BrandKnew June 2018

Branding matters. Because branding matters.

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Dear Friends: There is no heat and miss this summer. Close on the heels of the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook episode, comes the GDPR implementation in Europe. Brands and organisations are still distilling and interpreting the nuances while some (notably the likes of Google, Facebook etc) are doing their best to circumvent, obfuscate. Time will tell where we head on this front.

Coming to the issue at hand, we talk about how Brands can have Staying Power​and quote some examples. How terms used in marketing has changed over the years is also demonstrated in an article on the subject. What would happen if the wor ld’s most recognisable logos are redesigned as fonts. Our feature in this issue gives you a dashboard. There is also some sagely advice on how brands can embrace culture and consumerism.

What would definitely please the advertising fraternity is the story on fake news and if Advertising is the last bastion of truth in a Post Truth world. Doing good is doing great for brands and our feature on Brands with Purpose and their 2X growth articulates that very effectively. Programmat ic is going in-house and we reflect on how smart brands are treading that territory.

Loads more as usual to soak in. So go ahead. Till the next, my very best!

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Suresh Dinakaran

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@ISDGlobalDubai

@Brandknewmag

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Managing Editor: Suresh Dinakaran Creative Head/Director Operations: Pravin Ahir Magazine Concept & Design/ New Media Specialist: Mufaddal Joher Senior Hustler-Digital Marketing & Brand Development: Nikhil Thekkumkoottathil Creator: Brand Stories: Salindu Sadishan Brand Development & Engagement Specialist: Hasitha Fernando Brand Research & Creative Engagement Specialist: Anushka Kartha Country Head, Australia: Norbert D’Souza Country Head, UK: Sagar Patil Regional Director: Krishna Chugh Country Manager, India: Vinit Chugh Kenneth Extross, India: Business Development Director

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CONTENTS

Technology has upended the world’s advertising giants Marketing the New ‘Terms’ of Endearment The World’s Most Recognizable Logos, Redesigned As Fonts How Leading Brands Are Closing The Loop For Smarter In-House Programmatic Buying In A World Of Fake News, Has Advertising Become The Last Bastion Of Truth?

How can brands embrace culture and consumerism?

Unbranding Is Dumb Study: Brands with a purpose grow 2x faster than others How brands can cut through the £500bn sports market The Secrets of Staying Power Marketing To Parents Of ‘Theybies’ Is Now A Thing This Startup Built Its Brand On Facebook. Now It Can Never Leave.

What Marketers Should Know About Personality-Based Marketing Book, Line & Sinker

Technology has upended the world’s advertising giants ADVERTISING AGENCIES ARE UNDER PRESSURE TO CHANGE ARCHAIC AND INEFFICIENT ELEMENTS OF THEIR BUSINESS MODELS

By The Economist

IN BUILDING the world’s largest advertising company over the past 30 years, Sir Martin Sorrell, chief executive of WPP, has weathered two recessions and survived a global financial crisis. His firm nearly went bankrupt in the early 1990s. Now he must make his hardest advertising pitch yet, to convince the corporate world that image-making agencies like his are not dinosaurs on the brink of extinction.

The world’s advertising giants are struggling to adapt to a landscape suddenly dominated by the duopoly of Google and Facebook. Some of their biggest clients, such as Procter & Gamble (P&G) and Unilever, are also being disrupted, in their case by smaller online brands and by Amazon. They are cutting spending on advertising services, and also building more capabilities in-house. Consultancies with digital expertise such as Deloitte and Accenture are competing with agencies, arguing that they know how to connect with consumers better, and more cheaply, using data, machine learning and app design.

The resulting picture is an industry under siege. WPP just had its worst year since the financial crisis, with declining revenues from like-for-like operations (ie, stripping out revenue from

acquired businesses) and a slightly reduced profit margin.

This year the company projects that organic growth will be flat, compared with 5% or so in better times. Its big rivals, including America’s Interpublic Group and Omnicom Group and France’s Publicis Groupe, have registered anaemic growth. Publicis posted 0.8% growth in its like-for-like operations in 2017. Investors are losing faith—none more so than WPP’s, who have driven the company’s shares down by 23% since mid-February (see chart).

The ad giants have conventionally made much of their money from huge fixed contracts with clients, which lock in longterm relationships with multiple agencies. Their holdingcompany structures include famous creative firms that design and make ads for TV and other media, but also a host of other businesses that bring in the bulk of their revenue, such as media-buying operations, digital services, brand consulting and public relations. This month Marc Pritchard, chief brand officer of P&G, criticised their model as a “Mad Men” operation that is “archaic” and overly complex in an era when campaigns and ads need to be designed and refined quickly across lots of platforms.

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stems from a perception that the ad agencies have exploited their complexity to boost billings. In 2016 an advertiser trade association issued a report accusing the agencies of using opaque practices, including in digital-ad placement, to extract higher margins. The holding firms strongly disputed the findings, but the report prompted many clients to review their contracts with agencies and insist on more transparency.

Nonetheless, some of the advertising holding companies’ woes may prove less threatening than feared. It is far from clear that Google and Facebook will disintermediate agencies in the long run. The agencies all do programmatic buying of digital ads for clients. WPP, the only holding company that discloses its spending on the two giants, spent about $7bn of its clients’ ad budgets with Google and Facebook in 2017, out of a combined $46bn in advertising sold by both companies that WPP considers agency-relevant business (that is, not counting small-business advertising). Sir Martin says that market share is “not dissimilar” to WPP’s share of ad business with Comcast and Disney.

Spot of bother Technological forces are buffeting this model. The first big challenge is disintermediation. Despite the growing backlash against the tech giants, Google and Facebook make it easy for firms big and small to advertise on their platforms and across the internet via their powerful ad networks. The American advertising market grew by around 3% last year, to $196bn, but only because of the tech giants. MoffettNathanson, a research firm, estimates that Google and Facebook each accounted for more than $5bn of growth in advertising spend, and for almost 90% of online ad growth. All forms of conventional advertising, apart from outdoor, shrank.

The second headache is the rise of ad-free content for consumers, especially on Netflix, and the corresponding disruption of ad-supported television, which has declining viewership globally. This hurts agencies because their biggest clients, including the manufacturers of consumer goods, beverages and pharmaceuticals, use television the most. Planning campaigns and creating 30-second spots for television is a people-heavy, high-margin business that the agencies dominate. In America television advertising sales fell by $4.9bn in 2017, or 7.3%, to $62.1bn, according to Magna Global, which is owned by Interpublic. That is the biggest such drop in a non-recession year in two decades.

Third, Amazon’s e-commerce might, and the growing clout of internet-era direct-to-consumer upstarts, have weakened the distribution muscle and pricing power of the advertising giants’ biggest clients. In America Dollar Shave Club, a razor startup, significantly dented the market share of P&G’s Gillette brand in just a few years, forcing price cuts. (Unilever bought Dollar Shave Club in 2016.) Consumer-goods companies are responding to such margin pressure by cutting spending on agencies; P&G has cut agency fees and production costs by $750m in three years, and expects to cut at least another $400m.

Such cost discipline among clients is driven partly by the influence of thrifty private-equity investors like 3G, the Brazilian owner of AB InBev, the world’s largest brewer. It also

Facebook’s recent troubles over data privacy could lead to a regulatory crackdown that constrains both it and Google, potentially opening up the digital-advertising market to more competitors. Facebook’s market share in digital ads in America is forecast to dip this year for the first time. The more options there are for placing ads besides Google and Facebook, the more likely advertisers are to seek the help of agencies.

Sir Martin argues that the budgetary pressures that have forced his clients to cut back on advertising are a cyclical problem, not like the structural challenges posed by technological disruption. He believes that big brands will invest more in advertising to protect their positions in disrupted markets.

Some analysts agree with this rosy view. Agency executives further argue that digital consultancies will not be a threat to their core advertising business because they mostly compete for different, lower-cost services.

In private, however, a senior executive at a rival ad-holding firm rejects much of this optimism. Technological disruption and disintermediation, he says, will only deepen. The efficiency of targeted digital ads means companies can spend less for the same outcome in branding.

The advertising firms are responding by hiring away talent, acquiring businesses (in 2015 Publicis bought Sapient, a digital consultancy, for $3.7bn) and gradually changing how they make money. Their plans mostly boil down to two things: investing in digital services and consolidating their collections of businesses so that they can provide a range of services to one client more cheaply under one account.

That should be more than enough to keep them alive.

“Everybody says that we’re dinosaurs but we’re not. We’re cockroaches,” explains Rishad Tobaccowala, chief growth officer for Publicis. “We know how to scurry around, we hide out in the corner, we figure out where the food is, we reconstitute ourselves.”

Marketing the New ‘Terms’ of Endearment

By Suresh Dinakaran

Over the years, tried and oft used terms in the world of business and marketing have transcended convention. We seem to be in a perennial state of having to come to terms with these terms. Here is the term sheet on that.

Brand Owners, Advertisers and Marketers were once cosy with ‘ Mass Market ‘. Try and reach the maximum audience numbers through mass media. A lot of the times it was about Spray and Pray. Mass Market transitioned to ‘ Mass Customisation ‘ which went beyond one size fits all to one size fitting some. With the advent of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Data Science, we are now in an era of the ‘ Customer Segment of One ‘, where one individual as an audience is targeted with high degree of precision and success.

The disclaimers have been turned on its head as well. What used to be common place was a term going as ‘ Caveat Emptor ‘ which essentially was to say buyers beware. The entire onus and risk on buying a product or service was all on the buyer/ end user. Now, in an over commoditised world, where we have moved on from push and control to pull and engage, where top down has given way to bottom up marketing, what is evident is ‘ Caveat Venditor ‘, where the accountability and responsibility rests fully on the seller. The wheel has gone a full circle.

Not until long ago, brands and their marketing plans were etched out keeping demographic groups in mind. A pre decided age group with a certain buyer persona was carved out and communication was created to influence and impact that community. The universe has changed dramatically. Brand marketers have now started addressing mindsets which throws conventional wisdom out of the window. As they have now begun to chant, RIP Demographics!

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Consumer aspirations have taken a twist as well. Yesteryears we had all marketing and communication created to induce brand ownership. With so much millennial consumption happening, the entire paradigm has now shifted to owning experiences. The new brand mantra for marketers is CeX(Customer Experience) and the City. Ownership is passe, experience is the new aspiration.wallet space.

Remember those days when the quintessential manna from heaven was ‘ brand loyalty ‘. Coveted, treasured, revered. Loyalty was royalty. In an era of surplus of goods, information, choices, services and a deficit of trust, attention and resources, ‘ customer infidelity ‘ has replaced loyalty. Cheaper, better, faster? Here we shift loyalties!

We were just coming to terms with the ‘ knowledge economy ‘ as it moved on from the ‘ Industrial Economy ‘and before we knew it we were bang in the middle of the ‘sharing/collaborative economy‘. The dust had hardly settled on that and now the entire attention is rooted on the ‘ attention economy ‘. In an age of perennial distraction, attention is the new premium.

Since advent of marketing, and the quest for differentiation, the narrative has revolved around a USP(Unique Selling Proposition). That feature or benefit which makes your brand distinct or unique from other competitors in the eco system.Then came the not so holy communion onslaughtthe SOS- Sea of Sameness. Nothing unique, nothing distinct, the herd mentality, the also ran, the me too. Which prompted our research at ISD Global to discover what we have come to label as UFP- Unique Feelings Proposition– where state of the heart is what brands are appealing to win trust, loyalty, mind and wallet space.

Suresh Dinakaran is Group CEO of ISD Global, a brand strategy & creative ideations entity based out of Dubai with operations across the globe. With over two decades of insights, expertise and experience in building and growing brands across multiple geographies and media platforms.

The World’s Most Recognizable Logos, Redesigned As Fonts

By Jesus Diaz

Logo and identity designer Emanuele Abrate recently conducted a very curious experiment. He decided to recreate some of the most famous logos on earth–from Adidas to Red Bull–by replacing each brand name with the typeface used in each logo. Put down your Freight Sans Black frappuccino and ponder the results above.

I asked Abrate–who is also a teacher and managing partner at Italian blog and academy Grafigata–how the idea came to be.

It turns out, it emerged from a very common question among design fans, including myself: What’s that typeface? “Every time I see a logo,” Enmanuel told me, “I wonder how it was conceived, how it was designed, what kind of typeface was used and why.” He decided to turn his analysis into a graphic project that illustrates how important typography is to these iconic logos.

When I look at some of his mock-ups, I don’t even notice the brand name is missing. Bebas Neue is still obviously Netflix.

Klavika is obviously Facebook. My brain is so trained by the context of the logo mark, the color, and the typeface itself, that the “Futura” above the Nike Swoosh logo doesn’t even register as out of place.

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How Leading Brands Are Closing The Loop For Smarter In-House Programmatic Buying

By Leah Pope

Spoiler alert: This is not another list discussing the five or six reasons why you should bring programmatic in-house. That writing is on the wall. Since the start of 2018, it has been clear that blue-chip brands are making that move and the story isn’t going to fade.

Recently, an Adobe market survey found that 86% of brands and 89% of agencies are planning to spend more on programmatic ad buying in 2018 -- meaning marketers are prioritizing greater control of their online media buying.

The same survey found that two out of three marketers are planning to bring their programmatic efforts in-house by 2022, and the other third will do so partially. I think it’s safe to say that programmatic will become synonymous with digital advertising in the near future.

Closing The Loop But part of conversation isn’t getting light. How can you “close the loop” on programmatic buying with an automated approach to reporting and insights — not only for your programmatic data but with other marketing tactics, programs and business impact information (e.g., sales)? It’s a topic that is consistently being elevated by marketing leaders.

The reason?

Programmatic buying as a capability isn’t the end goal.

The technology may be new but the holy grail of smarter marketing that is more efficient, effective and impactful remains the same.

Double Checking Your Programmatic Tech Shopping List If you have already brought programmatic in-house, or you’re planning to, you’ll be adding to your tech stack. This will include, for example, new DSPs, your DMP, your ad server, one or more ad verification platforms that specialize in viewability, brand safety and ad fraud.

But what in-house programmatic marketers often fail to add to their list is a way to bring all of the real-time information generated by these platforms into one place. Instead, this capability is often relegated to 90s-era manual reporting tools like Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations or their millennial offspring, the G-Suite.

The problem with this approach is simple: While your

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execution tools give you the ability to buy in real time, your reporting and insights flow out every 30 days — or longer — due to the manual data crunching involved. That doesn’t help inform real-time buying decisions. It potentially wastes valuable marketing dollars and occupies analytics talent with low-impact data prep activity.

This is why marketers are turning to address this issue with advanced technologies to provide measurement, insights and reporting that closes the loop with their new buying capabilities.

How Leading Brands Are Closing The Loop Let’s make this concept real. Here are five scenarios that illustrate how global brands are finding success: • Automotive companies are leveraging in-house programmatic for hyper-targeted, local advertising and are connecting their campaign spend and performance data to business impact outcomes at the local dealership level. This includes: web visits, car configurations, dealer visits, test drives and sales.

• Music labels are leveraging their first-party data to programmatically target the right fans on weekly new release schedules across iTunes, Amazon and more. Creating programmatic views for media spend, engagement and sales allows creative marketers to throttle spending in hyper-quick campaign flights measured in days.

• Gaming companies are leveraging their first-party player data to quickly test and learn new programmatic combinations of channels, creative and formats with

behavioral data-based audiences.

• Pharmaceutical companies are putting the media transparency mandate into operational mode by having real-time access to a new set of KPIs that blend viewability, ad fraud and brand safety data into their media cost and performance KPIs. • E-commerce retail companies are connecting their programmatic search data with real-time site and inventory analytics to optimize media for higher average order values, sales and revenue — while pausing keywords for out-of-stock products to simultaneously drive efficiency and a better customer experience.

Going 100% In House — Or Not The reality of today’s brand programmatic trend is that not every organization will follow the lead of L’Oreal (disclosure: L’Oreal is a Datorama customer) or Netflix by going completely in-house. There are many reasons for this.

Some are budgetary, some are because of skill sets, some are related to positive agency relationships. Many companies are adapting by taking some programmatic in-house. That way they own the data and the technology but leverage their agencies for strategy and execution.

Across the spectrum of options, having closed-loop access to data, reporting and insights is the foundation to benefit from programmatic — whether or not you want to own all of the skills and infrastructure involved.

Leah Pope, Chief Marketing Officer at Datorama. Former CMO at Synthesio. Helping marketers navigate their data woes each step of the way.

In A World Of Fake News, Has Advertising Become The Last Bastion Of Truth?

By Will Burns

Recently I remote-controlled back and forth between MSNBC and FOX News. I was listening to what the reporters and pundits were saying, but couldn’t help but qualify every statement against the right/left hidden agenda that each respective “news” station has. Truth? Or their version of the truth? Then the ironic thunderbolt hit me. Advertising might just be the last bastion of truth. And it’s because advertisers don’t have hidden agendas, but overt ones.

To demonstrate my point, guess where this headline came from:

Fact is, I found that headline on Starbucks’ “Upstanders” online series of articles and films from the Starbucks Channel.

It was a truly uplifting story about an entrepreneur starting a company dedicated to turning a defunct coal town into a prosperous place again (without coal).

How does that story sell coffee? I’m honestly not sure beyond any affinity it generates for the brand. That’s a topic for another article. But my point is, there’s an opportunity here in how advertisers are perceived in the wake of fake news.

“Planting Hope in a Coalfield.”

An advertiser’s agenda used to arm us, now it disarms us.

You could read the line differently depending on the source.

If you found it on a news site like MSNBC, you might think it was a liberally slanted piece about coal miners seeing the light and refusing to work in a coal mine in order to save the environment.

In a world of fake news, vitriol, finger pointing and social media flame throwing, the fact a brand wants to sell me something suddenly seems quaint. Time was, we saw advertising as “all lies” and “just trying to sell you stuff.” Now it feels like fresh air.

But if you found it on the FOX News site, you might think the very same headline is about the resurgence of the coal business since Trump was elected.

While advertising is, in fact, trying to sell us stuff, it’s not an evil hidden agenda. A brand with an agenda of creating preference for its golf ball or its cup of coffee or its winter coat does not carry with it an automatic disbelief in what the brand talks about. I didn’t read the Starbucks article above and think, “Nonsense, they’re just trying to sell me a cup of coffee!”

Sadly, words like the five in that headline don’t matter anymore. The agenda behind words is all that matters these days. And we, as consumers of information, have been forced to be careful. The agendas behind these two news forces and many others - is so wildly different and so potent that we can’t be entirely sure what follows any headline is true or just some version of the truth.

Now, if I told you that headline was from a brand what would you think?

Starbucks, to be specific.

You may or may not like Starbucks coffee and Starbucks certainly has an agenda: to sell more coffee. But it’s a clear agenda, an overt agenda (not hidden), a harmless agenda, an agenda that won’t judge you or, worse, attack you if you don’t agree with it.

Now, read that headline again knowing that it’s from Starbucks:

“Planting Hope in a Coalfield.”

It isn’t laced with vitriol anymore, is it? We aren’t forced to tease out the hidden agenda before intellectualizing the line’s intent. Our identity won’t be in crisis if we choose to read the article it headlines. It’s just a brand trying to sell us coffee. As such, I’m more open to believe what’s reported in the subsequent article than if it were to come from MSNBC or FOX News.

I took the story about the coal town as gospel truth. Because why would a brand trying to sell me a cup of coffee lie about such a thing? They wouldn’t.

Imagine that. We can’t believe anything the “news” says anymore, but we can - and do - believe what a brand says.

The world has truly changed.

Marketers, we didn’t earn this position. It comes as a result of other sources of information internally combusting, falling on their hidden agenda-swords.

But what are we going to do with this trust? How can we make the world a better place? What can we tell the world’s citizens that it didn’t know before?

Because you might tell me about an entrepreneur who is turning around a coal town in West Virginia. And I might actually believe you.

Will Burns is CEO of virtual idea-generation firm, Ideasicle. Have him privately review your work like his Forbes posts with a “When In Doubt, Run It By Me” web meeting.

How can brands embrace culture and consumerism?

By Evan Magliocca

Brands can’t remain disinterested in social issues any longer.

They can’t bury their heads in the sand and wait for crises to blow over. Customers have found their voices and, more importantly, they’ve realized the weight that their dollars carry. Now, they’re learning to use it.

More worrisome is that brands are woefully unprepared for handling cultural backlash, issues of free speech, and their moral places in a consumer-driven world that is inflamed by convenient righteousness and outrage on social media.

That’s not to say that all outrage is wrong — in many cases it’s warranted -- but who draws that line and where do brands fit in?

It’s an area that most brands don’t want to get sucked into, but that’s now out of their control. Companies are constrained by advertising’s opacity with programmatic and television. It has brought brands unwittingly into cultural flashpoints and customer boycotts during the most polemical period in recent history.

So, how can brands proceed? Is the customer still always right when it comes to those issues? Who is your customer anyway? And how can you identify if they’re even angry?

How can brands traverse the flashpoints that encompass so much of our visible lives?

Crisis plans exist for a reason There’s an entire field of communications devoted to crisis

planning. Be proactive and tailor a plan to the very real possibility that customers may want you to act based on moral or political grounds. Identify how you’ll reach out to them, let them know what your position is or even that you’re not taking a position, and share why or why not you plan on making a change. A proactive plan will help your brand to get ahead of the story without stumbling over the early issues that arise. The foundation is already built so your team can focus on the actual issue and response at hand.

Find your collective compass Companies often invest heavily in branding and developing their identities, but they avoid creating structure for their own cultural values. In today’s world, those cultural values are an essential part of a brand and they need to be included in the same conversations that influence the company’s identity.

Today’s customers view value positions as part of the brand.

It’s beneficial to have those conversations on your terms and not pre-defined by a riled-up audience. Develop your brand identity around what the company stands for. Patagonia and REI are great examples. They’re rather quiet brands, but they’ve clearly thought out their principles on climate change and national monuments—their press and marketing around those issues has fueled enthusiasm in their communities and more closely aligned the brands to their customers. They are examples of how brands can align their identities with current issues that hit close to home.

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Know where your dollars are going There are a couple of factors that have led to brands being blind to their own advertising efforts. First, the rise of programmatic advertising enables companies to target customers no matter what sites they visit, which sounds great on the surface, but it leads to deeper issues when you examine where those ads are shown. Second, is the obscurity of advertising agencies in execution. They don’t want you to see the inner machinations; they don’t want to give proof.

Third, marketers must do more with much less. It limits what we can care about and how much time we can spend on those problems; it leads to a ruthless level of prioritization.

Those are symptoms of a larger problem, but there’s no good excuse for a brand that doesn’t know where its investment is going. Brands can vet approved advertising outlets upfront; they can demand more transparency on where ads are placed. It’s lazy and it’s bad branding.

Do you really want your ads to show on sites that don’t match your brand? Do you want ads displaying on sites with divisive content?

Vet outlets with your agency. Be strict and understand that where your ads display gives just as much of an impression as the ad itself. Make sure you’re not down at the bottom with the click-bait. It’s not difficult, it’s just good marketing.

Know your customer What happens if an outlet on which your brand advertises gets in trouble and people are outraged? The audience calls for advertisers to pull support. While your brand needs to identify if there is an obligation to act, one thing that should also be analyzed is simply who is outraged? Who is “they” and are they your customers?

Many of the media fiascos have merit, but it’s easy to produce a storm of tweets. It’s outrage by convenience, and it’s difficult to measure how big of a deal each one is because it’s so easy to trigger moral outrage over both tiny

and large infractions. The easy answer? Don’t use Twitter as a barometer. Twitter only operates in extremes of hate-filled trolling, moral righteousness and cat videos.

The more difficult answer is to know your actual customers.

What are their values? Do they match up with the company’s value statements and stance on advertising? In an era of data targeting and personalization, try to understand what your customers are thinking.

While an issue may or may not be hurting sales, it’s not an excuse for a failure to identify where your brand stands on certain cultural issues. That being said, identifying your actual customers will provide a better indicator of where the brand stands with the people that matter most and it will help you understand how to communicate with them.

Adapt to the new reality One thing that’s always stunning is how late to the game so many brand executives are with major shifts in technology, culture, buying habits, and generational differences. If the brand is reactive, it’s already too late.

A proactive approach tailored to the changing forces within each generation is paramount to traversing the cultural issues that have encumbered so many brands and caused others to go bankrupt from their inability to adapt to unmistakable, macro forces that are evolving not only shopping habits, but also the looking glass that everything is viewed through from politics to products. Brands can’t blunder unwittingly into the public sphere any longer. It’s simply too visible and far too controversial. Be proactive, know your customer, hold vendors to a higher standard, and learn that the tools of yesterday won’t be enough for the future. It’s time to evolve and adapt.

Evan Magliocca is brand marketing manager for Baesman Insights & Marketing, a full-service agency that partners with retailers to create highly-targeted, data-driven customer marketing, loyalty and CRM programs.

Unbranding Is Dumb BRAND-FREE BRANDING IS THE LATEST MARKETING TREND, BUT IT IGNORES THE QUALITIES THAT MAKE COMPANIES LIKE PATAGONIA, GLOSSIER, AIRBNB, AND NIKE SO COMPELLING.

By Katie Ewer

The latest trend in branding is no branding at all. Countless businesses, from beer makers to grocery companies, are stripping off their logos and sending products out into the world in all their naked glory.

make choosing easy. Brands are designed to be shortcuts to the decision-making process. They allow us to choose habitually.

They allow us to function on autopilot–which leaves us all with a bit more time in life for the things we do actually care about.

It’s easy to see why. Consumers are demanding more than ever before. We are discerning. We fret about GMOs, sugar, artificial additives, and aspartame. We agonize over ethically sourced cotton, chocolate, diamonds, coffee, plastic, and countless other things. We’re sick of corporate dishonesty. With Nars testing on animals, Chipotle cooking up E. coli, and VW fixing the results of emissions tests, the road to unbranding is littered with the stories of corporations that have betrayed our trust. Now we can smell bullshit a mile off. According to a recent report, only 23% of consumers in the U.S. believe that “brands are open and honest,” and that number dips to just 7% in Western Europe.

UNBRANDING IS . . . BRANDING

This is a real challenge for businesses. But unbranding is a wrongheaded solution. Just because consumers have had enough of the way some companies behave, doesn’t mean the role of branding is redundant. Unbranding confuses the symptoms of mass consumer branding with the cause.

UNBRANDING IS MORE CHOICE FATIGUE Recently a business called Brandless launched in the United States. Brandless sells household goods direct to consumers that are free of “brand tax”–the 40% premium it estimates consumers pay for that intangible aura that makes the difference between a mere product and a brand. Its founders saw people increasingly “paralyzed by the paradox of choice,” and in response Brandless focuses on the attributes consumers care about–ingredients, benefits, uses–over the brand itself. The packaging features the product name and a brief list of values like “gluten-free,” “organic,” and “no artificial colors” in a simple white box.

The logic behind Brandless isn’t wrong. But now imagine every company applies that insight. Who wants to choose between 10 identical products by scrutinizing 10 ingredient lists? Life’s too short. I might care about what goes into my shampoo, but that doesn’t mean I want to spend hours of my life researching it.

Unbranded goods don’t resolve the issues of choice fatigue. In fact, they could make it worse.

Proponents of the unbranding movement forget that brands have a valuable role to play in the lives of consumers–they

The bigger problem is that unbranding is still branding.

Brandless, for instance, is quite a compelling brand. It has an idea, a purpose, a set of values, a visual language, and it even has a logo. Like any mainstream brand, it is in the business of emotional persuasion.

So how are consumers supposed to square the paradox of brandfree branding? Isn’t that more of the dishonesty consumers have come to loathe? Brandless, for its part, has taken care to build some of self-awareness into the packaging; the company’s logo appears with a TM on each product. And as Emily Heywerd of the New York agency that designed Brandless’s packaging and identity told Co.Design last year: “Of course Brandless is a brand. We didn’t want that to ring false because that’s against the company’s philosophy.”

But you can imagine unbranding going awry in the hands of a less mindful brand. When businesses try too hard to convince us that they share our values, it can backfire. Just ask Pepsi.

A WAY FORWARD So what’s a brand to do? Consumers need branding to help make quick, easy, confident decisions. We need emotional shortcuts that help us survive the ordeal of a supermarket trip or session on Amazon. That won’t change until the human brain, with its subconscious, irrational hardwiring, changes.

But brands can still adjust their strategy. In the age of radical transparency, integrity and honesty are table stakes, not a differentiating factor. The best brands develop great products, then let the products speak for themselves.

To be clear: That is not the same thing as stripping away all branding. The trick is for brands to lean in to what makes their products great. Patagonia equips consumers to buy ethical fashion and be part of a movement to protect our planet.

Digital-first cosmetics brand Glossier cultivates a community that keeps customers loyal. Airbnb allows consumers to “live like a local” no matter where they are. Nike empowers athletes to “just do it.” All of these brands share three attributes: They have integrity that earns users’ trust, they have a purpose people can get behind, and they make lives better in some way.

In a speech he gave in 2017, Yuval Harrari said that “as a historian, there are two things I can tell you about the past. One, it wasn’t that good, and two, we can’t go back.” So, perhaps businesses should spend less time trying to recapture the purity of some pre-branding age and focus on designing brands that help us improve our future.

Katie Ewer is a writer and creative strategist at Jones Knowles Ritchie in Singapore.

Study: Brands with a purpose grow 2x faster than others

By Erica Sweeney

Brief: Brands with a high sense of purpose have experienced a brand valuation increase of 175% over the past 12 years, compared to the median growth rate of 86% and the 70% growth rate for brands with a low sense of purpose, according to Kantar Consulting’s new Purpose 2020 report “Inspiring Purpose-Led Growth” made available to Marketing Dive.

Among marketing leaders, 76% think their organization has a defined purpose, but only one in 10 have a corporate purpose statement that’s backed by a meaningful activation plan. Two-thirds of marketing leaders believe that purpose delivers long-term growth, just one-third believe purpose is a company-wide movement.

Nearly two-thirds of millennials and Gen Z express a preference for brands that have a point of view and stand for something, the report found.

Insight: Kantar’s study adds to a growing body of research and case studies that demonstrate how important it is for brand marketing to reflect a sense purpose beyond a purely commercial one in order to connect with today’s consumers and, at the same time, the difficulties inherent in implementing this approach.

As the findings underscore, purpose gives brands a long-term competitive advantage, with the brands that consumers see as having a positive impact growing at 2x the rate of other brands. The research also suggests that the traditional 80-20 model, where 80% of sales are thought to come from 20% of customers, is outdated. Instead, marketers should focus on

three key areas to create purpose-led growth: articulation, infusion and amplification. Currently, brands tend to invest too heavily in articulation and not enough in the other two areas, which are essential in engaging with consumers and driving growth, according to the study.

Getting purpose right can be a struggle for marketers.

Brands need to make sure that a cause or purpose makes sense for the them. Articulating purpose to drive business growth depends on a having a cause that is relevant, unique, meaningful and well measured, the Kantar research suggests.

Marketers also need to take a 360-degree strategy approach to bringing purpose alive across a brand’s platforms, reallife activations and overall messaging.

Kantar’s research is in-line with other studies showing millennial and Gen Z’s growing expectations for brands to take a public stance on social and political issues. Gen Z tends to have a strong sense of purpose, feels connected to important causes, and 69% think brands should help them achieve their goals, according to PSFK research. About 60% of consumers think brands should post about their opinions on social media, according to a Sprout Social study. Thirtynine percent of consumers think brands should donate to social causes, and 37% think they should encourage their followers to do the same.

Marketers often walk a fine line between successfully making a connection with purpose-driven messages and missing the mark, something evident in a recent misstep from McDonald’s.

Brands can also take sentimentality too far, and millennials, in particular, aren’t always responsive to campaigns that urge them to be a part of a solution or embody the brand’s values, an Ace Metrix study revealed. Ads that focused on values earned the highest marks among consumers.

How brands can cut through the £500bn sports market SPEAKERS FROM NFL, ADIDAS, NISSAN, LUCOZADE SPORT, GENERAL MILLS, UNICEF AND WE ARE SOCIAL SPORT TALK THROUGH THEIR STRATEGIES...

By Georganna Simpson

“Sport is unique. It has the power to bring people together in even the most difficult and fractured of times. It is opportunity rich. The challenge for brands is how to embrace sport as it evolves”.

Sally Hancock is managing partner at Y Sport. She was talking at Campaign’s Future Fit event that gathered the marketing, creative, media and sporting community to talk about the future of sports and fitness marketing.

The half-day session, hosted at Curzon Soho in London, provided case studies, research and advice from leading figures in the market on how to tap into the very lucrative market.

Here’s how the conversation went:

Knowing the fans, creating for fans Fans fund the sports industry directly through purchases or

indirectly through viewing habits. It is crucial they are central to any campaign, according to Paul Southby, senior project director at Wasserman.

“Fans sacrifice time, money and often relationships for their passion. They are more likely to change religion than their team. Fans are also demanding more exclusive content; fangenerated content is increasingly in demand.”

Lucozade Sport’s global head of sponsorship James Young agreed that brands and agencies must look at the value exchange with fans and audiences: “We must maximise what people get out of a campaign and always bring it back to the question: are we bringing value to people’s lives?”

He’s increasingly looking for rights holders and partners to help improve that value, which can mean moving away from more traditional packages: “I am hearing less off-the-shelf stuff but brands need to become more assertive and say

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target audiences, but authenticity is key explained Gareth Leeding, creative director at We Are Social Sport.

“There is massive opportunity with influencer marketing – but it’s a busy space so you have to find a unique way to own it. There are issues working with influencers – the big ones can be promiscuous and sometimes partnerships are not the most authentic. We believe true influence comes from authentic and trusted sources – paying for influence is not authentic and people can tell that.”

what it is they want. Rights holders are being more creative and I enjoy working with the ones that will co-create to help achieve your goals.”

Leeding approached influencer marketing differently when working with adidas on the Tango Squad and Tango Squad FC campaign, which set to built an influencer network from the ground up. They created their own army of football obsessed advocates by bringing together local football communities on dark social. The campaign spanned eight markets, engaged 1600 young people and targeted talented football captains with micro-influence level in their communities. The Tango Squad received new products first, enjoyed amazing experiences such as a David Beckham coaching session and

James Kirkham, head of COPA90, explained that football fans, for example, are looking for more nuanced content. They don’t just want to talk about football – they are multifaceted and we must remember that.

“Segment your audience more appropriately to connect with them better. You’ll see an intersection between football and culture such as music, fashion, food and more.

Culture drives deeper relevance”.

Engaging sport fans can be more challenging for those brands not directly involved in sports or fitness, explained Nissan’s global head of sponsorship Owen Hughes: “As an automotive and technology brand, we ask ourselves and our partners how we can be relevant in the experience of enjoying a sport and how we can improve the experience for audiences.”

Influencer marketing can be invaluable – if done right Many brands use influencer marketing to get closer to their

big transfer announcement, making the Squad the people to know.

Adidas Football and We Are Social Sport took the campaign further launching Tango Squad FC, a selection of 16 of the best footballers in the Tango Squad with the biggest and most interesting personalities. Leeding described this team as “a team made for Youtube”.

Adidas’ social media manager Stephen Cleary explained how the next challenge was to achieve scale and create influence to reach millions of football creators online.

“We made a fly-on-the-wall documentary series designed for Youtube – we’ve achieved 14 millions views so far with five episodes, and there’s another five episodes to come. We’ve set new boundaries for long-form content. And we’re driving exposure and opportunity for the Tango Squad FC. It’s really just the beginning.”

“Don’t follow the rules, rewrite them and don’t buy influence – grow it,” advised Leeding.

Traditional influencers – celebrities and sports stars – have been an important tool for the Movember Foundation, according to marketing and communications director Helena Jennison.

“As a non-profit, we’ve been lucky in that we’ve benefited from sports celebrities such footballer Theo Walcott and rugby’s Dylan Hartley – they have grown moustaches for us and we call them walking, talking billboards for men’s health. We have also worked with stars such as Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton to fundraise. There are a few different ways to use these big names and their reach to communicate our messages.”

Brands can use sport as a force for good Sport is a ripe opportunity for brands to tap into a greater purpose and drive positive change in society, according to Sports England’s chief executive Jenny Price.

Price explained how This Girl Can addressed reasons behind the gender gap in sports, most notably fear of of judgement.

“We tried to tackle this fear judgement felt by a lot of women and girls and we wanted to show real women, on the pitch, out of the pool and off the street.”

The ad campaign, created in collaboration with FCB Inferno, changed attitudes around gender in sport and encouraged 1.6 million girls and women to exercise Young explained how Lucozade Sport repositioned its strategy from a more male-focussed product with messaging based about competition, to a more inclusion strategy to get more people moving.

“Sport changed – it became more social and more mixed.

It has become a thing you do with a smile, not about suffering anymore. We identified half the problem with the UK population was people not moving enough. We created ‘Made to Move’ as a mission to get more people moving and spoke to existing and new partners to help with that mission.”

The shift in strategy has helped Lucozade Sport attract more female consumers, and they now have more women buying their product than men.

General Mills looked to tennis to help inspire 131,000 people during a campaign last year, explained marketing head of Haagen-Dazs and Snacking Arjoon Bose.

“We chose the sport as it’s primarily played outdoors, is transgenerational and has a strong element of mass participation. We staged a live game – current British tennis No.1 Johanna Konta v former Wimbledon champion Pat Cash.”

The campaign mixed live, digital and social to get people talking and audiences moving. Unicef’s head of sport Guy Price described a number of successful sponsorship programmes and testified that there are huge benefits for the charity aligning its vital cause with an amazing sport: “Connecting cause and sport is a no brainer for us.”

Jennison suggested brands approach initiatives with a key question: how can we look at sport as a tool for the wider community?

Modern sports marketing is about dialogue Sports marketing has evolved from a traditional approach of talking at people, to a deeper and more personal conversation with audiences. Social media allows you to adjust messaging and add value through experience, explained Hughes.

Lindsey Eckhouse NFL’s director of sponsorship Lindsey Eckhouse agreed that social and digital media is key to cutting through in her market: “Our burgeoning fan base is millennials and with digital and social consumption up year on year, we see much higher engagement with fans online compared with some traditional sports rights holders.”

Kirkham added that modern football is “built out of moments”, fans see it, talk about it and spread it on social media. The moments live on as a gif or a meme. COPA90 calls it the ‘”meme you later” generation. He also explain there’s huge opportunity in dark social – the instant messaging world – and how that gets used in storytelling.

“It’s not just about broadcasting anymore.”

The Secrets of Staying Power HOW THE BEST BRANDS CAME TO BE RECOGNIZED AROUND THE WORLD.

By Blaire Briody

Show almost anyone in the world a laptop with a small silhouette of an apple on the back, and they’ll immediately recognize the brand. A sneaker with the “swoosh” symbol?

That’s Nike’s signature logo, of course. These brands have reached iconic status — they’re not only recognized worldwide, but have remained that way for decades. But what’s the secret to achieving such status?

Soon Yu, a design and innovation advisor for companies like The North Face, Vans, Timberland, and Wrangler and a 1993 graduate of Stanford Graduate School of Business, set out to answer that question in his new book Iconic Advantage: Don’t Chase the New, Innovate the Old. He says, “The questions I had were what makes some brands iconic and others not and what makes brands that were once iconic fall out of favor and fade away.”

From the outside, some brands appear to stumble onto iconic status. But, in reality, that’s seldom the case, says Yu. Businesses strategically develop their well-loved and noticeable brands over years or sometimes decades. “I thought a lot of companies lucked into it or they just rode the right wave — that they were really good at shifting their strategies to fit whatever the prevailing winds were,” says Yu. “What I learned was, no. It’s deliberate. And there

are actually principles and best practices on how to create timeless relevance.”

And that timeless relevance has incredible benefits to a company’s bottom line: Iconic properties deliver up to three times the profit of other properties.

Yu studied more than 50 different companies to cull out the secrets of what it takes to become iconic. Here are his suggestions:

Be Unique First and foremost, a brand needs what Yu calls “noticing power.” A product should have an element that differentiates it from the competition and grabs people’s attention. For example, Nike’s point of difference was superior performance during physical activities. The company developed the Nike Air Max in 1987 with a visible air pocket to represent this.

Most sneakers lose about 40% of their cushion over their lifetime, but an air pocket maintains its bounce. “It was a great signature element that embodied their key point of difference on performance,” says Yu. In-N-Out distinguished itself by focusing on quality and fresh ingredients, even preparing food in front of customers. Vans created a waffle

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feature on the sole to help skateboarders stick on the board and better manipulate it. These are all elements that caused the brands to stand out and rise above the competition.

Appeal Mentally and Emotionally In addition to standing out for a distinctive element, the second most important step to reaching iconicity is what Yu calls “staying power.” The products that stick around are ones that are meaningful You want to be and useful to customers, says Yu, and not attempting to relevant to both chase a fad. When Google heart and head — first introduced its search engine, for example, it not both emotionally only generated better search thus fulfilling a need, and rationally. results, but its page design was so simple, it communicated that Soon Yu the product was easy to use, which tapped into people’s emotional side. “You want to be relevant to both heart and head — both emotionally and rationally,” says Yu.

Continue to Innovate For brands worried about fading relevance, Yu suggests returning to the elements that made them popular in the first place. A common mistake older companies make is to rest on their laurels with recognizable products, which typically bring in the most revenue, and focus on chasing something new and shiny, says Yu. Or they overhaul their signature product, rendering it unrecognizable. “If you’re loved for an iconic element, people recognize it and that familiarity creates trust,” he says. The companies that succeed instead focus on infusing newness into their signature product. Nike continued to enhance and innovate its Air Max — the air pocket was originally in the heel, then the toe, then it covered the entire

shoe. The company changed the material and added “power pockets.” Competitors like the Reebok Pump couldn’t catch up, because Nike was always innovating its key benefit, says Yu.

Turn Loyal Customers into Spokespersons Many companies make the mistake of focusing on ad impressions and developing expensive media plans, but a bigger marketing budget doesn’t equate to better marketing, says Yu. Instead, they should focus on a product that is adored by a small group of people and understand the elements that elicit this passion. “It’s better to be indispensible to 100 people, than to be recognizable to 1 million,” he says. “If you’re truly indispensible, you’re doing something right. It means you’ve tapped into something and have a captive audience.” With social media, customers today have immense platforms, and they can essentially become a company’s marketing team.

For example, Apple began including a sticker in every computer box. The stickers cost the company next to nothing, but customers applied the stickers to everything — their musical instruments, their binders, their bedroom walls — and generated millions more advertising impressions for the company.

An Eye-Catching Logo Isn’t Everything Logos are important because the human brain is wired to recognize icons. One MIT study found that the brain can recognize concepts with images in as little as 13 milliseconds.

But if a logo doesn’t have a story or meaning behind it, it’s less powerful, Yu says, and if the logo is “all you have to rely on to create your iconic advantage, you’re going to lose.”

Apple initially went after the education market and its logo represented the idea of bringing an apple a day to a teacher.

“That’s a situation where the logo became more than just a recognized symbol for the business. It went beyond and infused meaning,” says Yu.

MARKETING TO PARENTS OF ‘THEYBIES’ IS NOW A THING

By Adrianne Pasquarelli

The new buzzword in parenting is a mashup that will alarm even the most liberal of grammarians. A “theyby” is a baby born and raised free of the constraints of gender designation, according to an article published earlier this week by New York Magazine’s The Cut. Some new parents are adopting the childrearing practice, which includes keeping the baby’s anatomy a secret from others and referring to the child only by plural pronoun, in an effort to raise a more creative and uninhibited human.

It’s a new word, but it’s not an entirely new movement.

Retailers and brands have been wise to the idea of genderneutral for a few years now. Yet as the trend gains ground, particularly with millennial parents, experts expect retail efforts aimed at these consumers to increase.

“As parents are changing, what kids are playing with is changing, too,” explains Jim Silver, editor-in-chief of TTPM, Toys, Tots, Pets & More. He notes that the packaging from brands such as Mattel’s Hot Wheels, Hasbro’s My Little Pony and Star Wars products from Lego now include both boys and girls as a result of such new parenting behavior.

“Manufacturers are not categorizing toys the way they used to—they’re not gender-stereotyping the toy,” he adds, noting that ultimately it can only be beneficial for the toy industry as more children are attracted to products that are marketed toward them rather than exclusively targeting one gender.

Three years ago, some larger brands began dipping a toe in gender-neutral waters. Under former creative director Marissa Webb, Gap-owned Banana Republic debuted a capsule collection of gender-less baby clothes. However, a Gap spokeswoman says the company has nothing to share at this time for Gap, and that childrenswear is not a focus for Banana Republic. Also in 2015, Target dispensed with

all gender-based signage and references from its toys and children’s bedding aisles in stores. Online, consumers can sort toys by age, type and brand, a spokesman says. He notes that it’s an approach Target is continuing to take.

Courtney Hartman, who four years ago founded Seattlebased Jessy & Jack, a gender-neutral baby clothes brand, says she is seeing less of a focus on boy and girl labels, but that there is a lot of distance to still be covered before most boys clothes aren’t associated with aggressive behavior and sports, for example.

“What we are seeing more of is an awareness and mindfulness of gender stereotypes—of offering certain colors to certain children—and how that can be harmful,” says Hartman, who also owns Handsome in Pink, and Free to Be Kids, two apparel brands that challenge gender norms with color, slogans and design. She expects that more stores will start to pick up on the trend. To market her own products, which sell online, as well as through Etsy and Amazon, Hartman advertises primarily on Facebook, along with other social channels such as Instagram and Pinterest.

“We do a lot of Facebook advertising because we have a social message and a mission that really strikes a nerve with people—our ads get shared a lot,” she says.

Indeed, one of the parents in the Cut’s “theyby” article said he discovered the gender-neutral idea through an article in his Facebook feed.

A reporter with Ad Age since 2015, Adrianne Pasquarelli covers the marketing strategies of retailers and financial institutions. She joined Ad Age after a dozen years of writing for Crain’s New York Business, where she also focused on the retail industry.

This Startup Built Its Brand On Facebook. Now It Can Never Leave.

FACEBOOK GAVE QUIP GREAT BANG FOR ITS BUCK BUT LITTLE DATA ON THE CONSUMERS IT TARGETED. WITH A FACEBOOK BACKLASH BREWING, HOW WILL SMALL ADVERTISERS FARE?

By Elizabeth Segran

While scrolling Facebook you might’ve noticed a slim, futuristic toothbrush hovering between photos of your friends’ babies and your uncle’s political rants. It’s an ad for Quip, a brand dedicated to making toothbrushing sexier. Quip is unique in the history of toothbrush brands because it isn’t gaining customers by appearing on drugstore shelves.

Instead, it’s marketing its product where consumers spend much of their time: on social media, particularly Facebook and the Facebook-owned Instagram.

When founder Simon Enever launched the brand in 2015 with only $300,000 in funding, he knew only a fraction could go toward advertising. And according to Shane Pittson, Quip’s head of marketing, Facebook was an obvious place to spend it. “Facebook removes all kinds of barriers to entry for small companies,” he says. “You have a very clear understanding of what you’re paying for and how much is returning back to your business. With other channels–like magazine or podcast ads, for instance–it can be very difficult to measure the impact.”

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The strategy worked. Quip sold 100,000 toothbrushes in its first year. In 2016 it was named one Time‘s 25 best inventions and won a slew of other accolades, including GQ’s Grooming Award and inclusion on Oprah’s “O List.”

This kind of success isn’t uncommon. Many digitally native brands that have seen exponential growth in recent years– Warby Parker, Reformation, Away, Everlane, Glossier–used Facebook to introduce consumers to their products. The platform’s remarkable ability to connect companies with new audiences is one reason 5 million advertisers choose to pour money into it, which generated $12.97 billion for Facebook last year.

In many ways, these are brands that Facebook built. Yet it’s done so by amassing vast troves of data about its 2 billion users that the platform largely withholds from ad clients like Quip. Lately, with more users asking just what Facebook knows about them, how it knows it, and what it does with that knowledge, the future of this model–and the fates of the brands that rely on it–deserves some scrutiny, too.

TAINTED BY ASSOCIATION WITH FACEBOOK In March, news broke that Cambridge Analytica had scraped information from some 50 million Facebook profiles and used it to help the Trump campaign. This came after months of Americans hearing that Russians had been using the platform to manipulate the presidential election, and the news in February of the federal indictment of 13 Russian nationals for “information warfare” on social media. All the while, many Facebook users have encountered ads that seem eerily connected with the conversations they’d been having–

or even just things they’d been thinking about.

Before the Cambridge Analytica scandal, says Karen North, a clinical professor of communication at USC, “we were already sensitized to the fact that when we’re online, it looks like the digital world knows a lot about us.” In her view, “The reason that this is a big topic right now is not because anything has changed–it’s because something called our attention to it.”

It’s true that Facebook knows a lot about you and has for quite some time. Should you choose to download all the information it stores about you, the file you’ll receive is roughly the size of 400,000 Word documents. It includes every message you’ve sent or received, the times you’ve logged on and from what device and location, all the apps you’ve ever connected to your account, and a list of topics you might be interested in based on things you’ve liked or discussed. Before cutting ties with them last week, Facebook used companies like Acxiom and Experian–which gather offline consumer data from mailing lists, public records, and loyalty cards–to supplement its own cache.

Now that a spotlight’s been turned on practices like these, consumers don’t seem to like what they see. The company’s reputation is at an all-time low, and powerful figures like Elon Musk have fanned outrage among users calling for a boycott.

Brands that advertise on Facebook now seem worried about catching some of this blowback by association. That may be why, when I reached out to dozens of brands across multiple industries to hear about their experiences marketing on Facebook, only one was willing to talk with me: Quip.

WHAT QUIP KNOWS (AND DOESN’T) According to Shane Pittson, Quip’s head of marketing, Facebook knows a great deal more than it shares. While Facebook is capable of extremely specific ad-targeting, Quip’s parameters for finding potential customers is broad: The company wants to reach consumers of all ages, genders, and locations.

How Facebook goes about casting that wide net isn’t something Pittson understands, however. The platform has dramatically streamlined the process for marketers like him.

As Pittson explains it, Quip presents several types of ads and lets Facebook match each one to a user it deems likely to click it–and that’s basically it.

Yet he concedes that it works. “Facebook and Instagram do a great job of taking all the different inputs–whether you’re serving a long- or short-form video, still images, carousels of images or articles–and placing each type of content in front of people that will engage with it,” says Pittson. (Meanwhile, competing platforms like Pinterest or Twitter operate more like search engines, where it’s the brand’s responsibility to find a winning combination of keywords.)

This means that Quip only starts gathering data on a particular individual Facebook has targeted after that person has left the social network–by clicking Quip’s ad, engaging on its website, or subscribing to its newsletter, Pittson explains. Quip only gets that person’s email address once they make it all the way to checkout. This is no surprise to Pittson, who grasps as well as anyone that Facebook’s ad business is premised on hoarding, rather than sharing, data with brands.

“There’s no incentive for Facebook to release the data,” says North. “If it were possible, brands would buy the data once, then use it and not pay Facebook. Facebook wants to charge them every time they want to advertise.” Facebook did not respond to repeated requests for comment about its datasharing policies with advertisers.

Pittson says that if Quip wants more granular details, it can pay Facebook for deeper customer insights, which are nevertheless presented in aggregate. This is how Quip might learn that people who like yoga are more likely to be interested in Quip, or that pastel-tinted images do well among older men. But Pittson says Facebook has never shared information with Quip on individual users (which may hearten users, to a degree). To gather some of that intel on its own, Quip takes a manual approach–interacting with people who comment on its brand pages or posts. “We respond to most comments,” Pittson says, “so that’s one level of engagement,” but he acknowledges there’s a limit to what Quip can learn this way.

According to North, Quip’s experience is typical of how most brands learn about their consumers from Facebook. “Most of the time, brands don’t know anything other than what they tell Facebook,” she says. “They will say they want people with the following five characteristics, and Facebook will take their money and put those ads in front of them.”

FATES TIED UP IN FACEBOOK’S FORTUNES North points out that, until recently, Facebook’s users had accepted this hyper-targeting as the status quo; exchanging data for a better online experience was the implicit trade-off of engaging on the internet. “Really good, tailored, targeted advertising can be perceived as helpful because it gives you products and services that you want and are seeing,” she says.

But North believes this unwritten pact is fraying. The Cambridge Analytica scandal “is different than the past,” she says. “As a social network, Facebook is in real trouble.”

Customers may have agreed to see ads based on their

interests, North points out, but they never signed up for political propaganda. In addition, Facebook seems to have failed to protect the data it gathers from organizations bent on misusing it. North says it’s noteworthy that the Cambridge Analytica news was “reported like an identity-theft story. It was like stories of credit-card breaches, where all of a sudden you have to take steps to get a new credit card or make some other change.”

Indeed, even Facebook users who don’t take active steps– whether by tweaking their privacy settings or deleting their accounts completely–may spend less time on the platform anyway. In fact, that was already happening before the recent scandal. Users spent a total of 50 million hours less time on Facebook than last year, and the number of daily users in the U.S. and Canada fell for the first time in the company’s history. CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that Facebook anticipated this drop-off after changing an algorithm to serve fewer news stories and more personal content. The company’s ad revenue actually grew despite these declines, though–largely because Facebook has successfully pressed advertisers to pay more per ad.

If user activity continues to ebb, Facebook may find that harder to do. Until now Facebook has carefully engineered a system where brands are at its mercy. “It is ultimately Facebook’s algorithm that finds people who will think we’re a cool brand or a product that they are interested in,” Pittson says. “But we don’t have insight into how. At the end of the day, we’re just waiting for the Quip customer to emerge.”

For Quip, Facebook has proved a highly effective black box.

But if it stops minting customers as well as it used to, Quip– and countless similar brands–may think twice about pumping money into the platform.

Elizabeth Segran, Ph.D., is a staff writer at Fast Company. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her work has been published in The Atlantic, The New Republic, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs and The Nation.

What Marketers Should Know About PersonalityBased Marketing

By Christopher Graves and Sandra Matz

Communicators and marketers can now adopt a personalized approach to their work, ideally one based on behavioral science. But the execution lags behind the science while the claims of some marketers as to what personality marketing can do far exceed it. Moreover, public controversies like the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica story threaten personality marketing’s potential before it has really matured.

It’s important not to judge a field by its worst actors.

Marketers, communicators, and the public alike deserve a better understanding of personality marketing — what it is, how it works, and why it matters.

The personality targeting controversy Beyond the allegations of misuse of personal information gleaned from unwitting participants in social media, the Cambridge Analytica controversy raised an aspect of marketing that few people knew much about: the targeting of people based on not only on their past behaviors and explicitly stated preferences, but based on their underlying

psychological profiles. Cambridge Analytica claimed to use personality trait science to better tailor messages for its clients.

“This allows us to nuance our messaging,” said the Cambridge Analytica CEO, before an audience of 250 communications executives six weeks before the 2016 US presidential election, “so that rather than serving the same advert to 100 million people… you can sub-segment people by personality and change the creative to resonate with individuals based on how they see the world.”

Beyond traditional personalization based on demographics, or consumer self-expressed desires, this kind of customization claims to interpret basic human drives and match issue messaging with personality traits.

Some view psychometric or personality targeting as a dark art. But as behavioral scientist Cass Sunstein has cautioned, there are sound uses for personal data on social media if handled ethically. We believe that includes personality

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marketing. Personality insights and other aspects of behavioral science offer opportunities to better connect with individuals, and if done ethically it can be beneficial for consumers and businesses alike. Personality marketing can create a better match for products, services or experiences. And in sectors like health care, it could have even more positive affects, with better messaging leads to healthier behaviors.

What is personality science?

The American Psychological Association defines personality as “individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving.” Scientists have believed for centuries that humans have a mix of traits that determine the way individuals interpret the world and how they subsequently behave. Studies of identical and fraternal twins suggest that about 40 to 50% of our personalities can be attributed to our genes. Psychologists converged on the current and widely-accepted view of personality science about 25 years ago, simplifying hundreds or even thousands of personality descriptions to just five core factors with supporting facets for each. Called the “Big Five” or “Five Factor,” they form an easy acronym of OCEAN (see sidebar). An individual can be mapped to a sliding scale from low to high on each factor.

Psychologists have run tens of millions of people through the personality tests around the world with high reproducibility and consistency.

For marketers, communicators, and even public health agencies looking to promote healthier behaviors in large populations (diet, nutrition, exercise, quit smoking), the potential payoff of using personality science is to be able to better match how you engage individuals by personality profile, and to predict behaviors by personality traits. No marketer wants to present a message that is off-key or even irrelevant; personality science offers the chance to empathize with individuals, and engage them with the message, advertisement, or content in a way that is more likely to resonate with them.

How do you test consumers for personality profiles?

Until very recently, the assessment of psychological traits (also known as psychometrics) was almost inseparably tied to questionnaires. Ranging from just 10 to more than 300 questions, these questionnaires ask respondents about the extent to which they agree to statements such as “I am the life of a party” (Extroversion) or “I get chores done right away” (Conscientiousness). While such questionnaires provide researchers with an easy and pragmatic way to measure people’s psychological profiles, they are prone to unintentional misrepresentation, especially in certain contexts outside of the lab. For example, no job candidate in their right mind would indicate “strongly agree” to the statement “I make a mess of things.” Plus, these questionnaires were difficult to scale up beyond a few hundred or thousand test takers. If insights about people’s psychological make-up could only be gleaned at relatively small scale, how could marketers and communicators leverage such insights on millions and millions of potential customers?

Only about five years ago, the newly established field of

computational social science provided an answer: digital psychometrics. Instead of relying only on people’s responses to self-reported questionnaires, scientists started using people’s digital footprints—their Facebook Likes, Tweets, browsing histories, and more—to make inferences about their personality (with their consent). Studies compared large groups of individuals’ traditional personality questionnaire responses with those same people’s social media behavior to see if their personalities could be accurately inferred merely by decoding their digital footprints. Based on large datasets containing both people’s responses to traditional psychometric questionnaires and the information captured on their Facebook profiles researchers were able to identify empirical relationships between specific digital footprints and specific psychological traits. For example, certain correlations arose between liking a certain kind of music or food and specific personality traits. The more content, the more accurate the assessment. Using the Facebook Likes of U.S. Americans (around 250 Likes, on average, in 2012), computer algorithms were better at judging a person’s personality than their co-workers, friends, and even family members.

While still in its infancy, there are more and more commercial attempts at predicting personality from people’s digital footprints. IBM’s Watson Personality Insights, for example, uses natural language processing to digest bodies of text written by a specific user, like tweets and blog posts, to unearth their personality traits, needs, and values. With the rise of such services, insights from digital psychometrics will no longer be limited to mainly academic contexts, but will become available to industry at large.

Why use personality marketing?

Again, the theory is that if you can match the tone and framing of the communications or marketing with the personality profiles and thinking styles of potential customers, patients, voters, or those whose behavior you’d like to change, you can boost effectiveness.

For example, look at retail shoppers. Some do not particularly like shopping. They take a functional approach. It’s a chore.

They are not wedded to brands and are motivated by price.

Psychologists call them “utilitarian” shoppers. Meanwhile, “hedonic” shoppers enjoy shopping and love brands and join loyalty programs. They identify with brands and may use them to signal who they are and what they stand for.

They may look identical when viewed through traditional demographic data, but you would be sorely mistaken to treat them the same way. Certain personality profiles correlate with utilitarian versus hedonic shoppers. So, if you can know shoppers’ personalities, you can customize how you engage them.

But these findings are not limited to retail shopping. In fact, tailored communication has proven highly successful in the context of health care and health communication. We know that people show higher compliance rates when receiving messages that are customized to their individual motivations, and we also know that such messages help in changing a number of cancer-related behaviors, including smoking, dieting, exercising, and regular cancer screenings. What if

we could not only increase the chances that a customer buys a handbag, but improve their quality of health or the uptake of flu shots or vaccinations by tailoring the messaging to different personalities and cognitive styles?

But does personality marketing work?

The scientific evidence is consistent and clear: one can increase the effectiveness of marketing messages and other types of persuasive communication by tailoring them to people’s psychological profiles (see compendium of studies here curated by IBM).

The problem is that these results come primarily from the lab. Therefore, the usefulness of these insights for real-life customized marketing remained limited. The lab is not the same as the market, and questionnaires are not the same as personality inferences based on internet data. But there is reason to believe the science will hold up at scale.

The Ogilvy Center for Behavioral Science, where one of us works, has collaborated with Kantar, a global data and research company, to start layering personality traits research over the existing data from large panels of Kantar Lightspeed respondents. The idea is to find new correlations between specific personality profiles and other tastes, preferences, and behaviors. Kantar has also made progress in overcoming the self-report bias in personality questionnaires with a novel approach that forces respondents to prioritize descriptions and to do so in context.

So, what do we know about whether personality marketing works in the real world? One of us, Sandra, pioneered a study to determine whether the application of digital psychometrics to tailored communication could significantly impact the effectiveness of large-scale, real-life advertising campaigns on Facebook. While Facebook does not offer direct personality targeting, it allows marketers to do so indirectly via the option of targeting people based on interests. If liking “Lady Gaga” on Facebook, for example, is associated with the personality trait of extroversion, and liking “Stargate” goes hand in hand with introversion, then targeting users associated with each of these Likes allows one to target extroverted and introverted user segments. (The correlations need to be sufficiently strong, at least when taken together; if Lady Gaga Likers are only barely more extroverted than nonLikers, that’s not very useful.) Of course, the more data inputs such as Likes, the more accurate the analysis. The results of three campaigns reaching over 3.5 million users suggest that personality-matched advertising creatives significantly outperform their mismatched or neutral counterparts. In other words, in practice, this sort of social media-based personality marketing does appear to work.

However, in light of Cambridge Analytica, and claims that its psychological targeting tipped the election, we caution against any extreme claims related to personality marketing.

The early evidence may be promising, but the field is still relatively young.

The ethics of personality marketing The essentials of gathering and using personality traits ethically should follow the general guidelines of other

behavioral science research of consumers, employees or patients. They include: transparency of intent and usage; abiding by privacy laws and regulations; and aligning researcher/marketer interests with those of respondents (in other words, help them rather than exploit them).

That last principle is the right starting point for marketers: is your use of personality research actually making your customers better off, or just helping you? As the field evolves, marketers should look to the research community for inspiration and guidance on transparency. And, of course, businesses must comply with the law.

Putting personality marketing in action Given the promise and accessibility of this new form of communication, how should marketers get started?

In our experience, the first step is to understand the challenge or goal you’re trying to achieve. Is it to align employees with corporate goals, or to promote smoking cessation, or to increase uptake of vaccinations, or to change consumer behavior, or better segment consumers by what really motivates them (which they cannot articulate)?

Next, identify the cognitive biases and heuristics serve as barriers or drivers along the way to achieving the goal.

(The Ogilvy Center for Behavioral Science has built a tool to navigate thousands of studies to surface the relevant biases.)

Map the biases to steps along the consumer (or patient) journey. Doing so will help you identify steps along that journey where creative communications or content can help consumers overcome specific biases or other hurdles to a decision or new behavior.

Once you have a strong understanding of the customer journey, you can run a personality test and combine it with other data to reveal correlations between personality traits and certain behaviors, preferences, or mindsets.

The final step — and the “art” of personality marketing — is to craft the messaging, advertising or content to match different personality profiles while also considering the stage of the customer journey at which you plan to engage. This isn’t easy, by any means. But it offers the opportunity to create the most effective and empathetic messaging with different groups of customers.

Personality marketing is just one aspect of a new, fastemerging approach to understanding people from the inside out. We can now move from observational oddities of what makes humans “Predictably Irrational,” as the behavioral scientist Daniel Ariely has written, to decoding what truly moves individuals — at scale — and engaging them on their terms. How we do this will determine whether it is used for empathetic communication and positive outcomes, or for manipulation and exploitation.

Christopher Graves is the founder and president of the Ogilvy Center for Behavioral Science, a recent Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Resident, and Chairman Emeritus of Ogilvy Public Relations, as well as immediate past Chair of the PR Council.

Sandra Matz is a computational social scientist and Assistant Professor of Management and Organizational Behavior at Columbia Business School.

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