BrandKnew January 2021

Branding matters. Because branding matters.

Published by 01.21#99

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Dear Friends: We have been there, redone that. And, somehow, came out of 2020, hopefully more wiser, prudent, humane, grateful and aware. Wishing all of you and yours the very best of abundance, wellness and happiness in 2021 and beyond.

We promise to keep the BrandKnew flag flying high and our team is researching and curating the very best of content from around the world and packaging them in an easy to consume manner for you. And, thank you so much for your enrollment and support as a loyal subscriber.

We begin this year’s journey by focusing on quite a few things. Brand purpose is on top of the agenda and there are three different features in this edition that walks the walk on that. ABM(Account Based Marketing) has been the flavour of the season for a while but in order to extract the maximum impact, a marriage of both brand and demand is called for. Understand more in this issue. Email marketing has been an unsung hero for a while and it’s about time we get it done right. Examine that in this edition. With so many giants in the E commerce space that are hugely successful in China, there is ample to learn from these players for organisations and entrepreneurs alike. Understanding trends and acting on them can do brands a world of good. Know about it here. Thankfully, there are multiple vaccines that have hit the market and more on the way. The challenge for governments, health workers and pharmaceutical companies is to persuade people to take one. We take a look at some communication techniques that will help the cause. Which side of the divide is your brand? Is it surviving or thriving? Take a closer look. BOTS have taken over the landscape. How best to leverage the power that they bring along is discussed in this issue. We have been boxed in for almost a year and Zoom has taken over our lives. In the midst of all that, we take a look at how we can keep creativity alive and kicking. There is ample more to soak in and take inspiration from. So, go ahead and have your fill.

Till the next, my very best!

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Suresh Dinakaran @ISDGlobalDubai

@Brandknewmag

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For Advertising Enquiries: engage@groupisd.com or call + 050 6254340 All Copyright of the content in this issue rests fully & comprehensively with the respective contributors and/or media platforms at all times, as the case may be.

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Managing Editor: Suresh Dinakaran Creative Head/Director Operations: Pravin Ahir Magazine Concept & Design/ New Media Specialist: Mufaddal Joher Chief Strategy Director: Rishi Mohan Brand Engagement and Outreach Specialist: Anuva Madan Chief Country Man, India: Rohit Unni Brand Trends and Research Architect: Meeta Pendse Revenue Growth Architect: Ritu Dey Country Head, Australia: Norbert D’Souza Country Head, UK: Sagar Patil Performance Marketing Architect: Ryan Govindan Video Content Specialist: Vinayak Sivaprasad

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CONTENTS Why Purpose is Profitable Is Your Brand Surviving or Enduring?

How Gaming Can Help Learners of All Ages Three Branding Assumptions to Avoid Marry Brand and Demand to Unleash the Full Power of Personalization in ABM Our shiny new Zoom Brain – and how to keep creativity alive Navigating Digital Turbulence Putting a new ‘ seal ‘ of approval on advertising Colliding Work, Personal Values Underscores Need for Purpose-Led Brand Culture Marketers: Your Tech Stack Is Hollow What We Can Learn From E-commerce in China Acting On Trends May Determine Whether A Brand Survives What Will Persuade People to Take a Vaccine?

How Absolut Activates Brand Purpose Datathon Challenge: How to Boost Sales for a Global Retailer Dark Roast Double Shot: Why Brands Should Revisit Their Premise The BOT(tom) line 5 criteria for evaluating your email marketing program Clueless & Out-Of-Touch Book, Line & Sinker

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Why Purpose is Profitable

By Roger Horberry

Our hyper-connected world is changing faster than ever.

While new technologies are accelerating unprecedented marketing transformation, just simply applying them isn’t enough to solve old problems. Today’s marketing leaders need a whole new approach in building undisruptable bonds among brands, customers and employees.

CMOs have seen these dynamics unfold, and many have taken a path forward to anticipate, adapt and even invent.

Unfortunately, there’s no ‘big bang’ solution. It starts with changing the entire marketing mindset—from a focus on acquiring the next customer and driving transactions to creating and integrating a culture of strategy, employee experience, personalization, and insightful intelligence. In short, it means injecting more humanity into their brands.

Before embarking on marketing transformation, CMOs need to align their organization’s approach around answering a fundamental question: how their brand can serve a greater purpose. They know they won’t find the answer in algorithms.

As behavioral economist and Yale professor Ravi Dhar pointed out in our new book, The New Marketing: How to Win in the Digital Age, “CMOs must build a brand that isn’t just out to make money, but also to benefit society and other stakeholders…The CMO has a key role to play here; they are the person best positioned in the C-suite to help build connections with those stakeholders.”

In other words, marketing teams need to focus on building brands that have a positive impact on society instead of just building top-line sales.

According to Jon Iwata, Executive Fellow at Yale School of Management, for CMOs to be future-ready, they must unlearn deeply ingrained assumptions about their job. The

former IBM Senior Vice President and Chief Brand Officer says employees expect companies including marketing chiefs to speak out on a wide range of societal issues and customers increasingly care about how the company affects the environment. “CMOs rarely have a formal role in identifying, developing and debating these issues for their companies.

Yet I think this is what modern corporate brand stewardship requires,” he says.

In The New Marketing, we said that the key for brands is to prepare for the shift toward purpose-driven marketing. It’s no longer about just selling products and services. In today’s digital-driven world, a purpose-driven approach is essential for a successful marketing strategy and must be embedded in a brand’s DNA. Finding your brand purpose may require intense reflection or even historical investigation. For that’s how Dole’s CMO, Rupen Desai, landed on the 170-year old company’s brand purpose. In a recent PR Week article, Rupen shared that one of his first priorities was “digging back into the annals of Dole’s history to help it discover its new purpose.” Today, the world’s largest pineapple purveyor (and fruits and vegetables producer) is “now sharing its entire business model through the lens of its purpose as ‘Sunshine for All’.”

We also interviewed Susan Credle, Global Chief Creative Officer of advertising firm Foote, Cone, and Belding, about the importance of identifying their purpose. She told us: “Interrogate the past, understand the present, and anticipate the future. ... Interrogating the past is really about understanding the essence of the founder’s story. Why was this company originally created? What equities have been built? What values have been consistent over time? A true brand purpose will start to emerge. Understanding the

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present is pretty much where everybody lives in marketing today.”

In challenging times, when consumers expect more from the brands they buy--including humanity and empathy-there’s a magical element that can make a difference—we call it a brand’s metaphorical soul. Purpose can be a true differentiator for brands, not only in the COVID era but beyond.

This idea of brand purpose refers not only to the core of a company’s identity but also to its justification for existing, for customers, employees, shareholders and the world. Larry Fink, the founder and CEO of BlackRock, one of the world’s largest asset management companies with holdings valued at over $6 trillion, defined his company’s stance on purpose: “Purpose is not a mere tagline or marketing campaign; it is a company’s fundamental reason for being – what it does every day to create value for its stakeholders. Purpose is not the sole pursuit of profits but the animating force for achieving them.”

Brand purpose is universal and relevant today whether for a 1-year old startup, a 10-year old tech company or a 100year old legacy brand. In the spring of 2019, Patagonia fully flexed its purpose. The 47-year old American outdoor clothing company generated a lot of news and pushed the purpose discussion after announcing that it would no longer sell to companies unless they were B Corps (companies whose commitment to environmental or social causes meets specific certifiable standards).

Today’s generations of socially and environmentally conscious consumers require their brands to make the word better. Identifying, communicating and (last but not least) operationalizing purpose can help the brand own a differentiating narrative and create true competitive

advantage in the market.

Microsoft developed its purpose narrative by blending its corporate values into the social movement of inclusion. At the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, the tech giant was recognized for its 2019 Super Bowl commercial that featured the Xbox Adaptive Controller. Rather than highlighting the controller’s cutting-edge technology in the ad, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of Brand, Advertising and Research, Kathleen Hall, chose to focus on the real-life story of Owen, a young boy with special needs. When Hall heard Owen’s story, she knew that his needs lay at the heart of Microsoft’s mission of empowering people to do great things.

In The New Marketing, Hall shared with us how this story shaped the ad and their purpose-led strategy: “With this commercial, the secret sauce was that it had some relevance to its environment–in this case the Super Bowl. It was that line: ‘When everybody plays, we all win.’ The ultimate form of inclusion, which, in the context of the NFL and everything that’s going on in sports, was super relevant and emotional.

That was the bingo moment.”

Like Microsoft, companies that focus on driving social change over driving profits will stand out and win. By building goodwill and loyalty among their customers and their own people who serve them, these purpose-driven organizations will ultimately improve their bottom line and create a better world.

Brands that blend purpose and profit in this way will transform their marketing and build those valuable undisruptable bonds among customers and employees and, in the process, produce positive returns for shareholders and societal stakeholders alike.

Is Your Brand Surviving or Enduring?

By Dwan V. White

2020 is proving to be a year of heightened awareness, change, and for lack of better words to describe the significant shake up and shake down brought about by the enormous effects of one magnanimous event after another, immense disruption. Never before in the 21st century have consumer product brands truly been forced to find alternate ways to get their goods and services in front of their consumers. And in the midst of companies scrambling to rework key areas of their business model, consumers have put them on notice that it’s no longer enough for their company to do good, but to be good, be real and be publicly accountable in order to

get their patronage.

There’s a plethora of lessons for brands to learn during these extraordinary times. Unfortunately, many companies are spending lots of time being reactionary and surviving when all along they should have devoted their efforts and energy toward enduring. Survival implies working with whatever you’ve got and doing whatever it takes to tackle the complications being thrown at you, whereas endurance connotes running the race, being in it for the long-term, preparing for and overcoming obstacles and remaining focused and faithful when all others have fallen to the

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wayside. Being a brand that endures requires humility, listening, intentionality and purpose. Here’s what that looks like in a company’s business model and in their day to day.

Purpose Drives the Business Peter Drucker famously wrote in The Practice of Management that the purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer.

While that is minimally true, I think Ducktape Marketing’s, Josh Jantsch’s says it better by noting that the purpose of a business is to create and keep purpose. Consumers want to believe that businesses have somewhat of a higher calling and exist for more than just taking their money. To quote Jantsch, “People commit to companies, products and stories that are built on and positioned with a simple, easy to communicate purpose – we commit to things we believe in and companies that get that make their entire marketing about purpose instead of product.” Consumers demand for businesses to demonstrate humanity and transparency, and to capture their hearts and imaginations through even the most simplistic concepts, like community, inclusion, respect and trust. Brands must exist with intentionality and think, “us” vs. “me.”

Demonstrate Consistent Authenticity The days of fluff are over! Heidi Palermo of Adweek recently wrote, “With intention, comes an increased need for transparency and accountability.” Consumers can see through companies that only want their money and aren’t invested in issues that matter. On the inside, employees are demanding a work culture that lives out its purpose in ways that are highly visible, tangible, inclusive and evident in the way its leaders lead. Authenticity and transparency can no longer be campaign driven. They should be interwoven into the fabric of the company’s culture, mission and vision, and communicated so that consumers and employees can easily understand and articulate who the company is and what it stands for. Markstein Mid-Atlantic president, Sheila McLean is quoted, “When it comes to social responsibility, consumers are looking for companies to show them – not just tell them – what they’re doing,” Brands have to listen and understand their consumers’ values. Without doing so, they cannot effectively chart and navigate a social responsibility course.

Create and Sustain a Meaningful Internal Culture When organizations think about brand building, most typically consider the end user, the competition and shareholders. But what about their most valued stakeholders…their employees?

Brands should reflect their company’s culture. If you follow the trail of a broken brand the breadcrumbs likely lead back to a feeble company culture. Forbes contributor, Liz Ryan writes, “A progressive culture is one where the culture is deemed worthy of attention all the time. The company recognizes and celebrates the fact that its employees make the company great, so-so or terrible, as the case may be.” Culture and employee advocacy are often overlooked or underexplored marketing tools. When employees feel valued and proud of the contributions they make to their company they become more engaged, publicly communicate trust in the company, feel as though they’ve got skin in the game, and results in them acting as partners and brand ambassadors. It’s also

important to note that companies should be mindful of their employees’ mental wellness and emotional intelligence.

Providing adequate support demonstrates empathy and concern, helps reduce stress and contributes to a healthier work environment.

Trust Marketing Marketing’s role in brand-focused companies is an article all by itself. The roads that end at HR, I.T., Product Development, Sales or Operations, should originate from marketing and brand strategy. Marketing should be the driving force that helps the company navigate consumer-centricity, and consumer-centricity should be actualized across every area of the organization. Collaborations with Marketing should also address and create emerging opportunities that help solve more consumer needs. There are countless brands with incredible potential but are stagnated because of misalignment between other areas of the C-Suite and Marketing.

Consider Brand Reputation Over Short-term Sales Brand building involves time and intentionality. So how does this work when the company just wants to sell more stuff?

Of course, brands have to sell. But without a solid brand reputation, there’s no longevity, advocacy is weakened, and consumers will be easily swayed by the newest shiny thing that comes along. It’s the age-old debate between Sales and Marketing that won’t get resolved here. However, brand building and sales must work hand-in-hand. The takeaway is that brands can’t exist without a long-term focus. Otherwise, it’s impossible to endure (and dare I say, survive).

Explore Unique Possibilities The same old, same old just won’t do anymore. As generations of consumers come and go, an enduring brand finds a way to evolve, while maintaining all the elements of those lasting traits that consumers of all ages love about them. It’s ok to think outside the box. From unique, non-traditional partnerships (cross branding with the competition or open collaboration platforms) to brands becoming their own media company (evolve & enable internal communication to become a P.R. and media machine), there are limitless opportunities to take a brand to the next level, while remaining authentically true to itself.

A brand should never get too comfortable and it should always stretch itself by consistently checking its values pulse, becoming nimble enough to pivot when needed, meeting their audience where they are, starting conversations (and not be afraid of the difficult ones), and always maintaining a distinctive and clearly communicated point of differentiation.

Synergy and harmony between consumers, shareholders and stakeholders are key indicators that a brand is on the path of endurance.

Dwan V. White is a marketing professional and brand curator. With over 20 years experience in the Beauty, Consumer Packaged Goods and Home Décor segments, she has most notably developed and launched over 200 hair care products under a multitude of brand names sold in mass, drug, grocery, and specialty retail.

How Gaming Can Help Learners of All Ages

By Wharton Staff

Imagine a classroom setting where traditional lectures and slides are augmented with interactive games that let students fully immerse themselves in the lesson. That’s the goal at Wharton Interactive, which is dedicated to transforming education through game-based learning. The idea is not to allow teenagers to spend hours playing Minecraft or Among Us; instead, it’s about creating games that intensify the learning process by stimulating the brain in ways that make the subject matter really stick.

is backed by research that shows how gamified learning

Co-founded by executive director Sarah Toms and Wharton management professor Ethan Mollick, Wharton Interactive

this page, or read the edited transcript of the conversation

leads to more positive outcomes for both educators and students of all ages, such as the professionals who enroll in Wharton Executive Education programs. Toms and Mollick joined Knowledge@Wharton to talk about Wharton Interactive and to explain how game-based education can help younger and older students alike acquire new skills in a more compelling and immediate way than traditional teaching methods alone. (Listen to the podcast at the top of that follows.)

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Knowledge@Wharton: This idea was hatched by the two of you one afternoon in a coffee shop in San Francisco. Tell us about that meeting and about what this kind of learning entails.

Sarah Toms: Our origin story begins with a really interactive partnership between me and Ethan. We started working together about seven or eight years ago, recreating some of the simulations that Ethan already had been running for his entrepreneurship classes. While doing that, we realized that we had a lot of synergy with respect to our backgrounds.

We both came from entrepreneurship and we both love gaming. I have a very strong technology background — Ethan obviously in entrepreneurship and research. We just had a partnership made in heaven, quite frankly.

The idea that came out of that conversation in the coffee shop was Idea Machine, which is one of the platforms that we’re offering at Wharton Interactive and is being utilized by learners all over Penn. We also started to wrangle with this concept that traditional simulations are great, but they’re very expensive to create and are usually sort of on rails — the way Ethan and I describe them — where you’re entering numbers into a dashboard, you’re hitting submit, and you’re artificially moving to the next period. And that doesn’t sit well with us.

We’re interested in thinking about more authentic decisionmaking, more authentic learning, where there are more gray zones between that decision-making — there’s a narrative, personalities, challenges and trade-offs. It’s all happening together, which makes it incredibly difficult to teach in a classroom. But we decided we wanted to take it on.

“Interact with people from other cultures around the world, get personalized feedback and feelings of real accomplishment — that’s our goal.”–Ethan Mollick As our partnership started to develop when I was director of Wharton’s Learning Lab, we came to an inflection point where we decided it was time to take these ideas and concepts and develop them in our incubator at Wharton Interactive, and think about how we bring these incredible platforms — this next-generation of thinking in serious games — not just to Wharton classes, but to the world.

Knowledge@Wharton: Wharton Interactive’s stated mission is to “democratize the future of education. When students actively participate in their own learning, they own what they know.” What does that mean?

Ethan Mollick: It means a few things, and one of them is about how we learn. One of the great, powerful ways we learn is through experience and tying experience to pedagogy. That’s having the best teaching techniques, using stuff that we know boosts learning, and having those woven into an actual experience. Rather than telling you

how to run a company, you run a fake company. But you don’t just run it without feedback. You get feedback built in, you get tests on things. If you do badly at something, you try it again. It’s about the latest interactive pedagogy for teaching and about that feeling of ownership, control and agency.

The other important piece is about democratization. Wharton is an incredible place. [Penn] is an amazing university that I think we’re all happy to be a part of. We teach amazing students, but there are students all over the world who could benefit from [what we do here]. Just in the last few years, there have been a couple of very powerful studies showing that even basic business education boosts entrepreneurship rates, success rates, and helps people get out of poverty, helps countries develop better. We want to increase access to that sort of education, and games are a really great way to do that. This goes beyond those massive online open courses (MOOCs), the videos that people watch, and moves it instead to a world of interactivity. Interact with people from other cultures around the world, get personalized feedback and feelings of real accomplishment — that’s our goal.

Toms: One of the things that I found incredibly compelling came from a small study we conducted on the first generation of our platform, Alternate Reality Courseware. When we think about a traditional classroom, we know that 20% of the students on average are raising their hands, and their voice is heard in the class. That means that 80% probably have things to say, but they’re not engaging vocally in that class discussion. Ethan was curious and said, “I wonder what’s happening in our three-week-long entrepreneurship game. Are those students who are not vocal in the class also not engaging and participating as heavily in the game?” He found zero correlation.

He had a research assistant watch videos of the classroom and saw who was raising their hand. Then we looked at the level of engagement in the games. Students who were not raising their hand were highly engaged [in the game], meaning that this is another mode for learners to get engaged and feel psychological safety in the classroom.

That’s another way that we can democratize the access and the voice of those students with respect to the lessons that they’re receiving.

Knowledge@Wharton: Unlike a traditional class, where you think maybe the quiet students aren’t paying attention or aren’t getting the lesson, you found that they are highly engaged — just maybe with their screen. But the synapses are firing and they are absorbing what they’re learning through the simulation, correct?

“It’s creating that indelible impression in a learner’s memory that they can then retrieve and put into action later on in their career. It’s really magic.”– Sarah Toms

Mollick: Yeah, but it’s not just through the screen. You mentioned Among Us earlier. That’s a cooperative game.

Minecraft is also a cooperative game. Our games are not for a single player staring at a screen; you are interacting with other humans, often over the course of weeks. And you’re building a team in real life as you build it in the game. So, it’s not just a passive experience. The educational impact is clear. In other early studies, we find a full standard deviation increase in learning outcomes from people who do the simulation versus control experiments.

We’re still in the early days of this research, but we know it’s very compelling from a lot of different perspectives. There’s been a long tradition of trying to make games that can teach. It was once referred to derisively as chocolate-covered broccoli because people would just take teaching and add bad games on top. I think we’re one of the first to start from the ground up and say, “How do we build something that isn’t quite a game and isn’t quite a simulation, but it’s somewhere in between, that can teach compelling lessons and is based on the best science of how we learn?” What we do is based on the science as well as the art of gaming.

Knowledge@Wharton: How can gamified learning help an adult professional who doesn’t live in a sci-fi world but has to tackle real-world problems every day?

Toms: We do run a lot of our simulations through Wharton Executive Education classes, and we are rated incredibly high in all of those classes. What’s great for these executive learners is that we can leverage what’s known in gaming as appropriate fidelity. That means it’s better to shift you into a fictitious world where we are making you focus on learning and getting immersed in the world. A great example is a game we have called The Saturn Parable, which has now been played by hundreds of executives. In that experience, over the course of two days, they are learning crisis management, they are learning teamwork, leadership skills, etc. That’s all coming to life in this really engaging game where they are manning a mission to Saturn.

Mollick: The idea is that we don’t need to be in completely realistic worlds to teach realistic lessons. We wouldn’t let pilots fly a plane without being in a flight simulator first and crashing a bunch of times. We don’t penalize them for crashing. But in real life, we penalize executives for failing.

We might say “fail fast,” but failing fast is not actually that appreciated, and often people learn the wrong lessons from failure. We want to put people in a flight simulator for management. We want to give them a chance to crash, but learn from those crashes and understand what happened, to apply those lessons and get the experience they need before they’re actually flying the plane.

“We wouldn’t let pilots fly a plane without being in a flight simulator first and crashing a bunch of times.” – Ethan Mollick Knowledge@Wharton: Where do you see the future of simulated learning? Has the increase in virtual instruction during the pandemic shown us that perhaps simulated learning could replace traditional classroom instruction?

Mollick: I don’t think that it’s going to replace classroom instruction. Classroom instruction is still vitally important.

We’ve been doing this for thousands of years, and the truth is it’s still pretty effective. Getting people together and having conversations — that’s important. I think what it can do is a couple of things. One, it could extend the reach of classroom education. It’s being able to reach more people with more kinds of education. And I think it acts as a supplement to what’s happening in the classroom.

It also works incredibly well remotely. We were building these simulations to work remotely long before COVID happened, because we were building them around massive multiplayer games. The idea is that you don’t need to be in a class to get the same kind of compelling experience.

I don’t think replacing classroom education is our goal. I think democratizing, spreading it, making classrooms more effective and making it easier for instructors and more effective for students is our goal.

Toms: I absolutely agree. One of the things that I have seen that’s been incredibly valuable is that when you hit that eight hours of simulation and beyond, it really counteracts one of the issues with classroom learning. That is, you may learn a few lessons at the beginning of your semester, and then those ideas start to atrophy and you start to not remember them as well as you move on into more and more new lessons.

What’s great about a simulation is it brings all of those lessons together and shows all of the trade-offs that may be happening, and how all of those ideas are interconnected.

We do that with narratives, we do that with nonplayer characters who bring challenges to life. And that starts to add a lot more of that three-dimensionality to the coursework.

The next piece is memorable transference. It allows our learners to practice what we’re talking about, which creates memorable connections for them. We’ve had dozens and dozens of Ethan’s learners come back to us years later and say, “That thing that happened in the game,” and they quote chapter and verse and character, “saved me a lot of trouble because I got to practice it in your class and I knew what I needed to do.” It’s creating that indelible impression in a learner’s memory that they can then retrieve and put into action later on in their career. It’s really magic.

Knowledge@Wharton: Can you give us a sneak peek about what’s coming up next at Wharton Interactive?

Mollick: Sure. Sarah and I, we’re both entrepreneurs, both started companies. And we have long since been thinking about, how do you help entrepreneurs get better at their job? Entrepreneurship is really tough because it involves all kinds of fields. You have to be an expert in negotiations, pitching, financing your business, and being able to explore new customer possibilities. We have been working on a simulation that has been running internally at Wharton for a long time, and pretty soon we hope to announce it outside of Wharton. It will allow people to have the experience of running a [startup] with all the support of expert entrepreneurs, of myself and other professors and all sorts of incredible interactive experiences. So, stay tuned.

I’m very excited that we’ll be able to announce that soon.

Three Branding Assumptions to Avoid

By Divya Parekh

It’s critical to understand the realities of effective branding so that brand design and success can be developed based on the target market rather than assumptions.

Entrepreneurs are flooded with materials and advisors on how to develop an effective brand. They advise that branding is important because it conveys to customers what they can expect from the company. They push entrepreneurial companies to design their brand as soon as possible.

However, there are several assumptions at the base of that kind of advice, and some assumptions are misconceptions.

Here is an overview of the assumptions and misconceptions as well as the realities. If you understand the realities and base your brand design process on these facts, you greatly increase your chances of succeeding.

Get the timing right Here, we have two misconceptions. In what I call the “Rite of Passage Misconception,” entrepreneurs often assume at the outset that their business is too small to start branding efforts. They think it is important to first test their product or service while they grow their company. The second incorrect assumption is what I call the “Lottery Misconception.” With this mindset, an entrepreneur thinks it is necessary to have a fantastic brand right at the beginning and hopes to get lucky and hit the mark.

Yes, it is important to develop your brand early on since your brand is foundational to your company’s success.

But an activity that is crucial to success is first spending time identifying your target audience — that is, your ideal customers in your broad market.

What do you need to know about your ideal customers before branding? First, what problems do they need to solve, what needs do they have? Then, what motivates them? When you understand this information, you will know how to design your brand to convey why your product or service is better than your competitors’ products at meeting those needs.

Your brand must show how your company’s product or service is different from competitors’ offerings in the way it solves customers’ problems. Do not neglect taking the time to research not only your competitors’ products or services but also their branding and how they market their offerings.

If you understand your ideal customers’ needs and motivations, you can design your brand to convey differentiation based on how your customers will perceive the value of your product or service rather than how your developers see the differentiation. There is a big difference!

An example of effective differentiation For example, take the Dyson brand. This British company has a customer-focused brand and, in 2017, the British public voted Dyson as the most reputable brand in the country.

Inventor James Dyson created the innovative Dual-Cyclone, bagless vacuum cleaner and, later, other products such as a bladeless fan that also cleans the air in a house. His first TV advertising campaign’s slogan was “Say goodbye to the bag.” Result: It became the fastest-selling vacuum cleaner in the UK. Why? Because he first researched his market and identified his ideal customers: consumers at home who wanted an easier, more efficient way to keep their homes clean. That branding slogan strongly connected with the target audience’s problem and needs.

So, back to the timing issue. I would venture to say that as soon as you know what you want to offer, it is time to identify your ideal customers and begin designing your brand with them in mind.

Get the brand image right It is a mistake to design your brand based on the assumption that ultimately a good brand and a good product are the same thing and will result in growing your business. This

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“Product Misconception” is not correct. The reality: Your brand is much more than the product. Your brand defines why your business exists – your purpose and mission.

Think of a well-known person, like the actor John Wayne.

You know his image so well that just saying or thinking his name brings to mind an image of his face and the spirit and integrity of his actions in various movies.

Consider your company’s brand as your company’s image.

The image should suggest the spirit of your company and what customers can expect. Your brand image should convey your company’s values. Why? Because it will help consumers identify with your company, believing they share the same values as your company. Those values highlight why your company exists and what you want your target audience to believe about your company.

Going back to the earlier example of the Dyson brand, the company’s values were innovation, simplicity and reliability.

Customers valued those same characteristics and realized the company’s products were built on that foundation and would give them what they wanted.

What about your logo, tagline, and other brand marketing collateral?

Here we have another mistaken assumption. I call it the “Identity System Misconception,” which refers to entrepreneurs who assume their development of a logo, packaging, website and other materials essentially creates the brand.

As you now know from what I explained earlier, you need to conduct considerable research to identify your ideal customers’ problems and needs before you create a tag line, logo, and other brand components.

Keep in mind that your tagline needs to indicate what you offer, and you need to convey that information in a way that addresses how customers will feel when they purchase your

product or service. Your logo becomes your visible identity, your company’s image.

Both your tag line and logo must be memorable. By that, I don’t mean that it just needs to be easy for consumers to remember. I mean that it must speak to consumers’ feelings about the value of purchasing your offering. They know value when they see it, and they will remember the value.

I worked with a B2B company that made the glaring mistake of spending too much time upfront on developing its logo, tag line, website, and other marketing collateral. They undertook these creations without first conducting research to understand the market and how the company’s brand aligned with consumer’s needs.

They assumed they knew the market because the company leaders came out of the corporate world and assumed their own needs in that world were the same as other consumers in the market. Based on that mistaken assumption, they placed all the consumers in their market in one bucket and did not take the time to segment them according to their needs.

Once they recognized the brand collateral materials did not align with the ideal customers’ needs or solve their problems, the company discontinued the use of those materials. A costly mistake!

So do not react to pressure to develop your brand until you know you are not moving forward based on misconceptions that typically lead to costly mistakes or even failure. It takes time, but it’s crucial to first do your research on the problems and needs of your ideal customers, as well as competitors’ offerings.

Divya Parekh writes entrepreneurial leadership books.

She founded Dreams Accelerator Inc., a client-first business growth agency. She is passionate about teaching strategies that empower people, sustain, and scale business growth.

Marry Brand and Demand to Unleash the Full Power of Personalization in ABM

By Michelle Yancey

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Technology has been wonderful for B2B marketers: It’s given them the ability to hyper-target with a degree of accuracy never before possible. But no matter how accurate your targeting may be, driving sales still depends on the effectiveness of the marketing message you deliver.

All the technological bells and whistles in the world can’t make up for a message that fails to resonate with its target on a personal and emotional level.

To successfully drive revenue in today’s highly competitive B2B environment, marketers must find ways to tie their brand-building and demand generation campaigns together.

Hyper-targeting and focused conversion efforts are a big part of the demand side, of course, but it’s important to also incorporate elements of the emotional heartstring-tugging that characterizes most brand advertising.

Successful campaigns must be driven by your customers’ emotions and unique challenges, not just by the product you are trying to sell them. That’s the only way to break through the noise and confusion of a B2B marketplace that has become, to put it mildly, “cluttered.”

ABM for the Win Account-based marketing (ABM) gives B2B marketers the ability to hyper-target customers and prospects with highly personalized messaging—and thus break through the clutter.

But there isn’t a magic ABM switch, and the challenge is, How do you effectively personalize content at scale?

Customers are looking for customization and personalization based on their unique set of goals and challenges. There is no one-size-fits-all solution, but customers do have one thing in common: They are all human. And at the most basic level, customers want to engage with B2B companies that understand their needs.

That bottom line—customers want customization and personalization—is something that traditional demand gen, persona-based marketing can’t sufficiently provide.

Tapping Into Brand for the Emotional Element So how do B2B marketers appeal to customers’ needs, challenges, and goals at the buyer-specific level? They start by showing empathy and understanding.

The brand campaign’s role in that conjoined effort is to inject an element of emotion into the mix by way of narrative: What is this person’s challenge? Can I empathize with that challenge? Can I build a relationship with my target based on my understanding of what they need?

If your brand and demand marketing efforts are properly aligned, you should be able to tap into your brand campaign to strike the right emotional notes in the personalized messaging for your demand campaign.

Options for Identifying Needs Personalization should be a defining characteristic of all

B2B marketing messaging, whether you’re targeting an entire organization, a group of decision-makers within that organization, or a specific buyer or other individual.

Achieving that level of personalization requires a thorough understanding of each organization’s unique needs at all levels. It cannot be built on the type of broad-based assumptions that underlie persona-based marketing.

Identifying those needs is an important first step, and there are several ways to go about it. Primary research, especially direct interviews with customers and prospects, can be highly informative if you have the time and budget for it. Another option is keyword research, which can provide insight into the goals and mindset of prospective customers.

One of the most valuable resources for needs identification available to B2B marketers is right at their fingertips: their counterparts on the sales side. Because salespeople and account reps are on the front lines, they often have firsthand knowledge and up-to-date insights on what their customers are talking about. Conversations with the sales team can help marketers spot trends and topics to use in their campaigns.

Marketing and Sales Alignment Personalization of marketing efforts can only reach its full potential when there is true alignment between Sales and Marketing.

Experience has shown that such a collaboration is most effective when it is a top-down phenomenon, ideally driven from the C-suite. Sales and Marketing alignment is most successful when leadership positions the initiative as essential to winning accounts and driving revenue.

The ability to personalize marketing messaging at all levels of an organization has become even more important since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The B2B buying cycle is still complex and it often involves multiple stakeholders, but buying decisions are trending toward greater centralization in the C-suite. That means personalization efforts must take into account not only discrete goals and pain points around revenue, costs, and the like but also the overall goals of the business. If C-level executives don’t feel that you understand implicitly what they are trying to accomplish, you won’t be considered.

Hyper-targeting, personalization, and ABM are a winning strategy for such an environment.

Michelle Yancey is group account director at Centerline Digital, where she is a champion of account-based marketing. She partners with Centerline’s Fortune 500 clients to solve unique marketing challenges in the everevolving digital landscape.

Our shiny new Zoom Brain – and how to keep creativity alive

By Martin Lindstrom

Recently, while a fellow author and I strolled the streets of London, he shared a secret with me that he’d never shared with anyone before. Over the past several years, he’d felt his creativity slipping away. He found it a struggle just to get a paragraph or two on paper.

“There’s something wrong with me,” he said. “Don’t you think?”

He isn’t alone. Only a couple of days before, another friend — the head of one of the world’s leading innovation labs — had revealed exactly the same thing to me.

Hearing these two friends’ experience of “writer’s block,” I remembered an experiment I conducted three years ago, totally ridding myself of my smart phone. The lost creativity these friends described brought back my sense of going “cold turkey.” Back then, adapting to not having a phone in my pocket, I’d felt precisely the same as these friends were feeling.

For the last few months, we’ve structured our lives around back-to-back Zoom calls, perfectly crafted Excel spread sheets, and complex PowerPoints. In the process, our brains have taken up stations on a cognitive assembly belt. What I call “linear thinking” has come to dominate our thought processes.

It may not sound like a big deal. We’re all adjusting, more or less — aren’t we? But I think it might, indeed, be a pretty big deal.

Many years ago, while exploring new concept innovations for LEGO, I studied creativity. In the past, kids were set loose with a big box of “generic” LEGO bricks, without any sort of instruction manual, and they’d been able to dream up the most amazing castles. Then, in the mid-1990s, things began to change. It was as if kids’ brains had sprung a leak, draining all their imagination. They had lost the ability to generate their own ideas. Computer games, Internet surfing, endless TV streams, and social media … all these demands on kids’ attention converted their disruptive thinking to linear thinking. LEGO’s response was to introduce “premanufactured fantasy materials.” LEGO began providing pre-written narratives with their colorful construction sets.

In hindsight, this is no different from what is happening today to us adults.

Think about it: When was the last time you set aside an hour (or even just a few minutes) to simply think - with a ‘safety distance’ to your smart phone and PC? When did you do something more quietly cognitive than jumping on another Teams call and attending to another set of linear thoughts?

I’ll bet it’s been quite a while since you took the time to “defragment” your brain, reflect, and generate a few new creative ideas.

Running at breakneck speed on this new Zoom hamsterwheel, we’re distancing ourselves from the disruptive, creative thoughts we used to have. We’ve stopped training the creative muscle that used to generate such amazing ideas.

We’ve let that muscle shrink into something resembling a raisin.

I asked Mark Thompson, Thinkers50’s top CEO coach,

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“How are chief executives coping?” He gained huge insights recently while keynoting the 2020 MIT Sloan Fellows virtual summit, where he hosted Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly, Hewlett Packard CEO Enrique Lores, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

Each of them shared stories about how they’re triaging this unsettled world: • Multiply the Touchpoints: Since every global company has teams scattered across continents, digital meetings have been the norm for a decade. The difference today, Bezos told Thompson, is that the entire workforce is isolated, “so now it’s necessary to multiply the touch points by great orders of magnitude.” Every CEO has tripled or quadrupled the frequency of calls to keep in touch with their leaders.

• Create Social Context: When you can’t go out for a drink with colleagues, why not share an online toast across time zones? “As a CEO, I’ve always found it challenging to maintain personal social context,” Lores shared with Thompson. “Lately I’ve been digitally parachuting into people’s kitchens, basements, and garages, where it’s appropriate to ask about their family and hobbies.” Is that your guitar or offroad bike?

• Feed Forward Climate: Research on employee engagement suggests psychological safety is paramount for leaders who want to unlock creativity and innovation.

For that reason, CHROs are keeping the CSuite mindful about capturing employee and customer engagement scores on a weekly basis. “During the crisis, we’ve evolved from ‘work at home’ to ‘work all the time’.”

This tends to create routine thinking rather than creative insights, Joly mused. “You’ve got to lead with empathy and make it safe to think outside the box, rather than

endlessly prosecuting past mistakes, sins, or uncertainty.”

• Diverse POVs: In his New York Times bestseller, Admired, Thompson studied connections between Gallup’s Most Admired People and Fortune’s Most Admired Companies.

He found that highly engaged employees (a quarter to a third of all workers) admire different aspects in their leaders than the overall workforce does. Thompson focused on what those highly engaged employees look for in their boss. What they admire most are leaders who give them more creative agency and authority to impact their work for customers, and who have the sense of humor and generous support to get the team through tough times. The more admired bosses combine a selfdeprecating sense of goofiness with a strong dose of humility, while encouraging inclusive, creative, diverse points of view.

Here’s my take on this. The thought of dropping off the Zoomhamster wheel may be so scary that most stay on and keep running. But we’re letting technology run us, rather than us running technology. In the early days of Steve Jobs’s career, he wanted Apple “to be seen as the catalyst of man’s mind.”

For a long time, one could argue this was true not only for Apple, but for the entire tech industry.

But times are changing, and we’d better be careful to keep our creative and strategic minds intact, before it’s too late.

Let’s ensure that we don’t end up being a ‘catalyst for technology’ instead.

Martin Lindstrom is the founder and chairman of Lindstrom Company, the world’s leading brand & culture transformation group, operating across five continents and more than 30 countries. TIME Magazine has named Lindstrom one of the “World’s 100 Most Influential People.”

NAVIGATING DIGITAL TURBULENCE

By Wharton Staff

Vigilant firms gain an edge when navigating the uncertainties of digital technologies by paying close attention to what is happening on their periphery and fostering organizational agility, so they are ready to act when the time is right. Below, Wharton’s George Day and Paul Schoemaker examine three key principles that underpin organizational vigilance and show how Adobe’s leaders used them to great effect.

This article is reprinted with permission by Management

and Business Review (MBR), which just launched this month. A “grassroots initiative to bridge practice, education and research,” MBR is offering readers the opportunity to download the first two issues free. You can visit MBR here to download the Winter 2021 issue or to subscribe.

At some point, nearly every leadership team will miss a critical signal that they could — and should — have caught.

In the past, these missed warnings might have moved slowly

enough to allow reactive organizations to regroup and respond. But today’s environment is one of digital turbulence where change is faster, erratic, and less predictable.

This condition of instability and fluctuation requires greater speed, the skilled management of uncertainty, and often transformative business models, while strongly penalizing tardy responses. To successfully navigate this relentless upheaval, firms must become more vigilant so they can see risks or opportunities sooner and act faster. [i] Vigilance is much more than a single individual’s heightened alertness; it is characterized by collective curiosity, candor, and a willingness to play the long game which must be nurtured throughout the firm. Above all, vigilance enables firms to anticipate threats, recognize opportunities sooner than rivals, and act when the time is right. Vigilant organizations deftly use market probes and experiments and then make small bets to explore emerging markets or technologies. In so doing, they create flexible options that are easy to unwind or expand as needed, giving them a head start when the fog of uncertainty lifts. Without this degree of flexibility, firms can only react to events as they go by and much of their freedom to maneuver is lost.

Adobe’s Digital Gamble By 2009, Adobe’s image-editing program Photoshop was so popular it had become a verb, joining the elite few like Xerox and Google. Yet its growth prospects were still sluggish and the ubiquity of smartphones soon allowed everyone to be their own photo editor. A steep drop in cloud computing storage costs, forecast to be as much as 40%-50% a year, loomed on the horizon. Adobe could clearly spot the emerging threat, with deep-pocket rivals like Google, Oracle, IBM or Microsoft likely to use this emerging digital capability to enter its market.

The leaders at Adobe worked quickly, redefining the threat of the cloud as an opportunity to imagine a new creative process combining desktop and mobile to offer new capabilities. In November 2011, the company moved from selling boxed software on disc, which gave the user a perpetual license to one iteration of the program, to a cloud-based subscription service for fifty dollars a month.[ii] Adobe’s most loyal customers were outraged by the shift to a software-as-aservice model, reluctant to rent rather than own and having to store their content in the cloud.[iii] But the company pressed forward and in May 2013, simply stopped providing upgrades for its boxed software; further innovations would be available only via the cloud.

Adobe’s calculated gamble has been handsomely rewarded: Its revenue more than doubled to $11.17 billion between 2011 and 2019, and net profits more than tripled from $832 million to $2,951 million. So how did Adobe exercise such farsighted vigilance and take advantage of this nascent opportunity before its potential rivals?

Vigilance is much more than a single individual’s heightened alertness; it is characterized by collective curiosity,

candor, and a willingness to play the long game which must be nurtured throughout the firm.

Vigilant companies like Adobe follow three principles for navigating digital turbulence. First, they direct their attention to the most vital and active parts of their orbit. Second, they instill a sense of prudent urgency throughout their organization. Finally, they build the array of skills needed to become more agile. Taken together, these three principles can surmount the destructive, siloed thinking that concentrates attention only on immediate tasks. Leaders who embrace them take a longer view that lets them see the future sooner.

How Digital Technologies Intensify Turbulence Digital technologies are transforming how we process information, learn, make decisions, and interact. If we consider Gordon Moore’s 1965 paper[iv] on computational trends as marking a starting point, the digital, computational and communications revolutions have been underway for more than 50 years with, to date, a roughly billion-fold improvement in performance. The dramatic improvements in digital fabrication brought about by these advances are just one example.[v] Today’s 3D additive printers are the beginning of a powerful shift in which data can be turned into objects, from food to furniture to golf clubs. The hyperlocalized production of (almost) anything may one day overcome the constraints of fragile global supply chains.

The interwoven nature of digital technologies is depicted in Figure One and suggests nearly endless possible combinations. The eight digital technologies shown in the outer ring as examples can be both sources and products of other digital advances, enabling further capabilities.

Figure 1

These new digital capabilities are themselves made possible by breathtaking advances in computer system performance, including processing, storage, communication, and data analysis, shown in the inner ring of Figure 1. For example, artificial intelligence (which comprises a set of smart technologies that can learn from their environments and take autonomous action) is fueled by rapid advances in neural

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networks and silicon level technology, the aggregation of storage in massive data centers, as well as a host of other symbiotic advances.[vi] These combinations of digital technology are usually complex and non-linear. When they are applied, unanticipated interactions often occur, either good or bad. Similarly, a technology that seems neither viable nor commercially useful can surprise incumbents by taking off abruptly when the stars align. Honeywell, for example, was blind-sided when Nest Labs came out with a sleek Internet-enabled unit which allowed harried commuters to remotely ensure that the house would be warm and lit when they arrived. Nest had been working on this convergence of technologies for years, often secretly and away from the prying eyes of rivals. Despite a long incubation period, some digital technologies can ignite very rapid change when everything falls into place.

Honeywell eventually caught up with Nest, but it lost three years by missing the moment.

No single technology creates turbulence on its own. Rather, the upheaval stems from the simultaneous maturing and intersection of several symbiotic technologies, engendering sharp declines in cost, new functions, and shared platforms to put them to work. The turbulence in the relevant markets is intensified by the unpredictability of these processes. One such intersection is biometrics — the use of iris scans, along with face, voice, and fingerprint recognition — to securely verify an individual’s identity. These systems are enabled by advances in mobility (smartphones with fingerprint scanning or facial recognition), artificial intelligence (to learn behavioral patterns), and the internet of things (a broad range of computing devices embedded in everyday objects). These creative combinations pave the way for even more advanced biometric applications, ranging from authenticating travelers and tracking medical data to screening those entering stadiums and theaters.

The leaders at Adobe worked quickly, redefining the threat of the cloud as an opportunity to imagine a new creative process combining desktop and mobile to offer new capabilities.

A creative combination of digital technologies, drawing on the expertise of apparently unrelated sectors, can also spark innovation. When Callaway began designing its latest line of golf clubs, it combined advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computerized fabrication to generate the best product designs.[vii] Where the designers had previously been limited to trying five to seven physical prototypes from crafted designs, digital technologies allowed them to create 15,000 virtual prototypes. An algorithm then helped to select the best design based on performance parameters such as balance, ball speed, and trajectory, while conforming to the requirements of the U.S. Golf Association.

The result was an award-winning design called the Epic Flash

which helped many amateur players achieve longer drives.

Algorithmic design is likely to transform other sectors as well, enabling the rapid testing of many design options according to user determined performance objectives, materials, budget restrictions and aesthetics. It also suggests the possibility of hyper-personalized designs for products ranging from furniture to automobiles, all ordered up as readily as bespoke clothing. Vigilant firms will be at the forefront of such markets.

Yet they must still be alert, lest their virtual designs lose touch with customer needs, and designers become mere custodians of an opaque digital process.

Most leadership teams recognize that they are in the midst of digital turbulence. Yet they also tire of generic warnings of impending disruption and wonder, ‘OK, but what should we do about it?’ Generic warnings do not help them to anticipate what lies around the corner when: • Digital platforms help new global players to emerge unexpectedly. China now has a considerable lead in processing mobile payments (roughly fifty times that of the U.S.). In just fifteen years, the number of Chinese firms in the Fortune Global 500 has increased by more than twenty times.

• Market boundaries are blurring and dissolving.

“Fintechs,” or financial technologies, are changing not only how customers conduct transactions and secure loans, but also the nature of money itself. Some countries (like Bermuda and Switzerland) and companies are making big bets on cryptocurrencies, rooted in blockchain technology, which decentralize electronic exchanges of value and may hasten the obsolescence of cash. Business ecosystems are becoming more complex and difficult to navigate. This week’s competitor may become next week’s supplier, customer, or partner, or all three. Although Apple and Samsung compete fiercely in the mobile phone market, Apple at the same time relies on Samsung for key phone components.

• The pace of change keeps accelerating and traditional, hierarchical organizations are harder and harder pressed to keep up. In just two years, the Chinese video app TikTok, which supports the creation, sharing, and finding of short music videos, became one of the most downloaded mobile apps, just behind Facebook.

Meanwhile, organizations also grapple with continual changes in the requirements of stakeholders and customers, the strategies of competitors, the availability of talent and other resources, and the political and regulatory environment.

Because of the uncertainty of digital advances, our vision of the future may rest on unexamined and misleading assumptions. For example, the rapid acceptance of social media platforms conveniently obscured privacy concerns.

Only with the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018 — in which Facebook was revealed to have shared profiles without user permission or knowledge — did it dawn on people that their intimate digital data was being passed around in ways

they never intended. As Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO, later admitted, “we were too slow to spot this and too slow to act. That is on us.”[viii] It is ironic that digital innovators and data masters such as Facebook or Google failed, themselves, to be vigilant about broader societal issues or consumer reactions. It can be dangerous for companies to assume that an advance which improves their services or products will necessarily satisfy customers. Facebook, Google’s search engine, and Intuit’s Quicken all created customer value by being easy to use, saving time, reducing risk, and improving productivity.

But such technologies can carry unintended consequences or blind spots. Google Glass ran into such problems when it launched eyeglasses that included a computer display inside one lens, allowing wearers to communicate with the Internet using natural language voice commands. Although the product was admired as a technological tour de force, it lacked style and fashion appeal and set off alarms about possible privacy violations. Vigilant companies experiment broadly because they are alert to the uncertainty of markets, technology, products, regulations or societal reactions with regard to digital innovation. They learn as much as possible from pilot projects and only commit fully when the time is right.

Hacking and cybersecurity breaches present an everincreasing risk to digital innovators, both directly and through weaknesses in their corporate ecosystems. Mastercard and Visa, for example, were hacked through their payment processor, Heartland Payment Systems, which processes about 100 million transactions monthly for thousands of vendors. This particular hack was accomplished with Russianbacked spyware and resulted in the theft of 134 million credit card numbers. Such dangers fuel the existing turbulence.

Because digital technologies interact not only with each other but with outside forces, their confluences are difficult to time or predict. We can only suggest what to expect.

Market boundaries are blurring and dissolving…. This week’s competitor may become next week’s supplier, customer, or partner, or all three.

Bane or Boon to the Firm?

Because they are endlessly combinative, digital technologies cut both ways. On one side, they force leaders to wade through an enormous volume of information — much of it irrelevant — to discover vital indications. As Nate Silver noted, “Information is no longer a scarce commodity…but relatively little of it is useful, because useless data distracts us from the truth.” [ix] The cybersecurity breaches at Target, AOL and several credit scoring firms were worsened by the numerous false alarms which preceded them. That boy had cried wolf before. By the time hackers discovered how to invade the entire system and seize sensitive customer data, the overload of misleading warnings had lulled frontline computer analysts into dangerous complacency.

Advances in digital technology can also accidentally nurture

internal problems and allow them to fester out of sight.

Customer service personnel at Wells Fargo secretly created over two-million unauthorized accounts using digital methods and existing customer data. The scheme continued for years until, by the end of 2019, the bank was facing civil and criminal suits approaching $3.0 billion. Before the scandal ran its course, Wells Fargo fired 5,300 employees, including the CEO. [x] At its root, the fraud succeeded because the bank’s systems allowed customers to open accounts without going to a branch or providing an ink signature. Tellers, agents, and even automated systems, could therefore create what appeared to be legitimate accounts, selecting a “no statements” option so the new stealth accounts would not announce themselves.

But the digital sword is two-edged and can sometimes be turned on itself, fighting fire with fire. The problem of excessive cybersecurity alerts is being partially solved using artificial intelligence that filters out false alarms, allowing technicians to concentrate on genuine warnings. An Alphabet offshoot[xi] called Chronicle, for example, helps organizations to defend against cyberattacks before they can reach internal networks and cause harm. Still, cybersecurity is likely to remain a catand-mouse game, and the computerized cats will have to become more aggressive. Vigilant leaders who wish to protect their business interests will have to learn how to harness new digital security capabilities.

Advances in digital technology can also work to the advantage of established players in other ways. Although a single blog post can shatter consumers’ confidence in product quality, social media also allows direct connections with customers and can provide timely warnings when errors occur. Similarly, low-cost digital competitors may emerge from unexpected sectors or geographies, but their entry is often signaled by social media activity. Vigilant firms detect these early warning signs sooner which gives them extra time to respond to new entrants.[xii] Navigating Digital Turbulence with Vigilance Why are some firms adept at anticipating the opportunities and threats of digital turbulence, while others struggle to keep up? Our research shows that those who succeed have developed superior vigilance which they routinely exercise through deeply embedded organizational processes. While any organization can be blindsided at times, vigilant firms respond better. They know that thinking “it will never happen to us” is a false comfort. They may also know that weaker competitors are more vulnerable; as the joke goes, “I don’t have to outrun the bear… I just have to outrun you.” Strategic leaders in vigilant firms keep three navigation principles always in mind: Navigation Principle 1: Paying attention is deliberate. Vigilant organizations carefully discern which of a bewildering array of external and internal information to attend to, and which to ignore. They know that attention is the scarcest of all organizational resources and how it is used is vital to understanding and responding to an array of pressing issues each day. Struggling to pay attention to everything produces much the same results as paying attention to nothing. As

Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon wrote in 1971, “[A] wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. More information is not always a good thing if it leads to blinkered thinking and analysis paralysis.”[xiii] So, how should leaders allocate their organization’s limited attention and their own? In vulnerable firms, leaders direct most of their attention toward current operations in an effort to meet short-term goals. Their scarce remaining time goes to unexpected events, unwelcome surprises, or internal political tensions. Such leaders seldom have time left to scrutinize the big picture and discuss the future. In consequence, their response to unexpected change tends to be weak, fragmented, and rushed.

When Alan Mulally took over as the CEO of Ford in 2006, the survival of the company was in question. It had lost 25% of its market share in seven years and was hemorrhaging cash.

One of Mullaly’s first moves was to bring candor and vigilance to the senior leadership team’s Thursday morning meetings.

Previously, those weekly meetings were reputed to be like combat zones,[xiv] with executives scrutinizing one another for any vulnerability and focusing on self-preservation rather than collaboration. Their presentations were carefully vetted and rehearsed in advance, to avoid surprises.

No single technology creates turbulence on its own.

Mulally started each meeting by inviting senior executives to share their internal problems and describe any anomalies they had noticed outside the company. What troubles are you facing? What puzzles you and why? What does it mean for the company and what can we do about it? His frank approach altered the tone of the meeting so completely that at first, no one volunteered any external stirrings that puzzled them. As Mulally persisted in searching for obstacles and anomalies, candidly sharing his own concerns, he pushed the team to widen their perspective and expand their views.

Over time, they become completely honest about their own experience and more open to outside ideas.

Mark Fields, who succeeded Mulally as CEO, noted that, in the old Ford culture, talking about problems was viewed as a sign of weakness. Mulally challenged this macho view, redefining discussing problems and admitting collective ignorance early as signs of strength which allowed leaders to tackle potential upsets in a timely manner. This profound change in perspective paid off for Ford. When Alan Mulally came on board in 2006, the company was facing $17 billion in losses. Three years later, the company proposed a financing plan which netted it $23.5 billion in new loans, a clear sign of Wall Street’s confidence.[xv] Navigation Principle 2: Adopt a new perspective about speed. Once organizations can sense incipient change and are beginning to understand what it might mean, they need to decide what action to take. In the maelstrom of digital turbulence, speed is a useful creed, but haste is not. Delays tend to increase the damage and narrow the range of opportunities available. The sooner the company spots the situation, the more time it has to create strategic options which

it can then exercise when the time is right. This extra planning time helps in avoiding hasty and irreversible investments, and in reaping the competitive benefits of moving first, whether to establish a preemptive position or forestall a snowballing scandal.[xvi] Just because the clock of business is whirring faster, doesn’t mean leaders need to operate in haste. Being faster to act than rivals is about being ready for action at all times, and the first step is early detection and understanding by means of probing questions and exploratory forays. Only through clarity can leaders orchestrate the multiple options and contingency plans which comprise organizational preparedness. The aim of early detection is to avoid being boxed in by the actions of rivals and ensuring broad flexibility later, when circumstances call for quick or bold action. The upshot is that managers can act on their own terms rather than being forced to react to someone else’s initiative.

Navigation Principle 3: Vigilance fosters agility. Organizations at the bleeding edge of digital turbulence are moving from a comparatively comfortable and familiar risky environment (where goals can be specified, and probabilities calculated) toward the deep uncertainty of unknown unknowns. As Peter Drucker put it, we can navigate familiar environments by doing things right, whereas in turbulent times we must do the right things. So relying on our ordinary capabilities to efficiently carry out current processes, supply chain management, routine transactions, and delivering reliable performance, is not enough when digital disruptions strike.

To navigate their deep uncertainty, mangers require the tools of vigilance, rooted in three dynamic capabilities: sensing change early, seizing strategic opportunities at the right time, and transforming the organization so that it stays ahead.

Companies which master these three skill sets, and adroitly use the organizational systems that support them, can become truly vigilant.[xvii] Which of these supporting abilities managers should emphasize most depends greatly on the situation. In exploring alternative energy sources that would make the best use of their biotech expertise, DuPont had many high-risk, capitalintensive opportunities to consider. Mastery of real-options analysis thus became an essential capability for the company.

Meanwhile, organizations deploying widely available digital technologies, requiring smaller investments in tighter time frames, require different competencies. When Novartis equipped its sales representatives with interactive digital devices, so they could engage in consultative dialogues with prescribing doctors, it relied on highly tuned vigilant learning. [xviii] In each of these different cases, at least six supporting capabilities were deployed, ranging from peripheral scanning and real options analysis, to organizational redesign and changes in company culture, with the importance of each varying according to their circumstance.

With the right set of dynamic capabilities in place, an organization becomes agile amidst high turbulence. Agility here means the ability to quickly and adroitly move resources into higher value activities before rivals do. Agile strategies are used to form a temporary “scrum” team to tackle an emerging opportunity or address a sudden threat. A small team of three to nine people with the diverse skills needed

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for each issue or project can be quickly assembled. These self-managing teams follow a transparent process, using design thinking to develop and test prototype solutions, learning rapidly as they go. This approach is the antithesis of traditional, cumbersome, top-down innovation processes which require repetitive meetings, extensive documentation, and myriad other bureaucratic impediments.

Future Shock Is Still Here Few people are adept at seeing around the next corner, and even fewer know what to do about what’s coming. Alvin Toffler[xix] was an exception. In 1970, he predicted that the accelerating pace of society’s change would initially be disruptive before becoming normal, and would continue to intensify. Toffler labeled this, “future shock…a dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future” and characterized by “confusional breakdowns” in every structure of society. Nearly fifty years later, it is no longer the premature arrival of the future that sickens executive teams, their boards, investors, and society; it is their own belated responses to that arrival.

The business leadership challenge of the future will be to blend big data, machine learning, human judgment, and artificial intelligence to create viable and evolving competitive advantages — and to do it in a way that is proactive, not reactive. By building an enhanced capacity for vigilance, leadership teams can stay alert, ready to anticipate potential threats and opportunities, and able to confront a fast-forward digital reality.

Endnotes [i] We first presented this concept of vigilance in George S. Day and Paul J. H. Schoemaker, “Are You a Vigilant Leader?” MIT Sloan Management Review 40 (Spring 2008): 43-51. The notion of strategic vigilance has many forebears including John Boyd’s unpublished OODA loop for military strategy (observe, orient, decide, act); See https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODAloop. [ii] Useful sources on Adobe included: Sunil Gupta and Lauren Barley, “Reinventing Adobe,” Case 9-514066, Harvard Business School, January 20, 2015, 11, and Martin Ihrig, Ian MacMillan, and Jill Steinhour, “Mapping Critical Knowledge for Digital Transformation,” Knowledge@ Wharton, July 6, 2017, https://knowledge.wharton.upenn. edu/article/management -knowledge-assets/. [iii] The protests were in response to a petition: Derek Schoffstatt, “Adobe Systems: Eliminate the Mandatory Creative Subscription,” Change.org, May 6, 2013. [iv] Gordon E Moore, “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits,” Electronics 38, no. 8 (April 19, 1965): 114. [v] Neil Gershenfeld and Alan Gershenfeld, Designing Reality: How to Survive and Thrive in the 3rd Digital Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 2017). [vi] Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb, Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial

Intelligence (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2018). [vii] Spencer Bailey, “Remade by Data,” Fortune (March 1, 2019), 99-101. [viii] photo.

Wall Street Journal, September 6, 2018, front-page

[ix] Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail, But Some Don’t (New York: Penguin Press, 2012). [x] See Matt Egan, “Wells Fargo Strips CEO and 7 Top Execs of 2016 Bonuses,” CNN Business, March 1, 2017, http://money.cnn.com/2017/03/01/investing/wells-fargostrips-ceo-bonus-fake-account-scandal/. [xi] Nick Summers, “Inside Chronicle, Alphabet’s Cybersecurity Moonshot,” Engadget, November 30, 2018. [xii] The account fraud scandal was a result of aggressive sales tactics that, in turn, were a response to pressures from higher up. [xiii] Hebert A. Simon, “Designing Organizations for an Information Rich World,” in Computers, Communication and the Public Interest, ed. Martin Greenberger (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971), 37-72, 40-41. For a review of the latest thinking on organizational attention, see William Ocasio, “Attention to Attention,” Organization Science 22, no. 5 (September/October 2011): 1286-1296. [xiv] Sarah M. Caldicott, “Why Ford’s Alan Mullaly Is an Innovation CEO for the Record Books,” Forbes, June 25, 2014. For a deeper discussion, also see Harbir Singh and Mike Useem, The Leader’s Checklist (Philadelphia: Wharton School Press, 2017). [xv] See “24/7 Wall Street: Interview with Ford CEO Alan Mulally, September 16, 2009, http://www. newsweek.com/247-wall-street-interview-ford-ceo-alanmulally-79611. [xvi] George Stalk, Competing Against Time: How TimeBased Competition Is Reshaping Global Markets (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990); William R. Tobert, Action Inquiry: The Secret of Timely and Transforming Leadership (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2004); and Colin Price, Accelerating Performance (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2017). [xvii] David J. Teece, Margaret Peteraf, and Solivi Leiih, “Dynamic Capabilities and Organizational Agility: Risk, Uncertainty and Entrepreneurial Management in the Innovation Economy,” California Management Review 58, no. 4 (Summer 2016): 13-35. [xviii] George S. Day and Paul J.H. Schoemaker, “Adapting to Fast-Changing Markets and Technologies,” California Management Review, 58 Summer 2016, 59-77. [xix] Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Bantam Books, 1971). He defined future shock as “the distress, both physical and psychological that arises from an overload of the human organism’s adaptive systems…the human response to overstimulation.”

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Putting a new ‘ seal ‘ of approval on advertising

By Todd Wasserman

New York agency Walrus sprung to life 15 years ago. In 2005, Frances Webster and colleague and spouse Deacon Webster had learned that the agency they were working for, Mad Dogs and Englishman, would close. (It has since reopened.)

That was a Friday and the following Monday, the two opened Walrus with a bunch of account people and five accounts.

The intervening decade and a half were a time of rapid change for the industry. “It’s just so much faster and so much cheaper,” said Webster. “I mean, people are shooting movies now on iPhones, you know, good ones. Yeah. Back then, back then there wasn’t even an iPhone.”

Webster said the rapid digitization of media has had little effect on the role of advertising, which he said is still viewed as interruptive. Still, there is a small portion of advertising that people like and the agency’s mission is to make more of that kind of advertising.

Examples from the agency include ads for stool softener Colace that are designed to run as people are waiting for their videos to load and Feats of Middle Age, a campaign for magnesium brand Slow-Mag MG that features accomplishments like Getting Out of the Pool Without Using the Ladder rendered in comic-book style.

As Webster explains, changing how the world feels about advertising is a lofty goal, but “we’ve tried to put that lens over all the work that we make,” he said. “Would we be ashamed if our friends saw it? Or would they like us for it and want to tell their friends that this is what we do?”

The combination of a real-life perspective on how the work is perceived along with the ability to make funny ads is a hallmark of Walrus’ work. “The key is just putting the audience first,” said Frances Webster, the agency’s cofounder. At the same time, Walrus is cognizant that the messaging has to work for clients.

“I think it’s no surprise that the world hates advertising 99 percent of the time—it interrupts their web search experience and gets in the way of their shows, and it kind of yells at them. But there is a small portion of it out there that people actually like,” said Webster. “So we want to make more of that.”

I am a veteran ad industry journalist with a fondness for tech. I have also witnessed first-hand the sweeping changes in the media landscape over the past two or three decades. I was the final editor of Adweek’s Brandweek and was the founding business editor of Mashable.

Colliding Work, Personal Values Underscores Need for Purpose-Led Brand Culture

By Allyssa Kennedy

Brands that empower their employees to act with them in their sustainability plan — and let their brand culture guide the creation of that plan — reap benefits. To foster a purpose-led brand culture, brands need to fuse these five elements ...

In 2020, work and personal lives collided as offices closed and professionals carved out new home offices (who needs a dining room, anyway?). Likewise, more and more employees are recognizing that who they work for can have just as big an impact on the planet and people as their personal actions.

In a consumer research study conducted early this year, Barkley found that four in five people believe it is important to align their personal values and beliefs with the those of the places where they work. We see this as the fusion of purpose and sustainability. And employees who feel positively about the impact they can make at work are typically happier, less likely to leave, and more engaged in their work — producing higher-quality outputs.

You now might be thinking, “Yes! We should do that!” If only it were so simple.

Purpose-led culture is not easy to operationalize. It can’t simply be a statement on the wall. But it is a critical strategy for brands to help them reach their own sustainability goals.

It’s about winning inside to win outside. Brands that empower their employees to act with them in their sustainability plan reap benefits. Brands that let their brand culture guide the creation of that sustainability action plan are the ones who earn a competitive advantage.

So, what exactly is brand culture?

While culture is the values, beliefs and behaviors that employees experience while working for an organization; brand culture is the alignment of those internal values, beliefs and behaviors with how that brand shows up in the world.

Southwest Airlines is a good example of this idea in practice.

The brand’s purpose is: ‘Connect people to what’s important in their lives through friendly, reliable and low-cost air travel.”

The airline’s dedication to service, both to passengers and to each other, defines its brand culture. Southwest continues to strengthen that brand culture by celebrating acts of service both publicly and internally.

To foster a purpose-led brand culture, brands need to fuse these five elements: 1. Know your why. Defining your brand’s purpose is an obvious first step in creating a purpose-led culture. What is the intersection of what your brand does and how it can positively impact the people and planet? There are many ways to craft a purpose statement; but at the core, a purpose should be 1) meaningful — communicating your values and beliefs in a way that ignites the hearts and minds of your core audience; and, 2) actionable — inspiring initiatives that drive progress.

It’s also helpful to hire employees whose values align to your company values. A colleague of mine, Philippa, who used to work at Ben & Jerry’s, has said that Jerry (yes, he’s a real person) would often say it was far more effective for the company to hire someone who was passionate about the company’s social mission than hire for technical skills. The latter could be taught on the job, but the former is much harder to replicate.

This alignment of values can only come when a brand is clear about what it stands for.

2. Communicate your purpose internally first. You now have a purpose statement. Great! Don’t let your employees first learn about it in news coverage about your sustainability plan. As another colleague of mine, Jimmy Keown, explains in the upcoming book The Culture Advantage: “Oftentimes, sustainability programs don’t feel very real to employees, because they can’t participate. So, finding ways for more people to participate in organizations is really a good way to close the Brand Culture Action Gap, because people find again that sense of belonging beyond just words and what they see within the marketplace.”

The Brand Culture Action Gap refers to the discrepancy between what employees have identified as the most important brand culture attributes and what they believe to be true of their work experience. Making internal communication a priority is a simple step; and as Jimmy says, finding ways for employees to participate can help close this gap. Which brings us to the next point: 3. Involve employees in the creation of your sustainability plan. Employees are a brand’s greatest asset in reaching its sustainability goals; so make sure they are at the table when it comes time to ideate initiatives, programs and partners in support of your company’s commitments.

Eileen Fisher — founder of the leading women’s apparel brand aimed at providing clothes for a simple, sustainable wardrobe — agrees. Despite efforts to educate her employees on the importance of sustainability and the impact of the apparel industry, it wasn’t until her organization went through a series of cross-departmental workshops in 2013 that employees aligned on 2020 goals — including sourcing 100 percent sustainable materials.

In a recent Forbes article, Fisher was quoted as saying: “People really come with what’s the best for the company, what’s the best for the planet, what’s the best work we can do here, what’s the best product we can deliver, what’s best for the customer; and it’s really this kind of selfless, kind of egoless way of collaborating and being together, and searching always to solve the problems or find the best solutions.”

Having representation from across the organization will elicit new thinking, uncover stories that show your purpose in action, and bring your employees along on the journey toward reaching your sustainability goals — making it more likely that your company will achieve them. After all, employees are the ones who have the day-to-day power to

make change. Enter point four: 4. Enable and empower people to act. Although your company may have a core group responsible for developing and reporting on a sustainability plan, they can’t be the only ones responsible for results.

For example, many Unilever brands have a clear brand purpose backed up by sustainability action. This structure is by design. The organization has a relatively small central sustainability team; but it has a strong network of “sustainability champions” across functions, business units and brands.

For complex transformational change within an organization, it requires everyone from innovation to HR to distribution to marketing to think differently and collaborate on the best ways to solve pressing issues. One way to create accountability is to incorporate sustainability goals into performance reviews. But before you do that, brands must help employees understand what the company’s goals mean, how they are relevant to their job and what they can do to enact change.

There is also a growing trend among leading sustainable companies to help their employees discover their personal purpose. KPMG’s Higher Purpose initiative from 2014 is one such effort.

When employees can align their role to what the company is trying to accomplish, they find more meaning in their job.

Brands with successful sustainability programs will harness the power of their employees’ passion and create accountability across teams, through systems and structures that allow them to act on the strategy within their own role.

5. Celebrate actions that reinforce your brand culture. As humans, we are hardwired for reward. Whenever our brain’s reward circuit is activated, it tells us that something is worth remembering and repeating. Companies that succeed at building a purpose-led brand culture take time to create rituals that reward those behaviors.

At Barkley, one ritual we have is to recognize individuals with gratitudes. We share gratitudes at the beginning of every meeting for individuals or teams who have gone the extra mile, through heartfelt messages that recognize the positive contribution the individual or team has made.

Recognition of those that live the brand culture is key to developing and fostering a purpose-led culture.

By taking all of these factors into consideration, brands can move beyond simply stating their values — and instead, start cultivating a company culture that acts on those values and celebrates those who join them in making a positive impact.

Brand culture is a central component of any successful sustainability strategy; and, in a time when personal and professional collision is the reality, purpose-led brand culture is the best strategy for winning inside and out.

Allyssa Kennedy is an Account Director within Barkley’s Purpose and Sustainability group. For more than a decade, Allyssa has helped brands define, live and communicate their purpose inside and outside of their organizations.

Marketers: Your Tech Stack Is Hollow

By Vijay Chittoor

Marketing and technology is a marriage. For better or worse, it’s a partnership where each side relies on each other and helps bring out the best versions of themselves. Without being empowered by the right tech foundation — one that’s fast, scalable and interconnected — it’s impossible for marketers

to succeed today.

Prompting this relationship is marketing’s growing role in the customer experience (CX). Marketing is no longer responsible for driving customers to the brand’s store, branch, website or app where the customer experience takes place. Today,

marketers are increasingly entrusted with taking the experience to the customer, making marketing ever more closely entwined in the customer experience.

This new CX role, however, brings a new set of complexities.

Marketers need to make and act on customer engagement decisions faster than ever before. Not to mention, they need to do so on an increasing number of channels.

However, marketers are finding that their customer engagement initiatives are perpetually falling flat because their tech stacks are ill-equipped to keep pace with the drastic shifts in customer behavior over recent years. Marketing technologies can’t fulfill the new customer engagement dynamics because they were built to support a single channel and a one-directional relationship with customers. More importantly, martech stacks are failing marketers because they are hollow; they operate without a core customer foundation that connects and powers its channels and platforms around customers’ needs and intentions.

Luckily, there’s a new solution to fix that: a customer data platform (CDP) that acts as a smart hub, which centralized customer experience decisioning across channels based on a unified customer understanding.

The Proliferation Of Disjointed Channel ‘Spokes’ How is it that martech stacks, which are built with cutting-edge technologies, are missing such a foundational component?

Marketers’ tech stacks and organization structures were traditionally built around channels rather than around the customer. With rapid digitization in recent years, new channels multiplied — and so did new applications for marketers to add to the stack. Solutions such as CRMs, ESPs, mobile marketing platforms and others were brought on to solve very specific use cases and address distinct channels.

It’s no wonder that the average martech stack now has 28 platforms.

Yet with over 8,000 martech platforms available today, it’s not specific platforms that should take the blame but rather the structure of the platforms in the stack. When marketers were only responsible for delivering brand messages on select channels, independent platforms that focused on the requirements of the channel were sufficient. However, as the marketer’s role within CX evolved, their tech stacks remained static, siloed and incapable of supporting a customer journey sliced across different platforms and channels.

Now, marketers are finding that they are operating off a disjointed set of tools that operate virtually independently and barely communicate rather than off a tightly integrated network of technologies. Their tech stacks are, in fact, hollow.

Hollow Stacks: The Missing Customer Core Everything in marketing begins and ends with a fundamental understanding of the customer. Therefore, an optimal tech stack needs a complete, real-time customer view to guide it.

For most organizations, this isn’t how their stacks were constructed. Rather, every single marketing channel has its own data and siloed understanding of customers, and these data sources rarely feed into one another. Further, customer data from the brand’s owned properties (e.g. stores, digital apps) is barely integrated into these channel applications.

Martech stacks are void of a unified customer data and

experience foundation. They lack a comprehensive, realtime customer understanding and the shared, centralized decision-making across channels to unite all marketing activities around how to best engage each customer.

This creates a hollow martech stack that executes without real purpose or connectedness. Disconnected data then leads to disconnected execution across channels because there’s no means to convert customer data into deep understanding to inform the right experiences across customer touchpoints.

There’s no way to ensure every customer interaction stays in sync with the rest of the CX experience. It’s no surprise, then, that marketers use only 58% of martech’s potential.

Band-aid solutions, such as continuously adding more new tech, haven’t been working. Marketers need a permanent fix, and they need it to be future-proofed as their tech stacks will inevitably continue to evolve.

The Fix: The CDP As A ‘Smart Hub’ To fill in this void, marketers need a central “smart hub” to connect and guide their numerous channels and applications.

A smart hub serves to unite disconnected stacks around a shared, real-time customer understanding and provides a single point of control from which to base customer engagement decisions and guide execution across channels.

Luckily, with technology advancements in recent years, a new breed of CDPs has emerged to fit the bill. While many CDPs have focused on data integration and profile unification, according to leading analyst firm Gartner, Inc., smart hub CDPs go beyond unifying data to also centralize decisioning about how to best engage each customer across channels. A true smart hub CDP has three core components: • Data unification that integrates any data source and combines historic, real-time and predicted customer behaviors from across all channels into unified profiles of every known and anonymous customer.

• Smart decisioning that uses AI and predictive intelligence to extract insights from customer data and uses it to instantly trigger the next best action across channels.

• Distribution hub that has a marketer-friendly user interface and seamless integrations with all of your applications and channels.

Beyond the core components, look for a smart hub CDP vendor that can be a strategic partner and can help guide you in shifting from channel-centric to customer-centric engagement that marketing’s role now demands. With the right partner, you should quickly discover that smart hub CDPs provide not only “data fidelity” but also “decision agility” across the entire customer journey.

In today’s digitally connected world, marketers are only as good as the technologies that power them. Marketers will never meet customers’ rising expectations or turn customer experience into their competitive advantage until they have a connected customer core powering their tech stacks.

Cofounder & CEO at Blueshift (current), pioneering AIPowered Customer Engagement. Previously co-founder & CEO at Mertado (acquired by Groupon to become Groupon Goods). Early employee at Kosmix (acquired

by Walmart to become @WalmartLabs).

What We Can Learn From E-commerce in China

By Beth Rimbey

China’s integrated ecosystems merge search, social, and retail.

When it comes to retail, Asia is where the action is. With a huge market, high mobile use, and integrated ecosystems for social, search, and e-commerce, the opportunities are enormous for companies that can break in. Harikesh S. Nair, professor of marketing, explains the opportunities and the risks of entering the Chinese retail market.

Full Transcript WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM E-COMMERCE IN CHINA It’s very important for us in the West to understand that Asia is where the action is, and people in retail will already know this. But the bulk of consumer purchase and growth in retail is shifting towards Asia.

To give you a sense for the scale of China, if you take every dollar that was spent online in the United States last year, that came to roughly $500 to $600 billion, China alone last year was $1.3 trillion, which means China is larger than the US, plus UK, plus Japan, plus Germany, plus Spain and all of these markets combined. So we should spend some time thinking about what’s going on there, especially with respect to retail and to marketing.

WHAT IS THE STATUS OF RETAIL IN CHINA TODAY? The first thing to understand about China is that it’s a very large population and roughly 50% of that population is on the cell phone and is connected to the internet. So you are

looking at roughly 700 to 800 million users who are on the phone compared to about 300 million users in the United States. And the phone is a very potent tracking device, and the phone is actually creating a substantial impact on the lives of individuals through e-commerce. The offline retail experience is quite bad, quite poor in China. Offline stores have poor quality, very little variety. Targetability was very poor, prices were very high.

Enter e-commerce, Alibaba, JD, Tencent, these large companies. For example, for a user sitting in a small town in China who is typically exposed to five retail stores with potentially say 50 different types of shirts. You can log into the phone and get access to 10,000 different shirts available at much cheaper prices and delivered to you within one day.

INTEGRATED ECOSYSTEMS Unlike the United States where we have now walled gardens in technology, where social is within Facebook and e-commerce is within Amazon and search is within Google, these platforms have kind of merged in China to produce two very large ecosystems, the Alibaba ecosystem and the Tencent ecosystem. And if you are within one of these ecosystems, search, social, commerce, logistics, payments, et cetera, are seamlessly blended together.

WHAT ROLE DOES SOCIAL MEDIA PLAY? Two interesting things about the social media and retail

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intersection in China are worth noting. One is that within WeChat, which is a large social media platform, there is now the ability of every small retailer to have a storefront that is seamlessly connected to the social enterprise or the social network. And that store front will allow you to generate engagement with your users and convert that engagement into a selling opportunity.

Another aspect that is worth noting is what is coming out of China referred to as social commerce. And the most famous company that is doing this is a company called Pinduoduo. There is a huge desire by companies in order to get engagement, advertising and messaging amongst users.

And the insight of this company is, “Why don’t we just pay users to generate engagement with their friends.” And this always existed in marketing, we call it referral marketing.

But the way they implemented it was an interesting business model. You would get a reduction in the price of any product that you want as a function of the number of users that you bring in. Or alternatively, you could get a very massive price reduction if you posted a promotion sent by the brand to your social media feed, et cetera.

So they have been able to bring down the prices of a large number of products quite dramatically and make it affordable to users in tier two cities in China, which is where the massive opportunity arises.

THE OPPORTUNITY If you look at the United States, if you take all the dollars that are spent on retail and ask what proportion of that is in e-commerce, it’s roughly 12%. In China, it’s about 16, 17%.

One way to think about it is 83% of the market is still open, and it’s a massive market. So there’s lots of room for lots of companies, including the Chinese companies.

It’s not easy however, because it’s a local market and models that may work in the West will not work in China without supporting. And some brands have done a great job of this, such as Apple or Walmart. But some brands have failed too, for example, Amazon failed in China so if you have the right kind of localization strategy, it is possible to win in a very large market WHAT ARE THE RISKS? Now the risk is twofold. China is a country where government regulation is a substantial source of investor risk and as regulation changes or the government changes its stance on protectionist laws, or how they think about e-commerce or the propagation of content that can have a massive impact on the business, so one has to go in with their eyes wide open.

A second source of risk is a competition with incumbents is not easy. For example, in e-commerce you have two ecosystems which are vertically integrated into content, into payments, into logistics, into social media and into an advertising business. And these competitors are fearsome, they understand the local market well and it’s not that easy to compete.

The marketplace is large enough to allow for many players and I think the general view of a lot of businesses that are looking in this area is of collaboration rather than competition.

I think we should all think of it as a massive market.

ACTING ON TRENDS MAY DETERMINE WHETHER A BRAND SURVIVES

By Warc Staff

The end of the year brings a welter of articles about trends, and while it’s important to have an understanding of relevant ones – which may not always be directly related to a brand’s own sector – what is ultimately most important is whether or not a business acts on them.

Trends are not actually very hard to find, according to Verity Elgee, associate director at Savanta. “Many are heard and discussed, maybe at the pub, but they go unnoticed,” she told the recent Festival of Marketing. “They’re like an untapped potential.”

Her view is that they are rather like a storm approaching.

“You have to spot them early, monitor them and plan for them.”

The thing about trends, she added, is that spotting them is only half the battle. “We have to look at trends and be open to them but, more importantly, we have to act on them – and the ability to act is what will determine survival.”

Savanta places trends into one of three categories: • residual: looking back to trends that have already

happened; • dominant: trends that are happening today; and • emerging: hypothesising for tomorrow.

The last of these are clearly the ones that are most difficult to pin down, but they are also the ones that are most valuable, allowing brands to potentially get ahead of the game. “A good way to look at emerging trends, is they are kind of a whisper of something larger to come,” she elaborated.

Retailer HMV, for example, failed to heed the murmurs that heralded the trend to digital and really came unstuck when consumers in that category started moving away from ownership and towards prioritising access instead. “Why own 20 DVDs which take up space when instead you could buy a Netflix [subscription] – that gives you access to thousands of movies – but not actually own any?”

Not only can acting on trends help a brand stay relevant and survive, “for those [brands] truly on point and determined to act on trends, they can shape culture, shape the future and really create change.”

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What Will Persuade People to Take a Vaccine?

By Wharton Staff

Vaccines are a powerful weapon in the fight against disease, but only if they are taken. A team of behavioral scientists at Wharton and Penn is studying the best methods of communication to persuade more people to get off the fence

and into their doctor’s offices or local pharmacies to get vaccinated.

The Behavior Change for Good Initiative (BCFG) has partnered with Walmart to conduct the largest-ever study

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aimed at increasing vaccinations by examining what kinds of messages encourage compliance. Conceived in March, the study was originally designed for the 2020 flu season, just as the coronavirus pandemic was sweeping the country with exponential growth.

“We realized with the COVID-19 outbreak that there was a much bigger challenge we could try to help tackle,” BCFG codirector Katy Milkman said. “If we could use the opportunity of flu season to test what really encouraged vaccination in a way that might be portable to the COVID-19 vaccine, we could make a really big, positive impact. So, we scaled up our ambitions quite enormously.”

Milkman is a professor in Wharton’s operations, information and decisions department and holds a secondary appointment at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine. She led the study along with Wharton professors Mitesh Patel and Angela Duckworth.

The scholars created a tournament, inviting over 125 worldrenowned behavioral scientists on the BCFG scientific team to submit their best messaging strategies to nudge people from intention to action. The competition yielded 75 submissions, which were further narrowed to 37 fielded tests, and the results of the study will be finalized in a few weeks and released in late 2020 or early 2021. Milkman joined the Wharton Business Daily radio show on SiriusXM to discuss the study as the world anxiously awaits the release of a COVID-19 vaccine, which government officials said could happen as soon as mid-December. (Listen to the podcast at the top of this page.)

The Last Mile There has always been reluctance around vaccines — a skepticism has been fueled in recent years by the antivaxxer movement that has spread through misinformation on social media. Some people are nervous about the safety and efficacy of three COVID-19 vaccines being produced by pharmaceutical companies Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca because the government has fast-tracked approval. In an encouraging sign, monthly polls have shown an increase in Americans’ willingness to take a COVID-19 vaccine since September, although the numbers are still just below 60% and lower than they were last spring.

“What that means is that those people [are] interested in the vaccine at a high level, and they’re persuadable,” Milkman said. “They’re not strong anti-vaxxers, but they need to feel like it’s going to be safe. And if they’re not sure or they’re a little hesitant, we need to make it as easy as possible and as appealing as possible so that they do get the vaccine, so that we can achieve herd immunity.”

Milkman said many people have every intention of getting vaccinated, but they procrastinate or simply don’t follow through. Closing that gap between intention and action is key, and something Milkman has studied for years. She calls it “the last-mile problem,” a business term that refers to the final hurdle standing between consumers receiving products or services.

“We’re pretty convinced [a vaccine] is probably a good idea.

We have a little hesitation. Hassle factors, or the sense that,

‘Oh, this is going to be kind of unpleasant,’ can get in the way if we don’t get the communications right,” Milkman said.

Getting the Message Just Right A few of the messaging strategies in the study really stood out to Milkman. One was created by BCFG team member Gretchen Chapman, a psychology professor at Carnegie Mellon University who is also a member of the Penn Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics.

In a previous study on flu shots, Chapman randomly assigned subjects to receive a message from their employers with information about a walk-in clinic and inviting them to book an appointment. Others received a message that their employers had already booked an appointment for them at a specific date and time, but it could be rescheduled.

“We’re going to need to understand what’s holding someone back, what sub-populations have different concerns, and try to tackle those things.”–Katy Milkman The message with a specific appointment time “increased vaccination rates dramatically,” Milkman said, so Chapman tried a related approach in the BCFG study, letting people know that a vaccine had already been reserved for them specifically.

The BCFG study tested dozens of additional ideas designed by other team behavioral scientists including asking people to commit in advance to getting a vaccine, sending reminders to people minutes before they’d have a chance to get vaccinated, and asking participants to message their family and friends to get vaccinated.

“By essentially turning you into a proselytizer for the vaccine, it can change your own psychology and your own likelihood to go, as well as helping encourage your friends and family,” Milkman said.

The team even tried ramping up friendly competition between cities, like pushing Pennsylvanians to beat New Yorkers on vaccination rates, for example. The goal of so many different approaches is to find what works best for each group of consumers and tailor messages accordingly.

“We’re going to need to understand what’s holding someone back, what sub-populations have different concerns, and try to tackle those things,” Milkman said.

Scientists are charging ahead to make a COVID-19 vaccine available, working out the challenging logistics of wide-scale production and distribution. Milkman is hopeful that the work of the BCFG team will, in turn, help more people take the vaccine.

“Even if we get the supply chain issues right, even if we get every corner drugstore to someday be supplying these, we have to get them into arms in order for them to change the course of the pandemic,” she said. “And the messaging is going to be key to that.”

HOW ABSOLUT ACTIVATES BRAND PURPOSE

By Warc Staff

Absolut, the vodka brand, has demonstrated how brand purpose can be activated successively in different contexts with campaigns based on the notion of acting “responsibly”.

Pam Forbus, CMO for North America at Pernod Ricard, which owns Absolut, discussed how the spirits firm has leveraged brand purpose at the Association of National Advertisers’ (ANA) 2020 Masters of Marketing Week.

She noted that Absolut had run a campaign for Valentine’s Day 2020 that was premised on the idea of “Sex Responsibly” and highlighted the issue of consent.

“It was the first of a series of Absolut campaigns to tackle many aspects of responsibility and how they intersect with the most important cultural issues of the day,” said Forbus. (For more, read WARC’s in-depth report: How Pernod Ricard has responded to social disruption with purpose.)

As the 2020 elections loomed into view earlier this year, Absolut similarly emphasised the importance of voting, but without getting bogged down in partisan politics.

The executions in its “Vote Responsibly” program incorporated the brand’s first US TV commercial in three years, as well as

out-of-home, digital, and social messaging about making voting a priority.

And the precise messages included, “Your Vote Can Shake or Stir the Election”, “Save Your Drink for After the Vote”, and “Drinking Can Wait. Your Vote Can’t”.

“We believed in getting more Americans, of all political backgrounds, to vote,” said Forbus. “With that in mind, Absolut had a number of different instigations, right up until November 3, just to get out the vote.”

Pernod Ricard has even adopted a similar position with an “Engage Responsibly” program that aims to bring transformation to the marketing industry.

Endorsed by the ANA and the Global Alliance for Responsible Media – an ANA/World Federation of Advertisers coalition designed to eliminate harmful online content – this initiative has a clear mission.

More specifically, its objective is “bringing together consumers, brands, and platforms to provide tangible, technology-driven tools and resources that support advertisers as they work to stop the spread of online hate”.

Datathon Challenge: How to Boost Sales for a Global Retailer

By Wharton Staff

Every time you take advantage of a discount, join a store’s

function. The data given to the students revealed that the

loyalty program, or simply buy something online — whether

company also sold products such as cooking and dining

it’s a bag of groceries, a toddler sun hat or a shaving kit

items, luggage and home furnishings.

— you’re telling a retailer something about your needs, preferences and buying habits. Billions of pieces of information are continually being generated. How do companies make sense of it all to gain a competitive edge? That, of course, is where data analytics comes in.

“Using the data, how can we contribute value in the form of improving revenues?” Awad asked the students. He suggested they might take approaches such as optimizing prices for particular genres of goods; architecting and applying discounts; encouraging and improving cross-

The global big data analytics market for retail was estimated

selling (for example, promoting accessories with clothing), or

at $3.4 billion in 2018 and is projected to reach nearly $11

re-engaging customers who have stopped buying from the

billion by 2024, according to a report in Business Wire. The

company.

report noted that data analytics is being used at every stage of the retail process to understand customer behavior, predict demand and optimize pricing.

Awad said that although he had outlined those sample objectives, he wanted to keep the challenge broad. His aim was to give the students a sense of “a real-world scenario”

Recently, a group of Wharton and University of Pennsylvania

as an actual data analyst, which would typically involve

students were invited to try their hand at a real-world data

“having a dataset put before you and a blank sheet of

analytics challenge. They were given customer transaction

paper.” He encouraged the students to use their creativity

data from an international consumer brand and tasked with

while designing solutions that would be relatively easy for a

finding innovative ways to help the company improve its

company’s managers to understand and implement.

gross margins. The virtual event, a Datathon run by Wharton Customer Analytics, was sponsored by Baring Private Equity Asia.

The retailer, whose identity was not revealed, is part of Baring PE’s portfolio. Baring vice president Karim Awad described it as a U.K.-based international women’s wear and kids’ wear brand with both a physical store presence and an ecommerce

“I think it is more important than ever for retailers to use careful analysis of data to understand who their good customers are.”–Raghuram Iyengar The data shared with the students was two years’ worth of

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point of sale information, in the form of about 20 million rows of transactions and 50 variables. It included both retail and ecommerce activity from the UK and Japan.

Serving as one of the judges was Wharton marketing professor Raghuram Iyengar, faculty director of Wharton Customer Analytics. He commented in a separate interview about the increasing importance of data analytics in retail, especially given the challenges the industry has faced during the COVID-19 pandemic. “I think it is more important than ever for retailers to use careful analysis of data to understand who their valuable customers are,” he said.

One major improvement that data analytics can bring to retailers, Iyengar noted, is to help them identify customers across sales channels to better understand shopping behavior.

If a customer comes into a store, for example, were they motivated to do so by recent in-store promotions, an ad on their mobile, an online video, or something else? However, many retailers still manage their channels in separate siloes.

According to Iyengar, a top priority should be breaking down those siloes to enable data-gathering across them. The companies would then be on track to achieve “a holistic view of what customers are doing.”

What Do They Buy and When Do They Buy It? Fifteen teams of three to five students each competed in the Datathon. The participants were Wharton MBAs and undergraduates as well as students from other Penn programs

such as engineering and information technology. Teams analyzed the dataset using the programming languages and tools (e.g., Python, R) of their choice, and created statistical models that helped solve the business challenge. The judges’ panel was composed of Wharton Customer Analytics leadership. The first-place team was awarded $1,500 and the second-place team, $500.

Winning first place was a team whose presentation was titled, “Modeling Consumer Retail Preferences for an International Consumer Brand.” The team came up with a variation on RFM (recency, frequency, and monetary value), an established method for determining customer value based on how recently they bought something, how often they buy, and how much they spend. Team member Hoyt Gong asserted that the traditional RFM approach didn’t work well for this brand.

“RFM scores should normally reflect customer value….

However, when we tried to find a correlation between these RFM scores and the transaction history of our customers, we only saw a weak correlation. Similarly, we saw little to no correlation between that same RFM score and our client’s gross margins.”

“The company’s strategy will be the most successful if they … lower that churn probability.”–Hsien Tham They decided to pull apart recency and frequency measurements from monetary value, stating that their new

model would tell the business which customers, based on their recency and frequency, will make the greatest number of future transactions. The model would also yield customer lifetime value (CLV), determined by multiplying a customer’s expected future transactions by their average purchase size in dollars. Once the firm adopts this improved way to calculate CLV, they said, it will know which customers to focus on, and can better optimize its decision-making.

The team also used a technique known as network modeling or network analysis to reveal that the firm’s new and repeat customers have different purchasing behaviors: specifically, that they buy items in batches differently. They pointed out, for example, that bundles of Disney-themed items dominated the most frequent purchases for repeat customers, but not new customers. The team noted that the company could plug all their customers into this model to determine the most appealing products to promote to them as add-ons to their order.

The second-place team’s presentation was “Understanding the Customer.” Team member Gantavya Pahwa explained, “When we got access to the data, we very quickly realized that we should have our primary focus on the customer….

From this, we realized that there were a few key questions that we should ask.”

Pahwa and his teammates created a “when, what, why and who” question framework. First, looking at “when and how much do they buy,” they built a probabilistic model of customer transaction streams. Second, examining what customers buy, they sought to identify the optimal product mix for maximizing revenue. Asking, “Why do they buy?” they examined responsiveness to discounts and pricing. And finally, they looked at who the brand’s customers are based on age, gender, and country data.

Interestingly, the team found that customers with a high rate of what marketers call “churn” (meaning they stopped buying during a certain timeframe) were contributing a large chunk — about 74% — of the company’s revenue.

Since these churned customers provide significant value, reengaging them presents a lucrative opportunity, they said.

Team member Hsien Tham commented, “The company’s strategy will be the most successful if they … lower that churn probability.” The team suggested designing loyalty rewards, membership programs, exclusive events or other types of offers for this promising customer segment.

Another insight the team offered was that this particular brand’s most valuable customers are the more priceconscious ones. The firm should conduct more sales and offer more discounts, they said, and focus on lower-end products. Using data analytics they also managed to identify the product mix that these valuable customers tended to buy (which consisted of outerwear, separates and dresses).

Navigating a Sea of Data to Create Value The judges also selected a third-place team, whose

presentation was titled “Revenue and Retention Segmentation Models.” This team created a spending model and a retention model to analyze customer behavior. They then combined the top contributing features of the two models to arrive at a list of value-creating factors that the company should focus on: the ecommerce channel; high-frequency purchases; the accessories category such as luggage, bags, and backpacks; and the dresses category.

“It’s not enough to just show the numbers; you have to be good at talking about the numbers, and then explaining the ‘so what.’”–Raghuram Iyengar Among the recommendations the team came up with was that the company should strengthen its online platform to create a richer omnichannel experience. Team member Namrita Narula commented, “We saw [in the data] that e-commerce is indicative of sales and retention, and therefore it is important — especially in these unprecedented times — that the consumer brand has items fully stocked and their full range of products available online.” The team also advised investing in a mobile app since, according to Narula, the profitability of one-click sales through in-app purchases is increasing.

Secondly, the team suggested linking the bags/backpacks category with dresses, since both categories are good sellers.

For example, the company could increase tote bag sales through a fashion campaign focused on sustainability. In general, the bundling of products could enhance customer brand recall.

The team also presented a seasonality-related finding.

While conducting their analyses, they had noticed that the firm’s winter sales were nearly six times that of summer.

They speculated that the company’s summer product stock was perhaps not as inviting as the winter’s, and suggested that might be an area of expansion, with micro-influencers engaged to boost sales.

Of the Datathon overall, Wharton’s Iyengar said that the most important skill these students can learn — and that the Datathon helps them practice — is weaving a coherent narrative around their analyses. “It’s not enough to just show the numbers; you have to be good at talking about the numbers, and then explaining the ‘so what.’”

In fact, he said, just having the baseline skills of running analyses or working with the latest machine learning model are not as prized as they once were, because they’re now easier to acquire. “You can actually get that on Coursera or other platforms,” Iyengar said. Instead, a truly valuable candidate is one who can perform the data analysis and then stand up in front of a management team and persuasively explain the business significance of their findings. “And I think those people are more scarce,” he said.

Dark Roast Double Shot: Why Brands Should Revisit Their Premise

By Nitish Mukherjee

The Balance of Power is shifting and it is in every marketers’ interest to understand why and what they need to do in the new landscape.

It was mid-morning on a sunny day with a gentle breeze sending ripples in the waterbodies surrounding the giant gazebo of a luxury hotel in Bengaluru. I was settled comfortably in a cushioned chair with a cup of Dark Roast Double Shot at my elbow as I pored over the resume of a creative person I was to meet that morning. It was an interesting resume but what intrigued me most was his departure from his previous job in Malaysia. When asked, he replied, “Well, the last straw that broke the camel’s back was when I looked closely at the products and on-ground promotions; being implemented by a multi-national company marketing food products for infants and children that I was supposed to work on. What the products were doing and the values that the messaging was communicating was not in the interest of children. So, I thought it best to pack my bags.”

This was the first time that I had come across someone whose convictions had translated into action at significant cost to himself to register his displeasure. Since then I have seen the numbers grow. With one big difference. Many of them take affirmative action to make the companies responsible. It is no longer a passive protest. Big brands at one time seemed invincible and they dictated what and how things should be.

That is no longer true.

Increasingly brands and businesses are subject to rigorous scrutiny. The why, how and what you do in your business matters. A fairness cream may actually make you fairer but it signals promoting colour discrimination and that is

unacceptable, an energy drink’s promise of delivering instant energy to children by packing sugar in the product is unethical as it is detrimental to long term health, manipulating results to meet environment norms for an automotive manufacturer results in litigation and damages, exploiting labour in other geographies to circumvent the labour laws of your own country causes a severe backlash. All business and brands, but especially the legacy brands must revisit their premise in the context of this new active consciousness amongst consumers.

The Balance of Power is shifting and it is in every marketers’ interest to understand why and what they need to do in the new landscape.

It is primarily fuelled by three factors. The rise in incomes and consumption, growth of literacy and democratisation of knowledge, the extensive reach of audio & video enabled social media made possible by technology. Add to that a tone of aggressive and often bold assertion that pervades our social fabric and you have all the ingredients of today’s consumer activism. This has brought about changes that will have rapid and far reaching implications. Let us take a closer look.

The one-man army is a reality Consumer activism started in the 18th century when boycott of goods produced by slave labour was used as a way to give

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impetus to the anti-slavery movement. It gathered impetus in the 20th century with the rise of consumer organisations that represented consumer interest. But the process was slow. It took time to turn the wheels and it gave corporates time to manage the process and often the outcomes. The advent of social media and the speed and penetration of messaging thanks to a digitised world has changed all that. Now even a single individual with passion, intelligence and tenacity of purpose has the power to bring change. In fact, if you peruse some of the content created by activists it is more compelling and convincing than the messaging of reputed brands.

The good and the bad both get amplified. Intelligent leaders who understand the dynamics can use it both as a guidance mechanism as well as an instrument of growth. It is not about putting out your agenda through influencers. It is about guiding your decisions through listening. You have to keep your ear to the ground. You don’t necessarily have to respond. But it gives you time to plan if a tsunami is headed your way or raise the sail to catch the wind when the good you do gets applauded.

The conscience of the collective is on the move The knowledgeable, the engaged, the interested, the invested are all forming groups to promote causes that are close to them or are cause for concern. Geographies having been rendered meaningless in a digitally connected world.

Scientists, academicians, mothers, social activists across the world are connecting, sharing and evolving views that will affect choices for consumers. Scientists coming together to push for legislation on food, mothers sharing experiences on brands for infant care, youth coming together with their views

on climate change, the boycott of products from a country because of lack of trust. These are already a reality.

In a more complex world with many moving parts business and brands need a lot more. They can no longer be managed by researchers, planners and brand managers alone.

Progressive companies need think tanks that have specialists.

Economists, sociologists, anthropologists, environmentalists, humanists, nutritionists, design thinkers, lawyers etc. depending on the business. The beauty of complexity is that the antidote always lies in simplicity. But to get there you need deep understanding.

You are hurting others with your follies Which in turn will hurt you. The interrelatedness of politics and business today is intense, bordering on the dangerous.

The state is therefore often the target of consumer activism to pressurize business. While democratic governments are happy to support business, if their own credibility or constituency is threatened that is not acceptable. Bad products, misleading claims, socially disturbing messaging are often taken up by people’s representatives for reasons social or political and pressure is put on the bureaucrats and the legislature. The response is stringent, punitory laws.

Industry bodies and those responsible for implementing selfregulation would do well to take serious note of the real pressures that accrue when consumers get agitated. They tend to operate on the principle that they have to ring fence business. The real need is to emerge as an active, effective and honest protector of consumer rights if they want to limit state interference and gain the trust of consumers.

The BOT(tom) line ByMike Betzer

Chatbots are one of the biggest innovations in the marketing industry but in order to use them effectively, brands must carefully consider the customer journey and how they implement this technology. Mike Betzer outlines the dos and don’ts so your brand can make the most of bots.

Off the top of your head, can you name the one greatest advantage that every single marketer has in their arsenal?

It’s that every marketer is also a customer, so they know exactly what it’s like to be marketed to, and can appreciate very easily when it’s done well – and when it’s not.

But how often do marketers forget that knowledge when it comes to embracing the exciting and innovative developments in the marketing space? Marketers are an innovative group, often embracing the latest and greatest technology to make

sure every advantage is grasped. Sometimes though, when it comes to tech, that old adage holds true: just because we can doesn’t always mean that we should.

Consider the chatbot.

If you know anything at all about the history of this innovative marketing tool, you may well be aware it’s not that new. ELIZA, considered the mother of all chatbots, was developed by MIT engineers over 50 years ago. Of course, the technology has evolved profoundly since then. Developments over the last

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57 few years have enabled bots to appear more human than ever before and, equally importantly, to be more adept at dealing with human conversations.

Brands now have opportunities to create interfaces that feel genuinely human and interact with customers and prospects in a manner that feels more personal and responsive.

But just because you can…

Before you jump straight to implementing chatbots in your digital marketing strategy, think back to the times when you’ve come across them yourself as a customer, and at what point in your journey were they used. What was your first impression? Research has found that 65 percent of customers believe chatbots are slower and less accurate than human agents – and perception is everything. Brands that rely on bots too much and use them at inappropriate times will see an ensuing effect on customer satisfaction (CSAT), leading to negative impacts on revenue, retention and reputation.

However, even though two-thirds of your potential customers think less of chatbots than of human agents, more than half say they don’t really care if they interact with a human or a machine – the only important thing is getting the answer they’re after.

BOT(tle) it Used wisely, a bot can ensure your customers get more help, more accurately and more quickly. So how do you know when and where is the best time to use this particular tool?

To decide which is appropriate – a human agent, plain button bot or fully conversational bot – ask yourself the three following simple questions: • Is this a conversation that can be automated with buttons?

• Will customers react favourably to it? (i.e. would you react favourably as a customer?)

• Will it be straightforward to maintain?

Dos and don’ts Once you’ve determined that a bot is not only an appropriate tool for your brand or organisation, but also suitable for a particular stage of the customer journey, the next step is to think very carefully about how you implement it. The following list of dos and don’ts will point you in the right direction: Do Welcome users and set expectations – just as the salesperson at a shop counter or receptionist in an office sets the tone for customer expectations, the chatbot may well be the first point of contact a user has with you and your brand. Make sure they are greeted accordingly, but also let them know what they can expect – what kinds of queries or issues the bot can help them with and, importantly, how much time this will take.

Make the most of rich messaging channels – WhatsApp, Apple Business Chat, Facebook Messenger and their ilk allow you to deliver images, links, videos, catalogues and more – and these are all ways to make the chatbot’s conversation so much more than a simple text only affair and, consequently, more engaging. Pair your chatbot with a scalable conversation

management platform that can support agents as well as bots in any channel that customers find convenient.

Mix up the buttons and natural language – buttons are a natural fit for quick and easy decisions, common interactions or yes/no queries – but they can also become tedious.

Blending them with judiciously placed natural language results in a much better customer experience.

Make switching to a human agent easy – nothing infuriates a customer more than getting caught in a vicious circle when the AI cannot answer their query, but sends them back to the beginning of the process time and time again.

Ensure that there are buttons that will reach human agents and carefully identify any common phrases customers may use when they want to talk to a person. Then ensure that transfers or handoffs between agent and bot are seamless and intuitive.

Don’ts Bite off more than you can chew – always keep your unique business model in mind and create flows that support the most often reiterated interactions you have with your customers.

This also means considering what your team can handle and throttling your systems up and down as necessary to avoid overwhelming capacity and delivering a poor customer experience.

Try to pretend your chatbot is a human – customers hate being taken for fools. Even the 29 percent of people who say they sometimes can’t tell whether they’re interacting with a person or a bot will respond much more positively if their expectations and understanding of the bot’s limitations are made clear from the start.

Set and forget – we already know how far bot technology has come since ELIZA debuted in 1966, and as with any piece of technology, bots continue to evolve. More importantly, so do your business and the desires of your customers. Stay up-todate not just on the latest technological developments, but also on customer sentiment, to make sure you’re meeting their needs (without them having to ask you over and over again).

Offer too much choice or blanket text walls – these can be surefire ways to frustrate users. Keep your bot’s responses swift, relevant and easy to navigate.

Overdo the length of a button-based flow – this may be tempting, but customer requirements can often fall outside of preconceived options and a limited set of choices is a pathway to irritation.

Rely solely on a bot – if more than half of your customers are happy to interact with a bot as long as they get the assistance they require, that still means nearly half prefer not to use them at all. Conversations shouldn’t always be automated, and it’s vital that you plan for the unexpected and incorporate fallbacks and detection methods for any possible dissatisfaction.

Mike is the General Manager of Khoros Care where he is focused on maintaining strong customer health across all of the product lines. Mike has been helping big brands interact with customers for 30-plus years.

5 criteria for evaluating your email marketing program

By Jeremy Goldman

While email may not be changing as rapidly as some other digital disciplines, it evolves nevertheless. Gone are the days when a best-in-class marketer could rely on batch-and-blast techniques, whereby 100% of a brand’s email distribution list received emails that were 100% identical. Opportunities abound particularly in the realms of personalization and testing.

For years, marketing departments have consistently undervalued the lever that offers them the most consistent ROI. We spoke with a broad range of marketers to understand what they consider makes an email program highly successful.

A broad analysis of the market suggests that many email marketing departments may experience the Dunning-Kruger effect, a cognitive bias where people incorrectly overestimate their acumen in a specific discipline. As a result, many email professionals rank their own programs as more sophisticated than they actually are.

In creating our framework for evaluating email marketing as a whole, we factored in what is considered best in class today versus what is moving from best in class to standard customer expectation. The following are the five cornerstones of our framework which any email marketer can use to judge their own program:

Personalization and Segmentation: • How easily and frequently does your brand take advantage of segmenting its email list to send more relevant communications?

• Is your brand employing personalization on a one-to-one basis, using triggers and other key signals to increase relevancy to the recipient?

Omnichannel: • How does your brand’s email marketing integrate with SMS and live chat?

• What call center and in-person interactions integrate with and inform your email marketing program?

Testing: • How often does your brand engage in ongoing email testing behavior designed to improve results?

• Does your testing strategy inform not just the email program, but the brand’s overall strategy as well?

Acquisition and Maintenance:

Internal Processes:

• How proficient is your brand at acquiring new email addresses to market to?

• How successful is your brand at measuring the success of its program?

• What is your brand’s process for maintaining a clean, healthy email list on an ongoing basis?

• Are your processes agile enough with respect to changing tactics on the fly?

EVERY LIT TLE THING EVERY LIT TLE THING IS EVERY THING. EVERY LIT TLE THING IS EVERY THING. IS EVERY THING.

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CLUELESS & OUTOF-TOUCH

By Bob Hoffmans

You gotta laugh to keep from cryin’.

Marketers spend half a trillion dollars a year on advertising.

You’d think they’d take the time to understand what the hell they’re doing. There is incontrovertible evidence that they are alarmingly out of touch with the people they are trying to influence.

This week Ipsos Canada released a study on behalf of ThinkTV comparing the beliefs of 300 marketing “professionals” to the self-reported activities of consumers. The results are striking, if not shocking. Using the data from the Ipsos study, I’ve made a little table.

behavior be so astoundingly misinformed? The answer is pretty simple. Marketing people are living in a world of their own. They don’t wear the same clothes as “average” people, they don’t go to the same restaurants as average people, they don’t drink the same booze, buy the same food, watch the same programs, drive the same cars, see the same movies, or live in the same neighborhoods as average people. The only time they come into contact with real people is at the DMV, which they find disgusting.

They think they “understand the consumer.” They don’t understand shit.

While 58% of marketers and advertisers have “smart speakers” in their homes, 19% of real people do. While about 45% of adults in the US are over 50, in ad agencies about 6% of employees are. According to the coo of Ipsos, “Some of these differences really are quite gigantic.”

Every day hundreds of millions of media dollars are committed based on the supposition that marketing people know what the hell they’re doing and are spending media money wisely.

I wouldn’t hire half the marketing “professionals” I’ve worked with to walk my dog.

The World We Live In

One would expect there would be some degree of variance between the beliefs of professionals in a field and reality. It’s only natural. You could excuse it if the variance was 10 or 20%. Maybe even 30%. But to be off by hundreds of percent in virtually every measure? This is not a standard error of judgement. This is gross ignorance and incompetence.

The obvious question is this -- how can professional people who work in an industry that is largely constructed on media

I was a keynote speaker at a conference in a country that will go unnamed. My talk included stats like the ones above.

Although the stats greatly supported the general thrust of the conference, the organizers implored me to remove them.

The organizers were fearful that by publicly exposing the ignorance of many of the “professionals” in the room they would endure a backlash that would cost them dearly. True story.

Book,

&

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Sinker

How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know Illustrated Edition

Identity Designed: The Definitive Guide to Visual Branding

By Byron Sharp

Written by best-selling writer and renowned designer David Airey, Identity Designed formalizes the process and the benefits of brand identity design and includes a substantial collection of high-caliber projects from a variety of the world’s most talented design studios.

This book provides evidence-based answers to the key questions asked by marketers every day.

Tackling issues such as how brands grow, how advertising really works, what price promotions really do and how loyalty programs really affect loyalty, How Brands Grow presents decades of research in a style that is written for marketing professionals to grow their brands.

Brand New: The Shape of Brands to Come Paperback – April 22, 2014

By David Airey

Decoded: The Science Behind Why We Buy Hardcover – March 4, 2013

Are corporations here to maximize profits and grow, or to help society, or both? With the rapid rise of new markets in India, China, Brazil, and elsewhere, will new global brands emerge based around local cultural strengths and heritage?

If so, what will this mean for the traditional dominance of brands based on Western cultural norms?

by Phil P. Barden He shares the latest research on the motivations behind consumers’ choices and what happens in the human brain as buyers make their decisions.

He deciphers the ‘secret codes’ of products, services and brands to explain why people buy them. And finally he shows how to apply this knowledge in day to day marketing to great effect by dramatically improving key factors such as relevance, differentiation and credibility.

Building Distinctive Brand Assets Hardcover – Illustrated, May 16, 2018

The Halo Effect: . . . and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers

by Jenni Romaniuk

By Phil Rosenzweig

Building Distinctive Brand Assets is for anyone with a brand logo, font or colour scheme, and is essential reading for those who have wondered if (or have been told) it’s time for a change.

Readers will learn how to set up a long-term strategy to build a strong brand identity, metrics and management systems in order to build and protect a brand’s Distinctive Assets.

With two new chapters and a new preface, the award-winning book The Halo Effect continues to unmask the delusions found in the corporate world and provides a sharp understanding of what drives business success and failure.

Obsessed: Building a Brand People Love from Day One Hardcover – June 9, 2020

Binge Worthy Branding: Build Customer Loyalty Using AI and Personalization Like Amazon, Netflix, and Starbucks Paperback – June 5, 2020

By Wally Olins

By Emily Heyward The cofounder and chief branding officer of Red Antler, the branding and marketing company for startups and new ventures, explains how hot new brands like Casper, Allbirds, Sweetgreen, and Everlane build devoted fan followings right out of the gate.

By Sterling C McKinley Binge Worthy Branding reveals why innovation is important in business and how to build a brand strong enough to survive in this noisy and competition-driven economy.

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Give & Get Employer Branding: Repel the Many and Compel the Few with Impact, Purpose and Belonging Paperback – March 5, 2020 By ryan Adams In today’s fiercely competitive job market, with the balance of power squarely in job-seekers’ hands, how can organizations attract and retain the most talented candidates—and the best additions to their culture?

Simplicity: The Appeal of Minimalism in Graphic Design Paperback – November 3, 2020

By Wang Shaoqiang Minimalism emphasizes extreme simplicity of form. By reducing the number of graphic elements, the strength of each element is enhanced.the Nordic and Japanese design schools are the most outstanding representatives of this trend, which is being embraced by more and more graphic designers in their creative fields, be it branding, editorial, communication and packaging.

Branding and Marketing: Practical Step-by-Step Strategies on How to Build your Brand and Establish Brand Loyalty using Social Media Marketing to Gain ... Boost your Business (Marketing and Branding)

By Gavin Turner If you want to discover how to build your brand like Apple and establish brand loyalty on social media for more sales, then keep reading…

Complex Presents: Sneaker of the Year: The Best Since ‘85 Hardcover – Illustrated, October 20, 2020

By Inc. Complex Media In 1985, Nike released Michael Jordan’s first sneaker, the Air Jordan 1, and sneaker culture was born. Now thousands of people wait in line at Supreme, and companies throw millions of dollars at LeBron James to keep him in their marketing plans.

The End of Marketing: Humanizing Your Brand in the Age of Social Media and AI 1st Edition

Sprint (How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days)

By Carlos Gil

Entrepreneurs and leaders face big questions every day: What’s the most important place to focus your effort, and how do you start? What will your idea look like in real life? How many meetings and discussions does it take before you can be sure you have the right solution?

Social networks are the new norm and traditional marketing is failing in today’s digital, always-on culture. Businesses across the world are having to face up to how they remain relevant in the choppy waters of the digital ocean.

By Jake Knapp

Badass: Making Users Awesome Paperback – March 3, 2015

Start your own f*cking brand Book English

By Kathy Sierra

Maria Erixon founded the denim brand Nudie Jeans with Joakim Levin, her husband at the time, in 2001. Today the company has annual sales of over SEK 400 million; it is one of Sweden’s bestknown international brands and a global lodestar in sustainable fashion. The book offers a unique insight into the company’s journey, successes and setbacks.

The design and layout of this book play a key role in conveying the author’s message. When creating the ebooks, we’ve tried to keep the look and feel of the print edition, but this means that not all e-reading devices will support the files.

By Maria Erixon