In the Digital Marketing Forum's breakfast keynote address today, vice president of Marketing for Threadless, Cam Balzer, shares how people's geek love for Threadless is the lifeblood of his company ... and how knowing how to tap the passion for one's product is vital for every marketer.

"Marketing is the result of awesome products," Balzer says. "It's not something that you do to products."

Case in point: Hoodies can be an awkward palette for designers. The zipper in the middle can wreck even the coolest image, so it takes some out-of-the-ordinary thinking to work around it (or with it). So, Threadless put the challenge out to its community of artists: "Give us an awesome design that works well in designed hoodies."

The result is clever geekiness at its finest: the Spock Hand. It might look like a regular ol' hand on a hoodie, but unzip the hoodie halfway, and you've got the Vulcan hand sign.  Threadless then sent the image to the geekiest blogs it could find: sci-fi blogs and video-gaming blogs. Now, according to Balzer, "People can't stop talking about this." (He's right. I've sent the link to that shirt to all my sci-fi geek friends before writing this post.)

How does this kind of devotion to your products begin? How can you build this for your company? According to Balzer, "Tap the passion for products ... Let the thing do its thing. Then just try and make sure it gets in front of as many people as you can. It's almost like you're the facilitator."

Takeaways:

• Know that awesome products come to life. "Every good brand is the sum of people's engagement with it." For example, Threadless has a lot of knock-offs trying to imitate its cool geek look and culture. And Threadcakes features cakes based on Threadless clothing.



• Make sure you have a like button on your site. "It's a potential goldmine for word-of-mouth marketing."



• Let a community invest itself in your products. "Let a community invest itself in your brand, and you'll have an unquenchable font of creativity flowing into your business."  For example, a character in a graphic novel wears Threadless shirts.