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VOL. 34 • NO. 10 • NOVEMBER 2021
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HYPER-PERSONALIZATION IN FINANCIAL SERVICES
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Vol. 34 | No. 10 | November 2021
Creating Hyper-Personalized Financial Services in the Age of Data
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Why Purchase Details are Key to Unlocking a New World of Customer Engagement
No More Business as Usual When You Double Down on Remote Sales
STRATEGY & RESEARCH
DIGITAL MARKETING ❯ 10
Why Infrastructure is Crucial to Accelerating Canadian Retail’s Post-COVID Digital Transformation
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Six Customer Archetypes You Need to Understand as We Navigate the Future DMN.CA ❰
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ANALYTICS
Why Purchase Details are Key to Unlocking a New World of Customer Engagement BY JASON HOWARD
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ho hasn’t looked at their bank statement at one point and thought, “wait a minute, what’s this transaction again?” And often, there isn’t enough information on our digital bank statements to help us make sense of our purchase history. In most cases though, these confusing statement descriptors are perfectly legitimate purchases. But many of them can still result in cases of “friendly fraud” — where consumers claim valid transactions as fraud — that ultimately lead to a chargeback. This is a particular problem now when more people are shopping online than ever before. In 2020 alone, consumers spent nearly $900B at online retailers largely due to the pandemic, and many of these newly formed digital shopping habits are expected to stay. With heightened online spending, consumers are increasingly relying on their digital bank channels to keep track of their purchases. However, according to recent research, 77 percent of surveyed consumers report that they’re often unable to recognize transactions in their online statements, and 96 percent want more detailed information available in their digital banking application to help understand what they bought. One of the key problems is that consumers often lack the information needed to help determine if a purchase was truly legitimate or not. So, to build trust throughout the entire shopping experience, it’s important consumers have the information they need to recognize their purchases, in the place they’re ❱ DMN.CA
most often reviewing them — their digital bank statements. This enhanced consumer experience also benefits banks and merchants, helping to reduce unnecessary disputes and chargebacks caused by friendly fraud. Solving the transaction confusion conundrum Given that consumer shopping habits are changing and becoming increasingly digital, how can companies keep up and provide the right information and digital experience they need to protect themselves online? ‘Friendly fraud’ often occurs when a customer simply can’t recognize a purchase – but this can be solved by providing details like clear merchant names, logos, and even itemized digital receipts at the point a consumer may be questioning a charge. Addressing customer’s questions upfront in this manner can also lead to a much better customer experience and reduction in fraud. According to research, ‘friendly’ or accidental fraud accounts for 24 percent of all disputed charges, and the same study found that 73 percent of cardholders call their issuer first when they question a charge, with one in four dispute calls the result of confusion over statement descriptors. Much of the reputational damage and cost to companies from friendly fraud could be prevented by simply making it easier to share key purchase details between merchants and financial institutions. Meeting consumer expectations Ever since the first branchless, all-online bank offering, the digital information consumers get on
their transactions has been the same. You’ll find a name in block capitals, a date, and the charge itself (which could be a credit or debit). And while some merchant descriptors are easy enough to recognize, this isn’t always the case. This is especially a factor when the name showing up for a purchase is for a parent company, and not the shop where someone made the purchase itself. Compare this to other parts of a consumer’s eCommerce and digital experience and you’ll see how it falls short. The companies that we interact with daily, from social media giants to car manufacturers, make huge efforts to make their ‘user interfaces’ (UIs) as intuitive as possible. Some of the leading eCommerce merchants continually innovate their UI, knowing it must provide enough information for customers new to online shopping while also catering to experienced users that will be put off by any handholding. Breaking through digital noise and building a richer digital experience Until recently, all digital bank experiences had similar statements, but with the rise of collaborative tools that help share key information between merchants and issuers, new options are opening up to provide users more in-depth purchase details right at their fingertips. Sharing additional purchase information in digital bank channels also poses a new opportunity for financial institutions and merchants alike to interact with their customers. Breaking through the digital noise is critical for businesses
looking to forge better connections with customers. Globally, consumers are receiving 6 billion texts and over 300 billion emails daily, making it more difficult than ever for brands to connect with their users in meaningful ways. Digital bank channels present a space where consumers are already deeply engaged, with over 50 percent of consumers globally now interacting with their bank through mobile apps or websites at least once a week. It’s also something merchants can begin leveraging easily through programs like Mastercard and Ethoca’s logo initiative, an easy and free way to get their clear merchant name and logo into digital bank statements. The merchant logos will be linked to corresponding transactions, adding clear visual cues to help cardholders quickly identify legitimate purchases. It also means participating merchants are provided an opportunity to simultaneously extend their brand presence, as well as eliminate expensive and time-consuming chargebacks. As businesses navigate an increasingly digital world, leveraging additional purchase information, in the right channels, at the right time, can help reduce cases of friendly fraud and chargebacks, and also open up new engagement channels with customers that create a better digital user experience. JASON HOWARD is Executive Vice President, Ethoca. Jason is responsible for the overall strategy and leadership of Ethoca, working across the business to further drive Ethoca's leading collaborative technologies that aim to minimize chargebacks, friendly fraud and build better digital customer experiences. NOVEMBER 2021
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PERSONALIZATION
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Creating Hyper-Personalized Financial Services in the Age of Data
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NOVEMBER 2021
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PERSONALIZATION BY REG MARRINIER
T
he global pandemic has accelerated the rise of the digital economy, driving financial institutions to continuously contemplate the next big innovation to differentiate their service offerings. With huge stores of transactional data and client histories, financial institutions need to activate the value of data assets if they want to gain a competitive advantage in the banking world today. What is hyper-personalization? Outlined in the latest Deloitte report on the future of retail banking, Salesforce surveyed global consumers and came to the conclusion that 51 percent of customers expect that their bank will anticipate their needs and will make relevant suggestions prior to a direct contact. The general public has become accustomed to a certain level of personalization. Thanks to companies such as Amazon and Netflix who have perfected the art of “recommendations for you,” customers expect this level of tailoring to their individual needs to carry over into other industries as well. This is where hyperpersonalization comes in. In the report, Deloitte defines hyper-personalization as “harnessing real-time data to generate insights by using behavioural science and data science to deliver services, products and pricing that are context-specific and relevant to customers’ needs.” In other words, drilling down into client’s data to uncover insights into their preferences and behaviours can help generate recommendations for products that are suited to their needs and lifestyle, before they even realize what they need. With increased consumer expectations and the continuous need to add value for clients, how can financial institutions integrate hyper-personalization into their business strategy? What’s the value to the organization and to the customer? For example, at BlueShore Financial, a boutique financial institution in British Columbia focusing on affluent clients with complex financial needs, we know that one of the biggest commodities our clients NOVEMBER 2021
value is time. By using data and business intelligence to offer custom and expert financial advice, we’re ultimately helping our clients to save time while also moving closer to their financial goals. Personalization is key to the success of financial institutions in years to come. Providing value to clients through deep, long-lasting financial advisor and client relationships, and helping to anticipate and address their complex financial needs is critical. An example at BlueShore is our client digital scorecard. Using robust analytics allows us to first turn data into information, and then into advice. The client digital scorecard provides clients with information regarding the digital habits and decisions of a pool of clients just like them, to show what next steps other similar clients have taken. The end result is creating not only insights, but actionable insights, for our advisors who can then provide advice and recommendations to their clients. High Tech, High Touch The pandemic has changed the way Canadians conduct financial transactions in general, and for some the change could be permanent. A 2021 survey by Pollara Strategic Insights showed that approximately 84 percent of Canadians say their experience during COVID-19 has made them more comfortable conducting financial transactions online. However, 93 percent of Canadians feel that financial institutions still need to make it easy for customers to connect with a person in real-time to get answers to their questions. While many clients are open to doing their banking from home, they still want a personal touch of interacting with another human being for advice. Hence, we established that clients want interactions with their bank to be sophisticated, immediate, and very personalized. While having strong data is crucial to be successful at creating a hyper-personalized experience, just collecting client data is not enough. You need to know how to use it. This involves ensuring your organization has employed or up-skilled staff on how to sort, categorize and
report on the information in order to make it useful. Being able to execute hyper-personalized advice and products for your clients is highly dependent on your Data Analytics team taking a client-centric view and knowing your business inside and out. Truly understanding the business from a practical standpoint and understanding clients’ needs and wants is what will make your program successful. You also need to strike the right balance between people and technology to make hyperpersonalization work. This concept is a part of what we call a “high-tech, high-touch” approach. It is important to constantly look at new successful ways to blend humans with machines to enhance or deepen relationships with clients with the use of data and technology. For example, when you have determined the life stage of a client, or their recent behaviour indicates that they may be looking at mortgage rates or investing in a TFSA, it is imperative that someone from your institution reaches out to them with the right product at the right time, either through an email, a phone call or during a sit-down meeting with their advisor. Ideally, the concept of hyper-personalization occurs in real time to provide the most value and effect. After all, receiving an email about applicable mortgage rates a month later, may not prove to be beneficial or impactful. How to overcome obstacles So why aren’t multiple financial institutions making hyperpersonalization a top priority already? It may be because some larger banks tend to focus on volume and a one-size-fits-all approach, rather than addressing individual client needs. However, a financial institution may gain more client trust, and a larger share of wallet, if it can cater to individual client needs. There are also some specific obstacles that might prevent financial institutions from adopting hyper-personalization. Examples include organizational silos, lack of data, or a lack of structured data, poor Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems and data capture, and lack
of executive and staff support. However, each of these has its own solution. In the case of silos and different data sources, data has to flow between silos and easily throughout the organization with a single source of the truth. For example, the numbers used by the Finance team need to agree with the numbers used by the Sales team presuming of course the question is the same. In other words the right answers and the same answers to questions posed by various users. The best way to achieve this is by creating a strong, centralized Business Intelligence team with a decentralized, empowered end-user model. In order to capture data and analyze it successfully, you need a strong and reputable CRM system that is updated and maintained regularly, and that your tech teams and other employees understand how to use. Worse than having no data at all, is having outdated data. Therefore, having an engaged client facing team is critical. Accurate data capture has to be an essential part of everyone’s role in the organization. It starts from those first interactions that clients have with your front-line employees. Information must be captured during those personal interactions, otherwise, you will not have strong data to pull from later. To “learn and capture” needs to become part of the organizational culture, right from when brand-new employees are onboarded and trained on the frontline, and up to support from the top executive level. The future arrived faster that we all anticipated in 2020, and for financial institutions to stand out from the pack today, they must be agile, digital, and ready to get hyper-personalized. Though it isn’t a quick fix or fast project, the use of data and the goal of getting down to providing “insights of one” needs to be an ongoing journey supported completely through all levels of your organization. REG MARRINIER is, Senior Vice President, Retail and Business Banking at BlueShore Financial. He oversees their Solution Centre operations, Marketing, Business Group and Wealth Management. With over 20 years of experience in the financial industry, Reg has been instrumental in developing BlueShore Financial’s banking, client, and investment strategies. DMN.CA ❰
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DIGITAL MARKETING
Why Infrastructure is Crucial to Accelerating Canadian Retail’s Post-COVID Digital Transformation BY ANDREW EPPICH
M
any of the retailers that persevered during COVID learned how to conduct business online but many still overlook the digital infrastructure the apps powering their online sales need to perform their best. Since 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the Canadian retail industry’s digital transformation as consumers quickly pivoted to touchless or digital shopping. This shift in consumer behaviour was so sudden it left even established retailers scrambling to accommodate the surge in demand, while forcing many small businesses to close entirely. Members of the C-suite likely regarded these events as a lesson for their industry: Invest in digital sales tools or risk going out of business. According to Equinix’s recent Global Tech Trends study, nearly half — 46 percent — of digital executives in Canada have accelerated their digital transformation plans in response to the pandemic. That’s hardly the wrong course of action, but they would be equally well advised to consider the lesson their IT teams took away from what happened: successful digital transformation, and meeting the customer demands now driving it, requires digital infrastructure capable of quickly interconnecting existing and emerging technologies. It’s an investment too few Canadian retailers have made: If your company is trying to accelerate its digital transformation, investing in a flexible, vendor-neutral network architecture is as crucial as adopting a reliable online sales platform. At Equinix, we believe retailers benefit best from digital transformation by organizing their tools into three categories: digital infrastructure, which includes cloud access and business intelligence; digital exchange, which helps ensure the resilience of their supply chain and digital ecosystem; and digital edge, which uses analytics to optimize the user experience. The anatomy of digital infrastructure transformation In the post-COVID world, a retailer’s digital transformation goals shouldn’t be to simply facilitate sales online — it should be to provide a seamless experience capable of following users across multiple channels. Imagine, for example, the user who researches an item they’re thinking of purchasing on their work computer during an afternoon break, reading reviews on their mobile device later that evening, then finally placing an order for the device on their tablet before bed. ❱ DMN.CA
NOVEMBER 2021
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DIGITAL MARKETING To enable this type of real-time activity, retailers must have digital infrastructure in place that is agile enough to adapt to periodic spikes in network traffic, not to mention one that provides real-time access to customer and inventory data, which has gone from a nice-tohave to must-have for retailers trying to quarantined users during the pandemic. Traditional brick and mortar stores learned last year that they would need to upgrade their online ordering systems in order to survive, but an equally valid lesson applies to their pre-pandemic infrastructure: relying on hundreds of physical locations, with a main data centre that houses all the company’s data, no longer works. Given today’s traffic growth, a centralized network architecture is simply no longer sustainable: it creates latency issues and has a negative impact on application performance, and by extension, user experience. Fortunately, today’s data centres offer an easy solution. Using interconnection hubs to exchange digital information If your company has been conducting business online for any length of time, then you know sales are only one aspect of operations that benefits from digital tools: User experience, supply chain agility and resilience, smart cloud access, and behind-thescenes features such as business intelligence, data analytics, and the digital ecosystem that connects companies to vendors and partners are all key benefits as well. Retailers especially can benefit from regional interconnection hubs, which provide direct, secure access to partner ecosystems capable of offering cloud, network, financial, supply chain, and other SaaS-based support. For example, on-premises databases can be connected to hybrid multicloud platforms that support real-time analytics, giving retailers greater visibility into consumer purchasing behaviour while also enabling new online shopping and delivery services. They can also collaborate with partners to develop digital applications that provide timely, relevant, and personalized offers in a reliable, easily consumed format. NOVEMBER 2021
“On-premises databases can be connected to hybrid multi-cloud platforms Embracing the digital edge The other primary benefit of interconnection hubs, and the most crucial for retailers, is the multiple access points – the best data centre providers maintain locations across the country, ensuring companies can always offer, and users can always access, cloud-based services close enough to guarantee minimal latency. As your IT staff will explain, however, key to providing the fastest access is taking advantage of distributed networks and analyzing consumer data at the edge. Rather than housing data in a central location, data processing should occur where customers are. By localizing online traffic and applications at the edge, where customer data is generated and consumed, both cost and performance are improved. Little wonder that, according to Equinix’s fourth annual Global Interconnection Index (GXI), retail and wholesale businesses’ private interconnection bandwidth capacity is expected to grow by 35 percent annually between 2019 and 2023. How one grocery chain stepped up its digital transformation One of my favourite recent example of retail transformation is a North American grocery chain with more than 28 brands that embarked on digitally transforming its IT infrastructure to improve both the digital and in-store shopping experiences of its customers. During the pandemic, of course, this retailer also needed to improve its online shopping and home delivery services. It merged two critical projects to accomplish this: One aimed at optimizing operations, the other at unifying its network infrastructure across all of its brands. Hundreds of its 1,500 applications were migrated
”
to the cloud in an effort to better analyze customer interactions and transform their retail experience. Equinix worked with World Wide Technology (WWT) to replace the store’s legacy MPLS network with a Cisco SD-WAN. In doing so, we were able to connect more than 2,200 of the client’s retail stores to Platform Equinix across regionally distributed Equinix Fabric™ interconnection hubs, allowing the retailer to expand its internet, network, and cloud interconnection capacity from lone providers to multiple ISPs, networks, and clouds. It then moved more than 50 percent of its applications to new, best-in-class
cloud/SaaS providers. The result: All of the retailer’s brands are now under a unified, optimized network which has simplified store integration and increased online bandwidth while reducing IT and network infrastructure costs. Equinix’s Global Tech Trends Study also found that more than two-thirds – 68 percent – of Canadian business leaders have revised their IT strategy in response to COVID-19, while 58 percent say they want to invest in more agile technology postCOVID. Use cases such as our grocery store customer illustrate the type of strategy they should pursue. By upgrading their infrastructure and interconnecting their exchange and edge locations to accelerate their digital transformation, retailers can emerge from the pandemic in a better position to meet their customers’ needs than they were before it started. ANDREW EPPICH is the Managing Director of Equinix Canada.
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DATA-DRIVEN SALES
No More Business as Usual When You Double Down on Remote Sales BY DOUG SEABERG
E
nterprise change comes slowly. Could perfecting remote sales processes help speed it up? The enterprise sales cycle is typically measured in months, if not years. Products and services are often complex, and when you’re helping companies automate their vendor payments like I am, you’ll end up working through some process changes. Quite often, the sale involves a significant amount of dialogue around changing the “status-quo”. As with most enterprise offerings, there are multiple stakeholders and decision makers, each with their own concerns about the impact of change. Expert guidance at every step To make sure everyone understands the value of change, and is comfortable with it, I like to bring in many people outside of the sales team at different points during the cycle. These include our internal subject matter experts and company leaders who can speak directly to their peers in the prospect organization. Early on in the sales process I usually bring in someone from our operations or solutions consulting team to help us dig deeply into the prospect's current vendor payment setup. It helps to learn where the prospect is at, where they’d like to end up, and how our solution can take them there. As people start to think about how their process is going to change, I bring in people from implementation, supplier enablement and/or operations. This helps to better explain what the impact will be to their suppliers, and what implementation will look like for their users. Later in the process, I bring in customer success and tech support people to talk about what they can expect after they go live. Last year a government subcontractor client of ours ❱ DMN.CA
was very concerned about risk and about information security. I brought in the head of our information security team to talk to their Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). They spoke each other’s language and our credibility skyrocketed. The idea behind my process is to provide different perspectives, and to let people talk with others who have insights into their work. Similarly, to many salespeople in this kind of collaborative selling scenario, I act as master of ceremonies, bringing together the right people and putting together the right agenda for each prospect. Frequent flyer miles Before we moved to a more digital sales process, we were racking up those frequent flyer miles. Sometimes we’d fly to a far-away town for one meeting. We might end up spending several days somewhere between travel and meetings, keeping us from other work and costing the company money. We might also do it the other way around, flying prospects to our HQ. Taking up three days of their time, multiplied by however many people they’re bringing out. We also used to spend a lot of time, effort, and money going to trade shows. We’d ship in booths and equipment and team members to man these booths to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. After a year and a half of remote selling that looks really inefficient, even a bit antiquated. The only digital part of our sales process was bringing in executives or subject matter experts remotely. Effective but not efficient Last year, when I was succeeding at sales without ever leaving the house, I had a light bulb moment: Do clients even want to have faceto-face meetings? According to research by McKinsey, more than three quarters of buyers say they now prefer digital self-serve and
remote human engagement over face-to-face interactions, even in industries where field sales have long been the norm. Don’t get me wrong--there’s value in meeting folks face to face, depending on the situation. In-person meetings are especially important for big deals where you need to establish a high comfort level. However, face-to-face sales meetings are a very time consuming, expensive way to sell, not to mention that some of the people you want to have there are going to have to dial in remotely anyhow. Challenging sales Many of us who are in sales practice are at least familiar with The Challenger Sale. In a nutshell, it’s about understanding the customer’s problems, challenging the current way of thinking, and articulating things that they haven't even thought about. Maybe it’s time to apply those principles to ourselves. We’re selling change to the enterprise, but how much have we changed our own processes in the past decade? For example, look at how cars are being sold now. In the old days you’d have to go to the car lot, kick the tires, fill out paperwork, and sit for hours while the salesperson went to the back room and talked to their managers. I bought a lot of cars that way and every time it was an awful experience. Now you can pick out a car online and have it delivered to your home for a test drive. This process update had my gears turning (pun intended). Better remote selling Face it, now’s the time to double down on remote sales and improve our processes. We’ve reached a point where we can sell pretty effectively using videoconferencing technology, but we can do even better. We can work with marketing to help us brand our online presentation materials and backdrops and level up our sound
and lighting. We can use time not spent traveling to organize, polish, and practice our presentations and make them better. Scheduling is the hardest part of team selling, since there can be as many as 10 or 15 people that need to be on the call, but that was hard with in-person selling too. We can use calendar software to help, or hire someone that’s dedicated to helping set up these meetings for the whole sales team. We can make better use of expert and executive time by establishing regular office hours where multiple sales people can bring their prospects to ask questions. We can do more frequent live demos and take questions from the audience. I’ve got a lot of ideas about how to improve remote sales. They’re all absolutely attainable, especially with the time we get back by skipping travel. A team sport Enterprise sales is a team sport. People buy from you first. Then they buy from your company and your product, more or less in that order. Personal relationships are primary, regardless of whether you’re remote or in-person. I believe that there's more of an opportunity to make these kinds of connections, and build confidence and trust, remotely. Partially because we already are succeeding at this, and because remote sales are less of an ask on the prospects’ time. Virtual sales are efficient for sales people too. We can service more customers faster, which helps us accelerate the transition to automated vendor payments, or whatever kind of change for the better, that we’re selling. DOUG SEABERG is Vice President of Regional Sales at Nvoicepay, a FLEETCOR company. His experience in the financial industry spans nearly 30 years, and includes positions held with companies like Wells Fargo. With Nvoicepay, he delivers scalable payment solutions to midmarket and enterprise companies. NOVEMBER 2021
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STRATEGY & RESEARCH and well-being to accomplishment, and may judge others who didn’t achieve as much under pressure. Bridging the gap between them and others will be difficult. This group definitely thinks about maintaining their personal gains after we move into more normal routines and these ideas are totally valid. They are a bit alienating; there are lots of people who feel badly when they see these high achievers and feel like all they did during COVID was sit on the couch — of course both of these are valid responses.
Six Consumer Archetypes You Need to Understand as We Navigate the Future BY HELEN ANDROLIA
“I
n these uncertain times...” How quickly we became tired of these words that were meant to reassure. COVID-19 was a new exercise in how marketing professionals extend empathy and relevance in a world with infinitely more than just client challenges on our minds. There are high-level archetypes that have revealed themselves in the past 18 months, and understanding them will help brands anticipate the needs, beliefs and barriers of consumers as we head into ‘The After Times.’ What can we do to add a layer of understanding to how consumers were affected, and how they may have changed as a result of their experiences? The Resetter: After having their lives paused — or upended — by the pandemic, the Resetter wants to get everything back on track. They are looking for opportunity, and want ❱ DMN.CA
to see indications of movement and growth. They are frustrated by caution and anxiety. This is a group that wants to get back to ‘normal.’ They may not have lost their job, but they feel like they lost a lot. Brands should: ❯ Make them feel as though their feelings aren’t insensitive but normal ❯ Demonstrate the steps being taken to keep people safe and show you are heading towards full operation, or normality ❯ Allow them small gains (ie. consider experiential activations without the need to touch things ❯ Utilize humour when relaying requirements; e.g. asking them to wear masks, but making it thematically appropriate and with a side of fun and humour The Comeback: They took the pandemic as an opportunity to work on themselves by taking stock and rearranging priorities. They tie a sense of identity
Considerations for brands should include: ❯ Empathizing and validating; they were going through things too ❯ Gentle humour: making smaller achievements count, will help make them feel opportunistic ❯ Ways to bring them closer to others; even if they’re not aware of how alienating they might be, they’re clearly missing other people, and chances to connect The Challenger: It is important to them to keep moving forward. We can’t dwell; we have a solution and there are too many people depending on us getting the world back on track. They want an agreement that we’re all working together to move forward. They want new perspectives to accelerate change. Demonstrating future-thinking is the only way to get their buy-in. This group will love the opportunity to contribute; they want to feel like they’re a part of change and that their perspective can make a difference. These are community-oriented people who have really been trying to listen and support others as much as they can, they want to be leaders. Letting them know your plans is a perfect approach; allowing for sincere feedback loops so they feel like the brand’s community is being heard and changes are being made with those ideas in mind will resonate with them. The Transformer: They’re ready to take the lessons from COVID and implement them across their communities. They want to see commitments put into action, and without tangible demonstrations of
authentic change and solutions, they will write off brands and experiences as insincere and opportunistic. This is a group that also loves a cause; if a brand has been considering that, these are the folks to connect with. The Apprehender: They’ve been handling a lot of things on their own. Their own loss and difficulties have set them back considerably. They want to make sure the transition to normal is timed right, and are not prepared to start rebuilding only to have it all taken away again. They are looking for security and stability, and they want to know those are here to stay — even if it’s just small, incremental indications. It is important for brands to consider messaging that really takes their values to heart, showing that the brand values the same things that they do, and demonstrates tangible ways that those values come to life. The Negotiator: Surprisingly to them, they didn’t miss water cooler chatter and in-person yoga practice. Now, they’re ready to regain some normalcy, but not in the ways of the past. They need their organization and co-workers to understand that they have gained more than they lost. As kids start going back to physical schools, we expect that these consumers will be eager to go back to the office, but they definitely want flexible hours; to be able to leave when it works for them. Brands need to consider how they could give them some of that feeling that they had at the best of moments — such as family togetherness and making their lives more convenient. Ultimately for brands we must lead messaging with empathy to show consumers an understanding of their unique challenges. We must show shared common values so they feel their concerns are also our concerns. Show them that support is available even when facing a future-focused perspective. HELEN ANDROLIA is Strategy Director, Thinkingbox. NOVEMBER 2021
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