BrandKnew April 2019

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10 Dear Friends: We are done with the first quarter and the year seems to be galloping along. Well, we have tried to keep pace with the happenings in ‘ brandom ‘ and offered content that walks the torque. We talk about the need for authenticity while building a personal brand. There is a lot riding on nostalgia but that may not be enough to stop dumping legacy brands. Find out more in this issue. Watch out, its not just Google or Facebookthe freezer aisle in the super market is also targeting you now for attention. That’s advertising giving you the cold shoulder. If you are a CMO, we have a question for you- are you future ready? Understand that here. Are marketers getting emotion right in their communication? Know more in this edition. AI in advertising transcends beyond just bidding. Get to understand that in the feature on the subject carried in this issue. How to separate the signal from the noise in a highly cluttered digital landscape- read the primer on brand engagement. Long live brands. RIP business models. How brands outlive business models. Take a peek here. All these and much more to soak up. I leave you to that. Till the next…

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CONTENTS

The Future-Ready CMO How are big brands brushing up on customer understanding this year?

Audience or authenticity? Why building an audience strains your soul 5 Ways Marketers Can Gain an Edge With Machine Learning Apple redesigned the credit card. Can it redesign debt?

How to Feel Authentic While Building Your Personal Brand Business models die. Brands don’t It’s not just Google or Facebook: The freezer aisle is ad targeting you now Where is the love? Injecting emotion back into marketing – and doing it right A closer look at creating a strong brand identity Nostalgia Is Not Enough: Why Consumers Abandon Legacy Brands The art of the DIY Logo Can Your Advertising Pass The Acid Test?

10 Ways to Break Through The Noise: How To Build Brand Engagement In A Cluttered Digital Landscape It’s Not Too Late For Social Media To Regulate Itself How Brands Benefit by Using Virtual Reality to Engage Customers [Infographic] AI in advertising means more than bidding Book, Line & Sinker

The Future-Ready CMO

EFFECTIVE MARKETING LEADERS OFTEN LIVE IN TWO REALMS—THE PRESENT AND THE POSSIBLE. A DEEP UNDERSTANDING OF THE CUSTOMER CAN CREATE A BRIDGE BETWEEN THE TWO. By deloitte.wsj.com

Fueled by the rapid evolution of technology, marketing has changed dramatically in the past decade. What, then, do the coming years hold for CMOs? While the possibilities are endless, an increased focus on the customer is likely a safe bet.

Marketing isn’t simply about media and messaging, says marketing and communications consultant Mark Earls of Herd Consultancy. “More than ever, it’s about orientating all of the organization around what matters to the consumer,” he says.

This requires CMOs to develop a deep understanding of their audiences. “You have to understand the next consumer and reach the human knowing who she is, where she is, what

she’s doing, and what her favorite colors are,” says Faith Popcorn, futurist and CEO of Faith Popcorn’s Brain Reserve.

For marketers, the challenge can be to hold that consumer’s attention for as long as possible in an increasingly noisy world. “We all have 24 hours in a day,” says David Shing, digital prophet at Oath. “That’s not going to change no matter what technology comes along.”

Preparing for the coming years can require CMOs to imagine the future while also achieving near-term objectives. “The decisions you make to be able to deliver results today can’t keep you from going where you’d like to go,” says Ben Gaddis, president of Austin, Texas, independent agency T3.

Mr. Earls’, Ms. Popcorn’s, Mr. Shing’s, and Mr. Gaddis’ participation in this article is solely for educational purposes based on their knowledge of the subject, and the views expressed by them are solely their own.

How are big brands brushing up on customer understanding this year?

BRAIN TRUST: HOW ARE YOU DEVELOPING A DEEPER UNDERSTANDING OF CUSTOMERS THIS YEAR? By marketingmag.com.au

Louisa Thraves, head of media and connections, Johnson & Johnson The first area would be around the data we’re collecting and the insights we can get from it.

It’s a big opportunity for us. As a business, J&J doesn’t own a lot of first party data. We don’t own the end sale and the transaction – the retailers own that. So we’re starting to map out all of the different data sources we do have available to us. It may not be our sales data directly, but data we get through media interactions, owned channels and second-party data partnerships.

In order to help us in this area we’ve brought in a new role: audience and insights analyst. This role focuses on piecing together that data and building insights from it so that we can then better target our consumers.

Off the back of targeting, it’s about what we learn from that; making sure it’s a cyclical process, where we then look at the results and how we can translate them into further insights, to target again. We target, we look at results and we track against KPIs, but prior to having this role inhouse, we haven’t had a dedicated resource to see what’s out there in the data.

The key thing is moving away from the old-fashioned approach of demographics. In FMCGs, some companies own a lot of data and have done this really well, but some more traditional companies still tend to think and brief in terms of demographics.

Diversity and inclusion is a big thing for J&J. We need to consider it when we’re thinking about our consumers and not lump them into one ‘women aged 25-54’ bucket, for example, but instead actually understand the individual, who they are and what drives them.

William Papesch, global marketing manager, Heineken Beer marketers are lucky – we work in a highly emotive category where we are gatekeepers of brands rich in history that are often ingrained in the cultural footprint of a country. As a result, consumer insights are easy to come by, with passionate consumers who are vocal about purchase habits and the quality of brand communication.

At Heineken, international beer brands like Tiger are continually searching for the right balance between global consistency and local relevance, negotiating the obstacles of translating global strategy into successful local execution. For a brand like Tiger, the starting point in understanding local insights is to ensure we’re keeping our finger on the pulse and making sure we immerse ourselves in the bars and restaurants where consumers experience our brands. Additionally, trends can move quickly and staying relevant – especially when we are targeting young adults within premium environments – can be challenging and costly, and come with high risk if solutions are unproven.

In these situations an incubation approach can be successfully applied to prove a business case and gain more insight into the customer and consumer before launching at scale. Tiger Beer applied this approach in Australia and New Zealand where we were able to confirm unique consumer insights and a differentiated channel strategy before sharing and reapplying learnings globally.

In emerging countries, simplicity done right, first time and at scale can have a massive impact. In these markets, however, beer brands are regularly faced with a consumer insight that’s fundamentally different to those of more developed markets, or a global insight that doesn’t apply. In these markets, we often need to move fast to implement a tailored approach or commission comprehensive consumer research to generate deeper insights.

A more successful and pragmatic strategy can be partnering with one market where a local consumer insight is strong, and there is clear potential for broader application.

Tracy Hall, marketing director, GoDaddy The digital world gives on-demand access to research and data to learn more about your customers, but no amount of online resources can replace actual human interaction and conversation. It’s these personal exchanges that we will be looking to have more of throughout 2019, in order to develop a deeper understanding of current and prospective GoDaddy customers. Without discounting the valuable assistance online resources can provide in understanding more about customer demographics and behaviour, it can be easy for companies to fall into the trap of relying too heavily on this information.

Making the time to have face to face conversations with not only your customers, but also with other people in your network can go a long way to understanding the ins and outs of consumer behaviour. For me, it’s talking to everyone – from small business owners in my neighbourhood to the start-up entrepreneurs at WeWork and even Uber drivers who have multiple side hustles – that can offer some of the best insight into our customers.

What never fails to surprise me is the amount of insight I can collect from just a few conversations with business owners, discussing in-depth their challenges, drivers and what they may need from a brand like GoDaddy to help them succeed.

Conversations with customers that may have their products with a competitor can also offer a fresh perspective. It gives understanding into what draws customers to another brand, and their motivations for staying there. Speaking with the everyday Aussies who interact with small businesses in their day-to-day lives – for things like beauty, home maintenance, food and pharmacy needs – can also offer interesting insight.

Building relationships with your company’s community can be a door to a deeper understanding of how and why customers use your product. It can help you to better understand their expectations of your offering, and assist you in developing a set of experiences better suited to them. This can not only help to instil trust between your company and customers, but also help build you a loyal customer base.

Audience or authenticity? Why building an audience strains your soul

By Mark Schaefer

We desperately want to be heard.

If you’re creating a brand, trying to make change in the world, or simply creating content on Snapchat, You. Just.

Want. To. Be. Heard.

To be heard, you need an audience, and an audience rewards authenticity … and it can also take it away.

Let me explain what I mean …

Content creates us At the recent SXSW festival, I attended a fascinating panel that featured a young writer named Diego Perez. As Yung Pueblo on Instagram, Diego drops tiny bits of wisdom that have made him a minor New Age guru:

Honestly, I don’t understand a lot of his deep thoughts … but I’m not his target audience and enough people love him to make him an Instagram star.

During his presentation, he explained his tangled career that involved coming to America as an immigrant, forays into philosophy and psychology, and eventually his success with self-help journalism.

“I never thought about becoming a writer,” he said. “But now I have an audience who is rewarding me for my writing … so I’m a writer.”

His first book is coming out soon.

This is great example of the principle I’ve described here on the blog and in my books — We create content, but content also creates us. As we step out and explore the world with our content, we’re rewarded by an audience that helps define and optimize our online persona.

Has Diego’s audience helped forge his transformation from student to Instagram philosopher? building an audience yung pueblo We want to be heard. And if you’re humble enough and patient enough, the audience will tell you how to reach them.

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Influencer Darwinism.

I am not immune to this either.

One of my friends described me as the Mr. Rogers of Marketing. Perhaps this is true. Each day, I pull on my sweater, smile sweetly, and sing you a little song here on the blog. I am a nice guy — I can’t fake that — but I also know that if I went on a profanity-filled rant I would be off brand. I am mindful about how I show up on the web. I want to set a good example.

(PS I have never given somebody the finger in my life. Maybe I am more Mr. Rogers than Mr. Rogers.)

However, I have made one major concession in favor of authenticity and away from the needs of my audience.

The numbers talk Diego’s growing audience helped create a poet-guru identity that has launched minor fame. Wisely, he has responded to their feedback to become the rocket-fueled success he is today.

The most popular posts on this site are lists and “how-to” articles. Practical tips and tricks. If I offered nothing but tips and tricks I could triple the traffic to my site.

But he made an interesting comment in his presentation. He talked about taking an extended break from social media to meditate and re-energize but the absence caused a noticeable drop in his user growth. He lamented that he wold have to re-consider that sort of thing in the future.

So … he learned that taking breaks from his fans hurts his career. He wants to keep the train rolling.

Understandable. For an aspiring writer and influencer, audience growth and engagement is paramount.

But what he was also saying is that he can no longer be authentic. He can’t do what he wants to do, or truly be who he wants to be. If he evolves and changes away from the persona his audience loves, he risks losing them.

In other words, building and maintaining his audience strains his authenticity.

Isn’t that a strange enigma?

Your audience is attracted to you because of your authenticity.

But over time, you risk becoming less authentic as you conform to the personality your audience expects. But we all change over time. Will Diego’s audience-reliance prevent him from being the person he is destined to be?

But these posts bore me out of my mind. It is not authentic to who I am, or who I am becoming. I’m interested in thinking through what’s new, what’s next, and how it impacts us all.

That is my professional fuel.

I know these more insightful and “futurist” posts that I like to write have cut my audience potential … but I’ve attracted the RIGHT AUDIENCE, and that’s very cool. I will gladly make that trade-off to assure my personal growth.

So. Thanks for being here. We are perfect together.

Trading audience for authenticity

Thanks for allowing me to be myself (pretty much)!

This is not just about Diego of course. It is about all of us building a personal brand on the web.

And … won’t you be my neighbor?

Perhaps a few web personalities have been able to remain 100 percent true to themselves but I doubt there are many.

If you look at their personal trajectory, they become more of whatever sells their stuff.

Mark Schaefer is the chief blogger for this site, executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions, and the author of several best-selling digital marketing books.

He is an acclaimed keynote speaker, college educator, and business consultant.

5 Ways Marketers Can Gain an Edge With Machine Learning INTERPRET AND ACT ON LARGE AMOUNTS OF INFORMATION IN A SCALABLE WAY.

By Karl Wirth

It’s hard to escape the buzz around machine learning.

Practically every industry is talking about it.

So, what is machine learning? According to Hewlett Packard, “Machine learning refers to the process by which computers develop pattern recognition, or the ability to continuously learn from and make predictions based on data, then make adjustments without being specifically programmed to do so.” In other words, it’s a way for machines to analyze and act on large volumes of information and continue to learn and improve over time.

For an example of machine learning algorithms in action, let’s consider facial recognition -- an area we’re seeing improve by the day. Today, iPhone users unlock their phones with their faces. Law enforcement uses facial recognition to spot fraud activity and catch criminals. Google Photos allows users to sort photos by the people within them. These algorithms may not have been incredibly accurate in the past, but they have been trained over time with machine learning.

This isn’t human intelligence, it’s programmed learning, and its applications extend beyond facial recognition and across industries. Take marketing, for instance. Today’s marketers are striving to deliver a relevant message to their customers.

And while humans can’t communicate with large volumes of customers individually at scale, machines can. Not sure what that looks like in practice? In this article, I’ll explain five of the

key uses of machine learning for marketing.

1. Recommend the most relevant products or content.

Product and content recommendations have been used by digital marketers for many years. In the past -- and occasionally today -- these recommendations were manually curated by a human. For the past 10 years, they have often been driven by simple algorithms that display recommendations based on what other visitors have viewed or purchased.

Machine learning can deliver substantial improvements over these simple algorithms. Machine learning can synthesize all the information you have available about a person, such as his past purchases, current web behavior, email interactions, location, industry, demographics, etc., to determine his interests and pick the best products or the most relevant content. Machine learning-driven recommendations learn which items or item attributes, styles, categories, price points, etc., are most relevant to each particular person based on his engagement with the recommendations -- so the algorithms keep improving over time.

And machine learning-driven recommendations are not limited to products and content. You can recommend anything -- categories, brands, topics, authors, reviews vs.

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tech specs etc. Using machine learning in this way allows you to create a relevant site or email experience that shows visitors that you truly understand them and helps them find the things they like.

2. Automatically spot important customer segments.

Even though machine learning allows you to deliver more individually tailored experiences, segmentation remains a valuable tool for marketers. With segmentation, you create groups of prospects or customers based on meaningful differences to better understand those groups. Humans can spot the obvious differences that they may already know to look for -- such as the differences between high lifetime value vs. low lifetime value customers or new customers vs. loyal returning customers. But with so much customer data available to sift through, there are many other patterns that aren’t obvious to humans.

A machine can help you identify segments you didn’t realize you had, and you can use that information to speak to those segments in a more meaningful way.

For example, a machine-learning algorithm may be able to identify that millennials looking to refinance their home tend to exhibit certain types of behaviors. With that knowledge, you can come up with better-targeted messaging for that segment, speak differently to that segment while they’re on your site or speaking with an agent on the phone, and identify other prospective customers that may fall into that segment when they exhibit similar behaviors.

3. Identify and act on potential problems.

Your marketing campaigns generate a lot of data. Think of all the emails your company sends each day, or the number of people who visit your website, use your mobile app or interact with your call center. All of those interactions generate immense volumes of data -- so much data that a human can’t look at it all in a timely manner. It may not always be immediately obvious to you when something is wrong -- when a link is broken or a promotional code doesn’t work. Algorithms can sift through all of that data, predict what should happen, and notify you if something doesn’t seem right.

For example, suppose it’s Black Friday and one of your emails contains an incorrect link. Machine learning algorithms can predict the click through rates and/or conversion rates that should be expected from that offer and alert you right away if the reality is much lower than it should be. With that knowledge, you can take corrective action before too much damage has been done on such an important day of the year.

4. Move from A/B testing to delivering individually relevant experiences and offers.

Testing is another area that can be improved with machine learning. Traditional A/B testing allows you to run a test between two or more digital experiences, find the option

that produces the best result, and use that experience going forward. This is valuable, but it’s one-size-fits-all, and it doesn’t account for any differences in groups or individuals. Instead, it requires you to pick one experience to show everyone, which means many people will not see the experience that is best for them. Machine learning changes this game.

For example, rather than manually setting up a test between two homepage experiences, waiting until the test is complete and picking a winner, you can give those same experiences to a machine learning algorithm. The algorithm will pick the experience in the moment that it thinks will deliver the best results for each individual based on all the information it has available. It will learn from each of those interactions to inform the next decision it makes.

The same approach can be taken with promotions and offers. Instead of giving the same 20 percent discount or static promotion to all of your customers, machine learning can enable you to show the discount only to those who need the extra incentive to purchase. For those that don’t need the extra incentive, machine learning can select another relevant experience, such as promoting new arrivals in their favorite categories.

5. Decide how to communicate with each person.

How do you decide where and when to communicate with a prospect or customer? Does she prefer email? Push notifications? Texts? How often should you reach out to her, if at all? These are all questions that machine learning algorithms can answer for you.

For example, instead of a batch and blast approach to email where you simply send everyone the same email every day, you can use a predictive score generated by machine learning to determine if sending this next email to this particular person will cause them to open, ignore, click or unsubscribe.

If so, you don’t send it. Instead, you can wait until you have something more relevant to him or her.

Related: Netflix Has Adopted Machine Learning to Personalize Its Marketing Game as Scale

Wrap up.

Machine learning offers the potential for marketers to interpret and act on large amounts of information in a scalable way.

In a world where we constantly accumulate more data than we know what to do with -- and where we desire to build individual relationships with our customers at scale -- this is an exciting development. Take the time to learn more about how your organization could benefit from machine learning in the near future. Start dipping your toes in the water with one of these five areas, and go from there.

Karl Wirth, CEO and Co-Founder of Evergage

Apple redesigned the credit card. Can it redesign debt?

APPLE’S NEW CREDIT CARD HAS MINDFUL DESIGN, BUT HISTORY SHOWS IT WON’T NECESSARILY CHANGE HOW WE SPEND–YET.

By Mark Wilson

The card is a thin block of aluminum, with your name laseretched on top of it. There are no credit card numbers, CCV codes, or signatures. This card was born in Cupertino–and those details just get in the way of sleek design.

This is Apple Card: the credit card Apple is releasing both as a tangible credit card and a virtual card inside Apple Pay, in conjunction with Goldman Sachs and Mastercard.

Announced at yesterday’s live event in Cupertino and due out this summer, Apple Card marks a strategic shift for the technology company: Don’t just sell consumers shiny new gadgets; sell them enticing lines of credit, too.

In terms of the Apple Card’s features, some are great–like no annual fees or late fees on payments. Likewise, interest rates won’t increase with missed payments, and Apple and its partners have agreed not to sell your spending data. Others are just okay, like 2% back on purchases, and 3% back on Apple purchases. Interest rates will range from 13.24% to 24.24% (based upon your personal credit score placed atop the rate baseline in March’s Federal Reserve data).

But this is Apple. It’s not just promising you any old credit card. It’s promising a credit card “designed for a healthier financial life,” according to Jennifer Bailey, VP of Apple Pay. As such, the card offers all sorts of handy, Apple-designed visual metrics to help keep your spending clear. It’s a crucial problem in 2019. We’re on the edge of a recession. As many of 41.2% of Americans have an average of $5,700 in credit card debt and less than half of Americans have the cash on hand to cover a $1,000 emergency.

But can Apple’s UX and service design really change the way people use their credit cards? To answer this question, I talked to David Gal, professor of marketing at the University of Illinois at Chicago and expert on behavior economics.

(I also spoke to a credit industry insider, on the condition of anonymity.) According to Gal, the Apple Card has some positive ideas and some potentially lousy ones. But in the end, it probably won’t make a dramatic difference in the way any of us spends money. Here’s why even Apple probably can’t revolutionize this product genre.

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WHEN IT COMES TO MONEY, BEHAVIOR IS TOUGH TO CHANGE

issue for people yet, so Gal is skeptical that Apple Card will– regardless of how easy and intuitive the UX is.

One major feature of the Apple Card is that it’s extremely transparent in how it displays and manages spending data. An algorithm runs on the phone to sort your spending into clear, color-coded categories, breaking down your expenditures into a beautiful gradient bar graph. Your monthly payments look something like inverted fitness goals on the Apple Watch. By dragging your thumb around these glowing circles, you can tune down your full monthly payment to an interest-bearing partial payment. As you go, a number appears inside the ring, stating in dollars what you’ll be paying in interest as a result.

WILL THE APPLE CARD FEEL LIKE A SUBSCRIPTION SERVICE FOR DEBT?

These tools are clear, neat, and handy–the sorts of analytics you could pull up and understand in a few seconds. Gal is quick to point out, however, that they’re not entirely new.

Banks and credit card companies have been creating similar graphics for a decade. Maybe not as clearly as Apple, but it’s happened, and it didn’t really impact the bottom line of consumer credit. “Consumer habits are very ingrained,” says Gal. “I don’t think there’s much evidence that changing the interface . . . is going to have a clear impact on consumers of their motivation to pay down debt.”

For example, Gal points to the transition from paper to digital billing, which made paying credit card bills easier– but didn’t radically change how people used their credit cards. “There was a big concern by credit companies that people will know more when they should pay,” he explains.

“Credit card companies make a lot in late fees. But this hasn’t affected consumer behavior much.” In other words, user-friendly credit management didn’t make debt less of an

Apple did not do any consumer studies when determining Apple Card’s behavioral design.

Rather, its decisions are based upon common sense, which might not make much sense when you delve into user psychology. For example, the Apple Card will pay users a 2% reward on all of their purchases daily rather than make users wait a month for a larger cash-back reward like many credit cards. At face value, this is a proconsumer decision: Give someone their money back right away because it’s the right thing to do. But look at reward science, and you’ll see that short-term rewards are highly motivating at driving behavior.

In other words, this feature could encourage Apple Card users to spend more often by rewarding them more often at a time when all of us should probably be saving our money. Gal believes there’s some validity to the argument that the Apple Card might goad people to spend more often by rewarding them often. But he thinks giving people such small, constant rewards, rather than a large lump sum, might end up feeling meaningless to consumers. “I feel like in some sense that reward is so small I won’t notice,” he says.

Another concern of mine is that the Apple Card’s interface makes it extremely easy to drag your finger and decrease your payment amount. Could it be too easy to dial down your payments, and therefore nudge up the interest you accrue?

Combined with the card’s constant micro-rewards and the option to pay your balance down on twoweek periods rather than monthly, I can’t help but wonder if the Apple Card will feel like a subscription service for debt. Will it will feel natural to always owe a bit of money and to pay a little bit of interest–a habit known in the industry as revolving credit? “Revolving credit is the easiest way to make money,” says the industry insider, agreeing that Apple Card might end up promoting persistent debt.

“Late fees are a form of revenue that make people feel angry and bad. But interest is hidden.” In other words, fees make us feel like we’ve been fleeced, but interest can easily become a quiet, persistent financial burden.

THERE’S PLENTY OF ROOM FOR THE APPLE CARD TO EVOLVE If Apple does want to treat its users ethically and promote healthier spending habits, there’s a lot the company’s designers could do with the Apple Card as the product evolves. Gal points out that balancing short-term spending goals with long-term transparency–that helps consumers understand the process of paying down debt–really can affect consumer spending for the better.

“My research, and some other experts have recommended in the past, that consumers tend to be motivated by the perception of progress. If consumers feel like they could get out of debt, [you can] break that down to more manageable things to do,” he says. “Maybe Apple could break it down, if each month you pay this amount, over 20 months, you’d pay down your debt. If they had some app that showed progress toward paying off debt, that might be helpful to consumers.”

Apple has not debuted such a feature in Apple Card (or Apple Pay) yet, but it’s easy to imagine Apple doing so in the future.

The company could easily leverage the fact that the iPhone and Apple Pay are evolving into a remarkably context-aware spending tool (as Google Pay is for Android users) to help users develop healthier behaviors. To do that, the company will have to resist temptation and become the only company in the credit industry that doesn’t grossly monetize consumer debt. And that might be the greatest challenge Apple has ever faced.

Mark Wilson is a senior writer at Fast Company. He started Philanthroper.com, a simple way to give back every day. His work has also appeared at Gizmodo, Kotaku, PopMech, PopSci, Esquire, American Photo and Lucky Peach.

How to Feel Authentic While Building Your Personal Brand GET BEYOND CLICHÉS LIKE “ADAPTABLE” OR “SELF-STARTER,” AND LEARN TO TELL MEANINGFUL STORIES ABOUT YOURSELF.

By Suzanne Muchin

For some people, self-promotion is analogous to a chore: we understand why it’s necessary, but we feel a little squeamish about it. Building a “personal brand” can seem contrived and inauthentic—even a little dishonest.

“People worry that selling themselves means giving a false impression,” says Suzanne Muchin, an adjunct lecturer in the Kellogg School’s architectures of collaboration initiative and co-host of the podcast The Big Payoff. “But nothing could be further from the truth. Great selling requires the purest form of authenticity.”

For Muchin, one important place this authenticity comes through is in the stories we choose to tell others about ourselves—stories that communicate our values, convictions, strengths, and goals.

“Whether you’re an entrepreneur, a job candidate, or an advocate for a new idea, good storytelling is one of the skills you need to stand out,” Muchin says.

Stories in service of your personal brand must be universal enough to work in a range of contexts. “Think of your personal brand as a portable suitcase—an authentic self that travels,” says Muchin.

But developing these stories is not exactly a straightforward task. How do we know where to start? And how personal is too personal? Muchin offers a few tips.

Turn Your Attributes into Stories A common error most of us make when trying to sell ourselves is relying on lists of attributes to characterize our strengths.

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You know the ones: adaptable, creative, organized, a good communicator, a real self-starter.

“If you made a word cloud of the language people use to describe themselves,” Muchin says, “you would see how often we use the same boring nouns and adjectives.”

That’s why stories are so much more effective. It’s one thing to say you are adaptable; it’s another thing to describe the various life experiences that shaped your adaptability.

But a strong personal brand is not just about demonstrating your professional strengths. Muchin suggests asking yourself “What’s my unique value proposition to the person sitting across from me? What’s the promise I make to them when I walk in the room?” The most incisive question you can ask yourself is “What do I want to be memorable for?” If you ask that question—which is ultimately a version of “what makes me special?”—your stories will begin to surface.

For example, on a recent episode of her podcast, Muchin featured “Office Hours” with a young professional who was interested in a career in healthcare, but was struggling to identify what made her especially equipped to stand out among her peers. In a real-time “ah hah” moment on the show, she recognized that her parents’ careers in that same industry (and at her current company) had shaped her most distinctive attribute: her confidence to enter any room with a level of professionalism and adaptability. By learning to tell that story in an authentic way, she was able to connect her personal history to a stand-out feature of her personal brand.

Be Willing to Get Uncomfortable Sometimes, what makes us the choice for a specific opportunity is something very personal: our past experiences, for instance, or a deeply held belief. Yet many of us have an aversion to digging deep, which explains why so many fail to be authentic when selling themselves.

“The amount of self-awareness it requires to discover one’s unique story can make people uncomfortable,” Muchin says.

“But that’s a necessary part of the process: you need to be willing to get uncomfortable. It’s not just about being social.

It’s about digging into your history to uncover what makes you unique.”

This does not necessarily mean sharing your innermost secrets. The trick is to highlight parts of yourself that will help you connect with others on a professional level. Being honest can sometimes mean allowing yourself to be vulnerable, but you don’t want to overshare and make the other person uncomfortable.

For example, Muchin recently met a young professional who was honing his networking skills. He expressed that he loved the feeling of being “all in” on a project, and likened it to being inside a disciplined training regimen. It turned out that this student had competed in several triathlons and was currently training for another. But rather than bragging about being an “Iron Man,” or relating a flat-footed story about work ethic, he was able to incorporate his love of training and its application at work to share a memorable attribute and tell a memorable story.

Still, with storytelling, there are few hard and fast rules, and

context is everything. It isn’t always easy to strike the balance between under- and oversharing on the spot, which is why it is so important to prepare ahead of time, Muchin says. If you do the work of self-discovery in advance, and come with a mental script, it will be easier to hit the sweet spot.

It will also help you to be present when the time comes to connect with others.

“Empathy is key in these situations,” she says, “and the only way to be empathetic is to be present. It’s easier to be present when you have confidence in your story.”

Have a Roadmap—and Be Disciplined Once you’ve refined the stories that bolster your personal brand, the next challenge is learning how to weave them into conversations at job interviews, networking events, or any other situation where the goal is to sell yourself. Every answer you give is an opportunity to tell one of your stories.

“Whenever you enter a room, ask yourself ‘What conversation do I want to have?’ You need to have a roadmap for how to arrive at your story, and for how that story then leads you to a conversation that will engage others.”

Many scenarios call for some version of artful authenticity.

Consider late-night television interviews, which are planned in advance but not entirely scripted. The goal is to give yourself the platform and the context in which to be your authentic self.

Muchin likens it to the approach she takes when she prepares to facilitate a panel or fireside chat. After plenty of preparation on the main points that she wants to make, as well as the stories she wants to either tell or bring out of others, Muchin spends time mapping out the “beats” of the conversation in advance rather than writing out “remarks” or a full script.

“You want to be authentic, but you also need to be artful,” Muchin says. “And that requires discipline.”

Learn to Enjoy Sharing Yes, developing a personal brand—and the stories that make it successful—can take some work. But the payoffs are not limited to your career. Muchin thinks people shouldn’t forget the intangible benefits of sharing our own subjective experience.

“Talking about ourselves in a certain way can be extremely rewarding—it stimulates brain activity and increases our dopamine levels,” she says. According to a 2012 study, sharing information about ourselves activates neural pathways associated with rewards—suggesting we find it inherently pleasurable to do.

“Storytelling mode is still our default setting, so it’s no surprise it’s the mode we’re in when we’re being the most authentic.

But sometimes we need to remind ourselves how powerful it can be, and that we can all tap into it.”

Suzanne Muchin, Adjunct Lecturer of Management Communications

Business models die.

Brands don’t

By Steve McKee

Your business does not have a brand. Your brand has a business.

That may sound odd, backwards and perhaps even heretical.

But it’s true.

Consider the smartphone on which you may be reading this.

When it was fresh out of the box and had gigabytes of memory to spare, it weighed roughly 6 ounces, depending on what model it is. Today, loaded as it is with emails, apps, phone numbers and an encyclopedia’s worth of other stuff, it weighs the same 6 ounces. Why? Because while your smartphone is material, the ideas represented on it are not. Ideas have no mass; only the expressions of them do.

Your brand -- your company’s positioning and the reputation it has earned -- is an idea. It’s information. But your business -- how you actually go about delivering products or services to your customers -- is material. And material things decay.

That’s why the key to longevity is continually realigning your business to your brand, not vice-versa.

I say continually because it’s a challenge that never ends.

Every business begins as an abstract idea; only as it gets executed does it become concrete. The reputation a business gains, however -- how it’s understood and the extent to which it’s respected -- always remains an abstraction. As the material execution of the business gets buffeted by change, so does the abstract representation of it, and both can deteriorate together.

Your choice is not whether your model will change, but how and when. You can manage it intentionally, or you can let it happen to you -- and risk harming or even destroying your brand in the process (Sears, anyone?).

Business models naturally get out of focus as the conditions in which they operate shift. That loss of focus, as I’ve documented, often leads to a loss of nerve and a lack of internal alignment, which can be deadly. In new research my firm conducted last year, we learned that companies in growth mode -- those that are most relevant to the marketplace -are (unsurprisingly) most focused on the marketplace. By contrast, companies that are struggling -- those that are least relevant to the marketplace -- tend to be distracted with and preoccupied by internal issues.

Regaining a market-driven perspective is the key to seeing where your business model needs to go. It has never been easy to attract, let alone keep, customers, because consumers have always been a moving target. But in the old days, the context in which consumers made decisions changed slowly, which meant that business models and the brands with which they were associated could evolve slowly as well, often at an imperceptible pace.

Today, it’s different. As contexts change more quickly, business models must do so, as well. That’s where revisiting your

raison d’être can help. Businesses are tied to marketplace expectations. Brands are tied to human needs. Expectations change with the times. Needs don’t.

For example, it’s a fundamental human need to stay informed about the world around us. Because newspapers filled that need for generations until recently, the expectation has been that they always would. Technology is changing our expectations of how we get the news, but it’s not affecting our need.

Similarly, we have always had a need for professional medical advice. For the past 100 years, that meant going to the doctor, an expectation that has become somewhat ingrained. Today sophisticated medical websites, virtual visits and digital diagnoses are causing our expectations to change, but they’re not affecting our need.

And civilized cultures will always have a need for higher education. In previous generations, our expectation for meeting that need meant attending a university. Today our rapidly transforming economy, the new career paths it spawns, and an exploding array of online learning options (abetted by runaway tuition inflation) are causing our expectations to change; they’re not affecting our need.

It’s easy for us to put our trust in business models, particularly if they’ve worked well over time. But because business models are material things, the question isn’t whether they need to change, but how. And when. And how fast.

If you have no idea how to navigate such a situation, here’s a north star: Great brands get back to first things: what needs they meet and why they exist, not what they do. The greater the equity a brand has, the more room it has to maneuver.

But brands are always either building equity or burning it, and you don’t want to burn your brand’s equity for any longer than necessary.

What is your brand’s first thing? What is its immutable idea?

What has always been true of it, regardless of era? How can technology, data, scientific advances, cultural changes and other transformations enable you to meet the need you’ve always met better or differently or more efficiently?

These are not difficult questions for newspapers, medical professionals, universities or any other industries to ask. It’s answering them honestly -- and acting on the answers with courage and alacrity -- with which we all struggle.

The smartphone was a once-in-a-generation advance, yet took little more than a decade to become commoditized.

Material things are material; only ideas live on. If you want your business to last for generations, recognize that what’s important is not how you meet customer needs, it’s what customer needs you meet. Hold loosely to your model. Cling tightly to your brand.

It’s not just Google or Facebook: The freezer aisle is ad targeting you now WALGREENS IS USING CAMERAS, EYE TRACKING, AND MOTION SENSORS TO SHOW YOU REAL-TIME ADS MEANT TO INFLUENCE WHICH ICE CREAM YOU BUY.

By Katharine Schwab

I walk into a Walgreens just off Union Square in New York City that seems, on the surface, to be just like any other pharmacy. But as I make my way to the back of the store, where there are refrigerators and freezers that store cold drinks, ice cream, and other frozen food, the walls start to glow. That’s because the doors of most of these coolers are no longer the see-through glass you’d expect: Instead, they’re covered with screens that display what’s behind them using cheery, digital images and flashing promotions.

A man walks up to the screens, perplexed. “What the fuck is this?” he exclaims to an employee nearby, who is there to solicit feedback on the newfangled freezer doors. She explains briefly. “This is the future,” he says in awe.

We live in a surveillance society, from the cameras that dot many street corners to the constantly tracking phones in our pockets. And soon, even the freezer door at your local convenience store will be tracking you too.

A startup named Cooler Screens is piloting a new door for commercial freezers and refrigerators that’s equipped with a camera, motion sensors, and eye tracking in six Walgreens pharmacies around the country, including the one off of Union Square. The doors can discern your gender, your general age range, what products you’re looking at, how long you’re standing there, and even what your emotional response is to a particular product.

The company says that the doors don’t store any of this data, which is anonymized, meaning that it won’t know that when you go to your local pharmacy you always buy ice cream (however, studies have shown that anonymized data, especially in cities, is possible to de-anonymize). Instead, it will use the data it’s collecting on you in real time to show you ads and promotions that the algorithm has determined might be relevant to you.

For instance, if a man is standing in front of a cooler where

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Coke is displaying ads, the cooler might show a Coke Zero ad since that particular product skews more male, while a woman might see a Diet Coke ad, according to Jamie Koval, the company’s chief design officer. Similarly, he says, if a twentysomething man was standing in front of the cooler, it might show him a Red Bull ad, whereas it might show Koval a Gatorade one, because of their different ages.

Similarly, the doors also use contextual information like the time of day to convince you to buy more. “You could pass by the beer door, and [the door] may notice that you’re picking up a six-pack of Miller Coors,” says Cooler Screens CEO and cofounder Arsen Avakian. “It’s 4 p.m., so it’s near dinner time. [It might] offer to you, buy a DiGiorno pizza for a special price if you’re buying a six-pack of Miller Coors.”

has booked advertising deals with more than 15 of the 20 top consumer packaged goods companies, including CocaCola, Pepsi, Nestle, MillerCoors, and Anheuser Busch. Even if a company doesn’t choose to advertise with Cooler Screens, their products within the cooler will still be represented on the screen with a life-size image, but the advertisers can buy things like banner ads, full-size ads that can take over one full screen or multiple screens, and real-time promotions.

These advertising deals are the lifeblood of Cooler Screens, which doesn’t require pharmacies to buy the doors at all.

Instead, Cooler Screens retrofits the doors of traditional coolers with its digital ones for free, and then sells the advertising on those screens. Avakian says that in the first two months of its initial pilot, products that were advertised on Cooler Screens had more than 20% year-over-year growth in sales compared to other products.

This isn’t just a good gig for the companies trying to convince you to buy their beer. Cooler Screens says it’s also benefiting the Walgreens where it was first piloted in Chicago, which has seen double-digit, same-store sales growth for the Cooler Screens section as compared to the rest of the pharmacy.

The company is also looking into ways that consumers might opt-in to sharing more detailed information with the system.

For instance, one day you might be able to indicate in the Walgreens app that you like gluten-free products. Then when you walk by a set of Cooler Screens in a store, a screen could highlight the gluten-free options for you.

Through its real-time tracking, Cooler Screens is trying to bring the ad-targeting capabilities of the digital world to physical retail. And since the company’s research has shown that 75% of shoppers make decisions about what they’re going to buy from coolers on impulse, these ads have the potential to impact whether people are going to purchase Häagen-Dazs or Ben and Jerry’s–right when they’re about to reach for a pint.

That makes Cooler Screens valuable to companies that are fighting for customers’ attention on the freezer shelf; so far, the startup

The idea for Cooler Screens came directly from the experience of Avakian, who previously started and ran the indie beverage brand Argo Tea. “I’ve spent hours standing in front of [cooler] doors, observing consumers and their behaviors, and witnessing all the challenges there for . . . a smaller brand [surviving] against larger companies like the Cokes and Pepsis,” he says. “But every time Argo would have the opportunity to have a little message or sticker, a tag saying that Argo is organic and non-GMO, we would see a significant increase in sales.”

Plus, coolers are generally a mess, with products in the wrong

places and prices or promotions not clearly visible–if they’re there at all. Avakian saw an opportunity to provide a better shopping experience for consumers, targeted advertising for brands anxious to stand out, and better product tracking for grocery and convenience stores, which currently lack an easy way to tell if a cooler is out of stock. He teamed up with Greg Wasson, the former president and CEO of Walgreens, and launched in November 2017. Its investors include Microsoft (all of Cooler Screens’ technology is built on top of the Microsoft cloud), Verizon, and Dover, one of the country’s largest door manufacturers.

As for consumers, Cooler Screens claims that its flashy screens provide a better shopping experience. But Koval, the head of design, was personally worried during the design process that people wouldn’t realize they were doors. So he deliberately designed the interface so that it corresponds exactly to what’s on the shelf behind the screen, with subtle details, like having the price tags hang down below each product, that would mimic the freezers people were used to. “The reason we went that route was we wanted to help consumers understand the world they were in and not go so far away from that so that [the interface] seemed like an operating system or looked too much like the way you see your apps on an iPhone,” he says.

analyzed. When I was looking at the doors, I couldn’t find any sign of the cameras at all, although I knew they were watching me. When I asked Koval about how he designed the doors so that people wouldn’t find it creepy, he pointed again to the fact that the data is anonymized as enough reason for consumers to accept the technology. But these are serious privacy considerations as retail stores bring some of the tracking that already occurs online into the real world.

Most of us are aware that Facebook is tracking what we “like” on its website, but few would expect to have their emotions monitored at the local pharmacy.

Ultimately, for consumers who don’t want to be targeted, the only way to opt out is to avoid stores that do it. But as more and more brick-and-mortar stores install similar technology, it will be increasingly difficult to avoid.

Still, it’s hard not to see the screens as freezer doors as giant iPads (the doors do have touch-screen capacity, but Koval says it hasn’t been enabled yet). One woman standing near me at the Union Square Walgreens remarked that she was frustrated when she touched the screen and nothing happened. The experience wasn’t as seamless as promised, either. One of the screens was malfunctioning, causing a constant flicker that ruined the illusion of the long digital shelves. In the ice cream freezer, a whole shelf was mislabeled, with half the items the door promised missing.

As I strolled around the back of the Walgreens, the screens informed me which drinks were zero calorie and which had a discount with a store card. I learned that Ben & Jerry’s Salted Caramel Core is non-GMO, while its Phish Food is kosher.

Banner ads for Smart Water flashed as I walked by.

Was I seeing a Smart Water ad because I’m a woman? It’s not clear.

That’s a problematic lack of transparency. There’s no disclosure that users are being watched and their behavior

Katharine Schwab is an associate editor based in New York who covers technology, design, and culture

Where is the love? Injecting emotion back into marketing – and doing it right

By Sam Walters

Have marketers forgotten about the heartstrings? Or are they too afraid to pull the wrong ones? Sam Walters says Australian marketing needs a healthy dose of emotion.

As Plato said, “Human behaviour flows from three main sources: desire, emotion and knowledge” – and when it comes to advertising, this mindset is crucial. Make me laugh. Move me. Inspire me. Motivate me. In this cluttered digital world where one quarter of Australians actively use an ad blocker, emotional connection is key.

Emotion absolutely matters in advertising UK department store John Lewis knows this better than most. Each year, its Christmas campaign goes straight for the emotional jugular. In 2018, its ‘More Than Just a Gift’ ad featuring Elton John went viral (as did all its previous Christmas ads).

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It’s an emotionally charged creative that (literally) looks back at the music legend’s journey from the present to when his mum bought him his first piano as a little boy. This emotional storytelling style is further complemented by the overlay of his hit single ‘Your Song’.

UK supermarket chain Iceland also nailed emotion. It used the Greenpeace ‘Rang Tan’ film to draw attention to an environmental cause – the story of an orangutan losing its home and family. This is one 100% pure emotional storytelling.

Are you welling up yet?

Exception or the rule?

According to research from Kantar, globally only 38% of ads use storytelling as a technique, with the majority focusing on more rational messaging. Given people are actively avoiding advertising, marketers must aim to strike the right balance between creating emotional impressions and delivering a product message.

Ads adopting emotional routes have a better chance of breaking through the brain’s filters. Emotional cues are often processed automatically and are a powerful contributor to the essence of an ad – even if people are only engaged superficially. We pay more attention to emotionally powerful events and this makes them more memorable. So, advertising that makes us feel something is more likely to be remembered.

Utilising neuroscience techniques such as facial coding and intuitive associations to understand implicit emotional response to brands and advertising is today crucial to success. Ads that are remembered will likely drive both a short-term and long-term response. If we take the John Lewis ad, it strikes an emotional chord – even if you’re not a fan of Elton – because it tells such an earnest, engaging story that leaves you with positive impressions about the John Lewis brand.

Emotion and gender People love to laugh, but many marketers are missing the punchline A powerful finding from Kantar’s AdReaction 2019 study is that we aren’t delivering emotion as effectively across the genders.

Humour remains a trustworthy tool when it comes to emotion, but incredibly, just one quarter of ads featuring only women use comedy compared to half containing only males – and yet humour works especially well in connecting with both genders.

Despite being a core driver of creative success among both males and females, marketers are missing an opportunity to engage females with humour. Re-addressing a balance like this can open brands up to more engaging and positive experience for all viewers.

Avoiding reinforcement of stereotypes drives emotion Kantar’s AdReaction found just 8% of APAC ads show women as ‘authoritative’, yet ads led by authoritative female characters outperform all other ads. In particular, they generate more expressiveness (measured via facial coding), which leads to shortterm sales boosts – a 26% sales shift for ads that have strong ‘expressiveness’. Again, emotion wins.

No one size fits all In our increasingly digital world, the reality is almost half of Australians think brand content on social media is not relevant.

This is a reminder for us to take the time to really review how we use emotion to connect, regardless of the format.

1. Tell a story Stories create the opportunity to engage audiences, build memories and provoke emotional and rational responses for brands.

The reason John Lewis’ Christmas ads work so well is the combination of all key elements to create an engaging story – they are enjoyable, easy to understand and differentiate the brand.

2. Leverage a tension founded on a human truth Personal relevance can and will strike a chord with your target audiences. For example, within the financial services sector, Kantar’s 2018 Winning with Women research found financial confidence is lower among women. In its creative, Citibank uses a female lead who is in control of her life (and her finances), aided by her Citibank account. This hooked women and drove strong appeal and affinity for the brand. Likewise, the Always ‘Like a Girl’ series is founded on a universal truth that girls lose confidence when they go through puberty.

The campaign turned this phrase around from an insult to an empowering message. This led to a double-digit growth in brand equity over the course of the campaign.

3. Have a clear product benefit Engaging people emotionally is not a call to ditch talking about your benefits. We are, after all, still in the business of selling our brands. Clarify your product benefit and how you can leverage this to deliver strong emotional rewards. For example, a good skincare product makes you feel confident, saving money feels good, a delicious meal makes you feel proud of serving it to your family.

Getting the balance right is key. Kantar’s Brand Z global equity database shows that balanced functional and emotional associations are most likely to grow sales. Citibank’s ad serves as an enabler to simplify ‘her’ life and makes her feel secure about her financial position.

4. Factor in your brand’s position on gender Cater to feminine and masculine needs within the same campaign idea and creative executions and build in time and budget for consistent copy testing, including implicit measurement and gender equality metrics to fully understand the dynamics of emotion. This will help you avoid reinforcing harmful stereotypes and ensure gender portrayals that really connect.

By ‘designing to the edges’ – considering the needs of different groups at each extreme and not by resorting to target the easy default in their commonality – you can create ads that satisfy all.

Sam Walters is head of creative development at Kantar

A closer look at creating a strong brand identity

By Ross Kimbarovsky

If you are starting a new business or growth in your existing business has stalled, you should understand how your brand identity impacts the success or failure of your business.

Brand, branding and brand identity describe different concepts, although they’re commonly and often incorrectly used interchangeably.

What is a brand?

People commonly use the word “brand” to talk about logos.

However, a logo is not a brand.

Put another way: a designer’s job isn’t to design a brand.

Designers design the brand idenity.

A brand is the sum total of the experience your customers and customer prospects have with your company or organization.

A strong brand communicates what your company does, how it does it and at the same time, establishes trust and credibility with your prospects and customers.

Your company’s brand is a promise you make to customers and prospects about your products, your services and your company.

Your brand lives in everyday interactions your company has with its prospects and customers, including the images you share, the messages you post on your website, the content of

your marketing materials, your presentations and booths at conferences and your posts on social networks.

Importantly, your brand is not what you say it is. Your brand is how your customers and prospects perceive your company.

What is branding?

Branding is a process designed to develop, among other things, a unique business name and custom logo design for a company, product or service.

But branding is also about the company’s reputation, the way a company’s products and services are advertised and about a company’s values.

The goal of the branding process is to build awareness and loyalty.

What is brand identity?

Brand identity is everything visual about a brand. It’s what you, customers and prospects can see.

The goal of brand identity design is to tell your company’s story in a way that creates loyalty, awareness and excitement.

Ramon Ray, a successful entrepreneur, speaker, bestselling author, and one of the country’s top small business experts, meets with thousands of small business owners every year.

According to Ray,

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“People immediately recognize a Starbucks logo or a BMW logo because those logos are consistently displayed and used by each Brand. Smaller businesses might think that they don’t need to be consistent with their identity, but they are mistaken.

People recognize businesses based on their brand identity.

Only small businesses that have a small mindset don’t worry

Phase 1: Discovery Start by evaluating your existing core identity Your core identity is often defined by your company’s vision (why your company exists), mission (what your company does) and values (the beliefs that guide your company’s actions).

New companies don’t have an existing core identity and can skip to Phase 2.

Existing companies should evaluate whether their original vision, mission and values are still relevant. Here are some helpful questions you can ask: • Are there elements that have emerged in the company’s culture that aren’t reflected in that vision, mission and values?

• Are some of the existing elements poorly defined or no longer valid?

• What’s most important to your company?

• Does your existing brand identity and marketing properly communicate your core identity?

Conduct market research competitor analysis

and

perform

a

Here are some useful questions to ask when you conduct market research: • How big is your market? about design and branding. Small business owners who think big, who think about growth, who think for scale -- those owners understand that branding is important and invest in their brands.”

Brand identity takes disparate visual elements and unifies them into a complementary system. Whenever your brand identity elements are shown, they should be consistent in their appearance, use, scope, color, feel, etc.

Every decision your company makes and every action that it takes affects the brand.

Poor design, ineffective marketing, inconsistent messaging and bad partnerships can all tarnish a brand.

Instead of leaving public perception of your brand to chance, it’s always a good practice to build and shape your brand.

That’s where a brand strategy can help.

A brand strategy is how your company will build, shape and share your brand with the public. A brand strategy helps you shape the public perception of your brand.

How do you build an effective brand strategy?

There are three core phases to develop an effective brand strategy for most companies: discovery, identity and execution.

• How has your market changed since the time you started your company?

• How has it changed?

If you’re looking for help to better understand your market, watch this video on defining the size of a market.

It’s not enough to understand your market. You also must evaluate your competitors to understand where your company is positioned in your industry.

There are three parts to a good competitive analysis: (1) defining the metrics and identifying the competitors you’re comparing, (2) gathering the data, and (3) the analysis. For a primer on doing this effectively, read 10 Tips for Evaluating Your Competitors.

Articulate your selling proposition

unique

Ultimately, a company’s unique selling proposition (USP) is what your business stands for. For example, you could say that Apple’s USP is found in “user experience”: everything they do is meant to have the user at its core.

Develop your brand identity assets

Develop personas for your target customers Personas help you figure out: • Who your customers are, • What their goals and frustrations are, • Where they spend their time, • When they’re the most active or available, • Why they make certain decisions and • How they interact with your products or buy your services.

Evaluate how people perceive your brand As we wrote in Brand Health, 6 Important Questions You Should Ask About Your Small Business Brand, “Brand health can be measured in numerous ways, including brand reputation, brand awareness, brand equity, brand positioning, and brand delivery. This isn’t an issue you can afford to ignore. You need to know if your brand is thriving or ailing – before it’s too late.”

When you understand your brand and the components that define brand identity (colors, typography, shapes, etc.) it’s time for you to work with your designer to develop the creative elements that will give life to your brand identity. These include your logo, website, product packaging, brochures and more.

Phase 3: Execution Once you’ve completed discovery and developed your core identity, you must find the right way to communicate about your brand through marketing. Execution is beyond the scope of this article, but you’ll find detailed chapters on execution in the complete brand identity guide for marketers and businesses.

A strong brand identity can mean the difference between your company succeeding beyond your wildest dreams or failing miserably.

Are you ready to get started?

Remember that you should evaluate both internal (your employees) and external (everyone else) perceptions of your brand.

Phase 2: Identity Define your core identity If you’re starting a new company, start with a blank sheet of paper and fully define your company’s vision (why your company exists), mission (what your company does) and values (the beliefs that guide your company’s actions).

If you have an existing company, you evaluated your core identity in the discovery phase and now have a chance to evolve that identity to better match your current/future vision, mission and values.

Articulate your brand positioning Your brand positioning explains how your company differentiates in the marketplace and how you are different from your competitors.

Often, your positioning can be summarized in one or two sentences to explain what you do better than everyone else.

Ross Kimbarovsky is founder and CEO at crowdspring and Startup Foundry.

Nostalgia Is Not Enough: Why Consumers Abandon Legacy Brands By knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu

Earlier this month, Sears ended a nine-decade presence in Lincoln, Nebraska, when it closed its store at the Gateway Mall.

So it was, too, at Park City Center in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where that town’s Sears store was one of dozens shuttered nationally in yet another wave of contraction by the oncemighty retailer.

The closings set off the expected misty-eyed recollections about the legacy brand and the cherished place it occupied in hearts across the country. In Colorado, where Sears closed two stores in Colorado Springs and one in Pueblo, a columnist for the Gazette mourned the loss. But she also admitted that her February visit to report on the closing was the first time she had been to Sears in a decade. “I left empty-handed, and a little heavier-hearted,” wrote Stephanie Earls.

Among legacy brands, Sears is in similar, troubled company.

Payless ShoeSource is liquidating its 2,100 U.S. stores. Toys “R” Us — where many a young American parent remembers buying his or her first Transformer or Super Soaker – closed its 730 locations last year and is struggling to come back in some form post-bankruptcy.

You might have expected that the pull of nostalgia would have protected these brands from the retail re-sorting underway.

Customers have emotional connections to certain stores — places where their parents brought them as children and where they did their first Christmas shopping, and developed certain buying habits and loyalties.

So what was the breaking point for customers? Price?

Experience? Convenience? Why, in the end, are customers abandoning their shopping heritage and breaking up with brands?

“It is more like these brands are breaking up with the customers. I think that at some point the customer decides to pack up and leave,” says Santiago Gallino, a Wharton professor of operations, information and decisions whose research focuses on retail. “To me, it looks like the brands are consistently giving the customer the signal that they are done with them, that they are not going … to give them what they expect from the brand and what they used to offer.”

At Sears, that once meant things the customer couldn’t get anywhere else, Gallino points out — the Kenmore brand, for instance. What Sears became was a store that lacked any sort of distinction, and the legacy part of its story just wasn’t enough. “[They are] losing touch with the customer and thinking customers will keep going to a particular retailer

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because their whole life they had an emotional connection [with it]. They do not understand why the customer is starting to buy other things at different places. And this, over time, erodes the relationship.”

It’s shocking to see big legacy brands like Gillette and Johnson & Johnson struggling, says Barbara E. Kahn, Wharton marketing professor and author of the new book The Shopping Revolution: How Successful Retailers Win Customers in an Era of Endless Disruption. Gillette, for instance, was blindsided by the Dollar Shave Club and Harry’s, which undermined Gillette with lower prices and a subscription model. Gillette now has its own subscription service, but “already the habit [of buying razors in a physical store] had been broken,” Kahn noted. “One of the reasons it can happen so fast is because with online digital marketing you can get to people directly. Digitally native vertical brands go right to the end user and can respond much faster; they collect data directly and not through intermediaries.”

“I think as much as we like to keep our traditions and routines, nowadays with all the information and reviews out there we can quickly learn that a company is cheating us.”–Santiago Gallino

Gillette “has responded for sure.

But Dollar Shave Club is already there, so Gillette lost some market share forever.”

In many cases, Kahn says, legacy brands have failed to meet digital natives on their own turf, “and digitally native vertical brands go to millennials with an emotional, branded story that speaks to their lifestyles. Legacy brands didn’t see the change and didn’t change fast enough.”

To wit, as one shopper matterof-factly told a LancasterOnline reporter on the last day of business for Sears at Park City: “Retail changes, and unfortunately, Sears didn’t keep up.”

A Bright Future for the Past But nostalgia still motivates buyers and remains an important consideration, Kahn says. “I think nostalgia will always be around. People tend to become more nostalgic during recessions; they long for the good old days and have a positivity bias about the past. They only remember the good things, so you see it in advertising, and market share of nostalgic brands picks up in less prosperous times.”

Nostalgia does appear to help loosen purse strings, according to one study. “We wondered why nostalgia is so commonplace in marketing. One reason could be that feeling nostalgic weakens a person’s desire for money. In other words, someone might be more likely to buy something when they are feeling nostalgic,” wrote the authors of a paper published in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2014. In fact, the study confirmed that people were willing to part with their money when feeling a sense of nostalgia.

“We found that when people have higher levels of social connectedness and feel that their wants and needs can be achieved through the help of others, their ability to prioritize and keep control over their money becomes less pressing,” wrote Jannine D. Lasaleta, Constantine Sedikides, and

Kathleen D. Vohs.

Some companies have become good at having their cake (offering cutting-edge product substance) and eating it, too (acknowledging history). “Nike, Apple, and Patagonia are all great examples of brands that are tending to current trends, but also often invoke their nostalgia and roots,” says Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger. “They are often innovative on the product front, but their core identity and emotional connection has been consistent over time, and they often leverage their roots as a way to drive current action.”

“Digitally native The products themselves are new, he says, but campaigns telegraph nostalgia with images like 1972 Olympics track star Steve Prefontaine or the original Nike shoe, or by trumpeting the year of their founding.

vertical brands go right to the end user and can respond much faster; they collect data directly

Others brands, however, haven’t and not through been as quick to figure out how intermediaries.”– to marry legacy with the evolving preferences and vibe of today’s Barbara E. Kahn customer. “I think Macy’s is probably in a challenging spot,” says Gallino. “They have a really large footprint they need to handle and manage. I think the structure and legacy system can hurt you when it prevents you from adapting to customers’ needs.”

Kohl’s is a good example of a company that has been able to leverage its past success and adapt it to today’s customers’ needs, Gallino notes. Kohl’s has a large footprint in nonmall locations that tend to be closer than mall locations, which allows customers to visit more easily and make a trip to the store more intentional. Compared to other chains with similar business models, Kohl’s has been more active in renovating the exterior as well as interior layout of the stores, which makes the visit more gratifying, he adds. And Kohl’s has developed a number of house brands internally across different categories, such as Apt. 9 and Sonoma Goods for Life, that are valued by their customers.

These factors allow Kohl’s “to attract new customers while keeping their ‘old’ customers happy,” says Gallino. “To have a healthy business, retailers need to be able to be relevant to their existing customers while attracting new customers to their stores.”

With an emphasis on a vast inventory and discounts decipherable only by parsing text-heavy fine print, Macy’s may be sending out a message that is contrary to what many shoppers are yearning for today. “ATTN: 1,000s of specials to brighten your day!” blared the subject line of one recent email from the retailer. But who has that kind of time?

The Trusted Retailer-curator In fact, says Gallino, “what these retailers who are struggling or failing have lost track of is the curator role” — the idea that seeing a product on the shelf means knowing that the retailer has vetted it for quality and will stand behind it. “That has a lot of value.”

A good model of retailer as trusted curator is Costco, says Gallino. “They are very thoughtful about what they bring into the store to offer their customers,” he says, “and if you go to Costco and talk about Costco with other customers, it’s clear that the role of the retailer as curator is very prominent. They will trust something Costco sells just because it’s there.”

Gallino points out that Costco’s authority is such that online reviewers will often assess the low quality of a particular product by saying that it does not meet Costco’s standards and they are surprised to see that another company is offering it.

“They have developed a very strong brand. There are many categories where the Costco brand is more expensive than the outside option. It’s not necessarily a cheap brand, but they stand by what they offer the customer,” Gallino says.

“Nike, Apple, and Patagonia are all great examples of brands that are tending to current trends, but also often invoke their nostalgia and roots.”–Jonah Berger Gallino says that legacy and the idea of a family tradition of buying in a certain store as part of a certain routine is still very relevant. But one countervailing factor now is the abundant and easy availability of information about what other stores are offering.

“Years ago, if you were a Sears customer or a Macy’s customer, you might have known what other companies were doing, but it was not as prevalent as it is today,” Gallino noted. “If you were offering not-so-great service or not so up-to-date stores, you could get away with that easier than today. I think as much as we like to keep our traditions and routines, nowadays with all the information and reviews out there we can quickly learn that a company is cheating us.”

If legacy brands were once efficacious to consumer fidelity, then social media has added an element of “promiscuity” to the retail environment, says Americus Reed, Wharton marketing professor and identity theorist. “It’s like being on Tinder — there are thousands of objects you can get connected with,” he said, referring to the dating app.

“The legacy brands no longer have a stranglehold because physical experiences can be replaced by digital experiences.

Legacy brands don’t have the only ability to create that moment of aha, of delighted joy,” Reed said. “That creates a natural fluidity with consumers being exposed to a lot more things, and that really helps break the spell. Going to Toys ‘R’ Us used to be a big deal, but now you’ve got a million retailers online.” Other factors competing for customer affection with

the nostalgia-legacy factor have multiplied in recent years: concerns about a company’s politics and ethical behavior, its policies on environment concerns and child labor, or the sourcing and composition of ingredients.

Johnson & Johnson, for instance, noticed late in the game that sales of its classic baby shampoo were dropping off, Kahn said. While touting “no more tears” on the label was good enough to captivate customers for generations after the product’s introduction in 1953, by the second decade of the 21st century parents were finding the shampoo’s golden glow too artificial-looking to massage into the scalps of their little Jades, Maxes and Sophias.

“What makes that shampoo iconic are the additives, and these people weren’t interested in it,” says Kahn. “Johnson & Johnson hadn’t been monitoring online shopping, they had been mostly paying attention to physical stores. So they missed a huge trend because they weren’t paying attention to changing consumer behaviors.”

“The legacy brands no longer have a stranglehold because physical experiences can be replaced by digital experiences.

Legacy brands don’t have the only ability to create that moment of aha, of delighted joy.”–Americus Reed On Reed’s list of legacy companies that have not done a good job of making a leap with customers: Campbell Soup.

“They are iconic, and now young people do not care. Digital natives do not know who Andy Warhol is. They don’t have those legacy memories of the brand connected to experiential moments and milestones from their childhood. In fact, suddenly, younger consumers have this idea that you can’t possibly get something healthy in a can.”

Among historic brands that have changed with the times: Barbie, which now has a “Shero” line of she-heroes in the likeness of inspirational figures like Misty Copeland, the first African-American principal dancer for American Ballet Theatre; NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson; artist Frida Kahlo and others – as well as Barbies of varied body types, skin tones, and a handi-capable Barbie.

Says Reed: “How do you attract new customers to the Barbie brand? The whole world is changing, and if you are a store or a brand you have to reflect what these changes are.”

Tastes are always evolving, and some brands respond well, says Kahn. “Look at Coca-Cola. People are just moving to water. Next thing you know, they’ll probably move to CocaCola-flavored water.”

The art of the DIY Logo

By Janil Jean

If one principle of marketing is true for every industry, it is that the simplest logos represent the most successful brands.

From Nike’s swoosh to Apple’s apple, from the swirl of Coke’s dynamic ribbon to the bullseye of Target’s target, these brands have a combined market capitalization of $1.45 trillion.

Do not, however, try to create art. Instead, try to achieve an objective that satisfies these points:

They also have the simplest and most straightforward logos.

The logos speak for themselves, without the need for text or a space to fill with needless text. For marketers, my advice is to emulate the best by doing your best to have a logo that 1) aligns with your message, and 2) that is simple enough to duplicate, even if you cannot draw—and that consumers and fans can replicate.

3. What people imagine that logo to be complements what they see, whenever they view it.

If you cannot do it yourself, think before having others do it for you. If you need a designer to do it, because no one else can come close to drawing it, you have the wrong logo. With the “wrong” logo, consumers will, in turn, draw (if they draw anything) the wrong conclusions about your brand.

Go back to the drawing board, pun very much intended, until you get it right.

How to create a DIY logo Draw your message without writing it or write it and then draw an image to match it, until the form of the image functions flawlessly. For example, write the first letter of the service you provide, like “H” for hospital, or draw the symbol that best represents what your organization does, like the emblem of the American Red Cross. Write and draw these things, not because they are easy to do, but because they make it easier to simplify your message.

1. The logo itself is accessible, not abstract.

2. The logo, be it the imprint on a business card or the insignia on a gift card, is identifiable.

What they should see is the result of editing. What they should see must be clear and simple. Getting there is no different than editing a sentence or refining a sketch.

The power you add comes from what you subtract—the extraneous, the superfluous, the repetitive, the extravagant.

You do not write paragraphs when a number will suffice. You don’t write paragraphs when three numbers, 911, are the number to call for help. You don’t write paragraphs when a symbol such as an arrow, telling you where to go, says everything without saying a word.

Edit the iconography of your industry, until you have your own icon. For example: If you sell coffee, refine the image of a cup and saucer. Pick the color of the band that wraps around the top and bottom of the cup, the handle of the cup too. Sign your name, in cursive, across the outside of the cup.

If your signature is already iconic, all the better, since you may now serve your customers coffee.

To do these things is to do yourself a favor. To do these things is to have a logo that customers favor, which is what every business wants. That’s what your business should achieve by fulfilling the wants of your customers.

Can Your Advertising Pass The Acid Test?

By Aaron Shields

What makes a theatre production great is what makes a brand great. This shouldn’t be surprising: strong brands are expressions of a core idea that their customers love; and, great shows make us fall in love with language, a character, a relationship, an idea, or pure visual beauty—something that cuts to the core of what the show is really about.

It’s hard to talk about modern theatre without talking about Peter Brook; it’s even harder to talk about the relationship between theatre and branding without him. Synthesizing the works of the great theorists before him, Peter Brook has spent his life examining what it means to get to the heart of the theatre: what makes an event a theatre performance; what is minimally necessary to put on a show; and, most importantly, how to make an audience in a specific time, in a specific place care about and understand the essence of the play.

In his seminal work The Empty Space, Peter Brook introduces the concept of The Acid Test—a simple criterion for determining the difference between a bad theatre production and a great one: does the production contain a moment that, if recalled, a spectator can remember what the play was about years after the show ends?

That’s it. But, think about how powerful of a test it is: Years after you’ve seen a show, the only thing left is a memory; you’re not going to remember all the details of the show.

But, if there’s a singular moment burned into your mind that captures the essence of the play, it was able to connect with you on a meaningful level.

In movies, these are the moments we often see in highlight reels, moments that bring back memories and make us want to recapture the way they made us feel: Garland’s “There’s No Place Like Home” at the end of The Wizard of Oz, Brando’s “I Could’ve Been A Contender” speech in On The Waterfront, or Bogart sending away Bergman at the airport

in Casablanca.

Great brands aren’t any different: anything the consumer interacts with should clearly convey the essence of your brand. Think about advertising: How many great ads have a memorable image that captures the essence of the ad and the brand? I’d bet every one of them. How many bad ads don’t have an image that captures the essence of the ad and the brand? I’d bet every one of them again.

Apple’s 1984 ad has it: the image of the runner entering the crowd of drones says everything.

Bernbach’s “Think Small” ad for the Volkswagen captures both elements too: the image and the two-word phrase say it all (the text adds to the story, but the essence is there in the image).

Or, look at George Lois’s Esquire covers: Andy Warhol sinking in a Campbell’s soup can; or Muhammad Ali, hands tied behind his back, pierced by a barrage of arrows: clear images that sell the cover story by conveying the core idea in one, clear image.

All these shows, ads, and covers have one thing in common: they’re created by people who fully understand who their audiences are and what they’re really offering to their audiences.

Great theatre productions and great brands can’t be built without this understanding.

How well do you understand your brand now? Ask yourself: If someone were to ask you to explain your brand in one or two sentences, what would it be?

Who does your brand really serve?

They’re big questions that should have short answers.

10 Ways to Break Through The Noise: How To Build Brand Engagement In A Cluttered Digital Landscape

By ForbesWomen

We’re living in the age of social and entertainment overload.

According to The Collage Group “the proliferation of screens, rise of social media, and creation of new digital media outlets have all converged to create unprecedented (consumer) stimulation.”

This is creating an unparalleled challenge for new and established brands as they struggle to break through the

social and media noise to engage their audience(s). It doesn’t help that the digital world is such a “fractured ecosystem” that brand survival often depends on how well you can navigate this complex landscape.

So how do brands break through the clutter to gain attention for their products? Alle Fister, the Founder and CEO of Bollare, a communications firm with headquarters in LA, NY,

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and London, has experienced first-hand this shift in consumer behavior.

Fister observes, “Modern consumers are looking for more than a product. They’re seeking an experience, a brand ethos and values that align with their own, and messaging that resonates with them on a personal level. According to Fister, a recent Edelman Earned Brand study sites that two-thirds of global consumers now make purchases based on belief with earned media, consisting of social and mainstream outlets, being more successful in engaging a consumers’ attention than paid advertising and owned media.”

Daniel Khabie, a well known digital brand builder, venturepreneur and former Global Chief Executive Officer of Mirum Global for over a decade, made the same observation noting that he has had “the opportunity to deal with some of the biggest brands, who are all fighting for the same space to be heard.”

Reflecting on the changing landscape, Khabie detailed, “It wasn’t until massive digital changes were well underway that budgets started to shift and huge dollars moved into the space. Once that happened, there was a ripple effect as technology companies such as Facebook and Google became advertisers. If you look at the landscape today, the $539 billion dollar advertising market is being taken over by everyone from a child social media star to the Amazon of the worlds. So the question is, how do you stand out from the pack?”

If this all sounds familiar, Fister and Khabie both have a series of insightful tips on how to garner attention for your brand in a cluttered media marketplace. Fister emphasizes, “The clutter is real for younger generations. With more sources of media than ever, it’s critical to understand the mechanisms underlying strong advertising to informed messaging and executional strategies. Mastering these elements can put your brand in a position to maximize your advertising dollars and break through the clutter.” Here’s 10 tips that just might make the difference for your brand.

Brand As A Utility.

According to Khaibe, “Your brand can’t just mean something anymore, it has to be experienced. Major brands are making major invests in creating brand experiences and tools that allow consumers to interact with a brand through Apps, touch screens, in-store kiosks, and so much more.” Khabie advises, “Don’t just build brands, build your brand as a utility that your customers can leverage.”

Create A Brand Personality.

You have probably heard this over and over but what does this actually mean today? Khabie observed “The world of marketing continues to change at a rapid pace and more than ever brands need a voice. In the past, that meant logo, tag-lines, color schemes, today this means Chatbots, Voice and Robotic customer service. Understanding your digital voice is critical to standing out.” A special caveat it to make sure to extend this all the way through the customer care experience.

Find The Right Influencers.

This is a topic that has caused much discussion over the past 12 months. Khabie says what so many marketers have quietly been thinking. “So many brands focus on who has the most followers, viewership, etc. It is critical to find the right influencers that can truly drive your brand forward.

For example, let’s say that you have a Do it Yourself brand and looking for DIY influencers. It is critical to find those influencers that not only have used your product before, but are doing it because they love what they do. Consumers are increasingly learning the difference between paid influencers and those who happen to get paid for loving what they do.” This is a major distinction and also one of the primary reasons local and micro influencers are gaining traction as brand advocates.

Go Where People Are Buying.

Put time and research into doing your homework on where your consumer is spending time online. Khabie shared, “Although Amazon is dominating the commerce marketplace, you have other niche retailers like Guilt that are focused on a specific customer. It is important to align with niche brands and find ways to interact with those customers together.

Just buying advertising space on the AMS platform’s from Amazon or Google is not necessarily going to give your brand the conversation you might be looking for to build sales and conversion. Look for places where the people you want to connect with are shopping.”

Be Clear And Concise.

Fister notes that especially when you are first starting up “be clear and concise, when asking yourself, ‘what is my product,’ is key. If you cannot clearly convey what your product is, how the heck is anyone else supposed to? In three, snappy sentences you need to be able to clearly articulate the who, what, when, where, why, how. Practice these talking points - tell them to your friends, family, strangers...and after you’ve articulated your message - ask them to tell you back what it is they heard you say. If there’s a disconnect… go back to the drawing board. With the rise of social media, people communicate much more frenetically - the volume of messages people consume per day is off the charts. Therefore clear, repetitive messaging (visually and with the written or verbal word) is paramount.”

Leverage Data.

Fister is a proponent of leveraging data and surrounding yourself with a checks-and-balances team. If you’re looking to spur a movement or innovate, Fiser emphasizes “read the data. Thanks to modern media, we have access to so many data tools; use them to your strategic advantage and take a sincere survey of the data you have, both internally and externally, to guide your gut instinct.” Fister adds that “you absolutely should trust your own intuition but is also a firm believer in surrounding yourself with other professionals who make you think. Chose wisely those professionals who ask open-ended questions, who see a situation slightly differently.

You’re much smarter by surrounding myself with really smart

people. Then be smart enough to listen and learn from them.”

Be An Expert.

When asked for her tips and tricks for standing out in a saturated industry, Fister swears by consistency and good old hard work. She recommends developing an expertise (which I personally refer to as a go to war skill) and consistently delivering on it. Always being willing to do better than the rest. With regard to actively driving industry trends, rather than jumping on the bandwagon, Fister urges to remain “constantly curious - read articles, listen to podcasts, attend talks; make the extra effort to take in a wide range of diverse perspectives on an ongoing basis.” Fister also advises to “try and test - don’t be ‘too smart’ to try, test, and learn;” and when you do fail (it happens), “reflect.” We “learn more in our failures than our successes (if we’re smart enough to).”

Ad-Testing.

On a new frontier, if you have the budget and it is applicable, The Collage Group found that many marketers “believe that cognitive questions (think brand favorability and purchase intent) don’t properly capture ad effectiveness.” In order to test at a deeper level, they conducted tests built around preand post- advertising with emotional / implicit features by measuring respondents’ unfiltered reactions by tracking their micro-expressions through their webcams as they watched the ads. To do this, they embedded facial expression tacking technology from Affectica into their survey platform. These unfiltered responses allowed them to quantify unhindered and honest reactions to advertising. This allows for measuring ad effectiveness in another way. In a simpler format, make sure to test email campaigns and other efforts in A/B testing to gauge optimal approaches and results.

Universality of Humor.

The Collage Group study also revealed (and we all probably

instinctively know this) “humor is highly effective in producing emotional reactions across generations. This is especially true for younger generations for whom humor is an important and integral part of successful advertising. Gen-Z and millennials were both more likely to describe advertisements as boring, so providing entertainment via laughs is often the price of entry to engage younger audiences.” This approach was actually the hallmark of so many successful Super Bowl ads this past year.

The Uneven Power of Emotion.

The Collage group also cited moving appeals are another type of emotion that runs through top ads (and remember this can be everything from a traditional ad to an Instastory).

This messaging relies on sentimentality and feeling. This approach can be very effective and featured prominently for all generations, especially older ones.

Finally, form matters. Apparently, the frame of reference for length has shifted across all mediums. Younger generations are much more likely to call out the length as a rationale for liking the content. Older generations actually had the opposite reaction, occasionally calling out content for being “too short”. Second, younger audiences are more discerning consumers of video. The Collage Group found that this group “spends so much time watching user-generated content, they’re appreciative of tactical elements that lead to good videos. Millennials and Gen-Z is more likely to respond positively to executional elements including music and complex editing.” Bottom line quality and content matter in every element across every medium.” Don’t skimp in attention to detail and execution.

NJ Goldston, a Webby award-winning creative and serial venturepreneur focused on emerging luxury, fashion, entertainment and direct-to-consumer brands and the Managing Partner of Athletic Propulsion Labs (APL) as well as a member of the Vogue 125, a brand ambassador for Net-A-Porter...

IT’S NOT TOO LATE FOR SOCIAL MEDIA TO REGULATE ITSELF

By David Siegel And Rob Reich

Silicon Valley’s search and social media giants determine who sees what information, and how. Never before has such a small number of companies had the power to connect billions of people instantly—and with it, the ability to shape and alter the information ecosystems of entire societies.

At the 2019 World Economic Forum in Davos last month, numerous world leaders called publicly for greater international regulation around how data is collected and used. The tech industry has struggled to respond to this debate with a coordinated, constructive plan of action. If it doesn’t do so soon, the result may be overly blunt, rigid, and potentially counterproductive regulation. It’s not too late for the tech industry to help formulate rules that make sense for everyone, but time is running short.

The crux of the problem is the opaque process that determines how algorithms curate information for billions of users.

Every time someone uses search or social media services, they’re relying on a secret and proprietary algorithm tuned to maximize something—usually user engagement with the service. Transparency and accountability are largely absent.

Experimentation and risk-taking are cherished hallmarks of Silicon Valley, but the norms around algorithmic governance have become a free-for-all. History teaches us that unregulated marketplaces can produce a race to the bottom, externalizing harms while socializing these costs and privatizing the financial gains. The financial crises of the 20th and 21st centuries demonstrated that unregulated markets cannot safeguard all interests of society. Now Silicon Valley’s search and social media giants, long resistant to oversight, face growing scrutiny. Too often, company-level efforts amount to a “trust us, the engineers are working on

it” approach. These tactics have fallen short.

To protect the public interest and their own businesses, these companies should set up a robust self-regulatory organization along the lines of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), an SRO that derives its authority from the Securities and Exchange Commission. Thanks to its independence from bureaucratic government agencies, FINRA is effective—and relatively nimble—at policing securities firms with sensible rules.

Given the extraordinarily rapid pace of technological change, it is unrealistic to expect governments to devise, update, and enforce effective rules by themselves. Such an approach can hinder innovation and produce marketplace advantages for the largest companies. And in the tech world, everything from consumer behavior to hardware and software capabilities evolves too quickly for static statutes to remain meaningful for long.

Twenty years ago, regulators faced similar challenges in the financial industry. Rules were often arbitrarily enforced and created an uneven playing field between larger incumbents and smaller players. Ultimately, through a partnership between industry and government, FINRA formed as a more agile and effective way to help protect the public interest. Industry’s involvement helped ensure that in-house technical expertise accompanied strong rule-writing and enforcement powers, reducing regulators’ reliance on blunt and infrequently updated laws.

The key advantage of strong self-regulatory organizations like FINRA is their ability bridge the gap between appropriately slow-moving governments and complex, fast-changing

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industries. Since FINRA is technically not a government body, it is better able to provide close, active oversight while keeping pace with constant shifts in the financial industry. At the same time, the government sanction FINRA enjoys is essential to avoid the appearance of creating a cartel, a concern that plagued its precursor, the NASD. FINRA’s mission is “to provide investor protection and promote market integrity” in order to maintain investors’ trust in financial markets. What would the objective of a similar self-regulatory organization for the tech sector be? To protect citizens by promoting the integrity and user-controlled privacy of information on search and social media platforms.

Promoting public trust in the integrity of information on search and social platforms is more crucial than ever. Search personalization and similar algorithms work well—they keep users engaged by delivering personally relevant content—but have a dark side: The way search results are presented and the order in which social media posts appear in a feed can manipulate public opinion and behavior. In effect, whether they mean to or not, these companies are inching toward the creation of a custom echo chamber for everyone on the internet—but there’s no governance or transparency around the process.

FINRA provides a valuable blueprint for how a self-regulatory organization for the search and social media industry might work. The organization would be funded on a sliding scale by industry members (to ensure both large and small companies’ interests are represented fairly), independent of government but ultimately accountable to the Federal Trade Commission or another agency, and staffed by highly technically competent individuals paid at industry rates. The organization would be

tasked with writing and enforcing rules to protect the basic integrity of the online public sphere.

For example, it could help ensure that companies’ use of proprietary algorithms supports society’s fundamental interest in a high-quality information ecosystem, just as FINRA examines trading data to detect fraud. Crucially, it would do this without compromising companies’ valuable intellectual property or removing incentives to innovate. It could create clear rules about an independent appeal process when companies ban or delete information, and it could set forth requirements on algorithmic accountability.

It’s true that some companies have instituted their own policies on these issues—Facebook recently announced an effort to create an independent appeals process for its content moderation policies. But no framework applies to the industry as a whole. Self-regulatory organizations’ ability to balance the public interest with commercial imperatives should make a broad framework attractive to all stakeholders involved.

The passage of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation and California’s Consumer Privacy Act signal that it’s time to change the way we approach governance of the online public sphere. We must seek solutions that avoid the pitfalls of clumsy legislation and signal the maturation of the tech industry as it comes to grips with its power.

If search and social media companies can’t figure out how to supervise themselves constructively, lawmakers are bound to step into the void more aggressively. Time is running out for industry leaders to take the initiative and build an effective oversight model themselves.

How Brands Benefit by Using Virtual Reality to Engage Customers [Infographic] ONCE PERCEIVED AS NERDY GAMER TECHNOLOGY, VIRTUAL REALITY (VR) IS BEING EMBRACED BY BRANDS ACROSS THE GLOBE.

By Vahe Habeshian

Marketers are realizing the potential of VR to leave indelible impressions on consumers, so you might want to check out how you can use the technology to engage your own customers.

An infographic by The Missing Link, a provider of business continuity plans and disaster recovery solutions, makes the case for why brands should use virtual reality.

The benefits, according to the infographic, include increasing trust via virtually trying before buying, providing more sensuous as well as more intellectual experiences, minimizing product returns, providing engaging experiences, and more.

Jim Boulton is the curator of “Digital Archaeology,� an event that celebrates the golden age of the website and raises the profile of web archiving. The show has featured as a key part of Internet Week, gaining global media coverage and support from The British Library, The Library of Congress, and Google.

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AI in advertising means more than bidding By warc.com

Google’s display advertising is deploying AI in a way that allows it to tailor messages based on the content of the site, in a demonstration of its cloud-based AI capability.

Speaking at Advertising Week Europe, Google’s EMEA head of media, Emily Henderson, explained that AI could be deployed in advertising beyond optimising ad-buying and into creative executions.

Working with creative agency Essence, the search giant needed to go beyond a dynamic banner in order to showcase its Google Home smart speaker. (For a full treatment, read WARC’s report: Beyond the magic banner: Google taps AI to sell AI.) The Guardian, the UK-based media organisation, as a longtime partner and a premium publisher, opened up its content API so that Google’s new banner idea could adapt to the content on the page.

Working across teams in a ‘hackathon’ session, all three organisations – client, agency and publisher – brought engineers, creatives and planners to the table to think up an ad that could work with the Guardian content while also depicting the Google Home’s capability.

“We thought, very quickly, what we could do is to show the Assistant recommending dishes that would accompany the recipe that you were looking at on the [Guardian] site,” said Andrew Shebbeare, co-founder and chairman of Essence.

Initially, using a simple keyword search to work out if the recipe in question was sweet or savoury, the team thought they could recommend additional ingredients or accompaniments that would work with the dish. However, words like ‘tart’ which can describe both savoury and sweet dishes caused problems.

The solution was to focus the understanding on images as well as text using Google’s own AutoML program, which would create a model that the content could be served against.

“So we’ve analysed our image, we reckon that’s definitely a sweet dish, we cite the copy and recognise that the recipe that’s being built here is for a lemon and ginger friand (whatever that is). And we’ve also analysed the text and extracted the fact that the key ingredient in this recipe is ginger”, Shebbeare added.

With that information, the ad could illustrate a potential command to the Google Home device, with the copy reading: “Hey Google, add lemons and ginger to my shopping list.”

Ultimately, the lesson here is that AI, or more specifically machine learning, can help to create contextually relevant copy at scale by understanding both words and pictures.

You don’t need a computer science degree and you don’t have to use only Google’s platform to access services like this. Amazon and Microsoft have comparable products that make machine learning accessible.

Book,

&

Line

Sinker

By Seth Godin

Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen

For the first time, Godin offers the core of his marketing wisdom in one compact, accessible, timeless package. This is Marketing shows you how to do work you’re proud of, whether you’re a tech startup founder, a small business owner, or part of a large corporation. No matter what your product or service, this book will help you reframe how it’s presented to the world, in order to meaningfully connect with people who want it.

By Donald Miller Donald Miller’s StoryBrand process is a proven solution to the struggle business leaders face when talking about their businesses. This revolutionary method for connecting with customers provides readers with the ultimate competitive advantage, revealing the secret for helping their customers understand the compelling benefits of using their products, ideas, or services.

Branded Nation: The Marketing of Megachurch, College Inc., and Museumworld

A New Brand World: Eight Principles for Achieving Brand Leadership in the Twenty-First Century

This Is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn to See

By James B. Twitchell Branded Nation uncovers a society where megachurches resemble shopping malls (and not by accident); where a university lives or dies on the talents of its image makers -- and its ranking in U.S. News & World Report; and where museums have turned to motorcycle exhibits and fashion shows to bolster revenue, even franchising their own institutions into brands.

By Scott Bedbury, Stephen Fenichell

How Cool Brands Stay Hot: Branding to Generations Y and Z

Influence

By Joeri Van den Bergh, Mattias Behrer The book reveals how Millennials think, feel, and behave, and discusses how recent developments such as the recession, mobile marketing and purchasing, and the adaptation and evolution of social media, have impacted Generation Y. All the chapters offer new case studies and interviews, from companies such as H&M, Forever 21, and Converse, as well as updated facts, figures, and research.

Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator

By Ryan Holiday I’m a media manipulator. In a world where blogs control and distort the news, my job is to control blogs-as much as any one person can.

Why am I giving away these secrets? Because I’m tired of a world where blogs take indirect bribes, marketers help write the news, reckless journalists spread lies, and no one is accountable for any of it. I’m pulling back the curtain because I don’t want anyone else to get blindsided.

In A New Brand World, Scott Bedbury, who helped make Nike and Starbucks two of the most successful brands of recent years, explains this often mysterious process by setting out the principles that helped these companies become leaders in their respective industries.

By Bob Cialdini As useful to salespeople as it is to marketers, Bob Cialdini’s book is all about how people say “Yes!” and what you can do bring them to that point.

In a series of intensely practical observations, Cialdini reveals how your actions and words can profoundly effect the desires and needs of your customers, colleagues and even your competitors.

Essential stuff.

Eating the Big Fish: How Challenger Brands Can Compete Against Brand Leaders

By Adam Morgan The second edition of the international bestseller, now revised and updated for 2009, just in time for the business challenges ahead.

It contains over 25 new interviews and case histories, two completely new chapters, introduces a new typology of 12 different kinds of Challengers, has extensive updates of ...

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Brands in Glass Houses: How to Embrace Transparency and Grow Your Business Through Content Marketing

Building Strong Brands Kindle Edition

By David A. Aaker

Brands in Glass Houses shines light on businesses that are revealing themselves authentically, not just as a marketing tactic, but also as a way of doing business. It shows you how to provide interesting content so that customers can connect with your brand on an emotional level...

As industries turn increasingly hostile, it is clear that strong brand-building skills are needed to survive and prosper. In David Aaker’s pathbreaking book, Managing Brand Equity, managers discovered the value of a brand as a strategic asset and a company’s primary source of competitive advantage. Now, in this compelling new work, Aaker uses real brand-building cases from Saturn, General Electric, Kodak, Healthy Choice, McDonald’s...

Overthrow: 10 ways to tell a challenger story Kindle Edition

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

By Mark Holden, Malcolm Devoy, Adam Morgan

By Michael Lewis

By Dechay Watts, Debbie Williams, Said Baaghil (Contributor)

Anyone interested in challengers is interested in compression: how do you make a story utterly compelling in a very short space of time? And one of the reasons that the concept of the ‘challenger brand’ has caught on, you might argue, is that it itself does just that: within just two words you surely have all the ingredients of an engaging story – conflict, a protagonist and an adversary, an anticipation of a future event...

Growth Hacker Marketing

By Ryan Holiday This book points out that many of the megabrands of today haven’t spent much of anything on traditional marketing. Instead, they figure out how to reach customers who “sell” other customers on using the product. While I’m not certain that the techniques Holiday espouses will work in every (or even many) business situations, the book is worth reading simply to understand how companies like Dropbox and Twitter suddenly burst out of nowhere.

Forty years ago, Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky wrote a series of breathtakingly original papers that invented the field of behavioral economics. Led to a new approach to government regulation, and made much of Michael Lewis’s own work possible. In The Undoing Project, Lewis shows how their Nobel Prize–winning theory of the mind altered our perception of reality.

Netflixed: The Epic Battle for America’s Eyeballs

By Gina Keating Journalist Gina Keating recounts the fast-paced drama of the company’s turbulent rise to the top and its attempt to invent two new kinds of business. First it engaged in a grueling war against videostore behemoth Blockbuster, transforming movie rental forever. Then it jumped into an even bigger battle for online video streaming against Google, Hulu, Amazon, and the big cable companies.

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics

Red Team: How to Succeed By Thinking Like the Enemy

By Richard H. Thaler

By Micah Zenko

Nobel laureate Richard H. Thaler has spent his career studying the radical notion that the central agents in the economy are humans predictable, error-prone individuals. Misbehaving is his arresting, frequently hilarious account of the struggle to bring an academic discipline back down to earth and change the way we think about economics, ourselves, and our world.

Red teaming. It is a practice as old as the Devil’s Advocate, the eleventh-century Vatican official charged with discrediting candidates for sainthood. Today, red teams-comprised primarily of fearless skeptics and those assuming the role of saboteurs who seek to better understand the interests, intentions, and capabilities of institutions or potential competitors-are used widely in both the public and private sector.