BrandKnew January 2016

Branding matters. Because branding matters.

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Dear reader: Indeed. It’s a Brand Knew year and we all hope that it is a packed with happiness, wellness, prosperity & knowledge to you & yours. There is a whole lot packed into this issue as well. Features such as the Reclamation of Strategy and the Creative Checklist for evaluating branding will delight the purists for sure. For all those looking to be learning from experience, the article on the Big Marketing Fails of 2015 will be a lesson worth retaining. They say ideas are aplenty but ideas without execution are regrets. The feature on how to convert your idea to market launch will help definitely. There are no pre decided destinations where you can find innovation and the piece on Finding Innovation where you least expect it bears testimony to that.

For all the visualisers and graphic designers, the article on Stop laying ads like a lazy platypus and start a conversation should start well many a conversation. Expect more disruption, chaos and opportunity for Media in 2016 as made evident in the article of the same title. Loads more pumped into this issue and trust the take away for all of you from this issue is as enriching as the time we had in putting it together!

Best always

Suresh Dinakaran @sureshdinakaran linkd.in/1dsjYaW

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bit.ly/1h95tgO suresh@groupisd.com Managing Editor: Suresh Dinakaran Creative Head/Director Operations: Pravin Ahir Magazine Concept & Design/ New Media Specialist: Mufaddal Joher Country Head, Australia: Norbert D’Souza Country Head, UK: Sagar Patil Country Head, India: Rohit Unni Digital/Social Media Marketing: Loknath Swain, Vishnu Nath Associate: Brand Success: Andre Van Helsdingen Web Specialist: Prasanta Kumar Sahu Online Support: Mahendra Kumar Behera

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CONTENTS

The Reclamation of Strategy A Creative Checklist for Evaluating Branding Find Innovation Where You Least Expect It 5 big data predictions for 2016 The on-demand economy: Changing the way we live as we age Brands seeing benefit from mobile ad targeting The 5 Worst Marketing Fails of 2015 More disruption, chaos and opportunity for media in 2016 B2C Industries That Get the Most Engagement on Social Media Stop laying ads like a lazy platypus and start a conversation 5 Steps to Skyrocket That Great Idea Into Market Launch After a ‘Promiscuous’ 2015, Do Agencies and Brands Need Their Own Tinder?

Virtual reality terms for digital marketers Strong Brands Drive B2B Markets Book, Line & Sinker

The Reclamation of

Strategy

By Colin Strong

As has come evident, big data is one of the most important investments a brand can make. The stakes are huge — consulting and technology firm Capgemini has suggested that data can improve performance by 41 percent over a three-year period. Given the potential returns, what board would hesitate to sign off on a significant investment in big data?

But using big data to improve a business means more than just collecting the information, or even analyzing it — companies must develop a strategy for how to use the information to build their brands. Unfortunately, many firms are using big data tactically, rather than strategically. Marketers, in

particular, are not realizing the full potential of big data — they’re mainly using it to drive programmatic advertising.

Despite some success stories, the jury is still out on whether this method is effective. A clutch of recent studies has questioned the ROI brands are getting. Gartner, for instance, forecast that 60 percent of big data projects globally through 2017 will fail to go beyond the pilot and experimentation stage, and will be abandoned.

So what is a brand to do? To get real ROI from big data, marketers need to reclaim their strategic heritage and use big data to understand their markets in fundamentally new ways. Here’s what that might look like:

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At the individual level: Social scientists have long been aware that different psychological attributes, such as our personalities, influence our purchasing decisions. However, this has largely been met with a shrug of the shoulders by marketers, not least because these factors can be hard to measure. Marketers have instead preferred attitudinal data, which typically has a more direct To get real ROI from (and easier to understand) relevance to consumer activities big data, marketers that marketers can influence.

need to reclaim their strategic heritage.

But big data not only tells us what customers do but also how they think. A study by researchers at Microsoft and Cambridge University demonstrated just how much of our inner lives is revealed by very simple pieces of data. They found that Facebook likes revealed a wide range of information about participants, including hints about their personality and their voting preferences (even though these were not explicitly identified in the likes). So marketers now have many more levers to play with from their big data assets. Technological advances have made it a lot easier to start applying this information to good effect — rather than blind A/B testing, marketing communications can now be shaped by a strategic understanding of what underpins preference. For example, many brands are starting to undertake persuasion profiling of their customer base to understand what types of nudges are most effective at shaping customer activity.

At the social level: Another way in which marketers can make more strategic use of big data is to start exploring how social relationships are revealed through data patterns, something very hard to do by other means, such as market research surveys. Many of our beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors are shaped by our social connections rather than, as classical marketing would suggest, our own individual preferences and experiences. A good way of thinking about this is to consider forest fires: The fire itself has its own properties in the way it spreads, which we can’t necessarily explain by examining the way in which individual trees burn. Big data allows us to look at the way in which social effects rather than individual preferences are shaping markets. A huge amount of data — phone logs, social media, messaging and so on — tracks exactly how behavior operates at a social level. Studies, including one by Microsoft researcher Duncan Watts, have demonstrated how patterns of relationships are themselves critical to preference formation in markets such as music downloads.

Network theory (which identifies the different patterns in the way we communicate with one another) is also relevant here, which Watts demonstrated with his “big seed” marketing approach. He used large-scale mailing lists for an initial “seeding” of viral messages to determine how social effects lead to sharing. This strategy never got widely adopted, which may indicate that marketers continue to resist seeing how a web of relationships can reveal how to build influence.

Perhaps the time has come for marketers to reevaluate the use of network theory.

At the cultural level: An even more strategic opportunity for marketers is to explore data sets to understand how cultures are changing. A good example of this is Google’s Ngram service, a digital database of about 4 percent of the world’s books published since 1800, where users can plot usage rates of words over decades and centuries. This tool can help us to understand the ways in which ideas and language have evolved over time. Work by anthropology professors Alex Bentley and Michael J. O’Brien suggests that our use of buzzwords (which appeared in print) spread by social diffusion (copying) rather than reflecting the changes and developments in the topic itself. Hence, as Bentley and O’Brien’s write, “when humans are overloaded with choices, they tend to copy others and follow trends, especially apparently successful ones.” This finding can of course help brands shift the focus of campaigns toward cultural learning and away from emphasizing the soundness of their content. A new product may be verifiably better than previous versions, but if we ignore cultural learning as a means of communication, adoption rates may be weak.

It takes something of a leap of faith to see the full creative potential of big data for marketers. Senior decision makers generally don’t yet fully understand the opportunity, and data analysts don’t often have marketing expertise. The opportunities lie between these roles, and the prize for those brave enough to go looking is invaluable. Because personal attributes can be identified from data trails, marketing messages can now be much more effective. And as data analytics show us which trends are in decline and which are in ascendance, brands can put their best foot forward, anticipating consumers rather than reacting to them.

Colin Strong is managing director of Verve, a data-led consumer insight consultancy based in the U.K. and the United States. He is also the author of Humanizing Big Data

A Creative Checklist for Evaluating Branding

By Joe Pantigoso

Ever feel unsure about evaluating branding proposals from your creative team or agency? Like a seasoned pilot before takeoff, it’s good to have a checklist to help identify potential problems. Often we’re too close to the work or pressured by deadlines or just plain weary that basics can be overlooked.

So in addition to your strategic checklist, here’s a simple creative one to help ensure effective branding.

Is it clear and easy to understand?

It sounds so basic, but can your audience quickly read and understand your branding? My town, for example, is celebrating its 125th anniversary. Banners hang everywhere showcasing a new, bright, multi-colored logo. It’s very pretty.

But the number “125”—the cause for celebration—is in yellow type on a white background. So it’s virtually invisible.

“Hey, new banner,” you might think driving by. But what’s it about? “No clue.”

So don’t hesitate to speak up if you can’t easily read it, regardless if someone tells you how innovative the design is.

If it has to be explained to you, it’s not good branding. Your audience won’t have the benefit of someone to translate the work, nor will they likely give you the time to figure it out.

Being clear and easy to understand is fundamental. Get this right and you’re more than halfway there.

Does it look distinctively like your brand?

The old rule of thumb still works: If you hide the logo and name would you be able to recognize your brand? Take away the Apple icon and you’d still recognize Apple products, stores and packaging with their clean lines and simple, modern style. Victoria’s Secret stores, with their sharply contrasting black and pink accents, are unmistakable. Orange-colored Arm & Hammer deodorant is easy to find both on the store shelf and in your bathroom when you’re half asleep.

Again, it sounds so basic, but this is often overlooked because

stakeholders choose what they like (e.g., everybody loves blue) instead of what’s differentiating and distinctive.

Is it memorable?

If you can’t play back the creative—name or visual—then why would your target audience? The name Amazon, for example, is memorable. Images like KFC’s Colonel and Pizza Hut’s roof are quick to recognize and easy to describe. Unique names and iconic images can stick in people’s minds. But sometimes, simple basics work too. John Deer uses a deer.

Shell uses a shell.

Make it easy for your audience to remember your brand.

They’ve got other things to do.

Does it make you feel something?

Wharton business school professor Jonah Berger says, “Emotions drive people to action.” They “make us laugh, shout, and cry, and they make us talk, share, and buy.”

This can be the hardest criterion to achieve—but it can have the most impact. The first time I saw H&R Block’s corporate branding, for example, I was wowed—a simple idea, a green block, masterfully applied with charm and style across various touchpoints.

Tropicana Orange Juice, another example of inspired branding, replaced its orange and drinking straw icon causing consumer outcry. Some 20 percent of sales were lost in one month before the original, beloved branding was brought back.

Be clear, distinctive, memorable and inspirational—that’s a simple checklist for more effective branding.

Joe Pantigoso is a Senior Director in Global Branding at SAP, a leading enterprise software company and top globally ranked brand. Read more from Joe in his Brand Tips for Branders series.

Find Innovation Where You Least Expect It

By Tony McCaffrey and Jim Pearson

On the evening of April 14, 1912, the RMS Titanic collided with an iceberg in the north Atlantic and sunk two hours and 40 minutes later. Of its 2,200 passengers and crew, only 705 survived, plucked out of 16 lifeboats by the Carpathia.

Imagine how many more might have lived if crew members had thought of the iceberg as not just the cause of the disaster but a life-saving solution. The iceberg rose high above the water and stretched some 400 feet in length. The lifeboats might have ferried people there to look for a flat spot. The Titanic itself was navigable for a while and might have been able to pull close enough to the iceberg for people to scramble on. Such a rescue operation was not without precedent: Some 60 years before, 127 of 176 passengers emigrating from Ireland to Canada saved themselves in the Gulf of St. Lawrence by climbing aboard an ice floe.

It’s impossible to know if this rescue attempt would have worked. At the least it’s an intriguing idea—yet surprisingly difficult to envision. If you were to ask a group of executives, even creative product managers and marketers, to come up with innovative scenarios in which all the Titanic’s passengers could have been saved, they would very likely have the same blind spot as the crew. The reason is a common psychological bias—called functional fixedness—that limits a person to seeing an object only in the way in which it is traditionally used. In a nautical context, an iceberg is a hazard to be avoided; it’s very hard to see it any other way.

When it comes to innovation, businesses are constantly hampered by functional fixedness and other cognitive biases that cause people to overlook elegant solutions hidden in plain sight. We have spent years investigating how innovative designs can be built by harnessing the power of the commonly overlooked. We have identified techniques and tools to help overcome cognitive traps and solve problems in innovative ways—whether conceiving new products, finding novel applications for existing products, or anticipating competitive threats. Using the tools doesn’t require special talents or heroic degrees of creativity; taken together, they form a simple, low-cost, systematic way to spur innovation.

To understand how the tools work, let’s first look at the three cognitive barriers they address.

Functional Fixedness In the 1930s, the German psychologist Karl Duncker demonstrated the phenomenon of functional fixedness with a famous brainteaser. He gave subjects a candle, a box of thumbtacks, and a book of matches and asked them to find a way to affix the candle to the wall so that when it was lit, wax would not drip onto the floor. Many people had a hard time realizing that the answer was to empty the box of tacks, attach the candle to the inside of the box with melted wax, and then tack the box to the wall. The box acts as a shelf that supports the candle and catches the dripping wax. Because the box had been presented to subjects as a tack holder, they couldn’t see it any other way.

In similar puzzles—known by cognitive psychologists as “insight problems”—people have trouble seeing that in a pinch a plastic lawn chair could be used as a paddle (turn it over, grab two legs, and start rowing); that a basketball could be deflated, formed into the shape of a bowl, and used to safely carry hot coals from one campsite to another; or that a candlewick could be used to tie things together (scrape the wax away to free the string).

What causes functional fixedness? When we see a common object, we automatically screen out awareness of features that are not important for its use. This is an efficient neurological tactic for everyday life, but it’s the enemy of innovation.

One way to overcome the problem is to change how you describe an object. When told that a candlewick is a string, for instance, almost everyone recognizes that it could be used to tie things together. Our “generic parts technique” is a systematic way to change the way an object is described to avoid unintentionally narrowing people’s conception of it, opening them to more ideas for its uses.

We consider each element of an object in turn and ask two questions: “Can it be broken down further?” and “Does

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our description imply a particular use?” If the answer to either question is yes, we keep breaking down the elements until they’re described in their most general terms, mapping the results on a simple tree. When an iceberg is described generically as a floating surface 200 feet to 400 feet long, its potential as a life-saving platform soon emerges.

of the pouch or the rigidity of the plastic that makes it stand.

To be truly innovative, however, you need to manipulate the features that everyone else has overlooked.

Calling something a “wick” implies its use as a conduit of a flame. Describing it as a “string” strips away a layer of preconceived uses and suggests less common ones. Breaking the string down further into its constituent parts of “fibrous strands” might spark even more uses.

To see if generating generic descriptions bolsters creative thinking, our research team presented two groups of students with eight insight problems that required overcoming the functional fixedness bias in order to solve. We told the members of one group simply to try their best. We taught the other group the generic parts technique and then asked them to use it on the problems. The people in the first group were able to solve, on average, 49% of the problems (just shy of four of them). Those who systematically engaged in creating generic descriptions of their resources were able to solve, on average, 83% (or 6.64) of them.

Design Fixation Simple insight problems given in a psychology lab can be solved by focusing on only four types of features—materials, size, shape, and parts. But solutions to real-world engineering problems often depend on noticing unusual aspects of a broader range of features. This, as we noted, is very difficult to do.

We studied this phenomenon by asking 15 people to list as many features and associations as they could for a candle, a broom, and a dozen other common objects. We then classified their responses by the type of feature, including its color, shape, material, designed use, aesthetic properties, along with the emotions it evokes, the type of energy it generates, and the objects it’s commonly paired with. On average, participants overlooked almost 21 of the 32 types of features (about 65%) that we had previously identified for each object.

Why? When handed a product and asked to create a new design or variation on it, people tend to fixate on the features of the current design. This obstacle to novelty is called design fixation. To take a real world example, when people are shown a sturdy, resealable pouch full of candy and asked to think of a new design that could lead to new uses, they tend to manipulate the types of features used to create the current design—that is, they focus on the width of the base

But how do you do that? Just as airline pilots have long used checklists to make sure they don’t skip any necessary steps when preparing for flight, we developed a checklist of types of product features that people tend to overlook. Whether your product is a physical object or an intangible process, we recommend that you develop a checklist of features that were important to your previous and current innovation projects and add to the list with each new project. Teams working on innovation projects can then refer to the list to prompt them to consider features they would probably overlook—thus saving time, effort, and frustration. Examining the pouch of candy with our checklist in mind permitted us to easily uncover many features that could lead to new designs and new uses.

First, every pouch sold has something in it. This feature is so obvious that its absence is commonly overlooked. Why not sell empty pouches so that customers can decide what to use them for: jewelry, spare change, nuts and bolts, cosmetics, and so on? Imagine empty pouches next to the sandwich bags, freezer bags, and storage bags in your supermarket.

Second, most pouches sold are about the size of your hand.

Systematically considering changes to the size triggers new ideas for possible contents. What about selling a gallon of paint in a resealable pouch, for instance? Third, current pouches have one inner compartment. But what might you do with more? You could, say, sell two-compartment pouches for things you want to mix together later: cereal in the top compartment and milk in the bottom, salad in the bottom and

dressing in the top, and so on. Fourth, consider the pouch as a container of aroma (or as a guard against it). You could sell a large pouch as a garbage can that reseals to keep in the odor. These are just a few of the new designs that emerge from contemplating a checklist of overlooked features.

Goal Fixedness Suppose we asked you to think of a way to adhere something to a garbage can. Chances are that like most people, you would think of using glue or tape, both forms of adhesives.

But what if we asked you instead to fasten something to the can? Just switching a specific verb like “adhere” to a more general one would most likely prompt you to list a wider range of possibilities: binder clip, paper clip, nail, string, Velcro, and so on. That’s because the way a goal is phrased often narrows people’s thinking. We call this barrier “goal fixedness.” Framing a problem in more general terms can help overcome it.

But it can be hard to determine what constitutes a “more general term.” Is “fasten” more general than “adhere”? A good resource for mapping terms is a thesaurus that makes hierarchical structure explicit by identifying hyponyms— more-specific synonyms—for them. For example, the online thesaurus WordNet indicates that there are least 61 ways to fasten things—including sew, clamp, chain, garter, strap, hook, staple, belt, screw, wire, buckle, cement, tack, joggle, button, and rivet. Each describes the concept of fastening one thing to another in a slightly different way and gives rise to diverse solutions. “Adhere,” by contrast, has only four hyponyms.

Action words, the centerpiece of most goals, often have hyponyms. Each hyponym hints at a more specific way to achieve the goal. There are 172 for the verb “remove,” 50 for “guide,” 46 for “transport,” 115 terms for “separate,” and—perhaps surprisingly—only 24 for the seemingly very general term “mix.”

it to the real-world goal to reduce concussions in football.

First he dropped the prepositional phrase “in football” from consideration and focused on the verb and noun: “reduce concussions.” To break free of hidden assumptions, he used WordNet to rephrase the goal in as many different ways as possible: lessen trauma, weaken crash, soften jolt, reduce energy, absorb energy, minimize force, exchange forces, substitute energy, oppose energy, repel energy, lessen momentum, and so on. Using Google, he performed searches such as “concussions lessen trauma” to see which ways of phrasing the goal had been heavily explored already and which ones were underexplored.

Jim found that in the context of concussions, the phrase “repel energy” had relatively few search results—a sign that the solution it implied might have been overlooked. One way to repel energy is through magnets, and this suggested a possible approach: Make each helmet magnetic with the same pole so that two helmets would repel each other when in close proximity. Results from initial tests showed that when the helmets were about to collide they decelerated, and because of their circular shape, they tended to glance off each other, as two magnetic billiard balls would, rather than smashing head-on. Several physicists have verified the plausibility of this approach for significantly reducing the force during helmet collisions.

We began the patenting process for our solution, but our lawyer discovered that someone had submitted the same idea just weeks earlier. We tip our hat to that person.

Visualizing Innovative Thinking At its most basic level, problem solving consists of two connected activities: framing a goal and combining resources to accomplish it. Each variation of the goal, and every discovery of a “hidden” feature of an available resource, can suggest a different course to take. Our approach involves mapping the relationships among all the possibilities in a simple graph, somewhat analogous to a decision tree.

A Smarter Way to Brainstorm When people generate “brainswarming” graphs together, it’s best for the group to work initially in silence, write contributions on sticky notes, and place the sticky notes at the proper place on the ever-growing graph. The benefits of silence include the following: • The talkative few cannot dominate the session.

Of course, a goal consists of more than just a verb. The verb expresses what sort of change you’re after, but nouns express what needs changing, and prepositional phrases express important constraints and relationships between things. Put them all together, and almost any goal can be expressed as a verb (fasten), a noun (something), and a prepositional phrase (to a garbage can). Try it: Increase sales in Massachusetts, reduce vibrations in skis, and so on. By putting your goal in this format and playing with the hyponyms of each of its parts, you can explore diverse approaches to your problem in a simple and cost-effective way.

Here’s how the approach worked when one of us (Jim) applied

• There’s no need for a facilitator to keep people from hijacking the discussion or judging others.

• People can work in parallel, so ideas are generated faster.

• No one needs to create a summary of the session. Take a picture of the graph and distribute it by e-mail, or just keep the graph up on the wall for later use.

• There’s no need to group similar ideas together, as you would in a traditional brainstorming session, because the grouping is done as the graph is built.

• Ideas are concise, since all contributions must fit on a

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sticky note.

• The silence allows people to move between thinking, writing down ideas, placing them on the graph, and building on one another’s ideas.

• Top-down (big-picture) thinkers can work side-by-side with bottom-up (detail-oriented) thinkers.

• Fear of judgment from the boss or colleagues is reduced.

• There’s no need for everyone to be present at the same time during the session. The graph can remain on the wall so that people can contribute at different times.

Online brainswarming allows groups from around the world to work together remotely.

Starting with the goal at the top, we represent each refinement of the goal as a vector pointing downward. The available resources are placed at the bottom, with their features extending upward. Interactions among the resources and their features extend further toward the top. When the two sets of vectors connect, we have a “solution path.” A solution path can be built by working from the top down, from the bottom up, or by switching back and forth between considering the goal and thinking about the resources.

This approach is an effective alternative to traditional brainstorming sessions for group innovation work, because it allows people to play to their strengths: Strategically oriented people can focus on refining the goal, while those more familiar with technologies and production processes can begin with the resources. We call this approach “brainswarming”—a nod to the concept of swarm intelligence. As people contribute to the growing graph, their activity resembles a swarm of insects.

hand. You might remember that wood floats, for instance, suggesting that wooden tables might have been of help.

Planks, or perhaps doors, from the ship might have been placed between the lifeboats to hold more people out of the water.

Moving from floating things to even more-general considerations of buoyancy might bring to mind the many steamer trunks on board. Tying a set of trunks together to produce another sort of makeshift floating platform might have been enough to support several people directly or to provide a foundation upon which to build a more secure platform of wooden planks.

It was estimated that as many as 40 cars were on board. That means 160 tires and inner tubes (not to mention spare tires) were at passengers’ disposal. Tying together rubber tires and inner tubes might conceivably have created a floating raft on which wooden boards could have been placed. And of course, the iceberg itself is a giant floating thing.

On that April night in 1912, none of these ideas might have worked, particularly since it took so long for people to understand the peril they were in. But the point of such an exercise is not to discover the “right solution”; it is to uncover as many connections between the goal and the widest view of the features of available resources as possible so that people look beyond the obvious.

To understand how this works, let’s return to the problem facing the passengers on the Titanic. We’ll start with the goal “save passengers.” The most obvious resources are the lifeboats.

The simplest application of the resources to achieve the goal is “put people in the lifeboats.” Thus, we begin with a straight line.

Next, we find different ways to phrase the goal to bring out different solutions.

For instance, slightly different goals would be “keep people warm and breathing” and “keep people out of the water.” Let’s look more closely at one of the options, keep people out of the water. One way is to place them on floating things— not just lifeboats— which might spark a fuller consideration of the resources at

The goal of the brainswarming graph, therefore, is to distill the problem-solving process to its most basic components and show how they are all related to one another. People do not have to remember all the components under consideration, because the graph shows them in a glance. This systematic approach takes some of the mystery out of innovation.

In our research, we are discovering that barriers to innovation are like gravity—pervasive, predictable, and not all that strong. There are many ways to overcome them, but the simplest and easiest path is to help your innovators notice what they’re overlooking. Often it’s right in front of their eyes.

Tony McCaffrey is the chief technology officer of Innovation Accelerator.

Jim Pearson is the CEO of Innovation Accelerator.

A version of this article appeared in the December 2015 issue (pp.82–89) of Harvard Business Review.

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big data predictions for

2 0 1 6

By Neil Carden

I have worked in big data since the days before it even had a title. The pace of change in our sector is astonishing and people are constantly innovating in all sorts of ways.

However, there are key trends that come up time and again when speaking with our clients across the country.

From the death of junk mail to the growing dominance of the cloud, here are my predictions for the future of big data in coming year.

1. 2016 will be the year that the big data hype dies By this I mean that more businesses will expect to see real results from their big data spend. It will no longer be viewed as the antidote to all their business problems. Legacy systems and data silos are a huge problem for large organisations, especially in an age where agility is such an advantage.

Insight is only useful if you can get answers to the right questions quickly and from relevant data sets.

will be even harder to find Companies will have to pay a premium for those who are both technically and commercially minded. In my experience the biggest draw for the gifted analyst is not salary but working with like-minded people. Both consultancies and in house teams will have to up their game to win and hold on to the best talent.

4. Advances in targeted insight will herald the beginning of the end of junk mail and spam A lot of business people will realise that they’re wasting money and annoying customers if they are not being relevant.

They’ll start investing in sophisticated CRM, decisioning tools and the intelligence to drive them. If they’re executed well, customers will get interesting and useful contacts from the companies they choose to do business with.

2. Knowledge is power

5. We’ll all have our heads in the cloud

The coming year will see a rise in the importance of the CMO and CCO in the boardroom. Their direct access to insight will mean they will be the smartest, most clued up people in the room. They will know what’s happened to their customers, what is going to happen and what they need to do to be successful in future. They will be the best placed to answer that age-old business question: what three things should I be doing today to improve the business?

Next year more people will begin to realise that when the cloud is done right it’s every bit as secure as a physical inhouse data centre. In fact, the majority of cyber attacks have been directed at physical infrastructure. Using the cloud also gives you the added advantage of having access to all the latest security technology and software, again for a fraction of the price.

3. High quality, commercially savvy analysts

Neil Carden is director of business development at data analytics company Aquila Insight

The on-demand economy: Changing the way we live as we age

By Luke Yoquinto and Joseph Coughlin

Companies such as Instacart, Uber and TaskRabbit may be known for their appeal to young, urban consumers, but they may soon influence older adults’ lives just as profoundly.

Offering alternatives to traditional, senior-oriented services, these companies stand to transform how the older demographic gets things done.

At 88, Sally Lindover already participates as both a user and a provider in what’s known as the on-demand and sharing economy.

She recently signed up for home delivery services following a trip to France with a younger tour group. “I’m so competitive, of course I had to keep up with them,” Lindover says. The result was some lower-back pain that made it difficult for her to walk to the grocery store when she returned home to Cambridge, Mass.

So she started using Instacart, a company that does grocery shopping for you. “I was very pleased with it. I certainly will use it again in the winter,” she says. For bulky paper products and heavy household goods such as detergents, “I used a service called Jet, which is competing with Amazon — and competing very effectively, I must say — on prices.”

Lindover has a long history of defying expectations about her age. In 1983, she joined the U. S. Foreign Service at age 56. “I became the oldest junior officer at the time to enter the Foreign Service and broke what was known as the age barrier for that reason,” she says.

Now, living by herself in a two-bedroom, two-bath apartment, she rents out her extra room through Airbnb.

In her relationship with that company and others, she has taken a place at the forefront of a trend that’s likely to change the experience of old age. In the past, when frailer, older people needed dinner provided, a ride somewhere or a light bulb changed, solutions tended to be explicitly seniororiented: Think Meals on Wheels, paratransit services and dedicated senior living facilities. But now, on-demand and sharing-economy companies are offering those very services — and many others — to customers across the age spectrum.

It matters that they cater to all ages because consumers often avoid products and services that mark the user as old, even if that avoidance comes at the cost of quality of life. Stigma is one reason that the National Institutes of Health reports that most hearing-aid users live with hearing loss for 10 or more years before seeking help. Products and services marketed to the young and old alike, however, avoid this trap. And so older adults are now not only buying what such companies as Lyft and Instacart are selling, but also joining in as providers: driving, hosting and helping others.

Before joining the Foreign Service, Lindover, a native New Yorker, served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Malaysia and Rwanda. Then she entered the Foreign Service and earned world-traveler status, living and working in “Burkina Faso, Egypt, Kenya,” she says, pausing to look at the globe in her apartment. “India, Yemen, China, Azerbaijan, Lithuania, France, Germany, Haiti. . . . I always forget one or two. . . .

Oh, Poland, of course!”

After a brief retirement in the mid-1990s, she began renting a home in Cambridge where, now fully retired, she lives with a rotating cast of Airbnb users. She doesn’t worry about bringing new faces into her home, she says, “because I had so many experiences all over the world with so many people, and I have a lot of confidence in Airbnb’s vetting of people.”

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More than half of Airbnb’s hosts are older than 40, and 10 percent of them are older than 60. “Our older hosts have some of the best ratings on our site,” says Anita Roth, Airbnb’s head of policy research. Not only do empty-nesters tend to have extra rooms to rent, but they often also have “the life experience to know what it means to welcome someone into your home.”

“I like to be here when people come in,” Lindover says. “I like to see them, and they see me, and I can give them some information about the neighborhood.”

Ride-hailing companies Lyft and Uber similarly rely on large numbers of older adults. Twenty-five percent of the drivers at Uber, which recently announced a partnership with AARP, are 50 or older. “We have a lot of retirees who are drivers,” says Mike Masserman, Lyft’s director of government relations.

“They know the cities really well — they’re locals, and they love sharing anecdotes,” he says. “We hear from our passengers that some of our retirees are the most popular drivers.”

Between 2020 and 2030, the 65-plus population in the United States will increase by 18 million people, a base that sharing and on-demand companies are eager to gain as loyal consumers. “We think there’s going to be huge opportunity in this market,” Masserman says. At the same time, traditional senior-oriented services are awakening to the possibility that these young tech companies may poach their customers.

“I do view it as both a threat and an opportunity,” says Tom Grape, chief executive of Benchmark Senior Living, the largest provider of senior housing in New England.

The threat lies in the fact that companies such as Instacart and TaskRabbit will make it possible for some older adults to delay climbing onto the less-care-intensive rungs of senior living, instead meeting their needs via their smartphone or computer. The decision not to move to senior living “is already our biggest competitor, and of course we fully expect that technology will allow people to stay at home longer in the future,” Grape says.

The opportunity comes from tech-enabled efficiencies in how a company is run, he explains — efficiencies that on-demand companies are aware of as well. Perhaps the strongest challenger to the senior living industry would be a company that could make it easier and more efficient to bring care professionals into one’s home. The prospect is so enticing, in fact, that some of the best-known names in Silicon Valley venture capital have bet $20 million on a company that promises to do exactly that: Honor.

When an older adult needs help with a day-to-day activity, such as getting dressed or bathing, most professional care companies bill for a minimum of three hours of work in order to minimize travel and overhead expenses. Honor, which is now operating in San Francisco and Los Angeles, provides care professionals in one-hour increments. “It’s about efficient routing, and the right people in the right place at the right time,” says Seth Sternberg, Honor’s co-founder and chief executive. “A bunch of technology is making it possible,” he says, but “to the older person, that’s all just invisible. They’re just getting a better service.”

Perhaps the ultimate expression of the tech company with invisible tech is Hello Alfred, which offers a personal butler — the company is named after Batman’s stalwart companion — for a few hours every week. “We’re oriented towards people who need help in their home or in their lives for a variety of reasons,” says co-founder and chief operating officer Jessica Beck. “All the things that pile up in the back of your mind, which I can imagine, particularly as you age, go up, are some things that we can remove.”

Alfreds, as the butlers are known, are available in Boston and New York. They can help out with shopping, laundry and other chores. Perhaps more important, they can take over the management of other online services. “We do interface with all the sharing economy services,” says Beck, rattling off a list of names including Instacart; Airbnb; TaskRabbit, which provides workers for jobs around the house; Thumbtack and Pro.com, which connect users to local contractors; and Washio, a laundry service.

Instead of learning how to navigate a bewildering forest of companies, she suggests, people who are new to the ondemand and sharing economy “can learn one interface, and that can take care of everything on their behalf.”

Regardless of how one interacts with these companies, their offerings aren’t free. Some, such as Airbnb, can provide certain older adults with a welcome cash flow. But many other consumers on a fixed income will find that participating in the sharing and on-demand economy requires a significant, constant outlay — an added expense that would not be as discretionary as it might sound. To those who would otherwise be stuck at home, for instance, the cost of Uber or Lyft rides may feel far more like an essential expense than a splurge.

The price of such quality-of-life gains is something the financial advisory industry has begun tracking.

“I don’t think the advisers have any way of quantifying yet exactly how much that would cost,” says John Diehl, senior vice president of strategic markets at Hartford Funds. In some cases, solutions such as ride-hailing could cost less than car ownership and maintenance, he says, saving consumers money. But overall, the focus on renting, not owning, assets in the on-demand and sharing economies will translate into a need for more cash on hand than retirees currently need and less stashed away in illiquid assets such as real estate.

“It’s really taking the emphasis perhaps off of growth to some extent and onto income,” he says, “which over the long term could cost me some return.”

Lindover says that because she moved around so much in the Foreign Service, she never bought property in Cambridge, instead holding on to her apartment, whose rent has tripled over the past two decades. “My fixed income is not that high,” she says. Airbnb provided “a way of helping pay the rent. And a rather pleasant way, without too much investment on my part.”

“So, yeah,” she says, “I’m all for all these newfangled things that make life easier.”

Yoquinto is a research associate at the MIT AgeLab and a freelance science writer. Coughlin, founder and director of the MIT AgeLab, is writing a book on the convergence of old age, business and technology.

Brands seeing benefit from mobile ad targeting Ad targeting hits stride and continues to grow as data evolves

By Brielle Jaekel

The ability to target the right audience on mobile is becoming a key factor in the success of campaigns as smartphone adoption continues to grow, with tapping into data such as behavior, location, weather and events getting easier as programmatic matures.

Marketers are tapping into data to reach a specific audience, which is allowing campaigns to reach significant return on investments and noteworthy engagement rates. As technology and consumer behavior through mobile is continuing to evolve at a rapid rate, advertisements are gaining more tools to do so which alludes to a significant future in this area.

“It has become much easier to identify relevant mobile audiences as targeting capabilities have improved significantly,” said Ran Ben-Yair, cofounder and CEO of Ubimo. “As the mobile programmatic ecosystem is starting to mature, more data and inventory becomes available, and mobile centric technologies, like in-app targeting, are emerging to replace the desktop era platforms that are struggling to shift to mobile.

Targeting mobile users Ad targeting is important for brands and marketers as it allows their content to be more effective. Through the use of data and user information they are able to reach consumers more likely to be receptive based on demographic information such as background, location, weather and various other details.

For instance, Coca-Cola leveraged beacon technology in movie theaters in Norway to both target and then retarget smartphone-equipped moviegoers, with 24 percent clicking to collect a free soda while at the theater (see more).

Also, Hard Rock Café increased bricks-and-mortar traffic by 220 percent through the use of behavioral data and geotargeting, manifesting the potential these tactics have for restaurant chains (see more).

Another campaign featured a large tourism organization that rolled out mobile ad campaigns only when the weather was bad, such as raining or snowing, in certain areas. The advertisements shared content of good weather at its location and inspired consumers to book trips, during times in which the weather was not so pleasing at home.

“They ran their campaign only when it was snowing and raining outside and they reflected the real-life weather conditions in the creative, requesting users to swipe the screen to see the real-time temperature at the tourist attraction,” Mr. Ben-

Yair said. “This is a great example of how an advertiser can create highly relevant targeting based on weather conditions and adjusting their message on the fly.”

Ad aversion The strategy is important in today’s mobile-centric marketing atmosphere as consumers are highly averted by interrupting ad content a great deal more compared to the past. Mobile users simply do not want to interrupt their experience, and doing so can create a negative sentiment.

This form of ad content is allowing marketers to reach consumers with unique, personalized campaigns which can excited them rather than push them away.

Ad targeting has existed for quite sometime but the following year allowed it to really grow legs, as the technology for obtaining these types of data is much stronger than before.

“Instead of marketers attempting to use outdated Web-based methods adapted for mobile, they are now able to harness the power of real-time and real-life data layers such as location, weather and events in order to build a better understanding of their audience actual context,” Mr. Ben-Yair said. “This is going far beyond just location targeting. “ Brielle Jaekel is editorial assistant on Mobile Marketer and Mobile Commerce Daily, New York.

The 5 Worst Marketing Fails of 2015

By Kim Lachance Shandrow

Marketers, be warned: The Internet never forgets. Should you fire off an insulting tweet or an offensive burp of ad copy, accidentally or not, people will see it, save it and try your brand in the brutal court of public opinion.

Five big-name brands learned this lesson the hard way this year, carelessly tarnishing their reputations and fanning a firestorm of negative publicity in the process. The bigger they are, the harder they fall. From sexist ads to a QR code that -- whoops! -- directs to a porn site, here are the worst marketing fails of 2015:

5. IHOP’s inappropriate breast humor falls flat on Twitter We can’t believe we have to explain this, but here goes: Equating your product to women’s breasts is poor form.

IHOP stooped that low last October, when it tweeted out a suggestive image of a centrally butter-dolloped stack of pancakes. Perhaps written by a frat bro fresh out of junior college, it lamely read: “flat but has a GREAT personality.”

The international restaurant chain deleted the tweet amid the swift and well-deserved ensuing backlash. Two hours and one minute after the tweet reared its misogynistic head, the company ate humble pie by tweeting this apology: “Earlier today we tweeted something dumb and immature that does

not reflect what IHOP stands for. We’re sorry.” We should hope so.

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design blatantly recreated the famous photograph showing the U.S. flag being raised in victory after the historic battle.

In the wake of a predictable barrage of complaints on its Twitter feed and Facebook page, Under Armour pulled the T-shirt and apologized for the gaffe in a trio of tweets. Still, its public contrition wasn’t enough to keep some customers from boycotting the brand.

4. Under Armour makes light of a bloody World War II battle Dear Under Armour, there is nothing ironic or cute or sporty about the Battle of Iwo Jima. We think it goes without saying that the bloody, 36-day World War II battle, which resulted in thousands of casualties, has zero in common with basketball.

This fact seemed lost on the athletic apparel retailer when, last May, it issued a T-shirt called “Band of Ballers” depicting the silhouettes of four men erecting a basketball net. The

3. Bud Light’s ‘Up for Whatever’ campaign is a soberingly offensive downer The marketing mavericks at Bud Light thought it was a swell idea to position the beer as the perfect beverage “for removing ‘No’ from your vocabulary for the night.” The creepy slogan appeared on its bottle labels back in April (and, subsequently, everywhere on Reddit) because, hey, everyone’s “Up for Whatever,” right? Wrong. Which is exactly what it is to imply that Bud Light is the quintessential brew for turning a “no” into a “yes.”

Heinz replied with a terse apology to Korell. Latching on to the the free publicity, Fundorado offered Korell a free oneyear membership to its live cams, but not before cracking a crude joke we won’t retell here.

1. A Bloomingdale’s ad creepily suggests spiking your BFF’s drink Perhaps it was a case of swigging too much nog. Whatever the culprit, a shocking image published in Bloomingdale’s catalog a month ago inexcusably promoted non-consensual alcohol consumption, and, by extension, non-consensual sex. Likely meant as a lighthearted joke, it was anything but.

As our own Carly Okyle astutely noted, the “line speaks less to spontaneous fun and more to predatory rape culture.” Following a thorough trouncing on social media, Bud Light discontinued the label. Then it apologized for the “undisputable facepalm,” as its lead marketer put it, in a statement published on Anheuser-Busch’s website.

2. Heinz’s QR Code accidentally directs to a porn site

The picture, which shows a man side-eyeing a woman, eerily reads: “Spike your best friend’s eggnog when they’re not looking.” Understandably, the horrific suggestion -- which falls just short of an endorsement for alcohol-fueled date rape -- sparked disgust and contempt all over social media.

Bloomingdale’s, of course, was quick to do what all brands that publicly screw up do nowadays. It “sincerely” apologized in 140 characters or fewer on Twitter.

How would you react if, by innocently scanning a Heinz ketchup QR code, you were directed to a hardcore porn website? That’s exactly what happened to German resident Daniel Korell last June. Turns out that when the scannable barcode campaign expired last year, Heinz didn’t renew the connected URL, allowing Fundorado, a German purveyor of porn, to scoop it up.

Korell’s understandable response was to inform Heinz that the QR mix-up was not OK. “Your ketchup really isn’t for underage people,” he wrote on the company’s Facebook page. “Even if the bottle was a leftover, it’s still in lots of households. It’s incomprehensible that you didn’t reserve the domain for one or two years. It really doesn’t cost the Earth.”

Kim Lachance Shandrow Senior Writer. Frequently covers cryptocurrency, future tech, social media, startups, gadgets and apps.

More disruption, chaos and opportunity for media in 2016

By Paul Frampton

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The pace of change in media is about to speed up, warns the chief executive of Havas Media UK. As the year has progressed, so have the cracks appearing in the media business models of old. More people than ever are voting with their thumbs and blocking advertising.

Let’s not kid ourselves that this is just a digital thing. More ads are being skipped than ever before on TV too and the honest creatives will tell you that the quality is not what it used to be.

Snapchat formally joins the UK conversation next year with its high-profile hires and ITV and Sky’s timely announcements around cross screen buying show the TV industry awakening, if not yet quite leaning in, to programmatic.

What about the agency world? No doubt we’ll see another year of crazy pricing promises but expect to see more advertisers let down when these are not honoured.

Trust and genuine partnership will ultimately prevail over pricing.

Still, the old guard maintains a misguided confidence that the world can continue as is. From the new ad tech pioneers, there’s a different but equally misplaced air of confidence that complex tech stacks can solve everything.

Programmatic will continue to grow exponentially and penetrate all media channels meaningfully. The agencies and advertisers that pivot to buying audiences using data and technology as enablers, will win.

The world of not just media but also business has changed forever. Much like the arrival of the locomotive and a networked Britain in the 1800s, technology has silently transformed the way all business is conducted.

The first building block to realising this vision is again trust.

There has to be more than just audience efficiencies; expect to see the emergence of a new wave of content and experiential activity that delivers the impact of TV and relevancy of digital.

The world’s most valuable company (Apple) builds experience rich devices. The world’s most valuable transport business (Uber) owns no vehicles, much like the world’s most valuable media business (Facebook) which produces no content of its own.

Smart use of data will inform not just the distribution, but also the physical creation and engagement strategy. Expect to see media agencies further evolve their content and production capabilities.

These disruptive businesses have been at the vanguard, but expect to see many more emerge and faster disruption hitting monster sectors like automotive and finance in 2016.

More advertisers will look to bring specialisms in house as they look to realise a more customer-focused vision. Agencies must be more supportive and confident in their consulting ability to provide missing expertise and talent, not fight against the tide.

Traditional media owners are also being hit hard and it’s not just the fear of ad blocking. The Daily Mail moved fast to adapt to desktop consumption with Mail Online but its latest revenue numbers show a struggle to master mobile.

For those agency groups unable to wean themselves off the heroin of the past, those that genuinely foster integration and fast moving data-driven, start-up agencies will be there to clean up their lunch.

Media consumption has already moved to mobile with search, social and news consumption behaviour now smartphone, not desktop first. Most publishing organisations remain baffled and paralysed.

The future is certainly bright and media has never been so exciting, but it will get more, not less chaotic.

2015 has been another bumper year for TV and the current Christmas ads are arguably the best ever, but they can’t disguise a shift in viewing habits and the erosion of 18-34 audience impacts.

YouTube is reaching for its cheque book to buy content rights whilst Facebook and Snapchat are racking up billions of daily views for video content.

The pace of change dictates that it will not only be the fittest that survive, but also the fastest: those agile and progressive enough to pivot as fast as consumption habits do.

Paul Frampton is the group managing director, Havas Media Group and the chief executive of Havas Media UK

This article was first published on campaignlive.co.uk

B2C Industries That Get the Most Engagement on Social Media

By Ayaz Nanji

Automakers have the most engaged audiences on social media of any B2C industry, according to a recent report from TrackMaven.

The report was based on data from content posted by 213 leading B2C brands on Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter between January 1, 2015 and October 31, 2015.

The data set included top B2C brands in the apparel, auto, CPG, entertainment, food, hospitality, insurance, restaurant, retail, and telco/cable verticals.

Automakers receive 5.6 interactions (shares, likes, comments, etc.) on each social post per 1,000 followers, on average, the analysis found; insurance brands are receiving 2.4 interactions per 1,000 followers, on average.

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Apparel brands have the largest median social media following of the B2C verticals examined, followed by automakers and restaurants.

Across industries, B2C brands have the largest median audience sizes on Facebook.

Although Facebook accounts for a large share of most brands’ followers, other social networks often have higher engagement rates.

The number of interactions for each vertical tends to vary significantly by social network. For example, telco/cable brands have the highest engagement ratio (interactions per 1,000 followers) of any vertical on Pinterest but the lowest on Instagram.

The following graph shows the engagement ratio—the average number of interactions per post per 1,000 followers—for each vertical on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.

About the research: The report was based on data from content posted by 213 leading B2C brands on Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter between January 1, 2015 and October 31, 2015.

Ayaz Nanji is an independent digital strategist and the co-founder of Inbound ContentWorks, a marketing agency that specializes in content creatio. He is also a research writer for MarketingProfs. His past experience includes working for Google/YouTube, the Travel Channel, AOL, and the New York Times.

Stop laying ads like a lazy platypus and start a conversation

By Jamie Gavin

Jamie Gavin argues innovations from Facebook to programmatic are still stuck in a ‘laying flat ads on the page’ mindset The definition of a platypus is: “A semiaquatic egg-laying mammal believed to be the sole living representative of its family and genus. A duck-billed, beaver-tailed, otter-footed creature originally thought to be an elaborate hoax.”

Laying flat ads on a page is nothing new. William Caxton perfected it when he served the very first printed advertisement in England in 1477: “Pyes of Salisbury. Good and chepe.”

But fast forward more than 500 years and we’re still doing exactly the same thing: laying flat ads on a page. And in an age when one in five UK internet users are now using adblockers, this practice may finally find itself extinct.

It is no doubt true that a more targeted, “less invasive, lighter ad experience” as Guy Philipson of the IAB recently put it, can help quell the tide of ad-blocking, but this approach of simply cleaning up online advertising in its current form misses the point slightly.

People don’t want to be advertised to anymore. Mobile accounts for one third of global web traffic, social networking is now the second most popular medium in the world – either online or offline – behind television, 62% of Twitter users go on the service to find their news.

Gone are the days of being able to create neat, little content packages with neat little advertising, and gone too must be this old-fashioned concept of the traditional ad, however sophisticated the “algorithms” behind it may be.

The problem is that publishers and brands have misinterpreted what the technological advancements in digital have actually brought about, which is a shift in the very nature of content.

What brands need to do is take an “All roads lead to Rome” approach to their products and services, linking up messaging, interactions, and conversations across the web.

They have instead gone about lazily trying to “computerise” the old school practice of advertising.

By attracting audiences back to a dedicated online location they can convert potential customers into leads, and get into the mindset of pulling audiences in rather than pushing messaging out.

Far from being the height of technological advancement, programmatic advertising is really just an archaic vision of “The Future” akin to a robot that fetches you the newspapers.

It automates an essentially archaic model of didactic messaging, rather than using the true advancements in digital and social technology we have seen over the last 10 years.

Even Facebook, when you think about it, is still about laying flat ads on a page – and the clue is in the title.

Facebook represents an evolutionary step between old and new media, wrapping a traditional display advertising model around user-generated content, dipped in the promise of behavioural targeting.

Like Facebook, programmatic has provided a useful platypus in the recent evolution of media.

But if the industry is to move forward, it is time to get out of the lazy practice of laying didactic content on a page and move towards a more engaging, conversational model.

Jamie Gavin is managing director of communications agency InPress Online.

This article was first published on mediaweek.co.uk

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Steps to Skyrocket That Great Idea Into Market Launch

By William Hall

When it comes to choosing between creativity or productivity, most companies consider them to be mutually exclusive. In reality, they shouldn’t be. In a study by Adobe Systems, 80 percent of respondents said that unlocking creativity was crucial to economic growth. However, nearly the same number noted that they were under pressure at their workplace to focus on productivity rather than creativity, and only a quarter felt they were living up to their creative potential.

Today, people are living in an age of big data and its cousin, data analytics, spawned by Google and IBM’s Watson and furthered by any number of Silicon Valley companies. Data crunching is crucial to the smooth running of a company. But when the focus on data comes at the expense of creativity and innovation, the company has the potential to lose forward momentum.

Some highly successful companies have chosen to pay special attention to creative and innovative thinking. But the highly successful companies don’t stop there. They ask: “What comes after the idea? How can we create an environment that allows a light bulb thought to become reality?”

There are scores of lessons and workshops out there on how to think creatively, collaboratively and innovatively.

Traditionally, training employees how to think innovatively stops there. This is because the training exercises don’t take the next step. No one asks what happens to the ideas that are generated. A good idea is meaningless if it’s gathering dust on a shelf. It’s a success only if it can get to market or be

utilized in a way that provides value to the business.

Here are five steps on how to go from idea to market launch.

1. From the start, focus on the customer.

During the process of introducing people to the brainstorming and idea phase, encouraging a special focus on the customer will make the final idea more useable. Part of the customercentric focus will naturally contain two simple questions: “Will the customer find this useful,” and “Can we bring this solution to market?” If both of these answers are “yes,” then the idea phase has the potential to make it to market.

2. It’s just as important to plan how to go to market.

Teaching the process of innovation is important. It is also usually focused solely on a product or service. This is important, but in reality, it is only a very small piece of the business puzzle. Giving teams time and space to think about how the product and / or service gets to market is probably even more important than the product or service itself. After teams have come up with an idea of how to solve customer needs issues, tell them to focus on how the company can bring this product to market. Not only will this give them practice of creative thinking and innovation, it will also teach them a valuable lesson about how the company works as a whole.

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3. Visualize how the competition will react.

5. Focus on the company, not just the

The teams have now formulated a world-class and gamechanging product or service. They have also come up with how the product is going to get to market. It’s now time to brainstorm what might happen in the competitive landscape.

Asking simple questions such as -- “How will the competition react? Which competitor will this impact the greatest? What would we do if a competitor launched this product before us?” -- will help plan for unforeseen events and a set of responses. In doing so, both the team and the company will have a far greater understanding of the industry as a whole.

solution.

4. Predict customer behavior.

Just as important as how competitors will react is how the customers themselves will react, and what that means for the bottom line. Are there any sorts of behavior that customers may take which changes the profitability of the product? For instance, offering a lifetime money-back guarantee or return policy may seem advantageous, but take a hard look at the cost of different customer reactions through simple financial modeling. By doing so, the participants will successfully look at the total life cycle of the solution.

Oftentimes, a lack of focus on the business results from too much narrow focus on the product or solution in isolation.

This may be a fun exercise, but isn’t useful to the business as a whole. Taking the time to exhaust all possible solutions to the entire business process is critical. Ensuring teams have looked at the launch process exhaustively creates exceptionally valuable results to the company as a whole.

Teaching teams how to innovate through the entire product launch process is exceptionally valuable. Thinking about both the creative and business productivity sides of the equation fit together ensures that any product launch can be successful from beginning to end.

William Hall Executive Vice President of Development Strategies at SimStudios

After a ‘Promiscuous’ 2015, Do Agencies and Brands Need Their Own Tinder?

Chasing ‘bright and shiny’ forces assignment model to fore

By Michael Sharp

Marriages are breaking down, and clients are sleeping around.

So said Brad Jakeman, president of PepsiCo’s global beverage group, at the ANA Masters of Marketing conference in Orlando in October. Jakeman also declared that the ad agency model is broken, that large agency networks are dinosaurs and that agency retainer relationships are disappearing as “clients are being way more promiscuous with their agencies than they ever have.”

In other words, clients are not sticking with their agencies of record and are playing the field.

No surprise. There’s plenty of fish in the ocean. Independent agencies are everywhere nowadays, as plentiful as tech incubators. You might say it’s the dawning of the age of the indie-agency startup, and most if not all of them live on a steady diet of project work.

Indeed, the advertising industry has been moving toward an assignment (or, should I say, assignation) model for years.

Brands increasingly are looking for something different, so they reach out of their comfort zones and have flings with these bright, shiny objects.

Sometimes the brands go back to their retainers; sometimes they don’t.

Oftentimes, brands keep the retainer and keep playing the field. The results are fresh, exciting, healthy and sexy for both parties.

But what Jakeman did not address was search agencies.

Clients today simply don’t need them anymore. They’ve become obsolete. As clients continue to refuse to be tied down by long-term retainers, they are shedding the formalities of courtship and go-betweens and paperwork. Requests for proposals and the rigmarole associated with expensive, formal reviews are going the way of the massive diamond engagement ring—in other words, they are fast becoming an excess, not a necessity.

Clients know what they want and what options are out there.

They don’t like to waste time or money. And yes, they can go online and find out for themselves.

Last year, some clever ad folks in Amsterdam launched Pitcher, described as “Tinder for Marketers.” Unfortunately, the Pitcher platform is not as robust as Tinder. It’s not fueled by two-way, mutual attraction. Pitcher does not ask clients for photos and information. It is a one-way process that simply billboards agencies that users can select and request a phone call or email. Also, Pitcher is limited to agencies in Amsterdam. And it does ask for a pitch fee, suggesting that 2,000 euros is ‘a small gesture,’ while $20,000 is a

‘whoop whoop’. A pitch consultant’s fees would still be more. Imagine a Pitcher in the U.S., or even a global version, one that’s based on mutual attraction. That’s the next step.

Harley-Davidson’s former chief marketing officer Mark-Hans Richer said (at the same ANA conference) that “clients must take more responsibility for creativity. It’s not the kind of thing that you should offshore.” By offshore he meant parking a brand’s creative responsibilities with a lead agency. Harley, according to Richer, is not surprisingly very promiscuous.

They work with lots of shops.

Richer might agree that clients also must take more responsibility for selecting agencies. It’s not the kind of thing you should offshore with a search agency. Here’s how a search agency that calls itself “the Google of consultancies” describes why clients need them: “Finding and changing agency partners is serious business.

Can you afford to go to school on your own dime? Are you up to speed on the everchanging agency universe?

Are you comfortable making this important decision on your own?”

I would venture to say that today, in the digital age, this sounds incredibly patronizing.

Yes, clients are up to speed. They are comfortable making decisions on their own. Of course they can afford to go to school on their own dime, especially when going to school with a search agency requires a fistful of dollars, not dimes.

Agencies today continue to compete with technology startups (and leaders) in attracting and retaining top talent. Employee turnover is massive, which makes it simply not in a client’s best interest to offshore its creativity and engage in long-standing agency retainers. The agency you reviewed yesterday is not the same agency you signed with today. By the time the ink has dried on the contract, the shop has morphed into something else.

Brands are beginning to find their own way through these shifting sands, navigating “the ever-changing agency universe” with their own compass. They don’t need their hands held, their faces slapped and their wallets tapped out.

Save all that for the ad campaigns.

Based in Los Angeles, Michael Sharp (@michael_ sharp) is the founder and executive creative director of Standard Time.

Virtual reality terms for digital marketers

By Adam Doherty

As technology giants such as Google and Microsoft continue to innovate with their own pieces of futuristic kit, Google Cardboard and Microsoft HoloLens respectively, virtual reality devices, gaming and applications are becoming increasingly appealing avenues for brands looking to take their digital marketing campaigns to the next level.

Adam Doherty of Marshmallow Laser Feast, a company which uses new technology within the arts, experiential and live environment, has compiled this glossary on the immersive technology. It details the differences between virtual, augmented and mixed reality, highlights the most well-known headsets and companies associated with them, and explains technical VR jargon in plain English.

Virtual, augmented and mixed reality terminology Augmented reality (AR) Augmented reality differs from virtual reality in that AR places digital content into our real world, whereas VR tries to divorce users from the real world. AR uses a pair of transparent glasses, like Google Glass, and keeps you firmly locked in the real world but adds artificial images into your immediate surroundings.

4D 4D effects like added wind or water sprays come from outside the VR headset but are synched to the VR narrative.

When married subtly with a VR demo they can make the experience feel more real. But the jury’s out on 4D. It needs

to be handled sensitively to justify its inclusion by making the experience that much more compelling.

Gaming engine This is the clever behind-the-scenes element that gives VR, AR and MR experiences their real time interactivity. Originally pioneered by video game developers, gaming engines means characters within video games can interact with each other.

VR just takes this principle one step further. Unreal Engine and Unity are the dominant names in this field.

Gaze control Gaze control is used to navigate an experience, in the same way that a PlayStation controller would navigate a game. This ability to control a VR interface or experience comes from gaze control, where the headset picks up on the direction of your neck and head. Highly sophisticated headsets can even determine your gaze by picking up on your eye movement.

(It’s not to be confused with head tracking, which ensures consistency between eyeline and visuals.) In its simplest form, gaze control can be used to select an item from a menu – a technique used by the Samsung Gear VR.

Gesture control Similar to gaze control, gesture control is where sensors identify real-world hand movements as a cue to interacting with the VR scene.

Google Cardboard Google Cardboard is a cardboard headset assembled

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from flat pack that accommodates compatible Android smartphones, thus turning them into VR devices. So Google Cardboard can potentially enable anyone with a smartphone to experience VR. This removes one of VR’s biggest barriers to entry: cost. Where an Oculus Rift headset plus the associated hardware will set you back hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds, the DIY Google Cardboard headset is available on Amazon for the princely sum of a tenner. With over 1.2 billion smartphones in circulation it seems the only barrier to entry for mass VR adoption is learning to optimise the experiences for smartphones.

Mixed reality (MR)

Haptic

Oculus is the name of the company that pioneered the Oculus Rift headset, one of the first HMDs to conquer VR’s notorious latency problem which made people feel sick, and then reached global fame by getting snapped up by Facebook.

Haptic is the optional extra that creates sensory feedback on your hands, feet, or somewhere else on your body, as you experience virtual reality. So if your avatar bumps into something in the virtual world, your actual body will be on the receiving end of a simulated bump. This simulation can come from something as subtle as ultrasound; or bass vibration through a device like the SubPac. The goal is to create an extra layer of authenticity. Not many marketing VR experiences use haptic yet as it’s a luxury that busts the budget. But as technology inevitably gets more affordable, haptic is an area to watch.

Head tracking So that a user can navigate a VR world, the experience needs to know where the user is and what he or she is looking at. This is done by tracking the user’s head movements so that the device knows where the user is in relation to the 3D space. Without spot-on accurate head tracking, you’ll get a degree of latency that results in VR’s dreaded Achilles’ heel, motion sickness.

Head mounted display (HMD) Head mounted display refers to the all-encompassing nature of VR headsets. Like a pair of blinkered goggles strapped to your head, HMDs completely seal off your physical surroundings by blocking out everything in your peripheral vision. Without this approach, there would be no full immersion. The Oculus Rift HMD tends to dominate VR coverage, but there are other headsets out there that also offer a variety of high quality, minimal latency experiences, such as HTC Vive, Samsung’s Galaxy Gear VR, Archos VR glasses and Google Cardboard.

MR could arguably be described as sitting half way between AR and VR. MR blends a virtual world into your physical space. The key word here is blend, so rather than adding an unapologetically incongruous digital object into your field of vision as with AR, MR blends a digital object into your surroundings in an attempt to make you think it’s really there.

To see MR in action, take a look at Microsoft’s HoloLens demo.

Oculus

Photo realism Photo realism refers to the concept of creating a world that is indistinguishable from reality. Some VR experiences simply give you a chance to navigate a real-world scene that’s been captured on camera as a 360 degree video, but the more fantastical VR experiences have to be created with computer generated imagery (CGI) using a gaming engine. It’s pretty hard to get CGI looking authentically photo real in traditional screen-based film or TV content, so it’s even harder to pull off in VR or MR, where that added element of interactivity requires even greater creative skills and processing power.

Presence This is the Holy Grail of VR. It’s the moment when immersion is so authentic and believable that your body and mind genuinely think you’re actually there in that virtual world.

True presence requires the perfect marriage of technology, creativity, visuals and sound.

360 degree video This type of video is captured using multiple cameras to create a fully spherical film. It means you can turn your head within a VR experience and see all around you, rather than the experience being cut-off at the edges. And with new platforms like YouTube 360, this type of content isn’t just used in VR. We can now create screen-based experiences that are also 360 degree. Unlike watching a standard video with a fixed point of view, 360 degree video viewers can use their mouse to scroll around the video for a different perspective.

Immersion

Virtual reality (VR)

The whole point of VR and MR is to immerse people in an experience by manipulating their perceptions with images, sounds and other stimuli until they feel physically present in an artificial environment.

It can sound like 1980’s sci-fi, but if you think of VR as an artificial world built within a computer system, the idea becomes a little more digestible. A VR experience immerses the user in these computer-generated worlds, rather than just watching a traditional screen that’s surrounded by the real world. Once inside VR allows the user or users to navigate these digital environments whilst performing movements and actions within it; such as manipulating VR objects.

Latency This refers to the time delay between the person’s real-world movement and the movement that’s replicated in the VR space. The longer the lag between user motion and tracker system response, the sicker a user will feel.

Adam Doherty is managing director at Marshmallow Laser Feast

Strong Brands Drive B2B Markets

By Kevin Randall

To stay alive and flourish in highly competitive environments, business-to-business (B2B) companies spend more time and money on R&D. Suppliers focus on making their products more cost-effective and reliable, smarter, faster and smaller than the competition. They also find ways to improve and add services so that they provide customers with a complete and satisfying experience. Marketplaces are constantly changing, so companies have to adapt in order to stay ahead.

But how can these B2B companies truly differentiate their offering and be relevant to customers over the long-term?

This is where brands come in.

Brands matter in B2B markets. In fact, they may matter even more in B2B than in B2C.

Cut though clutter Brands matter because the B2B marketing communications world is characterized by numbing sameness, commoditized feature wars and laundry-lists of product benefits. In other words, there is a sea of noise, parity, clutter and dullness.

Branding–going all the way back to its origins with Norse livestock herders–allows a producer or owner to distinguish his/her goods or services. Branding today is a strategic tool that helps the supplier cut through the morass of the market, get noticed and connect with the customer on many levels and in ways that matter. A strong brand becomes the customer’s ‘shorthand’ for making good choices in a complex, risky and confusing marketplace.

Tap into emotional drivers Brands matter because companies act just like people when it comes to evaluating what products or services to buy. Along with a number of explicit rational criteria, a powerful irrational impulse is always present to influence the purchase decision.

A strong brand with an effective positioning strategy speaks to and taps into the totality of these buyer needs.

Facilitate delivery of promise

Brands matter when supplier teams are doing business with buyer teams. Through effective internal branding efforts, the brand becomes the “glue” that binds the supplier culture and organization together, enabling the brand to make good on its external promise. Enterprise customers will reward a brand which delivers a unified, consistent and satisfying experience with repeat business.

However, common beliefs in the B2B marketing universe overlook the importance of brands. Consider the following thoughts: Consumer brands are defined and presented largely based on emotive appeals—‘warm and fuzzies’. In B2B, products and services, rather than ‘brands’, are pitched, sold and transacted through cold logic.

Consumers are drawn to brands’ irrational benefits (status, prestige, affinity, self-security). Business customers specify and purchase based on rational drivers (pricing, specifications, product performance, metrics).

Such thinking by B2B marketers is not only naïve (and defies logic) but also undermines their ability to drive incremental business value and ROI.

As the following examples show, brands drive B2B. Those who recognize this fact and leverage their full brand assets will create a true, strategic competitive advantage.

1. Brands produce economic value in the B2B marketplace. According to the 2005 Interbrand/ Business Week “Best Global Brands By Value” ranking, IBM, GE and Intel, largely B2B-focused brands targeting sophisticated enterprises and “technical buyers”, are among the most valuable brands. Their intangible asset of “goodwill” drives billions of dollars in value and market capitalization. IBM’s 2005 brand value is $53.4 billion (GE $47.0 billion, Intel $35.6 billion). Their brands, not their products, are their differentiators that

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lead to competitive advantage. Brands drive value for small business-to-business companies too (see Acme Brick story in Did You Know?).

2. Ironically technology has led to brand importance in the B2B world. The growth of the Internet and e-marketplaces along with accelerating technological product obsolescence has resulted in a hyper-informed and commoditized B2B marketplace.

Buyers are overwhelmed with myriad logical choices, features, benefits, information, data, metrics–parity and clutter. They want to make an easy, safe and right choice. Thus, “Brand” becomes the compass or default for navigating the purchase process.

B2B customers often evaluate potential suppliers according to numerous, rigorous criteria–a ‘scientific’ RFP process. But does anyone really think a multi-million dollar decision will come down to a numeric score or check list? How does a supplier even make the RFP list? You guessed it…Through their recognized brand.1 Strong B2B brands benefit from organically created, branded, Web-based communities of loyal customer-advocates who evangelize the brand while providing it with new product or service ideas. As Chuck Feltz of Deluxe financial services notes, “if we can create more consciousness around the experience, it has ROI.” When it comes to marketing technology products, marketers all too often ignore the full package of customer benefits and instead focus only on rational product features. Mohanbir Sawhney, Professor of Technology at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, argues that there are three dimensions of benefits upon which technology firms should build positioning platforms: • 1st-Functional (what the product does) • 2nd-Economic (what the brand means to the customer in time and money) • 3rd-Emotional (how the brand makes the customer feel) Brands that deliver beyond the functional and economic levels with emotional benefits will command an incremental price premium and create strong competitive advantage and customer brand loyalty.

3. Emotive propositions resonate in B2B markets whether customers admit it or not. People say that they are not influenced by advertisements but data and client spending suggest otherwise. In the early-tomid 1980s, IBM did not have the best computer systems or pricing. “Big Blue,” however, became the enterprise systems market leader because you never got fired for buying IBM (same with Cisco today). IT Directors “bought” a relationship, company, reputation, service, people, assurance. In other words they bought goodwill or the brand.

Recent advances in neuroscience support the notion that buying decisions in B2C and B2B spheres are largely based on irrational impulses often unknown to the buyer. For example, the IBM customer was strongly motivated by job security and peace-of-mind. Today’s B2B customers may articulate their

need for ROI, higher performance, a better mousetrap. Yet, they really want: to avoid doing business with “an Enron”; a name or people they can trust; to buy from a “leader”. Strong brands play to these important drivers.

4. Successful B2B brands require one voice. B2B transactions often involve large amounts of lots of money, complexity and people. Corporate teams sell to corporate teams. OEM engineer or professional services clients interact with an array of supplier professionals (sales to marketing to senior management to support). Customers who have a brand experience that is integrated, consistent, easy and expected will more likely become customers again. Loyalty drives brand economic value according to leading marketing and brand valuation experts. With the objective of unifying the brand and improving the customer experience, Caterpillar has educated and trained over 10,000 employees through its “OneVoice” program on how to communicate and demonstrate CAT’s singular brand personality and values to the marketplace.2 5. Strong B2B brands are branded from the insideout, top-down and bottom-up. Aligning the whole organization from customer-facing reps to factory floor employees with the corporate brand strategy is crucial to driving brand value and customer loyalty, especially in the B2B world. For example, if every employee at a $500 million electronic component manufacturer or midmarket professional services firm did not “live” the brand strategy, then the firm may face lost sales and unhappy customers. On the other hand, if every Procter & Gamble employee who worked on Ivory Soap did not understand its brand promise, there may be minimal negative impact on sales and consumer satisfaction.

Infineon, a German-based semiconductor company spun out of Siemens in 1999, recognizes the power of branding as a guiding principle for both internal and external audiences.

Led by their CEO, 25,000 employees were engaged in the process of the initial brand launch. The company continues to conduct periodic studies to chart perceptions of both employees and customers in order to make sure the Infineon brand promise is fulfilled by the organization and that the brand is aligned with market values.3 There is a proven link between internal branding and the bottom line–across B2C and B2B markets. Companies like Pitney Bowes, Wachovia, Symbol Technologies, Itron, Hewlett Packard and William Blair have implemented CEO-sponsored “brand assimilation” programs that resulted in improved performance in internal and external brand measures.

Effective internal brand-building and communications efforts result not only in higher employee job satisfaction, improved morale, lower turnover and enhanced productivity, but also increased worker motivation, focus, engagement and conviction in the brand enterprise all of which leads to higher employee and organizational performance. A recent Watson Wyatt study showed the earning per share performance of companies with high employee trust levels outperformed companies with low trust levels by 186%.

Brands drive B2B. Because not all B2B marketers embrace or grasp this notion, there is a real

opportunity for the enlightened B2B brand strategist and marketer to achieve real impact.

Did you know?

• Small brands can achieve great impact…

Founded in 1891 and based in Fort Worth, Texas, Acme Brick is a manufacturer of bricks that are sold largely through the building trade. A good portion of their $1.5 million marketing communications budget goes into image building and strongly branded tactics including partnerships with professional sports celebrities and teams, PR, charity events and outdoor boards. In 1995 they introduced an unheard of 100-year product guarantee (3-5 years had been the industry standard) to further differentiate Acme. Their brand-building efforts have paid-off. Acme is the dominant brand in the area for both homebuilders and buyers. A 1998 survey of homebuyers showed Acme had achieved 84% brand preference when no other supplier was above 10% in their regional market. In fact, Acme estimates: • Their brand is worth an extra 10 cents for every dollar’s worth of Acme brick sold and $250 in incremental revenue per home • Approximately $20 million of Acme’s annual $200 million brick sales is a return on the investment that Acme makes yearly in brand-building.

• There is a 13-fold return on an average annual marcom budget of $1.5 million.

• If a brick can be successfully differentiated then almost anything can be branded to create value.

• Tech brands generate financial returns…Since 1984, technology consultant Techtel has been measuring the relationship between brand-building in the high technology arena and stock performance. Merrill Lynch and Fidelity Investments use Techtel’s research in forecasting tech stock movements. On a quarterly basis, enterprise customer respondents are queried about whether they have a positive, negative or neutral opinion of a technology brand. Over 100 brands spanning more than 40 technology categories (including Apple, EMC, Intel, IBM, Freescale Semiconductor, Cisco, Accenture, Toshiba, Hewlett Packard, Fujitsu and Oracle) are part of the study’s database.

Empirical research in the finance field shows that marketing ROI strongly correlates with stock return. Over the last decade, the Techtel study has consistently found on average a 70% correlation between brand equity and stock performance. Thus, there is a direct and positive relationship between brand image for technology companies and their financial performance.5 • An unseen commodity produced BIG money…

Before the 1990s, Intel, a second-tier electronics player lagging well behind Texas Instruments in microprocessor sales, was an undistinguished brand. Few people (PC manufacturers, buyers or users) knew or cared about specialized “386” components let alone if one brand name was different from another. In 1991, Intel launched a $100 million long-term cooperative “Intel

Inside” brand campaign with PC-makers to differentiate computers built with its chip “ingredient” and build “consumer pull” for the Intel component. At the time, Intel’s market capitalization was $10.2 billion. By 1998, its market cap had grown to $208.5 billion. It is estimated the brand itself contributes about $2 billion annually to Intel’s market value. Today the Intel brand, based on a commodity product, is the 5th most valued brand in the world with intangible financial worth estimated at $35.6 billion (Interbrand/Business Week).

• Trust is worth billions…According to Richard Costello, General Electric’s former Manager of Marketing Communications, the company netted a bonus of about $10 billion in 1999, roughly equal to GE’s entire net income that year when revenues were $111.6 billion.

Costello and others including former CEO Jack Welch and current chief Jeffrey Immelt attribute much of GE’s impressive growth and success to the cultivation of intangible brand value, or the GE “trust factor”. In fact, for a number of their flagship offerings like aircraft engines and medical equipment, GE makes more money and achieves greater differentiation through its valueadded intangibles, in the form of its “branded” offering (services, assurance, solutions, people, etc.) than its “parity products”.6 (Much like GE, IBM in the 1990s, under the skilled leadership of Lou Gerstner created transformative growth and value, reengineering itself with a customer and brand-centric offering and culture, discarding its product-focused legacy in favor of valueadded services.).

• Customers buy in a blink…Malcolm Gladwell’s bestselling book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking asserts that customers make most buying decisions (and the best choices) by relying on their 2-second first impressions (or their “adaptive unconsciousness”) versus a long, drawn-out process involving lots of rational yet extraneous information. Gladwell and others have exposed a dirty little secret known in marketing research circles that customers usually cannot articulate how they really feel, what they actually think or why they buy a particular brand of product. The driver of their real feelings, thoughts and actions according to Gladwell, neuroscientists and new wave market researchers is their unconscious. Buyers make split-second decisions (“thin-slicing”) based on stored memories, images and feelings—which is what a brand is all about. A strong brand equals a strong 2-second impression, whether you’re buying potato chips or specifying microchips.

Notes 1-Mia Pandey, Brand Channel 2-Harvard Business Online 3-James C. Anderson and Gregory S. Carpenter, Kellogg on Branding 4-Marketing News 5-Techtel/David Aaker 6-Robert Lamons/Marketing News Kevin Randall is Director of Brand Strategy & Research at Movéo Integrated Branding (www.moveo.com), a brand consulting and marketing communications firm based in Oakbrook Terrace, IL. His experience cuts across Fortune 500 brands, mid-sized B2B brands and a range of healthcare brands.

Book,

&

Line

Sinker

Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry

Every Town Is a Sports Town: Business Leadership at ESPN, from the Mailroom to the Boardroom

By Jacquie McNish, Sean Silcoff

By George Bodenheimer, Donald T. Phillips

Losing the Signal is a riveting story of a company that toppled global giants before succumbing to the ruthlessly competitive forces of Silicon Valley. This is not a conventional tale of modern business failure by fraud and greed. The rise and fall of BlackBerry reveals the dangerous speed at which innovators race along the information superhighway.

A Best Business Book of 2015, Strategy Business ESPN’s rise is one of the most remarkable stories about business and sports in our time, and nobody can tell it better than George Bodenheimer.

It may be hard to believe, but not long ago, getting sports updates was difficult and frustrating. ESPN changed everything.

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time

By Martin Ford

In Leadership BS, Jeffrey Pfeffer shines a bright light on the leadership industry, showing why it’s failing and how it might be remade. He sets the record straight on the oft-made prescriptions for leaders to be honest, authentic, and modest, tell the truth, build trust, and take care of others. By calling BS on so many of the stories and myths of leadership, he gives people a more scientific look at the evidence and better information to guide their careers.

Winner of the 2015 FT & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award A New York Times Science Bestseller In Rise of the Robots, Ford details what machine intelligence and robotics can accomplish, and implores employers, scholars, and policy makers alike to face the implications. The past solutions to technological disruption, especially more training and education, aren’t going to work...

By Jeffrey Pfeffer

The Shifts and the Shocks: What We’ve Learned-and Have Still to Learn-from the Financial Crisis

Wiser: Getting Beyond Groupthink to Make Groups Smarter

By Martin Wolf

Nudge coauthor Cass Sunstein and leading decision-making scholar Reid Hastie shed light on the specifics of why and how group decisions go wrong - and offer tactics and lessons to help leaders avoid the pitfalls and reach better outcomes. In the first part of the book, they explain in clear and fascinating detail the distinct problems groups run into...

The Shifts and the Shocks is not another detailed history of the crisis but is the most persuasive and complete account yet published of what the crisis should teach us about modern economies and econom­ics. Written with all the intellectual command and trenchant judgment that have made Martin Wolf one of the world’s most influential economic com­mentators...

By Cass R. Sunstein, Reid Hastie

Captivology: The Science of Capturing People’s Attention

Brand Famous

By Ben Parr

Another of our favourite books from the 2014/2015 book season — “Brand Famous”.

We loved this book because the author is sassy and a little brash and offers a lot of smart branding advice and exercises that will help you get straight to the heart of your brand and help you to communicate in your very own brand voice. Boyd works with a lot of big brands, but her advice in this book is all about the scrappy small business owner.

The entire purpose of branding is to create this “wormhole” effect that connects your ideal customer to you in seconds instead of years. To accomplish this, you’re going to need to grab their attention. And if you want to learn to do that like a “Boss” as they say, you’ll want to grab a copy of “Captivology”. This is a tasty bit of writing by Ben Parr (a journalist) who will astound and amaze you with how wondrous our brains are at managing what gets our attention. You’ll get fantastic ideas on how to make small tweaks that grab big attention.

By Linzi Boyd

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The New Rules of Marketing & PR

By David Meerman Scott

Heavyweight Marketing: Knockout Strategies for Building Champion Brands

The benchmark guide to marketing and PR, updated with the latest social media and marketing trends, tools, and real-world examples of success The New Rules of Marketing & PR, 4th Edition is the pioneering guide to the future of marketing, an international bestseller with more than 300,000 copies sold in over 25 languages.

It offers a step-by-step action plan for harnessing the power of modern marketing and PR to communicate with buyers directly, raise visibility, and increase sales.

By Nikolas Allen

Branding Basics for Small Business

The Step-By-Step Guide to Build Your Brand

By Maria Ross

By Sheralyn Pratt

We have chosen this one because it takes solid branding principles and makes them accessible for entrepreneurs and small business owners – without making you feel like you need the budget of an Apple or Nike to get your branding right.

You’ll feel right at home with it’s format of giving you basic questions to answer and then guiding you into implementation. This updated edition has added even more social media strategies and how-to’s for small business.

If you’re looking for a basic step-by-step guide through the branding process, this is the book for you. It will take you from the 30,000 ft. view of what branding is, all the way down to the 3o pixel view of choosing a color palette for your logo and everything in between. This book is far more focused on the design and image component of branding and helping you to give direction to someone who is helping you with design.

Hooked: How to Build HabitForming Products

Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content

By Nir Eyal, Ryan Hoover

This is one of our favourite branding books for 2015 for main street business owners. If you’re a startup and have limited to no marketing or branding done, or if you’re a marketing mess, you’ll want to check this one out. Nikolas Allen is truly the marketing guy next door who has taken is “in-the-ring” daily branding work with small business owners just like you and slapped it into this practical book.

Hooked is based on Eyal’s years of research, consulting, and practical experience. He wrote the book he wished had been available to him as a start-up founder—not abstract theory, but a how-to guide for building better products. Hooked is written for product managers, designers, marketers, start-up founders, and anyone who seeks to understand how products influence our behavior.

By Ann Handley

Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (3rd Edition)

Contagious: Why Things Catch On

By Steve Krug Since Don’t Make Me Think was first published in 2000, hundreds of thousands of Web designers and developers have relied on usability guru Steve Krug’s guide to help them understand the principles of intuitive navigation and information design. Witty, commonsensical, and eminently practical, it’s one of the best-loved and most recommended books on the subject.

Everybody Writes is a go-to guide to attracting and retaining customers through stellar online communication, because in our content-driven world, every one of us is, in fact, a writer.

If you have a web site, you are a publisher. If you are on social media, you are in marketing. And that means that we are all relying on our words to carry our marketing messages. We are all writers.

By Jonah Berger New York Times bestseller and named Best Marketing Book of 2014 by the American Marketing Association In this book, Berger reveals the secret science behind word-of-mouth and social transmission.

Discover how six basic principles drive all sorts of things to become contagious, from consumer products and policy initiatives to workplace rumors and YouTube videos.