Where would we be without gravity?

Welcome back to Exponential Growth, where I’ll share my insights and ideas on brand strategy, platform business, new technology, innovation, and staying relevant in a digital world. For more information, check out my website.

Gravity is something most people accept as a fact of life. It doesn’t require too much thought, right? You are sitting at your desk or on the train, standing and waiting for a coffee, or maybe even lying down because gravity pulls us toward the earth. If you hold out your phone or laptop and drop it, it will fall. Infants as young as two months old understand this “intuitive physics.”

So what if I told you that everything you thought you knew about gravity was wrong? Gravity is not a fact, it’s a theory. We don’t actually know what it is.?

At least, when it comes to science.

For the interaction field platform, building gravitational pull, the force that keeps the interaction velocity growing and growing, is one of the toughest challenges that any business will ever face. But when it comes to branding and building a successful business, gravitational pull is a necessary fact. In reality, without it, a business will fail.?

So what are the steps that you need to take to make gravitational pull happen?

1. Define what you are solving for and how you fit into the world of participants in the interaction field.

You must be clear about the purpose of your business and how it will make participants’ lives better. Framing it from a traditional perspective will not be effective. We’ve covered this before in Why Framing Alone Isn’t Enough. Railroads are a great example. Rather than taking the route of the car, which was framed as solving the problem of personal freedom and social mobility, railroads faltered because they framed their business poorly.?

Framing is made easier by the accessibility of data, which can be analyzed and grouped into clusters or moments of interest. For example, a food company might be interested in any food consumption during the day and likely will zoom in on the moments that are associated with consuming food and drinks.?

The goal is to create future life maps around consumers which can then be used to learn about the problems, challenges, pain points, and jobs to be done in the future. By creating these, it is possible to better understand the contexts, capabilities, and challenges that make up your consumer’s life, as well as the implications for creating and designing an interaction field.?

An interaction field company always frames itself within the context of the problem it seeks to solve, so step one is defining that problem.?

2. Identify the participants that create value among the nucleus, ecosystem, and market makers and analyze their core interactions.?

This step requires understanding the motivations of the potential participants and the connections among them. One way to do this is through participant mapping, a workshop process that can determine the participants in the nucleus, ecosystem, and market makers that either have significant influence on others or contribute or receive value from others.

This is important because you do not always know who the direct participants in the nucleus are and how they connect with one another. With Uber, for example, riders don’t really care about who else is using Uber or who the drivers are. In the GoPro market, however, surfers care a lot about who else is posting.?

This is fundamentally different from market segmentation, the typical pipeline-company approach to consumer research in which consumers are grouped by one or more characteristics: demographics, lifestyle, or psychographics and state of need.?

In order to build an interaction field, it is more appropriate to segment people in terms of influence or connectivity.?

3. Make it easy to participate and share.

It is helpful to understand how people currently go about solving the problem you have identified. When properly done, a journey map describes every step of an experience, showing where and at what point participants in the interaction field should be encouraged to join in, and how many reinforcements will be necessary to create sufficient gravitational pull.?

For example, GoPro could study how a beginner surfer learns about the various types of surfing conditions and waves he or she is likely to encounter, such as reef breaks, point breaks, or reform breaks. The surfer might engage in search and research activities (asking friends, going online), discovery (watching GoPro videos), comparing (studying alternative pro surfers), practicing, getting help (asking other surfers in a forum), sharing, and evangelizing.?

In a pipeline world, a company or brand would go about this from a touchpoint perspective. An automotive company might ask, “What is the set of touchpoints where I connect with a potential new car buyer?” The touchpoints might be watching TV, visiting a website, reading a magazine, or visiting a dealership. In understanding these touchpoints, the pipeline company’s goal is to communicate the brand consistently at each one.?

Today, this approach has its problems. There are so many digital touchpoints — as many as nine hundred in the process of buying a car. Each of these can become an opportunity to engage with a potential car buyer and each can be an opportunity for the buyer to share the brand. Each can also be a hazard, in which the brand may be presented in a negative light or inconsistently.?

A company may need to go through extraordinary efforts to make it easy to participate and share, but it is a necessary step in building gravitational pull.

4. Define what kind of value will be created for all participants in the interaction field.

Most businesses fail not because they don’t have a great product, but because they don’t consider what value they create for all the relevant participants in their interaction field.?

GM built an electric car long before Elon Musk hit on the idea of Tesla. GM spent over a billion dollars developing the EV1 and tried to market it through its dealer network. The cars did not sell, and GM concluded that there wasn’t enough of a market for electric cars beyond the relatively small number of environmentalists and tech enthusiasts.?

But the real reason the cars did not sell was that the dealers did not want to sell them. They would go so far as to take delivery of the electric vehicles (EVs) but not display them. This was because the cars required expensive charging infrastructure and were not good for the dealers’ lucrative maintenance and repair businesses. Electric cars have fewer mechanical parts than gas-powered ones and rarely break down. Dealers make most of their money on servicing, repairing, and maintaining vehicles, so electric cars would seriously cannibalize that business.

In short, GM did not consider how to create value for one of its major and most important ecosystem participants: dealers.?

The key to success in building an interaction field where participation and sharing drive? interaction velocity is to build a system that creates value through collaboration and coordination for all participants.?

It is extremely difficult to create gravitational pull for any company, but if you can pull it off, you can power the interaction field and virtuous cycle.??

Want to learn more?

Check out my book, The Interaction Field: The Revolutionary New Way to Create Shared Value for Businesses, Customers, and Society.

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