The Magic of Proximity

One of the best ways to build fans is to have personal connections with your potential and existing customers. Are you able to get into the personal space and social space of your customers? This idea of proximity and the four zones of human interaction are really important for this concept. You might remember that public space is 12ft or further away. So that's people who are far away from you. Then you've got social space, people who are within 4ft of you to 12ft. That's typically people in the same room, but that you're not having a conversation with. Then there's personal space, which is a foot and a half to four feet away. That's cocktail party distance when you're having a conversation with someone. There's also intimate space, but that's not important for us because that's reserved exclusively for intimate friends, for family members. So can you get within a foot and a half to four feet, which is personal space of your customers? This is incredibly powerful to us humans because when we trust someone and they're in our personal or social space, then we have true human connections. Our bodies are hardwired for this. That's what Josh did. Josh runs an egg business in Melbourne, Australia. It's called Josh's Rainbow Eggs, which he started when he was nine years old living on outside of Melbourne. His parents said to him, hey, if you'd like to make a little bit of extra money, why not go door to door and sell eggs to the neighbors? Josh said he thought that was a good idea. And he started to sell eggs, knocking on doors. People would open the door and there's cute little Josh selling eggs. And people were naturally in his personal space within four feet of Josh. He was building human connections with the people that he was selling to. He started to sell quite a few e soon, by age 11, he was selling at farmers markets. And the same thing was happening because he was hand selling his eggs at farmers markets. He was able to get within the personal space and the social space of his customers. And he did well in farmers markets, selling even more eggs. Then he went to the manager of his local supermarket, Kohl's, and he said, hey, I'd like to sell my eggs in your store. And they had a meeting at the head. They agreed, Josh is now 13 years old that he can sell his eggs in the supermarket. And he went after school many days, and he went on Saturdays to hand sell his eggs to customers to answer their questions. He was again in their personal space within four feet of his customers. He started to sell really well, and then he was in more supermarkets. He couldn't go to all of them, of course, but he did go on a regular basis to the supermar to have conversations with his customers. Remarkably, at age 17, when we interviewed Josh, he was selling 9,000 dozen eggs per week. And he employs his parents in his business. And it's because he developed close personal connections with his customers by being in their social space, by being in their personal space. And this is exactly can do. You can figure out how can I physically connect with my customers, how can I physically be in the same room with them, have conversations with them? That's terribly important for this idea of building a fanocracy. I've always thought it was interesting that Starbucks does so well. You know how they're always packed. What is it with that? I mean, you have to wait in line. That's no fun to get your Starbucks. It's expensive. I think it's because at a Starbucks you can spend a little bit of time in the social space of people who are just like you and you feel comfortable in that social space. And for people who work at home or people who just have time to kill, it's much nicer to be together with other like minded people. The idea of close proximity to people is one reason why inbound is such a fabulous event. We can learn many of the ideas that you can learn at inbound virtually. You can go to HubSpot Academy, you can see webinars, there's all sorts of different ways to learn the ideas, but you can't have physical connections with other like minded people, other marketers, other salespeople, other customer support people. You can't have physical connections and meet people in person, in their personal space, social and social space with HubSpot employees or even HubSpot Academy professors unless you're physically at inbound. We did a whole bunch of research on organizations that have used this technique. And one of the ones that's a standout is the RV industry, Recreational vehicle industry campers. We spoke with a number of different people in this industry and it's remarkable how the industry as a whole came together in order to showcase how people can interact in a close personal way by being in the personal space of one another while they're camping and use that in their advertising, in their photographs, and in the ways that they talk and market the entire recreational vehicle industry. In 2007, 385,000 RVs were sold in the United States. But during the economic crisis in 2008, sales plunged. The industry was in a terrible situation. Actually, many companies went bankrupt. They were scared at what was going on, and they started to do research about how people camp. It turns out that the research suggests that people love to camp. Yeah, the outdoors is great. Fishing is cool. Going into nature is kind of neat. Being by the lake is great. But what it's really about is the close human connections with other like minded people in the great outdoors. Now, it turns out that most campgrounds and most RV companies had been focused on camping as family units. And traditionally, most people had been camping in family units. Mom and dad and a couple of kids, or maybe a retired couple who go camping. That's what all the photographs show. That's what videos show. That's what campgrounds showcased. Well, it turns out that for millennials, for younger people, that's not how they camp. They camp in big groups, 20 people, 30 people. It's completely different. And so when the entire RV industry came together, they created an initiative called Go RVing. It's got a website, it's got a whole bunch of content around it. There's data that you can draw from. And what we found interesting, we spoke with one of the head people at the RV Industry Association. We spoke to the president of the largest campground organization, United States Campgrounds of America. We spoke to manufacturers of RVs, we spoke to people who sell RVs. It turns out that because millennials are camping in large groups, they needed to showcase that in the RV industry. They needed to showcase that you can camp with your friends and have a fabulous time. So it meant pictures need to be of millennials in one space. Campgrounds needed to completely change the way that their campground was organized instead of individual campsites for family units. And those are still there. They're not going away. They now make campgr spaces for millennial groups where there's five or six or seven camping spaces around a communal fire pit. Having photographs of those people became incredibly important. Turns out that this focus on the personal space, the proximity of how millennials camp. The idea of building fans of millennials around camping has been fabulously successful. In fact, of millennials say that they want to camp and they have an increased desire to go camping. So what are the results? The results have been amazing. In 2017, there were 504,000 new RVs sold in the United States, which is more than twice the number of 2008. So it has been fabulous for what the RV industry has been able to do. And it's all around the idea of, of camping and how millennials camp the growth. This is a quote from Bob Zagami. He is the Executive director of the New England RV Association. The growth has been staggering. We can't deliver RVs fast enough. There is a six to nine month backorder of RVs and help wanted signs at many manufacturers. So those are just a couple of examples of organizations that have used this idea of proximity, this idea of people coming together, this idea of close connections. And these are things that you can do in your business too. You can think about how you can get in the close physical space, the personal space or the social space of your customers to help build fans.