Branding matters. Because branding matters.
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Dear Friends: It’s a promise: this issue, you will be amongst the august company of quality content. Not that it is not at other times, but still.. Going the DTC(Direct-To-Consumer) route is now a compelling strategy for a lot of brands; here, we talk about how Gamification can be a great route to adopt as you do that. Brand Love is a myth.. see how it is getting busted in this edition. We take a look at the future of what an advertising agency should look like. Content is king, emperor and kingdom. Understand the three rules of delivering great content experience. Attention as a commodity is at a huge premium in a world of perennial distraction. Take a look at why you need to pay attention to attention as a marketer or brand guardian. Sonic branding has come of age and definitely on the comeback rail. We evaluate the most popular sonic logos of 2021. Just like your personal brand warrants a lot of importance to your body language, so does your Digital Body language. Understand more in this issue. This debate has been raging for quite a while: should go brands go in house with their marketing|branding|advertising or call for the services of an external specialist agency? We take a closer look and weigh both the options. E Commerce continues to be an enigma- setting up, learning quickly and scaling at speed- we offer a primer in this edition. The power of nudges in marketing can never be overestimated. Take a read at what Maya Shankar has to say about it. There is ample more to soak in and take action on. So, I leave you to do exactly that. Till the next, my very best!
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Managing Editor: Suresh Dinakaran Creative Head/Director Operations: Pravin Ahir Magazine Concept & Design/ New Media Specialist: Mufaddal Joher Chief Strategy Director: Rishi Mohan Brand Engagement and Outreach Specialist: Anuva Madan Chief Country Man, India: Rohit Unni Brand Trends and Research Architect: Meeta Pendse Revenue Growth Architect: Ritu Dey Country Head, Australia: Norbert D’Souza Country Head, UK: Sagar Patil Performance Marketing Architect: Suresh Babu Technology & Web Enabler: Vyanky Charakpalli Social Media Outreach: Pooja Chhabda SEO Advocate: Santhosh Rakonda Content & PR: Nitin Kumar
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CONTENTS Brand love? That’s just plain silly Leveraging Consumer Insight & Brand Strategy Pay Attention to Attention! Define the Need Before You Bleed: Marketing Rigor Can Reduce Start-Up Failure Gamification strategy and DTC brand marketing How to Optimize Your Omnichannel Marketing Strategy The Three New Rules of Content Experience Hire a Marketing Agency or Hire In-House Marketers: Which Is Right for You? What the Agency of the Future Needs to Become Building an e-commerce business: Lessons on moving fast These are the most popular sonic logos of 2021 The Power of Nudges: Maya Shankar on Changing People’s Minds How Effective is your Digital Body Language? Let’s find out... Why Social Media Should Leave Your Marketing Department—And Where It Should Go Instead Delivering contextually relevant ads in a post-lockdown, privacy-first landscape Four Examples of Brilliant B2B Marketing [Infographic] Harness the Power of Sound to Improve Mental Health and Well-Being Here’s what happened when this company banned meetings YouGov Recommend Rankings 2021 MENA Book, Line & Sinker
Brand love? That’s just plain silly By David Penn
Southwest Airlines speaks a language of love, but for Palantir, it’s all about war The use of metaphor in business is nothing new. Metaphors have been harnessed for decades to guide a company’s mission, shape its storytelling, and create a culture. As companies battle for attention from customers, employees, and investors, an effective metaphor can help a company craft a narrative that distinguishes itself from others. Businesses often talk about a “company voice,” a unique lexicon and tone that infuses its marketing, investor relations documents, and internal emails. Metaphors are key to the company voice because they are easily remembered and manipulated to suit different contexts and audiences. To understand how this works in action, let’s consider the divergent examples of Southwest Airlines and Palantir, which frequently use “love” and “war”, respectively, as guiding metaphors — only insofar as they are convenient for the stories they want to spin.
Business as Love: Southwest Airlines Southwest Airlines began its service in 1971 out of Love Field in Dallas. The company started with a vision to change the airline industry by focusing on customer experience: making the friendly skies even friendlier. They went public in 1977 with the ticker symbol LUV. In the past, they’ve served “LUV bites” as snacks on planes and dispensed tickets from “LUV machines”. Much of Southwest’s marketing and internal material is based on the concept of spreading love and care. The heart has become the carrier’s main visual symbol of this commitment to service, and love is a clear metaphorical device in their mission statement and their service commitment. Southwest’s website has many examples of this metaphor in plain sight. It’s vision is “to be the world’s most loved […] airline”. It’s employee promise is full of them: “I will
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show my Servant’s Heart by delivering Legendary Customer Service and treating others with respect. I will express my Fun-LUVing Attitude by not taking myself too seriously and embracing my Southwest Family.” Their messaging references being “in LUV with our Customers” and how its “LUV has spread from coast to coast and border to border thanks to our hardworking Employees and their LUV for customer service”. There are multiple references to Heart, connecting People, neighbors, community, and togetherness — all concepts related to love and social bonding. In Southwest’s 2019 annual report, CEO Gary Kelly referred to his employees as “family members” who he is “proud of” and who “have my deepest appreciation and love”. Companies that use metaphors well, like Southwest, tailor the metaphor to each of its stakeholders. The airline wants employees to feel like family, so it uses candid phrases to express appreciation and thanks. For customers, love can take the form of someone caring for another — providing for the customer, serving them, creating a neighborly community. And for investors, love can take the form of providing shelter and safety. They want to be trustworthy and want shareholders to believe that their money is safe and being put to use for a beneficial cause. The metaphor has paid dividends. If we believe that language can shape the culture of the company as well as the brand perception of consumers, it is no surprise that YouGov puts Southwest Airlines at the top of its list of most popular airlines and is consistently known as one of the best places to work. Customers and employees love them back. Business as War: Palantir While business may well be about love to the folks at Southwest, business is closer to war for those at Palantir, a data analytics software firm. At Palantir, this connection is not nearly as overt. To be clear, Palantir does not embrace this lexicon in any formal way, but the language that the company uses in its external-facing documents strongly suggests support for the war and military service metaphor, due in part to the fact that the Department of Defence is one of their flagship clients. Palantir’s website is chock full of language often used in the context of battle. A “Palantirian”, as its employees are called, have “an uncompromising engineering mindset with an unwavering focus on executing in service of the mission”. The software is “on the front lines, sometimes literally, and that means so are we”. In its S-1 filing, Palantir’s mantra includes phrases like: “we go where we’re needed most”, “we are engineers on a mission”, and “we seek out the most critical problems we can find — the ones that pose threats not only to many of the world’s most important institutions, but to the people they serve”. In closing, the document reads: “If we are going to ask someone to put themselves in harm’s way, we believe that we have a duty to give them what they need to do their job. […] We have chosen sides, and we know that our partners value our commitment. We stand by them when it is convenient, and when it is not.” The language is dripping with the aggrandizement and seriousness of a unit going into a fight, talking extensively
about the “mission”. Its three “guiding ideas” are: the best idea wins, nothing is permanent, and keep focused on the mission. One sub-team is specifically referred to as “Mission Operations”, and in descriptions of some engineering jobs, the role or job function is referred to multiple times as “the mission”. Some of these phrases have made their way into a broader business lexicon long before Palantir even existed, but the use of this word in so many contexts and by using it where other words would certainly do, the phrasing establishes a deeper connection to soldiering. Palantir understands that this kind of motivation for team members is effective, especially for young men, which, in today’s reality, many software engineers are. Getting its team to associate work with an honorable battle is a motivational tactic that has been used for millennia, but now the battlefield has moved to office buildings in Palo Alto and soon Denver. The company does not shy away from using war-like metaphors. This metaphor should resonate with shareholders and market analysts, too. Showing strength, fortitude and commitment to goals while draping it in patriotism is a great way to convince investors that a company that has not made money to date will reach profitability — especially when many of those in the world of finance are competitive men. Palantir’s use of metaphor must be somewhat subtle because war is more of a hot button issue than love. But unlike most business-to-consumer (B2C) companies, Palantir does not have to worry as much about the court of public opinion. In fact, the war metaphor is very likely to resonate with its clients in the US government or with veterans in the public sector. Even without a military background, the concepts of battle, honor, and a mission-driven mentality can draw like-minded enterprises to work with Palantir. As Palantir marches on after their public offering, take note of their martial tongue. The Metaphor as a Tool Metaphors are useful mechanisms to broadcast a company’s values, culture, and brand to the world, to customers, to investors, and to its internal team members. But metaphors are not destiny. Rather, they are used to achieve specific goals using creative language. Southwest Airlines only uses love as far as it can get customers to associate the brand with friendliness and good service. Love is not something to pitch investors when the bottom line is under scrutiny. Palantir only uses war as far as it can motivate its team members, get customers in the door, and rally investors. For example, Palantir’s trademark horizontal team structure has no resemblance to military hierarchies. Creating a company voice wherein metaphor is used effectively can help build a lasting and valuable brand, while clearly communicating a vision. Metaphors can be simple, powerful, and malleable linguistic tools, and the best brands use them with frequency and potency. As more companies continue to fight for attention from customers, investors, and job-seekers, more will have to learn to wield the tool of metaphor with aplomb to get noticed and stay relevant.
Leveraging Consumer Insight & Brand Strategy By Shruti Saini
What is a Consumer Insight? And perhaps, more importantly, why is understanding and applying consumer insights important to the development and deployment of brand strategy? Let’s first start with a definition, then get into what distinguishes insight from data, and lastly conclude with how to activate insights to drive your marketing strategy. A Consumer Insight is an ‘Ah-Ha.’ It’s the recognition of the ‘why’ - the story - behind an emotion or behavior.
underlying emotional matrix behind a particular motivation or action. Spin the axis in your mind on how consumer selection shows up in a given category. Insight is not the top-down behavior. It is the bottom’s up contextual rationale that delivers the ‘I want’ because ‘I feel/need/desire’ that eventually leads to what we see manifested in the behavioral data, the ultimate choice of ‘therefore I buy/select’.
It’s the light bulb moment that often times isn’t an explicit moment at all, but rather a pathway of light bulbs - truths - that collectively light the way towards consumer understanding.
Constructing an insight illuminates the path to the ‘why’ and is situational & circumstantial based on a confluence of consumer needs. These factors can be multi-fold and multifaceted across a breadth of dimensions — both demographic and psychographic.
At the heart of it, an insight is a statement of a truth, often times expressed and revealed as a tension, that unmasks the
Main takeaway — Consumers are multi-dimensional and what they do, what we often see and measure explicitly, is
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the optical crashing waves surface of the ‘what’. Consumer insight aims to dive even further down, to the deeper levels of the consumer ocean so to speak, to where the ‘why’ lives. This leads to the second crucial distinction of what an insight is versus is not. A Consumer Insight Throws Light on a Data Point. A consumer insight is not a data point. It’s an unlock of it. Take for example the following hypothetical example — men in the U.S. between the ages of 18–24 have increased their usage of food delivery apps, growing overall from 22% to 48% (versus a year ago). Although interesting, this observation is still just that — a raw observation. It’s a grey data point. It needs the color and context of consumer insight to be understood. Going deeper and asking the question of ‘why’ reveals that crucial link, the cause behind the effect — it might be the case that a subset of these men turn to delivery apps because they want to maximize their time and on-demand food delivery allows for that. For others, it might be driven by a nudge to experience and try a diversity of cuisine that is now readily accessible to them.
Which leads us to how insights can strengthen & guide brand strategy. A Consumer Insight Connects Brands to Relevance. The ultimate goal of brand marketing is to deliver insulated relevance. Offering a product or service in a way that is unique and differentiated and that ultimately invites the consumer to routinely select ‘you’ above all others for a certain (and likely evolving) needs-scape. How to do that successfully? Brands can’t operate in a vacuum. They have to be alert. And alertness requires an understanding of the ‘why’ — at the intersection of that ‘why’ (the consumer insight outlining a need) and the ‘how’ (the brand’s role in resolving it) lives sustained relevance. The choreography to relevance is a tricky one — the steps are mapped to different truths that combine in often intricate ways to reveal insight. These steps to consumer insight are often rooted in an amalgam of truths, various light bulbs that must be strung together — •
Yet for others, it might be a sheer value play, perhaps an inability to otherwise get access to ready-made food because of an inability or lack of desire to cook for themselves.
The macro forces and trends impacting consumer choice (could be universal sea changes shifting outlooks, perspectives, & expectations).
•
And for yet others, it might be a splurge to connect with others over a shared event or experience, perhaps during a larger gathering that requires this type of ‘catering.’
The micro forces influencing individual attitudes & preferences (could be life stage, age, gender, ethnicity, passion points, & life circumstance modifiers).
•
The energy field at the physical or digital shelf impacting accessibility (could be the platforms, offerings, assortment, & mix).
Those base needs across Convenience, Access, Necessity, and Connection are just the starting point of truths, the light bulbs, to dissecting how this seemingly monolithic group of ‘men ages 18–24’ partners with delivery apps to satisfy distinct needs. Each group might have commonalities across, but they likely also have certain drivers of difference among - knowing what those are can act as a real enabler of clarity and growth for brands. Often times the commercial data is just the starting point, not the finish line — it requires the drivers analysis of consumer insights to unwind an initial data view into multiple others which will together compose the ‘why’ and offer a more holistic understanding of where to play and how to win. Main takeaway - There isn’t a blanketed, single version of the truth behind a single data point. Consumer insight aims to demonstrate the broader complexion of truths that underpin the data. Going that layer deeper is the role of insights — to assemble an understanding of the ‘whys’ and to identify, size, and define the coordinates that can provoke nuance on where there is overlap & where there is distinction in the marketplace. This matters in a world of limited resources, mobilizing insights allows brands to develop programs more strategically & action campaigns more surgically to generate impact.
All of these truths combine powerfully to provide a bridge to consumer insight creation via the exploration of the ‘why’. And that bridge converges to opportunity spaces for brand behaviors. Stemming from consumer insight, implications will emerge for integrated brand strategy across the marketing flywheel from core positioning and creative development to media placement, channel optimization, brand partnerships, social strategy, & pipeline innovation. Main Takeaway — Consumer insight development & examination leads to a renewed appreciation of brand implications, serving as a critical handshake between consumer needs & brand strategy. Understanding these truths - these light bulbs - and ‘throwing light on the data’ requires learning this choreography. These steps to derive consumer insight are not an outright guarantee of winning brand relevance, but they are the crucial ticket to the dance. Shruti is the Founder & CEO of Drive Brand Strategy, LLC a brand and innovation consulting firm and has held previous marketing strategy positions at AnheuserBusch and General Mills, and was a featured brand & media strategy contributor for The Huffington Post.
Pay Attention to Attention!
By Karen Nelson-Field
Globally renowned media science researcher and founder of Amplified Intelligence Prof Karen Nelson-Field introduces her new column and why she wants to set a True North for the digital media industry Welcome to Attention Revolution, my new monthly column
measuring online advertising.
for Mediatel News, where I’ll be exploring different ways in
As well as being a source of insight and inspiration, I’d like
which brands can activate attention as a meaningful way of
to set a True North for how the media industry should build
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a better online ecosystem. If you’d like to ask me a question
and willingness to pay for quality content (that attracts
about anything I’ve written, or about why measuring attention
attention);
is so important in advertising and media, please email me at karen.nelson-field@mediatel.co.uk and I’ll attempt to answer it in subsequent articles. Responsible disruption I think by now, most of you know that the advertising ecosystem is broken. It’s broken because our trading currency relies on impression data being an accurate measure of what a human actually sees, but this is far from reality. And worse, without relativity across platforms (meaning what a human sees differs between platforms), there are large gaps in the relationship between dollars per impression and effectiveness per impression. Yet brand growth hinges on advertising being seen. Think of it this way, if you are overspending on low attention media platforms and underspending on high attention
2. Measurement companies, not marketing companies, should be looked upon to offer solutions; 3. Mark my words: within six to 12 months the industry will be flooded with vendors selling attention metrics. Some will be good, many will not; 4. Disruption is great, but only when the disruption can be validated against brand growth. I, and my team at Amplified Intelligence, believe that media trading should be fair and accountable. We believe that we owe it to the industry not to just jump in blind with a quick cure to fix what’s broken. Our job is to build a solid solution and, as it turns out, build a new measurement category. Building a solid solution is not a single, simple trajectory. It requires research, application and thought leadership – all at the same time. It requires replication and rigour so that the
media platforms while your competitors are doing the exact
solution doesn’t evaporate as soon as the industry throws a
opposite, your brand will not grow. Or worse, will more likely
new challenge at it. It needs a continuous loop of research,
decline.
product development, shared insight and feedback. And
Knowing this, an attention revolution has begun, where
again. And again.
actual human attention is fittingly looked upon as the North
A new measurement category needs ethical leaders to guide
Star to ad effectiveness. And this revolution is ignited by
the developing conversation. It needs a clear and obvious
those in the measurement industry who are actively looking
way to sort the burgeoning new quick-fix attention measures
for supplementary metrics to monetise. As well as agencies
from the rigorous attention measures. It turns out that the
and brands who are desperate to finally bring some level of
best measure for real human attention to advertising is, wait
transparency back to a job they are seemingly doing blind.
for it, real human attention to advertising. My quick tip is that
The result of this revolution is major change in the economy
if a vendor hasn’t actually used human gaze, then beware!
of our ecosystem, one that revolves around the monetisation
At every twist and turn, our attention research continues to
of attention – the Attention Economy.
show me that it is possible to approach the measurement
But beware, we have been here before.
problem, dare I say it ethically, and offer more certainty than the industry has seen for a long time. But we need to be
Cast your minds back to the mid-noughties when disruption
careful not to make the same mistakes. Attention can just
and blitzscaling created (accidental) media companies who
easily be used to drive to the cheapest, darkest corners of
were the perfect combination of unconventional thinkers,
the internet. It’s important to understand attention metrics in
risk takers, venture capital and commercial genius. Instant
order to use them to drive quality.
measurement appeared in an instant which sounded at the
Welcome to the Attention Revolution, where I’ll be parking
time like the exciting thing we all needed. Today, the industry is well aware of the negative flow-on effects of clickbait-style engagement metrics that made attribution promises they couldn’t keep. And worse, advertisers and brands have been devalued by the diminishing attention consumers pay to degraded content.
opinion at the door and sharing useful attention insights that move us all towards a positive attention economy. As an industry we have a second chance and a duty of care to work fast, but with validated application. After all, we need to move fast but we don’t want to break things!
So, as we enter a new era of measurement, what have we learned from the last effort? 1. Our obsession with and willingness to pay for instant measurement should be replaced by an obsession
CEO Amplified Intelligence. Author of The Attention Economy and Viral Marketing: the science of sharing.
Define the Need Before You Bleed: Marketing Rigor Can Reduce StartUp Failure By Donovan Neale-May
Post-mortems on start-up failures always intrigue me. Since coming to Silicon Valley in 1982, I’ve seen a good number of paradigm shifts and roadkill left on the side of the digital highway. Many characterized by founding team or VC avarice, arrogance, aberrance, deceit, inflexibility, capriciousness, and customer insensitivity. Often there is a herd instinct when it comes to funding, driving droves of investors blindly over the start-up cliff. All too often, entrepreneurs are backed based on pedigree or past success, rather than clarity as to the problem, need, pain point, business model, or measurable market opportunity to be addressed. Disproportionate early-stage funding is allocated to engineering and product development, less to validating and certifying customer certainty and resonance. Hence the incidence of new venture re-directs, GTM delays and reincarnations. One of my favorite daily reads are the updates and commentary from CB Insights. This month the research firm published a list of 378 start-up failure post-mortems. Here was an introductory note: “In the spirit of failure, we dug into the data on startup death and found that 70% of upstart tech companies fail — usually around 20 months after first raising financing (with around $1.3M in total funding closed). So why do so many startups flame out? The real reasons can be hard to uncover, but the obituaries written by founders, investors, and journalists offer plenty of clues.” CB Insights dug deep and came up with 210 of the biggest, costliest start-up failures of all time. Topping the list was Katerra with $1.5 billion in disclosed funding (from Softbank and other notables), along with Quibi which swallowed $1.75 billion and lasted just six months after launching its streaming service. Seems hard to believe. These are raging bushfires, not bonfires, of cash. The research buffs at CB Insights did their analysis and came up with a ranking of the top 20 reasons for start-up failure based on a scrub of the obstacles and issues encountered by 101 dearly departed ventures. Unbelievably, the top reason for failure by 42 percent of the companies was cited as “no market need,” well ahead of “ran out of cash” (29%) and “not the right team” (23%). Inquiring
CMO minds will be pleased to know that many of the causes ending the life of new ventures have their origins in strategic marketing planning and effective execution. Here’s another eight I pulled from the list of 20: Get outcompeted (19%) Pricing/cost issues (18%) User un-friendly product (17%) Product without a business model (17%) Poor marketing (14%) Ignore customers (14%) Product miss-timed (13%) Failed geographical expansion (9%) Given this analysis, why is the investment community not relying more on seasoned, professional marketers to evaluate, shape, and influence critical business and investment decisions in early-stage companies. Here is one post mortem quote from a listed CB Insights failure that attests to this: “Startups fail when they are not solving a market problem. We were not solving a large enough problem that we could universally serve with a scalable solution. We had great technology, great data on shopping behavior, great reputation as a thought leader, great expertise, great advisors, etc., but what we didn’t have was technology or business model that solved a pain point in a scalable way.” Treehouse Logic CMO Council research finds less than four percent of professional marketers serve on the boards of publicly traded companies and do not seem to have the same respect as the technical masterminds and engineering perfectionists populating early-stage ventures. U.S. venture capital funds raised over $69 billion in 2020 despite pandemic headwinds. VC deal-making in the U.S. was resilient with nearly 11,000 ventures and $150 billion in funds invested (Pitchbook). Perhaps more of that money should have been applied to analyzing the commercial market opportunity and the relevance of products in the pipeline before all the cash was consumed. As we say in the headline: “Define the need before you bleed!”
Gamification strategy and DTC brand marketing By Robert Williams
Nike’s Apps Played a Crucial Role in Driving Engagement & Digital Revenue Nike’s mobile apps have helped to fuel sales growth during the pandemic as part of the sportswear giant’s effort to boost direct-to-consumer (DTC) sales. Those apps urge people
to participate in a range of activities with a gamification strategy designed to maintain loyalty, reinforce brand messaging and drive sales.
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With many folks spending more at home and avoiding stores because of health concerns, brands with significant retail footprints like Nike have been forced to switch up their sales strategy. Consumers are still shopping for clothing — especially athleticwear and other comfortable styles for work-from-home settings — but are doing so through mobile websites, social media marketplaces and apps at a higher clip. On the strength of its websites and mobile apps, the company’s digital revenue jumped 84% in the quarter ended Nov. 30, according to its earnings report last month. While Nike didn’t provide exact figures, it reported a 9% gain in total revenue to $11.2 billion. Digital sales will make up about half of total revenue in the near future, the company forecasts. “Digital is the ‘new normal’ in consumer behavior, and we believe the trends that we’re seeing are here to stay,” John Donahoe, president and CEO of Nike, said in a December earnings call. “Consumers want to get what they want, when they want it, how they want it.” The company’s portfolio of apps underscores that philosophy of accessibility for customers, helping Nike to gather data on fans’ purchasing habits, personal information and exercise routines that can inform future marketing initiatives. Its Nike app, which is ranked No. 12 by downloads in Apple’s App Store shopping category, provides a mix of content and personalized commerce. Users can gain early access to product drops and chat with Nike specialists for style advice. The company’s Nike SNKRS app is more specialized in providing a hub for “sneakerheads” and ardent brand enthusiasts. The app gives users a way to participate in drawings for limited-edition sneaker drops and share in a community of Nike fans, among other interactive features to support engagement. Those digital-based experiences complement or even temporarily replace the in-store experience that had been a key part of Nike’s brand evolution before the health crisis. With fewer people visiting stores, pursuing compelling in-store efforts have become secondary to online sales channels such as Nike’s website and apps. “All of that brand equity out there for all these traditional big retailers has become devalued quite a bit just because there’s not as much foot traffic,” said Will Crocker Hay, vice president of customer and partner marketing at Braze, a provider of customer engagement software. “People aren’t walking through stores and browsing and perusing anymore.” Agency AKQA, which has worked with Nike on ad creative, pop-up stores and the Nike Training Club app, declined to comment for this story. Tying workout apps to engagement Separate from its dedicated shopping apps, Nike’s exercise apps also feature mini shopping sections to reach people when they’re thinking about workouts and necessary gear. The Nike Run Club app has guided runs with a pre-recorded coach to encourage and advise, along with practical tools like a GPS tracker to measure distance. A Nike Training Club
app has hundreds of video workouts and tips on nutrition and wellness, illustrating how content can reinforce the idea that Nike is a dependable source of inspiration in setting fitness goals and achieving them. Its suite of apps represents a key source of gathering firstparty data about consumers, bringing them into the top of the purchase funnel and urging them to check in regularly with gamified experiences. Nike Run Club lets people share their achievements with a community of like-minded people and receive encouragement, while Nike Training Club offers digital badges and other rewards for following workout routine or regularly logging in. “The backbone is membership…having a direct connection with consumers, and we are growing our membership,” Donahoe said on the earnings call. “How do we engage them? Engage them through engaging whether it’s Nike Running Club, Nike Training Club, SNKRS app. Live streaming is the way to engage consumers, and what we know is: more engaged consumers buy more.” Braze’s Hay agrees that engagement is a priority, though it has become more difficult as consumers spend more time “window-shopping” on their smartphones. “Companies have an 82% lower retention rate than before the pandemic,” he said. “There’s a lot of ‘stress-shopping’ going on during COVID, and that’s leading to lower retention rates. If companies don’t have an integrated and well-thought-out strategy for how to keep those people, it’s going to make the value of every ad dollar they spend less.” The mobile pivot As the pandemic led to lockdowns on nonessential businesses like clothing retailers last year, Nike was forced to switch gears quickly to emphasize its digital sales channels. With mobile apps becoming a necessary touch point between businesses and consumers, Nike took steps to boost repeat engagement. It dropped the subscription fee for its Nike Training Club Premium service last March, giving people immediate access to a suite of services including the Nike Run Club and Nike Training Club apps, social channels, website and “Trained” podcast. With more people stuck indoors, the company revamped its marketing and debuted a new slogan, “Play inside, play for the world,” along with corresponding hashtags on social media. Since then, Nike has continued to make its app a central part of its brand experience by provide exclusive product offers and interactive content. The company has maintained support for diversity and inclusion efforts, building on campaigns featuring Colin Kaepernick, the former quarterback who has become an activist for social justice. Nike in November celebrated Black women in a dance film, created with agency AKQA, that debuted on its Nike Training Club app. Viewers of “The Awakening in Dance: An experience in motion” in the app were granted access to exclusive content, including an instructional on the choreography to follow the moves at home. The film was another sign of Nike’s commitment to its apps as key gateways to its digital shopping platform.
Omnichannel marketing seems like a simple enough concept. Consumers like to shop online, offline, and across different channels, so firms need to meet them wherever they are. But coming up with an omnichannel marketing strategy is a lot more complicated than just collecting cookies and tracking purchases. A new study that appears in a special issue of the Journal of Marketing in collaboration with the Marketing Science Institute explains why omnichannel is not a panacea. There are three big challenges to making it work. Those challenges are outlined in the study, along with some solutions that include using machine learning and blockchain technology to harness the full benefits of omnichannel marketing. Wharton marketing professor Raghuram Iyengar is a co-author of the paper, titled “Informational Challenges in Omnichannel Marketing: Remedies and Future Research.” The other co-authors are: Tony Haitao Cui, marketing professor at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management; Anindya Ghose, marketing professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business; Hanna Halaburda, technology, operations and statistics professor also at NYU Stern; Koen Pauwels, marketing professor at Northeastern University’s D’Amore-McKim School of Business; S. Sriram, marketing professor at Michigan University’s Stephen M. Ross School of Business; Catherine Tucker, management and marketing professor at MIT Sloan School of Management; and Sriram Venkataraman, marketing professor at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School. Iyengar joined Knowledge@Wharton to talk about the findings. Listen to the full podcast at the top of this page or
keep reading for an edited transcript of the conversation. Knowledge@Wharton: Not only are firms trying to execute omnichannel marketing better, but researchers like you are trying to understand it better, even while the rapid evolution of technology makes that a moving target. What does this study add to the literature? Raghuram Iyengar: Omnichannel certainly is a very hot topic. When companies are thinking about omnichannel, they sometimes want to think about distinguishing from multichannel. The big distinguishing aspect of it is multichannel has different ways in which you’re reaching the customer. Omnichannel is that as well, but it should be in synergy. If you are, for example, a customer of REI, you might have a mobile application, you might have emails coming in. And if they are pursuing an omnichannel strategy, they are hoping that the customer is seeing different pieces of information in conjunction with each other and, in some sense, are complementary to each other. Carrying that out is not that easy because you need to have a good sense of what the data is like — all the different touchpoints that the customer has had with REI or any other company — and then be able to execute it on the back end. Putting it all together is not as simple as it seems. “Especially in the last year or so, consumer behavior has changed. What was working the year before perhaps is not going to work today.”
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How to Optimize Your Omnichannel Marketing Strategy By Wharton Staff
Knowledge@Wharton: The paper is organized into three distinct challenges and remedies that are easy to follow. The first challenge is about data. What is the issue? Iyengar: Let’s say you go to Nordstrom on their website and shop for something. And then you decide to go to the store and shop for something else. The hope would be that Nordstrom would have all your data in one place: going online, going to the store, perhaps using a mobile application. But the reality for many companies is that much of their customers’ data is very siloed. Why? Because different departments are in charge of different parts of the journey. There might be an online department. There might be an in-store department, and so on and so forth. These people are looking at different snippets of data, so sometimes in large companies, the data becomes siloed. This could be for various reasons. Some of it could be political, because some people want to take charge of data that is perhaps more important for revenues. And some of it could be that analysts just don’t know where the data is. Knowledge@Wharton: How do we apply technology solutions to that? Iyengar: Some of it, of course, is forcing the silos to be taken away within the company. Again, this is easier said than done, but it has to be top-down. Companies have to realize what is the value being added by some of those silos being taken away. Another set of solutions comes from more machine learning-
type examples. It may not be for every retailer, but you can imagine in certain regulated industries, even if they do want silos to go away, it may not be easy. In financial industries, for example, one part of the company might be interested in certain applications, and another part might be in another. But because of regulation, they can’t talk to each other. There is something called predictive learning, which is a type of machine learning where you can imagine data sitting in different places, and a central kind of — you can call it an algorithm process — [where] each of the data by themselves is anonymized. In that sense, you can mix in the secret sauce, so to speak, without any of the ingredients coming together. That might be a good analogy. That’s one way to do it where silos [exist] because of regulation. There are these kinds of solutions which, increasingly, many companies are thinking about. Knowledge@Wharton: Let’s go to the second challenge that you present in the paper, which is about marketing attribution. What is that, and why is it a problem? Iyengar: Let me give you an example and go with Nordstrom again as the representative company. Imagine you get an email. You [think,] “Well, that’s interesting. Nordstrom is sending me an email. Let me look at what the offer is.” I’m assuming Nordstrom also sends some catalogs, perhaps. You might go into the store. Let’s imagine that Nordstrom’s data is not siloed, and at some point, they see that you have bought something. Marketing attribution is about which part of this touchpoint was responsible. Was it the email? Was
it the catalog? Was it something that the salesperson did within the store? Perhaps all of them were responsible for that conversion that happened. But they’re also thinking about how much of that conversion can be credited to each of the different touchpoints. That’s what attribution is all about. How do you attribute the conversion at the end, or lack thereof, to what happened along the way?
“The issue with privacy is that customers may not want to give you that data.” Knowledge@Wharton: What are some of the solutions in shoring up marketing attribution? Iyengar: There are many. Let’s start with the simpler ones. In fact, what I’ve seen some companies do quite actively is this idea of testing and learning. Going back to that email example I was using, sometimes a company might say, “Well, let’s try to see what happens if we don’t send that email.” Then in a systematic manner — like test versus control — people are randomly assigned. Some people get an email; some people don’t. And then they track throughout the entire customer journey to see what happened to people who got the email versus not. What are they trying to do? Holding everything else constant, they’re trying to change one part of that journey to then be able to see what are the impacts of changing that one part. We can be a little bit more demanding in terms of coming up with an experiment. We change multiple parts of that journey in a systematic manner. That’s basically this idea of testing and learning. For example, recently I was talking to Hershey’s CMO, and she mentioned that especially during the last year, they’ve been experimenting with different types of media mixes to see what works and what doesn’t. It’s all about trial and error. If you knew the answer at the onset, you’d go ahead and go with the answer. But many times, the context is changing. Especially in the last year or so, consumer behavior has changed. What was working the year before perhaps is not going to work today. Knowledge@Wharton: The third and final challenge in the paper is about data privacy. We hear about these issues every single day, especially with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union and other measures being proposed in this country. What do you and your co-authors say about this issue of data privacy? Iyengar: When you think about all the wonderful things that omnichannel marketing can get you, which is the synergistic view of the customer, the 360-degree view where you can see the customer at all the different touchpoints, the issue with privacy is that customers may not want to give you that data. Especially with GDPR coming in and the California Privacy Rights Act coming in the U.S., a lot more control is being given back to the consumer. For example, the latest update from Apple is basically demanding that consumers give their approval for certain apps to track their information. All of this is giving a lot more information and control back to the customers, and now it’s up to the customers whether they would like to see some benefit from the data that they’re sharing. What you’ve seen is that privacy is not one-dimensional. It’s not a yes vs. no answer. It’s something that customers
have to think about. How comfortable are they with sharing? I’ll give you an example. I like drinking coffee. If I go to a website and it says, “Well, based on your preferences, here’s a coffee blend that I would recommend.” Great. Thank you. On the other hand, I don’t want my healthcare records being shared. I think it’s a question of what context you are in. It’s a question of what exact benefit we are getting as a customer, such that you might be more inclined to share that data.
“Do we actually need the most granular data for making appropriately good targeting decisions?” Knowledge@Wharton: Your paper also says that customers feel more comfortable when there is data transparency, when companies are telling them what they are sharing and letting them opt-in or opt-out. You also talk about using blockchain technology to help address privacy issues. Can you explain how that can help? Iyengar: For those of us who might be uncomfortable or unfamiliar with blockchain, think of it as a distributed ledger. You might have your own personal tracking of the money that you’re spending on different things. Think of blockchain as a giant audit book where things are being tracked, and it’s publicly available. But once the record is in there, it’s immutable. It doesn’t change as fast. The idea would be that you can imagine customers giving up certain information within the blockchain and firms being able to access that information to appropriately target customers. This is a great way of keeping track of what information firms are using, and then consumers or customers can demand appropriate compensation for using that information. Knowledge@Wharton: Omnichannel is an emerging area of research for marketers. What do you hope to study next? Iyengar: I think this idea of privacy and using machine learning and new technologies is very interesting to understand. This is some of the work that I’m doing with my colleague, Wharton marketing professor Eric Bradlow, and grad student Mingyung Kim. We are looking at, for example, the following question, which is something very much of interest to Apple and other companies: Do we always need the most granular data to make good decisions? Imagine we have individual data from customers. Then let’s imagine we have slightly more aggregated data, which might be groups of people, and so on. Do we actually need the most granular data for making appropriately good targeting decisions? At what point does some of the more granular data have a lot of noise, whereas slightly more aggregated data smoothes out that noise? We are trying to see what kinds of models can be built on slightly more aggregated data that might do quite well. What does this mean for privacy? You can imagine individuals may not want to share their particular data per se, but they might be comfortable if they are part of a data set: “We are aggregated with other customers.” I think that’s an interesting area of research where it intersects between privacy and machine learning and other kinds of models. That’s something I’m pretty excited about, to see how we can use data of different kinds to still make good decisions and, at the same time, respect people’s privacy.
The Three New Rules of Content Experience By Randy Frisch
Odds are good that asking 20 people what content experience means will get you 20 different answers. To some marketers, it’s about producing as many blog posts and emails as possible about topics related to what they’re selling, with the hope that prospects find something useful to choose from (admittedly, not a great experience for the consumer of that content). Others view it more broadly, and they include video, SEO, paid ads, and more in the mix (and, even then, the content consumer’s experience with the torrent of content is often not a priority for marketers). However you define the term, one truth remains: In today’s business landscape, you have to provide a truly great content experience, and it must succeed at scale. After spending time with some savvy marketers, I’ve learned to define content experience as where your content lives (the environment in which it exists), how it’s structured, and how it compels your prospects and customers to engage with your company. So whether you’ve just been dabbling content creation or pursuing it with reckless abandon, it’s time to rethink what you know. Because content’s efficacy is revving up, but only if you understand the new rules of the game. 1. Relevance and Speed = King and Queen of Content Experience Remember the 450+ articles with the title “Content Is King”
a few years back? In my opinion, that was true—and still is. But it’s old news. Today, the king is sitting back on his throne while the next generation of royals—relevance and speed—take their rightful place in the spotlight. Content marketing is nothing without them; it needs both to do its job. If you take nothing else away from this article, remember that. And whereas 10 years ago we spoke to relevance in terms of customer personas, the expectation now lives at the individual buyer level. Relevance is the most important thing to buyers. The largest percentage of respondents to a 2021 B2B Marketing Report were looking for companies to address “the problem I’m looking to solve.” People want solution-focused content. It’s time to stop thinking about personalization as merge fields, and start recognizing that it’s all about relevance. Your audience wants content on topics they care about, and they want it in a timely fashion. That’s where speed comes in. Those videos you posted a year ago are probably no longer relevant. And guess what else? The videos you’re posting today will likely lose their relevance, too. The world and its buyers are changing quickly, and organizations have to be nimble; they have to adjust to
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get results. Consider the healthcare industry over the past year as an example. COVID-19 drove health organizations to change their content rapidly, and by region, throughout the pandemic, which was incredibly challenging to do. The ones that rose to the challenge continued to adjust their content on the fly, which is what it takes to be successful today. Quality content is no longer enough; it must also be relevant and timely to make an impact. 2. Revisit What the Buyer Actually Wants From the Content Experience There is an enormous disconnect between what marketers prioritize and what buyers want to have prioritized, the previously referenced marketing report found. This may be shocking to hear, but marketers need to put their own agendas aside and instead zero-in on delivering what their audience actually wants. To start, buyers do not want to be sold to; they want to be educated. The study found that 64% of buyers find user reviews most useful, followed by product tours (43%) and videos (33%). But guess what marketers reported prioritizing? Sales sheets, whitepapers, and e-books. In many cases, your buyer is ready for your product to merge into their content experience—so give it to them! Providing a solid content experience is a strategic marketing approach that is ultimately meant to drive profitable customer action. Fully 61% of those surveyed for the B2B Marketing Report said that to take action they want content that is relevant to their needs. Meanwhile, 33% of respondents said they get too much irrelevant content and they are frustrated by its lack of relevance. What that tells me is that marketers have an opportunity right now to close the gap and do much better. And that starts by
recognizing what buyers actually want and giving them that instead of what you want them to have. 3. Rethink Your Content Channels It’s not only the creation of content but also the distribution and destination that matter. How have you historically shared your content? Where do you reach your target audience? Where are you sending people once you have their attention? If you haven’t already, now is a perfect time to re-evaluate the distribution and experience portion of your content marketing approach. Thanks to 2020’s major upheaval of the marketing landscape, live events and field marketing were taken off the table. Organizations had to scramble to replace those mediums digitally, and many are still struggling with pivoting their strategies. If you’re in that boat, it’s time to halt your approach and come up with a new distribution plan that works in the new environment. The digital marketplace is crowded, of course, and capturing people’s attention is getting harder and harder. Your new strategy for content should include making it engaging and enticing for your audience, beckoning them to continue along the journey you have in mind for them. Also, offer opportunities for prospects to consume as much decision-enabling content as they choose so that they can be the authors of their own story with your brand—so that they have what they need to move forward. A stellar content experience for your buyer can be transformative—to both their relationship with your company and your own business outcomes. But content experience works only if you treat it with respect and take the time to understand its nuances. When you do, you’ll be on a fast track to big results.
Hire a Marketing Agency or Hire In-House Marketers: Which Is Right for You? By Jackie Hermes
Determining when to invest in a new employee can be difficult, especially if your business is eager to grow but needs to be strategic with spend. As an entrepreneur, I’ve had to make decisions about when to hire, when to outsource, and when to contract with freelancers. As a marketing professional, I advise prospects and clients about which marketing resources make the most sense for their current situation and ultimate goals.
factors, including your current strengths, short- and longterm goals, and availability of resources.
The decision to go with in-house marketing vs. an agency (or both—I’ve seen plenty of that, too) depends on several
If you’ve got tons of website traffic and you manage to keep your sales pipeline full of qualified leads, keep it up! Do what
When to Use an Internal Resource 1. Your marketing efforts are working
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you can to keep that marketing team happy and engaged. But if you’re reading this article, that’s probably not the case.
from scratch when you can easily and affordably bring in a full marketing team’s expertise?
That said, even having a killer marketing team doesn’t mean you wouldn’t also benefit from partnering with an outside firm. Sometimes, highly competent B2B marketing teams partner with agencies at the forefront of marketing strategy to upskill their teams or test new strategies.
2. You can’t afford mistakes
2. You have the money and resources to support additional staff
When you interview agencies, ask them how often they roll out new services and how they do so. Are they guessing or winging it? If so, that’s not the agency for you.
Some people, especially in the B2B enterprise or SaaS space, think their product or industry is simply too complex to outsource. They would rather have dedicated marketing resources who spend all of their time learning the workings of the company versus an agency that typically juggles multiple clients and industries. If your company can afford to hire an internal resource (with salary and benefits) and dedicate training and support resources, you may feel more comfortable with in-house marketing vs. an agency. However, one marketing resource is typically not enough. Marketing requires a wide range of skills that you often cannot find in one person. And if you spend all of your time training one employee and that employee leaves, you’ll end up back at square one. 3. You already have marketing expertise CEOs and founders often wear a lot of hats, and perhaps in your company one of those hats says “Marketer Extraordinaire.” If you have prior experience with B2B demand generation or content marketing, you may be able to quickly identify opportunities to optimize your strategy. A word of caution, however: B2B marketing requires a different strategy from B2C marketing. Previous experience with social media marketing, B2C marketing, SEO, or other marketing strategies doesn’t always translate when you’re targeting a B2B buyer within a complex buying cycle. When in doubt, consultation with an outside agency can help you spot where your weaknesses are to ensure you hire a team member with the right skills. When to Hire a Marketing Agency 1. You need to grow quickly Generating results from marketing campaigns takes time, but it takes a lot longer if you don’t know where to start. Building and executing an effective marketing strategy requires a lot of research, planning, and testing. There’s plenty of B2B marketing advice online, but does any of it fit your own company’s goals? Often not. Marketing agencies have already done all of that work, and they can quickly map out a plan. They’ve worked with companies like yours before and can immediately offer recommendations for strategies that will help you meet your goals. At my agency, we always test new practices on ourselves first so that any recommendation comes from a place of experience. Effective marketing naturally requires some trial and error, but why spend your time (and money) starting
Hiring a team of experienced marketers to execute your strategy decreases the risk of something going wrong— sometimes catastrophically. The best marketing agencies must stay on top of trends and new strategies to be successful.
Also, partnering with a third party minimizes any risk that might impact your company should a customer or competitor challenge something in your content. Startups and growing B2B companies are especially vulnerable to risk, so any steps you can take to mitigate that risk—even in your marketing—can make building your business easier. 3. You want quality content without the big spend This is probably the most obvious reason that a B2B company would outsource its marketing. Outsourcing provides you with quality, results-driven marketing at a fraction of the price of a full in-house marketing team. The true value of the marketing agency you partner with is the talent and experience it provides. Through it, for a few thousand dollars a month, you can add a dedicated team of marketers: •
Strategic marketing program manager
•
Industry-specific and conversion-oriented copywriter
•
Technology and data specialist
•
Brand-conscious designer
•
Others!
Even with the most inclusive agency retainer, the cost is much less than paying salary plus overhead for five employees. Many startups and scale-ups (and even mature businesses) simply can’t afford that many people on their payroll. In-House vs. Agency: Choosing Resource That’s Right for You
the
Marketing
I may run a marketing agency, but I recognize that outsourcing may not always be the right option. Morevoer, agencies and all outsourcing options aren’t all the same; each company deserves to find the solution that fits its needs, whether that’s in-house marketing or agency options. Don’t let indecision result in leaving marketing on the backburner. Whether you choose insourcing or outsourcing, your company’s brand should always be in the care of a marketing professional. Do your research to explore the available options, and weigh the investment (and potential return) that best fits your business. I wasn’t vegan (I gave it a shot and dang, it was hard!). I turned four cookie recipes into a business—designing packaging, finding a kitchen and making the cookies, eventually outsourcing production, then selling and establishing distribution to 12 grocery stores around Wisconsin.
What the Agency of the Future Needs to Become By Sander Volten
A holistic ecosystem designed around creativity In the world of biology, an ecosystem is defined as “a strategy for the integrated management of land, water and living resources that promotes conservation and sustainable use in an equitable way.”
agencies foster and nurture creativity will be key to post-
What does this have to do with advertising? While we may not be worried about the elements of nature like land and water, we are in the business of nurturing and balancing a delicate creative environment—one in which integration, sustainability and conservation of resources, talent and skills are equally important.
that will take your agency to new heights:
The past year has also underscored the need for adaptability, which is a defining feature and key benefit of an ecosystem approach. A healthy ecosystem is ready to adapt to change at any moment, and with the rapid pace of change in our industry, the ability to operate nimbly on a global stage puts agencies at a huge advantage.
ecosystem for the future. Our industry has historically been
Indeed, coming out of the pandemic, everything in the ad space, consumer landscape and larger global work environment has changed, and a comparable shift in how
ideas. This will allow them to attract diverse talent from all
pandemic success. Forget the traditional siloed agency model; here’s how to shift your focus and design a holistic ecosystem around creativity
Look outside your individual agency to expand your footprint and build partnerships. Agencies need to embrace a forward-looking approach as they start to design their ecosystem. It’s about building an very insular and dominated by self-interest. That focus feels outdated and needs to change. We need a different type of agency with a different skill set to compete in the future landscape. Agencies should strive to move quickly, work collaboratively and be generous with over the globe and engage clients and consumers alike on a deeper, more authentic level.
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Embrace flexibility for your team and foster collaboration. Imagining the world as it could be, I suggest that agencies reorient themselves around an ecosystem model. This means creating a dynamic and adaptable work environment— that may span multiple locations and home offices—that is capable of hosting a variety of experiences and people, allowing them all to thrive. Make creativity and collaboration the central tenets around which you build your post-pandemic agency ecosystem, with the ability to scale and an embrace of hybrid work that are the offshoots of that system. Put the human experience first (whether it’s your employees, clients or their customers). It’s no secret that the advertising industry needs to reimagine how we organize, collaborate and solve. The key to success in this endeavor is the integration of human connection throughout all aspects of your business. Addressing the location of the office and how collaboration will continue is imperative to your team’s success. Agencies should strive to nurture relationships so they can be responsive to human needs across employees, partners and clients. And when it comes to client organization, a onesize-fits-all approach is not the answer. Building a strategy around a client’s specific needs and creating an ecosystem that can quickly respond to these needs as they evolve will serve the client best. In everything agencies do, encompassing human touch should be front of mind. As an industry, we often put all our effort into the campaign, but what about the audience?
A humanistic approach that thinks first of the audience experience will help our clients, their customers and our own agencies continue to thrive. No longer a single location, the agency ecosystem integrates home offices, corporate headquarters, pop-ups and more. Gone are the days of scheduling conference rooms, staring across the table and waiting for an idea to take hold. A healthy ecosystem doesn’t look back, but instead adapts to the evolving landscape, which in this case means new forms of collaboration that foster creativity while honoring people’s willingness to relocate or work remotely. We have to expand our view of the office, to consider the larger ecosystem of people working across different physical spaces. The agency ecosystems of the future should span not only the headquarters, but satellite offices, home work spaces and even “pop-up shop” style teams around the world The bottom line As we enter a new world as an industry, accepting the change before us and allowing the evolution of our work efforts is imperative. That evolution extends to the work constructs our agencies create. An ecosystem that prioritizes collaboration and creativity with a humanistic POV will ensure clients, employees and the agency itself will thrive in the postpandemic landscape. Sander is the Global CEO of the 180 network based in Amsterdam and New York.Founded in 1998, 180 is an award-winning creative agency that sees the world not as it is but as it could be. Known for its 180 thinking, the agency brings fresh perspectives to clients and ideas that sit at the intersection of Famous, Human and Seamless.
Building an e-commerce business: Lessons on moving fast By Arun Arora, Philip Christiani, Ralf Dreischmeier, Ari Libarikian, and Hayk Yegoryan
With consumers moving online in reaction to coronavirus restrictions, companies will need to learn how to launch new e-commerce businesses quickly. While the full implications of COVID-19 are still unknown, it’s clear that the impact on retail is already significant. Emerging evidence points to a significant shift, as customers scale back their shopping in stores and instead go online. In China, online shopping has increased 15 to 20 percentage points,1 and e-commerce in Italy has increased 81 percent compared with the last week of February.2 US consumers have largely followed the same pattern. The COVID-19 crisis is first and foremost a human tragedy, requiring companies to take immediate steps to protect their people. Amid this human cost, companies are also starting to come to terms with the impact of the crisis on their businesses. With offline shopping collapsing, companies’ strategies will need to focus on fortifying their web presence and, in some cases, building an online business. We have found that companies can create a working e-commerce site in much less time than they think. In fact, a poor understanding of what’s really possible with digital can be one of the most significant hinderances to moving quickly. As we highlight in Fast Times: How Digital Winners Set Direction, Learn, and Adapt (Amazon Publishing, February 2020), low aspirations lead to modest, even negligible, outcomes. In our experience, completely new businesses can be launched in fewer than four months. Normally,
a company requires at least six to nine months to get a complete solution up and running (and often considerably longer when outsourcing the work to multiple vendors and agencies, with the increased need for coordination slowing down cycle times). We had the opportunity to watch this thesis play out in the real world recently at one European retail chain that has around 1,000 brick-and-mortar stores across the world. The chain, owned by a private-equity fund, had no e-commerce presence. Although it had previously considered e-commerce, there were serious concerns about whether it could ever work, given the assortment, concept, and even brand constraints. Despite these issues, a variety of pressures, from consumer demand to competitive constraints, forced the company to take action. Thirteen weeks later, it had a functioning e-commerce business in one of the regions it operated in. Not only that, its launch was successful from the first month, generating almost 3 percent revenue growth within the chosen region, tripling average basket size compared with retail stores, and maintaining a high customer-satisfaction score. When COVID-19 started disrupting daily routines in Europe, the e-commerce revenues jumped up threefold almost overnight.
Science is resilient. It can overcome diseases, create cures, and, yes, even beat pandemics. It has the methodology and the rigor to withstand even the most arduous scrutiny. It keeps asking questions and, until there’s a breakthrough, it isn’t done. That’s why, when the world needs answers, we turn to science. Because in the end, Science will win.
Breakthroughs that change patients’ lives Learn more at www.pfizer.com
This article describes the main lessons from that program.
when the warehouse received an order and ended when the customer received their package.
Be pragmatic Before work started on launching an e-commerce business in our example, the company’s leadership gathered to discuss the ambition for the endeavor. One word dominated that discussion: “pragmatic.” Rather than attempting to launch a full-blown digital business across all markets at once, the CEO opted to go to market fast with a limited offering and in limited geographies, gain strong traction, and then scale up and out aggressively (see sidebar, “Supporting your remote teams”). Within days, a new team created a comprehensive, weekby-week plan that covered everything from creating customer-testing touchpoints to setting up the warehouse with electricity and equipment to photographing and writing copy for every one of the 800 products to go on offer. All nonrelevant initiatives were postponed in favor of efforts that had direct customer impact. The team closely scrutinized every feature and ruthlessly prioritized intermediate release goals for what mattered most. This biweekly review exercise also made room for fixing problems when things inevitably went wrong. This lesson was repeated a second time when management reevaluated scaling plans in light of COVID-19. The team focused instead on further strengthening the core functionality of the e-commerce business and providing an easy, dependable way for a locked-down population to shop for what it needed. Be clear with responsibilities: Assign ownership, not tasks A crucial element in enabling speed during our example retail chain’s launch of its e-commerce business was clearly designating which teams were responsible for which tasks— and then giving them the space to complete their work. Management created four teams with responsibility for specific work streams and ownership over a certain portion of the customer journey. Management then stepped back, giving teams the responsibility and flexibility to solve every unplanned issue that occurred there and pushed them to be creative with solutions. The four teams and their tasks were as follows: •
•
The tech-and-design team was in charge of defining the microservices architecture, including codesigning the online-store concept with customers and building it iteratively. It also had to develop tech capabilities for connecting the back end of the store with the warehousemanagement system, inventory synchronization, and order handling. The team owned the customer journey from the moment the customer arrived to when an order landed on the handheld tablets carried by the pickers in the warehouse. Over time, the tech stack developed to a point at which almost all content-level changes could be done without developer involvement. The operations team was in charge of setting up the warehouse: establishing packing stations and picking trolleys, setting up the workforce for the warehouse and customer support, liaising with carriers and intermediaries to set up a new relationship, and detailing the procedures for handling all common and edge cases. It owned the part of the journey that started
•
The product-assortment team analyzed the full product assortment available, chose the 800 best SKUs to launch with (based on multiple quantitative and qualitative criteria—for example, “shippability” of items such as ice cream and fragile glassware, sizing to fit existing boxes, and logical fit with other products in the assortment); obtained samples to photograph, measure, and describe; and created creative online-only bundles. It owned the portion of the customer journey covering all of the steps necessary for a customer to find, understand, and choose a product. As such, the team worked closely with the tech-and-design team in the initial phases.
•
The marketing team, which kicked off nine weeks before the launch, created a detailed marketing launch plan, set up a structured customer-relationship-management system and biweekly campaigns to increase the size of the database by almost threefold prior to launch, worked with an agency to come up with a creative launch campaign, and planned an operation in which all the content and merchandise (such as posters, T-shirts, and bags) would roll out in unison on launch day across offline stores, social media, search advertising, influencers, and various PR channels. This team owned the customer decision journey, from complete lack of awareness to the moment a customer landed on the home page for the first time.
At the end of each day, all the teams came together for an all-hands checkout to update each other about the newest developments. This habit—along with solid agile ceremonies, such as weekly sprint planning, biweekly demonstrations, retrospectives, and use of collaboration tools (Kanban boards and Slack)—was the perfect counterweight to work-stream independence and ensured that everyone was in sync at all times.
Putting in place the right measures and key performance indicators early in the process of creating an e-commerce business is as important as launching quickly. Learn and adapt Putting in place the right measures and key performance indicators early in the process of creating an e-commerce business is as important as launching quickly. It allows companies to track the progress that matters so that they can learn, adapt, and drive continual improvement. It is not enough to measure overall conversion or conversion by channel. Instead, companies need more granular metrics— for example, to identify relevant customer cohorts, measure microconversions per cohort, and then improve for that use case continually. Metrics or key performance indicators that are too high level don’t provide a clear-enough story. This concept, in particular, is crucial because launching an e-commerce presence is not a discrete project but much more a program of continual improvement.
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In our retailer example, the leadership decided early on that the goal of the e-commerce initiative was to launch quickly a business that could gain traction within a single region and then to use it to learn and improve before going all out globally. The company knew that it needed first to build a muscle to operate and optimize a multinational digital business—and that the best way to do that was by learning through doing. After a successful launch, for example, the team spent a month analyzing pain points and bottlenecks and then experimenting with new solutions to improving the experience continually. It was able to act quickly because it had established a simple spreadsheet model to track progress. The team checked it daily the first two weeks and weekly thereafter. It then added new metrics as goals changed. For example, when focusing on growing B2B segments, it tracked the number of orders and revenue
for B2B customers daily. When focusing on improving operations, it tracked pick-and-pack speed and the percentage of fulfilled orders per day. The team also developed prototypes for various new features to test with customers and abandoned many pet ideas that simply didn’t stick. The team had to go back on one of the online-exclusive ideas—staff curated bundles of products based on common occasions, such as birthdays— that tested very well with customers prelaunch but simply didn’t perform in reality. By keeping a weekly sprint rhythm, it was possible to pivot away from poor ideas and generate new ones constantly until the team found ones that worked. Week by week, the improvements and lessons accumulated, and by month three, the e-commerce business had matured into a state at which a good sales day wasn’t a victory but business as usual.
These are the most popular sonic logos of 2021 By Daniel Piper
In our world of streaming, sonic logos are becoming more and more important for brands. From Netflix’s opening ‘dundun’ to Apple’s startup ‘duuuhn’ (okay, sonic logos are hard to describe in words), there are plenty you’ll have heard before. And now, for the first time ever, an in-depth study has revealed most popular audio idents in the US and UK.
Created by sonic branding specialist SoundOut, the index brings together over 135 brands and draws from from the responses of over 30,000 consumer participants. And while you won’t be seeing any of them in our best logos roundup (you won’t be seeing them anywhere, for that matter), many of the sonic logos in SoundOut’s study are instantly recognisable.
To determine the top 100, SoundOut’s study considers effectiveness (the “intrinsic quality of the logo excluding any brand association”), market penetration (measuring how familiar consumers are with each logo) and strength of personality, reflecting how strongly the sonic logo matches the 14 core attributes of SoundOut’s ‘BrandMatch’ algorithm.
analysis and measurement of the effectiveness of sonic
“While more and more brands have been investing in sonic branding as the power of music’s impact on the subconscious becomes better understood, there has been little objective
You can read the entire comprehensive study on SoundOut’s
logos,” explains SoundOut CEO David Courtier-Dutton. “The SoundOut Index changes that. We are proud to be the first to establish which sonic logos have built a powerful emotional connection with consumers.”
website. And if you’re inspired to create a sonic logo of your own, check out the best audio editing software in 2021.
The Power of Nudges: Maya Shankar on Changing People’s Minds By Wharton Staff
When Maya Shankar was a young girl, she never dreamed that she would become senior director of behavioral economics at Google, lead the White House Behavioral
Science Team under President Barack Obama, or host her own podcast, A Slight Change of Plans.
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On her way to becoming a world-class violinist, she was accepted into the prestigious Juilliard School and studied under the legendary Itzhak Perlman. But an acute hand injury cut her promising career short at the tender age of 15. “I had to figure out a new path very quickly and also try to rediscover who I was because the violin had defined so much of me up until that point,” she said during an interview with Wharton operations, information and decisions professor Katy Milkman, who is a fellow behavioral scientist and author of the new book, How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be. Shankar shared stories from her career pivot to behavioral science — a broad discipline that examines the intricacies of human decision-making. (Listen to the full interview at the top of this page.) “That’s such an interesting and difficult challenge for a kid to experience,” Milkman said to Shankar about her hand injury. “If you hadn’t gone through that, you probably wouldn’t be so interested in the way that we react when we need to change.” Beyond the Halls of Academia An accomplished cognitive science student, Shankar earned her bachelor’s degree from Yale University, her Ph.D. from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, and was working on her postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University when she had a moment of clarity. She had been in the windowless basement of a lab for hours, conducting a brain scan on a test subject, when she realized she didn’t know anything about the person sitting in front of her. “I think the order of operations is off here because I’m literally peering into this person’s brain, but I don’t know how many kids they have. I don’t know anything about this person’s hobbies,” Shankar recalled. “It just felt for me and my personality that I needed to be in a slightly more social role. I didn’t know what could come next because what does a cognitive neuroscience postdoc do if they don’t become a professor?” A subsequent conversation with a mentor opened the door to public policy, where intriguing work was being done at the federal level on how to nudge people into positive behaviors through neuroscience. Shankar secured a meeting with Obama’s science adviser and successfully pitched the idea of creating the White House Behavioral Science Team. “In order to build this team, I had to be really scrappy,” she said. “It was almost like building a startup in my parents’ basement. I had to inspire organic interest in my government agency partners in order to get them to collaborate with me. There was no one telling them that they had to apply these nudges. I just had to try to convince them that they should, and that it would be best for their programs.” Obama signed an executive order that formalized the unit beyond his administration, and Shankar and her colleagues tackled a range of issues, including working with the Department of Veterans Affairs on how to encourage veterans to take advantage of a program that helps them
transition to civilian life.
“I’m both humbled by just how incredibly hard it is to get someone to change their mind, but also pretty inspired by the research that has been done over the last decade in this space.”–Maya Shankar “We had to stay within the fixed program costs, and we ended up just changing one word in a marketing email about the program. Instead of telling vets that they were ‘eligible’ for the program, we simply reminded them that they had earned it through their years of service,” Shankar said. That small change resulted in a 9% increase in participation, which Shankar credits to the “endowment effect.” People value things more when they feel like they have earned them, and that feeling creates a strong aversion to loss. The Next Phase A version of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Team, called the Office of Evaluation Sciences, still exists under President Biden, but Shankar has already moved on to a new phase in her career. She joined Google in 2017, and this year she started podcasting. Inspired by her own experiences, her podcast, produced with Pushkin Industries, is fittingly called A Slight Change of Plans. Shankar has intimate conversations with her guests about how they have navigated life’s challenges. Her guests so far have included actress Tiffany Haddish, who has been outspoken about her childhood marked by abuse and instability in the foster care system, and Daryl Davis, a Black jazz musician whose life changed following a single interaction in the early 1980s with a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Davis has since worked to persuade dozens of people to leave the Ku Klux Klan. “When I was conceiving of the podcast idea in the first place, I had Daryl’s story in my head,” Shankar said. “I felt like it was a remarkable story of change, because not only did his life change…he also worked to change other people’s minds. It’s such a rich change story.” Milkman asked Shankar what are the deepest insights that she’s gained over a career working in different spheres of human behavior. Without hesitation, Shankar said it’s the difficulty in changing hearts and minds. Core beliefs, values, and ideologies are fundamental to how people see themselves and the world around them. That’s part of what makes Davis’ story about combatting racism so interesting to her. “I’m both humbled by just how incredibly hard it is to get someone to change their mind, but also pretty inspired by the research that has been done over the last decade in this space,” she said. “And I think it’s becoming increasingly important given the political climate we’re seeing and how divided people feel.”
How Effective is your Digital Body Language? Let’s find out... By Gabe Weisert
Welcome to Leading Disruption, a weekly letter about disruptive leadership in a transforming world. Every week we’ll discover how the best leaders set strategy, build culture, and manage uncertainty all in service of driving disruptive, transformative growth. The digital age is not going anywhere. But something I know we’re all conscious of is the need for connection and clear communication — and many of us feel these are hard to foster when our teams are fully remote or hybrid. Why is there so much misunderstanding at work? How do we better connect across different ages and working styles? These were among the questions that prompted my friend and colleague Erica Dhawan to write her new book, Digital Body Language. I have to be honest with you: this book has been disrupting my mind! Erica joined me on my live show (here’s the replay) to talk about the importance of disrupting the digital age with thoughtful, intentional, digital body language. As Erica put it:
“We’re all immigrants to digital body language, and we need a rulebook for how to understand this new language.” Digital Body Language is the rulebook, and Erica was kind enough to join me and my audience of disruptive leaders to share the biggest takeaways from her book: Reading is the New Listening I love Erica’s point that reading carefully is the new listening, and writing clearly is the new empathy. I wrote last week that today’s thriving leaders must practice empathy, and Erica’s story illustrates how poor digital communication can hurt a leader’s perceived empathy: Erica worked with a woman who got some performance review scores that her empathy was weak. When Erica looked for all the markers of poor empathy (lack of listening, a lack of deep questioning, a lack of paying attention) she found that in face-to-face meetings, this woman was brilliant at empathy! But when Erica dug into her digital body language she found that the client would cancel meetings last minute, send brief, low-context messages like “we need to talk…” (yikes!), and
email on weekends without clarifying to her team that she didn’t expect a response. While her traditional body language signaled deep empathy, her digital body language signals were abysmal. You can’t get away with showing empathy in traditional body language only. We must master the skills of digital body language to build a culture of empathy and respect and showcase that we’re listening and that we value each other. 3 Ways to Build Digital Trust when Mistakes are Inevitable It’s clear how thoughtful digital communication improves empathy and relationships. But what about when you make mistakes? Or if you’re new to digital body language, how do you address shortcomings you may observe in your habits? Erica shares three terrific tips for continuing to build trust and improve on our digital body language: Assume good intent and create a culture where everyone gets the benefit of the doubt. Messages can feel ambiguous or passive-aggressive to you, but check your interpretation before you respond. And know when to switch the medium. As Erica says, “picking up the phone is worth 1000 emails.” Practice virtual water cooler moments. This is just as important in hybrid meetings as in fully remote ones. Creating spaces for those drive-by coffee chats is not a nice-to-have but a must-have. These could look like virtual office hours, group coworking sessions, or questions you asked at the end of monthly meetings so everyone can share their wins. These interpersonal moments break down barriers and allow everyone to feel engaged. Show your vulnerabilities. Technology can create masks. The more leaders share not just what we know but what we don’t know, the more others will feel the permission to do the same. Feeling anxious? Need help from someone who’s the most junior on your team? Not sure if the upcoming deadline is appropriate? Share with your team! These simple disclosures make it less about me and more about we. But it’s… Hard! It’s important to acknowledge that learning a new set of body language tools can feel like a heavy lift! But at the end of the day, Erica emphasized that what’s most important to remember is this: choose thoughtfulness over hastiness.
Top brands come to SCAD seeking new ideas, inventions, and business strategies for a changing world. SCADpro delivers. Tap into our talent bank. scad.edu/scadpro
Why Social Media Should Leave Your Marketing Department— And Where It Should Go Instead
By Aaron Templer
Jeremy Taylor spent a week in May 2021 attending the AdForum Consultants Forum, on the receiving end of nine full credentials presentations from some of the leading global advertising networks and from some up-and-coming independents. A general impression from almost every agency credentials presentation is the defensive position taken up by the agencies in the way they present themselves. Why should this be? Assume the defensive position Agencies presenting their credentials have a universal tendency that gets more noticeable when you see several of them in close sequence. It goes like this. After they have told you something factual about themselves, they then feel the need to spend the next few minutes telling you all the things
you won’t miss out on because of this fact. So – the agency that won a huge number of awards last year wants to reassure you that this means nothing to them and it’s purely the effectiveness of the work that matters to them. The new CEO of a big agency network has been hired from a management consultancy; this sounds fascinating, but the team is keen to reassure you that it’s OK because it turns out he always wanted to work in a creative environment. A network has offices in every major national market, but that doesn’t mean you won’t get personal service just like a small independent. Another network has invested in a state-of-theart platform to produce hundreds of variations of content tailored for every market and sector, but the thing they are keenest to tell you about is that they still believe above all in the power of the big creative idea.
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Some of it is clearly driven by hostile audience questions and the anticipation of them. At the AdForum conference, Mark Read, the CEO of the WPP group, was asked question after question about how the ongoing restructuring of his huge organisation was affecting client servicing capabilities. Eventually, he had to ask if he could take some questions about the benefits of being the world’s biggest advertising company rather than how to overcome the drawbacks. But audience questions can’t be the only explanation. Advertising agencies as an industry sector are defined by this very defensive approach to selling their services. It’s not a new phenomenon, they’ve been doing this for years. But why is it that agencies of all sizes and life-stages adopt this attitude? Is this approach common to professional services companies? A look at the way other professional services companies sell their services is interesting as a comparison. Management consultancies, law firms and accountancy firms also come in many different sizes and formats, from huge multinationals to small local practices. They also have specialised skills, often with a focus on different market sectors and skillsets. Having seen a number of these companies presenting their credentials over the years, they very rarely adopt a defensive attitude. Their focus tends to be purely on the positives of working with them. They play to their strengths and appear to feel no need to apologise for any weaknesses. In fact, they go much further with the non-defensive approach. They like to point out the potential dangers awaiting a client who does not choose to work with them – changes to corporate law, or tax updates, or commercial threats from new market sectors and players which are likely to trip up the unwary client. The ‘burning platform’ is established, and the pitch then is to reassure the client that the perfect solution is available only from the consultancy, so you’d better use them. It’s a very different sales pitch from the vague promises of greener pastures ahead that agencies have traditionally relied on. What’s behind the defensive agency approach? There is no one simple answer to the reasons for agency management teams feeling that they need to defend their position rather than play to their strengths. But, here are some contributing factors based on decades of personal experience working with and within agencies. First up, here is a widely-quoted damnation of advertising from the influential late American stand-up comedian, Bill Hicks: “By the way, if anyone here is in advertising or marketing… kill yourself. There’s no rationalisation for what you do and you are Satan’s little helpers. Okay – kill yourself. Seriously. You are the ruiner of all things good.”
Maybe far-fetched, but I think as a sentiment that it touches a nerve with many agency people. There is an element of embarrassment and discomfort about what they do for a living and uncertainty that what they are doing is really good for the world. Why? Advertising people are rarely found on the right-wing of the political spectrum, and often feel uneasy about naked capitalism. This immediately puts them on the defensive about what they do for a living. Perhaps it even helps explain the rise in the focus on corporate and brand purpose, which has the effect of diluting the raw sales function of advertising? Survey results are important to anyone who works in advertising and marketing. Advertising consistently scores very poorly as a ‘trustworthy’ profession in surveys, along with people such as journalists and politicians. This is perhaps another reason for advertising professionals to feel slightly unworthy. But then again, lawyers also appear near the bottom of those surveys, and as noted above it never seems to worry the big legal partnerships and corporations. One final thought. Unlike most other professions, advertising requires no formal training to enter the industry. You don’t need letters after your name and membership of a professional body to be qualified to work in the industry. Although this is changing and there are degree courses and training from industry bodies available, there is no obligation to use them and many in the business do not. Does this contribute some underlying feeling of inferiority? Is a defensive stance for the industry justified? TrinityP3 has a strong belief in the vital role of marketing as the engine of business growth. Advertising is the visible product of marketing, and it is a fact that without it growth would be severely restricted and the future of the commercial world put into severe doubt. So it follows that advertising is an important industry that needs to be confident in its role and abilities, for the good of the commercial world. Of course, it’s important for the industry to think deeply about its role and to act ethically and responsibly, and by doing so it can continue to attract the talent it needs in order to carry out its role effectively. But that does not mean that it needs to be embarrassed about what it does. It’s time for the agencies to move on from apologising for what they do and to focus more strongly on the skills and benefits that they bring to the market. TrinityP3’s comprehensive Search & Selection process provides extensive market knowledge, tightly defined process and detailed evaluation and assessment. I am a marketing communications professional with a long and successful track record in managing marketing communications agencies. I have been responsible for developing radical and effective communications strategies for my clients in many different markets.
Delivering contextually relevant ads in a postlockdown, privacy-first landscape By Nick Welch
Step four of lockdown easing is here and consumers wanting to take advantage of the additional freedoms will have no time for irrelevant ads. It’s the right moment to consider contextual advertising, says Nick Welch of IAS. As pandemic restrictions ease, fatigue is rife among UK citizens who have weathered three national lockdowns in over a year. And now, as consumers resume normal activities, the last thing they want to see are irrelevant ads. Every day the UK public sees countless advertisements, promotions, and direct marketing communications; brands have a big opportunity to consider mindset marketing. Consumers want advertisers to make a real effort to deliver ads suited to their content consumption. For example, recent research discovered that the majority (81%) of British consumers want to see ads that match the page content they are looking at. Further still, almost two thirds (65%) of UK consumers will actually have a more favourable opinion of brands that serve them contextually relevant ads. Key to delivering ads that are contextually relevant is the ability to understand consumer sentiment and emotion. Fortunately, advertisers don’t need to work harder to glean this information, they just need to work smarter. Looking ahead, brands can utilise machine learning and semantic technology to gather these insights to better inform their contextual campaigns through comprehension of online content at a granular page level. We can also expect this as part of a wider industry shift: first-party data approaches are becoming increasingly important as the sun slowly sets on third-party audience tracking. A little context goes a long way Historically, research has shown that consumer perception of ads, and in turn the brands themselves, are influenced by the quality of an environment. However, the digital advertising landscape is shifting, and context matters now more than ever. Consumers expect brands to advertise in relevant, appropriate environments and they’re more memorable when they do so. Additionally, consumers are more receptive to ads in the right environments from a data privacy standpoint, preferring contextual targeting methods to the traditional data-mining efforts of third-party cookies. Privacy legislation and consumer action are accelerating this shift to contextual
advertising. So, as UK restrictions ease, how can brands come to grips with machine learning and semantic technologies to better inform their campaigns? Measuring consumer sentiment and emotion Advancements in machine learning and cognitive technologies, such as natural language processing, can now determine the sentiment conveyed on a given page at scale, enabling more suitable ad placement decisions. In particular, these technologies analyse the full text and the relationships words have with one another in order to accurately comprehend the context of the page. The overall sentiment (positive, neutral, or negative) is understood along with the associated emotional classifications. For example, amusement, love, and hope are different emotions that can be classified within positive sentiment, even if those specific words are absent. In order to understand sentiment and emotions elicited by the text, a probabilistic approach using keywords in isolation will never be accurate. Appropriately leveraging the full range of sentiment and emotional classifications can drive significant value for advertisers. Sentiment analysis offers a unique opportunity to take control of how a message is presented in various contexts. Rather than simply avoiding content, advertisers can choose how to proactively advertise alongside content of varying sentiments. Looking ahead With an increase in UK marketing budgets during the second quarter of 2021, and the UK heading out of its third national lockdown, now is the crucial time for brands to better understand the sentiment and emotion of digital content and how this can shape their ad strategies. By tapping into the power of emotion and semantics at the page level, advertisers can use these insights to underpin their campaigns and deliver contextually relevant ads. This is essential to cultivate long-term consumer relationships and drive competitive advantage in post-lockdown life. Additionally, shifting to this more privacy-centric approach has never been more pertinent as we edge closer towards a cookieless future.
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Four Examples of Brilliant B2B Marketing [Infographic] Ayaz Nanji
B2B marketing is boring, right? Not necessarily. A recent infographic (below) from LinkedIn Marketing Solutions explores how B2B marketing can be fascinating—and even brilliant—when it’s rooted in human emotions. The piece looks at four emotionally compelling examples of B2B marketing, delves into their impact, and explains why each definitely isn’t boring.
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Ayaz Nanji is a digital strategist and a co-founder of ICW Media, a marketing agency specializing in content and social media services for tech firms. He is also a research writer for MarketingProfs. He has worked for Google/YouTube, the Travel Channel, AOL, and the New York Times
Harness the Power of Sound to Improve Mental Health and Well-Being By Steve Keller
At Studio Resonate, I spend my days working as a bit of an audio alchemist, blending sound science with sound art to help brands and agencies make sound decisions. And while the bulk of my work focuses on the use of audio in advertising, sonic branding and experiential activations, I also explore ways we can engage in “sonic interventions” by identifying problems in our lives, our businesses and our communities where the use of sound might offer innovative solutions. Consider this sonic intervention: the power of “sonic tonics” to improve our mental health and well-being. There’s a growing body of robust empirical research demonstrating the therapeutic role that music and sound can play in a variety of contexts, including the context of our mental health and well-being. Here are few practical tips, drawn from research, and offered to you as a “sound prescription” to improve mental health and wellness. Sound start While we might need a bit of a kick to get us out of bed in the morning, alarms can trigger a fight or flight response in our brains, increasing our heart rate, elevating our blood pressure and contributing to sleep inertia. Instead of a jolting alarm, try waking up to your favorite music instead. It can help you get your day started on the right foot—particularly if you can dance to it. Sound sentiments When we’re feeling sad, conventional wisdom might suggest that we listen to a happy tune to lift our spirits. However, we might do better choosing music that matches our mood, rather than trying to change it. It seems counterintuitive, but studies have shown that listening to sad music when we’re feeling down can actually induce pleasant emotions, akin to a friend who provides support and empathy after a loss. There may be a physiological benefit that comes with listening to melancholy music, too, linked to prolactin, a hormone associated with crying that helps to curb grief. While some researchers believe sad music can trick the brain into engaging in a compensatory response by releasing prolactin, others suggest that we may find sad music pleasurable because we find it aesthetically beautiful. Sound sleep Lack of sleep can increase our risk for obesity, heart disease and infections, as well as exacerbate depression, anxiety and other mental disorders. Getting a good night’s sleep can reduce stress, help us think more clearly and improve our reflexes. Though studies suggest that listening to relaxing, classical music can lead to improved sleep quality, new research reveals that listening to catchy, repetitive music before going to bed may produce adverse side effects,
triggering involuntary musical imagery that decreases the quality of sleep and increases daytime dysfunction. Instead of music at bedtime, try listening to soothing sounds of nature or white noise. These sounds can carry us to dreamland with an added benefit: masking other noises in the environment that might keep us from drifting off or interrupt a good night’s rest. Sound nutrition You are what you eat, the saying goes, and there’s research to suggest that our diet not only affects our physical health, but our mental health, too. One of the most surprising insights I’ve gained in exploring the relationship between sound and taste is that there’s also a relationship between sound and diet. We’ve learned a lot by studying the effects of music, sound and noise in restaurant settings. In loud, noisy restaurants, people eat more food. Conversely, in low-lit restaurants that play soft music, food consumption tends to decrease—by up to 18% in one study. We think that in more relaxed, lownoise environments, we consume food more slowly, and are more aware of when we begin to feel full. Try to avoid noisy environments when eating, and if you’re dining at home, try putting on some relaxing tunes. Or try eating while wearing ear plugs, which might put you more in touch with the sounds of your own eating, a sonic hack that’s been shown to significantly decrease caloric intake. Sound connections Listening to music can bring us closer together, literally. Prior to the pandemic, Sonos, Apple and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin conducted an experiment in 30 homes, collecting data from Apple watches, iBeacons and nest cams. When music was playing, the average distance between household members decreased by 12%. They were 33% more likely to cook together, 15% more likely to laugh together and 18% more likely to utter the words, “I love you.” We also know that singing together and moving in time with the music increases pro-social behavior. Covid-19 gave us an opportunity to examine the role music played in coping during lock downs and social distancing. Now, we’re just beginning to analyze data collected over the past year. Early results suggest that music has helped us relax, elevated our mood, kept us company, drawn us together, sustained a sense of community and improved our satisfaction with life. I hope that some of these suggestions will help you harness the power of sound in new ways. While all these sonic tonics are drawn from research, it’s important to recognize that they are no substitute for counseling or therapy from a trained professional. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, or having a hard time coping, remember: You’re not alone.
Here’s what happened when this company banned meetings By David Penn
Most of us consider meetings a necessary evil of getting work done. While some are clearly a waste of time, others can
decisions. But what would happen if you banned them altogether?
provide opportunities for teams to collaborate and make
That’s what the online media company TheSoul Publishing
did when it adopted a “no meetings” policy across their global company. The reason? Eighty percent of the company’s 2,100-member global workforce work remotely, and live, in-person meetings were not an effective form of communication.
working process,” says Mamedov. “Otherwise, it would be disrupting if a person is not trained basically to operate in such manner. The first thing they would likely do is try to set up a meeting with someone.”
“I like to compare meetings to large conferences,” says COO Arthur Mamedov. “Speaking in front of a group of people easily becomes an inefficient information exchange. Some people might get distracted in the moment. For others, the information may not be relevant. And during Q&A sessions, the speaker may forget important details. Meetings can easily become a passive activity that waste participants’ time.”
While they’re banned, Mamedov admits that meetings do sometimes happen, but only for special cases. “We have a two-page manual on how to set up a meeting, but for them to happen, you need to follow a very strict protocol,” he says.
The Exception
This is especially true when people are spread across time zones. “You cannot expect to get connected with people in a seamless manner,” says Mamedov. “It is always out of business hours for a group of participants.”
First, the employee will need to try to resolve the issue without a meeting, using the company’s project management software. If they reach a point where they cannot move forward in an asynchronous discussion, the employee who wants a meeting needs to create a plan and agenda for the conversation beforehand. The request for a meeting must be done at least 24 hours in advance.
A more efficient way to communicate to a group is to post information online. Moving the information-exchange process to written formats first allows people to get updated at their own pace.
“Then you need to make sure that you’ve invited only those people who really need to participate,” says Mamedov. “Usually, we try to limit all the meetings to two persons only and for 30 minutes maximum.”
How to Ban Meetings
After the meeting, the person who called it logs in the result in the location where the project work is stored, so everyone can benefit.
While it sounds simple, rolling out a no-meeting policy takes foresight and planning, says Mamedov, adding that how employees communicate is part of your corporate culture. “Corporate culture has to be focused on value creation,” says Mamedov. “It’s doing things rather than talking about them. Again, this sounds simple, but there are lot of cultural touch points that you need to address. You need systems to support the workflow and very clear principles of communication. Once a model of interaction is set up, you can build deep professional connections and trust within the team.” For example, TheSoul Publishing banned internal emails. “Getting rid of meetings requires radical transparency, which is usually the most uncomfortable one for people,” says Mamedov. “Emails are the opposite of transparency. Exchanges are only visible within the group. Anyone who needs access to the information should be able to get it to make sure that everyone is in sync.” Instead, information should be shared on a platform that provides everyone with equal access and instant updates whenever anyone posts anything. “You cannot expect people to perform as a team when they are not on the same page, even at the high level where our organization is moving,” says Mamedov. Having a team that can work under this model starts with recruiting. “You have to hire agile people who are likely to adopt those approaches and abandon the old way of doing things,” says Mamedov. “The more non-standard your culture is, the deeper and lengthier your onboarding process has to be.” New employees are taught how to communicate with each other. “There’s a learning curve and time allowed for new employees basically to digest it before they dive into the
“If the meeting was on Zoom, the recording is posted, as well,” says Mamedov. “With such a robust preparation process, people often push harder to resolve things without a meeting. And that’s the ultimate goal.” Benefits of Banning Meetings The goal of the no meetings policies is to make sure that everyone stays productive, minimizes distractions, and spends their time on focused work. Mamedov says he gets feedback from new employees that the no-meeting model is unusual and a bit stressful in the beginning, but once they get into it, they feel liberated because their productivity skyrockets. “Usually, people are best at their work and at their profession,” he says. “For most roles within the company, talking and discussing things is not part of their core job description. We’ve established an environment where people can generate incredible value in a faster turnaround time.” While it sounds a bit robotic on the surface, Mamedov says it doesn’t remove the human element. “People tend to socialize when they’re working colleagues and form a professional relationship,” he says. “Even if everything you’re doing is in a thread, you still enjoy conversations with colleagues.” In fact, TheSoul Publishing has set up social platforms, such as book clubs, where coworkers can connect. The focus is on removing the barriers to work that can be frustrating, says Mamedov. “Work has to deliver joy, and we’re just trying to design the processes in such a way that is both joyful and efficient, so people can concentrate on things that they’re best at,” he says. “Once they start doing more of what they’re good at, they become happier in general.”
YouGov Recommend Rankings 2021 MENA
By Ayaz Nanji
Word of mouth is the most influential form of brand awareness and credibility, with people far more likely to trust the recommendations of someone they know over impersonal advertising.
in determining whether someone is likely to recommend your
Factors such as customer experience, brand image, brand values, emotion and consumer personality play a pivotal role
to recommending their products or services to a friend or
YouGov Recommend Rankings 2021 UAE
brand or not. Discover what brands are taking the top spots when it comes colleague.
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Top Improvers in the UAE
Get in touch: The Rankings data can be further developed with YouGov Recommend+, a fresh approach to understanding consumer advocacy. Complete the form to speak to one of our experts about your brand ranking and learn more about YouGov Recommend+. YouGov Recommend Rankings 2021 Saudi Arabia
Top Improvers in Saudi Arabia
YouGov Recommend Rankings 2021 Egypt
Contact us: The Rankings data can be further developed with YouGov Recommend+, a fresh approach to understanding consumer advocacy. Complete the form to speak to one of our experts about your brand ranking and learn more about YouGov Recommend+.
developed with YouGov Recommend+ a fresh approach to understanding consumer advocacy. YouGov Recommend+ is a highly cost-effective NPS® diagnostics approach that gives marketers the full picture of what drives existing and potential promoters by speaking directly to those customers who recommend your brand.
Methodology:
YouGov BrandIndex draws data from interviews with our
The YouGov Recommend Rankings 2021 are calculated using data we collect from members of the public in markets around the globe every day, from our flagship YouGov BrandIndex tool.
15 million registered panel members across 40 sectors and
Every brand’s performance is tracked daily against a range of metrics, and our Recommend ranking measures the percentage of a brand’s customers who would recommend it to a friend or colleague. The rankings data can be further
Want to see how other markets compare? Our annual
more than 55 countries globally. This year’s ranking includes consumer views from across 33 markets, including the USA, China, Germany, India and the UK, and many more. rankings highlights the top 10 recommended brands across 33 markets and top 10 most improved brands across 29 markets.
What if food packaging were carbon-neutral?
Go nature. Go carton. Food packaging plays a critical role in getting food safely to consumers around the world. But it can also cause problems for the planet. What if all food packaging came from plant-based materials and didn’t impact the climate? At Tetra Pak, we already have paper-based carton packages with reduced climate impact. But we won’t stop there. Our aim is to create cartons made solely from plant-based materials that are fully renewable, fully recyclable and carbon-neutral. It’s all part of our journey to deliver the world’s most sustainable food package. Learn more at gonature.tetrapak.com
Book,
&
Line
Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator Paperback By Ryan Holiday Hailed as “astonishing and disturbing” by the Financial Times and “essential reading” by TechCrunch at its original publication, former American Apparel marketing director Ryan Holiday’s first book sounded a prescient alarm about the dangers of fake news. It’s all the more relevant today.
Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know By Adam Grant
Intelligence is usually seen as the ability to think and learn, but in a rapidly changing world, there’s another set of cognitive skills that might matter more: the ability to rethink and unlearn. In our daily lives, too many of us favor the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt. We listen to opinions that make us feel good, instead of ideas that make us think hard. We see disagreement as a threat to our egos, rather than an opportunity to learn.
No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram By Sarah Frier “The most enrapturing book about Silicon Valley drama since Hatching Twitter” (Fortune), No Filter “pairs phenomenal in-depth reporting with explosive storytelling that gets to the heart of how Instagram has shaped our lives, whether you use the app or not” (The New York Times).
No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention By Reed Hastings There has never before been a company like Netflix. It has led nothing short of a revolution in the entertainment industries, generating billions of dollars in annual revenue while capturing the imaginations of hundreds of millions of people in over 190 countries. But to reach these great heights, Netflix, which launched in 1998 as an online DVD rental service, has had to reinvent itself over and over again.
Sinker Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World By David Epstein Plenty of experts argue that anyone who wants to develop a skill, play an instrument, or lead their field should start early, focus intensely, and rack up as many hours of deliberate practice as possible. If you dabble or delay, you’ll never catch up to the people who got a head start.
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones By James Clear No matter your goals, Atomic Habits offers a proven framework for improving--every day. James Clear, one of the world’s leading experts on habit formation, reveals practical strategies that will teach you exactly how to form good habits, break bad ones, and master the tiny behaviors that lead to remarkable results.
Humility Is the New Smart: Rethinking Human Excellence in the Smart Machine Age By Edward D. Hess Your job is at risk—if not now, then soon. We are on the leading edge of a Smart Machine Age led by artificial intelligence that will be as transformative for us as the Industrial Revolution was for our ancestors. Smart machines will take over millions of jobs in manufacturing, office work, the service sector, the professions, you name it.
Radical Candor (Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity (Revised, Updated)) By Kim Scott The idea is simple: You don’t have to choose between being a pushover and a jerk. Using Radical Candor-avoiding the perils of Obnoxious Aggression, Manipulative Insincerity, and Ruinous Empathy-you can be kind and clear at the same time.
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First, Break All the Rules: What the world’s Greatest Managers Do Differently By Jim Harter They actually have vastly different styles and backgrounds. Yet despite their differences, great managers share one common trait: They don’t hesitate to break virtually every rule held sacred by conventional wisdom.
The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money, And Stand out From The Crowd By Allan Dib In The 1-Page Marketing Plan, serial entrepreneur and rebellious marketer Allan Dib reveals a marketing implementation breakthrough that makes creating a marketing plan simple and fast. It’s literally a single page, divided up into nine squares.
Marketing Made Simple: A Stepby-Step StoryBrand Guide for Any Business
One Million Followers, Updated Edition: How I Built a Massive Social Following in 30 Days
By Donald Miller
By Brendan Kane
The inability to attract and convert new customers is costing business owners valuable opportunities to grow their brand. This prevents companies, both big and small, from making the sales that are crucial to their survival. With Marketing Made Simple, you will learn everything you need to know to take your business to the next level.
This means that the question for anyone who wants to gain mass exposure for their transformative content, business, or brand or connect with audiences around the globe is no longer if they should use social media but how to best take advantage of the numerous different platforms and beat the algorithms.
Hook Point: How to Stand Out in a 3-Second World
Influencer
By Wang Shaoqiang A lot of people know who they are, what they do, and a few even know why they do it—but even when brands or individuals have clarity in these areas, they often struggle to grab a potential audience’s attention for long enough to get them to learn about their attributes. Others have amazing products or services that fail to achieve great success because they don’t know how to talk about what they do effectively.
What to Post: How to Create Engaging Social Media Content that Builds Your Brand and Gets Results (for Real Estate) By Chelsea Peitz This isn’t another one of those real estate marketing books that you read once and stick back in the bookcase, never to be read again.
By Brittany Hennessy Every one of your favorite influencers started with zero followers and had to make a lot of mistakes to get where they are today—earning more money each year than their parents made in the last decade. But to become a top creator, you need to understand the strategies behind the Insta-ready lifestyle . . .
This Is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn to See By Jake Knapp Seth Godin has taught and inspired millions of entrepreneurs, marketers, leaders, and fans from all walks of life, via his blog, online courses, lectures, and bestselling books. He is the inventor of countless ideas that have made their way into mainstream business language, from Permission Marketing to Purple Cow to Tribes to The Dip.