David Meerman Scott on making business personal

What this conversation is about

David Meerman Scott is a marketing strategist and the author of Fanocracy and The New Rules of Marketing and PR. He has been to a famously well-documented number of rock concerts, keeps a spreadsheet of them, surfs, and has a model of an Apollo rocket on his shelf. All of that is relevant, because his argument is that what you love is not a distraction from your professional self; it is the part other people can hold on to.

His definition of a fanocracy starts with human wiring: everyone wants to be part of a tribe of like-minded people, because that is where we feel safe. Very few businesses are built around creating one.

The bucket you don’t share at work

His diagnosis of the professional self is specific and familiar.

"...they've got their passions over here, you know, oh my family and my friends and my passions, that's a bucket that I don't share in business." — David Meerman Scott · 00:06:25

The passions go on one network and the business voice goes on another, where, in his words, people are super boring. He thinks that is backwards, because passion is infectious and it is what gives anyone something to relate to.

"when you share what you're passionate about, people have something to relate to yet. So few business people share what they're passionate about." — David Meerman Scott · 00:07:35

Glenn named what the archive keeps finding:

"...how easy it is for people to suppress their identity, just to fit in when they have so much to offer" — Glenn Llopis · 00:10:05

"We don't wanna do business with a robot. We don't want to do business with a chat bot. We don't wanna do business with an algorithm. We wanna do business with people." — David Meerman Scott · 00:10:21

Fans in a category nobody loves

His favorite example is car insurance, a product people buy reluctantly and use only after something bad happens. He describes Hagerty, which insures classic cars, building a tribe instead of competing on price: a strong video channel, a presence at classic car shows around the country, a database of what classic cars are worth that anyone can use whether they are a customer or not, and a drivers club. His point is the contrast. Most insurers in the category either try to be the cheapest or spend more than everyone else on advertising, and in his account neither builds what Hagerty has.

What made it work, he says, is that the company tapped a passion that already existed, among collectors, for their cars and for each other.

On the customer’s terms, not yours

The second example is about recognition. Scott has flown with the same airline for more than twenty years at its top status tier, and he is also active on social media. The airline, uniquely in his experience, had worked out that the frequent flyer number and the social media handle belong to the same person, so a direct message about a missed connection gets him rebooked in minutes. He was curious enough to travel to meet the head of social media and ask how it was done. The answer was mostly software, but the decision behind it was human: most companies keep customer service and social media in separate departments that never connect the two identities.

"they're basically molding you as a person into their convenient way of communicating." — David Meerman Scott · 00:14:48

He is awake at four in the morning and in bed early, which makes the point concrete. He is not asking anyone to answer the phone at dawn; he is asking for a way to communicate that does not require him to live on the company’s schedule.

"So personalization is about how the customer wants to communicate with you. Not what's convenient for you" — David Meerman Scott · 00:15:41

Showing up when the moment is right

The old ways to get attention, as he lists them, were to buy it, beg the media for it, or interrupt people one at a time. None of it is wrong, and much of it now works less well. What replaces it is understanding the people you are trying to reach and creating something genuinely useful for them, which is mostly free.

His own story about a small company that makes wooden surfboards is the demonstration. He found them by searching, read a website that explained their technique and gave away their trade secrets, liked what he saw, and within half an hour had paid for a four-day course to build his own board. They sold him nothing; they taught him something.

He also makes the case for timing. His term for it is newsjacking, injecting your expertise into a story while it is breaking, because that is the moment people are looking for someone who understands it. His example is a Canadian family law firm that built an information centre, videos and a podcast about what the pandemic meant for custody and family law, became the country’s most-quoted source on the question, and grew sharply because it answered when people needed answers rather than when it was ready to sell. His last example is a battery company whose trucks give batteries away free after floods, hurricanes and fires, with no sign-up and no personal details collected, which its marketing lead told him is the most effective thing the brand does.

"not that many companies are making business personal, and it's a competitive advantage right now to make your business personal." — David Meerman Scott · 00:31:54