In this 4th Richard Askam episode, Richard talks about creating your own tribe. Of course, you know a tribe is, but how does that relates to your work, the printing industry, customers, and how to grow your business? Well – take a listen for yourself, listen, and learn.

All you hear is just an opinion – but the opinion of Richard Askam is a strong opinion that hopefully will seed your mind and bring you forward.

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Hi, it’s Richard Askam. I’m going to talk to you for the next few minutes about my views on how you can create your own tribe. What do I mean by that? I think it’s important in this day and age with brands and retailers alike, and let’s assume for the purposes of this conversation that a brand and a retailer are the same thing, they’re not different. They both need you for the same thing, which is they need to rely on you, they need your support, they need your loyalty. But they have to earn it, can’t just buy it. And I think that’s the one change that we’ve all seen in our working lives over the last 20 years is the need for that direct engagement.

We talked before about personalization and I think that’s just one area that that can be brought in. But it’s actually make you feel as though you belong, which, ultimately, is where the DNA of tribal behavior comes from. We’re all, deep down in our souls, part of that tribe which is humanity. We’ve sort of spread our wings far and wide over the centuries and millennia that we’ve been lucky enough to be on this planet, but actually now, funnily enough, that behavior is coming back much closer than it’s been for a long, long time. And brands have to pick up on that, they have to buy into it and they actually have to be part of it. There’s no longer an us and them reliance between the consumer and the brand, it just has to be us. And that’s the key area that you can then exploit, if you like, if that’s not a bad word. And I don’t mean exploit in a bad way, I probably mean leverage that opportunity to be part of that tribe.

Brands, to a certain extent now, are behaving in similar, if not the same ways to achieve that end, but they’re all kind of looking at one part of the puzzle and that’s not necessarily the way that we all see it. I don’t necessarily think, for example, we bought a bottle of Coca-Cola because it had our name on it, I actually think it was a gift that happened to be made on a bottle of Coca-Cola. That was just the consequential benefit. 90% of those bottles of Coca-Cola, by the way, never got opened, which tells you everything you need to know about the buying decision. So, ultimately, that campaign as an example has created that tribal behavior from the brand to the product to the consumer in a way that we haven’t seen in a long, long time.

So many ways there are of connecting with consumers and brands directly, but if you concentrate on what it means to you as a group, not as an individual, then I think ultimately that’s where the value sits. Thank you.

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