Final adn report sept2015 3 by anydaynow

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The Future of Brands in a post-human world

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The Future of Brands in a post-human world

Published by Any Day Now Author: Tracey Follows Branding & Design: Jon Daniel Cover Illustration: Freepik.com Copyright You are free to copy and redistribute this article in any medium or format but you must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made and you may not use the material for commercial purposes. If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you may not distribute the modiďŹ ed materials. You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits. If you would like to republish this, please contact the author. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync-nd/4.0/

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The Future of Brands in a post-human world

The Future of Brands in a post-human world Many years ago the purpose of a brand was clear and simple. It provided a mark of trust and quality in a market of counterfeits and snake-oil salesmen. The brand was a mark of reputation and guaranteed a certain level of performance. During post-war Britain when products were still scarce due to rationing, no-one could afford to waste money on a disreputable product and as peace broke out, a host of household names asked consumers to put their trust in them, making them a regular item on their shopping list. Certainty and stability was what we were looking for and brands became part of that ‘reassurance’. As peace continued to hold, the West in particular rebuilt its shattered cities, industries and businesses and started to focus on growth. A positive GPD was a sign of a positive economy and progress in the increasingly global marketplaces. Over time, growth became the measure of all success until it was almost the only measure anyone was willing to contemplate. Consequently, corporations talked about innovation, and how that would fuel growth, how sub-brands would help them enter new markets and adjacent categories, and how takeovers, mergers and acquisitions of new companies with new competencies could also help convince consumers, or clients, to buy more and more of what they had to offer. The word brand became a shorthand for expansion and indicated an overarching portfolio of service offerings or product lines. The world that is emerging today is very different once again. Forget the idea of reassurance, or the idea of expansion (see China), we are entering an era of exploration. Thanks to exponential change in technology and the all-pervasive computing power in our lives, we are seeking out new experiences, new possibilities, new skills and even new worlds. That is not so much expansion, which promises just more of the same, but a desire to learn and discover something new: an era of exploration. Part of what’s emerging is a philosophy and belief in the potential of man and machine working in harmony; of the augmented human who is truly ‘super’ thanks to the advances we have made in technology. There is a mountain of evidence today that man and machines are becoming closer and closer and perhaps, as some Transhumanists suggest, they will indeed end up being one and the same thing. The old eras of the mid-late 20th century were times in which it was clear what it meant to be human. Even around the millennium and after the internet became mainstream, we still spoke of brands in an anthropomorphic way. And despite, or perhaps because of, the rise of social media, we continue to refer to brands as having very human qualities. They are ‘warm’, or ‘friendly’, or ‘restless’, ‘confident’ or ‘carefree’. We have always anthropomorphized brands because we use them to make a connection to other human beings. If we want a relationship to exist between a brand and a human being, the best way to establish that is to ape the human. Until now.

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The Future of Brands in a post-human world

So much of our communication is now computerized. So many of our services that we enjoy for free and with spontaneity are served to us via algorithm. By 2020 the internet of things will be present in about 30Bn devices and there will be more machine to machine communication taking place than human to machine communication. More of our communication will be artificial and less of it will be human. How does that make you feel? If you don’t believe this, have a think about your own communications and how your language has changed even in the last couple of years. Today, verbal and textual language almost constantly interpollinate each other. If you say LOL out loud in real life, or start tweets or emails with ‘Um’, or sign off with IMO, then your language is already an expression of a human-machine hybrid world. As Greg Rowland of The Semiotic Alliance put it to me: “This demonstrates a viral evolution of linguistic tics that are derived from click bait more than actually ‘lived’ language.” Our communication is changing, as are our behaviours. In fact one might argue that our behaviours are changing faster than the systems around us. Much of that is an evident source of tension in the world: the clash of the old and the new; the traditional and the modern; the digital and the analogue. We’re in transition. We are in fact mutating. We are on the cusp of a mutation of humanity as we transition from being biologically natural to become a multi-species, multi-gender, multi –skilled, multi-purpose hybrid of organism and computerization. This doesn’t happen overnight of course, but as Peter Shwarz said at The World Futures Society Conference recently: “The biggest change to come is that humans will take control of their own evolution. The next Century will see significant differentiation between and inter species that produces a great variety of forms”. People like Rosi Braidotti the philosopher, suggest we are still taking our prejudices, cultural biases and assumptions over into the posthuman world. What does that mean for brands? Must they reflect those prejudices or can they adjust and address inequalities and unfairness, promising a more holistic and empathetic world, actually compensating for the lack of human nature in a digitally intelligent and disembodied world? It is now common to say that the world is uncertain and therefore can’t be planned for. One thing is certain though. We are entering a world that is Post-Human. The question is, given that brands have always communicated using extremely human values, emotions and language, what does the future hold for the Post-Human Brand? What follows in an overview of each of the domains we need to think about in relation to brands. It is by no means exhaustive and there is not time to go into every one of the 100+ research points illustrated on the map. However, it will give a flavour of the current state of play. That will in turn point us in the direction of the most likely future if what we record continues to hold for the foreseeable future and ongoing trends are not disrupted by significant events or issues.

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The Future of Brands in a post-human world

The Future of Brands Domains:

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The Future of Brands in a post-human world

The Future of Brands map:

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The Future of Brands in a post-human world

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The Future of Brands in a post-human world

The Baseline (Probable) Future of Brands Creating:

There is a very lively debate about whether increasing automation is going to make us more or less creative. Some forecasts are suggesting that automation will liberate humans from routine, low-skilled tasks and that overall as a society we will turn our skills and talents towards exercising creativity rather than becoming tasked with productivity. Wolf Olins CEO, Ije Nwokorie told the audience at FutureFest (1) that creativity is everything automation can never be, and that the current economy already has a shortage of creative people. He, like many others, foresees a future in which every job that humans do is one deﬁned by its creativity. Creativity is an important value embedded in some brands. A recent Apple campaign promoting all kinds of content creation on iPhones, claimed ‘you’re more powerful than you think’, positioning creativity as a kind of super power and clearly trying to reassure people that technology increases creativity rather than destroys it.(2)

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The Future of Brands in a post-human world

In addition, within the media and creative industries, and advertising in particular, the debate concentrates on issues of execution. Is the execution of an idea original? Or is it inspired, or worse still, copied, from another execution elsewhere. The regurgitation of You Tube content is a case in point. Creativity used to be defined as originality, in these industries, but increasingly it has become one of recycling or remixing existing content. Diesel and Coca-Cola can argue it out about who originated the ‘Choose’ idea. The very idea of the ‘idea’ has been relegated to second place as people now worship at the temple of execution (the deliverable for which ad agencies get paid). As a result more of the media budgets are moving towards tactical promotions than long term ad campaigns (3), much of it fueled by huge spends in search marketing. And the long term brand campaign is no longer respected or seemingly aimed for. Continually changing executional direction reflects both short-termism of brand managers in their corporate position as well as everyone’s unwillingness to spend time building equity over a sustained period of time. ‘Newism’ is now officially a thing, partly to keep audiences interested and partly to keep agencies in business. In addition, agencies are no longer the automatic arbiters of what is classed as creative any more. The rise of user generated content (UGC) within brand communications has been slower to take off than first anticipated but Coca Cola’s recent foray into this, in particular with its aforementioned Choose campaign has reignited the conversation about consumer participation in creative communications (4). The Coke brand ran an on-pack promotion, giving away 1 million selfie-sticks to help consumers capture the "moments that make them happy" across the summer. Should users have a role in the creation of a brand’s communications? Do they even want to? Many suggest that millennials might (5). As a counter-trend towards this kind of democratisation of a brand’s creative expression, it is clear to see that more in-depth, more absorbing content, and curated content, involving more sophisticated storytelling is also emerging. Perhaps better characterised as editorial or native content, than advertising, long reads in Aeon and The Atlantic and latterly in Vice’s new female content offering, Broadly, are gaining in popularity. In audio, the Serial podcast became the must-listen-to of 2014, and that too has a longer form and an episodic structure. More absorbing content is a welcome alternative to the never-ending slew of messages and notifications that arrive in a fleeting micro format. Increasingly, consumers are expecting that any content worth their time will be served in a seamless way too – so that they can pick up where they left off with it, no matter what device they use for access.

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The Future of Brands in a post-human world

Meanwhile coding is challenging craft skills when it comes to developing creative execution for the digital world. Some agencies have sent their employees on coding courses, some clients are encouraging it amongst their ranks too (6). Somewhere along the line, programming became associated not just with design but creativity in general. As far back as 2009, the V&A’s Decoded exhibition, was promoting the idea of digital as an essential skill in the modern world of applied creativity. Coding is now an essential skill for communicating anything. Now clients and agencies have accepted that data and digital skills are part of the everyday creative mix, they are also turning their attention towards user experience (UX) too as customer experience largely carried out via a mobile interface is a high priority for brands. The sensorial aspect to user experience however is largely missing. Given that millennials in particular expect more ‘immersive’ experiences (7) and technology is enabling us to experiment with switching on our senses to more detail, we could be exploring sound sensations, ﬂavour, touch, (via haptics) and temperature and all sorts of body balance and orientation via creative brand experiences. Surprisingly though, few brands, if any, look to have made progress in this area. SUMMARY: CODING FOR CREATIVITY Creating brands has become more collaborative, but also more dependent on coding. There are many partners, many technologies, many layers to a story, many customizable designs, and so creating a brand is a more participative process. Creative executions thus have digital at the heart, due to the fact that one is delivering a more multi-layered experience than ever before.

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The Future of Brands in a post-human world

Connecting:

Technology is all pervasive and is connecting more people to other people as well as more people to more devices than ever. Internet connectivity is now at the heart of everything we do, every day, which includes brand communication. As Bill Gates once said ‘the future of advertising is in the internet”. Two thirds of the global population still does not have internet access, but of those that do they are spending more and more time on mobile. The hours of time spent on horizontal screens remains static whilst those spent on vertical screens is increasing. (9)

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The Future of Brands in a post-human world

The Ofcom report referring to the UK market alone states that two thirds of people now own a smartphone, using it for nearly two hours every day to browse the internet, access social media, bank and shop online. The vast majority (90%) of 16-24 year olds own one; but 55-64 year olds are also joining the smartphone revolution, with ownership in this age group more than doubling since 2012, from 19% to 50%.(10) The surge is being driven by the increasing take-up of 4G mobile broadband, providing faster online access. During 2014, 4G subscriptions have leapt from 2.7 million to 23.6 million by the end of 2014. We now spend almost twice as long online with our smartphones than on laptops and personal computers. (11) Millennials remain the pace setters when it comes to connectivity. Their behavior is heavily skewed towards use of the camera and taking pictures or video to post on social media. 44% of US millennials do this at least once every day. Mobiles are used for shopping, browsing and videoing but a lot of what we still do on them is communications, and that is where much of the innovation lies. Communications messaging is being reimagined almost on a daily basis. Six out of ten of the most used apps, globally, are messaging apps now. Global leaders include Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, Snapchat, Line and Kakao Talk; offer different benefits: fast messaging, social messaging, visual messaging or more expressive messaging. (12) Context is being built in to many of these messaging platforms as well as to apps in general. We are used to smartphones and the services we use on them accessing our location but we are not as aware of the implications of inbuilt GPS. Until recently, Apple had been tracking every location a user visited in a hidden data file, which meant that if your phone was stolen someone could pretty much work out where you lived through the frequent locations data stored on your phone. (13) Once the internet has been freed from mobile phones and is embedded in all kinds of devices it will continue to transform the world around us and our behavior in it. Gartner forecasts the number of internet connected devices to be 30Bn by 2020.(14) That will empower many individuals but it will also empower companies to have closer relationships with their consumers. Evrything, the Web of Things software company that makes products smart by connecting them to the Web, produced a whitepaper which described this as ‘Product Relationship Management’ ™ where physical products would become owned digital media. Andy Hobsbawn, Evrything CEO commented at the time: “Over the last decade, it’s not just the role of the marketer that’s changed significantly, but the consumer too. The emerging generation assumes that there is little privacy and there’s no surprise that machines know a lot about them. It’s almost expected and this impacts significantly on interface design and go-tomarket strategies for smart products”. (15)

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The Future of Brands in a post-human world

Moreover, when your products can communicate directly with you on a need to know basis, or even a nice to know basis, how much advertising will really be required? It could be that direct advertising becomes obsolete because all of that communication takes place directly - personally not publicly - between the product and the consumer, leaving brands to focus their brand advertising budgets on building the initial awareness and desire for the product. Advertising’s focus is then on building consideration and preference, rather than advocacy and repeat purchase. We are all used to having a social graph now, but once all of the products we use are data-rich they will be creating our product map too: what we use, when we use it, where we use it, who we might be with or where we are going at the time. These two graphs will then overlap. All of this will become more apparent when we remove the mobile device or handset from the mix and move directly to wearables. Wearables have been slow to take off as there are many barriers to adoption. But a recent BI Intelligence report estimated that the global wearables market would grow at a compound rate of 35% over the next five years, reaching 148 million units shipped a year, versus the 33 million units currently shipped. It is predicted that the lead wearable device will be the smartwatch, but there are other candidates that feel more natural, like clothing. Project Jaquard is lead by Google and Levis and aims to create properly wearable tech. (16) The use of the smartphone, particularly amongst millennials, is redrawing the retail map. There is a burgeoning new category of on-demand delivery with hundreds of services promising to connect you with your grocery, dining, travel and instant entertainment needs. If it’s not instant booking you are after, an Uber will arrive at your feet typically with minutes, and your shopping (if you use Shutl or Postmates) within the hour. Retail used to be a matter of supply: setting out your stall and allowing the customer to choose from a range of high to low priced items. In the connected world, retail is very much an on-demand business. Value is not just about choosing what you want - but when and where too. Amazon, Uber, AirB&B are monetizing that. And Meeker’s internet report makes it clear that it’s millennials who make up just under half of this on-demand workforce (in the UK, one of the reasons that zero hours contracts exist). With all this digital communication it is easy to feel overwhelmed. Especially when all of this content that is created and distributed online, is accessible for free. That’s where advertising comes in of course. The price one pays is the presence of advertising. And there are myriad models emerging since the days when social media first started to attract eyeballs. Facebook recently claimed that it offers more reach than BBC One, to 27m versus 25m, and that includes inbuilt personalization. (17)

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The Future of Brands in a post-human world

Personal privacy is of some concern but increasingly security will become big business. Loss of personal data and business data can be disastrous. Mary Meeker’s report shows that more than 20% of data breaches come from insiders with malicious intent, who have stolen data through privilege or abuse of the system. Increasingly it is mobile device data that is being harvested, giving phishing experts access to personal data of all descriptions. In response, no brand seems to making any headway in offering security as a differentiator. That is partly because there are so many touchpoints that need to be secured: cloud computing servers, the network, the data, the device and its analytics. But where are the people with the skills to protect us from our own tendency to be casual with our personal data? SUMMARY: Interfacing not communicating Connectivity is a great thing and it has transformed all kinds of businesses and behaviour. But in many cases, online connectivity cannot replace physical proximity to other people, other ideas, other influences. With an in-demand workforce fuelling an on-demand service sector it is hard to plan or spend time with others, and the immediacy of information often impedes proper conversation, adeeper investigation or even some serendipity. The connectivity that we are now experiencing is closer to interfacing, than communicating, with people.

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The Future of Brands in a post-human world

Consuming:

Value is increasingly a dematerialized concept. As digital has converted everyday products into services, the value of them feels more and more hard to ascertain. Sometimes, the value is in only using as much of something as you need and avoiding wastage, pay per view TV for example. Sometimes the value is in sharing a service or access to a service with others avoiding the necessity of having to buy the product outright, car sharing is the obvious example of that. Online retail now accounts for an increasing proportion of total retail sales. Figures from the ONS show that 11.2% of total retail sales were made online in 2014 compared to 10.4% in the previous year.(18) Consumers in the UK are also shopping more on their mobile; 40% of online retail sales at the end of 2014 were through mobile devices. (19)

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The Future of Brands in a post-human world

It is quite possible that the most intangible element of all is also now the most valued: time. For millennials much of this time is precious because it is concentrated on creative pursuits. For Gen X time is precious because they are often juggling so many aspects of life: jobs, family life, home-making, networking, hobbies if they are lucky. And the Baby Boomers who are ﬁt and healthy either spending on holidays while they can, or caring for a sick spouse and an elderly parent, possibly also minding their children’s children to enable the parents to go out to work. All of this on top of an ‘on demand’ economy. One thing that is common across the generations is a breakdown of trust in all kinds of institutions. The recent revelations about child sexual abuse at the heart of many establishments and carried out by known celebrities has added to the distrust. Beforehand, worry about the incompetence or impartiality of institutions seemed to be the driving force behind mistrust; now people fear there might also be something much more than that at the heart of institutions; a club that facilitates cover-ups, a mentality that obfuscates the truth about what individuals might be doing. There’s consequently a backlash against ‘the system’ whatever that might be. An uneasy feeling persists that some people are all too ready to ‘stick together’. Anti-establishment feelings pervades the public mood. And one category particularly mistrusted is the food and drink category. The horsemeat scandal is still fresh in people’s minds as is the news that three quarters of supermarket chickens carry campylobacter (20). Recently in addition snacks and drinks products containing sugar have come under the spotlight.

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The Future of Brands in a post-human world

Not long ago we were being told to cut both fat and cholesterol. Now it appears that is no longer the medical advice. What is certain is that this inconsistency of message about what is good for us and what is bad for us is not doing the food and drink industry any favours; as people become confused about the truth, guilty about following the ‘wrong’ advice for years, and ultimately unable to educate their children with any sense of accuracy. Who knows what is in our food. Many people don’t seem to care as long as it is convenient. Trust is going to the most important issue for the food and drink industry moving forward. With an extra 1Bn people globally, to feed in the next 12 years, society will have to start having a serious debate about genetically modified food. The most recent Edelman Trust Barometer shows that while the food and beverage industry has a 67% trust level currently, that plummets to 35% when it comes to the public’s confidence in the industry to develop and implement genetically modified foods. (21) There are so many aspects to the domain of consuming that it is impossible to do justice to them here but it is worth making the point that societal values and to an extent consumer values do take a long time to change. As GFK Roper top ten values for the UK show, ‘protecting the family’ was the highest ranking value held in 2009. And it still was in 2014. (22) The values that have shifted in ranking and have therefore gained in importance over that time are: self reliance, honesty, and freedom. In addition, Material security entered the top ten in 2014 though it was nowhere to be seen in 2009. Such has been the effect of austerity on the value system of those in the UK over the last five years. Enduring love had dropped out of the top ten entirely by 2014 *sad face*. Luxury still very much exists but it is concentrated in ever more specific pockets. Only this month, The Future Laboratory reported that 600 cities account for 85% of global luxury spending. Location is everything it seems, not merely when one is online. (23) Online is also key to luxury. In fact online was the fastest growing sales channel in 2014 for luxury goods accounting for 6% of sales. One can’t help thinking there is huge potential here for brands in the future. (24) One interesting counter trend is the transference of talent between tech and luxury. LVHM has just poached Ian Rogers who oversaw Apple’s online radio station, Beats1, to head up its digital division. Until now, it had only been luxury personnel moving to tech, the most notable being Angela Ahrendts who left Burberry in 2014 to move to Apple and become senior VP of Retail. (25). Now talent is two-way traffic.

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Many trends reports would have us believe that millennials and other non-Baby-Boomers are not interested in status and find luxury unappealing but that isn’t so; it is just that what provides status to the millennial generation is different. They want to be experts, to create content, to opine. Their status items are less about looks and style and more about unique stories and scarcity; value with values, if you will. Take for example the jewelry category: one jewelry designer uses casts from an African village to make a unique piece and then destroys the cast immediately, making that product always uncopiable. Et viola! Not only a piece of jewelry but an insta-friendly visual story ready to become a status update. SUMMARY: Convenience is the killer app Convenience is the universal need of the 21st Century. And digital is fuelling that. Once a service can deliver to your location, rather than you having to travel to it, then convenience is offered on a whole new level. Convenience is such a driver of demand that consumers are willing to overlook almost anything else, whether it be detrimental to their health, compromises their privacy or can only be gained at an over-inflated price – people are willing to trade it all. And if it can’t be convenient, then let it be unique.

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Publicising:

What has happened to mainstream media: is it alive or is it dead? That depends on who you ask. The latest ﬁgures from Ofcom suggests that the smartphone is now the screen of choice. But that doesn’t necessarily follow that is the primary device for watching TV.

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It’s a complex picture. As a proportion of viewing, time-shifted viewing has increased, and accounts for just under 13% of all broadcast TV viewing, up 11% on the preceding year. This is being driven by u-24yr olds. It is the 25-34yrs old age bracket where time–shifted TV is most prevalent though, now accounting for nearly a quarter of their viewing. (26) It is equally true that it is once again millennials who are the change-makers as they are the ones shifting their viewing away from linear TV towards over-the-top, on-demand services. However, whilst millennials are time-shifters, they are still more likely to watch something like Netflix on a connected TV than a mobile. Will that all change with the advent of Apple TV? On the very day this report is published they may have launched it at their 9th September conference. As BuzzFeed already reported, the new Apple TV will have a steeper price tag of $149 and feature both universal search across different streaming platforms and video library. Fast Company suggests that Apple is using Apple TV as a way to rapidly acquire customers for its upcoming subscription video streaming service, as well as expanding its foothold in the "connected home" market.(27) Press has been one media greatly impacted by the growth of digital. Facebook now accounts for more of the traffic to news sites than Google. And some would say that search has hit a plateau as a referral source for media whilst Facebook is a growing traffic source. In August 2015, Facebook celebrated the fact that it reached a billion users on the service in one day. “On Monday, one in seven people on Earth used Facebook to connect with their friends and family. When we talk about our financials, we use average numbers, but this is different. This was the first time we reached this milestone, and it's just the beginning of connecting the whole world."(28) In fact comScore reported that a total of 41.1 million minutes or 9.9 percent of consumer’s online time were spent on the site in August, surpassing time spent on Google which came in with 39.8 million minutes or 9.6 percent.(29)

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Increasingly press brands are moving into the digital space, some offering free content (The Guardian), and others operating a paywall (The Times and The Sun). The more interesting moves though are the completely new models like The Pool, reinventing women’s magazines by launching the first mobile glossy. The Pool is ‘a platform for women who are too busy to browse’. And it produces content drops, scheduling short reads or long reads in line with your dayparts, all of which contain inspiring original content covering everything from fashion to politics to parenting. An increasingly popular little tool is the Medium-inspired ‘total reading time’ iindicator, helping us manage our content consumption wherever we are. Information overload is an issue of course and not only from publishers but from advertising too. Adblockers are the issue du jour. Adblockers promise user privacy as well as reduce data usage which in turn preserves battery life. If you’ve ever accessed a homepage on your mobile only to be served a host of never ending ad pop-ups and pages then you’ll probably be looking at downloading an adblocker. Apple are about to announce the launch of content blocking with their iOS 9 release. That means that auto play videos will also get blocked as well as various scripts running in the background that usually follow you around. PageFair, an adblocker, together with Adobe, reported in August that 198million people around the world use ad blockers, which is thought to cost publishers an estimated $128billion in revenue in 2015 alone. (30) Some have hypothesised that potentially cutting off ad revenue on the mobile web will encourage publishers to adopt Apple’s forthcoming News app, but that seems rather risky, given that content blocking disrupts the entire publishing business model online. Others say that the only way around this new tech development is to make the ads better so that people want to view and engage with them, but that is equally as unrealistic and impractical. What this shows is what big business adtech has now become: a business that has largely grown off the back of using consumers rather than serving them. And it may get worse before it gets better because one of the solutions to ad blocking is for publishers to withhold all of their content from those with ad blocking tech on their devices, which seems to be the nuclear option. It all comes down to, once again, the user experience. Is ad tech there to service users with free content delivered in a seamless manner so that all of the nasty monitoring of users sits invisibly in the background, or is it there to notify us, make us aware of its presence but annoyingly interrupt what we really want to see?

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The Future of Brands in a post-human world

User experience has become the watchword of the last few years. It is UX we are told that will define the future of brands. This is partly true. Designing the right experience for a consumer is probably the single most important thing a brand can now do. As Tom Goodwin of Havas Media observed, when we spoke to him for this report: “Brands now lie at the combination of billions of interactions, most of which are not owned by the brand, but by others. It's review sites, experiences, recommendations etc. …In an era of Amazon dash for products, or Kayak for Flights or Booking.com for Hotels, we're removed from brands more and more and just easy and cheap becomes enough for most. So my question is what do brands mean for the modern age, for a time when information is finally symmetrical and we're in control?” The promising and the delivering of the service have become one and same thing. And it is as true for FMCG as it is for services; if P&G and Unilever aren’t looking at personalized direct shopping of their product to consumers using digital, we’d be surprised. By increasing the ability of consumers to engage with a brand directly, they can experience the brand first hand, and it is of course experience that builds trust The 2015 Edelman Trust Barometer showed that trust levels in business decreased in 16 of 27 countries. The majority of countries now sit below 50 percent with regard to trust in business. But Technology remains the most trusted of all industry sectors at 78 percent. Though privacy and security breaches have weakened trust in both technology products and the sector. Across 74 percent of countries, trust in the consumer electronics sector fell. In 67 percent of countries, trust in telecommunications decreased and in 70 percent of countries trust in technology in general sank. (31) SUMMARY: Technology as truth There is a perception that advertising is evil and should be avoided and that conversely technology is a panacea and will liberate us all. It’s free, and will open up opportunities for anyone to buy, sell and promote in any way they like – ultimately enabling everyone to avoid advertising altogether. By comparison, advertising appears to be manipulative, exacerbated by continuing to treat technology as if it is somehow ‘objective’. That could be largely because it is invisible, friendly and unobtrusive. Unlike, advertising of course.

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The Future of Brands in a post-human world

Managing:

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The Future of Brands in a post-human world

It’s increasingly difficult for clients, agencies and companies to keep track of all of the elements required to successfully manage a brand. There is the paid-for advertising, the owned media retail estate, packaging or online inventory, and social media which is no longer one social channel but a multitude of different channel options all catering to slightly different behaviours, age groups or mindsets. Gone are the days when a lead agency could co-ordinate all of the activities on behalf of a brand, there are just too many specialisms. One of the great quotes from J Walter Thompson’s Stephen King in What is a Brand is: “A campaign, like a brand, is not just a number of bits put together - a claim here, a pack shot there, a reason why, somewhere else. If we try to produce it by the atomistic approach, we will end up with a sort of Identikit brand. It will be a perfect description of the structure of the brand, as the Identikit can describe the contours of the face. But it won't be the same thing. The brand will never come to life" (32) However, brand owners and agencies are finding it increasingly impossible to set one overall brand strategy with one agency or consulting partner, to then be executed in many places. Every silo involved in the brands management seems to want its own strategy. And that is in part due to the fact that every silo is operating at a very executional rather than long term strategic level. “What is your social media strategy?” some ask. And how different is that from your retail strategy, your customer experience strategy, and your pricing strategy? And what of strategists? It seems increasingly common for client companies to hire their own strategists internally so that they are part of and can influence the culture of the company. Some companies are dispensing with the separate discipline of strategy and encouraging everyone in product development to take on responsibility for strategy too, this is especially true in tech firms that believe that the brand is the product experience. At the 2014 Account Planning Group Annual Conference (33), Google’s Ben Malbon spoke about how the strategists he now works with are actually the product managers: “they combine technology, user experience and business in their roles as chief executives of a product….to make things that people really want". And all of their work, from prototyping to launch, fixates on that objective. He also identified two strands of strategy in existence now: ‘deliberate strategy’, where one builds frameworks and models and sets out on a specific course with that in mind; and the second which he termed ‘emergent strategy’ described as the messy, real-time, intuitive strategy that reflects what is happening in the real world, constantly shaping and reshaping alongside reality itself.

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ISSUE No.1 : September 2015

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The Future of Brands in a post-human world

Whether at a personal level or an organizational level, one is bombarded with feedback almost constantly throughout the day. Polling, monitoring, and social listening is encouraging brands into a state of reaction, rather than action. To the point that there is little time left for planning as it is all taken up with responding. One way out is to move to a more anticipatory mode and many brands are looking towards tech to provide them with swathes of customer data which they can profile, in order to better anticipate a customer’s needs rather than waiting for a request that requires a response Possibly the most important change in managing a brand is the hiring of the right kind of skills and talent, and then retaining that talent. Working at Google, Apple or Facebook has probably never looked so appealing to new recruits to the communications industries. Whether or not client companies can exercise the same level of creativity as external agencies is yet to be proved though. Red Bull may be the exception. As brands become more connected globally and technologically, it is increasingly hard, but increasingly important, for the brands expression to feel consistent across time and space. In part that is not just down to cultural differences but the complexity of the media channels required to deliver messages and experiences. The more one attempts to bring some kind of coherence, the more one requires a process, and the more one encourages a process, the less time one can spend on creativity and spontaneity. Regardless, certainty usually trumps creativity in terms of global brand management. The control lies with the client company not the creative agency. As Avi Dan commented in his trend predictions for this year, “CMOs will begin to put silo busting on top of their agenda…integrating messages and insights across business units, geographies, and functional groups.”(34) In the US, Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business recently released its latest iteration of its CMO Survey. (35)They’ve been doing it twice a year since 2008. Among the many findings on a wide array of topics was the response to the question to CMOs to identify in their minds what they think will be most top of minds for consumers in 2015. Their choices were: superior product quality, excellent service, low price, trusting relationship, superior innovation and brand. The #1 top priority for CMOs was service. SUMMARY: More control not less As the rest of the world moves towards a more decentralized, more autonomous operating system with fewer border controls, brand management seems to be going in the opposite direction. The fact that most CMOs want to focus on delivering great service potentially places greater emphasis towards internal elements of the client company or brand, rather than external agencies. This may deliver consistency, but how will it affect creativity?

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The Future of Brands in a post-human world

Investing:

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ISSUE No.1 : September 2015

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The Future of Brands in a post-human world

One of the reasons that tighter control and internal focus is taking hold is the sheer cost of having too many suppliers doing too many different things. Procurement consultants are now so powerful that they themselves are coming under pressure to prove themselves both efficient and innovative. For brand owners, efficiencies are not easy unless you own the media you use and have customer data you can monetize. Social engagement has become a vanity metric, and somehow taken its place alongside effectiveness metrics that involve tracking actual sales. The amount of awards winners’ case studies that substitute ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ for actual sales, is illuminating. There is a value to these metrics but at what point they became inter-changeable is not clear. And that is not to say that engagement is not important. It is. But at the moment the industry lacks a way in which to measure the financial impact of a brands cultural influence. The only hard measure, ROMI, only measures financial profit not social or cultural profit. Whilst scale is still important, the tech giants of Silicon Valley have educated us that ‘speed’ is the modus operandum for a brand in the 21st century. Everyone is now encouraged to make decisions as fast as they can, to respond to competitors actions as fast as they can, and to build the next iteration of a product as fast as they can. Services such as Uber, Amazon Prime and Netflix evidence our need for immediacy. Everyone is operating in the ‘now’, even those involved in investment. Venture Capitalists are funding companies based on the fact that they are popular now (have large user bases), and they will worry about how they make money out of that popularity later. The concentration on the moment is robbing many brands of the time and resource needed for future planning. Responding is, after all, easier than anticipating. It’s one reason why brands are finding it so hard to innovate and incubate, let alone execute great ideas for their customers. As brand management becomes more internalised, companies will find that the cross-pollination of ideas starts to lessen, and brands who are not holding at least one Futures sessions a year with a combination of inspiring minds and talents across their network, will lose out. Many brands are talking about disruption but they are not actually disrupting their own models because there may be an immediate and negative effect on revenue or investment that will displease shareholders. But every industry will be disrupted over the coming decade. Perhaps better to rehearse those possibilities than sit and hope it doesn’t happen? Where are the companies or agencies involving their brands in new currencies like bitcoin? Which ones are investigating the impact of virtual reality on the service and the customer experience that the CMOs have indicated is so important?

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What happens when people can print their own 3D product at home? Every brand should be thinking of itself as a cottage industry, waiting to be disrupted. Because the betting is, it will be. SUMMARY: Proﬁt before ideas The investment role currently being carried out is really one of looking back at the past as a basis for what will work in the future. Models and analysis consider an idea proﬁtable on the basis of sales alone. However, there are more far-reaching cultural and social impacts that could be measured if the industry were so inclined, and by which we would deem a future idea as being one worth investing in.

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ISSUE No.1 : September 2015

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The Future of Brands in a post-human world

The Brand As Operating System:

ÂŠ Any Day Now / Tracey Follows

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The Future of Brands in a post-human world

Baseline Future of Brands in a Post-Human World: Brand as Operating System In this scenario the 21st century is in thrall to technology. Companies recruit and train technically

skilled employees and anyone with a software engineering degree or is a talented programmer will go far. The media industries become more and more ‘technologised’ automating many of the jobs that used to be done by hand, or over lunch. More and more of the communications that are carried out are automated and more of the advertising media placement and creative is held together by lines of code. Intelligent learning systems build up sophisticated profiles of individuals using media platforms and apps that automatically anticipate what news, stories, art, science and sports content should be served to each individual at specific times of the day. Consumers are happy to trust these services but they do also have to take out a ‘personal data insurance policy ‘protecting them from any future significant security breach that could jeopardize the privacy of themselves or their business. The advertising agencies have consolidated in what was an over-supplied market, and the best of them concentrate on core brand-building communications on big screens and small screens, in home and outdoor. The new kids on the block are the ‘Internet of Agencies,’ those dealing in product relationship marketing conducted directly between the products and the users. Brand marketers used to have brand architecture as their guide but now every brand is constructed as a Brand Operating System. The technology platform underpinning the real-time on-demand ordering system and the help content and advice that sits around that is the basis for all customer service. Customer service is conducted via a screen and usually with an avatar. The female voice has become synonymous with AI assistance; which is always programmed by a male. Super intelligence is what most humans are striving for - the augmentation of brain functions with AI - and the most famous names are those of the Super Intelligent Brands. These are brands that optimise personal data in the most powerful way, offering everything the user wants before they even know they want it, and new discoveries are few and far between. In fact, they are so efficient they often take payments for things you didn’t even know you wanted. The post-human world of brands is all about performance: sales performance, media performance, geo-location specifics and virtual-reality immersion. The more time spent interfacing with the brand, the cheaper it is for the user but the more an advertiser has to pay to be part of that user’s personal advertising platform. Brand management is personalized, it is automated and it is something anyone can be programmed to do.

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The Future of Brands in a post-human world

The Alternative Future of Brands But there are alternatives to that scenario. If the baseline future is disrupted or breaks down things could be very diﬀerent. In each of the following domains I have detailed just one way in which we could think about things diﬀerently. The alternative future is then summarized in a domain map and is followed by a short narrative describing the alternative future scenario.

Creating: creativity as uncertainty In some areas outside mainstream media and online advertising, there is a real exploration of ideas, not just of execution. The most recent issue of Wired features on the cover has Olafur Eliasson on its cover. Here is an artist drenched in authenticity who expresses ideas about human thought and behavior throughout his work. Perhaps most famous for The Weather Project which two million people saw, he mixes art with science, politics, and economics. He is an artist that collaborates with brands but he is in essence a polymath. And he thinks the way the artist should make you feel is like ‘you are co-producing your experience’. Wired features his work ‘The Sun’ which is a solar powered LED lamp whose aim was to provide free light to the 1.2 billion people living ‘off the grid’ using a work of art which would raise awareness. It is now distributed in nine African countries and sold in Europe, the US and Japan. He is very interested in public space, he works in a collaborative manner, and he’s particularly interested in science. He says “I am very curious to access fields in which I am less knowledgeable and see if the creative muscle can translate into action…as an artist I think I can co-produce answers” (36) On the fringes of art and science we can see signals of change; a shift away from the need for a definitive answer to a very specific problem. That’s how engineers approach issues. But others luxuriate in the possibilities and the uncertainties. Recently published is a book entitled ‘A More Beautiful Question” which starts with the EE Cummins quotation: ‘Always the beautiful answer, who asks a more beautiful question’.

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Brand managers and agencies think they need to approach briefs with ‘the answer’ or present ‘the solution’, and every pitch exacerbates this more and more. The real magic is in discussing and debating the possibilities and being curious about the question. Or as the authors of the abovementioned book state: find the power of inquiry to spark breakthrough ideas. Yacht (Young Americans Challenging High Technology) describe themselves as performing and making music, as well as objects, events, texts, video, products, websites, and other miscellaneous things. Yes they make music but they also use lots of other media to investigate the nature of an idea. They have a sunglasses range. And one of them writes science fiction. And they built an app called ‘5 every day’ that tells you five interesting things to do in LA every day. They don’t seem to know where their projects will end up when they start them and they rather go with the flow. In summary, when you have a co-producing mentality, you don’t really know how things will end up, or where they will take you. It is the exact opposite to coding, the job of which is literally to programme your way to one definitive solution. Both in art and science (if not in technology) some of the most creative ideas are emanating from questioning not answering.

Connecting: sensory system People notice the world around them, with their senses. Senses then guide their thoughts and feelings, and that won’t change. In fact, one could argue that the senses will become more important as our world becomes more virtual. In the years ahead, we could be returning to a world that puts the sensory (sensing), rather than thinking (rationalising) first. The shift is underway in everyday life, too, enabled by tech. Adrian Cheok, who runs Mixed Reality Lab (37) recently shared the Mini Hug Ring which you and a partner wear on your fingers, and even though you might be thousands of miles from one another, a squeeze on the Hug Ring by one partner sends the sensations of a hug to the other. People can literally touch each other when continents apart, making ‘hug’ emoticons obsolete. Adrian and his team are also experimenting with smell and taste, which are the two most difficult senses to replicate but the most important ones in terms of building memory associations. They have created smells that come out of a mobile phone, the best example of which is Oscar Mayer’s ”Wake Up and Smell the Bacon,” which lures people out of bed via their nose, rather than a noise. This is the perfect approach for millennials who crave more immersive experiences.

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Engaging a person’s sensory abilities is important for the future of brands because as Cathy Barnes of the Faraday Centre for Retail Excellence in London, has explained, a brand’s impact increases by 30% if packaging design engages one additional sense, and by 70% if three senses are integrated. We could be going way beyond connectivity into true connectedness if we can ﬁnd new ways to unlock the potential in our senses. In urban areas, smells and other multisensory elements could help people ﬁnd their way around. The city could start to come alive to our senses. Spaces enjoy sensory experiences (like sound) and one can share these experiences with one another. It could mean we start thinking about air quality and trees and cities as places that make us healthy, rather than ill. If anything, the future operating system of cities could make the whole environment connected in a more sensorial way.

Consuming: well-being is the killer app There are now as many people dying from obesity as there are people dying from hunger. Something has gone very wrong indeed. And the baseline future which marches onwards to super intelligence involving the intake of smart drugs to maximize our performance, or the uploading and offloading of tasks to a robot who can out-perform us and even self-learn new tasks, rather takes for granted the Cartesian notion that the mind is a separate and more important element than the body. It is no surprise that were we to be operating in that dualistic world, our internal moods and emotions would probably be negatively affected. In their Spring 2015 trends briefing, The Future Laboratory drew attention to the fact our senses have become dulled over time. They quote Professor Matthew Johnson at John Hopkins University saying: “Somehow all of the modern conveniences, all of the wonders of modern life aren’t making us more happy. People feel more disconnected with what is authentic. In our quest to reconnect with our sense and our bodies – to be our optimal selves – we are also seeking blissful altered states, with consumers now yearning for heightened sensory environments” (38) Hardly surprising that the wellness trend continues, though this alternative future suggests that what we’ve seen is not even the tip of the iceberg. There are now devices for checking your personal vitamin and mineral levels, allowing you to adjust your diet accordingly, and there is a growing movement towards ‘food moods’ where what we eat is guided by how we feel. We’ve already seen the recent popularity of ‘clean food’, that is just the start. Rest, as well as food, is also considered as an element of wellbeing and Sprayable Sleep is the world’s first topical melatonin spray, but probably won’t be the last.

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A recent report conducted by The Girlguiding Girls’ Attitudes surveys 1,200 young women aged between 7 and 21 (39) found that : “Three in four girls aged 11 to 21 know girls their age who self-harm (76%) or suffer from depression (73%), and two in three know someone with an eating disorder (66%). Bullying is reported as a major problem too. Significant numbers say that they know girls their age who have experienced racist bullying (42%), homophobic bullying (40%) and bullying about a disability (31%). Although many of these issues sadly also affect boys, this data indicates the toll these pressures take on the well-being of girls and young women specifically. Girls say that more education on mental health would be one way of helping them”. In addition, constant connectivity to technology is reducing the amount of downtime we can expect. BeKovert is a brand that helps people to find a balance between the time when they are connected to technology, and the time where they are connected to the other people around them. They describe themselves as being “about taking control of our digital habits. It's about creating enough space to hear our own internal voice and finding time to just be. It's about connecting with ourselves and others on a deeper level, and remembering what it means to be human. It’s about using our time wisely, and our technology mindfully”.(40) Better managing of your digital life, or being able to go on ‘a digital diet’ to escape the information overload is a growing area for brands. As mental health problems rise, so does the opportunity to offer holistic ways to help people. And away from health there is a growing industry in synthetic biology creating food and drinks products that will feed a growing global population. Whether these are less healthy or more healthy alternatives to naturally grown but processed food we currently eat, should be a forthcoming and important public debate. Either way, mental and physical health and wellbeing could be the biggest item on the agenda for the next 50 years.

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The Future of Brands in a post-human world

Publicising: culture as media

Where will you place your brand to publicise it to people? Previously, one would have bought media space on TV or in press. Now brands are delivering experiences; creating spaces in culture rather than in paidmedia and it may prove to be a more effective way of relating to people. When surrounding culture is your canvas, rather than a square white space, it’s not immediately obvious what it is that you are going to deliver. Creators, scientists, poets, engineers, teachers, could all equally have a point of view on what is interesting at a cultural level and how brands could become relevant in culture, or even just reflect it. Paid-media provides definition but culture is endlessly open to possibilities. At Sparks & Honey, for example, they understood the culture of the Maker Movement and harnessed it for PepsiCo. The Maker Movement has unleashed a world of possibility to co-create and participate in an open-source culturally creative environment. It taps into the millennial trend mentioned before about people wanting to participate in creating the products they consume. So why not, as a brand, create roles for people as Makers, not just as consumers. Sparks & Honey invited people to a pop-up lab, where Makers created their custom-flavored beverage using natural juices, extracts, seasonings, and herbs. They then went on to explore natural and synthetic packaging; synesthesia with visuals, audio and aromas; and finally gas as well as solid beverages, edible hydrogels and cloud tasting. In the end it all lead to PepsiCo’s “At Home DIY Beverage” strategy. One job that is definitely going to be around in 10 years time is ‘Cultural Intelligence Agent’, described in Mashable as: ‘a cultural savant who mines the cultural landscape to identify emerging trends and influences in music, gaming, design, tech and culinary, harnessing them to help fuel an environment of disruptive growth and innovation’. It already exists today. However, it tends to be a role in a trends agency rather than in-house within a client company. Now, as culture and media fuse together to become one and the same thing - a culturally-rich environment - brands will endeavor to create a cultural intelligence department of their own.

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Managing: ﬂow is the future

Steve Kotler (41) wrote a book called The Rise of Superman and set up an organization called Flow Genome Project promoting the ‘Flow State’. Focusing on what you are doing whilst in a natural state of flow improves performance and helps you learn faster, he claims somewhere between 200% and 500% faster. Flow is really a state of consciousness that is closer to being unconscious. As Kotler explains in an issue of Forbes: “Technically, flow is defined as a peak state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best. Sensationally, flow is an accurate descriptor. In the state, as psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (who coined the term “flow”) told Wired, “every action, movement and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz.” (42) Not only are people more effective in flow, Kotler’s research claims that people are 6 to 8 times more creative too. Every action and decision and consequence seamlessly flows from one to the next and are interconnected, they just follow naturally from one to another. It’s a heightened awareness and it feels like time stands still. Athletes in particular are claimed to be the best at flow. Now, imagine if this was the way that people managed, and in particular, managed brands. Brands would be coherent, anticipatory and more creative, because the decisions being made that determines all that would be natural and seamless every single time. Some brands are led by people who do have Flow. Richard Branson is one mentioned on Kotler’s website. Now look at the Virgin brand – is there another brand more authentically consistent in behavior than Virgin? Probably not. Airbnb may prove to be a flow brand of the future. When there is a shared culture and way of behaving that is evident in every action and in every decision, it shows up in the consequences, and creates a flow state for the brand. One other important signal in managing brand, is that the five year plan is dead. Venture capitalists, global companies with foresight, and entrepreneurial technology brands are all pursuing what John Hagel calls a ‘Zoom out/Zoom in’ strategy. (43) That means a focus on two periods of time concurrently: 10 -20 years out; and 6-12 months out.

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His contention along with many others is that the most visionary companies are concerned with the longer term future planning of 10-20 years out and are asking the question: what kind of world do we want to live in, what world do we want our children to live in? They are then linking that vision to action by ensuring that they implement several actions within the next 6-12 months that will contribute to that 10 year vision. If Elon Musk is thinking like this, and he is, why wouldn’t you? So, instead of focusing on automation and whether robots will steal our jobs, or how many connected devices there will be by 2020, which is only five years from now, better to focus on the more profound scientific advancements happening in genetic editing, synthetic foods, space colonisation, and life extension. These are the topics for a new era of exploration: of inner exploration and outer exploration, and brands too should be exploring them if they want to influence how the world takes shape in 10-20 years time.

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The Future of Brands in a post-human world

Investing: investing in individuals

Consumers often don’t behave as they ‘should. Regardless of the models and frameworks and predictive analytics that one can put in place in order to target investment in the right media or towards the right people, consumers are getting harder, not easier, to define. In Trendwatching’s 2015 Post-Demographic Consumerism’ trend (44), it is suggested that consumption patterns are no longer defined by traditional demographic segments such as age, gender, location, income, and family status. Rather the world now is too fluid. Here are three of the contributing factors to this trend: Access: ubiquitous global information fostering an increasingly post-demographic experience; Permission: the collapse of numerous conventions and norms that tended in the past to inform postdemographic identities; Desire: the erosion of the link between financial resources and social status giving rise to a more democratic post-demographic status, changing the balance of power between generations. We could certainly soon inhabit a world in which identity transcends sexuality; or, at least, gender. And where once we could sell particular types of products to particular types of people, most notably to "women" or to "men", we’ll be marketing to the individual. Brands know so much more about individual users than ever before because people have a Facebook profile, a Twitter handle, a LinkedIn biography, an Instagram account and a host of other ways to signal very specific needs, wants, values and preferences. Micro-targeting of individuals in the right place at the right time could mean that the detail of gender, and many other clumsy demographics become irrelevant over time. And rather than investing in profitable ideas, brands may well start investing in profitable people. When you can work out who are the most influential users for your brand, in ways that go beyond direct sales, then it is worth making the effort to get to know, understand and nurture their advocacy as part of an overall brand ecosystem. Especially if, as science is about to suggest, they are going to live to well over 100 years of age.

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The Brand As Living System:

ÂŠ Any Day Now / Tracey Follows

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Alternative Future of Brands in a Post-Human World: Brand as Living System

The world of work is automated and machines run lots of the routine tasks in our lives. But that hasn’t meant that we’ve forgotten we are flesh and blood not silicon. Sure, some people augment their physicality aided by bionics, and smart drugs help our brains work a little bit better in an important meeting or before an exam. But we recognize that underneath all that we are still very human too: we haven’t given up on humanity, or morality - or humility come to that. We see ourselves as just another species, one of many, and even though we now have more scientific control over how we evolve, we carry out genetic editing in a highly humane way. The goal is to bring us closer to the rest of nature and our environment not separate us by making us into machines. We are not machines, because we have a special kind of agency they don’t have. In marketing communications the new kids on the block are the ‘Internet of Agencies,’ those dealing in product relationship marketing conducted directly between the products and the users. Except we don’t call them users anymore, we call them ‘choosers’. That was felt to create too much of a disconnection between people (the humans) and the service (the algorithms). And anyway, the ‘personal data insurers’ insisted on the word ‘chooser’ because it reminded people that they had agency in deciding what personal data they would and would not share. Nearly all of our brands have evolved to become more human too. People had feared that brands would be so data-centric that they would become extinct. Who needs a brand pumping out information at you night and day, that’s annoying and stressful. But brands actually evolved to become less technological and more biological, aiming to understand every human as a whole: mind and body, thoughts and feelings, physical health and mental well-being too. As a result, all brands are now bio-brands: they use one’s DNA, know one’s genetic editing, one’s GP and hospital records, daily vitals, and exercise routines to work out what’s best for every individual to keep them fit and well. It has saved the government a fortune. The food and drinks brands only use the best of ingredients or at least the ingredients that are best suited to each individual consumer, and some of the synthetic food brands are more trusted than the old-fashioned contaminated foods of the past.

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An alternative view of the post-human world

As Marshall McLuhan said: “As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of ‘do it yourself”. The post-human scenario that is perceived as most likely is the one driven by the exponential growth of Artificial Intelligence. A world in which between 35% and 80% of the human population is unemployed due to the mass automation of many jobs and entire industries. It is a world in which Super Intelligence has taken over everything else. If we are no longer required for jobs, we either exist on basic incomes or use increased creativity to differentiate ourselves from the bots. This is a world in which brands relate to us in an automatic, algorithmic and anticipatory way, based on personal data that they constantly collect and process about us. A world in which everything is rational and programmable – nothing is emotional. Our senses are dulled because only intelligence matters and that can always be augmented by technology anyway. Mark Zuckerberg and Ray Kurzweil between them control all of the algorithms that keep our planet spinning. What my alternative scenario tries to present, is a world in which we harness biology more naturally than technology. In that world, we manage to connect humanity with the other species around us, and the environment as a whole, and that includes our own planet as well as the environment of the whole solar system. It means that rather than becoming human-machines, we become more in tune with ourselves, and our environment, than ever before. There is just as much evidence and as many signals pointing towards this as an artificially intelligent posthuman world. And it is my belief that there is no deterministic trajectory for brands who might be thinking that the only way to survive and thrive in the post-human world is by thinking of themselves as an operating platform. The operating platform metaphor, an algorithmic world view, conjours up a future of brands as logic alone, programming us rather than empathizing with us, and monitoring and surveilling us until we wonder who it is who really has the upper hand in this relationship after all?

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The Rise of the Bio Brand

The alternative future for brands in a post-human world, is one where we don’t assume that woman or man is nothing more than a mind; a mind that can be uploaded and downloaded and whose thoughts exist in isolation separated from action and consequence. The alternative is a biological model not a technological one; one in which it is recognised that mind and body are interconnected and where energy transfers from one to another all of the time, in flow. It is one in which one looks to nature (not just human nature, but the plant and animal kingdom too) to learn about sustainable strategies and building systems that are holistic rather than dualistic; community-enabled rather than over-personalised and can cater for serendipity and ingenuity rather than having to be predictive all of the time. The problem with the technological analogy for brands, also just in general, is that the only value in it is performance. Technology is largely about efficiency, whichever way you look at it. And by making humans into human-machines, we are really talking about making humans high performance operating units. That may be fine in some cases or for a short time, but that is isolating, stressful, one-dimensional and eventually debilitating. The conclusion here is that it is more appealing to think of biological rather than technological metaphors if we want humans to have the upper hand in the post-human world. And if we want brands to stay relevant in the post-human world, the biggest benefits they could offer would be around enhancing, maintaining and augmenting our overall health and well-being as well as that of our environment. This brand analogy means that we can build brands that are less like operating systems and more like living systems. Brands we build will use technology but they won’t be technology brands. The brands we build in the post-human world will be BIO-BRANDS. Bio-brands will support and promote our biology, our biography and bio-diversity. Humans will use technology in spectacular ways, ways that will service humanity. But humanity will not become technology. Humanity has a bigger world to explore: that of inner emotion and life fulfillment.

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ISSUE No.1 : September 2015

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The Future of Brands in a post-human world

Practical Implications for Brands

Is there even a role for brands anymore, or is the Brand a 20th Century convention? Consumers (people) are dealing with companies more than brands when they deal with technology platforms. As those companies are forced to become more and more transparent, and people become more and more interested in their practices and therefore their values, will the face – or façade – of the brand still prove useful? After all, one will be dealing directly with companies who have become platforms and enjoy a direct dialogue with users through the ‘internet of things’. If consumers are replaced by users, one can hardly say one ‘uses’ a brand. One uses a service or a product; one consumes a brand. Companies may well offer all kinds of experiences to their users, but it is not clear why one would continue to refer to those experiences as ‘brands’. Brands used to be mediators of an experience, making promises and offering benefits about what the experience would be like. When one can directly experience a service or product, feedback on it, modify and optimize it to their individual tastes, and pay directly for it, to what do we now refer when we use the concept of ‘brand’? This is further exacerbated by the notion that communication will be data-driven and involve machine learning. Little need for a brand to mediate anything then . As a reaction brands have been describing themselves as operating platforms. This is an analogy that has arisen by looking over the wall at what Google and Facebook have done to attract huge user bases. We are now so used to using technology metaphors to explain brands and brand behavior that we can no longer think about the alternatives. But there are alternatives, and I think they are just as valid, and plausible, as the engineering ones. And quite possibly more useful if we think about the future we really want to be living in. One of the very big issues we are going to face is cyber security. One can choose to see this though the lens of technology if you see your brand as an Operating System, and perceive our communications behavior and activities as algorithms or at least mediated by them. It is within this post-human world that we are referred to as ‘users’. Google, Facebook, any app you care to mention, all have us down as ‘users’ and that is because they believe in creating an online friction-free experience that is so good that we choose to come back and use the service day after day, not have to pay up front for it and then ‘consume’ it. Very laudable. But that term user is not doing us any favours. Whilst we continue with that language, we are denying ourselves (as consumers, customers, people, or whatever you prefer) any kind of agency. We are taught to think that we are using a service that has been designed for us for free. It is automated for our own good, and with our own permissions. So, don’t think about complaining, you’re not in a position, you are

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ISSUE No.1 : September 2015

ANY DAY NOW | REPORT:

The Future of Brands in a post-human world

a grateful user. That is all very post-human. Consumers, on the other hand, have paid for a product and service and therefore have some redress if it under-delivers, sells their data without them knowing, or is of a poorer quality that we did not expect. The automated service you opted in to when you accepted the 36 pages of online terms and conditions is in charge. It we started to think of ourselves not as automated users but as discerning choosers, we would start to feel more agency in the human-tech relationships that are now conducted across operating platforms. Language deﬁnes reality, and after 10 years of referring to ourselves as users, it is surely now time to reclaim our human value in this machine-human relationship. We humans provide all of these services with free, highly personal data, every minute of the day. We should start to think of ourselves as choosers not users, then we will begin to pause to decide in an active way every time we are asked to log in, opt out, sign up, or provide another preference or change a setting. Then we really do have agency, and when the cyber attacks and the data breaches do come, we will know that we did everything we could to protect ourselves. Cyber security is being talked about and tackled at the level of technological engineering. Even the word ‘hack’ equates to engineering. Would it not be better to once again ditch that post-human language and adopt some metaphors and approaches that are more biological? After all viruses exist in the natural world as well as the computing world, so shouldn’t we be trying to address a virus by mimicking how viruses are treated and killed in the human body or plant world, ie naturally? Biomimicry is a much better model for brand-building than an operating system (45). Biomimicry is an approach to innovation that seeks sustainable solutions to human challenges by emulating nature's timetested patterns and strategies. The goal is to create products, processes, and policies—new ways of living — that are well-adapted to life on earth over the long haul. We are entering a new era of exploration; we are about to explore what it is like for most people to live to be over 100 years old, explore what it will be like to colonise other planets, explore what it will mean when we edit our genetic code to develop diﬀerent strains of our own species, and explore how it will feel to connect our brains to other people’s and possibly to other material things. What model could we suggest other than one that seeks to develop brands as living systems themselves? THAT IS WHY THE SUMMARY RECOMMENDATION OF THIS REPORT IS THAT: EVERY BRAND IS A LIVING SYSTEM, NOT AN OPERATING SYSTEM EVERY BRAND SHOULD START THINKING LIKE A BIO-BRAND

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ISSUE No.1 : September 2015

ANY DAY NOW | REPORT:

The Future of Brands in a post-human world

References: 1.Nesta Future Fest 2. http://www.theverge.com/2014/4/22/5641806/apple-ad-uses-the-pixies-to-promote-a-new-tagline-youre-more-powerful 3. Nick Kendall in Campaign, Feb 26th quoting HBR article by Thales Teixeira 4. Marketing magazine, 2nd June 2015 5. Marketing to Millennials: Reach the Largest and Most Influential Generation of Consumers Ever (AMACOM, a division of American Management Association). 6. http://decoded.com/uk/ ‘code in a day’ 7. JWT Intelligence, top trends 2014 9. Mary Meeker, Internet Trends 2015 –Code Conference 27th May 2015 10. Ofcom annual communications report, 2015 11. Ofcom annual communications report, 2015 12. Mary Meeker, Internet Trends 2015 –Code Conference 27th May 2015 13. How your iphone is tracking your every move, The Telegraph 26th August, 2014 14. Gartner, http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2621015 15. White Paper, Product Relationship Management, Turning physical products into owned digital media, Evrything , 2014 16. The Wearables Report, BI Intelligence, 27th July 2015 17. twitter form IPA conference #Unlearning 18. Office of National Statistics, Overview of Internet retail sales 2014, 23rd Jan 2015 19. Interactive Media in Retail Group, Mobile accounts for 40% of all online retail sales 20. Guardian 26th Feb 205, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/26/three-quarters-supermarket-chickens-campylobacter-bug 21. Edelman Trust Barometer, 2015 22. GFK Roper Consumer Trends 2009, and 2014. 23. Luxury Futures Forum, The Future Laboratory, Sept 2015 24. think it was future lab 25. Wall Street Journal, http://www.wsj.com/articles/lvmh-appoints-apple-executive-ian-rogers-as-chief-digital-officer-1441108886 26. Ofcom annual communications report, 2015 27. http://www.fastcompany.com/3050689/apple-event-september-2015/heres-what-we-know-about-the-new-apple-tv 28.. http://www.zdnet.com/article/facebook-hits-1-billion-users-in-one-day/ 29. http://www.zdnet.com/article/facebook-hits-1-billion-users-in-one-day/ 30. http://techcrunch.com/gallery/everything-you-need-to-know-about-ios-9s-new-content-blockers/ 31. Edelman Trust Barometer, 2015 32. Stephen king – What is a Brand? 33. apg.org.uk 34. http://www.forbes.com/sites/avidan/2014/11/09/11-marketing-trends-to-watch-for-in-2015/ 35. http://www.forbes.com/sites/steveolenski/2015/02/27/according-to-cmos-this-is-priority-1-for-consumers-in-2015/ 36. Wired Oct 2015 UK issue 37. Mixed Reality Lab , Singapore 38. Future Laboratory, Trends Briefing Spring/Summer 2015 39. http://new.girlguiding.org.uk/girls-attitudes-survey-2014 40. http://bekovert.com 41. Steven Kotler, Wikipedia

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The Future of Brands in a post-human world

42. http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenkotler/2014/02/09/ﬂow-states-answers-to-the-three-most-common-questions-about-optimalperformance/ 43. John Hagel, Deloitte, speaking at the WFS Conference, July 2015 44 Trendwatching: Post-Demographic Consumerism Trend, 2015 45. http://biomimicry.org/what-is-biomimicry/

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ISSUE No.1 : September 2015

ANY DAY NOW | REPORT:

The Future of Brands in a post-human world

Any Day Now: We are a futures company specializing in the future of communications, media and brands. We believe in the art of the long view: that foresight is more valuable than insight. And that it is better to envision and inﬂuence a preferred future for yourself than be taken by surprise. One can’t predict the future but one can organize for it. Contact: tracey@anydaynow.co for more info or visit www.anydaynow.co

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ISSUE No.1 : September 2015

ANY DAY NOW | REPORT:

ÂŠ Any Day Now / Tracey Follows

The Future of Brands in a post-human world

www.anydaynow.co

ISSUE No.1 : September 2015