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Dear Friends: The menace of the Covid pandemic rages on world over and nations are battling it out to keep their citizens safe and well. As we do our own little bit, our prayers are with everyone.
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Economic downturn is a given considering where we have been left with the pandemic and in this edition we talk about pivoting and adapting to the situation with tactics and marketing strategy that can work. As the needle keeps moving in the world of brands and marketing, one thing that will come to the fore is ‘ justifying creativity ‘- get a lowdown on that in this issue. They have been the ‘ unsung heroines ‘ but the time is now for brands and businesses to accord more women their rightful place in the sun. Read about it here. The inimitable Tom Peters articulates some profound(and unexpected advice) to the marketing community. Soak it all in from this edition. Digital Communication is not everyone’s cup of tea, in spite of claims to the contrary. Understand the ‘ how to ‘ by reading the feature in this issue of BrandKnew. There is no sure fire formula to creativity in ads but you surely can take a look at these 7 proven strategies to make a significant difference in your advertising. Partnership marketing (or the Interaction Field as Erch Joachimsthaler would define it as) can build strong muscles for your brand and organisation. Read about it here. Would video advertising integrations on social media platforms spell the end of advertising? A crystal ball gazing is done in this issue. The lines have blurred- what’s mine is ours- consumption is given a new look. Know more in this edition. There’s ample more to chew on and take inspiration from. Till the next safe thoughts and prayers and my very best!
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Managing Editor: Suresh Dinakaran Creative Head/Director Operations: Pravin Ahir Magazine Concept & Design/ New Media Specialist: Mufaddal Joher Chief Strategy Director: Rishi Mohan Brand Engagement and Outreach Specialist: Anuva Madan Chief Country Man, India: Rohit Unni Brand Trends and Research Architect: Meeta Pendse Revenue Growth Architect: Ritu Dey Country Head, Australia: Norbert D’Souza Country Head, UK: Sagar Patil Performance Marketing Architect: Suresh Babu Technology & Web Enabler: Vyanky Charakpalli Social Media Outreach: Pooja Chhabda Research & Planning Specialist: Sarang Nair SEO Advocate: Santhosh Rakonda Content & PR: Nitin Kumar
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CONTENTS What’s Mine Is Ours: How Consumption Is Changing Justifying Creativity Is Key In 2021 How Brands Can Seize The Shoppable Media Opportunity Four Ways to Adapt Your Marketing Strategy and Tactics for an Economic Downturn Video Advertising Integrations Spell the End of Advertising Tom Peters’ Profound And Unexpected Advice To The Marketing Community Struggling With Digital Communication? Here Are Five Ways To Nail It This Is The Guiding Question For Your Service Business Or Personal Brand Three Proven Strategies For Advertising On Amazon 10 Steps Brands Can Take Now To Boost Women In Business 7 Ways To Build Your Business And Brand Partnership Muscle Martech Hangs In The Balance Best Foot Forward: Could Fashion Be The Next Big Thing In Corporate Social Purpose? Alexsandro Pinto: What Is Required Of A Good Marketer In 2021 Is Now Different Why Timestamping Your Online Content Is So Important Top 7 Ways To Make Your Ad More Creative—And Effective—In 2021 And Beyond Less Is More: Redefining The Luxury Goods Market ‘Advertising Still Not Casting Women In Compelling, Real Narratives’ Off The Record: Masked Marketer Interview - Scott Tilton Book, Line & Sinker
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What’s Mine Is Ours: How Consumption Is Changing By Wharton Staff
Technology hasn’t just changed the way consumers use
Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, are two
goods and services, it’s also changed the way they own them.
of the paper’s authors. They joined Knowledge@Wharton
Music collections, for example, have evolved from hundreds
to talk about changes in consumption and offered some
of alphabetically-organized records on a shelf, to carefully
strategies for marketers.
edited digital libraries, to the 2021 version — a list of songs stored on Spotify or some other streaming platform. What consumers used to think of as “mine” is now “ours” in the sharing economy, where everything from car rides to books has become less of a coveted item and more of an experience. But marketers know that there is value in psychological ownership. When customers form an emotional attachment or self-identify with a product, that sense of “mine” enhances its luster and keeps them coming back for more. As shoppers shift away from owning material things, how can marketers preserve these benefits? Some answers can be found in a new study, “Evolution of Consumption: A Psychological Ownership Framework,” which recently appeared in the
Knowledge@Wharton: This is such a timely topic for marketers. What made you want to study it and what questions were you trying to answer? Deborah Small: There is this very classic and robust finding in the science of decision-making known as the “endowment effect.” The endowment effect is the fact that people value things more when they own them than they would if they were not in their possession. For instance, if you had a fancy bottle of wine in your possession, the amount of money you would be willing to [accept to] give it up is much higher than the amount of money you would be willing to pay to acquire it if you didn’t own it.
Journal of Marketing. Wharton marketing professor Deborah
Scholars have understood for a long time that ownership
Small and Carey Morewedge, a marketing professor at
takes on this special psychological significance, but much of
this evidence was based on very traditional possessions, very
At the same time, it feels like we’re losing something — the
tangible items that a person had all to themselves. Maybe
feeling of mine. Our paper tries to understand and explore
a coffee mug or something like that. What really started
the consequences of its absence.
this paper was our musings about all of these new business models and new technologies that are moving away from traditional forms of ownership. Rather than owning my own car or bicycle, I might participate in ridesharing or bikesharing. Before, I had all these bookshelves filled with books and CDs and photo albums; now, I can store these things
Knowledge@Wharton: In the paper, you identify two important changes in consumer behavior. The first one is a change from legal ownership of goods to legal access of goods. The second one is that material possession is being replaced with experiences. Can you explain those?
virtually. We used to keep all of our medical records and tax
Small: We’re not the first to notice these changes. There’s
records and bank account records. All that personal data
been much discussion about access-based consumption.
was stored in a filing cabinet in physical files in our homes.
Sometimes it’s referred to as “liquid consumption,” which
Now, that storage is mainly in the cloud in an opaque form.
essentially distributes or spreads out property rights across
These advances are no doubt fantastic and provide a lot of value to consumers, but we found that they’re missing some of the signature markers of ownership. One is tangibility: I can still experience music, but I don’t have a physical album. Second, permanence: When I use a rideshare, I don’t expect a long-term relationship with that car. We wrote this paper as a way to try to deepen our understanding of what is at stake here from a psychological ownership perspective.
hundreds, even thousands of consumers. As Dr. Morewedge mentioned, this is very convenient for consumers. It’s cheaper, it’s less of a commitment, they can try out different things without the big expensive purchase. There’s a lot of freedom there for consumers, but they also lose a lot of control over the good because it’s not just theirs anymore. It’s also very temporary and short-lived, so they are less prone to develop psychological attachments and feel connections to their goods. These are critical aspects of psychological
Carey Morewedge: I remember in graduate school I would
ownership — the ability to control things, the development of
go to the library, and if I had to read an article, I would
a relationship over time.
photocopy it and write all over it. Those articles became a treasured resource locked in a filing cabinet in my office, and I would go back to the same physical document each time, covered in notes, underlining, and my reactions. When I eventually moved offices, I recycled all of that because I had duplicates on my computer, but it still felt like a loss of the self. I use PDFs now. Everything is digital, and I can read it anywhere, but there’s something about that digital copy that I don’t care as much about. I don’t feel ownership for the collection of PDFs that I store in the cloud. At least not in the way that those tangible pieces of paper felt like part of me.
“The trend is shifting such that we’re owning less and less material, tangible things than we did in the past.”– Deborah Small The second personal example is when I was younger, I was a DJ, and I have thousands of records in my house. I haven’t played them for a while. I’ve got a young child, a second on
The feeling that something is mine is a function of believing I am in control and expect to maintain something for a long time. That’s the first dimension — legal ownership to legal access. The second is this shift from more material consumption to more experiential consumption. We’re moving away from physical goods in many categories, to things that we merely experience, or that are digital or ephemeral in some way. The key threat to psychological ownership here is the lack of tangibility. Tangibility is a signature marker of a possession. Consider the case of purchasing a DVD for your movie collection. We don’t do that anymore. We purchase access to consume music. But it’s also more than that. The goal of purchasing is more about experiencing that movie or song rather than the goal of owning it or having it. It’s not that we never did that before — we went on vacation and stayed in a hotel, and we rented things occasionally. But the trend is shifting such that we’re owning less and less material, tangible things than we did in the past.
the way, and don’t have time to do that. But I still see them on
Knowledge@Wharton: The paper identifies three macro
the wall, and they remind me of a part of my identity and past.
trends in marketing. What are those?
The music that I listen to now is no more or less important to me, but it somehow feels different because when I close my laptop or turn off my phone, it all disappears. There’s no permanence to that kind of content.
Morewedge: The first would be growth of the sharing economy. We’re now engaging in many kinds of collaborative consumption like renting, reselling, and lending. We’re consuming things simultaneously. Many people are reading
This exchange that we’re making is extraordinarily convenient.
the same file or listening to the same music at once, and
I can be on the beach and pull down from the cloud the
we’re resource pooling. It’s not that these things weren’t
exact song I want to listen to, or the book I want to read.
present in our economy before. People used libraries and
shared with their friends and neighbors. The difference is that these platforms are mediating these kinds of transactions between strangers. What used to be public goods or things that you shared with your friends are now things that we’re using through this exchange with other people through these technologically-mediated platforms. You could think about a rideshare platform or a bicycle rental or renting an office from WeWork or renting clothes from Rent the Runway. We might not necessarily have wanted to spend the money on a fancy outfit for a wedding, and now you can rent that. It’s not that there weren’t places that you could rent clothes before, but it’s becoming much easier, and we’re using it for much more of our life.
“Our possessions become part of our self. And we see ourselves, and thus our things, through rose-colored glasses.”–Carey Morewedge The second is the digitization of goods and services. Streaming is now the most popular way to consume music, and we see this kind of diffusion of digital consumption through books, email, films, magazines, maps, news, and television. Think about the last time that you opened a paper map or the last time that you sent letters. Most of our letters are exchanged
it? Small: It’s important to start with an understanding of the underlying features of psychological ownership that are particularly meaningful and important to consumers. Feeling in control. Being able to express who you are through the goods that you possess. There’s a very seminal academic article in marketing titled “Possessions and the Extended Self,” which is all about how our possessions help define who we are and signal who we are both to ourselves and to others. Everything from the type of car you drive to your brand of blue jeans says something about who you are. To answer your question about how marketers need to think about this, it’s going to vary a lot across firms and product categories. But marketers need to be thinking about ways to offer those benefits in other forms and ways to retain psychological ownership as they shift to these new models. Can they find new ways to offer their consumers choices even when they’re in an access-based consumption model? Let’s say they’re selecting a car for a rental or a rideshare. Can they still have choices over the features of that car, so they feel more in control? Are there other opportunities for them to express who they are within these platforms, where they’re creating profiles of themselves and interacting with other consumers and firms?
in these kinds of digital communications. Those are not
It’s going to vary a lot, but I think the crux is for marketers to
necessarily the ones that people consider identity-relevant
recognize that those are some of the key features that provide
(like a birthday card), but the kinds of goods that we used
value to consumers, and to try to kind of creatively find ways
to think about as holding our cherished memories (like our
to bring those back.
communications, our photographs, our videos) are now all digital. The last trend is expansion of personal data. Our interactions, whether with government or with businesses, were often constrained to a record that was a single exchange. We had a receipt, and that was the data that existed about our behavior. Now, governments and firms have incredibly personal information about all facets of our lives: where we visited, who we were with, what photographs and videos we’ve taken, what’s our search history, what’s our medical or even our genetic information.
“Everything from the type of car you drive to your brand of blue jeans says something about who you are. The question is: What is lost, psychologically-speaking, when much of consumption exists without ownership?”–Deborah Small Morewedge: I would think first about the kinds of changes
As Prof. Small mentioned, we used to have physical paper
that are happening and how we find ways to either address
copies of our financial transactions, for example, our tax
them, offset them, or channel them. Think about the
records. Now, you might complete all of your taxes on
impermanence of things. If consumers access their health
a cloud-based platform, and the firm owns that data and
data through MyChart in the cloud, for example, are there
is selling it to others for marketing purposes for loans or
ways to give them an extended feeling of permanence? Can
for credit cards. The question of who owns that kind of
firms guarantee access over an extended duration to that
information is becoming increasingly relevant for consumers.
kind of experience? If I’m uploading my data, can I access
That tension is being played out in really interesting kinds of
it in perpetuity or for a number of years? If we’re losing the
policy arguments about what data should firms own, what
tangibility of material goods for these kinds of experiences,
data should consumers have rights to, and do we have a
are there ways that we can offer control that aren’t necessarily
right to be forgotten. This is a developing literature, but it’s
physical, but that give us different kinds of control over the
an important one, and we wanted to map paths for the field
goods?
to explore.
In experiential consumption, when you’re buying a trip
Knowledge@Wharton: If psychological ownership is so
from point A to point B in a rideshare like Uber or Lyft, it’s
beneficial in marketing, what can marketers do to preserve
ambiguous who owns what. You’re purchasing a ride, but
brandknewmag.com
13
what do you really own in that kind of context? Give people
the things that we used to think of as goods that we owned
some sense of clarity about what they own. For example, if
are becoming commodities. If I’m renting a car, I rent it by a
you’re renting a house on Airbnb, do you get information
class of car, not a particular model. If I’m using a rideshare,
about your upcoming visit and what you’re getting with your
I don’t really care what brand of car I’m riding in, I just care
trip? Are there ways we can remind people of their usage
about getting from point A to point B in comfort and safety.
history and all the kinds of experiences that they’ve had in
So, brands have to start thinking about whether or not they
these kinds of settings? Are there kinds of gamification we
want to engage in vertical integration to keep consumers
can use to show people a progression in their status through different kinds of programs? You’ve listened to this song 10 times! These were your top 10 songs on the streaming service in 2020. Give those experiences meaning, and connect them to memory cues, markers of having had them. There are really important consequences here, where a lot of
caring about their brand. Brands have to think about becoming commodities in cases where they were once these really strong markers of a consumer’s identity. Disney pulled most of its content from Netflix, for example, and started its own streaming platform. That may save Disney movies from becoming fungible with all the other programming for kids available through Netflix (or Amazon).
These kinds of threats are also giving rise to new kinds of
they have ownership rights, when they don’t feel they should
opportunities. In many cases, we’re engaging in new ways
be compensated for their use.
of collaborative consumption with other people. We have these communities of people consuming things that didn’t exist before. In those cases, we’re moving from mine to ours. Can brands tie into thinking about how we get people to feel membership in a group of consumers? There’s a lot of work in marketing looking at these kinds of brand communities. Harley Davidson is always touted as a firm that successfully built up a community around its products. Reddit is a place these communities appear to be forming organically. Other brands may have to start to think about that kind of development and get consumers to think about their
The third case would be when it creates frictions in sharing markets. For example, if I feel really strong psychological ownership for a particular brand of car, whether it be BMW or Toyota or Honda or Ford, that may create frictions for Uber when they try to give me a substitute like a Hyundai. If you think about these different kinds of goods needing to be highly substitutable, encouraging a feeling of ownership for any one of those goods may be deleterious for the firm because it’s leading consumers to search elsewhere for that kind of good.
membership in a group rather than their use of a particular
The last case is when service quality is inconsistent. As Dr.
good.
Small mentioned, this kind of endowment effect, or feeling
Knowledge@Wharton: I was surprised to read in your paper that there are some instances where companies would actually benefit if their customers do not have a sense of ownership in the product. What kind of instances are those?
of psychological ownership, has a value-enhancing effect. We see the things that are ours through these rose-colored glasses. If I feel psychological ownership for something, I may have higher expectations for the performance of that product, and firms have difficulty living up to that. We know
Morewedge: We identify four in the paper, and I’ll run
that customer satisfaction is performance minus expectations,
through each and then give you an example. The first is
and so if you’re going to have variable kinds of performance,
when changes in access rights are likely. The next is when
then it may not need to have that kind of value enhancement
consumers are the product, like lots of advertising-based
that psychological ownership engenders.
and freemium services. The third is when it creates frictions in sharing markets. And the last is when service quality is inconsistent. Getting to this question of access rights, for example, Microsoft ended sales of e-books in 2019, and it also deleted and refunded all books purchased through that platform. So, if I built this library on Microsoft e-books, it’s suddenly gone
Knowledge@Wharton: What is next for this line of research? Small: Many possibilities. We joke and use the term “me search,” which refers to studying things that are selfrelevant to us, that we, as researchers, are going through or experiencing.
and I get a check in the mail for what I purchased. That
One thing we talked about, as we were putting the finishing
kind of sudden change in access, if consumers do feel strong
touches on this paper over the summer as we were all working
psychological ownership, may leave them to feel a sense of
from home, was the subject of remote work. We discuss in the
loss or anger when their access rights are revoked. So, when
paper how there’s a parallel between the changing nature
the catalog that firms are offering in terms of these access-
of work, for which there is no longer a physical office. The
based models is highly fluid, they may not want consumers to
boundaries between home and work are becoming more
feel psychological ownership if it’s going to disappear later
liquid just in the way that a lot of consumption is becoming
on.
more liquid. That’s just one example of the kinds of things
“Brands have to think about becoming commodities, even in categories where brands were once strong signals of identity to consumers and to their social world.”–Carey Morewedge The second case is when firms are using consumers as the product. When firms are profiting from advertising or mining
that we discuss in the paper and have thought about taking in a new direction. Morewedge: I think a big question that we don’t answer in the paper is looking at whether or not our notion of ownership will change as a result of these changing trends. Are the cues that we used before — like physical control or touch or investing money in something or knowing a lot about it — are those kinds of cues that gave rise to a sense of ownership going to be replaced?
and selling consumer personal data, they’re going to benefit
The question of how what we feel is mine has for a long time
from cases in which consumers feel little psychological
tracked legal ownership, and this paper is looking at cases
ownership for their behavior online. Amazon may not want
where there are divergences. And part of that is because for
you to think about all of the data they have about all of the
thousands of years, owning things was a way that people
records and transactions that you’ve engaged in. Google may
expressed themselves, or built up their identity, or their
not want you to think about your search history as something
wealth, or passed things on to their children. How malleable
that you have a right to control. When those kinds of services
is that sense of “mine,” and how will it respond to these kinds
are monetized, firms profit when consumers don’t feel like
of changes in our lives and in the economy?
Justifying creativity is key in 2021 By Warc Staff
Proving the impact of creativity is now a key priority for both clients and agencies, according to new research from LIONS.
• Twenty-eight percent of brand leaders say there’s greater focus on proving the effectiveness of their creativity.
This finding comes from responses by 1,500 brand and agency professionals to a survey by LIONS, the results of which were first shared at March’s Lions Live event.
• “Our business has been negatively affected by the pandemic, so we are cutting the budgets to help the P&L”, says one marketer. “Media, brand activation and long-term equity driving initiatives are often the first to be sacrificed.”
Why it matters Despite best practice indicating that brand building is essential to get ahead in recovery, an ability to justify investment before the fact remains elusive for many marketers. This points to an important area for upskilling. Details • Showing the impact of long-term creative work was extremely or very challenging, say 61% of brand leaders. A slightly higher proportion (64%) of agency leaders say the same.
• “Short-termism and the consequential questioning about the inherent value of investing in brand and creativity vs tactical price or offer advertising is a major challenge,” a network chief strategy officer reports. • At the same time, the lockdown-induced need to buy online brought media and retail closer together than ever. • Sixty percent of brands listed e-commerce as a top priority for the coming year, and 45% said social commerce was one of top three areas for experimentation.
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How brands can seize the shoppable media opportunity By Warc Staff
The convergence of commerce and storytelling is driving the creation of a new advertising opportunity: shoppable media. A new WARC Guide outlines how marketers can take advantage of the rise of shoppable ad formats. The WARC Guide to Shoppable Media* Media owners are investing in tools to allow brands to catalogue and promote products on their platforms, with the aim of enabling users to complete a purchase without having to leave the app or website. Shoppable content can include static images or livestream videos, often hosted by influencers, and formats are also being trialled in TV and audio. Six takeaways 1. Online shopping is becoming a form of entertainment. Where e-commerce was previously utilitarian, users are growing accustomed to more immersive and interactive experiences. 2. Social media has offered a digital ‘store front’ during
COVID-19. With consumers unable to visit physical retail outlets, social platforms have helped brands to maintain visibility. 3. Livestream video is a key driver of shoppable media growth. Following its rise in popularity in China over the last few years, media owners are introducing in-app shoppable livestream events. 4. Shoppable media requires a new approach to media planning. Social commerce campaigns must blend storytelling with the information likely to trigger an immediate conversion. 5. Influencers are vital to shoppable media success, but their role is becoming more ambiguous. The arrival of influencers’ own branded product ranges may complicate advertiser relationships. 6. Shoppable media works best in categories like fashion and beauty. These benefit from a sweet spot of high levels of buyer engagement and accessible pricing.
Four Ways to Adapt Your Marketing Strategy and Tactics for an Economic Downturn By Fernando Mendez
COVID-19 has reshaped the world—and our economy—in fundamental ways. Business leaders and marketers worldwide have been considering how best to position themselves, their products, and their services, not only to survive but also to emerge stronger. For many, the threat of an economic crisis inspires fear and uncertainty. But research shows that during downturns, 14% of companies actually improve both growth and margins. Thus, strategic, smart wins can still happen if you reframe
improve sales and marketing success during a downturn. 1. Pinpoint imperatives for your new marketing strategy and tactics
your messaging and shift your focus onto the right industries.
What we’ve been experiencing is not business as usual. It
So, as we face the economic challenges that will inevitably
is essential to understand precisely how the downturn is
continue to knock on our doors, I’d like to share four
affecting not only your own business but also those of your
marketing tactics that will help you and your organization
customers.
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21
Doing so demands setting the noise aside and focusing on the key issues and identifying your top priorities—then building new strategies based on exactly how your industry, the sectors in which you sell, and your customers are being affected.
You cannot tell the same story you were telling before the pandemic. Consider what you have learned and how you can use that to inform your positioning and connect effectively with your customers.
It also means doing your homework, and for that, you have to go deep. Study industry and peer research to assess the impact of the pandemic. Talk to your customers; don’t secondguess them. Have conversations so that you understand their challenges and their emerging scenarios.
Accentuate the positive and remain empathetic. You should be prepared to take a long-term perspective. Find the right balance between being too eager and conveying too much fear. You may even need to tone down your message.
I recommend speaking to at least 15-20 customers and using that information to confirm (or disprove) your original hypothesis. The interviews should also give you ideas on future directions of travel. Use the information to produce a list of imperatives: • Cost-cutting opportunities: how can you cut fat—but not muscle—from your business? • Operational improvement: where can you release cash while still maintaining operational strength? • Sales and marketing: how can you strengthen your customer base while also identifying new revenue streams? • Customers’ desired outcomes: What data and insights can you use to resonate with business decision-makers? Imperatives will differ from one business or sector to another, as will their order of priority. 2. Rethink your product and audience Once you have gained perspective from prioritizing imperatives, you will need to rethink how you are selling, how you are marketing, how you are positioning your product or service, and whom you are targeting. Align your product or service with those emerging imperatives and focus on how your product or service will help achieve your customer’s business objectives. Focus on the outcomesell rather than the feature-sell. Resist the temptation to continue to do what you have always done. Think about which industries are likely to be least affected by the pandemic recession and how that might affect your approach to the market. For example, your product or service may be highly technical, but could it be the time to reach out to the business decision-maker instead of the IT manager with a message of how your product could help them deliver operational efficiency? Also, in a recession, mid-market companies tend to move faster than larger ones, so rethink your audience accordingly. Ensure the outcomes you target are specific to the industries you target: Financial services, manufacturing, and healthcare will all have different outcomes. 3. Reframe your story and use corresponding tactics
In short, be authentic, and accentuate the positive impact of your product or service—especially how it meets your customer’s needs or helps them achieve desired outcomes. The messaging you used in 2019 is not going to be relevant in 2021. I also advise acknowledging the pain. Recognize the situation your customers find themselves in, and use it as a benchmark for emerging stronger. Offer a product or service solution that will enable them to prepare for growth and—most important—stay ahead of the game. Demonstrate how your offering will enable your customer to stay ahead of the competition. 4. Focus on digital marketing strategy and tactics to help drive demand and close sales Now is a good time to evaluate how you conduct your business. In-person interaction has been fundamentally disrupted, so you need to embrace that digital is now the main conduit for establishing and conducting business. Explore how you can stretch the capabilities of your technology, and evaluate new ways to connect with your audience. That means thinking about how you are promoting your brand or filling your sales pipeline. While rethinking your digital strategy, rethink your metrics. Redefine what success looks like. Success in 2021 will look different from success in 2019. Revamp your sales pipeline and work out how to evaluate new opportunities while you redefine success. Choose metrics that align with your particular marketing mix, because digital marketing is not a one-size-fits-all process. Start from scratch. Look at your economic reality, and work out how your digital approach can be different from your in-person approach. Finally, ensure that you have the right platforms in place to lead with digital—whether that’s turning lunches and meetings into virtual chats, summits into virtual workshops, or live events into webinars and webcasts. Digital is no longer a strategy purely for lead generation. It should be your approach for nearly all sales and marketing activity. Fernando Mendez is the CEO of Audienz, a B2B technology consulting company. He works with Fortune 50 corporations to develop and execute complex marketing campaigns.
Video Advertising Integrations Spell the End of Advertising By Ben Lamm
The future is more embedded technology that turns video into ads With in-video clickable purchasing, the entire transaction takes place without the user ever having to navigate offpage or out of frame. This means that if I see sneakers I like in my favorite Marvel movie, I could click and purchase and then continue watching without ever having to wonder what’s happening with the tesseract. Think of it like affiliate links in video content but better because I never leave the page. This tag-level integration makes shopping in video and on websites easier than anything I’ve ever seen. What it also does is bring the consumer and the content closer together. The more direct purchasing can be conducted in the most heavily consumed medium, the less we will need ads and the more video will become advertisements itself. More and more services are interested in being the middleware between consumer and content creator. Services like Shoppable and Tipser reduce the friction of buying by creating instant storefronts in any digital medium. This means that in the future, you can purchase any product you see on any site without leaving that website. That’s very good for publishers, less good for sites like Amazon where traffic from content leads to spur-of-the-moment referral purchases, and less valuable for those who invest more heavily in ad spend than marketing tactics like PR. This middle layer helps keep more money in the hands of publishers because it keeps customers on site and creates a re-emergence in the supremacy of great content over great ads. In the short-term, this means more direct feedback for advertisements. Ads will need to become shoppable
moments, and performance will be directly dictated by sales. But in the future, do ads go away entirely—only to be replaced by better product placement in our favorite movies, TV shows and reels? Online, 82% of people are consuming video. That’s over 1 million minutes of video per second being uploaded to websites. Our future is not more ads as pre-roll: It’s more embedded technology that turns video into ads. In the future, you can shop your friend’s TikTok to buy their T-shirt and purchase the same toilet paper that your favorite sitcom dad buys. Right now, ads function to highlight brands alongside our content. If content can become a more shoppable experience, PR will reign supreme over on-site ads. If video can become more shoppable, the product placement experience will be elevated over the ad experience. We live in an increasingly ad-blind and content-hungry world. The future is not better ads; the future is more seamless integration between the products we want and the technologies that allow those products to be purchased directly, when we see them. This represents a fundamental change for the consumer from recipient of messaging to seeker of the hidden product of our desire. And, in the game of consumption, buying products when and how we see them is the future. And that future doesn’t need another pre-roll ad. Ben Lamm is a serial technology entrepreneur dedicated to making the impossible possible. He builds intelligent, disruptive software companies that help the Fortune 500 innovate with breakthrough technologies.
Tom Peters’ profound and unexpected advice to the marketing community By Mark Schaefer
Something important and unexpected happened on our Marketing Companion podcast last week. Let me set the scene for you. Brooke Sellas and I had a chance to interview the legendary Tom Peters, one of the greatest thought leaders in business history and the author of the bestselling book in business history, In Search of Excellence. This is significant because Tom is retiring and he has declared that his latest book, Excellence Now: Extreme Humanism, is his last.
Brooke asked a final question: “Tom, you begin your new book with an urgent plea. Essentially you are saying, ‘Listen to me dammit!’ We have thousands of marketing leaders from around the world hanging on your every word today. Now at the end of your career, if you had one message specifically for marketers, what would it be?” Tom was quiet for a long moment, gathering his thoughts. He looked off into the distance. Then, he said something so unexpected and profound that I was left speechless. And … he was SO RIGHT!
So, I regard this interview as an important show, and certainly a milestone in the history of the podcast. But something happened in this interview that took my breath away.
When the show was over and recording had stopped, I told Tom that this was an extraordinary piece of advice I had not heard before. He replied, “Me either. I’ve never said anything like that.”
Sure, Tom dropped a lot of precious insights and business truths. You would expect that. But then something extraordinary happened in the last minutes of the show.
So now, you know you NEED TO LISTEN to this show! One of the most unmissable episodes in our nine-year history. Let’s get to it:
Struggling With Digital Communication? Here Are Five Ways to Nail It By Adam Johnson
Virtual communication has been the name of the game recently, and B2B marketers are doing more digital outreach than ever before. However, the heavy reliance on digital channels raises questions: Are we delivering a great customer experience? Are we doing everything we can to effectively execute digital
strategies? Companies must communicate with prospects and customers
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in a compelling way that delivers a great customer experience, else they risk getting lost in the digital mix. But you might be struggling to figure out how to do that, since opportunities for personal connection, such as tradeshows, are no longer available. Or you may be wondering how you can help your customers make that adjustment. Here are five actions critical for a successful digital communication process. 1. Understand that automation does not mean loss of control
Another key to achieving great CX is understanding your customers’ skill set. The way customers use your product (or the features they’re interested in) can tell you a lot about them. If you’re selling martech, for example, some customers will know everything about it, whereas others will still be learning and will need help along the way. How you approach setting your customers up for success depends on where they are on their journey, and data can help you pinpoint their location.
A human element is what makes automation a successful tactic. With the right tools, you define the strategy, and technology handles the execution. You’re able to allocate more time and energy to prospecting, while automation is there to manage your pipelines and make meaningful connections with your customers.
4. Be sensitive to the business environment
You make the rules: If the customer does X, the response is Y. The system gathers data and applies what it learns. A single human (or team) can’t analyze each signal and respond to every request, but automation allows for that and scales up your ability to deliver a great customer experience.
That’s especially true if you sell products that help B2B customers manage digital outreach. Anyone who wasn’t using digital channels prior to the pandemic has had to quickly adapt and digitally transform in order to survive. Those customers are counting on you to provide guidance, so your communication has to be relevant, effective, and thoughtful.
2. Speak to customers where they are in their journey Personalization is no longer optional; it’s critical. You have to know who your customers are and what they need; but, more than that, you have to speak to where they are on their buying journey. If your communication is out of sync—if you send an email about buying a product they’ve just purchased, for example—your company loses credibility. One of the most overlooked opportunities is post-sale engagement. “The way you treat customers once they buy is how they will remember you. So, it is very important to maintain positive engagement post-sale,” explained ActiveCampaign CEO Jason VandeBoom in a recent E-Commerce Times article. I recently had a negative post-sale experience after purchasing a murder mystery game online for my wife. Not 10 seconds after I had placed my order, the company sent a request asking me to review a product I hadn’t yet received. That let me know I was dealing with faulty automation; it undermined trust, and it ensured the company wouldn’t get the post-purchase data it was seeking from me. Lose-lose! It may sound like a no-brainer, but deliberate action is necessary for good digital communication. If a sales team sends an email tailored for marketing managers out to its entire database, including Fortune 100 CEOs, it shows the team wasn’t deliberate in its targeting and so creates a negative impression. Avoid such cringeworthy mistakes by knowing your audience and precisely tailoring your personalization. 3. Take your customers’ level of expertise into account
At the moment, the pandemic is the primary factor driving business change. Already, over 100,000 small businesses have permanently closed. Those still standing are turning to digital channels to reach out to customers, which creates demand for more help in that area.
5. Drop the marketing speak and get to the point Don’t make the mistake of approaching digital communication like a product evangelist, focusing only on how great your product is and emphasizing all its cool features and capabilities. It’s important to believe in what you’re selling, of course, but customers don’t care about your product per se—they care about solving their problems and doing their jobs more effectively. Your job is to connect the dots for them and speak their language—to sell your product as the solution to their problem or the thing that improves their productivity. Fitbit’s commercials provide an excellent example of how to connect the dots for consumers by showing them how to reach a big-picture goal—managing stress, staying fit—through the features of the product. Immediate purchase value is created. High-quality copywriting is often overlooked, but it needs to be top priority in crafting your messaging. Mark Twain once said, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead,” underscoring the importance of great editing, too. In digital communication, respect readers’ time—aim to grab their attention quickly and be brief—and move and inspire them by speaking their language and focusing on their problems. Adam Johnson is the senior vice-president of sales and customer success at ActiveCampaign, where he scales the sales and customer success organization to deliver growth and engage with customers.
This is the guiding question for your service business or personal brand By Keith Reynold Jennings
In an effort to engage a group of high-energy kids, a church teacher threw out this question: “If you had to live on a deserted island for a year, and you could bring one thing with you, what would you choose to bring?” After some murmuring, one of the kids said, “Well, I know I’m supposed to say the Bible, but I’d rather bring Bear Grylls.” This funny vignette tees up a question that’s transformed the way I look at service businesses, as well as personal brands. As service buyers, in each situation we encounter, we either need an expert, guide, or agent to help us along. As service providers, we must get clarity on which one we are best positioned to offer.
Now, to be clear, she is a recognized expert on personal branding. She runs a lucrative coaching business. And she’s a terrific human being. But it prompted me to wonder, “Is being a recognized expert the only/best option for a person or business?” This guiding question made me realize that people don’t typically come to me for expertise. They come to me for guidance. Some freelancers I know are neither experts nor guides. They’re just really good at what they do — selling, designing, developing, etc.
The guiding question I want to help you explore is this: “Are you an expert, guide, or agent?”
An expert is someone who knows a lot about a specific subject. A guide is someone who knows how to find the way by synthesizing multiple areas of expertise. And an agent is someone who acts on behalf of someone else.
How you answer and leverage this question can greatly benefit your service business and/or personal brand.
Let’s break this guiding question down in a way that’s easy to grasp and remember:
The Difference Between Experts, Guides, and Agents
An expert knows — an expert provides subject matter knowhow
A few weeks ago, an author/coach I respect announced the re-opening of her intensive course that teaches participants how to become recognized experts in their field.
A guide shows — a guide provides situational navigation An agent sows — an agent provides increased scale and
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scope
resources, and performance metrics
These require distinct skillsets.
CEOs expect a lot of their CMOs, yet many don’t give them any real authority to drive the metrics they’re being held accountable for. Frustration and tension build up until the CMO leaves or is asked to leave.
Consider this. All businesses need tax work. Some need CFO-level guidance. Some need controller-level expertise. And some need accountant-level agents. Of course, some need all three … and often hire different people to fill those roles. Get Clarity on Which Job is Needed We hire everything in our lives to get specific jobs done. Sometimes those jobs are functional. Sometimes they are emotional. And sometimes they are relational. Of course, sometimes a job embodies all three. Expertise, guidance, and agency are distinct jobs people need to be done. Consider these scenarios: Your business has just been publicly accused of discrimination. What you most need is an expert to audit your business practices and provide you with clear, benchmarked feedback on where and how you can improve. Your business and its competitors work in a market that’s valued personalized, white-glove service for decades. Now, all of you are losing market share to technology providers using bots and charging a fourth of what you charge. In this case, you need a seasoned guide to help you identify the macro and micro trends in play and synthesize multiple areas of expertise into an adaptive plan that can navigate you through change. Your business is struggling to stand out and build engagement through digital media. You know exactly what needs to be done, so you don’t need expertise or guidance. You need someone who can actually do the work for you to scale-up your productivity and/or expand your scope. You need an agent, as either a contractor or new hire. This guiding question has helped me get unstuck recently. I’ve been struggling with a podcast series I’m developing because I’ve been producing each episode through the lens of an expert. But I’m not an expert. I’m a guide. I don’t want to be some guru. I want to be like Anthony Bourdain, albeit way less cool! So I abandoned everything I was working on and started from scratch scripting each episode through the lens of a guide. And things are humming along beautifully. The takeaway for you is this: Get clarity on which of these three jobs is needed by the people you serve. It will save you and them from a lot of headaches. So let’s address those headaches. Tensions and Turnover are Tied to Lack of Clarity Kimberly A. Whitler, a former CMO who is now teaches at the University of Virginia, provided revealing research into why CMO’s have the lowest tenure and highest turnover in the C-Suite. The root problem is faulty role design. Consider this: The range of possible marketing skills are vast — there’s no such thing as one kind of marketer No two people give the same answer to the question, “What does a CMO do?” CMO roles are rarely aligned with their responsibilities,
This phenomenon doesn’t stop at the C-level. I see it play out among marketing staff at all levels, as well as the consultants, contractors, and agencies they partner with. Three examples: A creative agency sees itself as a guide on digital marketing. As soon as they win the contract, they start trying to educate and consult. But the client never wanted a guide. They simply want an agent to build the website as fast as possible. A freelance writer can do the work better and faster than her clients. But she gets sucked into advising a client. Sure, she’s getting paid, but she could have taken on three new clients and doubled her revenue in the time she’s spending with this client. She’s an agent being asked to be a guide (with agent pricing). A digital marketing specialist (agent) wants a promotion into a new role the organization sees as a guide. She’s passed over, never made aware of the role mismatch, and winds up leaving within months with a bad taste in her mouth. The Guiding Question: Are You an Expert, Guide, or Agent? Your prospective clients are making moment-by-moment decisions between service providers based on whether they can tell them what to do (expert), show them how to do it (guide) or do it for them (agent). When you look at your website, which job is it projecting? Is that narrative aligned with the job you are best positioned to help others do? Even if you think you can provide expertise and guidance, I recommend choosing one as your primary focus and make the other secondary. Look no further than Bear Grylls. Bear is a survival expert. But what distinguishes him is his ability to guide others through extreme survival scenarios. He’s known and sought out as a guide. That’s why, like that boy in church, if I had to spend a year on a deserted island, I’d want to bring Bear with me. Not for his expertise. But for his ability to help me navigate the situations I’d be facing. Similarly, Mark Schaefer is one of the best guides I’ve ever met. It’s why his books read like adventures, rather than know-it-all blather. What about you? How do answer this guiding question? Why should I follow you? Why should I connect with you? Why should I hire you? Are you someone who knows, shows, or sows? Keith Reynold Jennings serves as vice president of community impact for Jackson Healthcare. He writes and speaks at the intersection of values, impact, and identity. Connect with Keith via Linkedin and his monthly newsletter.
Three proven strategies for advertising on Amazon By Ricardo Fayet
Since I’ve been working more and more with Amazon Advertising for a wide spectrum of authors, I’m thinking that will most likely be the subject of Book 2. Which means that I’ll dedicate several of the upcoming weekly Reedsy marketing newsletters to that topic, as that’s how I like to organize my thoughts.
conversion rate from click to purchase;
Today, I want to start with one of the most controversial topics around Amazon Sponsored Product ads: testing target keywords and products.
So on and so forth until you’ve “filtered” your huge keyword list down to the successful ones.
See, there are two schools of thought when it comes to finding keywords or products (ASINs) to add to your Amazon Ads campaigns. I call them the “bazooka” and the “sniper” strategies. Note: If you know nothing about Amazon Ads, you’ll first want to read the sections dedicated to the platform in my first book. Otherwise, the below might sound like incomprehensible jargon to you. The “bazooka” strategy This was the main strategy recommended by the experts in the early days of Amazon Ads, and it basically consists of testing as many keywords as possible, as fast as possible. To achieve that, you need to create huge campaigns with hundreds (or even thousands) of keywords. Then you’d use relatively high bids to get those campaigns to serve on all those keywords and rapidly gather impressions/clicks. Once a keyword has gathered enough impressions/clicks, you could then either: Dismiss it because of poor click-through rate, or poor
Adjust the bid if you think it could be a good one, but with a lower cost per click; or Keep the keyword and move it to a “successful keywords” campaign.
The result is that you spend quite a bit of money in a short amount of time, as Amazon places your ads on hundreds of different searches and product pages. Of course, not all of these will be relevant to your book, but that’s the whole point of this method: hitting a wide array of targets in the hopes of getting to the few that are relevant — hence my bazooka comparison. Yes, you’ll waste money on clicks that have little chances of converting. But in my experience, it’s not always easy to know beforehand which keywords will make for successful targets — and this strategy is still the best one to find a maximum number of good keywords in a short amount of time. The “sniper” strategy As Amazon Ads have become more expensive and more authors (with smaller budgets) have gotten into the game in recent years, this second “sniper” strategy has also become increasingly popular. It’s basically the opposite of the “bazooka” strategy: instead of hitting as many remotely relevant keywords as possible, you start with small campaigns focusing on a few hyper-
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relevant keywords/products (e.g. also boughts with similar covers/themes) with reasonable bids — sniper-targeting, if you will. The upsides of this second strategy are clear: You don’t waste money on targets that are unlikely to work; You only show your ads on searches/product pages where you think readers are most likely to click and buy; Because of this, your account’s click-through-rate will likely be high and encourage Amazon to prioritize your ads. The downside, however, is that it’s likely that your campaigns will get very little impressions and clicks. Why? Because highly-targeted keywords/products tend to get few searches/views, so it might take several weeks until you start seeing results and getting the kind of data you need to make decisions on those targets. The other downside is that you’ll miss on good keywords/ products that you don’t know or that you think are not relevant enough. As I mentioned above, it’s pretty hard to know in advance exactly what will work — some very broad comps might sometimes convert much better than close ones. The best of both worlds So what’s the best strategy? Well, it very much depends on your budget and your goals. If you just released your book and are looking to get as many sales as possible in the first 30 days, you might want to go broad with the bazooka strategy to make sure Amazon delivers your ads (and to find those money-making targets
quickly). If you’re conscious of budget, then you’ll definitely want to start small with hyper-relevant targets that won’t blow through your budget. Of course, it will also depend on your book, where it fits in the market, and your knowledge of the market: If your book straddles genre or has broad commercial appeal — or if you don’t know any super similar books out there — then you’ll have to go broad to find the targets (if any) that will bring in the kind of readers interested in your book. If you write in a well-defined niche in which you know all the top names, then it’ll be easy (and it’d make sense) to go for the sniper approach. In most cases, though, you’ll want to do a combination of both. You could have a campaign with a big budget plus all the hyper-relevant targets that you’re positive will work well, and then a broader campaign (with a lower budget cap, or lower bids) targeting broad comps or search terms. For example, I like having both a campaign targeting alsoboughts (targeted), and another one targeting the Top 100 and Hot New Releases in my main categories (broader). I also like to regularly update the second campaign with the latest Hot New Releases to piggy-back on any big launches in the niche — and because newly released books will generally have less Sponsored Ads competition than established ones.And on that note, that’s it for this first installment on Amazon ads! I’ll see you next week for the second installment.
10 Steps Brands Can Take Now To Boost Women In Business By Michelle Klein.
Even before the pandemic, women handled multiple responsibilities at once, from running a business to a household, caring for family or for community, and more. Unfortunately, the pandemic has made it more difficult for women to continue in so many roles—in fact, one in four women are considering scaling back their career or leaving
the workforce, according to LeanIn.org and McKinsey & Co.1 A key reason for this change may be that women bear the brunt of domestic duties. In Facebook’s most recent Global State of Small Business Report, created with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the World Bank, 31% of women business leaders surveyed
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reported spending more time on domestic tasks than before the pandemic.2
authentic in how it reaches a broader range of women’s voices.
Women have faced—and defied—setbacks before. But they shouldn’t have to advance progress alone. Brands can and should help women as they strive to achieve the equality they deserve.
Share the stage: Help amplify historically underrepresented voices.
Beyond being the right thing to do, increasing diversity in marketing can help business. Research has shown that diverse representation can increase ad recall.3 Another study found that brands with the most representative ads saw a 44% average stock increase over two years, 69% better business performance and 83% higher preference.4 Brand leaders can help remove barriers for women by considering how every decision drives inclusive representation. Here are 10 ways to put diversity at the core of your business: Support women suppliers. As of 2019, there were 12.9 million women-owned businesses in the U.S.,5 yet they received only 4.75% of federal contracts in fiscal year 2018.6 Organizations can take these steps to support women suppliers: Today: Hire women suppliers using databases provided by organizations such as the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC). This quarter: Offer workshops, professional matchmaking events, investment opportunities, training and other resources for women business owners. This half: Set aside part of your products—and shelf space— for women-owned businesses. When Brother Vellies Creative Director Aurora James called on brands to commit 15% of their offerings to Black-owned businesses, several retailers in the U.S. and Canada signed the pledge.7 Consider making a similar commitment to women-owned businesses. At Facebook, we’ve promised to spend at least $1 billion with women and diverse suppliers every year. Examine how your brand represents women. Today: Assess whether your creative contributes to harmful stereotypes. For example, are women in your commercials always cooking or doing laundry? According to an Unstereotype Alliance study, only 7% of women are shown in nontraditional, unstereotyped roles in advertising around the world.8 You can use marketing bias auditing tools such as the Geena Davis Institute’s GDIQ, which analyzes gender representation for brands and media creators. And the Association of National Advertisers assesses the sales lift impact of cultural representation in advertising and media through Cultural Impact Insights Measure (CIIM). This quarter: Include criteria for gender, race and sexual orientation in your briefs, scripts and casting documents. Consider representing intersectional identities that combine these attributes. To gain inspiration about inclusive marketing, register for “Forward Together,” a Facebook-hosted content series with videos launching on March 24. This half: Hire a diverse team so your creative can be more
Today: Build awareness for women’s interests during cultural moments such as Women’s History Month. Consider creating a social media post commemorating women who’ve made an impact. This quarter: Invite women to share their stories. On International Women’s Day, March 8, Pure Leaf’s “No Is Beautiful” social media campaign featured videos of women describing how they’ve said no to distractions in order to say yes to opportunities that changed their lives. This half: Elevate women’s voices in your products or services. Ancestry.com has created a tool for people to understand how their own women ancestors may have experienced suffrage. Collaborate with others working to make a difference. Today: Connect with and learn from other leaders, which can make a big impact on your own journey. During Women’s History Month, Facebook is offering networking and learning opportunities to small and medium business leaders and entrepreneurs around the world through our #SheMeansBusiness Spring Training virtual program. Small steps toward greater inclusivity can add up to a sea change of progress. Together, we can eliminate barriers and support women as they seek to accomplish their dreams and serve their communities. Sources: 1. “Women in the Workplace 2020” by LeanIn.org and McKinsey & Co., September 2020. 2. “The Global State of Small Business Report: Reflections on Six Waves of Data Collection” by Facebook/OECD/World Bank (Facebook-commissioned study of approximately 25,000 business owners, leaders and managers across 84 countries and seven regions), December 2020. 3. Global meta-analysis of Facebook lift study data, 2019. 4. Gross, Maggie; Wade, Lindsay; Khan, Nada, “The Value of Diversity in Advertising,” Deloitte, 2019. 5.
“The 2019 State of Women-Owned Businesses Report” by American Express, September 2019.
6. “Government-Wide Performance: FY2018 Small Business Procurement Scorecard” by the U.S. Small Business Association, March 2019. 7. “Aurora James, the Founder Seeking Shelf Space” by Bloomberg, December 2020. 8. “Unstereotype Metric 2020: Key Findings” by The Unstereotype Alliance, January 2021. Michelle leads as vice president of Global Customer Marketing at Facebook, where she sets the global vision and strategy for how Facebook connects people and businesses across the ecosystem of agencies, partners and businesses big and small. She serves on the board for Raaka Chocolate, a premium bean-to-bar brand.
7 WAYS TO BUILD YOUR BUSINESS AND BRAND PARTNERSHIP MUSCLE By Tim Brown
We detail how chief marketing officers can lead their organisation’s external partnership strategy more effectively and successfully The reasons for striking a partnership with another brand are wide and diverse. From extending audience reach and brand attributes to product and services expansion, cultural and social alignment, improving commercial dividends and solving a customer pain point, the list feels seemingly endless and full of opportunity.
partnership, the macro and consumer trends driving the need for external partnership, how COVID has driven this appetite and permission to extend partnership strategies, and what it takes to make them successful.
What’s more, statistics show partnerships can really deliver financial impact as well as in terms of acquisition and consideration through to retention and loyalty. According to a joint Forrester-Impact 2019 survey, companies with mature partnership programs were found to grow company revenue nearly twice as fast as other companies and are five times more likely to exceed stock price and bottomline profitability. Partnerships in this survey encompassed everything from strategic partners to B2B partners, affiliates, influencers, licensing and app-to-app integrations.
1. Ascertain your levers of growth
But just what kind of external partnership are worth pursuing? And how do you shore up the best chances of success when you do partner with an external player? Over the course of 2021, CMO has been exploring brand partnerships in the A/NZ market, investigating what opportunities are presented by disruptive forms of
Here, we round-up seven key tips we’ve gleaned from leading Australian CMOs and industry thought leaders.
Finding the path to external partnerships that can drive business impact means firstly understanding your role as a driver of organisational growth, Deloitte Digital’s national lead for new proposition and venture design, Tim Davis, says. “What’s the reason to do it? Is it to fuel your brand and keep things ticking over and keeping your brand interesting, or is the reason to do it because you see it as a strategic driver of growth for the business?” Davis asks. “Are partnerships a lever you can pull to do things you couldn’t otherwise do with your business model, and serve your customers in other ways you couldn’t otherwise have served them? If you see it this way, the idea of just putting That’s not to say more traditional forms of brand partnerships
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aren’t critical. There are plenty of good reasons why you would look to extend and pursue – improving reach, tapping a new set of consumers, aligning to a brand to lift your social and environment credentials, and building engagement with existing customers, to name a few. “But if you are a CMO who says I want to stake my claim on being a growth engine of this business and be a strategic growth driver changing the way we connect to customers and go to market, then external partnerships should be very interesting to you,” Davis says. The opportunity to think differently about external partnerships in 2021 is one where the CMO can take a true leadership role. “We’re seeing the words partnership, collaboration, ecosystem and taking a proactive role in shaping the context in which your business exists and the context with customers on the list for the vast majority of CEOs we talk to. But there is a breakdown between that and what their organisations are then able to do – there is a void there. That’s an interesting opportunity for the CMO,” Davis says. “CMOs have the ability to be the connector and also if they step up and make the claim for being the driver of top-line growth, then they can pull the pieces together to enable successful partnerships.” 2. Use brand as a guiding light At Reckitt Benckiser, owner of brands such as Dettol, Nurofen, Gaviscon and Durex, partnerships are driven by the strategy and unique characteristics of each brand. “The way we’re looking at and approaching partnerships has a very simple starting point: Where we’re really clear on our brand purpose and where we can enter partnerships to help us better deliver on that. It’s a great case of doing well by doing good,” marketing director of RB Health, Henry Turgoose, says. “It all starts with being clear on our brand purpose. And often, you are much more likely to deliver on your purpose by partnering with somebody.” At Binge, ensuring partnerships pursued not only make sense but also prove impactful has been underpinned by the work done to clearly articulate its brand position, values and approach to market, CMO, Louise Crompton, says. “I’m a big believer that if you get your brand architecture right, it can be very organising and help you make really clean and clear decisions. We did a lot of work in launching Binge to clearly articulate our point of view and purpose,” she explains. “When it came to looking at The Iconic opportunity around our ‘Inactivewear’ launch, for example, it was simple and easy to tick that partnership box; it made absolute sense.” Crompton says her team uses brand architecture as a set of guardrails to determine external partnerships through the funnel. “Does it to help us tell our story, to convey our brand point of view, and is there an alignment from a personality and brand positioning perspective? If you get your architecture
right at the beginning, it becomes quite simple to work out which partners are right for you,” she says. 3. Be prepared to compromise But just because you have a clear brand proposition, it doesn’t mean it’s shared by the partner you’re looking to work with. Uber head of marketing for Australia and New Zealand, Andy Morley, says partnership success requires a willingness to find a solution outside of what both businesses are currently doing. “I have seen contracts between businesses go round and round in circles, delaying projects. It often takes a real commitment from one side to say you know what, I’m happy to step outside our normal processes because I’m passionate about this and need a partner for that,” he says. “People actually have to move away from doing business the way they’re used to. You also need that passion and commitment from all levels of leadership at the start to be able to find the solution that takes the partnership forward and who’ll say it’s ok to do things differently. “Both brands need to understand how they are going to partner together, where the no-go zones are, what resources they’re going to need on both sides and identify those who’ll champion it to find solutions. And businesses need to show more flexibility – so often, this is where partnerships generally fall over.” Turgoose agrees there can’t be a one-size-fits-all approach applied to external partnerships. The framework RB uses to scope and build its multi-year Cricket Australia sponsorship partnership, for example, was wholly different to how it looked at a partnership with Uber in 2020 or other travel, entertainment and leisure partnerships in the face of the COVID-19 global pandemic. “Partnerships depend on situation, businesses and brands involved. To try and put them through a ‘sausage machine’ of an approval or building process doesn’t enable you to take the other partner’s priorities into account,” Turgoose warns. “Partners have different assets – for example, they might have a huge organic following and owned assets we’re interested in getting exposure through; or they might be looking to entirely borrow Dettol’s equity.” The more diverse and open-minded your partnership portfolio approach is, the more opportunity you give yourself to test-and-learn, says Crompton. “We are all very set in what we do and have our strategies. But one of the great opportunities about external partnerships with other organisations is learning about the great ways they position their brand,” she adds. “Take those tips and tricks as you partner with them and the way they see the world. 4. Have a clear framework and measures of success This doesn’t mean the absence of any guidelines or framework, however, and there are still hygiene factors that can throw a spanner in the works. While aligning with another organisation might make sense strategically, having the trust between two organisations in order to facilitate collaboration, and things like data sharing, push
requirements around partnership up much higher.
6. Check cultural and sustainability credentials
“Unless you have access to the legal, finance teams and CEO, you may not be able to pursue these partnerships properly. Knowing your constraints as well as your strategy is important,” Deloitte Digital partner, David Phillips, says.
Yet Quarmby is quick to point out neither audience reach nor external brand alignment would have been worth engaging in if partnership didn’t also have the right values and credentials through their products and supply chain.
His colleague Davis agrees what often prevents external partnership are nut and bolts.
“Whoever you partner with, that brand will rub off on you in terms of your brand and the messages you want to put out there. In this day and age, if you partner with the wrong brand and they say or do something out in the space, you’ll be impacted,” Quarmby says.
“It’s the basic hurdles of how do we protect ourselves commercially and legally, how are we going to share our data? How are we going to collaborate? Who’s office? What are the ways of working? How do we start to trust each other? That stuff is frustratingly hard and feels harder than it should be,” he says. Booktopia CMO, Steffen Daleng, also sees a framework of operating that makes sense commercially and operationally, supported by teams internally, as vital to partnership success. At Booktopia, one lens overlaid on any potential partnership is commercial, the other is the brand affinity or symbiotic approach. “You want to work with people who are either on the same level in terms of brand affinity with the people who love your brand and that also love that third-party company and the services they’re providing,” Daleng says. “If you work with your company that’s much stronger in terms of brand than yours, that may rub off as well. “There also comes a point of diminishing returns on brand equity, but again it comes back to looking at what matters and is valued by the customer.” Another part is the accountability you have around yourself, the business model and partners you work with, and monitoring how you’re doing against that, tracking and providing that value back to partners, he adds. 5. Know what value means to both parties Turgoose is another who stresses clarity around how both sides are realising value as vital.
To overcome this issue, NT Tourism has devised a thorough scoping and desktop research process on any prospective company it plans to partner with, checking their social feeds and followers, eco-credentials, as well as political stance. “Yes, they may be agnostic in what they believe politically, but even that has a reflection on you. Because if they don’t take a stance, that can increasingly turn consumers off,” Quarmby says. “The days of companies sitting on fences are diminishing quickly. Consumers want to know what you stand for before making a purchase decision. That’s especially the case for high-value purchase decision, which holidays can often be.” This process saw NT Tourism knock back an approach from one fashion company, for instance. “They were getting a lot of flak for how much wastage their products and activities generated. We didn’t want to be associated with that,” Quarmby says. “We did see another destination partner with them later and that did come out. You have to be more thorough than ever.” 7. Solve the customer’s problem With all of that said, impact of any partnership is ultimately going to come from solving the consumer’s problem or need in some way.
“Approaching things like a genuine partnership, where it has to be materially interesting to the other party as a way of working has been a learning for me, particularly over the last year. It’s about mutual value and embracing that as much as possible,” he comments.
“If it’s not a consumer problem that has already surfaced, you will probably find it won’t be super engaging,” Morley argues. “We have spent a lot of time in workshops with businesses interested in partnering, who have a lot of scale or might be interested in an idea worth exploring, and it’s rarely something mutually beneficial for both sets of customers.
While monetary value and sales growth are often elements of partnership, NT Tourism executive director of marketing, Tony Quarmby, says many of the most impactful and nontraditional partnerships he’s pursued are where there isn’t a monetary value but other forms of pay back.
“Going in and being really clear about what is the problem is you’re trying to solve and making sure both parties really are committed to solving that is key, because it is a big risk. But when you do it, it’s magic and can spur a lot of other things, partnerships and ideas.”
“That’s where it’s less about numbers and more about relevance and engagement of that audience,” he says. “We would much rather have a smaller and engaged audience, than a large reach and lots of likes and emojis. We try and find those brands and companies with those engaged audiences then have the brand attributes we want to be seen associated with emphasises.” What’s more, non-traditional partnerships are often about partners outside the travel spectrum. “This allows us to talk to a consumer in a different way to how we normally would,” Quarmby says.
To unearth these customer pain points and opportunities, Daleng recommends going back to the customer narrative first. “Sit down, understand your customer and make it into a movie: What is the first thing they do in the morning when they open their eyes? What do they do? What coffee brand do they drink? Do they turn on the TV or an app? How could you work with that app, or get in front of them? “Figure out who they are, and their patterns of behaviour, then think about what your brand can do within that lifecycle or journey that’s relevant for them.”
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MarTech Hangs In the Balance By Tom Kaneshige
Not so long ago, marketers had a saying when trying to acquire MarTech to solve an urgent business need: “Whenever you hear the words ‘RFP,’ an angel loses its wings.’” RFP, or a request for proposal, meant that IT had gotten involved. Technologists were applying their multi-staged process for software acquisition, which includes RFPs. This also meant marketers probably wouldn’t see their muchneeded MarTech for months. Marketers need to be fast and agile, while IT has a reputation of being slow and methodical. That’s why many marketers at smaller companies began doing stealthy end-runs around IT, while marketers at bigger companies delayed bringing IT into the process until the last possible moment. MarTech vendors started pitching marketers directly, and marketers would buy software as a subscription service out of their opex budget. But there’s a reason for IT’s due diligence. While MarTech vendors make promising pitches, IT can ask the tough questions, evaluate technical aspects, and punch holes in those pitches. IT also sees the bigger picture, in terms of technology already deployed throughout the company and how everything fits together in a secure and optimal way. Time and again, marketing’s haphazard approach has led to high software costs, duplicate software, under-utilized software and poor returns on investment. In many cases, marketers making MarTech decisions on their own unknowingly created a “Frankenstack,” an architecture lacking strong integration with enterprise systems and data sources. A Frankenstack also stalls adoption of emerging MarTech — you can’t build on top of what’s broken. While the dodgy marketing-IT relationship spans decades, the rise of digital marketing now demands a reconciliation. Simply put, MarTech is just too important for a company to allow this dysfunction to continue. Brands are pinning their hopes on MarTech to help them win and retain customers in a digital-first world, which has been accelerated by the pandemic. Much of the sales action now happens at the top
of the funnel where marketers have the most impact. Nearly 70% of marketers expect to boost spend this year, according to our survey, Getting It Done in 2021. Many are growing their investments in MarTech aimed at leveraging customer data insights, executing campaigns more effectively, optimizing the customer journey, and improving operations and performance. There’s no question marketers and IT must collaborate better on MarTech to gain a faster time to value and a higher return on investment. But where to start? Both marketing and IT have to acknowledge that they’re both partly to blame. By now, marketers must know how their go-it-alone strategy leads to failure. IT needs to accept that marketing may be the most valuable function in the company and marketers are under tremendous pressure to compete in a fast-moving environment, yet IT has been hamstringing them. A meeting of minds allows marketing and IT to begin anew and find innovative ways of working together. For instance, they can stand up a mini-IT team inside of marketing, assign liaisons who have both technical and marketing chops, build cross-functional skills within their respective teams, increase the frequency of collaborative meetings, adopt agile organizational models, hire a chief marketing technology officer, etc. Each of these new ways has pros and cons, of course, but all are a vast improvement on a dysfunctional relationship. That’s good news for everyone. MarTech can lead to a company knowing its customers better, thus its future may rest on the marketing-IT relationship. Tom Kaneshige is the Chief Content Officer at the CMO Council. He creates all forms of digital thought leadership content that helps growth and revenue officers, line of business leaders, and chief marketers succeed in their rapidly evolving roles. You can reach him at tkaneshige@cmocouncil.org.
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Best Foot Forward: Could Fashion Be the Next Big Thing in Corporate Social Purpose? By Coro Strandberg
A growing breed of fashion brands has adopted social purpose to propel their business models. They are transitioning themselves and the entire industry to be a force for good in the world. And that’s fashionable. In today’s — and even more importantly, tomorrow’s – world, businesses that succeed will need to re-engineer their operating models, reinvent strategies, and engage in disruptive innovation. Forward-thinking businesses are developing a social purpose as the reason they exist to help navigate the turbulent times ahead – and be part of the solution to society’s challenges. A recent article in The Globe & Mail outlined how at least some successful players in the fashion industry — an industry responsible for 10 percent of annual global carbon emissions — are overhauling their business models, moving toward products and production that do not exploit people and the planet. As a contributor to the article, I pointed out that for the industry to fully make the changes that must be made for global benefit, the work must be at the industry level — and that it needs to have government support (see The Sustainable and Just Industry Association Report for examples of how industries such as fashion can advance collectively, and the role of governments to support them via the industry’s associations). We can look at Vancouver-based Textile Lab for Circularity aiming to divert over 20,000 tonnes of apparel that goes into area landfills each year as an example of sector collaboration. Governments also have a role to play, such as in extending producer responsibility — requiring companies to take back end-of-use products for recycling and helping set up sector-wide reverse logistics systems.
In September, Canada will host the World Circular Economy Forum, which will be the first time this forum has been held in North America. Some large Canadian apparel companies have signed the UN Fashion Industry Charter for Climate Action. This is a move in the right direction — a direction that recognizes that the cheap system that moves apparel from the factory to the landfill has to change — and that the new business models being developed will disrupt the industry for good. Among the disruptions are the fashion retailers setting up repair and reuse outlets. Patagonia, for example, has its Worn Wear hub — where you can buy clothing that is vintage, used, recrafted or made from other clothes. You can also attend one of their repair events. Canadian sportswear brand Arc’teryx is thinking “resale, not just retail,” as well. It offers repair services and customers can bring gear trade-ins for discounts. And then there are the “clothing as a service” business models, where you rent the clothes you need for as long as you need and then return them. With the UK’s MUD Jeans and Sweden’s Nudie Jeans, customers lease their jeans, then return them to be recycled into new denim products in a continuous loop of material. The innovation potential in this industry is no less then profound. Companies such as these and others are part of the new, and growing, breed of businesses that have adopted social purpose to propel their business models. They are transitioning themselves and the entire industry to be a force for good in the world. And that’s fashionable.
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Alexsandro Pinto: What is required of a good marketer in 2021 is now different By Jack Neff.
Alexsandro BX Pinto, former vice-president, marketing, AB InBev South Korea, points out how domestic brands witnessed a rise in the year of the pandemic. Going forward, he expects premiumisation to return in a big way, but he also believes that a brand has to be fully leveraged on data and digital media in order to entertain and solve consumer problems. Pinto speaks to WARC’s Gabey Goh for the Marketer’s Toolkit 2021. How have you and your team changed and innovated to navigate through the challenges raised by COVID-19? South Korea is a market that is very connected, in terms of internet access and high usage of e-commerce services in general. What COVID did here is just accelerate what was already big. For our industry, the South Korean market is a very sophisticated and complex market. In South Korea, drinking with friends in restaurants is very important. What is happening now is people are trying to indulge themselves more, they are trying to have more solo occasions, where they are drinking alone, drinking with books, enjoying a beer rather than other beverages for relaxation – that is a huge change in behaviour. The pandemic changed everything for us, whether it is packaging, the number of brands, how we invest or how we talk with the consumer. When the first COVID wave hit South Korea last February, we scratched our entire annual plan. We had to revisit everything. We got our sales team, marketing team and in-house agents to think together. We had to revamp our plan for this new situation. With COVID happening first in China, we could see what could happen in South Korea and prepare ourselves for that.
We implemented a system in our work we called the “phase approach”. We got an idea of the consumer sentiment and spend every single day. We noted if the sentiment is more negative, are people getting frustrated or stressed, what they are talking about, what the tone of the conversation is, if they are going out and spending. Based on that, we adjusted our message. Phase zero, for us was when everyone was stressed. What could be the right tone for a brand then? Should we keep talking about going out when people are afraid to get sick or should we stop and try to help? So, in phase zero, our approach was basically to stop doing what we were doing and try to listen to the consumer and help as much as we could. We are market leaders in the country and we have a responsibility to help. We stopped advertising investment, we stopped promotions, and decided to help people with what they needed. We donated lots of hand sanitisers and masks, and supported NGOs. We talked as little as possible about ourselves. It was all about the consumer and giving them some comfort. Then, phase one was about getting back to normal, and that normal is not exactly the real normal; it is a new normal. It’s quite cliched now but we defined it way back in March 2020. We did a campaign with Budweiser where we said: “Guys, you can have fun at home. It’s tough. You need to be creative, but you can have fun at home. Enjoy music, cook, play DJ at home.” We offered some stress relief. In phase two, when more people were getting back to normal, we launched a campaign with Stella Artois a couple
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of weeks ago, when we created a “one-table restaurant”, a place with just one table for your closest friends. We designed an exclusive Christmas-themed experience. It went for one or two weeks and we were totally sold out and booked until December 31. Then, of course, there is phase three, when COVID was over. Unfortunately, we never got to that in 2020 but, we adjusted our plan based on this approach. Fortunately, South Korea is one of the most stable countries in the world in terms of the COVID impact. We had some ups and downs, of course. But it is a very prolonged situation and it’s still tough, but some restaurants are open. Yes, there are some restrictions on the number of people, the time and service but it is not as tragic as the Americas or Europe. What was the biggest change in the way you and your team worked to adapt to the COVID situation? The pandemic changed the way we listen to our consumer and try to solve their problems. We were faced with questions like should we spend, should we look for more optimisation. This plays a huge role in our investment. We more than doubled our investment in digital in 2020. Because it is the channel where we can adjust the message for the right consumer at the right time. We have tried to be very focused on ROI to keep the business flowing. And I think we got rid of a lot of bureaucracy in the process. We started to do a one-page brief or a one-sentence brief and established a routine. What is the job we need to do for our consumers? What are the problems they are trying to solve?
Secondly, we didn’t change any trend internally, we were only accelerating what we had identified before. The big trends are exploding now, like e-commerce and personalisation of content at scale. If your brand is not fully leveraged on data and digital media to entertain and solve consumer problems, you are doing it wrong. Of course, there is some small change in terms of direction. For example, before COVID, South Korea was seeing big growth in premiumisation. A lot of premium brands were growing at double and triple digits. With the pandemic, people are looking more and more for familiar and valuefor-money brands. The premiumisation is still happening, but there are more craft brands and specialties. For home consumption and self-indulgence, South Korean consumers are looking for more familiar brands, big brands, comfort brands, brands that are closer to them. So, domestic brands and brands with a long track record in the market have started to grow big time again. This huge growth in demand for domestic brands versus international, how are you managing this trend with your product portfolio? Fortunately, we have both leading international and local brands, but this doesn’t mean we should not push for further innovations to fulfil new consumer needs. When the pandemic hit, people became more concerned about their economic future. They became more focused on themselves and their close family members, and more rational towards daily consumer goods. In that sense, the domestic brands have a huge advantage because they are more competitive in terms of assortment and guarantee
quality at a good price. For example, one of our biggest growth brands in our portfolio last year was a value brand, Fillgood. How has the interpretation of health and wellness manifested itself in South Korea’s alcoholic beverage sector? Health consciousness is probably the biggest trend in South Korea. We launched our first zero-alcohol beer brand in Korea in December. It’s the first of its kind in marketing, where we produce a beer with a process we are calling “smart dealcoholisation”, which extracts all the alcohol but keeps the flavour. This is for people who want to enjoy the taste and refreshment but not necessarily the alcohol every day. Another big trend is well-being. People are looking increasingly to be in tune with themselves and to be more relaxed. We have in our portfolio, for example, Hoegaarden, our wheat beer made with natural ingredients. You will see a lot of initiatives in that direction where we try to teach consumers how to relax a little bit more with our content and innovations. We launched a new flavour of Hoegaarden Green Grape a couple of months ago. Through social listening studies, we figured out that certain flavours connote relaxation and green grape was one of the top flavours. Hence, we launched that variant. Even before the pandemic, there were a big trend in Korea where people vacation at home. You may not be able to travel but you can you relax and enjoy a different flavour at home. This was the whole idea around Hoegaarden Green Grape. It was a big hit. In China, we saw brands innovate and try to deliver at-home experiences with virtual promotions and activations. Have you been doing a lot of that in South Korea? Unfortunately, we are not allowed to sell alcohol directly to consumers through e-commerce. But food delivery is huge in South Korea and very developed. So, we started a partnership with one of the biggest food delivery companies in Korea. Our commitment together is how we can do this guaranteeing an age-check. It is a major concern for the government and us too. We are taking the right steps. We are also trying to offer entertainment to people at home. One of the biggest electronic music festivals in South Korea and the most important branded one is the CASS Blue Playground. It has been going on for five years. This year, of course, there was no way for a massive festival to be conducted, so we did an online festival. We saw a lot of live streaming around the world. Some of them weren’t top-notch in terms of production. We thought, what if we did it with very high-quality production and leverage augmented reality? We did a festival for four hours for almost 900,000 people online. The total interaction before, during and after the event was almost 14 million people. Our leading brand Cass was a global trending topic for the first time. It was an amazing return on investment and providing entertainment to people was a lot of fun. People are now at home and bored. So if you can really elevate the experience for them, people will come back to you later. From your vantage point and specific to your category, what’s
your outlook for South Korea in 2021? This is a very dynamic market. Normally, we see some trends around the world taking years to change. It’s amazing how fast things happen here. For our category, we see premiumisation coming back in a near future. We believe consumers are looking for more sophisticated products. Secondly, health and wellness is probably going to be the biggest trend for the next 5-10 years. South Korea has always been concerned about health, but the pandemic made everyone more sensitive to the issue. This is an aging country. So, this is becoming increasingly relevant for people. For example, we decided to launch our first zero alcohol variant with Vitamin C. We believe that consumers will look for more functional products. “Can I enjoy beer, but can you add a little more functionality to it?” In China and South Korea, this is very relevant. The health and wellness opportunity can be way beyond lower calories and carbs. It’s about balance. Doing products with natural ingredients with the appropriate process will be more and more relevant. The number of natural cosmetics in South Korea is amazing. There is concern among people about what they put on their bodies. Another thing we believe is going to have a big impact is new behaviours. Some think that after the vaccine, people will come back to party again. It could be true, but it will not be in the same way. I like to eat out a lot, but I see the convenience of food being delivered every day, I will never forget that. These new behaviours will stick to us for way longer – enjoying at home more, trying to have fun in smaller groups. Having more groups of friends was never so important. What are the key opportunities to leverage in 2021? For me, it is to try and accelerate the trends we already identified. We need to keep pushing and try to leverage the things we learned. Nobody predicted the pandemic would happen, but it did, and now we need to learn from that, so we are. This year, I think, will be a bit easier when you apply the knowledge and accelerate some trends. We are focused on developing solutions and solving customer problems for this new reality. What do you think is the single biggest issue that will impact all marketers universally in 2021? I am going to use another cliched phrase and you will probably hear this a lot – marketing transformation. Many companies are talking about it and we are taking it very seriously. This pandemic was a shockwave. I think we need to be humble and open our minds. There are a lot of challenges which impact the function of the CMO. The major function of the CMO is to grow the business. It’s important to understand where the business is heading, the concerns that are growing and try to address the pain points. What we found out during that terrible year in 2020 is that we need to update ourselves better, we need to close our capability gaps as much as we can and accelerate trends. We need to understand that future needs are different, and what is required of a good marketer in 2021 is different.
Why Timestamping Your Online Content Is So Important ByScott Baradell
I’ve been blogging for 15 years, but I’d never given a lot of thought about the best way to timestamp my blog content. Then I started writing a book called Trust Signals: The New PR, which required almost daily online research. The experience has turned me into someone with surprisingly passionate opinions about timestamping. Where’s the Fresh Stuff? When I go to the supermarket, I tend to shop the periphery rather than the interior aisles. That’s because grocery stores are generally laid out similarly, with fresh foods—meat, fish, produce, dairy—occupying the outer walls. I go to the center of the store if I want canned goods that will sustain my family
after a zombie apocalypse. As I’ve been doing my book research, however, I’ve discovered that no such separation standard exists among most blog content—for brands or publishers. When I search to learn more about a topic, I randomly encounter the following: • Timestamped posts that offer timely information • Timestamped posts with updates to ensure freshness • Timestamped posts that offer timeless information
• Undated posts that offer timely or timeless information • Timestamped posts that offer outdated information • Undated posts that offer outdated information The comparative usefulness of such posts aligns closely with the order I have listed them. Let’s look at each category in more detail to understand why. 1. Timestamped Posts With Timely Information This is the gold standard. If your post has a 2020 or 2019 timestamp, I know it’s fresh content. The only downside is that a fresh timestamp doesn’t tell me much about your own research standards. Sometimes I find links to “recent studies” from 2012 that have outlived their usefulness (even well-known publications are guilty of this). I was pleased to see, when producing content for Forbes Councils, they not only timestamp posts but also require any cited research to be no greater than three years old. Publications’ standards differ, but a recent timestamp is your best first step to identifying good-quality, relevant content. 2. Timestamped Posts With Updates to Ensure Freshness Of course, if you have a blog that’s been around a while, your content won’t all have recent publication dates. So how do you keep it relevant? The best way is to periodically update your posts and include a timestamp of the most recent update next to the original timestamp. Most sophisticated publishers know that the bulk of blog traffic comes from older posts, so if you can keep them fresh, both your visitors and Google will reward you for it. Make it a point to go through all your posts—at least those that have received traffic—at least once per year to read through and update the content. 3. Timestamped Posts With Timeless Information This one’s a little tricky. If the post has a recent timestamp, I know it’s fine to use. But if it has an old timestamp, I have to read the piece to determine whether it’s relevant enough that I can still use it—because it’s talking about high-level trends that don’t change as frequently, historical research, or general marketing wisdom. Even if your information is truly timeless, periodically adding an updated timestamp is still a good idea. It tells me that you have recently vetted your content for relevance so I don’t have to do it for you. 4. Undated Posts With Timely or Timeless Information This type of content may be helpful, but sometimes it’s just not worth the trouble. If your post is undated, I have no idea when you wrote it, so I have to figure out for myself whether it is still timely or relevant to me. I may be able to figure out from the context whether it’s recent (for example, if you note that Trump is president, I’ll know it’s more recent than if you mention Obama is president). I might click on a link and find it pointing to an interesting
2020 study. Pay dirt! Or I might click on a link that delivers a 404 error because the outdated research the post links to isn’t even online anymore. Frustrating. 5. Timestamped Posts With Outdated Information The bad news is that I can’t use outdated information. The good news is that if you tell me that right away with a 2011 timestamp, you won’t waste my time. 6. Undated Posts With Outdated Information This type is the worst of all. I have to scan your post, click the outlinks, check for comment timestamps, or perform other detective work just to determine that your content is worthless to me. Please don’t make me check your source code or the Wayback Machine to see when you published a post. Timestamped Content and Trust Since I’ve been writing about the ways brands build trust online, it occurred to me that content timestamps can be an important trust signal for brands. To return to the grocery store metaphor, when you pick up those steaks for dinner, what’s the first thing you do? You check the “best before” date. “Best before” or “sell by” dates are a relatively new phenomenon, having originated in the UK in the 1970s. You might be surprised to learn that in the United States, the USDA does not require foods to carry expiration dates, except in the case of infant formula. Nevertheless, food manufacturers add those labels to their products. Why? To build trust. Research has shown that consumers see expiration dates as quality indicators. And it’s not that big of a stretch to see timestamped content in the same light. Let’s be honest: Why do so many brands and publishers refuse to timestamp their posts? In the early days of blogging, all content was timestamped. It wasn’t a blog if the posts weren’t clearly dated and displayed in reverse chronological order. At some point, someone got clever and said, “You know what? Visitors bounce when they see old content, and Google doesn’t like it, either. So let’s just take the dates off and no one will be the wiser.” That might be clever, but it’s also deceptive. Your visitors— and your buyers—might wonder what else you are being deceptive about. When you devote the time and creativity necessary to create quality content, it’s well worth the relatively small additional commitment to keep that content updated and to share that status with your visitors. They will trust you all the more for it. Scott is the founder and CEO of Idea Grove, a unified PR and marketing boutique for B2B technology companies. Idea Grove has ranked three times as an Inc. 5000 company and was named 2020 Small Agency of the Year by the Dallas chapter of the Public Relations Society of America.
What if food packaging were carbon-neutral?
Go nature. Go carton. Food packaging plays a critical role in getting food safely to consumers around the world. But it can also cause problems for the planet. What if all food packaging came from plant-based materials and didn’t impact the climate? At Tetra Pak, we already have paper-based carton packages with reduced climate impact. But we won’t stop there. Our aim is to create cartons made solely from plant-based materials that are fully renewable, fully recyclable and carbon-neutral. It’s all part of our journey to deliver the world’s most sustainable food package. Learn more at gonature.tetrapak.com
Top 7 Ways To Make Your Ad More Creative—And Effective—In 2021 And Beyond By Rook Zimmatore
The pandemic has changed the rules for everything, including marketing. Never has the brand message or the way it is communicated mattered more than it has lately — and that’s a good thing for marketers and consumers moving forward. Brands have had to go beyond just selling their products and services to embracing sensitivity and empathy as well. At the same time, creativity has flourished, as channels and the variety of ad units available have proliferated. Meanwhile, categories like e-commerce have exploded, creating still more opportunity for marketers and necessitating more creative expertise. As the leaders in High Impact Advertising, with a rich history of creativity and campaign success, the team at Undertone has learned a thing or two through the years, especially in 2020. Our ads are more creative, more timely and more effective now than ever. Here, we would like to share our seven best practices to creating effective, resonant ads in 2021 and beyond. 1. Put creativity first. There are myriad creative tools you could and should be putting to use for your brand. First, think emotional versus rational. 95% of decisions are made by our
fast-thinking emotional side. In addition, show don’t tell. An ad littered by copy is less effective than telling a story visually. Provide context for your products or services by showcasing their use in a particular setting, to reinforce the benefits to the user and the solutions it brings. These are just a few of the tried and true creative best practices that over time have proved to work, no matter what is going on in the world around us. 2. Take advantage of the diversity of formats. Creating advertising is more complex than ever. You have to convey not just a marketing message but do so using as many ad units in as many formats and channels as are available, from mobile to desktop to CTV. Take a brand that limits itself to mobile units only. Why, in this universe of media choices, would a marketer do that? Brands must embrace multi-point solutions toward achieving their ultimate marketing goals. Which brings us to the next point. 3. Employ creative symmetry across formats. Articulating a message across platforms is crucial, and so is a seamless creative message regardless of medium. With the right partner, a client can get it done in one shot, knowing
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that their mobile ad won’t look totally disjointed from their CTV ad. Undertone created an interactive CTV ad for an automaker featuring three sub videos that enabled the viewer to see additional features of the car. So, a typical, 30-second spot was transformed into an interactive ad that more deeply immersed the consumer. And it’s not just CTV; the same execution could happen across mobile or desktop, and could be easily tweaked to fit those formats. 4. Rely on the best, most intelligent data. Data is abundant, but how smart is your data? You need to know not just who is seeing your ad but who’s engaging with it, and how. And you need to know which creative is working and which is not. Does a blue background work better than a green background? Intelligence and creative are part of the same equation for connecting with consumers. With the right data, you have the ability to know what your targets are thinking about your ad and can change up the creative accordingly. And you need a partner that’s always expanding its data resources. For example, Undertone recently enhanced targeting of our clients’ ads by partnering with Fyllo, creator of the first and largest ecosystem of cannabis and CBD-derived purchase data, which enabled marketers in mainstream categories like CPG, QSR and pharma to reach a whole new group of consumers. 5. Be agile, and find agile partners. We’ve all had to maintain the ability to turn on a dime the past year, and advertising is no exception. E-commerce has exploded. The travel industry has been rocked. Ad messaging has had to change in an instant around pandemic protocols and sensitivities. Social and political events have also necessitated shifts in content. The ability to change at a moment’s notice is essential in a marketer and in an ad partner. If you need to change your ad copy at once, and across formats and channels, you need a partner who you trust can get the job done. In today’s world, there is no other option.
6. Get involved. Today, brands must also be activists. Community service is not just the right thing to do. Consumers expect it of you. And brands must partner with companies that are also socially conscious and active. In the earliest days of the pandemic, we launched an initiative benefiting frontline workers called From the Front Burners to the Front Lines, encompassing partnerships with nonprofits in cities where we have offices—among them, Support and Feed in New York and The Giving Kitchen in Atlanta. More recently, we threw our support behind the Ad Council’s #AloneTogether campaign, focusing on mental health issues around the pandemic. Today, causes are top of mind for consumers, and they must be for you as well. 7. Stay forward-looking. How do brands create a connection with audiences in the thrall of social media influencers, and who embrace the latest technology, like TikTok? By being—and staying—ahead of the curve. Trends seem to come and go by the day, especially in these times. Relatively few of us would have ever, before a year ago, considered shopping for groceries online. Today, we can’t imagine living without Amazon Fresh or Instacart. The latest trends can spell opportunities for your brand. Don’t miss out. With these best practices, and by deploying the best creative, data and media options to intelligently craft and execute campaigns, your brand can make meaningful consumer connections and deliver powerful results. Bringing together the art and science of advertising means that consumers, brands and publishers all stand to benefit. Daniel Aks is the President of Undertone, leveraging his broad operating experience in C-level roles for the information, education, & consumer media industries. For the two years before joining Undertone,where he led their successful turnaround by introducing new products, lowering costs, & building an innovative culture.
Less Is More: Redefining the Luxury Goods Market
By Wharton Staff
The 1980s is often remembered as the decade of excess. Big hair, big shoulder pads, and big jewelry were the height of fashion. Shows like “Dynasty,” “Dallas,” and “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” sparked dreams about sipping Champagne, partying on a yacht, wearing a silk Versace dress, Gucci shoes, and carrying a Louis Vuitton handbag. Conspicuous consumption was aspirational, and the rich were glorified. But things have changed. In just a few short decades, there has been a cultural shift away from conspicuous consumption, towards something called “minimalist luxury.” Counterfeit goods have become so sophisticated that the real thing has lost some of its luster for the wealthy. After all, there’s no point in sporting your $100,000 Birkin bag if the woman sitting next to you on the subway is carrying a pretty good knockoff for about $100. Wharton marketing professors Z. John Zhang and Pinar Yildirim have been studying this phenomenon and have written a paper about it titled “A Theory of Minimalist Luxury,” along with co-author Z. Jessie Liu, a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s Carey Business School. Not only do the researchers explain this shift, but they also analyze what it means for the luxury goods market that relies on these wealthy consumers. Zhang and Yildirim joined Knowledge@ Wharton to talk about their study. Knowledge@Wharton: In this paper you write, “Less is more is the new conspicuous consumption.’” What does that mean? John Zhang: Conspicuous consumption was a term used by Thorstein Veblen, the American economist and sociologist, back in the 1890s. He noticed that wealthy people tended to buy many things that they could consume in public, things at very high prices. This was rather odd, given that functionally equivalent products were available at much lower prices. He suggested that these wealthy people engaged in this wasteful, showy consumption or “conspicuous consumption” to signal their wealth status. Essentially, these wealthy people were putting their wealth on display to convince others that they belonged to a different and much more desirable class. Therefore, conspicuous consumption is a way to signal social status. Pinar Yildirim: In his famous book, The Theory of the Leisure Class, Veblen was studying the Gilded Age, and he argued
that consumption was a signifier of wealth, and it became honorific to consume. It was almost like if you were failing to consume, it was a mark of demerit. He dubbed consumption as an end to demonstrate one’s economic position in society, and therefore signaling your wealth was a conspicuous behavior. Veblen had the insight that consumption and display of items that you owned was communicating information about yourself. That could be your economic status, it could be your social status, it could be the qualities that you have, for instance, coming from a famous or a royal family. Just like in those days, an expensive watch, an expensive car, and an expensive handbag today can tell others that we have wealth. There is a large body of academic research, as well as anecdotal evidence, that suggests that individuals spend a lot of their wealth in order to display these expensive items, to communicate these characteristics of themselves. This is very much the grounds on which the luxury industry operates. People buy luxury brands not because they just care about raw materials, craftsmanship, and high quality, but because they want to communicate something about themselves. They want to communicate their economic status, their social status, and consumption does this rather well.
“Spending on luxury goods is like burning money in public, to convince others that you really have a lot of money.”–John Zhang This trend of wasteful spending to communicate status is very much still alive and out there, but what we’ve been observing over the past one or two decades is this alternate emerging trend of minimalist consumption. Growing numbers of consumers have started practicing an opposite trend; that is, they decide and practice the idea of buying fewer items and buying better. This is what we refer to as “minimalist luxury” within the paper, but of course as many will recognize, minimalism itself is a much grander, a much bigger concept than just the luxury industry. There is popular TV personality Marie Kondo and her ideas of purging items that do not bring you joy. We see examples of minimalism in various industries. We see it in architecture. The number of items that you buy could be very few, the furniture that you own could be very
The problem with advertising these days is that it is too focused on sales. For an ad like this one to be considered successful, it has to first get your attention and then provide you with something so amazing — like a set of features or unique selling points or a solid promise — that you’ll put down the magazine you are reading and rush to the store to purchase the product. To help increase the chances of this happening, some ads include a “call to action” feature, which is a gimmick so ridiculously
unbelievable — like buy one and get 197 free — that you don’t have any choice but to put down the magazine you are reading and rush to the store to purchase the product. Good thing that this ad for Oatgurt* isn’t like all those modern ads. It’s only interested in providing you with an oversized cute visual of the package, an overpromising headline, a totally nonsensical call to action button and an asterisk with a side note to tell you what the product actually is.
*As a side note, Oatgurt is not yogurt, because yogurt is made with dairy and has no oats, while Oatgurt is made with oats and has no dairy.
few, kitchenware items could be very few, or you might be intentionally purchasing fewer clothing items. Minimalism is a very grand concept that applies to many different areas, but thinking about minimalism in the context of luxury to some was an oxymoron. We have known that people were consuming in a very conspicuous way. They wanted to show wealth. So, why would you want to buy less if the reason why you’re buying items is to display them? That’s essentially the observation that started us on this research. Knowledge@Wharton: Can you tell me how you went about studying this? Zhang: I’m an economist by training. I’m also a theorist, so the way I study the phenomenon is to build a model and propose a mechanism for what is happening. The Veblen thesis basically says that the rich buy expensive luxury goods to signal their status. However, if you look at today’s marketplace, you’ll notice that there are lots of high-quality, fake luxury goods around everywhere. And they are available at a fraction of the cost of the real thing. If you think a little bit about this, you realize that the Veblen thesis would not work in today’s environment. There is no good reason for the rich to spend on luxury goods. Spending on luxury goods is like burning money in public, to convince others that you really have a lot of money. Imagine that if you don’t have a lot of money. You obviously would never stage any kind of a public burning of money. However, if there is a lot of fake money around that looks just as real, you do not need to have a lot of real money to stage a public burning. You burn the fake money. Nobody needs to know. Thus, with fakes around, luxury goods can no longer serve as an effective signal for social status. The rich should find something else to signal their status. Yet, if you look at the reality, even with so many fake goods around, the rich are still buying expensive luxury goods and luxury brands are still prospering. What’s going on? That’s the puzzle that intrigued us. That’s what we wanted to solve. Our answer is that minimalist luxury is the right signal in today’s marketplace because when you buy less and buy better, you stand out. You stand out simply because you are gaining more through sacrificing functional utilities than the people you want to stand out from. To give you an example to illustrate, in ancient China, women from wealthy families practiced foot binding, which was a very, very painful process. When you saw a woman with extraordinarily small feet or minimalist feet, so to speak, you knew she must be from a wealthy family. This is because with such small feet, you cannot do any menial work. You must have servants to take care of your daily needs. A woman from a poor family could never afford to bind her feet. Here, you see that the rich make some sacrifices that the poor are not willing to make to stand out. That’s essentially the theoretical foundation for the minimalist luxury we propose.
“People buy luxury brands not because they just care about raw materials, craftsmanship, and high quality, but because they want to communicate something about themselves.”–Pinar Yildirim
Yildirim: Can this theory hold if you put together the economics behind it? Are there enough incentives for consumers to be able to practice this behavior? And would that be consistent with their desire of signaling their wealth? Those are the questions that we are asking, and this is a theoretical exercise. So, this is relying on economic theory in combination with math. What we started first looking into was trying to understand what kinds of incentives, what kinds of changes in the environment could result in this shift of behavior? The first question one can ask is, are we in a different market now? Do consumers no longer care about conspicuous consumption? That’s certainly not the case. The second thing we observed is that for consumers to be able to signal their wealth through consumption, the mechanism of doing this is a lot harder now. This is because there are a lot of high-quality and fairly cheap counterfeits available. This is the mechanism through which we talk about the challenges of signaling for the wealthy and luxury consumers today. In a market like today’s, where you have “super fakes” or AAA fakes, as they are called, these counterfeits are practically visibly the same. How can you, through consumption, signal your wealth or your other qualities to compete with anonymous strangers? This is going to be a challenging task for those who own wealth and who own luxury goods. As a result, they need to use some other tactics. They need to be able to find other means to signal that they are wealthy and to differentiate themselves from others. When we consume luxury or any other goods, there are symbolic benefits or nonfunctional benefits of self-signaling or wealth-differentiating yourself from others. Of course, there are additional functional benefits of these goods. If you own 20 different sweaters, those 20 different sweaters also serve a purpose. What the rich can do is to purge items to the degree that they can own a fairly small number of expensive luxury goods to be able to signal their wealth. At the same time, they somehow sacrifice all those other functional benefits of those goods, which the non-wealthy cannot replicate to the same degree. This is a reversal of tactics for the wealthy. They are trying to still spend money, but they are trying to do it on fewer items, imposing the costs of having to live with a fewer number of items. And that’s the story that we tell in the paper. Knowledge@Wharton: During the coronavirus pandemic, we’ve seen tremendous changes in consumer behavior in terms of what people are buying, how they’re buying it, and how they’re getting together. People are no longer gathering in the same places they used to, where they could signal their wealth through what they were wearing or the cars they were driving. Has the pandemic accelerated this idea of minimalist luxury?
“Luxury brands still have room to play even with this kind of a trend in the marketplace.”–John Zhang Yildirim: If anything, I think the pandemic taught us that conspicuous consumption is real because many of us are now spending time at home behind screens, and we don’t have these social interactions with anonymous strangers
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anymore. To the extent that we observe people spending less money on conspicuous items, but more on sweatpants or other comfortable items, that tells us that we don’t simply care about the quality of raw materials or craftsmanship or other characteristics of these luxury goods. Those things haven’t changed in the pandemic, right? The fact that we no longer buy those conspicuous things tells us that the reason that we consume these goods, at least in part, is the idea of signaling to others something about ourselves. In another study, I’ve been looking at how COVID-19 changed the shopping behavior of consumers relative to pre-pandemic levels. I am looking at brick-and-mortar store traffic. What I have seen, looking at about twenty 20 different product categories and comparing before-and-after store traffic, is the traffic in all of these categories had declined. Some categories had a little less decline, such as home goods and office products, but all of them had seen a significant decline. But the two or three categories that have seen the largest decline were luxury consumption and apparel — fashion goods, shoes, and jewelry-related items. Interestingly, men’s apparel pretty much floored. Women’s apparel also has seen a significant decline, but not as drastic as men’s apparel. But seeing these changes also confirmed to us that we care about others’ perceptions. If we don’t have these interactions to the same extent, we’re not going to consume these goods with the same motivation that we did before. If anything, the pandemic has taught us that conspicuous consumption is still pretty much alive, and it is pretty much a motivation for consumers to buy and consume luxury goods. The second issue is the pandemic has also given us the opportunity to reevaluate our values. How do we prioritize our lives and think about our social interactions in relation to other things, to ownership of objects? I think there might be some value or some benefits to managers in thinking about how the values of consumers might have shifted during the period of the pandemic. For a luxury manager, the question should be: Will consumers enjoy consumption of goods to the same degree as they did before, or should we expect changes in how they value or how they see the benefits from consumption? I think this is going to create even more hurdles for luxury brands moving forward. Knowledge@Wharton: That’s where your paper moves from the theoretical to the practical. You wrote, “The trend of minimalist luxury is not something to be alarmed about” — that luxury brands can preside over it if they know how to manage it. What do those brand managers need to be thinking about? Zhang: Our research really shows that a luxury brand should not get alarmed about the trend of minimalist luxury for a number of reasons. First, minimalist luxury is only one of the multiple trends going on in the marketplace. Not all consumers will embrace it for all product categories. This means that luxury brands still have room to play even with this kind of a trend in the marketplace. Second, even if consumers embrace minimalist luxury in a specific product category, the brand needs not to suffer in revenues or in profitability. As a firm you can still maintain your revenues or
profitability if you’re doing it right. When consumers buy less, but they also buy better; that means as a brand, if you cannot play with the quantity, you can definitely play with the price.
“Consumers wanting to own fewer items may not seem like good news from the perspective of luxury managers, but that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case.”–Pinar Yildirim Yildirim: We would like to nudge managers to think more carefully about this up-and-coming trend. Consumers wanting to own fewer items may not seem like good news from the perspective of luxury managers, but that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. As long as you can adjust your product portfolio and your pricing, you might very well ride on this trend and actually not suffer any losses. Those are the two actionable items that we would like to start recommending to luxury managers. You should think about your product portfolio, trying to perhaps narrow it down to the core products, and think about your pricing that is in line with consumers’ desires to signal their status or their wealth. A second and perhaps more intuitive recommendation that we can make is try to keep the value of your luxury brand as clear and as undiluted to the consumer as possible. That means try to make clear your differentiation from the counterfeits to the extent that it’s possible. It’s a very challenging task because counterfeiters are really good today. They have very high-quality materials and practically the same factories producing these items as the luxury goods. But to the extent that it’s possible, try to differentiate yourself and make your products visible to others, and then this challenge will actually go down. Knowledge@Wharton: What’s next for this line of research? Zhang: The luxury goods industry is a big industry. It is highly visible, too. Strangely enough, there have not been many studies that think deeply about how to maintain the viability of luxury goods as a signal for social status in a very changing and dynamic environment. So, we will stay on this viability issue in the near future for sure. Yildirim: The luxury industry or the entire research area of conspicuous consumption is quite an interesting area because it says so much about human nature. It tells us something about our desires for being in this world — how we want to live, whether we want to look like others or different from others, and how consumption serves this purpose of trying to differentiate ourselves from others. Consumers over centuries have relied on different tactics for this. They were spending their wealth in order to signal things about themselves. Now they are reversing these tactics to some degree, and in the near future, they might be relying on other tactics. They might be using alternate ways, alternate methods, alternate channels, or dimensions of signaling, and we are on the lookout for this. We are actively observing and looking at how consumers are trying to communicate characteristics about themselves through consumption.
‘Advertising still not casting women in compelling, real narratives’ By babita baruah
Babita Baruah is the managing partner of GTB India, which is part of Team WPP. On the occasion of International Women’s Day, Baruah offers up a simple checklist that can help achieve a better representation of women in advertising. The taste I cherish most is that of a smashed-up samosa mixed with the sweetness of a crushed mithai (Indian sweet). No matter how much I try, I have never been able to recreate this unforgettable delight. When I was young, my mother would come home from her monthly Ladies Association meeting and pull a rolledup napkin from her handbag as my sister and I waited with excitement. We watched her unroll the soggy paper wrap and squeal with happiness at the samosa and mithai she had wrapped for us from her plate – it was part of the tea and snacks she had been served. Her love for us made her carry back the soggy mess, and it is a taste that unfailingly brings back strong memories. I look back often to those days with pride and love and realize the power of emotion. Simple narratives come from deep cultural truths From understanding consumer behavior – the drivers, the influences – coupled with the ability to articulate and express. That’s our strength as an industry, our legacy as brand builders. There are some strong examples of ads aimed at shattering social conflict or stereotypes, at inspiring awareness for social change. Some have even faced a social backlash from certain fronts. Progressiveness is not universal and is, at times, in conflict with existing social systems. Many marketers wouldn’t want to take the risk of stirring such controversies and end up playing much safer than they would have perhaps intended to. However, a lot of advertising still stops at merely casting women, rather than characterizing them in a compelling, real narrative. This is poor utilization of resources and a lost opportunity for creating an ad that inspires, provokes action or even some behavior change. Here are some ways in which deep connections can be created. They are simple but require rigor and an appetite for powerful brand communication... Inspired discoveries: Search for deep cultural truths. Use data
well to unlock behavior traits. Connect and engage with women: On real stories. On challenges. Conflicts. Drivers. Detractors. Resilience. Vulnerability. Fear. Hope. Define with descriptors: Ambitious mother, pragmatic professional, imprisoned student, embraced scars, the explorer, the optimist... Or even something like this, which I read on the internet: “A mother is a person who seeing there are only four pieces of a pie for five people, promptly announces she never did care for pie.” When we define, we create visual imagery, which makes for a stimulating creative brief. Relook at the ROI: The ROI from such advertising may not be instant. It may not always be measurable with metrics on conversion if women are not primary buyers. The task here is to define the brand objective, the right metric and align expectations. As someone once said: “Not all that matters can be measured.” Our recent work on an automobile brand is a campaign for the festive season – a season driven by retail and, hence, numbers. As a client-agency team, we opted for a different approach, from a typical retail campaign to a cultural take based on the brand proposition of family values and relationships. We came up with a simple story of a mother and a daughter – a middle-aged mother’s concern for her injured daughter, her grit to drive on the highway at day-break to be with her daughter on a festive day, with her pack of home-made sweets, independence at her age as a home chef-entrepreneur. It worked well and created a positive buzz for the brand, especially on emotion. What was also encouraging was the extremely positive gender agnostic response. A translation to business impact. Inspiration doesn’t need scale. Nor does it call for big budgets. Leading with emotion just needs an honest idea that deeply resonates with women buyers or influencers who can be powerful brand advocates.
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Off The Record: Masked Marketer By Tom Kaneshige
Editor’s Note: “Off The Record: Masked Marketer” is a new series where we peek behind the scenes thanks to an anonymous marketing leader to gain insight into real-world best practices. The following story comes from a former CMO of a large Asian electronics company who learned the hard way about the importance of vetting a foreign company before joining its ranks. It has been edited for length and clarity. The Asian electronics giant relentlessly came after me over and over again. At the time, I was a three-time experienced marketing leader with 25 years of global team leadership of all major cultural archetypes, including across AsiaPacific cultures, for some of the best-known Fortune 100 CPG brands of U.S. corporations. I had the depth and
breadth of brand marketing, product innovation and business development experience that this Asian electronics company was looking for. During the interview process, I met repeatedly with the Regional CEO of North America, a highly experienced Asian business man skilled in sales and marketing who peppered me with questions. He was smart and engaging and gave me a list of top marketing priorities. My respect for him grew, and I was left to assume that I would be reporting to him directly. The other man in the room during the interviews, an Asian executive, hardly said a word. After several interviews with the Regional CEO, and reviewing their initial CMO contract and compensation package, I thought hard about whether to say yes. After
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initial due diligence, I contacted their Regional Head of HR and told him that I was pulling myself out of consideration. The HR Head said that they really wanted me and asked me to please reconsider. The HR Head proceeded to contact me every week with greater responsibilities and a more lucrative compensation package. Because the HR Head was courting me so strongly, I decided to conduct additional research. I asked that I be given the opportunity to meet with the senior most local-hire American in the Regional office, who was the SVP of sales, to attempt to get the truth about the company, business and culture. Looking back, I got the party line from him, not the truth. At some point, you need to make a career decision. While I was happy and doing well where I was at, this North America Regional CMO job scope and responsibility across all B2C and B2B businesses would be an opportunity to learn and grow in the fast-paced electronics industry. With my 25 years of global experience working with many different cultures, including Asian cultures, I truly believed that I could learn, adapt and succeed — and so I took the job. First Day Follies On my first day, you can imagine my surprise when I found out that I would be reporting to the executive who had been quiet during the interview process instead of the Regional CEO who did all of the talking. I was further shocked when the executive (now my new boss) told me that his priorities weren’t even aligned with the top priorities his boss, the Regional CEO, had given me. Then my new boss said my CMO role would not include the fastest growing, critical division of the company. It was one of the reasons why I took the job in the first place. A substantial portion of my role, which I was told would be in my scope, was taken away behind my back. I found out that day that they were interviewing and hired a CMO for that product division at the same time they were interviewing me. That CMO started on the same day as me. Adding insult to injury, the HR Head who I had built a trusting relationship came to my office on my first day to wish me luck. He informed me that now that he successfully recruited me, he would be leaving the U.S. offices and returning to the company’s headquarters in Asia. I felt betrayed and quickly realized that the reason he came after me so aggressively was to punch his ticket to be repatriated. I had been plunged into a culture of secrecy and untruths.
And then I found a mole in my midst. An expatriate executive assistant who attended my meetings proved to be less than trustworthy. At the conclusion of my meetings, I would get a call from my boss who already knew what had transpired. The executive assistant was shadowing me and sharing information back to my boss. English wasn’t the executive assistant’s native language, so a lot of the meeting discussion sharing wasn’t accurate, which only exasperated the problem. It Gets Worse — Much Worse If the first few days weren’t bad enough, things only got worse. Two female direct reports came to my office asking to speak to me confidentially. They told me that my new boss had made sexually inappropriate comments to them. They had reported this to the corporate head of HR, but nothing happened. They asked if I could report it on their behalf. So I did. I informed the second highest ranking person in HR, who showed concern and took notes. Then this individual said that my boss was connected to the senior most individuals in the company and, therefore, untouchable. Not surprisingly, I never heard anything more on this. More bad news: Government investigators began looking into potential tax evasion at the company. As CMO, I was getting interview requests from business media, and so I quickly went to my superiors for advice. I was told this chestnut: “Don’t worry about those things. We operate with different business ethics than Americans.” My jaw dropped. Adapt and Survive Sure, I continued to operate with transparency but also began employing political cunning and emotional intelligence in ways once unimaginable to me. I sought out and built alliances with people who showed integrity. I learned who to trust. But this is a reactionary tale of survival. The better path would have been to avoid getting into this situation in the first place. Or at least come into the job with a better understanding. You don’t want to get culture shock on your first day on the job. Here are my three lessons learned:
Language was used as a kind of concealing cloak. The American senior sales executive and I were the only native English speakers at the U.S. offices. Weekly C-suite meetings were conducted in their native Asian language, and we were given a short summary in English. Much of the debate, detail and strategy was not shared with us. Much context was lost as we were not seen as equals.
Do a substantial amount of due diligence in researching a prospective employer, especially if it’s a foreign company, and accept the fact that you won’t really know the culture until you’re there. In today’s world, use Linkedin and other networking tools to contact people at the company who you know and trust, particularly former employees who will tell you the truth, not the party line.
Product teams back at headquarters kept new plans close to the vest. Regional business units were given information at the last minute, forcing them to develop and share harried consumer plans with retail partners. Meanwhile, getting budgets was a back-and-forth negotiation between headquarters and the divisions.
Get everything in writing in your contract. Even though I did this, the company culture included breaking contracts. Don’t underestimate how company and country culture can overshadow everything else. As Peter Drucker famously said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
INTERVIEW - SCOTT TILTON By CMO Council
CMO Council: To what degree has the cancellation or postponement of mega-sports events diminished the appetite of brand sponsors, or re-directed spending into other areas? Hookit: From our analysis, the months of March through June is when COVID had its biggest impact. Sponsorship value created for brands by sports properties across all sports dropped by about $150M a month on average for those four months. This dip compared to the rest of 2020 caused a $600M “loss” in value. However, when you look at the year as a whole, the total sponsorship value generated for brands in 2020 was nearly $8B, which is only an 8% hit to the total. We also found that the total number of sponsor branded posts was down in 2020, but the engagement on those posts was up which helped make up some of the lost value. Brands absolutely doubled down their efforts and transitioned much of their activation efforts to social and digital. After March, in-person physical activations couldn’t happen or were severely limited in scope due to the coronavirus restrictions. To make up for this loss of in-person activations, there was a significant pivot to digital activations by brands and their partners within sports. These temporary “make-goods” weren’t the original plan, but brands were showcased in new ways and to new audiences that they had never been before. Some properties were able to create new revenue streams by leveraging their social channels. While
in-person activations will be back when the fans return en masse to the stadium, these digital activations will become standard in sponsorship contracts going forward. The best CMOs & sports marketing executives have realized that social media is now central to maximizing the value of sponsorship marketing spend, which has gone largely unmeasured. Top marketing executives have increasingly applied data and analytics across all their marketing channels to drive better results. Sponsorship is one of the last marketing categories to see that happen. Now, with the shift to digital activations, that data is more accessible than ever for brands through companies like Hookit. CMOs and sports marketers have realized that they must leverage social media and data to evolve their sponsorships. COVID has accelerated both the shift to social and digital as well as the importance of data to evaluate the effectiveness of sponsorships. CMO Council: What strategies and creative approaches have brands used to retain and maximize their sports marketing investments during these restrictive times? What is the outlook for 2021? Hookit: Fans weren’t in stadiums in 2020, but they were still following their favorite athletes, teams, leagues, and sponsors on social media. There were a variety of approaches taken by brands last year when working with their sports partners. Some brands simply stepped back from
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promotion, feeling it wasn’t the right timing to be pushing products. Others leaned in to support their partners, having the athletes or teams post how a specific brand had helped them through the pandemic or allowed them to continue training during lockdown. There were brands that took a more lighthearted approach, starting or participating in social media #challenges. Looking forward into 2021, the outlook is good. By July 2020, sponsorship value had bounced back to pre-COVID levels, signaling that sports marketing is as strong as ever. Brands and properties are working together differently now, but the goals are still the same. The more savvy brands are investing in sponsorship measurement tools to allow them to evaluate their portfolio and identify areas for opportunity or where their partners aren’t performing as well for the brand. CMO Council: What new digital media insights and analytics are helping brands select, direct, evaluate and justify sports marketing or athlete personality investments? Hookit: With more activations happening on social media in 2020 than ever, there is more data available to sports marketers to be able to make informed decisions on which partnerships are performing best for their brand goals. Sponsorship technology (spontech) companies like Hookit empower marketers to impact the bottom line by measuring sponsorship spend and partnerships against an optimized set of KPIs. Some of these KPIs that we see brands leveraging are Adjusted Ad Value (social media sponsorship value), Promotion Quality (how well the brand is promoted), and audience metrics like regional breakdowns, interests, and more. Sports marketers can now get live dashboards with these metrics and recommendations that can be leveraged across their organization to positively impact sponsorship strategy and results. CMO Council: How have brands evolved their use of social media campaigns and channels to amplify their sports and athlete sponsorships and fan engagement? And how does this vary worldwide? Hookit: Social media isn’t just an afterthought anymore when it comes to sponsorship deals. The trend we are seeing is brands building in specific fan engagement goals and metrics to the contracts instead of a certain number of posts, which used to be the standard. For example, instead of asking for 3 posts throughout the season, brands are requiring partners to drive 1M fan engagements or 20M video views on specific branded content, which can be tied to a certain level of sponsorship value. These are metrics that brands already understand and add to their media mix models to evaluate the impact overall on the brand. Brands are also getting smarter about when, where, and how to activate on social media through their sport partners. Now, brands can know which platform is most engaged for that partner and ask to have their posts on that platform. Or, brands can dictate how their brand is positioned within the content to maximize Promotion Quality but also understand how that can impact engagement based on previous campaigns. Often, we see that clear advertisements with near perfect Promotion Quality don’t get as much fan
engagement as more authentic brand placement. CMO Council: Which brands are doing the best job of interacting with fans and extending the reach, value and effectiveness of sports sponsorships? Hookit: The top brands are all listed in the full report and broken down by industry, but when it comes to biggest movers among the top 100, there are a few that stand out. Gambling brands as a whole have seen a significant uptick in sponsorship value in 2020. For example, Kindred Group’s Unibet had over double the number of sports properties promoting their brand, saw a significant increase in average Promotion Quality, and received nearly 3x the sponsorship value in total. Other brands with double-digit % growth in sponsorship value include Kia, Gatorade, Chevrolet, AT&T, Pirelli, and even Reebok. These brands are invested in various sports, for example, Pirelli saw the majority of its value from motorsports where Reebok saw significant value from Fighting Sports and their UFC partnership. CMO Council: What can brands learn from your 2020 Report on the State of Sports Sponsorship? Hookit: The #1 key takeaway for brands is that digital activations are here to stay. Brands and sports properties had to pivot and innovate in 2020. From that, they were able to create engaging initiatives that drove brand value. These types of activations will only continue to increase, even when fans come back to the stadiums. In fact, the two will likely become even more integrated. The second biggest learning for sports marketers is that frequency & quality of promotion are key. It may sound simple or obvious, but in order to maximize sponsorship value, make sure your partners are promoting your brand consistently and deliberately with their best content. In 2020, leagues and teams averaged 12 and 11 branded posts per week, respectively. With dozens of brands being promoted, frequency of promotion is key to your brand breaking through the noise. On the other hand, athletes averaged less than 1 branded post per week, but were far more deliberate in how they promoted their brand partners. However, unless you are the exclusive sponsor of that athlete, your brand is likely not being promoted often enough at that rate. In fact, the average brand received 3 branded posts per sports property promoting that brand. That’s 1 post every 4 months per partner. In addition to frequency of promotion, Promotion Quality is key to maximizing the value that your brand receives from every branded post. If you’re getting a limited number of posts, your brand needs to be well represented in each post. High Promotion Quality is what drove the Women’s Super League to the top of the list of value generated among our Leagues On the Rise. The average Promotion Quality for brands in 2020 was roughly 27%. Only 2 of the top 30 brands by AAV had an average Promotion Quality lower than that. Santander led the top 10 with a Promotion Quality of 41%. If Santander had only received the average Promotion Quality of 27%, the brand would have seen $69M less in sponsorship value. Relatively small changes in Promotion Quality can lead to large changes in sponsorship value.
Book,
&
Line
Sinker
Digital You: Real Personal Branding in the Virtual Age
Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator
By William Arruda
By Ryan Holiday
The most successful brands aren’t created, they are unearthed. Successful branding is based on authenticity. So how do you reveal your own brand? First, by searching yourself for answers to questions like these: What do you do better than anyone? What are you most proud of? What makes you lose track of time?
Hailed as “astonishing and disturbing” by the Financial Times and “essential reading” by TechCrunch at its original publication, former American Apparel marketing director Ryan Holiday’s first book sounded a prescient alarm about the dangers of fake news. It’s all the more relevant today
This Is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn to See
Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World
By Seth Godin
By David Epstein
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.
Plenty of experts argue that anyone who wants to develop a skill, play an instrument, or lead their field should start early, focus intensely, and rack up as many hours of deliberate practice as possible. If you dabble or delay, you’ll never catch up to the people who got a head start.
ZAG: The 1 Strategy of HighPerformance Brands Paperback
Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of NIKE
by Marty Neumeier
By Phil Knight
“When everybody zigs, zag,” says Marty Neumeier in this fresh view of brand strategy. ZAG follows the ultra-clear “whiteboard overview” style of the author’s first book, THE BRAND GAP, but drills deeper into the question of how brands can harness the power of differentiation.
In 1962, fresh out of business school, Phil Knight borrowed $50 from his father and created a company with a simple mission: import highquality, low-cost athletic shoes from Japan. Selling the shoes from the boot of his Plymouth, Knight grossed $8000 in his first year. Today, Nike’s annual sales top $30 billion.
One Million Followers, Updated Edition: How I Built a Massive Social Following in 30 Days
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.
This means that the question for anyone who wants to gain mass exposure for their transformative content, business, or brand or connect with audiences around the globe is no longer if they should use social media but how to best take advantage of the numerous different platforms and beat the algorithms.
By Brendan Kane
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Influencer: Building Your Personal Brand in the Age of Social Media By Brittany Hennessy
Stand Out: How to Find Your Breakthrough Idea and Build a Following Around It
Every one of your favorite influencers started with zero followers and had to make a lot of mistakes to get where they are today—earning more money each year than their parents made in the last decade. But to become a top creator, you need to understand the strategies behind the Insta-ready lifestyle . . .
By Dorie Clark Too many people believe that if they keep their heads down and work hard, they’ll be recognized as experts on the merits of their work. But that’s simply not true anymore. To make a name for yourself, you have to capitalize on your unique perspective and knowledge and inspire others to listen and take action. But becoming a “thought leader” is a mysterious and opaque process.
Difference: The one-page method for reimagining your business and reinventing your marketing
No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram
By Bernadette Jiwa
In 2010, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger released a photo-sharing app called Instagram, with one simple but irresistible feature: it would make anything you captured look more beautiful. The cofounders cultivated a community of photographers and artisans around the app, and it quickly went mainstream. In less than two years, it caught Facebook’s attention: Mark Zuckerberg bought the company for a historic $1 billion when Instagram had only thirteen employees.
We spent $500 billion globally on advertising in 2013. Every year we’re spending more money, to interrupt more people, more often, with messages they don’t care about and don’t pay attention to. We’ve come to believe that the way to succeed is to have an advantage—by being different or better, more visible, or just plain louder.
How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know
By Sarah Frier
Marketing: A Love Story: How to Matter to Your Customers
By Sharp
By Bernadette Jiwa
2020 celebrates the 10 year anniversary of How Brands Grow with over 100,000 copies sold. Voted AdAge’s Most-Recommended Marketing Book of the Summer 2013.This book provides evidence-based answers to the key questions asked by marketers every day.
One of the biggest challenges we face as entrepreneurs and innovators is understanding how to make our ideas resonate. We tend to have no shortage of ideas, but we struggle to tell the story of how they are going to be useful in the world and why they will matter to people. Marketing is the way we communicate how our ideas translate to value for people in a marketplace.
Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly
Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion
By Bernadette Jiwa
This book and the Story Strategy Blueprint inside are invaluable for anyone who wants to disrupt their industry and to know and genuinely matter to their customers. Bernadette’s unique views and teachings will give you the most important, empathetic tools to know the consumer and be a successful storyteller.
By Gary Vaynerchuk Do you have a hobby you wish you could indulge in all day? An obsession that keeps you up at night? Now is the perfect time to take that passion and make a living doing what you love. In Crush It! Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion, Gary Vaynerchuk shows you how to use the power of the Internet to turn your real interests into real businesses.