY first, any benefit will amount to simply increasing recognition.
    So many decisions (and indeed contract negotiations) are based on an advertising industry measurement called a Q-score—a quotient of how well recognized a celebrity is, how famous they are, so to speak. The higher the score, the better the unaided awareness of the celebrity. This information alone is not enough. The clearer the spokesperson’s own WHY is understood, the better ambassador they can be for a like-minded brand or company. But there is no measurement of a celebrity’s WHY currently available, so the result is obvious. The value of too many celebrity endorsements is the celebrity appeal alone. Unless the audience to which you are trying to appeal gets a sense of what that spokesperson believes, unless that spokesperson is “one of us,” the enforcement may drive recognition, it may even drive sales for the short term, but it will fail to build trust.
    A trusted recommendation is powerful enough to trump facts and figures and even multimillion-dollar marketing budgets. Think of the young father who wants to do everything right for his newborn child. He decides he’s going to get a new car—something safe, something to protect his child. He spends a week reading all the magazines and reports, he’s seen all the advertising and decides that on Saturday he’s buying a Volvo. The facts are in and his mind is made up. Friday night he and his wife head to a dinner party. Standing by the punch bowl is their friend the local car enthusiast. Our intrepid new father walks up to his friend and proudly announces that, as a new father, he’s decided to buy a Volvo. Without a thought his friend replies, “Why would you do that? Mercedes is the safest car on the road. If you care about your kid, you’ll get a Mercedes.”
    Playing on his desires to be a good father, but also trusting his friend’s opinion, one of three things will happen. Our young father will either change his mind and buy a Mercedes; he will go forward with his original decision, but not without some doubt about whether he’s indeed doing the right thing; or he will go back to the drawing board to redo all his research in order to reassure himself of his decision. No matter how much rational information he has at his fingertips, unless that decision also feels right, stress will go up and confidence will go down. However you slice it, the opinions of others matter. And the opinions of those we trust matter most.
    The question isn’t how should car companies talk to the father who bought the car. The question isn’t even how they court the highly influential opinion of his friend, the car guy. The concept of buyer and influencers isn’t a new one. The question is, how do you get enough of the influencers to talk about you so that you can make the system tip?

7
    HOW A TIPPING POINT TIPS
    If I told you I knew of a company that invented an amazing new technology that will change the way we consume TV, would that pique your interest? Perhaps you’d be interested in buying their product or investing in their company. It gets better. They have the single best product available. Their quality is through the roof, way better than anything else on the market. And their PR efforts have so been remarkable, they’ve even become a household name. Interested?
    This is the case of TiVo. A company that seemed to have everything going for them but turned out to be a commercial and financial failure. Since they seemed to have the recipe for success, TiVo’s flop defied conventional wisdom. Their struggles, however, are easily understood if you consider that they thought WHAT they did mattered more than WHY. They also ignored the Law of Diffusion of Innovations.
    In 2000, Malcolm Gladwell created his own tipping point when he shared with us how tipping points happen in business and in society. In his aptly named book The Tipping Point , Gladwell identifies groups of necessary populations he calls connectors and influencers. With little doubt Gladwell’s ideas are spot-on. But it still begs the question, why should an influencer tell anyone about you? Marketers are always trying to influence the influencers, but few really know how. We can’t dispute that tipping points happen and the conditions that Gladwell articulates are right, but can a tipping point happen intentionally? They can’t just be an