Tribes is the new marketing paradigm

Aug/28/2008 12:24

You know about waiting in line at an Apple store, or the look on a fellow Deadhead's face. You know about the way it feels to go back to the church or school where you grew up. You know about the real power of a brand. Tribes are groups of people aligned around an idea, connected to a leader and to each other. Tribes make our world work, and always have. The new opportunity is that it's easier than ever to find, organize, and lead a tribe. The Web has enabled an explosion of all kinds of tribes -- and created shortage of people to lead them. This is the growth industry of our time yet pharma has not started to explore social media ?

Brand management was top down, internally focused, political and money based. It involved an MBA managing the brand, the ads, the shelf space, etc. The MBA argued with product development and regulatory to get decent stuff included in the label so that DTC people could spend more on ads.

Tribe management is a whole different way of looking at the world.

lots of sites

It starts with permission, the understanding that the real asset most organizations can build isn't an amorphous brand but is in fact the privilege of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who want to get them.

It adds to that the fact that what people really want is the ability to connect to each other, not to drug companies. So the permission is used to build a tribe, to build people who want to hear from the company because it helps them connect, it helps them find each other, it gives them a story to tell and something to talk about.

And of course, since this is so important, product development and regulatory/legal work for the tribal manager. Everything the organization does is to feed and grow and satisfy the tribe.

Instead of looking for customers for your products, you seek out products (and services) for the tribe. Jerry Garcia understood this. Do you? Who else does this work for? Try record companies and bloggers, real estate agents and recruiters, book publishers and insurance companies. It works for Andrew Weil and for Rickie Lee Jones and for Rupert at the WSJ... But it also works for a small web development firm or a venture capitalist and it is already being used by patients who take prescription drugs.

People form tribes with or without us. The challenge is to work for the tribe and make it something even better. There are some DTC marketers out there who want to do this but they are too busy with justifying dollars to think about something so new that it would turn the organization upside down. Well if Lilly, a conservative midwest pharma company can show an ad with people in bathtubs on the Super Bowl (thanks to Paula and Mill) than you can do it if you're a leader.