Welcome to today’s episode where we explore the magic of branding with Jon Davids, author of Marketing Superpowers: Build a brand so good that getting customers feels like magic and branding expert. Jon’s book promises methods to transform marketing into a natural by-product of a beloved brand. We’ll dive into his strategies and frameworks that turn attention into sales and strangers into fans.
Jon Davids is the Founder & CEO of Influicity, helping brands grow through the secrets of community marketing.
Resources
Get a copy of Jon David’s book, Marketing Superpowers: Build a Brand So Good That Getting Customers Feels Like Magic: https://jondavids.com/marketing-superpowers-book/
Influicity website: https://www.influicity.com
Register for the Medallia CX Day webinar: Building Loyalty: How Top Brands Create Forever Customers with CX – https://bit.ly/3M7dkQM
Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstrom
Don’t miss a thing: get the latest episodes, sign up for our newsletter and more: https://www.theagilebrand.show
Check out The Agile Brand Guide website with articles, insights, and Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://www.agilebrandguide.com
The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by TEKsystems. Learn more here: https://www.teksystems.com/versionnextnow
The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. https://www.missinglink.company
Transcript
Note: This was AI-generated and only lightly edited.
Greg Kihlstrom:
Welcome to today’s episode, where we’re going to explore the magic of branding with Jon Davids, branding expert and author of Marketing Superpowers. Build a brand so good that getting customers feels like magic. Jon’s book promises methods to transform marketing into a natural byproduct of a beloved brand. We’re going to dive deep into his strategies and frameworks that turn attention into sales and strangers into fans. Jon, welcome to the show. Greg, thanks for having me here today. Yeah, looking forward to talking about this with you. First, why don’t we get started? If you don’t mind giving a little background as well as you know, what what inspired you to write the book?
Jon Davids: Yeah, I’ve been figuring out different ways to arbitrage traffic on the internet since college. I started my first business when I was about 18 years old in college. And really figuring that out was about figuring out where the traffic was on the internet, how to capture it, how to monetize it. I did that with the early internet portals. Then I did it with YouTube back when that was just getting started. And I’ve been doing it ever since. Influencers, podcasts, et cetera. And now with marketing superpowers, I’ve sort of put it into a playbook so that businesses, small and large, can take these same strategies and put them to work in their business.
Greg Kihlstrom: Great, great, well, yeah, let’s dive in here. So we’re gonna start with talking about turning attention into sales. So in the book, you have a framework for converting every click into a revenue opportunity. Can you talk a little bit about this framework, outline the approach and explain how businesses can implement it to maximize revenue from every interaction?
Jon Davids: The main framework in the book is called the movement formula. And essentially what I put forward is that the best brands in the world create movements. And a movement can actually be distilled down to a fairly straightforward three-step formula. It starts with a unifying belief. So what is that core belief that everybody can rally behind or that at least your believers can rally behind? Then you’ve got your faith builders, and that’s everything from the experts who back you up, to the books that are written to back you up, to the testimonials, the reviews, the rituals, all the things you can do. I go into a lot of detail on faith drivers in the book, and how humans connect to movements. And then the third step is action. If people believe in you, they’re rallying behind you, they have faith in the movement, they wanna take action. And in the case of a business, and we’ve seen this time and time again, it is sales, subscriptions, sustainable business growth. And so the key to turning the movement into action is really just making it a obvious choice. Hey, if you believe this, and this is how you feel about it, then the action is kind of a natural conclusion to that. that whole process. Yeah. Yeah.
Greg Kihlstrom: And you know, one powerful tool to be able to do that and, and to really get people hooked is using stories, right. To, um, to help a very powerful tool and marketing as, as many probably know, can, can you describe the critical story that brands need to tell to turn strangers into fans and sometimes their biggest fans, you know, what, what elements does the story need to include to ensure it resonates deeply with the audience?
Jon Davids: The most important story and I think the one that a lot of brands miss large and small is the origin story. So the most powerful movies, for example, the most powerful stories, the characters that we remember and feel closest to, we know how they started, we know how they turned into who they are. And the origin story is what a lot of folks miss. The example I give is If I’m selling pasta sauce in a grocery store, I’m just selling pasta sauce in a grocery store. But if I tell you a story about how I was growing up on a farm, and my grandma used to make this delicious pasta sauce, and I have memories of music playing, and we’d all play in the backyard, and then we’d come in for dinner together, and I want to bring that same pasta experience to your home, that’s a much more powerful story. And so in the book, I go into this formula. I call it the Originate formula, the eight steps to the perfect origin story. And you can turn anybody from something that’s very, very simple to maybe you’re offering plumbing services or a travel agency, all the way to the most exotic, fun things, you can create a very powerful origin story. And making that happen is critical because if you don’t have an origin story, you’ve missed the opportunity from the very beginning to create that bond with your customer.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, and to dive into that just a little bit more, you know, I think there’s some listening out there probably that are like, Yeah, you know that I know some great origin stories, and that’s for somebody else. But you know, what would you say to those that are, you know, kind of skeptical about that and be like, Well, I don’t really have that kind of story.
Jon Davids: So in the book, I give the example of, so my favorite origin story, I don’t know about yours, Greg, my favorite is actually Batman. I love the origin story of Batman. Christopher Nolan’s movie, Batman Begins, phenomenal origin story, and every superhero has one. And then in the book, I basically go through the formula, the originate formula, and I put Batman in there. And then in the very next chapter, I say, hey, let’s take the most boring person we can think about. Let’s take this character who’s a travel agent. She just books travel to go on your vacation. Let’s make her origin story as good as Batman’s. And I go step by step, and I make it happen. And the point of that is, the more boring the product, or I should say, and I use boring in a loving way, the more simple the product you’re selling, the more you need an origin story to decommoditize and actually stand out. Small businesses actually, especially in like, you go to a farmer’s market, or you look at the back of a package, somebody who’s making something in their basement and selling it with love and care, they actually have fantastic origin stories. But a lot of people want to sort of bypass that step. And the reason I called the book Marketing Superpowers and not Average Marketing is because I want people to have a superpower and to go into the market and just have this incredible relationship. And without a story, you just have nothing.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, no, that’s that’s great. Another thing you talk about in the book is this idea of, I mean, essentially charging more for the for the same product, but, you know, enhancing product value perception. Can you talk a little bit about this and the strategy behind it?
Jon Davids: Yeah, I go into detail on the product ladder and the idea behind that in the action step. So again, we have the unifying belief, the faith and the action. And in the action step, what I tried to get across is when people are really in love with your brand and they believe in what you’re doing, They actually want more from you, they want more value, and they’re willing to open their wallets and pay up in return. And oftentimes, the act of actually paying for something gives it more meaning, gives it more value. We see this with designer brands and luxury brands, of course. If you think about the example, I just wrote this story on LinkedIn about the cruise industry, so cruise ships. I love going on cruises. And I know that you could go on a cruise for 800 bucks. You could go on that same cruise ship and pay 2000 bucks. You can go on that cruise ship and pay $15,000. And all the cruise ship is doing is they’re laddering up the value and in return, they’re laddering up what they’re charging you. And it doesn’t have to be anything crazy or exotic, you know, something as simple as, hey, you can tour the galley, or you can have a better seat. All the things that the tour industry does, in fact, travel and tourism does this exceptionally well. Airlines do it, hotels, cruises. But a lot of industries kind of have like a one-size-fits-all, or we’re gonna cap people what they can spend with us. People, if they’re really into what you’re doing, they’re willing to spend more, and there’s a lot more value that you can give them in return.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, well, and I would imagine that also, people like to share their experiences with others, right? So it’s it also gives an opportunity to, it almost seems like a reinforcing kind of wheel there of, you know, you offer people more, they’re more likely to share it, because they’re sharing something a little more unique than the, let’s say, average experience, right?
Jon Davids: Yeah, and they wear it like a badge of honor. They experience it, they feel better about it, and they end up buying more from you because they had such great feelings the first time around.
Greg Kihlstrom: Another thing you talk about in the book is just the, you know, building social credibility and which, again, kind of to that last point is is critical and not only getting people to talk about you, but to have true credibility and and things. Can you talk a little bit about that? I think there’s 10 faith drivers that you mentioned in the book. And, you know, how how can businesses apply this to to build trust and enhance reputation?
Jon Davids: Faith drivers are critical because once you have people that believe in you, we see this with social media influencers. A lot of these strategies actually come from my decade plus working with the biggest YouTubers and celebrities in the world, seeing how they do what they do. And faith drivers are a big piece of it, just reinforcing the same message over and over again. The one big takeaway I would give you from the faith drivers, you could read all about them in the book, but the best faith drivers come from other people. So anything you say about your brand, it means something and it’s important, but the minute you have other people saying it, you just multiply the effect of it by five, 10x, because all of a sudden, the bias that’s naturally built into all of us to say we’re so fantastic, when other people say it, it’s way more powerful. We see this in reviews. If you can say, honestly, we have, over 1000 five-star reviews, that is an amazing faith driver. If you can say, hey, this book was written about us or this study was done, those are sort of where you get the most. And we see this also with user-generated content on social, influencer marketing. When you can have other people expressing your message for you, it goes way further than anything you could say.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, I mean, do you think that, I mean, certainly I think a lot of businesses know and understand the value of reviews, but it’s still, you know, it’s, it’s so easy to just. post something kind of self-promotional and stuff like that. It’s a little bit of a hurdle to get people talking about you. Do you think that most businesses are kind of taking the easier route and just kind of posting stuff but falling flat? Like should they be focusing more effort on building whether it’s user-generated content reviews than they’re currently doing?
Jon Davids: It’s the most overlooked part of the DNA of marketing departments that I see. Easy, easy misses. I’ll give you an example. We have a client who’s a major national retailer. And I went into one of their stores to buy something for myself. And I looked at the receipt. And I noticed on the receipt, there was no call to action about going to Instagram, going to TikTok, leaving a review on Google. And so I went to the CMO of the company and I said, you’re handing out, what, 3,000, 4,000 receipts a day. Why are you not saying, talk about us on social media? Everyone looks at their receipt the minute they complete their purchase. It’s such an easy piece of real estate. Building in into the DNA, into the fabric of your marketing and the operations, the marketing operations, getting people to talk about your brand is actually not that hard to do. Most brands just completely overlook it.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, well, and is this a I mean, I think I know the answer to this, but like, you know, is this a solely the responsibility of a marketing team? Like, how does an organization think about this, that that is successful? You know, is it is it throughout the entire organization? And if so, you know, how do you not even necessarily get started? Because, you know, a lot of a lot of people listening to this are at fairly large organizations, I’m sure they have some kind of components of this, but Obviously, not nearly enough. So, you know, where, where, how do you build a better kind of infrastructure to do this?
Jon Davids: The toughest job of the modern CMO is actually getting the entire organization to function as a marketing organization. There’s a lot of companies out there that are primarily sales organizations, of course, a lot that are primarily technical organizations. And I’m completely biased because I’m a marketer and we work with a lot of the of the big CMOs. The reality is, if you can get your business to think more like a marketing organization and do these things, which once you do them, they’re done. Once you get that little template out on your website, once you get that stamp on your receipt that says, follow us on Instagram and leave a review on Google, it’s done. You set it and forget it. As a marketer and as a CMO in a large organization, being the advocate for, hey, we need to do these things early and often because time is going to go by and we’re going to miss that opportunity. And all of our competitors, especially the small, nimble startups that are going to eat our lunch tomorrow, they’re doing all these things because the marketer actually has a chance to speak directly to the CEO, they get something done that afternoon. So yeah, it really is incumbent on a modern CMO to think about how to orient the organization to get this done.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, well, and to use the startup analogy, it’s like startups just don’t have the resources. They kind of have to do it. It’s almost necessity, and yet a Fortune 500 company, they’ve got a marketing budget and they can Kind of throw dollars a lot of again talking at their audience and stuff So, you know, it’s almost I mean, would you say it’s almost like kind of going back to well What if what if we didn’t have just dollars to kind of throw at a problem?
Jon Davids: You know, I’m so sympathetic to folks that have way too much money and not enough time. And I mean that because, again, we’ve been working with these clients for over a decade. So I understand what it’s like to say, listen, I could do this and this and this. Or I could just take $275,000 and the problem goes away. And I understand that. I do a lot of corporate training these days. I go into big companies and I sort of talk about the book. And the biggest takeaway that I have from the conversations is there are a whole lot of big problems and a lot of big fish to fry. You have quarterly earnings. You’ve got to worry about market share issues. These things are much more fundamental and foundational. So if you are in the earlier stages, let’s say you’re a 50-person, 100-person company, you can implement these things early and it becomes part of the DNA. If you’re already a thousand plus person company, it’s a bit of a harder lift and I completely am sympathetic to that. But it’s also something where once you get it done, once you get that special project done and you start implementing some of the strategies and making them part of the way you operate, the results really over the course of a few months, a few quarters kind of speak for themselves.
Greg Kihlstrom: yeah yeah another topic you you highlight in the book um and i i like this one it’s you know making buying inevitable Having done more sales than I wish I had to do in my career, I wish this was always the case. Can you talk a little bit about this? You talk about creating a scenario where buying your product is the only logical decision for consumers. Talk a little bit about this and how should an organization approach this?
Jon Davids: Something really magical happens when you are or when you become an influencer. And I’ve talked to enough of them at the highest levels, the biggest podcasters, the biggest YouTubers, the biggest folks in Hollywood. What starts to happen is that you get to a position where all the people that you’re trying to sell to already know about you. They’ve heard you speak at conferences. They’ve been following you on Instagram and LinkedIn. They know the message. And so then when you come in the room, all the normal selling that usually has to happen, hey, here’s who I am. Here’s my organization. Check out my deck. It’s like, yeah, we already know that. We’re talking to you because we want to do business with you. And that actually happens when you create a brand for yourself, a marketing superpower, as I call it. And this is kind of the whole point of the book and the magic pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that I hope a lot of readers actually get to, or at least pursue, is that when you get to that position where a small group of people really, really know who you are and know you and like you and trust you, the sales process totally changes. You can sort of throw your sales books out the window. Here’s how I do a discovery call. Here’s how I onboard. They already know who you are. They already want to do business with you. And it becomes inevitable.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. So for those out there that are, you know, it’s not at that level yet, you know, but and even even brands that are, I would say that are well known, but not, let’s say their superpowers are not quite evident to all, you know, where do they get started with this? You know, what’s what are some first steps that they can take to make that that buying step more more inevitable?
Jon Davids: So the first step is figuring out the unifying belief and which is it’s not a mission statement. It’s what is it that our core customer really wants to believe in or does believe in or what trend exists right now that we can latch on to. There are plenty of examples of this. Whole Foods did this with the natural and organic movement early on. Tesla did this. There’s plenty of examples of companies latching onto a movement and essentially making their brand a part of this larger thing. So the first thing I would say is, why are people actually buying from us today? Is there a cultural piece that we can latch onto, a social movement, a technological movement? And then from there, figuring out what are those mechanisms, the faith drivers, the content cadence, that we can speak to them and actually start to build this community. Ultimately, what you want is a customer community that is believing in you, that wants to do business with you, that wants to advocate for you. But it really starts with a core belief and very, very small steps at the beginning. And then, you know, again, the entire playbook is laid out in marketing superpowers, but you’ve got to start with something that’s digestible and easy to do.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, great. Well, Jon, this has been great conversation and definitely recommend that everybody picks up the book and to learn more. Before we wrap up, though, what are you seeing as far as future trends or just even current trends that brands and marketers should be paying attention to? What’s to come in the months and perhaps years to come?
Jon Davids: We’re seeing a lot happening in AI, specifically influencer AI, the emergence of AI characters that are essentially what I call the modern version of Bugs Bunny and Homer Simpson. These are AI characters. So I’d encourage brands to think about influencers and how they interact with AI and how they can create characters and memes for themselves using AI in the influencer space. So that’s something we’re paying a lot of attention to. And the other thing is really just the continued evolution of everybody’s moving to YouTube and TikTok and LinkedIn and podcasts. So the new cable news channels are podcasts, the new broadcast television is YouTube. And I think that is probably accelerating faster and faster every year. And so we’re paying a lot of attention to how we get our clients onto these platforms and make the most of them.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, one follow up on that, actually. So you know, because you mentioned AI, and, you know, certainly, it’s a lot easier to create content with AI, not, not always great content, but it’s easier to create it. But you know, some of some of the platforms that you’re mentioning, you know, whether it’s whether it’s podcasts, or, you know, making great videos and stuff like that, it still takes a lot of, of strategy and human effort. Where do you see the balance between AI for content generation and good old content strategy and stuff like that?
Jon Davids: We’re seeing it as a co-pilot. So I do not at all, and I mean at all, I don’t trust AI, any tool out there right now to actually put out a finished piece of content representing a brand. It is a co-pilot. It’s there to help you generate ideas, help you think through ideas, help you workshop, generate new concepts, ways of looking at things. So I would say that’s where it sits. Actually getting it to the place where you could create an AI thing and put it out. We’re not there yet. I haven’t seen it get there, but it’s moving very, very quickly. So talk to me in a year from now, and I might have a very different answer.
