Distilling the Value

If you don’t have a compelling or differentiated core value, nothing much in this book really matters. No matter how smart your tactics are and how well executed they may be, without that core value a Honey Pot strategy just won’t work for you.

A Honey Pot strategy can be a wild success when you have a clear and compelling core value, but it’s tough to build an online ecosystem around nothing other than an empty positioning statement. The amazing thing is lots of clients come to us with that compelling core but don’t even know they have it. We love those opportunities when we can help unlock hidden potential.

My agency, like many others, has one hard and fast rule about clients: we won’t work with companies that lack a solid core value because we believe an online ecosystem can thrive only if it is built around that core.

It’s important to find your core. If you’re really lucky, it’s the story that’s told in the marketing collateral. When it’s not, the best thing to do is to strip away all the marketing jargon and see what’s left. What was the spark that started the company? What was the founder’s intention? Sometimes when you get back to that, all of the elements you need to communicate the company’s core value readily bubble to the surface.

Maybe the company founder was a scientist who needed precision lab equipment to ensure the fewest possible variables in experiments, so he started making his own because he couldn’t find anything on the market that was good enough. There’s the story behind a major equipment supplier.

Maybe the founder was a baseball player frustrated that he couldn’t bend his pinky when wearing his mitt. He just wanted a mitt that was a little more supple so he could feel the ball a bit more. There’s the story behind a sporting goods manufacturer.

Sometimes the core value is at the heart of what drove everything before there was any profit. It’s okay if the founders were looking for some financial reward, but what was their real motivation?

Were they trying to solve a major problem faced by a loved one? Were they fascinated by an idea for an invention? The truer the story, the more it will help you communicate the core. If somebody was just searching for a dollar, they could have gotten that dollar any number of ways. So why did they choose this way?

You want to look for the heart so you’ll be able to decide when value’s being added in the right places. Everything you do to build the online ecosystem should be an enhancement of that core value – and not just an effort to get more traffic or higher conversion rates. Those things may result, but they shouldn’t be the primary focus.

Agencies typically go through some kind of “discovery” process with new clients. We try to elicit the business goals. We review what the positioning statement is and what the messaging has been to date. We break down the business units into teams, then we interview, research and summarize. The problem is, the usual discovery process doesn’t always yield results that are honest. When an organization has been telling itself a particular story for a long time, staffers may come to believe it – even if it’s not quite true.

Often, you can figure out what the core value really is by finding the passion in an organization. That’s why we sometimes pay more attention to the intangibles during discovery sessions. When do the CEO’s eyes light up? When do the chief marketing officer’s hands start moving enthusiastically? Sometimes the best place to look isn’t even within the organization. What do the company’s customers have to say about the core value of the company? Are there feedback mechanisms? Can you intuit anything from metrics that may have been gathered? Can you put some street teams out there? Can you make the call to a friend who happens to be a loyal user of the company’s product? Why does she use it? What problem does the product solve for her? That’s another way to find the heart.

But what happens if there really is no hidden heart? If you can’t get down to a core value that you believe in – or one that you at least believe can succeed in the marketplace – then you have some serious work to do.

Figure out how to improve or enhance what you’ve got. Work with your R&D folks. Find out who’s most closely aligned from a cultural perspective and work with them to enhance your core value. Take responsibility for making that product better, making that service better and making the real heart come through.