Buzz - Ad result rate of 3.4%, but only ONE SIGN-UP! Flop, why? Not relevant to the audience we were targeting: concept for ads wasn’t aligned with the audience, and the concept didn’t attract the right people. Trying to do too much at once.
Bootcamp - https://www.sherwoodfellows.co/bootcampcontent - Tr1b3!
Sample: my video
Writing your Manifesto will not be a process of creation. It’ll be a process of discovering what beliefs, values, and purpose are already under the surface.
Southwest Airlines founder Herb Kelleher understood this. A larger-than-life presence who loved Wild Turkey and once challenged another CEO to an arm wrestling match for a trademark, he knew that something was drawing people to work for his groundbreaking airline. If he could discover it, he could put it into words; if he could put it into words, he could more easily transmit those gut-level ideals throughout the organization, from the C-Suite to the baggage check.
Kelleher’s spirit courses through the company in the codified values on which Southwest builds their interviewing process, their retirement celebrations, and everything in between. Wise-cracking flight attendants reflect Kelleher’s hope for “Fun-LUVing” attitudes; Kelleher personally honored employees who went above and beyond for passengers, highlighting their “servant hearts,” and that description continues to be one of the greatest honors in the company today. To Southwest, their Manifesto of values is the heartbeat of their Tribe.
This has some astounding effects. For example, while the airline industry at large sees a turnover of 23%, Southwest employees leave at a rate of only 2.5% each year. They stick around for an average of 11.5 years, which means many stay much longer. This shocks my millennial sensibilities.
But I know that kind of loyalty could be attributed to travel perks or a fun culture. So how about this: Southwest surveyed its employees in 2014, asking them to rate their job as “just a job,” “a stepping stone,” or “a calling.” Nearly 75% selected “a calling.” That’s over 40,000 people who view their job — be it lugging 50 pound luggage or dealing with crabby passengers whose flights got delayed — as something transcendentally important. Southwest’s Manifesto does the work of imparting what every great leader hopes to give their followers: a sense of meaning.
Landing pages: https://www.tribeof.me/core-beliefs, https://anthony117708.typeform.com/to/ZJtsAwcH,
Quizzes for promotion: https://www.tribeof.me/leadership-assessment, https://anthony117708.typeform.com/to/ZJtsAwcH, Brand Archetype quiz
Accelerator - available on request
Brand Archetypes: https://www.instagram.com/p/CKkN6vnDwry/, https://www.instagram.com/stories/highlights/17855352671438648/?hl=en,
Social posts: https://www.instagram.com/p/CODnqaare4Y/,
Blogs (25% read rate on Medium) https://sherwoodfellows.medium.com/
Case study writing - https://www.sherwoodfellows.co/projects, https://www.sherwoodfellows.co/blog/2021/5/19/evermore-in-love-brand-identity-name-and-website
Sample: Sherwood Fellows Branded Longform Content
In order to promote new services that my creative agency was piloting, and to begin sharing the philosophy behind those services, I wrote a series of longform blogs in collaboration with the founders of the agency. I took the lead on concepting, researching, writing, and refining the blogs, with advising and prompting from the founders. The series lays out the Sherwood Fellows culture-building philosophy. This sample is from a case study that exemplifies some of the principles of that philosophy; more case studies and explanatory blogs are available here.
Netflix didn’t kill Blockbuster. Blockbuster did.
Purpose beats profit. Especially with change on the horizon.
Everyone has an opinion about Blockbuster’s failure. Every consultant and analyst offers answers for their decline, decrying all the poor strategic decisions. “Blockbuster failed because they didn’t embrace new technology.” “Blockbuster didn’t accept streaming until it was too late.” “Blockbuster clung to old business models.” These sound like the right lessons to take away from the company’s crash. But they’re just the obvious problems. They’re the errors we can point to and think, We would never do that. We’re smarter than that. It makes us feel safe to point out what we perceive as ineptitude: If all Blockbuster did was make bad choices, we can just make different ones.
But the people at Blockbuster weren’t stupid. They knew the market was changing, that their model was outdated, and that they needed to pivot. They had a lot of smart, innovative people working to solve their problems. They had an almost limitless war chest to dip into and they even had all the right ideas for how to do it. So the question is … why couldn’t they execute the pivot? Why did they make the wrong choices when the moment came?
Put simply: Blockbuster’s staff didn’t have a meaningful shared purpose.
The Coming Storm
In 1996, Viacom had just purchased Blockbuster and they knew it needed to be reinvented to stay relevant in the ever-changing media world. How would Blockbuster keep up with the times? How would they respond to Hollywood’s lackluster box office sales and television’s increasing competition for their customers’ attention?
Like a typical corporate overlord, Viacom decided to gut it. Against the wishes of two-thirds of its employees, they moved Blockbuster’s headquarters from Florida to Garland, TX, and replaced over 500 positions with new staff members, including a new CEO. This might have made sense to anyone who thinks businesses are spreadsheets and employees are just entries that can be rearranged and deleted. (We are sure someone, somewhere, in some boardroom, said, “What we need is fresh blood.”)
But great leaders know that people are not numbers; people have complex desires. They want paychecks, certainly, but humans also naturally want a sense of purpose, a feeling of belonging within their group, and opportunities to put their skills to use for a greater cause — even risking their security to take a stand for their beliefs.
Blockbuster’s panicked response to the changing horizons of their industry offered their employees none of this. They may have needed new talent, but the only guiding purpose was profit and survival, which drove employees to fight each other for status rather than fight side-by-side for Blockbuster’s success. There was no shared identity or transcendent purpose to bring the old guard and the new together; the company set off into turbulent waters with hundreds of talented new leaders who had no reason to trust each other and no world-changing ideal to bring to fruition together.
Without a shared identity centered on a radical and meaningful purpose, a culture will default not to “best idea wins,” but “my idea or bust.” Employees fight for their personal interests and not for the shared beliefs on which the company operates. When the storm clouds brew on the horizon, individuals and teams will turn on each other, and everyone will fight for the helm of the endangered ship. … [Read the rest of the case study here.]