How to Create a Bond Between the Employee and the Company and Make Customers Identify with the Brand? – Dave Birss’s Lecture Within DIDS Conference

Companies have to develop a sense of purpose, meaning, autonomy and constant engagement for their employees, so that they wouldn’t leave. As Dave Birss emphasized during his lecture at the Serbian Internet Domain Day, customers prefer products that they have to work for a little harder. He calls the effort invested in reaching a certain goal friction and considers friction a strong generator of brand value, the press release says. As he pointed out, all companies have an ultimate dream, namely, that their customers love them so much that they would wear their brands and identify with them. Brand loyalty can be achieved by companies’ setting certain goals for customers to achieve, so that they would invest effort and thereby earn their relation to the brand.

– That’s how they develop the sense of being special, of exclusivity, even of belonging to the brand, which releases the happiness hormone and helps develop a long-lasting bond with the brand – Birss explains.

In order to illustrate this, Birss says that people are lazy by nature.

– Once we had to hunt for food, we had to forage for food. It was a pretty hard life. Then we invented farming. You had to tend to your animals, plant your crops and harvest them. The industrial revolution also required certain effort. And in the last three generations or so, we’ve sat down for a living. Are we smarter and how does this affect our brains? We’ve got epidemics of heart disease, lower back pain, because we are sitting down – Birss illustrates.

As he points out, a survey carried out in the UK has shown that, in our lives, we spend as many as 8 years seated and that it has an impact on both out bodies and our mental health.

– Our bodies and our brains are connected and that is why we have to keep moving. Since mobile phones, we have been outsourcing our memories. How many of you have actually memorized a phone number in the last year? What happens when you have basic maths to do? Most people just get out their calculator. The young generation at the moment don’t know how to read maps, because Google Maps is telling us how to get there, reducing our skills. If you love technology, you have to be careful how you use it – he points out.

In what way does friction increase product value?

Research has shown that friction increases product value and sales.

Birss cited the example of a cake mix product in America. The company made a product that didn’t require additional effort. All you had to do was add water, stir it, put it in the oven. It didn’t sell. Why?

– The survey showed that the housewives felt they weren’t doing enough work, that it felt too easy. If you were baking a cake for your family, it was a way of showing your love. The company then removed one of the ingredients, so that it said all you had to do was add water and two eggs. Suddenly, this thing was so popular, because it felt as if there was a bit of work going into it – he clarifies.

How to increase the sales with the help of exclusivity?

Why do people buy expensive watches? They tell the time and the function is largely the same as with any average watch. You’re buying it because it makes you feel more powerful, business-like and authoritative. You buy it for emotional reasons. What makes a product exclusive?

An exclusive product is not necessarily expensive. The very meaning of the word indicates that, in order to make a product exclusive, you have to exclude certain people or groups of people.

– Kylie Jenner is a good example. She is the youngest ever self-made billionaire. She had released a limited-run make-up line and it sold like that, because she had millions of followers on social media. The cosmetics, although not expensive, were available to her followers exclusively. She’s excluding all the people who don’t follow her on social media. Another good example is a hotel company which excludes children. Or belonging to an organization which excludes everyone who has not run 100 marathons – Birss says.

As he further explains, when people make additional effort, they have bigger expectations. Some companies don’t invest in training, so the employees remain average. On the other, hand, some companies provide their employees with additional training and courses, the employees get good and then they might leave. In order to develop inspiration, you need to be engaged in something.

– During the pandemic, people were investing in themselves and learning. People need help with improving themselves. So it’s better not to make things too easy for the customers, friends, or colleagues. That will make them more engaged and connected with the activities they do – Birss concluded in his presentation.

S. Maricic

Serbian Internet Domain Day

DIDS

Dave Birss

Kylie Jenner

brand value

increasing brand value

increasing sales

brand development