The Loyalty Stack

I've been watching the World Cup. Group stage through the knockout rounds now, a phrase I didn't know until this summer. I have a team, the US men, actually good this year, though expectations were modest. They made it pretty far, but the exit was expected. But most of what's grabbed my attention has nothing to do with them. Argentina, the defending champions, against Cape Verde, a nation of just 500,000 people making their first World Cup appearance. Cape Verde cancelled out Messi's opener, fell behind again two minutes into extra time, and then equalized a second time. I couldn't look away.

Longtime readers know my history with soccer. Sixteen years ago I wrote a blog post asking why soccer was so boring, and I came back to it in The Value of the Unfinished Conversation as an early sensemaking problem. Consider this another chapter in that unfinished conversation. This tournament taught me something new — not about soccer or sensemaking, but about loyalty.

Fandom Isn't One Thing

Watching as an outsider to club soccer, one thing stands out: everyone else in the stadium is carrying at least three loyalties at once, and none of them conflict.

For most of the year, these same players belong to clubs whose fans are tribal, intensely loyal - sometimes irrationally so.Rivalries in the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A, the Bundesliga, Ligue 1, Brazil's Brasileirão run deep enough to end friendships. People genuinely spend forty weeks a year hoping certain clubs lose every match they play.

Then the World Cup arrives, that same player puts on the national jersey, and the same fans are on their feet screaming for him, cheering every touch.

That fan didn't stop hating the rival club. The club loyalty is fully intact. It's simply dormant for a month—waiting for the next domestic season. The national loyalty sits on top of it, on a different layer, active at a different time, and the two never have to resolve their contradiction because they aren't competing for the same thing.

I can see this because I have no club loyalties. Everyone inside the system takes the layering for granted. From the outside, it looks like the entire structure of fandom depends on it.

Marketing Assumes a Single Slot

Most marketing frameworks assume loyalty is singular. Win the customer, own the relationship, defend the account, grow share of wallet. The whole vocabulary assumes a zero-sum contest for a single position in someone's head.

But people don't organize loyalty that way anywhere else in their lives.  A customer can be deeply loyal to one product you make while feeling indifferent—or even hostile—toward your company overall. 

They'll swear by one tool in your lineup and reach for someone else's the moment the job next to it calls for it, and feel no contradiction doing it. The loyalties are layered. Nobody has to give up rooting for their club to root for their country. They're simply operating on different layers of loyalty.

If loyalty is a stack, the useful question changes. Instead of asking how to win the customer, ask, which layer of loyalty are we trying to earn? 

And do we actually need all of them—or only the one that matters in this moment?

For founders and CMOs, that's a different way to think about positioning. You're not always competing to replace an incumbent. Sometimes you're earning a place in a different layer of the customer's loyalty stack.

Berkson's Bits

Apologies, Explanations, and Excuses are not the same thing. If you do something that negatively impacts someone else, they deserve an apology. An apology is your admission that you hurt them, that you understand how and why you hurt them, and you validate their feelings of hurt. Full stop.

Explanations and excuses are for you, not them. And they fail to serve the purpose of validating how you impacted someone else. They may add context (after the apology) but they are NOT the apology.

Years ago I got great advice from a family friend. She said "when you make a mistake, you need to immediately take responsibility and apologize. Very often it will disarm people who are ready to yell or retaliate." I used this advice for years when I was in the tech support business. I would call a customer to say we broke something and apologize. Then I would say "you can yell at me after we fix it." Funny thing…they never got around to yelling at me.

What I'm Watching...

I admit I’m not a big hockey fan. This video is from a hockey coach who has a YouTube show where he does analysis for hockey. This video is about how the Carolina Hurricanes built a system that led to them winning the Stanley Cup. If you don’t watch it for the hockey, watch it for the advice: what is the hard thing only you can build?

This isn't only a marketing problem. Most of us carry the same zero-sum assumption into our own lives, treating loyalties as if a new one has to cost us an old one. But that's rarely true.

The city you moved to doesn't erase the one you left. The work you do now doesn't make the work you used to do a mistake. Cape Verde's players are scattered across a dozen leagues on three continents, and for one month they represent something larger, and nobody sees that as contradictory.

Maybe the contradiction never existed.

Looking forward to continuing the conversation...

Alan