Artist vs Artisan
Lies About Loyalty
Brand loyalty might just be the stupidest thing you could focus on this year.
This statement isn’t as much about branding as it is about loyalty. You are reading a story about loyalty — the type of loyalty you offer up every day and probably have never thought about deeply.
Who is Seth Godin?
If you don’t know the answer to this question, you’re missing out.
Seth means a lot to me. He has influenced many of my critical life decisions and guided me with the right words at the right time. However, we’ve never met.
Lucky for you, Seth is still writing his daily blog over at sethgodin.com. Nearly every day I will be in conversation with someone where I will quote Seth from one of his blog posts or books. It invariably starts something like:
I recall the other day that Seth wrote about…
What’s interesting is my connection to Seth. Although we have never met, I feel like I know how he would interpret most situations I encounter. It’s the classic ‘What would Seth do?’ test.
Seth is one of the guys who I follow. My bet is that you have someone whose work means a lot to you. I’ve probably never heard from, listened to, or watched them, but they mean a lot to you.
Perhaps they are a Youtuber, podcast host or blogger. Maybe they write great open-source code on Github or design social media graphics using Canva.
By now you should have a sense of what I mean when I speak of loyalty:
Loyalty is offered when we trade our attention for an artist’s work and they consistently deliver a delightful experience.
However, this story isn’t about your loyalty to those you follow. No, this is a story about your audience and those who are loyal to you.
Brand Loyalty: The Artisan
Before we walk in the shoes of an Artist, we need to understand who is an Artisan. Traditionally we would think of an artisan as someone who is a craftsperson, making the highest quality bespoke goods by hand.
With this primitive definition in mind, I think the word can easily be extended to:
Thoughtfully architecting your product in such a way that creates a valuable asset is work of an entrepreneurial artisan.
A brand can start as a single product or a business, e.g Dropbox or Apple. In either case, the brand creates promises to their customers who choose to exchange money and time for a product or experience. If the promise meets or exceeds expectations, brand loyalty grows. Otherwise, it decays.
In either case, the artisans who architected the valuable combination of product, team, customers and shareholders (e.g Drew Houston and Steve Jobs) don’t actually matter anymore. The media likes to think they do, but the brand may be worth a million times more than the individual who created the brand. In the long run, when Artisans perform they have the opportunity to do it all over again.
Contrast this with the artist. The artist builds a personal reputation that is independent of any specific product or business. Every author is an artist, as are most musicians and film directors. The fundamental difference is this:
Artisans build an asset, Artists are the asset.
What artists can’t do
By definition, you can raise money, grow the asset, sell the asset, and remove yourself when you are an artisan, but not when you are an artist.
Seth Godin can’t sell Seth’s Blog to someone else, collect his cheque and walk away. Tim Ferriss can’t sell the Tim Ferriss Show and not show up to host his podcast. The audience shows up for the artist, not the brand.
How often do you see artists trying to create a brand, yet doing the work of an artist? Whilst not impossible, the strategy of building a scalable business (by an artisan) is so fundamentally different to building a connection with your audience (an artist), a futile attempt is very likely to produce neither an artist nor artisan.
When you are an artist, your individual products become less valuable over time. Pat Flynn might have been able to sell SmartPassiveIncome.com in the first few years, but now the community is too connected to Pat to pass over to someone else.
I’ve spoken with Pat a few times and I know this is by design — he owns his community.
Whilst the artisan might have the long run strategy to build, measure, learn (and repeat), the artist only has two concerns: make better art, connect and own the audience.
Owning the relationship with each and every follower is the work of an artist. As these relationships grow stronger, the value of the artist’s enterprise falls, and the possibilities to grow personal income increase exponentially.
Interesting.
What does this mean for loyalty?
The entire dialogue around loyalty is focused on brand loyalty — the loyalty of consumers to make consistent tradeoffs between products, in favour of your brand of course. The ways we capture user data, determine value and ultimately make strategic product and marketing decisions for brands fundamentally breaks the rules of personal loyalty — that is, the loyalty between an artist and their fans.
The behaviours and emotions in expressing loyalty to our real friends are different to those we would show to our favourite fashion, technology and automotive brands. However the behaviours and emotions we show towards artists we admire are fundamentally the same as those towards our friends.
Over time, artists become our friends.
Have you ever used the first name of a blogger, Youtuber, musician or author when discussing them with friends? Of course you have. Never before have we felt so close to those who don’t even know who we are.
Artists are more than their art
Content creators are artists. Whether you write a blog, create youtube videos, host a podcast or draw illustrations, you are an artist. No doubt you have been fed the tools, tactics and strategies that artisans use to grow their business and expect these same tools to work for you. This isn’t always the case.
Loyalty is typically described in terms of repeated purchase behaviour by your customers. As an artist, purchasing may not be your only indicator of loyalty. Sometimes focusing on purchase behaviour alone may lead you to attract the wrong people into your community. Perhaps consider the following behaviours of loyalty:
- Those in your audience who listen and take action on your advice.
- Fans who contribute testimonials, creating social proof of your validity as an artist.
- Followers who think about who in their personal network needs to experience your art and makes an introduction or referral to your work.
Measuring loyalty through these indicators can be a tough task. Most analytics systems are now just beginning to grow in flexibility to enable us to track and measure behaviours that extend beyond purchases. Another Medium story will dive into exactly how this can be done.
This story is one of a collection of Medium stories in the Own Your Followers publication. If you enjoyed this story, recommend it below and follow the publication to read more stories like this one.
