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Dear Friends: As we dive headlong into the month of Valentine, our fraternity’s love for all things brand and branding is only set to grow. Quite a few of the features in this edition is about what marketers can achieve in 2020. Be it Brand Purpose and Doing Good or Messaging and Positioning for the Customer Journey. The article on strengthening your brand through product packaging really packs a punch. Nor does the feature on Technology is Anthropology hold back any. Content is King and Context is Kingdom. In this issue we reveal how to bootstrap your Content Marketing. The Achilles Heel for all Advertising Agency Owners: New Business Development is also addressed head on. It is said that as brand owners and marketers we can ignore reaching out to tech savvy baby boomers only at our own peril. Read in this issue how. We also strike up a conversation on how in non intrusive ways , employees can help with branding. Champion writer, author, speaker Roger Dooley strikes a note in his engaging tete a tete on Friction(his latest book) and more with BrandKnew. We also go down the rabbit hole of whether brands should be taking a stand on political, social issues. As passionate brand marketers you would also the story on Putting the C in CMO, featured in this edition. There is ample more where all this has come and I urge you to dive further and soak it all up. Till the next...
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CONTENTS Putting The C In CMO Technology is anthropology Messaging And Positioning For 2020: The Customer Journey As A Continuum Can you describe an ad in a sentence without mentioning the brand? The Secrets of Advertising Agency Business Development Marketers Ignore True Brand Impact At Their Peril Why Your Next Brainstorm Should Begin with an Embarrassing Story It’s time to rethink your marketing to tech-savvy Boomers If Your Brand Wants To ‘Do Good’ In 2020, Here’s Your Creative Brief When Naming A Company Consider These 3 Insights From Alexandra Watkins Six Ways to Strengthen Your Brand Through Product Packaging Beyond the Frame: The Art of Winfluencing! In an Era of Easy Outrage, When Should Brands Take a Stand? How to Bootstrap Your Content Marketing Five Ways Brands Are Changing Their Playbooks to Win How to reinvent your email as a productivity tool Three themes for brand purpose 15 Non-Intrusive Ways Employees Can Help With Branding E-commerce and Consumers: Can Retailers Meet Rising Demands? In defence of influencers Marketing the Cosmic Crisp: Will Consumers Bite? Book, Line & Sinker
Putting The C In CMO By MaryLee Sachs
This year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) attracted an increasing number of CMOs as technology continues to play an integral role in the transformation and disruption of the practice of marketing. Headlining content included the CMO Insights content track, C-Space sessions, and other panel discussions on relevant subject matter including privacy, AI, 5G, product innovations, and more. Jean Foster, SVP of Marketing and Communications Officer of The Consumer Technology Association—the owners of CES, introduced most of the marketing-led sessions and moderated the opening CMO panel “Putting the C in CMO” with Diana O’Brien, Global CMO of Deloitte; Deborah Wahl, CMO of General Motors; and Jennifer Berman, CMO of Insider.
From left: Jean Foster, Consumer Technology Association; Jennifer Berman, Insider; Diana O’Brien, ... [+] MARYLEE SACHS
Diverse businesses to be sure, but these marketing leaders were remarkably aligned on their charge to grow the business whether it comes with the “chief” title or not. “I think we should stop talking about the title difference. It is about the spoken responsibilities of your work. If you have strategic thinking to bring to bear with customer insight that helps to drive your business forward, what you are doing is the most important job,” according to O’Brien. “Different organizations, I think, need to call it different things based on their maturity, based on the type of work that they do. And so, I’d like to get away from even the title, and just start talking about the scope, because the scope is cool, and I can’t imagine wanting to do anything else.” So why are marketing leaders increasingly flocking to CES? “Every company is a tech company,” said Foster. “You only have to walk around in CES, and you’ll see companies like John Deere, Delta Airlines.... these companies are tech companies. You all represent brands that people wouldn’t think are traditional tech brands,” referring to the panelists. CES is known for showcasing new products or services or tech-led extensions or features. But developments in communication and activation with customers is a big part of the show as well. “Whether we’re talking about 5G or AI, or privacy issues, it is about helping the navigating change piece of it. And being an organization that needs to be at the front of that, you have to be able to walk the walk yourself, right? You have to be an organization that can iterate really quickly and move quickly, and that’s where you’re learning that [at CES],” said Berman.
Jennifer Berman of Insider (right) with Jean Foster of the Consumer Technology Association (left) MARYLEE SACHS
According to Wahl, “The biggest change that I have seen is people getting really focused on using marketing technology, marketing ideas, marketing insights to really solve core business solutions, not just do the bling on it. I have no problem with that; I think we still need great ideas that are inspirational and wonderful, but it has to be related to solving that core problem.” Harnessing technology to better connect to the customer was top of mind for CMOs attending CES. “But it is looking for what of those technologies, how we’re discovering it, and how we’re looking at it to provide delightful experiences. It’s the old marketing term, but it’s so much more meaningful today, because all the other stuff can be so crazy. And you’re seeing this ability for 5G to help vehicles speak to each other, speak to the infrastructure. We’re going to have a lot more ability to do what we kind of call, intuitive presponse. Not response, we want to use it to be ahead, and great,” said Wahl. “Every time you get in your car, how many of you have felt, ‘Oh my God, now I have to program my podcast, and then my directions, and I better set up when I call so that I’m not doing distracted driving, and now I can make sure that everything’s on?’ I think getting to the next level of that whole experience, is what all of the autonomous and 5G activity, et cetera is going to do. And then by the way, the other part of it is, keeping everyone safe,” Wahl continued. It’s easy to get caught up in the ‘what’s next’ of technology and musings over its likely impact on marketing but ultimately, these CMOs were aligned on the role of marketing as increasingly playing a vital contributor to business growth. “The biggest switch is more to really solving the fundamental business problems with the strategies that you get to really understand the customer,” said Wahl. “And that has been through a very disciplined approach of understanding what consumers are desiring, and then staying maniacal about that discipline,” said Wahl. Whatever’s next, the CMO will have a more important role change and the speed of change. “The CMO needs to be a internally and externally,” said O’Brien.
I am a marketing consultant, speaker and author of two books about CMOs: “What the New Breed of CMOs regardless Know of title; or she willand need toChanging appreciate Thatbut Youhe Don’t” (2013) “The MO of the CMO” (2011). I also am the cofounder and US few steps ahead to continue to help to translate that, both CEO of Brandpie, a different type of agency.
Technology is anthropology By Jon Evans
The interesting thing about the technology business is that, most of the time, it’s not the technology that matters. What matters is how people react to it, and what new social norms they form. This is especially true in today’s era, well past the midpoint of the deployment age of smartphones and the internet. People — smart, thoughtful people, with relevant backgrounds and domain knowledge — thought that Airbnb and Uber were doomed to failure, because obviously no one would want to stay in a stranger’s home or ride in a stranger’s car. People thought the iPhone would flop, because users would “detest the touch screen interface.” People thought enterprise software-as-a-service would never fly, because executives would insist on keeping servers in-house at all costs. These people were so, so, so wrong; but note that they weren’t wrong about the technology. (Nobody really argued about the technology.) Instead they were dead wrong about other people, and how their own society and culture would respond to this new stimulus. They were anthropologically incorrect. This, of course, is why every major VC firm, and every large tech company, keeps a crack team of elite anthropologists busy at all times, with big budgets and carte blanche, reporting directly to the leadership team, right? (Looks around.) Oh. Instead they’re doing focus groups and user interviews, asking people in deeply artificial settings to project their usage of an alien technology in an unknown context, and calling that their anthropological, I’m sorry, their market research? Oh. I kid, I kid. Sort of, at least, in that I’m not sure a crack team of elite anthropologists would be all that much more effective. It’s hard enough getting an accurate answer of how a person would use a new technology when that’s the only variable. When they live in a constantly shifting and evolving world of other new technologies, when the ones which take root and spread have a positive-feedback-loop effect on the culture and mindset toward new technologies, and when every one of your first 20 interactions with new tech changes your feelings about it … it’s basically impossible.
And so: painful trial and error, on all sides. Uber and Lyft didn’t think people would happily ride in strangers’ cars either; that’s why Uber started as what is now Uber Black, basically limos-via-app, and Lyft used to have that painfully cringeworthy “ride in the front seat, fist-bump your driver” policy. Those are the success stories. The graveyard of companies whose anthropological guesses were too wrong to pivot to rightness, or who couldn’t / wouldn’t do so fast enough, is full to bursting with tombstones. That’s why VCs and Y Combinator have been much more secure businesses than startups; they get to run dozens or hundreds of anthropological experiments in parallel, while startups get to run one, maybe two, three if they’re really fast and flexible, and then they die. This applies to enterprise businesses too, of course. Zoom was an anthropological bet that corporate cultures would make video conferencing big and successful if it actually worked. It’s easy to imagine the mood among CEOs instead being “we need in-person meetings to encourage those Moments of Serendipity,” which you’ll notice is the same argument that biased so many big companies against remote work and in favor of huge corporate campuses … an attitude that looks quaint, old-fashioned and outmoded, now. This doesn’t just apply to the deployment phase of technologies. The irruption phase has its own anthropology. But irruption affects smaller sectors of the economy, whose participants are mostly technologists themselves, so it’s more anthropologically reasonable for techies to extrapolate from their own views and project how that society will change. The meta-anthropological theory held by many is that what the highly technical do today, the less technical will do tomorrow. That’s a belief held throughout the tiny, wildly non-representative cryptocurrency community, for instance. But even if it was true once, is it still? Or is a shift away from that pattern to another, larger social change? I don’t know, but I can tell you how we’re going to find out: painful trial and error.
Messaging And Positioning For 2020: The Customer Journey As A Continuum By Div Manickam
Messaging and positioning are at the core of reaching the right audience at the right time and in the right place. Storytelling reaches far and wide where features and functionality don’t. Every product marketing manager (PMM) is keen on telling the best award-winning story about their customers. You know the good and bad ones when you hear them. Our generation grew up in the digital era, where marketing gimmicks are visible and transparent. Customers today are looking for authenticity, trust and credibility. As PMMs, it is our responsibility to manage perceptions and show the company’s value as trusted advisors. In the world of software as a service (SaaS), customer lifetime value is critical for long-term success. We are players in an infinite game, as Simon Sinek shared. We need to define the right metrics to make sure we reach a win-win approach with people, technology and innovation in mind. We all know we need to put the customer first, as the customer has all the power. At the start of every customer journey is the buying cycle. Whether it’s business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C), the purchase price is all we talk about: How much discount or promotion? Is it the best deal or negotiation? Most of our purchases are triggered by whatever gives the most satisfaction within the context at that moment in time.
A customer’s needs often vary based on urgency and timing. For example, a week before our user conference, I had dropped my phone and cracked the screen, and I had to order a new phone. After the incident, I was convinced I needed a cellphone case to protect the phone. While I was in Hong Kong, after checking a few shops, I realized my phone model was not a popular option, so my options were limited. I finally found a compatible phone case to meet my urgent need. Since there were only two options, I selected the option that met my need with simplicity in design as a key factor in my purchasing decision. I negotiated and felt good that it was the best price. When I came back to U.S., I randomly searched for the same product on Amazon and found a cover for my model and at a cheaper price. It all comes down to how much you’re willing to pay and the urgency. How often have we made purchases only to realize we were given limited options that made them look like exclusive deals? The economics of supply and demand are very real — often, companies show limited supply to drive demand. Have you wondered why? In order to manage customer perceptions and show your company’s value, there are four steps to follow when developing your brand’s messaging and positioning:
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Step 1: Find the true buyer persona. We want to find our product-market fit, and that starts with the buyer journey. As a technology platform, it’s easy to say we can solve for any use case, but it doesn’t help drive scale. Our first step is to identify our true buyer personas so we can position our value proposition to customer pain points and develop the right value-based pricing for that segment — not a one-size-fits-all. This involves several key players: • Business Initiative Leads: These are the agents of change — the project sponsors or champions. • Practitioners/Influencers: These people scope the work, know what it takes and eventually do the job. • Executive Signoffs: These are the economic buyers, budget owners and decision-makers who determine if a project is a go or a no-go.
Step 2: Identify the right market segment. Is there a difference between B2C and B2B pricing? It may seem like there is, but there isn’t. Even B2B buyers are looking for personal value from a technology investment. We need to help them grow in their careers and showcase the right investments as strategic decisions. With our short attention span in this digital era, it is critical to build awareness and an emotional connection between the product/technology and the customer, at the right time and at the right place. This requires taking two factors into consideration: • Market Segment: Focus on the right segment as the company evolves. Solving customer needs across each segment (enterprise, small to midsize business, midmarket) is unique and can be challenging during the transition from one segment to another. • Industry: Your customers exist across industries, but over the years, a few industries and their use cases become prominent, showing the true value and differentiator in that vertical.
Step 3: Establish key metrics to measure success. Keep the customer and their goals in mind across product, sales and marketing efforts to drive cross-functional alignment. With objectives and key results (OKRs), we can build transparency and visibility across the organization to drive focused efforts. Based on customer need, timing or urgency, OKRs can help ensure there is a pervasive need versus a niche use case for the loudest customer voice.
Step 4: Map the customer journey. We need to map out the entire customer journey, from awareness to consideration to decision to adoption to retention. It’s easy to stay focused on only the buyer journey within sales and marketing, but the reality is that our influencers in the buyer personas can be user champions leading the change inside their organization. Customers see value and purpose and are often looking for a platform that can help them make a future-proof investment. Product vision and road map is key to drive platform adoption and build revenue growth and scale. It’s now more critical for product qualified leads (PQLs) to help marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and sales qualified leads (SQLs) gain momentum across teams and organizations and drive customer lifetime value. What is your best customer story that led the champion to move mountains in their organization to bring your company (including people, technology and innovation) to be the guiding light for the future?
Div Manickam, Director Portfolio Messaging (Product, Industry and Solutions) at Dell Boomi.
Can you describe an ad in a sentence without mentioning the brand? By WARC Staff
If it’s possible to describe an ad in one sentence without mentioning the brand, or an established brand asset, then you may have a branding problem, according to an industry expert. In a WARC Best Practice paper, Developing brand assets, Dominic Twose, author of Marketing Knowledge and former Global Head of Knowledge Management at Millward Brown, outlines the importance of brand assets. These represent a huge opportunity to boost instinctive consumer recognition and have been shown to be effective, he says, citing a Kantar Millward Brown study which showed that brands with the strongest assets are on average 52% more salient than their rivals. “When you see the golden arches, hear the word ‘priceless’, or see a sheepdog, these are all potential brand triggers that can evoke a brand name in your memory, without the brand
name itself being present,” he observes. So choosing which assets to invest in is a first priority, and there is widespread agreement on what makes a good brand asset: it requires simplicity, distinctiveness and uniqueness. There is also an argument for consistency, Twose adds – look at how Disney has used the Mickey Mouse figure, the ears silhouette, the distinctive, hand-written ‘D’ logo and the Disneyworld castle throughout much of the brand’s life. Not only should the assets themselves be consistent but they should be used consistently across all media channels, including point of sale and on pack, to help generate instant recognition. “Once you have a strong branding device, it is like gold dust, and should be ditched only for very sound reasons,” Twose advises.
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The Secrets of Advertising Agency Business Development THE NOT SO SECRETS OF ADVERTISING AGENCY BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT By Peter Levitan
Do you think that advertising agency business development is hard? Try getting featured on Spotify or on stage at Coachella or Carnegie Hall. OK, so how do you get to Carnegie Hall? Well, you know the answer: Practice, Practice, Practice. That really means having objectives, strategies, executions, assigned roles, timetables and analysis. In other words, a plan. Back to practice because business development is a skill set that gets better over time.
The 10,000-Hour Rule Here is a definition from Wikipedia of the 10,00-Hour rule as discussed in Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers. A common theme that appears throughout Outliers is the “10,000Hour Rule”, based on a study by Anders Ericsson. Gladwell claims that greatness requires enormous time, using the source of The Beatles’ musical talents and Gates’ computer savvy as examples. The Beatles performed live in Hamburg, Germany over 1,200 times from 1960 to 1964, amassing more than 10,000 hours of playing time, therefore meeting the 10,000-Hour Rule. Gladwell asserts that all of the time The Beatles spent performing shaped their talent and quotes Beatles’ biographer Phillip Norman as saying, “So by the time they returned to England from Hamburg, Germany, ‘they sounded like no one else. It was the making of them.’
Gates met the 10,000-Hour Rule when he gained access to a high school computer in 1968 at the age of 13, and spent 10,000 hours programming on it.
Is Your Advertising Agency Willing To Work (Hard) At Business Development? If it isn’t, it will fail.
Try This Agency Road Map 1. Have a master business plan that is reviewed at least annually. The marketing environment, especially in advertising, is changing on a monthly basis. Know how you will make the big bucks and plan for it. 2. Have clear business development objectives. Not, “I want to work with Nike or Google.” Be real. 3. Have an in and outbound marketing plan. It must be an easy plan to follow and run – or you will join the 60% of advertising agencies that do not run their plan. 4. Your plan must be smart but not too complicated. Process rules here. 5. Be slavish to your agency’s brand positioning. Make it something clients want. 6. Have a business development leader that is 100% responsible for making sure the Biz Plan runs like clockwork. I suggest that for at least the first 6 months that it be the CEO or COO. She is a feet-to-the-fire person. If the top
person isn’t committed to putting agency time and assets towards business development 24/7 – fuhgeddaboudit. 7. Biz Dev has to become part of agency culture. And, yes, it can be fun, too. Winning business because your plan is working is super fun. 8. Biz Dev must a job on your daily project list like every client job. You are your agency’s client. If you don’t support the program, then what you do for paying clients will not matter when you shut down. 9. If you have a dedicated (or parttime, for that matter) aim her or him at the sales target. Here is how to manage that process. 10. This is a pan-agency challenge. Distribute the workload to responsible people in the agency. Make it part of their compensation plan. If they don’t do their part – they are not rewarded for their client work. They are not going get a large bonus. 11. Be everywhere your future client looks for new agencies. This includes agency lists, directories, in web searches, award shows, etc. Where would you look for an advertising agency? Are you there? 12. Have a marketing calendar and be slavish to it. 13. And… Whatever you do, make sure it’s Unignorable. Boring sucks. Go do it. From Mario Andretti: “If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.”
Marketers Ignore True Brand Impact At Their Peril By Larry Light
Marketers are confusing “clicks and listens” to buying. Marketers seek reliable data on how many people have viewed or heard particular advertising messages. The “view/ hear mindset” is captivating for marketers. Clicks feed egos. Every brand wants heavily viewed or frequently heard, multipleplatform shared, award-winning brand communications that people view. But, and here is the problem: just because a commercial garners views does not mean there is brand impact. Brand impact is the messages affect on brand image and brand preference. The ultimate brand award is not the extraordinary number of views or hearings, the multipleplatform sharing, the impressive gold statue or the groovy, global buzz. The ultimate award is the giant impact of greater sales. For example, The Wall Street Journal reports that Spotify has generated a new tool for its podcast advertisers. This tool lets an advertiser know who is hearing a given ad in a podcast, how many are hearing that ad, how frequently they are hearing, basically everything about the listeners listening behavior. The Wall Street Journal’s Anne Steele describes the tool and its measurement metric as the “… ability to track more precisely the number of impressions and frequency, as well as audience insights including age, gender, listening behavior and the type of device a consumer heard the ad on.” What this tool does not do is correlate hearing with actual improvement in brand preference. This is a marketing sin. The New York Times Sunday Magazine section printed an article about a new Renault Clio two-minute video on Twitter and YouTube. According to the article, the Renault Clio ad generated something around 10 million views when combining Twitter and YouTube. It is possible to think you are watching a very short auteur’s film. We learn the brand name in the very last seconds. As the journalist points out, “… the connection between the narrative and the product … verges on non-existent.” Further, Renault does not sell cars in the USA where the film garnered millions of views. And, the journalist wonders why viewers would watch this and then feel persuaded to buy a Clio. It is “… a bid for sales that may wind up garnering only clicks.” To be very clear: Capturing impressions is not the same as creating impact. An impression is just a media unit. It has a cost. It can be viewed or heard. But a viewing is not a substitute or synonym for impact. Brand value does not come from brand views. Brand value does not come from hearing. Brand value comes from customers’ perceptions about the brand’s total brand experience relative to its total costs. Kantar, the respected global market research powerhouse
released data at the end of 2019 that were benchmarked against their database of 200,000 ads. Only about 25% of this year’s Cannes Lion award-winning ads provided actual brand impact meaning the ads did not effectively generate brand sales. Cannes-winning ads were fabulously creative. But, these ads did not lead to sales. According to Kantar, this is a sign of declining advertising effectiveness. Advertising that does not have impact is impotent. No wonder C-Suite executives raise eyebrows over the seriousness of the CMO role. For advertising historians, think back to 1989. In 1989, both Lexus and Infiniti launched their vehicles in the USA. Lexus advertising focused on what made Lexus a luxury vehicle in the same league as Mercedes. Infiniti launched with pretty pictures of scenery The car sat in a beautiful wooded area with only the sounds of the forest. Beauty shots of the car, and especially the door handles dominated. Lexus sent a message that this is a luxury ride. Infiniti sent a message about Zen in the woods. Lexus sold cars; Infiniti did not. Today, Lincoln is sadly following the Infiniti model. Handsome actor, beautiful glacial area, sounds of nature and a wind flag humming in the breeze. Lincoln is the vehicle for you if you do not want to drive but have the time to contemplate nature from the tailgate of your SUV. I am transported by the serenity of the scene. But, I am not transported to the Lincoln dealership. Cadillac is opting for the same gimmicky approach: its marketers are feeling fabulous because the brand is generating buzz for its #ASMR advertising. Has it come to this: Cadillac cannot find a relevant, differentiated trustworthy brand promise to persuade us to visit a Cadillac dealer and buy a vehicle? The marketers who are excited about the views/seen/heard metrics are not only harming their brands but also harming their businesses. Loving an ad is not the same as buying a brand. Case in point: after the success of Bud Light’s Dilly Dilly campaign, data showed that sales had not increased. The Dilly Dilly campaign went viral. But, the Dilly Dilly ads said nothing about the beer and did nothing to increase Budweiser purchases. It showed creativity but without brand impact. Without a cohesive, compelling, focused brand message having creative, attention-getting, cool, buzzworthy, award-winning ads will not propel purchases. Marketers are focusing on the wrong measurements. Metrics are important. Of course we want to know all about our potential customers. We want to know their habits, their opinions, interests, attitudes, their demographics and their perceptions of our brands. But, these types of tools are not enough. What about the tools that point us towards building brands for enduring profitable growth?
Why Your Next Brainstorm Should Begin with an Embarrassing Story THIS COUNTERINTUITIVE EXERCISE CAN SPARK CREATIVITY. By Emily Ayshford
We’ve all had embarrassing moments at work—from finding a piece of spinach in your teeth after a big presentation, to thinking you muted yourself on a conference call, only to realize (a few snarky comments later) that you had not. Yet new research from the Kellogg School shows that these moments may have a hidden power. Embarrassment, the study finds, can actually be a gateway to creativity. When participants in the study recounted an embarrassing moment before a brainstorming session, they came up with both a larger number and wider range of ideas than those who shared a memory that made them feel proud. These cringe-worthy anecdotes seem to remove the barrier of self-censorship. “When you have a brainstorming session, what you’re hoping is that people are putting out any idea, without regard to any judgment or evaluation,” says Leigh Thompson, a professor of management and organizations at Kellogg and author of Creativity Conspiracy: The New Rules of Breakthrough Collaboration. Getting people to let their guard down is not easily done, says Thompson. So the idea that sharing an embarrassing moment could actually get a team’s creative juices flowing may appeal to managers. “Any fix we find is going to have a direct line of sight to business outcomes, to helping teams be more productive,” says Thompson.
How (Not) to Build Creativity in Groups As part of her consulting work, Thompson often facilitates corporate retreats. She noticed that organizers sometimes prompt attendees to do icebreaker exercises, which often involve recalling accomplishments and achievements. The goal of these brag sessions might be to boost people’s
confidence—after all, people prefer to focus on their accomplishments and minimize their shortcomings. But Thompson observed that it often had the opposite effect. Afterwards, “when I wanted people to engage in a brainstorming session, they tended to self-censor, because they’d just heard about all these great accomplishments,” she says. She suspected that it was their sense of pride that was hindering their innovative thinking. Which prompted the question: Might there be another emotion that could promote innovation? Eventually Thompson and her collaborators, Elizabeth Ruth Wilson of Harvard University and Brian J. Lucas of Cornell University, landed on embarrassment.
The researchers suspected that if individuals actually aired their embarrassing stories, it would encourage them to stop censoring themselves. In some sense, embarrassment is a surprising choice: after all, we tend to associate it with incompetence and awkwardness— hardly inspiring characteristics. But previous research on creativity suggests that the fear of embarrassment—of being judged as incompetent and awkward—is what inhibits idea generation, rather than embarrassment itself. The researchers suspected that if individuals actually aired their embarrassing stories, it would relieve this feeling of impending judgment and encourage them to stop censoring themselves. The researchers designed two experiments to test this hypothesis, one that looked at brainstormers’ creativity when they were alone, and one when they were part of a group.
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Can Embarrassment Increase Creativity?
more ideas than groups that shared stories of pride.
In the first study, 111 online participants were told they would engage in an idea-generation task, but first needed to complete a “warm up” exercise. Some were told to provide a written account of the most embarrassing thing they had done in the last six months, while others were told to describe something they had done in the past six months that they were proud of.
“One of the big findings in the creativity and innovation literature is that you want to have a lot of ideas to play with,” Thompson says. “If one group has nearly 30 percent more ideas than another group, there’s just a lot more fuel for the fire.”
Next, participants spent five minutes brainstorming as many unusual uses as they could for a paper clip. The researchers assessed their responses based on two standard measurements of creativity: the volume of ideas generated and the range of those ideas. Participants who had recounted an embarrassing story generated significantly more ideas than those who recounted a proud moment. They also generated more ideas in different categories, such as using the paper clips as earrings (jewelry), tomato pins (gardening), and unconventional cocktail picks (utensils). The researchers also ran a control group, which was asked to describe their commute to work before completing the paper-clip task. They found that this group’s results did not differ from those in the pride group—suggesting that the embarrassment made participants more creative than they would have been otherwise.
Embarrassment Leads to More—and More Diverse—Ideas Next, Thompson and her colleagues wondered: Could embarrassing stories help boost creativity in teams, as well? After all, in many business environments, brainstorming sessions tend to happen within teams. Yet some research shows that teams are actually less creative than individuals— making effective intervention strategies all the more valuable in a group setting. The second experiment included 93 managers who were enrolled in a university executive-education program. The researchers randomly assigned the managers to threeperson teams, instructing half to share an embarrassing moment from the past six months, and the others to share a proud one. Among the embarrassing story groups, “There was often a question of, who’s going to go first?” Thompson says. “Eventually one person tells a story, and inevitably there was what I call communal laughter. They’re not laughing at the person. They are laughing and saying, ‘Oh my gosh, I’ve pretty much done the same thing,’ or, ‘I empathize with you.’”
“If somebody puts themselves out there by talking about a moment of embarrassment, reinforce that.” Following the icebreaker, the groups were asked to generate unusual uses for a cardboard box. The results were clear: teams that shared embarrassing stories generated 26 percent
The teams that shared embarrassing stories also generated a wider range of ideas, spanning 15 percent more categories.
An Unconventional Icebreaker for Brainstorming Sessions Exactly why recounting embarrassing stories leads to more idea generation isn’t clear. The researchers hypothesize that it may alleviate concerns about future embarrassment and therefore promote performance. But it’s also possible that others in the group develop a greater liking for those who disclose their faults, which leads to more trust and better performance. Whatever the reason, the finding could help managers spur creativity among their teams. That’s especially crucial as more and more organizations embrace design thinking, which requires that everyone feel comfortable bringing new ideas to the table. Thompson recommends that managers consider beginning their brainstorming sessions with the embarrassing-story exercise. Not only does it promote idea generation, but it also engages people from the start. “Automatically, people start listening and they’re more engaged,” she says. “There’s an irresistible urge to let [the storyteller] finish, because the human story is never boring.” But to get the most out of the exercise, it’s important that people share recent stories, so that they don’t think to themselves, “Well, I’m a different person now,” Thompson says. Of course, the exercise isn’t right for every situation. If a team is engaged in a tactical mission like producing a financial report, or a problem-solving mission like damage control, that’s not the time to bring out embarrassing stories, Thompson notes. “The most effective leaders and the most effective teams and companies really are the ones who can execute on different types of plays, depending on what the challenge is,” she says. But when it’s time for creativity and innovation, and employees begin to reveal their stories, managers should make sure to reciprocate. “If somebody puts themselves out there by talking about a moment of embarrassment, reinforce that,” Thompson says. “Just say, ‘Oh, I’ve got one for you, too.’” FEATURED FACULTY Leigh Thompson: J. Jay Gerber Professor of Dispute Resolution & Organizations; Professor of Management & Organizations; Director of Kellogg Team and Group Research Center; Professor of Psychology, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences (Courtesy)
It’s time to rethink your marketing to tech-savvy Boomers By Bernardo Figueiredo
Baby Boomers are a vast, growing and lucrative demographic but marketers and brands should be careful to make sure they’re sending the right message, write Bernardo Figueiredo and Torgeir Aleti. Older people are often portrayed in the media as being technologically challenged. Jokes are often shared on social media about older people taking photos on their phones with their thumb covering the lens or accidentally installing viruses on computers. Although these stereotypes may be amusing, they can damage your brand and alienate one of the most significant market segments. The Australian Financial Review warns in a recent article that “brands must not forget cashedup Baby Boomers who are becoming more technology literate.” Many older Australians have both wealth and spending power. 15% of Australians (3.8 million) are aged 65 and over and this proportion is projected to grow steadily over the coming decades. With ageing populations in the world’s leading economies, there will be more Baby Boomers globally than children under the age of five for the first time in history by 2020. The idea that Baby Boomers lack technological literacy
is certainly not a generalisable reality. As a case in point, the inventors of the internet (Sir Tim Berners-Lee), Apple Computers (Steve Jobs) and Microsoft (Bill Gates) were all born in the centre of the Baby Boom; 1955. The inventor if WiFi (Dr John O’Sullivan) was born in 1947 and Martin Cooper (‘father’ of the mobile phone) was born in 1928. Picturing these seniors, when thinking about technology, could lead to better outcomes than focusing on negative stereotypes. Baby Boomers may not polish their Instagram accounts while on the toilet like Millennials. However, when, where and how often a person checks and updates social media is not a measure of digital literacy. Instead, social media participation has to do with needs and priorities when it comes to technology use and consumption. Baby Boomers do not suffer from FOMO. They find their social media usage to be ‘about right’ and are not concerned that the technology they created is taking over their lives. Understanding Baby Boomers’ relationship with technology is essential for any firm that either develops tech products or uses modern media to communicate with customers. Although seniors embrace digital technology and have high levels of device ownership, some barriers for usage still linger.
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Our research unpacks Baby Boomers’ relationships with technology and points out critical insights for understanding this vast and mobile market. Finally, our research uncovers insights related to product design, branding, and promotion.
Understand what your audience seeks – what it means to be connected Baby Boomers have different views of what it means to be connected than younger generations. While Millennials may equate connectedness with WiFi access, the meaning is much more complicated for Baby Boomers. Through technology, Baby Boomers are interested in keeping in touch with friends and family, getting information and staying up to date, coordinating activities, belonging to communities and having access to products, services and experiences. Typically, they view technology as a means to an end, not as an end in itself. That is, your tech solution may be seen more as a means of transportation than as a roof over their heads. You will miss the mark if you think you are selling real estate to an audience looking for a car.
Product design – integrated rhythms Baby Boomers do not like to be told what to do. Instead, they have their own rhythms when adopting and learning to use new products. They believe that connecting through technology is unavoidable, but they want it on their own terms. Most prefer to “learn what you need as you go.” As such, technology products that enable them to control the pace and content of learning and use will be preferred. Make it easy to get started and easy to learn more – if and when they are interested.
Branding – value proposition Many Baby Boomers are concerned about scams and bullying. Many believe that technology may do more harm than good, and sometimes lack the confidence to engage in what may seem like complex products. Thus, they are likely to prefer brands that offer ease of access to get started, with clear and convincing safety features. The latest inventions may not sway Baby Boomers in the same way as younger cohorts. Rather, they will come on board on their own terms. The key is to figure out the end goals of your distinct audience. From there, a value proposition that explains how your products will get them to where they want can be carefully developed.
Promotion – the power of consumer socialisation agents Socialisation agents are specific sources of information that transmit norms, attitudes, motivations, and behaviours to learners. Family, peers and the internet are the most prominent socialisation agents for Boomers learning new technology. Family is a crucial source, but frustration is often expressed between older Australians and their adult children. Peers also play a vital role, as they have similar lived experiences and are more prone to use the same pace and mode of
socialisation. Finally, the internet works in tandem with the other socialisation agents. It supplements and extends existing knowledge and skills. It can help get results quicker. For those who have the skills and confidence, the internet is the most preferred and useful consumer socialisation agent. When communicating with Baby Boomers, do not narrowly focus on one socialisation agent, for example, by playing on stereotypes of older consumers in need of ‘education’ from the young. This does not reflect on their experience. Many prefer to be able to find information on their own through the internet. Self-education is often preferred, as it saves them from not having to ask family (which some dread). YouTube videos that clearly explain how to use products and services are a significant consumer socialisation tool. Baby Boomers often use YouTube to stay up to date and learn new technology-related skills. For those less confident using the internet as a socialisation agent, family and peers play a vital role. However, this is not a one-way street. For example, grandparents and grandchildren often engage in an exchange of skills and knowledge. Further, grandparents appreciate the level of acceptance and understanding of learning new things seen in their grandchildren. Finally, peers come in as most useful when engaging in a more formal setting. Seniors willingness to approach new technology through peer-based computer classes tailored for their age-group seems heightened. When technology is disseminated by them and for them, it becomes easier to relate to, and the benefits will be easier to see when explained by someone with similar lived experiences. The key to reaching members of the large and lucrative seniors market is firstly to understand their current goals. Further, how does your technology solution help them as the means to their end? They have lived long lives; they know what they want and what works for them. This needs to be respected. Take into account their preference for easing into new technology and their scepticism towards what they perceive not to be made to solve their problems. Finally, promote your products through the consumer socialisation agents that they are most likely to consult to stay up to date on new technology.
Research insights This article is based on a two-stage project including quantitative interviews with 900 seniors from a seniors’ organisation in Melbourne. In the second stage, we conducted qualitative interviews with 30 members of a seniors’ network in metropolitan and rural areas of Victoria in order to drill down on some of the issues. The purpose of the study was to understand older Australians’ relationships with technology, including usage patterns and key influencers. The findings reveal that many seniors are quite tech-savvy, despite often being stereotyped as inept. They are interested in innovations that will improve their lives, but often do not see the benefit or perceive many products as not being made for them. A greater focus on understanding the needs and wants of one of Australia’s fastest growing consumer markets is needed.
If Your Brand Wants To ‘Do Good’ In 2020, Here’s Your Creative Brief By Will Burns
As anyone who reads my posts here at Forbes knows about me, I am wary of brands who take sides on political, social or on otherwise polarizing issues. Not because I am for or against those issues, personally. It’s that I don’t believe it’s responsible marketing to take sides and, in so doing, fuel even more polarization (more on that position, including examples, here). It’s not good business to alienate. Worse, as I often say, “...the day we make brands our collective moral compass will be the last day of our civilization.” But given the tremendously polarized world we live in right now where it’s almost a contest to see who is more righteous than the next, I have an idea as to how a brand can actually “do good” in the world without taking sides on any one issue. In fact, the idea is about eliminating “sides” altogether. And I am going to communicate this opportunity to you in a language we all understand: a creative brief. At the bottom is an image of the brief if you’d like to print it out and use it.
the people—all the people—have in common. Inspire the acceptance of new perspectives, help them see specific commonalities only your brand could see, tell them new stories that expose the sad dangers of polarization, challenge the truth of the “polarization” itself. Be subtle or overt, make your product a hero or not, up to you. But the goal here is to leave your audience a little more unified than you left it by leveraging the power of your brand. Closest example: Christmas/holiday ads. When done well, branded holiday ads unify us by appealing to singular emotions like love, or the magic of thinking of others, etc. These ads don’t intend to unify us, but they do anyway. Imagine if unification were the objective. Tone. Hopeful. Empathetic. preachy...
Reassuring.
Open
Minded.
Not
Here goes.
PROJECT: UNIFY What is the problem we are trying to solve? How can our brand, through the power of our brand idea, help to unify the country in some small or big way? What kind of ideas are we looking for? We’re looking for advertising ideas, public relations stunts, social media ideas, content ideas, new products, anything really where the message will uniquely unify those who experience it. Target audience. Everyone in the country. Yeah, admittedly broad, but consider these truths. For some reason, the country’s people no longer discuss and debate issues. They just think they’re right no matter what. In fact, it’s so bad that people don’t just believe they are right about these things, they identify with these beliefs personally so to debate an issue is to question one’s very essence. That’s scary and it’s why there’s no debate anymore. And we can’t unify if we can’t even talk about our differences. Driving insights. Deep down people don’t want to be this polarized. They don’t want to be this afraid to discuss politics or a social issue at a cocktail party.
The brand opportunity.
Don’t you wonder what your agency or in-house creative teams would do with that brief on behalf of your brand? Think of the good you’d do. Because I really believe the best way to take sides on polarizing issues is to take sides against taking sides.
Remind people through the brand’s behavior how much
I await your unifying marketing force in 2020.
The psychological energy that goes into polarizing issues (e.g. gun control, abortion, the economy, Trump, etc.) overwhelms our ability to see all the things we humans have in common.
When Naming A Company Consider These 3 Insights From Alexandra Watkins By Will Burns
Naming a company is hard. The client needs to like the name, a suitable URL has to be available, and the name has to pass the trademark sniff test. Enter Alexandra Watkins, who names stuff for a living and has a new book on the topic, Hello My Name Is Awesome. I’ve pulled out three of my favorite insights below, each related to the Herculean task of naming a company.
Full disclosure: Alexandra has her own company EatMyWords and is also one of my resident naming experts at my company, Ideasicle. I can attest firsthand to her expertise in anchoring the rest of the experts on any naming project. Now, on to three insights from Alexandra in naming a company.
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ONE: Settle on your brand name first, then get a domain name.
Don’t start the naming process at a domain registrar such as GoDaddy. That’s backward. Begin by creating your brand name, then find a domain name. If an exact match domain name isn’t available, you can find a creative workaround. - Alexandra Watkins
Assuming the brand name is loved by the client and passes the preliminary trademark search (we use uspto.gov at Ideasicle), and assuming the preferred domain name with the .com suffix is not available, all is not lost. Alexandra has some useful creative workarounds when securing the domain that might just save the name. You can add a modifier in the form of an extra word or two. Her example was Goodbit, a company her firm named that educates the public about cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. They landed on Goodbit101.com and got it for next to nothing, and it says exactly what the company does. Nice. Another thing you can try is NameStudio where you can input your name and it’ll generate all kinds of options for you. My favorite idea of Alexandra’s is to come up with a memorable phrase and use that for the URL. Like Peanut Butter & Co with their www.ILovePeanutButter.com. Or Paramount Coffee Company with www.JoeKnowsCoffee.com. Or Greenberg Smoked Turkey with www.GobbleGobble.com (fantastic!). I personally think these URLs are genius and, more importantly, easier to remember than company names. And this last idea also dispels the myth that a URL must be short. According to Alexandra, that’s a myth. Much more important to be memorable than short.
TWO: Avoid spelling-challenged names.
If your name isn’t spelled like it sounds, it’s a mistake. Spelling your brand name in a noninutuitive way isn’t clever; it’s a cop-out. - Alexandra Watkins
She sites a couple examples here. One is “Yooneek.ly” which she admits is cute and might make for an easier time securing a domain name. But think about this company’s customer
service calls having to constantly spell out the name/URL for people. What a waste of time and energy when a more intuitive name would have done the trick. Other examples of spelling-challenged names: Chuze, Zaarly, Svpply, Flickr. In her book, Alexandra suggests a great litmus test to avoid noninintuitive names and it’s right in your pocket. Use the “Siri Test” and see if Siri (or other voice recognition bot) spells it correctly from just hearing you say it. Does it get garbled? Does autocorrect suggest an absurdly wrong word? If so, keep thinking of more names.
THREE: When naming a company think about the future.
Look into your crystal ball and imagine what your company might grow into down the road. Plan ahead, and choose a name wide enough to cover you in the future. - Alexandra Watkins
It’s tempting when naming a company to believe that the company is what it is, and will always be what it is right now. But according to Alexandra that can be dangerous thinking. In her book she sites some great examples of brands who did not think ahead. Canadian Tire now sells all kinds of products beyond tires. Like toasters, tackle boxes, tool belts, trash cans, telescopes and loads of other household items. Lawn Love started out as a lawncare company, but has since added snow removal and Christmas lights installation. “Lawn Love” doesn’t work so well now. And, did you ever notice that the Dollar Store has almost nothing for a dollar anymore? Another good example of not thinking ahead when naming a company. But one company that did think ahead? Amazon. That name doesn’t commit to one SKU and really says “huuuge” so can work forever. As Alexandra suggests in her book, can you imagine if Amazon were originally called Book Barn? So there you have it. Start with the brand name, not the domain; avoid spelling-challenged names; and think about the future. All from Alexandra Watkins and her great book, Hello My Name Is Awesome. The book is riddled with many, many more insights, tips and tricks when it comes to domain names. I highly recommend you pick it up before you name anything ever again. Will Burns, Contributor, CMO Network I am an advertising veteran and current CEO of Ideasicle.com.
Six Ways to Strengthen Your Brand Through Product Packaging By Phil Bagdasarian
To stand out among competitors (consider, for example, the multiple retail channels for computer electronics), brands must convey their message distinctly. And there are few better ways to do so than by crafting a unique and visually appealing packaging design. Each element of packaging must be carefully employed to deliver the right message, appeal to a brand’s target audience, and provide an engaging and memorable unboxing experience. Here are six ways to strengthen a brand’s messaging by creating a lasting, positive impression through packaging.
1. Brand Clarity A solid brand foundation requires an aligned purpose and strategy that focuse on a brand’s values, personality, story, positioning and audience. Packaging, as a brand’s primary touch point, plays an important role in clearly communicating those elements. To successfully engage consumers, packaging should be clean, clear, and straight to the point. Adding too much text or too many photos and graphics will only confuse and frustrate shoppers. Instead, businesses should stick to the
fundamentals, using negative space (blank space) to direct the eye to a message’s key points.
2. The Target When shaping a brand’s entity, it is crucial to focus on a specific target audience, and then cater to that audience’s needs and desires. Brands that attempt to achieve universal appeal will usually overreach, and consequently appeal to no one. Conversely, the more targeted the information, the more it will connect with the brand’s desired audience. Advances in digital printing have enabled businesses to become highly adept at navigating customer variables, allowing them to personalize packaging for heightened connection.
3. Standing Out Consumers’ attention spans are short, so businesses need to employ innovative methods that will attract immediate attention. But being the “loudest” box on the shelf is not an adequate strategy.
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To make a captivating first impression that establishes a connection, brands may need to transcend tradition and break the rules. Through the use of uncommon shapes, tactile surfaces, alluring colors, compelling graphics, or captivating illustrations, a brand’s essence and attitude can be projected in a meaningful and memorable way. To stand out among all the visual noise, retailers need to take out the big guns and devise a packaging strategy that surprises and delights.
4. The Feel-Good Factor A captivating unboxing experience is a powerful way to create a positive moment filled with anticipation and euphoria, thus locking in consumer engagement and solidifying brand loyalty. The unboxing experience can have a dramatic effect on customer perception, which is why businesses should invest in creating a carefully branded process that takes shoppers on an emotional, dynamic, sensory-filled, and satisfying journey that is devoid of frustration. Soft-touch finishes, crisp edges, natural elements, crinkly paper, and smooth, moving components can add stimulating layers to the unboxing journey, helping to enhance the experience.
the consequences. One way authenticity can be conveyed is by minimizing the use of stock photography in packaging, instead showcasing actual faces and stories behind the product. Businesses must be completely honest about the quality of a product because attempts to inflate or exaggerate features will only infuriate consumers and create lasting damage. Today’s shoppers care about getting the best value, but they will not tolerate deception. To earn consumer trust, businesses should include all important details, including a complete and accurate list of ingredients, sourcing information, and sustainability attributes. Brands should also clearly communicate their core values and commitment to social responsibility.
6. Only Human After All Modern consumers want their purchases to deliver meaning and engagement, and packaging is a perfect vessel for delivering them. A shopper’s interaction with packaging offers a rare moment of controlled interaction, guided by a design that effectively transmits a brand’s evocative tale. To spark an emotional connection with customers, businesses can share content that pulls at the heartstrings. A personalized story such as a brand’s higher purpose or a founder’s entrepreneurial journey are examples of emotionally charged material that can ignite passion and engagement.
5. Honesty and Transparency Consumer trust is at all-time lows. Businesses need to go above and beyond to express complete transparency. If a consumer doesn’t believe a brand’s authenticity, all other efforts are futile, so businesses must get it right or suffer
Phil Bagdasarian is a co-founder and the president of Packwire, an online printing and packaging service that enables businesses to create their own box design, including branded mailers, folding cartons, shipping boxes, and gift boxes.
Beyond the Frame: The Art of Winfluencing! By Suresh Dinakaran
Roger Dooley (https://www.rogerdooley.com) wears multiple hats with ease and panache. He is as comfortable (and impactful) as a keynote speaker as he is being an entrepreneur, author, blogger (https://www.neurosciencemarketing.com/ blog/home#), a Forbes columnist and a podcaster (The Brainfluence Podcast). His books include Brainfluence: 100 Ways to Persuade and Convince Consumers with Neuromarketing, The Persuasion Slide & his latest Friction(recognised by Stategy+Business in the Best Business Books 2019). In this candid, frictionless conversation with BrandKnew(published by ISD Global), Roger is compellingly persuasive as he provides us with a distilled essence of actionable intelligence that will stimulate thought and action amongst brand owners, organisations, marketers, the creative community and beyond.
BK: Could you share a bit about your growing up days, your family etc? RD: I grew up in snowy Buffalo. Early on, I attended an unusual school that compressed a lot of learning into a few years. I started high school at 11, three years younger than my classmates. That difference continued through high school and university. That enabled me to start my career years earlier, but also meant that participating in competitive sports was unlikely. BK: What triggered your interest in writing and your experience and leanings especially towards � Behavioural Science �? And do you think in an overly distracted world with a deficit of time, attention, resources and trust, this Science can/must begin to play a bigger role?
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RD: Science has always interested me. From the earliest days I can remember, being a scientist was more interesting to me than being a fireman or cowboy. By the time I was choosing a college major, I decided on engineering – science, but applied in the real world. While I was at university, I was fascinated by psychology. I minored in that subject, and even traveled to another campus to take a course in the Psychology of Persuasion. I had zero idea at the time that this topic would become the focus of my professional work.
BK: Tell us a bit about your initiative ‘ College Confidential ‘ and what triggered the founding of it?
I think behavioral science can do a lot to improve our lives. App designers use behavioral science to keep us glued to our screens. Marketers use it to sell us more stuff. But, as I describe in my book Friction, individuals can use these tools to regain control, break bad habits and form new, beneficial ones.
After going through the process with my two children, I realized how little information there was for students and parents. In 2001, I co-founded College Confidential as a free resource to demystify college admissions and financial aid for families. We began with expert content and a small community. Over time, the community proved to be by far the most popular feature. No matter how obscure the school, other members would be able to comment first-hand on it. And, parents who had been through the convoluted process of applying for financial aid could help newcomers cope.
BK: As an authority on Neuromarketing & Behavioural Science, where do you stand in the debate between Success follows Happiness or Happiness follows Success? RD: There’s no doubt that one is more likely to be happy if one is successful than if one experiences the alternative, failure. But success is relative. A billionaire may be no happier than a successful auto mechanic. To me, the key to happiness is to enjoy the pursuit of your goals. If you don’t enjoy what you are doing, reaching the next pinnacle in your career isn’t likely to result in lasting happiness. BK: Brainfluence, The Persuasion Slide and now Friction: do you want to pick a favorite book or would that be an unfair question? RD: Can a parent pick a favorite child? Each book is different, written for a different purpose. Brainfluence is an easy to read guide to sciencebased marketing tactics, with one hundred short chapters. Friction is an ambitious big idea book, showing how the Law of Least Effort affects every aspect of human behavior. I delve into customer loyalty, employee engagement, habit formation, and even the fate of nations. To make it interesting and readable, I use lots of stories, some current and others historical, to illustrate my points.
RD: In the United States, the college process can be incredibly confusing for students and parents. There are over 3,000 institutions of higher education, and no individual can possibly know them all. While the vast majority of schools accept all or most of their applicants, a smaller number of elite schools are very difficult to enter. And, the criteria for acceptance can be mysterious.
We kept the site free for all users, and it grew to tens of millions of pageviews each month. In 2008, we sold it to part of the UK’s Daily Mail Group. They spun it off a few years ago, but the community is still thriving almost twenty years after founding. BK: 6 is the new 30. Shorter attention spans, vertical orientation, platforms like IGTV, the potential of UGC(User Generated Content): are we moving from the overt to the covert, appealing to the sub conscious rather than the conscious? What is your take and what are the learning and lessons for brand marketers and content creators in all these? RD: Appealing to the consumer’s non-conscious mind has always been a key part of advertising and branding. But, a few things have changed. The tools of neuromarketing – fMRI, EEG, biometric measurements, and so on – let us see what’s actually happening in the brain as opposed to relying on self-reporting. The second change has been happening for decades. Our understanding of the consumer mind has been greatly improved by the work of scientists in
multiple disciplines. Robert Cialdini’s principles of influence, BJ Fogg’s Behavior Model, Kahneman and Tversky’s work on thinking and bias… These and many other smart researchers have given marketers a far better understanding of how humans make decisions. Part of my function, as I see it, is to turn this science into practical business advice. BK: What was the core inspiration behind writing ‘ Friction ‘(and by the way many congratulations on the book being awarded as the Best Business Books 2019 by Strategy + Business) ? How has the book been received? (I am 1/3rd my way into the book and finding it difficult to put down). RD: I’m glad you find Friction compelling! I enjoy the way Malcolm Gladwell combines science, statistics, and stories in his very readable books. While we have different styles and objectives, I kept his approach in mind as I wrote. Friction grew out of my Persuasion Slide framework. I created that simple model, based on the common playground slide, for marketers to use to be more persuasive. It’s loosely based on BJ Fogg’s Behavior Model, and emphasizes that marketers need to be aware of both conscious and non-conscious factors that affect customer decisions. One of the four elements in the framework is “friction” – that’s what slows or even stops the child’s descent. I found that to be the most interesting element because reducing friction is often easier and less costly than trying to motivate the customers more. Once I started writing, I realized that friction affected not just customer experience, but employee experience, too. And, the effects were enormous – trillions of dollars per year in lost revenue and wasted productivity. I began seeing friction in places I hadn’t thought of. My hope is that Friction will equip every reader with a metaphorical set of “friction goggles” and that they will start seeing (and fixing!) friction at work and at home. BK: AI, Machine Learning, Predictive Analytics, Data Science etc: where do you see the human mind in the midst of all this? And do all of these increase or decrease friction?
RD: Making decisions and creating designs based on real human behavior is incredibly important. Oddly, not enough companies do that. How often have you encountered a website or app that was confusing, caused you to click on multiple choices to find what you were seeking, or repeat a search multiple times because your search term wasn’t interpreted correctly? Even the most basic measurement of behavior would detect this pointless friction so that the interface could be made more intuitive and easier to use. Amazon is constantly testing every aspect of their website and app. Jeff Bezos said, “When you reduce friction, make something easy, people do more of it.” Hence, you have One Click ordering, frustration-free packaging, and many other innovations designed to improve customer experience. BK: In an era of conformity, compliance, adherence and standardisation, I reckon modern-day organisations and brands should really see great meaning in what you are proposing with regards to friction to stand out and engage better? But I am also wondering is that really the case? RD: I think today quite a few organizations and brands are indeed reducing friction. Eventually, I hope, the ones that stand out will be the high-friction ones. Customers will avoid those brands whose customer experience lags behind their competitors. BK: We are seeing a definite shift in consumer behaviour patterns from ‘ownership’ to ‘experiences’. All the more reason they walk the walk on what you are proposing in context to friction? RD: I think people still want to own things, but only those they consider really important. Ownership often involves extra effort, i.e., more friction. If a drain stops working in your house, you can’t simply report it the building manager like an apartment renter. You’ll have to fix it yourself or call a plumber. Think about cars – just parking a car in New York is a huge hassle. For many, Uber and Lyft are much more convenient.
BK: Look around and you see in most cases the CMO not going beyond an 18-24 month duration at an organisation? What would you attribute this to? RD: I see multiple reasons for this. One is that the CMO is charged with getting results but doesn’t have control of the entire customer experience. All too often, marketing people may see problems with, say, the website user experience, but be unable to fix them because of pushback from IT, legal, accounting and other departments. I’ve personally seen critical, low cost improvements to customer experience delayed “until next fiscal” because of arbitrary budget restrictions. That doesn’t happen at Amazon. Another factor is the amount of waste in marketing. We accept email response rates of under 1% as normal. Nine out of ten paid clicks may generate no sale at all. Trillions of dollars of merchandise are left in abandoned ecommerce shopping carts every year. CEOs view this waste with suspicion. One survey showed that only one out five CEOs had full faith in the competence of their CMO – that’s scary.
inspired your life and career? RD: I draw inspiration from a lot of places. My current work has been heavily influenced by books like Thinking Fast and Slow (Kahneman), Influence (Cialdini), Predictably Irrational (Ariely), Nudge (Thaler & Sunnstein), and many others. My approach to writing has been influenced not just by Gladwell but by Steven Pressfield, Stephen King (he writes more than horror), and more. One book that influenced my career and business decisions is Tim Ferriss’s Four Hour Workweek. The tactics in it are dated and the title is a huge overreach, but Tim’s ideas about setting life priorities and being locationindependent are timeless. Over time, I phased out clients and activities that required me to be physically close. That enabled me to move to Austin, where, oddly enough, Tim also relocated to.
Applying smart neuromarketing and behavioral techniques won’t eliminate all wasted marketing spend, but it can boost results and impact profitability in a way that CEOs will appreciate. BK: The new 4Ps of Marketing seem to be Permission, Privacy, Personalisation & Performance. What are your views on this? RD: I don’t think we can ignore the original 4 Ps which are fundamental to the sales process. The new ones are important topics indeed, but seem a bit forced to me. Another version I saw was, “process, people, platform, and performance.” The only one in common is performance, and that’s the result of getting everything else right (whether it begins with “p” or not). BK: In our practice at ISD Global with brands and organisations, we have been proposing the value and impact of ‘UFP (Unique Feelings Proposition)’ and then by design move away from USP (Unique Selling Proposition) in an increasingly commoditised world. Do you see a new culture emerging based on the aforementioned? RD: I totally agree that for many products, how the brand or product makes you feel is at least as important as what the product does or how it performs. Research shows that emotional appeals are usually more effective than rational, logical appeals. BK: What do you enjoy doing more- writing, speaking or consulting? RD: Writing and speaking go hand in hand. Writing lets me research my ideas and organize them for easy access by anyone, anywhere. Speaking and training let me connect these ideas to the specific needs of an audience, whether they are accountants or auto dealers, giant brands or tiny startups. I really enjoy meeting people, hearing their stories, and trying to help solve their most pressing problems. I avoid most consulting engagements. Too often, a project that entailed a lot of thought and effort ends up in a binder on a shelf. The few engagements I do have a very well-defined objective and constraints. This minimizes scope creep and maximizes the probability of successful implementation. BK: Could you tell us about the books and people who have
BK: What makes Roger Dooley go ‘Wow, another day at work’? RD: [Not sure if I understand this question…] I find days when I can hit “publish” on a new article at Forbes, my blog Neuromarketing, or other venue particularly satisfying. The hours or days working before that are just as important, but getting an idea out in the wild gives a sense of completion. BK: What do you do in your spare time? Your leisure time pursuits? RD: When I’m not traveling, I try to get to the gym every weekday and do more casual activities like walking and yard chores on weekends. Travel for speaking engagements can make following an exercise routine more challenging, but I tend to walk a lot and explore new cities when time permits. I’m also an architecture buff, and if I’m visiting a city I try to visit at least one significant building or site. I’ve visited or at least seen most of the world’s tallest buildings, but at the rate China is constructing skyscrapers I’ve got some catching up to do! The Burj Khalifa is one of my favorites – despite its size, it seems to have a graceful elegance that many other tall buildings lack. 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.
In an Era of Easy Outrage, When Should Brands Take a Stand? A KELLOGG PROFESSOR EXPLAINS HOW COMPANIES CAN NAVIGATE BOYCOTTS WHILE STAYING CONNECTED WITH CUSTOMERS. By Samantha Eyler-Driscoll
We live in an era of unprecedented lifestyle marketing, where companies are able to bring an enormous amount of data to bear on personalized customer service that endears us to their brands. But with every Instagram follow and deep emotional appeal, companies are courting both the positive and problematic aspects of strong brand identification.
This shift has been met with a range of responses, including some skepticism by critics who see these steps as toothless. Still, there are some recent examples of companies making decisions not for financial reasons, but for moral ones. King offers the example of North Carolina’s transgender bathroom bill in 2016, which dozens of companies publicly denounced.
The fitness firm SoulCycle learned this lesson recently, when news broke that Stephen Ross, the chair of its parent company, had scheduled a big-dollar campaign fundraiser for President Donald Trump. SoulCycle’s predominantly affluent, urban, liberal clientele struck back by encouraging members to boycott the company. While online rallying cries often have little real-world follow up, SoulCycle saw its August purchases drop threefold in percentage terms compared to August 2018.
“Many of those companies were not doing business in North Carolina,” King says. “They didn’t have manufacturing there. They were not employing people in North Carolina. But nevertheless, they signed the statement because there was a belief it was the right thing to do.”
“Boycotts are actually pretty effective as a mechanism to create social change,” says Brayden King, a professor of management and organizations at Kellogg. With brands facing perhaps the most acute pressure in decades to strike exactly the right tone with their politically polarized consumers, King offers advice for how companies can continue to engage with their customers and their communities, while minimizing the risk of backlash.
Taking a Moral Stance Can Be Good Business Since Milton Friedman published “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits” in The New York Times in 1970, most American businesses have held that firms’ political involvement, like everything else they do, should act to maximize the value of the firm for their shareholders alone. But recently, CEOs have taken public steps to amend that doctrine to focus on additional stakeholders, including employees, communities, and the environment.
“The key is for companies to know who they are, and who their core stakeholders are, and what those stakeholders believe in.” This kind of proclamation, in other words, appears to be less about increasing short-term profits, or currying favor with politicians, and more about delineating the company’s values and culture. “Apple coming out saying ‘We are against this ban’ is not just Tim Cook talking to North Carolina politicians. Tim Cook is also saying to his employees, ‘We support you guys. These are the values we want to have in our company.’ Creating a corporate culture that embraces certain values, embracing a mission that is beyond making money, is actually in the end good for that company and its culture.”
Many Boycotts Hurt A Firm’s Reputation More than Its Finances In an online environment that often seems to traffic in outrage, companies may feel like they are operating with a target on their back. But that ire may not always translate into
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action beyond the confines of social media. “Consumers tend to have an empowered voice but weak behavioral will,” King says. “We’ve done some analysis that looked at the purchasing data of consumers. Some people expressed the belief that they had engaged in a boycott, but when we look at their actual purchasing behavior, there’s no difference in purchasing between those who believed they’ve boycotted and those who did not support the boycott. In that sense, the boycott almost seems more of an expressive kind of protest than a behavioral protest.” This expressive power shouldn’t be written off as just theatrics, however. Boycotts can still be remarkably effective in dinging firms’ reputations, especially since the advent of social media, which reduces the costs of both expression and coordination for protestors. “Boycotts typically create social change by triggering a large media frenzy around the company,” King notes. “It’s that negative spotlight and the accompanying reputational threat that causes the company to listen to what activists have to say.” In addition to harming its reputation, a media spectacle can also erode a company’s employee culture and recruitment efforts. It can even draw unwanted scrutiny from public authorities, who are less lenient toward firms whose reputations are on the rocks.
Some Boycotts Are More Effective than Others The difference between an effective boycott and a less effective one, says King, tends to be how well organized the protesters are. Because while a single angry Tweet can easily be amplified by sympathetic customers, it is generally the grassroots organizations and institutions that give messages their staying power. “For social movements to be effective in changing consumers’ behaviors, people need to have some sort of social connection to activist efforts, often through belonging to an organization or just having friends who are activists themselves and are putting social pressure on you to participate,” he says. “There are a lot of different activist groups that, for example, want to see better environmental policy. Have they created an infrastructure that will actually help them do that, or are they relying solely on social media and the goodwill of consumers to do that work for them?” He offers the example of the recent Fridays for Future global climate strikes, started by Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg in 2018. “There were certainly visible leaders on social media promoting it. But you also had a very organized effort by student groups to make sure that people were going to both comment online and attend the event in real life.” The social pressure generated by organizing efforts can make companies that rely on consumers actually showing up somewhere particularly vulnerable to boycotts. This is where SoulCycle ran into trouble this summer. “The reason the SoulCycle boycott has been more effective
than most other boycotts in changing participants’ behavior is because it’s a very social kind of company,” King says. “It’s not like its customers are just going out and purchasing a product. They’re participating in a community, one with an educated, more liberal identity. When people who all belong to this community get upset and start taking stands on Facebook or Twitter saying, ‘I don’t approve of this CEO’s political stance,’ then positive peer pressure can start to kick in. It leads people to say, ‘Hey, I’m not going to show up to class today, because if I do, I’m going to look bad—or oblivious—in front of my friends.’” Similar dynamics can come into play when companies activate consumers’ social instincts in their marketing and branding strategies: producing aspirational ‘lifestyle’ content, for instance, or marketing their products as “green.” These appeals may connect to customers’ deepest identities and beliefs—but may provoke an equally stark backlash if the company makes a misstep. For this reason, savvy companies that do try to connect with customers on a personal level often choose, of their own volition, to engage in corporate social responsibility activities, such as building sustainable supply chains, developing worker-friendly policies, or engaging with various communities.
Align Your Brand with Your Stand King has found that once companies face the wrath of a boycott, a funny thing happens. Rather than distancing their brand from politics or social issues, they are more likely to increase their prosocial pronouncements—actually deepening their social and political messaging. But with the United States fractured in half over politics today, that kind of messaging risks alienating a big chunk of companies’ potential consumer base. “The key is for companies to know who they are, and who their core stakeholders are, and what those stakeholders believe in,” says King. The difference between, for example, the boycott of SoulCycle and the way Nike was targeted after it launched an ad campaign featuring former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick—which famously led some sneakerheads to set their shoes alight but was still a clear boon to the Nike brand—lies in how the companies aligned their brand identity, stakeholder preferences, and political stances. Most Nike customers are pro-athlete and supportive of Kaepernick’s right to protest, whereas Trump support was deeply unpopular with SoulCycle customers. “Think about how your political statements align with your company mission and culture and your broader reputation. If you don’t see an alignment, then it’s probably not smart to make those kinds of statements,” he says. FEATURED FACULTY: Brayden King Max McGraw Chair in Management and the Environment; Professor of Management & Organizations; Chair of Management & Organizations Department
How to Bootstrap Your Content Marketing YOU DON’T NEED A LOT OF MONEY TO BE EFFECTIVE WITH CONTENT MARKETING. HERE IS HOW YOU DO IT THE RIGHT WAY. By Robbie Abed
Marketing is hard. Marketing is even harder when you see your competitors spending tons of money on paid ads and a full marketing team producing quality content on a daily basis. I’ve been on both sides of this situation. I’ve had to run marketing teams without much of a budget, and I’ve been on the other side where I’ve had millions of dollars to spend. Believe it or not, there are many advantages to being bootstrapped without the luxury of a full marketing team.
strategy, but people love it, and will continue to share things that make them feel happy. This works exceptionally well on LinkedIn. Any story about an underachiever in business who accomplished something against odds will always garner attention. This approach never fails.
When it comes to bootstrapping content marketing, there are three tips I have that can help you gain traction without having to spend a whole lot.
On the flip side, when you post controversial things that not everyone agrees with, people get upset and will do everything in their power to prove you wrong. They don’t sit at home and talk to their families about it. They become keyword warriors to engage with your content and tell you their opinions on why they think you’re wrong. That engagement leads to showing up higher on social feeds, and more people will discover you.
1. Pick a single social media platform to focus on.
Elon Musk’s tweets trigger many people. He’ll say whatever’s on his mind, even if it upsets readers. Opinions are extremely effective on many social media platforms.
I use LinkedIn almost exclusively. I’ve been able to garner a big audience because I focused on creating content on a consistent basis. I removed the Twitter and Facebook apps from my phone, just so I’m not tempted to go on those sites.
3. Engage with the people who can drive the most value.
Other talented marketers like Gary Vaynerchuk have the almost exact opposite approach, which is to create content for every single platform. I feel like it’s a great approach but extremely time-consuming for people who just don’t have the time, and you end up being decent at all the platforms instead of great at one of them. Once you build an audience, then you can move them over to the other platforms as well. But, for me, focusing on a single platform is the best thing I’ve ever done.
2. Be extremely opinionated, even if you’re wrong. There are two things to make your content go viral. Content that makes people really happy, and content that makes people really angry. This is why pictures of cute dogs will never go away. Of course, you shouldn’t use a dog as your content marketing
This approach works well for B2B companies where the price of services or products is higher. What I do is create a list of target companies and people that I would like to do business with. From that list, I start figuring out ways to get in touch with them. As I mentioned, LinkedIn is my target platform, so I add them individually on LinkedIn with a personalized message. Then once I’m connected, I’ll engage with their content. Of course, this doesn’t always turn into new business, but in many instances, my being on top of their mind has helped me win new clients. I’ll occasionally send them direct messages as well. Relationships are key when you have zero budget, and social media is by far the easiest way to do it. Don’t be discouraged if you don’t have a marketing team or if you’re the only marketer in the company. Follow these three tips for content marketing, and you’ll see traction almost immediately.
Five Ways Brands Are Changing Their Playbooks to Win By Knowledge@Wharton
Media giants in recent years have been battling for viewers’ attention and have spent $650 billion for acquisitions and content. In this shifting media landscape, how will brands win at getting their customers’ attention and emotional engagement? In this opinion piece, Gopi Kallayil explore fives modern principles for winning brands. Kallayil, an alumnus of the Wharton School, works as Chief Evangelist, Brand Marketing at Google. He works with the leadership teams of some of the biggest brands around the world to help them leverage digital marketing more effectively. (The opinions in this article are his own and not that of any organization with which he may be affiliated.) Have you heard of a media company called T-Series? Chances are, you probably have not. Gulshan Kumar, whose resume up to 1983 read, “Fruit juice seller, streets of New Delhi,” founded it that year. Since its inception, T-Series has become an unlikely media powerhouse — its YouTube channel has 119 million subscribers. To put that in perspective, The New York Times, which was founded in 1851, has a total subscription base of 4.7 million across print and digital. The T-Series channel also has 90 billion views. That’s the
equivalent of every human on the planet, including babies and people with no access to the internet, having watched 13 videos each on their channel. According to the Nov. 14, 2019, issue of The Economist, media giants in the past five years have been battling for viewers’ attention and have spent $650 billion for acquisitions and content. As The Economist puts it, with wry understatement, “There will be blood.” In this shifting media landscape, how are brands going to win at getting their customers’ attention and emotional engagement? In this opinion piece, we will explore five modern principles for winning brands.
Reduce consumer friction using the latest technology. How did Lyft and Uber become highly recognized international brand names in 10 years? They established a powerful brand name for personal transportation through a private car rideshare service when nothing like it had existed. They created an entire category and made it an indispensable household service.
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Now they are threatening to disrupt the place that brands like BMW and Lexus may have occupied in consumers’ mind. According to research by HSBC, car registrations in the U.S. have dropped from 135 in 2014 to 88 in 2019 (indexed numbers: 2011=100). As consumers stop owning cars and use rideshares more, they’re less likely to care what brand of car picks then up as long as it comfortably transports them to their destination. In the process of building their businesses, Lyft and Uber have also shifted a few cultural norms across the world. Ten years ago, parents advised their kids: “Don’t get into a stranger’s car. It’s dangerous.” Today, parents often request the reverse: “Honey, I have to stay late at work, Can you take an Uber back after your music practice?” What led to this shift in perception in the consumer’s mind? To gain a better understanding, let’s look at how Uber and Lyft changed the experience of personal transportation and took friction out of the process. With the old model of calling for a car, you phoned a Yellow Cab dispatcher and waited anxiously for a taxi to take you to the airport, hoping the driver would find your address, especially if he or she was picking you up at night. Today, your phone has been turned into a remote control for the physical world. Three clicks and your car pulls up to your address, or next to you if you’re on a street corner and not at an exact address. Before you climb into the car, your expectations are set. You know what car will pick you up, the name of the driver, what the driver looks like, and his or her ratings by other riders. And for the neurotic among us, while we wait, we get a minute-by-minute update of the driver’s progress on a map. It’s a minor miracle — the driver knows your name, where you’re going and exactly how to get there. No more annoying crackle of a dispatcher’s radio from the World War II era or watching annoying TV ads from the backseat that you may not want to watch. Before you get into the car, you can indicate your preference for the temperature and musical genre. How is that for personalized service? When the car drops you off, you don’t need cash or credit cards. You can say, “Thank you,” walk away, and the payment process automagically occurs. From coffee shops to travel to cosmetics, brands that are forming a deep emotional connection with consumers are removing friction from the consumer journey by leveraging the latest technology. The Starbucks app, Booking.com’s three-click room booking and the Sephora Virtual Artist are examples in each of these categories.
Partner with neofluencers. One of the traditional ways of building your brand was through celebrity endorsements — the voices and faces of Serena Williams, J Lo, and Tyra Banks. But a band of new influencers — the neofluencers as I like to call them — has emerged on the internet with unprecedented power and reach. In Mexico City, I was backstage at the YouTube Brandcast event, waiting for my turn to speak, when I met YuYa, a 26-year-old woman from Mexico City who creates beauty
and makeup tutorials for YouTube in Spanish. YuYa has a powerful influence upon audiences in the Spanish-speaking world interested in that topic. She has 24 million subscribers and her makeup videos have been viewed more than 2 billion times. If you’re a beauty brand launching a new product in the Spanish-speaking world, you have to leverage the power that neofluencers like YuYa wield. Across different categories, it’s neofluencers like Marcus Brown Lee, Sofia Nysgaard, Harry Wong, and Lukas Marques and Daniel Molo who will establish your brand in the minds of the massive audiences they can influence. Ryan ToysReview — which was just recently rebranded to Ryan’s World — is a family-run channel, but the star of the show is 8-year-old Ryan Kaji, who generated $22 million in revenue in a single year.
Respect the modern consumer’s power of choice. The old-fashioned model of brand building was to shout about your brand wherever the largest gathering of humans took place, even if only a fraction of the audience was interested in your brand. This explains why the World Cup Soccer broadcasts, the Oscar ceremony broadcasts and the Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo were popular with brand builders. Today, modern consumers are exercising their choices in many powerful ways. To begin with, they’ve time shifted. They watch the content they want to watch, when, where and however they want to watch it. For them, every day is Superbowl Sunday. Brands better show up on these consumers’ terms if they want to get their attention. Consumers also understand the power at their fingertips — the skip button and the swipe left feature. If the brand’s message is of no value, the consumer has no hesitation in swiping them into oblivion. Fortunately, there are now technologybased solutions that allow brands to talk to consumers based on their interests, passions or some self-expressed signal indicating they’re interested in the brand or its category.
“Consumers … understand the power at their fingertips — the skip button and the swipe left feature.” Similarly, consumers are increasingly vocal about privacy. They’re making choices about the information brands can gather, how long it can be kept and if these brands can use that information to target them. And consumer choices on these topics are as varied as humans are. Some consumers are willing to self-declare that they’re buying a new home and are open to receiving brand messages relevant to home buyers. Other are declaring that buying a new home is none of a brand’s business, and when they need products and services, they’ll come talk to the brand at a time and place of their choosing. To succeed in this new world, brands have to respect these new consumer choices and play by the new rules.
Be consistent across all touch points, both ancient and modern. It used to be that brands had three primary vehicles to reach and influence their consumers. First, there was the actual product (for example, the Nike Air Force 1). The second was the point of contact with the consumer (the Nike store, the Toyota dealership, the Marriott lobby). And the third vehicle included the marketing messages the brand directed at the consumer. These vehicles were very carefully curated with their agency and broadcast over TV and other mass media. Today, a brand is shaped by every digital surface it shows up on, every way it behaves and everything said about the brand on digital — often by those the brand doesn’t know and hasn’t authorized to speak about their product or service, let alone having carefully curated their comments. So, the consumer experience of the brand could be shaped by the brand’s website or app (the only two things the brand fully controls on digital), or by a flattering review by a neofluencer or a scathing commentary by a consumer who had a bad experience with the brand and is now free not to tell just 10 of her friends but an audience of 10,000. To succeed in this world, brands have to show up consistently across all the touch points that the consumer may access to explore or experience the brand. For example, Nike has a simple and elegant brand message — “If you have a body, you are an athlete.” Put on Nike gear and “Just Do It.” The company works hard to make sure that consumers experience this message consistently, whether they walk into a Nike store, visit the website or watch an inspiring video on their YouTube channel about athletes who defied failure. Nike orchestrates a consistent brand message across all its touch points.
“The consumer has changed. And traditional measuring methods like gross rating points and Net Promoter score are no longer sufficient.”
Use a modern measuring tape. The consumer has changed. And traditional measuring methods like gross rating points and Net Promoter score are no longer sufficient. They’re limiting and address only one dimension. Today, a consumer redecorating her house may explore ideas in her living room by watching YouTube videos on her laptop or tablet. While watching, she might see a Brightech arched floor lamp that would work really well. She can then use voice search to find who sells it. She might also check multiple sources to find the best price and read reviews. Finally, she can get in her car and use the navigation system to find directions to the nearest store. Once there, she might pull out her phone and check a few more reviews before buying the lamp. How do you measure your brand and its success across all these interactions, each of which has a role in strengthening your brand in the consumer’s mind, ultimately leading to a purchase? Given the extraordinary number of data points that are now available, hundreds of metrics are flying around — likes, view-through rate, comments and so on. All of these are marginally useful and don’t tell the full story. Some of them can be distracting or useless. Instead, look for a single overarching business metric, tied to your brand goals, that extends across all these touch points and the consumer’s journey with you. Depending on your brand and business goals, it could be a single business metric that measures who’s aware of your brand, the nature of their emotional connection, and if they’re taking action such as buying the product or recommending it. The modern media landscape is rapidly changing. Consumer behavior and expectations are quickly shifting. Winning brands are changing their playbook and adopting modern principles to reach their consumers and make an emotional connection.
GETTING BACK TO BASICS AND CONSOLIDATING EVERY TYPE OF CORRESPONDENCE ON EMAIL MAY SEEM COUNTERINTUITIVE, BUT IT’S A WAY TO INCREASE YOUR EFFECTIVENESS OVERALL. By DVIR BEN-AROYA
It amazes me how many communication “solutions” are available nowadays–and yet, we feel more stressed than ever. We talk endlessly about focus and productivity but the very same tools that claim to offer these values appear to make the situation worse. It’s no coincidence that burnout levels are at an all-time high, and our attention spans are blitzed. How can we be expected to focus when alerts are constantly going off in the background, not to mention the battle to stay on top of hundreds of conversations scattered throughout our numerous apps? Email, on the other hand, is simple. It’s unified. It’s an open channel of communication that is used worldwide to maintain an open dialogue both inside and out of the workplace. The problem is, people still aren’t using it properly. They spend endless hours trying to grapple with a bloated inbox, and then, frustrated, turn to other apps for help. This only fuels the problem, making workflow confused and fractured. At the same time, with remote work on the rise, the demand for easy communication and collaboration has never been higher. Email has a pivotal role to play here. By leveraging
the power of your inbox, and using it as a tool to unify all conversations and tasks, workspace productivity can be radically transformed. Here’s how to get back to basics and make email your productivity superhero.
TREAT EMAIL AS YOUR ULTIMATE TASK LIST Lots of people think of email as something they have to do “on top of” everything else. Instead, flip that perspective, and think of email as one giant task list–the nerve center of your business or work. The first thing you need to do is centralize these tasks. Just as it would be stressful to have your task list scattered all over the place, it’s massively distracting to have message alerts pinging in from different channels and trying to keep track of what conversations lie where. There’s no need to log into Slack to talk to your team, then email for your clients. You can do both in one space, without dividing your attention. Make good on this unsung quality by focusing all your conversations within your inbox.
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How to reinvent your email as a productivity tool Going forward, email is your go-to guru for everything that needs to be done. It’s the place for all messaging, ideas, and teamwork. No more frenzied alerts, or wisps of conversation lost in different apps.
STRIP AWAY THE BLOAT When you see too much, you see nothing at all. It’s time to detox your inbox by clearing out the clutter and grout. Do you get alerts every time Amazon dispatches one of your packages? Do you ever read them? What about Google doc edits? Few people think to change default notifications like this, but a forensic-level clearout makes a world of difference in freeing up your feed. The same goes for any unwanted newsletters you’re signed up for. Unsubscribe from them in bulk. Ditch your email signature, too. It adds needless bulk to your conversations, and most people you chat with are well aware of who you are anyway. Stripping away the bloat allows you to truly focus on the important work you have to do.
PRIORITIZE LIKE A PRO The best kind of task list operates by tackling your most important goals first. Make sure your email has a strong auto-priority feature that filters out everything but essential conversations and messages. You can help this process further by grouping messages per person or topic, and setting up rules so that messages go directly to those groups.
It’s also worth pinning your most critical emails right to the top of your inbox, so you can’t miss new messages and updates. Low-priority messages that you still need to respond to can be snoozed for when you have more time, or set as a reminder to respond at a later point. People get obsessed with the idea of inbox zero, but it’s a misleading goal that creates unnecessary pressure to delete for the sake of it.
RECLAIM HEADSPACE TO BE MORE RESPONSIVE What I really like about email is that, unlike instant messaging, there’s no need to reply straight away. Make the most of the freedom to respond at whatever time works for you. As research shows, we get a whole lot more done when we’re not available at all hours. This flexibility allows you to reclaim headspace for priority conversations. Real-time technology, such as the ability to see when someone has read an email, can also help bridge the gap and provide reassurance between teams. By consolidating emails, messages, and tasks into one workspace, you get the best of both worlds. Everything is simpler and clearer, and you know at a glance what needs to be tackled first. At a time where our focus is worn to a thread, the ability to unify workflow like this is revolutionary. In a chorus of noise and distraction, trust me when I say that a clean, streamlined inbox has the power to transform all.
Three themes for brand purpose By WARC Staff
Brand purpose can be a driver of growth, a key to unlocking new partnerships and a way of signalling modernity, according to a new WARC report edited by Burger King Global CMO Fernando Machado.
are empowering brands to communicate in new ways. One fifth of this year’s shortlisted papers cited partnerships as a creative strategy, indicating that these can help to shape a new style of purpose-led advertising.
The Effective Use of Brand Purpose Report 2019 is based on analysis of the metadata of the shortlisted entries in the Effective Use of Brand Purpose category of the WARC Awards 2019 as well as discussions in the jury, which was chaired by Machado.
Absolut partnered with Slovak musicians and Spotify to promote diversity in Slovakia, for example, while Manpower in Norway partnered influencers to help millennials transfer their gaming skills into the workplace.
“A purpose needs to link back to the company’s mission and to demonstrate results,” he says. “This is critical because marketers need to see how purpose has shaped brand attributes over time through sales and objectives, as well as through behaviour change. But the biggest challenge of all is to come from the heart.” Get it right and, as research by the Harvard Business Review has shown, purpose can drive growth and create new markets while serving stakeholder needs. The report also notes how partnerships built on purpose
A third theme to emerge from the report is how some brands are beginning to reset the way they portray gender, tapping into the zeitgeist around gender fluidity and LGBTQ+. At the same time, there continues to be a high number of campaigns that promote female emancipation. Recent work for Barbie, Gillette, Renault and personal-care brand Billie shows brands attempting to debunk gender stereotypes by addressing issues around gender and sexuality. “Rethinking gender has become a priority for certain brands that are starting to be more inclusive in their approach,” notes Lucy Aitken, Managing Editor – Case Studies, WARC.
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15 Non-Intrusive Ways Employees Can Help With Branding By The Young Entrepreneur Council
People who work daily with the company’s services and products have insights that can’t be found anywhere else. However, if a business owner were to come out and pitch the idea of having employees help with branding, a number of team members might feel uncomfortable or out of their depth. Helping employees to feel more engaged with branding efforts requires tact, understanding and the right approach. That’s why we asked 15 members of Young Entrepreneur Council the following: What is one way you can encourage employees to help with branding efforts, without coming across as demanding or intrusive?
set goals. At the end of the quarter we have a team day where these committees present their work. The team enjoys the structure and we get a lot of great projects done. – Tony Scherba, Yeti
2. Make Them Proud Our team is small, but we have been fortunate enough to be a part of some really amazing conferences around the world. Being able to travel and enjoy these experiences has made our team proud to be with us. With that comes their own desire to help our branding effort. They understand that the better we are doing, and the more our brand becomes known, the more opportunities we will have. – Zach Binder, Bell + Ivy
Employee Branding Examples
3. Showcase Your Talent
Here’s what they had to say:
Invite your employees to be a showcase for the talent your business offers. You can host a personal interview session with each individual that is then streamed on the corporate website and media. Employees will likely get excited to be recognized for their successes and will share this content with others. Prospects might identify with one of your employees and reach out to them directly.
1. Create Committees Each quarter we allocate committees to take on various new branding and marketing initiatives. These don’t take away from daily tasks but are projects that help build our brand. We give them a budget and allow them to individually
– Jared Weitz, United Capital Source Inc.
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4. Ask Them to Write Career Tips I ask my employees, mainly software developers, to write career tips and we share those on LinkedIn, Medium and other media. It helps us propagate our brand among developers. The staff is enthusiastic about writing such type of content since it relates to their current job and it’s easy to write. It helps us attract more applicants for our job requirements. – Piyush Jain, SIMpalm
5. Hold a Casual Meeting You can set up a short, casual meeting with your team to discuss branding and see what new ideas you come up with. You don’t have to push them to become brand ambassadors. Rather, you want to get them excited thinking about the branding possibilities of the future. Encourage them to create their best ideas. You can even offer a prize to the person with the best idea. – Stephanie Wells, Formidable Forms
6. Workshop It (And Make It Fun) Hold a workshop and make it fun. Keep it short and sweet (one to two hours) and stimulate imagination and discussion. For example, I ask employees to bring an object that represents their vision for the brand and an image that represents the personality of the brand. Employees describe their show-and-tell items. Then I’ll take all of the input and lay out brand attributes, benefits, values and essence. – Robby Scott Berthume, Bull & Beard
7. Create Sustainable Incentives People are more likely to change jobs than they were 20 years ago, owing to the growth of various industries and disruptors. If you want employees to participate in company branding, create extrinsic reasons for them to do so. Praise people who participate in company charity runs via email, track who joins on LinkedIn or other social media, and reward them with practical, stylish swag. – Duran Inci, Optimum7
8. Invest in Company Swag If you want your employees to help with branding efforts, invest in company swag. Every year we give our employees quality, branded apparel like T-shirts, sweaters, hats and so on. Our employees appreciate the free gifts and they’ll wear their company swag out and about, which is a great way to increase brand awareness. – Thomas Griffin, OptinMonster
9. Ask for Feedback When you ask for your team’s feedback on branding items they will start to enjoy getting more involved with the brand, and this is the best way to get them introduced with the idea of helping with the brand’s initiatives. Also, having a lot of social media images with team members is a good way to get them sharing, especially when they are tagged in the company photos. – Nicole Munoz, Nicole Munoz Consulting, Inc.
10. Gamify the Experience
Create a game where employees share company posts and try to get the most engagement on their share. The employees that get the most engagement at the end of the quarter get a bonus in the form of an Amazon gift card. Gamification improves customer experiences, but it can also encourage your employees to get involved with the business. – John Turner, SeedProd LLC
11. Get Them Involved in the Creative Process Get the whole team involved in the brand-building efforts. What I mean by that is not just asking them to repost something from a corporate Facebook page but actually making them an integral part of the process. Recently, we’ve started filming a YouTube series with our people being the key figures in each episode. It’s engaging, it’s fun, everybody loves it, and it works great for our brand. – Solomon Thimothy, OneIMS
12. Have Them Share Content They Found Helpful We ask our employees to share our content on the same grounds that ask consumers to share our posts. As a general rule, if you found one of our posts helpful, we would like it if you could share what you found with your friends. We don’t monitor our employees on social media because we hire individuals who are predispositioned to want to share our posts because they found value. – Chris Christoff, MonsterInsights
13. Ask Them to Update Their Professional Profiles Most people already have public and professional social media profiles. You can ask them help you with your branding by including information about your company on LinkedIn and other places. You can help by creating a template or a format which they can follow that reflects your brand well. – Syed Balkhi, WPBeginner
14. Create a Social Media Training Program Branding is essential for social media as much as any other platform, and you can use this to create a social media branding program. It’ll teach your team how to apply branding strategies to your company’s social media accounts so they build experience and help with branding as a whole. – Jared Atchison, WPForms
15. Create Graphics for Social Media They Can Use You can make it easier for your employees to help brand your company by creating awesome graphics they can use. This removes additional effort needed for them to create posts on social media. By making fun and “cool” graphics, it’s possible to build a sense of pride and willingness to help with your business’s branding. – Blair Williams, MemberPress
E-commerce and Consumers: Can Retailers Meet Rising Demands? By Knowledge@Wharton
When consumers order online these days, they want what they want, and fast –whether it’s a pair of earrings, a lawnmower or a takeout dinner. They also expect a good price, and outstanding service if there are any issues. Meanwhile, e-commerce companies are vying to differentiate themselves, to fulfill customers’ ever-higher expectations, and to push online selling to the next level. At the Baker Retailing Center’s Fall 2019 CEO Summit in New York City, e-commerce executives discussed their strategies and challenges. Among the speakers was Marc Lore, president and CEO of Walmart eCommerce U.S. Lore is a successful serial entrepreneur, having founded Jet.com, Diapers.com and other notable e-commerce brands. He landed his current post after Walmart acquired Jet.com in 2016. Lore was asked how he sees the future of the competition between pure plays (the e-commerce companies) and brick-and-mortar retailers like Walmart. He said he thinks brick-and-mortar stores with the right strategy can have a significant advantage, because “the puck is moving toward faster and faster delivery speeds.” He elaborated that in order to achieve speeds such as sameday or two-hour delivery, a business needs to have forwarddeployed inventory (meaning inventory is maintained in a number of small locations around the country rather than one large warehouse). And Walmart, he said, has 4,700 warehouses all over the U.S. with 100,000 products in them. Walmart’s physical stores typically get plenty of store traffic and have a positive operating margin, which helps cover the cost of fulfilling orders out of their warehouses, Lore noted. Moreover, Walmart is increasing the number of associates who can pick products; there are now employees picking at almost 3,000 stores, he said. The plan is to roll that out chain-wide, so that the store has the capability to “put
your purchase in the back of your car at the lowest possible marginal cost. Way lower than anyone else could, Amazon or otherwise, because the infrastructure is already in place.” Lore also described an innovative initiative in which Walmart delivers your grocery order directly to your refrigerator — literally entering your house while you’re at work or elsewhere, stocking your refrigerator and cleaning up all the packaging. The new concept was launched in three markets in fall 2019, he said: Pittsburgh, St. Louis and Vero Beach. Smart technology is enabling the effort, including a lock with a code on the refrigerator, cameras on the Walmart employees’ vests, and an app with which you can monitor the delivery person as they enter and leave your home.
“[The] puck is moving toward faster and faster delivery speeds.” – Marc Lore While the scenario might raise some eyebrows, Lore noted that it was not much more invasive than renting your house through Airbnb and having somebody sleep in your bed. He added that the first consumers to use the grocery service were a little skeptical, but then they enthusiastically embraced it.
All E-commerce Is Global “Today’s best practices are becoming table stakes … and the cycle is just getting faster and faster,” said Bernardine Wu, founder and CEO of FitForCommerce, a boutique consultancy for e-commerce companies. The panel she was moderating agreed with her. They also shared her opinion that today’s customers expect omnichannel service: to shop their favorite stores and brands anytime and anywhere they want. That’s the baseline with which e-commerce retailers are working.
For Christiane Pendarvis, senior VP for e-commerce at FULLBEAUTY Brands, having excellent mobile functionality is essential. She noted that FULLBEAUTY, a plus-size apparel business, is actually a direct-to-consumer catalog company. But while the catalogs are a key marketing tool, 80% of the company’s sales arrive digitally, and more than half of that through smartphones. “If your business does not have a friction-free mobile experience, you’re really going to miss out,” she said. She talked about FULLBEAUTY’s efforts to speed up its checkout cart experience so potential purchasers don’t lose interest or run out of time. If Pendarvis herself is shopping on her phone while on the train commuting to work, and a transaction takes too long, she ends up abandoning the digital cart: “I’m one of those notorious consumers that probably has carts in ten different sites on my device…. [Companies] need to get it done, and done quickly so you can convert [site visitors into buyers],” she said. The panelists also discussed the challenges of serving customers outside the U.S. Today, whether an e-commerce company is U.S.-based or not, it must function as a global brand, noted Sapna Parikh, executive director of digital and e-commerce for the luxury skincare and cosmetics company Clarins Groupe. Companies need to use data to build a single view of each customer, she said, especially since customers may travel between countries or have multiple addresses. She characterized the shopper’s perspective: “Whether I’m buying this product in Shanghai or the same product in the U.S., I want that brand to understand who I am and what I’m looking for.” The nuts-and-bolts issues faced by global brands were vividly evoked by Cynthia Hollen, the U.S. president of eShopWorld, an e-commerce platform that helps brands build their digital capabilities. International customers’ expectations are much higher than they used to be, she said. Retailers need to seamlessly handle issues such as different currencies or the lack of a zip code.
“Today’s best practices are becoming table stakes … and the cycle is just getting faster and faster.”–Bernardine Wu They also need to resolve fulfillment difficulties, Hollen pointed out. She described how shipping lingerie, cosmetics and perfume to a customer in the same package, for example — something domestic customers take for granted — can present a roadblock in cross-border orders because perfume is subject to hazardous materials regulations. When eShopWorld recently designed a solution, there was a significant uptick in basket size, she noted. Consumers bought more when they could receive the items together. What does the future hold for e-commerce? FULLBEAUTY’s Pendarvis talked about some developing concepts. Voice commerce — the ability to tell your smartphone or other device to ‘order me such-and-such an item’ — is going to
gain traction. “I know it sounds sort of fairytale or Jetsons-like, but it’s coming,” she said. (While voice-activated assistants like Alexa have been around for a while now, only 17% of consumers have browsed or shopped using this method, according to TotalRetail.) Pendarvis also asserted that the idea of “going shopping” is fundamentally changing. For example, soon a customer using Instagram or Facebook, or playing a video game, may see a relevant product appear and be able to complete a purchase transaction in that moment. Although some might think that “no one’s going to go out and buy a $5,000 Chanel bag” through methods like these, eventually they will, Pendarvis said. She noted that similarly, many experts had doubts about mobile retail five or so years ago, and now it’s commonplace.
Satisfying the Hungry Consumer Supplying a different take on the retail environment and e-commerce was a panel on the food and beverage industry. Food and beverage is a huge market in the U.S.: It’s about $1.5 trillion more or less split between groceries and prepared foods, according to moderator Eric Dzwonczyk, a managing director at AlixPartners. How are the players competing for “share of stomach,” he asked?
“If your business does not have a friction-free mobile experience, you’re really going to miss out.”– Christiane Pendarvis Freshness, especially in produce, is key in Jessica Adelman’s business: she is a group VP for corporate affairs for Kroger, one of the country’s largest supermarket chains. “We spend a lot of time thinking about freshness because that’s why people typically come into the grocery store. It’s the numberone driver.” Another priority for the company, she said, is minimizing waste. Adelman described Kroger’s partnership with Ocado, a U.K. retail solution that uses robotic pickers and warehouses. She stated that Ocado achieves less than 1% food waste on its system. Zak Normandin, the founder and CEO of Iris Nova (a beverage startup that owns the Dirty Lemon brand), cited the eye-opening statistic that by 2023, 70% of millennials will be buying all their groceries online. He said that as hard as bigger chains try to fight the trend, the format is definitely changing, and the way we’ve experienced grocery stores historically — walking up and down the aisles with our mom or dad when we were kids — is not the way we will experience them in the future. Discussing the take-out and delivery space was Jonathan Zabusky, a managing partner of Bounce Ventures and former president of GrubHub. He pointed out that while early services like GrubHub were competing against a paper menu and a phone call, today there is a proliferation of food delivery services. “Now you’re seeing a bunch of companies doing the same thing,” he said. “The question is, how do you bring a better differentiated consumer experience?”
In defence of influencers By Ed East
Following the censuring of an influencer for Pretty Little Thing for posting about the brand outside of an advertising context, Billion Dollar Boy’s Ed East explores where the rules suggest some murky standards. It took just eight days for the first Influencer Marketing story of the year to hit the news pages. 2020 starting where 2019 left off, with a bombardment of negativity from the traditional media. This time Molly Mae Hague, former Love Island runner up (and now fully-fledged macro influencer with 3.6 million followers) was forced to take a post down because the ASA ruled it breached the CAP Code. But did it? There is a lot left open to interpretation. In the offending post she tagged the image with the fashion brand PrettyLittleThing, for which she is an ambassador. However, both Hague and the brand say that this particular post was outside of her contractual obligations and was, in fact, a personal post demonstrating her genuine interest in the brand’s clothing. And, when you look at the ASA’s own guidance about when to label social media posts with #Ad, it arguably could be seen to contradict the Molly-Mae decision. If an influencer has a) not received any money for a specific post, b) not been told to say specific things about the brand c) the brand doesn’t have final approval over it and d) the brand has not stipulated any specific posting dates, then the ASA guidelines
suggest is not a #ad, but rather editorial or sponsored content. The decision feels like a poor precedent to set that will only lead to more grey areas, confusion about where the line is actually drawn and a strengthening of the “us and them mentality” that is growing. It also raises a host of difficult questions. What if the influencer used to be sponsored by the brand? Does that mean they have to announce this every time they post? What if the influencer is being sponsored, but bought something from the brand themselves? Do they now have to declare ‘bought with own money’? The decision is also another indicator of the inherent hypocrisy in the treatment of Influencer Marketing compared to other more established areas of the media. If influencers can’t wear clothes in their organic content from brands they do partnerships with, do footballers, for example, now have to declare #ad in all of their content where their sponsor’s logo appears? Or will celebrities such as Game of Throne’s Emilia Clarke and Richard Madden have to declare when they post content such as the below? • Emilia Clarke and Clinique
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• Richard Madden and Land Rover • Cara Delevingne and Puma And then, what about the resulting pressure on the client? How can a brand stay responsible for what an influencer posts outside of a contract? Every time this happens the brand gets dragged into the story, which is not going to help the relationship. There are more examples of this hypocrisy across other areas of advertising. Take the regulations around product placement - the PP that appears on the corner of TV programmes at the beginning, before the break and at the end of every TV programme where product placement appears. Never seen them? No, neither have many viewers. Research from TRP Surveys into just this issue found that 8 out of 10 people don’t know what the product placement symbol is, and only 27% have even noticed it. But where are the constant negative stories about product placement? Or the updates to the regs? Nowhere to be seen. Or take this further and look at the film industry. Product placement is absolutely rampant and the audience is never forewarned about this, even when it’s hugely jarring to the film. Remember James Bond driving a Ford Focus in Casino Royale?
And a number of focus groups we ran last year back this up. Instagram users not only understand the business behind influencer posts, but also don’t take what they see at face value. The majority of them said they only use what they see on an influencer’s posts as a starting point. They usually follow this up by doing their own research into the product on third party sources - seeking out their own verification and reviews. Finally, consumers understand the context of posts. Followers of Molly Mae Hague will know she’s a PrettyLittleThing ambassador and treat her posts accordingly. What is needed to fix this up, is a little more common sense and a lot more collaboration. Influencer marketing and the ASA actually have the same goal: trust. If influencers don’t have trust and transparency with their followers then they lose their followers, their currency, their value add, and ultimately their jobs. Looking to the future, it’s content and conversations that matter. Regulations can help industries, see food standards as an example. If food regulations didn’t force brands to have strict standards, their food would be terrible, they’d cut corners to save a few pounds, then lose the brand trust in the consumer and then lose the consumer. Heinz
How much product placement will appear in the upcoming instalment, No Time To Die? I’m guessing a lot. When looking at it like this, you could be forgiven for thinking that the ASA regulations make the assumption that consumers don’t fully understand the medium and what constitutes an #ad or organic content. Which could absolutely not be further from the truth. The majority of humans have been watching and absorbing ads since their eyes could focus. On Instagram, the majority of users are Gen Z and Millenials (figures from Hootsuite show that 71% of Instagram users are aged between 13 and 34). Most of these individuals have been seeing digital ads and engaging with social content since they could form a cogent thought.
pushed for higher food regulations precisely because they had high standards and they knew the new rules would force their cheap copycats out of business. So we need the ASA to also tell us what influencer marketers are doing right too, to support the good guys (the vast majority) and come out in defence of influencers, so we can all grow the industry together in the right way.
Marketing the Cosmic Crisp: Will Consumers Bite? By Knowledge@Wharton
For apple aficionados who share in the opinion that the Red Delicious can “rot in hell,” as one Vice.com columnist wrote in an expletive-laden diatribe on the mealy fruit, there’s a new variety that promises to tickle the taste buds. The Cosmic Crisp is an intriguing hybrid of the popular Honeycrisp and Enterprise varieties that should find its way into some grocery stores by fall. A large, juicy apple with a firm texture, the Cosmic Crisp is the result of more than 20 years of research by Washington
State University’s fruit-breeding program to produce better apples for both consumers and farmers. What’s remarkable about the new apple is that it can stay in storage up to a year without losing flavor or texture. “We have done a lot of evaluation, and we are really excited to get it out there for consumers this year,” said Kate Evans, horticulture professor at WSU and lead scientist on the Cosmic Crisp, which was initially developed by WSU emeritus professor Bruce Barritt. “How nice is it to be able to have
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some confidence that the piece of fruit that you purchase in May is equally edible as the piece of fruit that you purchased in November.” The science behind creating hybrid apples is well-established, but it takes time to get it right. Enough trees have to grow to maturity to bear fruit, and enough fruit has to be harvested for sampling, storage and other tests. And then there’s the name. “You can imagine naming an apple — it is not an easy thing to do. I think actually it’s worse than naming your children because people are a lot more vocal when they don’t like it,” joked Evans, who spoke about the Cosmic Crisp during a segment of the Knowledge@Wharton radio show on Sirius XM. (Listen to the podcast at the top of this page). The university used focus groups to taste-test the apple and asked participants what they would call it. One person said the lenticels, or white spots on the apple skin, reminded them of the cosmos. The “crisp” part of the name is a bit more obvious and draws on the consumer popularity of the Honeycrisp, Evans said. Produce marketing firm Proprietary Variety Management (PVM) will oversee the Cosmic Crisp launch campaign with a $10 million-plus budget, calling it the “largest consumer launch in apple history,” according to The Shelby Report.
for it. It is not a meaningless proliferation of variety, as we sometimes see in some categories.” Evans hopes consumers will embrace the Cosmic Crisp because there’s a lot riding on its success. Millions of pounds of apples are thrown away each year along various points in the supply chain, and consumers have grown wary of varieties, like the Red Delicious, that look beautiful on the outside but may taste spongy and flavorless on the inside. The long storage life of the Cosmic Crisp means consumers won’t have to forgo flavor, growers won’t have to worry so much about sell dates, and less food will be wasted. “With any industry, new products are really the lifeblood. They keep things moving on. They give growers opportunities to change out and to try perhaps new orchard systems, new management systems,” Evans said. “We want growers to be sustainable, and in order for them to be sustainable they’ve got to make money. A new variety, some new interest, hopefully getting more consumers to eat the apple — we want to just boost returns back to growers.” The project funding came from apple growers through the Washington Tree Fruit Research Commission, which is why the patented Cosmic Crisp will be sold first in its home state
Novelty and Familiarity
before being more widely distributed. Evans said it’s only
Wharton marketing professor Cait Lamberton, who joined Evans for the radio segment, gives the researchers top marks in naming the fruit. The choice of words connects apple consumers from the old product to the new, and from the known to the unknown.
investment.
“In a category like produce, where we all have our familiar favorites and we know what we expect to see, it’s hard to jump out. You have two different conflicting forces to deal with in marketing,” she said. “What they have done is make a really nice metaphorical jump for people. They’ve made a connection that allows people to accept novelty in a place where they expect familiarity, so I think it is a brilliant name.” The professors said people get attached to the kind of apples they like to eat, and some consumers will forsake all other varieties out of loyalty to the flavor they like best – be it Pink Lady, Fuji, Gala or even Granny Smith. That’s why it’s important not to underestimate the power of a name when marketing a new variety like Cosmic Crisp.
“It seems a bit bizarre, perhaps, to think of an apple as a piece of intellectual property, but it is.”–Kate Evans “What is nice about apples is they play a different role in your life in different cases,” Lamberton said. “One is the lunchbox apple, one is the fruit and cheese apple, one is the pie apple. There is room for all of this variety and there is a reason
fair for the state’s growers to get an initial return on their
“In a category like produce, where we all have our familiar favorites and we know what we expect to see, it’s hard to jump out.” –Cait Lamberton “It seems a bit bizarre, perhaps, to think of an apple as a piece of intellectual property, but it is,” she said. “In order to protect the intellectual property, which means they have some say in the future of what happens to that apple around the world, we’ve had to license it into different international territories.” The Cosmic Crisp has tested well in consumer trials, and Evans thinks it will be a hit just in time for fall. Lamberton agreed, saying she expects the consumer testing will be followed up by free in-store samples to entice buyers. “You’ve got the apple pies [at Christmas], and then January comes and you’ve got all of these people who just made resolutions to eat fewer candy bars and more apples,” she said. “When it is a new kind of apple, what you get is this nice combination between, ‘Yeah, it’s healthy so I can feel good about it,’ but it’s also this new cool thing, so it feels special.”
Book,
&
Line
The Ten Principles Behind Great Customer Experiences (Financial Times Series) By Matt Watkinson
Sinker Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (3rd Edition) (Voices That Matter) 3rd Edition
This book covers ten principles you can use to make real world improvements to your customers’ experiences, whatever your business does and whoever you are. For managers, leaders and those starting a new business, the book shows that making improvements customers will appreciate doesn’t need to be complicated or cost a fortune.
By Steve Krug
Selfie Made: Your Ultimate Guide to Social Media Stardom By Meridith Valiando Rojas
Get Scrappy: Smarter Digital Marketing for Businesses Big and Small
Selfie Made is a one-of-a-kind guide to creating a digital identity, finding an audience, and building a powerful brand your own! on the Internet. Whether you want to be in front of or behind the camera, produce click-worthy content or start your own business, this book is the place to begin. Written by Meridith Valiando Rojas, the hugely successful (and super friendly IRL) founder of DigiTour who has worked with every major star from YouTube to Musical.
By Nick Westergaard It’s an exciting time to be in marketing, with an array of equalizing platforms from the Internet to social media to content marketing, that have reset the playing field for businesses large and small. Yet, it’s also a challenging time, with much work to do and an ever-changing array of platforms, features, and networks to master--all on tighter budgets than ever before. Don’t get discouraged, get scrappy!
Change Anything: The New Science of Personal Success
Everybody Writes: Your Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content
By Kerry Patterson A stunning new approach to how individuals can not only change their lives for the better in the workplace, but also their lives away from the office, including (but not limited to) finding ways to improve one’s working relationship with others, one’s overall health, outlook on life, and so on.
The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business By Charles Duhigg In The Power of Habit, award-winning business reporter Charles Duhigg takes us to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed. Distilling vast amounts of information into engrossing narratives that take us from the boardrooms of Procter & Gamble to the sidelines of the NFL to the front lines of the civil rights movement...
Since Don’t Make Me Think was first published in 2000, hundreds of thousands of Web designers and developers have relied on usability guru Steve Krug’s guide to help them understand the principles of intuitive navigation and information design. Witty, commonsensical, and eminently practical, it’s one of the best-loved and most recommended books on the subject.
By Ann Handley Everybody Writes is a go-to guide to attracting and retaining customers through stellar online communication, because in our content-driven world, every one of us is, in fact, a writer. If you have a web site, you are a publisher. If you are on social media, you are in marketing. And that means that we are all relying on our words to carry our marketing messages. We are all writers.
Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less By Greg McKeown The Way of the Essentialist isn’t about getting more done in less time. It’s about getting only the right things done. It is not a time management strategy, or a productivity technique. It is a systematic discipline for discerning what is absolutely essential, then eliminating everything that is not, so we can make the highest possible contribution towards the things that really matter.
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Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life
The Entrepreneur Roller Coaster: Why Now Is the Time to #JoinTheRide
By Susan David
By Darren Hardy
Emotional agility is a revolutionary, science-based approach that allows us to navigate life’s twists and turns with self-acceptance, clear-sightedness, and an open mind. Renowned psychologist Susan David developed this concept after studying emotions, happiness, and achievement for more than twenty years.
The Entrepreneur Roller Coaster: Why Now Is The Time To #JoinTheRide, will prepare you for the wild ride of entrepreneurship. It will warn you (of forthcoming fears, doubts, and the selfdefeating conditioning of your upbringing and past), inoculate you (from the naysayers, dreamstealers, and pains of rejection and failure), and guide you...
Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time Kindle Edition
Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike
By Brian Tracy The legendary Eat That Frog! (more than 1.5 million copies sold worldwide and translated into 42 languages) will change your life. There just isn’t enough time for everything on our “To Do” list—and there never will be. Successful people don’t try to do everything. They learn to focus on the most important tasks and make sure they get done.
Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events By Robert J. Shiller
By Phil Knight Bill Gates named Shoe Dog one of his five favorite books of 2016 and called it “an amazing tale, a refreshingly honest reminder of what the path to business success really looks like. It’s a messy, perilous, and chaotic journey, riddled with mistakes, endless struggles, and sacrifice. Phil Knight opens up in ways few CEOs are willing to do.”
Stories That Stick: How Storytelling Can Captivate Customers, Influence Audiences, and Transform Your Business
In this groundbreaking book, Nobel Prize–winning economist and New York Times bestselling author Robert Shiller offers a new way to think about the economy and economic change. Using a rich array of historical examples and data, Shiller argues that studying popular stories that affect individual and collective economic behavior...
By Kindra Hall
Overthrow: 10 ways to tell a challenger story Kindle Edition
The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds
By Mark Holden, Malcolm Devoy, Adam Morgan
By Michael Lewis
Anyone interested in challengers is interested in compression: how do you make a story utterly compelling in a very short space of time? And one of the reasons that the concept of the ‘challenger brand’ has caught on, you might argue, is that it itself does just that: within just two words you surely have all the ingredients of an engaging story – conflict, a protagonist and an adversary, an anticipation of a future event...
Storytelling can do everything-from helping leaders better communicate to motivating sales teams and winning customers away from competitors. In Stories That Stick, Kindra Hall, professional storyteller and nationally-known speaker, reveals the four unique stories you can use to differentiate, captivate, and elevate.
Forty years ago, Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky wrote a series of breathtakingly original papers that invented the field of behavioral economics. Led to a new approach to government regulation, and made much of Michael Lewis’s own work possible. In The Undoing Project, Lewis shows how their Nobel Prize–winning theory of the mind altered our perception of reality.