BrandKnew June 2022

Branding matters. Because branding matters.

Published by 06.22#115

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We are halfway through 2022 and the blistering pace that was set at the beginning of the year continues.

We engage in looking back and looking ahead in this issue.

For eg The Future of Marketing Jobs. It certainly won’t be what we have seen in times gone by. The Next Frontier In Branding: Logos that One Can See From Space. Offering a helicopter view, literally! We also examine why the notion and concept of The 360 Degree Customer View is Over and Done with. While going back to the basics of understanding The Fundamentals of Branding. Old is Gold. Once again the adage is being proved right if we are to look at the age of successful Tech Entrepreneurs. Know more about it in this edition. Behavioral Science gets a visit with our feature on Why Free Stuff Makes Us Irrational. We also gave the typical agency brief a brief makeover and presented it in Three Words. Understand better in the article The Three Word Brief.

We re-emphasize the Power of Listening and How It Can Keep You Alert to Big Ideas. It is said that Culture eats Strategy for breakfast. And How Big Organizations Can Cultivate Intrapreneurs. In the Creative arts, we see both hitmakers and one hit wonders. We do a deep dive and come out with the rational and the inferences. There is plenty more to soak in, absorb and learn from and I leave you to do exactly that.

Till the next my very best!

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Suresh Dinakaran @ISDGlobalDubai

@Brandknewmag

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Managing Editor: Suresh Dinakaran Creative Head/Director Operations: Pravin Ahir Magazine Concept & Design/ New Media Specialist: Mufaddal Joher Chief Strategy Director: Rishi Mohan Business Performance Director: Sunil Vasudevan Chief Country Man, India: Rohit Unni Brand Trends and Research Architect: Meeta Pendse Revenue Growth Architect: Ritu Dey Country Head, Australia: Norbert D’Souza Country Head, UK: Sagar Patil Performance Marketing Architect: Suresh Babu Technology & Web Enabler: Vyanky Charakpalli Social Media Outreach: Pooja Chhabda SEO Advocate: Santhosh Rakonda

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CONTENTS

The next frontier in branding? Logos you can see from space 5 tricks for navigating uncertainty when you need a creative breakthrough Why the 360-degree customer view is over YouTube v TikTok: What Gen Z prefers Why free stuff makes us irrational “Are You Listening?” How to Stay Open and Curious to Other People’s Ideas Retailers: The Time is Now for Enhanced Social Advertising Winds Of Change Are Blowing In The Streaming Industry How Big Companies Can Cultivate Intrapreneurs Rafael Serra Reimagines Iconic Logos Through a Nostalgic ’80s Lens How a game development company wants to support the ‘future of marketing’ with content creators How to Avoid the ‘Ethical Slide’ That Leads Companies Astray The Basics of Branding The future of marketing jobs A guide to IKEA’s impulse buying hacks How Alicia Keys is expanding her brand mindfully How Old Are Successful Tech Entrepreneurs?

The Three-Word Brief What Separates the Hitmakers from the One-Hit Wonders Book, Line & Sinker

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The next frontier in branding? Logos you can see from space

By Elissaveta M. Brandon

In January, a seemingly disjointed pattern of solar panels began to fill the roof of Tesla’s brand-new Gigafactory near Austin, Texas. For a while, it looked like a puzzle. Then the pattern slowly revealed itself: Using negative space amid a sea of solar panels, the company was spelling “T E S L A.” An increasing number of companies are turning to solar energy to power their buildings and productions, and they want you to know it. Near Epcot in Orlando, Disney built a solar farm in the shape of Mickey Mouse’s head. Target now sports two solar arrays shaped like its bull’s-eye logo—one is on the roof of its distribution center in Phoenix, the other is in Inglewood, California. And if you search for “SpaceX Headquarters” on Google Maps, you’ll notice the outline of a giant “X” surrounded by solar panels on its roof.

Solar arrays are growing into an unexpected marketing canvas—and satellite imagery could become the next frontier in branding.

Branded solar arrays seem like the natural progression of a phenomenon called “roofvertising.” Once practical near airports and along flight paths, roof advertising went, well, through the roof when Google Earth entered the picture. This has even spawned companies that specialize in painting giant logos on companies’ rooftops. (In 2006, KFC took this concept even further with its 65,000-footwide logo of Colonel Sanders in the Mojave Desert, though it was removed a year later.)

Now companies are beginning to realize that solar panels can be used as yet another tool for creative branding and advertising.

“Most people use maps to search for locations, so if the first thing you see when you type in a destination is that branding, it’s an added wow factor, especially if they can immediately tie the branding with their clean solar initiatives,” says Anthony Occidentale, VP of product at the Boston-based solar startup Sistine Solar. (Target has said it aims to source 100% of its energy from renewable options by 2030, and 40% of the Walt Disney World Resort in Florida will be powered by solar energy starting next year.)

Founded in 2012, Sistine Solar specializes in a product called SolarSkin. It acts a bit like a graphic overlay that can be applied on top of any kind of solar panel. This cuts the panel’s efficiency by about 10%, but it provides

homeowners with an opportunity to camouflage their solar panels with a pattern and color that mimic the roof, and install them in places with stringent historic preservation standards. As for companies, it allows them to turn their solar panels into powerful branding assets without having to arrange the panels in a specific way; instead, they can simply be overlaid with the logo.

For example, Sistine Solar recently completed a floating solar array in an artificial lake at the Universal Orlando Resort. Since Comcast owns NBCUniversal, the solar array portrays Comcast’s logo, complete with NBC’s peacock logo. “They resonated with the idea of having an aesthetic design,” Occidentale says, noting that Comcast saw an opportunity for brand awareness. Google hasn’t updated its satellite imagery yet, but the solar array can already be seen on Bing. And for those visiting IRL, Occidentale says the lake is sunken so you can catch a glimpse of the array from an off-ramp as you enter the park.

The main idea here is that a company that wants to brand its roof and cover it with solar panels can do both. At Giga Texas, Occidentale says Tesla could have added about 20% more solar panels—or the equivalent of 10 megawatts to its solar array—if it had filled the logo outline with branded panels. (Covering solar panels with SolarSkin would cost about 10% more than the array itself, but for companies that want to use it only to outline their logo, that number would be closer to 1%, according to Occidentale.)

As solar energy continues to gain traction in the U.S., it won’t be long before more and more companies jump on the bandwagon and adopt solar branding. Sistine Solar is working with the South Korean car manufacturer Kia to put a branded solar array on its roof. (The company can’t disclose the exact location, but Sistine Solar hasn’t done projects outside the U.S., so this will likely be at one of Kia’s U.S. facilities.)

Wait a few years, and you may be able to play “spot the logo” every time you hop on a plane. (Or perhaps it will be “spot the ego?”) When Giga Texas is done installing its solar panels, the company will break the record for the largest rooftop solar project in the world—and anyone flying over it will know that the building belongs to Elon Musk. Pretty on brand for someone whose plans also involve launching billboards into space.

5 tricks for navigating uncertainty when you need a creative breakthrough

By Andrea Small And Kelly Schmutte

The 1977 documentary Powers of Ten by designers Ray and Charles Eames is one of the most famous short films ever made.

The movie starts at a lakeside picnic. The camera viewpoint is directly overhead and shows a scene one meter wide. The camera zooms out. Every 10 seconds, it reveals a greater view, each one power of 10 wider than the last. First we see the park, then the lake, then the city, the state, the country, and the planet, and so on, until our galaxy is just a speck of light.

Then the camera zooms back in at the same pace. With

the picnic back in view, the camera focuses on one of the picnicker’s hands and begins to zoom closer, into the skin texture and structure, individual cells, and so on. Now, every 10 seconds, what you see is magnified by a negative power of 10. Before you know it, you’re seeing inside a proton.

That’s where the journey ends.

This little movie had a big impact on how science is shared.

By moving between the tiny details of molecular biology to the enormous expanses of astrophysics, the film reveals interconnections across scientific fields. Comprehending scale, or as the Eameses liked to call it, “the effect of adding

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another zero,” helps connect these hidden dots, making us better designers—and citizens.

Eames Demetrios, grandson of Ray and Charles, believes scale is a timeless method for navigating ambiguity: “Many of the challenges we are facing today are a combination of things very big with opportunities and threats and things very small that have opportunities and threats.” And you can’t really navigate these big opportunities unless you understand the basics: What are you dealing with? How big is it? What is its relationship to other things? Whether it’s a weird object you picked up in the attic or an abstract concept you can’t let go of, “having a sense of scale,” Demetrios says, “gives you tools for a new kind of understanding.”

When you’re shrouded in uncertainty, naming what you do know can get you started on making sense of a thing.

Designers do product breakdowns to get a closer look at the guts of an object. Doctors take X-rays to look at the hard inner structures of the body and MRIs and PET scans to see soft tissue with more detail. Project managers use to-do lists, timetables, and calendars.

When you don’t know how something works, take it apart (metaphorically or literally) and look at it closely. Ground yourself in what you know about the challenge. This can help you make connections that aren’t already in your head—and create the room to explore.

Keep it human-centered.

There’s a reason Powers of Ten starts at the scale of humans. Connecting to the needs that you want to satisfy keeps you laser-focused on the “why” behind your work.

A strong point-of-view statement can be a tool for crisply defining what you’re trying to navigate, who it’s for, and why it matters. It can sustain motivation when you feel like you’re spinning your wheels or getting stuck in the trenches.

By zooming in and looking at a problem through the lens of a specific person, your work becomes more focused.

Stick to constraints.

We deal with constraints all the time. Your kid refuses to eat carrots, you have to use a certain software, there’s a deadly pandemic outside and you can’t leave the house— whether known or unforeseen, constraints can feel like roadblocks.

But they’re often the most powerful force behind getting us to come up with creative solutions. Your greatest ideas might emerge when you have to improvise within a theme, sneakily substituting parsnips for carrots. Time, materials, budgets, space, human resources—all of these can be hugely valuable constraints. If you find yourself stuck for how to get started, return to the knowns and see if that sparks your next move.

Fall back on rules.

Once you’ve staked out some “knowns,” you can feel safe to explore. Define what you need, and commit to it. On a team, sharing individual needs and outlining a common agreement on how you’ll work creates a framework that can become a safety net when you’re feeling unsure. For example, what times are sacred meeting times? Who is in charge of what? How will you deal with conflict? What are your communication norms?

ZOOM OUT. In 1971, Edgar Mitchell was a lunar module pilot aboard NASA’s Apollo 14 mission. Mitchell was responsible for the lunar module itself as well as science on the moon (which is about 1^8 meters from Earth, for those still counting).

With his jobs complete, he had a minute to kick back, so to speak, on the return trip to Earth. And like anyone on a bus or in a plane or on a ship, he looked out the window.

Mitchell saw the Earth—blue, bright, with a thin shell of atmosphere surrounding it—floating in inky darkness. “In outer space, you develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it,” Mitchell said.

This sensation is called the “overview effect,” a term coined by the philosopher Frank White. “Anyone living in a space settlement . . . will always have an overview,” White observed. “They will see things that we know, but that we don’t experience, which is that the Earth is one system.

We’re all part of that system, and there is a certain unity and coherence to it all.”

Another NASA astronaut, Ron Garan, has focused his career on spreading the word about the overview effect.

He believes that what he terms an “orbital perspective” can have “profound, positive effects on the trajectory of our global society and our world.” His new mission is to “communicate the transformative power of acquiring a big picture and long-term perspective of our planet.”

Designers recognize—and are energized by—the reality that everything is connected. When you’re creating a new idea, it helps to move fluidly between concrete details and more abstract systems. Activities like populating a stakeholder map or visualizing the connections in a system help you zoom out to understand the full landscape of implications.

From Buckminster Fuller to Carl Sagan, people have found inspiration and insight in the concept of zooming out.

When we step back and look at the big picture, we gain an intangible understanding of how things work and connect.

We need to take that time to step back, reflect, and look at our world as a tiny speck. Seeing something from afar helps us understand it.

Reprinted with permission from Navigating Ambiguity: Creating Opportunity in a World of Unknowns by Andrea Small and Kelly Schmutte and the Stanford d.school, copyright © 2022. Published by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House.

Andrea Small is design leader, strategist, and educator.

Currently she teaches at the d.school and leads storytelling and design strategy for Samsung Research America’s R&D Innovation team. Andrea has worked with some of the world’s most iconic brands, including Nike, Facebook, Starbucks, and Herman Miller.

Kelly Schmutte is a designer, educator, and entrepreneur. At the d.school, she designs learning experiences with lasting impact, reimagining the future of higher education, creating life tools for high schoolers, and building out the Navigating Ambiguity curriculum. Kelly teaches core d.school classes alongside d.school founder David Kelley.

Why the 360-degree customer view is over

By Tomas Gorny For Nextiva

Connected communications will revolutionize customer engagement for every business The customer experience arms race—the drive for businesses to give customers more and more convenience, speed, and personalized service—has created an overwhelming tsunami of tools, apps, and data that leaves most businesses at a huge disadvantage.

Today, businesses get lost in a maze of applications and a sea of data, with customer information living seemingly everywhere. This deluge does not give them what they need—insight into customer conversations and the ability to make timely, informed decisions. Businesses need relevant information at the right time—in real time—to guide them in a conversation.

Connected communications will change the dynamics of not just customer experience, but the way entire businesses operate and collaborate.

COMPLEXITY, SILOS, AND UNHAPPY CUSTOMERS

Not long ago, every business lived or died by their reputation and ability to build and maintain personal connections.

Growing up, our favorite bakery, a local jewelry or toy store, every diner, and our dentist knew us by name and remembered our birthdays and our important events. They treated us as if we were their only customer. We felt valued, and it was understood that our relationship was more than just a transaction.

This was the advantage that most businesses were able to count on against the corporate conglomerates. But in the increasingly commoditized world, the advantage that all local businesses once had against the impersonal, slowmoving giants has vanished. The power has shifted in favor of companies with the most technical resources. Today, they are the ones who can provide a more tailored, personalized, and convenient experience. They remember us with more accuracy, and predict changing behaviors and unrevealed needs even before we become aware of them.

Giants like Amazon and Apple understand how vital great experiences are to a winning business strategy, and they are increasingly investing to deliver effortless convenience. They are growing their relationships with customers at scale by serving them at an individual level. Simply put, they know, understand, and remember all of their customers, not just their biggest ones.

Most businesses, whether they have tens, hundreds, or thousands of customers, fail to see a clear picture of any one customer. Therefore, they cannot meet rising customer expectations. These expectations have been reset by the giants. We as consumers are becoming accustomed to these experiences and expect every business to meet them, in B2C and B2B.

While these giants are doing great business with all of their customers, other companies are struggling to remain relevant. They lack the tools to gain a relevant picture of constantly changing customer sentiment and behavior. At best, most other companies today are doing good business with just a fraction of their customers.

While the promise of leveraging technology to improve the customer relationship is right, the widely adopted idea of having a “complete picture” of the customer is wrong.

Customer engagement and management apps that ensure a 360-degree view are missing the point. Very rarely do we need to examine a complete X-ray of our customers. They

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need only the right and relevant information in the moment they are interacting with the customer.

conversations for contextual insight across all channels. Once harnessed, that insight can be used the moment it’s needed.

Think about the business applications that most of us use as we try to collect and merge data about our customers. It’s usually in the dozens—communication tools, customer management tools, call center systems, collaboration software, plus tools for surveys and customer feedback, marketing, and many others. Every app adds complexity to the environment that is disproportionate to the value it brings. Teams and people become more siloed. Customers are still unhappy. And the quest never ends.

In a fully digitized world, communications tools need to do more than link one person to another. Those tools need to connect all customer and team communication channels digitally across the entire business. This way, regardless of what team or department is using the information, they are aware of the continuous conversation with the customer.

WHY CHANGE IS COMING Two trends are coming together and reaching a tipping point: 1. Communication needs have changed, but communication tools have not. Providers are still doing what they have always done—selling businesses a communications pipe that passively links parties through phone, SMS, website chat, or email. Every time customers switch between these communication channels the conversation breaks. Or, worse, the customer leaves the conversation, taking with them all their knowledge of the relationship.

1. It’s a customer-first world, but most businesses have too much data and no insight. They approach customer experience one transaction at a time, amassing input that does little to actually improve experiences.

A paradigm shift is needed. Instead of allowing customer context to fly out the window as soon as the customer hangs up or finishes a conversation, businesses should be harnessing

With advances in technology like AI and automation, businesses can now harness the power and intelligence inherent in their most foundational and important investment—their voice, chat, and video communications— and join it with their team collaboration which is linked to the customer. It’s a simple solution to a complex problem, and it levels the playing field at the same time.

The status quo cannot hold—it’s too cumbersome and is costing businesses their customers, agility, and relevance.

A connected communications approach meets the moment.

It responds to the needs of customers and businesses alike.

The apps and systems most businesses are juggling today are becoming ridiculously complicated, fragmented, and clearly not up to the task.

We started Nextiva to give businesses the foundational communication tools to connect them with their customers and teams. Now we’re pioneering the next wave of communication to deliver connected communications. This shift is creating the customer-first world customers want, simplifying communications for real people, and freeing up employees to do what they do best—create deeper relationships with customers.

YouTube v TikTok: What Gen Z prefers

By Warc Staff

Young Britons are three times more likely to be using YouTube than TikTok, but they engage more with ads on the latter, a new study finds.

The Social Effect, from video tech business Channel Factory, shows YouTube is the most-used platform across all age groups, with 88% of respondents using it since 2020 – that figure rises to 93% in Gen Z adults (aged 18-29) – followed

by Meta (73%), TikTok (54%) and Snapchat (51%).

Why it matters Different platforms deliver different results for different age groups. Understanding these nuances can help marketers better focus their advertising efforts depending on what they want to achieve.

Key findings Ads that are aligned with social content have a 17% higher

return on investment.

Millennials and Gen X tend to share a brand video ad when they think its content is relevant to their friends or family members (64% and 57% respectively) Gen Z users are more inclined to share ads that they find ‘funny’ (59%) or ‘creative and cool’ (57%).

When it comes to online shopping, Gen Z mainly engage with Meta Image Ad (40%), TikTok video ad (40%) and YouTube video ad (32%).

Key quote “It seems that adverts are not only influencing the next generation’s purchasing decisions but also providing a meaningful way for them to interact with their peers, express themselves and shape their identity” – Rob Blake, UK managing director at Channel Factory.

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Why free stuff makes us irrational

By Mark Dent

If you’ve ever wondered just how passionate people are about free samples at Costco, look no further than these 2 incidents:

In 2007, he co-authored a study titled “Zero as a Special Price: The True Value of Free Products” in which participants were asked to choose one of the following:

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1. A free Hershey’s Kiss

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2015: At a Southern California Costco, a 78-year-old was punched in the face after accusing a 24-year-old of hogging too many Nutella waffle samples. An arrest was made.

2018: At a South Carolina Costco, 2 septuagenarians on a cheeseburger sample binge got into a spat over line etiquette that ended in a hat-flying slap to the face.

It may seem odd that a few small nibbles on toothpicks would incite violence. But this conduct is rooted in behavioral psychology.

In short, free stuff makes us do very strange, irrational things.

We’ll look at how “free” affects consumer behavior across 3 different areas: grocery store samples, shipping, and online content.

The ‘positive glow’ of not having to pay Dan Ariely, a professor of behavioral economics at Duke University and the author of Predictably Irrational, has researched the allure of free for years in all kinds of settings.

One time, he even hired somebody to give out free tattoos at a party. People who otherwise may not have considered a tattoo — especially not on a whim — got inked up because the price was right.

“There is something special about being free,” Ariely tells The Hustle.

2. A $0.13 Lindt truffle (a superior product in quality that retails for multiples more than a Hershey’s Kiss) More than 2x as many people chose the free Hershey’s Kiss than chose the $0.13 Lindt truffle. But when Ariely and his co-authors put a $0.01 price tag on the Hershey’s Kiss and adjusted the Lindt truffle price by a mere penny, participants overwhelmingly selected the Lindt truffle.

Science is resilient.

It can overcome diseases, create cures, and, yes, even beat pandemics.

It has the methodology and the rigor to withstand even the most arduous scrutiny.

It keeps asking questions and, until there’s a breakthrough, it isn’t done.

That’s why, when the world needs answers, we turn to science.

Because in the end, Science will win.

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The researchers conducted other experiments involving real chocolates and photos of chocolates, and the results were similar every time.

They dubbed this the zero price effect: People overvalue things that are free and make irrational decisions in many cases when something free is involved.

understanding why shipping should cost anything: •

They feel OK paying for a tangible product, but they don’t compute how the time and labor involved with shipping should drive up the price.

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The added price of shipping makes them see the total purchase as having an “unfair” cost.

Kristina Shampanier, a co-author of the study who now works at an economics consulting firm, told The Hustle the behavior is irrational because the research participants who picked the free item gave up something better, something they should prefer in a traditional cost-benefit analysis.

People do it because they are guided by a good feeling — “a positive glow that people have about not having to pay,” according to Shampanier.

As Ariely explains further, when people see something for free, they don’t see the downside.

Most days, we’re not confronted with a choice between free Hershey’s Kisses and inexpensive Lindt chocolates. We do, however, face situations where accepting a free offer feels good but isn’t necessarily the best deal.

Free shippingAccording to the 2019 Walker Sands Future of Retail Survey, 77% of 1.6k respondents said free shipping had made them more likely to buy an item online, ranking far above inducements like same-day shipping or the ability to visualize products in 3D.

When the “unfair” barrier is removed (by making shipping free), people are more likely to buy the product.

And inexpensive shipping isn’t nearly as effective as free shipping — at least anecdotally.

During Amazon’s early days, the company introduced free shipping in several European countries. In France, it reduced shipping to one franc. While business increased dramatically in the free shipping countries, purchases in France didn’t rise at nearly as high of a rate.

Free samples When stores like Costco, Sam’s Club, Whole Foods, and Walmart halted free samples at the peak of the pandemic, they had to adjust.

At Walmart, Cure Hydration made a deal for samples of its electrolyte-infused beverage to be featured in curbside pickup orders. Walmart also started offering samples for ecommerce customers.

Why so much trouble for a freebie? It’s simple: Free samples often make people spend money.

To get samples in stores, businesses typically partner with independent companies that staff sampling events and that have relationships with major stores.

In a study about free shipping in ecommerce, former Wharton School professor David Bell found that free shipping lulled buyers into financially unsound decisions.

The consumers he studied preferred to save $6.99 and get free shipping, versus saving $10 on the purchase price but still pay for shipping, even though the savings would have been greater.

In addition to the positive glow inherent in the free offer, Ariely says the popularity of free shipping is attractive for another reason. Consumers, he says, have a difficult time

Based on 2011 data from The Street, costs for contracting with a demonstration company for one sampling event at a grocery store range from $150 to $340 a day. Companies spend ~$2B a year on free samples.

The returns are usually high, both for the companies looking to sell new products and the stores.

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The former supermarket chain Marsh found 68% of samplers were persuaded to buy a product after sampling.

•

A sampling event by one brand leads to higher average

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sales of brands in the same category that were not part of the sampling event, according to a Brigham Young University study.

after consuming a couple of articles and then feeling the need to reciprocate, right?

Ariely says the circumstances are different.

•

People who read 3 articles for free may want to read another when they bump up against a paywall. But they may see a monthly subscription rate as an expensive price for one more article.

•

For food and drink items that get sampled at stores, people are familiar with their regular prices. Because so much content is still free on the internet, people think of online media “in the realm of free.”

Some 20% of Americans pay for online news, according to the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report for 2020.

Their reasons for subscribing are varied, ranging from supporting a specific journalist, to wanting to get ahead in their careers, to believing that paying for news is a societal good.

When Ziploc sampled a new space bag at Costco, it saw a 156% sales increase. Products in categories like beer, wine, cheese, and frozen pizza have seen increases ranging from 71% to 600%.

Researchers have identified several reasons behind the success of the free samples, from customers gaining familiarity with a product they may have otherwise never tried to customers learning where sampled products are located in the store after sampling them.

But because something free is involved, irrationality is also at play.

The “free” aspect of a free sample causes the same glowing feeling that people experienced with the Hershey’s Kisses, and, Ariely says, people who receive the free sample want to reciprocate.

“You feel obligated to some degree, [making] it more likely you buy the full package,” Ariely says.

But the feeling of reciprocation doesn’t apply everywhere.

But ~40% of Americans say they would never pay for news.

Similarly, Ariely says hardly anybody would want to pay for Facebook after being ingrained in its ad-based model for so long.

Whether it’s a Substack newsletter or a publication as decorated as The New York Times, many media outlets have readership bases built on giving away a few stories before requiring people to sign up for a subscription.

Yet free content isn’t necessarily the best deal. It’s possible that subscription news sites are higher quality than the free options and also that the free sites — as well as the free version of Facebook we’re accustomed to — include more ads that hook users into paying more money in the long run.

On the surface, it sounds similar to offering a free sample.

So readers should be basking in the glow of a free deal

The behavior isn’t rational, a common thread when something free is involved.

Free content

“Are You Listening?”

How to Stay Open and Curious to Other People’s Ideas

By Matt Abrahams Kristin Hansen

“Listening actively and deeply happens when I genuinely believe that the person who’s speaking has intrinsic worth and brings a perspective that I lack and need.”

Matt Abrahams: Shhh. Hear that? Silence. We often equate communication with talking. But not talking — that is, listening — is as important, if not more important. I’m Matt Abrahams, and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast, Talk Smart: The Podcast.

Today, I am so excited to be joined by my strategic communication teaching partner and longtime friend, Kristin Hansen. Beyond teaching our class, Kristin recently co-taught Leadership for Society: Big Arguments, Courageous Leadership. Beyond her lecturing at the GSB, Kristin is the executive director of the Civic Health Project and a board member of the Listen First Project. Hey there, partner. Welcome to the podcast. Ready to have some fun?

Kristin Hansen: Well, Matt, I always have fun talking and teaching with you. In fact, there’s nothing I’d rather be doing every Monday before 8:00 in the morning.

Matt Abrahams: It is quite early. There are lots of things I would rather do before 8:00, but I truly enjoy teaching with you. Let’s go ahead and get started. We have known each other for a long, long time. We taught our first public speaking class together in Stanford’s engineering school while undergraduates three decades ago.

Kristin Hansen: Well, as they say, Matt, time flies when you’re having fun.

Matt Abrahams: Things get better with age, at least I hope. Back then, we had a lot of fun helping our students communicate better. What are one or two best practices you find yourself still highlighting after all of these years?

Kristin Hansen: Our challenge, back at that time, was helping students in technical degree programs to convey complex ideas in more accessible ways. And to this day, that is something I still really enjoy, and I know you do, too, helping students craft engaging storylines from dense, complex or highly technical material.

And I also remember — do you? — how we helped students reduce filler words like uh, um, and like from their verbal communications. We would actually bang a book on the desk each time they did it. Well, we don’t bang books anymore, do we? But we still help students to be more confident and fluid in their verbal delivery.

Matt Abrahams: I remember banging books, ringing bells, clapping hands. And today, of course, there’s an app for that. It’s the idea to help people become aware of those disfluencies. Really important.

One thing many folks don’t know about you is that you were a true pioneer in virtual communication. Our students really enjoy and get a kick out of showing the video we have of you selling the first video conference technologies from the last century.

Kristin Hansen: Okay, Matt. Now you’re really making me feel old. But you’re right. I actually worked for the early 1990s version of Zoom.

Matt Abrahams: Thinking back to then and bringing it forward to now, what are a couple of the best practices you can share about hybrid and virtual communication?

Kristin Hansen: Effective virtual communication, both then and now, is so much about getting the setup right.

Is my network connection strong and reliable? How’s my lighting? Should I use headphones with a mic? Pro tip: yes, you should. Do I have permission from the other side to display my slides? Getting any of these things wrong risks losing your audience before you’ve even gotten underway.

And once the show begins, it’s about finding ways to leap out of your screen. How do I let my audience know that not only do they see me, I see them? Effective virtual communication is about closing the distance and coming across bigger than that little screen that holds you.

Matt Abrahams: So many important points there about presence, about engagement, about permission. But the one thing I heard you say that I really want to dig deep into that helped me so much when we went virtual was the notion of it’s a show. You helped me understand that you have to plan and coordinate your virtual communication.

You have to think about the timing, who speaks when, how quickly do you move from one thing to the other, just like you’re an executive producer of a television show. And once I started doing that, it freed me up to be more of myself in my virtual communication. So, thank you for that personally, and thank you for the advice you shared with all of us.

I’d like now to shift gears from talking and presenting, which is what we primarily help our students with here at the business school, to listening, which is a big focus of your work outside of the business school. Can you describe that work and how it relates to the principle of listening first?

Kristin Hansen: Well, after getting my MBA here at Stanford and enjoying a long career in the tech sector, I started worrying a few years ago — and I know I’m not alone — about what seemed like an alarming deterioration in our civil discourse here in the U.S. infecting our politics, our media, even just everyday interactions among families, friends, neighbors. And for me, that sense of alarm prompted me to pivot out of tech and into an emerging sector in our country full of organizations that are focused on helping Americans to bridge our social, cultural, and political divides.

So now, I run a philanthropy; it’s called Civic Health Project.

And we help organizations that are doing bridge building work across the U.S. And I also serve on the board of Listen First Project — #listenfirst — the umbrella organization that represents hundreds, literally hundreds, of grassroots bridge building organizations across the country. Collectively, this whole field is focused on a pretty monumental task. We’re trying to shift norms in our country toward listening and away from cancelling, toward intellectual humility and away from absolutism and virtue signaling, toward curiosity and away from animosity.

Matt Abrahams: I so respect the efforts that you and your colleagues are doing to really help make a difference in our

civil discourse. And I can see so clearly how you can apply the skills that we teach our students in terms of strategic communication. I’m curious if we can bring this back to a very tactical set of advice and guidance. What are some best practices you’ve learned that leaders, managers, and employees can use to help listen better?

Kristin Hansen: Well, there’s no silver bullet here, but it’s important to understand that better listening starts with intent. Listening actively and deeply happens when I genuinely believe that the person who’s speaking has intrinsic worth and brings a perspective that I lack and I need. In work settings, just like in our personal lives, our relationships thrive when we cultivate our own openmindedness, intellectual humility, genuine curiosity.

I love how the book Conscious Leadership by John Mackey and Steve McIntosh explores this idea of cultivating an integral worldview, urging because leaders to appreciate and synthesize employees’ diverse backgrounds and beliefs and perspectives when aiming to resolve conflict or make transformative change. Active listening is at the core of developing this more integral worldview. And when we listen, it isn’t a passive exercise. Active inquiry is part of listening, too. The trick is asking genuine questions that open up new pathways for understanding.

Now this can really feel hard when the viewpoints or the values that are being expressed by somebody else challenge our own, including in our workplaces. But that is also when the greatest opportunity for learning presents itself. Even if we understand this intuitively, it is hard to do. We have to practice.

Matt Abrahams: Practicing listening, just like practicing speaking, is so critical. One of the key elements that you talked about, Kristin, was this notion of how you approach it. It’s your mindset. Many of us listen just enough to try to understand what the person’s saying rather than really deeply try to figure out the nuance, the meaning. I like to instruct people to listen by trying to figure out what’s the bottom line of what the person’s saying.

Now, I have to say, I might be better at teaching this than actually doing it. You know in the conversations we have sometimes I don’t listen well. And my wife reminds me all the time that I don’t listen as well as I can. But we need to listen with intent.

And then I really like what you said about inquiry following.

So, it’s not just about listening. It’s about synthesizing and then following up through listening and paraphrasing.

Last fall, you co-taught with Brian Lowery, a former guest here, a class called Leadership for Society: Big Arguments, Courageous Leadership. What was the main thrust of that course and what takeaways can you share with us?

Kristin Hansen: Co-teaching that course, Big Arguments, Courageous Leadership with Dean Lowery, was a chance to equip students here at the business school with some of the theories out of social psychology as well as the tools and practices to help listen better, contemplate different perspectives, and navigate conflicts where they emerge, from the boardroom to the school board to Thanksgiving weekend with family.

One of the main concepts that we urged our students to

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25 contemplate and focus on is developing and applying that integral worldview that considers and synthesizes different perspectives among diverse workforces and citizenries. And just to broaden that a bit beyond workplaces and leadership roles that many of our students will go on to inhabit in the workplace. Just looking at our society as Americans today, by now we can all see that the shouting, the posturing, the grandstanding isn’t really getting us anywhere.

I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time, Kristin.

Before we end, I’d like to ask you the same three questions I ask everybody who joins me. Are you up for that?

One of my favorite quotes from a colleague, Mark Gerzon, is, “The world today has an advocacy surplus and an inquiry deficit.” These massive societal challenges that we’re facing, they’re not going to get solved if we just sort and retreat into tribal factions, we label Americans outside our own tribes as enemies, we lose any sense of trust or goodwill towards one another.

Kristin Hansen: Use a microphone and hold it close to your mouth. Sorry, that’s nine words.

Social science research — and this is a lot of what we delved into in the course — it makes it clear that when we engage in deep, genuine listening, perspective taking, and perspective sharing — so that is hearing other people’s lived experiences and honestly sharing our own — that’s how we get down to the root. That’s how we begin to cultivate deep reservoirs of trust, goodwill, and empathy toward one another. And that is a recipe for success in business and in our civic life.

Matt Abrahams: So much there that is so important. The foundation of this podcast is really based on some of those principles. It’s really better understanding yourself, being able to listen, and then respond and communicate in a way that is connected, respectful, and hopefully positively directed towards solving problems, achieving goals, pitching well. I wish I could have been a student in that class. Given the wide variety of topics you teach and work that you do, do you have any last ideas you’d like to share?

Kristin Hansen: Here’s my chance to plug the idea that business can actually be uniquely impactful in helping to shift people in our society and other societies away from deep division and toward greater social cohesion through skills that include listening, inquiry, perspective, sharing, and so on. And there are three reasons for this.

First of all, we know that business leaders are more highly trusted than nearly all other institutional leaders in our society. So, there’s receptivity to the idea that business leadership can point the way forward.

Second, workforces are used to getting trained and acquiring new skills at work. It’s one of the few places that we achieve norms and skill development at scale after we become adults.

And finally, work is one place where we as Americans do tend to bump up against people with different backgrounds, beliefs, and values, something that’s becoming more rare in all other parts of our lives. So, it’s a perfect place not only to learn, but also to practice skills of listening, bridging, problem solving, and social cohesion.

Matt Abrahams: So well put. It is abundantly clear that the skills we teach can be so helpful to our students, to their colleagues that they will have in the future in the workforce, and to our society. I really, really appreciate you highlighting the value of listening and strategic communication. Now

Kristin Hansen: I am.

Matt Abrahams: If you were to capture the best communication advice you ever received as a five- to sevenword slide title, what would it be?

Matt Abrahams: So, I know you’re big in amplifying your message. I’m curious. Why of all the things you could’ve said did you choose to say that?

Kristin Hansen: It’s the simplest thing. But if your audience can’t hear you, they’re going to tune out, and you don’t want that to happen.

Matt Abrahams: And I know you have so many suggestions for how to get your audience’s attention, to sustain that attention. And you’re right. If they can’t hear you, they can’t listen and learn. Question number two: what are the first three ingredients that go into a successful communication recipe?

Kristin Hansen: I’d be remiss if I didn’t share the advice we give our students quarter after quarter: know your audience, know your context, and know your speaking goal —what is it you want that audience to leave thinking, feeling, and doing differently because they’ve just listened to you?

Matt Abrahams: There you go, folks. You don’t have to attend our class. You got it all in three key ideas: know your audience, know your context, and know your goal. Who is a communicator that you admire and why?

Kristin Hansen: Well, Matt, in saying this, I’m ending our talk on a somewhat more serious note. But my answer to this question has to be Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Talk about knowing your audience, your context, and your speaking goal. I mean, while literally under fire, he has the presence and the composure to explain what he needs, whether from the Ukrainian people, from Russia, or from western democracies. I’m floored, amazed, and humbled.

Matt Abrahams: Absolutely. It has been truly remarkable to see somebody under the pressures and stresses that are going on to communicate so clearly and so passionately.

Kristin, thank you so much for being here. You know I love collaborating with you and learning from you. And I love the fact that our audience gets to learn from you as well.

Thanks for sharing your insights and ideas with all of us, and thanks for not sharing any of the embarrassing stories you have about me.

Kristin Hansen: It’s been a pleasure, Matt.

Matt Abrahams is a passionate, collaborative and innovative educator and coach. He has published research articles on strategic communication, cognitive planning, persuasion, and interpersonal communication.

Retailers: The Time is Now for Enhanced Social Advertising

By Jeff Cohn

The ways consumers engage online—particularly how they shop via social media—continue to keep retailers on their toes. In order to drive business outcomes, it is essential for advertisers from retailers and big-box brands to understand how to crack the code on social media and determine what is important to consumers in the moment.

Not only have consumers been increasingly engaging with brands on social media, but audiences have also continued to become more opaque as data privacy flips the script on how user behavior can be tracked. This industry shift has caused retailers to rethink how to authentically tell their brand stories across social media channels and resonate with shoppers.

Retailers and big-box brands have the opportunity to leverage social media ads in a unique way to tap into new strategies, drive more revenue, and improve their bottom line. Smartly.io is helping to drive this innovation through our latest enhancements for retailers: Budget Pacing Visualizer, Dynamic Local Inventory Ads, and Cross-Campaign Budget Optimization. These products will help retailers to connect with shoppers with the right message at the right time, all while providing flexibility to users in how they like to browse and buy.

Here’s more on how we’re doing this: Budget Pacing Visualizer Because retailers generally have strict financial rules, especially for budgeting within marketing and advertising, it is often a challenge for them to adhere to ad spend accuracy and tracking across a multitude of campaigns. The Budget Pacing Visualizer is a platform-agnostic feature, supported for Facebook, Pinterest, Snapchat, and Twitter, that supplies visual representation of campaigns’ budget pacing progress as compared to the target spend for specified timeframes and date ranges. The unique visual-first approach to this budget pacing and tracking makes it easier for retailers to manage various campaigns across business units and keep their finance teams updated on status.

Dynamic Local Inventory Ads Retailers want to surface local in-stock products that will

resonate with shoppers, but it is challenging for them to operationalize this within ad campaigns. The Dynamic Local Inventory Ads’ capability allows for dynamic ads to leverage a local inventory feed on top of a product catalog for campaigns on Facebook. This gives consumers insight into a product’s store-level price and availability. Smartly.io also enables retailers to customize these ads with branding, logos, borders, and other overlays to further enhance the product imagery. Using the Smartly.io Image Templates on top of Facebook’s solutions allows for a world-class ad experience for shoppers.

Cross-Campaign Budget Optimization Already available on both Facebook and Snapchat, retailers can now also leverage Smartly.io’s best-in-class budget optimization suite on Pinterest. Now, retailers can pool campaign budgets together and leave the difficult decisionmaking of optimal budget splits up to automation. For example, retailers can optimize budgets across multiple campaigns on Pinterest that have the same campaign objective in order to maximize ROAS. Grouping similar campaigns into a shared Budget Pool allows retailers to achieve the best possible results while improving their bottom line. With retail advertisers having a heavy presence on Pinterest, Smartly. io’s platform expansion enables their campaign dollars to be spent more smartly.

We bring together media, creative, and intelligence into one platform. Our goal is to always provide brands with a competitive edge when it comes to their social media advertising strategies. We do this by continuously providing new products and tools that break down silos and help advertisers bridge the gaps which often exist between internal teams. As our retail customers continue to seek out new and authentic ways to engage consumers and test across all touchpoints of the buyer journey, we continue to empower them via technology and with exceptional experience in mind.

Jeff Cohn is a global product marketing manager at Smartly.io. His thought leadership and expertise within digital advertising and the retail industry stands out in the articles he writes. Prior to joining Smartly.io he managed social media advertising campaigns for some of the largest clients in the world including AT&T, Target, and Macy’s.

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Winds Of Change Are Blowing In The Streaming Industry By subscribed staff

Netflix’s stock market crash this week has put the entire streaming sector on notice. There are reasons for this. The Californian company has lost tens of billions in capitalization after revealing that it lost 200,000 users in the last quarter. It is the first time in the last decade that it has not added new customers. And it expects another two million to drop out in the coming months. Investors’ panic also translated into falls in the shares of Disney (Disney+ offer) and Warner Bros Discovery (owner of HBO Max), two of its main competitors.

Are we facing a Netflix-only crisis or the beginning of an industry-wide turnaround? Most analysts point to the latter.

Just look at the CNN+ streaming channel, which has just closed after just one month of life. There are a number of problems that affect all operators equally. The first of these, with the exception of growing competition, is the economic situation. Low-cost subscription business models suffer when the going gets tough. Those who have to tighten their belts will start there. The pandemic, the energy crisis, the war in Ukraine and inflation have been putting pressure on many pockets. Netflix will be the hardest hit because it has the most customers, but no one will be spared.

Consumers have also evolved. A report by Deloitte found last summer that young people, who are more price-sensitive as they suffer from economic hardship, are able to sign up for and cancel the same service several times in the same year. “Some mature users analyze their subscriptions month by month,” explains Rodrigo Miranda, CEO of ISDI (Instituto Superior para el Desarrollo de Internet). “This affects

streaming platforms, but also music or sports services.”

Another ingredient must be added to this cocktail. The model on which Netflix has built its overwhelming growth seems to be reaching the end of the first phase, that of attracting users at rock-bottom prices. Now it is time to retain customers and make them profitable. To do this, it is necessary to combat password cheating (Netflix executives estimate that there are 100 million users who share their passwords with friends and family) and look for new ways of monetization, such as introducing advertising.

This last avenue has been explored in the industry for some time. Amazon and HBO Max already serve ads to those who want to pay less for their subscription. Disney+ has said it will do so. Netflix is not ruling it out either, despite having always made a banner of the absence of commercials on its platform. Morgan Stanley estimates that the company stands to make billions a year from it. The arrival of advertising seems inevitable. “In many ways, we’re seeing the television of the last half-century now being reincarnated in the streaming era,” JB Perrette, the Warner Bros Discovery executive in charge of online video channels HBO Max and Discovery+, said recently.

Runaway growth To write Netflix off as dead would be rash. It may have lost 200,000 users, but it still has 221 million left and its revenues have not stopped growing: it generates some $30 billion annually. It remains the undisputed market leader. Its founder, Reed Hastings, made the decision to transform his

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DVD rental company into a streaming platform at the turn of the century, when the Internet was far from functioning as it does today. Analysts called him crazy, as they did when he set out to become the world’s largest audiovisual production company. But it managed to convince investors and its growth was unstoppable. It is estimated that during the first pandemic year it was responsible for 11% of global internet traffic.

Netflix has even managed to sneak into the Olympus of big tech. Some U.S. media even reformulated the usual acronym to refer to them: from GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple) it became FAANG. This deference was not only intended to highlight its economic power (it reached a stock market valuation of over 300 billion dollars), but also to include it in the club of companies that master the art of extracting and exploiting huge amounts of user data.

2016 was unforgettable for the company. That course gave its great international leap, entering 130 countries. There are studies that point out that it came to monopolize 40% of the nightly online traffic in the US. There were even those who proposed that operators should charge it for abusing the installed fiber capacity. Everyone wanted to imitate this successful model. It was also that year when Hastings uttered one of his most iconic phrases: when asked if he was worried about people sharing passwords, he said that “we love it when people share Netflix”. A few months earlier he said another: “Netflix will never run ads”. Both are in question today.

One of the keys to the platform’s success, they say, lies in its good management of this treasure trove of information. Its content recommendation algorithm, based on viewers’ own ratings, has been extensively studied. Netflix also uses big data in its productions. The company’s analysts, for example, saw that the British series House of Cards was a hit, as were the films of actor Kevin Spacey and those of director David Fincher. “They identified that at the intersection of those three elements was a large potential audience,” data scientist Mark Tenenholtz said. To finish off the buzz, they served ads for their new series, an adaptation of the 1990 series, to those who came in contact with any of those three elements. The result was one of Netflix’s (and television’s) biggest hits to date.

The phase of capturing at a loss has come to an end. The company had not considered ways to monetize its customer base until now simply because new additions did not make it necessary. The time had to come when that curve would start to flatten. “What’s happening with Netflix is not new. We’ve seen it already in other subscription models like insurers or mobile operators,” Miranda points out. “The expensive, really expensive and difficult thing is to get the user, and they’ve already done that.”

Now it’s time to retain customers. Either through prices, reducing them by placing advertising, or with special content.

They could even offer new categories, such as video games, something that has been the subject of much speculation.

“We have no plans to enter the video game sector,” Hastings himself told EL PAÍS Retina four years ago. Officially, he hasn’t changed his mind.

A data business

The major streaming platforms (almost all but Apple TV) sell their customers’ data to third parties, as a Common Sense report showed last year. Their goal is to enrich and supplement the profiles they build of their users. “The moment I am giving data to a third party I can have a reciprocal equivalent. You gain information on uses, interests or situation that helps you hyper-personalize ads. Netflix customers would not put up with seeing conventional advertising, they need something super-targeted,” Miranda says.

Netflix has agreements, for example, with Meta. If someone posts on Instagram that they are sad, they might go to Netflix right after and see melancholic movies. It will be one of those cases in which we suspect that the machines are listening to us.

How Big Companies Can Cultivate Intrapreneurs

By Wharton Staff

The following article was written by Scott Snyder, a senior fellow at Wharton’s Mack Institute for Innovation Management and author of the book Goliath’s Revenge: How Established Companies Turn the Tables on Digital Disruptors, and Bill Seibel, author of Press Go — Lessons Earned by a Serial Entrepreneur, and former CEO and founder of Mobiquity. Snyder is also Chief Digital Officer at EVERSANA.

photography, or JC Penney doubling down on brick-andmortar stores as the ‘Amazon effect’ was taking over retail — big companies seem to lack the ability to innovate ahead of the next disruption. Instead, most big corporations become addicted to their business models and move from “risk-taking” in their early life to “caretaking” as they scale and mature, and then “undertaking” when it is too late to pivot to a new model before becoming obsolete.

If history has taught us anything, it’s that big corporations struggle with disruptive innovation. Whether it’s missing a new wave — like IBM underestimating the value of the operating system, Kodak underplaying the impact of digital

The speed of digital innovation, accelerated by the recent events of COVID-19, has only intensified the pressure to innovate in large corporations and is increasing the gap between the innovators and pretenders. And it’s not for

lack of effort. Over 75% of companies have some form of innovation accelerator or lab, yet over 90% of these labs fail to achieve real financial impact (Cap Gemini, 2019).

Some recent examples of high-profile corporate innovation efforts like GE Digital and Nokia Labs failed to save either of these companies from serious disruption. With the vast resources that large enterprises have access to, why is such a small percentage successful at disruptive innovation?

What do successful corporations do differently? And why are start-ups able to beat them to the next market opportunity so often? We believe that there are lessons earned from successful startups that can help large enterprises innovate, pivot, and turn their ideas into successful ventures that can move the needle on their long-term value.

David vs. Goliath on the Digital Battlefield A recent Dell survey of 4,000 senior business leaders found that 78% of C-level decision-makers believe digital startups will pose a threat to their organization now or in the near future. The same survey also reveals that 62% have already seen new competitors enter the market as a result of the emergence of digital technology. Gartner adds that 125,000 large organizations are launching digital business initiatives now and that CEOs expect their digital revenue to increase by more than 80% by 2020. Business disruption is real and it’s accelerating. It seldom comes hard and fast like Uber. Instead, it targets segments of a company’s products and services, and manifests itself as death by a thousand cuts. CEOs can decide to be either a Disruptor or a Defender. Both strategies are viable. Both require unbundling an enterprise’s products and services and exploring how innovation can impact each. And both are hard work.

With the vast resources that large enterprises have access to, why is such a small percentage successful at disruptive innovation?

But everyone knows that starting a new business venture is challenging. The odds are not great. Seventy percent don’t survive, 20% break even, and only 10% grow to achieve significant returns. And most startup leadership teams spend the bulk of their time raising very expensive capital from VCs (often expecting 25%-30% IRR) and acquiring customers, data assets, and brand equity — things that large corporations already have! Yet the odds for a new venture launched within an existing enterprise are even worse.

Rubicon Intelligence reports that only 4% of them will ever reach $1 million in yearly sales. And only .4% ever reach $10 million. That doesn’t even begin to move the needle for a large corporation. With all the resources available within a large company (funding, expertise, market presence, global reach), why aren’t the odds better? Shouldn’t that make it easier? It’s just the opposite. Rubicon reports that the success of a new venture is inversely proportional to the amount of corporate help.

What Makes Startups So Disruptive?

Digital startups don’t waste time with consultants and flipcharts to find their top ideas or need to convince five layers of management to approve a new investment. They

are typically born from the hypothesis of the founders to disrupt an existing market by creating a step-change in value compared to existing solutions. This requires a very different mindset compared with how successful corporate executives running mature businesses might think. Some of the ways these startups — or “Davids” taking on Goliath — think differently are: 1. They Embrace Uncertainty Startups require the ability to deal with uncertainty through most of their early life. They have an intense sense of urgency and can pivot quickly. They are skilled at executing Plan B — because Plan A seldom occurs. They have no market share or existing revenue stream to defend. They don’t have to worry about upsetting existing customers, partners, or distribution channels. Successful startups have an experienced team with an unwavering commitment to make their idea a success. Failure has a direct impact on their career and personal life, unlike corporate ventures where teams may feel little to no financial stake in the outcome.

2. They Pick Their Team Not building the right team is one of the top reasons why startups fail. Successful startup teams are composed of experienced entrepreneurs that possess both broad digital and innovation skills and expertise in key areas needed to bring the new product to market. They also share a passion for creating something special with game-changing potential. The best teams share a common set of values but include diverse points of view. Startup CEOs get to pick their team versus getting handed one, as is the case in most corporate innovation efforts, where politics may dictate team composition more than raw skills and capabilities.

3. They Value Agility Business plans seldom survive their first contact with the customer. Successful startups pivot five times on average.

Sometimes the founders need to tweak the technology, evolve their go-to-market strategy, or perhaps fundamentally rethink their business model or use cases. Every one of these scenarios is likely to occur at some point in a startup’s life. The best early indicator of a successful new venture team is their ability to execute Plan B. How good is the team at taking one step backward and turning it into two steps forward? Large organizations find it difficult to pivot. The more successful they have been, the harder it is and the more courage it takes.

4. They See Opportunity in Low-end Clients Large companies tend to overlook Tier 3 customers. They are the ones that are small, without a huge budget or a strong brand, and perhaps not as sophisticated as other clients. Tier 1 customers have the most attractive customer profiles and are the targets of most marketing and sales efforts.

But, as a startup, if your business model is still evolving, so is your best-fit customer profile. Opportunities are hard to come by and you can’t afford to squander them. Being open-minded to a Tier 3 customer that can move quickly and is willing to help you demonstrate outcomes for your product may be far more valuable to growing your business than “whale-hunting” for a Fortune 500 client that may

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take a year or more to make a decision. Winning your first customer always makes it easier to win your second.

How Can Goliaths Out-innovate the Davids?

Given the unique advantages of startups to create new ventures, how can we harness the strength and scale of established companies — or Goliaths — to beat them at their own game? Below are three pathways for large enterprises to turn the tables on disruption.

1. Develop a Second Speed While the core business must continually improve through incremental innovation to drive near-term returns, or Speed One, companies must create a Speed Two capable of rapidly innovating the next generation opportunities that will disrupt the core business someday. And this second speed is highly unpredictable and needs air cover to allow the teams pursuing these disruptive ideas to experiment, pivot, and pursue seemingly unattractive markets without the daily scrutiny of the existing business units. Without this protection, radical innovations will be exposed to the chorus of reasons not to do something like: “This will cannibalize sales,” “We tried this before and it didn’t work,” “Our competition isn’t doing this,” or “This represents a huge security risk.”

One structure that we have seen be successful that provides protection while also maintaining connection and sponsorship by the core business is a foundry model with several innovation teams capable of internal and external venture creation, and an investment committee composed of both insiders (business leaders and strategists) and outsiders (experts and VCs) that can balance the strategic needs of the company with what new markets and new customers will truly value.

2. Cultivate Intrapreneurs Intrapreneurs have entrepreneurial DNA but relish the opportunity to leverage the scale and resources of a big company to drive meaningful impact. Whether it’s building new AI-based models to identify patients at risk of disease or validating a new self-driving car feature, large enterprises have access to data, customers, and markets that startups can only dream of. Intrapreneurs can navigate both speeds of the organization to access these assets and apply them to new ventures, but they need protection and support. They also need the ability to build T-shaped teams that marry new digital talent and thinking with legacy talent that has the institutional knowledge and access to “crown jewels” from the legacy business to scale new innovations using the company’s resources.

[Disruption] seldom comes hard and fast like Uber. Instead, it targets segments of a company’s products and services, and manifests itself as death by a thousand cuts.

Despite how critical these unique venture leaders and teams

are, most companies do not create an environment that attracts intrapreneurs or gives them a path to thrive inside their companies. A few ways to break through in building a strong pool of intrapreneurs are: 1) Make sure you balance both internal development and external hires. You need a healthy mix of external digital and venture talent with edgethinkers that know the business. 2) Create a new rewards structure for internal ventures that includes longer-term asymmetric payoffs versus just short-term rewards, and 3) encourage and celebrate “risky” career moves in your best talent, even if it includes being part of a failed venture.

Because even failed ventures create learning that benefits the company.

3. Help Startups to Scale Instead of trying to do everything inside, corporations have an opportunity to multiply their innovation capabilities by partnering with innovators outside their walls, especially in pursuing opportunities where the internal capabilities and speed are insufficient. Under A.G. Lafley, P&G was one of the first major companies to demonstrate the power of external innovations with its Connect and Develop program which increased new innovations coming from external sources from 15% to 45%.

But most corporations are not set up to successfully partner with tech innovators or startups. Instead, they apply their traditional ways of doing business and suffocate the innovative potential in these startups with legal, financial, compliance, and security reviews before even demonstrating the potential value these innovations can deliver. External innovations need the same attention and protected pathways as internal ventures. Instead of tossing the opportunity over to your partnership group with little to no experience in new venture creation, you need to set up an innovation leader and team responsible for validating and scaling the new opportunity including navigating the corporate antibodies to ensure the new innovation partner does not get crushed or run out of capital before it even gets started. Intrapreneurs are best positioned to shepherd these opportunities through just as they would for an internally incubated venture.

David’s Mindset in Goliath’s Body The biggest risk to future success and becoming a disruptor is a company’s existing business model, culture, and bureaucracy. Every company was a startup once in its history, but most of the startup DNA mutates into mature corporate thinking over time — which is why most entrepreneurial talent chooses to leave. Cisco’s ability to retain more than 150 former entrepreneurial CEOs of previously acquired companies under John Chambers is an exception, not the rule. Running at digital speed and shaping the disruption in your market will require a different approach to leadership, culture, and talent than what has worked in the past. You need the willingness to disrupt yourself on a continual basis, develop your own unique ambition to drive step-change outcomes for your customers and society, and create an environment where Intrapreneurs can grow and thrive.

Then, you can harness the advantages of both the attacker and the incumbent to build your own unique advantage in the future digital battlefield.

Rafael Serra Reimagines Iconic Logos Through a Nostalgic ’80s Lens

By Sarah Fonder

What do marketers need to know about user-generated content (UGC) advertising?

20th century nostalgia isn’t going anywhere, and plenty of brands are cashing in on the desire for more old-fashioned graphics. Portuguese lettering artist and type designer Rafael Serra has clearly taken note, and recently presented his own endearing, ’80s-inspired logo redesigns.

While most of the brands he chose already retain a strong ’80s association, like Vans or Uno, he doesn’t shy away from modern tech, like Spotify and Playstation. The designs feature a light spot-the-reference feel that ’80s kids are sure to love. Serra’s reimagined Spotify logo recalls a glitchy landscape from Tron, while Microsoft and Playstation’s color-blocked squares evoke the classic look of handheld memory game Simon. Clean lines and poppy, streamlined colors ground his designs in the here and now.

Top brands come to SCAD seeking new ideas, inventions, and business strategies for a changing world. SCADpro delivers.

Tap into our talent bank. scad.edu/scadpro

How a game development company wants to support the ‘future of marketing’ with content creators

By Alexander Lee

As game developers realize the marketing potential of individual content creators, they are investing in programs and platforms to help creators turn their pastimes into businesses.

Last month, game developer 2K announced the second class of its NextMakers initiative, a training program that gives a selected group of gaming creators privileged access to the company’s intellectual properties and professional network. The expansion of the program brings content creators further into the 2K fold, evidence of the company’s increasing awareness of their increasing role in generating and maintaining interest in gaming IP. 2K selects participants for the program based on their alignment with the brand and their “investment in the future of content creation” rather than their current popularity or follower count, according to Mitchel Inkrott, a senior influencer marketing manager at 2K. “We are able to break it down by title,” Inkrott said, “so that we’re not sitting there looking at a list of 4,000 applicants and being like, ‘well, what do we do now?’”

Building on the first iteration of the NextMakers program last year, the new class of 200 trainees will be mentored by creators such as Tess and Mitsu, who participated in NextMakers last year and continue to work with 2K on content such as The Bordercast, a podcast based on the developer’s popular Borderlands series. (Both streamers, whom 2K put in touch with Digiday, requested anonymity due to a desire to keep their personal lives separate from their careers as

entertainers.)

“I was working at Starbucks at the time while doing content creation, and through the NextMakers program, I don’t have to do that anymore,” Mitsu said. “I have stability; I have the ability to take care of my family.”

2K’s NextMakers program provides creators with resources to transform their hobby into a full-time job, including training sessions about building a personal brand and marketing it to potential sponsors, a self-care Discord channel featuring a dedicated personal trainer and talks with industry leaders such as James Davidson, director of talent strategy for prominent esports organization 100 Thieves. “We joke a little bit that it was enlightening for some creators to hear that pitch decks are a thing,” Inkrott said.

There is no exchange involved, and the company does not put pressure on participants to stream or otherwise produce content based on 2K titles. “There’s nothing from them that says ‘you have to do this’ or anything like that,” Tess said. “I just want to because I have this trust and love for the game that is encouraged and valued by 2K.” While participants don’t receive paychecks, stipends or company benefits, 2K sends them content kits, creates work opportunities and generally treats them as if they are a part of the company — which, as creators promoting 2K’s original IP, they essentially are.

“Content creators are our colleagues in so many different ways,” Inkrott said. “So many companies tend to look at

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‘influencers’ in some sort of transactional way — we are looking at it as the future of marketing.”

The end goal is to help creators bring in consistent income, whether by employing them to create officially supported content such as the Bordercast or by supporting their independent brand deals. The arrangement raises the tide for the whole flotilla of online gaming creators that build their communities around 2K titles.

“One of the things the program has really provided is that stability,” Tess said. “Before this, I was basically streaming every day, like eight to 12 hours — it was a lot, and it was very stressful, and I was definitely starting to get a little burned out. Coming to work with NextMakers has given me this understanding that quality matters more than quantity, and that quality will improve if you’re not overworking yourself.”

NextMakers is not the only program of its type, but rather the latest of a number of initiatives that demonstrate a rising awareness of the power of individual content creators. Last year, EA rolled out its Creator Network, which similarly provides content opportunities and logistical support to creators whose content focuses on EA titles. Outside the developers, dedicated start-ups such as Infinite Canvas have sprung up to help creators monetize their work, though founder Tal Shachar pointed out that his company is focused on creators in metaverse platforms such as Roblox and provides more in-depth marketing support and monetary grants to its participants. “What we’re doing is, effectively, a version of what these guys do on some level,” Shachar said.

“But we primarily work with game developers on open-world platforms like Roblox, Fortnite Creative, and so on, so we’re working with a different type of creator.”

Indeed, the rise of creator power has come alongside a serious expansion in exactly what it means to be a creator.

Developers in Fortnite Creative and Roblox are creators; so are TikTok stars and Twitch streamers. There’s never been a more opportune time to make a career out of online creation — and yet there has never been more confusion or disagreement about what exactly it means to be a creator.

“Are all of these people, in some form, creators? Yes. But I do think we’re starting to get to the point where the blanket term is so broad that it can sometimes be confusing,” Shachar said.

For the 2Ks and the EAs of the world, this distinction doesn’t really matter. Even before the rise of developer-backed initiatives such as 2K NextMakers and EA’s Creator Network, gaming creators inherently marketed their titles, generating interest and conversation around games without their developers having to lift a finger. Now, developers are lifting their fingers — in 2K’s case, perhaps even a whole arm — and creators are starting to reap the benefits.

“It’s really part of this even broader shift in the content sphere, towards individual creators and communities being the most important part of the distribution mechanism,” Shachar said.

“As opposed to the previous era, where you just pushed stuff out — and if you were a user or community, you got what you got.”

How to Avoid the ‘Ethical Slide’ That Leads Companies Astray

By Bryan Lufkin

Building strong ethics requires continuous effort from everyone in an organization. In the book Business Ethics: What Everyone Needs to Know, J.S. Nelson offers practical advice for cultivating a “speak-up” culture.

Company managers have likely heard the old quip: Business ethics is a contradiction in terms. That’s because too often, business is viewed as a hard-hearted enterprise, driven by getting ahead at all costs, even if that means cutting ethical corners.

But that attitude is seriously outdated, says Harvard Business School visiting professor J. S. Nelson in her new book Business Ethics: What Everyone Needs to Know, which will be released on April 21. Nelson, a Villanova University law and business faculty member, co-wrote the book with Cornell University professor Lynn A. Stout, who died in 2018 while the book was in process.

Today, strong ethics are a central issue for business leaders, knowing consumers are drawn to companies that do the right thing while steering clear of businesses that break ethical boundaries, Nelson says. As business leaders navigate a fluid marketplace, a solid ethical practice is the best compass, she advises.

“The world is changing around businesses,” Nelson says.

“There is more pressure to make profits, and at the same time to respond to environmental, social, and governance issues.”

And, she says, good workplace and customer ethics aren’t just trendy promotional talking points for companies.

Rather, they’ve become crucial for a corporation’s success.

As the authors write, “Organizations and societies with high ethical standards tend to flourish, while those with weak

ethics often fail.”

‘You have to live it’ Business Ethics is written in a question-and-answer format that’s accessible for everyone from C-suite executives to business students. It covers a wide range of topics, from the basics of ethical behavior and legal liabilities to the cultivation of best practices and the role of whistleblowers.

One overriding message emerges from the book: Good ethical practices don’t just happen; everyone within a corporation has to continuously work on them.

“People are not always comfortable talking about ethics,” Nelson says. “Some have been dismissing ethics as, ‘I don’t have to think about [those things].’ But making ethical choices has got to be conscious. You have to put the work in. You have to live it … Cultivating positive ethics within our companies is among the most important things we can do.”

Surveys show plenty of work still needs to be done. Nelson and Stout write that unethical behavior arises from the “ethical traps” of opportunity, motivation, and rationalization, and typically can be seen through measures of at least five types of misconduct: abuse, lying to employees, discrimination, health and safety violations, and stealing.

Worldwide, 20 percent of employees say they’re pressured to bend the rules; in the US, that figure is even higher, at 22 percent. And managers are responsible for 60 percent of all misconduct, with nearly a quarter of it coming from

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Avoiding ’the ethical slide’ Nelson points to the recent Theranos trial, in which founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was convicted in January of defrauding investors. A sure sign of the ethical lapse at Theranos was that “people started asking questions, and they got fired,” Nelson says.

Wells Fargo’s 2016 account fraud scandal, in which bank representatives were pressured into creating 3.4 million fake accounts to meet company quotas, is an example of what Nelson calls “the ethical slide” into shady or illegal actions.

“People who stay in that kind of system, they get used to it,” she says. “Either nothing happens [to you] when you commit misconduct, or you’re rewarded. And bad behavior snowballs. If it’s happening across the company, you get to the point that all your time is spent in crisis management.”

Cultivating a ‘speak-up culture’ While cultivating good ethics may sound daunting, Nelson says it isn’t complicated. For example, Costco’s code of conduct is based on a few simple values, such as: Obey the law. Take care of our members and employees. Respect our suppliers. And the company promotes managers in-house to maintain a consistent ethical culture.

The Hershey chocolate company’s code is similar and includes a question that corporate employees should ask themselves: “Would I feel okay if everyone knew about it?”

Hershey also has a firm anti-retaliation policy, which is intended to make whistleblowers feel secure about reporting illegal or unethical activities.

Nelson says the ethics at corporations like Costco and Hershey start with the creation of what she calls “a speakup culture,” which encourages employees and lower-level managers to report problems.

With customers and investors more attentive than ever to corporate social responsibility, firms that act ethically will have a competitive advantage, Nelson says.

“You have more innovation. You have customers who seek you out. Having a good ethical reputation is attractive,” she says. Not only that, “those companies are more steady and less volatile. They do not go through huge ethical collapses.

They’re well-managed, and they’re able to respond [to challenges].”

In addition, in this tight labor market, people want to work for ethical companies, Nelson says. They will seek them out, be willing to take less money, push innovation, and be more committed than to other companies. “Ethics are an enormous competitive advantage in every way,” she says.

“Savvy companies understand this, and invest in their ethics to do so many other things.”

Most people follow at least some ethical rules in their daily lives. (The small percentage of individuals who do not are called psychopaths; we discuss them some more in Chapters 2 and 10.) The world of business, however, presents some unique issues, which is why they have evolved as a specialized field of ethics.

One of those unique issues is the sheer size and frequency of the ethical challenges that businesspeople must face. It is not unusual for those in business to be presented, almost daily, with opportunities to personally profit by violating the law or by harming or misleading others. The stakes can be enormous, especially when a big transaction or careermaking decision is involved. This means people in business often face much larger temptations in the office than on the street. (Although it is usually not very tempting to shoplift a small item, the opportunity to make millions of dollars by insider trading or cheating on a large contract is far more enticing.)

As a result, businesspeople must always remain aware of and sensitive to their ethical obligations. If they do not, they risk joining the long and sad parade of once-virtuous— but now notorious—white-collar criminals like Enron Chair Kenneth Lay, Goldman Sachs director Rajat Gupta, and business maven Martha Stewart.

A second unique aspect of business ethics is that they operate in a social environment—business dealings—in which people, to some extent, often tolerate, expect, or even praise the selfish pursuit of personal gain. This makes the business environment quite different from many other social environments in which we interact with other people.

Few of us want to be perceived as selfish at a wedding reception or a bar mitzvah. But when we are negotiating a contract or trying to sell a product, a certain degree of material self-interest is expected.

The key phrase here is the qualifier, “a certain degree of.”

Business ethics help to keep us from crossing the line from legitimately self-interested behavior, over to unethical and/ or illegal behavior.

Third, business ethics emphasize the obligations we owe not only to our friends and family, but also the obligations we owe to people with whom we have only an “arms-length” business relationship, and even obligations owed to total strangers. Indeed, sometimes business ethics go further still, and teach that we have obligations to intangible legal entities like corporations. This aspect of business ethics can raise some practical difficulties. It is relatively easy and natural for a person to remember the interests of friends and family whom she likes, and with whom she interacts on a daily basis.

However, as we discuss more in Chapters 8 and 9, it is often more difficult for us to stay aware of, and respect, duties owed to people whom we don’t know well or even may have never met—much less duties owed to intangible legal entities. Business ethics help us find our way through this minefield.

Finally, a fourth distinguishing characteristic of business ethics is that ethical problems in this context tend to involve unique concepts and rules specific to the business world.

Many of these concepts and rules are based on, or draw upon, legal rules that apply primarily to business institutions and business dealings. For example, in this book we will discuss fiduciary duties, rules against fraud, duties owed to corporations and other legal entities, and the resources and legal protections available to “whistleblowers.” Business ethics and the law are deeply intertwined.

The Basics of Branding

By Mo Saha

Learn what a brand is and how it can help your business.

Why is it worth thinking about your business as a brand?

Isn’t branding just for big, global companies who have the money to spend on it? What does the word “brand” really mean, anyway? This article will answer these questions, help demystify the branding process, and show you that a brand is much more than a logo.

your business. A brand is valuable because it helps you connect more easily with your customers, stand out from your competitors, and increase the value of your offer.

Articulating what your business is about can also help you define your own identity and give you more confidence in promoting it personally.

What does “brand” mean?

1. Connecting with your audience

A brand is how a business is perceived in the mind of someone who has experienced it in some way. Someone can form this perception by hearing a friend make a comment about the business, spotting a logo on a delivery van, reading a review online, listening to an interview with the founder, or through a personal experience as a customer.

The moment when a potential customer connects with your business at a brand touchpoint is crucial. The goal is to draw customers to your business because it feels like the right fit for them.

Think of all the ways your business could leave an impression on someone—a customer, supplier, employee, journalist, or anyone else who may come into contact with it. These are your brand touchpoints, and the special place it occupies in someone’s mind is called a brand positioning.

Your business can consider and control some of these brand touchpoints, such as the design and wording on your website or email newsletter. Many other brand touchpoints will be outside of your control, such as an online customer review. The goal of branding is to create a clear, positive impression of your business across as many touchpoints as you can control. These are described as brand associations, and you can vastly improve your business by influencing them.

How can it help my business?

Let’s start with the clear benefits a brand can bring to

2. Communicating difference Branding is a way of highlighting what makes your business different from your competitors. Customers have both rational and emotional reasons for choosing products and services, and branding can help connect with an audience on an emotional level.

3. Creating additional value Because branding influences perception, customers may be willing to pay more for a product or service that is wellbranded. The perception of the brand must match up to the actual experience or there will be no repeat business. This is often described as keeping the brand promise.

Where do I start? Your brand idea Think of all the experiences you have had to date with your business and why customers have chosen you in the past.

This is where you will find the clues which will help you form the basis of your brand. Many people don’t believe there

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is anything particularly distinctive about what they do, but there is something unique about each business. It helps to go back to the beginning of the business and identify the original motivation.

If you’re a new business without previous experience to draw on, imagine what you would like your future customers to say about you. For example, a plumber may like to be known for being particularly considerate and tidy in people’s homes. A furniture maker may have a focus on using sustainable materials. A restaurant might want to be known for a warm and homey atmosphere. All these factors have the potential to be the basis of a brand.

The test The ultimate test of a brand idea is to apply it to as many of your touchpoints as possible. For a restaurant that wants to be known for a warm and friendly atmosphere, what does the signage look like? How does the staff greet customers?

How do the menus look? Each of these touchpoints should reinforce warmth and friendliness for the customers—who can then tell their friends about their experience—as well as employees. The brand idea should feel consistent inside and out.

Brand values The brand-building process can be as surface level as the design of your logo and as deep as delving into your personal identity—and thinking about your legacy. When it comes to the deeper side of brand building, defining brand values will help you clearly articulate what your business stands for to your customers.

The culture and values of a small business tend to reflect those of the founders, so it’s always a fruitful exercise to clarify these by writing them down. Try to move away from generic words like “honest” and “passionate.” Instead, identify values which are especially true to you and that are shaped by your personal experiences.

Brand personality As with values, the personality of the brand can often reflect the personality of the business owner. Establishing a consistent brand personality is important, because if there is a disconnect between the brand personality and the actual experience, customers can be left confused.

The personality of the brand can be communicated through the tone of writing at the brand touchpoints: You could choose a funny and chatty tone, for example, or one that is more expert and authoritative.The design of the brand touchpoints can also convey a wide range of messages to attract a particular audience. A style-conscious customer will be attracted to businesses that have paid attention to creating a particular look to their branding. A well-thoughtout brand will do some heavy lifting to engage your desired audience.

Get outside opinions Identifying and being able to articulate the brand idea, personality, and values are the foundations of creating a strong brand. It’s a challenging task to do by yourself, so reach out to a trusted friend, colleague, or consultant to get the perspective of someone with distance.

The future of marketing jobs

By Jarrod Lipshy

The field of marketing is changing at a breakneck speed.

Whereas marketing jobs were once about developing creative ad slogans to appear on television or in newspaper ads, today it is a highly complex and technology-driven field where data analysis tools and a sophisticated real-time understanding of audience behavior are expected norms.

What does that mean for the future of marketing jobs?

Some things remain true: Even as audiences move increasingly into virtual spaces and what Deloitte calls “digital campfires,” marketers still need to focus primarily

on establishing human connections.

The popularity of marketing in video games is one example.

Coke recently decided to launch its new “pixel-flavored” limited edition cola in virtual form on a special island in the popular game Fortnite. But ultimately, its campaign had the same underlying principles as one in real life — a promotion that aimed to engage audiences and generate excitement.

To that end, marketers can be successful in their careers when they foster impactful relationships among their audiences

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Marketing jobs are about engagement People have more options for ways to spend their time than ever before, and yet less time than ever to spare. Instinctively, they’ll seek out experiences that offer community, release and connection.

The modern marketer’s job is to make that connection stick, emphasizes career marketer and mentor Kathrina Miranda of MiMA. Compared to a decade or so ago, marketers also have a narrower window in which to make their mark.

“Back then marketing was this big umbrella,” where companies would “try to get everyone with one big marketing message, ” Miranda says, adding, “We’re all now trying to target the buyer persona of you.”

Given the many competing demands for attention, marketers may have to work more collaboratively than in the past — tapping influencers and creators to help engage audiences.

The goal is to spark conversations in a targeted manner. If you can find a way to make that conversation feel personal, all the better. For big brands like Coca-Cola, that can mean giving your target demographics a digital playground to experience. Smaller brands don’t have that luxury, so they must rely on engaging through more thoughtful means.

“Soft skills” matter more than ever The changes demanded by distributed teams compel people who train future marketers, like Kathrina Miranda, to hammer home the importance of “soft skills.” Miranda’s company mentors young, aspiring entrepreneurs in disadvantaged communities.

MiMA partners with Fulphil (where Miranda sits on the board and acts as marketing director), a remote learning program that develops professional “soft” skills. These skills are now considered nonoptional in an industry that cherishes human relationships.

“People will ask in interviews now: what are your personal skills? Do you get along with your teammates?” Miranda says.

Such qualities aren’t just important for HR but also translate into your ability to connect with customers.

“Now we really do have to be personable,” she says. “We have to get to know our customers and make sure that they like us.”

One telltale sign of the growing need for personability is that “people want to know who these founders are of these startups,” says Miranda, whereas “before, nobody cared.”

Cazenave agrees. He observes how a compelling company story acts as a powerful form of currency. When people are faced with a choice of three nearly indistinct products, he predicts they’ll ask “which resonates with me more?”

“You have to find ways to break through,” says Bruce Cazenave, founder and principal at Inflection Management LLC. “There’s so much information that comes through to people digitally, so you have to very efficiently deliver the key points you want them to be aware of.”

“Customers instinctively gravitate towards businesses they want to feel associated with because they are, say, more environmental, or are more public about their commitment to inclusion,” Cazenave reflects. “Build a community around that, and people will help you build your brand.”

Accordingly, every customer touch matters, particularly when it comes to digital experiences.

Marketing jobs will evolve, often

Flexibility, self-management are key Marketers also have to be ready to pivot at a moment’s notice. A few years ago, brands were given a mandatory flexibility lesson in the form of pandemic-related office and retail closures.

They were forced to not only find creative ways to reach consumers, but also think more deliberately about how marketing professionals could collaborate with one another.

After all, even with the resumption of office work and inperson meetings, virtual work seems here to stay.

LinkedIn data shows a 177% increase in remote marketing job listings in the first half of 2021. A January Pew Research poll revealed that 59% of people able to work from home continue to do so, and 61% do so by choice. Just as revealing: 64% of those surveyed stated remote work made it easier to maintain a work-life balance, although 60% said it makes them feel less connected to their coworkers.

Working remotely means more freedom, but without the luxury of a social safety net in-office interactions could provide. This makes being organized and capable of self management essential skills for any marketer.

Keeping up with changing times is another top priority for marketers. Disruptions can arise at any time, and organizations expect teams to be able to creatively work around them “We look for resourcefulness,” says Cazenave, explaining one of the emerging skillsets his team pinpoints when recruiting. “We want people who take initiative; people who can quickly triangulate different types of information to come to a conclusion.”

In a time when every moment counts, every team member has to be ready to make use of the best tools available to them in that moment, including data and their own intuition.

Marketers should remind themselves, too, that major brands such as Coke are slimming down even as they experiment with new products. What’s working now may not work tomorrow.

Professionals in the industry have to be willing to listen to the data, and they also must be prepared to creatively respond to it.

To future proof your marketing career, be prepared to connect creatively with consumers — and with teammates — wherever they happen to be in the current moment.

A guide to IKEA’s impulse buying hacks

By Warc Staff

Homeware titan IKEA deploys a shopping experience like no other, one in which around 60% of purchases are impulsive – a new analysis uncovers what makes IKEA so good at getting shoppers to add to their baskets.

What it does

Why it matters

Rooms as they would be. IKEA shows many items in a context of an actual room to trigger availability bias (if you can imagine using a product the more likely you are to buy it), often with a lot of mirrors so that you see yourself (and often partner/family) in them. This can sometimes be so powerful as to induce tension in some couples.

Singular, consistent, and eventful, the IKEA experience – from the outside of the store, to showroom, to marketplace, to café, to checkout, to a hotdog for the road – works by following some of marketing’s most essential rules and breaking others, as a great new piece in The Hustle explains.

The numbers An analysis by researchers at University College London pegs the amount of impulse purchases in IKEA at 60%. While internally, the company believes that up to 80% of purchases defy logic.

Its in-store maze design is a “submissive experience”, one researcher tells The Hustle, in which shoppers are taken through the entire product catalogue.

Pricing is what brings people to IKEA, but once there it uses techniques like decoy prices to encourage buyers to choose more profitable options.

Food courts are essential: one study of 700 shoppers found that IKEA shoppers that ate in the in-store restaurant spent close to double what non-eaters spent.

How Alicia Keys is expanding her brand mindfully

By Ashley C. Ford

Growing up in the music business, Alicia Keys was used to working late into the night. Today, she’s as busy as ever—but also focused on being well.

You don’t garner 15 Grammys across a two-decade-long career without a strong work ethic. Alicia Keys, the artist with the dynamic voice and extraordinary songwriting and producing talent, developed hers at an early age.

in New York City, sometimes working multiple jobs. “She

Her role model was her mother, who raised Keys on her own

don’t work or don’t go for what you want, you won’t get it.”

had to work these long hours,” Keys tells me over Zoom on a bright March afternoon. “And so I saw her and I said, ‘Okay, that’s what you do. You work hard.’ Because if you

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The approach certainly produced results. But success came at the expense of Keys’s mental well-being. Keys was barely out of her teens when she first reached superstardom, and she has spoken publicly of experiencing episodes of exhaustion and depression amid the pressures of fame at a young age.

Since then, she’s developed a new understanding of what it means to commit to work while tending to her mind and body. “I do believe you can care deeply about yourself, which we don’t often allow ourselves,” she says.

Keys is now channeling her interest in mindfulness into an expanding portfolio of projects in the wellness space. In September 2020, she launched her Keys Soulcare skincare brand with E.L.F. Beauty. And in March, she debuted an athletic-wear collection with Athleta, part of an ongoing partnership with the brand that has her designing clothes and helping to spread its long-standing message of empowerment.

As she juggles these new business interests with the demands of her music career—she’s going on a world tour this summer—Keys has discovered she must reimagine the way she works once again. The habits of a performer, which include long hours in the studio in the single-minded pursuit of an artistic vision, don’t always lend themselves to being a good business partner and collaborator.

“Coming from the music [industry], it’s kind of expected that you start early, and you’ll end late, and you’re never going to have weekends off,” she says. “I have to work extra hard to create the proper culture.” In the midst of the pandemic, Keys is expanding her purview. But she’s also ensuring that work-life balance remains a priority for everyone involved, herself included.

“With the businesses that I’m building, there really is a theme about empowerment and diversity, and finding ways to be yourself,” Keys says. Fresh-faced and wearing a sweatshirt, she explains that she wants her E.L.F. and Athleta partnerships—and any others in the future—to prompt larger conversations.

Keys’s first collection with Athleta, which comes in sizes XXS to 3X, dropped in early March, on International Women’s Day. Athleta CEO Mary Beth Laughton says this initial line— the first of several to be designed with Keys—is intended to help introduce the brand to new consumers. “Alicia is such a great fit for us because throughout her 20-year career, she’s been vocal about her own well-being journey,” says Laughton.

The multiyear Athleta partnership follows the launch of Keys Soulcare, a skincare line that the performer developed with E.L.F. Beauty, the Oakland, California–based cosmetics company, which has been eager to expand into wellness.

Keys has been at the forefront of the natural beauty trend since 2016, when she declared in an essay titled “Time to Uncover” that she no longer wanted to conform to impossible standards and hide herself behind makeup.

Though she still uses cosmetics, Keys’s more unadorned approach to beauty has resonated—and is what E.L.F. is tapping into with Keys Soulcare, which is sold online and distributed by Ulta and Athleta.

I VALUE MYSELF NOW, AND I THINK FOR A LOT OF YEARS, I DIDN’T.” ALICIA KEYS Keys weighs in on branding decisions, works on formulas, ingredients, and efficacy with the company’s in-house dermatologist, and even writes all the affirmations that appear on the packaging. “There is not a single part of Keys Soulcare that she doesn’t touch,” says Kory Marchisotto, the CMO of E.L.F. Beauty and president of Keys Soulcare.

The pandemic nearly derailed plans to launch the brand in September 2020, forcing everyone to quickly adapt. Keys and the dedicated team at E.L.F. that’s responsible for Keys Soulcare had to conduct crucial product and packaging reviews over Zoom. Yet Keys was determined to see it through. “Alicia was the one saying, ‘Let’s go,’” Marchisotto says. “She has a lot of ‘yes’ energy.”

Of course, “yes” energy is something you need to manage carefully, as Keys knows all too well. She was just 21 years old when she took home five Grammys for her debut album, Songs in A Minor. Back in those days, she spent a lot of time doing what others wanted her to do. With experience, she grew. “I value myself now, and I think for a lot of years, I didn’t,” she says. “I learned that in order for me to be the most productive, I have to be well. I prioritize myself in a way that I just didn’t [before].”

Today, whether she is working with the six employees at her personal production company, AK Worldwide Productions, or the larger groups she collaborates with at Athleta and E.L.F., she looks to balance her strong creative vision with empathetic leadership. She makes a point to start quarterly meetings by asking team members how they are doing and keeps an eye on time-off requests for evidence of burnout.

“A lot of us who are working at high outputs feel like, in order to reach our goals or scale our businesses, we have to go to a level that surpasses normal,” she says. But that’s not sustainable. “I’m always thinking about how to make sure we’re creating time off and how we’re checking in [on people] just on a spirit level.”

She credits her husband, record producer and artist Swizz Beatz, with encouraging her to demand excellence in every project she takes on but also to pull back from “thinking you can control everything.” This shift in mindset was particularly useful as Keys was planning new businesses while, like every pandemic-era parent, helping her two sons, Egypt and Genesis, adapt to remote learning.

When I ask Keys what she’s thankful for today, she answers immediately: “Just being able to do the simple things,” she says, such as taking her children to school in the morning.

“My [youngest] son had a little sleepover last night,” Keys continues, noting that she usually doesn’t allow them on school nights. The perfectionist performer who once would have worked through the night on a project now makes flexibility, relaxation, and family time a priority.

“Last night we were able to break the rules,” she says, “and, for just those types of vibes, I’m super grateful.”

How Old Are Successful Tech Entrepreneurs?

By Benjamin F. Jones

Silicon Valley’s tech workers can go to great lengths to appear youthful—from having plastic surgery and hair transplants, to lurking in the parking lots of hip tech companies to see how the young and promising dress, as chronicled a few years ago by the New Republic.

While this may seem extreme, there is clearly a bias among many in the tech sector toward the young. Take Mark Zuckerberg’s statement that “young people are just smarter,” or the $100,000 fellowships that PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel hands out each year to bright entrepreneurs— provided that they are under 23.

“There’s this idea that young people are just more likely to have more valuable ideas,” says Benjamin Jones, a professor of strategy at the Kellogg School.

But is this notion accurate?

“If you look at age and great achievement in the sciences in general, it doesn’t peak in the twenties,” he says. “It’s more middle-aged.” Even Nobel Prize winners are having their breakthrough successes later and later in life, Jones found in earlier research. Are the startups of Silicon Valley really an exception?

In a new study, Jones, along with Javier Miranda of the U.S. Census Bureau and MIT’s Pierre Azoulay and J. Daniel Kim, use an expansive dataset to tackle that question. The researchers find that, contrary to popular thinking, the best entrepreneurs tend to be middle-aged. Among the very fastest-growing new tech companies, the average founder

was 45 at the time of founding. Furthermore, a given 50-year-old entrepreneur is nearly twice as likely to have a runaway success as a 30-year-old.

These findings have serious implications—not only for aspiring entrepreneurs, who might be over- or underestimating their odds of success based on their age, but for society at large. After all, if venture capitalists are reluctant to bet on older entrepreneurs, then many potentially successful startups may never get off the ground.

“If we’re not allocating dollars to the right people in entrepreneurship, we may be losing, in terms of the advances that best raise socioeconomic prosperity,” Jones says. “It’s actually a fairly high-stakes question.”

Older vs. Younger Entrepreneurs In theory, Jones says, there are plenty of good reasons to think that younger people make better entrepreneurs, especially in technology.

“One idea is that young people are especially likely to have transformative ideas—that they’re not beholden to the current paradigm,” he explains. “When you think of Mark Zuckerberg saying, ‘Move fast and break things,’ the

early Facebook mantra, it’s very much this emphasis on transformation and disruption.”

As digital natives, younger entrepreneurs may also have a better sense of how technology can meet consumer demands. Furthermore, people in their twenties are less likely to have mortgages or families that distract from their professional goals.

“They can be all-in, hour-after-hour, in a way that older people might have trouble matching, given other responsibilities,” Jones says.

But the opposite story is just as compelling: Older people have had decades to build the business, leadership, and problem-solving chops that help a startup succeed. And while they may be less tapped into certain consumer trends, especially around the habits of the young, they may know quite a bit more about other business opportunities.

“Experience can bring substantial insight about specific markets and specific technologies, in addition to skills at running things,” Jones argues.

So which narrative is correct? “I’ve wanted to ask the question for a very long time but didn’t have the data,” says Jones.

either by getting acquired by another company or going public in an IPO. The average founder for that group was even older, at 46.7.

While these results clearly indicate that middle-aged founders dominate among the highest-growth firms, it is also true that forty-somethings are much more likely to try to start a new company than twenty-somethings.

“There are more bites at the apple from 40-year-olds,” Jones says.

To further test their results, the researchers made another calculation looking at the probability of success among those who had founded a firm. They determined what they call “batting averages”— the odds that founders of different ages make it into the top 0.1 percentile.

The data revealed that a founder who is 50 years old is 1.8 times more likely to start a top company than a 30-yearold founder, and that a 20-year-old founder has the worst chance of all.

“The longer you’ve been around, the better your odds,” Jones says.

Why Do Entrepreneurs Get Better with Age?

While researchers could measure the success of new companies on a large scale, they were not able to identify their founders. That changed last year, when information on company owners was made available to researchers working on internal Census projects.

The results prompt another big question: What is it about middle-aged founders that accounts for their higher rate of success? Is it stronger leadership skills? Greater financial resources? A more robust network of customers and suppliers? Or something else entirely?

“The longer you’ve been around, the better your odds.”

While the paper does not attempt to pick apart all the mechanisms behind success, it does offer an enlightening insight: founders with three or more years of experience in the same industry as their startup are twice as likely to have a one-in-1,000 fastest-growing company.

By combining tax-filing data, U.S. Census information, and other federal datasets, the researchers were able to compile a list of 2.7 million company founders who hired at least one employee between 2007 and 2014.

Previous studies of entrepreneurship have had to rely on relatively small samples of founders. “But the beauty of administrative data is that it’s not a sample,” Jones says.

“It’s the actual universe of data.”

Focusing on Tech Entrepreneurs Among the 2.7 million founders in their dataset, the average age of a company’s founder at the time of founding was 41.9 years.

However, that analysis included all kinds of firms, from tech companies to nail salons to restaurants. The researchers were chiefly interested in high-growth new ventures—the kinds that can transform the economy—and understanding whether the Silicon Valley mythology was true. So they limited their dataset to include only technology companies, and further winnowed that down to the fastest-growing 0.1 percent—in other words, the one company out of every 1,000 that saw its sales or number of employees increase the most in its first five years.

Among this exclusive subset, the average founder age was 45.0. “It surprised me,” Jones says. “It’s even older than I thought.”

For an alternative measure of success, the researchers also looked at firms that had successfully “exited” the market,

“The facts stand strongly against the idea that you want to come from outside of the industry,” Jones says.

He hopes to explore this question more deeply in future research.

Jones also wants to investigate a puzzle that the paper introduces: while older people build stronger companies, venture capitalists nonetheless invest disproportionately in firms with younger founders.

Perhaps this is because young people tend to have fewer financial resources, so venture capitalists intentionally target them, knowing that they are likely to get a better stake in the company. Or it may be evidence that venture capitalists are buying into the flawed belief that young people make better entrepreneurs.

“It could be rational for the venture capitalists, or it could be that they’re just making a big mistake,” Jones says.

He suspects that the “young founder” myth has pushed young people to take unwise risks in the past and kept older people from acting on their ideas. He hopes that the study takes a step towards dispelling that myth.

“At the individual level, you have to ask yourself ‘Do I want to be a founder now, at this point in my life?’” he says of people deciding whether or not to choose the entrepreneurship path. “I think this can be very useful information to people weighing that decision.”

The Three-Word Brief

By Bob Hoffman’s

Those of us who create advertising or make advertising decisions need to start from a position of reality. What can advertising realistically achieve and how can it best achieve it?

Advertising is a small part of marketing. We don’t control the product. We don’t control the pricing. We don’t control the distribution, the customer service, or the marketing strategy.

The only thing we control is one aspect of communication.

Which leads to a big question. What is the one capability of advertising that has the greatest likelihood of resulting in success? Is it differentiation? Is it positioning? Is it creativity?

Is it precision targeting? Is it empathy? Is it brand purpose?

Is it salience (whatever that means.) Or is it something else?

The correct answer is, it’s something else. But until we know what that something else is, our objective is not clear and our task is not well-defined.

Before launching a new campaign, marketers, branding experts, and advertising practitioners often spend months trying to define what a brand should stand for. We are very fond of the concept of “brand meaning.”

This is driven by the belief that consumers impute specific attributes to brands and exercise their buying prerogatives

based on the meaning they assign to the brand, and how well that meaning aligns with their personal needs or values Marketers also believe that consumers want to have “relationships” with brands, and be part of a brand’s “tribe” or “community” and “co-create” with brands and, of course, respect and trust their “brand purpose.”

I think this is largely horseshit.

The idea that the brands we use are intensely important to us and that we spend time and energy sussing out their meaning and trustworthiness is a deeply ingrained marketing fantasy.

For most people, their relationship with most of the brands they buy is shallow, transactional, and contingent. Brands are not nearly as important or meaningful as we marketers would like them to be.

Are there some brands we’re attached to? Sure. We each have a handful. But consumers are faced with thousands of brands. The likelihood of yours being one of the handful they are strongly attached to is absurdly small.

Whenever I argue that brands are not as important to consumers as we marketers think they are, I get the same response from traditional marketers: “Oh, yeah, well how about Apple and Nike...?”

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I call this arguing from the extreme. They take the most extreme version of something and pretend it’s the norm. Of course, there are a handful of brands - like Apple - that have very loyal customers to whom the brand may be very meaningful.

These handful of brands are two or three standard deviations from normal and, I’m sorry, but your brand ain’t one of them.

As you’ll see, I believe the most probable driver of brand success -- and the central principle of communication that we advertisers can control -- is fame. Not brand meaning, or relationship building, or brand purpose or any of the other fantasies that the advertising and marketing industry has concocted.

Consumers are annoyingly impervious to understanding the finer points of product positioning, differentiation, and brand meaning.

Here are some questions for you:

Don’t agree? Stop someone on the street today and ask them what the difference is between BMW and Mercedes-Benz?

Ask them for the difference between Coke and Pepsi? Ask them how Nike is different from Adidas? I will bet you very large sums of money that their responses will have little to no correlation to the strategic documents floating around those brands’ headquarters. And these are some of the most successful brands in the world.

- Why do some people get the best tables at fancy restaurants while nicer people can’t even get in?

Each of these brands has spent tens of millions of dollars over the years concocting delusions of “differentiation.” They believe their brands are successful because of their unique “brand meaning.” They’re wrong.

Simple ideas like “fame” are anathema to the marketing industry.

The main advertising influence on their success is fame.

- Why do some actors get million dollar fees for appearing in movies while other equally good actors get nothing?

- Why do some people become President of the United States while there are millions who are smarter and more decent?

Right, because they’re famous. Fame is a massive advantage in business and in life.

We advertising and marketing professionals make our living by convincing business people that marketing communication is a deeply specialized practice that requires particular

knowledge and acumen. So we do our best to complicate the shit out of it.

That’s one of the reasons why “brand meaning” is such a popular idea. The more mysterious we can make brand building, the more brands need people like us to interpret consumer psychology. Brand meaning fits the bill very nicely.

But if consumer buying behavior is more reliably traceable to brand familiarity than to brand meaning, who needs all the relentless, expensive busywork we throw at developing brand meaning? How much value does all our research, ethnography, anthropology, strategy and planning have if actual consumer behavior is more directly aligned to simple familiarity than to the meaning of the brand? Or its position?

Or its purpose?

The people who promote the importance of brand meaning are promulgating a self-serving theory that puts them at the center of marketing activity by placing the interpretation of consumer behavior in their hands.

Ironically, the brand meaning crowd tend to be further removed from the behavior of actual consumers than they’d have us believe. They claim to understand the consumer, but do they really? It has been demonstrated time and again that marketing and advertising people live in a world that has little relation to the world of most of the people they are trying to influence. If you doubt this, I will be happy to accompany you to the DMV and show you what your customers actually look like.

Marketers’ “understanding” of consumers is usually not based on actual first-hand experience, but on the reports of people who brief them — researchers, strategists, and planners. The researchers, strategists, and planners tend to share the same brand delusions that the marketing people have. They tend to interpret the behavior of consumers through the same lens and language of differentiation, positioning, and “meaning” as the marketers. When you’re looking for brand meaning, it’s very rare not to find it.

Try this. Read the documents that your researchers, strategists, and planners have written about the meaning of your brand.

Then get out in the street and ask a few people what comes to mind about your brand. I promise, you’ll be appalled.

While most brands do not have deep meaning to most of us, and while our discernment of brand positioning and differentiation may not be all it’s cracked up to be, at some point when we’re buying we do have to make a decision.

It is not that positioning and differentiation are irrelevant.

It’s that a) they are not advertising’s primary contribution to brand success and b) they are not as compelling to real people as most marketers think they are.

Nonetheless, when we are creating advertising, it has to be about something. Positioning and differentiation are better than non-positioning and non-differentiation. So go ahead and position and differentiate away. Just don’t fool yourself into believing that they are advertising’s central goal.

Oh yeah, and don’t ever let some half-assed marketer’s idea of purpose, empathy, empowerment -- or whatever happens to be the brand babbler cliché of the month -- get in the way of a great idea. In an environment like advertising, where strategic insight is usually a cruel joke, a great creative idea

is usually the best advertising strategy.

While we’re on the subject of marketing knowledge, let’s take a little side trip. While I believe that positioning is a useful concept in advertising, I wonder why I believe it? (I’m using “positioning” as an example here. The following is also true for several other widely accepted marketing dogma.)

Do I believe it because I’ve seen hard evidence? Or do I believe it because “experts” have told me so? As someone who claims to be skeptical of the opinions of marketing experts, I have to admit that I may well be the type of idiot I’m always railing against -- because I don’t have the slightest bit of scientific evidence for believing that positioning is predictably effectual.

In order to prove to my logical lobe that positioning in advertising is essential, I would have to see research on a requisite sample of ad campaigns -- many hundreds -- in which products that were determined to be “well-positioned” outperformed products that were not “well-positioned.”

I would also have to confirm that other factors like creativity and media weight have been controlled for.

I have never seen such a study. I have seen dozens of anecdotes and case histories (just a fancier term for anecdotes) and thousands of assertions about the efficacy of positioning, but nothing even resembling a scientific study with a random, reliable sample and well-controlled-for variables.

In believing in the efficacy of positioning, I am trusting that 1) my general “sense” of how marketing works is reliable, 2) conventional marketing people know what they’re talking about, and 3) consumers are reliably sensitive to the distinctions we call “positioning.”

I have very little reason to believe any of that.

If I may continue down this road... at one time I was a science teacher. I also spent a year as special assistant to the executive director of the California Academy of Science. By no means am I a trained scientist. But by hanging around for a while in science-world I picked up a few pointers on the difference between a fact and an opinion.

Many marketing practitioners assume that concepts like positioning, differentiation, purpose, empathy, etc are important in the success of advertising because “everybody knows they are.” Well, I don’t know they are and until someone can prove it to me I will remain skeptical.

Widely held beliefs based on questionable assumptions can be very dangerous and costly. It has been my experience that the existing science in support of these marketing shibboleths is not terribly convincing.

Contemporary advertising thinking would also have us believe that a clear path to brand success is built on personalization and precision targeting (thanks in large part to the influence of the online media industry and its supplicants.) I would like to suggest the opposite.

I would like to suggest that the main power of advertising is not in precision targeting, it is in mass targeting. The real power in advertising is in having large numbers of people familiar with and comfortable with your brand. A realistic view of the world’s most successful brands gives us a very clear and unambiguous picture — spreading the word is far

more likely to create success than concentrating it.

Most marketers are famously inept at creating a consequential differentiation for their brand. That’s why god created advertising. A poorly differentiated brand that everybody has heard of has a lot better chance of success than a welldifferentiated brand that nobody’s heard of.

In the long run, getting a lot of people familiar with your brand and comfortable with it has a much higher probability of building your business than any other theory of marketing communication.

Familiarity and comfort with a brand come in a variety of ways, including... …the brand my mom used …the brand my neighbor uses and likes …the brand that works satisfactorily for me …the brand I see everywhere The questionable brand “differentiators” dreamed up in conference rooms and codified in briefing documents are largely lost on consumers and play secondary roles in most actual purchasing behavior. And yet developing these so-called brand differentiators — through research, ethnography, strategy and planning exercises — occupy an enormous amount of time, energy, and money. If you’ve had a look at advertising lately, I doubt I have to tell you how infrequently they result in anything very compelling.

On the other hand, brands that are well-known and distinctive (both a cause and an effect of fame) in their categories are the ones that tend to have the most marketing success and tend to be category leaders.

Is this always the case? No. Is it the most probable case? Yes. Nothing in marketing is absolute, all we have are likelihoods and probabilities.

Marketers have the naive but apparently fact-resistant belief that customers care deeply about what they buy, and buy according to a logical or emotional comparison of what they want and what the brand says it’s “about.” Sometimes they do. But mostly they don’t.

I am officially skeptical that consumers exercise as much conscious assessment of alternatives when they make a purchase as we marketers believe.

Before I get an avalanche of abuse from the people who are betting their company’s money on traditional marketing assumptions, let me explain…

- Do people recognize the differences between brands? Not as much as we’d like to believe.

- Do people have brand preferences? In most cases, yes.

- Does a strong brand have value to a marketer? Without question, tremendous value.

Q: Wait a second. You say a strong brand has tremendous value, but consumers aren’t that interested in brands. WTF? A: Exactly. Most consumer choices are done without deep thought. People don’t have the time, energy, or inclination to assess the ramifications of every brand decision before they buy. The fact that people are not as sensitive to brand

variance as we think makes strong brands more powerful, not less.

Ironically, the less energy people spend analyzing brand meaning, the more important top-of-mind awareness (or as Prof. Sharp might call it, “mental availability”) becomes.

One more time...the less patience and appetite people have for analyzing brand variables, the more important brand familiarity and comfort become.

But let’s get back on track. What we are talking about today is not the value of a strong brand, it is the most probable way of creating a strong brand.

Any scientific, non-ideological interpretation of consumer behavior can lead to only one conclusion: Most people buy most brands in most categories because they are familiar and comfortable with them. Not because they are the most deeply understood or the most personally meaningful. The leading brands in virtually every category tend to be the most familiar, regardless of what the brand babblers say about their meaning.

Let’s make this even simpler. People are mostly too busy, too lazy, or too indifferent to give 2/5ths of a flying shit about the “meaning” of the stuff they buy. Mostly, they buy on auto-pilot from familiar brands they feel comfortable with.

The easier you make it for people to choose your brand the more likely you are to be successful. From the standpoint of advertising, the best way to make the choice easier is to be famous and let probability do its work.

This is true even for brands that are already famous. Like the man said, when you get the plane to 35,000 feet you don’t turn off the engines. This is why outstanding creative work is such an unmatched advertising asset. It creates a lot more fame per dollar.

Does this mean that positioning, differentiation et al are not at all important? No. As previously stated, when you create advertising it has to be about something. So you might as well make it about something useful like positioning and differentiation. But these elements of advertising are not the central goal. The central goal is to achieve fame. A brand that is famous has enormous advantages over its rival brands that are not famous.

This does not mean that fame is a guarantee of success.

Fame cannot save a stupid idea or a stupid product. Fame is strong. But stupid is stronger.

There are several ways for brands to achieve fame. Some do it by being clearly superior and generating exceptional word of mouth. This is obviously the best way to become famous.

Some get lucky. They’re good copy. The media love to cover them, follow them everywhere, and provide them with zillions in free exposure.

Others become famous through imaginative PR initiatives, clever stunts, the charismatic personalities of their leaders, or a combination of these things. There are many ways to achieve fame, and they’re all good.

The most expensive way to become famous is through advertising. It is the most expensive, but also the most reliable.

It is the only avenue to fame that you can buy your way into.

What Separates the Hitmakers from the One-Hit Wonders

By Dylan Walsh

An analysis of 3 million songs explores the question: Is it better to churn out than to fade away?

Why has Beyoncé had over 60 hit singles since 2003, while Hilary Duff, who debuted on the charts in the same year, has only had seven? How do we account for the enduring catalogs of Billy Joel and U2 while Lou Bega’s and Blind Melon’s stars quickly fizzled? And, why, for every Stevie Wonder or Dolly Parton, are there dozens of Tommy Tutones

and Chumbawambas — acts that score a hit or two and then all but disappear?

“Music has a very high churn rate, making it a quintessential creative industry,” says Justin Berg, an assistant professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business. “It is full of one-hit wonders, but we see very few

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sustained hitmakers.”

A search for what causes this divergence lies at the heart of new researchopen in new window by Berg, who has long studied the workings of creativity. He finds that a musician’s portfolio of songs leading up to their initial success helps predict how well their career will endure. Artists who have crafted a creative catalog of music by the time they achieve their first hit tend to keep generating additional hits. Those with less creative catalogs early in their careers often peak quickly, then fade away.

This insight is a departure from existing theories about creativity, which assume that the process of creation is “path independent” — the success of one creative work is unrelated to the success (or failure) of the next one.

“I instead explored the possibility that creative endeavors are path dependent: Early work is connected to later work, and success can mess with you — it can lock you in, it can make you learn things you shouldn’t have or prevent you from learning as you go forward,” Berg says. “It can create expectations that are unrealistic or limiting.”

The Double-Edged Sword of Creativity To test this idea, Berg assembled an archival dataset of more than 3 million songs by nearly 70,000 artists — virtually every song released by any artist on a hit-producing label between 1959 and 2010. “It was a giant effort, but well worth it,” he says of the data collection process.

From this list, Berg tagged artists with at least one Billboard Hot 100 song during the period, amounting to 7% of the total population of artists (who altogether produced 19,000 hit songs). He then measured the level of creativity in each artist’s portfolio of songs at the time of their first hit. Using a series of algorithms, Berg quantified creativity in terms of both novelty and variety: How sonically distinct was the artist’s portfolio compared to others’ hits at the time? How internally diverse was the artist’s catalog of songs? These two measures of creativity were then overlaid on each artist’s career to determine whether a relationship exists between a portfolio’s creativity and long-term success.

“Artists cannot maximize their odds of being a hitmaker without simultaneously increasing their odds of having zero hits in their careers.”

Berg found, most fundamentally, that artists with novel or varied catalogs at the time of their first hit were more likely to keep creating hit songs. Two mechanisms likely drive this result. First, expectations: Because success often occurs quickly in creative industries, musicians can be thrust from obscurity to icon status in weeks. Industry gatekeepers and fans then exert tremendous pressure, through their expectations, on the kinds of music with which the artist can find success going forward. Having a more creative portfolio when initial success strikes broadens the range of these expectations, and thus the possibility of longevity in an ever-shifting market.

The second mechanism is learning: A novel or diverse portfolio also implies that the artist has been experimenting and learning a range of creative tools. Once they achieve success, this past learning can serve them well as they try to keep up with the constant changes in pop trends. Artists who reach their initial hits with little creativity in their portfolios usually struggle to adapt as the market leaves them behind.

“When you go from a low level of success to being pumped through the airwaves all over the world, then everything you’ve learned up until that point becomes very important, as do the expectations of the gatekeepers and the audience,” Berg says. “At that point, artists are much more likely to succeed with new songs that are closely related to their existing portfolios. The problem is they also need to keep up with new trends that emerge in the market. Artists with more creative portfolios have more options for pulling off this balancing act over time, increasing their odds of sustained success.”

However, Berg also found that building a novel portfolio makes it less likely that an artist will have a hit in the first place. Unorthodox music is, by definition, usually not popular. There is an irresolvable tension between cultivating a typical catalog that is likely to have initial success and building a novel repertoire that supports long-term success.

“Artists cannot maximize their odds of being a hitmaker without simultaneously increasing their odds of having zero hits in their careers,” Berg says.

Can You “Moneyball” Pop Hits?

Broadly, Berg hopes this research will spark people across all creative industries — from writers and chefs to architects and choreographers — to consider their body of work as a unified whole, akin to an investment portfolio. The novelty or variety of earlier work may enable or constrain one’s creative capacity and success down the road. Taking time to establish a strong foundation may delay initial success but boost the odds of a viable career in the long run.

This study also has important implications for the use of data to predict commercial success in creative work, especially the music industry. Berg suspects that data analytics could help upend the way the music industry chews up and spits out artists.

“Some clever executives or producers could probably take the insights and methods from this study and come up with a data-driven approach to signing and managing artists, where they are preparing artists for sustained success instead of cashing in on short-term opportunism,” Berg says. “If you want to be Bruce Springsteen and eventually sell your catalog for $500 million, then you need more than a couple of hits.”

However, Berg warns that relying solely on quantitative data to predict creators’ success may be misguided. “I think measures like those in this study ought to be used in conjunction with more intuitive assessments of creative work,” he says. “A 100%-data approach may someday beat a mix, but we’re not there yet. At this point, if someone were using a hybrid data and intuition approach, I’d bet on them over either one alone.”

Book,

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Line

Build Your Brand Mania: How to Transform Yourself Into an Authoritative Brand That Will Attract Your Ideal Customers

By Matt Bertram he missing piece of internet marketing that almost all business owners miss is transforming themselves into an authoritative brand that attracts their ideal customers.

Sticky Branding: 12.5 Principles to Stand Out, Attract Customers, and Grow an Incredible Brand

By Jeremy Miller Companies like Apple, Nike, and Starbucks have made themselves as recognizable as they are successful.

But large companies are not the only ones who can stand out. Any business willing to challenge industry norms and find innovative ways to serve its customers can grow into a Sticky Brand.

Linkedin: The Number One Social Network for Personal Branding

By Michael King Linkedin The Number One Social Network for Personal Branding is a comprehensive guide to building a successful personal brand on LinkedIn. This book will help you to understand how using LinkedIn can help you to gain an edge over your competitors.

Hook Point: How to Stand Out in a 3-Second World

By Brendan Kane Hook Point: How to Stand Out in a 3-Second World, by out of the box thinker Brendan Kane, breaks down the most effective strategies to generate new opportunities, innovate and scale your business, and create a compelling brand— both online and off—so you can thrive in the new micro-attention world in which we live.

Sinker How to Launch a Brand (2nd Edition): Your Step-by-Step Guide to Crafting a Brand: From Positioning to Naming And Brand Identity

By Fabian Geyrhalter Most entrepreneurs, even seasoned brand managers, launch first and then work on slowly transforming the new offering into a brand. A logical progression, I would agree.

Identity Designed: The Definitive Guide to Visual Branding

By David Airey

Ideal for students of design, independent designers, and entrepreneurs who want to expand their understanding of effective design in business, Identity Designed is the definitive guide to visual branding.

Lifescale: How to Live a More Creative, Productive, and Happy Life

By Brian Solis Somewhere along the way, we got distracted.

As much as we multitask, love our devices and feel like we’re in control, deep down we know that something is off. Shortened attention spans, declines in critical thinking, lack of sleep, selfdoubt and decreased creativity are just some of the effects coming to light in an age of digital distraction.

Winning at Social Customer Care: How Top Brands Create Engaging Experiences on Social Media

By Dan Gingiss Seth Godin has taught and inspired millions of entrepreneurs, marketers, leaders, and fans from all walks of life, via his blog, online courses, lectures, and bestselling books. He is the inventor of countless ideas that have made their way into mainstream business language, from Permission Marketing to Purple Cow to Tribes to The Dip.

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He Said, She Said: Branding

By Michael Russo In He Said, She Said: Branding, the husband and wife team of Jaci and Michael Russo share what they’ve learned over their combined decades of experience working in branding and with each other. Through their unique voices, you’ll learn about tried-and- true branding best practices and even get an inside look into how their agency has continued to help businesses from coast to coast thrive for the past twenty years.

Brand Storytelling: Put Customers at the Heart of Your Brand Story

By Miri Rodriguez Written by the award-winning storyteller Miri Rodriguez at Microsoft, this actionable guide goes beyond content strategy and, instead, demonstrates how to leverage brand storytelling in the marketing mix to strengthen brand engagement and achieve long-term growth, with advice from brands like Expedia, Coca Cola, McDonalds, Adobe and Google.

The Business of Aspiration

By Ana Andjeli The Business of Aspiration is about how consumers’ shifting status symbols affect business and brand strategy. These changing status symbols, like taste, aesthetic innovation, curation or environmentalism create the modern aspirational economy.

Activate Brand Purpose: How to Harness the Power of Movements to Transform Your Company

By Scott Goodson We live in an age of activism - the conscious consumer is more socially aware than ever before, and this is reflected in their buying habits.

Yet, activism on behalf of brands is lagging. While many claim to be ‘purpose driven’, far too often this purpose is relegated to a plaque above the CEO’s desk, and never goes any further.

B.Y.O.B. Building Your Own Brand: Branding for Designers, Brand Strategy, Identity Assets, Logo Design, Blogging & Marketing

By Karan Gupta Who is this book for? This book is tailored for professionals in the fields of graphic design, branding design, visual design, ui/ux, business administration, brand management, public relations, architecture, interior design, content marketing and communication design.

REBRAND: The Ultimate Guide to Personal Branding

By Bernard Kelvin Clive In the midst of this noisy and busy world if you don’t purposely decide to stand-out you will be drowned by competition. This book contains guidelines to help you build an authentic personal brand that will promote your product and services.

Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

By Rory Sutherland “Sutherland, the legendary Vice Chairman of Ogilvy, uses his decades of experience to dissect human spending behavior in an insanely entertaining way. Alchemy combines scientific research with hilarious stories and case studies of campaigns for AmEx, Microsoft and the like. This is a must-read.” —Entrepreneur (“Best Books of the Year”)

The Context Marketing Revolution: How to Motivate Buyers in the Age of Infinite Media

By Gavin Turner We are in the midst of a massive media revolution.

For the first time in history, ordinary people around the world have the ability to create, distribute, and consume content instantly, from anywhere, using connected devices.