164: David Meerman Scott — Fanocracy: How to Turn Fans Into Customers and Customers Into Fans

So we all love fans. We're all fans of something and we love it when our customers are fans of our companies. But how do we turn fans into customers and customers into fans? That's the subject of our conversation today and we'll go deep into what it is to connect and relate as a human being that ties into this fandom and the phenomenon of fan where it actually begins in life and give you some thoughts on how to recreated. Listen in to a fascinating show. If you've been listening to our podcast or you've read the book Scaling up, you might be interested in our workshop on the Scaling Up Growth framework for your own business. We have a workshop coming soon to San Francisco and we have a few hundred dollar discounts for our loyal podcast listeners while supplies last. Just go to scalingcoach.com workshops and then enter the code sup that's s u p for scaling up Podcast when you register. We'll see you there. All right. Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business Podcast. I'm your host and scaling coach, Bill Gallagher. So on the show with me today is David Meerman Scott. He co authored a book with his 26 year old daughter Reiko Fanocracy. It's how to turn fans into customers and customers into fans. I've heard him talk about the things he's passionate about at many of our summits. He'll be a speaker at our upcoming Summit. He's written 11 books. He speaks all over the world at many of our Scale up summits. He's an advisor to companies like HubSpot. We'll talk about that today. And he built a course for gazelles for the Scale Up Growth Institute, the MBD program there. So I'm excited to have you. You're outside of Boston today.

Yeah, it's good to be here.

Bill.

Thanks a lot for having me on.

Thanks for joining us on the show. So I would. So there's so many things to talk about.

Yeah, we could probably go for three hours if we wanted to. Tons of stuff to talk about.

Let's talk about a little bit of your background, how you came to write the book and maybe what it was that led to that. Give us, the listeners, a little bit more.

Yeah, sure, of course. So I've written, as you mentioned now, 11 books and the last one to come out was five years ago. So I kind of had a book a year there for a while I.

Was like, so you're a slacker.

I was cranking them out, man. But they were a number of them were fairly similar. I was really lucky that I was able to see the revolution in the ways that people communicate very, very early. And the reason for that is because my early career was in the real time financial markets. I worked for Dean Witter and some other Wall street companies and I worked on the trading desk where we had real time data. We had data from Bloomberg and Reuters and Dow Jones. And so I really understood de how data is used to make business decisions, in this case financial market trading decisions. After that I moved to Asia. I lived in Tokyo for seven years, Hong Kong for two years. And then I came after that came back to the States. And for about 15 years I worked in the real time financial news business. I worked for part of Dow Jones, I worked for part of Thomson Reuters. And my job was around selling and marketing and product development of the systems that bond traders are using real time financial market Systems. So in 1995 and I was still working in the financial markets at this point in 1995 is my line in the sand for when the Internet started. Because that's when Netscape went public. And I felt like this is nothing new. I understand this stuff. I mean, I've been working with digital information my whole career and so I feel like I had an unfair head start in understanding real time digital information. Then in 2002 I started my own business to advise companies. And that's when I started to write. I started my started writing for magazines in 2002. I started my blog in 2004, wrote my first book in 2004 which came out in 2005. And then in 2005 and six I wrote what became my international bestseller, the New Rules of marketing and PR, which originally came out in 2007, so 12 years ago. And that was the first successful book that talked about this idea of real time communications. And social media was just the very beginning of social media. But I talked about it and how you can use real time content to market a business. And it sold like crazy. Yeah, so 400,000 copies in the English language. It's in 29 different languages. And the books that I wrote after that, I wrote a book called New Rules of Sales and Service Worldwide Rave Real Time Marketing and pr. These books were all also talking about this idea of using online information to generate attention for a business. And I've spent more than a decade writing and speaking about this idea. But starting about five years ago, I started to hear a lot of new things from people as I was going around the world. And I've spoken in over 40 countries, all seven continents. People were telling me that they were feeling like this online world had more promise than it's delivering. People were telling me that things are getting more polarized. And this was, you know, this was pre the political climate we're in now. And now it's even worse where, where in politics, the online world, everybody is sorted into tribes, you know, the right and the left, the red and the blue, not only in our country, but in other countries as well. At the same time, companies were doubling down with annoying ways of communicating online with things like spam and things like yet another tweet, yet another text message, and so on and so forth, and people were just getting fed up. I believe that the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of superficial online communications at a time when people are truly hungry for a true human connection. And I was just hearing that from quite literally thousands of people. They're like, you know, this stuff is like just. It's so superficial. It's not really. I'm not really digging into it. The promise of social media isn't really living up to the hype. So what, what I ended up doing then was I was talking with my daughter at the time, she was 21. This about five years ago. And I said, you know, Alison, isn't it weird that I've seen 75 Grateful Dead concerts? What's up with that? I mean, I'm such a huge fan of the Grateful Dead and I've been to a whole bunch of other rock concerts from other bands. And she said, I know. I mean, I'm really. To Harry Potter. I just finished an 80,000 word alternative ending to the Harry Potter series. How weird is that, Daddy? And. And she said, I get up, I get dressed up several times a year and go to Comic Con with my friends. And it's, you know, it's weird. We do this weird stuff of things that we're a fan of. And this light bulb went off in my head and I said, wow. You know, what's really interesting is on one hand, we humans are incredibly passionate about the things that we're a fan of. We spend money on it. Our best friends are in those fandoms that we enjoy. We can't wait to do it again. And also at the same time, we're fed up with the ways that organizations are communicating online. So that's when I started to do some research around what people are fans of and why. And I kept coming around to the powerful notion of fandom and how people become fans of a rock band or an artist or an athlete, or a sports team or a company, or even a B2B software company of their doctor, of their lawyer. I mean, people become fans of all kinds of different people and organizations. And I kept having conversations with my daughter about it because I wanted to get her perspective. And then it dawned on me that it would make sense for us to become a team to write the book. And she instantly agreed. She's a fabulous writer, already has published some stories that she's written. So we collaborated on it. And so it's obvious we're different genders, it's obvious that we're different generations. But in addition to that, she's mixed race. So she comes at it from that perspective. She obviously has different fandoms, as I just mentioned, but Alison is a neuroscience graduate from Columbia University and is currently a fourth year medical school student. So she comes at it from a scientific perspective. So we actually did a bunch of research to understand how people's brains are affected when they become fans of something, how and why. And we interviewed dozens and dozens of different people and organizations to just really get at the deep, interesting stuff around how and why you become a fan of something and how organizations can tap fandom in order to grow. And it's perfect for companies that want to scale up because it's another piece to the puzzle about how you can grow quickly if you understand how to build fans.

Well, so I hear two aspects of it, right? One is I want people to be fans of my company and I want my fans to be my customers. But I also hear the connecting on something. And I know as I looked over the stuff in the beginning, that there's these connection. We all find ways to connect. As I know, meet somebody new, I look around their office, if I'm in their office, or I look for clues as to what they're interested in. I look for the commonality where we're connected like that. And as I look broadly about that, I find that there are ways to connect with everything. So part of it is sharing, oh, we have this connection. And then the other part is letting them share something they're passionate about. So, like, I live in an old house. My house is I'm in the Oakland hills outside of San Francisco, and I bought my house from a family trust. And the occupant was Henry Kaiser iii, who is a recording artist, interesting character from a historical family. And people come to my house all the time now because they're like, well, there's two classes, One, our kids who walked past it and we have a distinctive bridge in the front yard that's carved like a lizard. And then the other one is. The other one is that Henri was friends with the Grateful Dead and had a recording studio in the background. So evidently, they partied and jammed and stuff here. The Dead did.

Nice. That's awesome.

And I. I'm not. I like the Dead fine, but I've never been, like, a fan of them, but I find that, like, there's a thing that connects me to people, and people like, oh, yeah, I love the Dead and the significance and the connection. Right. And I know you've spoken from stage about how you, like, love the Dead and.

Many times. Many times, yeah. I love speaking about the Grateful Dead. I even wrote a book about the Grateful Dead. It's called Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead.

Well, there's a lot to learn there about engaging a fan base and embracing what's already happening. I don't know what you wrote in that book, because I didn't read that book, but talk to us about that experience, maybe, and connecting with HubSpot.

Yeah, sure. Of course. So you're absolutely right. It's a deep human trait, goes back for thousands of years of how we want to have a connection with other humans. It's hardwired into us. We can't change it. And so we look for commonality. We're specifically looking in sort of the deep background. We're specifically looking. Is this person a friend or a foe? Is this person somebody I can trust or who I need to be wary of? And when we have something in common with somebody, we feel like we can trust them more. Whether that's true or not, that's just something that our subconscious brain allows us to do.

Are we of the same tribe? Of the same quality? Exactly. We know each other.

Exactly right. Exactly right. Oh, you're from the same town as me. There's a connection. Are you, like, the same sports team that I do? Whatever it is. So many times when people wear T shirts or ball caps or in some other way show what they're interested in, that's an instant connection. And in some cases, it can be a funny connection, because if, you know, I live in the Boston area, if I'm wearing a Red Sox T shirt and then I meet someone who has a Yankees T shirt, we can kind of goof on one another because it's that incredible rivalry, but in a way that connects us in an interesting way. So then you have to kill them, right? Yeah, exactly. So 12 years ago, the new rules of marketing and PR came out. And very, very soon after it came out, just a couple of weeks, the entire HubSpot team of only eight people at that time read the book, first edition. And they really, really liked the ideas in the book because it was very much in line with the philosophy that they built their company around. And the company was only one year old at that point. They didn't have any customers, only eight employees. So they said, hey, we've all read this book. We'd like you to come so we can chat and see if it's. There's anything we can do together. I thought, well, that's pretty neat. They're only 10 miles away in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I'll go check them out. So I went there, and I had never met them before. They had, you know, they didn't know who I was other than reading my book. So I walked in and I opened up. I pulled out my computer. This is one minute after having shaken their hands for the first time in the conference room. Opened up my computer, and I had a bunch of stickers on the back of the. My computer. As many people do, I showcase the things that I love by putting stickers on the back of my computer. And so, among others, I had about maybe a half dozen stickers. Among others, I had a Grateful Dead sticker, I had a Japan sticker, and I had a Nantucket island sticker. And Brian Halligan, who's the CEO of HubSpot, said, hey, hang on a minute here. We can't start this meeting until we talk about these stickers on your computer. Tell me about the Japan sticker. And I said, well, I lived in Japan for seven years. My wife was Japanese. And she. He said, I lived in Japan, too. And it turns out we actually overlapped for a short period of time. Then he said, tell me about Nantucket. And I said, well, I've got a house in Nantucket. I go there all the time. I love the place. And he goes, I go there every summer. I love Nantucket as well. What about the Grateful Dead? And I said, grateful Dead's my favorite band. I've seen them dozens of times. And Brian said, they're my favorite band too. And I've seen them over a hundred times. So we had these instant connections. And then I said, I've got an extra ticket to go see Phil Lesh, who was the Grateful Dead spacest in a couple of weeks. Would you like to go with me? And he said, sure. So we bonded within a minute of meeting each other over these shared fandoms that we had for Nantucket island, for the country of Japan, for the Grateful Dead and, and after that first Phil Lesch concert, Brian invited me to become the founding member of the HubSpot advisory board, which I did. And that again, that was 12 years ago. Now HubSpot is something like 3,000 people. There are $8 billion market cap, they've got 65,000 customers around the world. I'm still on the advisory board, unfortunately took equity as my compensation over the years. What's fascinating about this to me is that we've actually spent time together in Nantucket. He's been over to my house and I went and delivered a speech for the opening of the HubSpot Japan office a couple of years ago. And we've probably seen over 100 live concerts together in the, the past 12 years. So simply by sharing what, what I'm a fan of, by virtue of having these stickers created a very strong personal relationship, but also a very strong business relationship. Because many of the ideas that I shared with the HubSpot team, they implemented and I'm not saying that I'm the, I'm responsible for their growth, but certainly some of my ideas contributed to their scale up from a very small company 12 years ago to a New York Stock Exchange listed company worth $8 billion now. And I think this idea of showcasing what you're passionate about and being unapologetic about mixing business and personal is something that people are looking for with the people they do business with, the companies that they become a customer of. This idea of passionate people are somebody are those that you gravitate to and celebrating what you're passionate about is something that can be an incredibly powerful business driver. It's counterintuitive, but mixing business and pleasure is something that can work really well.

That's a brilliant story in that finding that connecting and, and connecting on multiple levels I think is really helpful for not only the company relationship like customer, client, vendor, that kind of thing, but also then just the pure interpersonal thing finding those connections from within the company itself to each other, seeing where we're common. I think many of us have this notion that there's only certain kind of people that we can connect with. And these kind of people I'm not good with, and those kind of people I'm not, I am good with. And, and so if I recognize it, and the problem is then we start to just react to little cues stereotypically through some facet of something and we fail to see or look for what else there might be. I Know, I used to have this in a huge way and now I go looking for what connects us. And even when I see somebody who looks like completely foreign or different from me, I'm like, okay, we both have a mother and a father.

Yeah, that's right.

We both have some common human character. And then I go, look, okay, so what else is there? Right?

And what's interesting about that is the further away you are from home, the more willing you are to create a bond with somebody just to be able to have that personal connection. What I mean by that is, you know, if you happen to be in, I don't know, Perth, Australia, just to pick out a random place that's really far away from here and you meet another American, you're like, oh yeah, I'm an American too. And you know, you have, you have kind of a bond, but you know, you don't have, you don't feel like you have that bond. When you're in Boston, you say, oh yeah, I'm from Boston. Well, I'm from la. No, no, we're totally different. But if you happen to be in Perth, Australia, I'm from Boston and I'm from la. You feel like you're connected because you're so far away from home. So I think we have a lot more in common than we do all humans, a lot more in common than we do not. And finding that way to bond with people is a powerful business prescription.

Yeah.

And connections, it's incredibly powerful and, and I think is something that can absolutely benefit with a scale up.

Well, I just to share something along the lines that you said that it seems incredibly relevant. But a few years ago I was on a speaking tour and I had two stops in Pakistan and on one of my connecting flights in Pakistan, I found myself in an airport lounge with a flight delay, surrounded by faces that were really different from my own. Right. I'm a straight white male from North America. I look every bit the Bill Gallagher that you might expect from that name. But I look around and I see dark skinned, dark and very serious expressions, different clothes, things like that. And I don't know what's going on. The announcements are largely not in English. I'm, I'm a little unclear and I, and I feel anxious. I feel like, who do I call? What do I do here? My cell phone's almost dead. Everybody seems to be having this stern, serious expression and I'm like, I'm trying not to suck, get to go down into stereotypes that we have here about the appearances of certain people because I've just been having a great time connecting with people in Pakistan, except now I'm surrounded by people I don't know and I didn't connect with. And I look down at my phone like we all do, to try to distract myself or do something like, you know, to occupy my brain and all of this fairly unconsciously. I'm just uncomfortable. I see this and then I look down and I realize, oh, my battery's about to die. So I look up and I look for somewhere to plug it in. And I see an outlet over on a pole next to some chairs and appears to be the only outlet around. And it's filled with, I don't know, 18 Daisy chained plugged in phones of all these things. And so I wander over to this thing to see if maybe there could be 19, maybe we could add one more to this mix, right? As I look down and I sort of. There's people crowded around, I just sort of smile up in humility, like at my predicament, right? Like, look, I'm just trying to charge my phone. Apology, humility, connection. I offer a little smile. Those stern faces, starting with the couple people closest to me, changed in an instant. Their smiles broke out. They went from these serious, what looked to me like unhappy, unfriendly things, like maybe they hate me because I'm a white guy to common human beings with a common predicament. And I found a way to plug in. Or somebody offered, I don't remember exactly, but like, I started charging my phone and then we kind of smiled each other. And then before too long, somebody came forth as, like, I speak English. And we started to talk and it turns out he went to school in the same town that my wife is from. And it's just like mind blowing how you can take a little crack, a little opening, a sticker on the back of somebody's thing, and then find and build, you know, a multi year relationship with all kinds of things is what I heard.

Absolutely. Yeah, that's absolutely right. I think it's. I think it's one of the most incredibly powerful things that we humans can do is develop those relationship with relationships with others. And that's a fundamental building block, block of growing fans for a business.

So I have this podcast now and folks come up because we've been doing it for a few years and we have a global audience and people come up to us, to me at conferences and, oh, Bill and nice to meet you and things like that. And they share the moments that they love and that made a difference for their business or their life. But I think that what you wrote about Hagerty creating fans of their thing and tying in a very different from what we think of in the insurance world. I, you know. So talk to us a little bit about Hagerty. I think it's a great example.

Sure, absolutely. So Hagerty is an insurance company and everybody hate, everybody hates insurance companies, right? Everybody does because the product that they sell is just awful. You have to pay all kinds of money to have this policy that you hope you don't ever need to use. It's like the craziest business. And so you think about how can an insurance company scale up? How can an insurance company company stand out from the crowd of what is seemingly other companies that do precisely the same thing. And it seems like an insurmountable challenge. And Hagerty Insurance, they're actually a classic car insurance company has done a fabulous, fabulous job at building fans. I'm actually a customer of theirs. I have a 1973 Land Rover Series, Series 3 that they've. Hagerty has been ensuring for me for about a decade now. And what they do. I actually had a chance to interview mcheel Haggerty and his story is in the book, our book Fanocracy. But what they did was they realized they couldn't build a growing and thriving scale up business just by selling insurance. They had to develop fans. And so they develop their entire approach to business around growing fans.

Yeah.

So here are some of the things that they do. For example, they are on site at over a hundred classic car shows around the country and they're providing all kinds of interesting information for the people who are there. In fact, if you have your car and you have a, a teenager who's learning how to drive, they'll actually teach your teenager how to use stick shifts. So you don't have to do that because they've learned that apparently trying to teach your own teenager to drive a stick shift is a very not conducive to good family bonding. So Hagerty will do it for you. Exactly right. You can. There's another place that Hagerty has set up at car shows where you can renew your wedding vows in your beloved classic car. And Hagerty's employees dress up as bridemaid, groom and they take your photo and so on. It's really clever. They have a membership program where they have 600,000 members of the Hagerty membership and there's a print magazine, online content, they have a YouTube channel that has a whole Boatload of followers, hundreds of thousands of followers, where they provide really cool classic car content. And they have a valuation service where you can value the cars that you own or cars that you might want to buy. And they recently launched an app, smartphone app, where all of the auction prices of classic cars are built into the app so that you can always find out what the most recent valuation is. And that's actually really important for people who go to the yearly Scottsdale auctions, because there's multiple auctions going on the same weekend and you can't possibly be at all of them, but you can use the app to monitor prices over the multiple different auctions. They've built an incredibly strong brand business. Double digit growth for their entire history. They expect to have 200,000 new customers this year. And it's all because they've built fans. And when I interviewed Michiel Haggerty, the CEO of the company, he said, you know what, David? Everybody hates our business, but we've been able to build a scale up because we've been able to build fans. So I love this idea that even in an industry that everybody hates, you can still build fans.

Well, and in our world, they're big practitioners of core customer sandbox words. You own brand promises. They really think about all of these things. And as I hear you share some of the things they do, I'm struck by how so many companies are like, I don't know if we should have that YouTube channel. I don't know if we, like, we're not getting enough return on that. And it's not necessarily any one thing, but the whole world of connecting to this area of passion. Right. We're not necessarily rational about our classic car the way you would be about a people mover like a Prius or a Camry. Right now, actually, people could be pretty passionate about.

I think people are passionate about all kinds of cars.

Yeah.

But Priya Prius especially.

Prius especially, yeah, I misspoke.

Passionate.

We briefly had a Prius and I kind of hated it. I'm thinking more about the generic, actually speaking more about, say, the Camry, although some people would be passionate about that for different reasons.

Passionate because they tend not to break down.

Right.

They get passionate about that. I think you can find people who are passionate about virtually any. Let me give you an. Let me give you an example of that. Batteries, ultimate commodity. You know, one battery works just as well as another battery. So Duracell is a company I actually, we actually profiled in our book Democracy. Duracell has done Something remarkable.

Yeah.

The time that batteries are the most in demand is during a natural disaster, a flood, a fire, a hurricane, Something like that is when the power goes out and you need batteries. And many people find that they don't have enough batteries to power their flashlights or their portable radios or their, you know, their, their mobile phones end up draining of power. So at the time that batteries are most in demand, and many of the local shopkeepers are doubling and tripling prices of their batteries, Duracell has a program called Power Forward where they actually deliver free batteries to people in need. For example, they delivered 700,000 free batteries to Puerto Rico right after Hurricane Maria. They airlifted several trucks on military cargo planes down to Rico. Puerto. Puerto Rico. And then they drive around to the most hard hit places that are without power. And they give away free batteries at a time when batteries are in the highest demand, when they could probably charge double or triple if they wanted to try to sell them. Durasault gives away batteries for free. And just in that one particular instance of Power Forward, they had tens of thousands of people commenting on social networks about how much of a fan they are of Duracell batteries. Now you imagine, imagine that then, you know, a year later, two years later, five years later, somebody's in the store and they need batteries. Which brand are they going to remember? The brand that they had to buy at the corner store when they were being gouged? Or Duracell that came by and gave them eight free batteries to power their flashlight for the next four days. And so I'm convinced if even a battery company, kind of an ultimate commodity, can build fans by doing something clever, I believe every company can.

Yeah. Thinking about and relating to your people and what they're dealing with and what they're struggling with, I think is the thing that I hear there, understanding who they are and creating that real connection that's so missing from so much of our routine, structured, transactional reality, which there's value in. But you miss that human piece.

It's a challenge when you're running a company that's got to deliver quarterly results, if you're public, or has to deliver results in a regular basis to the VCs. If you take adventure money or you've got to, you know, you've got to relate to your, your husband or wife or partner. If you're running a very small business, you know, every. We all have to, you know, we have to measure ourself financially, but I think we can also measure ourselves based on how many fans we have based on how, how we're helping people, based on the goodwill that we're developing and strongly believe that. And that's something that's incredibly a powerful thing to build up. And if you end up getting in trouble along the way, you know, if you, if you have a misstep, having those supporters out there will be an incredibly valuable asset that will help you to pick up and continue to along.

Well, I had, in my last business, we had a pretty significant impact to some of our packaging. Our packaging materials were damaging the product, and it took us a while to figure out what it was and, you know, where it was and how the whole thing was, trace it back, and then fix it. But in the middle of all or just before all of that, a storm came along to the east coast of the United States, Hurricane Sandy. And we were hearing about the whole thing, and it was going to come. It was going to hit. And so I went to our CRM and I downloaded our customer list for the relevant states. And then I dropped all of that into Google Maps, I think it was Google Maps. And then I zoomed in and I looked at, okay, who's like, right on the beach, who's gonna get rocked? And of our retail partners, we had 600 stores across the country that carried our product. And I called them all, and I didn't reach the vast majority of them, but I left them a message and I said, listen, we know you're in the path and we're thinking about you, and we want you to know that we're here for you and anything that we can do, let us know if you need help to restock or there's something you could think that we could do. We want to do anything we can. And I don't think I really heard back from anyone. I got a couple thank you messages like that, but I called dozens of stores. But a couple years later, somebody said, listen, hey, I never got a chance to tell you, but you're the only one that called. You're the only one that reached out of all the different products we carry and all the vendors, and you're the one who. And I was like, wow, that's really. That had to have really helped us as we struggled to deal with that, our own emergency, the thing that hit us, I think we had a lot of goodwill and a lot of extra stuff just because I made those phone calls.

Oh, I think so, yeah. I mean, it sounds to me like that goodwill, I mean, you know, you're from California, I'm from Massachusetts, you know, I think we give each other permission to get a little bit airy fairy here. But I believe that you get back from the universe what you put into the universe, you know, And I don't know the best way to describe this sort of feeling I have, but if you are a giving person, you give things away. If you're nice, if you smile, if you, if you're helpful, if you give gifts with absolutely no expectation of something in return, do what you did. Just place the call saying, hey, can I help? I believe that the universe returns those things to you in some form. I think if you're the opposite, your take, take, take, everything's a financial transaction. I'm not going to do something for you unless you do something for me. I think it's much harder for the universe to give things back to you. And I know that's a little bit of a woo woo kind of thing to talk about, but I think in spending five years researching how and why people become fans of something and how companies can get a prescription for developing fans of their business, I'm actually even more convinced about this idea of sort of the universe giving back. Because it seems like all of the examples that we came across of organizations that have been successful, like I just mentioned Duracell giving away batteries, they're by far the top battery company that these things actually work, you know, by developing fans for the sake of fans. You know, many of the fans of Hagerty who are we talked about earlier, they're not even customers. They're fans of the company because of the information they provide, because of what they do at the car shows, because of their app, because of the content that they create, because of their YouTube channel. You don't have to be a customer to watch their YouTube channel or use their app or subscribe their magazine. But they're building all of those people who are fans and then, you know, hey, I need to insure my classic car. Who am I going to go to first? The people who gave me something. So I'm, I'm so happy that I dug into this idea of fandom because it's something I've been living in my own life with the things that I'm a fan of. And it's something that I've seen that's been so powerful in a way for companies to grow their businesses as well.

Well, you're probably also a Beatles fan too, aren't you?

I'm a little. I mean, I'm certainly like the Beatles. But it's funny how one of the Things we discovered in our research is that it's not true of every single person, but it's highly likely that the thing that you're the most fan of is a fandom you developed when you reached puberty.

Yeah. Yeah.

And so I miss the Beatles because they're a little bit older than my generation, but the Grateful Dead, for whatever reason, that was what I bought. That's what I bonded with when I was. When I was reaching puberty. My daughter Allison, who I mentioned is a massive Harry Potter fan. The first book came out. I think she was seven years old when the first Harry Potter book came out. I might be getting the number wrong, something around there. And when she was really young, I read it. I read the books to her, and then very soon she read them herself. And then the movies started to come out. So.

Right.

You know that reaching puberty era of people is when you have an incredibly powerful fandom. And for a very large number of people, that fandom stays with you for the rest of your life. And so one way to get in touch with your. Your inner child, you know, as you were, that inner child was beginning to emerge as an adult, is to think about, you know, what did you love to do in sort of your middle school years, 12, 13, 14, 15 years old? Because that's likely to be something. Something that if you've lost touch with it, you may end up really loving if you were to rekindle that interest, you know.

My dad was a PhD in linguistics, and his dissertation was on second language acquisition. And his research was into how is it that it's so much easier, or is it, in fact. So what he found is that it was much easier to learn a second, third, or other language before. Before puberty sets in. And what he showed was that our identity solidifies in those years and how we think of ourselves, how we look to ourself, how we sound, all kind of gets concrete in those years. And so learning other languages is in part hard because they sound funny to us. And I grew up speaking a few languages, and so I'm more able to do a wide range of language, but some are harder for me, and I think it's entirely because I feel funny making those sounds. So I'm great with Spanish and German and Hebrew, and then related languages sound interesting to me. Italian and Portuguese and Arabic. But French really throws me. I feel silly making French sounds.

Isn't that interesting? Isn't that interesting? One of the things that we researched for this book, which is kind of related to that, is that throughout human history, there's almost universally across cultures, there's a coming of age ritual. When people reach puberty, it's marked by the community in some way. Whether that's in religious education, the bar mitzvah. Bar mitzvah, whether it's.

Yeah, quinceanera, other.

Yeah, exactly.

Sweet 16.

Sweet 16. But much more. That's much less prevalent in today's culture than it was that it has been in the past. And therefore, when people reach that age and their parents or their religious leaders or their. Or whatever, they don't have those communities, then people find their own way to have a ceremony. I mean, they don't say that, oh, now we're going to have a ceremony. But like things like your first acid trip or you know, the first time that you kiss someone from that you're attracted to, these sorts of things become very powerful. And that's one reason why when you be. When you begin to love something passionately at puberty and you become a fan of it, Harry Potter for my daughter, the Grateful Dead for me, that it can stick with you for the rest of your life. Because it's in a sense a substitution for the coming of age ceremony that so many of us do not experience now because it's not really a part.

Of the culture anymore. Well, the reason that I brought up the Beatles earlier is actually because as you were speaking, what I heard and what came to mind was the Beatles song the end and Lennon McCartney in their song say, and in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make. Right. It's a beautiful philosophical thing and, you know, it applies to us on a human level. But I think sometimes in business we forget we're dealing with human beings.

Yeah, right. No, it's absolutely right. I mean, and people are absolutely hungry for a human connection because we don't get it very often and especially when we're glued to these screens which are not human. Even though you might be engaging with people on social network and it feels like you're having. You're having a connection, it's superficial. So the more you can bring true human connection to your business, the more successful you'll be.

Connect, relate, tap into the passion. Share your passion. Hear and feel their passion. These are the things that I'm hearing in.

Absolutely.

So the book's how to turn fans into customers and customers into fans. You can pre order it. It's not out yet. It won't be out till January. You can pre order on Amazon, but you can also go to fanocracy.com and you can do that or you can hear David talk at our summit. So upcoming summit, as we record this, you're just in time to register. If you hear it after the summit. I'm sorry, get the video. Yeah.

And that's mid October, right?

Mid October in Anaheim. I'll be there. You'll be there. We'll have a whole roster of fantastic speakers. You can go there, I think, for our loyal listeners, if you remember and piece this out. I think if you, if you're not working, if you're working with a coach, put that in there. If you're not working with a coach, just mention that I'm your coach during the registration process. Pick me and you'll get, I think, a little. I'll give you whatever discount I get as a result of that. So that can be worth something for folks. And I would register our. Our summits are fantastic. We have two solid days.

They're wonderful.

You'll go into more detail, I know and lead people through some work in this area. So I so appreciate it.

I will. I will. And we'll use some different examples in we talked about today. And the summits are great. This will be the third or fourth one I've done. I love that they're one track. Everyone's in the room the whole time. I love that speakers. Stick around. You can meet them at lunch, breakfast, at dinner, cocktail hour. It's fantastic.

All right, fanocracy.com, go there, check it out. Come see us at the summit. David, thank you so much for being on the show.

Thank you, Bill. I love the conversation. I really like digging in deep to the this topic.

And reminder to our listeners, we're here every week with another topic, something to do with scaling up your business and developing yourself as a leader. If you're not subscribed yet, please subscribe. If you love the show, please go give us a review on itunes or wherever you get your podcast. We could use a little feedback, little love. Find all of these back episodes 160 or more. More now@scalingcoach.com along with free downloads of all the tools and worksheets and the notes related to all of these shows and that kind of thing. I'll even send you a copy of the book Scaling up for free. Just pay the shipping and handling and we'll ship it out to you. Thanks again to everyone. Scalingcoach.com thank you, David. Talk to you guys next week. Don't forget to register now for our next workshop on Scaling up to get one of our limited $100 discounts for our podcast listeners while supplies last. Just go to scalingcoach.com workshops and then enter the code sup that's S U p for Scaling Up Podcast when you register. We'll see you there. Well again, big thanks to the original Growth guru, creator of Our Whole World in Scaling Up, Verne Harnish. The show was produced by Lucy Summers, audio production done at podflight Productions with audio editing by Albert Burge show notes written and compiled by Ein Kudina, proofread by Tim McGowan and just so we could not do the show every week without our team. If you got some value of the show, pass it along. Go to wherever you get your show like it. Give us a review, four star thumbs up. Whatever it is there, subscribe to get it every week. You can also go to scalingcoach.com subscribe there, get on our list and we'll send you an email about once a week with the updates and all the show notes. If you would like to hear more of something, you'd like to give us some feedback, send a Note to info scalingcoach.com thanks again for listening and keep Scaling Up.

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