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How Combat Flip Flops Used its Brand Story to Become Bigger Than its Products
The full article of below’s excerpt was first published on Startup Nation on 04/18/18.
While writing my last book, I reached out to Matt Griffin, CEO of Combat Flip Flops, to answer one specific question: How did regular flip-flops turn into objects that manufacture peace through trade?
While on duty in Afghanistan, Griffin, then a U.S. Army Ranger, stumbled upon an Afghan combat boot factory that also created flip-flops for soldiers for when they were taking off their boots to pray. Feeling empathy for the people he met, he immediately knew he wanted to bring those flip-flop designs home with the goal of creating jobs and funding education in war-torn countries, such as Afghanistan.
There is no significant product innovation, but there is a story that is so much bigger than flip-flops: one that leads to sales.
“Other than materials and details, there isn’t anything special about our product. They’re flip-flops and shoes. The story leads the way into our ecosystem, then the product enables more people to tell the story. The cycle goes round and round–educating little Afghan girls throughout the process,” Griffin said.
The cause and his strong belief is indeed the foundation of a thriving business.
If you are an entrepreneur that aches to create a cause-based brand or transform an existing brand into one that does more than sell products or services, but positively affects mankind, Matt has some advice for you.
I asked him about the top challenges such entrepreneurs may face, and below are his top three pieces of advice on how to overcome them:
- Commit fully: Question yourself. Are you willing to go all in? Give up all of your comforts and security to take on the challenge?
- Prepare for no funding: As much as people will agree with your “nice” idea and mission, getting them to separate with money to support you is difficult. You have to prove it with your own money before they give up theirs.
- Craft a story that works for your audience: For example, getting the Western Consumer to be empathetic with the challenges felt in developing nations, then inspiring them to action. Empathy is difficult these days.
Don’t be discouraged, as you are dealing with a new generation of consumers willing to commit to you and your brand. Both millennials and Generation Z consumers strongly skew toward brands with a bigger mission.
Given the rise of the BOGO movement (buy-one-give-one) through TOMS and Warby Parker, the path is clear for new ventures with a social cause.
“TOMS will forever be known as the brand that made conscious capitalism a ‘thing.’ If they can make it work and are truly helping others, good on them. The one-for-one model works at scale and it’s tough for a lot of competition to get to that point. It’s not impossible, though,” Griffin said of such trends.
As my time with Matt was running out, I wanted to know what other cause-centric brand resonated with him that we should get to know, and why? He noted saffron distributor, Rumi Spice, which was founded by a female soldier and is now the single largest employer of Afghan women.
“They help Afghan farmers directly export product to the U.S. market, putting money into the hands of the farmers instead of middlemen,” Griffin said.
Stories like the one of Combat Flip Flops are awe-inspiring to me as a brand builder, and they also push us to think outside of our comfort zone, and outside of the notion that only products based on tech and innovation can turn into admired brands in today’s entrepreneurial age of disruption.
Joyfully crashing Deirdre Breakenridge’s Women Worldwide Podcast
We dove into such topics as branding for Generation Z and brands emerging need to talk politics.
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Staying sane with Barry Moltz on Business Insanity Radio
Tune into Segment 2 to catch me talking about what it takes to launch a brand in 2018 on Chicago’s Business Insanity morning show.
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Joining Rohit Malhotra for the Indian Life Self Mastery Podcast
A conversation about the four steps of launching a brand, brand storytelling and my book Bigger Than This.
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Joining Donald C. Kelly on The Sales Evangelist Podcast
I discuss what branding means for Sales teams, chat about Tide’s big Superbowl win and the idea of Radical Transparency.
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De-mystifying branding on Nick Westergaard’s On Brand Podcast
A passionate discussion on why I declare branding having substituted advertising and dive into my new book Bigger Than This.
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Bigger Than This
A quick read about the deceptively difficult task of turning your venture into an admired brand.
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About Bigger Than This
Video with author Fabian Geyrhalter discussing the book “Bigger Than This.”
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What Any Brand Needs To Learn From Amazon’s Physical Bookstore Experience
I just spent an hour at Amazon. Not on Amazon, at Amazon.
As an author with a second book release upon me, I study book marketing up close hence I just had to make a pilgrimage to Los Angeles’ first physical Amazon bookstore. It opened two weeks ago as part of the Westfield Century City Mall‘s universally talked about staggering 1$ Billion re-model (…and we thought retail was dead).
I was doubtful when I initially heard about Amazon going into physical storefronts thereby going back to the business model they once so successfully disrupted many years ago. Well, my doubt was quickly turned into exhilaration as Amazon did not simply open a storefront, they changed the way consumers experience products offline – with a whole lot of help from online insights.
Amazon successfully and holistically transformed what worked online into a physical brand experience. It took full advantage of its massive amounts of data, to my delight. At the AmazonBooks store, you are greeted with shelves titled ‘Highly Rated – 4.8 Stars & Above’ or ‘100 Books to Read in a Lifetime – Our Picks from the Amazon.com List.’ Not surprisingly, it works and it pulls you into a curated, and more importantly, customer-verified, experience. Do you trust that Maggie from the local bookstore has a ‘Staff Pick’ or do you trust hundreds, thousands, millions of readers just like yourself? Sorry, Maggie, I am all up for supporting local stores, but that was an easy pick.
Not so quick though, as Amazon knows it needs to, and should, make the experience a local one. ‘Read Local – Notable and Highly Rated Los Angeles Books’ as well as top-rated books from readers in L.A. are showcased prominently. Another nice touch is Amazon’s integration with the online reader community of Goodreads, albeit logical as Amazon acquired the site in 2013. Still, seeing ‘Goodreads Most-Read Classics’ and ‘Book Club Picks from Goodreads’ adds more intrigue to the books stacked in traditional bookstore style underneath. Each of these components engages, builds trust, and keeps you in the store longer.
But let’s not paint a picture of Amazon showcasing only the proven books, by the biggest authors, on their rather limited shelf-space. You’ll see books of unknown authors, some that are rated only a few times, next to the big sellers. One book particularly stood out (Innovating by Luis Perez-Breva and Nick Fuhrer) as Amazon’s description reads ‘100% of reviewers rated this item 5 stars.’ The book only had 21 reviews in total. This makes me feel like I am discovering something, which is one of the key ingredients of a great book store.
Amazon also picks customer reviews to showcase, rather than the author’s book description, or an Amazon editorial review, which makes the experience even more personable.
The last store curation effort that made my heart speed up was the huge shelf-space dedicated to ‘If you like this, you’ll love these.’ A key component of the Amazon.com shopping experience, seeing a book you liked on a shelf with six you never heard of next to them, suggesting that you’ll love them is a sure-fire win in any customer browsing experience.
Besides taking away that Amazon has nailed its data integration into its retail environment – not to anyone’s surprise – what can you, as a CMO of a brand or as a startup entrepreneur learn and immediately utilize from its success?
Map your online customer brand experience, then take it offline.
It feels upside down, and precisely that is Amazon’s amazing ‘Zag’ in this instance. How do users behave on your site, what content do they read, what call-to-actions do they skip, which offerings do they spend the most time on, and so on and so forth. Study it. It’s there, you just have to start digging into it.
Then take that data and make use of it in all the ways you conduct business offline. As many of you don’t have retail stores that you can start experimenting with, you may think this is not applicable to your brand. Think again: sales presentations, prospect case study conversations, tradeshow experience designs, new product launch considerations, brand initiative ideas, brand narrative adjustments – you name it. That online journey can be a game-changer in the way you engage with your customer/consumer/member everywhere else.
Much has been said about leveraging latent data and creating actionable new data points for brands of all sizes to utilize, but the essence of what Amazon did is actually rather simple at heart: Study the trail your online users leave behind and use it to educate a new or revised, deeply educated and highly personalized offline brand experience.
What we learn from AmazonBooks is that these insights can even be used to craft a brand narrative for a new brand extension: Translating what works naturally online (‘if you like this – you may like that‘ as an example) for their brand and making it work as a novelty in an offline experience that is 100% true to Amazon’s brand essence. It’s not just connecting data for increased sales, it is doing so in a way that is intrinsically true to the core brand philosophy.
Amazon’s user journeys helped create an offline sub-brand. It may be time to look at your brand’s online data, create your user journeys and translate them into successful offline experiences. It will re-affirm, or re-educate your brand’s essence, or perhaps it will even inspire you to launch a new brand extension.
Until then, you can find me at Amazon as on Amazon is just too one-dimensional and old-fashioned.
How To Share Your Brand’s Offering – Brilliant Brand Messaging Lessons From Acorns And Emojis
I entered a contest. Not a design competition, but a simple consumer contest.
And that matters because, really, who enters contests? We are all busy people. Especially a man in his early 40’s who is not bootstrapping his life, especially not aiming for a $20 gift card.* Well, I did, and here is why: While procrastinating – it happens to the best of us – in-between important and time-sensitive client workshop preparation tasks, the following E-Mail popped up in my ‘Everything Else’ area of my Inbox (yes, it accurately landed on the opposite side of my ‘Important’ E-Mails):
They got me with the squirrel.
And the time-sensitive part.
So, nuts I went.
I went nuts not to find that silly acorn, well that too, but over the genius, or the team of geniuses, who were briefed to get people to click-through their Fall Collection of indie food products. Instead of a beautiful collage of their products, or by cramming in as many different products as they can, they created a ‘fallen acorns scavenger hunt’ thereby ensuring people had to click through a lot of their new products thereby familiarizing themselves with a variety of offerings not unlike they would scrolling through an Instagram feed.
I did click on one product (‘brand research – had to make sure it worked before I wrote about it’) and saw an acorn. That’s when my brain switched from ‘marketing technique intrigue’ straight to ‘happy acorns hunt participant.’
If you can get the E-Mail recipient who is the least-likely to partake in a contest, even less likely to engage in reviewing products he is not interested in purchasing at the time (but will likely recall once the holidays are rolling around) to click through your E-Mail and participate in your brand in the middle of a workday, you clearly did something very right.
Back in July, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) launched their way of successfully distracting people from their work by asking them to text them an emoji. The service sends a related art piece of their vast collection in return of you texting ‘send me [insert any emoji, keyword or color of choice]’ to their number (572-51, if you are curious).
Here was my wife’s interaction at the time. I immediately tried it myself.
Intrigued? Of course.
You are not alone. In one single week they received – hold your breath – 2 million texts of people hungry to see art that was relevant to their current mood or personal interest. For the museum, it was an answer to the question ‘How do we get people to see all the art (95% of the collection) we simply can not show on the floors of our museum?’ What they got in return was so much more than interest in art. They created brand awareness, and brand love, (and collected millions of phone numbers) via a simple idea and an auto-reply powered by good data.
It’s time for us to gamify our brand experiences, especially the ones that are being sent via E-Mail to thousands of opted-in customers like it was the case in MOUTH’s acorn hunt example. E-mail has a median return on investment (ROI) of 122% – more than four times higher than other marketing formats, including social media, direct mail, and paid search. Combine that with an audience of hungry, active users that are ready to act, and yet you plug out one templated E-Mail promoting your product after another.
Stop.
Sit back and think about why the recipient would take action.
- Is it a question you provide a ‘must-know’ answer to?
- Is it an ‘act-now’ (and now only) deal?
- Is it a unique gamified experience?
- Is it triggering intrigue, or a feeling of exclusivity, that causes actions?
Send less. Think more. Gain real engagement.
Take a step back from your analytics tools, grab a few fellow team members, a conference room, and a highlighter and take over the good old whiteboard. Your ROI will soar and your brand will thank you for not being a spam brand, but an engaging brand.
Let’s thank a bunch of acorns and emojis for that.
*Side note to that acorns hunt E-Mail example: Getting a $20 gift card for a minimum $100 order, so a 20% Off Your Next Order ‘gift’ is a rather sad incentive (why not truly give $20 gift cards?) that can quickly turn potential fan excitement to immediate bummer brand reclusive. I noticed that after my hunt was over.
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Fabian Geyrhalter is the Principal of FINIEN, creating clarity for brand transformations.
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