Branding matters. Because branding matters. 09.22#119 brandknew.groupisd.combrandknewmag.comPublished by
Sureshlinkd.in/1dsjYaWDinakaran @Brandknewmagisdglobaldubaiisdbranding@ISDGlobalDubaisuresh@groupisd.combit.ly/1h95tgO Brand Knew is published by Brand Consultancy | Advertising | PR | Publishing Digital Media | Film Academy For Advertising Enquiries: engage@groupisd.com or call + 050 6254340 All Copyright of the content in this issue rests fully & comprehensively with the respective contributors and/or media platforms at all times, as the case may www.groupisd.comwww.brandknew.groupisd.combe. Managing Editor: Suresh Dinakaran Creative Head/Director Operations: Pravin Ahir Magazine Concept & Design/ New Media Specialist: Mufaddal Joher Chief Strategy Director: Rishi Mohan Business Performance Director: Sunil Vasudevan Chief Country Man, India: Rohit Unni Brand Trends and Research Architect: Meeta Pendse Revenue Growth Architect: Ritu Dey Country Head, Australia: Norbert D’Souza Country Head, UK: Sagar Patil Performance Marketing Architect: Suresh Babu Technology & Web Enabler: Vyanky Charakpalli Social Media Outreach: Pooja Chhabda SEO Advocate: Santhosh Rakonda 6062 Dear ComefriendsSeptember and early traces of autumn are beginning to make its mark. Also making more than a mark is the branding and marketing industry and the incredible talent that is housed within Andythat.
Warhol was a freak, considered a genius but the discussion we have here is why the advertising industry can never produce anyone like him. Cannes is the annual jamboree that happens but there is a clarion call for creative effectiveness- understand more about it in this issue. Brand positioning made iconic by Al Ries and Jack Trout is coming under the lens- we talk about it in the feature ‘ From Cult To Culture ‘. AaaS is the next go to for the Automobile sector- Automobile As A Service and it will be driven by Subscriptions not gimmicks. The debate continues on the virtual and the real and the increasing emergence of ‘ Digital Empathy ‘- we ask can virtual interactions make lasting, meaningful connections? Know more in this edition. Twitter as has been as its nemesis been embroiled in one controversy after another- we take a look at where the brand is headed to in this issue. If you are mapping the metaverse, we articulate the four concepts that business leaders must focus on.
Inflation has reared its ugly head and how- we offer a primer on how brands can swim against that tide. The US Open would be tennis icon’s swan song- but Serena William’s stature as a brand icon will remain steadfast. Read about it here. There are bagfuls more in this issue and I leave you all to soak in that. Till the next, my very best.
3834323028262422201218141040425052545658
CONTENTS Book, Line & Sinker Mapping the metaverse: 4 critical concepts business leaders must focus on Why Today’s Ad Industry Could Never Produce the Next Warhol ‘Somewhere Yes’ Explores What Pervasive Branding Has Done to Our Brains Want Fresher Creative? Stop Siloing Your Agencies Auto-As-A-Platform: Cars of the Future Will Have Smart Subscriptions, Not Gimmicks Fashion-As-A-Service: It’s Less About Clothes, More About Relationships What is a copywriter? Brands Try Turning NFTs From Kitschy Collectibles Into Something Utilitarian for Consumers Lessons from Cannes Lions: Making the case for creative effectiveness Formulae for successful advertising Where does the Twitter brand go from here? Marketing Is Harder Than Ever, But Your CX Doesn’t Need to Suffer How Brands Can Swim Against the Inflation Stream Dealing with the creepiness of personal branding Serena Williams Will Exit the Court, but Her Title as Brand Icon Is Assured Competing on Analytics Who Is Falling for Fake News? There’s a new Gmail. But can it ever really change? When advertisers get scary—and the horror of self-indulgence
From
Cult to Culture: It Isn’t Just About Positioning Digital Empathy: Can Virtual Interactions Create Meaningful Connections?
There has been a lot of talk about Andy Warhol recently. In May, his silk-screen “Marilyn” sold for about $195 million at Christie’s in New York, making it the highest price achieved for any American artwork at an auction.
By Carlo Cavallone
Be patient and let unconventional talent find their calling
Sadly, it’s hard to imagine today’s advertising industry giving a job to the next Andy Warhol. Advertising seems to no longer naturally attract and nurture artists, writers, designers, filmmakers and creatives with different Thisbackgrounds.isinpartbecause
Earlier this year Netflix released “The Warhol Diaries,” a documentary about his inner life, and Anthony McCarten’s play—”The
Why Today’s Ad Industry Could Never Produce the Next Warhol
Collaboration”—recounting his relationship with Jean-Michel Basquiat is being turned into a movie. In other words: Warhol is still very influential. His undying relevance also serves as a reminder of an issue that has been affecting the ad industry for some time now. Warhol famously started his career in advertising and has always been proud of it. In fact, shortly before his death, he said: “I was always a commercial artist.” And he’s not the only one. Many other world-famous artists have an advertising past, including Ridley Scott, Fay Weldon and Salman Rushdie.
the industry has lost allure in the eyes of the general public. Let’s face it. We’re not as cool as we used to be. In the Mad Men era of the ‘60s, advertising was seen as a desirable job, something to aspire to, and all the way into the ‘80s and ‘90s getting a job in the industry was seen as an achievement. Art, film and design school grads would line up outside agencies’ doors. It’s not really happening now. Advertising attracts fewer and fewer people outside of ad schools or its own talent pool. This causes a lack of diversity when it comes to skillsets, mindsets and backgrounds in a creative industry that desperately needs it. Diversity of thought and a wide variety of experiences are key for Anothercreativity.reason why ad agencies struggle to get the most interesting talent is competition. Competition is fierce and it comes from everywhere. Advertising has ceded much of the cultural clout to tech companies but also design companies, animation companies, film production businesses and brands creating their own in-house functions. Not to mention the fact that a lot of creatives now decide to go solo on their own social media platforms. Who needs a company when you can be your own boss?
There’s a lot out there and some of it is easier to figure out than advertising for a young creative mind.
The main problem with our industry today is that it is incredibly fast-paced. It’s crazy, to be honest. No time to really think, no time to really craft and, therefore, a
for this process is patience. It’s all about patience. Young people who have never made an ad before and maybe don’t even want to make an ad in the traditional sense need time, a forgiving environment around them to get up to speed, the opportunity to try things, experience work without crushing pressure, and maybe get a sense of all the different disciplines. Ultimately, learn.
At 72andSunny, we’re trying to attract young people from different creative backgrounds. It is not an easy task but it’s something we believe we have to do. Again, we’re trying, sometimes succeeding, often failing. Like many other companies, we do have an internship program and we offer young “unconventional” talent the chance to join the agency while giving them the opportunity and time to discover their potential and learn new skills. The watchword
In our Amsterdam office, for example, we would hire young creatives and give them the chance to experience every aspect of the creative business, without necessarily defining them as writers or art directors or designers. It was a bumpy process but when it worked, it was really rewarding. Some of our best creatives were created like that. The thing is that artists and creatives outside the system will not thrive in a homogeneous environment. They need to work with a wide variety of talent and craftspeople. Everyone in the industry must focus on creating a culture of learning, whereby anyone coming in gets extra support and training from senior members of staff. Meanwhile, we must really accept that failure is a crucial part of the creative process. We all say publicly that we love it but the truth is we all hate it and we all fear it. But if we don’t really embrace it, we won’t have the chance to put this industry back on the radar for the world’s most creative minds.
brandknewmag.com 11
daunting prospect for anyone entering without some kind of preparation. When I started out, the pace was much, much slower and there was room for experimentation and, crucially, failure. As a young creative, I was able to shadow senior people, the most talented creatives, designers and craftspeople and learn from the best. I tried out different crafts and I got the time to figure out whether I wanted to be a copywriter or art director. While the industry model was far from perfect back then, it was a much more forgiving environment for junior creatives coming into it. Finally, agencies have also been outsourcing their craft skills. Most agencies today work with animation studios, film production and design companies on content that requires specialist craft skills. The industry doesn’t have the same caliber or variety of craftspeople and so advertising is no longer the first choice for people coming out of the best design or art courses. Twenty years ago, if you came out of CalArts you would consider advertising as a top choice, not sure it’s the same now.
By 2030, over 95% of cars sold globally will be connected, up from about 50% today, according to McKinsey. Connected
Just last week, news leaked from South Korea that BMW would start charging for heated seats, but the Bavarian automotive manufacturer never expected the response to be so sour. This rocky start with introducing subscriptions to fans of the “ultimate driving machine” was met with disagreement from a united front of publications, consumers, and car enthusiasts alike. But the conventional wisdom is wrong here. In the next few years, subscriptions are definitely coming to vehicles, but the debacle with BMW’s heated seats clearly illustrates that the how is just as important as the why. The unbundling of the automobile is already happening, but not because of heated seats. It has been for a few years now, with the introduction of over-the-air updates, or adding features via paid software unlocks, and more. The how is because the in-car ecosystem could become an $86 billion industry by 2025, according to Juniper Research. And that’s just the beginning.
The next decade of the automobile industry will be its most disruptive in generations, due to connectedness and electrification. Why is electrification a game changer?
Because cars built on electrical platforms are more like computers with wheels. This gives auto manufacturers a clean slate on how to design their cars, and enables them to do what Apple and Android phones have done over the last 15 years. And you can bet they are excited about the idea of earning revenue on a recurring basis. And there will be wider access to private mobility, in the form of scooters, bikes, and other vehicles.
Auto-As-A-Platform: Cars of the Future Will Have Smart Subscriptions, Not Gimmicks By Achilleas Boukis
The future of the automotive industry is all about going fast and far, thanks to electrification. Your next car will be more like your smartphone, with features you can add via subscriptions, and bug fixes that can be addressed with over-the-air updates. The consumer of the future will have to be informed and ready for these changes in car usership, but it’s the automotive manufacturers that are tasked with building these systems internally, securely, and with costeffectiveness in mind. After all, the car of the future is just a smartphone with four wheels that you can’t put in your pocket.
The car buyer from a decade ago wanted a car that was “fully loaded” (all optional features installed), but the buyer of today wants the latest driving and performance technology with the ability to connect to your smartphone. The specific features desired are different, but the search for a car with an experience unique to you is still the same.
The car is already becoming a platform, some people, like Tesla and Rivian owners are already living this lifestyle. It is going to be one of the most profitable business transformations for the automotive industry ever, centered around creating a customer ecosystem that is compliant and safe, while developing functions and services that add to the lifecycle of the car, rather than charging for an extension of features and functions of the vehicle.
These are all value-based features that add to the overall experience of driving the vehicle, can be skipped over entirely without compromising the customer’s experience.
The electric F-150 doesn’t have any available subscriptions that let you improve performance, but the better question is, what if it did? Ford would be able to learn more about its truck owners. This new generation of vehicles will, for the first time, grant manufacturers true insight into the owner(s) of a given vehicle via the data points made available by subscription services. Better insight into how drivers use their vehicles, what features they use most, and when, can help better guide original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) towards making informed decisions about what to charge for and what not to.
BMW forgot that sitting down, feeling comfortable, and experiencing warmth in the winter months is not a feature, it’s a necessity. Having HD radio stations or mobile hotspot on-demand is more in line with a recurring subscription.
It’s also worth noting that the features that older and younger drivers will be willing to pay for on a recurring basis depends on their age. Research from Deloitte this year shows that younger drivers tend to expect experiencebased features, like better smartphone integration, headsup displays, and smart driver assists. Whereas older drivers expect more vehicular-based features, like blindspot detection or roadside assistance.
Reduce Costs While Increasing Available Features
But Tesla isn’t the whole automotive industry. This year, Ford began shipping its first all-electric F-150 pickup truck across the United States, and it’s becoming increasingly obvious that electric vehicles are here to stay and are gaining traction.
I believe that the features within a modern vehicle are like apps on a phone, especially in electric cars where most features become digitized or are available via touchscreen. With a phone out of the box, you can pay for the features (apps) that you really want, or you can just take basic photos and make calls.
It’s time to go back to the drawing board and understand what is non-negotiable with the consumer. Thankfully, in a series of tweets it looks like BMW’s marketing team heard the disagreement from customers loud and clear.
There’s A Generational Divide (Don’t Piss Off Your Customers) Okay, so we’ve established that subscriptions are definitely coming to cars and that BMW made an error by thinking customers would want to pay for a feature they consider part of the core experience. So, if you’re head of BMW, what should you be thinking about right now? How to monetize without pissing off your customers, naturally!
Adding value-based services under subscriptions will allow the OEMs to potentially generate double the revenue selling the same number of vehicles. For the first time, it will also allow automotive OEMs to learn about their drivers (data mined from subscriptions), even after cars are resold to new drivers, they inevitably will need to pay up in order to use in-car systems that are subscription-based. By then, maybe BMW drivers will warm up to the idea of paying for heated seats as a subscription. Comfort can be made indispensable, after all.
cars will have subscriptions, we know this. That’s not to say there won’t be obstacles. A recent Cox survey that asked potential car buyers whether or not they’d pay for in-car subscriptions, and 72% said they’d rather not. The problem is the question the car companies are asking today is: which of a car’s internal systems gets monetized? But that is anchored on current expectations. Contrary to what BMW might have been thinking, 92% of drivers surveyed in the Cox survey said they expect heated seats to be part of the purchase price. It’s not a great idea to charge for something people are already used to getting.
Instead, Tesla’s in-car systems are a good example of what you should monetize: fully integrated systems that can be unlocked with software (Full-Self Driving Beta), charging-asa-service (the Tesla SuperCharger network), and even ondemand performance upgrades (Tesla Acceleration Boost).
The Car-As-A-Platform Is Real and Can Be Indispensable
groupisd.com 13
Despite paying for more features and services, automotiveas-a-service can still help the consumer by driving down upfront costs. By prebuilding and lowering upfront prices on premium features in the base car, then gating those features behind subscriptions, manufacturers can earn back the lost revenue. The consumer ends up paying for the personalized driving experience that they want, without having to buy a higher-end vehicle or trim, because the equipment within the vehicle is fully equipped. Both sides win and no one is roasted on social media for hiding gimmicky features behind paywalls.
It’s supposed to communicate so much, so our discourse becomes very superficial. A brand is the ultimate visual soundbite, or a visual Tweet. It’s very difficult to have a discourse around complex topics when we’re all talking on a visual surface level.”
“Somehow, hate and hateful ideas are much easier to condense,” he continued, “like ‘Pro-Life,’ or ‘Make America Great Again’—they’re very simple, branded ideas that completely eliminate all of the complexity underneath. It’s
by Charlotte Beach
‘Somewhere Explores What Pervasive Branding Has Done to Our Brains
Yes’
At its core, Somewhere Yes chronicles Baudenbacher’s exploration of ideas and concepts that he is still working through himself through the very act of writing it. “Is everything around us an illusion? Which version of us— is us? Are we hopelessly, forever f*cked?” His tone is authoritative, but it’s also clear that he’s on an ongoing journey of dissecting these topics. “I don’t want to come across as having all the answers because I’m just grappling with things as much as everybody. But at the same time, I also know that you can’t just have a book full of questions,” he told me. “My thinking has already evolved on some of the ideas in the book since it was ‘finished.’”
Baudenbacher expertly undercuts big-picture ideas about society with a tone that is often humorous. He also gets playful with imagery throughout, like a fake movie poster he designed to accompany an idea about human survival.
“How did life turn into something that needs to be performed, not Beatlived?”Kaspar
” Somewhere Yes is the product of a four-year evolution that started from a presentation Baudenbacher gave at a conference. With the help of a speaking coach, he zeroed in on the central theme of the way we look to branding for a sense of belonging. “The goal was to write my version of a TedTalk: What’s my story in 20 minutes?” he said. “I wrote down the idea of searching for belonging through branding at some point, and my coach latched onto that.”
The Swiss-born Baudenbacher is the co-founder of the New York creative agency loyalkaspar, where he currently serves as Chief Creative Officer. After he came to the states in the mid-90s to attend the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, he landed a job in New York and never left. “I was just going to sort of stop by here on my way back to Europe and got stuck,” he told me over a Zoom call from his place in Brooklyn. Now with over two decades of experience in the branding biz, Baudenbacher has authored Somewhere Yes. “I don’t know if this is the end of a journey or the beginning of a journey,” he said. “I’m not quite sure.
Somewhere Yes doesn’t shy away from addressing the negative side of branding either, and the very real repercussions of branding used for nefarious purposes— far right extremism and Nazi Germany propaganda are two examples that Baudenbacher names. “Branding tends to flatten complexity,” he said. “Ultimately, all of these things and ideas need to get distilled down to a symbol.
Baudenbacher poses this question almost off-handedly in tiny text at the bottom of the page in his new book, Somewhere Yes: The Search for Belonging in a World Shaped by Branding. It’s one of the countless existential quandaries Baudenbacher broaches in his book, as he dissects the practice and concept of branding and its chokehold on our society.
“If you think about it too hard or go super academic, that’s a very existential page. Can we get along long enough on this planet to continue our existence? But there’s enough dark news out there in this day and age, so the intention was to make it light and tongue-in-cheek.” These fun visuals and the overall witty tone add to the accessibility and approachability of the book, giving readers an entry point into topics that might otherwise be alienating if too theoretically academic or highbrow.
With Baudenbacher’s design background in mind, it’s not surprising that Somewhere Yes isn’t your traditional book. In many ways, it defies genre and has a dynamic blend of the written word and original imagery that interplay throughout the book’s uniquely laid-out pages. “I go back and forth between visuals and words,” Baudenbacher explained. “There was an outline and paragraphs, but then I would start combining them with images. Then I’d see the images and go back again— it was a circular thing. I didn’t want this to be a dissertation. I really wanted it to be an engaging combination of visuals and words.” This distinct structure makes for a singular experience as a reader, aided by Baudenbacher’s accessible writing style. While the ideas he addresses can be lofty and profound, his sentences are concise and clear. His writing isn’t dense or intimidating, neither in diction or layout. Instead of large, daunting blocks of text, ideas are presented in a few lines positioned throughout a given page. The negative space feels just as considered as the words themselves, necessitating a slower pace with which to engage with Baudenbacher’s ruminations. This spatial layout gives readers the literal space to think through these ideas, claims, and questions.
“There’s a multi-hierarchy way of reading it with different layers of communication,” Baudenbacher said on the book’s layout. “The idea was that even if you just read the headlines, you get a rough, kind of sketchy narrative. Then you have the paragraphs that take you a little bit deeper, and then the visuals take you even deeper. Then there’s what I call the ‘color commentary,’ which is the teeny, tiny type at the bottom of the pages. So there are multiple levels to engage with.”
his belief that design experts can use their knowledge for good. “There are many places where we should be using the tools of branding,” he said. “What do we want to achieve? How do we want people to feel and act about a specific topic? The transition from ‘Global Warming’ to ‘Climate Crisis’— something much more dire, to me— that’s a branding assignment. Language, and then the visual expression of that, is super important. We can use the power and tools of this discipline to help solve problems that are bigger than just selling more stuff.”
“So while some of the topics may be pretty heavy, the way they’re presented on this crappy paper with fun visuals kind of brings those ideas down and balances it out.” In this way, Somewhere Yes practices exactly what it preaches: any decision about the presentation and performance of a topic is a form of branding, including the way this book has been put together. “Even the book itself is sort of a brand,” said Baudenbacher. “It even has a logo on it.”
While a book felt like the right way for Baudenbacher to communicate these ideas, he’s the first to clarify that he’s a designer first, and not necessarily a “trained” writer who primarily writes for himself. “I love words, and I’ve always written,” he continued. “I think writing is an under-appreciated part of design, whether it’s writing a presentation, or communicating a story of a brand, or a design approach or whatnot. Writing has always been part of the process.”
This theme of blending high and low concepts is also extended into various elements of the physical design for Somewhere Yes— even the paper choice. “It’s a pretty lowquality paper, and I actually wanted it to be even crappier paper— a sort of newsprint, but the deep blacks printed all splotchy. I also wanted it to be a softcover and black and white; I didn’t want it to be precious.” This carried over into other aspects of the book’s interior design.
If you’re eager to keep questioning right alongside Baudenbacher, Somewhere Yes is available for purchase wherever books are sold. “I love the books that I keep picking up, thumbing through, putting down, and then picking up again,” he told me. “Books that get my brain going in a different direction. That’s really what I wanted with Missionthis.”accomplished.
Charlotte is a New England expat currently living in Los Angeles, CA with her cat, Joan Cusack. She is a powerclashing maximalist with an inordinate disdain for the color navy. When she’s not writing about ad campaigns and colorways you can find her scouring estate sales or attempting to teach herself calligraphy.
“With some of the design, like the handwritten stuff— the notes and underlines and scribbles— I wanted to make it feel like it’s part of a conversation, or part of a thought process where somebody else has already gone through it and highlighted what they liked,” Baudenbacher explained.
challenging for the more liberal, progressive side to compete with that because solutions to some of these problems are actually very, very, very complex. The trajectory to simplify everything into soundbites, and 140 characters, and symbols, and logos is not helping with some of these more complex conversations that we need to have.”
In many ways, Baudenbacher is reconciling his gradual discovery of these truths with his own career in branding. “It’s challenging,” he told me. “I love design and branding so much, and I believe in its power so tremendously that to me, that outweighs the negative aspects. I try to use those skills and that power more for good. I don’t really know what that means in practice— do policy makers have to have a branding expert on their teams to help shape progressive Baudenbacherideas?”maintains
brandknewmag.com 17
It has the methodology and the rigor to withstand even the most arduous scrutiny.
Breakthroughs that change patients’ lives Learn more at www.pfizer.com
Science is resilient. It can overcome diseases, create cures, and, yes, even beat pandemics.
It keeps asking questions and, until there’s a breakthrough, it isn’t done. That’s why, when the world needs answers, we turn to science. Because in the end, Science will win.
The Coinbase QR code idea and execution (with its distinct lack of storytelling and celeb cameos) traversed many different realms of creativity—from cross-generational tech tropes to social and meme culture. I like to think that the execution was a clear result of many disparate groups inspiring each other to get to the most talked about commercial of the game. Bring design upstream.
Brand is now product and product is now brand. There is increasingly less distinction between these two concepts, and with the encroachment of the metaverse, this distinction will only become more blurred. I predict a world where all future brand storytelling is anchored in literate product design system thinking that doesn’t feel the need to be designed with the exact same user interfaces.
To stand out in a convergent marketing world, build crossfunctional teams that are open to learning from different backgrounds and lived experiences. Break the process and make space for them to think outside the box and approach problems from new angles. What might look or feel out of place now may be the next humanist typeface.
Startup advertising has for years been a sea of sameness. Take off the logo and see for yourself: is it an Rx at-home delivery service or an emerging fintech challenger brand? Surprise! It’s a new dating app. We’ve seen this with the rise of the sans-serif typeface. It had a minimalist vibe that represented the apex of flexibility and convenience of the new DTC universe that we were all about to scroll our way into; Swiss Style-inspired fonts and grids that said challenger brands, free of brick and mortar, are here. But design is ever-changing and pendulum-like. Notice how now, in lieu of clean lines, we are all living in a world of long bendy arms? It’s the latest illustration trend initially adopted by tech companies, known as Corporate Memphis, that involves the use of simple, cartoon figures with distortions in body proportions to signal that a company is inclusive and fun.
On TikTok, to be a part of the social conversation, you have to espouse all the copycat tropes of the day... it’s a culture of sameyness that the algorithm requires you to adopt to break through, even if it’s fleeting. Everyone is trying to stand out while giving people a sense of belonging. Millennial Pink has been officially replaced by Gen Z Green, which makes sense since we have outsourced the saving of the planet to Butthem.what can we do to counter program all this, and ensure that we are not caught up in a copycat sea of sameness?
Build collaborative, multidisciplinary teams. Bill Bernbach’s sage advice still holds true: “An idea can turn to dust or magic, depending on the talent that rubs against it.” One strategy to avoid sameness is to build collaborative multidisciplinary teams that are not predisposed to seeing solutions in set media channels or outputs. Make sure there are folks in the room (on the Zoom) who see the world differently and intentionally create a working model for them to come together and create.
By Cedric Devitt
Seek diversity in ideas.
If your creatives all look the same, the ideas likely will too. Much has been written about this already by great minds. What I will add to this is that we need to check our creative egos at the door and allow for not just the possibility that ideas can come from anywhere, but also that they can grow and be nurtured by people who didn’t go to the same prestigious art schools and ad schools.
Want Fresher Creative? Stop Siloing Your Agencies
Modern brands are increasingly complex, the sum of many human touchpoints that need careful management—so much so, that no one agency can do it all (despite what the holding companies will tell you). Clients increasingly feel the need to put agencies in specific “lanes” with remits according to their expertise or build their own internal agency to control.
On the surface, it makes lots of sense, but the more you resign them to a lane, the more you get work that is fundamentally limited from the outset. Worse, over time it all starts to look and feel the same.
I find that there’s too much distance between the strategy and the design phase. It’s never been more true that people love to be drawn in by design, so if you want to break through and land a punch, consider bringing design upstream into the organization. Ensure your strategy is built on robust brand design principles, (not just brilliant insights and cultural behaviors) with designers and strategists working hand in hand from the outset. Good strategy is about unearthing the things that make your brand unique, so don’t forget the folks who will bring it to life visually.
Infuse your brand with product thinking.
As a key partner in government innovation, we blend unparalleled mission understanding with emerging technology to help our clients modernize their organizations and integrate, innovate, and dominate at speed. See our ideas in action at BoozAllen.com. ADVANCE TOMORROW’S MISSION groupisd.com 19
Lesson 1: Build direct relationships Accessibility and personalization are important if you’re
RelationshipsMoreClothes,LessService:As-A-Fashion-It’sAboutAbout
By Ryan Goodpaster
Let me explain. I think we can all see that subscribing to things you don’t really want in a box was never a great model. Dispensable subscription box services are bad for the environment, restrictive for both consumers and companies, and aren’t creating excitement right now on social media. They provide no true curation, no real improvement using technology (AI/machine learning), and there isn’t a compelling retail or ecommerce experience.
Now, in my conversations around the world, I hear many doubting the reign of the subscription fashion industry, pointing to the steady decline of subscription boxes. That’s understandable, as lots of folks associate subscription fashion with monthly boxes. But that thinking is archaic. It’s never been about the boxes! It’s actually about filling a deeper customer connection paired with the experience of improving your wardrobe.
Subscription boxes also don’t sync up well with hypebeast culture (sneakers, streetwear, etc.) due to the idea of scarcity in streetwear and high fashion. What the fashion industry needs is to go through a shift from “fashion boxes” to true fashion-as-a-service, where the key relationship is between the wearer and the fashion designer, potentially curated by a stylist. There’s tons of potential for a fashion gold rush of digital relationships, subscriptions, and styling services. This evolution in fashion retail to fashion-as-a-service has already been happening. Stitchfix, for example, continues to be unfairly labeled as a subscription box company. In fact, they are a fashion-as-a-service company that uses artificial intelligence (AI) and more personalized curation in order to create clothing shipments based on what you would wear, instead of a random mix of brands thrown into a box that you might like. Again, it’s about the relationship between the wearer having access, not just receiving clothing boxes. The excitement and experience of getting new items from your favorite fashion brands that you’re certain you’d want to wear, definitely beats a random care package every month.
The reason why is it appeals to a deeper meaning – some might call it an emotional craving – that the wearer has because they’re looking for clothes that feel like they were meant for them, not randomly picked out of a warehouse.
Summer mode: activated. The hot months mean an increased focus on fashion and what you wear, and that has me thinking of fashion-as-a-service.
So what are key things that fashion companies must do to execute this evolution? Here are five.
Lesson 3: Planning for the future and overcoming supply chain Fashionchallengesbrandsare all about being trendy, but they need to think long term. Supply chain issues, inventory issues, and sustainability have made all fashion brands rethink their long-term success and operations. This is because almost no brand is above issues affecting supply, even Nike. Building resiliency to disruptions and managing the damage will all be part of managing a strong brand in the future, especially in the fashion industry. Also, some buyers may want to use fashion-as-a-service to waste less, the opposite of fast fashion, which is destroying the planet.
The same goes for popular hypebeast streetwear brands that were founded in New York City, like Kith or Supreme. Brands like them produce a limited number of units, with the full intention of having them be sold out, with consistent social media rollouts to ensure their customers are engaged and aware about upcoming releases.
Lesson 5: Balancing the tension of ease-of-access and scarcity. Another company is attempting to do something with access to fashion, instead of monthly shipments –Rent-The-Runway. So far, it has gone through two major iterations. The first being a service where you can “rent” women’s designer or ready-to-wear runway pieces and accessories for special occasions or outings. The second, being a monthly subscription that allows you to essentially wear designer clothes for work, so you always have a new outfit. While Stitchfix is more focused on figuring out which clothes you’d like to continuously wear everyday, Rent-TheRunway is more focused on when you dress up, but don’t want to spend hundreds (or thousands) on a fashionable outfit. So far, RTR is closest to the concept of “usership for high-end fashion”.
Therein lies the needle in the haystack: if high-end fashion brands could build those customer relationships in order to better organize their releases, release even more exclusive merchandise, and prevent the resale market from taking over, then there’s a real chance for fashion-as-a-service.
running an ecommerce fashion business, more so than a retail experience. This made me wonder: if you chose, could you start with fashion ecommerce then successfully transition to fashion retail? Of course. An Instagram model and a programmer both want clothes that fit them well and embody who they are. The longform answer comes from the real-world example of Stoney Clover Lane, a hugely popular and successful accessories brand that took its audience hype and social media engagement and pivoted into retail stores and brand collaborations with companies like Disney. And that’s all just within the last two years. Does your brand have a community-created fan page? Stoney Clover Lane does, and it directly contributes to customer engagement and sales.
It’s worth noting why fashion-as-a-service struggles with balancing high-end fashion: it goes against the exclusivity and scarcity of fashion houses and their brand. Gucci has no interest in the subscription box business. They know their customer will seek them out, whether it be ecommerce or retail, and most importantly, can afford the merchandise.
Lesson 2: Mobile apps are key Mobile, it turns out, is one of the best ways to build that direct relationship. Nike is a great example. Nike maintains excellent use of mobile apps, social media, and influencers in order to generate hype for its ecommerce. Generating big sales through social media engagement isn’t a tactic solely for the Creator Economy. Nike listened to its users and placed a marketing campaign into the hands of Spike Lee, generating hype and interest into record-breaking engagement for Nike ID and the Nike mobile apps. You don’t need to advertise the latest sneaker release, if your favorite influencers are wearing new pairs before they’re even on sale. Part of what makes Nike’s resurgence so mesmerizing is that Nike invested heavily in technology to understanding the customers that use their apps. This partnership gives Nike incredible flexibility with its mobile apps. The results speak for themselves. The SNKRS app and Nike’s other mobile apps helped directly fuel its 18% increase in annual revenue growth. Nike Digital’s total growth was 11% from a year earlier to $4.8 billion for Nike Direct. Mobile apps are undoubtedly important for the accessibility of fashion.
The old world model was “I want this celebrity to wear the clothes I would in an ad”, but has since transformed into, “I want this Insta/TikTok personality to wear the clothes I would in an ad”. Fashion brands have an opportunity to redirect the focus of what appeals to their customers by leveraging more everyday influencers versus aspirational role models. And this in turn, gives them insights into what their customers want. Influencer marketing company, Unbox Social says, “Fashion influencers have now become an integral part of the social media marketing channel because they have carved a spot in the virtual lives of the Understandingusers.” your customers’ digital habits from likes on a video of a TikTok star galloping in a summer dress to them buying said dress, gives you even more insights into what pieces appeal to your customer.
After all, if fashion was so easy to pull off, we would all be experts at “summer mode”. Not everyone is so talented that they can style themselves. Fashion-as-a-service, at its best (in theory), allows you to always wear new, trendy clothes at work or to a party. That’s indispensable; monthly boxes are not.
An interesting example I’ve seen in sustainability within the fashion space, is with recyclable sneakers that are only available via a subscription. Creatively pitched as “the shoe you will never own”, On’s Cloudneo running shoes can be ground up and melted into plastic pellets at the end of their life cycle, then turned into new shoes. For $29/ month, you’re promised an endless supply, as long as you return your worn out pairs. This business strategy addresses recurring revenue, locking in a supply of raw material (reducing waste), and accessibility ($360/yearly on shoes you can have swapped out for a fresh pair). I might just get a pair myself! After all, I don’t have to own Lessonthem.
4: Use influencers.
brandknewmag.com 21
I suggested they demand half their fees back. But... There is one course, run through Bartle Bogle Hegarty by the venerable Tony Cullingham, where copywriting is taught properly, alongside the plenitude of skills necessary to make creative departments of the future every bit as good as those of the past. Seeing this course made me realise that the best way to rid our industry of faux copywriters is to train a new generation of real ones. And who knows? One day, some of them might be as good – OK, almost as good – as Chris O’Shea.
However, the term “copywriter” has recently been adopted and adapted to describe people who’ve never worked in an agency or even written an ad. The writing of ads is the plinth on which our entire business is built. So how have we allowed the name of our occupation to be stolen by people who weren’t, aren’t and never will be good enough to work in a creative department?
Enter the idiots
Blame the agencies
That said, there were always talented, experienced copywriters in most agencies so what did those agencies do? They got rid of them. This was framed as a cost-cutting exercise but it was nothing of the sort. As discussed many times, it was more to do with insecure creative directors’ reluctance to employ or retain people who were older, more experienced and possibly more talented than they were. So now the craft of copywriting is no longer passed down within creative departments from seniors to juniors.
he answer was always very simple: one half of a creative team working in an agency, writing ads for TV, radio, print and digital. The great Chris O’Shea, who passed away a couple of weeks ago, was an exceptionally good example.
Then you’ll cry As you become depressingly aware of what they’re doing. Constantly posting pictures of great ads to associate themselves with work that was nothing to do with them. Though interestingly, they rarely show any work that was. Odd, isn’t it, how such proud “copywriters” are so unwilling to show us their copy or how “brand storytellers” never actually tell us any stories. Is this because they’re all theory and no practice? If so, that’s a terrible worry. Especially as some are now charging clients copywriting “masterclasses” and inveigling their way on to advertising awards juries because they’re “copywriting experts”. Experts, remember, who’ve never written an ad in their lives. So what do we do?
We start by reclaiming the name. Thousands of us worked very hard to call ourselves “copywriters” and then worked even harder to write the ads that justify our descriptor.
And of course, there’s the old saw of stating the obvious as though it’s a new and startling discovery. “Use examples because examples make your writing clearer” declared one genius. I look forward to her next post: “Always remember that two plus two equals four.”
It was they who neglected the word “copywriter” in favour of the indistinct and meaningless “creative”. This meant that neither member of the team really took ownership of the words, so the ability to arrange those words in the right order began to decline.
copywriter?a
What is
By Paul Burke
Seeing that the term “copywriter” had been left unattended, a slew of charlatans were able to sneak in and help themselves to it. This was made easy by the fact that becoming a copywriter requires no formal qualifications. So any idiot with a website can claim to be a “copywriter” and, sadly, a lot of idiots have.
That descriptor is now being cheapened and debased. If you landed from Mars and wanted to know what a copywriter was, the baseless boasts of a “freelance ideator and copy ninja” is what you’re now likely to find. It’s no good asking agencies to re-hire proper copywriters. Those ships have sailed. Neither is it any good putting your faith in the average advertising course. Often, the only thing worse than the standard of writing among students is the standard of writing among tutors. One young team told me that there wasn’t even a copywriting module on their course.
First you’ll laugh When you go on to LinkedIn and type in “copywriter”. Up comes a rich seam of comedy gold. One describes himself as a “hypnotic” copywriter; another claims to be “A wordsmith who’ll make your copy sparkle!” (His exclamation mark, not mine). Then there’s the “Awesome hat-wearing copy legend”. Some offer a greetings-card standard of inspirational quote including “You’re only as good as you dare to be bad”.
Top brands come to SCAD seeking new ideas, inventions, and business strategies for a changing world. SCADpro delivers. Tap into our talent bank. scad.edu/scadpro
NFT projects that give people a sense of community, access to a physical experience or rewards are now the most promising for brands, industry executives said.
“It should be about the value it gives you in completing your everyday life,” said AJ Dalal, managing director for data and Web3 at digital consulting firm Publicis Sapient.
Organizers see digital technology as a way to upgrade the Coachella experience, Mr. Schoonover said, adding that they plan to bring NFTs back for next year’s event.
By
Coachella attendee Chad Dominic Sahilan said the benefit of the NFT that came with his ticket, a free Ferris wheel ride, loomed larger for him than anything about the blockchain or digital collectibles.
Marketers are moving past offering nonfungible tokens as branded collectibles and instead trying to make their NFTs practically useful for consumers.
Ann-Marie Alcántara
Brands Try Turning NFTs From Kitschy Collectibles Into Something Utilitarian for Consumers
All ticketholders were eligible to claim a free NFT that could be used for extras such as expedited entry. And a selection of the free NFTs gave pass holders further benefits such as a free ride on the festival Ferris wheel or weekend passes for next year’s event.
The efforts capitalized on the broader interest in NFTs as investments, as exemplified by the $69.3 million sale of a digital image by the artist Beeple in 2021 and the $2.5 million winning bid this month for a bottle of champagne that came with five NFTs.
“I was more so intrigued by the utility of the NFT—the perks of it—rather than like the actual NFT crypto side,” said Mr. TheSahilan.marketing industry initially seized on the rise of NFTs to pepper consumers with tokens attached to digital renditions of Budweiser cans, Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons and McDonald’s McRib sandwiches.
More than 63,000 of the 250,000 total ticket buyers claimed their free NFTs, and more than 13,000 benefits and experiences were redeemed above and beyond the speedier entry, said Sam Schoonover, head of innovation at Coachella.
Coachella sold three sets of NFTs as the festival returned in person this April after a two-year hiatus because of the pandemic. One set sold at auction comprised 10 NFTs conferring lifetime passes to the annual event. Buyers of a second set of 1,000 NFTs, priced at $180, were eligible to receive a photo book not available to others.
While plenty of consumers are still speculating on NFT collectibles for financial gain, the NFT industry is being forced to evolve, said Geoff Renaud, chief marketing officer and co-founder of Invisible North, a marketing agency that helped create the on-site experience for an NFT project this year at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival.
Liquid Death, which is owned by Supplying Demand Inc., is positioning its NFT program as an “ultra premium kind of VIP club,” said Dan Murphy, senior vice president of marketing at Liquid Death and one of the architects of Murder Head Death BrandsClub.that create NFTs need to make a commitment to engage with people who are interested, Mr. Murphy added.
are trying twists similar to Coachella’s to make their NFTs more rewarding for owners.
“You can’t advertise on Facebook and connect with these people; you have to really do boots on the ground work to get involved,” he said. That may mean showing up in Twitter Spaces conversations, at NFT conferences or creating a Discord server for NFT holders to interact with each other and the brand, Mr. Murphy said.
“The best part about it is that if you’re just not interested in that brand or that product or that store anymore, that you can just sell it if there’s enough demand…for someone else to experience that same amount of value moving forward,” he Watersaid.brand
Now,cryptocurrencies.othermarketers
“Not everything needs to be this massive risk [and] investment for your average consumer,” Mr. Renaud said. “You can actually reward people and come up with incentives for them to engage.”
Tokens offered consumers a sense of community and ownership even before brands began trying to add tangible benefits, said Mr. Renaud of Invisible North. That is the opportunity that brands can build on, he suggested.
groupisd.com 25
Still, the tokens’ novelty has waned over time. And as the cryptocurrency market fell this year, so has the desire to purchase and own NFTs, which are often bought and traded with
Run It Wild, the development studio that created the Australian Open NFT experience, is exploring how the ability to buy and sell NFTs can add further value for consumers, according to Adam De Cata, the studio’s founder.
Thecryptocurrency.NFTsincluded digital images of a tennis ball and were each associated with a unique spot on the tennis court. Eleven of the winning championship points from the tournament gave holders of the associated NFT the right to receive the actual tennis ball from that match.
The Australian Open plans on bringing back its NFT project for next year as well, after selling out 6,776 of its AO Art Ball.NFT tokens in January that were priced in Ethereum
Liquid Death in March sold 6,666 NFTs under the name Murder Head Death Club and priced in Ethereum worth about $225 each at the time. They bestowed owners with benefits such as conversations with executives on Discord, a chat platform, and member meetups.
“The strong uptick in the number of compelling entries is a great testament about how marketers are increasingly understanding the investment of the Creative Effectiveness Lions and their value in driving long-term brand building,” noted the category’s jury president Raja Rajamannar, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer for Mastercard.
Effectiveness in Creative B2B
This year’s Grand Prix winner, ‘Contract for Change’ by FCB Chicago for Michelob Ultra, was selected, according to juror Karna Crawford, Head of US Marketing at Ford because “it made a change that could impact the marketplace, others in their category, the farmers, and also the AB InBev business.
By Warc Staff
Stand-out B2B work is predicted to grow in the near-future as it is a critical source of growing business. LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky noted on the Cannes Lions stage that “even in our current financial markets, the uncertainty we have today, these B2B businesses have a market cap that is greater than Nike, Coca-Cola, Adidas and GM combined.
Creativity proved its value by supporting business growth as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold. The world and its economies face new challenges, from a cost-of-living crisis to an anticipated global economic slowdown; advertising effectiveness is more necessary than ever.
WARC joined forces with Cannes Lions for a mini festival of effectiveness inside the Palais, featuring the world’s leading effectiveness experts and the brands making the work. Talks unpicked topics from maximising the impact of advertising by understanding attention, to a guide on building mental networks for demand generation, to the future of strategy. Impact at every touchpoint
Growth, measurement, sustainability and cultural relevance were the key talking points driving the creative effectiveness conversation at this year’s Cannes Lions. From stage talks to the Lion-winning work, creative effectiveness – one of six core themes explored at the Festival – was a major theme across the Evidencefestival.of a correlation between creatively excellent and effective Lion-winning work is growing. Perhaps that’s why entries into the Creative Effectiveness Lions award skyrocketed by 80% in 2022.
Creative Effectiveness Lions jury president, Raja Rajamannar added that the winning campaign “was not only strong on creativity and effectiveness, it went above and beyond – it [was] disruptive, game-changing and ha[d] impact lasting into the future. It’s a powerful example of how marketing should play an effective role in driving the business, build the brand and play a key role in the entire business value chain.”
“For the advertising industry these new B2B categories – and the businesses like them – that’s where the growth is going to come from.”
The Creative Effectiveness Lions honour creative work that demonstrates hard results over the long term, including how the work drove tangible business effects, whether it was instrumental to cultural change or if it was integral in the achievement of brand purpose.
Lessons from Cannes Lions: Making the case for creative effectiveness
Winning Creative B2B Lions entries included hyper-creative, hyper-targeting from FCB New York for Spotify with ‘A Song for Every CMO’, which took home a Gold Lion, while the Grand Prix went to ‘Speaking in Color’ from paint and coating manufacturer, Sherwin-Williams Coil Coatings, by Wunderman Thompson Minneapolis.
Creative Effectiveness is one of six key Cannes Lions themes, distilled in the Cannes Lions Official Wrap-Up Report.
The Creative B2B Lions award which launched this year also highlighted creative effectiveness in the business-to-business space. In fact, two big Creative Effectiveness Lions winners this year – the Grand Prix, AB InBev’s ‘Contract for Change’ and Silver Lion-winning work ‘The Island’ by Boys + Girls Dublin for Three – were B2B creative examples.
“When you bring all those things together, you’re talking about creative effectiveness at a much more epic scale.”
Ogilvy was no fan of creativity without efficacy, but he falls into the same trap that many people do when considering creativity by conflating it with originality. We do worship at the altar of originality, as though every idea has sprung from a blank slate rather than being a function of inspiration, culture and constraints. Advertising is made of and for media. All media settle into established tropes and typologies. Sonnets are only sonnets because they obey the rules that make them sonnets. Early pioneers establish tropes. Later generations learn those rules in order to deviate from them to build higher orders of meaning on their shoulders. Clichés start out as compelling aphorisms. When they become too successful their overuse deflates their impact and so innovators look to modify them, playing to the understanding of a media-literate audience.
By Faris Yakob, Genius Steals Ideal ideas are not original but variations of a form, marrying innovation and immediacy to different frameworks.
The first television commercial for Bulova Watches aired over 75 years ago. Since then, key formulae have emerged for successful advertising and we would thus assume that the most successful ads would use those formulae in innovative ways. The scientific evidence supports this.
Formulae for successful advertising
“General advertisers and their agencies know almost nothing for sure because they cannot measure the results of their advertising. They worship at the altar of creativity, which really means originality, the most dangerous word in the lexicon of advertising.” (Ogilvy)
Advertising goes wrong in its search for originality, says Faris Yakob, when it confuses originality of content with originality of form.
Ideal ideas are not original but rather variations on a form, marrying innovation and immediacy to existing frameworks. A dash of the familiar makes something palatable, a hint of the strange makes it interesting. This makes sense in terms of cognitive processes. Our attention system is a pattern recognition engine, looking for repeatable phenomena to simplify how we navigate each day. When a baby first drops a ball, it has no idea what will happen. Enough repetitions adjust its model of the world and by two months old babies have grasped the idea of gravity. Once that pattern is established it will no longer trigger attention –only disruptions will. We are drawn between the opposing poles of familiarity and novelty. That’s why the label ‘new and improved’ is ubiquitous in consumer goods packaging, despite being an oxymoron. It promises reliability (improved) and novelty (new) at the same time – a mythic collapse of an inherent contradiction.
In a paper called The Fundamental Templates of Quality Ads, an academic research team analysed 200 awardwinning commercials and established that 89% could be classified into just six categories. IPA research shows that award-winning ads are 11 times more commercially effective than those that do not win awards, so we can use this as a proxy for efficacy. To quote from the study: “The research suggests that successful advertisements share and are characterised by abstract patterns termed creativity templates.” These formulae are: (1) Extreme Consequences (the Lynx Effect); (2) Pictorial Analogy (Sony Balls); (3) Extreme Situations (Dumb Ways to Die, Epic Split); (4) Competition – against anything, not necessarily competitive brands but could be (Comcast Rabbit, Energizer Bunny); (5) Interactive Experiments (Whirlpool Care Counts, Fabreze Breathe Happy); (6) Dimensional Alteration – in which the ads change some parameter such as size or time (Guinness noitulovE, Carlton Draught Big Ad, Morton Salt, and OK Go The One Moment). The researchers then tried to classify other ads for the same products that didn’t win awards and found that only 2.5% of them fit the templates. Then the researchers experimented to see if the frameworks could create good ads by design. Two groups were briefed to come up with ideas, one equipped with the templates. The results from the latter group were judged to be more creative using standard pretesting Wemethodologies.continuallyconfuse originality of content with originality of form. As media typologies become established, the tropes, and then the form itself, become less resonant. Sonnets do not have the same cultural salience they once did. There is only so much a brand can do in 30 seconds of film or a print ad or poster but fortunately we are no longer restricted to such. The NEW @ LIA Awards (which I cocreated and continue to curate) were designed to embrace such novelty of form, to encourage experimentation that might lead to new media typologies for brands. To make award-winning successful advertisements, use a formula. To make something original, seek new forms.
Look at these three quotes from industry leaders, all from the past two months:
Do you think the CEO of Penguin Random House would declare on social media, “I don’t like the word ‘publishing’ Would“?
Where does the Twitter brand go from here?
the chairman of Universal Studios give a speech at the Oscars and say, “No one cares about movies anymore”?
By John Long
The CEO/founder of a major digital agency, in a panel discussion at Cannes, said: “No one on the planet watches TV Thespots.”co-founder/CEO of a canned water company, in an interview with an advertising trade publication, said: “Marketing sucks, and I don’t want to make marketing.”
Excuse me, but what the hell is going on here?
Imagine if leaders of any other industry publicly bashed their business like this.
The CMO of a global soft drink company, in a lengthy post on LinkedIn, wrote: “I don’t like the word ‘advertising.’ “
What are the odds that the CEO of McDonald’s would tell The New York Times, “Fast food sucks, and I don’t want to make fast food”?
No, never, nada. Not to pick on these three—I see this kind of talk all the time. And what’s kind of inexcusable is that many people who talk like this are in the business of persuasion through communication. They should understand the power of messages to shape opinion. And they have powerful microphones through which to amplify this message, so disparaging advertising is literally costing them money.
As for you, Mr. CEO of a Canned Water Company, people don’t hate marketing—they hate marketing that sucks.
And with respect, Mr. CEO of a Digital Agency, if no one on the planet is watching TV spots, why are brands spending $68 billion on them in the U.S. alone?
The advertising industry must regain its confidence and cultural cachet. How it does that exactly is an interesting topic for another piece. But I know for a fact it starts with leaders publicly talking advertising up—not putting it down.
I have a theory about what’s behind this self-destructive behavior, but we still need to spend a minute examining just how absurd it is.
This crisis of confidence in advertising all stems from the collapse of print and broadcast. It was through those two media that advertising shaped culture for most of the 20th century and was therefore seen as “cool.”
John Long has held creative leadership positions at Ogilvy, The Economist Group and Huge. He is currently executive creative director at LG’s in-house agency, HS Ad.
The publishing industry is a $26 billion business in the U.S.
I recently visited the American History Museum at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. There’s an entire exhibit dedicated to advertising (despite the fact that everyone hates it), and the gallery is dominated by artifacts of these two mediums. I snapped these photos.
It’s true that the mass-media era, in which captive ears and eyeballs could be bought for a steep price, is gone. But advertising is very much alive. It’s just harder to get attention than it was back then. That’s a creative challenge for our business, not an existential one.
The global fast-food market, roughly $650 billion.
And the (we don’t want to say the word advertising because it’s icky) industry? $766 billion, worldwide. So why all the self-loathing?
So, apologies, Mr. Soft Drink CMO, you should love the word “advertising” because it’s how your company persuades people to buy your sugary drinks and salty snacks.
First, let’s look at some data, since we’re data-driven now.
The movie industry is worth $42 billion.
brandknewmag.com 31
In speaking to marketers of all stripes—from startups with a seed round and 10 employees to those supporting global brands—I’ve encountered a particular phrase so often, it bears repeating: “Marketing is just becoming harder and Thisharder.”seems to be a common refrain among all marketers, though the reasons they hold this belief are muddled. Are they saying those words to garner respect from others, or is marketing truly and fundamentally becoming harder? Digging into this further, it seems that marketing is indeed becoming a broader challenge across the board. Here’s a distillation of what I learned, including a few tactics for marketers to adopt to deliver brilliant customer experience to meet consumer’s demands.
By Prashanth V K Marketing Is Harder Than Ever, But Your CX Doesn’t Need to Suffer
As customers learn, marketers must adapt People can’t help but notice and appreciate great marketing and customer experience. This means that their benchmark for greatness is constantly moving up, often because your offerings are always being compared to brands that don’t even fall within your industry.
Amazon set the bar for great service even within a b-to-b context, and Apple may do the same for the hospitality industry. As a result, marketing teams have to consistently evolve alongside customers and pick up cues from even the least related of business sectors—much harder than it seems. For help guiding this evolution, take a page from your competition. By spending some time perusing great
groupisd.com 33
marketing campaigns—as well as their strategy, content and approach—you’ll develop a sense of what worked, what didn’t and, most importantly, what takeaways and universal truths can be applied on a broader level. Your customers can provide some guidance as well, and software exists that can present customer feedback in real time to differentiate between trends and fads.
The traditional view of marketing holds that it builds awareness and encourages trial. Today, that scope has been enlarged to a great extent in nearly every industry. To name only a few examples, marketing is a strong source of differentiation (Apple), a driver of adoption (Netflix), a resource that encourages learning (H&R Block), a mitigation method for abandonment or churn rates (Amazon), a means to attract great talent (Alphabet) and other essential business
Prashanth V K (a.k.a PVK) is the head of market strategy and thought leadership for the CX product group at Zoho. He has been with Zoho for 10 years and led worldwide marketing for the customer service and contact center categories before.
The brands that execute this mandate well often tend to employ effervescent marketing teams that are natively collaborative; a product of the traditional siloed mindset has no place in this new environment.
Accept that shelf lives are significantly shorter If every market segment is crowded by brands, and customers are consuming a ton of information throughout their day, that can logically lead to only one thing: dissonance.
This remains an evolving situation, but the early indicators are unambiguous: There will only be inferior data available in the future, and more stringent legislation on data privacy is about to exist across the globe. A strong, emerging hypothesis is that customers will not only sacrifice personalization for better privacy, but also pay a premium for brands that set a gold standard for data privacy.
Modern data proliferation means that every single marketer knows infinitely more about their customers today than they had even dreamt of 10 years ago, and it’s naive to think customers don’t recognize this fact. Therefore, transparency is key—customers are open to sharing their data if they receive clarity on how exactly it will be used to improve their Twolives.things immediately become clear: First, the onus is on the brand to explain why they need particular pieces of data and all the modalities associated with its storage and use. Second, it’s clear that most (if not all) customers prefer to maintain ultimate control over their data.
Asoutcomes.customer engagement grows to involve more programmatic work and self-serve experiences, it’s natural for marketing’s role in the organization to increase. However, that renewed importance carries with it a new responsibility to serve as the hub of experience management, requiring marketing to pull up a seat at every table, and necessitates that marketers take a much broader view of their role.
Marketers rely on various forms of customer data for initiatives like personalization and attribution. When customers draw a new line every day, it becomes harder for marketers to create any reliably personalized experiences.
Understand every segment is crowded, and plan accordingly Every marketer out there, at some point, will say that their market or segment is crowded; their customers have plenty of other options, these companies will posit. They’re not making this up: If you look at any product intended for daily life— everything from chips to cars—you’ll notice more brands vying for market share in this space than even a mere five yearsEcommerceago. has opened up markets for many small companies, and it’s now possible to reach critical mass purely from selling online. Brands compete intensely to generate demand for their offerings, carve out a respectable image for themselves, and establish a strong market position that leads to repeatable growth and sales.
Having deep pockets allows you to purchase any of the more than 8,000 pieces of marketing software available today, as well as plenty of advertising, but it certainly can’t buy the respect of your customers. A more practical strategy would be to pivot towards longer term outcomes such as improved customer education, better customer experiences and higher overall transparency in marketing initiatives.
Weave marketing into every business function
Let the consumer draw the line
To truly stand out in an oversaturated marketplace, ensure that your customer experience is flawless. Consider the customer journey step-by-step from both technical and emotional perspectives. Your shade of personalized customer experience can serve as a key differentiator that’s impossible to Also,replicate.don’tbe afraid to slow down: High-quality marketing— as opposed to high-quantity marketing—not only builds brand awareness but increases customer loyalty and respect.
Customers’ attention spans have steadily reduced over the last two to three decades, and as a result, the shelf life of any isolated piece of news, content or advertising is highly limited or shrinking further with time. This often means that marketers have to adopt reinforcement methods to drive any major messaging, lest their campaign fall onto overstimulated ears, which leads to even higher levels of bombardment and It’sdissonance.averytricky balance to achieve, and those that do tend to be great at storytelling—offering some value to the consumer in every piece of communication or content. It’s best to start by ensuring a healthy sampler of content, as part of an omnichannel marketing strategy, that offers both immediate gratification mixed with long-standing educational value. This could take the form of a detailed ebook to educate customers on important industry topics—one that can be later divvied up into snackable social media excerpts.
How Brands Can Swim Against the Inflation Stream
“Unprecedented inflation”, “highest inflation rate in 40 years”, “peak inflation”, and “first waves of a recession shock” are just a handful of ways we’ve been bombarded with clickbait headlines about the current inflation experienced by most of Ifus.you are a US adult, you are aware of the inflation happening in the American economy. In fact, Americans see inflations as the #1 issue facing the country, with 70% saying it’s a big problem (source: PEW research). 71% say inflation has impacted their spending (source: Ipsos). And people expect inflation to persist over the next six months (source: Gallup). Which is why it is critical for brands and marketers to be aware of the potential impacts, acknowledge inflations’ existence, have an informed plan to respond to it, and leverage the opportunities the situation presents.
By Amanda Ortiz and Olivia Rindone
While people tend to blame politicians for the economic hardships, they vote with their spending – or lack thereof – every single day. Mitigating the immediate effects on the bottom line can send brands and marketers down the shorttermism rabbit hole. But historically, keeping the big picture in mind, investing in long-term brand health, innovation, and providing value to consumers has proven to be a better Butstrategy.isthis going to hold true this time around if inflation persists? Do the same strategies apply to the current brand & media landscape? Will consumers behave differently and expect more from brands – given this is yet another crisis following unprecedented challenges?
Understanding inflation Embrace the change Inflation has an immediate and tangible economic impact, and some sectors will be harder hit than others. Some might even benefit from an inflationary environment. Without a more nuanced understanding of the complex dynamics at play, brands won’t be able to come up with an adequate
level.brandknewmag.com 35
of inflation, people are less likely to buy luxury items, make impulse purchases, plan vacations, and are less willing to pay premium for frivolous claims. But in 2022, things might play out differently. For instance, in the tourism industry, travelers are tired of putting their plans on hold and are seeking retribution against COVID-19 and its grip on their lives. (AXIOS). This could mean less change in travel plans, or consumers opting for a domestic destination or other “budget” solutions as opposed to cancelling plans altogether. Despite airline fares surging, demand is steadily increasing: “About six in 10 Americans are planning at least one summer trip,” (U.S. Travel Association).
response. Savvy marketers will look to focus on how small changes in consumer behavior can help guide their brand’s behavior.
Every category has its own set of opportunities
There are some sectors and brands that will do incredibly well in this environment. Either because affordability is a core promise that they just have to amplify (like discount retailers), or because shifting consumer behavior creates an inherent advantage for them to capitalize on implementing a DIY (Do It Yourself) mindset. This may be attributed to a withstanding behavior that consumers are willing to pay more for products and services that allow them to continue living life, under a consumerfirst mindset, from brands they trust and have pleasurable experiences with (Salsify).
Historically,(WARC)intimes
If your message already centers getting more with spending less, this is a good time to just turn up the volume, and reach as many people, as frequently as possible. Other retailers might have an entirely different interpretation of a DIY mindset. When people are tightening their purse strings, personalized recommendations become even more important. This will benefit data-driven retailers that can customize their offers down to the individual
Old habits won’t make the cut, consumers are savvier (and more resourceful) than ever
In summary, understanding inflation’s impact on your consumer and your category is critical in defining the problem you can authentically solve for. When a brand finds its unique challenge, it is much more likely to come up with distinctive solutions that resonate in the long-term. It’s the perfect time to pressure-test what your brand means for Inflationconsumersisatough time for all. And your brand is only one of many purchases consumers will have to think twice about. Don’t make any assumptions about the importance of your category. Invest in doing the research that can illuminate your standing with consumers right now. What does the brand mean for them? How could it add value to their lives during this period? And most importantly: if your brand went out of business, what would consumers miss most about it?
Research (Kantar) suggests that consumers are currently operating under the framework of risk-reduction, not just value seeking. They are looking for a sense of security amid insecure times. You must channel the brand trust and loyalty you already have, framing your brand as the guiding hand and reassurance of buying the best during a time when a dollar is worth so much more. This includes transparency. Being transparent with your consumer is key to justifying your choices while showing them they still come first. The COVID-19 pandemic provided time for consumers to get serious in interrogating their expectations for brands, becoming vocal on their needs and demands.
As we enter another economically strenuous period for a majority of consumers, this is an optimal opportunity for brands to develop a strategy around product transparency and place themselves in a position where they can be realistic with their consumers, laying out what they are doing AND why. Consumers having a full understanding of what is happening within their favorite brands and products gives them their confidence and purchasing autonomy back, knowing they are aware of what is going on and can make the best choices for them and their families.
For example, continual price increases can contribute to current skepticism. If a company reports a profitable year while also saying that the higher prices are due to circumstances, consumers are quick to brand that as corporate greed. (NY Times). For marketers, it’s crucial to understand the consumer’s perspective and to not underestimate their savviness. Ultimately, you can shrink your product but never shrink the value or perception of it. Smart ways to bring value
When prices increase and wallets shrink, brands must recognize the functional value proposition will be weighed heavier to competitors. Consumers are going to choose the brand they have a connection with.
Consumers will “allow” you to raise prices as long as they are made to feel worthy and valued. As a marketer you may not have the choice if prices rise, but don’t sacrifice the emotional value just because the functional may lower in quality or raise in price. And to do so, never underestimate the power of your brand.
Higher prices are inevitable and, historically, we have seen companies respond to the high product costs by using techniques that could impact the consumer’s perception for good or for bad. One of them being “shrinkflation”, the process of items shrinking in size or quantity, or even sometimes reformulating or reducing quality, while their prices remain the same or increase. Not only “having less chips” in the bag, but swapping key ingredients with less quality ones, or removing certain perks in a hotel stay experience. All those changes put consumers in a spot where, more often than not, shifts go unnoticed. On the other hand, sticker shock is apparent when it comes to the products and services used on a daily basis. A venti cup of coffee from Starbucks stood at $2.45 in 2021, but today that same cup of coffee in some locations will set you back $2.95, a 20% increase (CBS News). Gasoline hikes arguably affect consumers’ day to day life the most. The latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) shows gasoline alone is up nearly 44%.
As we just mentioned, finding value within your response is key to productively and proactively moving forward. It’s much more than that.
Let’s put this idea in context. It’s not just a sandwich to feed your hunger, it’s a moment to take for yourself, your piece of mind and enjoy. Perhaps even be reminded of easier days or a person you shared the said sandwich with. So, it becomes more important for brands to link the emotional response their products emit because it can be priceless to consumers. When brands magnify emotional value, they become something to be counted on and respected for acting in service of the consumer instead of striking against. CPG brands like Dove, are a true luxury in many countries and consumers continue to purchase because it makes them feel good. Their communication is a reinforcement of who you are in this world and that’s what matters, not how you look.
However, today, consumers are savvier than ever, and they are a click away from dismantling techniques that did not feel right. For example, in 2016, Swiss chocolate brand Toblerone altered the fan-favorite candy bar to keep up with higher ingredient costs. (BBC News). Fans immediately took to social media to express their dissatisfaction. Consumers are especially on alert in periods of disruption and are prone to be more skeptical of brand promotions and tactics when choosing what to opt in for.
94% of consumers have expressed a higher likeliness to develop brand loyalty based on transparent advertising and communication (LabelInsight). This is heightened during times of uncertainty and vulnerability.
Inflation Requires a New Response
Providing Value with Transparency
I feel so strongly about this that I believe marketing departments should devote at least part of their resources to supporting executive branding. But this does not address the central issue of today. It can still feel creepy to put your self out there.
If you’re struggling with these feelings but want to create an effective personal brand, I can help. I have a place on my site where anybody can sign up for an hour of my time. By Mark Schaefer
Mark Schaefer is the executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions. He is the author of some of the world’s bestselling digital marketing books and is an acclaimed keynote speaker, college educator, and business consultant. The Marketing Companion podcast is among the top business podcasts in the world.
I recently responded to a LinkedIn post from Ashley Sumner, the founder of the Quilt social network. Ashley is doing a great job presenting her personality to the world. One of her posts described why she felt misunderstood. And yet, she is struggling with this idea of a personal brand. She posted: Anyone else sick of figuring out the best way to “brand” themselves? It feels inauthentic and painfully limiting. HereThoughts?wasmy response:
Dealing with the creepiness of personal branding
My advice to her was simple … and difficult, too!
If you’ve followed me for a while, you probably know that I think developing a personal brand is important. It’s the only sustainable competitive advantage we have as professionals. It opens the doors of opportunity!
In your question, you are providing your own answer.
But beyond the individual, encouraging the people around you in your company to make a mindful effort in this direction is important because increasingly, the personal brand IS the brand!
I do a lot of executive coaching and one of the big discussion topics is accepting the creepiness of personal branding — the fact that talking about yourself in public is part of business life these days. In fact, this topic leads to an entire existential discussion about sharing, over-sharing, privacy, and “it’s nobody’s damn business!”
Your question is honest and vulnerable. And that’s how you “brand yourself.” Just keep doing that. Your content and thoughts will attract the right audience, an audience that will want to work for you, buy your products, and invest in Whileyou. it may seem a little creepy, putting yourself out there consistently is the single most important thing you can do as a founder. Nobody believes in marketing messaging (speaking as a marketing professional!). We believe each other — Our friends, our family, and even company Youfounders.can’t fake authenticity!
Creating a personal brand doesn’t mean you over-share. It doesn’t mean you have to pretend. It doesn’t mean a compromise. The personal brand just offers more of you at your best. It takes some courage to put yourself out there, but if you want to earn attention in this world, you don’t have a choice. To stand out, you need to be original. To be original, you have to share your story. At least part of it. Even if it might feel a little creepy!
Serena didn’t just play for the majors. She also was partial to working with comparatively smaller brands like Tonal, Masterclass and Just Egg.
Williams’ marketing playbook
Her illustrious sporting career sets Williams up for pretty much anything she wants to do in the long run, noted Allen By David Kaplan
While she didn’t go into much detail about future plans, she noted her interests lay elsewhere. Primarily, she wants to focus on raising her 4-year-old daughter with husband Alexis Ohanian, the tech entrepreneur and founder of Reddit. She also indicated a desire to be more active in her venture capital fund, Serena Ventures.
Don’t call it retirement. Instead, the end of her tennis playing days is an ‘evolution’
One thing the second highest-paid female athlete (behind fellow tennis star Naomi Osaka) didn’t bring up was her career as brand spokesperson and advertising star. She’s pitched for several dozen companies since she and her sister, 42-year-old Venus, burst onto the tennis scene and changed the sport—and the advertising around it—forever. Nike, Lincoln, JP Morgan Chase, Beats by Dre and DirecTV are just some of the marquee advertisers Williams has lent her image to.
After 27 years as one of the world’s most recognized and iconic athletes, Serena Williams is winding down her professional career in tennis following her participation in the U.S. Open at the end of August.
“Thank you, Serena, for being one of the most dynamic athletes of our generation and an inspiration for so many,” DirecTV CMO Vince Torres told Adweek. “Sports fans will remember you for your numerous Grand Slam titles, but all of us at DirecTV will cherish working hand-in-hand with you over the years to make an indelible, positive impact on the sports industry and beyond.”
Serena Williams Will Exit the Court, but Her Title as Brand Icon Is Assured
But as Williams, who will turn 41 in September, revealed in a Vogue essay explaining her departure from professional sports, she rejects the word “retirement” as lacking any modern meaning. Rather, she views this next phase as a transition, or “evolution.”
“Serena Williams is an inspiration on and off the court and it has been a thrill and honor to partner with her on our latest Just Egg campaign and welcome her as an investor,” a Just Egg representative told Adweek. “Her athletic, philanthropic and entrepreneurial endeavors are unparalleled, and we look forward to seeing what she accomplishes next. She’ll always be the GOAT to us.”
Adamson, co-founder and managing partner of marketing agency Metaforce.
“The previous generation of tennis stars—John McEnroe, Bjorn Borg, Chris Evert—didn’t really lean that heavily into celebrity endorsements,” Adamson said. “They did some. So tennis is ripe as a jumping off point for Serena. That’s especially true since it attracts luxury and upscale marketers who sell their brands based primarily on image. She’s already proven herself in so many ways. And she’ll be potentially more powerful off the court than on the court.”
Williams’ experience is more akin to former NBA phenom Michael Jordan. His ability to sell everything from his own Nike brand of sneakers to cereal matched his unparalleled achievements on the basketball court. But tennis has always been different. The Williams sisters both shattered the image of tennis as an elite and overwhelmingly white sport largely dominated by male personalities. Even the relatively few women stars like Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova can’t compare. The closest women’s tennis champion in terms of influence to Williams is Billie Jean King, but her cache has largely been relegated to pushing the envelope on social and political matters, not brand marketing.
David is Adweek’s brand marketing and performance marketing editor. A journalist for 30 years, including an earlier stint at Adweek, David has covered ad tech, digital marketing and media. He was the founding editor of Kambr Media and previously was an editor and reporter at AdExchanger, paidContent and MediaPost.
The playbook of sports figures’ endorsement careers that well outlasted and outshined their years of professional play could fill volumes. The modern era of sports marketing personalities arguably began with former Jets star Joe Namath. He earned his media nickname “Broadway Joe” as a rookie with the New York Jets in 1965.
groupisd.com 41
“How long that run could be, how powerful it is, will likely have more to do with that than what else she does,” Adamson said. “Whether it’s movies, entertainment, how effective she is as a spokesperson, is determined by how selective she is. If she shows up everywhere, her brand could be diluted.”
“Namath was never that great on the field, but he was a phenomenal spokesperson from everything from underwear to shaving cream,” Adamson said.
In that sense, Williams can still make a certain kind of history on the marketing front.
by Thomas H. Davenport
are competing on analytics not just because they can—business today is awash in data and data crunchers—but also because they should. At a time when firms in many industries offer similar products and use comparable technologies, business processes are among the last remaining points of differentiation. And analytics competitors wring every last drop of value from those processes. So, like other companies, they know what products their customers want, but they also know what prices those customers will pay, how many items each will buy in a lifetime, and what triggers will make people buy more. Like other companies, they know compensation costs and turnover rates, but they can also calculate how much personnel contribute to or detract from the bottom line and how salary levels relate to individuals’ performance. Like other companies, they know when inventories are running low, but they can also predict problems with demand and supply chains, to achieve low rates of inventory and high rates of perfect orders.
Competing on Analytics
Editor’s note (2022): To mark our 100th anniversary, we’re highlighting 12 of our very favorite articles. Subscribers can access all 12 at any time and, for nonsubscribers, we’re unlocking one per month this year. For August, we’re sharing Thomas H. Davenport’s 2006 article that revealed a new breed of competitor—companies like Amazon, Procter and Gamble, and Progressive—that transformed analytics from a tool into a strategy. We all know the power of the killer app. Over the years, groundbreaking systems from companies such as American Airlines (electronic reservations), Otis Elevator (predictive maintenance), and American Hospital Supply (online ordering) have dramatically boosted their creators’ revenues and reputations. These heralded—and coveted—applications amassed and applied data in ways that upended customer expectations and optimized operations to unprecedented degrees. They transformed technology from a supporting tool into a strategic weapon. Companies questing for killer apps generally focus all their firepower on the one area that promises to create the greatest competitive advantage. But a new breed of company is upping the stakes. Organizations such as Amazon, Harrah’s, Capital One, and the Boston Red Sox have dominated their fields by deploying industrial-strength analytics across a wide variety of activities. In essence, they are transforming their organizations into armies of killer apps and crunching their way to Organizationsvictory.
(QWUHSUHQLVWD0HGLD
Courtney Spritzer and Stephanie Cartin were pioneers when they started their social media business in 2011. Not just because the medium was relatively new, but also because they were one of the few women-owned startups in the industry. That’s why, today, they use their social media savvy to build a support network that inspires female entrepreneurs of all ages. And with Mastercard’s Digital Doors program, these Citi Small Business clients can further amplify their digital presence. So businesses like Courtney & Stephanie’s can thrive in the digital world while they’re busy impacting the real world. Because their business is much more than the services they provide.
/HDUQKRZ0DVWHUFDUG®LVSUHSDULQJORFDOEXVLQHVVHVOLNH6RFLDOɥ\DQG(QWUHSUHQLVWD0HGLDIRUWKHGLJLWDODJHDWPDVWHUFDUGXVFLWLVPDOOEXVLQHVV k&LWLJURXS,QF&LWL&LWLDQG$UF'HVLJQDQGRWKHUPDUNVXVHGKHUHLQDUHVHUYLFHPDUNVRI&LWLJURXS,QFRULWVDɸOLDWHVXVHGDQGUHJLVWHUHGWKURXJKRXWWKHZRUOG Mastercard®DQG3ULFHOHVVDUHUHJLVWHUHGWUDGHPDUNVDQG6WDUW6RPHWKLQJ3ULFHOHVVDQGWKHFLUFOHVGHVLJQDUHWUDGHPDUNVRI0DVWHUFDUG,QWHUQDWLRQDO,QFRUSRUDWHG k0DVWHUFDUG$OOULJKWVUHVHUYHG VRFLDOɥ\Q\FRP Brand Builders Role Models Together, let's Start Something Priceless®
Courtney & Stephanie 6RFLDOɥ\DQG
In sports, the real secret weapon isn’t steroids but stats, as dramatic victories by the Boston Red Sox, the New England Patriots, and the Oakland A’s attest.
To identify characteristics shared by analytics competitors, I and two of my colleagues at Babson College’s Working Knowledge Research Center studied 32 organizations that have made a commitment to quantitative, fact-based analysis. Eleven of those organizations we classified as fullbore analytics competitors, meaning top management had announced that analytics was key to their strategies; they had multiple initiatives underway involving complex data and statistical analysis, and they managed analytical activity at the enterprise (not departmental) level. This article lays out the characteristics and practices of these statistical masters and describes some of the very substantial changes other companies must undergo in order to compete on quantitative turf. As one would expect, the transformation requires a significant investment in technology, the accumulation of massive stores of data, and the formulation of companywide strategies for managing the data. But at least as important, it requires executives’ vocal, unswerving commitment and willingness to change the way employees think, work, and are treated. As Gary Loveman, CEO of analytics competitor Harrah’s, frequently puts it, “Do we think this is true? Or do we know?” Anatomy of an Analytics Competitor One analytics competitor that’s at the top of its game is Marriott International. Over the past 20 years, the corporation has honed to a science its system for establishing the optimal price for guest rooms (the key analytics process in hotels, known as revenue management). Today, its ambitions are far grander. Through its Total Hotel Optimization program, Marriott has expanded its quantitative expertise to areas such as conference facilities and catering, and made related tools available over the Internet to property revenue managers and hotel owners. It has developed systems to optimize offerings to frequent customers and assess the likelihood of those customers’ defecting to competitors. It has given local revenue managers the power to override the system’s recommendations when certain local factors can’t be predicted (like the large number of Hurricane Katrina evacuees arriving in Houston). The company has even created a revenue opportunity model, which computes actual revenues as a percentage of the optimal rates that could have been charged. That figure has grown from 83% to 91% as Marriott’s revenue-management analytics has taken root throughout the enterprise. The word is out among property owners and franchisees: If you want to squeeze the most revenue from your inventory, Marriott’s approach is the ticket.
And analytics competitors do all those things in a coordinated way, as part of an overarching strategy championed by top leadership and pushed down to decision-makers at every level. Employees hired for their expertise with numbers or trained to recognize their importance are armed with the best evidence and the best quantitative tools. As a result, they make the best decisions: big and small, every day, over and over and over.
Employees hired for their expertise with numbers or trained to recognize their importance are armed with the best evidence and the best quantitative tools. As a result, they make the best decisions.
Although numerous organizations are embracing analytics, only a handful have achieved this level of proficiency. But analytics competitors are the leaders in their varied fields—consumer products, finance, retail, and travel and entertainment among them. Analytics has been instrumental to Capital One, which has exceeded 20% growth in earnings per share every year since it became a public company. It has allowed Amazon to dominate online retailing and turn a profit despite enormous investments in growth and infrastructure.
Progressive employs similar experiments using widely available insurance industry data. The company defines narrow groups, or cells, of customers: for example, motorcycle riders ages
Clearly, organizations such as Marriott don’t behave like traditional companies. Customers notice the difference in every interaction; employees and vendors live the difference every day. Our study found three key attributes among analytics Widespreadcompetitors:useofmodeling and optimization. Any company can generate simple descriptive statistics about aspects of its business—average revenue per employee, for example, or average order size. But analytics competitors look well beyond basic statistics. These companies use predictive modeling to identify the most-profitable customers—plus those with the greatest profit potential and the ones most likely to cancel their accounts. They pool data generated in-house and data acquired from outside sources (which they analyze more deeply than do their less statistically savvy competitors) for a comprehensive understanding of their customers. They optimize their supply chains and can thus determine the impact of an unexpected constraint, simulate alternatives, and route shipments around problems. They establish prices in real time to get the highest yield possible from each of their customer transactions. They create complex models of how their operational costs relate to their financial performance.
Leaders in analytics also use sophisticated experiments to measure the overall impact or “lift” of intervention strategies and then apply the results to continuously improve subsequent analyses. Capital One, for example, conducts more than 30,000 experiments a year, with different interest rates, incentives, direct-mail packaging, and other variables. Its goal is to maximize the likelihood both that potential customers will sign up for credit cards and that they will pay back Capital One.
At such organizations, virtuosity with data is often part of the brand. Progressive makes advertising hay from its detailed parsing of individual insurance rates. Amazon customers can watch the company learning about them as its service grows more targeted with frequent purchases. Thanks to Michael Lewis’s best-selling book Moneyball, which demonstrated the power of statistics in professional baseball, the Oakland A’s are almost as famous for their geeky number crunching as they are for their athletic prowess.
Analytics competitors, by contrast, field centralized groups to ensure that critical data and other resources are well managed and that different parts of the organization can share data easily, without the impediments of inconsistent formats, definitions, and Somestandards.analytics
CEOs leading the analytics charge require both an appreciation of and a familiarity with the subject. A background in statistics isn’t necessary, but those leaders must understand the theory behind various quantitative
UPS embodies the evolution from targeted analytics user to comprehensive analytics competitor. Although the company is among the world’s most rigorous practitioners of operations research and industrial engineering, its capabilities were, until fairly recently, narrowly focused. Today, UPS is wielding its statistical skill to track the movement of packages and to anticipate and influence the actions of people—assessing the likelihood of customer attrition and identifying sources of problems. The UPS Customer Intelligence Group, for example, is able to accurately predict customer defections by examining usage patterns and complaints. When the data point to a potential defector, a salesperson contacts that customer to review and resolve the problem, dramatically reducing the loss of accounts. UPS still lacks the breadth of initiatives of a full-bore analytics competitor, but it is heading in that Analyticsdirection.competitors treat all such activities from all provenances as a single, coherent initiative, often massed under one rubric, such as “information-based strategy” at Capital One or “information-based customer management” at Barclays Bank. These programs operate not just under a common label but also under common leadership and with common technology and tools. In traditional companies, “business intelligence” (the term IT people use for analytics and reporting processes and software) is generally managed by departments; number-crunching functions select their own tools, control their own data warehouses, and train their own people. But that way, chaos lies. For one thing, the proliferation of user-developed spreadsheets and databases inevitably leads to multiple versions of key indicators within an organization. Furthermore, research has shown that between 20% and 40% of spreadsheets contain errors; the more spreadsheets floating around a company, therefore, the more fecund the breeding ground for mistakes.
Senior executive advocates. A companywide embrace of analytics impels changes in culture, processes, behavior, and skills for many employees. And so, like any major transition, it requires leadership from executives at the very top who have a passion for the quantitative approach. Ideally, the principal advocate is the CEO. Indeed, we found several chief executives who have driven the shift to analytics at their companies over the past few years, including Loveman of Harrah’s, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Rich Fairbank of Capital One. Before he retired from the Sara Lee Bakery Group, former CEO Barry Beracha kept a sign on his desk that summed up his personal and organizational philosophy: “In God we trust. All others bring data.” We did come across some companies in which a single functional or business unit leader was trying to push analytics throughout the organization, and a few were making some progress. But we found that these lower-level people lacked the clout, the perspective, and the cross-functional scope to change the culture in any meaningful way.
brandknewmag.commethods 45
An enterprise approach. Analytics competitors understand that most business functions—even those, like marketing, that have historically depended on art rather than science— can be improved with sophisticated quantitative techniques. These organizations don’t gain advantage from one killer app but rather from multiple applications supporting many parts of the business—and, in a few cases, being rolled out for use by customers and suppliers.
competitors apply the same enterprise approach to people as to technology. Procter & Gamble, for example, recently created a kind of überanalytics group consisting of more than 100 analysts from such functions as operations, supply chain, sales, consumer research, and marketing. Although most of the analysts are embedded in business operating units, the group is centrally managed. As a result of this consolidation, P&G can apply a critical mass of expertise to its most pressing issues. So, for example, sales and marketing analysts supply data on opportunities for growth in existing markets to analysts who design corporate supply networks. The supply chain analysts, in turn, apply their expertise in certain decision-analysis techniques to such new areas as competitive intelligence.
In traditional companies, departments manage analytics —number-crunching functions select their own tools and train their own people. But that way, chaos lies. The group at P&G also raises the visibility of analytical and data-based decision-making within the company. Previously, P&G’s crack analysts had improved business processes and saved the firm money; but because they were squirreled away in dispersed domains, many executives didn’t know what services they offered or how effective they could be. Now those executives are more likely to tap the company’s deep pool of expertise for their projects. Meanwhile, masterful number crunching has become part of the story P&G tells to investors, the press, and the public.
30 and above, with college educations, credit scores over a certain level, and no accidents. For each cell, the company performs a regression analysis to identify factors that most closely correlate with the losses that group engenders. It then sets prices for the cells, which should enable the company to earn a profit across a portfolio of customer groups, and uses simulation software to test the financial implications of those hypotheses. With this approach, Progressive can profitably insure customers in traditionally high-risk categories. Other insurers reject high-risk customers out of hand, without bothering to delve more deeply into the data (although even traditional competitors, such as Allstate, are starting to embrace analytics as a strategy).
The most-proficient analytics practitioners don’t just measure their own navels—they also help customers and vendors measure theirs. Walmart, for example, insists that suppliers use its Retail Link system to monitor product movement by store, to plan promotions and layouts within stores, and to reduce stock-outs. E.&J. Gallo provides distributors with data and analysis on retailers’ costs and pricing so they can calculate the per-bottle profitability for each of Gallo’s 95 wines. The distributors, in turn, use that information to help retailers optimize their mixes while persuading them to add shelf space for Gallo products. Procter & Gamble offers data and analysis to its retail customers, as part of a program called Joint Value Creation, and to its suppliers to help improve responsiveness and reduce costs. Hospital supplier Owens & Minor furnishes similar services, enabling customers and suppliers to access and analyze their buying and selling data, track ordering patterns in search of consolidation opportunities, and move off-contract purchases to group contracts that include products distributed by Owens & Minor and its competitors. For example, Owens & Minor might show a hospital chain’s executives how much money they could save by consolidating purchases across multiple locations or help them see the trade-offs between increasing delivery frequency and carrying inventory.
so that they recognize those methods’ limitations—which factors are being weighed and which ones aren’t. When the CEOs need help grasping quantitative techniques, they turn to experts who understand the business and how analytics can be applied to it. We interviewed several leaders who had retained such advisers, and these executives stressed the need to find someone who can explain things in plain language and be trusted not to spin the numbers. A few CEOs we spoke with had surrounded themselves with very analytical people—professors, consultants, MIT graduates, and the like. But that was a personal preference rather than a necessary practice. Of course, not all decisions should be grounded in analytics— at least not wholly so. Personnel matters, in particular, are often well and appropriately informed by instinct and anecdote. More organizations are subjecting recruiting and hiring decisions to statistical analysis (see the sidebar “Going to Bat for Stats”). But research shows that human beings can make quick, surprisingly accurate assessments of personality and character based on simple observations. For analyticsminded leaders, then, the challenge boils down to knowing when to run with the numbers and when to run with their Theirguts.
The right focus. Although analytics competitors encourage universal fact-based decisions, they must choose where to direct resource-intensive efforts. Generally, they pick several functions or initiatives that together serve an overarching strategy. Harrah’s, for example, has aimed much of its analytical activity at increasing customer loyalty, customer service, and related areas like pricing and promotions. UPS has broadened its focus from logistics to customers, in the interest of providing superior service. While such multipronged strategies define analytics competitors, executives we interviewed warned companies against becoming too diffuse in their initiatives or losing clear sight of the business purpose behind Anothereach.consideration
Marketing, for example, has always been tough to quantify because it is rooted in psychology. But now consumer products companies can hone their market research using multiattribute utility theory—a tool for understanding and predicting consumer behaviors and decisions. Similarly, the advertising industry is adopting econometrics—statistical techniques for measuring the lift provided by different ads and promotions over time.
Sources of Strength Analytics competitors are more than simple number-crunching factories. Certainly, they apply technology—with a mixture of brute force and finesse—to multiple business problems. But they also direct their energies toward finding the right focus, building the right culture, and hiring the right people to make optimal use of the data they constantly churn. In the end, people and strategy, as much as information technology, give such organizations strength.
when allocating resources is how amenable certain functions are to deep analysis. There are at least seven common targets for analytical activity, and specific industries may present their own. Statistical models and algorithms that dangle the possibility of performance breakthroughs make some prospects especially tempting.
The right culture. Culture is a soft concept; analytics is a hard discipline. Nonetheless, analytics competitors must instill a companywide respect for measuring, testing, and evaluating quantitative evidence. Employees are urged to base decisions on hard facts. And they know that their performance is gauged the same way. Human resource organizations within analytics competitors are rigorous about applying metrics to compensation and rewards. Harrah’s, for example, has made a dramatic change from a rewards culture based on paternalism and tenure to one based on such meticulously collected performance measurements as financial and customer service results. Senior executives also set a consistent example with their own behavior, exhibiting a hunger for and confidence in fact and analysis. One exemplar of such leadership was Beracha of the Sara Lee Bakery Group, known to his employees as a “data dog” because he hounded them for data to support any assertion or Nothypothesis.surprisingly, in an analytics culture, there’s sometimes tension between innovative or entrepreneurial impulses and the requirement for evidence. Some companies place less emphasis on blue-sky development, in which designers or engineers chase after a gleam in someone’s eye. In these organizations, R&D, like other functions, is rigorously metricdriven. At Yahoo, Progressive, and Capital One, process and product changes are tested on a small scale and implemented as they are validated. That approach, well established within various academic and business disciplines (including engineering, quality management, and psychology), can be applied to most corporate processes—even to not-soobvious candidates, like human resources and customer service. HR, for example, might create profiles of managers’ personality traits and leadership styles and then test those managers in different situations. It could then compare data on individuals’ performance with data about personalities to determine what traits are most important to managing a project that is behind schedule, say, or helping a new group
Thomas H. Davenport is the president’s distinguished professor of information technology and management at Babson College, a visiting professor at Oxford’s Saïd School of Business, a research fellow at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, and a senior adviser to Deloitte’s AI practice.
And,UPS. of course, new analytics competitors will have to stock their personnel larders with fresh people. (When Gary Loveman became COO, and then CEO, of Harrah’s, he brought in a group of statistical experts who could design and implement quantitatively based marketing campaigns and loyalty programs.) Existing employees, meanwhile, will require extensive training. They need to know what data are available and all the ways the information can be analyzed; and they must learn to recognize such peculiarities and shortcomings as missing data, duplication, and quality problems. An analytics-minded executive at Procter & Gamble suggested to me that firms should begin to keep managers in their jobs for longer periods because of the time required to master quantitative approaches to their businesses.
to Companiesassimilate.just now embracing such strategies, however, will find that they take several years to come to fruition.
The organizations in our study described a long, sometimes arduous journey. The UK Consumer Cards and Loans business within Barclays Bank, for example, spent five years executing its plan to apply analytics to the marketing of credit cards and other financial products. The company had to make process changes in virtually every aspect of its consumer business: underwriting risk, setting credit limits, servicing accounts, controlling fraud, cross-selling, and so on. On the technical side, it had to integrate data on 10 million Barclaycard customers, improve the quality of the data, and build systems to step up data collection and analysis. In addition, the company embarked on a long series of small tests to begin learning how to attract and retain the best customers at the lowest price. And it had to hire new people with top-drawer quantitative skills.
The German pathologist Rudolph Virchow famously called the task of science “to stake out the limits of the knowable.”
Much of the time—and corresponding expense—that any company takes to become an analytics competitor will be devoted to technological tasks: refining the systems that produce transaction data, making data available in warehouses, selecting and implementing analytic software, and assembling the hardware and communications environment.
The Oakland A’s aren’t the only ones playing moneyball. Companies of every stripe want to be part of the game.
Analytics competitors pursue a similar goal, although the universe they seek to know is a more circumscribed one of customer behavior, product movement, employee performance, and financial reactions. Every day, advances in technology and techniques give companies a better and better handle on the critical minutiae of their operations.
And because those who don’t record history are doomed not to learn from it, companies that have collected little information—or the wrong kind—will need to amass a sufficient body of data to support reliable forecasting. “We’ve been collecting data for six or seven years, but it’s only become usable in the last two or three, because we needed time and experience to validate conclusions based on the data,” remarked a manager of customer data analytics at
Who FallingIs
who regularly browse fake news stories served up by social media algorithms are more likely to diversify their news diet by seeking out mainstream sources. These well-rounded news junkies make up more than 97% of online readers, compared with the scant 2.8% who consume online fake news exclusively.
The study, which examined the browsing activity of nearly 31,000 households during 2017, offers empirical evidence that goes against popular beliefs about echo chambers. While echo chambers certainly are dark and dangerous places, they aren’t metaphorical black holes that suck in
“We find that these echo chambers that people worry about are very shallow. This idea that the internet is creating an echo chamber is just not holding out to be true,” said
People who read fake news online aren’t doomed to fall into a deep echo chamber where the only sound they hear is their own ideology, according to a revealing new study from Surprisingly,Wharton.readers
Fake News?
By Ken Moon for
Senthil Veeraraghavan, a Wharton professor of operations, information and decisions. Veeraraghavan is co-author of the paper, “Does Fake News Create Echo Chambers?” It was also written by Ken Moon, Wharton professor of operations, information and decisions, and Jiding Zhang, an assistant operations management professor at New York University Shanghai who earned her doctorate at Wharton.
The professors analyzed household news consumption before and after the policy among both Facebook and non-Facebook users. Before the policy, Facebook and nonFacebook users alike browsed real and fake online news at roughly the same rate. After the policy, Facebook users consumed less fake news, which was the policy intention, but they also consumed significantly less mainstream news compared with those off the platform.
The data yielded few demographic differences between households browsing predominantly mainstream news and the 10% identified as “avid readers” of fake news, meaning they spent more time than average browsing fake news sources while still consuming mainstream news. Avid fake news readers tend to be slightly older, live in smaller households, and are less likely to have children, the paper stated. “Contrary to some popular beliefs, they are neither poor nor less educated. In fact, they average slightly higher education levels.”
The professors found that relatively few sites account for most of the fake news, so rather than rating individual articles as true or false based on content, they parsed the data by source. The news sources in the study that were identified as purveyors of fake information, including Occupy Democrats and The Federalist Papers, had about 1 in 1,000 articles that were fact-checked and determined to be false. By comparison, mainstream sites, including The New York Times and Bloomberg, published incorrect information in 3 out of every 100,000 articles.
Thechambers.recommendation comes from a pattern they found in the data after August 2017, when Facebook began flagging questionable content to discourage users from sharing it. Pages that repeatedly shared false information were also banned from advertising on the platform, which sharply incentivized them to stop the viral spread of fake news.
“This idea that the internet is creating an echo chamber is just not holding out to be true.”
– Ken Moon
“If you’re looking for folks who read only fake news, they are actually hard to find.”
Moon and Veeraraghavan said these demographic similarities show the hazard in stereotyping people who read fake news. There’s no singular profile; virtually everyone is at least a casual reader of information that’s dubious or downright wrong.
The study found that households exposed to fake news actually increase their exposure to mainstream news by “We9.1%.were surprised, although we were very aware going in that there was much that we did not know,” Moon said.
“People are complicated,” Veeraraghavan added. “I think the straw man that has been built about who the fake news consumers are doesn’t quite add up. That’s one thing the paper tries to address: Who are these consumers?”
groupisd.com 51
“Fake news is always going to be there,” he said. “You’re not going to eliminate fake news or make people uninterested in it, so we have to understand how fake news is consumed rather than judging people for consuming it.”
The professors make a specific recommendation on how platforms such as Facebook can better moderate fake news content: Rather than having blanket policies designed to protect all users from fake news, target the tiny percentage of households that are most susceptible to falling into echo
“One interesting thing in the data was that the outliers, the people who read the most fake news, also tend to read more news in general,” Moon said. “These news-loving consumers seek all the information that’s out there, so they consume a healthy amount of fake news. But if you’re looking for folks who read only fake news, they are actually hard to find.”
Blanket policies are expensive and inefficient for social media companies, and they have an unintended consequence of choking off legitimate news access, the professors argue in their paper. Instead, Facebook and other platforms ought to use their vast consumer data to zero in on the most vulnerable users with “harm-based interventions” that would stop those individuals from accessing fake news Moonsources.and Veeraraghavan concede that the recommendation may not solve all the problems associated with fake news, but it’s a suggestion that companies and policymakers should consider in the complicated efforts to combat the
“Thisproblem.recommendation comes with the caveat that we should implement it carefully,” Moon said. “There is always a question of what’s ethical. Should we really censor content for one particular group of people? But if you understand that the problem boils down to the vulnerability of just a few, what safeguards can there be? It suggests a more informative way to look at solutions that are ethical or palatable, and to evaluate their efficacy for that vulnerable Veeraraghavangroup.” pointed out that fake news will never be eradicated; it’s been around since the dawn of storytelling.
From ancient times to yellow journalism, from grocery store tabloids to deep fakes on the internet, history is rife with examples. The goal, he said, is to find ways to make it less influential and less dangerous.
Locking Readers Out of Echo Chambers
every person who reads an article about, say, Obama birtherism theory or conspiracies about COVID-19 vaccines.
– Senthil Veeraraghavan
“One thing we wanted to see is how much fake news is out there. How do we figure out what’s fake and what’s not, and who is producing the fake news and why? The economic structure of that matters from a business perspective.”
Over the last week, Google has started its soft rollout of a newly designed Gmail—meaning it’s likely that your Gmail already looks a little different, or it will soon.
Aside from the unmissable new font—Google Sans Text, which is inspired by basic geometries like circles—the biggest update is to its very left column. What was once a vertical mashup of your email directories, Chat, Spaces, and Meet, is now an app switcher. You can tap on any of these icons, but instead of getting a bit larger in that left pane, they’ll now take over your whole window. It means you can do much the same non-email-related things in Gmail that you could before, albeit with a more expansive view. (Read: Google wants you using its apps other than Gmail.)
This sort of personally adaptive UI sounds like sci-fi—but in fact, it already lives within Gmail! Priority Inbox (which launched back in 2010) is a feature that uses AI to learn
There’s a new Gmail.
First launched in 2021, Material You is the new design system behind Android. Its big idea is that the user interface of a phone is inspired by its user: You. The most clear way that plays out is in how Google uses AI to create novel color palettes from your own photos, ensuring that the Google interface itself complements your wallpaper. However, I’m actually more intrigued by Google’s deeper plans for Material You, in which its engine will be able to customize every individual interface element you see to your taste or need. Instead of designing one perfect interface to rule them all, Google is working on a system that less prescriptively molds to us, like a design consultant sleeping in the code.
But the new Gmail barely embraces the design philosophy of Material You. In desktop mode, there’s no color customization or option to change the appearance of buttons. There are all sorts of reasonable technical explanations as to why Google can’t work the same mojo in a desktop browser as in its own smartphone, of course. And I’m not terribly concerned about the Gmail interface being matchy-matchy with my desktop (though, wow, Google really embraced the blue in this redesign!). Still, I’d love Google to serve as that “coded design consultant” it teases in Material You, albeit fully focused on my email needs. Track how I use Gmail over time. Do I always constantly consult my calendar? Do I never use its chat? Then reshape the interface for me around those practices, instead of cramming ’em all in front of my eyeballs in the interest of a guess or a business plan. Let my own hand imprint itself into the tool, like fingers can work their way into the wooden handle of a hammer. (And by that, no, I don’t mean offer five fundamental layouts to customize Gmail that are all a similar onslaught of services, windows, and text, as the new Gmail does today.)
The other big updates are to search—the platform now lets you use Google’s toggling “search chips” to better filter emails for images and attachments—as well as a new fit and finish across the interface. Inspired by the company’s new Material You design language, Gmail’s drop shadows are gone, with new curves and buttons that remind me of the tabs inside an organizational binder.
But can it ever really change?
By Mark Wilson
I realize this mentality seems defensive, and at odds with Silicon Valley’s mantra of moving fast and breaking things. I realize, too, that we are all looking at the new Gmail redesign and scratching our heads as to why it’s not more of whatever each of us wants it to be. Without sounding too defeatist, I’m going to admit: I need Gmail to be pretty much what it’s always been. But maybe made a little better, somehow, without making big changes? And it seems Google knows this, Whichtoo.is why the new design has one last option I haven’t mentioned thus far: A button to revert back to your old brandknewmag.comGmail.
who your most important contacts are over time, and floats their messages to the top. I’ve used it for over a decade, and thankfully, it still works inside the new redesign. The AI has never gotten perfect; despite how many messages I’ve marked as priority, or not, to train the system, spam still slips by. If a family member writes from another email address, it might not make its way to the top. I’d equate the accuracy of Priority Inbox to that of a decent intern. But that’s okay because I know what to expect from that poor schlub I’ve freely employed for a dozen years. And for Gmail, knowing what to expect is my singular concern above all others. That singular concern is a paradox for Gmail’s ongoing design strategy. On one hand, it could shape Gmail to our individual needs, with more features like Priority Inbox and design direction from Material You. On the other hand, improving efficiency or workflow is a collective risk amplified across the 3 billion people who use Google’s Workspaces— which includes its apps like Gmail and Google Docs. These users need Google services to be reliable and predictable more than they need any new button style. May I be the first human to admit, I’d be terrified if Google made any truly significant functional or design changes to Workspaces— even if Google had some data proving it might save me five minutes a day! These platforms are so integral to my work that learning a new system isn’t just jarring; since it’s unproven, it’s hardly worth the professional roll of the dice. I’m reminded of a discussion I had years ago with Gordon Beckham, former infielder for the Chicago White Sox. He’d just broken his wrist because of the precise way he hit a ball with his bat—a common accident among professional baseball players. When I asked if he’d considered using a new $100 offset bat that was designed specifically to avoid the injury, he admitted he’d tried it, but he’d never make the switch in a real game. It was a fine bat, he explained, but players simply didn’t like changing equipment once they reached the majors. We consider oily old gloves to be a piece of baseball’s nostalgia— or perhaps even superstition. But Beckham reframed them as an important part of every player’s proven formula: If you’ve reached the majors, don’t mess with the equation that got you there. Much like Beckham preferring to use a bat that might break his wrist in the interest of supporting his career, so too would I rather use a dependable, known Gmail than experiment with one that might offer some theoretical efficiency benefit.
53
When advertisers get scary—and the horror of self-indulgence
BORING AND ENDLESS IS NO WAY TO GO THROUGH FordLIFE tries to transform a truck ad into a grindhouse-style
In a time when the fight for our increasingly fragmented attention is so heightened, marketers’s one-two punch, as it were, is making us laugh and scaring the hell out of us all at the same time. (Further down the list: making us cry our eyes out.) Humor—or attempts at it, anyway—is arguably overused, but horror still feels fresh enough to break through. It’s actually surprising, then, that advertisers don’t use horror more often, though there are some notable precedents. One of my favorite examples of brands using horror is the 2017 Skittles spot, “Floor 9.5,”which was part of a collection of shorts from Mars brands for Halloween. Another is Dirt Devil’s “Exorcist” from 2011. The latter has a hilarious twist that I won’t spoil for you, but both deftly set a mood and crucially tell a story in a very short period of Horrortime.
No wonder advertisers want in on the trend.
THING Horror is hot. Nope, The Black Phone, the new Scream, and of course, the most recent season of Stranger Things are pop culture hits. According to Netflix’s recent shareholder letter, people watched a collective 1.3 billion hours of Stranger Things, season four, in its first four weeks, making it the company’s most popular season of English-language TV in its history.
works because, well, brain science. The thrill of horror stories comes from something called excitation transfer, as sociologist Margee Kee told The Atlantic back in 2013. After the fear-induced reactions, such as accelerated heart rate, heavy breathing, and maybe flop sweat wear off, we experience intense relief. As a result of these positive feelings, our brains are flooded with feel-good chemicals. When was the last time an ad did that for you?
BY JEFF BEER
You’re in the desert. It’s daytime. There’s a scorpion. No, wait, it’s nighttime. Truck lights in the distance. Cut to truck interior: Dark, can’t see anything. Truck racing through the desert. Spooky shadows. Moon turns to fireball. Truck is doing donuts? Is it being chased? By what? A snake! Wolf! Not chasing, just standing there. Truck stops. Driver squints into the darkness. Cut to: Burning cactus. A creepy hand reaches over a rearview mirror. Truck takes off, jumps desert dune under a blood red moon. Fin. The film I just described isn’t a new horror thriller on Netflix: It’s a new ad for the Ford F-150 Raptor R truck. The video is called “Scary Fast.” It could just as easily be called “WTF.” The failure of the Ford ad needs to be reckoned with because if brands are going to try to surf the zeitgeist, they need to understand why this film bombs. As luck would have it, that spot wasn’t even the only major brand to play with horror this week, so we have an interesting comparison of two brands playing with the cool new thing—and each failing in different ways that should serve as an object lesson moving THEforward.CURRENT
In a world where our attention span has become such a finite resource, that’s just scary. Most Innovative Companies comes to the Middle East this October! Click here to know more.
Charles Byers, marketing professor at Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business, says that current research pegs attention spans for small-screen videos at 3 to 5 minutes. “Anything beyond 5 minutes is, at best, pure waste, and at worst, bad messaging and production,” he says. Unfortunately, La Massacre doesn’t pass that videolength litmus test.
At least the confusingly limp execution is only two minutes Likelong.Ford, KFC in Spain went full horror-nostalgia vibes with a short film called La Massacre, following a group of friends to an abandoned cabin where they eventually meet with a pizza-inspired demise. Great start, fun casting. What’s the problem then?
Using the style and moods of horror as an advertising tool is smart. Like comedy. horror is a a genre of emotion. And emotion is what gets an audience’s attention.
That’s a harsh take on long-form brand content when you consider work like The Day Sports Stood Still, an 85-minute doc created by Nike’s Waffle Iron Entertainment that’s streaming on HBO, and any number of projects Observatory has created for such brands as eBay, Bonobos, and Doritos over the years. But Byers does hit a nerve in that he’s delivering advice that most brand content should probably adhere to. (It’s not horror, but I have to mention the horrifyingly long Liquid Death exercise video spoof with comedian Bert Kreischer. It’s hilarious! Buuuut with a 9-minute running time, it’a about 6 minutes too long.)
“The focus should be on achieving outcomes and how to influence behavior,” Byers adds, “not on outputs or, ‘How much can I say about me.’”
groupisd.com 55
ADVERTISING CAN’T STAND STILL
Whether it’s Ford’s lack of a story, or KFC and Liquid Death’s lack of time constraints, all of these appear to have one thing in common: At no time, it seems, did their creators consider how the audience would be engaging with the work, and whether it really, truly, would be worth their time.
La Massacre drags its story out to a full 14 minutes. If you want people to spend 14 minutes with your branded content, it first better be Sundance- or Tribeca-worthy as a short film—and as an ad second.
horror clip, but as my narrated experience, above, of what it’s like to watch the ad reveals, all we get is a collection of loosely related, flashy visuals. The idea had potential— and the agency behind it, Wieden+Kennedy, knows how to do creative storytelling. It hired an up-and-coming talent in Lauren Sick to direct. But it seems to have gotten a bit too besotted with everything it could do with this idea. It designed complementary merch to go with the vibe of the spot, from T-shirts to horror novel slipcovers for owner manuals to back seat air-sickness bags. So “Scary Fast” has all the accoutrements of a, er, killer campaign spot. Alas, it’s all style, no story. No beginning, no middle, no end. No coherent message.
While some of our clients are niche brands of some kind, and several may be considered bona fide cult brands, all have been structured and supported in ways that invite personal connection and scale. Positioning is invaluable as a discipline that focuses a brand, but that focus doesn’t have to hinder growth. By carefully implementing and attending to three fundamental factors—story, sensibility and significance— brands and organizations that might otherwise have been niched into charming but limited specialization have scaled and enjoyed remarkable success. First, a clear, compelling and authentic story must be established. Then a distinct aesthetic and perspective, a variety of elements we refer to as a brand’s sensibility, are developed. Finally, links that lead to genuine significance are identified and cultivated in a compelling way. This ensures products and services aren’t just marketed to a brand’s key internal and external audiences, they actually matter to them. The convergence of these three critical factors results in the culture at the heart of culture brands. Each intersection also generates the functional value for consumers that make culture brands so extraordinary: symbol to self, signal to others, and shared value to a like-minded group.
By Matt Ferebee
From Cult to Culture: It Isn’t
Just About Positioning
In the 1960s, Al Ries and Jack Trout introduced a concept to describe a poorly articulated dynamic in marketing and advertising: positioning. Now one of the industry’s most adhered to principles, positioning prompts us to stake a specific claim to a unique place, or position, in the mind of particular consumers. It’s how brands find a valuable niche for their products and services, and how many pursue what some consider niche marketing’s highest state: cult brands.
One less-understood aspect of positioning for specific segments and angling for cult-brand status is the world of culture brands. Few have examined, or perhaps even recognized, this different kind of niche brand. Culture brands are more focused than traditional commodities, but not as constrained as typical niche or cult brands. Their positioning is still distinct, but their segments and audiences aren’t as narrow. Whereas cult brands are smaller by nature and often aligned to an existing niche, culture brands can be scaled, effectively defining and creating their own niche as they grow. Both connect with audiences in fundamentally personal ways, but unlike cult brands, the power of a culture brand isn’t fueled by limiting its growth, evolution or audience.
One example of how our culture branding lens impacts our work is our most recent collaboration with longterm client Le Creuset in launching a limited-edition product partnership with Harry Potter. Instead of just developing a typical marketing campaign to promote an existing co-branded product, we worked with the client team to develop a range of designs genuinely rooted in fan insights and interests. The marketing and engagement, in essence, started with the product. Our team created concepts, visuals and messaging that invited fans to connect with the launch in genuinely personal ways. Our goal was to develop pieces that were as meaningful as they were functional. That meant articulating a range of target personas and matching our products and messaging to those personalities. Each design was evaluated based on its ability to represent something individually gratifying to the purchaser, to symbolize a beloved facet of the Wizarding World franchise. Simultaneously, we worked to ensure that purchases could be shared and showcased to other fans, signaling a rare Harry Potter win to a like-minded community sure to appreciate it. Finally, we contemplated the secondary value each product might one day have. Is this the sort of product that people would hand down to a child? Sell to another fan? Trade among fellow aficionados? Those cultural considerations led to a range of cookware that reflected and respected the real passions of those who love all things Harry Potter—while also honoring the sensibilities of Le Creuset devotees. Our campaign revealed products like wand-inspired spatulas, a Deathly-Hallows spoon rest and a Dutch oven that paid tribute to Harry Potter himself, including a custom cast lightning bolt knob (as well as another cast iron Quidditch pot with a life-size gold snitch knob). Fans of both brands clamored for the chance to buy the limited-edition line—which sold out online and in store. Subsequently, the hope of launching truly resonant products that created their own marketing momentum on cultural value is now evidenced by re-sales on platforms like eBay already commanding three and four times the original sales price.
By DieuCam Nguyen and Emily Poon
value of digital possessions like NFTs, for instance, lies not in their status as objects but in their role as a medium for connecting people in a shared story that evolves as people
Thisengage.ispossible due to innovation in artificial intelligence.
Theeffectively?newwave
Thereach.real
AI can gather data from users on a vast scale, analyze that information, and generate content based on people’s behaviour. The ability of AI to learn and create has already transformed the way we produce personalized content online, and that potential is only growing. AI is getting more sophisticated and opening the door to creations such as meta-humans, and generative art in the world of NFTs.
Digital Empathy: Can Virtual Interactions Create Meaningful Connections?
of digital tools is designed to transport us to virtual realities; a world of digital people, possessions, and spaces. The tools may be new, but the art of storytelling is not. It has always been about creating meaningful human experiences through virtual realities. Every work of fiction, from the books we read as children, to the video games we play today, to the best films we watch, presents a world inhabited by characters who exist only in the shared imaginations of creator and audience, a world where we forge powerful emotional bonds. For the savvy communicator these manufactured worlds present opportunities for very real emotional impact and genuine human connection.
Just as it always has been.
We borrow meaning from a wealth of life experiences, and from cultural immersion, to bring these stories to life, and the expression of that authentic connection is the key to influence.
When strategizing the creation of digital influencers or other digital communications programs, brands should consider what communities they can borrow influence from, and what team capabilities they will need in order to create the right cultural codes.
This paper presents three points of view on how brands can successfully deploy digital humans, digital possessions, and digital spaces to engage communities and craft stories that create positive impact for consumers and brands.
Technology now enables us to personalize these storytelling connections, unlocking remarkable creative possibilities, lowering costs, and enabling engagement and real time
The Metaverse. NFTs. Virtual humans. There’s no small amount of hype around these new forms of digital engagement, but how should brands use these tools to influence people
A good starting point for brands to begin with is empathy, taking care to feel what audiences are themselves feeling, and using new digital capabilities to offer relevant and meaningful experiences. Whether the connection is digital or analog, empathy is what makes it real.
The platforms we tell stories on are changing, but success still depends upon the bedrocks of influence, creativity, and Theseempathy.new storytelling vehicles - be they digital people, digital possessions, or digital spaces - feed into the fundamental human desire to learn through empathy. Empathizing through stories is part of our nature as social beings, but making meaningful connections requires skilled creators, with deep insights into the lives of the people they are trying to engage.
The main goal of the design thinking process is to identify alternative solutions that might not surface from linear thinking. This is achieved through being open to challenging assumptions, redefining what solutions can look like, and brainstorming and creating prototypes that can be tested and reassessed based on what works best for human-centered Itneeds.allows designers to create better and longer-term solutions while placing emphasis on empathy and understanding what changes and shifts will serve the population most efficiently.
The design thinking process is a two-pronged approach that involves both empathetic ideology and a process that aims to find the best possible solution for gaps in the market or problems in a given demographic or community. Big-name brands such as Apple and Samsung were quick to adopt this user-focused approach early on to help foster innovation in order to provide long-term positive solutions for users and Brandsclients. and companies that have adopted a design thinking process in-house know that innovation doesn’t come from being stagnant. They also understand that progressing and innovating for the sake of innovation alone isn’t the best method for creating products and solutions that consumers actually want and need—that’s where the human-centered approach comes in. So what exactly is the design thinking process and why is it so important in the design and UX world? Read on to better understand the ins and outs of design thinking as well as some of the most popular tools of the trade.
The design thinking process is a nonlinear, solutions-oriented methodology that was created to help solve complex or illdefined problems or gaps and opportunities in communityfocused services, products, and general human-focused needs.
WHAT IS THE DESIGN THINKING PROCESS?
WHAT ARE THE FIVE STAGES OF THE DESIGN THINKING PROCESS? the metaverse: 4 critical concepts business leaders must focus on By Marketing Mag Staff
Popular brands like Apple and Samsung, for example, were quick to adopt design thinking processes in order to best serve their customers while ensuring products could be easily integrated into consumers’ daily lives in an intuitive and userfriendly manner.
The core of the process involves reframing problems or holes in the market in human-centric ways. This helps designers shift the crux of the problem to be more tangible through drilling down to the most important aspects of the problem and determining how a solution can trigger long-term positive effects on a given population or community as a whole— rather than coming up with an easy short-term, quick-fix solution or underbaked product to fill a market need.
Mapping
The first stage of the process, empathizing, involves usercentric research. This could look like immersing oneself in the users’ environment, engaging with users, and setting aside one’s own assumptions and biases. The second stage, the define stage, uses the research collected in stage one to define the core of the problem in a way that reflects the users, rather than the company’s bottom line.
The final two stages of the design thinking process involve developing and testing various prototypes and ideas. The back-and-forth between testing and receiving feedback in the final stages is vital, and most prototypes will be tested and sent back to the drawing board multiple times before getting it right.
brandknewmag.com 61
The third stage of the design thinking process, ideating, moves into the idea generation phase of the process. After looking at the problem from different perspectives, designers brainstorm as many solutions as possible before moving into the prototyping and testing phases.
The four quadrants help design professionals paint a full picture of what the user needs and feels in relation to a problem or hole in the market. This allows designers to get into the mind of the user to better put aside any assumptions or biases that they might have while also ensuring the prototyping and testing phases will be as close as possible to the best result or solution.
WHAT IS ONE OF THE TOOLS ASSOCIATED WITH DESIGN
Traditional empathy maps will have four quadrants—says, thinks, does, and feels—with the user or demographic in the middle of the quadrants. The “says” quadrant is reserved for what users have said out loud in an interview or during consumer research while the “thinks” quadrant is used for mapping out what users think throughout the experience or testing phase. The “does” quadrant reports on how users interact with the prototype or testing phase and the final “feels” quadrant provides space for designers to note down the user’s emotional state during the interaction.
The five-stage design thinking model as suggested by the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (a.k.a. the “d.school”) is one of the most popular modes of design thinking. According to the d.school, the five stages of design thinking include empathizing, defining, ideating, prototyping, and testing.
ThereTHINKING?areplenty of tools used in the design thinking process— but the first and most important tool is the concept of empathy mapping. Designers and UX professionals use empathy maps to help ensure the process takes users into account in a way that will allow them to prioritize their real needs and the solutions required to make long-lasting positive change.
cofounder
Plenty of experts argue that anyone who wants to develop a skill, play an instrument, or lead their field should start early, focus intensely, and rack up as many hours of deliberate practice as possible. If you dabble or delay, you’ll never catch up to the people who got a head start. But a closer look at research on the world’s top performers, from professional athletes to Nobel laureates, shows that early specialization is the exception, not the rule.
the Year
&
Obsessed:
You Manifest Positive Vibes. Good Vibes,
Red Antler, the branding and marketing company for startups and new ventures, explains how hot new brands like Casper, Allbirds, Sweetgreen, and Everlane build devoted fan followings right out of the gate.
For The Last 25 Years, Jim Kwik Has Helped Everyone From Celebrities To Ceos To Students Improve Their Memory, Increase Their DecisionMaking Skills, Learn To Speed-Read And Unleash Their Superbrains. In Limitless, Readers Will Learn Jim’S Revolutionary Strategies And Shortcuts To Break Free From Their Perceived Limitations.
The 2020 Porchlight Marketing & Sales of
chief branding officer
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World By David Epstein
By Vex King Leadership And Elite Performance Expert Robin Sharma Introduced The 5Am Club Concept Over Twenty Years Ago, Based On A Revolutionary Morning Routine That Has Helped His Clients Maximize Their Productivity, Activate Their Best Health And Bulletproof Their Serenity In This Age Of Overwhelming Complexity. The 5 Am Club by Robin Sharma
Legendary
Limitless: Upgrade Your Brain, Learn Anything Faster, And Unlock Your Exceptional Life by Jim Kwik
The Halo Effect: How Managers let Themselves be ByDeceivedPhilRosenzweig Too many of the most prominent management gurus today make steel-clad guarantees, based on claims of irrefutable research, promising to reveal the secrets of why one company fails and another succeeds, and how you can become the latter.
Book
Building a Brand People Love from Day One by Emily Heyward
The 1 Help Good Life: How SelfLove Is The Key To Unlocking Your Greatness: The #1 Sunday Times Bestseller
Sunday Times Bestselling Non-Fiction Book Of 2021 – Over One Million Copies Sold Worldwide. Join The Self-Love Revolution With Visionary Writer Vex King And Discover Inspirational Messages And Universal Wisdom To
Building Distinctive Brand Assets is for anyone with a brand logo, font or colour scheme, and is essential reading for those who have wondered if (or have been told) it’s time for a change. Readers will learn how to set up a long-term strategy to build a strong brand identity, and how to make use of knowledge, metrics and management systems in order to build and protect a brand’s Distinctive Assets. Building Distinctive Brand Assets is divided into three sections Building Distinctive Brand Assets
By Jenni Romaniuk
The 1 New York Times Bestseller. Over 4 Million Copies Soldtiny Changes, Remarkable Resultsno Matter Your Goals, Atomic Habits Offers A Proven Framework For Improving--Every Day. James Clear, One Of The World’S Leading Experts On Habit Formation, Reveals Practical Strategies That Will Teach You Exactly How To Form Good Habits, Break Bad Ones,..... Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way To Build Good Habits And Break Bad Ones By James Clear
Book,Line Sinker
The and of
loyalty,
Instant Wall Street Journal Bestseller! Congratulations, you’re a manager! After you pop the champagne, accept the shiny new title, and step into this thrilling next chapter of your career, the truth descends like a fog: you don’t really know what you’re doing.
Voss Joined
marketing professionals
grow their brands. How
Your Life Depended On It by
The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to YoubyJulie Zhuo Not all of us get to work on multimillion corporate identity projects for airlines and huge conglomerates. If you are new to the sector or honing their skills, this book if for people who... Know Your Onions - Corporate Identity: Get your Head Around Corporate Identity Design and Deliver One Like the Big Boys and Girls by Drew de Soto
Fbi,
The best-selling Thinking with Type in a revised and expanded second edition: Thinking with Type is the definitive guide to using typography in visual communication. Ellen Lupton provides clear and focused guidance on how letters, words, and paragraphs should be aligned, spaced, ordered, and shaped.
answers
A Movement And Asked Us To Find Our Whydiscover The Book That Is Captivating Millions On Tiktok And That Served As The Basis For One Of The Most Popular Ted Talks Of All Time--With More Than 56 Million Views And Counting. Over
The Inspirational Bestseller That Ignited A Started A A A Chris The Where His Career As A Brought A Split The Difference: Negotiating As If Chris Voss
This provides evidence-based to the key questions asked by issues such as how brands how advertising really works, what really do and how programs really affect How Brands Grow presents decades of research a style that is written for to Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know by Byron Sharp
loyalty
Range... Never
Stint Policing The Rough Streets Of Kansas City, Missouri,
Him Face-To-Face With
Pay Attention!: How to Get, Keep, and Use Attention to Grow Your byBusinessCassandra M. Bailey
Thinking With Type 2nd Ed By Ellen Lupton Getting, keeping, and using attention is one of the hardest and most important challenges for marketers today. People’s attention is being pulled in a million different directions by social media, podcasts, TV, Facebook/Instagram, family, friends, politics, the list goes on.
groupisd.com 63
Wall Street Journal Bestseller **After
Decade Ago, Simon Sinek
Hostage Negotiator
book
in
Movement That Inspired Millions To Demand Purpose Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone To Take byActionSimon Sinek Major New York Times Bestsellerwinner Of The National Academy Of Sciences Best Book Award In 2012Selected By The New York Times Book Review As One Of The Ten Best Books Of 2011A Globe And Mail Best Books Of The Year 2011 Titleone Of The Economist’S 2011 Books Of The Year One Of The Wall Street Journal’S Best Nonfiction Books Of The Year 20112013 Presidential Medal Of Freedom Recipientkahneman’S Work With Amos Tversky.. Thinking, Fast And Slow by Daniel Kahneman PhD A Former International Hostage Negotiator For The Fbi Offers A New, Field-Tested Approach To High-Stakes Negotiations--Whether In The Boardroom Or At Home.**
grow,
marketers every day. Tackling
price promotions
