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Dear friends It only seems like yesterday that we gingerly began 2021 and here we are right at the end of it. But, that being said, are we seeing the end of the pandemic? Not in the least. So, let us all be on guard and do our bit by being socially responsible. Just like love or music, marketing has no language barriers, or does it? Know more in this edition. Customer Centricity is being redefined as a one to many phenomena. Read about it here. It’s a good time of the year to take a look at the World’s Best Brands in 2021. See the listing in this edition(not many surprises here though). BMW is giving cool a new chill. Examine it closely. Branded Content Marketing has been the flavour of the season for a while. We talk about how E Commerce brands are using it to their advantage. Pixar has been recognised as the epitome of the greatest creativity. You get a chance to understand how they consistently foster collective creativity in an industry that is so unpredictable. We encourage you marketers to enter the New Year 2022 with a new lens. The Marketers Toolkit 2022 is our New Year’s gift. Where has all the humour gone from marketing and advertising? We urge you to look at humour more seriously. The Buyer Journey and its trail need not be an enigma. We show brand marketers the way where to begin their pitch and engagement. There is ample more in this edition for all of you to soak in. For the next year and beyond, my very best to you and yours. Stay safe and healthy!
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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 Business Performance Director: Sunil Vasudevan 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 Does Language Really Matter in Marketing? Join the B Hive: Why agencies are seeking B Corp certification BMW is transitioning into a very cool brand Your Buyers Start Their Journey in the Dark Funnel, and You Need to Be There When It Happens How the best soccer team in the world lost its luster How your brand can sound distinctive in a noisy world The World’s Most Valuable Brands 2021 How Agencies Can Retain Clients When a New CMO Comes In Standard Chartered Bank’s Emma Sheller: ‘Marketing needs to be bolder’ The Serious Case For Humor How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity Bottling the Secret Sauce: Brands Share Insights on Closing the Intention-Action Gap The questions Spotify, Bumble, and Medium execs are asking themselves—and why you should follow their lead Creativity May Suffer When Mature Projects Change Hands What Ecommerce Consumers Really Want from Branded Content Marketing Marketer’s Toolkit 2022: How to step into new rivers Curbing Clutter: Why Do We Hold On to Things We Never Use? One Person, Many Needs: How Customer Centricity Has Changed Book, Line & Sinker
Does Language Really Matter in Marketing? By John Furgurson
You’ve probably heard this one before, but it’s worth repeating: The purpose of your company means more these days than the product or the price. It’s not what you sell, it’s what you stand for. It’s like adding a new P to the classic 4 Ps of marketing. Product. Price. Promotion. Place. PURPOSE. If you’re trying to target young consumers and you don’t have a worthwhile brand purpose that’s communicated clearly and consistently, you’re going to have a hard time gaining traction in the marketplace. Consumers of all ages — but especially Gen Z — want to buy from people who stand up for the things they believe in. They’re looking to do business with like-minded people. It’s belonging, plain and simple. If you try to be all things to all people, that means you stand for nothing and appeal to no one. If you stand for something, that means you have to choose. Who do you want to ignore? What are you going to stand against? In order to gain a large share of one particular market, you have to give up another. Apple ignored the corporate world and chose to focus on a different target market: “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels…” Even the world’s largest marketing organization – Proctor & Gamble — understands that ideals can spell the difference between failure and success for their brands. Jim Stengel, who was the Global Marketing Officer at P&G,
puts it simply: “Your organization can’t move in the right direction if people don’t understand what you believe in. They all want to know what you stand for and what you’re working toward, and they want to see you expressing that in everything you do.” “Numbers alone cannot be your northstar,” Stengel said. A lot of business people admit that they started out with nothing but profits in mind. It’s only after they achieved what they’d call “success” that they stop to think about something a little more meaningful for their brand. It’s fantastic that so many start-ups are now building philanthropic practices into their business models. As long as they are genuine and relevant. Having a brand purpose doesn’t mean jumping on the bandwagon and giving 1% of your revenues to environmental non-profits, like Patagonia does. It means standing for something relevant to you, your customers and your brand. Patagonia is an outdoor gear company. It makes sense for them to support nonprofits that protect our outdoor spaces. If you’re a real estate developer the environment as brand purpose doesn’t quite jive. Your cause needs to sync up with the realities of your business. Otherwise, it’s all a big lie. Also, giving to your favorite charity isn’t the same thing as having a genuine purpose for your brand. It’s nice to have charities that reflect and support your brand purpose, but you CAN have a definitive purpose without having a related charity. It’s okay. The fact is, a strong sense of purpose is a common element of all great brands.
Join the B Hive: Why agencies are seeking B Corp certification By Mark Schaefer
It’s no secret that modern consumers and employees are much more interested in companies’ social, political and environmental impact than in the past. But in a marketplace where the word “purpose” has become saturated, agencies are pursuing more tangible commitments to creating a better world. One such way is by achieving B Corp certification, a distinction that assesses a businesses’ practices and impact across sustainability, employee wellness, pay equity, diversity, company benefits, community, government and working conditions. To obtain the distinction, granted by non-profit organization B Lab, for-profit companies must enter into a rigorous evaluation process and emerge with a score of at least 80. The process requires answering 200 questions that measure an organization’s positive impact across various categories, including salary ratios between senior and junior employees, parental leave policies, diversity and inclusion or efforts to control greenhouse gas emissions. Since its inception in 2006, B Lab has certified over 3,500 corporations in more than 70 countries, including notable brands such as Patagonia, Allbirds and Bombas. B Corp certification is now rising among advertising and PR agencies as well, as clients and staff increasingly inquire about diversity and sustainability practices as a condition of business or employment.
Dept, a digital agency headquartered in Amsterdam, received B Corp certification globally on Thursday. The agency, which works with clients including Adidas, Samsung and Beats by Dre, is now legally required to measure its social, environmental and community impact, and must continuously gather information to outline changes and improvements in those areas. The process was rigorous, but the decision to go B Corp helps Dept hold itself accountable as a responsible business operator, said head of U.S. marketing Kristin Cronin. “We felt that it was a really good way [to have] a third party auditor, someone who can truly hold us accountable,” she said. As a result of the audit process, Dept has installed solar panels on the roof of its Amsterdam office and has committed to becoming climate negative across all of its offices by 2023. It has also introduced faceless recruiting to achieve equitable and diverse hiring and has opted to work with clients that have a direct social or environmental impact. The changes are just a few steps in what Cronin referred to as a “continuous process” for maintaining a purposeful mission. “There’s a lot of validation that goes into [it], and proof,” she said. “[It’s not that] you get certified and now that work is done. That’s really just the first step in the journey.” “[And] we’re still figuring it out,” she added, “We are not
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13 about to get on a soapbox and act like we’ve got it all figured out.” The B Corp journey B Corp certification is not a one-and-done process. According to B Lab, companies must get recertified every three years to track their progress. B Corps are subject to random audits and can lose certification if they do not continue to meet a minimum score of 80. Going B Corp is not for the faint of heart, nor for companies that simply want a badge of honor, said Paul Cohen, partner and CEO of North America at Milk & Honey PR. “Every company on the planet now describes themselves as a purpose-driven organization, to the point where that phrase has lost a lot of meaning,” he said. “But having the B Corp certification gives us the impression that we really are a purpose-driven organization, not just because we say so, but because we go through a rigorous vetting process and are on a constant road of improvement.” After getting globally certified in August 2019, Milk & Honey PR, which launched its U.S. office in May, has nearly doubled its B Corp score already as it begins its recertification process. Since its first audit, the agency has made all employees majority shareholders and has aligned itself with the United Nations global sustainable development goals. Milk & Honey has also created a code of conduct contract for its clients to ensure it conducts business ethically. While Milk & Honey works with clients across all categories including wine and spirits and retail, Kirsty Leighton, founder and CEO, said the agency is selective about who it works with and chooses clients that share its values in order to balance purpose and profit. Challenges Aside from the exacting nature of the process, pursuing a B Corp certification presents individual challenges for agencies. For UK-based ad tech company Good Loop, a particular challenge that cropped up when it sought certification in 2019 was electricity consumption. While the company had already changed its pay policies, carbon offset its flights and switched to renewable servers, the technology it uses to serve ads used huge amounts of electricity. “We had no concept of how much electricity was used, and we didn’t, frankly, account for it in offsetting [our carbon footprint] at all,” said Amy Williams, founder and CEO at Good Loop. “We did a lot of work figuring out how to calculate the electricity used to serve an ad.” That included developing a methodology to calculate and offset electricity impacts for every ad served. Good Loop has since packaged the methodology into products including the Green Ad Tag, a viewability tag that carbon offsets the energy used to serve the ad in real time. Boston-based
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Communication, on the other hand, which has been B Corp certified since 2013, had trouble accounting for water consumption because it operates in a building with shared water supply. For Yulu Public Relations, a social and environmental impact relations agency with offices in the U.S. and Canada, a particular challenge was allocating resources to provide extended benefits to all of its Canadian employees. “[Extended benefits] plans are not typical for startups or small agencies until they get those resources,” said Melissa Orozco, founder and CEO at Yulu. “It’s a big investment.” Since becoming certified in 2015, however, the agency offers an extended benefits package for Candian employees that includes extended health care and dental benefits as well as a meditation app allowance and flexible vacation policy. Though all Canadian employees are entitled to a year-long parental leave under government rules, Yulu also provides a top up offering to add to funds allocated from the government. B Corp certification is only getting more rigorous. Teak Media founder Jackie Herskovitz Russell said the organization has started to look for more detail on how companies operate in each specific area of B Corp certification. For instance, while she says B Lab has been “ahead of the curve” on diversity, equity and inclusion, the organization is now placing more emphasis on drilling down into what the company is doing specifically in that area. The business imperative Despite its challenges, agency pros agree that B Corp certification is a worthwhile endeavor. Elsa Perushek, partner at Minneapolis-based creative and design agency Zeus Jones, said that being certified has allowed for more authentic, transparent and credible conversations with clients about their social impact. “By bringing [social impact] to the core of our business, it [has made] for more honest conversations with our clients about making positive change in the world,” she said. “Because now we’ve done that, not only with other organizations, but with ourselves.” She noted that talent is also attracted to companies that make conscious impacts, especially recent college graduates and Gen Zers entering the workforce. “[It] brings a more fulfilled and inspired workforce, which is going to create better results,” she said. Milk & Honey’s Cohen echoed that sentiment, noting that going B Corp is simply a good business move, as it makes the company more attractive to clients, consumers and talent. “I know that all the clients we work with are doing their part to improve the lives of employees and the broader community, and that makes a really big difference,” Cohen said. “And people want to work with companies that do the right thing.”
BMW is transitioning into a very cool brand By Jennifer Hahn
BMW has used recycled and recyclable materials to create the i Vision Circular, a concept car designed in line with circular economic principles to be easily disassembled at the end of its life. Currently on show as part of the Sustainable Innovation Forum at the COP26 climate conference, the four-seater vehicle features reduced numbers of components and materials. It is held together by detachable connections rather than
permanent adhesives so that they can be separated and reused. The instrument panel, the seats and wheels can be opened up using quick-release buttons that were informed by the Boa lacing system on snowboard boots, in which the constituent parts are strung together using a wire that can be tightened and released in one move. “Wherever this button is, it symbolises disassembly,” explained BMW Group’s head of sustainability design
Daniela Bohlinger. “You can push it and, whatever it is, it falls apart.” “Everything is just connected through the wire, it’s not glued together so you can easily disassemble it,” she added. Although the i Vision Circular will never go into production, it was designed to show how the industry could become more circular by 2040 and cut down on the embodied carbon associated with material production, which currently accounts for between 18 to 22 per cent of a car’s lifecycle emissions. “Lowering the carbon footprint is our main target,” Bohlinger told Dezeen. “The circular economy is a tool to address this topic when it comes to product design.” BMW not committed to phasing out fossil fuels The project forms part of BMW’s wider commitment to reach carbon neutrality by 2050, as well as the short-term goal of reducing the whole-life carbon footprint of its cars by 40 per cent by the end of the decade. To tackle emissions from materials, the company will be increasing the recycled content in its vehicles from 30 to 50 per cent over the same time period. Reaching these goals would bring BMW “into the corridor of 1.7 to 1.5 degrees” of global warming set out in the Paris Agreement, said the company’s head of sustainability strategy Thomas Becker. Elsewhere in the sector, electric carmaker Polestar is aiming to produce a climate-neutral car by 2030 while parent company Volvo has committed itself to phasing out the internal combustion engine by 2030. BMW has so far abstained from making similar pledges, and despite undertaking lifecycle assessments (LCAs) of all of its cars, the company has neglected to calculate a carbon footprint for the i Vision Circular that could quantify the emissions reductions achieved through a more circular design. “We only have LCAs for the cars we sell,” Becker said. “We don’t do this for each and every variant.” But he claims the fact that the vehicle is made exclusively from recycled steel, aluminium, plastic and glass, alongside renewable bio-based materials, means the carbon savings are “pretty huge”. Design focused on reducing and recycling materials The design team did not look at creating a battery for the i Vision Circular, despite this being the most emissionsintensive component of any electric car, accounting for around 26 per cent of its supply-chain emissions. Instead, they worked on the car’s metal shell, which was anodised and tempered to colour it in iridescent shades of copper and blue without the need for paint. This is necessary, Bohlinger explained, because beyond hindering recycling, “painting the cars has a super high impact in terms of electricity and water consumption”. The BMW logo is engraved into the hood rather than being added on as a separate badge and the carpet and velvetfeel upholstery on the interior are made from old BMW seat
covers, which were shredded and spun into new PET yarns. While the yarns can be continuously remelted and recycled using readily available technology, Bohlinger concedes the same is not true for the recycled plastic bumpers, meaning they are not truly circular. “You might not be able to make another car out of that at the moment, you might just downcycle it to another product that does not have the same performance requirements,” she said. The wheels of the i Vision Circular are cast from responsibly sourced natural latex, derived from the sap of the rubber tree, and a wood-offcut composite was 3D printed to form the steering wheel. Although these natural materials generally have a lower embodied carbon footprint than petroleum-based plastics, neither can be recycled. Price and quality of recycled materials is prohibitive Becker says he “would not guarantee” that BMW will actually be able to close all of the material loops for all of its cars by 2040. “You can get a 100 per cent recycled vehicle, which is this one,” he said. “But unfortunately, you will not get it at a reasonable price and not in sufficient volume.” “Although secondhand clothing is cheaper than new stuff, this doesn’t apply here,” Becker continued. “Because while we have an increasing demand for recycled material, this is not matched by sufficient volume at automotive-grade quality.” In order to increase this, he argued, there needs to be collaboration, politically and across the sector, to overhaul the current recycling system. This includes improving the sorting technology and chemcycling process for plastics to get better quality recyclates and putting in place a take-back system for old cars so that their high-performance materials can be reused for new vehicles rather than being sent to the scrap yard. “I doubt that the current situation, where the same shredder digests microwave ovens, fridges and cars, is the future,” he said. “So there will have to be an overarching logic where the customers know if they want to get rid of the car, this is the solution,” Becker continued. “How much sense would it make to do that in isolation?” A multilateral deal is set to be proposed at COP26 this week, uniting governments and manufacturers behind a pledge to phase out the internal combustion engine by 2040. BMW has said it will not sign on to the deal, which has received support from a number of other major car makers including Volvo, Ford and General Motors, citing concerns about the lack of necessary charging infrastructure. Jennifer is design and environment reporter at Dezeen. She was previously a commercial editor at The Times & Sunday Times and has written for publications including Vice and Huck.Originally from Berlin, she has a degree in media and communications from Goldsmiths, University of London.
Your Buyers Start Their Journey in the Dark Funnel, and You Need to Be There When It Happens By 6sense
Having been privy to the lead management processes of hundreds of B2B organizations of every stripe, I would estimate that at least half have internal demand funnel (AKA waterfall) stages that combine stages of their sales process with what are really stages of the buyer journey. The difference between those two seemingly similar constructs and that misalignment is one of the most common causes of
funnel to the buyer’s journey. This article will explain what each is, how they are different, why they are typically not closely aligned, and what is required to do so.
inconsistent revenue team performance.
Your Funnel Is Not Their Journey
Every B2B organization should work diligently to align their
A B2B buyer’s journey is not about an individual person,
is vital. They are not only different, but often badly misaligned,
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but nearly always about a team of people who are working together to address a business need. Buyer journeys, therefore, are labels applied to the internal state of buying teams as they progress toward a purchase. Typical buyer journey stages include awareness (of the business need and potential to address it), consideration (of potential solutions and solution providers), decision (selection of a provider or providers that can solve the business need) and purchase (where the deal is negotiated and consummated). What is critical to understand about buyer journeys is that they exist independent of seller funnels. A buying organization might easily go from awareness right up to the moment of purchase without having entered into any selling organization’s funnel.
If you are a relatively small brand, lighting up the Dark Funnel is especially important, but even the largest brands may not see potential buyers until those buyers have progressed deep into their journeys. By accessing evidence of that research activity—commonly referred to as intent data— from the Dark Funnel, sellers can begin to see virtually all relevant buyer journeys as they are beginning Although most of the Dark Funnel is found on external resources, an important part of the Dark Funnel can be found much closer to home. We know that between 90-98% of traffic on B2B websites is anonymous. Unless you are identifying the source of that anonymous traffic, there’s a strong possibility that some of the buyer journeys that you would love to know about are happening right under your nose.
In contrast, a funnel describes a provider organization’s progress in recognizing, engaging, and converting potential buying teams. There are numerous models depicting funnels, but the best-known model is the one my colleagues and I built at SiriusDecisions, the Demand Unit Waterfall, which includes stages ranging from Target (containing good-fit prospective buyers) and Detected (where a buyer’s journey has been detected through behavioral data) down to Pipeline and Closed won (link out). Think of the funnel as describing relationship status (we are dating), whereas the journey is the internal state of the buyer (I am smitten).
What’s more, your organization’s marketing activities are responsible for bringing those anonymous visitors to your site. You have already paid to engage those buyer journeys, but you must illuminate that part of the Dark Funnel to capitalize on your investment.
Buyer Journeys and Funnels Are Misaligned
In the poll discussed above, 65% of respondents said they would prefer to know about buying processes even before they start. Though that may seem impossible, anticipating buyer journeys simply means anticipating or predicting buyer needs. Fortunately, in addition to the familiar behavioral signals just discussed, there are signals in the Dark Funnel to help you do just that.
In an ideal world, B2B organizations would discover the buyer journeys their prospects are embarking on as, or even before, they occur. Doing so would allow organizations to understand and shape buyer needs and establish their brands as desirable partners. Early detection also allows sellers to execute consistent buyer enablement and selling practices, which lead to more predictable revenue outcomes. When sellers encounter buyers at random times, however, funnels are compressed into whatever time remains in that buyer’s journey. Unfortunately, as a poll I conducted during a recent webinar demonstrates Although 97% of our respondents reported wanting to know about buyer journey as or before they start, none reported anticipating when buyer journeys would begin, and only 23% reported consistently discovering them as they were starting. The Dark Funnel: Where Journeys Begin and Funnels Align The key to aligning funnels with buyer journeys is to employ modern data science to illuminate what we at 6sense call the Dark Funnel. Consider that unless you are the only provider of the solutions you offer and your digital properties are the only places where your category of solution is discussed, it is likely that some or even most of your potential buyers will begin their buyer journeys on influencer sites, product review sites, competitors’ sites, social media, or the myriad of other places buyers can go in the digital realm. Taken together, all those places buyers are searching for information make up the Dark Funnel.
Rather than looking at anonymous data as a failure to convert visitors, you can work with a provider to de-anonymize that traffic and illuminate the part of the Dark Funnel that is closest to home. Anticipating Journeys With Dark Funnel Signals
For example, detailed technographic data can identify companies that have aging equipment and technologies that will need to be replaced. Financial performance data can identify companies that are growing and need to expand their infrastructure. Regulatory and firmographic data can identify companies that will require solutions to address pending business requirements. Many more such signals are available to help sellers anticipate buyer needs. By acquiring and acting on those types of Dark Funnel signals, organizations can begin shaping the needs and preferences of potential buyers just as they become aware of the need to make a purchase. In the poll discussed above, 39% of respondents said they met active buyers at random points along a buyer’s journey. When organizations discover buyer journeys only when a member of the buying team becomes a lead, or when a prospector happens to reach out to a buying team member, the results can’t be anything other than random. Finding out about journeys at random times means that your sales cycles and funnel will be unpredictable. By tapping into the Dark Funnel, organizations can see and align their marketing and selling processes to the beginning of the buyer’s journey. By doing so, you’ll have a better chance of winning more deals, and you can bring consistency and predictability to the revenue generation process.
How the best soccer team in the world lost its luster By Simon Kuper
If you had to date the peak of FC Barcelona’s reign in global soccer, it might be November 25, 2012. That night, Barça, which plays in the Spanish topflight La Liga, won 4–0 at little Levante. When Martín Montoya replaced the injured Brazilian Dani Alves after 14 minutes, all 11 of Barcelona’s players on the field had come through the club’s youth academy, La Masia. Even Barça’s coach that day, Tito Vilanova, was a Masia alumnus. Arguably, this homegrown 11 were the best on Earth. Soccer clubs pride themselves on having strong youth training programs, but this team was something special. Most of the players had won the World Cup with Spain in 2010. Another, the little Argentinian Lionel Messi, was widely recognized as the world’s best footballer. Barcelona at the time was all-dominant: in the decade from 2006 to 2015, it would win the European Champions League, the biggest prize in club soccer, four times. How the mighty fall. For years now, Barça has regularly been thumped by better teams in European competition. This August, after running up debts of about US$1.5 billion, Barça was forced to let Messi join Paris Saint-Germain. The
Catalan team couldn’t afford to offer him a new contract even after he had agreed to halve his pay. With the club in decline while I was researching my recent book, The Barcelona Complex, I sometimes felt as if I were writing about Rome in 400 AD with the barbarians already inside the gates or perhaps a chronicle of the humbling of GE, a once mighty industry giant whose management relied on past strategies for success with disappointing results. Barcelona’s fall from grace offers lessons for companies that lead or aspire to lead their sectors. The club fell into the trap set for every company that’s number one: it got lazy while its rivals copied its best ideas and built on them. It failed to create a sustainable succession plan for its aging players, and it was profligate with its finances. Barcelona failed to understand that greatness is always a moving target, not just on the pitch. Talent unmanaged More than almost any other industry, professional sports revolve around the war for talent. The difficulty teams face in finding the people is something that most companies
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21 are starting to experience in the current tight jobs market. The cheapest way to find talent is to source it in-house, as Barcelona did brilliantly in the Messi era. But then the club fell victim to its own success. Once the team was packed with world-beating players, there was little scope for new talents to make their own developmental journey. When the playmaker Thiago Alcântara emerged from La Masia around 2010, he found his path to the first team blocked by the world’s best midfield in Xavi, Andrés Iniesta, and Sergio Busquets. Thiago ended up leaving for Bayern Munich. In 2020, he starred in Bayern’s 8–2 demolition of his old club. The Brazilian Neymar did find a place in the great Barcelona side, but he too eventually saw his development blocked. Neymar aspired to something greater than playing as Messi’s right hand, running onto the Argentinian’s passes. He wanted to be Messi: the fulcrum of every attack, winner of Ballon d’Or awards for European Footballer of the Year. In 2017, he left to become the main man at Paris SaintGermain. Messi considered him modern Barcelona’s most significant loss. (Ironically, the pair are back together again at PSG this season.) More fundamentally, Barça fell into the trap that catches industry leaders across all sectors: complacency. When an organization is number one, the temptation is to stop thinking. Why innovate when you are already the best? Paco Seirul·lo, a physical trainer who over the decades has turned into the guardian of Barça’s culture—he is known as El Druida (“the druid”)—told me that the club had never bothered to study the great Masia generation to understand how it had emerged. Meanwhile, every rival club was studying Barcelona. They followed the lead of the long-running advertising slogan of rental car firm Avis, which was number two in the market: “We try harder.” The German Hans-Dieter Flick was just one of countless European coaches who visited La Masia to discover its secrets. In 2020, Flick coached the Bayern Munich team that crushed Barça. During Barcelona’s glory years, as one La Masia coach admitted to me, he and his colleagues never made study visits abroad to see what other clubs were doing. They traveled only to explain their success to admiring foreign colleagues at conferences. Over time, every big soccer club’s youth academy in Europe became La Masia: a university whose curriculum was devised by the legendary Dutch soccer player Johan Cruyff when he took over as manager at Barça in 1988 and explained that winning at soccer meant mastering the rapid passing game. For years, the on-field geometry of Barcelona’s interplay left opponents bewitched. But once everyone else has become La Masia, the original Masia loses its lead. “Football is evolution,” summed up Pep Guardiola, coach of Barcelona in its peak era, from 2008 to 2012. Especially in Europe, where the best teams play one another constantly, the sport improves almost by the month. After a team lost to Barcelona, it would go home and work out what it was doing wrong. Everyone kept getting better—except Barcelona. The one-time innovators were overtaken, in a process that the economist Joseph Schumpeter labeled “creative destruction”: new entrepreneurs come along with new ideas, and the pioneering systems of yesteryear are
junked. If you play the soccer of 2012 in 2021, you will lose. Messy money When you’re number one, you also tend to get careless with your spending. While the money pours in, you stop counting every penny. In 2018, Barça became the first club in any sport ever to gross more than $1 billion in annual revenues. And so when Jorge Messi, Lionel’s father and agent, kept threatening that his son would leave unless he got another pay rise, the club kept giving in. From 2017 through 2021, Messi earned a total of more than €555 million ($674 million), according to highlights from his 30-page contract published in Spanish newspaper El Mundo, and not denied by player or club. Bayern Munich’s chairman Karl-Heinz Rummenigge said he had “had to laugh” when he saw the contract: “I can only compliment him on managing to negotiate such an astronomical salary.” A senior Barça official told me Messi’s salary had tripled between 2014 and 2020. He added, “Messi is not the problem. The problem is the contagion of the rest of the team.” Whenever Messi got a raise, his teammates demanded one as well. By 2019, average first-team pay at Barça was $12.2 million a year, the highest for any sports club on Earth, according to the Global Sports Salaries Survey by Sportingintelligence.com. (Rival soccer clubs Real Madrid and Juventus were second and third in the rankings, with NBA basketball teams completing the top ten.) In any talent industry, the talent has substantial power vis-àvis the employer. But at Barça, the talent was so successful, experienced, and well-paid that its power became close to absolute. Quique Setién, head coach for seven unhappy months in 2020, said he was always aware that Messi could get him fired at any moment. By then, the survivors of the great Masia generation were effectively running the team and quite simply not working hard enough. Almost every day at Barcelona was take-your-children-to-work day. Kids would kick a ball in the changing room with their dads before a game. And whereas other Spanish teams would fly to road games the day before the game, to acclimatize, Barça usually flew on match day itself. The Barça players preferred it: they liked being at home longer. As the dominant players aged, Barça’s training sessions slowed down. That was a shock for the Frenchman Antoine Griezmann, who had come from Atlético Madrid in 2019. There, he recalled, “Every training session was at the intensity level of a match.” Barça paid €120 million ($142 million) for Griezmann. In August 2021, it lent him to Atlético for free, his talent wasted for two years in what had become a dysfunctional team. Barcelona is now in freefall, and yet this is also a strangely creative moment at the club. The people on the inside understand that having lost their greatest talent, it’s time to start rethinking. Some of the spirit of innovation that once made this the world’s leading club may now be returning. Simon Kuper is a columnist for the Financial Times and author of five books about soccer. His latest is The Barcelona Complex: Lionel Messi and the Making— and Unmaking—of the World’s Greatest Soccer Club (Penguin Press, 2021), published in the UK as Barça: The inside story of the world’s greatest team.
How your brand can sound distinctive in a noisy world By Roscoe Williamson, MassiveMusic
Sound assets can capture consumer attention, boost distinctiveness and build mental availability, explains Roscoe Williamson of MassiveMusic We used to have to educate marketers on the benefits of a more strategic approach to use of music and sound in their communications. There’s rarely now a marketer that doesn’t grasp this – how could they not? The challenge they face today however, is understanding how to achieve that effectiveness whilst navigating the growing landscape of audio touchpoints. As new platforms, channels and services emerge fighting for the attention of our ears, the role of sound in marketing is evolving. That’s why MassiveMusic has collated the most meaningful and groundbreaking research on marketing effectiveness, positioned through the lens of sound, in a single whitepaper titled ‘Sound Advice: The Contrarian Truth about Brands’. It
offers the ultimate guide for brand marketers looking to use sound more effectively in driving distinctiveness. Because, despite the rise in places a brand can be heard, from Spotify to Pandora, Apple to Sony, Live Nation to Playstation, it can feel daunting to a marketer to know where to start. The contrarian truth is that nothing really has changed: despite mass technological disruption shifting our consumer behaviours and brand interactions, effectiveness principles remain the same and must revolve around brand, distinctiveness, meaningful differentiation, craft and emotion. Changing brand perception Jenni Romaniuk says in her book Building Distinctive Brand Assets that sound assets are the most overlooked class of all, while the Ipsos study Power of You shows that not only are sonic cues still heavily underutilised, they are also the most
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23 the report ‘The Long And The Short Of It’ which recommends brands balance their advertising efforts between long-term brand building (focused on reaching all category buyers) and short-term activation (highly targeted) to be maximally effective at driving profits. The greater a brand’s media spend, mix of channels and level and duration of consistency, the better chance there is to allow distinctive sonic assets to attain reach and impact. Think about all the brand touchpoints where there is interaction with consumers through sound. With a touchpoint map, a marketer can plot which distinctive sonic assets should be consistently applied, which need to be adapted, and which can be used to effectively connect the dots. Brands like Apple, Skype, Visa and Google often consciously or unconsciously connect these dots in highly creative ways – for example, through subtle product sounds in advertising and direct marketing like a power-up sound at the end of an ad or a contactless payment sound in the middle. When intelligently placed within advertising content, the tactic closes the loop between product and comms and greatly increases the reach of the assets. Have a clearly defined set of first principles
effective distinctive assets for gaining branded attention, beyond even celebrity endorsements and brand colours. Our research on 1,000 people in the Netherlands tested if sonic logos could trigger the correct brand in complete isolation of other assets – and it concluded they absolutely can. Brand assets like fonts, colours and slogans rarely ever trigger brand recognition if exposed in isolation to consumers, but sound can cut through, as validated in the research. We also tested whether a sonic identity could help bolster the brand perception and drive relevance and meaningful differentiation. Using the Interbrand Brand Health methodology, we asked the respondents questions around the brand and separated the results based on whether they correctly attributed the sound to the brand. The results were telling: when sound is correctly attributed to the brand, the brand is perceived more favourably by the audience. Be consistent and strategic Connecting your message to your brand in the mind of the consumer is a big challenge. And marketers need to do everything they can to build that link. One essential guideline is ‘be consistent’, but also, ‘be strategic’. Despite there being multiple platforms on which your brand can be seen or heard, ask yourself which brand assets need to be included depending on what attribute needs to surface in every piece of comms. Decades of research by Les Binet and Peter Field culminated in
Music is a highly effective tool when it comes to enhancing the emotive, storytelling power of branded content. Whether it’s the choice of commercial music, library music, playlist curation principles or guidance on potential artist or music influencer partners, having a clearly defined set of first principles will help create a consistent musical tone and aesthetic, and differentiate the brand over the long term. They will always be the guide as to how a brand should or should not sound. Subjectiveness among stakeholders can be a challenge when creating these first principles. It’s not rare that we hear people asking for a song to be ‘beautiful’ or even ‘more yellow’. What sounds innovative and inspiring to one person can sound dated and cold to another. That’s why, at MassiveMusic, we developed a data-driven tool called MassiveBASS in collaboration with sonic testing company SoundOut. MassiveBASS is the world’s first datadriven tool that uses data collected from over half a million participants to objectively align music with a wide selection of brand values and archetypes. For instance, it can illustrate what a charismatic explorer sounds like according to 500,000 people. It helps objectively validate choices and provides a great platform from which to build differentiating first principles. So, be the contrarian marketer that follows the evidence, not the herd. Use the power of brand sound to your advantage. Prioritise the power of your brand building, build the right memory structures with the audience for future moments of buying, consistently and creatively integrate distinctive brand assets into all of your communications and use the power of sound to harness emotion and drive distinctiveness. The results will be music to your ears.
The World’s Most Valuable Brands 2021
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
How Agencies Can Retain Clients When a New CMO Comes In By Jameson Fleming
I’ve spent the past decade of my career working in businessto-business (B2B), software-as-a-service (SaaS) marketing. It’s a crowded, competitive space, one where if you use the same tactics and tropes as everyone else, you might as well be shouting into an abyss - the only return you’ll get is the echo of your own voice. The last company I was with had a SaaS offering that applied artificial intelligence (AI) to service and support. My current work focuses on SaaS for AI-powered contract lifecycle management (CLM). Marketing-wise, there are a few major differences, foremost, the buyer, who now is a general counsel (GC) or chief legal officer (CLO). GCs and CLOs are responsible for the entire legal operations of a company, and legaltech purchases are only a small slice of that responsibility. At the same time, in our part of the SaaS world, there are hundreds of vendors targeting the same decision makers. As such, reaching these non-traditional buyers requires distinct marketing tactics, which I believe are applicable to any SaaS marketer targeting buyers outside the typical tech echo chamber. Tip #1: Understand the journey When you’re marketing to a buyer that isn’t already familiar to you (as legal was to me when I first started at LinkSquares), I’m a firm believer in research and asking a lot of questions. A great marketing foundation can be built by talking to customers, interviewing decision makers and legal teams, listening in on sales calls and reviewing use cases. With this information, you can map out how marketing can best reach
targets and support the buying process. One great way to collect some of this early research is to attend industry events. Even better is to work your company’s booth if you’re sponsoring an event. It’s an invaluable opportunity to refine a pitch, learn in real time and rampup fast. You’ll quickly learn prospect pain points, pressing questions, what they care about most – and what will trigger a response. Tip #2: Match content to your buyer One key insight I had was that making a technology purchase was a new experience for many legal teams. For some, it may be the first time they’ll make the case for a technology investment outside of their own comfort zone and that of their peers. Based on this, I created marketing to match their needs: Educational materials that revolve around building trust and providing valuable information is key. Content like buying guides, breakdowns of AI methods, product videos that show the experience and customer testimonials work well. Aim to answer questions such as: What would our software look like in their organization? What will be the benefits and ROI? How would it be for users on a day to day basis? What training would be necessary, what’s the deployment process like? These are the details prospects want to know most of all. Understand their buying journey and show them how tremendous gains can come with very little pain. Just equip them with the resources to feel confident in their recommendations and sway decision makers.
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Tip #3: Accelerate the buying process with product marketing and video
it’s important to think differently and try new things. Design
At the end of the day, your customers are buying your product or service because of the real results it can offer them. Flashy marketing can get someone’s attention, but showing how you can provide a tangible ROI is key to getting them to sign on the dotted line. Prospects want to know that they are going to be more successful after buying your product than they were before and that the costs don’t outweigh the benefits.
and iterate on vs. experiments that require a huge investment
Resources like case studies, free trials, and proof-of-concepts can work wonders in demonstrating the value your product or service can deliver. Most companies I’ve worked at in the past have utilized free trials as a way to put prospects in the driver’s seat and give them a taste of what it’s like to be a customer. Free trials are a great way to show off how easy your product is to use, what the experience is like, and the results customers can expect. However, given the nature of our product at LinkSquares (most legal teams would be reluctant to upload sensitive company documents and contracts to a system without an NDA in place), it didn’t make sense to drive prospects to it before engaging in sales. Instead, I made the decision to heavily invest in video. It allows us to illustrate differentiators like ease of use and robust features. Product videos are great for mimicking the customer experience and can be invaluable in reaching them in a clear, engaging and easy to digest way.
networking events that offered a more curated, creative
Tip #4: Experiment often, fail fast Traditional marketing tactics are limited in such markets, so
smaller pilot experiments that are easy to deploy, measure and months to produce results. Show the potential and gain support to expand, or fail fast, learn from it and refocus. To this final point, keep an open mind, too. We participated in a large virtual event that wasn’t a great experience; attendees spent most of the time trying to figure out the platform. However, we experimented with our own smaller, virtual and personal experience. We wanted to get as close to that personal, face-to-face feel as possible. In doing so, we found we could provide a better, more intimate program and with more relevant speakers. And not only did these events produce greater traction, they were less expensive than participating in big shows, fast to conduct, easy to duplicate, and tracking success and gaining precise feedback was simple. Further, experimenting often, and failing fast, keeps a marketing team nimble and ready to make the most of new developments. That’s important in this space, because more often than not, you need to find your own way and create Juliette Kopecky is the chief marketing officer at LinkSquares, where she sets the company’s strategy for driving awareness and demand. She has run marketing programs at high-growth technology companies, including HubSpot, Datto and Talla. Juliette holds a B.S. in Business Management from Boston University and an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Standard Chartered Bank’s Emma Sheller: ‘Marketing needs to be bolder’ By Gabey Goh
The business of banking has become increasingly dynamic and crowded. Emma Sheller, Global Head Brand & Marketing for Standard Chartered Bank, speaks to WARC’s Gabey Goh for the Marketer’s Toolkit 2022 about how the banking brand is positioning itself as a change agent and the need for marketing to not retreat to safe and familiar spaces. How are you adjusting to a start/stop economy with the constant threat of rolling lockdowns and continued travel restrictions? How have your marketing strategies and objectives adapted to this ongoing state of volatility? While the impact of COVID has changed many aspects of life, the need for money remains more pressing than ever. Indeed, what COVID drove home for us is how important it was to live up to our promise of being here for good, for both individuals and companies, going through an unexpected yet existential challenge. And as we have come to witness, a heavy burden fell on many of the developing nations we call home. So we had to act fast and decisively, promoting how we injected a billion dollars to finance stressed supply chains producing life-saving PPE at a corporate level, and enacting new, digital channels to help individuals carry on living, even
if their physical bank or ATM was suddenly out of bounds. And our marketing has pivoted away from the discretionary and indulgent to focus on topics like the preservation of wealth and sustainable economics, encouraging our clients to transition their financial strategies to bring about both present and long-term benefits. Are you seeing any evidence that COVID has changed customer perceptions or sensitivities around advertising, and have you had to change your communication tone and style in some way to cater to that? Advertising was already changing rapidly before COVID struck, with greater fragmentation of channels, lower attention spans and growing distrust of corporations and institutions. That said, we have long been a counter-cyclical brand, one that people turn to and trust more when the going gets harder. In that regard, we have seen people respond very positively to our brand marketing during the past two years of the pandemic. I think that’s been aided by a fundamental of our brand strategy – that we only ever talk about the things we actually do. We now see a lot of brands follow our lead in circling around sustainability. But while most brands talk
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29 about action, they have been slow in taking action. And I think people are fed up with promises of one day this or by 2050 that. We’ve long led by example and hence have built credibility. We communicate from a place of genuine compassion and activity and that’s helped put us in a positive light. Has your thinking around new product development and launching new brands changed following COVID? The business of banking has become increasingly dynamic and, dare I say, competitive. We don’t just face the same old rivals anymore, there are new competitors and concepts coming at us from all sides. But that’s also an invitation for us to step up and pioneer new ways of understanding client needs and address them. We’ve pioneered new digital banking channels in Africa that have empowered a generation with new ways to prosper. We’re introducing sustainable investments that are fundamentally reshaping the future economies of the region. And, yes, we are introducing new retail banking concepts that address discrete parts of the market with distinct needs – for on-the-move finance or seamless payments. We also have a long and successful track record of partnerships, so this isn’t new to us. We know just how far our main brand can stretch and where we can tap green growth with a fresh venture, where we can leverage the strengths of both parties. How has the company’s approach to and investment in its digital brand experience evolved over the last two years? To be honest, retail banking had started pivoting to digital long before the pandemic. Who really wants to visit a branch if they can get the job done from the office or home? But the pandemic has accelerated a couple of things – it’s helped drive that shift in some of the more traditional markets like Hong Kong, where digital banking has now caught up with many of our other markets. And it’s definitely increased the scope of tasks people are now happy to do remotely. We have digitised new client onboarding, loan applications – for individuals and businesses – and a great many more services. Our apps now allow people to practically do anything they would do in person, from anywhere and at any time. I’m very proud of how our marketing teams across our footprint have encouraged people to make the switch. One such campaign used our title sponsorship of Liverpool FC to encourage digital adoption across Africa. It has been an amazing success and I love that this idea came from an internal competition we ran among our international marketing teams. Do you see a trend towards new brands breaking through more frequently? Are you seeing any new trends in brand positioning as a result?
If banking was once seen as the sleepy backwater of brand and marketing, it isn’t any longer. Technology and more open regulation are resulting in a plethora of new entrants and concepts. We face new brands advising on wealth, in trading, in payments and cross-border transactions, not to mention new forms of currency. It’s challenging yet exciting because for every new rival we face, as a challenger brand ourselves, we also see new opportunities to grow our scope and scale of business. Digital access opens up many new markets for us too, and with our history being built on trust and commitment, that opens up a tremendous opportunity for growth. Ultimately, the way I see it is we’re dealing with people’s money – this stuff matters – so it’s a high consideration category. Consequently, successful positions are typically built on two main levers – trust and utility. Yes, people want to do more with their money so fintech brands can seem appealing. But the cost of failure is high, so trust is critical. Banks like ours need to keep pace with innovation but always stay true to the responsibility we have to protect our client’s interests too. When it comes to evaluating campaign effectiveness, what are the key metrics you judge your campaigns against? And how has this changed in the last year or two? We face quite a unique challenge with our brand as we don’t fit the usual archetypes of being either a local champion or global giant. But being different is our unique strength and opportunity and that’s what we model and benchmark against. So what we elected to do as a brand was be a change agent – the bank that reset the rules. Here for good encapsulates that. We don’t set out to be biggest, but we do want to be best. And we benchmark our campaigns at how they position us as a thought leader, a change agent, a pioneer for better and also, as is increasingly important among younger clients, the kind of company they want to do business with. Do you currently use any form of modelling, e.g. market mix modelling, to evaluate ROI across media channels, or plan to do so? Yes, we regularly undertake market mix modelling and econometric studies to understand the impact of our media. These studies allow us to recognise both the macro impact of our media spend at a global level in order for us to plan for the long term, as well as the levers that impact our short/ medium-term success at an individual market and channel level. What do you hope the industry can achieve in crossmedia measurement in 2022? With the shifting media landscape, the deprecation of cookies and its impact on direct attribution, I believe that cross-media
studies should be a fundamental aspect of through-thefunnel media planning and buying. Our hope is that the industry moves with these changes to focus less on last-click attribution, towards a more holistic view of media measurement. SCB launched a new global brand campaign this year – “Through Different Eyes” – to further articulate the company’s commitment to sustainability. Can you share with us a few of the company’s sustainable strategic priorities? To answer this, let me first go back a couple of years. We rebooted our brand campaign in 2017 to showcase the positive impact we are committed to making in the markets we serve. We did that by calling out issues that hold back commerce or prosperity across our footprint, be it financial preparedness as people live longer, access to equal opportunity, safe working conditions or the financial system being hijacked by criminals, to call out a few. It was powerful and provocative – topics no other banks were talking about. That same commitment to change remains in our new work but we wanted to use our new campaign – and our new branding – to signal our stated goal to be the world’s most responsible and sustainable bank. And as I said earlier, to do so by tackling the topics people care most about and promoting the tangible and measurable things we are doing to make things better. Everything we say comes from a place of action. How do you avoid “greenwashing” when articulating such sustainability efforts/commitments in your advertising and messaging? We only ever talk about the things we actually do, where we use the position and influence of being a bank to change things for the better. I really believe our brand campaigns are the very opposite of greenwashing as they shine a light on areas of critical importance and demonstrate the exact things we do to reshape the economic engines in those parts of the world that need it most. But I also recognise that this is a polarised and often emotive topic, where corporations and banks in particular are often cited as the problem. Our view is that money has the greatest role to play in driving change, which is why we do what we do. And if we can lead the category to bank in a good way, then we’re living up to our promise. I hope and believe in time, people will come to see how we led the way, with honesty, integrity and conviction. From your vantage point in the industry, what is your outlook, for the year ahead? I hope that the worst of the pandemic will soon be over, and some form of normality will return. The end of the last pandemic saw the arrival of the roaring ’20s – it’s hard to believe that was a century ago. But I don’t see that part of history repeating as the financial implications of just how much money was spent to prop up the global economy will
become apparent. There will be bills to pay. Nevertheless, I also don’t see a prolonged period of thrift and decline. I sense in our markets a great amount of pent-up energy and I can foresee a driving entrepreneurship, a period of innovation and reinvention, and my hope is a lot of that will be focused on building sustainable economic revival. What are you and the marketing team anticipating in terms of opportunities/challenges in meeting business objectives in 2022? Competition will only get tougher as more players – old and new – compete for share. For instance, in Dubai, we face over 50 banks and that level of intense competition is likely to become the norm everywhere. So our marketing teams are going to have to be ready, to be more imaginative, more innovative, more targeted and also braver. In marketing, I say first you have to stand out, then you have to stand for something. Nobody notices the invisible genius. Specifically, our marketing and agency teams will need to really work with the data, really get a handle on how culture is shifting and use innovation to drive our business in new areas and to new audiences. What will be your key areas of focus for the coming year, in terms of where limited resources and budget granted to the marketing function will be spent? We have our business priorities – and we don’t have limitless funds – so our focus will be to grow specific parts of our client base, protect the business we have and to build our brand, specifically to be the lighthouse – the measure of what it means to be the good bank. What do you think will be the single biggest challenge/issue that marketers will need to grapple with in 2022? As we enter 2022, I think the volume of noise coming from opposing sides to almost every topic is masking the truth that most people are still somewhere in the middle. But with views coming at them from all sides, the challenge for regular people is knowing which brands to trust, which brands to invest their emotional (and in our case, monetary) capital with. That also applies to marketers: how do we separate the hype from the meaningful. And by that, I mean with an opinion and a data point for every imaginable marketing scenario, channel, tool, format, how we do know what is right. I worry the polarisation of culture and the sheer, relentless speed of business are disincentivising marketers from being bold and are encouraging them to retreat to the perceived safety of the familiar. But while doing that may buy a short reprieve, it will ultimately erode all credibility for what we do. 2022 will be a real pivot point. It’s time for marketers to step up, believe in their story and have the conviction to see it through, in a world where many voices will implore taking a different path.
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THE SERIOUS CASE FOR HUMOR By Jon Evans
Advertising, an industry that has always taken pride in making the audience smile, is increasingly turning its back on humor. Funny ads get caught in a squeeze between worthy, purposedriven work that gets industry approval on the one hand, and the flat, message-heavy style of online ads on the other.
increasingly rigid culture. It gets the attention of the right side of the brain, which handles that broad-beam attention. Wood’s work identifies a number of features that have rightbrained appeal, and also demonstrates how they’re more effective for generating big, brand-building business effects.
But humor should always have a place in advertising for one simple reason—it works. If people like an ad, they’ll like the brand a little more too.
That’s why Cheetos’ funny ad isn’t just a funny ad. It’s an example to follow. It’s also highly flexible. Humor gives you a jolt of positive emotion very quickly, which makes a funny campaign often easy to adapt to ultra-short formats, which Cheetos did well with the Hammer ads.
Just like the Oscars seldom give top awards to comedies, ad industry juries don’t hand the big prizes to funny ads. At Cannes this year only one of the video Lions went to a humorous campaign, Cheetos’ Super Bowl ad with MC Hammer popping up to tell us that “U Can’t Touch This” with Cheeto-dusted fingers. The rest of the awarded work at Cannes might have made you think, or get mad or nod in appreciation at the technical wizardry. But laugh? No chance. And yet the Cheetos ad isn’t just excellent, it’s effective. It scored four stars out of five in System1’s Test Your Ad, a tool that tests every ad that airs to predict each one’s long-term and short-term growth potential for its brand. Most ads only get one star—they don’t make people feel anything, which means they won’t help build any positive associations for a brand. Cheetos’ Hammer-Time antics put them in the top tier of audience response—you can see the second-by-second response to the ad of people’s positive emotions grow in happiness and surprise! Why does humor work so well? In his new book, “Look Out,” Orlando Wood offers a guide to making effective attentiongrabbing ads across different media platforms, ranging from TV to pre-rolls and in-feed environments. Humor is one of his big themes; the clever juxtapositions, satisfying repetitions and unexpected reversals that make people laugh are also great ways to attract the broad-beam attention that ads need to capture. Humor, “Look out” argues, is a source of flexibility in an
When you start digging into the Test Your Ad database, you see the same thing in category after category. Funny ads show up high in the rankings. That’s true whether it’s insurance with the World’s Strongest Man helping out a Geico customer, or coffee with George Clooney hanging out with the Muppets (among others). Some of this year’s highest-rated ads have used humor and left viewers feeling good about their brand. Humor doesn’t just beat out rational, message-led ad formats in long-term effectiveness. It also beats other emotional approaches. In the food and drink category, a lot of ads lean on “sensory pleasure” as a way of generating happiness. But in Wood’s earlier book, “Lemon,” he breaks down which types of happiness are the most effective at generating business effects. Sensory pleasure is a solid approach. But amusement and schadenfreude (in other words, humor at someone else’s expense - usually in advertising a correction for excessively rigid, single- or absent-minded behavior) comes top of the chart. The fact is that there is a serious case for humor. It sells stuff. Orlando Wood’s “Look out” includes a meta-analysis of campaign case studies that shows how using humor in an ad makes it more likely to achieve major business effects, like profit growth or share gain. All those puns, jokes and pratfalls aren’t a distraction from sales efforts. They are the sales efforts. It’s time more brands started taking humor seriously again, because the chances are that if audiences are laughing, they’re also buying.
How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity
By Ed Catmull
Listen to Ed Catmull discuss managing creativity. A few years ago, I had lunch with the head of a major motion picture studio, who declared that his central problem was not finding good people—it was finding good ideas. Since then, when giving talks, I’ve asked audiences whether they agree with him. Almost always there’s a 50/50 split, which has astounded me because I couldn’t disagree more with the studio executive. His belief is rooted in a misguided view of creativity that exaggerates the importance of the initial idea in creating an original product. And it reflects a profound misunderstanding of how to manage the large risks inherent in producing breakthroughs.
The view that good ideas are rarer and more valuable than good people is rooted in a misconception of creativity.
When it comes to producing breakthroughs, both technological and artistic, Pixar’s track record is unique. In the early 1990s, we were known as the leading technological pioneer in the field of computer animation. Our years of R&D culminated in the release of Toy Story in 1995, the world’s first computer-animated feature film. In the following 13 years, we have released eight other films (A Bug’s Life; Toy Story 2; Monsters, Inc.; Finding Nemo; The Incredibles; Cars; Ratatouille; and WALL·E), which also have been blockbusters. Unlike most other studios, we have never bought scripts or movie ideas from the outside. All of our stories, worlds, and characters were created internally by our community of artists. And in making these films, we have continued to push the technological boundaries of computer animation, securing dozens of patents in the process. While I’m not foolish enough to predict that we will never have a flop, I don’t think our success is largely luck. Rather, I believe our adherence to a set of principles and practices for managing creative talent and risk is responsible. Pixar
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is a community in the true sense of the word. We think that lasting relationships matter, and we share some basic beliefs: Talent is rare. Management’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the capability to recover when failures occur. It must be safe to tell the truth. We must constantly challenge all of our assumptions and search for the flaws that could destroy our culture. In the last two years, we’ve had a chance to test whether our principles and practices are transferable. After Pixar’s 2006 merger with the Walt Disney Company, its CEO, Bob Iger, asked me, chief creative officer John Lasseter, and other Pixar senior managers to help him revive Disney Animation Studios. The success of our efforts prompted me to share my thinking on how to build a sustainable creative organization. What Is Creativity? People tend to think of creativity as a mysterious solo act, and they typically reduce products to a single idea: This is a movie about toys, or dinosaurs, or love, they’ll say. However, in filmmaking and many other kinds of complex product development, creativity involves a large number of people from different disciplines working effectively together to solve a great many problems. The initial idea for the movie—what people in the movie business call “the high concept”—is merely one step in a long, arduous process that takes four to five years. A movie contains literally tens of thousands of ideas. They’re in the form of every sentence; in the performance of each line; in the design of characters, sets, and backgrounds; in the locations of the camera; in the colors, the lighting, the pacing. The director and the other creative leaders of a production do not come up with all the ideas on their own; rather, every single member of the 200- to 250-person production group makes suggestions. Creativity must be present at every level of every artistic and technical part of the organization. The leaders sort through a mass of ideas to find the ones that fit into a coherent whole—that support the story—which is a very difficult task. It’s like an archaeological dig where you don’t know what you’re looking for or whether you will even find anything. The process is downright scary. Then again, if we aren’t always at least a little scared, we’re not doing our job. We’re in a business whose customers want to see something new every time they go to the theater. This means we have to put ourselves at great risk. Our most recent film, WALL·E, is a robot love story set in a post-apocalyptic world full of trash. And our previous movie, Ratatouille, is about a French rat who aspires to be a chef. Talk about unexpected ideas! At the outset of making these movies, we simply didn’t know if they would work. However, since we’re supposed to offer something that isn’t obvious, we bought into somebody’s initial vision and took a chance. To act in this fashion, we as executives have to resist our natural tendency to avoid or minimize risks, which, of course, is much easier said than done. In the movie business and plenty of others, this instinct leads executives to choose to
copy successes rather than try to create something brandnew. That’s why you see so many movies that are so much alike. It also explains why a lot of films aren’t very good. If you want to be original, you have to accept the uncertainty, even when it’s uncomfortable, and have the capability to recover when your organization takes a big risk and fails. What’s the key to being able to recover? Talented people! Contrary to what the studio head asserted at lunch that day, such people are not so easy to find. What’s equally tough, of course, is getting talented people to work effectively with one another. That takes trust and respect, which we as managers can’t mandate; they must be earned over time. What we can do is construct an environment that nurtures trusting and respectful relationships and unleashes everyone’s creativity. If we get that right, the result is a vibrant community where talented people are loyal to one another and their collective work, everyone feels that they are part of something extraordinary, and their passion and accomplishments make the community a magnet for talented people coming out of schools or working at other places. I know what I’m describing is the antithesis of the free-agency practices that prevail in the movie industry, but that’s the point: I believe that community matters. The Roots of Our Culture My conviction that smart people are more important than good ideas probably isn’t surprising. I’ve had the good fortune to work alongside amazing people in places that pioneered computer graphics. At the University of Utah, my fellow graduate students included Jim Clark, who cofounded Silicon Graphics and Netscape; John Warnock, who cofounded Adobe; and Alan Kay, who developed object-oriented programming. We had ample funding (thanks to the U.S. Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency), the professors gave us free rein, and there was an exhilarating and creative exchange of ideas. At the New York Institute of Technology, where I headed a new computer-animation laboratory, one of my first hires was Alvy Ray Smith, who made breakthroughs in computer painting. That made me realize that it’s OK to hire people who are smarter than you are. Then George Lucas, of Star Wars fame, hired me to head a major initiative at Lucasfilm to bring computer graphics and other digital technology into films and, later, games. It was thrilling to do research within a film company that was pushing the boundaries. George didn’t try to lock up the technology for himself and allowed us to continue to publish and maintain strong academic contacts. This made it possible to attract some of the best people in the industry, including John Lasseter, then an animator from Disney, who was excited by the new possibilities of computer animation. Last but not least, there’s Pixar, which began its life as an independent company in 1986, when Steve Jobs bought
the computer division from Lucasfilm, allowing us to pursue our dream of producing computer-animated movies. Steve gave backbone to our desire for excellence and helped us form a remarkable management team. I’d like to think that Pixar captures what’s best about all the places I’ve worked. A number of us have stuck together for decades, pursuing the dream of making computer-animated films, and we still have the pleasure of working together today.
in Japan. At a critical point in the story, Woody has to decide whether to go to Japan or try to escape and go back to Andy, the boy who owned him. Well, since the movie is coming from Pixar and Disney, you know he’s going to end up back with Andy. And if you can easily predict what’s going to happen, you don’t have any drama. So the challenge was to get the audience to believe that Woody might make a different choice. The first team couldn’t figure out how to do it.
It was only when Pixar experienced a crisis during the production of Toy Story 2 that my views on how to structure and operate a creative organization began to crystallize. In 1996, while we were working on A Bug’s Life, our second movie, we started to make a sequel to Toy Story. We had enough technical leaders to start a second production, but all of our proven creative leaders—the people who had made Toy Story, including John, who was its director; writer Andrew Stanton; editor Lee Unkrich; and the late Joe Ranft, the movie’s head of story—were working on A Bug’s Life. So we had to form a new creative team of people who had never headed a movie production. We felt this was OK. After all, John, Andrew, Lee, and Joe had never led a full-length animated film production before Toy Story.
John, Andrew, Lee, and Joe solved that problem by adding several elements to show the fears toys might have that people could relate to. One is a scene they created called “Jessie’s story.” Jessie is a cowgirl doll who is going to be shipped to Japan with Woody. She wants to go, and she explains why to Woody. The audience hears her story in the emotional song “When She Loved Me”: She had been the darling of a little girl, but the girl grew up and discarded her. The reality is kids do grow up, life does change, and sometimes you have to move on. Since the audience members know the truth of this, they can see that Woody has a real choice, and this is what grabs them. It took our “A” team to add the elements that made the story work.
Disney, which at that time was distributing and cofinancing our films, initially encouraged us to make Toy Story 2 as a “direct to video”—a movie that would be sold only as home videos and not shown first in theaters. This was Disney’s model for keeping alive the characters of successful films, and the expectation was that both the cost and quality would be lower. We realized early on, however, that having two different standards of quality in the same studio was bad for our souls, and Disney readily agreed that the sequel should be a theatrical release. The creative leadership, though, remained the same, which turned out to be a problem. In the early stage of making a movie, we draw storyboards (a comic-book version of the story) and then edit them together with dialogue and temporary music. These are called story reels. The first versions are very rough, but they give a sense of what the problems are, which in the beginning of all productions are many. We then iterate, and each version typically gets better and better. In the case of Toy Story 2, we had a good initial idea for a story, but the reels were not where they ought to have been by the time we started animation, and they were not improving. Making matters worse, the directors and producers were not pulling together to rise to the challenge. Finally A Bug’s Life was finished, freeing up John, Andrew, Lee, and Joe to take over the creative leadership of Toy Story 2. Given where the production was at that point, 18 months would have been an aggressive schedule, but by then we had only eight left to deliver the film. Knowing that the company’s future depended on them, crew members worked at an incredible rate. In the end, with the new leadership, they pulled it off. How did John and his team save the movie? The problem was not the original core concept, which they retained. The main character, a cowboy doll named Woody, is kidnapped by a toy collector who intends to ship him to a toy museum
Toy Story 2 was great and became a critical and commercial success—and it was the defining moment for Pixar. It taught us an important lesson about the primacy of people over ideas: If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up; if you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something that works.
If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they’ll screw it up. But if you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they’ll make it work. Toy Story 2 also taught us another important lesson: There has to be one quality bar for every film we produce. Everyone working at the studio at the time made tremendous personal sacrifices to fix Toy Story 2. We shut down all the other productions. We asked our crew to work inhumane hours, and lots of people suffered repetitive stress injuries. But by rejecting mediocrity at great pain and personal sacrifice, we made a loud statement as a community that it was unacceptable to produce some good films and some mediocre films. As a result of Toy Story 2, it became deeply ingrained in our culture that everything we touch needs to be excellent. This goes beyond movies to the DVD production and extras, and to the toys and other consumer products associated with our characters. Of course, most executives would at least pay lip service to the notion that they need to get good people and should set their standards high. But how many understand the importance of creating an environment that supports great people and encourages them to support one another so the whole is far greater than the sum of the parts? That’s what we are striving to do. Let me share what we’ve learned so far about what works. Power to the Creatives
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Creative power in a film has to reside with the film’s creative leadership. As obvious as this might seem, it’s not true of many companies in the movie industry and, I suspect, a lot of others. We believe the creative vision propelling each movie comes from one or two people and not from either corporate executives or a development department. Our philosophy is: You get great creative people, you bet big on them, you give them enormous leeway and support, and you provide them with an environment in which they can get honest feedback from everyone. After Toy Story 2 we changed the mission of our development department. Instead of coming up with new ideas for movies (its role at most studios), the department’s job is to assemble small incubation teams to help directors refine their own ideas to a point where they can convince John and our other senior filmmakers that those ideas have the potential to be great films. Each team typically consists of a director, a writer, some artists, and some storyboard people. The development department’s goal is to find individuals who will work effectively together. During this incubation stage, you can’t judge teams by the material they’re producing because it’s so rough—there are many problems and open questions. But you can assess whether the teams’ social dynamics are healthy and whether the teams are solving problems and making progress. Both the senior management and the development department are responsible for seeing to it that the teams function well. To emphasize that the creative vision is what matters most, we say we are “filmmaker led.” There are really two leaders: the director and the producer. They form a strong partnership. They not only strive to make a great movie but also operate within time, budget, and people constraints. (Good artists understand the value of limits.) During production, we leave the operating decisions to the film’s leaders, and we don’t second-guess or micromanage them. Indeed, even when a production runs into a problem, we do everything possible to provide support without undermining their authority. One way we do this is by making it possible for a director to solicit help from our “creative brain trust” of filmmakers. (This group is a pillar of our distinctive peerbased process for making movies—an important topic I’ll return to in a moment.) If this advice doesn’t suffice, we’ll sometimes add reinforcements to the production—such as a writer or codirector—to provide specific skills or improve the creative dynamics of the film’s creative leadership. What does it take for a director to be a successful leader in this environment? Of course, our directors have to be masters at knowing how to tell a story that will translate into the medium of film. This means that they must have a unifying vision— one that will give coherence to the thousands of ideas that go into a movie—and they must be able to turn that vision into clear directives that the staff can implement. They must set people up for success by giving them all the information they need to do the job right without telling them how to do it. Each person on a film should be given creative ownership of even the smallest task. Good directors not only possess strong analytical skills
themselves but also can harness the analytical power and life experiences of their staff members. They are superb listeners and strive to understand the thinking behind every suggestion. They appreciate all contributions, regardless of where or from whom they originate, and use the best ones. A Peer Culture Of great importance—and something that sets us apart from other studios—is the way people at all levels support one another. Everyone is fully invested in helping everyone else turn out the best work. They really do feel that it’s all for one and one for all. Nothing exemplifies this more than our creative brain trust and our daily review process. The brain trust. This group consists of John and our eight directors (Andrew Stanton, Brad Bird, Pete Docter, Bob Peterson, Brenda Chapman, Lee Unkrich, Gary Rydstrom, and Brad Lewis). When a director and producer feel in need of assistance, they convene the group (and anyone else they think would be valuable) and show the current version of the work in progress. This is followed by a lively two-hour give-andtake discussion, which is all about making the movie better. There’s no ego. Nobody pulls any punches to be polite. This works because all the participants have come to trust and respect one another. They know it’s far better to learn about problems from colleagues when there’s still time to fix them than from the audience after it’s too late. The problemsolving powers of this group are immense and inspirational to watch. After a session, it’s up to the director of the movie and his or her team to decide what to do with the advice; there are no mandatory notes, and the brain trust has no authority. This dynamic is crucial. It liberates the trust members, so they can give their unvarnished expert opinions, and it liberates the director to seek help and fully consider the advice. It took us a while to learn this. When we tried to export the brain trust model to our technical area, we found at first that it didn’t work. Eventually, I realized why: We had given these other review groups some authority. As soon as we said, “This is purely peers giving feedback to each other,” the dynamic changed, and the effectiveness of the review sessions dramatically improved. The origin of the creative brain trust was Toy Story. During a crisis that occurred while making that film, a special relationship developed among John, Andrew, Lee, and Joe, who had remarkable and complementary skills. Since they trusted one another, they could have very intense and heated discussions; they always knew that the passion was about the story and wasn’t personal. Over time, as other people from inside and outside joined our directors’ ranks, the brain trust expanded to what it is today: a community of master filmmakers who come together when needed to help each other. The dailies. This practice of working together as peers is core to our culture, and it’s not limited to our directors and producers.
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One example is our daily reviews, or “dailies,” a process for giving and getting constant feedback in a positive way that’s based on practices John observed at Disney and Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), Lucasfilm’s special-effects company. At Disney, only a small senior group would look at daily animation work. Dennis Muren, ILM’s legendary visualeffects supervisor, broadened the participation to include his whole special-effects crew. (John, who joined my computer group at Lucasfilm after leaving Disney, participated in these sessions while we were creating computer-animated effects for Young Sherlock Holmes.) As we built up an animation crew for Toy Story in the early 1990s, John used what he had learned from Disney and ILM to develop our daily review process. People show work in an incomplete state to the whole animation crew, and although the director makes decisions, everyone is encouraged to comment. There are several benefits. First, once people get over the embarrassment of showing work still in progress, they become more creative. Second, the director or creative leads guiding the review process can communicate important points to the entire crew at the same time. Third, people learn from and inspire each other; a highly creative piece of animation will spark others to raise their game. Finally, there are no surprises at the end: When you’re done, you’re done. People’s overwhelming desire to make sure their work is “good” before they show it to others increases the possibility that their finished version won’t be what the director wants. The dailies process avoids such wasted efforts. Technology + Art = Magic Getting people in different disciplines to treat one another as peers is just as important as getting people within disciplines to do so. But it’s much harder. Barriers include the natural class structures that arise in organizations: There always seems to be one function that considers itself and is perceived by others to be the one the organization values the most. Then there’s the different languages spoken by different disciplines and even the physical distance between offices. In a creative business like ours, these barriers are impediments to producing great work, and therefore we must do everything we can to tear them down. Walt Disney understood this. He believed that when continual change, or reinvention, is the norm in an organization and technology and art are together, magical things happen. A lot of people look back at Disney’s early days and say, “Look at the artists!” They don’t pay attention to his technological innovations. But he did the first sound in animation, the first color, the first compositing of animation with live action, and the first applications of xerography in animation production. He was always excited by science and technology. At Pixar, we believe in this swirling interplay between art and technology and constantly try to use better technology at every stage of production. John coined a saying that captures
this dynamic: “Technology inspires art, and art challenges the technology.” To us, those aren’t just words; they are a way of life that had to be established and still has to be constantly reinforced. Although we are a director- and producer-led meritocracy, which recognizes that talent is not spread equally among all people, we adhere to the following principles: Everyone must have the freedom to communicate with anyone. This means recognizing that the decision-making hierarchy and communication structure in organizations are two different things. Members of any department should be able to approach anyone in another department to solve problems without having to go through “proper” channels. It also means that managers need to learn that they don’t always have to be the first to know about something going on in their realm, and it’s OK to walk into a meeting and be surprised. The impulse to tightly control the process is understandable given the complex nature of moviemaking, but problems are almost by definition unforeseen. The most efficient way to deal with numerous problems is to trust people to work out the difficulties directly with each other without having to check for permission.
Managers need to learn that it’s OK to walk into a meeting and be surprised. It must be safe for everyone to offer ideas. We’re constantly showing works in progress internally. We try to stagger who goes to which viewing to ensure that there are always fresh eyes, and everyone in the company, regardless of discipline or position, gets to go at some point. We make a concerted effort to make it safe to criticize by inviting everyone attending these showings to e-mail notes to the creative leaders that detail what they liked and didn’t like and explain why. We must stay close to innovations happening in the academic community. We strongly encourage our technical artists to publish their research and participate in industry conferences. Publishing may give away ideas, but it keeps us connected with the academic community. This connection is worth far more than any ideas we may have revealed: It helps us attract exceptional talent and reinforces the belief throughout the company that people are more important than ideas. We try to break down the walls between disciplines in other ways, as well. One is a collection of in-house courses we offer, which we call Pixar University. It is responsible for training and cross-training people as they develop in their careers. But it also offers an array of optional classes—many of which I’ve taken—that give people from different disciplines the opportunity to mix and appreciate what everyone does. Some (screenplay writing, drawing, and sculpting) are directly related to our business; some (Pilates and yoga) are not. In a sculpting class will be rank novices as well as world-class
sculptors who want to refine their skills. Pixar University helps reinforce the mind-set that we’re all learning and it’s fun to learn together. Our building, which is Steve Jobs’s brainchild, is another way we try to get people from different departments to interact. Most buildings are designed for some functional purpose, but ours is structured to maximize inadvertent encounters. At its center is a large atrium, which contains the cafeteria, meeting rooms, bathrooms, and mailboxes. As a result, everyone has strong reasons to go there repeatedly during the course of the workday. It’s hard to describe just how valuable the resulting chance encounters are. Staying on the Rails Observing the rise and fall of computer companies during my career has affected me deeply. Many companies put together a phenomenal group of people who produced great products. They had the best engineers, exposure to the needs of customers, access to changing technology, and experienced management. Yet many made decisions at the height of their powers that were stunningly wrongheaded, and they faded into irrelevance. How could really smart people completely miss something so crucial to their survival? I remember asking myself more than once: “If we are ever successful, will we be equally blind?” Many of the people I knew in those companies that failed were not very introspective. When Pixar became an independent company, I vowed we would be different. I realized that it’s extremely difficult for an organization to analyze itself. It is uncomfortable and hard to be objective. Systematically fighting complacency and uncovering problems when your company is successful have got to be two of the toughest management challenges there are. Clear values, constant communication, routine postmortems, and the regular injection of outsiders who will challenge the status quo aren’t enough. Strong leadership is also essential—to make sure people don’t pay lip service to the values, tune out the communications, game the processes, and automatically discount newcomers’ observations and suggestions. Here’s a sampling of what we do: Postmortems. The first we performed—at the end of A Bug’s Life—was successful. But the success of those that followed varied enormously. This caused me to reflect on how to get more out of them. One thing I observed was that although people learn from the postmortems, they don’t like to do them. Leaders naturally want to use the occasion to give kudos to their team members. People in general would rather talk about what went right than what went wrong. And after spending years on a film, everybody just wants to move on. Left to their own devices, people will game the system to avoid confronting the unpleasant. There are some simple techniques for overcoming these problems. One is to try to vary the way you do the postmortems. By definition, they’re supposed to be about lessons learned, so if you repeat the same format, you tend to find the same lessons, which isn’t productive. Another is to ask each group
to list the top five things they would do again and the top five things they wouldn’t do. The balance between the positive and the negative helps make it a safer environment. In any event, employ lots of data in the review. Because we’re a creative organization, people tend to assume that much of what we do can’t be measured or analyzed. That’s wrong. Most of our processes involve activities and deliverables that can be quantified. We keep track of the rates at which things happen, how often something has to be reworked, whether a piece of work was completely finished or not when it was sent to another department, and so on. Data can show things in a neutral way, which can stimulate discussion and challenge assumptions arising from personal impressions. Fresh blood. Successful organizations face two challenges when bringing in new people with fresh perspectives. One is well-known— the not-invented-here syndrome. The other—the awe-of-theinstitution syndrome (an issue with young new hires)—is often overlooked. The former has not been a problem for us, thank goodness, because we have an open culture: Continually embracing change the way we do makes newcomers less threatening. Several prominent outsiders who have had a big impact on us (in terms of the exciting ideas they introduced and the strong people they attracted) were readily accepted. They include Brad Bird, who directed The Incredibles and Ratatouille; Jim Morris, who headed Industrial Light & Magic for years before joining Pixar as the producer of WALL·E and executive vice president of production; and Richard Hollander, a former executive of the special-effects studio Rhythm & Hues, who is leading an effort to improve our production processes. The bigger issue for us has been getting young new hires to have the confidence to speak up. To try to remedy this, I make it a practice to speak at the orientation sessions for new hires, where I talk about the mistakes we’ve made and the lessons we’ve learned. My intent is to persuade them that we haven’t gotten it all figured out and that we want everyone to question why we’re doing something that doesn’t seem to make sense to them. We do not want people to assume that because we are successful, everything we do is right.• • • For 20 years, I pursued a dream of making the first computeranimated film. To be honest, after that goal was realized— when we finished Toy Story—I was a bit lost. But then I realized the most exciting thing I had ever done was to help create the unique environment that allowed that film to be made. My new goal became, with John, to build a studio that had the depth, robustness, and will to keep searching for the hard truths that preserve the confluence of forces necessary to create magic. In the two years since Pixar’s merger with Disney, we’ve had the good fortune to expand that goal to include the revival of Disney Animation Studios. It has been extremely gratifying to see the principles and approaches we developed at Pixar transform this studio. But the ultimate test of whether John and I have achieved our goals is if Pixar and Disney are still producing animated films that touch world culture in a positive way long after we two, and our friends who founded and built Pixar with us, are gone.
Bottling the Secret Sauce: Brands Share Insights on Closing the IntentionAction Gap By Maxine Perella and Christian Yonkers
This is one of a series of posts filled with insights gained from dozens of industry leaders, practitioners and innovators on a variety of themes at SB’21 San Diego. Read more insights on supply chain optimization, product and business model innovation, brand storytelling, regenerative leadership, regeneration and social impact metrics and more …
also get you labeled as a “bad” company.
That elusive slice of pie: BFG, NRS, Petco, Sustana on satisfying consumer appetites
The key is identifying values and holding true.
More than ever, consumers can envision themselves taking social and environmental action. The challenge is moving them from envisioning to actual action, and brands are poised to help push them over the threshold. A Monday morning panel at SB’21 San Diego discussed new ways that companies are leveraging consumer insights for good. Rachel Whitacre, Manager of SB’s Brands for Good (BFG) collaborative, opened the discussion with several insights. Recent BFG research found that 96 percent of consumers are trying to make sustainable decisions at least some of the time. Heeding this data can be lucrative: 85 percent of consumers are loyal to brands that help them achieve better, more balanced lives. “Brands have the opportunity to lead the way by both showing and actively creating options for consumers that make sustainable behaviors accessible and aspirational as part of the mainstream,” Whitacre said. Consumers are mired in a polarized world, said Susannah Enkema, VP of Research & Insights at Shelton Group. The same values that can get you seen as a “good” company can
What do all “good” brands have in common? Criteria include treating employees fairly, excellent customer service, and providing a quality product. Aside from these, 23 percent of survey respondents said ESG-related criteria informed their choices to purchase from a particular brand.
“We are no longer living in a world where everybody is going to appeal to everyone,” Enkema said. “It is increasingly important to know what your mission is, who you are appealing to, and how you reach them.” Enkema shared five practical steps in becoming a “good” company and winning in the court of public opinion: 1. Decide what you’re trying to accomplish 2. Determine what goals fit your brand 3. Treat employees well 4. Stay committed to goals for the long haul 5. Tell your story, build trust, and leverage resources
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NRS: The value of values Case in point: Idaho-based Northwest River Supplies (NRS) provides river-ready kayaking, paddleboarding and angling equipment to outdoor enthusiasts and outfitters across the nation. It needed hard, actionable numbers to quantify its secret sauce and bottle it for sale. Through a recent analysis, NRS discovered it’s on par with its competitors in terms of quality and price — so, it doubled down on marketing its values as a differentiator. The study found that sustainable products enjoy a 10-30 percent increase in consumer preference. What’s more, there’s a 10 percent uptick in preference even after a 10 percent increase in price for a sustainable product, translating into a 6-7 percent boost in revenue for companies that bake value into products. Buying decisions are sliced up like a pie, explained Mark Deming, NRS’ Director of Marketing. After standard value factors, there’s a sliver left for social and environmental values. NRS has found it’s usually that last slice that convinces consumers to make a purchase. For Petco, sustainability isn’t a whole other animal For Petco, sustainability means looking at what humans are doing and extrapolating the trends for pets. The drive to reduce human footprint mirrors reducing pawprints. Eleni Kardaras, Petco’s Customer & Market Insights Manager, found that pet parents value sustainability in high-use pet items, a trend mirrored in the human consumption world. Cory Skuldt of Corporate Citizenship helped Petco crunch its sustainability numbers, and highlighted the power of small decisions to leverage massive change in value chains. “[Sustainability commitment] enables Petco to be a catalyst for change for the entire pet industry,” she said. “We’re planning on bringing the entire industry along with us on this journey.” Regeneration: ‘The essence of expression’ Regeneration is the theme of SB ‘21, and Emily Olson of Sustana Group and ReGenFriends quickly laid out a definition (a definition, she admits, was stolen from Carol Sanford): “Evolving capacity for essence expression.” Through her work at Sustana and ReGenFriends, Olson is exploring how to deepen capacity for the fullest expression of people and systems. She’s seeing Sanford’s definition of regeneration coming to fruition in surveys, expressed by respondents’ descriptions of “regeneration” and how they think brands should express it: •
76 percent valued reducing carbon footprint
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70 percent valued social impact transparency
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87 percent valued innovative products and services
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77 percent valued transparency about environmental impact
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regenerative business. Responses evoked aspirations of going beyond neutral, safeguarding future generations, and creating a business model for the future. If product prices stayed the same, over three-quarters of those surveyed said they’d buy the product. If the prices were higher, 46 percent said they’d still buy. A regenerative mindset, carried with innovative thinking, is key to bridging the gap between customer aspiration and brands with a purpose. Key stakeholders as agents of regeneration Philip McKenzie Later in the week, an energizing cluster of keynotes on day three at SB’21 San Diego provided glimpses into a wide variety of inspiring stakeholder-engagement initiatives. Cultural anthropologist Philip McKenzie opened the plenary by calling on brands to enter a new type of social contract, one based on stewardship values and regenerative principles. This would help power a framework that centers both people and planet, altering the way humans think, see, act and exist in the world. “The current social contract isn’t broken; but none of us signed up for it,” McKenzie said. “It needs to work – not for the owners, but for the rest of us.” Continuing this theme, Simon Mainwaring, founder and CEO of We First, stressed that businesses were not moving fast enough – or far enough – to address the world’s most pertinent issues. He said many companies put self-limiting parameters on their ambitions such as working with familiar suppliers or customers, potentially restricting the scale of achievable impact: “This results in isolated pockets of good intentions.” Mooting the idea of collaborative leadership and collective purpose, Mainwaring talked of a virtuous spiral, or hierarchy, that brands could aspire to. This starts on an individual level, adopting a “lead with we” mindset (the subject of his new book); before moving up onto other levels that center around leadership, company, community, society and ultimately transcendence — which is about restoring harmony between humanity and the natural world. Cyrus Wadia Cyrus Wadia, head of product sustainability at Amazon, then spoke of the importance of mobilizing customers to drive positive change. Amazon’s Climate Pledge Friendly shopping program, which launched a year ago, is designed to help customers discover and shop for more sustainable products; it has since grown to encompass over 200,000 products and 37 certifications. “We are realizing that customers are ready and signaling with their purchases what they want to see,” Wadia said. “Give citizens and customers alike something they can believe in, and they can move this system. I’m optimistic about our future ability to make that change because of the customer.”
Brand firepower comes in many different forms, as illustrated by Deluxe Chief Brand Officer Amanda Brinkman’s talk. As a provider of marketing services for small businesses, Deluxe wanted to raise its profile by using its ‘do well by doing good’ motto as a springboard for action. “Our way of doing well would be to do good for small businesses, to inspire more people to support them. On our 100-year anniversary, we wanted to tell the stories of 100 small businesses across America,” she said. The result was Deluxe’s Emmy-nominated series, “Small Business Revolution,” which showcases inspiring stories of small businesses helping to revitalize the towns and communities they operate in. “When you invest in a small business, and take brand action to go out and help them, you can see a ripple effect through the entire community,” Brinkman said. Ensuring that your brand remains relevant is an ongoing challenge for many sustainability leaders, especially if the brand in question has been around for a long time. L-R: Nancy Mahon, Katie Decker and Angelica Beard (moderator) Speaking from experience, Katie Decker, global president for essential health and sustainability at Johnson & Johnson Consumer Health, said, “When you think of Johnson & Johnson, you don’t think about sustainability or sustainable products. We took a hard look at ourselves and asked, ‘what do we need to do to remain relevant?’” The answer lay in understanding what united the company and its people – this led to the company’s Healthy Lives Mission, which launched last year. “It’s our health, trying to make people’s lives healthier. But you can’t have healthy people without a healthy planet – that was our rallying cry,” Decker told attendees. Such initiatives often rely on an ability to drive organizational change. Nancy Mahon, SVP for global corporate citizenship and sustainability at The Estée Lauder Companies, emphasized the importance of empathy here. “Where are you driving value, and how do you show up? That is going to be very different for the HR department versus the R&D department. Then you need understand what are the levers of change for your organization. Lastly, you need to focus and prioritize,” she said. Jonathan Webb The latter half of the plenary had a strong focus on sustainable consumption. Looking to the future of our country’s food system, AppHarvest CEO Jonathan Webb asserted the importance of controlled-environment agriculture, which he predicted would come to the fore ten years from now. “Farming is broken. Climate disruption has already hit us in the face on agriculture … our food supply is dangerously unstable,” he warned. According to Webb, the solution lies in combining innovative technology with natural resources and farming know-how to produce more with less. AppHarvest’s indoor farms in
Kentucky, for instance, use up to 90 percent less water than open-field agriculture and run on recycled rainwater. Heidi Hackemer With food being a great connector for people, Heidi Hackemer, executive creative director at Oatly, advised brands to take advantage of that and open some emotional doors. “Oatmilk is great compared to dairy, but sustainability is boring — it’s not exactly the stuff that consumers are super excited to engage with,” she said. Oatly’s ‘emotional door’ approach involves creating interesting gateways that get people intrigued or psyched about something, thus helping to bring them into more complicated conversations. An emotional door can come from great user design or user experience, for example. “It’s not about how your company talks about sustainability, it’s about how people want to hear about sustainability,” Hackemer told delegates. According to Mathias Wikström, CEO of Doconomy, consumers are key to solutions as they can drive more conscious consumption. “We need to connect consumption to its impact on the planet … it’s all about making those mindful decisions,” he said. Doconomy’s partnership with Mastercard offers a new approach to environmentally informed spending by helping users estimate the carbon footprint of their purchases. Speaking about the rationale behind the carbon calculator, Kristina Kloberdanz, chief sustainability officer at Mastercard, said that while her company’s carbon footprint wasn’t that significant, the reach and scale of its influence is huge. “Individuals are looking to see how they can make a difference — we did some research and found that 85 percent of adults are willing to take climate action,” she told delegates. Nick O’Flaherty Taking a stand on social issues is just as critical. Nick O’Flaherty, director of UNSTUCK at the Tent Partnership for Refugees (TPR), spoke of his organization’s work in bringing brands, consumers and suppliers together to create jobs for refugees. With many refugees now in a state of limbo or displacement for longer periods of time, the case to economically integrate them has grown stronger, O’Flaherty said. TPR developed UNSTUCK to scale up its job creation work, partnering with brands to create products sourced from suppliers who hire refugees. “We are harnessing the power of the market to create the change and impact that we seek,” O’Flaherty said, adding that by buying UNSTUCK products, consumers can help support this job creation. He also highlighted the business benefits of recruiting people who are fleeing or have been displaced, such as increasing workforce diversity and employee engagement: “It also helps builds brand integrity, which is what young consumers are looking for — brands who take a stand on social issues.”
The questions Spotify, Bumble, and Medium execs are asking themselves— and why you should follow their lead By Warren Berger
Is questioning the starting point of innovation?
entrepreneurs.
That’s a question I explored at length in my 2014 book, A More Beautiful Question, wherein I chronicled breakthroughs over the years that began with someone asking a question. It turns out game-changing questions led to the internet, instant photography, Gatorade, the International Red Cross, Netflix, and much more.
Those conversations are primarily focused on the practical nuts and bolts of launching a new business venture and enabling it to grow rapidly—encompassing everything from how to raise venture capital funding to how to hire the right people. But what stands out most is the passion behind the process. These founders convey a genuine sense of wonder about the world as it currently exists and the possibilities to bring about change.
But it was still surprising to learn—as I did from Reid Hoffman’s new book, Masters of Scale: Surprising Truths From the World’s Most Successful Entrepreneurs—how many of today’s top Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are inveterate questioners, driven by curiosity. While tech founders are sometimes stereotyped as hyper-driven people who scarcely pause to breathe, let alone to reflect or question anything, the Masters of Scale book’s interwoven portraits of dozens of startup leaders (many but not all from the tech world) show that the process of scaling a business idea is rife with complexities, contradictions, and uncertainties. To navigate the challenge, you need to be a restless learner and a person who’s not afraid to question anything—including your own bright ideas. The book, based on the Hoffman-hosted popular podcast of the same name, is coauthored by Hoffman with June Cohen and Deron Triff (who helped scale TED Talks before launching the multimedia company WaitWhat, producer of the Masters of Scale podcast). Disclosure: I consulted with the authors during the early stages of producing the Masters of Scale book, which led me to do a deep dive into Hoffman’s recorded conversations with the featured
As the book shows, entrepreneurialism all starts with “the big idea,” and the ideas that drove so many of the Masters of Scale (hereafter MOS) startups came out of the founders’ real-world experiences and frustrations. And those ideas tended to take shape, at least initially, as a question or set of questions. As in, Why does problem X exist? What if we tried doing Y to solve it? As their businesses launched and grew, the challenges—and the questions—tended to grow and become more complex. What do some of those questions look like? Below is a sampling of what the MOS founders asked themselves as they launched and grew their businesses—a quick primer on the art of asking questions that spark innovation. Some of these questions may seem obvious in hindsight, but no one else was asking them at the time. WHITNEY WOLFE HERD OF BUMBLE Reacting to her own unsatisfying experiences with online dating services (she’d previously worked on the dating app Tinder), Herd started with a simple diagnostic question:
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What’s broken in online dating? She felt it just wasn’t working for women, who had little control over online interactions with men and sometimes ended up getting harassed. This led to Herd’s ambitious follow-up question: What if only women could initiate the conversation? She then designed Bumble so that with any potential match, women always got to make the first move. Herd’s two-step questioning approach is classic: Start by inquiring about a large, systemic problem, then proceed to a bold, imaginative what-if question that proposes a possible solution. DANIEL EK OF SPOTIFY Here’s another example of a similar “one-two” questioning approach. When he was young, Ek had been a fan of Napster, but as a musician himself he understood why music piracy didn’t work as a business model. So his initial question was, Why hasn’t anyone made a version of Napster that works for both consumers and artists? To do that you’d have to design an online music streaming service that rewarded the content producers; to that end, Ek worked directly with record companies to strike deals with their artists. But he also had to capture the fancy of consumers, and as he set out to do that he was guided by this question: What if we could build something that makes it feel like you had all the world’s music on your hard drive? To achieve that, Ek had to ensure that Spotify provided a massive offering of music, delivered at near-immediate download speeds, and customized to listener preferences. JENN HYMAN OF RENT THE RUNWAY For those wondering where to look for a problem that can spark a great question, the answer is . . . anywhere. Hyman happened to be looking in her clothes closet, where it seemed just about everything was old and outdated. Which prompted this question: Why is it that we have a closet that’s a museum to who we once were? In pondering that question, she came up with this second one: What if the closet were a living, constantly changing thing? The way to practically and affordably do that would be to rent, not buy, the clothes in your closet. Hyman’s online site made it easy to rent the latest, most fashionable apparel, and the idea made sense not only for cost-conscious customers, but also for clothing suppliers—who now had a whole new market available to them. EV WILLIAMS OF TWITTER AND MEDIUM As Hoffman explains in the book, Williams has been pursuing some version of the same question for years, as he has had a hand in launching first Blogger, then Twitter, and then Medium. The overriding question: What’s preventing people from sharing thoughts online? Williams’s attempts to answer that have taken the form of blogging, tweeting, or longer-form online writing. The key takeaway here is that if you take ownership of a big enough question, and adapt it to different markets or situations, it can spawn multiple answers and opportunities over the years. SARA BLAKELY OF SPANX Blakely invented Spanx by questioning the way women’s pantyhose were designed; specifically, she famously cut off the feet of her own pantyhose and subsequently launched a billion-dollar company around that creation. But the
question featured below is one that Blakely began asking after she launched her company, as she was starting to scale it and wanted to encourage creativity in her staff. Blakely’s question was: If no one showed you how to do your job, how would you do it? That question continues to guide the way she manages the people who work for her— encouraging them to learn, experiment, and bring their own ideas into the mix. DANNY MEYER OF UNION SQUARE HOSPITALITY The famed restaurateur shared the same concern as many other MOS in the book: How does one maintain a strong company culture while growing rapidly? But that’s a mundane, rather uninspiring question. It gained new force when, at the suggestion of consultant Erika Andersen, Meyer flipped that question to this one: How can we use growth to advance our culture? As Meyer realized, culture can’t really be “maintained” anyway—it’s a living force that’s bound to change. But Meyer could leverage the company’s growth to invest more in culture—by creating more incentives for employees and putting more resources into clearly articulating and spreading cultural values throughout the organization. The lesson: Questions can become more powerful when you turn them upside down or flip them sideways, particularly if you can turn an ordinary question into a more provocative or inspiring one. CATERINA FAKE AND STEWART BUTTERFIELD OF FLICKR One of the surprises in the Masters of Scale book is seeing how many success stories were born out of failure. Just before launching the groundbreaking photo-sharing app Flickr, Fake and Butterfield were trying to get an online video game off the ground, with no luck. They had burned through funding and were about to give up when they asked themselves: Is there any way we can not go out of business? In his book, Hoffman refers to this as the question that “has launched a thousand pivots.” You hit a wall and then ask what can we still do with what we have? Fake and Butterfield had a video game no one wanted, but buried within that game was a feature that allowed you to drag, tag, and share photos. They killed the game and focused on that feature, which became Flickr. For those trying to find their own beautiful question to pursue, here are a couple of final tips from Hoffman (who helped launch LinkedIn and PayPal, and now is an investor at Greylock Partners). He says too many would-be entrepreneurs are focused on the question, What’s the next big thing? If you lack a crystal ball, that’s a difficult question to answer. A better question tries to get at something only you can answer and that you care deeply about: What is my vision for the future, and how can I begin to realize that vision? One final question that can be useful: If you think you’ve found your big idea and want to know what others really think about it, Hoffman recommends sharing the idea and then asking: What’s wrong with this idea? Don’t ask for encouragement—ask for criticism. “You want people to challenge and poke holes in your idea,” Hoffman says. “It’s better to find those holes before you bring that idea into the world.”
Creativity May Suffer When Mature Projects Change Hands By Dylan Walsh
“Zemeckis spent several years working on the screenplay before he even started shooting,” says Berg, assistant professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business. “I think if instead he’d been handed a screenplay that someone else had written, he wouldn’t have had a vision for the film that was so unique and developed, so unified and coherent.” This possibility got Berg, who studies creativity and innovation, thinking. Most research on implementing creative ideas focuses on how people successfully win support for their ideas from others. But what, he wondered, about actually building creative ideas into creative final products? Once support for an idea exists, what contributes to its successful execution? A new articleopen in new window in the Academy of Management Journal, coauthored with former Stanford GSB doctoral alumna Alisa Yuopen in new window, finds that, in line with Berg’s intuition, handing a mature idea to somebody else for execution harms the creativity of the final product. Instead, people should be involved with creative projects from relatively early in their development, as this helps lay the foundation for building creative final products. Specifically, it gives “implementers” a sense of psychological ownership over the outcome — a conviction that the project is truly theirs — and helps them develop a coherent vision. For Your Consideration The researchers unearthed this insight with two studies. They looked first at the movie industry, winnowing a list of nearly 25,000 films released in the United States since 1915 to about 5,700 titles that allowed them to test their hypotheses with relative precision. They mined each movie for credited roles that differentiated who was involved in three stages of creative development: the generation of the idea; the elaboration of that idea (writing the screenplay); and the execution of the idea (directing the film). They then matched each film with an aggregate critics’ score based on Rotten Tomatoes ratings to provide a measure of the final product’s creativity. Films in which there was a “late handoff” — that is, a director received a screenplay written by someone else to make into a movie — tended to be less creative than films in which the same person drove the entire process or drove the process from screenwriting on (an “early handoff”). “The notion of handoffs has been studied very thoroughly in medicine, but not in the context of creative projects,” Berg says. Yet handoffs are quite common in creative work. Engineers often build based on others’ designs; many
marketers execute others’ ideas for campaigns; employees are increasingly asked to implement ideas that were crowdsourced from customers. “With creative projects, it’s clear how much handoffs should matter, as you need to be deeply committed, you need to go the extra mile to get this new thing born into the world.” To bolster these findings with a clearer causal connection, Berg and Yu ran an experiment in which participants were paid to develop an advertisement for soft pretzels made with cricket flour. In this study, too, projects handed off late in their development were judged to be less creative than those in which people were involved throughout most, if not all, of the process. The results also showed why late handoffs reduced creativity. Because recipients of late handoffs missed the opportunity to shape the mature ideas they were handed, they struggled to form a sense of psychological ownership or a coherent vision for their ads, decreasing the creativity of their work. Creative Control vs. Collaboration The takeaway is straightforward: avoid late handoffs. “If you’re working on something creative, you can certainly receive the project as a handoff, but it shouldn’t be too late in the process,” Berg says. “Make sure you’re not handing over a mature idea for someone to implement, as you cut off the opportunity for them to develop psychological ownership and a coherent vision, which are key ingredients for turning creative ideas into creative final products.” Second, under some circumstances, late handoffs might be the best option. “If you already have a mature idea and realize that unique skills are needed to implement it, handing the idea off to someone with the requisite skills may be worth it,” Berg explains. In most situations, however, Berg says steps can and should be taken to avoid late handoffs. He suggests the findings provide “good news” for those who are expected to implement others’ ideas — they can do so effectively if they enter before the substance of the idea is cemented. “Is this effort-free? Absolutely not,” Berg says. Organizations need to make sure those tasked with the execution of creative ideas are brought on-board early enough. But neither is this recommendation excessively difficult to abide. “People don’t have to be involved from the very beginning. They can receive early handoffs and still form a sense of ownership and a coherent vision. But if the stakes are high, it’s probably better to err on the side of being too early than too late.”
What Ecommerce Consumers Really Want from Branded Content Marketing By Jessica Wynne Lockhart
Is branded content marketing dead? Research indicates that it’s very much alive—it’s set to grow by $417 billion by 2025—and very much worth investing in. According to marketing platform Semrush, brands using content marketing generate 97% more backlinks and land 434% more search engine results pages—resulting in five times as many sales leads. Not only can a good branded content marketing strategy result in sales, it’s also a future-proof strategy. With upcoming changes to privacy and data collection—including Apple’s latest iOS 15 update and Google Chrome’s plans to phase-out third-party cookies by 2023—the importance of organically driven traffic is more important than ever. According to 2019 research conducted by BrightEdge, organic search remains the most dominant source of trackable web traffic and the largest digital channel, accounting for over 53% of traffic. “Content marketing won’t be affected by [data and privacy changes],” says Chris Tatum, Director of SEO at Visiture, an ecommerce digital marketing agency. “As long as you’re creating content that is valuable and specific to your customer’s queries, you have the chance to win those clicks and bring in traffic to your site.” What has changed, though—and is constantly changing— are search engine algorithms. Content marketing didn’t die, but it has evolved and been transformed into something entirely new. The days of stuffing blog posts with search terms are long over. Today, site crawlers look at content within the context of your overall site, while Google’s search quality raters (actual humans who give insights into whether the algorithms are providing good results) now focus on what’s called E-A-T: expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
Google is constantly trying to find new ways to improve the way that they understand and process content,” says Chris. “They are pushing toward making sure that marketers create
content that isn’t just appealing to the algorithm but is valuable to the users searching.” This all comes at a time when there’s more content being produced than ever. Consider, for example, YouTube: more than 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. For those counting, that’s 30,000 hours of newly uploaded content every hour. Meanwhile, WordPress users produce 70 million new posts each month. “The bar is increasing for content marketing. It’s getting hard to stand out,” says Kevin Indig, Director of SEO for Shopify.
Instead, you have to really focus on creating outstanding high-quality content that only you have—and make it really hard for others to compete with you.” Here are the biggest trends set to shake up the content marketing scene in the coming year—and how to ensure your brand stands out from the competition. The biggest content marketing trends for 2022 1. What consumers want is changing Although blogging continues to be the format that marketers prioritize (with nearly 70% of businesses using it as part of their content marketing strategies), there’s a disconnect from what consumers actually want. In 2021, content marketing platform Contently surveyed over 1,000 Americans to find out what consumers wanted from branded content. Here’s what they found: Consumers want more memes and visual content. Video will continue to reign supreme as we move into 2022, with 30% of consumers indicating it’s the content they enjoy most, followed by memes and photography (28%). These are also important for search engine optimization,
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as Google has started putting video snippets next to search results—and preliminary research indicates users are more likely to click on them when they’re displayed. Consumers want to support sustainable and ethical brands. Does your brand have sustainable practices? If so, now is the time to make it a central component of your content marketing strategy. According to Contently, “social impact storytelling drives purchase consideration,” with 49% of consumers saying they’d buy something from a brand after reading about the positive impact they’re having on the world. There are countless ways to do this—whether it’s through creating a short film highlighting your company’s green practices, or writing long-form articles and creating interactive features about sustainability throughout your supply chain, such as industry leader Patagonia does. Consumers want more educational content and courses. There’s a reason Google chose to emphasize the importance of “expertise” in refining how it indexes sites—it’s because it’s what consumers value. That’s also why Contently advises creating educational courses, with 58% of consumers saying they’d be likely to take a free course created by a brand. These could be adjacent to your brand or directly related to what you’re selling (such as the tutorials created by Bullet Journal on how to use its product). They could also be aligned with influencer content creation, such as the partnership Bullet Journal has formed with author Cal Newport. “It’s a very solid, very successful strategy,” says Kevin. 2. Voice and visual searches are becoming increasingly popular Why ask Jeeves when you can ask Alexa or Siri? Increasingly, consumers are turning to voice and visual searches. In 2018, Google reported that 27% of the global online population was already using voice search on a mobile device—a number that’s only increased since then. By 2019, 45% of American millennials were using voice assistance to shop. The result is that search engines are beginning to serve up multi-format content, including videos, images, podcasts, and shopping recommendations—which, in turn, changes the type of content brands will need to produce to stay highly ranked. 3. AI and AR will soon lead the way in content creation AI is already being used by brands to optimize content marketing campaigns and to brainstorm and audit content. A good example is the popularity of tools such as Clearscope, an AI-powered research and content optimization tool. AI can even be used to produce original content. Publications such as The Washington Post have already been using machine-generated content for years (although this writer would like to remind her editors that humans are still needed to refine the product before it’s published). Likewise, augmented reality (AR) may become a key component of many merchants’ content marketing
strategies, with the market currently valued at $30.7 billion and around 810 million active mobile users. How to develop a content marketing strategy that works Test new channels According to Tatum, there are three main components of a strong ecommerce content marketing strategy designed to capture more purchase-driven searchers: •
On-page category content to help your category pages (where your products are) rank for specific keywords
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Informative blog posts and articles that will provide valuable information to your visitor.
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Low-funnel, long-tail keyword content pieces, which— while lower in search volume—will correlate to the highly specific queries from your audience
He says that the biggest mistake he sees merchants making is not utilizing multiple forms of content across their content marketing strategy. “Merchants need to focus on a broad, comprehensive strategy that will utilize multiple forms of content to ensure they are appealing to users at all different points in their sales funnel,” says Chris. This wide-sweeping strategy should be based on the latest consumer trends and demands— including those for more podcasts, search-optimized video content (including livestreams), social media content, and user-generated content, including influencer marketing. In addition to developing your brand voice, Tatum recommends determining what questions customers will ask at all points in the sales funnel, and how your brand can answer them. “Without these pieces, it’s hard to build out a well-rounded content marketing strategy that will drive conversions and sales,” he says. Create original content designed for users—not for search engines SEO keywords may remain, well, “key”—but they’re not enough to stand out from the competition. To make it onto the first page of search engine results, you’re going to have to establish yourself as an authority on a topic by ensuring your content is meant for actual users—not for robots. This can also help to create consumer trust and establish your brand as an authority in your space. And while “authority” may have once referred to the number of backlinks to an article, this relevancy is decreasing over time, as search engines continue to revise their algorithms for real users. “It is so important that the content that merchants create is built for users. At the end of the day, Google will reward what is best for the user and you’re more likely to get conversions from content that is relevant and valuable,” says Chris. Take, for example, this blog post. Not to get too meta, but what you’re reading right now is a piece of content marketing for Shopify Plus. Here’s what might surprise you, though: We didn’t come up with the idea for this article by researching SEO keywords. Instead, we wondered what questions merchants might have about content marketing and how we can help answer them. Then, rather than regurgitating existing content or outdated statistics, we
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sought out the latest research and interviewed experts on the subject. Original interviews are just one of the things that can set written or video content apart—another element is developing and sharing your own data-driven research. “Data is increasingly becoming a key differentiator for content,” Andrew Dennis, Shopify’s Senior Content Marketing Manager, told CMSWire earlier this year. “There are likely already thousands of posts on the topic you want to cover—so if you want your page to rank in search, you’ll need to find a unique angle, and what better way to do that than with original research that other pages can’t replicate?” When it comes to written content, go long (and thorough) Think that the average attention span is shrinking? When it comes to SEO, nothing could be further from the truth. In a 2020 analysis of 1.2 million articles (including their backlinks, social shares, and visits) Semrush found that long reads (posts of more than 7,000 words) are the leaders in terms of content performance. They’re more likely to be read, and drive almost four times more traffic than articles of 900 to 1,200 words in length. Most importantly, the report notes that “long reads likely perform better because they provide users with in-depth information on the topic—not just because they contain more words.” Be strategic when using SEO keywords According to Brightedge, SEO continues to drive more than 1,000% more traffic than organic social media. But the days of keyword stuffing are long over, especially with more people competing for what Indig calls “commodity content” (content that anyone could create on a particular topic).
“The biggest mistake is to go after irrelevant keywords that have a lot of search demands or search volume, but to not really ask yourself whether it fits with your business and whether you’re the best authority on the Internet to appear for those search terms,” says Kevin. He recommends finding a mix and balance in your content marketing strategy between topics that you’re a clear authority on and those that you want to be part of the larger mix. “A good thing to keep in mind is that anything that helps to establish more share-of-mind of your brand in your customer’s heads is also good for SEO,” he says.
While this change does not affect search page rankings, it may affect how likely consumers are to click on a search result. Develop your content marketing for mobile and voice search As we outlined above, voice, image, and mobile searches should be top of mind when it comes to creating your content marketing plan for 2022. In particular, as voice search technology continues to evolve, the type of content being generated will need to be modified for it. “As the popularity of voice queries increases, the voice and tone of the content are undergoing some major changes. One of the biggest changes is a shift to a more conversationlike style of writing that would correspond to the natural voice queries users may perform,” reports DOZ Marketing Solutions. Set up strategies to measure ROI The last major component of a strong content marketing campaign is developing strategies for measuring its ROI— yet 27% of marketers indicate demonstrating ROI is their biggest recurring challenge. There are several ways to determine if your content marketing campaigns are successful, including tracking conversions (sales or newsletter sign-ups), social engagement, backlinks, or earned media. And while few merchants invest in tracking gains in search traffic and rankings improvements, Contently says this is a missed opportunity and a valuable part of the ROI puzzle. “By occupying valuable real estate on search engine results pages, content was not only driving traffic to their websites, but also improving brand recognition at the crucial research stage of the buying cycle,” reports Contently. “Forrester research tells us that executive buyers look at an average of 17 pieces of content before signing a contract. These assets provide a steady stream of qualified visitors without forcing brands to repeatedly spend money on paid ads.” Kevin, for one, strongly advises that merchants make Google’s Core Web Vitals tool (which shows how your store’s pages perform based on real-world usage) a priority for monitoring your site and determining ways to improve its performance. The future of branded content marketing
Writing titles and title tags
Social media platforms will come and go, and algorithms constantly will be in flux, but one thing has remained the same: the best content marketing strategies identify consumer’s problems and help to find them answers.
According to Semrush’s research, the most effective headlines are between 10 and 13 words. Titles of this length drive twice as much traffic and 1.5 times more shares than those of seven words or less.
“Content marketing is all about creating content which is valuable to users and answers the questions they are asking,” says Chris. “Always keep that in mind as your top priority when creating content for your business.”
Title tags and meta descriptions also continue to be a key component of a strong SEO strategy. However, as of 2021, Google has started rewriting title tags, by replacing them with other relevant text from a webpage (often the page’s H1 tag).
Jess is an award-winning Canadian freelance journalist and editor currently based in Australia. Her writing has appeared in Chatelaine, enRoute, The Globe & Mail, and The Toronto Star, amongst others. Learn more about her work at jesslockhart.com.
Marketer’s Toolkit 2022: How to step into new rivers By Aditya Kishore
Marketer’s Toolkit 2022, which launches today, includes a series of reports aimed at helping marketers identify disruptive trends, and adapt swiftly to exploit the opportunities being created. Aditya Kishore, WARC Insight Director, explains why it’s bigger than ever. Given the turbulence of the last two years, most businesses are hoping for a return to normal in 2022. Unfortunately, it looks like Heraclitus got it right when he said “No man ever steps in the same river twice – for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man”. New years bring new rivers to cross With high vaccination levels in most developed countries, consumers are venturing out again and confidence is building. However, even as aspects of daily life are seemingly returning to normal, it’s clear we’re not simply stepping back into the same “river”. An overwhelming 97% of respondents to a survey for Marketer’s Toolkit 2022 were concerned about changes in consumer behaviour following the lockdowns – the most widely held concern amongst respondents by a sizeable margin. Lengthy lockdowns have changed perspectives and habits, and people are discovering new interests and priorities. Industry structures have also changed; some as a result of these consumer shifts, some simply because they were pending and have been accelerated. The rapid surge in online behaviours, for example, has businesses scrambling to adjust. Nearly eight out of every ten respondents expected to increase spend on e-commerce in 2022, and accelerating digital transformations to reach customers across channels was the highest-ranked challenge. For businesses, there’s an unfamiliar new balance that they need to find. On one hand, they must cater for the “normal”, pre-pandemic customer, but on the other hand they must also make adjustments for very significantly transformed new behaviours and market requirements in important areas. The 2022 Marketer’s Toolkit series Given the complexity of the market, we decided this year to
create a Marketer’s Toolkit series: a set of reports offering a selection of different “tools” to help navigate the coming year. The first of these – the Global Trends Report – comes out today, providing research, analysis and insight into the five key trends that will shape marketing strategies in 2022. Forthcoming reports will provide regional perspectives, quantitative analysis on global ad trends, and a review of emerging concepts and metrics that could help maximise marketing effectiveness. We’ve weighted our analysis more towards economies that are opening up, as that is where businesses will need to make the most rapid adjustments. We built our base case scenario on the IMF’s global economic outlook, anticipating steady recovery in vaccinated countries but with significant inconsistency worldwide, and recognise overhanging concerns around inflation, labour shortages and supply chain interruptions, as well as the threat of new coronavirus variants driving another round of lockdowns. We’ve spent the past few months working to identify the most important global shifts, looking at queries, concerns and areas of engagement for WARC clients. We’ve layered on a significant amount of desk research, fielded a proprietary survey of 1,500+ marketing and advertising executives and conducted lengthy interviews with more than two dozen marketing leaders at some of the biggest brands worldwide. And then we’ve utilised all the subject matter expertise that we have in-house at WARC, with analysis from our team around the world, to create this report. Uncertainty brings opportunity One of the most important findings from our survey was that industry optimism is high worldwide, with approximately three out of four respondents expecting improvements to their business in 2022. That’s an important finding, because even though there are significant adjustments that need to be made urgently for 2022, these disruptions are also pockets of opportunity. Savvy marketers can benefit from identifying, adapting and targeting these opportunities – and the Marketer’s Toolkit 2022 can help.
Curbing Clutter: Why Do We Hold On to Things We Never Use? By Filip Urban
If you took a quick glance around your home, you’d probably
simple observation. This one was around a pair of shoes. A
find items you’ve purchased in the last year but haven’t used.
number of years ago when I was on the job market, before
Maybe it’s a pair of shoes you were saving for just the right
I came to Wharton, I got myself a pair of interview shoes.
occasion, a bottle of wine for a special dinner, or even the
I wore them for my interviews, but then I never wore them
good towels that you only put out for overnight guests. If you
again. And it wasn’t because I didn’t like them. In fact, just
haven’t consumed these things by now, Wharton marketing
the opposite. I loved them — so much so that I always passed
professor Jonah Berger says there’s a pretty good chance you never will. He’s the co-author of a recent study on why people buy things they don’t use and end up with piles of clutter. There are psychological components to clutter, but there are
up wearing them because I wanted to save them for the right occasion. Then, eventually they went out of style, and I got rid of them.
also implications for marketers who want consumers not
I noticed similar examples across areas of my life. I would
only to buy their products, but also to use those products
buy some new pairs of socks. Let me tell you, socks aren’t
and hopefully come back for more. The paper, titled “How
super-special. I would be like, “Oh, is today the day to
Nonconsumption Can Turn Ordinary Items into Perceived
break open that new pair of socks? Maybe I should wait for
Treasures,” was written with Jacqueline Rifkin, assistant
tomorrow? Maybe I should wait until the next day?” What
marketing professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas
it felt like was that by not using these things once, in some
City’s Henry W. Bloch School of Management. Berger joined Knowledge@Wharton to discuss the research findings. Listen to the podcast at the top of this page or read an edited transcript of the conversation below. Knowledge@Wharton: Can you give me an overview of this research and what inspired you to look at this topic? Jonah Berger: As with many research ideas, it started with a
sense they became more special. Through not using them, it changed how I saw these products.
“Why do ordinary items become treasures? Why do we hold on to these things that started out having none of these associations?”–Jonah Berger
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We started to wonder, “Well, is this just my weirdness, or
at a later occasion. And when we asked them what would be
is there something more interesting here that might tell us
the ideal occasion to use it, we found that they listed more
something about consumer behavior and something that
special, unusual, unique occasions. Rather than just saying,
might help marketers better meet consumers where they
“I’d pop this open on a Tuesday or Wednesday night,” it
are?”
became, “I’d be saving it for a special occasion,” or “I’d be
Knowledge@Wharton: You and your co-author conducted six experiments, and your findings were consistent across all those experiments. Take us through one as an example. Berger: We told participants to imagine that they had a $12 bottle of pinot noir. It’s not a fancy bottle of champagne, just a usual bottle of wine. For half the people, we asked them to “imagine you thought about using this bottle of wine while having dinner one night, but then you decided not to.” Then, we gave everyone an opportunity to drink the wine. We said, “There’s an opportunity coming up. How likely would
saving it for a date night with my spouse,” or “I’d only use it on this occasion.” Originally, this thing was just a bottle of wine. It wasn’t that special. But by passing up using it once, people started to infer that maybe this thing is special. Maybe the fact that I wasn’t using it means that it’s special — which made them less likely to use it in the future. Knowledge@Wharton: This gets us to a concept that you and your co-author identify in the paper as the “specialness spiral.” Can you explain that?
you be to use this wine at that opportunity? And also, what’s
Berger: We all have this notion that certain things in our life
the ideal occasion when you would use this wine?” What
just are special. There’s that heirloom china that your parents
we found was really interesting. Just telling people, “Hey,
may have passed down to you. There’s that special suit that
imagine you passed up using this once” — when they were
you might have worn at your wedding. These things are
given another opportunity to use it later on, they were more
clearly special. But why would a $12 wine become special, or
likely to pass it up again. The fact that they had forgone
that pair of ordinary socks? Why do ordinary items become
using it for one ordinary occasion made them forgo using it
treasures? Why do we hold on to these things that started out
having none of these associations? This is what we call a specialness spiral. You take an ordinary item and forgo using it once. Because of that, you start to see it as a little more special. But because you see it as a little more special, at the next opportunity to use it, you say, “Well, maybe this is not a good enough opportunity,” so you pass up using it. It becomes a little more special. The next opportunity has to be even better, which means that it’s less likely to be used, so it becomes even more special. It’s this ratcheting upward of a specialness spiral where an item that started out very ordinary, through repeated lack of use eventually becomes quite special and seen more as a treasure.
“By allowing people to see that they’re not using things, they’re understanding more about their own foibles in decision-making.”–Jonah Berger Knowledge@Wharton: You mentioned socks. Could this happen to any product? Berger: Certainly. This is not a paper about socks and wine, and we don’t mean to suggest that all clutter is driven by this. There are certainly other reasons for clutter, but when we do have these things that start out quite ordinary and eventually become extraordinary, this is one reason why that happens. Knowledge@Wharton: Let’s get into the implications for marketers. It has always been desirable for companies to market their products as exclusive or special, but your study indicates maybe that’s not such a good idea. What can marketers do to mitigate this effect of perceived treasures that leads to nonconsumption? Berger: You’re very right that it’s good to be special. Many marketers are interested in marketing their products as exclusive or special, and we see that language used a lot in
to use their offerings as soon as possible after purchase. We see this a lot with groceries, with perishable items. You’re not sitting there treasuring a banana because you know if you wait too long, it’ll turn brown on your counter and attract fruit flies. You can see “best by” dates on yogurt, for example, but we could imagine the same thing on other types of products, even if they’re nonperishable, sort of encouraging people to realize that they haven’t used them yet. This is something experts on clutter and things along those lines often talk about. They say, “In your closet, turn all your hangers in a particular direction, and when you use something, turn it in the other direction.” Then you can see if you have a shirt that’s been sitting there forever that you never use.
“If we buy something and don’t use it, we have not unlocked the value that thing offered to us.”–Jonah Berger By allowing people to see that they’re not using things, they’re understanding more about their own foibles in decisionmaking. They can avoid getting stuck, and marketers can be more successful. Knowledge@Wharton: Is this a tough sell for marketers at the moment? We’re in this ethos of “consume less, live more” and Marie Kondo’s “spark joy.” Can marketers steer away from that? Berger: I think that’s one way of looking at it. I think you can also look at the fact that people are interested in helping the environment and being more prosocial and really not wasting things as much. If we buy something and don’t use it, we have not unlocked the value that thing offered to us. It’s one thing if it’s heirloom china, and we’re not really using it as china. We’re using it as something to be looked at once in a while to remind us of a memory. But a pair of Nike socks doesn’t need to be that way. Hopefully, by understanding this, marketers can help consumers unlock the value in their products and services.
a variety of categories. But I think while marketers do that to
Knowledge@Wharton: What are some follow-up angles for
increase valuations, it can have a downside if it means that
this research?
thing never gets used. If we buy a dress or a shirt or a pair of socks or a bottle of wine that we never end up using, that may get in the way of using things in the future, and you may actually be less likely to buy from the brand. We might think, “Well, I never used the shoes from that brand. Maybe I shouldn’t buy from them in the future.” Marketers may want to consider a number of ways of dealing with this. Maybe it’s associating offerings with a specific usage occasion. Instead of a dress being marketed as a fancy dress or wine being just marketed as red wine, describe it as a “New Year’s dress” or “wine for a steak dinner.” Really associating it with specific occasions will make people go, “Oh, this is that occasion. It’s time to use this thing.” Alternatively, brands could consider encouraging consumers
Berger: Through Jacqueline, who’s the first author of this paper, I’ve become interested in what drives specialness. Why do some products and services and experiences and aspects of our lives become special? I think there are certain routes that are clear — heirlooms and those sorts of things. But how do products and services take on additional value? And how can marketers use that? Marketers not only want to sell products that people use, they want to build experiences. If products and services remind us of close others, that can make them more special. If they help us connect with aspects of our lives, that can make them more special. I think this question of how to turn ordinary things into treasures is interesting not only from the consumer side, but for marketers, as well.
One Person, Many Needs: How Customer Centricity Has Changed By knowledge wharton Staff
It’s no longer good enough for companies to cater to the needs of many different customers. If businesses really want to build loyalty and lasting value, they must figure out the different needs within a single customer. That’s the advice from Wharton marketing professor Eric Bradlow, who encouraged firms to think beyond the oldschool definition of Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) — a metric that captures the worth of the entire relationship between firm and consumer. He said the modern definition of CLV includes how a single customer’s needs change over time. “Ignoring heterogeneity does not seem very 2021 to me,” said Bradlow, who moderated a recent workshop by Wharton Customer Analytics in partnership with Teradata. The workshop, titled “Analytics in Action: It’s Still All About the Customer,” featured industry experts along with Wharton faculty who offered their insights on how companies can become more customer-centric. To explain how the view of customers has evolved, Bradlow went back to basics with the Four Ps of marketing: product, price, placement, and promotion. These concepts have long been held sacrosanct as the key to unlocking the most value from a business. While the Four Ps are still relevant, they aren’t the only way to capture customer value because
they don’t account for the heterogeneity within the same person, he said. Bradlow offered himself as an example. He’s a professor, a radio show host, a business partner, a husband, a father, and a sports fan. What he’s looking for as a consumer largely depends on which role he’s filling.
“Ignoring heterogeneity does not seem very 2021 to me.”–Eric Bradlow “I’m as much to blame for this as anyone else, because I thought for the first 20 years of my career that understanding heterogeneity [among customers] was enough,” he said. “What about the concept that there isn’t just one me?” Customizing at Scale Realizing and reacting to the full range of needs within each customer is a big challenge that needs big data, according to Kartik Hosanagar, Wharton professor of operations, information and decisions. He encouraged firms to harness the power of algorithms that can analyze customer preferences and provide a unique experience for all the hats an individual wears. “To do this at scale, you have to rely on algorithms,” he
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said. Hosanagar, who is also faculty co-lead of Wharton’s AI for Business, said Amazon, Netflix, and YouTube have mastered this technology, showing how machine learning helps keep customers engaged. When he visits Netflix, for example, his homepage is loaded with offerings based on his previous viewing habits. But those choices begin to change once he clicks on something different, like a comedy instead of a drama. “YouTube does this brilliantly, as well,” he said. “We’ve all experienced this. We go to watch one video on YouTube, and before you know it, you’ve lost a couple of hours because they were just so good at recognizing the context and providing that level of personalization.” Hosanagar did not dismiss the risks associated with automation, including data quality and privacy concerns, and worries over human biases that can get baked into an algorithm. He said companies have to be mindful of such issues while they build out their capabilities. “No doubt, there’s tons of risk, but I think the opportunities are immense,” he said. “It’s all about having a governance structure in place while you’re embracing all of the upside and the potential.”
“Too often, we’re looking for a single answer and a silver bullet that comes readily off the shelf and is well-tested by science.”–Katy Milkman Making a Change Bradlow said it’s hard for companies to shift their old ways
of thinking about customers, so he asked colleague Katy Milkman for some insight. Milkman, a Wharton professor of operations, information and decisions, and co-director of Penn’s Behavior Change For Good Initiative, is the author of How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be. The book offers sciencebased strategies for creating lasting, effective change. While the book was written for individuals, Milkman said the strategies it contains have been tested on organizations, making them perfect for business leaders looking to navigate changes both large and small. “The good news is people seem to be people across the board, whether they’re in managerial roles, employee roles, customer roles,” she said. According to Milkman, marketers can borrow lessons from behavioral science that can be applied to customers, who often see their life stages as chapters in a book. From college to career to retirement, each chapter is a chance to start anew. It’s called the fresh start effect, she said, and it’s what drives consumers to make New Year’s resolutions, birthday promises, and other commitments that companies can capitalize on. “When you feel like you have a chapter break and you’re turning the page, you feel like you have a bit of clean slate and a fresh start,” she said. Milkman offered one important caveat for companies pursuing a more modern customer-centric course of action: there is no one-size-fits-all solution. “Too often, we’re looking for a single answer and a silver bullet that comes readily off the shelf and is well-tested by science,” she said. “It really depends on the context and what the barriers are to change.”
Book,
&
Line
He Said, She Said: Branding By Michael Russo In He Said, She Said: Branding, the husband and wife team of Jaci and Michael Russo share what they’ve learned over their combined decades of experience working in branding and with each other. Through their unique voices, you’ll learn about tried-and- true branding best practices and even get an inside look into how their agency has continued to help businesses from coast to coast thrive for the past twenty years.
Brand Storytelling: Put Customers at the Heart of Your Brand Story By Miri Rodriguez Written by the award-winning storyteller Miri Rodriguez at Microsoft, this actionable guide goes beyond content strategy and, instead, demonstrates how to leverage brand storytelling in the marketing mix to strengthen brand engagement and achieve long-term growth, with advice from brands like Expedia, Coca Cola, McDonalds, Adobe and Google.
Book of Branding: a guide to creating brand identity for startups and beyond
Sinker B.Y.O.B. Building Your Own Brand: Branding for Designers, Brand Strategy, Identity Assets, Logo Design, Blogging & Marketing By Karan Gupta Who is this book for? This book is tailored for professionals in the fields of graphic design, branding design, visual design, ui/ux, business administration, brand management, public relations, architecture, interior design, content marketing and communication design.
REBRAND: The Ultimate Guide to Personal Branding By Bernard Kelvin Clive In the midst of this noisy and busy world if you don’t purposely decide to stand-out you will be drowned by competition. This book contains guidelines to help you build an authentic personal brand that will promote your product and services.
Wally Olins: Brand New: The Shape Of Brands To Come By Wally Olins
By Radim Malinic Book of Branding is a creative guide for new businesses, start-ups and individuals, which puts visual identity at the heart of brand strategy. The conversational, jargon free, tone of the book helps the reader to understand essential elements of the brand identity process.
Wally Olins: Brand New: The Shape Of Brands To Come by Wally Olins is a an interesting presentation of branding and its related terms. The book is a useful resource for everyone who wants to know everything about branding and how it works in the current world.
Brand Society: How Brands Transform Management and Lifestyle
Persuasive Signs: The Semiotics of Advertising (Approaches to Applied Semiotics, 4)
By Martin Kornberger Brands are a fait accompli: they represent a mountain range of evidence in search of a theory. They are much exploited, but little explored. In this book, Martin Kornberger sets out to rectify the ratio between exploiting and exploring through sketching out a theory of the Brand Society.
By Ron Beasley Using both verbal and nonverbal techniques to make its messages as persuasive as possible, advertising has become an integral component of modern-day social discourse designed to influence attitudes and lifestyle behaviours by covertly suggesting how we can best satisfy our innermost urges and aspirations through consumption.
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Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action (Int’l Edit.) By Simon Sinek Why are some people and organizations more innovative, more influential, and more profitable than others? Why do some command greater loyalty from customers and employees alike? Even among the successful, why are so few able to repeat their successes over and over?
Unfu*k Yourself: Get Out of Your Head and into Your Life By Gary John Bisho
Joining the ranks of The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, You Are a Badass, and F*ck Feelings is this refreshing, BS-free self-empowerment guide that offers an honest, no-nonsense, tough-love approach to help you move past self-imposed limitations.
Hook Point: How to Stand Out in a 3-Second World 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.
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.
Hello, My Name Is Awesome: How to Create Brand Names That Stick By Alexandra Watkins Every year, 6 million companies and more than 100,000 products are launched. They all need an awesome name, but many (such as Xobni, Svbtle, and Doostang) look like the results of a drunken Scrabble game. In this entertaining and engaging book, ace naming consultant Alexandra Watkins explains can create memorable and buzz-worthy brand names.
Influencer 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.