Brand Quarterly Issue 14

DON’T BLEND IN...

STAND OUT! Your business IS your brand. Maximise it.

ISSUE #14 Influencer Insights With Brad Haugen, CMO At SB Projects Global Branding And The Non-Profit Organization A Chief Marketing Officer Kicks Off 2015 The Trouble With Better Mousetraps Big Data The SMART Way ...and much more inside.

Featured This Issue:

4 Drive More Customers, Better Experiences And Great Products Michael Brenner

8 Why Most Companies’ New Years Resolution Of Innovation Will Fail Mark Payne

14 Influencer Insights Interview: Brad Haugen Fiona Vesey

US/UK Regulators Agree: Social Media Marketing Must Be Transparent Glen Gilmore

32 The Trouble With Better Mousetraps David Burkus

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More Popular Articles On BrandQuarterly.com

22 Global Branding And The Non-Profit Organization Françoise Hovivian

Chief Marketing Officer, SB Projects

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36 The Changing Playing Field Of Ingredient Branding Joe Tradii

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A Chief Marketing Officer Kicks Off 2015 Alan See

Brands: Do Good And Earn A Profit Anne Bahr Thompson

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Building Your Business From The Brand Up

48 To Native Or Not To Native, That Is The Question Rachel DiCaro Metscher

52 Big Data The SMART Way Barnard Marr

56 Marketers: Gain Greater Credibility With The CFO Laura Patterson

Use This Simple Button To Come Back Here Anytime At the top right of page spreads

From The Editor This year don’t blend in… Stand Out! Your business IS your brand, so maximise every area of it, from marketing, to customer service, finance and HR. We have a brilliant lineup of contributors in this issue, each sharing their knowledge to help you do just that - maximise your brand and your business. Along with a few of our returning reader favourites, I’d like to welcome our six first time contributors - it’s a pleasure to have you on board!

This issue also sees us welcoming the first of our new Brand Benefactors - organisations that believe in our vision and are helping Brand Quarterly benefit more businesses and business professionals. In continuing our great relationship with the Brand2Global conference, it’s wonderful to officially have them join us as Brand Benefactors. And we’re also excited to welcome the internationally recognised LocWorld conference and event series to our Brand Benefactor family. We really appreciate your support guys.

Speaking of support… a big thanks to our readers who’ve connected with us via social media - your social love and sharing is truly appreciated. As is your feedback. Following your requests, subscribers will soon have updates on the latest online articles winging their way directly to their inboxes.

So if you haven’t already, come join the conversation, let’s connect on Twitter @BrandQuarterly and/or LinkedIn. That seems like the perfect place for me to sign off. Enjoy the insights shared from our contributors in this issue... and if you love it, feel free to share it :) Cheers,

Fiona Brand Quarterly magazine ISSUE #14 - Published FEB 2015 www.brandquarterly.com Publisher/Design: Vesey Creative Ltd brandquarterly@veseycreative.com

As the publishers of Brand Quarterly, we take every care in the production of each issue. We are however, not liable for any editorial error, omission, mistake or typographical error.

The views expressed are those of the contributors and not necessarily those of their respective companies or the publisher.

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Copyright: This magazine and the content published within are subject to copyright held by the publisher, with individual articles remaining copyright to the named contributor.

Express written permission of the publisher and contributor must be acquired for reproduction.

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Does Marketing Get No Respect?

How Marketing Can Drive More Customers, Better Experiences And Great Products Michael Brenner

Marketing Has A Marketing Problem Ask most people to define what marketing is, and the answer will almost always come down to some form of a definition that is more closely related to advertising.

Not that there is anything wrong with advertising. Advertising is an effective technique for any business that can afford it.

And it should be part of every large brand’s marketing mix.

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But when I attended university, and took that Introduction to Marketing course, I remember something about 4 Ps. Yes Promotion was one. But there was also Product, Price and Place.

Look under the covers of the marketing budget inside many brands, and what you will see supports the conventional wisdom that marketing is mostly all promotion, based on the percentage of the budget allocated to advertising.

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Getting The Message Out To put it another way, the job of most of us in marketing has been to simply get a message out. Reach and frequency. Success in this traditional approach to marketing is simple and binary. Did you maximize the budget for reach and frequency? Yes. Or no.

There are analytics to show which demographics, and day parts, and now also which devices are being reached. And there is aided and unaided awareness done pre and post. And so we count what we can. All the while knowing that, to quote the famous saying “I know half of my advertising is effective. I just don’t know which half.”

And we were basically happy with this approach for decades.

...with every piece of information published, there is an equal amount of data available...

content with our connections, and open it up to anyone in the world.

And with every piece of information published, there is an equal amount of data available: likes, shares, views, time spent, subscriptions, conversions, purchases, referrals, inbound links, outbound clicks, and much more.

The Battle For Customer Attention Then The World Changed The commercial web browser is now more than 20 years old. In the early days, corporate brochures were translated into corporate websites. Traditional advertising was translated into banner ads where click through rates were as high as 20% or more.

And search engines became a gateway for anyone, anywhere, to access all the information you could ever want, as long as you had a computer with Internet access.

Social media came along around 12 years ago to allow us to connect with people who had similar interests. And we started to see smartphones with enough power to deliver all the content of the Internet, any time and anywhere.

We Are All Publishers Suddenly, we all became publishers.

Consumers didn’t need to rely on media companies for the news or brands for product information. The digital, social, mobile web provided the infrastructure to allow us to share an increasing amount of

Brands are now faced with a battle for customer attention unlike anything we have ever seen. Advertising is what consumers tune out. It’s the noise we make every effort to avoid.

Content is the new game for marketers as we seek to attract audiences vs buy them. Entire departments, agencies and technologies are being formed to handle all the content that goes out and the data that moves across the web.

Inside some businesses, Marketers get no respect. They get big budgets to hire expensive agencies who make massive media buys. Or they negotiate the contracts to put the logo on a stadium.

Marketing Is A Conversation But leading organizations see the digital, social, mobile world as a conversation. They understand that marketing has always been about the conversation - a two-way dialogue between the business and the consumer.

And now, technology allows that conversation to happen in real-time.

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Successful digital brands look more like new age publishers. They have managing editors, web designers, beat journalists, editorial departments, video producers, social media community managers and for some brave brands, even comedy writers.

They use the latest technology and content platforms to do more than just reach and frequency. The content game is continuous, not campaign-based. They understand that behind every like, tweet and purchase is a person. And they seek to meet the information and entertainment needs of their audience. In a human way. With great storytelling techniques, typically found in a Hollywood studio.

Marketing That Gets Respect This is a marketing organization that does not just command respect, but leads the business.

The modern marketing approach puts customers at the center of everything they do. They drive a re-structuring of the entire way the business thinks and acts. Some have called this “extreme customer-centricity” where the customer (in the form of data, ideas and insights) defines the business plan. Nothing is created unless it serves a customer need.

All with the belief that serving customers, serves the business.

The modern marketing approach puts customers at the center of everything they do.

This in turn increases innovation and experimentation. The business iterates, tests and optimizes everything it does.

Products become better. Employees become engaged in a feeling of attachment to the business’ higher mission: to help customers solve a problem.

Great products, developed by engaged employees, delivered over amazing customer experiences, creating increasingly demand by more customers who buy more.

This is the promise of the marketing-led company in today’s digital and collaborative economy.

The CMO helps define the customer-centric company mission. His team and strategy acts as the arbiter of customer insights with amazing experiences across all customer touch points. Product innovation moves faster. Employee engagement goes up and maybe finally, marketing gets some respect.

What Kind Of Marketer Are You? What type of brand are you? And which type of brand do you want to buy from?

Michael Brenner Head of Strategy | NewsCred Michael Brenner is the Head of Strategy for leading content marketing platform NewsCred, and the former VP of Global Marketing and Content Strategy for SAP. Michael is a recognized expert in marketing strategy, content marketing and social media. He is an accomplished marketing speaker, author of the B2B Marketing Insider blog, and a frequent contributor to leading publications such as Forbes, The Guardian and more. Follow Michael on Twitter (@BrennerMichael).

www.b2bmarketinginsider.com 6

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Main Conference 30 Sept - 1 Oct 2015 Academic Conference 29 Sept 2015 LAST YEAR’S SPEAKERS INCLUDED REPRESENTATIVES FROM: Lenovo

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Why Most Companies’ New Years Resolution Of Innovation Will Fail Mark Payne

Chances are, the calendar rolling over to 2015 brought a surge of positive energy to your office. You can almost hear the collective exhale of your team after the holidays, reinvigorated by new budgets and new ideas.

This year, resolve to see that expectation of wildly successful innovations stand proud past the spring thaw. Though, statistically, most innovation projects are destined to not make it. Not unless companies leap past the problematic innovation methods that under deliver year after year.

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You’d be hard-pressed to find a company whose 2015 goals include doing less innovation than they did the year prior.

Innovation has become virtually synonymous with growth in many sectors, and for most mature brands. The right innovation strategy, turned into big concrete ideas that reach the street and the balance sheet, will free a brand from a stifling plateau.

Building Your Business From The Brand Up

hollow feeling of seeing their seemingly big idea, nurtured so long and with such passion, eventually slip through the cracks.

By the fourth quarter, we find ourselves applying the soothing salve of postrationalization – the usual pat explanations for low success rates, from “innovation is hard” to “failure is normal and noble,” and drawing comfort in the mantra that “failure is the ultimate teacher.” All of which launches us into another hopeful year, where we start the cycle again.

How do we break this pattern? How do we ensure that 2015 will be different? What my team at Fahrenheit 212 has learned through years of trial and error is that low success rates aren’t in fact due to the inherently difficult nature of innovation, but the nature of prevailing innovation methodology, and the way today’s noisiest orthodoxies tell innovators to think and work in pursuit of the big idea.

...nine out of ten innovation projects never deliver anything to market.

The tough reality though is that by most sane estimates, nine out of ten innovation projects never deliver anything to market. For a metric that can decide the growth of a company, success rates of innovation projects remain absurdly low.

The numbers say that most companies live the same spiral every year: the innovators who were bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in the first quarter will face a tough hill by midyear. Any veteran innovator knows that

If you want to break the cycle, you have to break the habits, myths and misconceptions that are getting in the way of better outcomes. At Fahrenheit 212, by virtue of a decade’s worth of resolutions aimed at transforming success rates, we’ve scrutinized and ultimately thrown to the curb a host of these widely held, but wildly off base, assumptions. Culling misconceptions has shaped a more impactful approach to innovation that we hope can help you make the year ahead your best yet.

Here are some of its tenets.

Innovation Problems Are Two Sided; Solve Both Sides Or Nothing Happens Obsessing over the consumer’s needs is vital and necessary, but this healthy obsession can come with an unwelcome and potentially destructive side effect: too many innovation

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To succeed as an innovator, you must solve for two distinctly different constituencies: the consumer and the business itself.

projects are approached as though solving the consumer need is all that matters. To succeed as an innovator, you must solve for two distinctly different constituencies: the consumer and the business itself.

As is so often the case, the problems of these two constituencies actually have little to do with each other, yet they must be solved in tandem for any idea to make it onto the street.

Too often, as innovators we poke, prod, and thoroughly understand every nuance of the consumer, feverishly attempting to find the holy grail of a big unmet need. Meanwhile, commercial realities are either given little attention, or deliberately blocked from consideration out of a misplaced fear that they taint the creative process. Ultimately, the only innovations that make it to market and thrive are those that solve both needs.

It’s Time To Ask What’s Next After The Orthodoxy Of Design Thinking Can we be fans and tough critics in the same breath? Of course. We do it with our sports teams all the time, so let’s not hold back here. The innovation approach in questions is called Design Thinking. As a devoutly usercentered approach to observing consumer behavior, prototyping and iterating toward better products, it has been a huge leap forward from the purely business-centric models that preceded it. Yet, it has failed to do what businesses need most from innovation today: elevating the success rates.

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The reason it hasn’t moved the needle is uncomplicated: it only solves one side of the equation. In relegating commercial factors to the tail end of an innovation process, it is at best 100% effective at solving 50% of the problem. It’s made innovation more humanistic, and arguably more fun, but no more reliable than it was before as a driver of growth for businesses.

By banishing commercial factors as impediments to creativity, it has a tendency to deliver a breed of idea we call unicorns: visions that are beautiful to the think about, but only profitable in some remote imaginary world. You can’t hitch your plough to a unicorn.

You can’t hitch your plough to a unicorn.

Thinking About Money Won’t Destroy Creativity The widely propagated view that thinking about how you’ll make money is toxic to creativity is a narrow situational truth that’s somehow been given universal status. In the majority of cases, we’ve found that ignoring commercial concerns significantly raises the odds of your bold creative vision never coming to fruition.

By excluding the realities of the business from the consideration set, we let our inventive minds shape a vision in a vacuum. Few of these concepts survive when profitability questions inevitably assert themselves.

Instead of asking these money questions so late in the game, understand the levers of profitability from the beginning and it will empower your creative thinkers to use them, bend them, play with them and stretch them.

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We don’t give enough credit to our most creative minds by assuming they aren’t comfortable with the commercial side of the project. The unfounded belief that moneytalk kills creativity, has fostered a tendency to shelter creative thinkers from commercial conversations.

In what was initially a contrarian experiment, we joined creativity and commercial perspectives from the start of each project at Fahrenheit 212, and saw something amazing happen. Brave thinkers became remarkably adept at pulling commercial levers that turn interesting ideas into lucrative ones, in ways they never could when we assumed their creativity had to be sheltered from “all that money stuff.”

Judgment-Free Zones Sound Great, But Devour Your Time And Money Any fledgling innovation idea will eventually face tough questions and need to stand up to intense commercial scrutiny, from investors, project sponsors, or a CEO. That idea you’re nurturing needs to be fortified and shaped to stare down those tough questions.

The widely celebrated ‘judgment free’ brainstorming models that have done wonders for the Post It Note business have resulted in vast populations of ideas dying off prematurely, because they’re so sheltered from inquiry that they simply aren’t designed to answer those tough questions.

So instead of celebrating every idea that emerges in our ideation process, we fuse creativity with constructive criticism from day one. The hard-hitting questions aren’t meant to destroy a new idea, but guide it through development, strengthen it, define it.

That kind of in depth scrutiny is inevitable, so better that it comes from within your project team than catches you flat-footed under executive review.

The hard-hitting questions aren’t meant to destroy a new idea, but guide it through development...

You’ll also find that creating a healthy positive tension around an idea elevates the team’s creativity in ways that saying every idea is wonderful never can.

Happy New Year Making 2015 a standout year won’t happen through wishful optimism alone. Getting to better innovation success rates will require more tangible changes to the way your team thinks and works. Shed the myths, habits, and methods that held you back last year, so that you can look back at year’s end with a great sense of accomplishment.

Mark Payne Author, Co-Founder and President | Fahrenheit 212 As Co-Founder and President of leading innovation consultancy Fahrenheit 212, Mark Payne has spearheaded innovation projects that have created over $3Billion in revenue for Fortune 500 companies, entrepreneurial emerging businesses and Private Equity firms. Mark’s insights on how innovators from big organizations to startups can transform the odds of success are captured in his book “How To Kill A Unicorn: and build the bold ideas that make it to market, transform industries and deliver growth”, highlighted with behind the scenes stories from the firm’s work with the likes of The Coca-Cola Company, Samsung, Procter & Gamble, and GE.

www.fahrenheit-212.com

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More Popular Articles On BrandQuarterly.com Would You Buy From You? Ryan T. Sauers Would you buy from you? Many people struggle with this question only to find that their best response is a “maybe” or the noncommittal “it depends.” Huh? If you would not buy from you, why would anyone else buy from you?

It’s Time To Stop Counting Followers And Likes Nick Taylor Today’s marketer knows that having a social media strategy is important. More and more, customers are looking to Facebook and Twitter when making their purchasing decisions. But knowing exactly how much of an impact your efforts are having on social has always been tricky.

Marketing Audit Tools: The Internal Environment Dr Antony Michail Do you know as much about your own marketing strategy and operations as you should? This is your opportunity to put your own marketing under the microscope – the internal marketing audit takes a close examination of your current business situation and how your marketing affects each area of it.

From Big Gorilla To Big Fall?

Jeffrey Peel Once you get to the top of the mountain, it’s a long way down. Big brands and large businesses need to continuously work to stay at the top. There’s a lot they can learn from startups and the small and agile crowd.

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5 Tips To Create A Breakout Personal Brand On Social Media Catherine Kaputa The 24-Carat Virtual Brand…

A weak online brand is like a weak reputation in the traditional world of business. People won’t think you’re as good as others who have a strong online brand presence.

Transforming Digital Globalization From ‘Cost Center’ To ‘Profit Driver’ Bruno Herrmann The most successful global companies go beyond considering digital globalization as part of their global presence online. They manage it to enable improved business operations, then capitalize on it to drive profits forward around the world.

Please Don’t Confuse Lying With Selling David Tovey I recently received a twitter message from a follower asking if I’d seen a Channel 4 TV programme about the sales tactics of some retailers. “They seem to confuse lying with selling” he wrote in his tweet.

Why Tracking Customer Experience Is Essential Rita Tochner For all organisations, monitoring the voice of customers is an essential, in order to improve operations and remain competitive.

But are current methodologies and systems delivering what we need? Rita Tochner shares her thoughts on ensuring every customer’s unique voice is be heard.

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Brad Haugen Chief Marketing Officer SB Projects Fiona Vesey

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SB Projects (formerly Scooter Braun Projects) is a diversified entertainment and media company with ventures integrating music, film, television, technology and philanthropy.

I was lucky enough to have a chat with their top marketing mind Brad Haugen and gain some wonderful insights into the process behind launching chart-topping artists, TV shows and more...

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Fiona

Fiona

Let’s kick things off with a brief insight into the man himself. So who is Brad Haugen?

And all that fun and hard work has lead to lot of success. From those successes, what are you most proud of?

Brad

Sure. Brad Haugen - I’m CMO at SB Projects.

My background’s in marketing and advertising with some experience in tech as well. What I’m all about is forward thinking creativity - not creativity for creativity’s sake, but creativity with purpose.

I’ve been working with Scooter and the team for the better part of six years now, being the third ever employee after Scooter himself and Allison Kaye, the GM of our music business.

There are about 30 of us now, so we’re growing rapidly.

I was blessed at a very young age to be working at BBH in New York and was able to touch some major brands and work with some incredibly intelligent people - some of the smartest people I’ve ever worked with.

On the flip side when you’re young and in the advertising industry, great opportunities can come to you but it’s often a much more rigid structure of ‘if you’ve worked here for a certain amount of years you get exposure to x, y, z’.

I always felt I could add more and it was not the fault of anybody there, I was just ready to move on and try new things. Fortunately my childhood friend Scooter Braun, who I always knew as Scott, had just discovered Asher Roth and needed some help building a website. With some friends of mine, we built a really cool augmented reality site.

Then he had this kid, Justin Bieber and he convinced me to leave my job and go work with him. I’ve been doing that ever since.

We’ve kind of been testing out innovative pieces of digital media and social media as well as just coming up with creative ideas.

Sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t, but we’ve been having a lot of fun ever since.

Brad

It’s hard to choose any one thing, but I think the thing that I’m most proud of is that we started this. Scooter started about eight years ago. I joined him about six years ago and here we are at the beginning of 2015 and we’re still considered to be at the forefront.

I’m proud that every year we’re able to find new ways to innovate and break artists.

And also working with some of the TV properties that we’re involved with, we’re starting to expand our influence in the digital and social space.

We did it with Asher Roth first with ‘I Love College’ - that was largely Scooter’s brainchild - and the same thing with Justin and his breaking on social media. He’s the original YouTube star - it’s commonplace now, but when Justin broke he was the first. No one had ever done it.

He’s the original YouTube star it’s commonplace now, but when Justin broke he was the first.

Fiona

It must have been so exciting, being involved right from those early stages.

Brad

It was just incredible, like you’ve got a seat on a rocket ship. There was a moment when Carly-Rae Jepsen’s ‘Call Me Maybe’, Psy’s ‘Gangnam Style’, ‘Glad You Came’ from The Wanted and ‘Believe’ from Justin were all humming at the same time - we were like holy cow, we really are dominating the digital space with regards to music.

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Ariana Grande had a massive year in 2014.

She was arguably the most talked about new artist in pop music, which is pretty cool for us. She deserves every bit of it. She works so hard, is so talented and such a good person.

She really deserves everything that’s coming to her.

on my phone. I’ll force myself to use it for a week. If I love it, then it stays on my phone and I’ll start using it in my work. If it falls off my phone then I don’t really bother with it anymore. If I think something’s great I’ll tell our talent and a lot of times they’ll come to us too.

Then we’ve got a few things for 2015 that people probably don’t know about yet. We’re starting to see some momentum bubbling online where we’ve been seeding things and seeing what people have to say. 2015 is going to be big for some of our new artists for sure.

You just kind of roll with it and see. You have to try - maybe you try starting a ‘Scorpion’ Vine account and see if that works. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t, but it doesn’t hurt to try it out.

Fiona

When you’re working on social, there are so many platforms and apps. It’s not possible, or even a good idea, to have a presence on all of them. How do you select the best options for your talent or current project?

Brad

The beauty of talent - they’re people. They have points of view and they all gravitate towards different things. It’s our job to make sure that we’re well versed in what things are coming next.

Our social team run a weekly newsletter called Tech Tuesday, where they highlight new apps that are buzzing and some really cool tech news and innovations, so our managers and creative teams are always at the forefront of what’s coming.

Then we try everything out. If there’s a new app that everyone’s talking about I’ll put it

Fiona

For you it really is individual to every artist and project - saying okay, this is cool, but does it work for you?

Brad

Exactly. One thing people always ask us is what’s our secret sauce? To be totally honest, to me, it’s that we don’t think we have a secret sauce. We’re pretty normal people and we figure that if we like something then a lot of other normal people will like it too.

We’re in a position where if we think we know everything then we definitely don’t know anything. We really like to be of the mindset that we don’t know what’s coming next, so we have to learn as much as we can and constantly be changing and evolving.

Fiona

Of course everyone knows Justin Bieber, but all the talent you represent have large, engaged, even devout followings on social media. While this seems like a dream come true, what sort of challenges does it throw your way?

Brad

It’s funny because a lot of artists start on social media and they do it because they have this one-on-one connection with their fans. Then when you start getting to 10-1525-50 million followers on Twitter or fans 16

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on Facebook or Instagram or whatever it may be - It starts to not feel as personal anymore. But you have to keep having those conversations, because if you’re one fan out of 50 million and you get recognized by the artist, it’s that much more special.

The key is finding the new products. We’re working on some exciting technology right now where fans can have a more intimate relationship with their favorite artists.

Fiona

It’s all about finding the ways to maintain that close personal relationship with your fans.

That’s what we strive to do with our artists.

They’re all good people and care a lot about their fans. They want to make sure that they can talk to their fans, hear feedback from their fans and have a connection with them.

It’s all about finding the ways to maintain that close personal relationship with your fans.

On the flip side of the coin, how do you go about building a social or digital strategy for an artist no one’s heard of yet?

Brad

It is challenging and from a music standpoint specifically it starts and ends with the music.

The first and most important thing is that they have great songs.

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People talk about the music industry and say that it’s falling apart, it’s a mess and nobody buys music anymore. But in the next few years the music industry is going to come back with a vengeance, I believe. It’s not that it’s falling apart; it’s changing and hasn’t figured itself out yet. What’s interesting is at the end of the day music is still the most consumed form of content on Earth. If the songs are great, people will come.

Once you have that, it’s just about starting the conversation and finding places where you think fans might be, then injecting yourself into that conversation. We are students of qualitative and quantitative research here.

When we find people who have numbers and people who are in the demographic of an artist that we want to get out there, we will give them content to share.

The mistake a lot of people make is they don’t have a steady stream of content coming. a moment you have to have a lead up to it. If I know that someone’s posting something on Friday I’m looking forward to it all week long.

When we start utilizing YouTube, we don’t abandon it just because people aren’t coming.

We also don’t start it without knowing that we’ve got a year’s worth of stuff to shoot, because you have to keep it steady and consistent. You can’t just post three videos. They might do well, but if you don’t put a video up for five months no one’s coming back.

Fiona

Obviously in digital marketing, YouTube is perfect for the film and music business. But there’s more to getting over seven billion combined views than just throwing a few videos online and waiting. How do you select the right content to share?

Brad

I think a mistake a lot people make is they don’t put enough content on there. It’s the same reason television has been so successful over the years - if you watch Homeland, it’s on every Sunday night for these 12 weeks. You know when The Voice is on.

You know when your shows are going to be on. You go back - because it’s eight o’clock and guess what, the show starts at eight o’clock on this night.

The mistake a lot of people make is they don’t have a steady stream of content coming.

The great YouTubers have weekly videos, daily videos, three times a week, two times a month, whatever it may be, but their viewers know that they’re coming back and people anticipate them. When you’re trying to create 18

EDITORIAL CREDIT: Calvin Klein Jeans, Calvin Klein Underwear IMAGE CREDIT: © Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott

Building Your Business From The Brand Up

But of course quality is important. What’s really cool about talent is that people like feeling they can just ‘discover’ something.

People like to feel like they’re part of it. It’s about storytelling and bringing moments to life. I think Scooter and Justin did a phenomenal job when they first got started.

Ariana did this as well - really making you feel like you were just watching a kid in their room performing for you.

...people like feeling they can just ‘discover’ something. People like to feel like they’re part of it.

Then with ‘Call Me Maybe’ there were videos out there we had nothing to do with. We had friends make videos for that song when it first started. Ultimately they’re just videos that were made because you felt like you were part of something. If you made one then you were part of a club.

You have to create these moments where if people like, they can join in and hop on the bandwagon and be part of the ride.

Fiona

SB Projects have also diversified into film and TV recently. Tell me a little about these new and exciting projects.

Brad

We were involved in the release of ‘The Giver’, with The Weinstein Company, which is an amazing movie with Jeff Bridges, Meryl Streep, Alex Skarsgard, Katie Holmes and Brenton Thwaites. It was cool for us because it was our first. We’ve done two movies with Justin, but we’ve never done a full-length feature film. We learned a lot and it was really exciting. It’s helped us figure out how we want to get into the film industry in future.

With our friends at Blumhouse, we’ve got another full-length feature film coming out Fall 2015, ‘Jem and the Holograms’. We’re trying to dip our toes in the film business and not just jump all in. It’s a complicated business and we’re not pretending we know it. ‘Jem’ made sense for us because our good friend Jon Chu is directing it. Jason Blum and his team were working on it too and we love those guys. Plus it’s a music film so we were able to source the music for it and can almost run it like a music release. We’ve got some amazing hit songs in it. It’s going to be really exciting.

We love the movie industry but we’re moving slowly in that space just to learn and make sure we do things the right way. TV is kind of the same way. We definitely got right place, right time luck with ‘Scorpion’. It’s been a tremendous success for us already. Scott Manson our COO met Walter O’Brien and signed the life rights. We brought it to our agent at CAA, and all of a sudden we’re at CBS. Then a year later we have one of the biggest new shows on television. It’s just been really exciting to learn how you roll out a TV show on network television.

Fiona

How have you found building marketing strategies around these projects compared to working in music?

Brad

It’s a total learning process and it’s very, very different. I find that it’s a bit more rigid - a bit more traditional. What’s cool about the music industry in particular is you’re marketing individuals. Sure you might be investing a couple of million bucks to launch an artist, but you’re not spending $30-$100 million like a movie. Your risk is a lot lower overall. You can try more things and be more flexible with taking risks. There’s a way to market a movie - and it’s two weeks before the movie you put out a huge blitz.

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We did some innovative things with ‘Believe’ and ‘Never Say Never’ because of the nature of our relationship with the talent. In general you can’t really do that much outside of the box yet, but I feel like the film and the television industry are ripe for some change, the same way the music industry is.

We’ve worked with some amazing people on both of our film and television projects in the last year. We’ve all come up with amazing ideas, but at the end of the day you still need to buy your billboards, your TV spots and your print work. I think some of it still works, but it’s definitely ripe for change.

Fiona

What do you see on the horizon that will change how your market your artists and projects?

Brad

From a music standpoint there’s a conversation right now about streaming that’s really interesting. I think that the next five years are going to change the music industry dramatically. Not for better or worse - it’s just going to be different. People are going to have to evolve with it and start to realize that the future is now. Stop complaining about low CD sales and start thinking about what’s next. Music is a vehicle to build a big brand and we need to embrace the future.

I don’t know what that is yet. People say it’s streaming - It looks like it’s streaming but who knows. You didn’t anticipate Facebook coming along in 2004. I think we’re in like 2002 now right before Facebook. I don’t know that we’ve nailed it yet but I’m a fan of what companies like Spotify, Songza and Pandora are doing. Hopefully one of them cracks the formula.

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The other thing I think is going to really impact the industry and I preach this all the time to my team - I’m really bullish on big data - the hybrid of science and art. Obviously the artistry is huge for the music industry, but I think that as big data evolves, we can really leverage it to make smarter decisions and spend less money to have bigger reach.

I’m a musician… I love the creative aspect of it. I never want to take away from that. I want artistry to be what separates musicians and now you can level the playing field with data for sure. All of a sudden everyone’s on the same page and whoever truly is the best artist can win.

Fiona

In finishing I’d like to draw on your previous agency experience. What advice can you offer to marketers who want to learn from SB Projects’ success?

Brad

For me, it’s harder as an agency because you have to deal with your clients and often times, clients play it a lot more conservatively than the creative might want to. So I think you have to show that you can take risks and do things for less money in the spend, that just might have a bigger impact.

We always try to spend zero dollars to market our projects. A lot of times we can because we just try things. For me it’s all about what’s the moment we want to create and what

We always try to spend zero dollars to market our projects. path can we use to do it? There can be 100 different paths to get there, so you just have to keep trying.

A lot of the experience I had at agencies is that people tend to fall in love with ideas. You can’t fall in love with ideas - just because it seems like a good idea doesn’t mean it’s going to work and connect with people. You have to put yourself in the shoes of Jane from Oklahoma or John from Canada - someone who’s just not in the world that you live in.

What would they think?

- just because it seems like a good idea doesn’t mean it’s going to work and connect with people.

The worst thing you can do is fall in love with an idea and take it to the grave because at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is getting from point A to point B - and the journey you take can be exciting. It’s going to be different and it can go 1,000 different ways. You just have to be prepared to go for the ride.

Fiona Vesey Editor-in-Chief | Brand Quarterly Magazine Fiona is Co-Founder of Vesey Creative, the Brand and Graphic Design agency behind Brand Quarterly magazine, for which she serves as Editor-in-Chief.

She thrives in partnering with people and companies wanting more than just aesthetically pleasing design, using her natural ability to build relationships, communicate and truly understand clients businesses to create result generating, people focused design and branding - and great magazines...

Fiona is passionate about learning from industry thought leaders and enjoys sharing those conversations with others through her ‘Influencer Insights’ features.

www.veseycreative.com

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Global Branding And The Non-Profit Organization Françoise Hovivian

Are the typical brand management and international marketing issues faced by a powerful for-profit company the same as those navigated by an international non-profit organization? Do non-profit organizations need to worry about a global branding strategy, website conversions, or visitor metrics?

World Pulse is a powerful online community of women and allies of all genders worldwide, who speak out and build solutions to today’s biggest challenges. World Pulse empowers women leaders on the ground by advancing their digital skills and leadership, to mobilize around the world and create real social transformation.

In short, yes.

Today, tens of thousands of women from 190 nations are using WorldPulse.com to start movements and pressure global leaders to take a stand on the issues affecting their lives, ranging from the allocation of economic resources to securing leadership at all levels of society.

World Pulse’s mission is to accelerate the global changes women seek by using digital communication to unite and amplify women’s voices, solutions and impact worldwide.

Let’s take an in-depth look at how one nonprofit organization approaches this.

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Non-profit organizations like World Pulse are endowed with humanitarian missions that complicate their practice of marketing in an international market. Even though non-profit organizations, like for-profit companies, do marketing to obtain revenue, donations and visibility, they also need to manifest their values and mission clearly, as these are the primary driving force of their brand.

The organization is also recognized for its use of strong, inspiring visuals of real women of all ethnicities, shapes and sizes, a welcome respite from the objectifying and over-sexualized images that pervade today’s media around the world.

And what is World Pulse’s marketing strategy? Here enters the World Pulse web site, which is the main conduit to fulfill and communicate World Pulse’s brand goals.

What makes World Pulse unique is that it is a 100% digital non-profit organization.

That means the World Pulse web site is the product, the business, and the marketing strategy.

A brand is what a company wants to project deliberately but also what is organically perceived via the different channels used to communicate the global identity. Brand is in large part about emotional attachment and psychology. Non-profit organizations need to evoke trust, empathy, and a unique kind of connection.

...the World Pulse web site is the product, the business, and the marketing strategy.

Non-profit organizations need to evoke trust, empathy, and a unique kind of connection.

This is why World Pulse recently redeveloped their site, based on several years of key learnings from facilitating their online community. The new site launched on January 21, 2015 as a multilingual platform in English and French, with other languages in development.

So what is World Pulse’s brand? That every woman has the right to say, “No one speaks for me, I speak for myself”. World Pulse is celebrated by its online community members - its customers - for being willing to address today’s toughest issues in a feminine way: through open communication, genuine listening, and mutual support.

Many members refer to the World Pulse Online Community as “a global sisterhood”.

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While headquartered in Portland Oregon, World Pulse’s reach is global, aiming at connecting individuals and especially women around the world. Users are able to join World Pulse’s Online Community quickly and easily, and then crowd-source their experiences, stories and solutions on the multi-lingual forum “communities” platform.

Communities are the central feature of the site and provide opportunities to tell one’s story in her native language, share news, resources, opportunities, training, and services. The site is user centric, i.e., the user becomes a collaborator and builder of the brand. For women who are underrepresented in decision-making forums and in some cultures forbidden from voicing opinion regarding political, economic, social or other profound matters, the power to publish, share and post their own original content through 24

WorldPulse.com presents a powerful new avenue for gaining confidence in one’s own voice and individual agency.

A huge component of a global marketing strategy is content quality and relevance.

Whereas the previous World Pulse site was overflowing with content, the new site makes use of minimum but relevant content.

Sentences are short and easy, layout is airy with white space that rests the eye, sections are clearly outlined and the site map is more obvious.

A huge component of a global marketing strategy is content quality and relevance.

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Translation into other languages is provided by a translation utility for visitors, powered by Google. That feature only reaches the text content, so any text that is part of graphics is not translated, however World Pulse designers ensured that all text was part of the page, not layered in graphics. The text is authored simply, which leaves little room for ambiguity.

Even non-profit organizations need a global content strategy, because content richness is the single most important factor in bringing to and maintaining visitors on any site.

Even non-profit organizations need a global content strategy...

The new site is also designed efficiently, i.e. the right content appears at the right time and in the right place. And that is really the big difference between the old and new site.

The economical and utilitarian direction is what makes the new site action-focused, whereas the old site was bogged down in too many layers.

The main call to action “Join us” appears right in the middle of the new home page, and other lesser calls to action have been moved to the menu under Get Involved, which expresses the action that is the most important to World Pulse. The site answers these questions: what they do, why they do it, and how you can become part of it.

Navigation and the site map are simple via a two-level layer format, and two clicks can get you to your destination. Nothing is hidden deep any longer, and that’s important when two-thirds of your audience does not speak English as a first language and can get disoriented in a multi-layered site with a complex layout. It is also important because the web site is all about connection –that’s the product, essence and brand of World Pulse. And connection must be made as easy as possible for their global audience.

The launch of the new site has introduced an entirely new structure of engagement for World Pulse, centralized around collective groups, with less of a focus on the individual voice than the old website had. Not only are these new online groups communityled, empowering community members themselves with leadership opportunities, but they also make it much easier for individuals to find and connect with others who share their passion.

Studies have shown that women naturally socialize and problem-solve in groups.

World Pulse Groups provide a place online to connect across borders, nurture ideas and solutions, access resources, network, and make things happen.

Proper web site design rules often coincide with world-ready site qualities, in the same way as accessibility requirements match globalization requirements almost to a T. You see, responsive design, which makes the new World Pulse site look great on an iPad, any tablet, Surface, Android, in Google Chrome or Firefox, or viewed on a PC, is the child of global design and should pertain to any global marketing strategy. Most templates are prebuilt with responsive design capabilities but World Pulse has customized the layout further to reach optimal design and usability for users worldwide who access the web more regularly on smartphones and non-smartcard cell phones than computers.

...responsive design ... is the child of global design and should pertain to any global marketing strategy.

The Women and the Web Report, commissioned by Intel Corporation with consultation from World Pulse, the U.S. State Department’s Office of Global Women’s Issues, and UN Women, found that more

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women have access to a cell phone than a computer worldwide. And in today’s world of news spreading by the Internet and revolutions beginning on social media, mobile phones are the more agile way to gain access to current events in the world. Just as people hop on Twitter and Facebook to share breaking news in their communities, World Pulse sees itself providing a similar platform, dedicated to uniting the voices that are speaking out for deep social, political, and cultural change.

Not only is the new World Pulse site mobileresponsive, it was also intentionally designed to be low-bandwidth: stripped down with no macro or complicated code to inhibit users with small screens, tiny alphanumeric keyboards, a slow connection, and/or a spotty internet access.

The site is also designed to speak to the needs and desires of its donors, funders, and partners. A brand new section spotlights the organization’s impact in a way the old site never did, and gives specific honor and recognition to its greater network of supporters, all in the spirit of inclusivity and community.

When designing their site, non-profit brands have dual objectives: fundraising and the implementation of their mission. And that requires a marketing strategy.

When designing their site, non-profit brands have dual objectives: fundraising and the implementation of their mission.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, for example, has Tom Scott as their Director of Global Brand and Innovation. Universal Giving also maintains a full marketing department headed by Debi Gunders, who drives marketing and brand strategy initiatives and previously helped define and shape global identity for firms such as AOL, MSN, and Sun Microsystems. Very telling.

Ingrid Srinath, Secretary General of CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation, said, “You are a brand whether you like it or not….

You’re going to leave some impression in a person’s mind [and] it’s your choice whether you want to actively manage that impression or whether you want them to come to their own conclusions of what they think about you. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a one person advocacy organization or a transnational INGO.” Every organization has the opportunity to shape and communicate its identity. The key for World Pulse has been in listening to what women need on a global scale, and pioneering new territory to create the first digital change network that is powered by women worldwide.

Françoise Hovivian Senior Vice President of Global Programs | Valente Françoise is a Senior Vice President of Global Programs at Valente, a digital marketing consulting firm based out of Seattle, WA. Françoise’s passion is helping companies devise a strategy for international market share, and she gained that experience from her previous years at Microsoft where she started in 1992 in the Word “User Assistance” business unit, before it became merged into Office. With an initial background in technical writing from the American University of Paris (France), she discovered the new concept and intricate world of localization and globalization, which more than 20 years later still ignites her fire.

www.valenteglobal.com 26

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“The Internet of Things”

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US/UK Regulators Agree: Social Media Marketing Must Be Transparent Note: Although Glen is an attorney, the article that follows should be viewed for general informational purposes only and not as legal advice.

Legal questions should be directed to an attorney licensed in your own jurisdiction.

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Glen Gilmore

You Say “Obviously Identifiable,” I Say “Clear And Conspicuous” “Obviously identifiable” is the phrase used by the United Kingdom’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) to set the standard for how brands and their marketers must distinguish to audiences “marketing communications.” In the United States, a parallel body to the ASA, known as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), uses a similar phrase to explain its advertising disclosure standard: “clear Building Your Business From The Brand Up

agency.” In 2009, it expanded it advertising guidance to include social media marketing examples. See, FTC Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising. In 2013, it expanded its guidance with its .comDisclosures document elaborating in great detail on how disclosures should be made in digital advertising.

The ASA The ASA, in contrast to the FTC, is an “independent regulator” of advertising, not a governmental authority. In 2010, the responsibilities of the ASA were officially expanded to include social media advertising.

The ASA notes that it relies much on the persuasive power of “bad publicity” to bring compliance with its decisions, though it can resort to other sanctions to inspire compliance with its rulings as well.

Yes, US and UK Regulators Tweet! and conspicuous” “from the perspective of a reasonable consumer.” Both authorities have made it clear in their guidelines and investigatory actions that the requirement of transparency applies whether the marketing content is in traditional media – or in a tweet, a post or a pin.

The FTC The FTC is a U.S. federal agency with a broad regulatory mission to “prevent business practices that are anticompetitive or deceptive or unfair to consumers.” It has called itself “the nation’s consumer protection

Both regulatory authorities can be found on Twitter: @ASA_UK and @FTC.

Cole Haan’s #WanderingSole Contest Wanders Too Far For The FTC In 2014, the FTC conducted an investigation into whether Cole Haan, Inc., a major retailer of shoes and bags, violated a requirement under the FTC Act that compels “the disclosure of a material connection between a marketer and an endorser when their relationship is not otherwise apparent from the context of the communication that contains the endorsement”.

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The marketing campaign that caught the FTC’s attention was a social media contest on Pinterest that invited consumers to create a “board” entitled “Wandering Sole”, with five shoe images from Cole Haan’s own board and five images of the contestant’s “favorite places to wander,” along with the hashtag #WanderingSole in each pin description. The most creative entrant was to receive $1,000 shopping spree.

The FTC’s Problem With Cole Haan’s Pinterest Contest?

A Lack Of Transparency.

In particular, the FTC was “concerned that Cole Haan did not instruct contestants to label their pins and Pinterest boards to make it clear that they had pinned Cole Haan products as part of a contest”. The FTC concluded that the required #WanderingSole hashtag was simply not enough to alert other viewers of the pins that they were being posted as part of a contest. From a regulatory perspective, the absence of such transparency would be likely to mislead other viewers of the pins.

From a regulatory perspective, the absence of such transparency would be likely to mislead other viewers of the pins.

The FTC Takes Cole Haan’s Contest In Stride Taking Cole Haan’s contest in stride, the FTC decided not to recommend an enforcement action against the brand, noting that the FTC had not previously addressed the issue of whether the entry into a contest is a form of “material connection” requiring disclosure and whether a “pin” could be deemed an 30

endorsement. It further noted that the scope of the contest was small and Cole Haan agreed to adopt a social media policy addressing the FTC’s concerns and to take steps to “monitor social media influencers’ compliance” with the duty to “disclose material connections when endorsing its products”.

Oreo Cookies Takes A Licking From The ASA In November of 2014, the ASA issued an adjudication against Mondelez UK Ltd, the owner of the Oreo cookies brand, for a YouTube social media influencer campaign that had invited influential YouTube vloggers (people who create and post videos online) to post specific content about a contest to see who could lick the cream from an Oreo cookie the fastest.

The ASA’s Problem With Oreos’ YouTube Contest?

A Lack Of Transparency.

In its ruling, the ASA cited five YouTube videos from “vloggers” (i.e., people who create and post videos online) that failed to meet the ASA’s standard of being “obviously identifiable” as “marketing communications”.

Mondelez UK Ltd confirmed that the vloggers were paid to participate in their campaign, but said that it had thought that the ASA’s disclosure requirements would be met by variations of disclosure statement the vloggers included in their videos: “Thanks to Oreo for helping make this video happen!”

The ASA cited two problems with Oreos vlogger disclosures: (1) they did not “clearly indicate that there was a commercial relationship between the advertiser and the vloggers” and (2) the disclosures did not appear “before consumer engagement with

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the material.” The ASA instructed Mondelez UK Ltd that the videos “must not appear again in their current form”.

Truth In Advertising Is All About Transparency Businesses leaders and marketers will often be heard to lament the difficulty of staying on top of evolving social media law. Although such law is in a state of evolution, the core of it, whether in the US or UK, is familiar to marketers: marketing communications must be obvious as such to prevent consumers from being misled. This has long been the standard in traditional media and it remains a guiding principle in new media.

Takeaways: •• Giving an endorsement in social media while not disclosing that a sponsored relationship exists between the brand and endorser is misleading – and likely unlawful.

•• Entry into a contest to receive a “significant prize” in exchange for posting or pinning or tweeting triggers a “material connection” that requires disclosure.

the pin or post or tweet that the content is part of a contest.

•• Disclosures of material relationships between endorsers and brands should be “obviously identifiable / clear and conspicuous”and appear before consumers are asked to engage with the sponsored content.

•• Have reasonable procedures in place to monitor incentivized bloggers for compliance with their duty to disclose material connections.

•• Adopt a social media policy that addresses the requirement of transparency in social media marketing communications.

•• Both brands and bloggers risk reputational damage by not being transparent in their marketing campaigns.

•• Follow the FTC and ASA on Twitter to stay abreast of their latest rulings!

References: •• http://www.asa.org.uk •• http://www.FTC.gov •• FTC Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising •• .comDisclosures

•• If you are asking consumers to pin or post or tweet as part of a contest, require that they disclose somewhere in

•• FTC Cole Haan “No Action” Letter •• Federal Trade Commission Act, Section 5 Unfair or Deceptive Acts or Practices •• ASA Adjudication on Mondelez UK Ltd

Glen Gilmore Digital Marketing Strategist, Lawyer, Author, Rutgers Business School Instructor.

Glen Gilmore, aka @GlenGilmore on Twitter, author of “Social Media Law for Business,” is an instructor of Digital Marketing, Crisis Communications, and Social Media Law at the Rutgers School of Business. He is also an attorney and social media marketing strategist. For two years in a row, Glen has appeared near the top of Forbes’ list of “Top 50 Social Media Power Influencers.” He was also recently named by Burson-Marsteller as being one of the “Personalities most followed by NYSE listed companies on Twitter.” Glen can also be found on Twitter at: @SocialMediaLaw1 and @UKSocialMedia.

www.GlenGilmore.com

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The Trouble With Better Mousetraps David Burkus

There is a common misconception about great ideas, whether it be new products or new pitches. Often when presenting the new idea to the world, it is too easy to believe that the world will adopt it on merit alone.

We want so badly to believe that if the idea is good enough, it can be pulled from the lineup easily and will scale as rapidly as our excitement for it. We want so badly to believe the cliché that “if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.”

In my book, The Myths of Creativity, I label this misconception as the mousetrap myth, after this exact cliché. I’ve struggled to verify the proper source of the quote. Many credit Ralph Waldo Emerson but there isn’t any reference to mousetraps in what would have been the closest quote from Emerson.

Emerson, being a poet and author, probably experienced all to well the opposite effect the truth - that new ideas struggle often to get attention, let alone scale. Great ideas get rejected all the time.

Great ideas get rejected all the time.

Consider several historical examples.

Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, one of the most famous compositions in musical history, triggered not one but two riots during its debut performance in Paris.

William S. Sims presented an innovative new firing method learned from the British to his superiors in the US Navy 12 times, each met rejection. It wasn’t until the 13th try, 32

when Sims appealed to President Theodore Roosevelt, that his improved method was recognized.

Researchers from Kodak invented the world’s first digital camera in 1975 but, their superiors refused to let them pursue it - a decision many say was the first signal of Kodak’s eventually bankruptcy.

At the famous Palo Alto Research Center, engineers from Xerox developed the first personal computer, but across the

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country at headquarters the senior leaders decided that it wasn’t a fit with their existing business model.

These aren’t just comical anecdotes about smart people doing dumb things. All four of these examples are part of a larger revelation: humans aren’t that good at recognizing genius ideas. We say we want new, out of the box thinking, but when we’re presented something outside of the box, we fail to realize its true ingenuity.

Researchers led by Jennifer Mueller at the University of Pennsylvania found that humans actually hold a bias against innovative ideas.

The researchers investigated our perceptions about creative ideas, especially when faced with uncertainty. As part of their study,

Brand Quarterly

...humans actually hold a bias against innovative ideas.

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participants were divided into two groups, with the only difference in the groups being uncertainty about pay (one group was told the exact amount, one group told they could be making the exact plus an undisclosed bonus).

The participants were then asked to take a battery of tests, some judging their explicit beliefs about creativity, innovation, and originality and others designed to examine the assumptions behind their explicit statements.

What Mueller and her team found was that, when in uncertain situations, individuals often claim they like new and original ideas, but underneath the surface lies a hidden bias against these exact ideas. This bias can even cause individuals to make poor judgments about an idea’s potential.

For an idea to be truly innovative, it must be new and useful. The bias against innovative ideas exists because we only have our past experience to judge an idea’s utility. So while it’s easy to recognize a new idea because it doesn’t fit in past experiences, it’s a lot harder to see that ideas potential because we only have past experiences with which to compare it.

So how do you keep your great ideas from the fate of Stravinsky or Sims? Innovation researcher Everett Rogers may have some good advice. Rogers was the theorist behind

For an idea to be truly innovative, it must be new and useful.

the diffusion of innovation curve and the man who coined the term “early adopter.” He studied the ideas that made it through the diffusion curve quickly and found that they shared five things in common: 1. Relative Advantage. To what degree is an idea or product perceived as better than the existing standard?

2. Compatibility. How much is the idea an apparently logical extension of the status quo?

3. Complexity (or simplicity). How easily can people understand the new idea or use the new product?

4. Trialability. How effortless it is for the target audience to interact with the new concepts or experiment with the product?

5. Observability. How noticeable are the results of people trying idea to observers?

When these five factors are met, the public’s reaction to the idea is a little more like the mousetrap cliché suggests. As such, the five factors make a useful litmus test for judging if an idea is ready to be presented to the world.

Despite your excitement about your new product or pitch, take an unbiased assessment of the idea against these five factors and you’ll have a good gauge of whether your excitement will transfer. If it doesn’t meet the five factors standard, you may have to go back and build an even better mousetrap.

David Burkus Author, Assistant Professor of Management | Oral Roberts University David Burkus is the author of the best-selling book The Myths of Creativity: The Truth About How Innovative Companies and People Generate Great Ideas. David is Assistant Professor of Management at the College of Business at Oral Roberts University, where he teaches courses on leadership, creativity, strategy, and organizational behavior. He is the founder and host LDRLB, a podcast that shares insights from research on leadership, innovation, and strategy. His work as been featured in Forbes, Fast Company, PsychologyToday, Inc, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, the Financial Times and the Harvard Business Review. You can connect with David on Twitter at @davidburkus.

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Feel A Little Invisible?

Need To Stand Out?

Talk to the experts Brand Guardians for both the Brand2Global and LocWorld conference and exhibition series

The creators and production team behind Brand Quarterly magazine

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36

The Changing Playing Field Of Ingredient Branding Joe Tradii

Teflon®, Gore-Tex®, Dolby® Digital sound. These three very different brands all have one thing in common – they are all successful ingredient brands. One of the things which make them a continued success is the very fact that you (and most likely a large percentage of the public) are familiar with them. After all, an ingredient brand isn’t very useful if no one has heard of it, or isn’t familiar with what should be its’ wellentrenched positioning.

Lately there have been some major shifts in how the makers of ingredient brands are going to market. However, before we explore these changes in strategy, a short refresher on the basics of ingredients might be in order.

Ingredient Branding - The Basic Recipe In short, an “ingredient” brand is used by a “host” brand to borrow established brand equity. By definition, an ingredient brand, unlike the cheese, doesn’t stand, alone.

Rather, it requires a host brand to which it lends some needed attribute. In the previously mentioned examples, Teflon lends the attribute “non-stick,” a brand with Gore-Tex attached to it signals trusted weather protection, and the Dolby brand signals high-quality audio.

However, none of these ingredient brands manufacture their own line of products. Instead they are content to use their marketing resources to reinforce their positioning and attract host brands. Also note that a successful ingredient brand is perhaps the purest example of the marketing maxim that a brand should only own a single unique position − or risk brand dilution or confusion as to what it stands for. But that’s a story for another article.

Another important aspect of an ingredient brand is nonexclusivity. While the host brand would no doubt prefer only they be allowed to boast the benefits of any particular ingredient brand, the opposite holds true for the ingredient brand. Strategically, it makes sense for the ingredient to attach itself to more than a single host brand – it increases its name recognition, solidifies its positioning, brings in more revenue, and spreads business risk. This dynamic between

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host and ingredient brand is common and usually finds its own equilibrium. However, that may be changing as we’ll see shortly.

Lastly, from a brand architecture perspective, the ingredient is always subservient to the host brand. The ingredient brand is there to lend credibility, not to share co-billing with the main brand. One exception that comes to mind is the liberal use of the Teflon brand on generic cooking pans. I see this as a sign of a mature brand seeking to expand market share at the risk of making itself less “special” for more popular brands of cooking pans.

The ingredient brand is there to lend credibility, not to share co-billing with the main brand.

When Might A Company Employ An Ingredient Brand Strategy?

Several elements could influence whether a company might want to consider introducing an ingredient brand to one or more of their products. Factors such as the competitive landscape, where the product is in its life cycle, and brand perception all play a role in the decision.

Two of the primary reasons for a host brand to pursue an ingredient brand strategy are 1) pricing power and 2) defending market share.

If pricing pressures are increasing and there are limited opportunities to squeeze more efficiencies out of the supply chain or manufacturing process, the strength of an ingredient brand may allow a company to either maintain a price or even command a slight premium. This is certainly the case with Dolby audio/video receivers.

For challenger brands, adding an ingredient brand to their products can erode the market leader’s share by offering a clear point 38

of differentiation. Of course, due to the non-exclusive nature of ingredient brands (unless the challenger brand can negotiate an arrangement with the ingredient brand ensuring exclusivity in its category) there’s little to stop the leading brand from also adopting the same ingredient brand.

In an excellent paper, “Measuring the value of ingredient brand equity at multiple stages in the supply chain: a component supplier’s perspective”, written by Waldemar Pfoertsch, Ph.D, et al,. in May of 2008 and accessible via an Internet search, the authors demonstrate the positive contribution from an established ingredient brand to a variety of host brand parameters.

Which brings us to a key question for the maker of an ingredient brand: how to establish credibility without spending a fortune. A look at a few ingredient brand companies demonstrates a new approach made possible by the Internet.

Web-Based Marketing For Ingredient Brands Traditionally ingredient brands, especially when first launching, have had to work extremely hard to attract the attention of a host brand. This included one-to-one business development efforts, heavy trade advertising and trade show presence, and, for some, very expensive marketing directly to consumers in order to generate awareness and a “pull” strategy. For example, Intel spent (and continues to spend) a huge amount of money establishing the “Intel Inside” brand by advertising directly to consumers, as well as paying original equipment manufacturers large amounts of market development funds to participate in maintaining the brand.

On the other hand there’s another company, lesser known (for now) to the public, that has taken a unique approach to building their ingredient brand. Their efforts are aimed not at the public, but squarely at other marketers.

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If you’re engaged in an Internet search on the subject, you’ll no doubt come across the website www.ingredientbrands.com. On this site, which is written with marketers in mind, there is an eBook one can download that explains what ingredient branding is and offers different strategies for successfully using an ingredient brand. Case studies on ingredient branding are also available for download. The site touts ingredient branding as “The Secret Ingredient to Growing Your Business.”

Now here’s the interesting part: the site is sponsored by the ingredient brand “Microban®”. In the eBook the brand is used in a few examples, but by no means all of them. Rather, Microban cleverly touts the advantages of ingredient branding with themselves as an option. By providing something of value to the reader, it’s an inexpensive way to establish yourself as a leading ingredient brand. Paid search would help narrow responses to host brands that would be more inclined to make use of Microban’s products. MIcroban also has its own branded site, www.microban.com, aimed at educating everyone about the benefits of their product.

Other ingredient brands are also pursuing robust digital strategies, albeit with a more end-user focus. For example, a visit to www.gore-tex.com brings up a well-designed site, which does an excellent job of educating the visitor on the benefits of Gore-Tex.

Other ingredient brands are also pursuing robust digital strategies, albeit with a more end-user focus.

Not only does this strategy help the ingredient brand maker cost-effectively create awareness and stimulate demand with a “pull” strategy (“Be sure and look for the “Gore-Tex logo”), it also provides the ingredient brand opportunities to monetize the site. Depending upon the traffic the brand is able to generate, it can charge host brands to be listed on their site - or for a premium position on the site.

Gore-Tex goes one better in monetizing their site. Clicking on a host brand’s logo, Adidas for example, brings you to an e-commerce page on the Gore-Tex site exclusively featuring Adidas products. Visitors may then purchase an Adidas product without leaving the site.

Ingredient brands that can manage a wellconceived digital strategy can shift the power in the relationship with their host brands in their favor, providing themselves a competitive advantage. The relatively low cost of entry for a digital strategy allows even less well-known ingredient brands to help establish their brand positioning and awareness.

Joe Tradii Director of Commercial Marketing | Frontier Communications Joe Tradii is a globally recognized branding and marketing strategist. His thought leadership has been seen in leading publications such as Brandweek, The Marketer, and the Journal of Brand Management. Currently he is Director of Commercial Marketing at Frontier Communications in Seattle, Washington. His previous roles include Senior Brand Manager at Microsoft, where he was responsible for creating brand value for their commercial and cloud-based brands. Mr. Tradii has won numerous advertising awards, firmly believes the best way to own a category is to create one, and welcomes any inquires.

www.joetradii.com

Brand Quarterly

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A Chief Marketing Officer Kicks Off 2015 Alan See

A trim balding man in khakis with a button down shirt, the CMO looks the part he has played for so many years – the affable, hardworking executive who gets the job done. It’s the 2015 sales kickoff meeting and he is sitting in the front row with the rest of the executive team, getting ready to address the troops.

He could still remember a time when these meetings required full business attire, there was no PowerPoint, and there were no smart phones or facilitated hashtagged social conversations with the audience.

The business world had changed, and he loved it. He had been one of the first to join LinkedIn back in 2002, and could tweet and blog with the best of them. Social media and mobile devices were changing the business landscape, and his company was determined to meet the transformation challenge.

The prior year had involved several one-onone meetings with his counterparts. They were productive, but at times he could still feel a little tension and some apprehension.

Information Technology - The Chief Information Officer The prior year had begun with several meetings involving the Chief Information Officer. In late 2012 Gartner analyst Laura McLellan had published a report that contained the statement “by 2017, the CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO”. Of course a sound bite like that raised some eyebrows in both marketing and IT. It was time to check their facts and see if that prediction could be supported with their own data. The CMO and CIO had already been

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working closely together over the past couple of years as a result of the organizations ongoing social media and mobile marketing initiatives. And what did they discover?

That technology spends of 17% was indeed the second largest part of their marketing budget. But for their company, the associated dollar value was not more than the IT budget or likely to overtake it. What was actually becoming of greater concern was the number of applications, programs and platforms the small marketing team was being tasked to learn and manage. In fact, across all the marketing functions, the number currently stood at well over two dozen.

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2015 CMO/CIO View:

Sales – The Chief Sales Officer

Marketing departments are often responsible for several ‘IT’ applications. They can include aspects of CRM, marketing automation, email marketing, website analytics, data analytics, marketing research, creative applications, webinar-meeting, and more. This doesn’t even begin to touch on all the new social media and mobile marketing related platforms and applications that are now part of the strategic marketing plan.

Like many CMO’s he had started his career in sales. He had carried a quota and covered a territory just like the CSO. That background brought great credibility and helped them agree on many strategies; but they could still have their moments when it came to lead generation. Of course sales would like “qualified, ready-to-buy right now” leads. But they both know in complex solution selling environments that’s not a realistic expectation.

The CMO and CIO need to focus more on matching talent and headcount to the applications that are actually being used and bringing value, than worrying about who has the bigger budget.

Marketing was providing support through the entire sales cycle, but their main focus – including the budget – was on the front end. Creating awareness, generating interest and building greater industry credibility had

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CEO: I hear about social media all the time now; but does Wall Street really care if we get social?

What’s our competition doing?

CFO: Are we talking about decreasing expenses or increasing revenues with this strategy?

CIO: What about network security?

By the way, we can’t allow everyone to be downloading all these untested desktop social apps.

been important to helping them engage with prospects and customers. And the fact that over 60% of their marketing budget was dedicated to lead generation activity supported that point-of-view.

2015 CMO/CSO View: There will always be some degree of tension between sales and marketing when it comes to lead generation activity. And that’s OK, the key is not to let it spiral out of control.

One area the CMO and CSO agreed needed more focus was on helping the sales teams understand and make better use of social media, particularly LinkedIn. Many sales people still viewed LinkedIn as a resume tool. They were not leveraging it as a business development platform. Subject matter experts from the marketing team will be spending more time training the sales teams, one-on-one if necessary, in order to make improvements in this area.

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Sales: Are we using this to generate leads or is it about customer service?

If it’s about leads, will the quality be any good?

HR: Are we going to allow all employees access?

If so, what about productivity?

Legal – Chief Legal Counsel A few years ago the CMO and Chief Legal Counsel had a difficult relationship. At one point the CMO had actually said “I’d rather go to the dentist than have a meeting with our legal department”. The reason is that Legal and HR had formed an alliance to ban all corporate social media activity. Employees were not allowed to access LinkedIn during its early years and later on blogging, Facebook and Twitter went through similar review processes. That was now in the past, the legal department was onboard.

2015 CMO/Legal View: Legal understands the value of social media and recognizes the fact that there will always be some degree of risk associated with those media channels that cannot be totally mitigated. However, that doesn’t mean marketing gets a free pass.

The marketing department will work to make sure all “Social Media Policies and Procedures” documentation is always upto-date and communicated throughout the

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...there will always be some degree of risk associated with those media channels that cannot be totally mitigated. organization. This will be very important because new “Social Employee Advocacy” software applications are likely to expand how marketing leverages social media throughout the company, in order to help employees feel comfortable in the role of brand advocates.

Human Resources – Chief Human Resources Officer Like legal, HR has been fully engaged with marketing as it related to the new social media channels. Sure, in the beginning they worried about employee productivity and whether or not social media was even relevant to their functional area. At times they still wonder about the productivity, but they definitely see the recruitment value.

2015 CMO/HR View: There is one important area the CMO would like to see a change made as it relates to HR and how their current processes impact the corporate brand. This project will also involve IT. Current HR applications and processes offer prospective employees the ability to connect

their LinkedIn profiles and / or upload their current resumes. Either way, the process still requires them to enter the same employment and education history that can be found in those sources. This duplication of effort is time consuming, frustrating and leaves a bad first impression of the corporate brand.

The Chief Executive Officer The Chief Executive Officer came up through finance and is pretty much a numbers person.

And, as you might suspect, the CEO takes special interest in things that increase revenue, decrease costs, or mitigates risk. In short, that means the question “What’s the ROI?” is never going to be far from the surface.

2015 CMO / CEO View: The CEO is taking the stage now to kick off the meeting. Let’s listen…

“What is currently impossible to do that if it were possible would change everything.”

That’s an interesting question to open the meeting with…

“Well, use the hashtag #ItsPossible for today’s meeting because we’ve got big news!”

OK, the CEO is more than just a numbers person! The CEO understands the importance of leading by example and is not afraid to leverage the new social platforms.

It’s going to be a fun year!

Alan See Principal, Chief Marketing Officer | CMO Temps, LLC Alan See is a senior marketing executive and currently ranked as the most followed CMO on Twitter by Social Media Marketing Magazine and a Top 1% Influencer by Kred. His rare ability to speak Web 2.0 and Sales 101 in the same sentence makes him a popular blogger and conference speaker. Alan has over 25 years of industry experience and has performed in senior marketing, senior analyst, management consulting, and sales management roles at MindLeaders, AT&T, Seapine Software, AberdeenGroup, Teradata, SAS Institute, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, and NCR Corporation. He has also served as an associate faculty member at the University of Phoenix facilitating courses in Marketing & Management Theory.

www.cmotemps.biz

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Brands: Do Good And Earn A Profit Anne Bahr Thompson Doing good.

For most people, this phrase conjures up images of kindness and self-sacrifice. A young boy scout helping an old woman to cross the street. A Peace Corp volunteer teaching a Nepalese man to build a smokeless stove. An aid worker in Haiti rescuing a young child from the rubble.

Mother Theresa surrounded by young children in Calcutta. The Red Cross, Doctors without Borders, CARE and other non-profit organizations may even come to mind.

Few, if any of us, envision a business - a bank, a fast food chain, an oil and gas producer or even a retailer - when we hear the phrase doing good. Yet, brands today are doing good.

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According to Giving USA and Charity Navigator, US corporations gave $16.76 billion to charities in 2013. By the World Bank’s 2013 statistics, that’s more than the GDP of Iceland ($13.66 billion), Nicaragua ($10.51 billion), the West Bank and Gaza ($4.02 billion), Liberia ($1.77 billion), St. Kitts and Nevis ($0.75 billion) and many other countries. And, Giving USA’s figures don’t include many corporate social responsibility initiatives and sustainability investments, which if added in would clearly make the number higher.

So, why are many people still uneasy with aligning a brand with the notion of doing good? One argument that gained momentum since the Great Recession put a microscope

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on corporate greed: even though the number itself is large, corporate giving represents a very small percentage of corporate profits. Less than 1.6% of the Fortune 500’s combined $1.080 trillion in profits—when compared alongside executive compensation, this tiny number is shocking. The issue, however, runs deeper. Our Western cultural narrative, derived from our Judeo-Christian roots, associates doing good with idealism and altruism. Two concepts we typically don’t connect with corporations.

For decades, corporate efforts to fund social and environmental programs have been considered anything but idealistic or altruistic.

They’ve generally been judged as public relations campaigns designed to boost brand reputation at best and, at worst, a way to right wrongs. They were seemingly part of a zero sum game in which companies’ positive efforts simply offset their negative behavior (negative behavior + positive response = zero sum) rather than create a net positive for society.

For decades, corporate efforts to fund social and environmental programs have been considered anything but idealistic or altruistic.

Today, social media demands that doing good be more than part of a zero-sum game.

In fact, doing good is a practical reality for corporate survival across industries. People expect nothing less. They want transparency from the brands they buy – especially the ones they trust the most. And more and more CEOs are acknowledging that fair and ethical business practices are as essential a criterion for lasting business success as is earning a profit.

In an era when businesses are forced to adapt to the challenges globalized sourcing, production and sales present, business

leaders recognize that economics and ethics cannot be viewed as separate constructs.

Further, our technologically interconnected world where coopetiton (collaborativecompetition), hybrid cars, mixed racial backgrounds and gay marriage are becoming mainstream concepts demands that the notions of idealism and realism no longer be at odds with one another.

...economics and ethics cannot be viewed as separate constructs.

Clearly, integrating sustainability and social responsibility initiatives into brand development must become more than a zero-sum game or self-promotion. It must be recognized as one element of transparent communications enabling consumers to buy products from companies that invest into things they care about.

As technological advances and digital communications further alter the way we accomplish daily tasks, communicate with one another, produce and consume media, and live our lives overall, they are simultaneously shifting our cultural narrative.

Think about the impact of cutting and pasting, for example. The fact that we can readily cut two seemingly different images and place them side-by-side has dramatically changed the way we see things fit together. We mashup how we dress, our playlists, books, videos, the list goes on.

The ability to cut and paste, and mash things up eliminates our need to choose between two seemingly opposite things. We don’t need to pick between H&M and Chanel, flip flops and a suit, Beyoncé and Jimi Hendrix or even Brokeback Mountain and Back to the Future, for example. Now we can comfortably express the inconsistencies in our personalities every day. And as we grow more at ease with the notion of paradoxes

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living side-by-side, our cultural story need no longer emphasize choosing between two things. Technology has conditioned us to expect that we have the right to have it all.

a Me-We paradigm, Brand Citizenship connects consumers, employees and other stakeholders to something bigger and more meaningful than themselves.

We don’t have to decide between seemingly opposite states: competition or collaboration; money or meaning; love or power; sustainability or prosperity. Historical contrasts like these represent mind-sets at odds with the spirit of our times. The digital age allows opposites to comfortably co-exist alongside one another and moves us beyond a world of either/or, into a new universe of also.

Beginning with offering quality products at a fair price, Brand Citizenship climbs up the benefit ladder to enhance its users lives, connect stakeholders with communities and issues they care about, sustain our planet and better our world. Integrating initiatives traditionally managed at a corporate level with individual product and service brands and consumer priorities, Brand Citizenship helps democratize the traditionally more centralized concepts of sustainability and CSR in the same manner that social media liberated communications.

Three years of insight from Onesixtyfourth’s ongoing CultureQ research project brand investigating leadership, loyalty and good corporate citizenship in the UK and US, indicate that this cultural shift is leading to a new model for brands to simultaneously do good and earn a profit. The core element of this model is the recognition and acceptance by businesses that they, too, are citizens, sharing the responsibility of progressing and sustaining the world alongside the consumers who buy their goods and services.

The model - called Brand Citizenship strategically aligns marketing, sustainability, corporate social responsibility (CSR), human resources and social media community building efforts under a united framework.

It enables brands to integrate sustainability and social initiatives into their development, without sacrificing the benefits they offer users or asking consumers to pay more.

Stretching development efforts across ®

The processes of laddering up and integrating corporate silos will become increasingly important as social media continues to expose offensive business practices and as investors focus more on transparency of operations and the strength of a brand’s reputation.

Assimilating attributes of brand leadership, loyalty and good citizenship, Brand Citizenship helps to strengthen reputation, grow equity and increase return on investment of sustainability activities. It is an integrated strategy that aids businesses to simultaneously earn a profit, sustain the environment and better society - co-creating a more positive future alongside people. A winwin-win approach.

Anne Bahr Thompson Founder & Managing Partner | Onesixtyfourth Anne Bahr Thompson is founder of Onesixtyfourth, a strategic brand consultancy that uses proprietary research into cultural shifts and social movements to inspire business leaders to reimagine their category and more meaningfully engage stakeholders. Previously, Anne was head of the consulting businesses for Interbrand, first in the USA and then in London. She has taught as an adjunct professor of marketing at NYU in London and continues to be an adviser to former students in start-ups. A natural problem-solver, Anne focuses primarily on opportunities for progress and helping brands transform their relationships with people, the marketplace and the wider world.

www.onesixtyfourth.com 46

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To Native Or Not To Native, That Is The Question Rachel DiCaro Metscher

Like many of you, I see the term ‘native advertising’ flood my inbox from industry magazines and pundit newsletters. Currently, I have more than 50 articles about native advertising sitting in my inbox today. In case you don’t have time to read that many articles, here is my brief review of what native advertising is and how best to use it.

Some marketers may think this is a fad, but according to a 2014 eMarketer report, spending on native ads on social sites alone is expected to increase from $3.1 billion to $5 billion by 2017. As a percentage of total social ad spending, it projected that native would rise from 38.8 percent in 2014 to 42.4 percent in 2017.

Seems to me native advertising may be sticking around long enough for the majority of marketers to potentially use it in their promotional mix. A recent Ad Age article described how many publishers such as The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Time Inc. are increasing staffing to capitalize on the native advertising opportunity.

What Is Native Advertising?

In order to best understand how native advertising can benefit your business, let’s first define what it is. Native advertising as defined by Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) as “paid ads that are so cohesive with the page content, assimilated into the design, and consistent with the platform behavior that the viewer simply feels that they belong”.

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Multiple Faces Of Native Advertising

Tips For How Best To Use Native Advertising

Publishers use a wide array of forms to persuade consumers to click on sponsored content. IAB defined six commonly used forms as in-feed, paid search, recommendation widgets, promoted listings, in-ad, and custom. Most of us have seen in-feed ads and recommendation widgets in our national publications for some time now.

The association offers some language that alludes to native advertising in-feeds such as “Advertisement” or “AD“ (Google, YouTube), “Promoted” or “Promoted by” (Twitter, Sharethrough), “Sponsored”, “Sponsored by” or “Sponsored Content” (LinkedIn, Yahoo), “Presented by” + “Featured Partner” tag (BuzzFeed, Huffington Post), and “Suggested Post” + a “Sponsored” tag (Facebook).

The point: advertisers and publishers generally place language around the content to notify the consumer that it is not apart of the regular editorial content.

What’s The Fuss?

The biggest concern about native advertising is that the reader is aware that the content is advertising not editorial. Most readers or consumers have become aware of paid advertising in their favorite news outlet or social media feed.

HubShout, a online marketing firm, conducted a survey last year that found 72.8 percent of internet users who have read sponsored content believe it has equal or greater value as non-sponsored content on the same website.

Native advertising like any other content initiative is an extension of the brand.

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Partner With The Right Publisher Part of the intrigue of native advertising is that publishers have the audience that businesses need. The key is to make sure the publisher has the right audience for the content you want to produce. Before jumping into a native advertising campaign ask questions about the type of traffic the publisher receives, who are they, and most important what type of engagement do most brands see? Native advertising like any other content initiative is an extension of the brand.

Content Like any other campaign, what useful information are you providing your audience?

It’s about what the audience wants to read rather than what the company wants to say.

Matthew Schwartz of PR News wrote some sage advice when creating paid content, “A simple test for any content is to take off your PR and marketing shoes and look at the content from the audience’s perspective. Does it focus on issues and subjects that people are talking about outside of your brand?”

As David Ogilvy once said, “What really decides consumer to buy or not to buy is the content of your advertising, not its form.”

Brands can also look internally to the sales or product development folks for ideas on content. When I worked in technology we would create a running list of all the questions we were asked either from the market or customers. This list would help drive content from our blog to editorial content. The same process can be used for native advertising.

Ideally, the publishers you partner with can come up with some ideas for you too.

Decide On A Goal Like any good marketing plan you need to identify what you want to achieve. Without a

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clear vision of your campaign’s goal - whether to increase brand awareness or engagement - you will never get beyond tactical conversations. Why? That conversation is like a rocking chair: Everyone feels great about accomplishing a task - they feel movement - but, as time will surely tell, your initiative ends up going nowhere.

A former colleague, Patrick Costello, founder of Naytev, chatted about the importance of goals in campaigns. “ What are the tangible things you want to drive with this campaign? If it is exposure, publishers can focus on it, but this is more than just eyeballs on a page. Eyeballs don’t equal value.”

Patrick offered this goal for brands considering the use of native advertising, “Think engagement. Meaningful currency is a constant of new business.”

readership that is interested in your content.

Hubspot wrote some helpful hints on how to build a successful native campaign: 1. What is the demographic breakdown of the audience? (i.e. company size, title, industry, etc.)

2. Will the content be posted in other channels such as newsletters or email?

3. Will there be social promotion?

4. Other distribution methods included?

Ultimately, engagement translates into discussion and shares. Discussion and shares yield into visits to your site and form conversions.

Promotion And Distribution Is Key In Google’s Zero Moment of Truth study it showed on average, consumers are reading 10.4 pieces of content before making a purchase. You want to make sure you are where your audience is and more importantly, finding content that leads back to your brand.

In fact that is why you are partnering with a publisher: to deliver an active and engaged

...on average, consumers are reading 10.4 pieces of content before making a purchase.

Whether you are considering going native or not, the results are compelling. 70% of individuals want to learn about products through content rather than traditional advertising. More than half of consumers who click on native ads do so with the intention of purchasing something, compared with just 34 percent who click on banner ads.

The key with any “new” channel is to make sure your goals are realistic, your content is relevant to your audience, and your management team supports marketing campaigns from idealization through execution.

Rachel DiCaro Metscher Director of Content Marketing | ICF International Rachel DiCaro Metscher is responsible for helping her clients create content that adds value, maximizes results, and contributes to the conversation as the director of content marketing at ICF International. A champion of clear and concise communications, she has worked for The Princeton Review, Fannie Mae, and other B2B software companies to build successful marketing programs. You can hear about her musings on PR, social media, content marketing on her blog, Metscher’s Musings. Rachel is a conference speaker and writer on social media and content marketing and has written for American Marketing Association Marketing News, Social Media Today, and MarketingProfs.

www.metschermusings.wordpress.com

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Big Data The SMART Way Barnard Marr

Everyone in business knows about big data now, and how it’s going to revolutionise the world we live in. Information is a valuable commodity – the more we have of it, the more we can learn from it, and make changes that will drive business success.

That’s the theory anyway – and what many people will tell you if you ask them to define “Big Data”.

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But in the rush to avoid being left behind, I also see that many companies, frantically measuring and recording everything they possibly can, risk becoming “data rich but insight poor”. In short, too many have gathered a lot of data they have no idea what to do with, and no hope of learning anything useful from.

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To add to the problem, a lot of data has a life span. At some point in time, it becomes no longer relevant – inaccurate or outdated. But often it is held onto it anyway – with vague thoughts that it may one day prove useful in some way. Storing all this data has its cost.

Ignoring the costs of collection, data requires somewhere to keep it, electricity to power it and, if your information is sensitive (such as customer records) time and money to be spent on security and data compliance.

In fact, research has shown that on average, businesses use less than 10% of the information available to them to inform decisions.

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...businesses use less than 10% of the information available to them to inform decisions.

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To be fair to them, it isn’t entirely their own fault – you see, the problem is a lot of businesses have been misled. And much of the blame for that lies with Big Data itself.

Specifically, its name.

As I outline in my new book “Big Data”, Big Data isn’t about size at all. As the old saying goes, it’s not how big it is, it’s what you do with it that counts. In my opinion, we shouldn’t be thinking about Big Data at all. That may sound like a strange comment coming from someone who works in Big Data for a living. But, I believe what we should be focussing on, is Smart Data.

Those that have really profited from the explosion in available data, and our increasing expertise at analysing and learning from it are those who have learned to “think smarter” about data and what to do with it. Industrydominating behemoths such as Google, Facebook and Amazon have all been pioneers – not simply collecting vast quantities of data, but finding pioneering ways to put it to use.

Sure, these are companies with vast resources at their disposal – millions of users willing to share increasingly intimate details of their lives, as well as teams of highly-trained data scientists versed in the arcane arts of turning data into insights. But one thing they have in common – something by no means only available to multinational corporations which turn over billions - is they have been smart about how they have used their data.

And that forms the foundation of my SMART Data framework – which you can use to move from thinking about Big Data and instead think about smart data.

Start With A Strategy Don’t worry about how big your data is, right away – start right from the beginning by working out what you are trying to achieve.

Big Data giants such as Google and Walmart

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may have the capacity and expertise to analyse every scrap of information they can gather, but most businesses don’t.

Do your business’s key needs hinge on attracting the right employees? Is cutting wasted time and effort spent dealing with faulty returns key to success? Or are you simply trying to increase good old sales?

By knowing what you want, you’ll know what information you need to achieve it. If you want to use Big Data to carve out a competitive advantage, you need to understand what your strategic objectives are and what business questions Big Data will help you answer – I cannot emphasize this firmly enough, which is why it is the starting point of Smart Data.

Measure Metrics And Data Increasingly, everything we do in our lives leaves a digital trace. The ability to collect an ever-increasing variety of this data in ever-increasing volumes is a basic concept of Big Data. Data can be either structured or unstructured (or a mixture of both) and increasingly, value is being found in the mountains of unstructured data becoming available.

Unstructured data is data which can’t be easily categorised and inserted into traditional databases – messy data like photographs, videos, voice recording, websites and social media posts. It’s estimated that 80% of business-relevant information is unstructured data.

This makes it incredibly valuable, but also far more challenging to collect, store and interpret. The ability to harness this data in an intelligent and practical way is what Smart Data is all about. But remember – no matter how clever you are about capturing it, data is only useful if it provides answers to your important business questions.

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...no matter how clever you are about capturing it, data is only useful if it provides answers to your important business questions.

Apply Analytics This is where we try and make sense of the messy data we have gathered together.

Textual analysis can be used to mine huge documents to pick out key phrases, concepts and sentiments. Human speech recordings can be analysed to determine the emotional tone. Video can be analysed to determine the behaviour of people – for instance, customers standing in line at a retail store – as well as identities, using facial recognition technology.

Of course, ethics play a big part here, and proper concern will have to be paid to privacy – there are still significant ethical and moral dilemmas to be ironed out in this field. But these are issues that will resolve with time, as regulations are put in place and public attitudes evolve.

Analysing data is where you will extract the valuable insights that will answer the questions you are asking.

Report Results The size of your data or the sophistication of your analytics won’t mean a thing unless they are presented to the right people in a meaningful way. Managers and decisionmakers already struggle to keep up-to-date with the mountains of information that come their way every day – reports, agendas, emails – much of which is skim-read or ignored due to time and attention-span constraints.

Smart Data involves getting creative about your reports, and that means visualisation, and storytelling. Maps, text and infographics can be combined with traditional charts and graphs to create neat packages of insights ready to pass on to those who will put them into action.

Transform Your Business Thinking SMART about your data will let you transform your business in two main ways. It will let you optimise and improve your existing operations, and it will give ideas about new directions you should be heading in.

Always be alert to new ideas and opportunities that might become apparent from the insights you are finding – and use them to make better decisions that will benefit your customers, your brand, and your bottom line.

Barnard Marr Founder and CEO | The Advanced Performance Institute Bernard Marr is one of the world’s most highly respected voices anywhere when it comes to data in business. He is a best-selling author, popular keynote speaker and consultant who helps companies to better use data and metrics. His latest book is ‘Big Data: Using SMART Big Data, Analytics and Metrics To Make Better Decisions and Improve Performance’. You can connect with Bernard on Twitter (@bernardmarr) or on LinkedIn where he has over half a million followers.

www.ap-institute.com

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Building Your Business From The Brand Up

Marketers: Gain Greater Credibility With The CFO Laura Patterson

In today’s world, financial rigor and strategic insight are becoming tightly linked.

Increasingly, CFOs are playing a primary role in developing and implementing strategy within their company, serving as a key advisor to the CEO for developing growth opportunities for the future.

A study by Ernest & Young found that onethird of CFOs “play an active role in developing and defining the overall strategy for their organization and a greater proportion provide insight and analysis to support the CEO and ensure that business decisions are grounded in sound financial criteria.” According to Gary Patterson, CEO of advisory firm Fiscal Doctor, Inc., “…today’s CFO’s are expected to play the role of both COO [chief operating officer] and CFO, which is even more of a strategic position”.

As companies turn their attention to growth, CFO’s will begin to shift from focusing on how to optimize marginal revenue to asking “where should the next dollar of investment be made?” With finance gaining greater influence and authority over the business as a whole, including marketing, marketers wanting to invest the company’s money in strategies and programs that enable the organization to acquire, keep and grow the value of customers, need the CFO’s buy-in.

Securing the CFO’s support takes credibility. Credibility starts by being able to better quantify and measure the value of your marketing programs and articulate marketing’s impact and contribution in business terms that resonate with the CFO. Your budget depends on it.

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These five steps will help you gain greater credibility with the CFO:

3. Serve As A Value Creator Not Just A Sales Enabler Or A Campaign Producer

1. Pursue Alignment

Best-in-class marketers build business acumen and customer intelligence so they can create value for customers and the company. To be a value creator you must think beyond this quarter’s leads or this year’s integrated marketing campaigns and how to produce more content.

This is the starting point for everything!

Establishing a clear line of sight between marketing initiatives and the business enables marketers to make both strategic and tactical decisions regarding customers, channels, touch points, and content investments.

Alignment points the way to accountability and analytics. With alignment you know what data you will need, what analytics to apply, and what metrics should be included on your dashboard.

2. Select Relevant Metrics You need to know how to create a chain between the outputs of marketing efforts, such as response rates, sentiment, referrals, and net new qualified opportunities with new customer win rate, share of wallet growth, customer retention rates, and business outcomes such as revenue growth and shareholder value.

Knowing which metrics matter the most will bolster your competence around marketing planning and forecasting. Pick metrics that enable you to know what is and isn’t working and that demonstrate Marketing’s value to the business. You want metrics that help make investment decisions and appropriate course corrections; not metrics that are easy to collect or “cool.”

You want metrics that help make investment decisions and appropriate course corrections; not metrics that are easy to collect or “cool.”

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Value creators understand the entire customer journey and help their company validate, penetrate, and dominate markets.

These marketers embrace data, analytics, and modeling to facilitate market, customer, and product innovation, and competitive move decisions. They do not operate primarily as a “service center.”

4. Take An Investment vs Saving Approach To Your Budget Marketers with business acumen understand that they are using company funds to make investments on behalf of the company. Most CFO’s understand the concept of portfolio management. Marketers are in essence portfolio managers. Their portfolio is comprised of a mix of emerging customers and markets, and goals such as retaining and/or profitably growing a set of customers and markets.

Marketers are in essence portfolio managers.

Build a marketing plan that represents this portfolio mix and how you are allocating the funds across each component. Clarify how the investments are intended to contribute to the business, and then develop a dashboard that monitors and communicates marketing’s portfolio investment performance.

Building Your Business From The Brand Up

5. Forge An Explicit Collaborative Alliance With Finance Finance is not an adversary. The finance organization often has access to vital data you need. Your access to this data will improve if the relationship is a positive one.

The finance organization also often has analytical and dashboard capabilities you can tap. Seek to create an ongoing collaborative relationship with the CFO and the finance team. Engage them in the planning and dashboard process.

In summary, the abilities to achieve alignment, choose the right metrics, serve as a value creator, take an investment approach to budgeting, and partner with finance, are now just as important as understanding marketing principles and disciplines. So, make sure that you are investing in upgrading and expanding these skills in your team – starting with you.

Then make sure that the outcome of that investment is visible.

Laura Patterson President and Founder | VisionEdge Marketing For 20+ years, Laura has been helping CEO’s and Marketing Executives at companies such as Cisco, Elsevier, ING, Intel, Kennametal, and Southwest Airlines prove and improve the value of their marketing. She was an early advocate of using marketing data, processes, automation, metrics, and dashboards to link marketing initiatives and investments to business outcomes. Laura has authored three books on marketing performance management, including the most recent: Metrics in Action: Creating a Performance Driven Marketing Organization. You can see Laura in action online at Marketing Made Simple, MarketingProfs, and Software Advice.

www.visionedgemarketing.com

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