Tribalisation of markets

It’s been a while since I posted anything on my blog. I just did a lecture on Tribal marketing to my Internet marketing class. While it is fresh in my head, thought I continue from my previous posting on Tribal marketing.

Tribal marketing is a segmentation exercise based on emotions. It is an incredibly powerful approach for creating tight-knit communities loyal to the emotive cause. Three elements are fundamental for Tribal marketing to be effective. They are 1) chieftain, 2) signs and emblems, and 3) meeting places. Notice I am using tribal terminologies. The nice thing about Tribal marketing is that these elements get established as tribalisation occurs. What’s important is that marketers recognise the elements as they get established and promote them within the tribe.

The role of marketers in Tribal marketing is that of facilitating individuals to get together to form a community. A website can serve in this task. The community grows by members recruiting new members. If the segmentation and targeting are done correctly, the growth of the tribe will be exponential. When the community reaches the size to have chieftains, you will have a stable market. At this stage, you will also notice signs and emblems and meeting places getting established. One example of tribal marketing in New Zealand is Vodafone’s One Tribe - http://www.vodafoneonetribe.co.nz/. Trademe uses many Tribal marketing principles. It will be interesting to find out if that is their marketing strategy.

If what I said so far sounds interesting, recommend reading Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us by Seth Godin.

Next time, will blog about how to achieve business objectives using Tribal marketing – Ciao till then: )

Tribal Marketing 101

Tribal marketing requires a philosophical shift to the way we view our environment. To establish this foundational requirement of tribal marketing, I will first write about marketing philosophies. I can hear, “not one of those boring lectures”. Read on, particular if you are struggling with your business; this will change you in to a success story.

In the marketing literature we observe an evolution of marketing philosophies starting with the product orientation, followed by the sales orientation and then the market orientation. We are currently experiencing a domination of services within the marketing orientation. Academics call it “Service Dominate Logic”. The name is charming not because it is catchy but for the fact it ousted the Kolterian view of marketing. No more marketing dogmas that prevent us from thinking “outside the square”, what all marketers should be doing. In fact, that is what I teach my marketing students – to think outside the square. Presto - see what we have because of thinking outside the square - experience marketing, relationship marketing, service marketing and tribal marketing.

Most people fail to see the value of these philosophies. Many put them aside, thinking they belong to academia – not so. In simple terms, the philosophy determines the way a business is set up, that is, the wealth creating activities the business undertakes and the infrastructure required to support the activities. Infrastructure, as we all know, has a direct implication on our financial investment in the business. For this reason, the philosophy we hold is foundational to our business plan. Let me give you an overview of the marketing philosophies.

The marketing age commenced with humans starting to engage in activities intended to accumulate wealth. This age can be broadly divided into pre industrialisation period (prior to the 1920s), industrialisation period (1920 to 1960) and post industrialisation period (1960 to the present time). The way the philosophies became evident to scholars suggest they belong to each of periods within the marketing age, that is, product orientation to the pre-industrialization period, sales orientation to the industrialization period and market orientation to the present period. If this view is taken then product and sales orientations are redundant. That is a wrong understanding of the marketing philosophies. I believe they co-existed right through the marketing age at varying levels. By this, I am suggesting that there was (and is) one philosophy that dominates each of the periods. This is true at an individual level too in that a business can have one dominating philosophy while still keeping others. For example, a business can be totally marketing oriented to its customers but product oriented to the investors. The business will need to develop its infrastructure to facilitate the two orientations to the two stakeholders. Another example is a business can adopt marketing orientation for its regular products and product orientation for its innovations. By mixing and matching philosophy we can maximize opportunities to utilise our infrastructure to the fullest, thereby registering a higher return on investment. This is fundamental to productivity, that is, maximisation of wealth for unit cost of investment. The thrust of this piece is not on the philosophy but rather on businesses having a philosophy. I believe small and medium size businesses in New Zealand and in other emerging economies must mix and match philosophies to their advantage. The philosophies must then direct their marketing activities.

Perhaps I should mention couple of reasons why we fail to think about our philosophy. One is, we take over an existing business; in doing this we basically inherit the dominating philosophy by which the business has been operating. This happens in a lot of family businesses and big corporations. This also happen with business operators who buy into a franchise arrangement. Little do they realize that they are spending their investment to adopt the philosophy of another. In such cases, any subsequent shift in philosophy needs to be championed by the new owners or managers. It primarily comprises of making radical changes that usually receives the disapproval of the vast majority, hence the shift has to be championed. Another reason for failing to think about our philosophy is, for a vast number of us, we are struggling to meet our basic needs. Consequently our sight is fixed at the immediate future with no time to strategise the future.

Returning back to Tribal marketing – there is tremendous success in this novel way of marketing. However, to implement tribal marketing a radical change to our view of the world is required. If I have got you to read to this point, I know that I have captured your interest. I will blog again with an account of how to tribalise, which will delineate its philosophical requirement.

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...