Tribal Marketing

The Distiller is a bunch of highly talented entrepreneurs who are eager to encourage and mentor one another. Visited these fellows at http://thedistiller.org/. I visited their den recently…see photo below...you guessed right, it’s the presidential plane…they hire it for their think-sessions.


The only connection to earth is the telephone on the wall that dials 111 automatically as you pick the handset up…just incase too much thinking blows the fuse. Two things that they take on their mission are Coca Cola and Dominos. Coca Cola spends $40 million on marketing in New Zealand…what a price to get into these think tanks.

They will take anyone with a smart idea on the thinking mission. Jason of pocketsmith standing in front, next to me, is the captain. Get in touch with him to join the next mission. Scott president of OCOM and wannabe entrepreneur and Jaroslav of VirtuosoOnline ia a budding entrepreneur who went on the last thinking mission. They returned a bit tipsy from zero gravity…went home leaning on one another.


I went to speak to them about Tribalisation and living well, a notion drawn from the life of people from the Mediterranean region. Like the Mediterranean diet, known for good health and wellbeing, their tribal way of life is storming the commerce world.

Vargo and Lush wrote the first article on Service Dominate Logic (SD Logic). The articles reach journals still are conceptual. I believe academics are working hard to produce a SD Logic version of the 4Ps. The Kotlerian 4Ps framework was conceived under the product dominate logic. Can we cut and pasted this framework to the service dominate logic? You be the judge.


Being true to SD Logic, the variables of value to marketer ought to be from market, that is, variables pertaining to customers or the market. To be consistent with the SD Logic notion, the word “market” should be replaced with the word “society” or “tribe”. A SD Logic marketing framework called Tribal marketing is emerging in the literature. Variables of this framework are derived from the structure and activities of the tribal way of life of people in the Mediterranean region. My attempts to understand Tribal marketing caused me to re-discovering myself and the relationship I have with my own tribe. Without saying anything further, you can see that developing and maintaining relationship is a essence of Tribal marketing.

Will talk about relationship next time...