Mindshare is a fickle beast. You can’t simply flip a switch and have mindshare. And, once you have mindshare, you can quickly lose it if you ease up.

Mindshare is achieved (and maintained) through an approach strikingly like that of the “flywheel effect” – a metaphor for next level transformations described in the seminal book Good to Great by Jim Collins. (Learn how mindshare is a catalyst for next level transformations here)

Collins describes an enormous and heavy flywheel, and the goal is to get it spinning. But it’s massive and, therefore, requires intense effort and persistence just to break the inertia and budge it forward. Eventually, it builds momentum. And here’s where it gets interesting:

Then, at some point—breakthrough! The momentum of the thing kicks in in your favor, hurling the flywheel forward, turn after turn … whoosh! … its own heavy weight working for you. You’re pushing no harder than during the first rotation, but the flywheel goes faster and faster. Each turn of the flywheel builds upon work done earlier, compounding your investment of effort. A thousand times faster, then ten thousand, then a hundred thousand. The huge heavy disk flies forward, with almost unstoppable momentum.

When you’re building mindshare, it can be a daunting task. You need a plan. And you need a killer story. Most importantly, you need effort and persistence to achieve a breakthrough.

An individual tactic such as a tagline or a LinkedIn post or exhibiting at a trade show or a press release or some other marketing activity won’t earn you mindshare. For breakthroughs, Collins observes there is no single defining action:

It was all of them added together in an overall accumulation of effort applied in a consistent direction. Some pushes may have been bigger than others, but any single heave—no matter how large—reflects a small fraction of the entire cumulative effect upon the flywheel.

Oh, and mindshare isn’t just a marketing thing. Rather, it’s sales, support, leadership and other internal stakeholders telling and sharing the story so that, over time, external stakeholders including customers, partners, investors, media, analysts and more come to believe it and, similarly, start telling and sharing it. It’s a program. That’s how you build mindshare and trust to grow market share and achieve next level outcomes.

However, it’s possible to get lulled into thinking the momentum of the mindshare flywheel is unstoppable. But it is.

I wrote last year in my ode to the flywheel effect that there are myriad reasons why this happens in companies including changes in leadership, loss of funding, arrogance, laziness, and more.

Remember, mindshare is a fickle beast: it must be nurtured, or it will disappear.

Effort and persistence – the success keys in the flywheel effect – not only achieve but, importantly, preserve mindshare. So, get started and don’t rest on your laurels.