BrandKnew October 2021

Branding matters. Because branding matters.

Published by 10.21#107

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Dear Friends: Welcome to the Oktoberfest of content on branding and all things related. Power packed with loads of actionable intelligence in store for our readers.

We cycle back a bit to talk about rethinking the role of the strategist. On the other side of the spectrum, we crystal ball gaze about how AI will change marketing forever. More and more brand marketing professionals are realising the importance of the power of storytelling in communication.

We look at how that can be made more compelling. There is also a conversation that we have about brand positioning and how best to create a brand story.Brand loyalty comes up for debate as we delve into delighting the audiences that most love your brand. We also take a look ahead to the rest of 2021 and what trends we can hope to see being adopted by brands. In an increasingly commoditized world, B2B marketing is receiving an enhanced pride of place.

Read more about it in this edition. In an ecosystem of deep discounting by brands all through the year, the feature on Numerology and the Marketing Math will receive rapt attention I reckon. Linguistic calisthenics have a huge power in shaping consumer behavior- we talk about the power of language in this issue.

There is ample more to soak in and I leave it to you to discover the wealth of actionable content in this edition. Till the next, my very best!

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Suresh Dinakaran @ISDGlobalDubai

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Managing Editor: Suresh Dinakaran Creative Head/Director Operations: Pravin Ahir Magazine Concept & Design/ New Media Specialist: Mufaddal Joher Chief Strategy Director: Rishi Mohan Business Performance Director: Sunil Vasudevan 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 SEO Advocate: Santhosh Rakonda Content & PR: Nitin Kumar

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CONTENTS 10 Marketing Trends To Watch In The Second Half Of 2021 The Neuroscientist, The Storyteller, And The Power Of Brand Imagery Why B2b Branding Is More Important Than Ever When Ai Behaves Badly Rethinking The Role Of The Strategist How Starbucks, Peloton & Pizza Hut Use Gamification (And You Can Too) 6 Principles To Build Your Company’s Strategic Agility The Beauty Of Contrast 26 Universal Questions For Brand Positioning (And Creating Your Brand Story) Numerology And The Marketing Math!

How Video Games Are Emerging As Essential Platforms For Music Marketing You Should Never Work On Weekends Unless You’re Doing One Thing Talking About Purpose Won’t Transform A Brand; These 5 Skills Will How Language Is The Key For Brands To Unlock Consumer Behavior How To Make Your Brand’s Storytelling More Compelling Tap Into The Power Of Loyalty By Serving Your Brand Lovers Better Than Anyone Else The Key Ad Trends Driving The In-Car Commerce Boom 3 Ways Artificial Intelligence Will Change Marketing Forever Creating A Marketing Masterpiece - Great Plan & Disciplined Execution Living Your Best Digital Hygge Life Book, Line & Sinker

10 Marketing Trends to Watch in the Second Half of 2021

By Joseph Chukwube

As companies prepare for the rollercoaster of holidays that mark the end of the year (Halloween, Thanksgiving & Black Friday, and Christmas & New Year), it is important to outline and explain some of the marketing trends that will prove helpful.

Among all the trends, though, one factor stands out, which is relatability. Brands in 2021 are not just trying to build fantastic products, though that should be a given. Instead, they are trying to build authentic connections with customers.

As the world makes a slow, gradual recovery from COVID-19, marketers have learned that customers are more in tune with brands that relate to their situations and desires. Some brands already have a head start this year by taking advantage of these trends.

However, if you haven’t already integrated any of these trends into your strategy, you are not late. You can make an allowance for any of these within the next six months and reap good rewards.

These trends are not just 2021 fads, but strategies and tactics that will endure for the coming years.

1. Social Audio If you need proof of history repeating itself, look no further than internet social audio.

People from the 90s and early 2000s remember internet

chat rooms fondly. At the height of the chat room revolution, people spent millions of hours chatting in several thousand rooms on the internet.

However, within the five years from 2010 to 2014, the major social networks AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, and MSN Messenger ended support for voice chat rooms.

Fast forward to the 2020s and social audio has made a groundbreaking return with the innovative Clubhouse app.

Interestingly, even though Clubhouse is still in beta, it has over 10 million users already.

Now, even already established social media networks are not left out in the game to capture their audience via live conversations and chat rooms.

On the back of Clubhouse’ growth, Twitter launched its social audio feature called Spaces and Telegram introduced Voice Chats 2.0. More recently, Spotify launched Greenroom, while Facebook Live Audio Rooms just started rolling out.

Despite the setback that chat rooms suffered in the 2010s decade, the recent return of social audio reinstates the importance of intimate human associations that mediums like audio provide in a way that text doesn’t.

There are obvious challenges with marketing via a medium where the actions are so transient. However, audio rooms open up marketing opportunities for brands via community events and sponsorships. Still, it remains to be seen what

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more surprises social audio has in store for marketers.

2. Marketing Automation In the past few years, marketing teams have expanded their budgets for marketing automation as they seek to integrate new technologies to scale their efforts.

Until marketing automation technologies went mainstream, marketers have tried to find a cohesive medium to seamlessly integrate marketing with sales.

The main use case of marketing automation has been lead generation. Eventually, this extends to subsequent aspects of lead nurturing and customer engagement, ultimately boosting sales revenue.

Marketing professionals are already well familiar with social media automation and email marketing automation.

However, one aspect of automation that has gained a huge boost over the past year is data-driven automation; this covers the use of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and data analytics tools to extract insights about one’s audience to improve marketing strategy and tactics.

The top marketing automation products in the market are data-focused. At year-end, data insights would prove very important in capturing leads as well as in more specific tactics such as cross-selling and upselling.

3. Video Content and Live Streaming Lockdown restrictions last year resulted in an uptick in live activities, especially video live streams. Live videos are among the most engaging content types since the audience is present and connection happens in real-time.

More so, people perceive live videos as more authentic and realistic because they are part of a real-time stream of action; therefore, a live content strategy reflects positively on any brand.

Already, according to a survey, 48% of marketers have committed to boosting their marketing budgets for video in 2021.

One of the key features of the rise of live streaming is brands as entertainers as they recapture a significant part of their audience that previously relied on television but are now more online.

4. Influencer Marketing Influencer marketing has been waxing strong for a couple of years, especially with the proliferation of micro-influencers on social media platforms. In 2021, the industry is expected to grow to about $13.8 billion and remains firmly on course to even surpass this.

For many businesses, 2021 is the first year they have had a dedicated influencer marketing budget, indicating the evolution of this form of marketing, breaking away from but still firmly integrated with social media and content marketing.

TikTok and Instagram Reels are emerging as the most common ways for influencers to connect with their audience via short, easily digestible and engaging videos.

Many of these influencer videos combine entertainment and education to maintain the excitement of their audience.

As more people demand authenticity for brands, microinfluencers would continue to be a huge pillar in the influencer marketing industry. Some of these partnerships are sometimes repurposed by brands for ads and marketing content on other platforms.

5. Micro-Moments The idea of micro-moments and macro-moments have been transforming the ways marketers approach the customer journey in the last couple of years.

With numerous simultaneous technological advancements on the back of the rise of the internet, people of this age are far more exposed now than those who existed in previous decades. Marketing has always been about seizing critical moments to attract people’s attention.

That has become far more important now that there are numerous channels and platforms where people can find entertainment, education, and so on.

Instead of casting their net wide and hoping to get desired results somehow, marketers are now focused on intent-driven moments of decision-making to capture the attention of individuals.

These are micro-moments, such as when someone looks up how to sign a PDF while reading a contract. On the other hand, macro-moments are times when a person has got time to kill but is not intent on fulfilling a task.

Micro-moment marketing is driven by timing and relevance and thus, more important to marketers in this age and more specifically, as we approach the year-end holidays.

In the rest of 2020 and beyond, marketing would be increasingly focused on identifying crucial want-to-know, want-to-go, want-to-do, want-to-buy moments and delivering just what individuals want.

6. Brand Differentiation This is an age when customers are spoiled for choice. In this kind of situation, what mostly informs customer decisions is their perception of the business brand. That is why the smartest businesses differentiate themselves with branding to connect with their customers better.

There is already an understanding that products are not just products; they represent experiences. Therefore, the most successful branding efforts are those that communicate the authentic experiences connected to the product.

But good branding is also about adapting to the changing needs and experiences of consumers. These days, brands are not only known for products, solutions, and experiences but

also personality, social values, and authenticity.

9. Community (-based) Marketing

Today, a brand needs to build an identity around trust, transparency, and credibility to be accepted, especially by the younger generations, Millennials and Gen Z.

Still, on relatable marketing, it has become more important now than ever to have strong communities. Word-of-mouth marketing is the oldest form of marketing and frankly, still the most potent.

7. Conversational Marketing A high emphasis on brand relatability in the past few years has spurred growth in conversational marketing.

The understanding is that no matter the tactics used by businesses to be more relatable, such as interactive content, social media strategy, or storytelling, nothing beats communicating with customers directly.

Most traditional marketing channels have been one-way, allowing brands to connect with their audience but not vice versa.

Now, businesses are opening up new channels to allow their customers to communicate with them. Mind you, this is beyond the usual customer service complaints handling and whatnots.

Conversational marketing aims at meaningful customer interaction via purposeful dialogues. The key to successful conversational marketing is to center the customer, their needs, wants, and desires, rather than the business or product.

Marketers should not be in a hurry to capture information about leads, lest they risk 50% – 90% leaving the conversation prematurely.

Of course, much has evolved in conversational marketing with the emergence of COVID-19, which has practically forced many brands to up their games in phone calls, SMS, social messaging, and chatbots in engaging customers.

8. Mobile Commerce and Mobile Marketing With 6 months remaining until the new year, it is important to note the prediction that mobile commerce will grow by a whopping 68% in 2022.

Therefore, it is more than apparent that businesses with a solid mobile marketing strategy ahead of next year are well-positioned to take advantage of the growth of mobile commerce.

This growth is one of the many ways the pandemic has strengthened certain technological advancements.

The challenge with mobile marketing is that it is allencompassing, cutting across various marketing formats from social media and email to video and paid advertising.

However, marketers can apply innovative strategies such as push notifications and mobile SEO. For instance, in the case of push notifications, 40% of users interact with them within an hour of receipt. And push notifications have an open rate of 90% even though the consensus is that they are annoying.

You can make your brand stand out with straight-to-thepoint, relevant push notifications that drive attention.

By building strong communities to pass the word about your products and services around, you are tapping into an ageold idea that relationships based on shared connections are the strongest.

Some marketers shy away from committing to community marketing because it is one tactic that is not more relationshipfocused than acquisition-focused.

However, the real advantage of communities is that it makes ambassadors out of loyal customers. You may not be able to quantitatively track the gains, but the gains are present nonetheless.

Digital communities serve various needs and community marketing is one that truly forces marketers to invest in people, rather than channels.

10. User-Generated Content Another growing strategy for building authentic connections with your audience is by encouraging user-generated content.

This is often a precursor to or a product of strong communities.

So, this point is strongly connected to the previous section.

For one, user-generated content influences the purchasing decisions of 90% of shoppers. Much of this is due to the authenticity that UGC provides by ‘humanising’ the brand.

For once, individuals can view a brand and its products from the lens of other human beings. If this perception is positive, it brings new customers.

This form of social proof has proved highly effective. To take advantage of UGC as a brand, you should engage and amplify content shared by users to encourage other people to get involved.

For instance, when planning your year-end discount sales, including a contest to push a compelling narrative will help to propel your brand widely.

Besides, remember that your role in UGC strategy is to plan; let customers tell their stories and drive the campaign. Of course, you need to watch the campaign patterns for insights on improving your brand aspects.

Conclusion In essence, change and adaptation are part of life, nonetheless that of marketers, one of whose unsung duties is watching the trends of market behaviours, customer habits, and technological adoption, and then integrating insights from these trends to refine their strategy for greater success.

At this point, marketers should have left the chaos of 2020 behind and now look forward to opportunities to scale their efforts within the remainder of the year and beyond.

Hopefully, these trends would drive marketers, brands, and business leaders to adopt more purposeful marketing.

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

Tap into our talent bank. scad.edu/scadpro

THE NEUROSCIENTIST, THE STORYTELLER, AND THE POWER OF BRAND IMAGERY Bj Bueno

What makes art art? Why is art so important to humanity?

These are big questions and not ones that come up often in the context of connecting more effectively with your customers.

That’s a shame. Understanding what art is and why recorded imagery has such a powerful impact on human behavior is a fundamental aspect of successful brand building.

Through the Eyes of the Neuroscientist To answer these questions, we need to take a two-pronged approach. The first investigation considers our customers simply as the human-animal: we’re biological organisms, influenced by the way our nervous system and brain respond to external stimuli.

may be why we find the experience of viewing this pattern in artwork an enjoyable experience. Experiences we enjoy are experiences we repeat, and thus the best imagery—artwork— comes to occupy an important place in our culture.

This type of information is good to have. It helps us understand the mechanics of the human experience. However, just as a car is far more than the motor that propels it, we are far, far more than our biological responses to external stimuli.

Nurture, it turns out, is just as important as nature. Our education and experience lead us to prefer particular patterns over others. Cultural influences play a powerful role in shaping our opinion of what is attractive and what is not.

Here we see research that measures brain activity when viewers are exposed to different types of art. It’s clear that certain patterns evoke more brain activity and stronger positive emotional responses than others. For example, the two eyes and a smile of a human face pattern is so appealing that we try to find it everywhere—in the clouds or in the dappled colors of an Impressionist painting.

The impact of artwork on human beings can be divided into two parts: the way the image affects the human bio-mechanically, and the way the image resonates and is received within the individual viewer’s personal frame of reference, generally measured in terms of an emotional response. We’re happy to know the car works, in other words, but what we really want to know is: Is it fun to drive?

Being able to recognize this pattern pre-disposes one toward survival suggests neurologist V.S. Ramachandran.1 That

For that, we need less of the neuroscientist and more of the storyteller.

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Through the Eyes of the Storyteller

group of people.

Every image tells a story. Sometimes this story is told overtly.

Sometimes the tale-telling is more subtle.

Imagery has become a tool of the culture, a way for individuals to express themselves (both through the production of artwork and the consumption of it!)

Look at the image above. This painting is The Letter by Gerard ter Boch. We can see two layers of storytelling here. At first glance, it seems simple enough: a messenger is delivering a missive to two young ladies. Delving deeper, we examine the expression upon each of the two ladies. They are quite distinct, and we wonder what might have provoked them.

It is that sense of wonder that interests us. When something makes us wonder, we’re curious. We want to learn more. A spirit of inquiry arises.

The search for wonder is always with humanity: we scan imagery constantly, incessantly, and almost completely unconsciously in the search for the visuals that speak completely and concisely to us. We are seeking our own experience, our own emotions, our own worldview, delivered via someone else’s vision.

When many people find that wonder in one image, that image is shared. It becomes part of the collective experiential framework.

When an image is shared, it is transformed. Individual appreciation of art takes on a new dimension when others enter the conversation. Having one’s opinion validated or repudiated, explicitly and enthusiastically embraced or violently rejected, shapes the perspective one has in relationship to the artwork. Maybe the painting you adored really isn’t all that awesome if everyone you know hates it.

How tenaciously we hold on to our opinion of individual images as we become aware of other people’s opinions is a way we demonstrate our comfort with our position in that

Imagery builds bonds between individuals, and connections between cultures.

Choosing the Right Imagery for Your Brand What does all of this mean for the brand manager? We can use the understanding of what makes artwork and imagery more appealing to humanity in general to connect more concretely with our customers. But we have to be smart about it.

The emerging science that is slowly accumulating into the discipline of neuro-aesthetics (and already packaged as neuro-marketing at an agency near you!) has definite value.

Knowing definitively what shapes, colors, and patterns provoke the strongest biological responses in the viewer is good information to have.

This good information becomes better when it is coupled with an understanding of the experiential framework most common to your customers.

It’s safe to say your customers are all human, but what type of human are they? The stronger your ability to answer that question accurately, the easier it becomes for you to select imagery that will resonate strongly within your customer’s experiential framework.

In other words, you’ll be able to build a car that’s mechanically superior and a lot more fun to drive.

Understanding the human customer means respecting the body and the mind, addressing your messaging to both.

Why B2B Branding Is More Important Than Ever

By Margaret Molloy

For years, B2B brands invested more in sales and product than in brand marketing.

The conventional wisdom was that superior specs and personal relationships would win the day.

Today, however, it’s clear that strong branding is crucial in B2B, where it enhances the effectiveness of demandgeneration activities, lowers the cost of sales, and commands a price premium.

Some of B2B branding’s salience stems from evergreen truths: Emotion has always been a large driver in B2B purchases—more so than some people imagine. A business buyer, after all, is still a human buyer, and there are detrimental career implications for selecting the wrong supplier for a critical business process.

What’s more, savvy B2B brands recognize that potential buyers can be classified into two groups: in-market and out-of-market.

Only a fraction of buyers are in-market: i.e., actively seeking your product or service and thus likely to respond to rational product features and benefits marketing. Your goal in relation to the out-of-market majority, on the other hand, is to be memorable enough that when those buyers do have a need, they seek out your brand. Emotional messages are more likely to create such memorable bonds.

The power of emotion aside, we’re also experiencing major market shifts, both technical and societal, that are intensifying the importance of smart branding for B2B— specifically branding that demonstrates how purpose, values, and user experience shape a brand’s messages and behaviors.

1. Digital Transformation

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It’s a new business model, and it has upended the B2B sales cycle. To renew and grow subscriptions, companies must keep customers engaged and satisfied throughout their experience journey (conversion to sale is just the beginning). In short, marketers must think about customers as users rather than as buyers.

Bearing that in mind, great B2B companies become true resources committed to their clients’ success.

Consider HubSpot, the pioneer of digital inbound marketing.

Its brand voice—empowering yet simple—is channeled through every touchpoint, including its AI chatbots. What’s more, it’s come to serve as a hub for professionalization resources, offering freemium content for marketers at every step of customer relationship management (CRM) implementation.

By being approachable—easy to “talk” to—and an abundant source of marketing thought leadership, HubSpot offers a brand experience that lives up to its promise to help clients Grow better.

2. Increased Competition Digital transformation creates competitive proliferation as traditional barriers to entry come tumbling down thanks to scalable technology platforms, remote work, and copious VC funding. It is challenging for any B2B company to maintain differentiation at the product or feature level.

That’s where B2B branding comes in. Brands must show that though their heritage gives them scale and resources, they also possess the ability to flex to meet modern demands and opportunities.

American Express had long found differentiation in its exclusivity: Paying with a Gold (or Platinum or Black) AmEx card was a sign of prestige. Furthermore, by providing shoppers financial incentives for buying local on Small Business Saturdays, American Express became the credit card provider of American small businesses.

The program proved enormously successful, driving revenue to small businesses and also evolving American Express’s brand positioning as highly purpose-driven and differentiated.

3. Sustainability as Business Imperative Every year it gets clearer that environmental sustainability is not a “nice to have” but an imperative for continued business success. B2B companies have some of the largest changes to make to lower their carbon footprints: Industrial and utility firms create about half of the nation’s greenhouse gases.

In times of transition, brand provides not only a guiding light but also goodwill from stakeholders. Marketing plays a pivotal role, translating complex boardroom decisions about sustainability into reasons to believe for clients, employees, and investors alike.

In addition, a well-loved brand can provide insulation

from stakeholder doubt. The goodwill earned from years of brand marketing can ease B2B companies’ sometimes bumpy transitions from brown to green energy.

For a case in point, look at Maersk, the shipping giant: Its Scandinavian brand is based in humility, accountability, and “constant care.” Maersk’s brand-building activities have proven extremely valuable to the firm, especially in times of crisis.

For example, after one of its cargo ships struck and killed a whale, the brand’s transparency and contrition on social media won the respect of many followers, easing the potentially negative PR effects of the incident.

4. Millennials as Decision-Makers Millennials are now well into adulthood, and they occupy prominent decision-making roles. They are responsible for making myriad B2B purchases on behalf of their companies, from services to products.

Having come of age with mobile banking and Amazon Prime, Millennials expect the B2B brands they procure to deliver similarly personalized and frictionless experiences.

That includes employer brands. According to a study by American Express, a full 78% of millennials say they want to work with a company their values align with.

Brand marketing is central to articulating and evangelizing a corporate ethos. However, it must be done in tandem with employee engagement initiatives that model desired behaviors and reward those who live the brand.

An engaged workforce is often a B2B brand’s greatest marketing asset—more effective at disseminating brand messages and creating a consistent experience than any paid channel. The talent you attract will define the brand that you become.

Salesforce has invested seriously in cascading corporate values throughout the organization. It’s become wellknown for its promotion of “stakeholder capitalism,” or the idea that business can benefit not only investors but also employees, customers, and community members.

Salesforce walks the walk. Its “trailblazers,” as it calls its employees, are empowered to contribute to positive social change as part of their job duties. The company’s 1-1-1 program devotes 1% of Salesforce’s equity, technology, and people’s time to bettering education, equality, and the environment. For its efforts, Salesforce has been consistently named one of the best places to work in America.

United in Purpose: Great B2B Brands The B2B companies that have risen to the new brand imperative have all located their North Star in something more emotionally impactful than products, services, or shareholder value.

From HubSpot’s commitment to helping other brands grow better to Maersk’s stalwart uprightness, mission-centric brands allow enterprises to create human connections with employees, customers, and the community, simultaneously guiding the sometimes-dramatic changes necessary for growth in today’s fast-paced, highly saturated market.

Facebook faced a firestorm after its AI committed an “unacceptable error.” If Facebook’s AI, backed by worldly resources, elite data science, a wealth of data and years of training, can embarrass the brand, what does this mean for the rest of us?

Here’s what went down: The Daily Mail featured a video on the social network of Black men in altercations with white civilians and police officers. After watching the video, Facebook users were asked if they would like to “keep seeing videos about Primates.”

To its credit, Facebook investigated and disabled the AIpowered recommendation feature and apologized for what it called “an unacceptable error,” the New York Times reported.

Facebook said it will be looking into the problem to “prevent this from happening again.”

If this sounds a little too familiar, it is. In 2015, Google mistakenly labeled pictures of Black people as “gorillas.” AI in healthcare also has had a bias problem. A couple of years

ago, six algorithms impacting millions of U.S. patients were prioritizing care coordination for white patients over Black patients with the same illness.

“These high-profile, very bad missteps will rightly give marketers and providers reason for pause, spurring the industry to think more deeply, ask the right questions and raise the bar for rapidly improving these systems,” says Jim Lecinski, co-author of The AI Marketing Canvas. “But a failure even as egregious as this one should not result in full abandonment of any powerful new technology like this.”

There’s no question that AI will be disruptive to marketers.

CEOs and boards of directors are increasingly viewing marketing as the chief growth engine charged with making data-informed predictions. The ultimate goal is to “find the optimal combination of the right product at the right price, promoted in the right way via the right channels to the right people,” Lecinski says.

So how can marketers hedge their AI bets and reduce the

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When AI Behaves Badly

By Tom Kaneshige

risk of unacceptable errors? I sat down with Lecinski to get his advice — mostly, what questions marketers should ask to safely navigate AI’s tumultuous waters. Here’s what he told me: Given what happened at Facebook, how should marketers proceed with AI? Lecinski: Since I don’t know the details behind [the Facebook AI error], I am not able to comment on it directly. But generally speaking, marketers should start with a small-scale, lowstakes, low-budget test to see what happens with their own training data, in addition to what the machine has ingested from other people’s training data.

Many marketers are still trying to determine fact from fiction.

What do they need to know?

Lecinski: With any new initiative, marketers need to understand and carefully evaluate machine-learning-powered systems. Is the system really using machine learning or a set of if-then rules? Where training data is used as an input, a “recipe”

is written for the machine to make predictions using that input, leading to some automated output application using that prediction. Then feedback comes back automatically to improve the next prediction and output application in a continuous learning loop.

How do marketers hedge against unacceptable errors?

Lecinski: Marketers should ask a lot of questions. How widely has this AI algorithm been tried and tested for reliability of outcome? By whom and how long? How often are they updated? What is the training data set? Where did it come from? Who was doing the categorization and classification?

How was it checked and validated? Someone had to tell the machine that this [image] is a dog and this is a blueberry muffin to help it learn. This is where breakdowns can occur.

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.

Rethinking the role of the strategist

By Michael Birshan, Emma Gibbs, and Kurt Strovink

Strategic planning has been under assault for years. But good strategy is more important than ever. What does that mean for the strategist?

Many companies have an executive to guide their strategies.

The discipline’s professionalization, which began in earnest in the 1980s as it evolved from the chief executive’s domain into a core corporate function, prompted the creation of heads of strategy, strategic-planning directors, and, more recently, chief strategy officers (CSOs). Who better than a professional strategist to help meet the big new uncertainties of the 21st century?

Yet today’s unpredictable environment is utterly incompatible with what, historically, has been one of the chief responsibilities of many strategists: leading the annual strategic-planning process. While nothing new, the weaknesses of traditional strategic planning—characterized by a lockstep march toward a series of deliverables and review meetings according to a rigid annual calendar—have been amplified by the importance of agility in a rapidly changing world.1 Strategists have responded by increasing the scope and complexity of their roles beyond planning. In a recent survey of nearly 350 senior strategists representing 25 industries from all parts of the globe, we found an extraordinary diversity of responsibilities (13 by our count). But running the planning process still loomed large, ranking second in priority on that list, even if many respondents said they would prefer to spend significantly less time on this part of their role.

There’s a way out of this box for chief strategists and other senior leaders, particularly CEOs, CFOs, and board members, whose roles are deeply intertwined with the formulation of strategy. The starting point should be thinking differently about what it means to develop great strategy: less time running the planning process and more time engaging broader groups inside and outside the company, going beyond templates and calendars, and mirroring the dynamism of the external environment.

But this isn’t enough. Achieving real impact today requires strategists to stretch beyond strategic planning to develop at least one of a few signature strengths. Several important facets of the strategist’s role emerged from our research, including reallocating corporate resources, building strategic capabilities at key places in the organization, identifying business-development opportunities, and generating proprietary insights on the basis of external forces at work and long-term market trends. A number of these roles are more appropriate for some strategists and organizations than for others. But the core notion of stretching and choosing is relevant for all.

Developing signature strengths Four years ago, executives around the world told us their companies were creating, by their own admission,

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substandard strategies.2 Only 35 percent were generating strategies that passed more than three of ten tests we use for measuring the likelihood that a given strategy would beat the market. And many respondents blamed the ineffectiveness of the annual strategic-planning processes for the state of their companies’ strategies.3

effective developers of strategy,” and that enjoy higher profitability than their competitors, for example, are twice as likely to review strategy on an ongoing basis (as opposed to say annually or every three to five years). They are, for instance, twice as likely to have a corporate-strategy process that goes beyond the aggregation of business-unit strategies.

Since then we’ve sensed, in our work with a wide range of global organizations and strategists, a growing recognition that traditional strategic-planning processes are insufficient to absorb the shocks and disruptions characterizing their markets and to stimulate the ongoing deliberation that a top-management team requires. Increasingly, they recognize a need to rethink their approach to strategic planning and to embrace a more frequent strategic dialogue involving a focused group of senior executives.4 Effective organizations seem to be transforming strategy development into an ongoing process of ad hoc, topic-specific leadership conversations and budget-reallocation meetings conducted periodically throughout the year. Some organizations have even instituted a more broadly democratic process that pulls in company-wide participation through social-technology and game-based strategy development.5

Our research also supports one of our major observations about what it takes to innovate in the development and delivery of strategy: over and over, we’ve seen that the chief strategists best at driving more dynamic approaches have a professional credibility that extends well beyond a traditional process-facilitation role. At the same time, we’ve seen tremendous diversity in the characteristics of effective strategists. In a quest for greater precision, we applied statistical cluster analysis to the 13 facets that chief strategists responding to our survey described as most important to their efforts. The analysis yielded five clusters in which the strategist’s role becomes more than the sum of its parts.

Widespread across industries, these clusters embody choices that face every strategy leader (exhibit).

These experiences are consistent with our own findings.

We’ve found that companies that consider themselves “very

The architect These strategists, 40 percent of the executives we surveyed, make the most of their talent for using fact-based analysis to spot industry shifts and to understand their own companies’

sources of competitive advantage as a foundation for clear, differentiated strategies. Organic growth is a core concern, and driving business performance to meet tough organic targets is a critical part of the architect’s role. By monitoring competitors, these strategists can challenge their own organizations to set ambitious targets and reach them.

Architects also focus on driving mergers and acquisitions, divestitures, joint ventures, and other opportunities. They may “own” the deal-sourcing and integration teams and work to find the right acquisition targets in line with a strategic vision.

Since this cluster reflects the most traditional part of a

strategist’s role, the architect is fairly common. A prototypical architect is the strategist of an oil-and-gas company who recently led a root-and-branch strategic review of her largest business unit. As part of the effort, she built new analytical tools and capabilities to create insight into the true competitive advantage of her business. She is now leading a program to identify potential joint ventures and to continue the pursuit of growth in difficult markets. Another strategist we know has redefined what it means to do strategy in the retail part of his business by creating an analytical and granular view of how each of its “cells” is performing against its plan and the performance of its market. Architects can

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directly push efforts like these, and they also can stimulate a more broad-based reevaluation of strategy by designing and orchestrating gaming and social spaces where it is developed more democratically.

The mobilizer An additional 20 percent of CSOs surveyed fall into a mobilizer role, developing the strategic muscle of their companies, building capabilities, and delivering special projects. Mobilizers play critical leadership roles in companywide efforts to build what one CEO in an operationally intensive industry describes as a “higher organizational IQ on strategy.” Chief strategists in this model focus on ensuring that strategy meetings are truly strategic and that the people involved in those discussions are actually skilled at making them so. They ask the right questions, scrutinize critical assumptions, and ensure that their companies are learning organizations: porous to outside trends and examples. They also make sure that strategy is synthesized in a concise and easy-to-communicate way that organizations can seamlessly translate into action.

A strategist at an aerospace company, for example, runs training programs on core skills, such as how to create a business plan, that key members of the organization need to craft clear, well-informed strategic proposals. Another strategist, in the resources sector, ran a large-scale strategy refresh with a multidisciplinary team from across the organization. The team, made up of representatives from the business analysis, marketing & sales, technology, exploration, and operations units, conducted analyses and strove to reach strategic conclusions. This approach brought direct experience and expertise from the front line to the company’s strategy, which therefore became sharper and more relevant. The process also built the team members’ strategic-thinking skills while enhancing their understanding of how the business creates value and their own role in creating it. Finally, the process helped generate strong support throughout the company for the actions the strategy set out. All team members acted as its champion within their part of the business because of the clear ownership they felt.

In today’s fast-moving markets, strategy is set in the microdecisions made by people throughout the organization every day and not only by the strategy function, wherever it sits. Small wonder then that six out of ten chief strategists wish they could spend more time building capabilities. Mobilizers, on the leading edge of this thrust, are often found in industries whose business models depend heavily on talent.

The visionary A key strength of visionaries (14 percent of respondents) is trend forecasting, which at its simplest involves scanning the landscape for trends and shocks that may create opportunities or risks for the business. The best visionaries are using the advent of big data to create unique perspectives on where the next growth pocket will come from and, specifically, on what will be needed to serve it. For example, one chemical company built a bespoke model of the fundamental drivers of end markets for its chemicals. Its analysis went right down

to projections about how much new commercial floor space would be built in Latin American cities, an input to forecasts about how much demand there could be for the plastics it creates for use in electrical wiring. And some consumer companies can pinpoint exactly which street corner in a city in, say, Brazil will be the most effective place for promoting its premium shampoo rather than its standard brand.

Of course, the goal is more than observation; it’s to spot opportunities for creating unique sources of value that can keep the strategy ahead of external trends and competitors.

In our survey, technology and consumer-products strategists were most likely to be visionaries. But visionaries can also succeed in slower-moving industries. We’re acquainted with a chief strategist in the paper industry who recently embarked on a structured program of innovation workshops to identify new products, services, and business models, even in markets that look slower, on average. Well versed in key trends, visionaries are often well placed to run innovation processes.

The surveyor Surveyors are the 14 percent of strategists who define themselves by spotting potential disruptions and quickly advising their businesses on the impact and opportunity such shifts could produce. These are the people with their eyes on the furthest horizon. Like visionaries, they worry about trends, but their brand of trend spotting focuses on the long-range topics that have the greatest potential to change the way an industry operates and therefore require a response. One surveyor we know in the aerospace industry described his role as being the “long-term health” advocate—identifying the trends, shocks, and competitive behavior that will keep the company around for 100 years.

Given the influence of the state in such matters, surveyors often possess a deep knowledge both of government and of regulatory strategy. They proactively shape the public debate for their industries, informing, monitoring, and responding to opportunities and risks that arise from external stakeholders. The strategists we know in this cluster tend to work in traditionally regulated industries with long planning horizons, such as banking, telecommunications, and utilities, and may have titles that extend beyond strategy to reflect responsibilities for risk or external relations. The activities of a surveyor at an agriculture business include managing its lobbyists, thinking about where to deploy governmentrelations resources so that they have the greatest impact on the agencies of the company’s national government and on international organizations, and engaging personally with external-stakeholder groups.

The fund manager Fund managers, who accounted for 12 percent of strategists in our study, emphasize reallocating resources and optimizing the corporate portfolio of their businesses. Focusing on performance, they are dynamic in their approach, thus encouraging their organizations to enter and exit businesses and to nurture and prune their existing portfolios. Fund managers tend to inhabit businesses with portfolios of brands, such as fast-moving consumer-goods companies; portfolios

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of businesses, such as large industrial conglomerates; or portfolios of capital-intensive assets and projects, such as telecommunications. Banking- and insurance-sector companies are also more likely than most to prefer strategists in the fund-manager cluster, reflecting the need to balance risk and return profiles across a portfolio.

Fund-manager strategists rely on robust analytics that underpin decisions to rebalance the portfolio. However, they also need to invest heavily in decision-making processes and in their personal ability to help leadership teams get beyond their natural bias to maintain the status quo. One new chief strategist—unlike her predecessor, who tended to act as a facilitator—is trying to develop her role into that of a fund manager as she faces a major disruption in her company’s core consumer-goods market. Her top priority now is to help the company’s executive committee make a series of unfamiliar and uncomfortable choices to reallocate resources away from traditional cash cows and into a disruptive technology that represents the future of the business.

Above and beyond Regardless of which profile best fits the needs of a company and its leadership team, three broader issues bear consideration for organizations and strategists seeking to raise their strategic game: career background, resource reallocation, and prioritization.

Why career background matters While nobody wants to be a prisoner of the past, the familiar is comforting, especially when starting a new and often very wide-ranging role. Many new strategists therefore gravitate to what they know already—a trap that requires an alert and honest self-assessment to avoid.

Chief strategists who are former investment bankers, for example, are 2.5 times more likely to focus on business development than the average strategist. Former project leaders are two times more likely to prioritize the projectdelivery facets of the chief strategist’s role. Although a company driving a strategic M&A program may find it advantageous to choose a former investment banker as chief strategist, he or she must be careful to avoid overemphasizing familiar mind-sets and activities.

The data from our survey suggest that basing priorities on prior experience doesn’t necessarily correlate with better strategic performance. For example, among former project leaders who prioritize the project-delivery facet of their role as strategists, only 20 percent feel that their strategy is actually effective, compared with 51 percent of all respondents.

Resources, resources, resources Whichever type of strategist you may be, or need to be, a shift in the way your company allocates its resources must accompany its strategy. McKinsey research shows that companies tend to allocate 90 percent or more of their resources to the same places year after year, regardless of changes in the environment or their strategies.7 Dynamic companies that reallocate resources more actively deliver better, less volatile annual returns to shareholders, on average,8 than their

more dormant counterparts—particularly during economic downturns.9 Whether or not chief strategists measure this, they intuitively know it. Some 40 percent of those surveyed cite concerns about translating strategy to action. In particular, linking it to budgets and objectives is their top concern. Yet only 10 percent include resource reallocation among the top three facets of their role. Of the few chief strategists who do prioritize it, only 24 percent feel they do so very effectively— the lowest percentage of any facet. The strategist for a minerals company astutely remarks that, along with building strategic capabilities, “the resource-reallocator role is always critical, since it defines how to execute the strategy. Without it, you just have a good strategy paper.” By fighting inertia in resource allocation, strategists can go a long way toward making strategies stick.

Prioritize!

Implicit in effective resource allocation is prioritization—a critical need for strategists more broadly as the potential scope of their roles continues to widen. Our survey shows that chief strategists are up to four times more effective at the facets of the specific role they prioritize.

To cut through a potentially vast scope of responsibilities, chief strategists, and those who hire them, need to make choices. What drives these choices will depend on the unique circumstances of the organization and, to some extent, the capabilities of individual strategists and their partners on senior-executive teams. A chief strategist may be better placed to take on certain roles that have historically been part of the mandate of other executives, and as CSOs carve out their role, they will need to facilitate a reshuffling of responsibilities within the executive team. For example, a strategist whose priority is to be a fund manager may wish to own the company’s resource-allocation map, which might currently be within the responsibilities of the CFO as part of the budgeting process. (The same could be true in reverse for a CFO assuming greater strategic responsibility.)

Having explicit conversations about expectations and the division of roles and responsibilities across the executive team will improve its dynamics and make the organization as a whole more effective. The chief strategist’s role is partly about setting the mandate for a job that can mean many things in different organizations. These conversations should take place when a new strategist takes over and when the needs of the organization change and it makes sense to reassess priorities. A critical place to start is deciding whether the strategist will shape and run the process that generates the strategy or will instead take responsibility for crafting the strategy itself on behalf of the senior team. A related issue for the CEO, board, and other executives concerned with the quality of the company’s strategic direction is who owns the organization’s resource-reallocation and strategic capabilitybuilding efforts. If a hard look in the mirror reveals that these roles aren’t owned elsewhere or aren’t managed effectively, that too can influence the priorities of strategists, including tough questions about whether or not their strengths will lead them to emerge as strong fund managers or mobilizers.

How Starbucks, Peloton & Pizza Hut Use Gamification (And You Can Too)

By Jenn McMillen

There’s a reason gamification has continued to be one of the marketing buzzwords you’re seeing everywhere. Because it works.

Gamification involves applying game mechanics, as easy as challenges, bingo cards, memory games, scratch-off, or spin-to-win, to marketing-driven outcomes such as visiting a website, watching a video, or interacting on a platform. In my article titled Actionable Strategies for Driving Customer Engagement: 4 Go Do’s, I discussed how gamification drives meaningful engagement when driven by a specific strategy or goal. While on the surface it appears to be a pleasant diversion, gamification is actually a powerful marketing tool based on human psychology.

“People like winning. It’s human nature. When you win, your brain releases dopamine which makes you feel happy. So when you use a game to reward completing a behavior, the dopamine reinforces that behavior and makes people want to complete that behavior over and over again,” says Todd McGee, CEO of CataBoom, a leading SaaS-based gamification platform. Working with clients such as Southwest, Dell, and Michaels, CataBoom is proof that gamification works with a 3X open and engagement rate on emails, 2X social media engagement rates, and 5X retention rates.

Take a second look at gamification through the lens of the examples below where brands leveraged game mechanics to achieve various marketing goals.

Goal: Driving Sales While the pandemic has driven an increase in at-home dining, it has also spurred feelings of nostalgia among many customers for simpler times. Pizza Hut is leaning into both with their recently launched “Newstalgia” campaign.

The arcade games you loved to play while waiting for your Personal Pan Pizza(R) made a comeback in the form of an AR Pac-Man game that you can play on your limited-edition pizza box. Players who shared their scores with Pizza Hut on Twitter were entered to win a custom Pac-Man game cabinet.

Leveraging a game with a global brand recognition rate of 90% is creating much-needed at-home entertainment for Pizza Hut’s customers and driving sales. The game kicked off the brand’s year-long campaign that will see the return of many more beloved Pizza Hut icons of the 80s and 90s.

Goal: Reaching a larger audience It wasn’t too long ago when luxury brands looked down on gamification as a kitschy marketing tactic that was misaligned with their elevated brand experience. Not anymore! Games have grown up and found their own personal style for brands such as Hermès, Louis Vuitton, Gucci and more. Italian fashion powerhouse Salvatore Ferragamo launched their spring/summer 2021 campaign via a custom game titled Enigma. Serenaded by soft piano music, players make their way through four beautifully animated activities, such as word searches and memory games, that highlight Ferragamo

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designs and are set in various iconic landmarks around Milan. The game helps Ferragamo to reach a broader and younger audience and provides a fun way to virtually shop the brand at a time when travel and Fashion Week are not possible.

Goal: Learning About New Products Starbucks didn’t just celebrate Earth Day, they celebrated Earth Month with games designed to drive sustainable choices and promote the brand’s eco-friendly products. For every purchase during the month of April, Starbucks Rewards members earned one game play for a chance to win prizes such as free non-dairy drinks, a discount on select food items and reusable merchandise, or grand prizes such as eBikes, drinks for a year and more. Members earned additional game plays for foregoing plastic straws, trying meatless menu items and reading articles about food waste. With each level achieved in the Play + Plant puzzle game, members earned votes that were cast to choose which reforestation effort Starbucks will select for a donation of 250,000 trees.

Facts and product features were sprinkled throughout the games to highlight Starbucks’ Planet Positive initiative and eco-friendly products like reusable drinkware made from recycled products.

Increasing Frequency: This wouldn’t be an article about gamification without a nod to Peloton. Today’s exercise bikes are more or less a

commodity and oftentimes a glorified laundry drying rack.

But not Peloton. The key to Peloton’s success lies in the brand’s gamification of the user experience. Cyclists earn badges for milestones such as their 100th ride, celebrated with a shiny silver Century Club badge (digital, of course) and a free Peloton t-shirt (this one is not digital!). Take a look at some of my badges and milestones below (you are welcome to connect with me on Peloton! My leaderboard name is ForbiddenGinger because I picked a dish off the PF Chang’s menu in a moment of pique. True.)

Riders can also compete against one another in challenges and on leaderboards, and perhaps most addictively, complete “streaks.” A streak is an activity completed consecutively – in the case of Peloton, working out every day for 30 days, for example. The longer the streak is sustained, the greater the desire to keep the streak going. The power of streak psychology, plus the sense of community and achievement, help to create the habit of riding your Peloton. This, in turn, leads to continued use of your bike, the monthly paid subscription for access to classes, and of course, sharing your Peloton love with all of your friends. Who may go out and buy a bike themselves.

Jenn McMillen is Founder and Chief Accelerant of Incendio, a firm specializing in customer-facing initiatives, whether it’s marketing or technology. She was the VP of Loyalty and CRM for GameStop & Michaels.

6 Principles to Build Your Company’s Strategic Agility

By Michael Wade, Amit Joshi, and Elizabeth A. Teracino

In early 2020, Airbnb was headed for a banner year — bookings were up, expansion plans were in place, and an IPO was set for the spring. Then Covid hit, and more than $1B of bookings disappeared, expansion plans were postponed, and one-quarter of the workforce was cut. However, by the end of the year, revenues had recovered, and the company completed one of the most successful tech IPOs in history.

California Pizza Kitchen (CPK) is well known for its innovative offerings. It was one of the first pizza chains to offer glutenfree crusts, “take and bake” home pizzas, and iron-chef-style innovation competitions for its cooks. During the Covid crisis, it moved quickly to offer curb-side delivery and upped its online capabilities. Yet, despite its reputation for innovation and forward thinking, the company filed for bankruptcy protection in July 2020.

Why was one able to thrive while the other floundered?

Ultimately AirBNB and other companies that successfully navigated the crisis identified were able to deviate from their strategic plan and adapt to the changing environment. Our research identified three distinct ways they did this: First, they were nimble enough to avoid the worst impacts; second, when they were hit, they were robust enough to absorb a lot of the damage; and third, they were resilient enough to accelerate forward faster and more effectively than their peers. We refer to this combination of capabilities as the Triple As of strategic agility.

As soon as it became clear that Covid-19 travel restrictions would be inevitable, Airbnb took steps to avoid impact to its business. It implemented strict disinfectant protocols for its properties and added a mandatory free night between

stays to allow additional time for cleaning. It also relaxed guest cancellation policies and put measures in place to compensate hosts for lost revenue. Of course, the company couldn’t entirely avoid the effects of the pandemic, so it raised capital to bolster its ability to absorb the impact of reduced bookings and cancellations. Even before the business was stabilized, the company began to accelerate into areas that were less affected, such as in-country travel and stays at rural locations. It also started to promote longer “quarantine” stays and added details such as internet speed to its listings.

California Pizza Kitchen, by contrast, was unable to shift its core dine-in business to delivery fast enough after stay-athome orders were issued, and thus was unable to avoid a direct revenue hit. Furthermore, years of mismanagement had left the company with a high debt load, inhibiting its ability to raise additional capital to cover its costs. With its locations either closed or operating at limited capacity, cash started to dwindle. The company entered bankruptcy protection in June 2020. After a few months of restructuring, it emerged in November 2020 owned mostly by its debt holders, who had swapped their loans for equity. The company is now trying to make up for lost time by focusing on “Cali-health” menu items like non-meat proteins (BBQ Don’t Call Me Chicken Pizza), expanding its global franchise footprint, and investing in marketing and digital channels.

The Six Principles Behind a Triple A Rating Strategic agility is the ability to improve performance — not just survive but thrive — amid disruption. Our multiyear research project, based on studying qualitative and quantitative data from hundreds of organizations, suggests that strategic agility can be further broken down into six

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principles. These principles are not definitions, rules, laws, tools, or frameworks, but guidelines to help organizations leverage disruption proactively to their advantage.

Avoiding shocks: Speed and Flexibility Side-stepping shocks is linked to sensing risks in the environment, being able to position yourself to avoid dangers, and moving quickly to dodge impacts.

Principle 1: Prioritize speed over perfection Opportunities come and go quickly during a crisis, so organizations need to be ready and willing to act quickly, even if they sacrifice quality and predictability in the process.

Absorbing shocks: Empowerment and Diversification When it’s impossible to avoid a shock, like the Covid-19 pandemic, the next best thing is to minimize the damage.

This step is often misunderstood by managers. Some of the hallmarks of strong shock absorption — scale, inefficiency, or centralization — are seen as impediments to effective competition in volatile environments. Yet, when set up in the right way, these elements can enhance the ability of organizations to withstand shocks without inhibiting performance.

Principle 3: Prioritize diversification and “efficient slack” over optimization

During the multi-day celebration of Chinese New Year, movie theaters are typically full of families. However, in January 2020, due to the spread of Covid-19, most theaters were empty, and many had closed their doors. The Huanxi Media Group (Huanxi) stood to lose millions on its New Year-themed movie Lost in Russia.

Many organizations struggled — and some failed — during the pandemic not because they weren’t nimble or innovative, but because they were felled by a single devastating blow.

The root of this problem, in many cases, was either a lack of diversification or an overemphasis on efficiency and optimization.

While most of its peers decided to postpone their releases, Huanxi approached Bytedance, the Chinese company behind the blockbuster app TikTok. Bytedance was not an obvious distribution partner, as its properties mostly stream shortform, user-generated content. TikTok, for instance, caps videos at 15 seconds — and Lost in Russia clocked in at over 2 hours.

The principles of diversification and slack have fallen out of favor recently. The share price of diversified organizations is often hit with a “conglomerate discount,” and markets and activist investors are quick to penalize any sign of slack. Yet, these are both powerful hedges against the impact of shocks.

Pain in one area can be compensated by gain elsewhere.

During the pandemic, when sales in P&G’s personal care brands dropped, the company was able to make up the difference in increased revenue of its cleaning and disinfectant brands. By contrast, Gold’s Gym, Avianca Airlines, and Brooks Brothers suffered from a lack of diversification and ultimately went bankrupt.

In just two days, Lost in Russia racked up 600 million views on Bytedance platforms. Not only did the movie gain a huge following, it also led to a flood of goodwill from Chinese citizens who were frustrated about not being able to leave their homes during the outbreak. By waiting, other studios missed out on a major opportunity to build market share and capitalize on a limited-term opportunity.

Principle 2: Prioritize flexibility over planning Strategy is often taught in business schools as a cascade of choices around where to play and how to win. These choices are typically built into strategic plans that are devised and approved over a period of several months, and then executed over three or five years, before the cycle repeats. However, in a crisis, a strategic plan can easily become an anchor that locks an organization onto a path that is no longer relevant.

Faced with a massive drop in revenue during the pandemic, Qantas abandoned its five-year strategic plan and dusted off an old idea from the 1980s to offer “flights to nowhere.”

These excursions included fly-bys of some of Australia’s main tourist destinations, such as the Great Barrier Reef and Uluhu.

The entire stock of seats sold out in 10 minutes, making it the fastest-selling promotion in Qantas’ history.

Qantas was not only quick off the mark, it was flexible in how it operated. The airline recognized the public’s latent desire to travel, even if they couldn’t leave the country, and it quickly adapted its services to meet this need. It then built upon its initial success, next offering viewing flights to Antarctica.

Swiggy, one of India’s largest food-delivery startups built a platform that included more than 160,000 restaurants in 500 cities. During the Covid lockdown, restaurant activity, including deliveries, fell by more than 50%. Swiggy realized that its overdependence on fixed location, traditional “sit-down” restaurants as delivery partners was a severe vulnerability. In response, it started a program to add street food vendors to its platform, ultimately adding more than 36,000 of these vendors. While servicing these vendors was less profitable, they provided valuable “slack” during the crisis, while also delivering a societal benefit. As a consequence, the company rebounded to about 90% of its pre-Covid food delivery volumes.

Principle 4: Prioritize empowerment over hierarchy Systems are most vulnerable at their weakest points. A hierarchy, for example, is most vulnerable at the top.

Empowered teams, by contrast, are inherently robust. Since they’re decentralized, no single strike or crisis can take them all out. The key is to maintain open and regular information flows so that they are working from the same page.

Zoetis, a leading global-health company for animals, adopted this approach during the pandemic, which arrived just as

they were about to launch their largest ever new product, a medication for dogs. A number of challenges, including supply-chain disruptions, marketing delays, and reduced opening hours at testing enters and laboratories, threatened to scupper the launch. In response, Zoetis’ CEO decided to allow local leaders across 45 global markets autonomy to conduct the launch in the most appropriate way. For example, social distancing regulations varied massively by location, as did requirements to wear protective clothing. The empowerment extended to field-based employees, managers and teams who were encouraged to “run it like you own it.”

To further enable these employees, a priority was placed on data-driven decision-making, and dashboards containing up-to-the-minute information on the pandemic were made available to everyone in the organization.

Accelerating modularity

away

from

shocks:

Learning

and

Bouncing back from shocks is partially operational (being able to redeploy and reconfigure resources) and partially cultural (fostering a tolerance for failure and implementing an environment that encourages risk taking and rewards learning). The application of the acceleration principles has a major impact on performance in highly uncertain environments.

Principle 5: Prioritize learning over blaming It has been well established that organizational cultures that reward risk taking and tolerate failure move more quickly that those that don’t. If people are criticized for failing, they are less likely to take risks; in a crisis, this can be fatal.

Evalueserve is a mid-sized global IT services firm with offices in India. When the country declared a strict lockdown with six hours notice, it had no choice but to shift almost all of its 3,000 employees to work-from-home. This move created an increased risk to employee wellbeing and morale, as home environments were often stressful and not conducive for working. In response, the company instituted several changes to promote a “no blame” culture. It added mental health and wellbeing initiatives such as “no agenda check-in calls” to maintain motivation, as chairperson Timo Vättö and cofounder Marc Vollenweider explained to us in an interview.

The company also adjusted its incentives to reward employees for learning and adaptability. As a result, Evalueserve faced negligible attrition of both employees and clients during the period of the lockdown.

Principle 6: Prioritize resource modularity and mobility over resource lock-in Since it is difficult to predict how the future will unfold in a crisis, it is hard to effectively plan the allocation of resources.

Thus, it important to build resources that are modular and/ or mobile so they can be reconfigured or moved as needed.

An example of resource modularity comes from the “Paranoid Fan” app, which allowed NFL fans to order food to be delivered to their seats in sports stadiums. But with live events curtailed by the pandemic, the app lost its users. Seeing long queues outside food banks in New York City, founder Agustin

Gonzalez recognized an opportunity to reconfigure the app’s mapping and delivery technology. The company launched a new app, named Nepjun, that allowed food banks to set menus and create delivery protocols, while also allowing users to find operational food banks in their neighborhood.

Putting Strategic Agility into Action 2020 was an extremely disruptive year for the media and entertainment sector. Streaming companies like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video experienced strong growth, while organizations involved in live events and cinematic releases suffered massive drops in revenue. The Walt Disney Company was caught in the middle. In early 2020, media and broadcasting operations accounted for about a third of its revenue, 17% was earned from direct-to-consumer brands, and the remaining 50% came from movie studios, theme parks, and product sales.

Gains in broadcasting revenues failed to offset heavy losses from the closure of movie theaters, theme parks, and retail stores. Disney’s share price began 2020 at $146, but by March 20 it had dropped to $86 a share as the global scale of pandemic became apparent. The company managed to avoid the worst impacts of the pandemic for as long as it could by keeping its theme parks open in a limited capacity and adding strong safety protocols for all facilities, staff, and guests. It saved money by laying off employees across its portfolio of stores, parks, and cruise ships, and worked with local governments where possible to supplement its income.

A strong balance sheet allowed it to absorb the drop in revenue.

Meanwhile, the company reallocated resources and people to its Disney+ streaming service that had been launched in November 2019. The company worked hard to accelerate enhancements to the offering, adding new content throughout the year. For example, the live-action cinematic release Mulan was offered through the service as a special paid feature. By the end of the year, the company had attracted more than 90 million paying subscribers to the Disney+ service, significantly outperforming competitors such as HBO Max and Peacock, and far exceeding a goal it had hoped to meet by 2024.

When conditions improved, Disney was quick to take advantage. It reopened its theme parks in Shanghai in May and Tokyo in July. Most importantly, it continued to heavily invest in Disney+, building it into one of the world’s largest video subscription services just a year after launch. It empowered local managers to make decisions as situations shifted across the world, and it moved people and resources around to focus on growing areas. Its story shows that even large companies that are in the firing line of shocks like Covid-19 can respond effectively as long as they leverage the Triple As of strategic agility.

While we will eventually see the end of the Covid crisis, there is no doubt that organizations will continue to face other challenging situations in the future. Under these circumstances, incorporating avoidance, absorption and acceleration can be the difference between survival and collapse.

The beauty of contrast

By Steve McKee

To the poet, blue is the hue of sky and sea, the aura of twilight and haze of lost love.

To the scientist, blue is a color on the visible light spectrum with wavelengths between 450 and 495 nanometers.

To Dave Ortega, my company’s creative director, blue is meaningless without green, red, orange, and yellow.

While the poet inspires and the scientist informs, I believe the creative director’s observation is uniquely instructive.

Blue has distinct and undeniable scientific properties, but it only becomes meaningful to us in relation to other colors. If everything was blue, nothing would be.

It’s as true of our other senses as it is of sight. Without bitter, we wouldn’t know sweet. Without cold, we wouldn’t know heat. And imagine what life would be like if we could hear only one sound.

In his sweeping analysis of the historical arc of culture, “The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self,” Carl Trueman makes the point with respect to humanity in general: “Individual personal identity is not ultimately an internal monologue conducted in isolation by an individual self-consciousness.

On the contrary, it is a dialog between self-conscious beings.

We each know ourselves as we know other people.”

Just as we can fully appreciate one color, taste or sound only by knowing others, it’s our relationships with other people that both define and enrich us—personally, emotionally, and spiritually. And when it comes to economics, literally.

Bestselling author and economist George Gilder has repeatedly demonstrated that wealth isn’t a function of raw materials, but of know-how. The stuff from which we make things has always been there, but somewhere along the way humanity learned to put airplanes in flight and turn sand into semiconductors. The process of learning and discovery comes as a result of trial and error, accelerated by human interaction.

That’s the idea behind various innovation districts that are springing up around the country in an attempt to foster “creative collisions” between entrepreneurs and engineers, programmers and financiers. One way to describe creativity itself is the combination of previously unrelated ideas, and a great way to generate unrelated ideas is to put unrelated

people in close proximity to one another.

Just as the colors on the visible light spectrum operate at different wavelengths, so do each of us, and there’s beauty in the contrast.

When I was a kid shopping for school supplies, the sight of a giant, 64-color box of Crayola crayons (with built-in sharpener) made my eyes light up. The more colors, the greater the possibilities, and the better able I would be to reflect all that my young eyes took in about the world -- Forest Green, Robin Egg Blue, Dandelion Yellow, Sunset Orange and 60 other glorious possibilities. Alas, my mother thought a dozen or two was enough. (Given my artistic skills, she was probably correct, but you get the point.)

The more colors we have, the more combinations we can make. The more combinations we can make, the more creativity we can foster. And the more creativity we can foster, the more things get better in the world.

Someone once quipped, “If I didn’t have to work for people, or with people, I’d love my job.” It’s a humorous thought with which we all can identify at some level, but if my team has learned anything from 18+ months of on-again/offagain working from home it’s that there’s a tradeoff between productivity and creativity.

To some extent we can all individually be creative, but there’s nothing like sharing bad pizza or day-old doughnuts as we bounce ideas off one another in three-dimensional space and time. Eliminating a commute has its benefits, but collaboration isn’t one of them.

Embrace the varieties of tints, tastes, tones and talents around you, celebrating the contrasts that help you paint a better world. It sure beats being blue all by yourself.

Each month, When Growth Stalls examines why businesses and brands struggle and how they can overcome their obstacles and resume growth. Steve McKee is the co-founder of McKee Wallwork + Co., a marketing advisory firm that specializes in turning around stalled, stuck and stale companies. The company was recognized by Advertising Age as 2015 and 2018 as Southwest Small Agency of the Year. McKee is also the author of “When Growth Stalls” and “Power Branding.”

26 Universal Questions for Brand Positioning (and Creating Your Brand Story)

By Ulli Appelbaum

How do I position my brand for success? What is the most compelling story I can tell about my business? Those are two of the most substantial questions marketers and entrepreneurs have to answer when running their business. In fact, the answers will determine whether their brand will gain traction in the marketplace, grow, and get shared by consumers—or not.

An analysis of over 1,000 case studies from around the world of successful brand building has found that there are 26 different “approaches” to telling a brand story, each representing a different but proven opportunity to positioning your brand and telling your brand story. Each approach can be summarized by a key question (or set of questions), which I share below.

Tapping into this collective marketing intelligence by answering those 26 questions will help marketers sharpen their brand positioning platforms and tell better brand stories.

Setting the Stage The first 10 questions deal with the context in which the brand can be positioned. They set the stage of the brand story, if you will.

1. Redefine your business: What other categories satisfy a similar need or provide the similar emotional reward that yours does? And what opportunities would this new perspective offer for building your brand and your portfolio?

(Example: Cirque du Soleil) 2. Claim the gold standard: What is collectively understood

and accepted to be the “ideal” your category has to offer, and how can your brand claim, utilize, or position itself against this ideal and its associations? (Example: DiGiorno’s “It’s not delivery, it’s DiGiorno.”)

3. Be a part of culture: What cultural movement or subculture (and associated set of values) could your brand fit into or position itself against? (Example: the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty) 4. Tap into consumer rituals: How does your brand fit into your consumers’ existing rituals? What emotional transformation do they go through during those rituals?

How can your brand become a believable part of these rituals and help in the transformation? (Example: the way people eat Oreo cookies) 5. Harness the usage context: Where do consumers consume or use your brand, and what expectations, associations (both positive and negative), and opportunities does this environment provide? (Example: the original Got Milk campaign) 6. Disrupt category conventions: What are the generally accepted rules for how your category operates, and which ones could you break to change the category dynamics

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elevate your brand’s appeal? (Example: Abercrombie & Fitch’s exclusive focus on the cool kids in school)

7. Resolve a category paradox: What are the biggest consumer frustrations in your category? What is your category’s biggest paradox? How can your brand help resolve them? (Example: Dyson doesn’t lose suction.)

18. Conduct a torture-test: By showing how your product reacts under the most challenging circumstances or is used by those who depend on it the most, can you also demonstrate the value the product could provide to your everyday consumers? (Example: Duracell’s “Trusted Everywhere”)

8. Overcome consumption barriers: What barriers (real or perceived) are preventing consumers from purchasing or using your brand, and how can your brand help overcome those? [Example: the user imagery of Harley-Davidson’s core riders, the OWG (old white guys), preventing younger riders from identifying with the brand] 9. Identify an enemy: What threat (real or imagined, conscious or unconscious) could your brand mitigate in your consumers’ lives? (Example: the Truth anti-smoking campaign focusing on the corporate executives of the tobacco industry) 10. Brand archaeology: What lessons can be learned from the strategies and tactics that lead to your brand’s growth in the past, and how can those lessons be translated into a contemporary solution? (Example: Buddy Lee) Creating the Story The next nine questions deal with the offering itself and provide the building blocks to create the actual brand story.

These questions help you illuminate the main characters of the brand story, their antagonists, and their most defining features.

11. Romance the origins: Where does your brand come from, and what explicit or implicit meanings are associated with this origin that you could use to enhance the appeal of your brand? (Example: Fosters Beer) 12. Craft a creation story: Does a compelling story arise from the expertise and care with which your brand is made, or the ingredients and components being used? (Example: Jack Daniels) 13. Romance the way the product works: Can a focus on how your product works and delivers its core benefit elevate your brand? (Example: Febreze doesn’t cover up the odors—it eliminates them.)

14. Celebrate the ingredients: Is there a highly differentiating ingredient or component of your product or brand that can be focused on to tell a compelling story? (Example: Westin’s Heavenly Beds) 15. Identify your brand’s defining attributes: What attributes do consumers find most distinctive and appealing in your category or for your brand? And which of those can your brand credibly claim or focus on? (Stella Artois’ “Reassuringly Expensive,” where price is a defining attribute) 16. Give meaning to the brand’s weakness: If your brand has a real or perceived weakness that acts as a barrier to consumption, what meaning can you associate with this weakness that would turn it into strength or benefit?

(Example: Old Spice’s “If your grandfather hadn’t worn it, you wouldn’t exist” campaign) 17. Create a sense of scarcity and exclusivity: Can the scarcity and exclusivity of any aspect of your brand story

19. Let experts tell your story: Who would be the most authoritative (or memorable) expert you could utilize to share your brand’s story? (Example: Hill’s Pet food “Vet’s #1 Choice for Their Own Pets”) Defining the Connection The last seven questions focus on the type of value the brand offers to consumers and the role it wants to play in their lives. Does the brand connect with its consumers by delivering a powerful and differentiating benefit or experience addressing a relevant consumer need, or does it want to connect with them at a deeper, more purposeful level?

20. Highlight the benefit: Does your brand deliver against a relevant consumer need by providing a benefit that is new to the category, or by providing a new level of benefit, or by providing a new combination of benefits? (Example: Method Cleaning Products, Clean Happy) 21. Stimulate the senses: What are your brand’s sensory properties and how do they affect how people perceive, feel about, and interact with your brand? (Example: 5 Gum’s “Stimulate your senses”) 22. Dramatize the reward: What needs and wants drive consumers to choose your brand and how does your brand help your consumers help improve their lives? (Example: Wal-Mart’s “Save Money. Live Better.”)

23. Create a branded ritual: Can a set of ritualized behaviors be associated with the consumption of your brand that would give it increased meaning or emotional resonance with your customers? (Example: the Stella Artois nine-step pouring ritual) 24. Communicate shared values: Which core values driving your brand’s actions and behaviors would best match the core values that guide your consumers’? Looking at those two sets of core values, what narratives and positioning territories emerge? (Example: Molson Canadian Beer’s “I am Canadian”) 25. Highlight your purpose: What’s your brand’s core reason for being? Why does it exist? How does your purpose tie back to an unmet consumer need or something that is of significant relevance to your consumers? (Example: Cheerios’ Cheer on Reading Program) 26. Identify your brand’s archetype: What core motivations and desires do your consumers try to satisfy by using your category in general and your brand in particular, and which archetype best corresponds to this set of desires? What characteristics define this specific archetype and how can those guide your brand story? (Example: The Geek Squad Hero archetype)

Numerology and the Marketing Math!

By Suresh Dinakaran

Numerology and the Marketing Math: The 25 to 70% off

billboards, radio ads, digital ads etc. In fact, some of

enigma!

us were mistaking the 25 to 70% off to be a tourist

Numerology: Definition: The branch of knowledge that deals with the occult significance of numbers.

destination(considering how many of them sprout all over the city)- One cannot miss it because leading brands across industry verticals with the support and ‘ advise ‘ of big ticket

​We are all swayed by possibility. As we are swayed by short

advertising agencies make sure such campaigns are run 13

cuts. Human beings are hardwired to be lazy. So, unless and

months in a year. So, that makes it 24X7X395. A different

until there is a by design effort to put in the emotional labour​

numerology this!

, routine is the ardently followed also ran. Mundane replaces

The ever lasting love affair of brand and marketing experts

the potential jugular. It remains that way, because it’s always been done that way. So why upset the applecart? But what happens when the cart is being toppled? ​I am not a numbers person. Far from it. It somehow just doesn’t add up for me. So, I have almost subtracted it from my life. But, being in the space that I am, and observing the brand marketing communications around me, I am tempted to do a deeper dive and know more.

with 25 to 70% off remains a mystery. Or by now, it should not be. Considering the amount of time ‘ the practice ‘ has come to root(or should it be rot?). And the practice has been perfected beyond question. And ably aided by ‘ brand guardians ‘ who toe the line willingly as this ‘ ad vise ‘ is coming from senior czars at the big ticket ad agencies– how can they get their ‘ numbers ‘ wrong? . They have everything going for them- They use ‘ fancy calculators ‘, wear Armani suits, have Turkish coffee 8 times a day, the hair is slickly

25 to 70%off: Most of you would have seen these numbers​

gelled. Sorry, forgot to add the clincher-they also wear

scream out at us day in and day out from newspapers,

crocodile skin pointed leather shoes!!!

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I have heard somewhere that ‘ the more things change, the

belief(believe it or not!). We can keep bribing them and they

more they remain the same ‘. Recently, a very senior brand

will keep flocking like bees to honey. But, what happened? The

and business head of a market leading lifestyle brand called

numbers are not adding up. ​​The 25 to 70% off numerology

us at ISD Global saying that they are in troubled times. They

chapter needs to turn the page. The strategy is now clearly

were losing market share and from being a clear category

a ‘ has BEEn ‘! And still being tried Bees Saal Baad( Twenty

leader with over 65% retail market share, it was time for

Years Hence for those not familiar with the Hindi language).

store closures, downsizing(or rightsizing to make it sound sweeter) and market share dipping to below 40% – all that in

So, where are they headed? To me the writing is on the wall-

a matter of about 18 months. Inspite of increased marketing

or is it on the palm?

spends as advised by the ‘ experts ‘. My question to him was to understand what were they doing different to what was being done and not surprisingly the answer remained

​Palmistry, anyone?​Could be easier. Palm off your responsibility to someone or something else! Enough suckers around.

‘ we have aggressively started doing deep discounting and

As for me, I am calling up my Mom(God Bless Her) to know

instead of doing it 4 times a year, we remain committed to

more about the occult practice..you guessed it: Numerology!

doing it through the year ‘…so there you go, enough said – ‘ the more things change, the more they remain the same ‘. ​So, do these brand owners and guardians take their coveted ad agencies to task? I’m afraid not. If that were to happen,

Disclaimer: She is a retired Math teacher. And she has no interest in ‘hyperbole discounting‘.

And if you permit me a bit of Marketing 01(not even 101):

how can they make ‘ interesting, cerebral conversation ‘

‘ Differentiation is not an intrinsic characteristic of a brand;

saying that our brand works with XXXX agency – they are in

differentiation is in the eye of the consumer ‘.

the Top 5…and walk around with a chip on their shoulder​.

And be ranked among ‘ Top 50 ‘ Marketing Professionals in XXXX. Recognised as the ‘ best 40 under 40 ‘ or the ‘ leading 50 over 50 ‘- to be flagged on their Linked In profile. And ‘buy awards ‘ and (p)ride of place in Superbrands next hard bound edition.

Customers buy only on price and the more you deep discount, more loyalty they bring to the equation is still the

For all those swayed by the ‘ herd mentality ‘, this may never get heard. But, that being said, marketing is a serious responsibility. And there is no running away from that!

Suresh Dinakaran is the Chief Storyteller at ISD Global, a brand strategy & creative ideations entity based out of Dubai and Managing Editor, BrandKnew. With over two decades of insights, expertise and experience in building and growing brands across multiple geographies and media platforms.

HOW VIDEO GAMES ARE EMERGING AS ESSENTIAL PLATFORMS FOR MUSIC MARKETING

By Ilyse Liffreing

Music labels, artists and legacy gaming companies are leaning in to new gaming and music relationships Earlier this month, Ariana Grande, rocking her traditional high ponytail, dazzled audiences with her hits “Raindrops” and “Be Alright” against backgrounds of dreamy, candycolored sets. It wasn’t your typical concert. Grande, wearing a shimmering dress made of shards of glass, towered over her fans and smashed them with a bejeweled hammer upon her entrance. At one point, she sprouted wings and flew across a landscape of floating bubbles and ornaments, blowing kisses back at her fans dressed as mini Ariana Grandes.

“We are right at the beginning of a massive new industry,” says Jon Vlassopulos, VP, global head of music at Roblox.

“Artists, labels, publishers, venue and festival owners, video platforms, all have a chance to reinvent themselves and capture first-mover advantage. Virtual performances are now an integral part of the music landscape even with the return of IRL [in real life] concerts and other types of events and will become more immersive in the months and years ahead.”

All of this could only happen within the world of “Fortnite.”

The virtual concert is expected to top the 12 million concurrent players the Travis Scott “Astronomical” event saw last year. In the three days after Grande’s event, video streams of her hit “Be Alright” surged 123% from 42,000 streams to 93,000 streams, according to MRC Data.

Young audiences are a big reason why music marketing is blending much more with video games today. Multiple studies point to music discovery stopping by 33-yearsold. After that, many people simply continue listening to the bands they know and already love. With such a tight window of opportunity, it’s essential to reach young audiences where they are already spending the majority of their time. In 2021, that means the virtual worlds of video games. Already, with 2.9 billion worldwide gamers taking part in the $177.8 billion industry, brands and ad agencies have been bolstering their capabilities to reach these young gamers.

Video games have long served as a way for consumers to discover new music. But over the past year, the pandemic gaming boost and new metaverse technology have further merged the worlds of gaming and music, reaching new audiences of concert-goers and music streamers. So much so that the opening ceremonies of the Tokyo Olympics featured the theme songs of “Dragon Quest” and “Final Fantasy,” to popular role-playing games.

Music labels, talent agents and brands are all looking to be part of the equation, namely to reach young audiences who might be experiencing their first concert in a virtual setting.

Even legacy gaming companies are seeking new ways to position their games as platforms for music discovery. And even with in-person concerts coming back, experts say the assimilation of music and gaming, such as virtual concerts, has staying power.

A new generation of concert-goers

“For many kids, their first concert will likely be a virtual concert and it’s going to be normalized for them,” says Jarred Kennedy, chief operating officer at Wave, which uses gaming technology to create virtual concerts for artists like The Weeknd, Dillion Francis and within gaming environments like Roblox and social platforms like Twitch, TikTok and YouTube. “For kids who are coming of age and getting into games, it’s the way they are getting entertained.

Instead of having two separate tracks—where there are game scores and music recorded for consumption—these lines are blurring.”

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In fact, Gen Zers and millennials spend more time gaming than taking part in other forms of traditional entertainment like watching broadcast TV, reading, and yes, even listening to music, according to an August Newzoo study of 72,000 people across 33 markets. The study found that the younger the generation, the more time is spent on gaming, with Gen Zers and millennials averaging around seven hours gaming every week. Gen Zers make up the largest majority of video game players, with 81% taking part. Roughly 25% of Gen Zers’ leisure time is spent gaming compared to 14% listening to music.

to a community,” says Kennedy. “In a virtual environment, the opportunity to doing that is robust.”

Brands hear the music

Vlassopulos says Roblox has a goal to make music an integral part of its platform’s experience, where 46.6 million daily active gamers, mostly under the age of 18, can explore and play games in millions of virtual worlds as avatars, a concept it promotes as a metaverse. On its way in doing so, Roblox is starting to license more music catalogues like Monstercat onto the platform so developers and creators can use it to enhance the virtual worlds they are creating.

Roblox has also created experiences to introduce a love of music to its players. With Splash, players can DJ and create music, and in games like Robeats, music fans can play with their favorite songs.

Naturally, music labels and the talent that fuel them are driving many of these concepts forward. Increasingly, musicians themselves are angling to be part of the world of video games. For recording artists during the pandemic, virtual concerts replaced in-person shows as forms of revenue drivers. Although top talent can still make more with in-person stadium concerts and tours, virtual concerts allow them to bolster their business portfolios and cater to an even wider base of fans, since many of the virtual concerts on platforms like “Fortnite” are free to all players.

For talent that might not see themselves headlining stadium tours, the chance to grow their following virtually spells big opportunity.

Bridging connections Platforms like Roblox see the potential and their place in creating virtual concerts and album release parties their users can take part in. “Artists can perform in an infinite venue that they dream up, connect directly and literally hang out with millions of fans in a single night—instead of having to fly around the world for 18 months on a physical tour,” says Vlassopulos.

Geoff Sawyer, a video games agent at United Talent Agency (UTA) who focuses on fostering collaborations between UTA’s music clients and the gaming industry, says artists’ interest in collaborating with video games has never been higher.

Of course, virtual concerts, album release parties and artist meet-and-greets are popular with music labels and artists and can be monetized through virtual merchandise and VIP experiences within Roblox. Over the past year, Roblox has worked with Columbia Records, Warner Music, RBC Records and others to create virtual experiences popular with players in the U.S. and Europe.

Over the past year, the agency has secured “Fortnite” virtual concert deals with artists like DJ Marshmello, rapper Trippie Redd and singer Dominic Fike. Marshmello’s “Fortnite” concert alone was attended by 10.7 million players. For chart-topper Post Malone, Universal Music Group for Brands crafted a deal with Pokémon to have him headline its 25th anniversary virtual concert in February on YouTube and Twitch as well as another deal that made the rapper and songwriter an owner in esports organization Team Envy.

After its Lil Nas X virtual concert in November 2020 garnered 36 million visits and with virtal merchandise expected to bring in more than eight figures by the end of the year, the platform replicated the concept for artists like Royal Blood, and this past weekend for UK rapper KSI, as well as launch parties for artists like Zara Larsson, Ava Max and Why Don’t We. Vlassopulos says labels are seeing between 5% to 1,000% increases in streaming numbers and social followers during events.

“Video games are becoming the most influential arbiters of pop culture in the entertainment industry. With their thoughtfulness and authenticity, partnerships between the gaming and music industries in particular have built up a strong momentum,” says Sawyer. “Authentic artist integrations are one of the most effective ways a game can delight its audience, and that audience might well be hundreds of millions of people worldwide. The mutual benefit is massive.”

The path to integrating music with gaming isn’t always smooth, however. With so many users and platforms growing so quickly, it can be challenging to regulate the use of music, as social media platforms like TikTok have seen.

In June, Roblox partnered with Bertelsmann Music Group (BMG) for future music usage after being embroiled in a $200 million lawsuit from the National Music Publishers’ Association for illegal use of music.

For brands outside of the world of gaming and music, there are still opportunities to become incorporated into the events. Wave, for instance, has worked with brands like Crocs, Asics, People Magazine and Hyper X to secure product placements in virtual shows. For instance, Dillion Francis wore a pair of Crocs during his virtual performance that changed color based on viewers’ votes.

“A lot of times when brands look at opportunities like this, it’s how can they bring added value, not just sponsor or slap on their logo, but bring added value to an experience and

Not your parents’ music Legacy gaming companies, seeing the momentum in the space, are also further positioning their games as drivers of music discovery to reach younger audiences. Electronic Arts (EA), the U.S.’s second-largest video game company behind Activision Blizzard, is releasing its own hip-hop album in partnership with Universal Media Group’s Interscope Records for the soundtrack of its upcoming “Madden NFL 22” game out on August 20. Unlike with past soundtracks, 11 songs have been exclusively made for “Madden” from hip hop artists like Jack Harlow, Swae Lee, Tierra Whack and

Moneybagg Yo, and available across streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music. The 11 songs will be included in a 56-song in-game soundtrack. It’s a deviation away from purely licensing existing songs, an approach that has been in place for the company’s entire 40-year history. This is a product that can live on its own outside of the game.

“It’s a little disruptive in the sense that people generally want to hear what they know already, but we feed them the tone and sound of what they will love, not what they have loved,” Schnur says. “There’s high expectations of nextgeneration football fans to lean into Madden and to hear what’s next.”

The new tactic allows EA to promote itself through the upand-coming artists on its album. The musicians are creating original content with the music over social and digital platforms to promote the new game. EA’s collaboration with the NFL also means the songs will be used for the football season kicking off next month, playing in stadiums and at NFL events.

Therefore, it’s important that the album not sound like something parents might play. “There was a time when the NFL sounded like Bon Jovi. Football does not need to continue to sound like it belongs only to the people in the suites,” he says. “The tone should sound like it belongs to the people in the stands—the next generation of season ticket holders; the next generation of people who may respond to the advertisers of the sport.”

Steve Schnur, worldwide executive and president of EA Music Group, says the new approach better positions the game as a place of music discovery for the next-generation of football fans, a tactic that has always been part of the company’s strategy but is leveling up.

Ilyse Liffreing reports on pop culture, social trends, influencers and esports. She has covered the advertising industry for Ad Age since 2019 and has previously covered brands and agencies at Digiday and digital platforms at Campaign U.S. She is a proud alum of the NYU Graduate School of Journalism and the University of San Francisco.

You should never work on weekends unless you’re doing one thing

By Filip Urban

Her words soared across the Twittersphere, inciting thousands of reactions: “Unpopular opinion: the best thing young people can do early in their careers is to work on the weekends.”

If we wanted to be pedantic, we could call venture capitalist Jordan Kong’s tweet more of a hot take. But still, I agreed

so much with it that I thought it would be one of those unpopular opinions that wasn’t that unpopular. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Responses range from descriptions of working on the weekend as a “never-ending wealth-chasing capitalist hellscape,” to an inevitable path to “zero time with their

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friends and family . . . zero social skills, have no life experiences, and suffer from mental burnout before 30,” to “sell yourself body and soul for companies that don’t even bother with your mental, physical, and financial well being.”

So, I do marketing and writing simultaneously. At points, there is definitely a sense of brain overload. But it’s a common element in many jobs, it’s still a privilege to experience them while I was doing the thing I liked to do. It helped that marketing paid well, and I didn’t hate it.

Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham supported Kong’s tweet, noting responses that equated work with earning an income. He replied, “for the ambitious, they are far from identical.” Kong clarified that work “can mean different things: could be a project that you own at your day job, could be a new skill you need for advancement, could be a side hustle you love.”

Like Kong says, my marketing opportunities started compounding thanks to my work in my spare time. After writing dozens of articles for a Canadian tech publication— on weekends in college and for a summer—through my friend Keane’s introduction, I got a contract job with Xtreme Labs, which got bought for $65 million in 2013.

Can you consider the radical proposal that even if your work never pays you, it will still be a valuable and integral part of your life, for the rest of your life? What if your art gives you life and your employment pays for that life?

Work means something different to everyone, which is why Kong’s tweet was polarizing. For example, the Futur CEO Chris Do tweeted, “my wife and I can’t agree on this. Can you work hard and make sacrifices if you love the work you do? She only considers it work if you hate what you do.

Therefore I haven’t been working [for] the last six years.

Thoughts?”

Similarly, in 1843 Magazine, Ryan Avent writes that software and IT have made the workplace much more likable. He writes about the joys of flow, collaboration, and a sense of purposeful immersion. This is probably the case in most venture capitalists and technology offices, and even for some of the people who get to work from home.

Still, there are many who don’t get to work in this type of environment. I could put on my headphones and get into flow at a coffee shop or in a coworking space, but there were always others that made it possible—the baristas, the caretakers, and the drivers, among others.

Therein lies the rub. The digital divide might cover hardware and internet access, but the diverging natures of work, and feelings of optimism or despair in the future, drove the strong responses to Kong’s tweet. It’s not necessarily ambitious to work on the weekend when it involves learning, autonomy, and feels fun. It’s easy.

Venture capitalist Mark Suster wrote a post titled, “Is it Time for You to Earn or to Learn?” The frank truth is, many of us probably feel the need to do both. For example, there was a point when I worked at Lifehacker in what would be the last days of Gawker Media, where I was also running my editorial studio.

In my ideal world, I would be a full-time author. But writing is an unstable business. I inherently knew and felt the same as Kim’s Convenience lead actor Paul Sun-Hyung Lee and Donald Glover when they said they felt like they didn’t have chances to fail. I’ll quote Brenda Peterson quoting Edith Oliver at The New Yorker, “My deah (sic), you don’t mean to say that you actually live on your salary?” Many of us do, and that’s just the way it is. For me, I couldn’t risk not earning, but thanks to my friends and family, I also knew the essentiality of learning.

I didn’t own any equity, and I wasn’t even working that day so I missed the party. But I learned a lot, and I could easily pick up relatively well-paying freelance opportunities with that. I learned to negotiate, to price, and to write, all on the weekends. Spending less time making the same amount of money meant I could make more time to write.

For most of my childhood, my schedule was packed with classes. Sunday was for going to church and attending Sunday school. Monday to Friday I went to daycare and public school. Piano class would be on Thursday, but I practiced each assigned song six times every night. Friday nights were swimming. When I stopped swimming, my parents made me play floor hockey. On Saturdays, I went to Chinese and math classes. If I wanted to watch cartoons on Saturday morning, I’d have to wake up at 6:45 a.m.—the earliest time of the week—which I did happily. I was upset cartoons didn’t start earlier and usually turned on the TV to the end credits of That ’70s Show. If I woke up even earlier than that, I would draw pictures.

My parents made it clear: I was privileged to have a chance to learn. I also knew that a lot of other kids who went to my daycare had a similar schedule with different mixes of classes—ballet, guitar, violin, Kumon, martial arts, and such.

I loved books, and my parents made sure I could read plenty for fun (I would finish a book at the bookstore, and borrow a maximum of 50 books at the library). And I spent no shortage of time playing video games. But the structure and discipline my parents instilled in me was a huge asset that made earning and learning—working on the weekends— much easier than if I hadn’t had those habits.

I also know that none of the habits that serve my work ethic would matter if I didn’t enjoy my work. Given my temperament, I’m just not the type of person that can grind away for 14 hours a day, thirstily seeking out drops of joy in something that makes me feel miserable. These days, I still do things that might look like work on the weekends— writing at Medium, taking notes, figuring out GPT-3, and reading, among many other things.

Even after all of this, I still find myself agreeing with Kong.

I would amend her tweet more carefully, by removing the vague elements and polarizing misunderstandings that made it go viral in the first place: “The best thing young people can do early in their careers is to learn skills that excite and fulfill them on the weekends.”

Talking About Purpose Won’t Transform a Brand; These 5 Skills Will

By Laura Quinn

From Pride to voting rights to climate change, modern brand leaders have to be ready to step up and take a strong point of view on the biggest social and environmental issues of our time. And in a world of woke-washing and cancel culture, it’s a skill that can’t be taken lightly.

We all know the stats by now — globally, 67 percent of people agree it has become more important that the brands they choose make a positive contribution to society beyond just a good service or product; and 64 percent of US adults now say a company’s “primary purpose” should be “making the world a better place.” Masses of purpose-driven startups are disrupting sectors from eyeglasses to fashion to toilet paper; while legacy companies including Unilever, Mars and Danone have made brand purpose mandatory in the positioning of their legion of brands.

The result is a wholesale shift in the work of brand leadership.

According to Pree Rao, Head of North America CMO Practice at leadership advisory and executive search firm Egon Zehnder: “Brand purpose is now critical to how CMOs and their teams can both respond to the consumer and drive bottom-line results. For full-stack marketing leadership roles, bringing brand purpose to life is core and central — no matter the industry.”

But transitioning from a traditional brand leadership role into a leader who can deliver real societal impact through purpose is a journey that takes commitment and skill. At Purpose, we meet amazing brand leaders every week with one very clear ask: How do I do this work?

The challenge they face is that “purpose” and social impact have been written into job descriptions, but the skills needed to deliver a traditional brand campaign and those required to support real, effective social change are not often the same. Navigating complex issue spaces, finding a meaningful brand role within a movement, working with nonprofit partners effectively, and mobilizing consumers to take real-world actions requires new muscles and a different mindset than the traditional expertise of brand leaders and their partner agencies.

From our work supporting leaders to deliver brand value through purpose, we’ve identified five skills that every brand leader needs — but as yet, not enough have: 1. Ecosystem thinking Movements and social issue spaces are complex ecosystems

with many actors working together. Unlike a traditional brand campaign approach, working within these spaces isn’t just about pushing out relevant messages or creating engagement — it’s about knowing who’s already in the ecosystem and being ready to listen, to understand where a brand or corporation can add the most value.

2. A sharp equity lens Arguably the most valuable skill for any leader today is to understand how and where inequities play out in their business and society, in order to position their organization to counter existing structural inequities and to take an equity lens to all brand touchpoints, from ethical tech to respectful representation.

3. Movement generosity The muscle memory of brand leaders is to identity, occupy and “own” a space. But a brand can’t, and shouldn’t try to, own a movement. To create an authentic positioning within an issue space that consumers will respect requires a brand to understand the movement that already exists, share resources generously with other actors, and fill the gaps that are most critical — not just those that are most self-serving.

4. Double impact measurement Brand leaders are well versed in tracking brand value and measuring marketing ROI. In order to deliver brand purpose effectively, leaders must also seek to understand social impact measurement and evaluation methodologies. Once they’re able to track the impact of their activities, brands can build powerful platforms and stories that drive credibility and engagement.

5. Knowing what you don’t know Working in challenging issue spaces often means experiencing discomfort. You never know what you don’t know. Surrounding yourself with the right people to help navigate complex issues, partners and relationships — and understanding when you’re not the expert in the room — creates deeper, more authentic strategies and more powerful brand impact.

When brand leaders are able to build these skills — or find the right people to support them — they not only succeed in delivering authentic brand purpose that drives real, positive impact in the world; they also build credible stories, protect the reputation of their brand, and develop deeper and longer-lasting consumer relationships.

HOW LANGUAGE IS THE KEY FOR BRANDS TO UNLOCK CONSUMER BEHAVIOR

By Adrianne Pasquarelli

The CEO of research company MotivBase offers a primer for brands on changing purchase behavior brought on by the pandemic Ujwal Arkalgud has had a busy 18 months. As co-founder and CEO of research firm MotivBase, Arkalgud studies the meaning behind what consumers say and write and decodes it for brands. Among MotivBase’s clients are Clorox, Procter & Gamble and General Mills.

On the latest episode of the “Marketer’s Brief” podcast, Arkalgud discusses how the coronavirus has altered consumer behavior and what marketers might learn from some of the changes, particularly regarding concepts including sustainability and eco-friendly products.

“The pandemic has been the perfect breeding ground for us in a way,” says Arkalgud. “When clients, companies, marketers look at behavior, what they forget is behavior can change overnight; it changes anytime something happens in culture.”

MotivBase has spent recent months tracking the rise in demand for cleaning products during COVID-19. Previously, many consumers had been seeking out eco-friendly solutions but in 2020, they scooped up any cleaners they could find— even those kitchen products boasting chemical ingredients.

Many manufacturers of household cleaning products asked Arkalgud if the “natural trend” was done. On the contrary, he says.

“The meanings around natural cleaning haven’t changed,” Arkalgud says. “The knowledge of the average consumer around the benefits of cleaning with natural products like vinegar were increasing through the pandemic, though behavior, sales data was not demonstrating that. It teaches us that when we look at meaning, we maintain focus which allows us to get past the short-term blips to think about what will settle in.”

On the podcast, Arkalgud also discusses how brands can responsibly add sustainability messaging into marketing, particularly following a recent Greenwashing in Advertising guide released by the 4A’s.

Adrianne Pasquarelli is a senior reporter at Ad Age, covering marketing in retail and finance, as well as in travel and health care. She is also a host of the Marketer’s Brief podcast and spearheads special reports including 40 Under 40 and Hottest Brands.

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

How to Make Your Brand’s Storytelling More Compelling

By Andy Nairn

In recent years, it’s become fashionable for marketers to describe themselves as “storytellers” for their brand. But many brand narratives are deadly dull. That’s because they lack the one element that every good writer uses: conflict.

Every great story, whether a novel, play, film, or TV series, is based on a dramatic conflict—a protagonist’s struggle to get what he or she wants in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles. That tension is what gets us interested and keeps us hooked: We want to know whether our hero will succeed

or fail.

Without that element of jeopardy, a story can be flat, predictable, boring.

Sadly, much of branded content and brand storytelling is all

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of those things. The characters and setting are nice, lest they reflect badly on the organization. Wonderful things happen to the protagonists, as if by magic. Difficult themes are avoided, and negativity is frowned upon. There’s no conflict.

Obviously, I’m not suggesting we start putting Freddy Krueger and Hannibal Lecter into Cornflakes ads (although “Cereal Killers” would be amazing to watch). But we should always ask ourselves why anybody should care about our brand stories.

I think it’s helpful to consider the various types of conflict that storytelling experts say make for the best narratives.

Five Types of Conflict in Storytelling 1. Character vs. Self Some of the greatest novels and films revolve around an inner conflict, but such turmoil is usually avoided in branded content because it’s believed to signify a lack of confidence.

And yet, acknowledging self-doubt can be used to heighten empathy toward the character—your brand or its products— and emphasize strength.

What concerns might your prospects have about buying from you? What myths or taboos might put them off? Instead of avoiding those issues, why not make them central to your story and show how you can overcome them?

2. Character vs. Character This conflict is a storytelling classic: David vs. Goliath, King Kong vs. Godzilla, Kramer vs. Kramer. It’s common in marketing, too: Pepsi vs. Coke, Mac vs. PC, Burger King vs.

McDonald’s. But it’s not easy to pull off. It can come across as petty and it can inadvertently draw attention to your rival.

The character vs. character storyline makes sense only for a challenger brand. Market leaders should avoid mentioning the competition. (When they get dragged into a fight like that, you know they’re in trouble!)

But upstarts need to make their conflict entertaining to a wider audience, not just to their own stakeholders, and one way to do that is using humor. How could you poke fun at your bigger, slower rival?

3. Character vs. Nature This is an increasingly popular plotline in movies. It’s even given rise to a new genre sometimes called “eco-apocalypse” or “cli-fi.” But it’s almost untouched by brands in a classic example of organizations’ trying to avoid conflict: They want to steer customers toward eco-friendly choices but don’t want to scare them with the consequences of inaction.

Again, I’m not saying your brand content should start with flooded cities or burning forests. But think twice before cutting straight to the solution.

Can you capture the struggle that went into creating your green product? Can you show nature’s destructive power being tamed? Can you set up a ticking eco-time-bomb then show how it can be defused?

All of those scenarios are more likely to grip the imagination than a pretense that the world is perfect.

4. Character vs. Technology This is another conflict that writers are using more often in Hollywood. After all, the relationship between people and machines is one of the great themes of our time.

In marketing, of course, we’re typically trying to sell a technology, so we tend to focus on its benefits. But let’s face it: Downsides exist, too, and sometimes leaning into those frustrations in your marketing storytelling can highlight your product’s strengths.

Can you harness category concerns, then present an alternative? Can you dispel myths or untangle confusion?

Above all, can you make your technology feel human and loved, rather than just mechanical and efficient?

5. Character vs. Society In this kind of conflict, the protagonist takes on societal forces such as prejudice, ignorance, and oppression. It’s a dominant theme in fiction right now, and it’s increasingly popular with commercial organizations, too.

Used well, the character vs. society conflict can tell a compelling story and help make the world a better place. But it should be used with caution.

First, your brand should have a strong and relevant story to tell. Otherwise, you could be accused of “purpose-washing.”

Second, ensure that your narrative goes beyond platitude.

Otherwise, there’s no real conflict; you’re just mouthing empty words about a topic that everyone agrees on, anyway.

To get this one right, ask yourself what social problems your organization genuinely cares about and how it can move the issue forward instead of just jumping on a bandwagon that’s already rolling along.

Brand Storytelling: From Conflict to Resolution Some of the suggestions in this article may feel counterintuitive for content creators who have been brought up on the need to accentuate the positive. That should be your goal, but you should also think about how you get there.

Obviously, a happy resolution is crucial for any brand storytelling. But you need to make people care about it in the first place, and that’s where conflict comes in.

I’ll leave the last words on the subject to one of the greatest storytellers of all time: the late, great John le Carré. He sold more than 60 million books—often with very complicated plots—over the course of his career. But his philosophy was simple, and it was about conflict: “’The cat sat on the mat’ is not a story,” he once said. “But ‘The cat sat on the dog’s mat’ is the beginning of a story.”

The next time you create content for your brand, ask yourself: Does your narrative consist only of a cat on a mat?

If so, find a dog.

Andy is one of the 3 founders of Lucky Generals, a creative company for people on a mission. It’s been shortlisted for Campaign’s Agency of the Year for 5 years in a row.He also chairs Dark Horses, a sports marketing agency for those who want to break away from the field.

Tap into the power of loyalty by serving your Brand Lovers better than anyone else …

By Bj Bueno

Marketing used to be fairly straightforward: Throw money at advertising in order to influence people to buy your products and services. If your advertising campaign was decent, the resulting sales outweighed the cost of advertising. If your campaign was excellent, your business grew like a wildflower.

Fast forward to today: The customer is now in control. Media fragmentation from hundreds of cable networks, millions of Web sites. mobile devices in every hand, and social media make it more difficult to reach the general market. And even if you do reach your potential customers, they don’t have to listen, and probably won’t. What’s an intelligent marketer to do?

Five ways to tap into your most profitable customers 1) Understand what branding is really all about.

Management guru Peter Drucker explained that the purpose of business is to create a customer.1 In contemporary marketing, your job is to create a repeat customer who is likely to build a relationship with you and buy from you year after year. In order to accomplish this magnificent feat, you must develop what’s called a brand. A brand is an association that a customer has with certain feelings and images represented by a company, not simply a company name or a logo. You cannot create a brand by yourself because branding is a co-authored experience between you and your customers.

When a group of customers has strong associations between your brand and a desired feeling, the brand has “equity” it can leverage in order to grow.

2) Focus on your best customers.

The secret ingredient to a sustainable enterprise is called Brand Lovers: The customers who love you the most. Brand Lovers emotionally connect with what you do and they want to celebrate who you are. Their connection with your brand is so strong that they often don’t consider doing business with anyone else. Apple’s Mac users, for example, don’t consider purchasing a PC. To them, there is no alternative.

At the very least, your Brand Lovers choose you more often than your competitors. For many companies, the best customers drive a significant part of their profitability—both through purchasing and by acting as evangelists to convert other people into customers—and yet the business generally knows very little about them. Basic market research does not offer you insights into your best customers. The true drivers of choice for your best customers are emotional connections to your brand.

Certain brands have a legion of Brand Lovers – we call them Cult Brands. In a Cult Brand like Apple, CEO Steve Jobs knew he was selling a unique way of life that’s intelligent, creative, and special—he wasn’t just selling computers, digital music players, and mobile phones. Oprah turned herself into a Cult Brand by being is far more than just another talk show host: real, honest and loving, Oprah

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radiates hope and the promise of a better tomorrow.

them.

3) Identify your Brand Lovers.

5) Serve your Brand Lovers better than anyone else.

Perhaps your enterprise doesn’t have Brand Lovers like Apple or Oprah, but you do have your best customers – customers who give you repeat business and who may tell their friends and colleagues about your brand.

There are always ways to grow your business by embracing your best customers. The answers don’t have to be complex.

For World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), offering free meatball subs before the show increased the love among participants. Skaters were ostracized by most businesses, but Vans listened to its customers and gave them what they wanted. Harley-Davidson developed leather jackets for its riders.

So how do you find your best customers? Actually, they often find you. They congregate at your stores. They send you e-mails and call you from time to time to tell you how great you’re doing. Some customers might even blog about your products or services or create videos and post them on social media.

On the financial side, if you maintain a customer database, you can sift through and determine who purchases from you with the greatest frequency – and for the longest time span.

What if none of the above helps you locate them? Then get creative. Carefully crafted surveys might point you in the right direction or you may need to hire a firm to help you identify who your best customers are.

4) Get to know your Brand Lovers.

Talk to them. Find out why they keep doing business with you. Don’t be afraid to ask. But listen carefully.

Look for the intangible clues that make you unique in your customers’ eyes. Uncover the emotional effect you have on

The role of marketing is to create the future today, which requires you to know what your customers will want tomorrow. The only way to anticipate the future needs of your customers is to understand who they are, talk to them and listen. Then, you can create the future together.

Onward A final word of advice: Don’t try to be all things to all people. You don’t need everyone to like you. You only need your Brand Lovers who already love you. Remember, your best customers are the lifeblood for growing a sustainable business. By learning to understand their needs and serving them better than anyone else, you can build a legion of brand loyalists that catapult your business growth without throwing more money at directionless advertising campaigns.

Welcome to the New World of Marketing!

The key ad trends driving the in-car commerce boom

By Lawrence Dodds

With news that traffic on the roads has in some cases exceeded pre-pandemic levels, the car has been thrown into the limelight as the key mode of transport for millions up and down the country. Consumers are driving further for leisure and even staycationing more, as Covid concerns have created a jittery foreign travel market.

At the same time, the car market has had a confidence bounce-back from the early days of the pandemic, with consumer demand increasing and a global chip shortage creating price inflation for used cars and increasing waiting lists for new cars.

Cars as digital platforms Encouraged by strong demand, car manufacturers are releasing new models into line-ups, even though they are struggling to get them off the production line. They have also had to look for ways to respond to the success of Tesla, the share price of which has skyrocketed, leaving a wide array of manufacturers with red faces, given their own slow adoption of technology.

Support for mobile mirroring services has risen as manufacturers have recognised the importance of mobilephone-based services at the centre of the in-car experience.

However, no manufacturer has yet been able to offer mapping that can compete with Google or Apple. Both tech giants are starting to accelerate their in-car offerings in what can be seen as a drawing of battle lines in the ever-increasing war for our attention. Amazon’s Alexa is also playing a role, with Ford adding the smart assistant as a hands-free option in an over-the-air update.

before the value of advertising revenue is fully recognised.

This would mirror the step that TV manufacturers have taken in the development of offerings such as Samsung TV and Samba TV. With more self-driving and driving-assistant options due to become the norm, the focus is set to shift to cars as entertainment platforms. Competition is rife, with in-car screens getting bigger and Netflix becoming available as incar entertainment. Mercedes also recently debuted its in-car infotainment hyper screen. There is a strong likelihood that contextually relevant advertising will not just come from in-car software and navigation apps, but also from entertainment platforms tapping into in-car consumption.

Forget ecommerce, think in-car commerce A newer, exciting development in cars is connected commerce, with in-car payments being trialled and launched by auto manufacturers. Hyundai is one such company, bringing incar payments to its all-new Ioniq 5. Hyundai is betting on the technology as a way to drive incremental revenue and sees fast food and charging occasions as key opportunities.

When the technology arrives in the US in 2021, it will include partners such as Domino’s, ParkWhiz and Charge hub.

The potential for such technology is clear and will ultimately represent an opportunity for retailers to provide seamless services and remove barriers to purchase. Consumers could potentially order their favourite pizza as they drive home or even pay before arriving at a drive-through. Coffees could be paid for just before collection. The potential for frictionless commerce is clear.

Emerging advertising opportunities

What should advertisers do now?

As cars start to benefit from connected services and direct internet connections, it comes as no surprise that advertising opportunities are increasing. Advertisers can already drive visibility on Google Maps and Waze through programmatic offerings. Waze already offers four ad formats in which to intercept journeys and drive up the prominence of bricksand-mortar destinations. Given that the car is such a vital method of transport for retail, you can see why so many advertisers are already investing here, especially destinationdriven businesses.

The connected in-car experience offers advertisers one of a few ways to tap into spatial context. Retailers, especially bricks-and-mortar ones, should optimise their digital presence to ensure they are accessible on digital platforms and then supplement this by testing in-car navigation opportunities to further increase visibility.

The future in this space is potentially fragmented as car manufacturers are likely to get in on the party. Companies such as Telenav are already offering OEM advertising systems to auto manufacturers and it is only a matter of time

Fully expect to see in-car purchase technology accelerate quickly. Brands should look to drive integrated partnerships to unlock enhanced consumer experiences as the technology develops, rather than waiting and being left behind.

In-car audio opportunities are a way that advertisers can intercept consumers today. DAX, Spotify and Acast are an easy win. Campaigns can be customised fully to the environment, using dynamic audio technology.

Science is resilient.

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

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

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

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

Because in the end, Science will win.

Breakthroughs that change patients’ lives Learn more at www.pfizer.com

3 Ways Artificial Intelligence Will Change Marketing Forever

By Courtney Behrens

Marketers are no exception to the relentless pace of organizational digital transformation and automation— especially by leveraging artificial intelligence. AI-powered automation doesn’t just make a firm’s marketing department faster, it also becomes smarter by leveraging data far more efficiently than through manual methods. It’s no surprise that many companies have already begun to adopt marketing intelligence in their digital marketing strategies, which can generally be broken down into three main areas: smarter customer interactions, personalization and risk assessment.

Smarter customer interactions An increasing number of businesses have modernized their methods for customer communication by implementing predictive messaging tools such as chatbots and more.

These automated communication instruments enhance the customer experience by opening rapid communication channels between interested buyers and sellers, bolstering the customer experience while simultaneously fostering brand loyalty. Younger customers especially have higher expectations for customer service innovation.

In particular, the era of direct messaging has led to a boon for “smart” chatbots. They can be a powerful customer tool, cutting response times, saving costs and expediting customer interactions. These automated interfaces operate through several channels to streamline conversations with customers at any time and place, even outside regular working hours.

Chatbots’ cousins, AI-powered phone agents, are also becoming customers’ everyday companions. Virtual assistants in general have grown in popularity, as they provide faster, more economical ways of encouraging online sales.

Smarter personalization Another marketing area that AI transforms is personalization.

According to data from dotdigital’s Global E-Commerce Benchmark Report 2020, only 5% of brands currently provide contextually relevant content.

As businesses market across multiple channels, it is essential to utilize every piece of data collected to conduct smart outreach. Artificial intelligence enables businesses to predict consumer preferences by collecting and interpreting data to tailor messaging, products and recommendations accordingly across channels, from social media to email. For instance, web metrics, such as response and value indicators, will

indicate what resonates with the targeted consumer. Sellers can then predict consumer wants and needs more accurately through AI-powered data mining. This allows businesses to personalize their content in terms of segmentation and targeting.

Smarter risk assessment Digital transformation, which has only been accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic, opens the door even further to security risks. Hence, solutions that help businesses detect and prevent security risks are more needed than ever.

AI’s cognitive computing capabilities are a great asset to risk management and assessment. Cognitive analytics allow businesses to tap unstructured information, personalize services and reduce subjectivity in decision making. With respect to information security, data gathered through sales and marketing programs’ AI solutions can help businesses analyze massive amounts of data, and recognize unusual behavioral patterns at lightning speed. And because AI tools are free of emotions and biases, they can improve the context for prioritization and responses to those risks, making detection and threat mitigation more efficient.

Not only does artificial intelligence detect security risks, but it also helps risk management in terms of managing businesses’ return on investment (ROI). The data gathered through sales and marketing initiatives can power better decision-making and reduce ROI risk. With AI, businesses and marketers can more accurately target their audiences, such as what they are responsive to, which marketing touchpoints drive brand engagement, and how to optimize reach and frequency.

Lastly, it is critical that businesses connect their data across all platforms for a unified marketing perspective. Data silos pose a major barrier to most businesses—a Forrester report found that 72% of firms stated their most significant sales and marketing challenge was managing data and sharing insights across organizational silos. Utilizing data and breaking down these data silos can minimize human error when calculating risk and ROI. From customer interactions to risk management, enterprises are using AI to streamline marketing workflows, improve predictive capabilities as well as better accommodating customer demands. The data is becoming smarter, so marketers must be, too.

Creating A Marketing Masterpiece - Great Plan & Disciplined Execution

By Vanessa Singh

So often we as Marketeers get excited about a brilliant idea from our creative agencies. Expectations run high in terms of changing brand perception, growing market shareacquisition of more clients, deepening the share of wallet with existing clients and ultimately getting clients and staff to become ambassadors of the brand.

5.

Above the line (ATL), below the line (BTL) and through the line (TTL) thinking is important.

This often does not materialise, one has to have a solid strategic plan and a disciplined execution plan in place that includes marketing, advertising, communications and change management.

I found the most effective way to succeed is to implement “marketing sprints.” As a first-line approver, this ensures consistency in the message and mix, and managing your time efficiently.

Let’s talk about the plan. In all of my highly successful campaigns, I found the construction of a detailed plan to be a winning formula. The plan should ideally include the following:

-

1.

Advertising channels: to avoid wastage and ensure effectiveness of your ad/s, be ruthless in choosing 3 to 4 channels and ensure optimal spend on each channel. Use previous data to choose the optimal channel mix.

Once approved, at key milestones/ approval /guidance points, the work stream has to book a sprint slot.

2. Think digital first; digital channels are paramount. The big creative idea needs to be carried through for digital.

Remember, you need to have an ‘Always On’ mindset.

Don’t forget to make provision for link testing of your ads prior to implementation date.

3.

Below the line advertising mix , the big idea needs to be carried through for this channel. use test and learn methodologies. Create champion and challenger campaigns. Segment groupings of potential clients to ensure correct messaging. PS. Timeous Request for data/ data mining is essential.

4.

Communications, both internal and external PR. This is the most inexpensive way to convey your message.

Don’t forget change management with the value chain stakeholders.

6. Socialise plan/obtain approval from key stakeholders.

This is a crucial milestone!

Disciplined execution using “marketing sprints”

Identify work streams.

Each work stream to schedule an initial sprint session to present their strategy.

All work streams present top-line status at a weekly alignment session.

Non-disclosure agreements to be undertaken with key personnel to ensure no market leakage or competitor advantage/ambush.

Create learning environments were all team members want to be and feel included.

Have fun and celebrate your awesome ads that’s on time, within budget with an extraordinary launch! Monitor the effectiveness of your campaigns hourly, daily, monthly, weekly and publish post campaign results. Don’t assume a media schedule guarantees your ad being flighted.

Living Your Best Digital Hygge Life

By Martin Pedersen

How to leave clients with a warm, inspired and fulfilled feeling Each year, leading up to the Oxford Dictionary’s selection of their “word of the year,” is a shortlist of words up for the honor. These words are generally a tally of pop culture idioms, memes, movie catch-phases and the like. Think words we’ve all come to know in the last few years like Brexit, gaslighting or youthquake. One particular word that was shortlisted back in 2016 caught my eye because it’s one that I am quite familiar with: hygge.

Pronounced “hoo-guh,” this is a term near and dear to my native Denmark. Hygge is “a quality of coziness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being.” The English word equivalent would likely be cozy, although hygge is an English derivative.

Still, I’m not sure either of those nails it though.

For me, hygge was more like the feeling I would get as a child when my mother would light a candle every morning when we would have breakfast and talk about what lies ahead that day. It brought a sense of calm and purpose over me, and the consistency of the act made the moment even that much more impactful.

As a Dane, I feel hygge is literally in my DNA, and a defining feature of my cultural identity. When I came to the U.S. hygge came with me and is a part of my everyday home life and work. As a fellow Dane aptly said, “hygge is to the Danish what freedom is to Americans.”

Creating that same feeling of hygge in the office is a greater challenge though. This is the agency industry after all, and I’m not naive enough not to know success isn’t always based on merit. Competition among agencies is often fierce and people sometimes do un-hygge things to get ahead.

Undeterred, the agency I founded would bring what I call

“digital hygge” not only to our office, but to the clients we work with, and the work we create. You see, digital hygge is a mindset that is embedded in all of our business relationships.

You can see it with our employees, the work we create, the services we provide and the trust we earned. It’s about more than wanting to do great work, it’s about loving the work we do, being genuine, and remaining curious and innovating.

It’s basically a form of affective design that considers the emotions and mindset of the user into the experience. Think of it as a UX/CX that leaves you feeling warm, inspired, and fulfilled. Yup, it can be done, and we’re pretty good at it.

When you understand customer psychology, you can create experiences that amplify the right emotions and feelings.

For UX/CX to truly be effective, designers need to incorporate empathy into the experience so they can better understand what the end users’ needs are, why they’re there, and how to actually help them. A user experience involving a help desk chatbot, for example, that leaves the user feeling more stressed than when they first sought help is an epic fail. One that was likely created by a UX designer who wasn’t really thinking about the customer’s experience, and definitely not feeling cozy I’m sure.

Ultimately, digital hygge is about infusing emotion into your work so your clients’ are left with a warm, inspired, and fulfilled feeling. Deliver that consistently for your clients and they too will get used to that feeling of hygge, just as I did many years ago with breakfast by candlelight with my mom.

A longtime digital marketing executive, I have strengths in team and project leadership, talent recruiting, and financial management.My experience includes leadership roles at both small and large digital agencies, and working with brands such as Sony, Nike, Yahoo!, and the NFL. I also have in-house leadership experience at a Fortune 500 company.

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

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

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

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

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

Book of Branding: a guide to creating brand identity for startups and beyond

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

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

Identity Designed: The Definitive Guide to Visual Branding

By David Airey

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

Wally Olins: Brand New: The Shape Of Brands To Come

By Wally Olins

By Radim Malinic Book of Branding is a creative guide for new businesses, start-ups and individuals, which puts visual identity at the heart of brand strategy. The conversational, jargon free, tone of the book helps the reader to understand essential elements of the brand identity process.

Wally Olins: Brand New: The Shape Of Brands To Come by Wally Olins is a an interesting presentation of branding and its related terms.

The book is a useful resource for everyone who wants to know everything about branding and how it works in the current world.

Brand Society: How Brands Transform Management and Lifestyle

Persuasive Signs: The Semiotics of Advertising (Approaches to Applied Semiotics, 4)

By Martin Kornberger Brands are a fait accompli: they represent a mountain range of evidence in search of a theory.

They are much exploited, but little explored. In this book, Martin Kornberger sets out to rectify the ratio between exploiting and exploring through sketching out a theory of the Brand Society.

By Ron Beasley Using both verbal and nonverbal techniques to make its messages as persuasive as possible, advertising has become an integral component of modern-day social discourse designed to influence attitudes and lifestyle behaviours by covertly suggesting how we can best satisfy our innermost urges and aspirations through consumption.

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Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind

By Al Ries

Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It

The first book to deal with the problems of communicating to a skeptical, media-blitzed public, Positioning describes a revolutionary approach to creating a “position” in a prospective customer’s mind-one that reflects a company’s own strengths and weaknesses as well as those of its competitors.

By April Dunford

Brand New Name: A Proven, Step-by-Step Process to Create an Unforgettable Brand Name

The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you

By Jeremy Miller You will discover how names persuade people and get stuck in their minds, and the origin stories of iconic brands. Brand New Name brings together a practical how-to guide with loads of examples and inspirational stories so you can create a name that you will be proud to own.

You know your product is awesome—but does anybody else? Forget everything you thought you knew about positioning. Successfully connecting your product with consumers isn’t a matter of following trends, comparing yourself to the competition or trying to attract the widest customer base.

By Rob Fitzpatrick They say you shouldn’t ask your mom whether your business is a good idea, because she loves you and will lie to you. This is technically true, but it misses the point. You shouldn’t ask anyone if your business is a good idea.

The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win

This is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn To See

By Michael Lewis

For the first time Seth Godin offers the core of his marketing wisdom in one compact, accessible, timeless package. This is Marketing shows you how to do work you’re proud of, whether you’re a tech startup founder, a small business owner, or part of a large corporation.

The bestselling classic that launched 10,000 startups and new corporate ventures - The Four Steps to the Epiphany is one of the most influential and practical business books of all time.

The Four Steps to the Epiphany launched the Lean Startup approach to new ventures.

By Seth Godin

Deploy Empathy: A Practical Guide to Interviewing Customers

The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest & Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture

By Michele Hansen Empathy is a skill that anyone can learn. Armed with the tactics you’ll learn in this book and the toolbox of scripts and phrases, you’ll be able to sell more of your existing product, build the right features that will delight your customers, and stop churn in its tracks.

By Scott Belsky How do you make your start-up a genuine success in the long term? While most books and press focus on the more sensational moments of creation and conclusion, The Messy Middle argues that the real key to success is how you navigate the ups-and-downs after initial investment is secured.