Marketing at a start-up: why seeing your brand tribe is important and why it can be tricky to do so

Photo by Jehyun Sung on Unsplash

When I was trying to learn more about how to build a brand and launch a product one of the ideas I kept coming across was the importance to find your tribe: a group of people who share similar passions and habits, a group that that would share a language to talk about the worlds — e.g. would they call something that is new digital or modern or novel? — and a group that would share stories in similar ways and channels — e.g. would they share updates about their kids’ birthdays on WhatsApp stories, or would prefer to visit their neighbor face to face or they would rather opt to create an event on Facebook? If you’re launching a new line of running shoes, your tribe could be the die-hard-runners who run every day and won’t miss any running events. They are the early enthusiasts and can spend hours talking about running gears and gadgets: you will find them at any running event and diving straight into a conversation about running will make them very happy.

The advantage of finding a tribe for your brand is that it helps to understand who the product is for, how they talk about it and the language and framing you want to use to spark the light in their eyes when they see your products. That made a lot of sense to me but there was only one problem: if you’re launching a product like mattresses — as we did — there is no evident tribe so who do you starting talking to? This is what I learned trying to answer that question

1. No specific tribe? For some products, the tribe is not self-evident: there are no die-hard mattresses enthusiasts, everyone uses a mattress every day but that would rarely fall into hobbies or passions. There are no public meetups or forums to chat about mattresses or quality of sleep and sleep happens in the most private space: hardly a place for hoping to meet and connect your tribe. But that’s ok. You can think of another group that shares the same passion and aspirations, that uses your product yet wouldn’t put it in their passions bucket. After some thinking, we thought that young families starting a new chapter in their lives with a big dream for themselves and their babies could be our tribe. They were no enthusiast of mattresses in the same way marathon-runners would be about new running shoes but they did use the product we were launching — and there lied the opportunity for us. They had the same features of a tribe with common passions, common dreams, a similar place to meet; they just lacked the enthusiasm about the product: we could come to the rescue to bring the spark about sleep in their life
2. How do you define the tribe? One thing that I struggled to figure out at the beginning were the details to define our tribe: were the young families we had in mind within a specific age bracket or they were just young in spirit and attitude in life (I’m 32 but my best friend claims that I have the same energy and bouncy nature of her 2-year-old baby)? What jobs did they have: were they self-made young hustler entrepreneurs or were they working in a big company? A friend of mine helped me to think more clearly about the question: he told me “ask yourself what am I going to do with this extra piece of information? if you don’t have a clear answer you probably don’t need that information now.” Knowing where they work is not a must-have piece of info because what you look for is the dream spirit and that can come in different fashions. But if you don’t know how the tribe meets and spends their free time that is probably an actionable piece of information you want to know because it’ll inform how and where they could meet your brand.
3. Can this tribe connect with other tribes? One of the advantages of keeping a tribe in mind is that your first tribe will spread the word to another tribe so that your brand goes from early adopters to the early majority. One question on my mind was: how do you know in foresight if that will happen? If you make a movie the move-enthusiasts that are passionate about watching and talking about movies will be the first tribe you think of. By that definition, movie-critics would fall into that category and after watching that movie they will connect with other tribes. As some movies have shown however the critics-tribe has very little in common with the layman-movie-enthusiast or occasional-cinema-goers tribe: you can displease the first tribe but just be ok with the other ones, the first tribe hated Bohemian Rapsody but the other tribes loved it. I don’t have a clear answer for this point as it’s hard to know in foresight if the young dreamers’ families will spread the words to other families. But you can keep an eye on it and see if the assumptions you make about tribes hold true in the real world.

When thinking about building a brand and crafting its message do think about your tribe, don’t panic if the tribe is not evident — there lies the opportunity -, focus on the actionable piece of information you want to know about the tribe you’re talking to and keep an eye if the early-enthusiast tribe are in sync with the other tribes that you hope one day will connect with you.

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by +424,678 people.

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