Whether it’s being part of a family, a circle of friends, a neighbourhood, a company, a nation, or even a band club, humans have this intrinsic necessity to belong.
Since we’re all part of communities ourselves in one way or another, there should be no doubt in the power this sense of belonging has, especially when it comes to marketing.
For example, consider how a world-class musician can round up his/her fans and create hype around a new album even before releasing it to the public.
In his book, Tribes: We Need You To Lead Us, renowned marketing expert Seth Godin focuses on the power of tribes and their inevitability. How we could (and should) be leaders and what it takes to create a movement.
A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, to a leader and to an idea.
Godin says that you only need two things to form a tribe: a shared interest and a means to communicate and that what separates a tribe from a crowd is the presence of a leader and an effective way to talk to each other.
Nowadays, it’s even easier to form a tribe with the advent of technology but, at the core of this, there needs to be a sense of caring. Individuals who are part of a tribe need to genuinely care about something and this common interest is what connects them all.
It doesn’t matter how small your tribe is, Godin explains. A tiny but motivated group of people is much better than a big bunch of people with a weak connection. Godin mentions Kevin Kelly’s popular article, wherein he explains that you need only 1,000 true fans to become “successful”.
These are the people who will travel for miles just to see you. These are the ones whom you can serve to your best ability and, in return, they’ll be the most loyal and devoted fans you can ever have.
Moreover, in the online universe, we have what’s called a ‘niche’ and you’ve probably heard of the saying “The riches are in the niches”. In other words, when you try to appeal to everyone, you end up appealing to no one. This is also why effective social media strategies shouldn’t focus solely on numbers and ‘growing your following’. It’s much better to be concerned about engagement.
The political bottom line is that you cannot appeal to all tribes at the same time, all the time
Godin emphasises that society is craving for people to lead, to spread ideas and to be remarkable.
In a way, leaders are actually heretics because they upset the status quo, they lead people in a different direction and they make and say things worth making a remark about.
To be great leaders, Godin says, we need to be more like a thermostat, able to change and dictate the conversation, as opposed to a thermometer which only tells or repeats what’s out there.
For this, leaders need to be willing to be wrong. Godin says: “The secret of leadership is simple: Do what you believe in. Paint a picture. Go there. People will follow.”
According to Godin, tribes are just waiting to be turned into movements.
While tribes start through a shared idea, it turns into a movement when their common interest becomes a goal they are passionate about reaching, when it becomes their rallying cry and when their idea transforms into a narrative they believe in and is something that’s bigger than themselves alone.
If we’re to be leaders of these tribes, we need to make it easy for them. There needs to be fewer limitations to communicate with one another and even to recruit more people to join the tribe. We need to clarify who the tribe is for and what it represents, as well as who it’s not for and the status quo it’s trying to work against.
Godin says that we need to be transparent about our goals and intentions and we need to encourage, support and empower our tribe.
In the end, we get to choose the people or tribe that we want to lead anyway but always remember that “people are most easily led where they wanted to go all along”.
We all have heard the recurring narrative of Malta being divided in two main tribes and how dreadful that is. Indeed, it is. However, look at, say, the festas as one indicator of the need people have to be part of a tribe. In reality, there are numerous other tribes in Malta: the hunters, the environmentalists, the pro-life and the pro-choice, just to mention a few.
The political bottom line is that you cannot appeal to all tribes at the same time, all the time. As I had written in this newspaper, tutti frutti ideology doesn’t work.
Alan Xuereb is a lawyer-linguist and the author of Reflections about the Common Good.