BrandKnew June 2019

Branding matters. Because branding matters.

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Dear Friends: It’s almost the middle of the year and we are most notably in the midst of a flurry of action in the branding and marketing eco sphere. We have tried to pack in some really solid content. Advertising and Ageism: the cost of overlooking a very valuable audience that are ageing is well thought out and will be an eye opener for many brand marketers.

Understanding Generation Z might be perplexing in the least. We unravel the truth in this issue. We circle back on some fundamentals where we speak about the Do’s and Dont’s of Repositioning a Brand. As CMOs you would gain a lot from the feature on what to look out for in in terms of challenges and focus areas for 2020. Marketing Strategy has entered a new era. We explore that. There is also a very brief treatise on how to avoid wasteful ad spends which I believe marketers will lap up. AI need not be the unattended elephant in the room. And that’s why we did a primer with the ABCs of AI in Marketing article. Marketing’s next frontier is about screening the screenless when voice and other conduits will bring about a new approach to targeting audiences. A simple 101 for Marketers is reflected in the article “On social media, please sell your brand, not your stuff “. The ABC of ABM (Account Based Marketing) is very craftily articulated as well in this edition. There is also an insightful piece on how brands can address the fake news threat. Bucket loads more in this issue to soak in and I let you do that. Till the next…

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Managing Editor: Suresh Dinakaran Creative Head/Director Operations: Pravin Ahir Magazine Concept & Design/ New Media Specialist: Mufaddal Joher Business Development Director: Rishi Mohan Chief Country Man, India: Rohit Unni 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 Performance Marketing Architect: Ryan Govindan Video Content Specialist: Mikhaela Cena Brand Engagement and Outreach Specialist: Anuva Madan Content Development Specialist: Abijith Pradeep Brand Research & Coordination: Meeta Pendse

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CONTENTS Originality is dying: how social media is hindering self-expression Screening the screenless: Marketing’s next frontier When the brief gives you grief The antidote to wasteful ad spend – where marketers go wrong On Social Media, Sell Your Brand, Not Your Stuff Advertising and Ageism For marketers, culture fatigue is real Top CMO Challenges and Focus Areas for 2020 The ABCs of AI in Marketing The Dos and Don’ts of Repositioning Your Brand Generation Z – the truth and nothing but the truth 5 Visual Marketing Platforms for Brands The New Era of Marketing Strategy Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Account-Based Marketing (But Were Afraid to Ask): Samantha Stone on Marketing Smarts Why marketers should tap into Pinterest influencers How do you bring a brand to life?

What consumers want from social Is your favorite fashion brand greenwashing? Use this checklist to find out How brands can tackle the fake news threat 4 Ways to Drive Performance with Corporate-Consumer Value Alignment R&D Spending Has Dramatically Surpassed Advertising Spending Here’s how brand marketers can use immersive technology to build an effective retail experience Book, Line & Sinker

Originality is dying: how social media is hindering selfexpression

By Hannah Gillett

Last summer, I moved into a new house and like many other new homeowners I couldn’t wait to head to Instagram for some inspiration on interiors. Before I’d even signed on the dotted line, I had immersed myself in beautiful pastel kitchens and intricate bathroom tiling. But it wasn’t long before I felt wholly uninspired. The exact same styles, in the same homes were cropping up again and again. Was this really all the world of interior design had to offer?

Over recent years, there has been a huge growth in the use of “visual discovery” social channels. These platforms have been key in inspiring millions of chefs, home owners, beauty addicts and globe trotters with new ideas, and have allowed those with a creative passion to connect from across the globe. A whole new generation of style influencers have emerged who are able to express themselves without the constraints of traditional media institutions. Never before have we had access to so much visual inspiration from so many different voices.

But recently, when I scroll through my Instagram feed or look at the content of top influencers and brands, it all

looks strangely familiar. In reality, has social media created a vacuum for creativity, and have all our tastes started to become homogenised?

Predictable content Katherine Omerod writes “Social media has become an echo chamber of mainstream and predictable content”, in her book How Social Media is Ruining Your Life. In our obsessive quest for likes, people and brands are learning the recipe for a popular post and recreating the same images over and over again. Even top influencers on these platforms have admitted to identifying which of their competitors’ posts received the most likes, and then recreating it.

The phenomenon is best shown by the Instagram account InstaRepeat which pokes fun at the #wanderlust generation of travellers, the group who are supposedly the embodiment authenticity and independence. The account collects identical travel posts and then reposts them as a collage with a suitably sarcastic caption. As a new generation of travellers are fed the same images over and again, we are seeing a big impact

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How social media has changed Firstly, the sheer quantity of images we’re exposed to has grown exponentially. 95 million images are uploaded every day on Instagram, more than 100 billion pins currently living on Pinterest and the average person spends 116 minutes a day on social media. Previously, when we had much less access to this kind of content, we would just make our own rules when it came to fashion, design and culture.

Secondly, the way we are able to control which images we see within visual discovery platforms means we narrow the pool of potential influences even further. Eli Pariser’s acclaimed book “The Filter Bubble” exposed the way we limit the variety of content we allow ourselves to see, particularly on platforms like Amazon and Netflix, but we’re still doing it. And now we are now seeing the impact spread to the clothes we wear, holidays we take and the furniture we buy.

Finally, the seamless purchasing routes that social media platforms are starting to offer means that with the touch of a button users can instantly buy whatever they see in posts. Consumers are able to recreate a style or experience, without any opportunity to shape that decision through future experiences and influences.

Beyond short term engagement Some brands have fallen foul of this trend in the same way that influencers have. Flatlays, motivational statements, 90s photos with a witty caption – we see the same posts over and over again, all designed to maximise engagement within a specific platform. As audiences start to get bored it’s important that brands start taking a different approach and think beyond just short term engagement.

on the decisions they make on where to travel.

In the world of interiors, when prominent influencer Erica Davies posted a picture featuring a rug from the retailer La Redoute, the Instagram interiors world went crazy. Not only did the rug sell out six times within a year, but it was even honoured with its own Instagram page with over 6,000 followers. Now there is hardly an interiors post which doesn’t feature a very similar monochrome, Atlas mountain rug.

However, is there really anything new happening here?

It has always been in our nature to mimic what we see around us, and there is certainly nothing new in people being influenced by aspirational celebrities and brands.

Academic studies have even put the scientific proof behind this (Chartrand & Bargh call it the “Chameleon Effect”), and we also now understand more about how images and pictures are much more likely to influence our decisions than text – the “picture superiority effect”.

But since the dawn of the digital era and the explosion of social media, a lot has changed.

Brand authenticity is at the heart of creating a unique voice on these platforms. “Perfect” posts may get the most likes, but do they get remembered? Instagram Stories have been a huge success since they launched in 2016. The raw, unedited nature of the videos have resonated with people, and allow us to feel closer to the brands and influencers we follow.

Diesel is one example of a brand who have rejected the idea of perfection and “sameness” on Instagram, opting for rougher, more authentic visual content. In 2017 they made the decision to delete their entire Instagram feed in order to focus on the spontaneous, the flawed and the imperfect.

Following this model, brands can use experiments with the formats they use to standout. New formats like Instagram TV have allowed brands to start using the platform as a broadcast channel for longer form videos. Instazines are another example of this. Ballantine’s created a whisky magazine entirely on Instagram and was one of the first brands to use Instagram as a publisher back in 2015.

Social media shouldn’t just be about surrounding ourselves with what is comfortable. We have an opportunity to embrace diversity in all its forms and make ourselves more unique people in the process. So, follow people and places on social media that challenge your thinking, that broaden your understanding of style and design and travel and food. The opportunities for inspiration are endless. Don’t let yourself just see one part of it.`

Screening the screenless: Marketing’s next frontier JUST AS MARKETERS HAVE JOCKEYED FOR SEO POSITION IN THE PAST DECADE, MARKETERS MAY NOW LOOK TO DO THE SAME THROUGH PERSONAL ASSISTANT DEVICES.

By Joe Hyland

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I’ve caught myself a few times in recent weeks – sitting at my desk and flipping between looking at my computer screen and my phone in hand. Across the office, television news runs on mute. It’s hard to avoid screens in today’s age, and even harder to avoid their constant, almost gravitational pull for our attention.

On my commute home, though, I avoid screens. I throw my phone in my duffel bag and listen to podcasts and articles as a way to decompress while staying up to date on the latest news. Ironically, I recently listened to a story by New York Times writer Farhad Manjoo, titled “I Didn’t Write This Column. I Spoke It.” The column, which was originally dictated to a smartphone, details a trend that I was already taking part in, but didn’t realize: we’re moving away from screens. It may still be unconscious for most of us, but it’s happening nonetheless — whether we’re asking Alexa about the weather, having Siri set us a reminder, or listening to an audiobook.

Screens are simply a part of everyday life. But I think we’ve all experienced the fatigue that comes with constantly being glued to a screen: having our eyes strained, constantly responding to the endless pings of notifications and messages, being unable to sleep at night because we’ve been on our phone.

Interacting with a screen, clearly, is not always a positive digital experience. I know that’s why I relish my commutes home, with nothing but sound. And I’m not alone. Nielsen found that online radio listening has grown steadily, and that “[a]s of early 2018, 64% of Americans ages 12 and older had listened to online radio in the past month, while 57% had listened in the past week.”

When the digital revolution exploded, it revolutionized marketing. Suddenly we had unparalleled insights into our email content, whitepapers, webinars — everything. We knew how many people watched our videos and for how long. It fundamentally transformed how marketers operated in this new data-driven world. And it all unfolded on screens. For a long time, it was hard to imagine how digital marketing would ever happen off screen.

But now we’re starting to see that the screenless internet is coming, and with it so will screenless marketing. What’s so intriguing about this, is that we’ve almost come full circle.

Even though screenless marketing represents the next step in the evolution of digital marketing, ironically, it’s not really digital at all. Our screen fatigue has driven us offline: though we still want to consume content, we don’t always want to do that through our fingers on a keyboard or touchscreen.

As the screenless internet continues to grow, we marketers have to grow in parallel: audio can now be transcribed, translated, scaled and distributed largely in the same way content – from emails to whitepapers to case studies – can be. How will this reshape marketing? The implications are endless.

In a recent article, Harvard Business Review suggests that our loyalty will be less toward brands, and more toward AI assistants like Alexa, Google Home, and HomePod who we’ll converse with daily. “In fact, we predict that AI assistants will win consumers’ trust and loyalty better than any previous marketing technology. […] AI platforms will be able to predict what combination of features, price, and performance is most appealing to someone at a given moment.”

As a result, marketers will look to optimize their position on AI platforms and partner relationships with brands. Just as marketers have jockeyed for SEO position on search engines in the past decade, marketers may look to do the same through these personal assistant devices.

It’s up to us marketers how we shape this new marketing landscape – to understand how we will effectively “screen the screenless.” But while we don’t know what shape this will take, rest assured that the same principles of good marketing will hold steady. No matter who the medium or channel, a winning marketing strategy will always prioritize the customer and their needs, deliver them valuable and personalized content and engage them with the right message at the right time. As marketers venture into this new frontier, the ones who win – as always – will be those who abide by these proven marketing truths.

When the brief gives you grief

By Mike Teasdale

If you’re involved in creativity service provision, then you’re probably as relaxed as a bee on uncut cocaine right now.

Not only are you navigating your way through unprecedented change (the competitive landscape, the nature of creativity, the ad model, the economic model) but you’re coping with this while doing something that is very hard.

The Cul-de-Sac Brief This one gives you nowhere to go.

We all like the freedom of a tight brief but if it’s too tight and there is no room for manoeuvre then it will be a creative dead end.

Creative thinking is difficult, so the last thing you need in the mix is a brief that gives you grief. Yes, it’s possible to overcome a bad brief (even a pig with a sinus infection can sometimes find a truffle), but why make a difficult process more difficult?

The Daydream Believer Brief

While every creative endeavor is a journey into the unknown, my thirty years of being a planner teaches me that if you start the creative process with any of the following types of brief you are likely to be in for an unpleasant journey to a disappointing destination.

These kinds of brief often have a self-importance to them.

A sewage treatment system for caravans is very useful if you have a caravan and nature calls, but it’s not going to change the world.

The War and Peace Brief This one damages the environment when you print it.

And it’s not just long, it’s likely to have everything in it so it’s unlikely to be a good creative catalyst. Arses might be covered, but it reveals a client and planner who don’t know what they want. Inevitably, creative work will be sacrificed to get to strategic clarity.

The Frankenstein Brief This one is where copy and paste has been deployed to join the front end of one brief to the back end of another. As a result, it doesn’t hang together.

If there’s one thing briefs need, it’s consistency of internal logic. There is nothing like the creative process to flush out contradictions quicker than a turpentine enema.

This one is wildly over optimistic in its ambition. It’s away with the fairies with an optimism that is completely divorced from the reality of data or budget or deadline.

The Chameleon Brief This one changes constantly. The client and planner never settle on a course of action and instead constantly add new requests. Mission creep sets in.

There is a healthy dynamism to the best creative processes and briefs naturally evolve in response to creative development, but when the brief is changing simply because someone has had another brain wave it usually leads to compromised creative solutions.

The Atacama Desert Brief This one is drier than a cat’s tongue on a hot day. There is no sense of storytelling or emotion. Reading it makes filling in your tax form seem stimulating.

These briefs often use jargon or business-speak. Or contain language that is generic and meaningless. They’re bland,

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and with nothing to get your teeth into they suck the oxygen out of the creative process.

The Politician Brief This one has got something for everyone. It’s hard not to agree with because it fails to come to a POV on the problem in hand.

My experience of large clients is that their multiple layers of people do not create the best environment for the ruthless logic required to distil and sacrifice your way to a POV. This is where a good planner can play a vital role.

Remember, a brief is like a snowball: the more you roll it around the bigger it gets, and the more twigs and poo it picks up.

The Missed-the-Point-Entirely Brief This one is focused on solving the wrong problem.

Good briefs always have a crystal-clear articulation of the key problem that advertising needs to solve. Not a woolly business or marketing wish-list but a specific job to be done that advertising is capable of.

Trust in your Michelangelo Remember that the one thing creatives need from a brief is direction. Inspiration is a bonus, but ultimately what they need is direction.

It’s not much to ask. Or is it?

The brief is simultaneously the most and least important stage in the creative process. It increases your chances of getting to great work in an efficient manner but what matters is getting to great work. If you stumble on great work by good fortune or great talent, then the brief needs to get out of the way and let that greatness come through.

The brief is a means to an end, not the end itself.

After all, no one ever said, “Hey, let’s go visit the brief for the Sistine Chapel ceiling”. Not even the planner’s mum.

Mike Teasdale is a strategic problem solver. He is Director at Left-Handed Planning Ltd and provides consulting, writing, mentoring, and facilitating services. His background is in ad land, with 28 years of experience as a strategist in agencies like BBH, BBDO and Lowe.

The antidote to wasteful ad spend – where marketers go wrong

By JJ Eastwood

Research indicates that something in the region of $80 billion in digital marketing spend is wasted each year. There are, however, strategies that can help stop the rot, writes JJ Eastwood.

JJ Eastwood 150 BWAll marketers squander a portion of their ad spend. In fact, the average marketer is quite realistic about their profligacy. Last year, for instance, a Rakuten Marketing survey of more than 1000 marketers revealed they estimate 26% of their spend is squandered.

The most pessimistic of this marketing cohort, about 2.9%, figure that more than 80% of their spend goes up in smoke.

With eMarketer estimating that 2019 will see global digital ad spend hit a dizzying $316 billion, then we can reason that around $82 billion of it will be wasted. As for why it’s happening, well, most marketers cite the pursuit of audience reach as the main reason for their advertisements not cutting through.

The historical focus on the reach of a marketing campaign can certainly have some undesirable side effects in the current digital environment. Of greater importance is an awareness of where your advertising actually lives. Closely tracking where it is shown is a key step in reducing the wastage of your advertising dollar. As is having a clear insight into how the channels it is hosted on perform.

There are certainly ways to do this, and marketers – under increasing pressure to justify every dollar outlaid – are understandably looking to channels that offer clear-cut results. Channels that might have previously flown under the radar.

Take affiliate marketing, for example, which has the ability to provide the kind of sound returns marketers crave. Operating on the basis that an advertiser only pays when a cash register rings and a sale is made, it offers a more sure-fire way for

marketers to outlay their spend. It’s omnipresent too, and familiar to us all in one way or another, even if the term ‘affiliate’ has you scratching your head.

Essentially, if you’ve earned loyalty points via an online purchase (think the Qantas Online Mall), you’ve used an affiliate link. If you follow a fashion blogger and have been inspired to click through and purchase off the back of their recommendation, you’ve used an affiliate link.

It’s a simple model, but its efficacy owes much to recent technological advances. Up until recent years, affiliate marketing was constrained by its reliance on manual business processes, placing limitations on its ability to achieve scale, and to improve personalisation and contextualisation.

The machine learning boom of the last five years has changed the game. We are now seeing laser focused data automation, personalised offers and granular segmentation in the affiliate commercial model. It’s transforming the relationship between advertisers, publishers and consumers.

And, with even clearer measurement of spend and results, it is combating the issue of wastage directly.

For marketers doubting the effectiveness of their advertising dollars, it’s important to know you’re not alone, and there are steps you can take to better account for your spend. A good place to start is with an internal assessment of your advertising spend. And with the technology of the digital age at our disposal, tying your marketing directly to sales outcomes and eliminating wastage makes a lot of sense.

By utilising channels that offer clear-cut results such as affiliate marketing, marketers are empowered to make performancebased decisions for budgeting and mitigate wasteful practices.

After all, the fewer dollars you contribute to the $82 billion of wasted marketing, the better your business will perform.

On Social Media, Sell Your Brand, Not Your Stuff A NEW MARKETING STUDY OF FACEBOOK USERS SHOWS THAT HARDSELL TACTICS STIFLE ENGAGEMENT, AND ENGAGEMENT IS GOLD.

By Lee Simmons

Off the coast of New Zealand last year, a kayaker was drifting along quietly when a seal burst from the water and slapped him in the face with a large octopus. As it happens, the trip was funded by GoPro as part of a product launch, and that sucker punch was caught on video by one of the company’s cameras. When GoPro posted the clip to Facebook, it exploded, yielding a publicity bonanza.

But what kind of content works best on social media?

Opinions abound; evidence, not so much. “There’s been very little real-world research on this,” says Harikesh S. Nair, a professor of marketing at Stanford Graduate School of Business. The problem is data: Facebook could do it, but each commercial user on Facebook sees only its own metrics; there hasn’t been a way to draw general insights.

It’s a marketer’s dream: What could be better than having viewers voluntarily send your branded content to friends (and “friends”), saying, “You gotta see this!” Chasing that dream, companies today are moving more and more of their media spend to social channels. It’s a natural evolution — business goes where the buyers are, and nowadays that’s on the platforms.

So Nair, along with Dokyun Lee of Carnegie Mellon and Kartik Hosanagar of the Wharton School, hooked up with an analytics firm that gathers daily performance figures for some 800 business users of Facebook. By pooling the data for more than 100,000 posts — and using novel machinelearning techniques to characterize their content — the researchers published a paper that offers real answers that

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companies can use to optimize their social media strategies.

Content Matters When firms first tiptoed into social media, Nair says, they brought to it a mindset from old media, where the goal was to maximize “reach,” which is simply the number of people exposed to a brand message. The corollary online, it seemed, was to maximize one’s follower count — and companies employed a variety of inducements like coupons and free swag, not to mention sponsored posts, to amass followers.

But eyeballs didn’t equal engagement. “Early audits showed that awareness wasn’t enough,” Nair says. “Followers weren’t interacting with the content in any way.” Which isn’t surprising: commercials were always an annoyance, the price of watching TV shows for free. Why would anyone “like” a corporation, comment on its self-serving ads, or share them with friends?

“The focus,” Nair says, “then became not just getting exposure, but figuring out what to put in the message so users will want to engage with it. This generated a whole new industry called ‘content marketing.’ The question became, what kind of content do I need to reach what kind of user, to generate what kind of engagement — and toward what goal?”

Be Someone The goal might seem obvious, but there are two distinct streams of social media marketing, Nair says, with different objectives. One, known as “performance marketing,” aims to generate immediate sales, or “conversion.” The other is “brand building,” where the goal is to connect with consumers in a more personal way, in hopes of earning their long-term loyalty.

When a company says, ‘Hey, here’s a coupon for 20% off,’ it gets very little engagement.

But when it uses ‘brand-personality’ content and talks to users in ways that simulate a human being, it gets lots of engagement.

Interestingly, the data showed that most firms used one or the other exclusively — only a few did both at once. “I don’t know why that is,” Nair says, “but it could be an organizational thing — where the teams responsible for social media in different companies are more aligned with the sales or marketing departments.”

To characterize each post, the researchers first hired workers Harikesh S. Nair on Amazon Mechanical Turk to evaluate a subset of about 5,000 posts and label content based upon soft attributes like humor and emotion or upon hard information like price deals. Then they used that labeled set to train a computer, with natural language processing and machine-learning algorithms, to power through the rest.

When they finally combined the content attributes with the engagement figures — the actual likes, shares, and comments for each post — they found stark differences in performance:

“When a company says, ‘Hey, here’s a coupon for 20% off,’ it gets very little engagement,” Nair says. “When it uses what we call ‘brand-personality’ content — essentially, when it talks to users in ways that simulate a human being — it gets lots of engagement.”

Mix It Up On one level, of course, we know we’re being played — the bantering, irreverent personality on the other end is a construct, a brand profile, an avatar — but our brains can’t resist. Marketers hack our basic urge to connect with others who are like us, to sort ourselves into tribes. “There’s a lot of research showing that efforts at persuasion are more credible when they seem to come from an individual person, a friend,” Nair says, “instead of, say, a corporation in Cincinnati.”

However, performance marketing still has a place. Nair thinks users might be reluctant to share such posts because they don’t want to appear to be shilling for a company or seem unduly excited about saving money. “People are hyperaware of the optics on social media,” he says. “They think about how their actions will look to others.” But that doesn’t mean they won’t click through for the coupon.

There’s also no reason a company can’t do both, he adds, and that may be where most of them fall short today: “A possible content strategy would be to combine them, to use informative posts to generate immediate leads and personality-driven posts to build long-term brand capital. A portfolio approach.”

Engagement Is King Still, they’re not equally important; the study shows that the crucial element in any social marketing campaign is the brand-personality content. And the reason for that, Nair says, gets at the key difference between traditional broadcast media and new media: In this new world, user engagement is noticed by the algorithms that drive reach.

“Facebook’s News Feed algorithm gives priority to content with good engagement. If you’re sending out posts that aren’t getting any visible traction, the algorithm will say, ‘Aha, users don’t like this company’s posts very much.’ Then you get buried farther and farther down in News Feed, so you have little chance of ever showing up in front of users.”

In this way, Nair says, maximizing engagement — those precious likes, shares, and comments — on social apps is perhaps today’s equivalent to search engine optimization, or SEO, on the web. In both cases, the goal is to reverseengineer the ranking criteria used by systems that essentially equate popularity with value.

“It sounds paradoxical, but you can’t get engagement without engagement,” Nair says. “So even if you’re mainly interested in performance marketing and driving sales, it’s really essential to add some good brand-personality content — if only to remain visible in this crowded marketplace.”

Advertising and Ageism ADVERTISING AND AGEISM = INSANITY

By Peter Levitan

I am going to discuss two forms of advertising and ageism.

First, as it relates to agency staffing and second about the insanity of not marketing to the richest consumer market.

Start Here: There are few areas of the advertising industrial complex that baffles more than rampant ageism. Here is a World Health Organization definition of the master issue…

Ageism is the stereotyping and discrimination against individuals or groups on the basis of their age; ageism can take many forms, including prejudicial attitudes, discriminatory practices, or institutional policies and practices that perpetuate stereotypical beliefs.

I see two areas where ageism lives in advertising.

Oh, oh… before I start. I was going to use Jeff Goodby of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners (that’s him in the photo) as an example of an ‘older’ guy who still works in advertising.

But, and I find this kinda humorous, it is virtually impossible to find out how old Jeff is. I suspect that he has erased age from his bio.

First: Ageism and Advertising Agency Staffing There is no question that the advertising industry is about young people and the not over 45 employee. According to AdAge: In 2017, the majority, or 63 percent, of workers in advertising, public relations and related services were under 45 years of age, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The median age in the category was 39.2—roughly the same as a decade earlier. (By comparison, the median age in accounting, including tax prep, bookkeeping and payroll services, was 45.)

Though I find advertising agency employee-based ageism unnerving, I understand this bias from a business perspective.

As an ex-agency owner, I know the need to keep staff costs down. In what is becoming a lower and lower margin industry, cost efficiency, especially when it relates to salaries and healthcare costs is critical. My over 50 employees cost a lot more than my under 40.

Another reason that agencies go “young” is that there is the perception that older workers do not “get” new digital marketing platforms. Really? Are we really thinking that one has to have been born after 1990 to understand how digital marketing works? I am twice the age of the average agency employee. Yet, I was one of the ‘inventors’ of digital news in 1995, launched the first natural language marketing interface in 2000 (think bots) and ran an Oregon agency that specialized in digital marketing. Do you think that I am the only older person that gets it? I mean frankly, how much of a fucking genius do you have to be to understand Instagram video?

I think that the idea that anyone over 45 does not get it is simply an excuse to keep costs down by reducing the number of more expensive employees.

Second: Ageism and Advertising’s Missing Demographic Imagine a marketer waking up and not wanting to market to a huge segment of the population? Well, that is how advertising works today.

Despite being a massive market, only about 5% of U.S. advertising is even aimed at people over 50 according to Havas Group. There are many reasons for this. But I think that ageism plays a part (like you are 27 and like why would I want to spend my client’s budget on people like my parents?)

I mean, they don’t use Snapchat. They don’t play Minecraft.

They don’t binge drink.

When you staff up an agency with 27-year-olds, you are going to miss having a bunch of people with broader life experiences. The kind of life experience (and no, I am not suggesting that agencies need in-house 70-year-olds) that helps your agency sell more stuff.

Isn’t an advertising agency in the business of selling more stuff? To like, whomever?

Possibly, not selling more stuff is a reason that advertising agencies are not perceived as being essential as they used to be to driving client sales.

OK, time for my milk and cookies.

For marketers, culture fatigue is real

By Alexis Fragale

Keeping up with the culture has become an apparent imperative, but the currents that inform the conversation though it may move at the speed of Instagram - are deeper lying and require our focus, writes Mindshare’s Alexis Fragale.

every day. Brands looking to connect with culture often try to jump on these trends, but to many, it’s a death blow once it becomes mainstream. And oftentimes, brands don’t hit the right tone.

The speed of culture is accelerating. A good idea spreads quickly online, shared and multiplied through the news and social media. Copycats inevitably come along, hoping to capture some of its success and glory.

The quickening of culture doesn’t only affect our digital lives and internet phenomena – books, music, and fashion have been impacted as well. Fewer titles are staying atop the bestsellers lists, as churn for the next ‘it’ book rolls on.

The music industry is transforming in the streaming age as artists like Ariana Grande accelerate the time in which music is released to be culturally relevant in the moment. Fashion used to be defined by seasonal collections, but fast fashion has shifted everyone to more rapid releases, and streetwear has moved one step further into unannounced drops.

There was a time where hitting a million followers was an impressive feat, but today, thousands have reached that landmark, expecting the same treatment their predecessors received, only to be disappointed. In 2012, Justin Bieber became the first person to break one million followers on Instagram. Now there are over 3,600 accounts with over one million followers.

Today, anyone can become an influencer, with the industry shifting ever smaller to micro-and nano-influencers. Soon, we might be reaching a point of oversaturation. And with the emergence of newer social and video-sharing platforms like TikTok, aspiring influencers are quick to adopt them in the hope of making it big.

But we’re in an age where emerging platforms and viral sensations die as quickly as they arrive. In the past, memes and challenges enjoyed “long” lifespans. With less competition and the novelty of the new, these quirky images and videos could capture our attention and slowly work their way from some niche online community and spread across the internet.

Older memes have become a part of our culture and some have even endured (we are still being Rick Rolled). Now, it’s more difficult to keep track of all the new ones being created

So what are the key implications for marketers in a landscape that won’t slow down? It’s crucial to understand that connecting culturally isn’t just about being down with the kids and the latest viral sensation. It’s about identifying the bigger trends that impact your consumers and can shape your communications. In the era of everybody being an influencer, think about who your brand both could and should (that’s the key word here) tap into to be culturally relevant. And while the culture fatigue is real, your brand still needs to lean into agility in your media strategies – because if you don’t keep up with changing culture, you’ll find yourself stuck in the past.

Alexis Fragale Director, Insights, Mindshare

Top CMO Challenges and Focus Areas for 2020

By Dom Nicastro

CMOs are consistently confident in their marketing technology (martech), innovation and personalization investments, according to a Gartner CMO report. So, confidence is great, outcomes are better, but CMOs are not blind to the great challenges they face as 2020 approaches, at which point they’ll be under pressure to create innovation and revenuegenerating marketing campaigns. At the recent Gartner Marketing Symposium/Xpo six CMOs shared with us what’s top of mind, what concerns them, what their focus areas are and what challenges they feel will persist next year.

Marketing Team With Spirit of Innovation Meredith Jurek, CMO of Anytime Fitness, said she’s constantly working on ways to make “better emotional connections” with customers. This, she said, requires a discipline that’s “under-appreciated in terms of complexity” because of the challenge of capitalizing on the CMO’s technology tool set. The data is there to create personalized, customized interactions but pulling it together in an “actionable structure” is one of her greatest challenges.

Brent Adamson, principal executive advisor for sales and marketing at Gartner, told the audience during his keynote

at his company’s conference earlier this month the reality for many marketers in terms of personalization is, “Happy Birthday. Here’s an offer.” Jurek acknowledged that reality and said, “We’re better than this.” To get to a better place, Jurek is focused on getting marketing technology vendors to be upfront with their offerings in terms of what works for her organization.

But, beyond martech tools that function, she wants a dedicated marketing staff that is data-oriented, thrives in a test-and-learn environment and has a spirit of innovation in which they are not “afraid to let go of things they’ve done in the past.”

Focus on Personalized Outreach David Hurwitz, CMO at BloomReach, said his focus is using account-based marketing (ABM), which he calls personalization by another term. It’s about having the infrastructure to be able to do personalized outreach, personalized advertising. Who is the persona that we’re trying to reach? Is it a marketer? Is it a chief digital officer (CDO)? Is it a site merchandiser? Content marketer? And what industry are they in? What company?

Where are they geographically? Are they in the UK? Are they here in the US? “Are we getting a personalized message to them when they come to our site, or when

they interact with us electronically?” Hurwitz asked. “Those are all high priorities.”

The CMO wants his marketing team to have the marketing instincts and savvy to get out the right messaging and not get bogged down in the mechanics. “Having from a team point of view, from a talent point of view, the right mix of people who really know the customer and know the product, people who can make these set of marketing technologies work and get good reporting from it, that’s a challenge,” Hurwitz added.

Am I a Worthy Investment?

Leah Anathan, CMO for Qubit, said one of her primary focuses is ensuring she’s effectively using as much of the marketing dollar as she can. “The investors of Qubit look at me as an investment,” she said.

“And the question that I have to answer is, ‘Am I giving them the maximum return on investment for the many dollars that they’re investing with me, and am I a good investment? And that’s something I’m really working hard to do. I’m trying to drop the cost of acquisition, while increasing the efficiency of our output.”

Anathan’s past position had her in the “freemium world,” which gave her significant acquisition lessons.

Today, she’s focusing on effective targeting on LinkedIn and facilitating meetings and networking with clients. “I’m still using a little bit of that community marketing, and then acquisition marketing, but highly, highly targeted,” she said.

Anathan said she’s also spending the bulk of her time making sure her company occupies a “unique space for our brand.

We need to have our own authenticity, and a clear reason why you choose Qubit. … And that needs to permeate all of our content. It needs to be when you hit the website, that you see the differences very rapidly between Qubit vs. the rest.

And I think that drives content.”

Becoming a Known Entity Is a Daily Struggle Want to know what freaks out Magnolia CMO Rasmus Skjoldan?

Big vendors that come out with “brute force” in the awareness game, leaving smaller vendors like his out in the dust. “The winnertakes-all approach scares me,” Skjoldan said. “The awareness game is very important to someone like Magnolia.” Customers may praise the product but at the same time say it’s not well-known.

Beyond awareness, Skjoldan said making sure his brand has good timing on topics and trends is a great challenge for him and most CMOs. “Getting that

right is so damn difficult,” he said. “... You have all of these different signals and voices, and there are so many in digital, trying to influence you saying this trend is important or this is what matters for buyers, and so forth. And picking the right one to kind of ride today at the right time is incredibly difficult.”

Doubling Down on Attribution, Customer Data Lynne Capozzi, CMO for Acquia, spends a good deal of her time making sure her organization is getting prescriptive around personalization. She’s also working hard trying to solve multi-touch attribution challenges. “It’s the ageold problem,” she said.

Figuring out how to store, manage and access customer data remains a challenge, too, Capozzi said. “I think that’s still a pain point for people, and I think that’s going to be a big area,” she said, “whether it’s [a customer data platform (CDP)] or whatever you end up calling it.”

Gartner reported CMOs are spending more on technology than talent, and Capozzi confirmed talent is something she’s constantly working on in her organization. “It’s not only finding the talent,” Capozzi said, “it’s maintaining and retaining that talent once you have them. The young people that are fresh out of school, or maybe they’ve got two years of experience, you train them on these new tools, and then they’re going to follow the next shiny object, some other, smaller organization or a startup. It’s definitely a challenge.”

Breaking Through a Crowded Field Liz Koman, CMO of digital agency Manifest, calls her firm an established agency that has been around for a long time. That doesn’t mean, she said, they don’t have to keep evolving. “We have to find the way to break through,” Koman said. “There’s just a lot of agencies, and quite frankly, a lot of them do our core disciplines.

We like to think that we’ve been around a little longer, we’re a little smarter, but again, it’s how do you get that message out?”

It comes down to, she said, finding the right fit and good targeting. “It’s hard to make sure you have the right point out there for the right target,” Koman said. “It’s a targeting issue more than anything else. It helps to pick a really good partner. It’s all about the fit. You can be a great agency and end up with a client that doesn’t operate the way you do … and you find yourself in a mismatch.”

The ABCs of AI in Marketing ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE—YOU’VE HEARD THE TERM, YOU KNOW IT’S A TREND, YOU KNOW YOU’RE “SUPPOSED” TO BE USING IT, BUT IF YOU WERE ASKED TO EXPLAIN WHAT IT MEANS FOR MARKETERS IN A FEW SHORT SENTENCES, COULD YOU DO IT? IF NOT, THEN YOU’VE COME TO THE RIGHT PLACE

By Bart Frischknecht

A quick Google search of “marketing AI” returns 950,000,000 results. And although Google does its best to surface the most relevant content to the first page (using AI to inventory, categorize and label, and recommend content, might I add), I doubt you have time to sift through each mention until you find a piece that actually gets down to brass tacks.

AI sometimes feels like “the man behind the curtain”— elusive, complex, and a little scary. Instead of skimming by with surface-level knowledge, marketers should learn more.

So here are a few questions, definitions, and tactics for evaluating marketing technology solutions that claim to be “powered by AI.”

As a marketer, the things you likely want to know are these:

Breaking Down the Buzzwords

• What new, AI-powered marketing technology should I spend budget on?

Artificial intelligence (AKA intelligent

• What time investment are we talking about in relation to implementing AI? • Which marketing functions are best suited for AI? Which should I just leave alone?

automation) My all-time favorite definition of AI for marketers (and there are many definitions) comes from Paul Roetzer of the Marketing AI Institute: “AI is technology that automates a task previously done by a person.” Pretty simple, right?

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Every time you see AI in the context of martech, just substitute out the term “artificial intelligence” for “intelligent automation,” which can mean one of two things in marketing: 1. Recommending. Some marketing software predicts which action will have the most positive outcome in order to recommend a next step in a series of events. Think of these small recommendations as stepping stones on the way to fully automating a given task. A few examples include offering content topics for a blog post, or suggesting email subject lines.

2. Automating. Automating builds on recommending. To qualify for being automated, a task needs to be routine and repeatable; the goal needs to be specific; and the steps to achieve that goal must follow an exact set of rules. Tasks that fall under this umbrella include running programmatic ad campaigns and triggering the next email in a journey-driven series.

As we collect more and more data, and the capabilities of marketing tech improve, the tasks we’re able to automate within marketing will certainly increase.

Should you be worried that all functions of marketing will be completely automated? That’s simply not the case yet. The likely evolution will be that the more functions are automated the more opportunity for marketing strategy and creativity.

Data science (AKA the tech that enables AI) When you think about science, the first few things that likely come to mind are test tubes, beakers, and your 9th grade biology class—not data. But if you ask anyone who actually builds marketing AI for a living, you’ll get a different answer.

According to the Berkeley School of Information, data science is the practice of “organizing and analyzing massive amounts of data,” and to be an effective data scientist, one must be “able to identify relevant questions, collect data from a multitude of different data sources, organize the information, translate results into solutions, and communicate their findings in a way that positively affects business decisions.”

The three most important pieces of data science to understand are as follows: 1. The data source. A consistent, repeatable process that can be measured is referred to as the data source.

It acts as the information input. An example of a data source is the open rate on an email. If recommending email subject lines, a data scientist could look at the open rate of previous emails, determine which had the highest open rates, and suggest a subject line based on

that data.

2. Big Data. Access to a large number of observations from a specific process is called “Big Data.” For example, credit card companies use transaction records from a variety of customers to power fraud detection technology.

Which transactions are common, which seem out of place as compared to the norm?

3. Machine-learning.

Organizing and analyzing structured data (like website visits and purchase data) or unstructured data (like images or written content), and making predictions based on that data, is known as machine-learning—an umbrella term that is applied to a range of data science methods. An example of machinelearning is scanning images and tagging them in a searchable database based on identified objects. Think about machine-learning as a set of techniques using machines (i.e., computers) to help us (i.e., humans) learn something specific.

Questions to Ask When Considering AIPowered Marketing Tools Next time you come across a too-good-to-be-true piece of marketing tech that promises to exceed your KPIs and make your boss smile, ask yourself the following: • Which marketing task is being intelligently automated?

Do I need to automate that task?

• Does the tech come with its own Big Data source, or will I need to provide it? Do I have the appropriate amount of data? Will I be able to connect my data source to the tech, if needed?

• Is there evidence of the technology either making good recommendations for or automating one of my tasks?

When considering new technology, it’s all about knowing the right questions to ask. So, hopefully, those questions will help make AI a little more approachable for your marketing team. *** Artificial intelligence, Big Data, and machine-learning aren’t going anywhere, so the quicker you are able to determine the need-to-know info about the systems you are considering implementing, the faster you will be on your way to staying ahead of marketing’s biggest disruption.

Bart Frischknecht PhD is the vice-president of product strategy at content intelligence platform Vennli. His background consists of a blend of design, marketing, and engineering.

The Dos and Don’ts of Repositioning Your Brand THIS “STRATEGY OF LAST RESORT” SHOULD NOT BE UNDERTAKEN LIGHTLY. AN EXCERPT FROM KELLOGG ON BRANDING IN A HYPER-CONNECTED WORLD.

By Alice M. Tybout

In 2012, Blue Apron shipped its first meal kits and a new product category was born.

At the time, the company appealed to potential customers by promoting the idea that their product—refrigerated boxes sent to people’s homes with everything they needed to create a delicious meal—was superior to other dining options: that it was more efficient than grocery shopping, for instance, and more fun and engaging than takeout.

But then competitors entered the fold: HelloFresh, Plated, Purple Carrot. These entrants weren’t comparing themselves to grocery shopping or takeout; they were comparing themselves to, well, Blue Apron. Had Blue Apron’s original brand positioning—how it wanted consumers to think about its product—run its course?

Once a brand’s position gains traction, the goal is generally to build on that positioning, says Alice Tybout, a professor of marketing at Kellogg. But occasionally, a brand’s position might need to be reconsidered from the ground up. In this excerpt from Kellogg on Branding in a Hyper-Connected World, Tybout explains when a brand may need to reposition itself, as well as the challenges it will likely face.

When a brand position is developed, the goal is to sustain it over time. However, certain circumstances may require the repositioning of a brand, which may involve changing the frame of reference or reframing. This typically is necessary when a brand is the first entrant in a category.

Consider the introduction of Miller Lite, which was the

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first successful light beer in the United States. Its frame of reference—the category in which it held membership— was regular beer, which had great taste, and its point of difference was being less filling, which was supported by having fewer calories than other beers. The entry of Bud Light resulted in consumers changing their perception of the frame of reference from regular beer to light beer. This new frame changed Miller Lite’s point of difference—less filling—to a point of parity. To differentiate the brand, Lite had to develop a new point of difference. Bud Light beat Miller Lite to the punch by promoting its superior taste, which was supported by the fact that Budweiser’s base brand was the “King of Beers.” By focusing on its superior taste, Budweiser adopted the point of difference that is a key determinant of beer choice, leaving Lite to find a niche benefit. Blue Apron faces a similar challenge with the emergence of other brands in the meal kit category.

Excerpted and adapted with permission of the publisher, Wiley, from Kellogg on Branding in a Hyper-Connected World by Alice M. Tybout and Tim Calkins. Copyright (c) 2019 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. This book is available wherever books and ebooks are sold.

Repositioning is also warranted when a brand’s position is too broad to be supported by the “reason to believe,” or proof of the brand’s benefits. For example, Aleve was positioned as a convenient analgesic that effectively relieved pain and only needed to be taken every 12 hours. However, this broad frame of reference did not fit with the brand’s reason to believe. In fact, for consumers, 12-hour dosing implied slowacting rather than convenient. To align the reason to believe with the frame of reference, Aleve was repositioned as the brand that relieves arthritis pain. Narrowing the position in this way made the convenience of infrequent dosing a compelling reason to believe for those suffering chronic pain.

Although this frame narrowed the number of people being targeted, Aleve was relevant to the 40 million people in the United States who suffer with arthritis. Moreover, it set Aleve apart from Advil and Tylenol, which require more frequent dosing to sustain pain relief.

Another situation in which repositioning can be achieved readily occurs when the initial position failed to gain traction.

For example, Apple introduced its first-generation watch as a fashion item whose band could be changed to accommodate different wearing occasions (see accompanying figure).

This position was changed a year later when the watch was reframed as a functional device for those interested in health and fitness. This repositioning was successful because the Apple Watch never gained traction as a fashion accessory but was relevant for monitoring health and fitness.

Changing or sharpening a position may also be appropriate and feasible when the original positioning has been diluted due to licensing or other growth-motivated activities, or the brand has been “hijacked” by consumers who are not the desired target. Such was the case for Burberry in the early 2000s. Loose control over licensing deals resulted in the brand name appearing on a wide range of products (including chocolate) at price points that varied dramatically.

Further, football (soccer) hooligans (“chav”) had embraced

the brand and sported caps and umbrellas with the distinctive plaid pattern (often counterfeit) at games where brawls in the stands were common.

The repositioning of the Burberry brand, which was led by Christopher Baily and Angela Ahrendts, involved regaining control of licensing and distribution, dialing back the use of the Burberry plaid in the apparel, stepping up innovation in design, using supermodel Kate Moss and other celebrities in advertising, and creating a strong online presence. These activities drove sales growth for a decade and reestablished Burberry as a luxury brand that blends fashion and function in a uniquely British way. In late 2017, the new CEO, Marco Gobbetti, who was recruited from Céline, announced his plan to reposition Burberry as a super luxe brand, similar to Dior, Hermès, and Gucci. The jury is out as to whether this repositioning will succeed, but the brand’s heritage in functional outdoor attire may limit how far upscale it can move. At a minimum, Old Navy’s experience serves as a cautionary tale about the difficulty in moving a brand up to a higher fashion or luxury tier.

Old Navy was a brand for value-oriented families interested in purchasing casual clothing. Old Navy’s reason to believe was the unusually wide selection of T-shirts, jeans, khakis, and other casual attire. When a new chief marketing officer was hired, a line of trendy but inexpensive clothing was introduced with the goal of appealing to young, fashionconscious women. However, the space allocated to the trendy items reduced the breadth of selection that was central to Old Navy’s position and frustrated its core consumers. Old Navy sales declined dramatically—over 20 percent in several months. Similar, equally disastrous results occurred when new CEOs at JCPenney and Lands’ End attempted to reposition those brands as more fashion-forward. Existing customers were not impressed, and not enough new customers were attracted to offset the defecting old customers.

In sum, once a brand has traction in its current position, repositioning is a strategy of last resort, as it is likely to alienate the brand’s core users. It may also conflict with the prior brand position and thus confuse consumers. And even if these issues do not arise, repositioning typically takes considerable time and financial resources. Nevertheless, modest changes in a position are sometimes warranted to better align a brand’s frame of reference with its point of difference and reason to believe, as was described for Aleve.

Moreover, when a brand is the first entrant in a category where the frame of reference is typically another category, repositioning is generally required, as we noted for Lite beer and Blue Apron. Finally, when a brand has not gained traction in a position, adopting a new frame of reference may be warranted, as was the case for Apple Watch.

Alice M. Tybout Harold T. Martin Professor of Marketing

Generation Z – the truth and nothing but the truth

By Leanne Ledger

Generation Z are a current challenge for many marketers trying to answer the questions: how do we define them? How do we market to them? What do they need?

So of course, many, many articles and studies about Gen Z are emerging (most of which the Access team and I have now read), but along with these studies come quite a few myths.

Some articles are brilliant and insightful, showing the differences within the cohort which is hugely important, especially as they want to be treated as individuals. But on the flip side, there are strong arguments to say that we cannot see them as a homogenised group.

As marketers we need to be careful not to take some conclusions at face value. We are at risk of going too far into looking at the extremes of Gen Z, for example going digital

only and forgetting about marketing techniques that have always worked.

Gen Z are shiny and new, and there have been changes with every generation, but some things remain the same for all generations and we shouldn’t forget that.

So what are some of the main myths emerging around Gen Z? TRUE: Gen Z all have something in common. They were born at the same time so they experienced the same things growing up.

NOT TRUE: Gen Z all share the same attitudes, behaviours and characteristics. As with the world at large, there are many tribes, individuals and groups that buck against the

impression or view we have of this cohort. According to IPSOS MORI: “Lives are becoming more stretched and varied within a cohort group, and often it’s other things (like country, income, education) that are more important in explaining differences.”

TRUE: Gen Z are digital natives. They were born into technology, compared to older Millennials and Gen Xers who were not. So, their approach to technology is unique and can be learned from.

NOT TRUE: • Gen Z only engage with digital media channels. A study

by Kantar Millward Brown suggests that Outdoor is the channel they are most receptive to with 55% positively receiving Out-of-Home ads. Though they are also more receptive to cinema advertising than other generations.

OOH, mags, TV and cinema marry with Gen Z’s preference toward visual information and also its mass appeal means that, unlike digital formats where you have no idea of campaign scale or reach, if a brand is advertising OOH, there is some perceived shared experience with many other people, increasing the saliency and status of the brand.

• Gen Z don’t read books any more. A study by Unidays found that 77% of the 22,723 student-age members of Gen Z surveyed read printed books.

• Gen Z prefer shopping online.A study showed that 60% of Gen Z shoppers prefer purchasing in physical stores, rising to 77% in the USA. 46% say they check in store to get more information before purchasing online. IPA suggest that online shopping is associated with negative feelings and in store with positive feelings.

TRUE: To engage with Gen Zers, you need to be authentic.

NOT TRUE: • Gen Zers are not influenced by influencers. The continuing rise of influencers is no coincidence; Gen Z are receptive to peer-to-peer and influencer marketing. As a whole,

what is being called out is the onset of ‘fake’ influencers.

• Gen Zers don’t buy or use unethical brands. In 2018, despite unnerving stories around their bad treatment of staff, Uber still managed to grow their customer base and the Gen Z audience are clearly part of this growth, with 10% of their audience being 18-24-year-olds. Amazon continues to thrive despite its tax avoidance.

• Only Gen Z are calling for authenticity from brands. In a world that is changing constantly, and the rise of social media - which my friend’s gran is on - anyone can find out info and call out brands, politicians and celebs at the touch of a button.

TRUE: Gen Z are prolific on social media.

NOT TRUE: • Only Gen Z are prolific on social media. All generations feature many heavy users of social media, including the 65+ audience.

• Gen Z don’t use Facebook anymore. They absolutely are, however they are favouring ‘dark social’ where they can message and share content with friends privately and directly rather than publicly.

• Gen Z are obsessed with social media and aren’t bothered about interacting with people in real life. So we should focus on engaging them digitally. They are only on social media so much because they are obsessed with each other and desperate to connect with friends and family. They also need face-to-face time and to feel part of a community.

In summary, it’s important to be cautious about making huge generalizations and assumptions from some of the data presented on Gen Z. One thing is definitely true - the focus on and coverage about Gen Z is only set to continue in abundance until we turn our attention to the Alphas!

Leanne Ledger is creative strategist at integrated and digital marketing agency Access.

5 Visual Marketing Platforms for Brands

By Stephanie Miles

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With visual search on the verge of mainstream adoption, visual marketing platforms have never been more in demand.

Platforms that help brands collect, curate, and showcase photos created by consumers are being sought out, as retailers search for better ways to compete with pure-play e-commerce giants.

Amazon, Alibaba, and eBay are just a few online retailers with new visual search tools, and social media platforms like Snapchat are letting users take pictures of items to buy on Amazon and Pinterest. By using enterprise-level visual marketing platforms, brands can capitalize on their visibility across the web and drive more revenue from the images and other content their customers are creating.

Here are five visual marketing platforms that brands are using right now.

1. Pixlee Pixlee is a visual marketing platform for brands that want to find new ways to take advantage of the user-generated content being posted on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. Brand marketers can find customer photos that showcase their products on social media and build a database of photo submissions from their actual customers. This database can be curated and managed, using image recognition technology to quickly identify top content and tag the products featured in photos. Those images can then be re-published, with permission, across all of a brand’s marketing channels, giving shoppers a way to scroll through shoppable social galleries and ultimately make their purchases based on social media content. Pixlee works with brands like Kimpton Hotels, Levi’s, and Cole Haan.

2. Olapic A visual commerce platform that helps brands get more from their influencer marketing strategies, Olapic offers a way for its clients to collect, curate, and showcase user-generated content. Brands collect and deploy real customer photos using a combination of algorithms and human moderation. Once they’ve found the best content, brand reps can quickly request permission to repost or tag products. Olapic’s platform includes tools to republish visual content across e-commerce, social, mobile, ads, emails, and offline channels. Measurement tools are available within the platform, as well, so brands can connect with top influencers and track the success of their initiatives. Olapic clients include West Elm, Timberland, and The Body Shop.

3. Curalate Curalate is all about helping brands sell more efficiently through visual channels. To do this, the platform’s creators have developed tools to leverage user-generated content across social media. More specifically, brands collect content posted by influencers in their Curalate Media Library, and the platform uses AI to quickly tag products and add commerce links to those images. Curalate also drives commerce from images with tools that let customers discover product links by simply pointing to the products in online photos. Brands can measure which content is performing best, and even discover influencers and microinfluencers who are already authentic fans. Curalate works with brands like Target, Sephora, and Crate & Barrel.

4. Stackla Designed for modern marketers, Stackla has a new way to discover, manage, publish, and optimize user-generated content.

The visual content engine and asset manager gives brands a way to discover social content from more than 30 sources, with a visual search tool that relies on location data, keywords, and hashtags. Top posts are automatically curated and tagged, with all content permissions managed within the platform. Brands can quickly showcase the user-generated content they’ve tagged across all of their marketing channels. Stackla’s machine learning technology, dubbed Co-Pilot, observes content performance patterns and makes recommendations based on new trends. Brands that work with Stackla include BMW, Subaru, SONY, and Nintendo.

5. Nicho Nicho’s self-service visual marketing platform is all about delivering seamless brand experiences. Brands create their own branded social hubs by leveraging the visual content already being posted online. Nicho’s visual search tools rely on hashtags to pinpoint social media photos and videos related to the brand. Brand marketers can republish their favorite content on responsive media walls that can be embedded almost anywhere. They can also link posts to their product inventory pages, so customers can make purchases directly through their social hubs. Nicho has worked with Sean Paul, the Eat Real Festival, and DJ Jazzy Jeff.

Sebastian Dreyfus, managing director of Rosetta Europe

The New Era of Marketing Strategy

By Melissa Parrish

Marketing has been a story of eras: from mass marketing to the direct marketing era to digital marketing, and now data-driven marketing. As marketing strategy changes and marketing resources shift, so do consumers and customer loyalty — today, consumers use more devices, ad blockers and other privacy protection tools, and still have increasingly sophisticated customer experience expectations. And make no mistake: if you’re not meeting those expectations customers will find someone who will, as according to Forrester Analytics, 54% say they’re willing to experiment in any market.

Unfortunately, in their efforts to deliver data-driven marketing and high-quality customer experiences, marketers have stumbled. For example, in many cases, their attempts to build data-rich customer profiles created data hoarding practices and broke customer trust when the extent of some companies’ profiling became public (see Facebook and Cambridge Analytica). Or consider that when marketers recognized the growth of values-driven consumers, they tried to appeal to them with values-focused messaging, but sometimes at the cost of authenticity, like when a car reseller announced it was pulling advertising from a television show it hadn’t bought media in years just to take a stand against in a controversy.

Why have marketers’ attempts at becoming customer obsessed backfired? Well, one of the myriad challenges with stabilizing your customer base under these circumstances is that customers are complex human beings, not just numbers in a spreadsheet or targets in an ad tech platform. However, just when the challenges seem insurmountable, a fundamental truth about customers emerges that should give marketers some amount of comfort: People’s most basic needs and desires haven’t changed. They seek to express their identity and individuality; they long to be part of a community; they want tools to make life better and easier; etc.

What’s different is how these needs are expressed, demonstrated and met in today’s world. For example, the drive for belonging has led to tribalism as polarization has

set in. For proof, just do a quick Twitter search for the day’s threatened boycotts. Similarly, we know that customers will actively participate with and advocate for brands that they care about, and yet their measurable loyalty has waned.

Forrester’s Customer Experience Index shows a 20-point difference in sentiment when customers judge the quality of a brand’s overall service and sense that they are rewarded for their loyalty. The majority of brands’ scores show that less than 50% of customers believe their loyalty is rewarded.

When marketers fail to understand the complexity and nuance of how customers’ core characteristics evolve, people lose trust in them. As they look elsewhere, customers have found a more nimble set of businesses to meet their needs: directto-consumer (DTC) brands. DTC brands pride themselves on their direct relationships with customers, and often drive rich personalization based on zero- and first-party data, rather than inferred data. Many incorporate values-driven missions as well, such as Parachute’s participation in the United Nations’ Nothing But Nets program. (Every Parachute bedding purchase helps provide mosquito nets to families in areas with a high risk of malaria.) These benefits have driven consumer trial and adoption — Forrester’s data shows twothirds of 18- to 34-year-old US consumers have made at least one purchase from a DTC brand.

For large, historic brands, DTC challengers represent not just a shifting competitive landscape and changing consumer attitudes, but also an opportunity to examine the shifting marketplace at large. Purpose-driven ecosystems will embed tribalism even further, but people are increasingly taking control of their consumer identities—through the emergence of the Personal Digital Twin, for example—which means segmenting customers into tribes won’t save brands either.

Instead marketers must grapple with how they can serve consumers’ individual needs, expressed on the customers’ own terms, through the innovative use of AI technologies and curation platforms; rather than jumping on the latest tech bandwagon just for the heck of it.

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Account-Based Marketing (But Were Afraid to Ask): Samantha Stone on Marketing Smarts

BY NOW, MANY COMPANIES ARE INCORPORATING CONTENT MARKETING INTO THEIR MARKETING STRATEGY AND TARGETING THEIR CONTENT TO SUIT A SPECIFIC AUDIENCE. BUT YOU COULD DO MORE: YOU COULD IDENTIFY SPECIFIC ACCOUNTS YOU’D LOVE TO LAND, THEN DEVELOP CONTENT ESPECIALLY FOR THEM! THIS APPROACH, KNOWN AS ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING, OR ABM, CAN GET BETTER RESULTS FOR SOME TYPES OF COMPANIES.

By Kerry O’Shea Gorgone

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If you’re in B2B and haven’t considered ABM, you’re missing out! Even if you’re in a B2C marketing organization, ABM might be a good approach.

not a lot of value in narrowing down your marketing to an account-specific approach.”

Here are a few highlights from our conversation:

Selling your company on ABM is easy; the hard part aligning Sales and Marketing (09:45): “What is difficult, culturally, is to say that ‘I’m no longer going to say that marketing is responsible for X and sales is responsible for Y.’ ‘In fact, we’re going to have shared accountability for how we go after the set of accounts we agree on.’

Account-based marketing involves more than just targeting (02:05): “ABM is largely misunderstood. A lot of people approach account-based marketing like any other targeted marketing program and say ‘I’m going to use the same tactics and techniques that I’ve done before, I’m going to use the same lead scoring models I’ve used before, but I’m going to direct it to a list of accounts.’

“That doesn’t mean we don’t have different tasks. Sales does different things than Marketing does, but how we measure ourselves has to be similar and together. That is remarkably difficult in a lot of organizations. Because Finance wants to say ‘I want to know the return on my marketing dollars independent of the return on the salaries I’m paying to salespeople.’”

“Targeted marketing is a good thing. People should be doing that, especially in B2B, but true account-based marketing really looks at and changes how we approach all aspects of marketing. It changes how we message. It changes our integration with the sales team. It changes our lead scoring models. It really is the combination of targeting a list of accounts with specific things, but doing it in a very, very different way.”

Before you jump into ABM, figure out what data you have and what data you still need (17:15): “The first thing we have to do is...look at the data we have and analyze it. So, what kind of customers come into the buying journey with us? Which ones come out the other side? And do a whole bunch of analysis on where they get stuck, who progresses, who pays the most, where our margins are best, what is repeatable and what isn’t. We’re often surprised by what we learn. There are more patterns there than we think.

To help you understand what ABM is, what it can do, and whether it’s right for your company, I invited Samantha Stone, founder of The Marketing Advisory Network and author of the book Unleash Possible: A Marketing Playbook That Drives B2B Sales, to Marketing Smarts.

ABM is not ‘all or nothing’ (04:07): “It may, in fact, turn out that for a division of your business or one of your products or something that you’re launching or a segment of market you’re going after, ABM is the right strategy, but you continue to run the rest of your marketing functions the way you always have. A lot of organizations do that quite successfully.”

Forget 20 questions: To see if ABM could work for you, you just need 5 (04:40) “There are five characteristics you need to say ‘ABM is right for our organization’: 1. Do you have a complex buying committee of people you need to sell to? Are there multiple people involved in that process?

2. Does your buying process take an extended period of time? The nature of ABM is building a relationship over time across lots of interactions.

3. Do you have messages, offers, and content that you can share with multiple different roles within a buying committee? You need to build the core infrastructure to be successful. You can’t send the same content to everyone.

4. Are you willing to change? You have to have the organization be willing to change. A lot of organizations still measure marketing success on leads generated. The idea of a lead is artificial, because the first place I met someone doesn’t matter. What matters is whether this account is engaging with me over time.

5. Do you have a clearly defined target market?

If you can and want to serve everybody equally, there is

“But we 100% cannot stop with only internal data.

We have to augment the information we have with information from third parties. Sometimes, that augmentation is as simple as building out the account profiles to do the analysis. I might have an account in my system and a bunch of contacts, but I may not have the size business they are or the industry they’re in. It may not tell us what kind of products they have installed. The kinds of things that might be important purchase indicators for us. So, at a minimum, you need to do that account-level, firmographic, basic augmentation.”

To learn more, visit UnleashPossible.com, and follow Samantha on Twitter: @SamanthaStone. Also check out the MarketingProfs series of courses on account-based marketing to get started using ABM at your company!

Samantha and I talked about much more, including the biggest mistake companies make when first trying ABM, as well as the best metrics to use when measuring the success of your ABM efforts, so be sure to listen to the entire show, which you can do above, or download the mp3 and listen at your convenience. Of course, you can also subscribe to the Marketing Smarts podcast in iTunes or via RSS and never miss an episode!

Kerry O’Shea Gorgone is a lawyer, podcaster, speaker, and writer. As a learning designer, she helps develop MarketingProfs’ premium training products.

She co-hosts The Punching Out Podcast with Katie Robbert about people’s hobbbies, interests, and weird collections!

Why marketers should tap into Pinterest influencers PINTEREST INFLUENCERS REMAIN AN UNTAPPED RESOURCE FOR MARKETERS

By Rebecca Heilweil

The nearly decade-old tech company Pinterest has been slow to capitalize on its product’s potential for on-platform shopping. But that doesn’t mean marketers don’t stand to gain from the site’s wealthy supply of influencers.

industry in communicating what exactly it is. Is it search?

Is it social?” he said. That ambiguity has made it difficult for marketers to categorize spending on Pinterest in their budgets.

“From Pinterest’s point of view, it’s probably one of the most underutilized mediums in terms of influencer marketing,” Oliver Yonchev, the U.S. managing director of the social media marketing agency Social Chain told Cheddar. “The users are in a buyers’ mindset. I go there to be inspired. I go there to decorate my apartment, to plan an event. That’s such a unique mindset to be in.”

Yonchev explains that “there’s an abundance of supply, but the industry hasn’t really capitalized on it from an advertiser point of view.” With a limited demand, the cost of hiring an influencer on Pinterest is likely lower than the cost of hiring an influencer on another platform. Moreover, Pinterest doesn’t take a cut.

Pinterest now boasts more than 290 million monthly users and expects just over $1 billion in revenue this year. Still, the company isn’t profitable, and its first quarterly earnings report as a public company - revealing losses greater than expected-- triggered a 15 percent fall in share prices last week.

Yonchev said Social Chain, which has worked with ASOS, NBC Universal, and Apple Music, doesn’t plan to spend more on media on Pinterest, but will be increasing the time it spends on influencers who work on Pinterest’s platform.

In recent years, Pinterest has made efforts to court influencers and the advertisers that want to hire them. Last fall, the company made available an API that helps markets and brands track insights from influencers’ data. Now advertisers can access valuable data including monthly views, impressions, clickthroughs, and the number of times an image is saved. Such information could be vital as one of the biggest challenges for advertising on social media is accessing metrics that can confirm the success of a campaign.

But marketers haven’t taken full advantage of the opportunity, according to Yonchev. “Pinterest has struggled with the ad

The nature of Pinterest’s ‘pins’ - the saved images that are posted on the platform’s ‘boards’ - distinguishes the platform from its competitors, which have increasingly focused on ephemeral content. These pins have a longevity that images and videos on platforms like Instagram and Snapchat don’t.

According to Pinterest, a pin can drive engagement for more than four months.

Yonchev says that influencers on Pinterest, like an influencer on any platform, should have creative control over the placement of a product. He highlighted that “Pinterest is about aesthetics,” and not necessarily voice and personality.

Despite growing interest in influencers, Pinterest is still behind major competitor, Instagram, in building technology that can facilitate on-platform transactions. YouTube also is incorporating a shopping component.

“Pinterest is better placed to become a commerce platform, in my opinion. But they haven’t capitalized on it as of yet,” Yonchev stated.

Gerber Kawasaki President and CEO Ross Gerber echoed that sentiment last week, when he told Cheddar: “This is Pinterest’s problem. They got a lot of eyeballs but they’re just not monetizing them even a tenth of as well as Instagram.”

How do you bring a brand to life?

By WARC Staff

Humans are wired to feel connected to others when they find interests, traits or experiences in common to which they can relate – and brands can capture attention and earn loyalty when they exude personality traits that consumers identify with or aspire to.

In a WARC Best Practice paper, How to create a consistent yet dynamic brand personality, brand strategist Liane Koh notes that consumers tend to prefer brands they perceive to be compatible with their own personality or self-image.

It’s rare for them to choose brands that portray personalities opposite to their own and understanding this relationship between self-congruity and consumer behaviour can help brand builders in a number of ways.

“A well-developed brand persona effectively steers strategic decisions in messaging, marketing, company culture, voice, experiential factors and many more key aspects of business with clarity and a human touch,” Koh says.

Having such a persona may be especially important for all the new and young brands that are challenging incumbents in numerous categories: it helps brand builders to define and agree on who they are.

But it is also a valuable exercise for established teams, Koh adds: by identifying disparities and discovering new facets of their brand, they can keep it up-to-date and relevant.

In practical terms, this means thinking of a brand as a character (human, animal, plant or even an object assigned human qualities) and then building out the core dimensions of this individual’s life and personality consistent with the product or service.

By spelling out the personality of the brand explicitly and concisely, “everyone in the company can have the same concrete base understanding and reference point,” Koh advises.

“This gives immediate value as it presents to marketers, PR practitioners, creatives and strategists a defined yet flexible space in which to be creative and respond on their feet.”

The best-developed brand personalities maintain a consistency that helps build trust, while also being able to evolve and respond to the world around them, so giving teams “autonomy to mix genres, inspiration and references in their work, all while colouring within the brand’s lines”.

What consumers want from social REPORT: CONSUMERS UNFOLLOW BRANDS DUE TO POOR SERVICE, IRRELEVANT CONTENT, ADS

By Larissa Faw

Half of consumers follow a brand to learn about new products and services, while 48% of consumers follow brands on social to be entertained, according to a new report by Sprout Social.

Conversely, poor customer service is the number one reason why consumers will unfollow a brand on social media (56%), followed by posting irrelevant content (51%) and too many ads from that brand (43%).

More than two-thirds of consumers (67%) will engage with social posts that are entertaining, while only 37% say the same about posts that include discounts or sales. That’s a big shift from the company’s 2018 report, where 67% of consumers said they were most likely to engage with discounts and more than half (51%) said they would share posts promoting sales.

For consumers who choose to engage with brands on social, there’s usually a specific reason for reaching out in the first place. The majority (59%) of consumers say they’ll interact with a brand when they have a great experience with that organization, while 47% reach out when they have questions about a product or service.

And despite what some brands think when it comes to posting about politics or social issues, only one out of ten consumers will reach out to a brand when they choose to get political.

Social success is defined by marketers as “likes” and/ or comments (72%), shares/retweets (62%), and personal interactions (60%). Fewer believe revenue (34%), inspiration (32%) and prompting an emotional response (29%) are

metrics for success.

Less than half of marketers (47%) say developing social strategies that support overall business goals is their number one challenge, and 53% say proving the value of social to those outside their department remains difficult. And 22% of marketing leaders worry their brand’s social strategy is ineffective.

The report reveals that there is an opportunity for social marketers to become leaders outside of marketing and influence success across their company, says Kristin Johnson, director of content and communications, Sprout Social.

In addition, 71% of social marketers say they are able to provide helpful insights to other departments. “Far too often, though, we are seeing these insights siloed within marketing which creates a barrier and inhibits business-wide growth,” says Johnson.

More than four in 10 of all social marketers (43%) say one major challenge is identifying and understanding their target audience. To address this concern, marketers are turning to social data, with 63% believing social listening will become more important in the coming year.

Live video, user-generated content and Instagram Stories top the trends charts for social in 2019. Forty-five percent of consumers said they want to see live video from brands in 2019, followed by 24% who want more user-generated content and Instagram Stories.

Is your favorite fashion brand greenwashing? Use this checklist to find out HOW TO TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BRANDS THAT MARKET THEMSELVES AS SUSTAINABLE AND ONES THAT ACTUALLY COMMIT TO SUSTAINABILITY IN A HOLISTIC WAY.

By Elizabeth Segran

Environmental activists have been sounding the alarm about climate change for decades, but only now is public sentiment shifting: Research finds that more Americans are worried about climate change than ever before. According to a Yale University survey released last year, 73% of Americans now believe in global warming, an increase of 10% since 2015.

Nearly half of Americans believe they are being personally harmed by climate change right now, about 15% higher than in 2015.

That has changed what people value in their consumer

goods. A just-released study by the Global Fashion Agenda, an international organization devoted to helping the fashion industry become more sustainable, found that 75% of consumers around the world view sustainability as extremely or very important, and mentions of sustainability with regards to fashion in social media have spiked between 2015 and 2018.

But how can you tell the difference between brands that market themselves as sustainable and ones that actually make sustainable products? “Fundamentally, it’s a good

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thing that brands are feeling pressure to keep up with consumer demand for sustainable companies and products,” says Andrew Chung, who has been investing in sustainable startups since 2006, first at Lightspeed and Khosla Ventures, then through his own company, 1955 Capital. “But now the challenge is to distinguish between brands that are making serious, holistic commitments to sustainability, and brands that are making more superficial tweaks.”

In the fashion world, many brands tout a low-carbon footprint, use of recycled plastic, sustainably sourced materials, or a made-to-order business model that reduces excess inventory waste. Some talk about using less water than traditional production methods, while others talk about using deadstock (which are are bolts of fabric that other brands purchased but did not use). Which methods are really helping reduce global greenhouse gas emissions? Which ones are just hype? Here’s a three-part guide to help you figure it out.

carefully study its own carbon footprint and offset emissions?

Does it allow customers to repair and then eventually recycle products? Does it use recyclable packaging materials?

If a brand is working hard to be more sustainable, it usually provides a lot of information in the “about” or “sustainability” page of its website. (Or you can do a Google search for the brand’s name along with the words “sustainability” to locate this page.) Be wary of brands that talk about their goals and achievements without providing much detail; this could be a sign that it is greenwashing, rather than actually doing the work of making its supply chain eco-friendly. If a brand is serious about its commitment to sustainability, it will share specific information about what it has already achieved, and when it hopes to reach new goals.

Patagonia stands out even among eco-friendly brands for considering its entire supply chain when making products.

The brand has been experimenting with recycled plastic fibers since 1993, when it was still difficult to find. Now, the vast majority of synthetics used in Patagonia’s clothes come from recycled sources, but the company also uses recycled wool, recycled down, and reclaimed cotton. The brand has committed to becoming carbon positive by 2025 in a variety of ways, including moving to renewable energy and sequestering carbon. (All of this information is readily available, in great detail, on the brand’s website and in its annual report.)

Patagonia is way ahead of the pack in terms of sustainability, but it offers a model to help consumers judge whether other brands are making a holistic effort to be sustainable, or just offering one or two sustainable products.

HOW HOLISTIC IS THEIR COMMITMENT TO SUSTAINABILITY? Given that consumers care about sustainability, it makes sense that brands want to market their most eco-friendly products. But buyer beware. A large sportswear brand may market a small capsule collection that is made from recycled plastic, or sustainably sourced cotton, which gives the entire company a halo of sustainability, when, in fact, it makes up only a tiny fraction of the company’s total sales, the majority of which are made from regular old virgin plastic.

“All of these efforts are worth celebrating,” says Francois Souchet, the fashion lead at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which is committed to helping businesses find new uses for materials after we’re done with them. “But the brands that really stand out when it comes to sustainability are the ones that have a more holistic vision, and think about the entire life cycle of a product, rather than just one aspect of the process.”

So how do you begin to glean whether a brand considers its entire environmental impact? If there’s a brand you’re interested in, go beyond its most-advertised sustainable product, whether its a recycled plastic sneaker or an organic cotton T-shirt. Pick a couple other products on the brand’s lineup and do a deep dive on them to see if they are also sustainably made. Then dig around on the brand’s website to learn more about its processes. Does the brand use mostly recycled or biodegradable materials? Does the brand

IS IT A STARTUP OR A LARGE CORPORATION? Companies of different sizes have varying challenges when it comes to creating eco-friendly supply chains. Startups generally have smaller, more manageable supply chains, so they can more easily shift away from polluting suppliers toward greener ones. On the other hand, smaller companies have a smaller impact because they sell fewer products, and often don’t have the resources to invest in new, cutting-edge sustainable techniques–like fabric or sneaker recycling–that could possibly propel the entire fashion industry forward.

Consider Everlane and Adidas, two companies I wrote about in a magazine story recently. They are both working

to eradicate virgin plastic from their supply chains. While Everlane, which generates just over $100 million in annual revenue, promises to only use recycled plastic in its supply chain by 2021, Adidas, a $21 billion company, requires more time to accomplish the same goal, setting a target of 2024. Everlane is also more comprehensive in its ambition, saying it will cut virgin plastic from its offices, stores, and packaging materials as well, while Adidas will only cut virgin plastic from its shoes and clothes. The differences in their approach makes sense. Since Adidas has a much larger supply chain, it will take time to comb through every last product and supplier. On the other hand, Adidas’s potential impact is much greater, given that it makes 403 million pairs of shoes every year, and about 92 million are made from virgin plastic.

All of this means that you should have slightly different expectations for large and small companies. You should expect both startups and established corporations to choose sustainable suppliers, but you can expect larger companies to take longer to achieve their goals. However, larger companies often have the resources to invest in innovation labs that can lead to bigger breakthroughs. Indeed, according to a recent report from the Global Fashion Agenda, the fashion industry needs major developments in infrastructure to get to the next level of sustainability. “Many brands have reached the limit of what they can do with the current infrastructure,” says Morten Lehmann, the organization’s head of sustainability.”

Some large companies are stepping up. For instance, Adidas is working on developing a new sneaker that is designed to be entirely recyclable, something uncommon in the world of shoes. The H&M Foundation, the charitable wing of the fast-

fashion company, is investing in projects that will encourage fabric recycling, which is not currently happening at a large scale. And Nike is inventing new materials like Flyleather, which uses leather scraps from the cutting room floor that are more sustainable than traditional leather. Consumers should continue to expect large corporations to take the lead on this kind of research and development.

DOES THE BRAND WANT YOU TO BUY STUFF YOU DON’T NEED? One of the biggest problems in the fashion industry is that it encourages consumers to buy products that they don’t really need, simply because they are in style and on trend.

Ultimately, individual innovations don’t matter much if a brand keeps pushing new products on you. After all, choosing not to buy a product is the most sustainable thing you can do as a consumer. Buying five sustainably produced items that you don’t need is still a waste of resources.

It seems like a tall order to expect companies, whose survival depends on selling products, to encourage you not to buy new things. But there are brands that do this. Patagonia, for instance, has a WornWear program which invites customers to bring their old items back to be repaired so that you can keep wearing them for years, rather than throwing them out. Other brands try and discourage over-consumption by selling classic, durable outfits that are designed to last more than a season. Eileen Fisher, another brand known for its sustainable practices, deliberately sells very simple silhouettes–like flowing tunics and button-down shirts– in classic colors like white, black, and navy. Startup Aday creates clothing that is versatile and can often be worn in at least two ways. The company encourages consumers to “do more with much less.”

In some ways, encouraging consumers to buy fewer items is the most radically sustainable thing any fashion brands can do. That means rethinking their business model to set more modest targets for growth. In general, brands that are able to achieve this tend to be privately owned, and don’t have unreasonable expectations from shareholders or investors pushing them to sell more and more products.

“The fashion industry is making great strides when it comes to sustainability,” says Lehmann. “But all of this good is being outpaced by the industry’s pace of growth.” According to the Global Fashion Agenda’s forecasts, the fashion industry is going to grow from its current size of $1.7 trillion to $3.3 trillion at a predicted growth rate of 5% per year.

For now, it largely falls on consumers to check their own buying behavior. To help you on your quest to own less, apps can help. Finery, for instance, collects receipts for your recent online clothing purchases and helps you style outfits with what you already have. Cladwell allows you to track every item in your closet and comes up with 10,000 browsable outfits so you never feel like you have nothing to wear.

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.

How brands can tackle the fake news threat

By WARC Staff

Brands worried about the prospect of their ads appearing on fake news sites may need to refine their programmatic strategies and allow for greater human oversight of campaigns, a paper in the Journal of Advertising Research (JAR) has argued.

“The predicament for brands is that their advertisements can and will end up on pages containing controversial content,” the study asserted.

“Because most brands prefer to occupy relatively noncontroversial and positive positions, the more controversial the fake-news website is, the less favorably the brand’s advertising on that site will be received.”

Authors Adam J. Mills (Loyola University New Orleans), Christine Pitt (Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden) and Sarah Lord Ferguson (Simon Fraser University, Canada) highlighted programmatic advertising as one issue to be addressed.

This automated process, they argued, is effective and efficient, but can lead marketers to “chase the traffic”, a quantitative strategy that often fails to take quality into account – and incentivises fake news providers to create evermore content.

Additionally, the study – entitled The relationship between fake news and advertising: brand management in the era of programmatic advertising and prolific falsehood – stated that fake news purveyors frequently use properties like Twitter and

Facebook to attract eyeballs, either organically or using ads.

Social media platforms, in turn, stand to benefit from this process, both because of the ad revenue, and as fake news is typically “interesting and eye-catching”, and can thus keep users engaged for longer periods of time.

Another problem, according to the study, is that “advertisers, to a large extent, have relinquished certain elements of brand management with respect to online advertising channels”, with intermediates and affiliate networks playing a central role.

One resultant recommendation: “There may be room, in fact, for a new category of ‘intelligent’ intermediary to enter into the digital advertising space.

“In the online advertising business, there appears to be an unmet need for a higher service option for advertisers to have a tighter control over when, where, how, and to whom their advertisements are displayed.”

More “bespoke digital-campaign management”, such as creating white lists of approved sites for advertising, could also be useful in countering the brand risk from fake news.

Such models require greater “manual placement and human endeavor”, the study said, “but the returns would be worthwhile to brands concerned about reputational capital.”

4 Ways to Drive Performance with Corporate-Consumer Value Alignment

By Resonate

Companies were often hesitant to speak out on social issues, unless it was tax or regulation-related because they had nothing to gain and everything to lose. Their creative and messaging focused on the brand promise, product or service feature they were selling and that’s all consumers expected.

Today, people want more from brands. It’s not enough to just sell a product or service; consumers want to buy from companies that champion the values and causes that are important to them. In fact, nine in 10 consumers say that if a company promotes the values they care about, they will go out of their way to do business with them, pay a premium for their products or recommend it to friends and family*.

Companies are now beginning to understand the value in aligning to the right causes and movements. Eight in 10 B2B and B2C companies in the U.S. that put their corporate values into action say they expect to see profit growth within the next five years*. The reality is, consumers are human, and they want their brands to be too.

So how does a brand take a stand on a cause or issue without irking prospects who don’t agree, setting off a frenzy of customer churn or eroding brand value? How do you show your customers that your brand really does care about an issue and it’s not part of a larger marketing ploy? In essence, how does your brand authentically take a stand that aligns to your brand values and reinforces your brand promise?

Here are four ways to ensure you get it right and create meaningful, lasting relationships with your customers.

1. Support issues that align with your products and services Avoid taking a stand on a cause just because it’s trending in the news or because it seems like every other company has something to say on the matter. Choose an issue that’s related to your core business proposition and makes sense based on your company’s products or services. Make sure the cause or issue represents your brand across your entire ecosystem. For example, if you’re taking a stand on gender equality, make sure your employee makeup reflects that. If not, it might be beneficial to focus on something else, or make a public pledge to address the gender equality issue within your own business.

One company that champions causes in line with its brand mission is Patagonia. In December 2017, President Trump issued an order reducing the size of nationally protected land in Utah by almost 2 million acres. Patagonia replaced their usual homepage with the phrase, “The President Stole Your Land” written in white, bold letters. This wasn’t part of a big marketing blitz or campaign strategy; it simply fit in well with their mission statement: “Use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.” It was an authentic way to take a stand on something the company has always been passionate about. This type of brand to value alignment builds brand equity. It also drives customer loyalty by authentically aligning to the values of their customers.

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Another successful example of staying true to company values is Brandless, an e-commerce company that sells its own household and food products. Every time a customer makes a purchase, they donate a meal to the Feeding America network of food banks. This act of charity directly correlates to the company’s mission statement: “Brandless was brought to life with the intention of making better stuff accessible and affordable for more people.” They’re also dedicated to providing value to the greatest number of people possible, and they want to give back every day, according to their website. Their dedication to this cause fits in perfectly with the core of who they are as a business, so it doesn’t feel like a marketing tactic, it feels authentic to who they are.

2. Understand the values and psychological drivers of your customers Creating a deep, emotional connection with your consumer requires an understanding of what that makes them human—their values and motivations. What motivates them to get out of bed every morning? What are they passionate about? Understanding their psychological drivers and values will guide your approach on championing a cause.

For example, women who buy Nike products are 44% more likely to value equality. According to Resonate insights, these individuals emphasize the equality of all people and believe life is about social justice. Nike’s #DreamCrazy campaign successfully tapped into that belief with their most recent ad. Their creative and messaging highlighted some of the most decorated female athletes challenging the gender bias in sports. The reaction on social media was widely positive and the campaign deepened brand affinity, particularly with women.

Resonate Personal Values

Another successful example of a brand reflecting its customers values was Lyft’s reaction to Trump’s travel ban in January 2017. Its founders wrote an email to its users outlining its plan to donate $1 million to the ACLU over the next four years, citing that the travel ban was, “antithetical to both Lyft’s and our nation’s core values.” The letter also stated, “We created Lyft to be a model for the type of community we want our world to be: diverse, inclusive and safe.” This aligned with the core values of Lyft riders; 25% of them believe everyone in the world should be treated equally and that life is about social justice, according to Resonate insights.

3. Uncover how your customers engage in civic expression Understanding the causes to champion that reflects both your brand and customer is just a piece of the puzzle; learning how to do that in a way that speaks to your customer in a meaningful way is just as important. Resonate reveals the different ways consumers show support for the causes that matter to them, and its critical you implement their preferred method of civic expression in order to strengthen your connection even further.

For example, H&M’s garment collecting initiative, incentivized customers to bring their old clothes to their local store so they could reuse and recycle them. Doing so would result in the donors receiving 15% off their purchase. According to Resonate’s insights, H&M customers are 92% more likely to contribute to a cause and 61% more likely to volunteer for a cause than the average U.S. shopper, meaning they value social engagement beyond monetary donations. H&M’s initiative correlates with their customer’s preferred avenue of civic expression, and it highlights their commitment to social responsibility.

Resonate Personal Values

department store does just that. They joined the EPA Green Power Partnership over 10 years ago and started installing solar systems in their stores. They also continue to be one of the biggest consumers of green energy, as they largely use alternative energy sources to power their stores and corporate offices. Tapping into the very core of what drives their customers strengthens their customer relationships.

Resonate Personal Values

Another prime example is Southwest Airlines. 31% of Southwest customers donate money to charity as their preferred method of giving back. The airline’s “Points for a Purpose” program gives its customers the opportunity to donate their frequent flyer points to nine different charities, including All Hands Volunteers, American Red Cross, Make-A-Wish and Ronald McDonald House Charities. The airline shows that it values its customers by giving them an outlet to express their social activism in a way that’s meaningful to them.

4. What motivates your customers to choose or abandon a brand?

Understanding what factors drive your customers to advocate or buy from one brand over another is crucial to keeping your customers loyal. Having insight as to why they buy what they do informs your brand about what you can do differently.

This is particularly helpful when it comes to championing a cause. If insights reveal that your shoppers prefer companies that reduce packaging, consider getting involved with waste reduction on a bigger scale in order to reach your customers on an emotional and personal level.

For example, according to Resonate’s insights, 34% of CVS customers prefer doing business with companies that have truthful ads. CVS recently launched an initiative called “Beauty Unaltered” in which they plan to identify beauty advertisements found in their store that have been digitally altered. Explaining further in their official statement they said: “We believe we have an opportunity, and responsibility, to think about the messages we send to our customers and how they impact their health.”

Another company that taps into the motivations of its customers is Kohl’s Their shoppers are 33% more likely to do business with a company that reduces energy use, and the

Conclusion One-fifth of U.S. consumers put values first, even ahead of competing factors like price and convenience*. When brands take a stand on a cause or issue, they’re creating an emotional connection with their consumers by tapping into their values and motivation—and it’s working. People want their brands to be authentic, personable, trustworthy and above all else, human.

There are a few important steps to take to ensure the stand you’re taking isn’t perceived as a marketing ploy. Stick with an issue that aligns with your corporate values, don’t take a stand on something because it’s trending; understand your customers’ values, they should feel strongly about the issue you champion; discover how they engage in civic expression and attempt to mirror that; focus on what motivates your shopper to advocate for a brand. Following the above will help you avoid a blowback from your customers and instead deepen your connection and increase customer lifetime value.

R&D Spending Has Dramatically Surpassed Advertising Spending

By Vijay Govindarajan, Shivaram Rajgopal, Anup Srivastava and Ye Wang

In February, 3G-owned Kraft Heinz Co. wrote down the value of its Kraft and Oscar Mayer brands by $15.4 billion. 3G cofounder Jorge Paulo Lemann described 3G’s mistake of not spending enough to sustain brands: “We bought brands and we thought they would last forever.”

Have firms become complacent about marketing and sustaining their brands?

There is some evidence that the corporate marketing function has lost budget, head count, and influence. Another HBR article claims that firms do not spend as much energy and investments into marketing new products and services as they do in generating them. Are these claims true? Have firms’ commitment towards marketing changed over time? We recently examined this question using data.

It’s hard to test these claims because marketing expenses are typically not disclosed in financial statements. However, firms do disclose their advertising expenses. Although marketing and advertising are distinct, advertising expenses could represent a firm’s commitment towards marketing as a discipline. A firm with higher advertising expense is likely to have greater marketing commitment than a firm with smaller ad budget. Based on this idea, we estimated the percentage of advertising costs in total expenses for 374,242

data points (firm-year observations) representing 33,139 unique companies from 1975 to 2017. We also calculated similar percentages for research and development (R&D)

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expenditures. Over the past 45 years, one of them has risen substantially, while the other has declined. Until the late 1970s, companies spent about the same amount on R&D and advertising. Today, they spend ten times more on R&D. The chart above shows that firms spent more than 1% of their total expenses on advertising until the 1980s. This percentage declined to less than 0.8% in recent years. During the same period, R&D investment increased dramatically from less than 1% to more than 7% of total expenses. A part of the ad decrease can be explained by a 1994 accounting rule.

Similarly, a part of R&D increase can be explained by the introduction of R&D tax credits in 1981. But neither of these regulations can explain the overall long-term trends that demonstrate a systematic shift in firms’ focus from marketing towards engineering, technology, and innovation.

You might think this trend could reflect the changing nature of firms over time. A firm listed after 1980 is more likely to be a biotechnology or an internet firm than a manufacturing firm. So, we recalculate these trends separately for retail, manufacturing, and technology industries. Retail firms continues to have similar ad expenditures—2 to 3% of total expenses—as they did in the 1980s. Furthermore, there is no significant increase in their innovation efforts. That is, these industries have not changed their business models for the last 35 years, which could explain their struggle in face of onslaught of competition from new challengers like Amazon.

In contrast, the manufacturing industry has changed its business model and now spends more than 5% of its total expenses on R&D. Plausibly, more and more manufacturing activity has been subcontracted to vendors in low-wage countries and the firms have shifted their focus to high value activities such as innovation and product development.

Their expenditures on advertising, however, follows the trends of the overall trend, from more than 1% in the 1980s to approximately 0.8% today. Technology firms show most dramatic change. Since 1995, they spend more than 10% of expenses on R&D and less than 1% on advertising. The fastest growing industry in the last three decades has shifted its focus away from marketing towards innovation and product development.

We also looked at the differences between small, medium, and large companies, based on their sales revenue.

While the most dramatic divergence occurred for the small firms, even the large firms have shifted their focus away from marketing and towards engineering, technology, and innovation. This might represent the sign of times—no company is safe today and without innovating.

Finally, we looked at spending by the top three companies in the Forbes’ 2018 list of most valuable brands: Apple, Alphabet (Google), and Microsoft. While Apple spent more on advertising than on R&D in its initial years, it reversed its expenditure patterns starting in the early 1990s. In recent years, Apple has not separately reported its ad spending, indicating a drop to below 1% of expenses. Microsoft and Alphabet always spent significantly higher amounts on R&D than on advertising. It’s clear that these firms have achieved the most recognized and valuable brands on this planet not primarily by force of advertising dollars but through their technology prowess and superior business ideas.

There are several other explanations that could partly account for our findings. First, firms might increasingly rely on acquired brands instead of developing them organically.

Second, firms might achieve higher mileage from advertising dollars through more intimate knowledge of their customers and by using improved tracking and analytics. An ad shown to a specific Facebook customer must achieve greater success than an ad printed in Readers Digest — and it’s cheaper.

Third, firms increasingly rely on peer networks, word of mouth, blogs, and cross-sold services to establish brands.

And fourth, new firm founders may be more passionate about discovering new technologies than about marketing success.

But it is at least plausible that marketing has lost relevance relative to engineering, technology, and product development.

We’re not saying that’s necessarily the case. But if that is true, it would have profound implications for organizational structures, manpower planning, and management education.

Here’s how brand marketers can use immersive technology to build an effective retail experience SEVERAL RETAIL AND FASHION CAMPAIGNS HAVE LEVERAGED IMMERSIVE TECHNOLOGIES TO BUILD A BRAND EXPERIENCE THAT IS SOCIAL AND PROVIDE VALUE TO CUSTOMERS. ByLisa Peyton

It’s your typical overcast Saturday in downtown Portland, Oregon, and I’m heading out to the park to walk my dog, Betty. What I find this particular evening is anything but typical as instead of a few homeless guys sleeping on benches and fellow dog walkers, I encounter hundreds of people of all ages walking through the south park blocks. Their excitement was infectious, and I was delighted to see so many Portlander’s enjoying one of the cities most prized resources. But what made this Saturday different from every other and why had this happy mob descended on my neighborhood?

As I took a closer look, I noticed that everyone was engaging with their phones, some even had two, three, up to four different phones. I had to learn more about what was going on and if my suspicions were true that this was some sort of online community. My thoughts immediately went to Pokémon Go, but wasn’t that a thing of the past and had that game appealed to such a cross-section of the population? There were families, young children, groups of teens, adults – some solo but the majority were traveling in packs. I stopped one group who were kind enough to answer my newbie questions and learned this was indeed a Pokémon Go Community Day. A special global event that features rare Pokémon and other in-game goodies during a dedicated window of time.

According to Wikipedia, Pokémon Go has accrued over a billion downloads worldwide and has 147 million monthly active users.

So how does this story relate to immersive retail and fashion?

Good question! Love or hate Pokémon Go, there’s no denying that it is the most broadly used immersive app to date. The secret sauce its creator, Niantic, has cooked up is chock full of lessons for all of us looking to leverage immersive technologies to build brand experiences and ultimately sell more stuff. Let’s dive a bit deeper into how brand marketers can build effective fashion and retail experiences using immersive technology.

1. It needs to be social The most successful digital disruptors over the last few years have one thing in common, they build social into their DNA. Recent examples include Pokémon Go and Peloton, who has grown a $4 billion dollar business by replicating the community of an actual fitness class at home. A great example of this within the fashion industry is China’s Tmall.

This shopping app has leveraged immersive technology to provide their online audiences access to VIP events such as the hugely popular “See Now, Buy Now” event last year.

This “retail-as-entertainment” event is part of Alibaba’s Singles Day shopping event and featured big-name designers, celebrities, musical productions and much more all filmed live in front of a select VIP audience. The live-stream was broadcast across both immersive and 2D channels to over 57 million viewers and included a streamlined ‘see now, buy now’ app that allowed viewers to buy the products they saw on the runway instantly. The show also offered a “Play Now” feature that allowed the viewers to rank the outfits in realtime, creating an instant trend report and sending feedback to the designers. According to Sean Lane, immersive retail specialist and Technology Principal at digital studio Point B, the Singles Day event “had over 8 million users make purchases using their VR headsets. They have also been very successful with Tmall VR experiences with users watching fashion shows on the runway and leveraging the ‘purchase now’ feature.”

2. Provide value to the customer What differentiates a good immersive experience from another is the value it offers to the user. To pay off the hassle of either strapping on a VR headset or downloading an AR app, the user must gain substantial value from the result. There are several ways that innovative brands are both meeting their business objectives while meeting the needs of customers.

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Immersive technology is an amazing way to take users to places they otherwise wouldn’t be able to go. Providing customers something they want and can’t get anywhere else is a good formula for success. One B2B fashion app based in Paris, Change of Paradigm, offers designers and brands the ability to do just that. Their high-quality, 3D models of luxury brand apparel are the best I’ve seen. If I were a clothing designer, I would want its Paris studio director, Franck Audrain, to create the digital version. A fashion designer in his own right, Audrain has spent years in the technology industry and meticulously mimics the most complicated garments in 3D. His team can create a hyper-realistic version of an already exiting garment or build a digital proto-type of a garment that only exists in the imagination of its designer.

This recent AR experience at Paris department store, Bon Marché, shows the detail captured in Change of Paradigm’s 3D fashion technology.

The company has a proprietary technology that digitally duplicates each fabric to realistically depict how the garment will flow when moving through space. This attention to detail and the fact that they can output the 3D assets across multiple channels such as web, VR and mobile AR make their offering compelling to luxury brands.

They are working on a virtual try-on experience that will rival anything we’ve seen to date but this is still several years away. According to founder Henri Mura, “currently effective immersive experiences for trying on apparel is limited to jewelry, accessories and footwear. For clothing, if you want to go beyond a simple 2D overlay, you really need to understand how the material will fit a customer’s unique shape in 3D and then represent that in the immersive environment. We’re working on a solution, but it has to be perfect to provide true value.”

Other ways brands can provide value to shoppers can include something as simple as easing friction along the path to purchase, such as the ‘See Now, Buy Now’ feature in the Tmall VR shopping app or creating a memorable experience.

Macy’s successfully used virtual reality to allow Chinese shoppers the rare opportunity to visit their flagship store in New York without having to leave China. Ensuring that the immersive journey is as intuitive and seamless as possible is an important part of the recipe for success. Many U.S. brands are still struggling on that front as immersive experiences often require unique downloads and a series of user actions before accessing the experience. Puma’s recent launch of an AR shoe is an example where the user needs to download a

stand-alone app that can recognize the shoe to use special decorative filters similar to SnapChat’s lens feature. I’m not so sure I would find that valuable.

3. Leverage the right immersive technology for the job Before building any immersive experience, it’s essential to understand your objectives, your audience and the technologies at your disposal for bringing your vision to life. There are still quite a few challenges to consider when building an immersive experience and striking the right balance between quality and scale is essential. Are you trying to reach a high-stakes, niche audience like the 1% who can afford luxury items or anyone who has access to a smartphone? Is your marketing objective strictly to sell more product or are you looking to build a connection with your audience? These types of questions need to be clearly defined before getting started so that you can determine the best flavor of immersive – Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality or Mixed Reality – for the job.

There have been several AR, retail experiences that have been dumbed-down for mobile to scale with not so great results leading to posts like this one dismissing the value of immersive retail technology.

Immersive retail specialist, Sean Lane, breaks it down this way: “I think latency, ease of use and accessibility are still impeding factors to adoption. I have seen Virtual Reality gain limited adoption inside brands, mostly for HR onboarding, marketing and training. I have built a few pilots testing VR internally for training, planning, global development and the like. While the experiences are good, they are not good enough. Many people still get motion sickness and the graphics are not realistic enough. Interoperability with other platforms is not seamless. However, I still believe there are times when VR is the right tool for the job. When you want to have complete control over an experience and direct the process, then VR enables a brand to do that. I think that Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality have a greater chance of widespread adoption in enterprise and retail.”

Where to start?

There are several resources available for fashion brands looking to leverage immersive technology. Hiring a specialist or creative agency to build a strategy isn’t always an option but a great first step if the budget is available. Other less costly resources include publications like Medium, which hosts a community of immersive professionals sharing insights, and marketing sites like MarketingLand.com. One specific community of brands looking to solve some of the issues surrounding 3D technologies for apparel and footwear is the 3DRC (3D Retail Coalition), which is made up of brands, technologists and educators.

The best and most important advice I can you leave you with comes from Lane, who wisely proclaims: “The biggest win for any of these technologies is to ensure the use is authentic to your brand and not forced. When immersive is used to create real experiences that enhance consumer interaction with your brand or to build brand loyalty or connection, THIS will lead to better results.”

Book,

&

Line

Sinker

By Seth Godin

Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen

For the first time, Godin offers the core of his marketing wisdom in one compact, accessible, timeless package. This is Marketing shows you how to do work you’re proud of, whether you’re a tech startup founder, a small business owner, or part of a large corporation. No matter what your product or service, this book will help you reframe how it’s presented to the world, in order to meaningfully connect with people who want it.

By Donald Miller Donald Miller’s StoryBrand process is a proven solution to the struggle business leaders face when talking about their businesses. This revolutionary method for connecting with customers provides readers with the ultimate competitive advantage, revealing the secret for helping their customers understand the compelling benefits of using their products, ideas, or services.

Branded Nation: The Marketing of Megachurch, College Inc., and Museumworld

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

This Is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn to See

By James B. Twitchell Branded Nation uncovers a society where megachurches resemble shopping malls (and not by accident); where a university lives or dies on the talents of its image makers -- and its ranking in U.S. News & World Report; and where museums have turned to motorcycle exhibits and fashion shows to bolster revenue, even franchising their own institutions into brands.

By Scott Bedbury, Stephen Fenichell

How Cool Brands Stay Hot: Branding to Generations Y and Z

Influence

By Joeri Van den Bergh, Mattias Behrer The book reveals how Millennials think, feel, and behave, and discusses how recent developments such as the recession, mobile marketing and purchasing, and the adaptation and evolution of social media, have impacted Generation Y. All the chapters offer new case studies and interviews, from companies such as H&M, Forever 21, and Converse, as well as updated facts, figures, and research.

Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator

By Ryan Holiday I’m a media manipulator. In a world where blogs control and distort the news, my job is to control blogs-as much as any one person can.

Why am I giving away these secrets? Because I’m tired of a world where blogs take indirect bribes, marketers help write the news, reckless journalists spread lies, and no one is accountable for any of it. I’m pulling back the curtain because I don’t want anyone else to get blindsided.

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

By Bob Cialdini As useful to salespeople as it is to marketers, Bob Cialdini’s book is all about how people say “Yes!” and what you can do bring them to that point.

In a series of intensely practical observations, Cialdini reveals how your actions and words can profoundly effect the desires and needs of your customers, colleagues and even your competitors.

Essential stuff.

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

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

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

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Brands in Glass Houses: How to Embrace Transparency and Grow Your Business Through Content Marketing

Building Strong Brands Kindle Edition

By David A. Aaker

Brands in Glass Houses shines light on businesses that are revealing themselves authentically, not just as a marketing tactic, but also as a way of doing business. It shows you how to provide interesting content so that customers can connect with your brand on an emotional level...

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

Overthrow: 10 ways to tell a challenger story Kindle Edition

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

By Mark Holden, Malcolm Devoy, Adam Morgan

By Michael Lewis

By Dechay Watts, Debbie Williams, Said Baaghil (Contributor)

Anyone interested in challengers is interested in compression: how do you make a story utterly compelling in a very short space of time? And one of the reasons that the concept of the ‘challenger brand’ has caught on, you might argue, is that it itself does just that: within just two words you surely have all the ingredients of an engaging story – conflict, a protagonist and an adversary, an anticipation of a future event...

Growth Hacker Marketing

By Ryan Holiday This book points out that many of the megabrands of today haven’t spent much of anything on traditional marketing. Instead, they figure out how to reach customers who “sell” other customers on using the product. While I’m not certain that the techniques Holiday espouses will work in every (or even many) business situations, the book is worth reading simply to understand how companies like Dropbox and Twitter suddenly burst out of nowhere.

Forty years ago, Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky wrote a series of breathtakingly original papers that invented the field of behavioral economics. Led to a new approach to government regulation, and made much of Michael Lewis’s own work possible. In The Undoing Project, Lewis shows how their Nobel Prize–winning theory of the mind altered our perception of reality.

Netflixed: The Epic Battle for America’s Eyeballs

By Gina Keating Journalist Gina Keating recounts the fast-paced drama of the company’s turbulent rise to the top and its attempt to invent two new kinds of business. First it engaged in a grueling war against videostore behemoth Blockbuster, transforming movie rental forever. Then it jumped into an even bigger battle for online video streaming against Google, Hulu, Amazon, and the big cable companies.

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics

Red Team: How to Succeed By Thinking Like the Enemy

By Richard H. Thaler

By Micah Zenko

Nobel laureate Richard H. Thaler has spent his career studying the radical notion that the central agents in the economy are humans predictable, error-prone individuals. Misbehaving is his arresting, frequently hilarious account of the struggle to bring an academic discipline back down to earth and change the way we think about economics, ourselves, and our world.

Red teaming. It is a practice as old as the Devil’s Advocate, the eleventh-century Vatican official charged with discrediting candidates for sainthood. Today, red teams-comprised primarily of fearless skeptics and those assuming the role of saboteurs who seek to better understand the interests, intentions, and capabilities of institutions or potential competitors-are used widely in both the public and private sector.