Finding, sharing, igniting and harnessing passions in 2015 to drive business growth.
Learning is inspiring and infinite and open-ended. The best learning happens every day. And when you discover something new, it can ignite a passion inside you. It can be fun, fascinating, inspiring, it's ignites your desire for exploration, it poses questions and stokes your lust for curiosity. And it can create a firestorm in your heart. When you find your passion, you feel energized, alive, your endorphins fire. You feel purpose, motivated and failure is not an option. Once smitten by the bug of passion and you dig in, a firestorm of passion can build in your belly.
So how do people come into contact with passions? It's not easy to know what you're passionate about. It's also bloody hard to find what really clicks for you.
Most likely you hear about the passion from people you know and respect, people who influence you or people who share opinions that you trust and admire.
In the old days thoughtful writers or great adventurers inspired our passions. Most people lived their passions through others. Want to be a pirate? Hollywood enabled you to watch a good movie and escape to your dreams and passions.
But now movies aren't enough. We want it all. We want to be part of bigger things and we want to realize and live our passions. Here is where brands and companies can help. By crystalizing passions and curating them, brands can offer people the opportunity to be passionate, to be a part of something bigger and for you, to do something that makes you feel great.
When a brand or someone behind a brand says something that startles us we respond, especially when it ignites a passion inside of us. When we hear "Hey, you, yes, you... Here's an idea that we care about and you might too," our ears perk up and we listen, especially when it touches a nerve. It's not about the company product because we are not really looking to be sold. We are looking to be inspired, we are dying for passions that inspire us in our daily lives. That enrich our experience on earth. If you are a business the product must be at the center of a movement architecture but in addition to the product, what gets people almost feverish about sharing something with their friends? Through this exchange of ideas, we are at first curious and then potentially smitten by passion. A movement can do this. Movement marketing can connect a passion between a brand and people, and by doing so motivate them like wild fire.
When I wrote the book Uprising, I curated 50 movements that had been started by companies big and small, and demonstrated how these movements can generate growth, sales and revenue, and drive share. But what I've realized since the book was published how these movements can drive and inspire incredible passions.
The wisdom of movements is that they curate and inspire passions and thereby drive business growth passionately.
When you think about it, there are two types of marketing movements: Mass participation (where your passionate movement idea is embraced by pop culture) and social movements (where your passionate movement idea actually changes society or culture). Both are ways of connecting and engaging your passion to a wider audience.
From passions we make a short step to business value. The business value of mass engagement by the culture includes earned media (on top of paid media) and deeper penetration, conversion and loyalty through word of mouth. As a result the movement marketing drives greater share.
Movement Marketing is the ignition or passions, the curating of passions, the focusing of passions, and the spread of passions.
Passions that lie behind movements can inspire all sorts of people. When you care about something you inspire others. When you stand for something you motivate others. When you stand against something you act as a catalyst for change, and rally others to do the same.
Consumer brands grow revenue quickly by marketing this way. In the book How Google Works by Eric Schmidt, small groups inside a company -- in this case Google -- are shown to be able to change the world. If you think about the power of passions, this means passionate ideas can lead to a movement within an organization that can change habits, leadership engagement and make the organization more dynamic, more focused around an idea with everyone in that organization more aligned.
Passions are never boring.
How motivating are passions? Let's do a little experiment. After you see this video feel your pulse, see if your heart rate hasn't had an uplift. Even if you're not into Haiti at the moment, see whether you're not thinking a little differently about yourself and in this case Haiti.
Recently I visited Haiti with friends. The person who influenced me to go to Haiti was a friend of Donna Karan, the well-regarded NY designer. Donna is passionate about Haiti. This passion is contagious and spreading like wildfire. It's motivated me and others to dive in and belong. Watch this video >>>