The Monthly: Brand Love | v1.011
Challenger brands express love and win over hearts
Welcome to the The Monthly, an exclusive newsletter for subscribers only. This 1st edition is all about brand love — subscriber love, too!
❤️ 🖤 🤎
My People,
I am not one for celebrating Hallmark holidays, but this year I will make an exception. Not only could we all use a little more love today, but when I see love in action, as you all have shown me, I must pay it forward.
You have helped make this new conversation, through this daily blog, a joy. And I want to first express my sincere gratitude to you. Thank you for helping to build this new learning community we are nurturing together. It exists because of your love.
With love,
Jorge -
P.S. — It wouldn’t be Valentine’s Day without a little chocolate. Wait for it …
Now, for some Brand Love
I believe new power dynamics and servant leadership are changing the economy.
Traditional leaders seek power and control, and that’s just not a modern approach to leadership. Instead, Millennials, and now Gen Z, seek to be part of the solution, as employees, and as customers — as stakeholders of your organization — they want to co-create the future with you. Servant leaders are open to sharing decision-making, and they are inclusive, deep listeners. They are also shaping today’s challenger brands.
Take Tony’s Chocolonely, a 100% slave-free produced chocolate, based in the Netherlands — that’s right, a slave-free product. Modern day slavery persists in big, global industries like chocolate. Tony’s Chocolonely changes the game. The mission-driven challenger brand is taking on big business saying they are “crazy about chocolate and serious about people.” It’s doing so by being inclusive, equitable and transparent.
This company has a mission powered by love — the love of people, planet and profit. Its supply chain is traceable, and it relies on farmer cooperatives to make a better product that pays out more. Oh, and it’s still affordable for chocolate lovers that give a damn. It’s actually one of my new favorite chocolate brands now.
A Deeper Love
For entrepreneurs, these same principles of operating as a challenger brand, right now, might be a unique way to attract new customers. After experiencing significant revenue loss, and with consumer confidence and spending at record lows, many of us need to find new ways to grow revenue. Plus, we risk seeing a lot more money leaving local communities, if more small businesses close. Let’s dig into this.
The traditional ways to attract customers and build brand loyalty are no secret. We either need to invest in product marketing strategies to compete on price, quality, and availability; or we need to do a better job than our competitors at marketing to our customers.
Successful brand marketing strategy today employs rich storytelling, influencer marketing and engagement tactics to connect with target audiences and build brand loyalty by deepening those connections — and, by the way, we’re not just competing with direct competitors anymore. We are also competing for attention. That means your brand story has to be compelling enough to keep your audience interested and not distracted — like, scrolling my feed on social media, streaming movies, or doing anything else.
Time really is money now, and it has become more scarce. In this attention economy, appealing to human emotion commands more attention — fear and love being two of the strongest emotions we can work with. Effective challenger brands have to do all that, and successful emerging brands are doing so by choosing love.
Fenty Beauty does many of these things … well, beautifully! Of course, it helps to be RiRi (a.k.a., Rihanna, the singer, actress and businesswoman), who launched this new brand in 2017 during New York’s Fashion Week. But beyond the hype, Fenty offers an affordable product, at scale, made for every person, gender, and shade. These are never-before seen attributes in the cosmetics industry, acknowledging that we are all beautiful and there’s no one definition of beauty.
Fenty’s philosophy, “Beauty for All,” democratizes the sector by eliminating barriers and crushing stereotypes about who wears makeup, thereby disrupting the standards. And despite reports last year that the industry lost 1/3 of its volume, brands like Fenty are growing rapidly. Brands employing love pays off.
Then there is the power shift. A new generation of consumers is making choices about how they live, work and show up daily. They practice self love and care, they nurture a well-being culture at work, and they look for meaningful connections in their communities. Challenger brands are listening with empathy, responding with compassion, and developing authentic claims, quality products, and compelling stories, centered on the value of transparency, in order to build and maintain trust. Trust is critical. Like any good relationship, love cannot flourish without trust.
Despite this blooming relationship between challenger brands and consumers, a K-shaped recovery threatens Main Street and innovation, the harbinger of entrepreneurship. This phenomenon is accelerated by the gains of dominant brands (eCommerce and other tech platforms, especially), and the losses are felt more deeply by companies with fewer than 500 employees that lack the resources right now to compete with big business. The story across the nation for small businesses looks bleak. According to this report from the Kauffman Foundation:
25% of all small businesses have closed at least temporarily as a result of COVID-19. The number is higher for the restaurant, hotel, and retail industries;
60% of those closures were reported as permanent, according to Yelp;
Millions of Americans are out of work as a result of these closures;
4 million small businesses took out SBA loans without any clarity on whether the loans would be forgiven or not;
12.3% of the U.S. population is Black, but only 2% of small businesses are Black-owned. Due to COVID, the number of active Black businesses declined by 41%. 💔
You’ve probably read this last statistic before. This one breaks my heart, every time I read it. The K-shaped recovery is widening U.S. inequality. Once again, we have a choice to make. We risk seeing a whole generation of high potential, challenger brands disappear, if we do not consciously shift how we spend our time and money. One way to do that is by looking out especially for Black-owned businesses.
Google and the U.S. Black Chamber of Commerce are helping with this, encouraging Black-owned business owners to add the attribute to their business profile. Lists and aggregators are forming organically online. There’s a subscription service, operated by theBOM (Black-Owned Market) in Boston and the Black Makers Market in Austin. I have also found online directories in Philadelphia, New York and Chicago. There’s also Intentionalist, founded by my friend, Laura Clise.
Laura started the Intentionalist platform as an online guide for consumers who want to be intentional about spending. Intentionalist supports small businesses and diverse local communities — these include women, people of color, veterans, LGBTQ, families, and differently abled people.
Finally, there’s a renewed focus on hyper local economies — basically, home-grown or neighborhood businesses. Check out Freedom Market in Brooklyn. They operate on the mission of economic justice, bringing collective power to BIPOC small businesses and fostering relationships with their neighbors. They are offering a home essentials bundle that has almost sold out. Glad to have gotten one, and it looks like they will be starting a monthly subscription service. That’s what’s up! ✊🏾
I encourage you to do your own research where you live, and I invite you to share what you learn here, so we can all show them some love.
The commitments we make
Servant leadership empowers leaders to embrace the power shift — this is one leadership philosophy that, I think, especially shows up as love and can win over hearts. It requires a mindset shift and a different approach to business.
Servant leadership requires action. It is not passive. And, yes, it shows up like love sometimes because love is an act, right? You’ve heard me say before that our commitments to our mission and the community require greater clarity in this moment, giving new life to what it means to innovate. It might also be the key to how we make our planet sustainable and society equitable.
These are the actions, the decisions, the choices we have to make as a community. That is, if we, as leaders, are willing to share the journey and confront the status quo by embracing new power dynamics. If we don’t, then other challenger brands might exploit this new power shift to win over hearts.
This term, “new power”, has been promoted as a leadership model for the 21st century, and it is the thesis of a book by the same name, first published in 2018 by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms. An early iteration of this work was featured in HBR in 2014. It speaks to the power shifts we are seeing, away from the status quo, through grassroots movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matters. What’s important now is leaders adapt, and adopt this new mindset, to shape their brand’s long-term competitive advantage — by showing love of people, before profit.
Thanks for reading this week, for showing up, and for showing love, my People. Until next time, sharing is caring — another form of love! 🤓
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Warning: Eating chocolate🍫 while reading this newsletter has also shown to cause sudden, uncontrollable acts of self love. Don’t forget to show yourself some love today too.
Reading this was a joy. Hearing you share these words would be phenomenal. Thank you for your brilliance.