BrandKnew February 2016

Branding matters. Because branding matters.

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Dear reader: The Super Bowl advertising frenzy is well & truly on as we put this issue to bed. Upwards of US$ 5 Million a spot is being spent by advertisers on CBS to reach out and create an impact during the highly watched live TV event. Closer home, in this issue we touch upon the fundamentals in the feature The Art of Building a Brand. Whoever thought that an iconic brand like Barbie would get a revisit. That’s exactly what you will discover in this issue. What’s App plans for brands will change the face of mobile marketing for ever. Read more about it here. A one on one tete-a-tete with the brand maverick and guru Seth Godin shows you his incredible approach to marketing and how he perceives the world around us so differently. The advent of self driving cars and how it will transform marketing is a very interesting read. If you are heading a creative agency, or in the throes of doing so, the article on How to be a Creative Agency CEO will be an eye opener.

We also touch upon the importance of shape will designing a company logo. Bagfuls more in this issue and in the true spirit of Valentine’s Day, if you love brands and branding, you will want to keep this issue close to your heart. Till next time,

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Best always

25 Suresh Dinakaran @sureshdinakaran

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linkd.in/1dsjYaW bit.ly/1h95tgO suresh@groupisd.com

Managing Editor: Suresh Dinakaran Creative Head/Director Operations: Pravin Ahir Magazine Concept & Design/ New Media Specialist: Mufaddal Joher Country Head, Australia: Norbert D’Souza Country Head, UK: Sagar Patil Country Head, India: Sanjay Kothandaraman Digital/Social Media Marketing: Khaleef Mayowa Junaid Web Specialist: Prasanta Kumar Sahu Online Support: Mahendra Kumar Behera

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CONTENTS

Choosing the Right Color for Maximum Brand Impact The art of building a brand The lowdown on creating award-winning content campaigns Why 2016 will be the year of live streaming The Revamping of an iconic brand Game, Seth & Match!

How self driving cars will transform marketing Why WhatsApp’s brand plans will revolutionise mobile marketing How brands can keep it personal How to reduce the anxiety of a brand launch?

How to be a creative agency CEO Why The Shape Of A Company’s Logo Matters Balancing aspiration and accessibility will be key for brands Book, Line & Sinker

Choosing the Right Color for Maximum Brand Impact Evoking specific moods and impressions, colors may be used to benefit your small business in a variety of ways.

By Julie Bawden Davis

At President Obama’s final State of the Union address, Michelle Obama commanded attention with her marigold-colored dress. The positive reactions she received wearing the dress, which sold out online before the president finished speaking, helps illustrate the often overlooked power of color to make an impact.

“Most of us learn about the color wheel as children, but color theory goes deeper than knowing how to mix finger-paints to get the right shade of purple,” says Pamela Webber, chief marketing officer for the online graphic design marketplace, 99designs, which recently completed a comprehensive research project on the power and psychology of color as used by small businesses in their branding and marketing.

“Color theory is the collision of science, art and culture,” Webber says. “How your customers respond to colors and color combinations is influenced by aesthetics, learned cultural associations and evolutionary programing.”

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Color Affects Mood For decades, business professionals have found anecdotally that colors do affect mood, claims Donna Hamilton, chief wellness officer of Manifest Excellence, LLC and author of Wellness Your Way. “Early landmark studies found that the color red, considered a warm color, was associated with the increased emotional responses of love, fear and anger, and if already energized, those who experienced red found it disturbing,” Hamilton says. “Blue, on the other hand, is considered a cool color and was found to have a calming effect. Business research shows that colors can have a strong effect on how customers perceive and react to your brand.”

Color can be a powerful tool, agrees Mona Patel, founder and CEO of Motivate Design and author of Reframe: Shift the Way You Work, Innovate, and Think. “Different colors can make us feel different emotions,” she says. “Warm colors [reds, oranges, yellows] make us think of the sun, so they can be used to create a cozy feel and bring people together, whereas cool colors [blues, greens, purples] remind us of the sky and ocean, so they calm us. Motivate Design’s primary brand color is bright orange, which is sharp and alive. The color creates a welcoming, collaborative office environment and portrays our employees as creative, friendly, focused and standing out from the crowd.”

Choosing Company Colors “Because color can affect psychological and emotional response, it’s wise for small-business owners who offer inperson services to pay attention to the colors they expose their clients to, such as in their office decor and clothing, like staff uniforms,” Hamilton says. “For example, companies offering stress management or relaxation products and services might want to use a more soothing palate in their office, for their logo and on their website, whereas businesses that promote services based on speed might want to use more stimulating colors.”

“Choosing the color of your company’s logo or brand identity is not as simple as liking green and wanting a dark forest logo,” Webber agrees. “Consider the traits and attributes associated with the primary colors used in your brands and logos and whether those are traits you want your business to communicate. The ideal colors enable you to share your brand’s true personality with customers.”

When selecting your brand colors, you may also consider the choices of others in your industry. “Many food and beverage companies use reds, blacks and yellows. And Internet, software and social media companies have a tendency to use blues,” says Patel. “When it comes to color choice, it can be advantageous to position your brand within the norms of your industry, or you might want to deliberately set yourself apart.”

“Consider your specific industry and the most popular colors used in that sector,” Webber adds. “Maybe it would be best to stand apart and be memorable by choosing a more original color scheme. Can you benefit from being the exciting, fun

company in a more traditional field? Sometimes zagging is far better than following everyone else’s zigging.”

Also consider the effect office colors can have on you and your employees. “You can’t work well if you don’t feel well, so use colors that have a positive emotional effect on you and your staff,” Hamilton says. “Depending on the sensitivity of your office team, some people could feel overly stimulated, especially by warmer colors, or overly sedated by cooler colors.”

Color and Company Image Color can be most important in defining your company’s brand identity, believes Patel, who suggests creating a color palette with primary and secondary colors that are harmonious, yet contrast. “After deciding on a color palette, use it to design all visual touch points of your brand, such as the logo, website, promotional materials, signage and social media assets,” she says. “You want to create a cohesive experience for your customers.”

Once you’ve decided on a color palette, stick with it, advises Patel. “Don’t add colors haphazardly. The use of color should always be considered and intentional. By adhering to a defined set of colors for your brand in a consistent way, you can create brand recognition and trust with your customers, and that can set your company up for success.”

Julie Bawden Davis Writer/Author/Publisher/Speaker, Garden Guides Press

The art of building a brand What Apple And Starbucks Taught Me About Building A Brand

By Mark Wilson

When we see an energetic advertisement from Apple that inspires our sense of adventure, or exchange hellos with a Starbucks barista in a way that feels like we’re talking to a friend, we fall hook, line, and sinker for the brand. These moments are obviously constructed, but we don’t register them as such.

That’s because they’re meticulously designed by the likes of Alessandra Ghini to feel seamless and natural. Ghini is a brand and marketing specialist who has had some fortuitous job timing. A 20-year industry veteran, she landed at Apple in 2000, right before the iPod took over the world, then spent two years at Starbucks directly following the return of CEO Howard Schultz. As she gives up the freelance life for a new position, as chief marketing officer with the techie tea startup Teforia, Ghini recounts her career, which includes two stories filled with lessons for anyone who works in branding. Here she is in her own words:

WHAT I LEARNED AT APPLE - A PRODUCT IS A STORY, NOT A LIST OF FEATURES

I was at Apple during, what people call pre-turnaround, 2000. This is before iPhone and that other side of Apple, so you have to think in that mindset.

Everyone thought I was crazy. “You’re gonna go to Apple now that they’re on their last legs!” What I really learned there the most as a marketer was the power of constraint and having really tight almost guardrails that some people might feel were claustrophobic. But the more constraints you put on people, the more incredible the breakthrough you can have, because when you have so little to work with, you have to push yourself in new ways.

Think about the color of Apple’s ads—white, silver, and black.

Within those constraints, you have to really push yourself to come up with a compelling design.

THE MORE From a marketing perspective, I specialized on the software side, and music. Software was just beginning. We hadn’t really launched. Hardware was always

CONSTRAINTS YOU PUT ON PEOPLE, THE MORE INCREDIBLE THE BREAKTHROUGH.

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the showcase of Apple. They’d taken on software (like Final Cut Pro, iTunes, and iPhoto) to show off the hardware. In software you were a lofty second. Software is what no one wanted to do. No one inside Apple would have taken it.

The list of no’s was long: No fliers. No brochures. No takeaways. This was when software was still sold in a box! I was thinking, how am I going to market, and sell this thing with retail partners? But Steve [Jobs] wanted to get away from printed materials. He said, “I don’t want to make any more paper because no one’s going to read it.”

So I worked a lot harder to find amazing designers using the software, and I invested in videos. Before YouTube was popular, Apple created amazing videos on how to use Final Cut. All this sounds boring now, but at the time [it was radical]. Everything back then was all through the digital experience. We worked hard with the web because those were the constraints we were given.

It turned out to be great.

Those old digital videos were laying the foundation for what became very standard for training and telling a great story in a digestible manner, and not cluttering that selling experience.

We tried to get past features and benefits, because you have much more limited time in a video. It’s easy to fall into features and facts, but Apple’s brand was about the story.

You always had to find a story to tell and create a narrative that made that product appealing. And that was a really interesting switch to me. At my last job, Macromedia, we had really high-end Pro Tools, and we were always selling to the pro user, so we did a lot of technical marketing. But Apple knew, eventually, Final Cut’s going to be used for kids. So getting into that mindset early on—how to tell a story, not based on the technical details, but on the outcome—was important. Apple was always about what’s possible, what the imagination can unlock. It was a great thing to learn. We saw it a lot in the iLife. With iPhoto, we tapped into the emotional

aspects of what photos mean.

EVERYONE WAS TRYING TO VIE FOR STEVE’S ATTENTION.

Or with the iPod, we did the traditional product hero— the beautiful shot—and the tagline “a thousand songs in your pocket.” It wasn’t super successful. If you remember, there was a big shift where we stopped talking about the iPod as a hardware approach, and started talking about the emotionality that had started in these software products. So we put the emotional spin on the iPod, and that’s where you got the aspect of musical joy that could release your inner self, the colorful silhouette.

WHAT I LEARNED AT STARBUCKS - BIG BRANDS CAN SHIFT FAST, IF THE LEADER CEDES POWER In all the wonderful things I learned at Apple in discipline and constraints, it was also a very tough culture in marketing. I don’t want to say it was cold per se, but culturally, everyone was trying to vie for Steve’s attention.

With Starbucks, it was originally going to be a six-week project to help them update their brand book. This is right

after Howard Schulz came back. He felt accountable [for the fall of the brand], and he didn’t feel he instilled the brand as a filter to Starbucks operations.

I went to Seattle, looked at brand book, and asked questions.

I said, “Your brand book is kind of important... you want to do an update, but what’s your bigger goal?”

I think my initial draft got brought up to exec level. Howard said this is more than an update, this should be a tool for the company. I owe them this. The project turned into a two-year commitment of taking what was in his head, what he knew to be true about Starbucks, and turning it into a brand story the entire company could learn, understand, and use as a filter.

It was a fantastic experience. The YOU DON’T GO Starbucks culture is very different from Apple’s, especially at that TO STARBUCKS TO time. Howard is an incredibly CONNECT WITH nurturing person.

Incredibly SOMEONE OVER A involved in empowering his execs.

MASSIVE SCONE. I met with him several times, every few months checking in. But once he made key choices, he let his executive marketing team develop it. That level of empowerment was fantastic to see, especially at a company that was so large.

It was like, “Wow you don’t need to be a complete, utter dictator!” You could say Starbucks was more sloppy in its brand than Apple, and yes that’s true, but they’re passionate, and needed constraint.

We changed the logo. We did a lot of the logo work internally before we engaged with [the design agency] Lippincott because they had a young design team inside. Often, the young design team doesn’t get to do the fun stuff. They let their entire internal team spend weeks doing explorations.

And to be honest, two young designers ended up with a logo that’s almost identical to what they have now. When the brand strategy was done, Lippincott did the refinement, but

the vast majority, real inspiration, came from inside.

We focused on the moment of connection, whether it’s a barista knowing your name, or you having a quiet moment over coffee with a friend. Each moment had to be fully fleshed out. In this sense, most of my brand work was internal-facing, like our decision to separate the food from the coffee.

The only chance for food to fly was to pull it out into its own division rather than stuck under coffee, to be elevated to be as strong as beverage. [Ed Note: Schultz notoriously complained of the food stink overpowering the coffee smell as diluting the Starbuck brand.] That was in 2007, when they really started pushing their food offerings. You don’t go to Starbucks to connect with someone over a massive scone.

Instead they developed smaller items. Power packs. Mini bites. Cake pops. All of that came out of that brand work.

Even getting La Boulange, even though that changed, was to elevate the food to be as strong as beverage.

Here was a massive organization, but they were so agile, so willing to pivot. The reorganization happened 30 days later, they started working for it. From that, I learned you really can move a massive organization quickly if the leadership is aligned. It doesn’t mean you’ll always get your end result, but you can be a huge company and be nimble. You don’t have to be a tank.

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

The lowdown on creating award-winning content campaigns

By Belinda Barker

Content. It’s a small word for a massively important element of marketing that has been embraced by advertisers and publishers alike.

55% of marketers plan to increase content marketing budgets over the next 12 months, according to Adobe.

Why are consumers embracing branded content?

Content comes in a number of guises, from native advertising (the evolution of advertorial into tailored, brand-led editorial online) through to a brand’s own content on their website and much in between.

The reason content, in whatever form, is growing is because consumers are, well, consuming it.

Consumers are happy to engage with brands through content as long as it is useful or entertaining, says Alex Altman, the managing director at MEC Global Solutions, London. “If it achieves this,” he explains, “they then go on to share the content because it makes a statement about them – I am connected, I am clever, I am funny.”

What does great native content look like?

The partnership between brand, publisher and agency is something that comes up again and again and is nowhere more important than when looking at native content, where powerful branded content is leveraged with the trust of a publisher’s audience.

Aaron Robinson, director, custom content, The Wall Street Journal, says, “There must be a genuine connection between the two brands and the campaign must be executed in a way that is not seen to deceive the user. The best campaigns are those that deliver, in a timely manner, real substance that the audience can use. Above all, “native” must feel it’s delivered in the voice of the platform it appears on.

Damien Marchi, global head of content at Havas Media Group, agrees, “Native content is best when, from a consumer standpoint, it is as good as regular publisher content and would look the same without the involvement of the brand and, from a brand standpoint, it achieves the given objectives.”

What are the biggest challenges when planning a ‘multi-national’ vs ‘international’ campaign?

This adds another layer of complexity as there are so many other factors that come into play when planning content campaigns, from language and culture to humour and demographic differences.

Jane Grenier, executive director, client services for Quartz, says, “Balancing multi-national relevancy with international efficiency is a tough juggling act. Publications with a global audience for their editorial lend themselves most easily to international branded-content campaigns.”

Niki Webb, CEO EMEA at FleishmanHillard ContentWorks, believes that for global campaigns the brand story has to be the absolute core. “There is a tendency to use more local tactical approaches so it’s best to work through these in the planning phases and use brand journalists to create the outline narrative first,” says Webb. “Localisation is a fine art but it is easier if there is a shared narrative.”

Pitfalls to avoid in content-driven marketing Don’t start devising your content strategy from the brand perspective, points out Sonia Le Louarn, chief strategy officer at Mindshare Lat Am. “Find out first what your target audience likes and why,” she says, “and then fit the brand around these insights. However, you have to do this without losing your attributes, values and key message on the way.”

Altman says, “Be authentic – do not try to be something you are not. A bandwagon approach will almost certainly lead to disaster. As is said of comedians – tell me a joke, don’t tell me you’re funny.”

Key points • Content must be useful, entertaining and relevant to be picked up by consumers • Delivered within trusted environments, content can deliver higher reach and engagement • than traditional ads • Content works best when created as part of a strong partnership between brand, publisher • and agency • Content must speak in the same voice as the platform it appears on • International content campaigns can be localised, but require a shared narrative • Be part of a conversation, be authentic – and don’t sell Belinda Barker is owner of BSB Media and director of the World Media Group, which is currently running the www.wm-awards.com (or World Media Awards) for international content-driven ad campaigns

Why 2016 will be the year of live streaming

By Alexander Pettitt

Live streaming is nothing new. Amateur bedroom radio shows have been transmitted over ropey internet connections since the early 1990s. But the start of 2015 saw the introduction of a new, interactive and highly engaging form of broadcasting – mobile live streaming.

This real time conversation creates a highly powerful and extremely engaged community.

Some broadcasters will pull out their smartphones and hit the start broadcast button multiple times a day.

For now, there are a handful of players in this emerging market: Meerkat, YouNow, Facebook, and most notably Periscope, Twitter‘s latest acquisition.

Each time they do, their fans come rushing in to get the latest fix. Dare I say it… it’s like a hyper reality version of the Kardashians, and Periscope is certainly creating a new batch of ‘stars’.

Just four months after its release, Periscope had acquired over 10 million users, who collectively watched on average 40 years’ worth of broadcasts every day.

The app enables users to broadcast live video from an Android or Apple iOS device, sharing it with millions across the world whilst allowing viewers to comment and interact in real time.

It’s this live interaction coupled with ease of use and zero start up cost that has now made live streaming accessible and appealing for so many.

So how will it be used in 2016?

Breaking news Apps like Periscope are the television channels sitting in your pocket right now, ready for you to go live and garner a worldwide audience at the touch of a button.

Anyone and everyone now have the ability and tools to be a citizen journalist and to break news to the rest of the world.

In 2016, we’ll see first hand breaking news feeds on Periscope, many minutes before traditional TV has even heard about a story, let alone the additional time needed to then send a crew to the area.

We’ve already seen this come to life in the latter parts of 2015 with #ParisAttacks and the New Years Eve Address Hotel fire in Dubai. Some of the first footage of both of these events came from Periscope and saw viewing figures in the hundreds of thousands.

Hyper reality and its stars Many mobile live streaming apps allow the audience to interact and comment with both the broadcaster and other viewers who are watching live. From a 17-year-old boy sitting in his bedroom talking about his first kiss, to the beautiful sight of the sun setting across London’s skyline, people across the world share their feelings and views about what they are watching.

These stars connect with their audiences every day and have built up a large amount of trust with their followers. They hold huge influence over their followers’ purchasing decisions, and when matched with the right brands, their ability to drive sales is unbeatable. 84% of consumers around the world say they trust word-of-mouth recommendations from friends and family above all other sources of advertising. These online stars are seen as friends and family by many of their fans, and they have more influence over people’s purchasing decisions than any advertising campaign ever could.

In 2016, we’re likely to see many brands try live streaming on their own accounts, but the smart brands will be the ones who also look to work and collaborate with live streaming influencers in creative ways.

Brands will try their hand at live streaming In 2015 we saw a handful of brands embrace live streaming and even fewer use it in a creative way that would entice viewers to watch. Royal Caribbean used Periscope (and its influencers) to engage a younger demographic with cruises, BMW and Mercedes both launched new cars on the medium, and 2016 will certainly see many more brands experimenting with the technology.

However, the ones who will be successful will be those who create truly interactive and creative concepts rather than using it as another platform to shove a product down people’s throats.

This isn’t traditional advertising, and it’s not even traditional one way broadcasting, it’s a two way conversation and brands need to remember that when creating campaigns around this medium.

If you want to read more, try my tips for how brands can use Periscope and other mobile live streaming platforms.

Alexander Pettitt, Associate head of live and social at John Brown Media

The Revamping of an iconic brand The Doll Evolves, Big and Tall: Mattel Revamps Barbie Brand

By Sheila Shayon

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Barbie, born Barbara Millicent Roberts in 1959, stands 11 and a half inches tall—but not any more.

The newly diverse dolls are a calculated bet from the global toy powerhouse, with a billion-dollar brand to protect in Barbie, but Dickson said, “It would be more of a risk if we don’t continue to evolve Barbie—if we stayed stagnant, if she looked the same, if she did the same thing. She’s got to evolve with the times.”

The ideals of American beauty have transformed with the likes of Beyonce, Jennifer Lopez and the Kardashians. “This is what our future looks like, because this is what the world looks like,” said Robert Best, senior direction of production design in a video about the evolution of the doll (hence the hashtag, #TheDollEvolves). “We’re saying there isn’t this narrow standard of what a beautiful body looks like.”

Mattel is making the cover of TIME magazine with the news that Barbie will now come in tall, petite and curvy body types, in addition to a variety of skin tones and hair colors, as part of the brand’s Fashionistas line. That’s right: Barbie now comes in 4 body types, 7 skin tones, 22 eye colors and 24 hairstyles (including blue and purple).

“We were hearing that many thought that Barbie was out of touch,” commented Evelyn Mazzocco, Mattel SVP and global brand general manager, to CBS about the transformation, called “Project Dawn” within Mattel HQ. “I actually think this is one of the most exciting times for the brand, broadening girls’ choices,” added Mattel President and COO Richard Dickson. “What Barbie looks like—her body type, her ethnicity, her career—this is all part of the evolution of the brand and what we believe is the right conversation around the world to have with kids today.”

“We said to our teams, ‘If you could start the brand over today and you didn’t have any rules, you could do whatever you wanted, what would you do?’” said Kim Culmone, the head of design at Barbie, to TIME. The answer was greater diversity—in terms of skin tone, hair color and texture and finally body size.

The first batch of new dolls, each costing $9.99, will make their debut at the New York Toy Fair, Feb. 13-16. They are now available to order online in the US and will be available in spring 2016 at major toy retailers worldwide.

“We believe we have a responsibility to girls and parents to reflect a broader view of beauty,” stated Mazzocco. “We are excited to literally be changing the face of the brand. These new dolls represent a line that is more reflective of the world girls see around them – the variety in body type, skin tones and style allows girls to find a doll that speaks to them.”

three seconds and nine out of ten people worldwide know the brand, as TIME points out, “staying the course was not an option. Barbie sales plummeted 20% from 2012 to 2014 and continued to fall last year. A line of toys designed to teach girls to build, Lego Friends, helped boost Lego above Mattel as the biggest toy company in the world in 2014. Then Hasbro won the Disney Princess business away from Mattel, just as Elsa from the film Frozen dethroned Barbie as the most popular girl’s toy. The estimated revenue loss to Mattel from Elsa and the other Disney Princesses is $500 million.”

Last year Mattel launched a girl-empowering campaign also speaking to moms, called “Imagine the Possibilities.”

At that time BBDO San Francisco executive creative director Matt Miller, who worked on the campaign, observed that, “This generation of moms has been bombarded with images with Barbie, but don’t know why Barbie was created in the first place… We had this creative ‘aha’ moment when we found a quote by Ruth Handler, Barbie’s creator, saying that she created Barbie to show girls that they had choices.”

Mattel also has an imperative to modernize Barbie. Although it’s estimated that a new Barbie doll is sold somewhere every

Now Barbie’s creators are giving girls more choices—and voices—in the hope that the born-again Barbie will resonate with them, and the adults buying them dolls that better reflect the diversity of shapes, sizes (and hair color). The bold brand revamp could restore #BarbiePride to bedrooms—and Mattel’s boardroom.

Game, Seth & Match!

Seth Godin. The Psychology of Success By 52 Insights

He’s been branded as a maven, a legend of the business world, and the godfather of modern marketing. Successful entrepreneur Seth Godin is a man possessed with an extraordinary passion for his work.

The Author of 18 books, thousands of blog posts, and many podcasts, Godin maintains an uncommon and tenacious enthusiasm which he infects upon his readers worldwide, captivating them with his sharp and humorous prose.

Talking to us from his home in Hastings-on-Hudson, we find Godin in fine form, relaxed but animated and eager to share his insights. It seems no topic is off limits, from the insidious nature of capitalism to why failure should be encouraged. He also shows us around the space he calls both home and office, allowing us a glimpse of the man behind the so quotable and eloquent sentences.

Your work seems to fit at a nexus between psychology, entrepreneurship and motivation. You’re an extremely prolific writer and speaker and there seems to be an endless cascade of insights that you have to offer about our irrational culture. Would you agree?

It’s been endless so far but I think it will quite likely end one day. I view my business as being about change in a couple of ways. First of all I think that each of us has the ability to cause more change than any of our ancestors could ever have dreamed of and that brings with it a lot of responsibility.

What change will you seek to make in the world? And the second part is, why do we get stuck not changing when it’s so clear that a certain sort of change is in our interest?

And so I work both sides of that. It turns out that a fairly universal angle into the world of change is through business because it is often both the victim and cause of change. I could talk about relationships because that is also something that affects many people, however it’s different for everyone, whereas in the world of culture and business there are a lot of universal precepts.

You preach a lot about what I would call empathetic capitalism. Creating a connection between people but having compassion for the person or the idea.

The style of capitalism that has been promoted in the past century has really become quite insidious but you seem to have encouraged more empathy in business.

I’d like to go further than that. I think that the industrial revolution ushered in this industrialised cruelty. Look at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory where so many women burned to death because one man was unwilling to unlock the doors.

We somehow let one tenth of one percent of the population tell us that the relationship between the owner of capitalism and the worker should be based on this hard-nosed shortterm profit maximisation and if you don’t like it then tough.

I think in a factory setting where the resource of the building is so expensive compared to everything else you could argue

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that it was the economics that drove that decision. If you had a hundred people competing in the pin making business and one of them is cut-throat he’s going to lower his price. If he lowers his price and all the pins are the same then his market share will go up and everyone else will go out of business. So the logic became this, if you’re kind then you’re a sucker and you’re going to lose.

I don’t believe that was morally correct but it was certainly economically correct in 1930 or 1950. What has shifted in our lifetime is that the rest of the factory is not nearly as important as the workforce. It turns out that the workforce is pretty much all you need now if people have a laptop. In that environment your best assets are humans. So I can now continue the moral argument of ‘lets treat people like people’ and expand it to saying, it’s also good business. It’s also good business to have motivated, connected, honest, passionate people on your team because that’s what it’s going to take to earn more trust and connection going forward.

person can never fail enough right?

Well the person who fails the most wins. And buried within that sentence is the fact that if you fail in a way so big that you don’t get to play anymore then you don’t get to fail the most.

So failing the most involves doing things that are important enough to fail at but not so dangerous that you only get one try. That’s one of the reasons why small scale start-ups teach people so much. They almost never work but they start you down a path to becoming a true contribution.

I’ve seen you mention spirituality in a couple of interviews. Are you a spiritual person? I was surprised to learn that you’re friends with Pema Chodron.

I can’t stretch the term friend enough to claim I’m friends with Pema. She is my teacher and I have never met her but I did write the foreword for her new book and that was one of the highlights of my career. She’s pretty amazing.

I have never met someone who isn’t spiritual, if we define spiritual as somehow seeking a humanity within themselves, somehow seeking a way to build something bigger than themselves. So I’m not going to say I’m any more spiritual than anyone else. I do believe that organised religion as a bureaucratic institution is generally a bad thing because it was invented by humans and designed to get other humans to comply to their wishes. I’ve gone to great lengths to help people see that there’s a difference between religion and spirituality. There wasn’t always but as soon as you start writing things down and building organisations of a thousand or a million people you get this other bureaucratic function that has been used against the best interests of a lot of people.

Do you have a favourable view of this start up generation?

Well the start-up generation is mostly a media fiction. I would say less than 1% of the people between twenty and thirty are actually on an edge of creation. But that’s fabulous. It’s the same percentage that were writing screen plays in the 1980’s, and the same percentage that were writing novels in the 1960’s. That’s what happens when you open the doors to a fast growing segment of the world. Do those people learn something? They learn so much! They learn about how to tell a story, how to be rejected and pick themselves back up, how to generate compassion for other people and deliver content that’s worth more than it costs. The real question is not, do we have enough people who are “EVERY ONE OF MY BOOKS trying it for the first time? The IS MISUNDERSTOOD AT question is, do we have enough SOME LEVEL BECAUSE people who will keep doing it THAT’S THE PRICE OF after they fail three times?

HAVING IT REACH MORE PEOPLE.”

- SETH GODIN

Yeah you focus quite a lot of the failure aspect, that a

I was watching a documentary about the famous debates between public intellectuals Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr. and one of the quotes that they made which instantly reminded me of your book was, “the ability to talk the same language has gone.

More and more we are divided into communities of concern, each side can ignore the other side and live in their own world. It makes you less of a nation because what binds us together is the pictures in our heads, but if those people are not sharing those ideas they are not living in the same place anymore.” This quote itself seems contrasting to your ideas about tribes.

I think you could have said that in any decade of the last 250 years. If you’re asking me if I think it’s a good thing that we’re going to have filter bubbles and many small isolated groups, I’m not sure I have an answer for that. I just know it’s a thing. So what should we do about it? It feels to me that we should create the kind of leadership that we are proud of.

I am completely disgusted and ashamed of Donald Trump.

He is intentionally a divisive character who is appealing to the baser instincts of a group of people and amplifying their tribal connection. And he’s doing it to get something for him, not for anybody else. If I was an alien overlord who could command everybody, what would I command them to do?

I’m not exactly sure. It would be really nice if we were all in sync for a while. And doing the right thing for as many people as possible.

When Gore and William were having their debates they were the elite white upper 3% and they were lying to themselves if they thought people in Louisiana and people in Alaska were in sync with them. Of course they weren’t. Those people were just ignored. And now they’re not ignored because they’ve been amplified by the power of this connection engine that puts any group of people together in a way that lets them be noticed.

It seems like nowadays everywhere we go people are talking about unicorns, disruptions, start-ups, IPOs, entrepreneurs. Clayton Christensen who was the originator of the disruptive theory recently said that most people have the origination of the disruption theory completely wrong. Do you think we’re seeing a dumbing down of business culture at the moment?

Everything that gets popular gets stupid. When you look at the fringes of electronic music or the fringes of early folk, it’s all so rich and detailed. Then you look at a Taylor Swift song and realise that someone could copy it in fifteen minutes, because it’s for everyone. It’s supposed to be dumb. One of the reasons I keep moving to new industries is that I’m thrilled for example when the insiders start discovering the magic of what the early generations of the oculus rift are like, but that’s insider baseball. The real shift in our culture happens when it gets simpler and stupider. But lamenting it doesn’t get us anywhere. What gets us somewhere is deciding if you’re going to be the amplifier of the thing or on the inventor side, early in the game when not many people get what you’re talking about. So I feel Clayton’s pain. Every one of my books is misunderstood at some level because that’s the price of having it reach more people. It has to get diluted because the masses aren’t as interested as the original creators and spreaders of an idea. They need to figure out how to make it smaller and easier to conceptualise. But guess what happens?

These cycles of creative destruction come along, people are doing things with my fifteen year old permission marketing idea that I never would have thought of.

You’ve reached so many people and have so many followers. Do you find that you have to be careful about what you say? And do you think people expect something from you? Almost looking to you as an oracle telling them how to live their life?

The second part, despite my working very hard in the opposite direction is true. I don’t want anyone to do something because I said they should. I try to show my work. I’d like them to follow the work, think about the logic and then make their own decision. In terms of having to watch what I say, I decided a long time ago to write like I talk and to be in public the way I am in real life. That makes it much easier to keep myself in line. And I don’t use Twitter or Facebook and I don’t read my reviews on amazon. I work very hard to engage with direct interactions with people who aren’t anonymous because it’s a privilege. But I am not exposing myself to anonymous mobs

of people because it would wreck my day.

What do you mean when you say you write like you talk? How would you describe the way that you talk?

I find that one of the things that happens when people pick up a pen is they think they should write like a college professor or bring in this earnest intellectualism that isn’t really who they are. That’s what we get taught in college but in college I only went to one English class so I didn’t learn that. What I try to do when I talk to people is engage directly, watching them to see when the light goes on and to bring as much as I can to the conversation in a way that helps them see at least briefly the world in the way that I see it. That’s what I’m doing in my books and my blog. I’m not trying to depersonalise it.

What I’m trying to say is I noticed this, I noticed that, now you think about it. All I do for a living is notice things and then try to explain to people what I’ve noticed.

Like a sociologist?

Yeah I have a lot of sociology books here on my shelf but the problem with a book like Reisman’s The Lonely Crowd– which is a super important book – is that it’s 288 pages long when it should be 28 pages. If it was 28 pages he would have changed a much bigger part of the world, but he couldn’t get it published and the reason he couldn’t get published is that the person who publishes sociology books took English classes when they went to college.

You work within the circles of business and entrepreneurialism, which is obviously dependent on structure and rules to some extent. But you also write at length about why the school system doesn’t work.

I find that even within the work that you do there’s a plea for some type of pseudo anarchy, encouraging people to break out and fulfill their potential. Would you agree with that?

I don’t agree with part of it. I think that there is a disturbing strain of libertarian anarchy among many people in Silicon Valley. On October 15th last year I wrote a blog post called infrastructure and it is the least anarchistic point of view I think I could articulate. Basically what I think is, the more money and time and stability society spends of transportation, education, civility and expectation, the better off everyone is. I love paying taxes, I think everyone should pay more taxes. I think that taxes are one of the greatest things that civilisation has ever developed because they more than pay for themselves. The point I’m trying to make is on an individual basis, using bureaucracy as an excuse to not care is shameful. And so what I’m arguing is that people care and if that means that you have to dream that you’re going to get rewarded then fine, but I want you to start by caring.

“THE PERSON WHO FAILS THE MOST WINS.” - SETH GODIN

Could you elaborate on that point? What are you saying is shameful?

What’s shameful is saying, I’m not allowed to care. When we say, the system is the system so I give up, that’s shameful.

And the reason it’s shameful is that you could do so much

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and you’re holding it back from the rest of us. We built this infrastructure for you, we created this civil society for you, we built the internet for you. We didn’t build it so that you could watch videos of cats. We built it so that you could pay us back by building something for the next person.

What does your work have to say about these very unpredictable current political, social and economic situations? A lot of people would say it’s always been the same, but it does seem like there’s a lot of unpredictability at the moment.

Well I’ve talked about the media a bunch. Steven Pinker’s book hammers home all these points. The world is the safest it has been in my lifetime, it’s the safest it’s been in 5000 years. It is more stable on a per capita basis. You are the least likely to be the victim of any violence. So let’s be really clear, the media wants us to be afraid. That’s their job. And that doesn’t mean you have to buy into it. Did something horrible happen last week? Yes. Will something horrible happen next week? Yes. Is it happening to thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of people at a time? Yes. But you know what? When I was three years old the earth was almost destroyed. We were within a week of the entire planet becoming radioactive. And I think we ought to at least give ourselves some credit because fifty years later, we have a platform where we can make a difference. If you want to publish an important book tomorrow, you can and no one can stop you. If you want to sing, you can sing and if you want to lead you can lead. Pointing to what’s on the front of the New York Post as a reason to not do it is childish.

Seth you’ve been on the edge of bankruptcy yourself.

So what would you say to people in a similar position?

What did failure teach you personally?

I’ve had nine hundred rejections from publishers that I’ve sent manuscripts to. So I’d say if you’re going to take it personally, you’re going to have to quit. Because somewhere around rejection number fifteen you think, well these people hate me, I should stop. Or you could say, wow I just learned one new way to not sell a book to this particular person. What did I learn from that interaction? And how can I structure the next interaction so that I’m welcome on that person’s desk. ‘No’ doesn’t mean, no I hate you go away for ever, ‘no’ means, in this moment the story you’ve told me doesn’t match the story I need to hear. You haven’t been rejected for your style or your humanity, only because you cared enough to show up with something that might have worked but didn’t work. As you start processing these rejections you can get better at it. If you don’t get better at it then you need to try something else.

I think it’s partly the emphasis we place on the word ‘failure’ in our society. I know so many talented intelligent people who are terrified of stepping out of their jobs and doing what they believe in. It’s a scary thing and you’ve said yourself, “change is only a few steps away from death.”

There’s no question that the fear of failure is bigger than failure. Living with the fear of failure is horrible but there’s a choice. Failure is not a choice, the fear of failure is. It’s a form of hiding to say that the only way to make a change is to quit your job, leap out the window and start something.

I don’t think people should do that. I think people should start by finding some small project they can get paid twenty dollars for. Start a side project, organise a local volunteer orchestra or launch something on Kickstarter. Those things don’t require you to quit your job. They require you to quit your fear of failure. So let’s do one thing at a time.

I quite often hear you say, “thank you for the work that you do.” What do you mean when you say that?

I rarely say it to someone who is just doing what they’re told. I try to say it to people who have gone out on a limb emotionally to do something for other people. Whether or not they’re paid for it. I know how difficult that is and I know how important that is. And I think it’s worthy of my gratitude.

All photos courtesy of Where They Create

How self driving cars will transform marketing Marketing In The Fast Lane With Self-Driving Cars

By Loni Stark

From George Orwell predicting the overwhelming reach of television in 1984 to the video phone calls in Back to the Future, it seems that technology often imitates pop culture.

Nowhere could that be truer than with the new developments in self-driving vehicles.

These self-driving vehicles won’t just change the way we look at transportation. They will shift people’s behavior in a critical way, making it a new avenue for digital marketing. When you consider how much time the average person spends in their vehicle every day — about two hours according to most studies — this type of marketing could become a new cornerstone. This new avenue could be a great new way for brands to connect with their target audience, by creating personalized, value-added services.

How self driving will become the new driving One of the champions of self-driving cars, Elon Musk, likens them to elevators and the elevator operators of old: “They used to have elevator operators, and then we developed some simple circuitry to have elevators just come to the floor that you’re at, you just press the button. Nobody needs to operate the elevator. The car is just going to be like that.”

As the technology improves, cars will actually be able to do the job more efficiently than humans. After all, 90 percent of motor vehicle accidents are due to human error. Once it’s evident that self-driving cars can eliminate the vast majority of accidents, they’ll become the standard for roadway use.

Indeed, having a car you could actually drive would be prohibitively expensive, or even illegal. The end of the need for drivers will impact just about every industry.

ways to take ridesharing to an individual level.

Airlines will feel the impact as well, as short commuter flights are abandoned for the privacy and convenience of a selfdriving vehicle. After all, if the driver can sleep in their car, it’s just as convenient to drive that 8-9 hour trip rather than fly it.

Advertising that already exists in these public transportation venues is aimed at the masses. Flat-screen advertisements in subways have been around since 2005; in-flight movies and magazines have been around for much longer. These advertisements are not personalized for the individual, but instead focus on gaining as much attention from a large group of Cars will not be people in order to convert an extremely small percentage of just a mode of them.

transportation, but an extension of the individual inside.

But when individuals are able to order up their own vehicle, these advertisements aimed at the masses will no longer be appropriate.

Instead, the individual will come to expect individualized service and in that, individualized advertisements. By ensuring that in-vehicle advertising is focused, and designed to give the individual something they need, companies can connect and create brand recognition.

The interior will create the experience

Mass public transportation will become mass individual transportation

Instead of staring at the road, occupants might browse the Internet, watch TV or decide on a restaurant along their route. People spend an average of two hours a day in their cars, and that time that used to be occupied by driving will be wide open for other tasks. This is where personalization will be important. Cars will not be just a mode of transportation, but an extension of the individual inside.

Public transport options will become less popular as selfdriving vehicles become available at a moment’s notice.

Governments will be able to funnel money away from expensive public transit programs and instead focus it on

Things like picking up groceries or take-out for dinner have the potential to be done by the car itself. The car might receive the address from their owner, or even get a check-in from a company letting it know that an order is ready. In a way, self-

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driving cars could become the new delivery man.

The focus of driving itself will change. It will go from being a purpose-driven activity to an experience-driven activity.

The time spent staring out the As vehicles become windshield at the concrete will be occupied elsewhere. Selfautonomous, driving cars will be expected to drivers will become know their occupants, making passengers. the impact of marketing in these places even stronger.

Marketing toward the future Of course, when it comes to this marketing avenue, it’s not about spamming a captive audience with ads for products or services. Instead, it’s about enhancing their in-vehicle experience. If the traveler is on their way to an amusement park, the vehicle could send them information ahead of time about any special events or things to see. If they’re on the way to a grocery store, they can receive more information about products and even learn about specials that might be going on. The vehicle can become a tool for enhancing the customer’s trip and helping them plan their day.

While this seems like a distant future, it’s important to always be marketing toward the future. Things we already know about mobile marketing will work when implemented in a vehicle, as well. That’s why it’s important to focus on things that will work with technology on the move, like:

• Targeting by location. It’s important to integrate the physical and the digital for customers on the move. After all, 90 percent of customers still do their purchasing in brick-and-mortar locations.

• Personalized by user preference. The ads the passenger should be given will be targeted to their specific preferences. For example, a vegetarian won’t get ads for steakhouses along their routes, single adults might get ads for new clubs or concerts and so on.

• Happening in real time. Marketing in-vehicle will kind of be the new billboard. Smart marketers put their billboards in just the right spaces. Not so far the person forgets about it before they get to the exit, not so short that they miss it entirely. In-vehicle ads will need to recreate this experience digitally.

With apps turning vehicles into moving wearables, more opportunity grows for marketers. On average, people spend about two hours a day in their vehicles. If these people didn’t have to drive, what would they be doing? As vehicles become autonomous, drivers will become passengers. Marketers need to prepare for this by working on location-enabled, personalized messages that can happen in real time, on multiple devices.

Loni Stark Sr Director @Adobe digital experience business / CoFounder @StarkInsider / Creator @StarkArtStudio. tech+culture. day+night.

Why WhatsApp’s brand plans will revolutionise mobile marketing

By Matthew Chapman

WhatsApp made waves when it revealed it was dropping its subscription fee and the move is set to have significant repercussions for marketers.

Facebook-owned WhatsApp immediately moved to dispel users’ fears the decision was a precursor to the introduction of third-party ads, a move its founders have always pledged to avoid.

If you want to get to the point where there is a closer alignment to the moment that a consumer is in, then fundamentally you have to align with these messaging platforms Instead it revealed in a blog post that it will “test tools that allow you to use WhatsApp to communicate with businesses and organisations that you want to hear from”.

The wording of the post hints at an opt-in notifications service, but other details of how it could work are still thin on the ground.

WhatsApp suggested, as an example, that a banking brand could use the service to flag a fraudulent transaction to a customer. Or an airline could update customers about a delayed flight.

WhatsApp claims it is dropping the $1 annual subscription charge because consumers in emerging markets, which make up a large chunk of its customer base, are unable to

pay due to lack of a debit card.

Others are speculating the move is really designed to emulate the much more profitable business model of China’s WeChat.

Turning WhatsApp into an ecosystem WeChat’s average revenue per user (ARPU) is $7, which is seven times that of WhatsApp. How does WeChat achieve this?

It has monetised the integration of third-party apps into the WeChat ecosystem. A user of WeChat can also use the service to do any number of things including booking a taxi, transferring money to friends, receiving utility statements, reading celebrity gossip or donating to charity.

If WhatsApp were to follow in the footsteps of WeChat, would that render brand apps redundant?

Not in the opinion of Carl Uminski, co-founder of mobile agency Somo, who believes there is still a place for standalone apps.

“For me, applications are for deep utility and for loyalists,” says Uminski. “There will absolutely still be a place for them for the next few years for the loyalists who are engaging with a lot of content.”

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Uminski is extremely excited about the prospect of WhatsApp opening up to brands and the real-time customer service possibilities it offers.

“By bringing a brand into WhatsApp it creates real-time interaction with the consumer that is great for everybody,” says Uminski. “I think this also has a huge Artificial Intelligence (AI) opportunity with AI bots that can start talking to customers, which will dramatically reduce the cost of customer services.”

Rather than being a pipe dream, Uminski believes AI technology has already developed enough to provide an imperfect yet effective customer service experience.

He also argues it will allow consumers to interact with local brands when abroad to carry out tasks such as booking restaurants, because AI is able to work irrespective of the language, and is not limited by the language skills of a native customer service operative.

Redefining customer relationships MediaCom joint head of digital Dan Chapman describes the WhatsApp move as “customer relationship management (CRM) on steroids”.

“I do not think it is a challenge to specific branded apps,” says Chapman. “We are going into a space where first party and non-cookie based data is becoming more important the richness of branded apps will increase.”

Chapman believes it is other messaging apps that should have cause for concern because of the integration possibilities between Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

“Other players that sit outside of larger tech stacks will struggle,” says Chapman. “The ability for the brand to get under the skin of the consumer will blow other messaging apps out the water because they do not have that broad understanding of the consumer that Facebook has.”

He believes WhatsApp opening up its real-time messaging services is another step towards “humanising data”.

“The industry slightly commoditised this thing called data, and in all honesty we are talking about people and the moments they are in,” says Chapman. “If you want to get to the point where there is a closer alignment to the moment that consumer is in, then fundamentally you have to align with these [messaging] platforms.”

WhatsApp opening up to brands does have one scary side effect – companies handing over even more customer data to Facebook.

Uminski argues this is a moot point because most brands have “given all their data to Google”.

“It is no more than everyone putting Google Analytics into their site, which is basically giving Google everything,” adds Uminski.

However WhatsApp’s new business model pans out, both Uminski and Chapman agree it can only be a good thing for brands.

Chapman concludes: “For me this is the next evolution of understanding consumers better.”

This article was first published on marketingmagazine.co.uk

How brands can keep it personal

By Rebecca Dersh

Recently, I attended the first ever Fast Company Innovation Festival in New York. The week-long event was created to inspire creativity and innovation through workshops, panels and on-site visits. The candidness and depth of information shared by each speaker inspired me to share my takeaways from the event.

just a few years ago. In an arguably short amount of time, they pulled the network out of what was reportedly going to be a complete failure for my favorite daytime talk show host.

As they worked vigorously to increase ratings, Sheri stated the turning point was when the team finally asked themselves, “What do we have that nobody else does?”

Regardless of industry, we are all bound to face challenges within our business. So why not share our experiences and find common ground in the areas we should be working on thriving in?

While I thought the answer was obvious, it seemed the solution wasn’t solely Oprah. It was strategizing how to best infuse her into the network because she was always going to be OWN’s greatest asset.

1. Identify what makes you special…then execute on it

It’s undeniable that asking, “What do we have that nobody else does?” is so vital. However asking the question isn’t enough; it’s how you execute on the answer. Wolff Olins’ President for North America, Tim Allen, talks about promise and delivery often and those two words are really what it comes down to. With so much competition in the marketplace, it’s not sufficient to just have something that sets you apart. You have to find how to best deliver that unique offer so it captures your audience’s attention. Maybe it’s time to take a step back and have that Aha! moment Oprah’s always talking about.

I should preface this by saying I’m a big Oprah fan. Abnormally so for someone who was still a college student when The Oprah Winfrey Show came to an end (I’m still recovering.)

So when I heard the co-presidents of her television network OWN, were speaking about ‘Inspiring Innovation,’ I was excited to say the least. Specifically I wanted to hear what these individuals had to say about the conceivable pressures and expectations when working on a new venture with one of the most powerful women in media.

I listened closely as Sheri Salata and Erik Logan shared what it took to turn OWN around after a dismal start to the network

2. Make your philanthropy personal In high school I worked with The African Millennium Foundation, a non-profit that provides tools for self-sufficiency

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in the poorest areas of Africa. I traveled to Mozambique to visit one of the orphanages we raised donations and supplies for. My most vivid memory was spending the day with an energetic young boy whose shoes were completely damaged.

They were worn to the point of uselessness but I knew he had no other choice but to walk in that pair.

It wasn’t long after my trip I heard about TOMS. I was immediately intrigued after learning that with every pair of shoes purchased, a pair would also be donated. This One for One concept (also known as the “buy one give one” model) was completely innovative at the time, which is easy to forget in today’s emergent socially conscious market.

While their One for One model has evolved since launching in 2006, TOMS’ brand story and messaging have remained clear due in large part to founder Blake Mycoskie. I was able to hear him speak alongside model and founder of the nonprofit Every Mother Counts, Christy Turlington-Burns.

It’s been almost a decade since TOMS was founded and the popularity of companies incorporating charity into their business, from Warby Parker to The Honest Company, has increased significantly. Studies continue to prove that consumers are more likely to support businesses with a philanthropic component. What used to be a revolutionary way of thinking is becoming the new normal. This should only give organizations further incentive to keep thinking of new ways to set themselves apart.

If TOMS launched today, I wonder if it would still be as successful as it’s become. A lot of the attention that led to their initial success was a result of Blake sharing how his lifechanging trip to Argentina inspired both the shoe design and the One for One model. Regardless, TOMS proved it’s more than just a fleeting trend, which it very well could have been.

As the business and product line expanded, they remained true to the brand they built, in everything from the content they produced to their partnerships – one most recently with Christy’s non-profit, Every Mother Counts.

Every Mother Counts is dedicated to making pregnancy and childbirth safer for mothers around the world, and through TOMS they sell tote bags and backpacks. It was a natural partnership according to Blake and Christy, who both discussed the importance of having a personal connection to what you do. In Christy’s case, it wasn’t until she had complications giving birth that she became an advocate for maternal health. She talked about the irrationality of celebrities she knew who were “matched” with charities and couldn’t understand how anyone could find the authenticity in that.

If your story doesn’t feel genuine, it will always be harder to get people invested in your cause, regardless of if it’s a nonprofit or for-profit organization. Being able to communicate why giving back matters to your business is necessary, given that it’s becoming such a large part of organizations’ DNA.

that takes the point of view of a magazine, changes like a gallery and sells things like a store.” Every one-two months an entirely new “issue” is produced for the store consisting of a new store layout, merchandise and theme. I was there to hear STORY’s founder, Rachel Shechtman, speak about creative collaboration with fashion icon and businesswoman Iris Apfel.

Iris, who had a successful interior design career, shot into the spotlight ten years ago when The Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibited her vibrant personal collection of clothing and accessories which she’s renowned for. Since then, the self-proclaimed “oldest living cover girl” has had successful partnerships with everyone from MAC Cosmetics to Bergdorf Goodman. She’s now more popular than ever, thanks in part to the late Albert Maysles’ documentary Iris which was released earlier this year. At 94 years young, Iris has had enough life experience to inherently know what collaborations she’s interested in being part of. She truly enjoys involving herself in each project, which is probably why every partnership she’s done thus far feels so authentic.

When asked to explain her thought process behind choosing collaborators, Iris expressed there was no real strategic method and that luck was her reason for success. While a little luck never hurt anyone, she has her own unique creative process whether she was aware of it or not – Iris follows her gut. “I don’t intellectualize it. I just feel it.” In an age when we’re taught to overprepare, overanalyze and overproduce, can it really be as simple as going with instincts?

After hearing Rachel Shechtman speak alongside Iris, I’d trust she bases a good portion of her decisions for STORY on intuition as well. There’s clearly a strategic plan behind everything her team does but I imagine it might be difficult to develop a distinct voice when so much of who you are is rooted in a constant rotation of collaborators, sponsors and merchandise. Rachel, a former brand consultant, acknowledged nonetheless that without STORY’s partnerships, the entire concept of the store couldn’t thrive in the way that it does. Having only opened in 2011, they’re still continuing to grow their audience along with their brand. I’m confident STORY is on the right trajectory but their biggest challenge will be continuing to ensure their consumers understand their individual brand and what they represent. Maybe they’ll just have to go with their gut to find the story.

Post-festival, I had a greater optimism and curiosity for the future of business and creativity. I stand by Blake Mycoskie’s notion that being philanthropic soon won’t be perceived as the right thing to do in business, but the necessary thing to do.

Still, without an authentic connection or delivering something that sets you apart, it can only be done so successfully.

Whatever story you’re going to tell, make it a distinct one that people want to hear. Then if you follow your gut, perhaps the rest will follow.

3. Go with your gut On the last day of the festival, I visited STORY. If you live in New York and have never shopped there, you’re missing out.

The 2,000 square foot space is advertised as a “Retail concept

Rebecca Dersh is Marketing Manager at Wolff Olins New York.

Illustration by LA Hall.

How to reduce the anxiety of a brand launch?

My biggest creative fear

By Justin Jackson

As product people, we don’t want to create something that’s just good. We want it to resonate with people.

up every day, you’ll find opportunities to help people in meaningful ways.

When I launch something new, my biggest fear is that people won’t like it, won’t care, or won’t show up.

For example, my friend Jarrod is a designer and hangs out with other designers. His friends were having a hard time communicating their value to clients. So Jarrod decided to write The Tiny Designer.

Additionally, a lot of people I know also struggle to promote the things they’ve made.

My biggest creative fear

Learning to promote your projects

These two pain points are related. If you’re not confident that people will like what you’ve made, it’s hard to promote it.

“Self-promotion just feels so icky. I hate doing it. It’s my biggest challenge.”

No one wants to send out party invitations, and have zero people show up on a Friday night.

Once you’ve created a solution that people need, you won’t feel like a huckster. You’re helping folks solve their problems (and that’s worth doing).

How can you get over this fear?

You don’t.

You never truly get over the fear of launching something no one wants.

But you can reduce it. There’s a feedback loop you can go through that will give you the confidence you need. It’s a system for discovering products people want.

It looks like this: 1. Research your audience. Embed yourself in their community. Hang out every day. Listen.

2. Observe the topics, pain points, and desires that come up over and over again. Make a list.

3. Prioritize the list. Which topics do you think are most important to this group?

4. Create something small that solves your audience’s #1 issue.

5. Launch it. Observe the reaction. Gather feedback.

6. Iterate by making something a bit bigger. Try charging a bit of money for it. How do people respond? How hard is it to find customers?

7. Keep repeating this cycle until you’re sure you’ve found a problem that people really care about and a solution that they’ll pay for.

I realize that this might seem simplistic. But when you show

Now you can focus on your communication technique.

And technique matters. Making something people want is no good if they never hear about it.

Tweet: Good products don’t always win...

A lot of marketing is experimentation. It’s knowing about the different approaches, tactics and channels to try. And it’s about having a system for implementing and evaluating your experiments.

The starting point To find out what works for you, you need a list of things to test.

From the beginning, you’ll want a framework for collecting and evaluating marketing data.This strategy should fit the stage you’re at right now (pre-launch, launching, postlaunch).

These are the topics I cover in Marketing for Product People.

It’s the equivalent of my other book Marketing for Developers, but for folks who aren’t engineers. It’s for product people, like you.

It’s launching on February 10th. If you’d like a sample chapter, click here and I’ll send you one!

Justin Jackson I make stuff for makers. I want to help you reach more people with the things you create.

How to be a creative agency

CEO

Managing the organised chaos of an ad agency requires a certain approach and a special set of skills, says Adam & Eve/ DDB chief executive James Murphy.

By James Murphy

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Know what kind of agency you want to work in Most of us will have been shaped by the early places we worked. I’ve experienced things I loved (the shared experience of success and failure, energy, debate and the realisation that you can create things together that will change your agency’s and your client’s fortunes). There were other things that I disliked (hierarchy, politics, wasting time and money, lip service to creativity and lack of honesty). These experiences shaped the kind of agency I’d like to work in.

Get a gang Whether big or small, the best agencies feel like a gang .

A gang you want to be part of, a team you want to work with, friends you enjoy getting drunk with. A great team is infectious; something clients point to, pitch consultants swear by and industry commentators are savvy to. It doesn’t mean everyone gets on the whole time but, if you share a view on life and work, you can argue, debate, infuriate and then get over it.

It’s not about vision statements The boss of another agency asked me how we had created a culture and vision that enabled us to make great work and win pitches. My answer was that we make great work and we win pitches. I’m suspicious of people who want to do workshops on the vision of our organisation or come up with agency brand statements. They’re usually the people who can’t create or make anything with vision for clients. We express our vision in the work that leaves the agency every day.

It’s about leading by example Don’t try to write down the values of your agency in trite statements or management babble. Agency people are too smart to insult their intelligence. You have to exemplify them every day. Don’t expect anyone in your agency to do something you wouldn’t do. If people are working late on a pitch, then we’re in among it; if you want people to do brave work, then you’d better be prepared to back them . And if there’s bad news to break to a client, or a very tricky meeting, that isn’t delegated.

We’re a craft business – we make things Whether it’s brilliant strategies, amazing positioning work, brilliant execution and experiences through any of a huge range of channels…we’re making stuff, week in and week out. If you’re running the agency, you need to work hard to make sure you’re creating the best possible conditions for great stuff to be crafted and made. Sometimes it means creating space and time for brilliant people, sometimes it actually means the opposite – creating urgency and energy and adrenaline. Some senior types think they’re above the work and just focus on the money, the strategies and the business. The best chief executives obsess about the work – because that is the business.

Be a simplifier

It’s a lot harder to be simple and there are loads of pseuds out there trying to baffle you with jargon and over-wrought thinking. Consumers and clients have complicated lives – we can help both, and do our jobs, by being simple.

Avoid the paralysis of perfection Momentum is important in a creative business. It’s amazing how quickly things can grind to a halt because people are looking for the perfect answer. Better to make a decision and press on; if it’s wrong, you’ll find out soon enough and you’ll have the momentum to correct your course quickly.

Find out what you’re good at (and do that) With experience, you get a much clearer idea of where you’re competent and what you enjoy doing. Once you’ve got that, you can supplement your failings by having great and varied talent around you. It’s rare, and frankly annoying, if someone is a total smarty-pants and can do everything.

In a nutshell How will your job change in the next five years? Well, the gang I mentioned is growing. Agencies are evolving to encompass much broader skills and expertise. We’ve moved beyond creating selling messages to creating selling tools and experiences, and then utilities that keep customers involved with brands. So, as a chief executive, you’re working across teams with more diverse skills and personality types than ever before. We need to provide a workplace that is exciting and challenging for people who are as excited by tech and user experience as others may be by writing and images.

What do you need to be a successful agency chief executive? You have to enjoy balancing process and chaos.

You need some process – more so as you grow. But when it becomes an end in itself, you kill the energy and joy in a creative organisation. I’m never happier than when the whole thing feels like it’s going at 200mph and might leave the rails. But that’s not everyone’s bag.

What do you look for when hiring someone? Someone with opinions and energy. Agencies, especially larger ones, can become crippled by too much respect for authority. People assume that, because someone is in charge, they know best.

This is dangerous. Just because someone schmoozed their way to a corner office or did one Cannes-winning ad back in the 90s doesn’t mean they’re an expert on delivering a seamless social and content campaign to engage distracted millennials. You want people who speak up, who flag up problems so they can be solved. The old hierarchies and egos of adland have stifled this creative energy over the years. Great talent must feel free to be opinionated and contribute – whatever their age, stage or specialism. Many of the best things we’ve done were made brilliant by unexpected contributions from unexpected people.

James Murphy is the chief executive of Adam & Eve/ DDB

Why The Shape Of A Company’s Logo Matters WELCOME TO A WORLD IN WHICH CURVES ARE A GOOD THING.

By Annie Sneed

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Think about the iconic brand names you know: Apple, Target, McDonald’s, Gap. What images come to mind? For many of us, probably their logos. That’s because whether it’s an apple or big golden arches, a logo is crucial to a company’s identity. Now, new research says that logos are even more important than businesses and consumers realize. A recent study in the Journal of Consumer Research found that even just a basic element of logos—their shape—affects how people perceive a company and its products.

There’s already a good amount of research on how logos influence customers. For example, a 2011 study found that when a company has an incomplete logo (think IBM), people perceive the business as more innovative but less trustworthy.

Another weird logo effect that researchers have found: when consumers see a complex-looking logo over and over again, they start to like the brand more. Given these past findings, Amitava Chattopadhyay and his team at INSEAD thought something as simple as a logo’s overall shape—circular or angular—might also impact people’s opinions in a significant way.

Jiang, Gorn, Galli and Chattopadhyay. Journal of Consumer Research It’s well-established that people tend to associate circular shapes with soft, comfy things, and angular shapes with hard, sturdy things. And that makes sense, says Chattopadhyay, a professor of marketing at INSEAD. “If you think about it, circular shapes on average tend to be quite soft—balls, pillows, mattresses—whereas angular shapes like bricks, tables, and knives tend to be hard and durable,” he says.

“These associations probably form over time because that’s how we encounter the world.” The researchers wanted to know whether they could exploit these strong associations by using the logo as a subtle, subconscious guide in consumers’ minds.

In a pair of experiments with a total of 178 participants, the researchers had people look at ads for either athletic shoes or a sofa, and the ads included a circular logo, an angular logo, or no logo at all. The researchers found that

when people looked at these ads, they perceived the shoes or sofa with a circular logo as more comfortable whereas they thought shoes and sofas with an angular logo would be more durable. This finding effect isn’t actually that surprising, says Tom Meyvis, a professor of marketing at NYU, who wasn’t involved in the study. “It makes sense that the features of your logo are going to have this effect,” Meyvis says. “It’s what’s called priming—the idea that you prime certain concepts in someone’s mind by showing them something that’s associated with this concept.”

It turns out that this priming effect doesn’t just apply to products—it also distorts how we perceive the characteristics of a company itself. In another experiment, Chattopadhyay and his team asked 95 people to view either a dozen circular or angular logos then read a scenario about a hypothetical airline company. In the scenario, a man named Kevin was trying to board his flight with overweight carry-on luggage, and study participants were asked how the airline would deal with him—whether the company would listen to Kevin, show him empathy, and let him onboard with his luggage.

The researchers found that when people looked at circular logos beforehand, they thought that the airline would be more sensitive toward Kevin compared to people who saw the angular logos and then read the same scenario. This means that the logo doesn’t even have to be present when you’re judging a company or product—as long as the shape association is fresh in your mind, it’ll have an effect on what you think. What’s even crazier is that the logos people looked at weren’t even connected to the airline company—apparently, just looking at shapes activated these powerful associations, and influenced what people thought of a company.

In two other experiments, the researchers also tested whether logo shape actually caused this effect (they found that it did), and they also tried to figure out how other aspects of advertising, like the ad headline, interact with logos to influence people’s judgments. They found that when an ad headline and a logo conveyed conflicting information about a product—for example, if a headline says an athletic shoe is rugged and durable, but is paired with a circular logo—the logo shape effect didn’t work.

These are all things that companies should keep in mind, says Chattopadhyay. “When companies are designing their logos, they should be thoughtful about making these associations fit with the associations they want for their brand,” he says.

He also thinks it’s also important that when companies show people an ad, the information—like the logo and ad

headline—needs to fit together, otherwise it won’t convey the right message. “We need to worry about what we’re saying to consumers verbally versus what we’re signaling accidentally or deliberately through other kinds of cues,” he explains. Chattopadhyay goes even further, saying that his results suggest that even the shape of physical objects—like product packaging and store design—may influence people’s judgments.

But of course, it’s important to remember that logos are complex, and they’re part of a much larger context in marketing, which means that you can’t just count on the shape of a logo to make people think a certain way about your company and its products. “If you’re looking at the real world, with actual brands that people already have a lot of

prior beliefs about, then these effects can just wash out,” says Tom Meyvis. Chattopadhyay agrees that logo shapes are just one part of what companies use to influence what people think, though they’re still potentially very useful. “From a marketer’s point of view, every cue—whether it’s the scent, color, taste, shape—all of this is explicitly engineered,” he says, “That’s because we know that those perceptual cues affect people’s behavior.”

Annie Sneed is a San Francisco-based science journalist. She writes stories on topics ranging from beer microbiology to infectious diseases to the science of design for Fast Company, Wired, and Scientific American.

Balancing aspiration and accessibility will be key for brands

By Forrest Cardamenis

After a disappointing holiday season to end 2015, what will this year bring for the luxury industry?

luxury clients that participated in Single’s Day through platforms such as Dealmoon.com saw growth.

On Jan. 20, panelists on the “Outlook 2016: Key Luxury Marketng, Retail, Media and Digital Trends and What’s Next” panel at Luxury FirstLook: Strategy 2016 discussed what luxury marketers should anticipate in the 2016 economy, where growth lies and the always-growing role of digital.

Brands will need to balance access with aspiration, cut discounts, connect channels with creative marketing, locate growing markets and continue to innovate to pull ahead in these economically trying times.

Lastly, online “Cyber Monday” promotions were spread more evenly throughout the season, and many retailers were not hitting their numbers in the holiday season, but discounting after Christmas led to growth in the week after.

“There is a paradox happening where luxury is obviously aspirational, but there’s an expectation of accessibility,” said Greg Monaco, founding partner of Monaco Lange. “You have these two opposing forces, so how do you maintain aspiration yet be accessible at the same time?

“One thing that I’m noticing is that the veil has been lifted or is expected to be lifted,” he said. “So if you are in the market for a Maserati or something you have this image of an owner, now with digital you know his name, you follow him on Twitter and you realize his life is just as boring as your life. So brands that are going to survive are those that can toe the line.

“Tell the story, maintain aspiration, but don’t reveal too much under the hood.”

Discounting is getting more prevalent, but worries still arise over the potential long-term harm it could cause a brand.

Marie Driscoll, CEO and chief consultant of Driscoll Advisors notes that 40 percent of luxury products sold online in the U.S. are discounted – right in line with Amazon, known for its lowest prices, accounting for 40 percent of overall ecommerce sales.

While potentially disrupting, 40 percent of ecommerce sales is risky in the short term as brands try to make their numbers year after year, doing so could prove productive in the longterm. A lack of discounting could generate desirability and exclusivity as a result of high prices, which will in turn make its products objects of aspiration for consumers.

Chris Rovzar, digital head of Bloomberg Pursuits, also saw sales slow, with a projected growth in holiday of 3.7 percent clocking in at just 3 percent. However, there are plenty of growth opportunities nonetheless.

Certain hard goods are still under-indexed in the U.S., and the slowdown of China, while too recent to predict may

Access and aspire According to Natalie McCaffrey, the associate director for strategy at iProspect, there are three significant trends she has seen lately. The first of them is that, as expected by many, social media is proving to be an enormous area of growth in terms of traffic and engagement. The next step will be devising accurate models to translate those metrics into gained sales.

The second was the boost in United States sales on Single’s Day, the biggest shopping day in the world primarily due to its popularity in China. Ms. McCaffrey notes that iProspect’s

not be a big presence. The country’s economy continues to grow at a rate that makes Western countries envious, and falling stocks will not necessarily impact all Chinese luxury consumers.

“We interviewed during Fashion Week a lot of Italian CEOs of companies like Moncler and Dolce & Gabbana, and they’re optimistic,” Mr. Rovzar said. “The weather is getting colder so people are buying winter clothes, and the middle class isn’t as affected by the stock market and they’re still splurging.”

Regardless of where the growth happens, both geographically

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and in terms of physical versus digital, localization is a key to reaching consumers. Bricks-and-mortar growth is slowing while online growth is skyrocketing, and brands know that a Web presence is a virtual necessity to grow.

“Brands need to bring the heritage but also bring in some of what’s Chinese, incorporate China’s culture” said Gustavo Gomez, director of research and methodology for Envirosell.

“You see billboards full of white people; where are the Asian models?”

said. “We are mobile first.”

In other sectors, particularly those with products to sale, omnichannel integration is clearly the next step.

“There is nothing worse than going to pick up a dress or pick up a shirt and the store not having it in stock,” Envirosell’s Mr. Gomez said. “Yet the stores aren’t integrated with the Web, with inventory and with recommendations from customers and fitting rooms aren’t digitally enhanced.

“There is a lot of growth luxury can lead to get that going, and I think that’s an aim for 2016.”

Omnichannel demands and mobile integration are pervasive among young consumers, who represent opportunity for the future of luxury brands. If brands can’t reach those consumers when, where and how the consumer wants to be reached, however, competitors will blow by.

The potential for continued growth from China is particularly true in the real estate world. Anthony Hitt, CEO of Engel & Volkers North America, notes that Chinese buyers drove real estate in 2015 and are expected to continue to do so.

Many consumers that are impacted by China’s falling stock market are inclined to move their money into U.S. real estate, a comparatively safe, high-return investment. This is particularly true to markets such as Vancouver, British Columbia, San Francisco, Seattle and especially New York.

While many sectors are still catching up on true omnichannel integration, real estate is ahead at least in regard to the importance of mobile.

“We know, from a real estate perspective, 90 percent of shopping at all price points is happening on mobile,” Mr. Hitt

“HENRYs are the future of luxury brands,” iProspect’s Ms. McCaffrey said. “They have grown up with cell phones and iPhones, so if brands cannot connect with them, they’re going to lose.

“Some luxury brands are making headway,” she said. “L2 points out Gucci and Louis Vuitton stood out within the luxury space in terms of being able to find store inventory on the Web site, and these very simple things are very important.”

Unifying commerce While panelists agreed that true omnichannel experiences were the industry’s future, it is unlikely that brands will accomplish it sometime this year.

A unified commerce experience hosting a single cart across all channels is the future of retail, but retailers are struggling to deliver, according to a report by Boston Retail Partners.

Eighty-five percent of retailers list unified commerce as a top priority, meaning that soon customers will be able to shop, ship and pick-up products from wherever they wish. Getting there will involve improvements in point-of-sale hardware and software as well as increased support of mobile technology both for purchasing and recognition purposes and is likely two or three years away (see story).

Brands must also be able to reach impulsive, high-spending tourists from abroad to stay ahead in 2016.

Chinese tourists spent $229 billion in 2015, according to a report from GfK, Germany’s largest market research institute.

Although some of this money is spent in Hong Kong or in Southeast Asian countries where luxury brands do not yet have a large presence, such as Thailand and Taiwan, tourism to Europe, North America, South Korea and Japan is also way up. Beyond illustrating once again the importance of reaching Chinese travelers, the data reveals trends in movement and spending that can help luxury brands reach the group (see story).

“The Chinese consumer is still traveling, so brands need to keep growing the online presence and find out where the Chinese tourists are going and that’s where your growth is going to be,” Mr. Gomez said.

Book,

&

Line

Sinker

The Athena Doctrine: How Women (and the Men Who Think Like Them) Will Rule the Future

The Brand Bubble: The Looming Crisis in Brand Value and How to Avoid It

By John Gerzema, Michael D’Antonio

By John Gerzema, Edward Lebar

Brought to life through real world examples and backed by rigorous data,The Athena Doctrine shows how feminine traits are ascending—and bringing success to people and organizations around the world. By nurturing, listening, collaborating and sharing, women and men are solving problems, finding profits, and redefining success in every realm.

Using a five-stage model, The Brand Bubble reveals how today’s successful brands--and tomorrow’s--have an insatiable appetite for creativity and change. These brands offer consumers a palpable sense of movement and direction thanks to a powerful “energized differentiation.”

Spend Shift: How the Post-Crisis Values Revolution Is Changing the Way We Buy, Sell, and Live

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

By John Gerzema, Michael D’Antonio, Philip Kotler In Spend Shift, John Gerzema, world-renowned expert on consumer values, and Pulitzer prizewinning author Michael D’Antonio document the rise of a vibrant, values-driven post-recession economy. To tell the story of this movement, the authors travel to large cities and small towns across eight bellwether states, to examine the value shifts sweeping the nation.

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

Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative

Idea Industry: How to Crack the Advertising Career Code

By Austin Kleon

You love advertising, so much so that you’re thinking about starting a career in it. But aside from creative directors who think up the ideas for ads, who does what at an ad agency? Idea Industry: How to Crack the Advertising Career Codes is the first book that breaks it all down and explains what everyone does, which job might be the right fit for you and how you can get that job. We cover the major areas in six straightforward chapters...

You don’t need to be a genius, you just need to be yourself. That’s the message from Austin Kleon, a young writer and artist who knows that creativity is everywhere, creativity is for everyone.

A manifesto for the digital age, Steal Like an Artist is a guide whose positive message, graphic look and illustrations, exercises, and examples will put readers directly in touch with their artistic side.

Breakthrough Thinking: A Guide to Creative Thinking and Idea Generation

By Thomas Vogel Breakthrough Thinking is a holistic approach to creativity complete with industry examples from successful creative professionals and some of the top creative organizations in business today. Within the pages of this timely and comprehensive guide to idea generation and problem solving you’ll find techniques and exercises to help you...

By Brett Robbs, Deborah Morrison

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

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

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

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The Pirate Inside: Building a Challenger Brand Culture Within Yourself and Your Organization

The Culting of Brands: Turn Your Customers into True Believers

By Douglas Atkin

Most marketing and branding books fall into one of two camps: either they are about leaders or they assume that brands can be managed by process alone. The Pirate Inside is different. It forwards the idea that brands are about people, and Challenger Brands are driven by a certain kind of person in a certain kind of way...

Marketing expert Douglas Atkin has spent years researching both full-blown cults and companies that use cult-branding techniques.He interviewed countless cult members to find out what makes them tick. And he explains exactly how brands like Harley-Davidson, Saturn, JetBlue, and Ben & Jerry’s make their customers feel unique, important, and part of an exclusive group—and how that leads to solid, long-term relationships between a company and its customers.

Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences

slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations

By Nancy Duarte

By Nancy Duarte

By Adam Morgan

Just as the author’s first book helped presenters become visual communicators, Resonate helps you make a strong connection with your audience and lead them to purposeful action. The author’s approach is simple: building a presentation today is a bit like writing a documentary. Using this approach, you’ll convey your content with passion, persuasion, and impact.

Written by Nancy Duarte, President and CEO of Duarte Design, the firm that created the presentation for Al Gore’s Oscar-winning film, An Inconvenient Truth, this book is full of practical approaches to visual story development that can be applied by anyone. The book combines conceptual thinking and inspirational design, with insightful case studies from the world’s leading brands.

Building Strong Brands

Brand Aid: An Easy Reference Guide to Solving Your Toughest Branding Problems and Strengthening Your Market Position

By David A. Aaker In this compelling work, Aaker uses real brand-building cases from Saturn, General Electric, Kodak, Healthy Choice, McDonald’s, and others to demonstrate how strong brands have been created and managed.

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

The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding

By Al Ries, Laura Ries This marketing classic has been expanded to include new commentary, new illustrations, and a bonus book: The 11 Immutable Laws of Internet Branding Smart and accessible, The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding is the definitive text on branding, pairing anecdotes about some of the best brands in the world, like Rolex, Volvo, and Heineken, with the signature savvy of marketing gurus Al and Laura Ries...

By Brad VanAuken This is a ready reference that leads the way for anyone setting out to build a winning brand!

Written by an acknowledged expert with 20 years of experience building world-class brands, “Brand Aid” is a day-to-day quick-reference guide that provides solutions for the 22 most pressing problems faced by brand managers.

Brand Portfolio Strategy: Creating Relevance, Differentiation, Energy, Leverage, and Clarity

By David A. Aaker In this long-awaited book from the world’s premier brand expert and author of the seminal work Building Strong Brands, David Aaker shows managers how to construct a brand portfolio strategy that will support a company’s business strategy and create relevance, differentiation, energy, leverage, and clarity....