BrandKnew March 2020

Branding matters. Because branding matters.

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03.20#89

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Dear Friends: As the corona virus gets omni, sending trade and business worldwide into a tizzy, we put our best foot forward and continue the march towards offering distilled compendium of the finest resources from the world of marketing, branding, digital, advertising, technology etc. Brands have begun to acknowledge the power of community as a competitive advantage as outlined in our article on the same subject.

We also delve into how AI helps search engines achieve high efficacies aside from talking about how AI facilitates contextual targeting(the new kid on the block). Status quo and states of impasse are synonymous and in this fast changing landscape let us understand that brands that make iconic moves, live to tell a stellar tale. Read more about it here. One of my personal favourites in this edition of BrandKnew is the feature titled ‘Marketers do it Vertically, Consumers do it Horizontally‘, it’s an El Classico, if one could use that analogy from European football. There are great learning on social strategies adopted by big brands on Facebook and Twitter that has been articulated here. You will find the learnings from it worthwhile.

There is a feeling amongst aware marketers and brand owners(yours truly included) that the Ad Agency RFP Process should be accorded a ‘ RIP ‘ status. Understand more on that in this issue. We also talk about the new 4Ps of marketing wherein personalisation is one strong pillar to consider(the other three being Permission, Privacy, Performance) and how omni channel personalisation is the future of marketing. For far too long, brands have held onto the inside out perspective.

It’s time to reverse that. Engage with it here in this edition.

As is always the case, there is ample more to feed on, so go ahead and build up an appetite. Till the next, my very best.

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Managing Editor: Suresh Dinakaran Creative Head/Director Operations: Pravin Ahir Magazine Concept & Design/ New Media Specialist: Mufaddal Joher Business Development Director: Rishi Mohan Brand Engagement and Outreach Specialist: Anuva Madan Country Head India: Rohit Unni Research & Analysis: Meeta Pendse Country Head, Australia: Norbert D’Souza Country Head, UK: Sagar Patil Performance Marketing Architect: Ryan Govindan Video Content Specialist: Mikhaela Cena Content Development Specialist: Abijith Pradeep Trend & Market Intelligence: Simran Thanwani Revenue Generation Specialist: Nitin Kumar

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CONTENTS Why Making ‘Iconic Moves’ Sustains Brands When Community Becomes Your Competitive Advantage Why AI means the return of contextual targeting How Speech Delivery Speed Impacts Audio Ads Why Brands Need To Escape The Inside-Out Perspective 5 Smart Cities Lessons from CES 2020 Why Omni-Channel Personalization Is The Future Of Marketing A Better Way To Map Brand Strategy When Big Brands Fall, Big Dollars Follow Loyalty Lasts If The Customer Comes First Markets Do It Vertically. Consumers Do It Horizontally Veteran Cmo Jeanniey Mullen On The Four Cmo Types And Why She’s A Hybrid Eight Tips For Building, Maintaining, And Leveraging Your Professional Relationships 8 Considerations When Selecting An Ai Marketing Vendor Client Thoughts On The Advertising Agency Rfp Process ‘Misbehaving’: When Psychology Meets Economics How Search Engines Use Artificial Intelligence Sweeping Away Sludge: How Consumers And Firms Can Find A Barrier-Free Path Social Ad Strategies From The Top Brands On Facebook And Twitter Durex Rebrands With Flat Logo And “Sex Positive” Campaign Netflix, the New York Times & the Evils of Advertising Book, Line & Sinker

Why making ‘iconic moves’ sustains brands

By WARC Staff

It’s hard to build a lasting brand, harder still to make the transformative decisions that mean it remains well placed to stay relevant to consumers – but those are the ones that are more likely to endure through the decades, according to the CEO of Interbrand.

Daniel Binns has observed the comings and goings on the annual Interbrand Best Global Brands rankings and at the recent Mediatel Future of Brands conference in London he set out some lessons that can be learned from the 37 brands that have been ever-present.

“There’s lots to be learned from what has been successful,” he said. “What successful brands are doing is making these transformative changes – bold moves – that completely reframe how a customer sees the category.

“That is what we can learn from the last five to ten years of success from these best global brands.” (For more, read WARC’s report: How the world’s most successful brands stay at the top.)

Brands which build enduring growth view the status quo through the lens of human truth, experiences and economics,

Binns explained.

And those brands which have managed to stay near the top of Interbrand’s annual list – such as Apple, Amazon, Disney and McDonald’s – have embraced a strategy of constant innovation and transformation to stay relevant to consumers.

“If brands are stories, iconic moves are the chapters in those stories,” he said.

“It used to be possible if you just renovated the core of your business and your brand, that you would be able to keep close to meeting customer expectations,” he continued.

“What we’re finding now is that [if] you just renovate the core over time, [the brand] just gets further and further away from them” – hence the need for a revolutionary rather than an evolutionary approach to change.

The brands that do this “physically alter the competitive landscape and are iconic because they’re exciting,” Binns said. “[These brands] capture the imagination of customers and get people to think about a category in a very different way.”

When Community Becomes Your Competitive Advantage

By Jeffrey BussgangJono Bacon

We’ve seen a precipitous decline in participation in civic organizations in recent years; membership numbers are down for religious groups, labor organizations and nonprofits. A cynic could interpret these trends as a sign that we have all become digital hermits, with our noses buried in our highly personalized screens. The reality is that powerful communities are not just alive and well but also booming.

They just look different than they did 50—even 20—years ago. They are organized around businesses and brands and providing profound opportunities for companies around the world.

Take Salesforce for example. While you might think its $140 billion valuation is due purely to its innovation of software delivered on demand through the cloud, it has also created a community of nearly 2 million members who support each other, organize events, produce content, and are a critical part of its global operations. This community is an international network of minds, talent, and time, all supporting the success of Salesforce. The company’s annual “Dreamforce” conference, which attracts nearly 200,000 acolytes to San Francisco each year, represents a mecca for its ecosystem to convene, build relationships, and advance its corporate agenda.

Other examples include Harley Davidson, which has created more than 1,400 local chapters around the world for enthusiasts to get together in person and discuss their bikes; Fitbit, which has a community of more than 25 million

members, who share and refine their exercise regimes; and HITRECORD, which has brought more than 750,000 artists, writers, and filmmakers together to collaborate on productions, many of which have shown at Sundance. The list goes on.

While communities generate tangible value for businesses — such as content, events, online advocacy and marketing, technology production, customer support, and education — it is the intangible value that members derive from the experience that makes these environments truly “sticky.”

Human beings are fundamentally social animals. Behavioral economics and psychological research have taught us that we fundamentally crave a sense of connectedness, belonging, mission, and meaning, particularly when performing our work. Theresa Amabile’s The Progress Principle and Daniel Pink’s Drive both demonstrated that making progress towards a shared mission is the most motivating force a professional can feel. Communities deliver these benefits, creating a sense of shared accountability and a set of values while preserving individual autonomy.

A Superior Business Model If a company can transition from simply delivering a product to building a community, it can unlock extraordinary competitive advantages and both create and support a superior business model. Specifically: Enthusiastic members help acquire new members, resulting

in lower customer acquisition costs and a tight viral loop.

Members are loath to abandon the community, resulting in increased retention and therefore improved lifetime value.

Members support one another, resulting in high gross margins due to a lower cost of service.

The result of this are very real network effects: as engagement grows, the community gets smarter, faster to respond, more globally available, and generates more value.

Codecademy is another example of a company that has figured out how to use community to support its business model. Since the company was founded nine years ago, more than 50 million people have taken one of its courses.

Beyond its rich catalog of interactive educational content, the secret to Codecademy’s success has been its ability to link learners who contribute to the catalog and collaborate to improve their skills. Users of Codecademy Pro (the company’s paid offering) have access to a Slack group so they can meet, mingle and share best practices with others and gain access to events with industry professionals and peers. More advanced learners mentor the novices. This rich learning environment generates a network effect in the business model for a company that might not inherently have one.

A Sea Change Is Happening Why is this happening now? One key reason is that technologybased communication platforms are more commoditized and accessible than ever before, building a rapidly growing addressable audience.

We now have multiple generations of people who have grown up with technology and especially mobile phones and social media as part of their day-to-day lives.

Global smartphone penetration is estimated to reach 45% in 2020, thus nearly one out of every two humans on the planet has the capacity to engage socially with others online.

With the ground seeded, many cheap, scalable tools for building communities both digitally and locally have been developed. These include Discourse, Slack, GitHub, Meetup. com, and WordPress, all of which m a k e it practically effortless to convene and engage like-minded individuals and, as a result, are increasingly popular.

Consumers today also expect different relationships with brands. They don’t just want a customer support email address and a newsletter; they want deeper interaction with the company and fellow buyers of the product or service. It should be no surprise that in a recent survey, nearly 80% of

startup founders reported that building a community of users was important to their business, with 28% describing it as their competitive moat and critical to their success. The top five brands in 2019 — Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook — have all invested significantly in digital and in-person community engagement across their various product portfolios.

Seven Success Patterns in Community Building Motivated by the allure of a superior business model, accessible tools, and an eager and available audience, any company can build a tribe. But this is both a technological and cultural challenge. It’s not enough to set up a platform.

You also need to create an environment that incentivizes the behavior you want to see, exposes the value generated, and highlights and rewards great participation.

Successful communities have seven key elements: 1. A shared purpose and values. As former Instagram executive Bailey Richardson puts it, the community must be able to answer the question “Why are we coming together?”

2. Simple, easily accessible value consumption. Prospective and existing members can easily see what they’re getting: support, events, documentation, the ability to download and use technology, etc. This value is not hidden or buried, it is clearly organized and available.

3 .

S i m p l e , easily navigable value creation. Members can easily create new value for others in the group to consume. This contribution process is (a) crisply defined, (b) simple and intuitive, and (c) provides almostimmediate gratification.

4. Clearly defined incentives and rewards. Quality contributions (e.g. content, support, technology, etc.) and community-centric behavior (e.g. mentoring, leadership, and growth) are acknowledged and applauded to build a sense of belonging, unity, and satisfaction.

5. Carefully crafted accountability. There is a clearly defined, objective peer review and workflow — for example, reviewing content, code, and events. This doesn’t just produce better,

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more diverse results, it also increases collaboration and skills development.

6. Healthy, diverse participation driven by good leadership.

When you are intentional about diversity and good conduct and have leaders who embody and empower these important principles, you reduce toxicity and increase value.

7.

Open, objective, governance and evolution.

There is clear, objective governance, and community members can play an active role in reshaping its structure and operational dynamics

those evaluations. This process is an evolutionary one, where your cross-functional team should repeatedly ask questions about the results they see and hypothesize changes to drive improvements. These changes are then delivered as a series of small experiments that will both move the needle and build internal experience.

F

o

r

companies building a community initiative, the areas you track should be: 1. Community Consumption and Creation.

This means tracking active participation and the value that members consume and produce. For example, measuring community traffic, sign-ups, individual contributions (e.g. answering questions, running events, improving content), and other areas.

together, giving them “skin in the game� and, thus, a sense of ownership and responsibility.

Chief is an interesting case study of an emerging community seeking to embody these patterns of success. The company is a private network designed to support exceptional professional women with a core set of services such as coaching, peer learning and network building. Since its launch in January 2019, the company has grown rapidly and has more than 5,000 names on its wait-list. Value consumption (advice to advance your career) and value creation (peer-to-peer coaching) are obvious and clear, as is the healthy, diverse participation of community members that feel a sense of mutual accountability for their individual and collective success. As the company scales to cities throughout the United States, its community presents a formidable competitive moat, organized around the mission of professional advancement and support for female executives who are members.

Measuring Success While there is no silver bullet for building a community, success is delivered by tracking a crisp, focused set of metrics and regularly evaluating and making adjustments based on

2. Delivery and Execution. This means looking at how well your company is building community strategy, estimating work, and executing effectively. This is important to ensure planning and execution are aligned and avoid spinning your wheels.

3. Organizational Experience. This involves following the incubation and evolution of community skills and expertise in your business (e.g. reading and reacting to data, mentoring, moderation, conflict resolution, building and delivering incentives, etc.). This is important to ensure the company is what it needs to foster and grow the community, especially as it scales up.

We are in the early stages of truly harnessing the potential of carefully crafted, productive communities. Done well, and when intentionally woven into the fabric of the business, communities can offer a sustainable competitive advantage and drive brand awareness, value production, and therefore overall commercial valuation (oh, and delivering a worldclass, personal, gratifying member experience.)

The future of business is a more open, connected, engaging one, and communities are going to change the nature of how we interact with brands, products, and other people.

Why AI means the return of contextual targeting

By WARC Staff

The slow death of the third-party cookie means that contextual targeting will become increasingly important – and marketers should use the insights they generate from current cookie data to inform their future contextual strategies, an industry specialist advises.

In a WARC Best Practice paper, Ben Plomion, Chief Growth Officer at media and tech company GumGum, explains that contextual targeting is making a comeback, as brands use it to find new ways to reach audiences, and publishers use it to communicate the value of their inventory.

All this is taking place, he says, “at a moment when transformation is not only welcome, but necessary”.

That’s because privacy legislation is forcing publishers and advertisers to develop digital advertising strategies and technologies that are not dependent on user tracking and third-party user data sources. And platforms like mobile and OTT have never been friendly to audience-tracking through cookies in any case.

“Contextual is one strategy for targeting in an increasingly cookie-less world, and, thanks to advances in machine learning and other technologies that make large scale content analysis possible, it is perhaps the ripest for the picking,” Plomion states.

The notion of contextual advertising – reaching relevant audiences by serving advertising either a) adjacent to content

that is product and/or brand-relevant or b) adjacent to content customarily consumed by a target audience – is hardly new, although it’s been overtaken during the past decade by the rapid rise of programmatic and cookie-based targeting.

During that time, however, context has continued to quietly evolve in the background, thanks to technological advances and the development of industry standards for contextual categorization.

Plomion cites the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Content Taxonomy (1.0 in 2015, 2.0 in 2017), which works in conjunction with its OpenRTB protocol to give providers the ability to target on context and audience simultaneously within a programmatic bidding environment.

Today, he says, contextual targeting capabilities are advanced because AI and other technology can be used to: • discern web page sentiment • understand the nuance of language • ascertain the content and tone of images and video • automatically configure ad creative to complement context That means that advertisers can begin deploying contextual targeting techniques in conjunction with audience targeting to maximize the value of the ad market today, while preparing for tomorrow.

HOW SPEECH DELIVERY SPEED IMPACTS AUDIO ADS

By Warc Team

Audio ads would benefit from slowing down the delivery of speech instead of attempting to fit in as much information as possible at a rapid rate, according to a paper in the Journal of Advertising Research (JAR).

“The common strategy of using fast speech style to convey information in a short period should be avoided if the goal is for listeners to understand and better remember the information,” the study recommended.

Emma Rodero, from the UPF Barcelona School of Management, addressed this subject in a study entitled,

“A message delivered at a moderate pace of 180 words per minute should not increase excessively the length of the commercial or, therefore, the economic costs, because this timing is faster than normal.”

Do your ads talk too fast to your audio audience? How speech rates of audio commercials influence cognitive and physiological outcomes.

A core insight from the study was that for audio ads the “optimal timing is about 180 words per minute, a commercial delivered at a moderate dynamic pace (a little bit faster than normal)” for the industry.

“Packing in too much complex information, delivered quickly in a short space of time (a common trend in audio advertising), is not an effective strategy if the goal is to move consumers to the product,” Rodero’s paper added.

In reaching this conclusion, some 51 participants listened to 12 audio ads to determine the impact of messages of various lengths and speech rates of 160 words per minute, 180 words per minute and 200 words per minute.

For ads of a longer duration, it was thus suggested that reducing the amount of information was preferable to increasing the speed at which material was delivered.

“A shorter commercial script, conveyed at an optimal speech rate of 180 words per minute, is more effective than a longer message delivered very fast,” the study said.

Elaborating on this topic, the study argued that the main goal for an ad is to make sure “a consumer pays attention to the commercial, has a good perception and attitude, is motivated, and recalls the information”.

And speech delivered at 180 words per minute, according to the study’s findings, allows the listener to follow the information easily. “The consequence is a more positive perception, more attention and arousal, and, last, more recognition and recall of information. The final goal of the commercial thus can be achieved.”

WHY BRANDS NEED TO ESCAPE THE INSIDE-OUT PERSPECTIVE

By Warc Team

Market research is often more focused on what matters to the business than what matters to the customer – and therein lies a major problem for many businesses that profess to be customer-led, according to an industry figure.

What’s needed, Sills argues, is a customer-led, immersive approach to proposition development, one that is “centred on experiencing outside-in perspectives in a way that has the impact needed to build belief”.

Questions like ‘would you recommend our service?’ are simply about shifting arguably irrelevant NPS scores; questions like ‘what stops you living the life you want to live?’ are rarely if ever asked.

That means belief in the way in the way customers really do perceive the world, however inconvenient it may be for the business, and belief that there are new and better ways of doing things that can be valuable to both customers and the organisation.

“A market researcher bringing inconvenient truths is more likely to find themselves in an argument about the methodology than an impassioned debate about innovative new ideas,” notes John Sills, partner and managing director at The Foundation, in a WARC Best Practice paper, Creating breakthrough propositions around inconvenient truths.

All that time and money expended every year on research reports, feedback surveys, and social media scanning usually ends up with leadership teams choosing safe options that everyone can agree with.

“They find reassurance in frenzied activity,” he observes.

“Expensive research reports confirming what is already known, week-long creative sprints without any customer input, and over-analysis of data that leads to ideas that customers say they want in a focus group but would never pay money for in the real world.”

Of course, none of this is achievable without involving customers throughout the entire process, from giving the initial insight to critiquing the final ideas.

It’s a notion that UK supermarket chain Morrisons took on board at a low point in 2014 when it was losing money and market share.

The inside view was that the brand’s vertically integrated food manufacturing made them distinctive, not something customers recognised.

But personal customer immersion – including the CEO speaking directly to customers – revealed that what they did value was Morrisons’ ability to make fresh food in-store, especially when they could see the evidence of it happening.

Building this into the supermarket’s proposition and marketing led to 14 consecutive quarters of like-for-like growth.

5 SMART CITIES LESSONS FROM CES 2020

By CES Team

The rapid growth of smart cities brings with it new concerns and corresponding solutions. Leaders from across industries came together at CES 2020 to discuss the potential and risks of building smart cities.

From detecting health issues for first responders to keeping communication open with the public during emergencies, improved technologies can help smart cities put their citizens first.

1. Smart city designs should be inclusive and equitable for citizens.

“How are cities thinking about what public safety could do with the technologies developed for general use, but that could be leveraged to reduce response times, increase safety and decrease fatalities?” said Dr. Jennifer Harder, senior director for product, First Responder Network Authority (FirstNet).

For example, mobile navigation systems that help those who are visually impaired navigate the London subway system using Bluetooth.

“If technology does not serve us and amplify our lives, then obviously we are not doing our jobs,” said Omar Khan, of Magic Leap, an augmented reality startup.

2. Intertwining new technologies with established — and even sometimes crumbling — infrastructures can offer renewable solutions for smarter futures.

Cities need to find a way to pool resources and fund the needs for city renovation, which can be identified through tech advances such as AI and 5G. As an example, Karen Lightman, executive director of Metro21 – Smart Cities Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, said, “We’re using artificial intelligence as a way of predicting the likelihood of landslides so that investments can be made in infrastructures.”

3. Public safety needs to be a priority for smart city innovation.

4. City officials need to have a data-centric view of cybersecurity and develop multifaceted security solutions.

As cities become smarter and more connected, they are also becoming more vulnerable to cyberattack.

“We don’t want to waste time. We love those gadgets that make life easier and more efficient,” said Ami Dotan, CEO of Karamba Security. “But v comes with a huge risk.”

5. Governments must set distinct goals for their private partners to further develop innovative smart cities solutions.

Nonprofit organizations can also play a role in mediating between public and private sectors and attracting attention to prominent issues.

“We really have been extraordinarily successful in having those individualized [goals] across various cities and agencies, because not everyone is going to need the same thing,” said Prashanthi Raman, director of public policy at Lyft.

Why Omni-channel Personalization Is the Future of Marketing

By Wharton Staff

Knowledge@Wharton: Last year, McKinsey published a report that said advances in technology, data and analytics will soon allow marketers to create more personal and “human” experiences across moments, channels and buying stages. When you think about what’s happening in the world of martech or technology-driven marketing, how far has the promise of personalization been realized?

Rajesh Jain: I think we are at the early stages. The end game is omni-channel personalization and it will take us some time to get there. The drivers are that everyone has devices — and whether it’s a computer or a mobile phone, these devices are connected. There’s a lot of data that these devices are generating. Every click that you do on a site, every action that you take on an app, is being recorded somewhere.

This is helping lay the foundation for digital customers and digital companies. The disruption in the world of marketing has been brought about not by traditional companies but by digital-first companies — either mobile-first or app-first companies.

There is also the world of ad-tech, where companies use Google, Facebook, etc., for customer acquisition. My belief is that as we go along, budgets will shift from adtech to martech. Adtech is about acquisition. Martech is about customer engagement, customer retention, development, and maximizing customer lifetime value. There are only so many customers you can acquire in the world. You also have to maximize value from each of these customers. So that’s the first point — that budgets will shift.

The second issue is that in doing so, companies are going to recognize that not all customers are equal. The work being done by Wharton’s Peter Fader around customer centricity and the best customers is critical. You need to focus on a

certain set of customers who are your best customers, who have the largest lifetime value. For me, the “best customers” are those who spend more, stay longer and also spread your message more. They have the greatest lifetime value, so you want to concentrate on them.

How do you do that? That is where martech comes in. What these customers want is omni-channel personalization — whether they interact via a website, an app, email, SMS, instore and so on. They want to be treated uniquely. That’s where brands can use the entire data stream, those digital footprints that their customers are leaving. You can use machine learning and algorithms to predict what future action the customer is likely to take, what is the next best action the customer should be prodded towards. That’s the world of personalization that is coming up.

“Every click that you do on a site, every action that you take on an app, is being recorded somewhere. This is helping lay the foundation for digital customers and digital companies.”

Knowledge@Wharton: There is a lot of buzz about artificial intelligence and related technologies. Do you see AI starting to make an impact on marketing and building customer engagement? Where do you see the greatest promise and potential in redefining customer journeys?

Jain: The potential in terms of machine learning in martech will be around the next best action – for example, using historical data to predict what the customer is likely to do

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25 next. In other words, what is the next best action that is most beneficial from a company’s standpoint? It could be just a marketing message, but then how do you send the message?

What content should be sent out? What is the right time to send the message out?

At Netcore, for example, when we send out emails to our customers, we use machine learning to optimize the send time. Machine learning figures out when you open your emails. The likelihood that you will act on an email is higher if the marketing message from the brand comes to you in that window when you are likely to see emails. This is different for every user. Humans cannot do this at scale, but machines can. Machines tend to learn. If you change your behavior, it learns from what you are doing — be it subject line optimization or the right channel to interact with you.

All of us have a preference. Some prefer emails while others may like app notifications.

The whole objective is to create a unique experience for each customer. And that, in the customer journeys, can only be done at scale if it’s fully automated. It can either be rulebased, which becomes somewhat limiting as we go ahead, or machine learning-based, which becomes better every day.

Knowledge@Wharton: What are some of the most interesting developments you’ve seen in the use of technology and data and analytics for marketing, and what is still a distant dream?

Jain: The ability for a brand to communicate at scale with a large customer base is something that was not there earlier.

Brands knew very little about their customers. Now, because of digital devices, there’s a unique handle. There’s an email id or a mobile number that’s typically available for clients.

That becomes the way they can start learning a lot more about the customer. As devices become more common, the costs for things like processing compute power, the computational complexity, have dropped dramatically. Now it becomes possible to do this at scale.

“The potential in terms of machine learning in martech will be around ‘next best action’.”

What should be the goal of marketing? What would I as a CMO love to do? I’d love to maximize the lifetime value of my customers, which means I need to identify from my current set, from my current cohort, who are my best customers. How can I get them to spend more? How can I engage with them more? Earlier, it was very difficult to do this. Every person was treated pretty much the same. The next question is: What are the characteristics of my best customers? How can I go out and acquire more such customers? A marketer now has the ability to almost craft the perfect company, the perfect organization, with a customer base of the best customers. It’s a very exciting world. I think we are still at the early stages of this world. Google and Facebook have transformed the world of customer acquisition through adtech — being able to pinpoint our needs and then get the right targeted ads delivered to us through multiple channels. The same, I believe, is going to happen in the world of martech, but this time it’s the brand engaging with the customer, creating

a direct relationship. That’s the opportunity for the future.

That’s how marketing is going to evolve into this omnichannel, personalization future.

Knowledge@Wharton: There has been a greater push to digitize physical spaces through AI-enabled tools such as facial recognition. At the same time, there has also been a backlash against facial recognition on the grounds that such technologies violate privacy. How will this debate play out?

Jain: You have to follow the money. For example, you walk into a store. The store has no idea whether you’re in the top 10 percentile or in the bottom 10 percentile of customers.

If you walk into a store and by doing face recognition you can get a differentiated experience — you get a shopping assistant to come and help you if you are in the top percentile — you will love that experience. You will not mind your face being recognized at places like this. Or take airline boarding.

Someone was telling me recently that in China, they recognize your face and then tell you exactly where your boarding gate is, which direction you need to go into. This is how a lot of these technologies will be used.

The question is, what are the limits on this? At a protest, is it right to use face recognition to identify people — there are cameras now everywhere — and then take targeted action against some of these protestors? Society will have to address these questions. They will need to have limits put on this. But in the world of marketing, as long as customers feel that they are benefiting from personalized experiences through the use of new technologies like facial recognition, I think these are inevitable.

Knowledge@Wharton: You referred to Peter Fader and his work on customer centricity and the need for companies to focus on their most profitable customers. To what extent do you see marketing companies doing this today? Could they be doing anything that they’re not doing today to attract and retain their best customers?

Jain: A lot of the focus today in companies tends to still be largely on customer acquisition, probably because those are the metrics that investors are asking for. It’s an arms race for new customer acquisition. Not much attention is being paid, I think, to the cost of new customer acquisition. And as long as startups, the unicorns [or companies valued at more than $1 billion] and others have easy access to money, it’s going to be a race for just acquiring new customers.

This needs to change. Investors and company management — the CFOs — need to start asking: “What is the worth of each of these customers? What is the lifetime value of each of these customers? Why are we acquiring customers that are likely to cause us to lose money?”

There is a book by Sunil Gupta from Harvard on driving digital strategy. One of the points he makes is the 20/200 rule.

Twenty percent of your customers account for 200% of your profits, which means there are probably a lot of customers who are actually causing you to lose money. That may not matter today, but at some point in time it will. Companies will start realizing that all customers are not equal and that they need to start analyzing their segments and figure out which customers they should go after. Which are the types of customers they need to attract and engage?

“As long as customers feel that they are benefiting from personalized experiences using new technologies like facial recognition, I think these are inevitable.”

Knowledge@Wharton: What are you and your colleagues in Netcore doing in martech? What lessons have you learned through your experiences that could benefit marketing executives in other companies?

Jain: Netcore is Asia’s largest email marketing and marketing automation platform. We have multiple products and hundreds of customers in India and Southeast Asia. Most of the largest companies across sectors — BFSI, e-commerce, travel, OTT platforms, app-based video-streaming platforms — use our products.

The way we’ve built our stack is that you start with multiple channels — email, SMS, app notifications, and so on. Brands can use our platform to send out messages across multiple channels. We also have a product called SmartTech, which lets brands automate these customer journeys. The whole idea is about intelligent communication and engagement that needs to get done, and this is where analytics and machine learning come into play.

The third aspect of what we do is personalization. In late 2019 we acquired a company called Boxx.ai, which does incredibly powerful, personalized experiences for customers.

It can give a 10% lift on revenue in multiple categories like e-commerce, travel, and OTT (over the top) media within a month. It analyzes customer data, showing you a different set of products and me a different set of products, because we are different. Just this action can help lift revenue for brands.

Our dream is to help companies manufacture best customers through intelligent automation, intelligent personalization, and intelligent communications.

Knowledge@Wharton: Netcore is headquartered in India, but in recent years you have been expanding in other parts of the world, including the U.S. Could you tell us about your global journey? Where are you doing your most innovative and instructive experiments?

Jain: We started as an Indian company more than 20 years ago. We have had a dominant position for many of our products in India. A few years ago, we decided that we needed to go beyond India. We first looked at Southeast Asia, and we’ve had good success there. Countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines and Vietnam are growing very rapidly.

Some of them have large populations with consumers interacting on mobile phone apps and mobile devices. Those markets have very similar characteristics to Indian customers.

Over the last year, we’ve commenced operations in the U.S. Our proposition to companies here is that we have a full stack solution. We are probably one of the few companies globally that can do communications, automation, and personalization in a single stack. In many cases, we also take up KPIs [key performance indicators] with the CMOs and their teams to ensure that outcomes are delivered. So it’s not just the use of technology. There are clear deliverables.

Knowledge@Wharton: What does your roadmap look

like for the next three to five years?

Jain: I’ll answer the question in two parts. From a technology standpoint, the way we’ve built out Netcore is essentially having the engineering in India. There are very strong engineering capabilities to build out the whole B2C martech stack. And that part continues. In the next three to five years, we see a lot of machine learning coming in to make the job of the marketer much simpler. For example, being able to automatically identify best customers, being able to suggest what communications should go to these customers.

Marketers are not doing many of these things at present.

The platforms are of course complex to use but over time machine learning will help make many of these tasks easier.

So that’s the first track. How do we transform marketing?

How can you ensure that you develop a powerful relationship with the customer and that increasingly, a greater number of your customers become “best customers?”

The second track is around how we’ve architected the company. The word I like to use is “profi-corn.” Many of the unicorns have been burning a lot of cash. I felt we needed something new, a new way to build companies, the way we have built Netcore over the last 20 years.

A profi-corn has four characteristics. It’s profitable. It is private. It’s bootstrapped — there is no external capital, which ensures that the focus is on employees and customers, and not investors. And it has a baseline valuation — let’s say $100 million. Unicorns have a billion-dollar valuation, but the founding team is probably left with less than 10% of it. So if it’s $100 million (for profi-corns), and the founding team and the employees own 100%, it’s almost the same thing.

At Netcore, we’ve always looked at profitable growth, focusing on both profits and growth. One without the other doesn’t work. The second is a long-term mindset. It’s what Simon Sinek in his new book calls the “infinite mindset.”

While you have to worry about what you’re going to do in the next quarter, in the next six months or year, there’s no finish line in business. It’s an infinite game that you are playing. So how do you think about the longer term?

And the third element is extreme employee centricity. At Netcore, we instituted ESOP – an employee stock option program — almost 10 to 12 years ago; today employees own some 25% of Netcore. With the profits we had accumulated through the years, we did a stock buy-back recently. The earliest employees — some are no longer with us — got 250 times return on their investment, on their stock. It gives us great joy that we can make this happen. Over time, I would like to list Netcore in the public markets. But for the next few years, the priority is to keep the profitability baseline and reinvest surplus earnings back into the company. It’s a great time to make the right bets for the next three to five years.

Keeping the foundation is critical — long-term thinking, profitable growth, and employee centricity.

“Profi-corns are sort of like unicorns – they are rare sightings.”

Knowledge@Wharton: The “profi-corn” is a great concept. Can India produce multi-billion-dollar global companies as, say, China has been, using the model of the profi-corn?

Jain: Profi-corns are sort of like unicorns – they are rare sightings. But I think there is a great opportunity for Indian companies to become large, multi-billion-dollar global organizations. The first generation was in IT services — companies like Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Wipro, HCL and many others. We are seeing a similar trend now in the world of SaaS, software as a service, cloud-based companies coming out of India and targeting customers in the U.S. For instance, Zoho, Freshworks, Chargebee, and CloudCherry. These companies are very successful at using new age marketing techniques in the B2B world, using lead generation from India through SDRs [sales development representatives], in-bound marketing, account-based marketing, and so on. With a small team of front-end account executives in the U.S. and product engineering in India, they are able to take on market leaders in the U.S. in different categories with aggressive price-value combinations.

Knowledge@Wharton: Many international publications in recent months have focused on the troubles of the Indian economy. What do you think India can do to counter the slow-down?

Jain: When you look back, it’s clear that the slowdown has happened because of multiple reasons. These include the banking crisis, demonetization, GST [goods and services tax], problems with the NBFCs [non-banking financial companies]. A lot of these things have come together and they have started impacting consumer spending in India. All the pillars of growth are now under threat.

About a year-and-a-half ago, I put together an idea called Dhan Vapasi, which means wealth return. This is perhaps the most powerful idea to counter what we are seeing in India. The idea has two parts. The first part is public asset monetization.

It is amazing to know that the Indian government controls assets worth $20 trillion. This is locked up in minerals, land, and public sector undertakings. When I say “land,” there are a lot of land parcels across the country in large cities, which are lying disused, unused, in many cases abused.

Public sector undertakings — where the government has no business being in — is still a very large and growing sector in India.

Our idea was that you can start monetizing all these assets… bring out all the idle land or idle assets into circulation. As we start generating money from these assets, the idea should

be to return it to the people. This is the people’s wealth. The government only controls these assets. It’s the people who are the owners. To counter the slowdown on the demand side, our proposal was that every Indian family can be given back Rs. 100,000 (approximately $1,400) every year. This effectively doubles the median income of a family in India. As they start spending, it starts the virtual cycle of consumption, manufacturing and job creation. I think if the government can do this it will put Indians on an irreversible path to prosperity.

Do it for 10, 20, 30 years — that’s the kind of wealth which is locked up in India. That’s how you can replicate the Chinese success. You can pull out a few hundred million people from poverty in the next 10 years.

Knowledge@Wharton: Assuming that this is done, and it allows India to put her citizens on the path to prosperity, as you said, who will take the lead in making this happen?

Jain: There are two parts. One, the current government is a natural first decision-maker. The current government and the bureaucrats need to think about this idea seriously and make it happen. We have done all the groundwork. We have created a Bill, which we have sent to all Members of Parliament. The second part is a bottom-up demand from people. Look at what’s happening right now — the handouts, the subsidies, and the welfare schemes are not really doing the job. They are not creating enough wealth. They are not creating enough jobs. They are not creating enough opportunities. They are stifling people’s futures. But that’s a harder problem. You’ve got to change mindsets. You’ve got to get them to understand the real problem. The fastest way is for people in power to realize that this is how we can put India on a fast track to prosperity.

Knowledge@Wharton: To end, let us return to the topic with which we began, the future of marketing. If you had a platform to address chief marketing officers and CEOs, what would you tell them about which areas they should pay the most attention to in the next few years?

Jain: Identify and engage with your best customers. That is the differentiated proposition that a company can create.

That is the way to create valuation for their own businesses and incredible value for customers via omni-channel personalization. You can’t deliver that to every customer of yours. So focus on your best customers and give them omnichannel personalization.

A Better Way to Map Brand Strategy

By Niraj Dawar and Charan K. Bagga

Marketers have always had to juggle two seemingly contradictory goals: making their brands distinctive and making them central in their category. Central brands, such as Coca-Cola in soft drinks and McDonald’s in fast food, are those that are most representative of their type. They’re the first ones to come to mind, and they serve as reference points for comparison. These brands shape category dynamics, including consumer preferences, pricing, and the pace and direction of innovation. Distinctive brands, such as Tesla in cars and Dos Equis in beer, stand out from the crowd and avoid direct competition with widely popular central brands.

Striking the right balance between centrality and distinctiveness is critical, because a company’s choices influence not just how the brand will be perceived, but how much of it will be sold and at what price—and, ultimately, how profitable it will be. And yet, marketers have lacked the tools needed to get this balance right. Traditionally, companies have analyzed brand positioning and business performance separately: To locate gaps in the market and gauge how people feel about their brands, marketers have used perceptual positioning maps, which typically represent consumers’ perceptions of brands or products on opposing dimensions, such as budget versus premium or spicy versus mild. To assess performance, they have used a different set of strategic tools that map or measure brands on yardsticks such as market share, growth rate, and profitability. In this article, we present a new approach called the centrality-distinctiveness (C-D) map, which to our knowledge is the first tool that allows companies to directly connect a brand’s position on a perceptual map with business outcomes such as sales and price. Using the

tool, managers can determine a desired market position, make resource allocation and brand strategy decisions, track performance against competitors over time, and evaluate strategy on the basis of results. In the process, they will find that centrality and distinctiveness need not be contradictory goals; companies may choose to pursue both—and benefit substantially.

Positioning and Performance Creating a C-D map of a brand category is a straightforward but labor-intensive process. A company begins by identifying the geographic market of interest (an entire country, a region, a single city) and the customer segments to be surveyed.

As we will discuss, a brand’s position on the map can vary dramatically depending on those variables. The company then conducts a survey to collect data on consumers’ perceptions of the brand’s centrality and distinctiveness (scored on a 0–10 scale). This data yields unique coordinates for each brand’s position on a 2×2 matrix. The map also captures market performance: The “bubble” for each brand is sized proportionally to its unit sales volume, price, or other metric. (See the exhibit “The Centrality-Distinctiveness Map.”) By focusing on centrality and distinctiveness—dimensions that, unlike narrow product characteristics, apply to brands in all categories—companies can make comparisons across categories and geographies. Where a brand falls on the map has implications for sales, pricing, risk, and profitability.

Marketers can also make important strategic assessments such as “This market is more crowded with distinctive brands than that one.”

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Two Case Studies

car sales and about 15% of beer sales.

Consider C-D maps for two brand categories, cars and beer in the U.S. market. (See the exhibit “C-D Maps for Cars and Beer.”) Brands in both are broadly distributed, showing that it’s possible to effectively compete across a wide range of positions—even, surprisingly, with brands that are neither central nor distinctive. Let’s look at each quadrant of the maps in detail.

In the upper-left quadrant are unconventional brands— those with unique characteristics that distinguish them from traditional products in the category. Think of Tesla, Mini, and the Smart car, each of which departs in some way from the standard view of a “car.” Among beers, Dos Equis and Stella are both unconventional in the U.S. market. The low share of sales of brands in this quadrant (about 2% to 4%) suggests, as you might expect, that this is a niche strategy.

Aspirational brands—those that fall into the upper-right quadrant—are highly differentiated but also have wide appeal. For cars, this quadrant accounts for a solid 30% of unit sales and contains powerhouse brands such as Mercedes and BMW. For beer, this quadrant accounts for the lion’s share of sales (62%) and includes strong performers such as Heineken and Sam Adams. These high-distinctiveness brands tend to command higher prices than brands that score low on this dimension.

Brands that have wide appeal but low distinctiveness fall into the lower-right quadrant. These mainstream brands tend to be the first that come to mind when consumers think of the category. Their lack of distinctiveness reduces their pricing power, but they are very popular and most often chosen by consumers. For cars, mainstream brands like Ford and Chevrolet account for about 44% of sales; for beer, popular brands like Miller and Busch deliver 19% of sales. Peripheral brands have little to distinguish them. They are unlikely to be top of mind or the first choice for most consumers. Examples in the lower-left quadrant include Kia and Mitsubishi for cars and Old Milwaukee for beer. Despite their low prices and lack of distinctiveness, many peripheral brands clearly succeed in this seemingly unattractive position; they account for 24% of

Now let’s consider how centrality and distinctiveness affect business performance on two key metrics—sales volume and price—in the categories we studied.

Sales volume.

In both the car and beer markets, the higher a brand scores on centrality, the greater its sales volume. Toyota, the car brand with the highest score on this dimension in our survey, is the only one that sold more than a million passenger cars in the United States in 2014. Budweiser, the most central beer brand, also had the largest sales volume in its category—it captured almost 30% of the U.S. beer market. The impact of boosting centrality even slightly is dramatic: Our regression analysis suggests that a one-point increase (on the 0–10 scale) corresponds to greater sales of about 200,000 cars per year, on average, for a given brand and a sales volume boost for a beer brand by an average of 10.3 million barrels per year. These are theoretical numbers, of course, produced by mathematical modeling of the data. In practice, sales volumes are affected by many factors, and for many firms, shifting position by one point would require an overwhelming commitment of R&D, marketing, and other resources.

However, the message is clear—and the opportunity very

appealing. In fact, increasing centrality is a key strategic goal for the highly distinctive, pricey, all-electric Tesla.

In contrast, increased distinctiveness is associated with lower sales volume for both cars and beer, though the effect is less dramatic. Our analysis suggests that increasing a brand’s distinctiveness by one point would reduce annual sales by about 144,000 units for a car brand and about 8 million barrels for a beer brand.

Price.

If higher distinctiveness results in lower sales, why do so many brands aim for the crowded higher-distinctiveness quadrants? (Together these account for more than 65% of beer sales volume, even though being more central yields higher sales volume.) The answer lies in the higher prices that more distinctive brands can charge.

Porsche, the most distinctive car brand in our survey, had the highest average base retail price. The most distinctive beer brand, Guinness, also had the highest retail price. For cars, a one-point increase in distinctiveness is associated with a retail price increase of $12,900, on average, per unit.

For beer, a one-point increase translates into a retail price increase of about $2.59 for a 12-pack.

Aspirational brands must defend against challengers from the mainstream and unconventional quadrants.

Centrality, on the other hand, tends to be negatively related to price in both categories, though the reduction was not statistically significant for cars. A one-point increase in centrality in the beer category was associated with a reduction in retail price of about $1.10 for a 12-pack.

Strategic Implications A brand’s position on the map can vary dramatically depending on the customer segment, region, or other factors.

In our national survey of cars, for example, the Subaru brand was considered neither central nor distinctive; however, a survey of consumers in the Northeast would most likely position Subaru in the aspirational quadrant. Likewise, older consumers would probably perceive the Cadillac brand as aspirational, while younger consumers would most likely give it a peripheral position.

Regardless of where a brand falls on the map, its position should reflect a company’s strategy and be consistent with its business model. Let’s look now at the strategic implications for each quadrant.

Aspirational.

Because aspirational brands are both central and distinctive, companies can take advantage of high sales volumes and premium pricing. These trusted brands are well positioned to launch innovations that redefine the category. With the Prius, Toyota introduced hybrid cars into the market and became the dominant player, paving the way for many other brands.

Experiments with fuel cell technology by Daimler (MercedesBenz’s parent company) and Toyota are intended to start the next revolution in the car category.

The key for aspirational brands is to make their distinctive

features sufficiently mainstream to be widely appealing without becoming run-of-the-mill. They must defend their position against challengers coming at them from the mainstream and unconventional quadrants.

Mainstream.

Mainstream brands build their central position through careful engineering and product development to align with (or even shape) popular tastes and through heavy advertising to make the brand synonymous with the category. Their strategic position calls for risk-averse stewardship of the brand; they avoid rocking the boat. But because of their heft, they can shape markets and consumer preferences more adeptly than brands in the other quadrants can. CocaCola, for example, recognized consumers’ shift to less sugary and less carbonated drinks and successfully led the market migration first with its diet brands and then with its Dasani water brand.

The primary competitive challenge to mainstream brands comes from peripheral and unconventional products that could become central as consumer tastes shift. Take vacuum cleaners. iRobot’s Roomba sells more than a million units annually, and robotic vacuums claim 15% of the market.

These unconventional products are now posing a legitimate threat to mainstream incumbents.

Peripheral.

These brands tend to follow a “me too” strategy. They offer benefits similar to those of more central brands; consumers typically buy them as substitutes, generally because they are attracted by lower prices or have minimal engagement with the category. Peripheral brands, on average, pull in neither the volume of more central brands nor the price premium of more distinctive brands. Still, this can be a viable position for brands with business models that call for low marketing and innovation costs—such as generic or private-label players in the pharmaceutical and grocery industries.

Peripheral brands may attempt to shift their positioning by adding distinctive features or launching advertising campaigns, but this is an uphill and expensive battle. Over the past decade, for instance, Hyundai has introduced longer warranties and luxury models such as the Genesis and Equus.

These moves have boosted sales volume but have not budged Hyundai’s position as a peripheral follower, not that far from its sister brand, Kia, and second-tier Japanese brands such as Mazda. Finally, peripheral brands are more likely than brands in the other quadrants to exit the market (Pontiac and Saturn are examples), but their low-cost business models can be designed to fortify their relatively uncompetitive positions.

RC Cola, for example, has survived in its category for almost a century. Unconventional brands.

Brands in this quadrant are niche players. Their business models must be designed for profitability at low volumes, as those of Mini and Dos Equis are, or their position in the quadrant must be a stepping-stone for greater centrality.

Efforts to become more central can include making the brand’s unique features more mainstream (as Tesla is doing, for example, by promoting policies that favor electric cars) or adding mainstream features (Stella beer is now available on tap as well as in bottles). A reasonable strategy for Tesla and Stella would be to migrate from the unconventional to the aspirational quadrant. This would increase sales volume

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without compromising distinctiveness (and the premium prices that go with it).

would help Unilever standardize and provide a rationale for

How to Use the C-D Map

company to track how effectively marketing dollars were

As we’ve shown, brands’ map positions carry strategic implications. Using regression analysis, companies can create what-if scenarios for a range of strategies to move a brand along the centrality or distinctiveness dimension and assess how those moves would affect sales or profitability. By mapping the positions of its brands (and competitors’) over time, companies can develop an understanding of the costs associated with different strategies and the impact that the resulting shifts in position have on brand performance.

We see five potential applications of C-D mapping.

Assess your brand’s positioning strategy.

Brand managers typically believe that their marketing differentiation strategy distinguishes their brand in consumers’ minds and accounts for its sales. Measuring customers’ perceptions of a brand’s distinctiveness and linking that statistically to performance provides an instant check on a strategy’s effectiveness. For example, if the marketing goal is to maximize price, but the brand is becoming more mainstream in consumers’ minds, the C-D map will reveal the disconnect between strategy and objective. Companies can then use the tool to assess whether strategy adjustments are having the desired effect on business performance. Track the competition.

Conventional maps usually gauge consumer perceptions about narrow product characteristics. For example, a map may evaluate brands of beer on bitterness and foaminess.

However, neighbors on such maps aren’t necessarily competitors. Heineken and Old Milwaukee may be equally bitter and foamy, but they don’t directly compete.

C-D maps overcome this sort of challenge because they reveal a brand’s location relative to others in a way that reflects consumers’ mental representations of the category.

This helps focus competitive efforts on actual rather than perceived competition. For instance, it may come as a surprise to managers of the Lincoln brand that their brand is closer to Chrysler than to Cadillac in consumers’ minds. Similarly, while Dodge and Chevrolet might consider themselves competitors, C-D maps suggest that consumers perceive substantial differences between the two.

budget allocation across brands but also would allow the utilized by the brand teams, by measuring how far the brands moved on the maps.

Manage global brands.

Many companies that attempt to manage global brands in a standardized way find themselves stymied by differences across markets. C-D maps offer a way to visualize differences in consumer perceptions and in performance across markets.

Consider Chevrolet and Tide. Both brands are highly central in the United States but score relatively low in centrality and distinctiveness in emerging markets such as India. The ability to gauge these differences is useful on three levels.

First, it helps a firm set realistic performance goals for a global brand across geographical markets. Second, it helps explain differences in cross-border performance. And finally, it helps global managers make decisions about brand standardization versus localization.

Track and analyze results.

Managers

often

struggle

to

quantify

the

impact

of

their marketing efforts on consumers’ perceptions. The two dimensions that C-D maps track—centrality and distinctiveness—are shared by all brands and remain relevant over time. By repeatedly charting the position changes that result from marketing initiatives, marketers should be able to gauge how their (and their competitors’) actions affect consumer perceptions.

For example, companies should tie pricing disruptions (such as E-Trade’s slashing of brokerage fees) or focused advertising campaigns (Apple’s “I’m a Mac…I’m a PC” campaign) to movements of brands on the C-D map to yield insights about what drives consumer perceptions—and brand performance.

The more frequent the mapping, particularly in categories that have a lot of innovation and market churn, the clearer the resulting picture.

Which quadrant a brand occupies on the C-D map reflects

Manage your brand portfolio.

the firm’s strategy, capabilities, and the nature of the market,

Because C-D maps can be made for any brand in any category, they allow companies to compare brand performance and strategy across categories. Thus a company that sells multiple brands of different product types could use the maps to allocate resources objectively across categories. Suppose the consumer goods conglomerate Unilever wanted to increase sales of two brands that are noncentral in the U.S. market: Tigi in hair care and Degree in deodorants. Using C-D maps, it could estimate the amount of marketing resources to allocate to each brand (after controlling for category size and advertising expenditures) to achieve a given objective— for example, a specific increase in centrality that would yield a specific increase in sales volume. The C-D map not only

but that position isn’t set in stone. Companies may, for good reason, shift a brand’s location—to exploit less crowded territory, for example, or grow sales. Unconventional brands may seek to become more central in consumers’ minds to gain market share, as Tesla is doing. Peripheral brands may also see opportunities in becoming more mainstream, as Kia has.

By allowing a firm to evaluate a brand’s strategic position, assess the risks and rewards of shifting it, and monitor progress along the way, C-D maps can help ensure that the investment pays off.

When Big Brands Fall, Big Dollars Follow

By WARC Staff

The annual crop of global brand value rankings makes me think of the board game Snakes & Ladders. Many climb up, but just as many slide down!

For example, who can argue the heft of the mighty Uber brand? It’s very name echoes disruption. Uber has become synonymous with the sharing economy. Business consultants now use it as a verb — as in, don’t be “uberized” — to scare clients into buying their services.

There’s just one problem: Uber’s brand valuation appears to be in free fall.

In Brand Finance’s newly released “Global 500 2020 Report,” which tracks how much brands are worth, Uber dropped nearly 50 spots and out of the top 100. Its brand value fell by one-third. Uber also earned a spot on the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council’s unenviable list of the 20 most bruised and battered brands.

actually decreased in value from year to year. Other brands with a poor showing: Verizon, Chase, General Electric, Boeing, SK Group, Siemens, Bosch, Taobao, NTT Group, IKEA, Dell, Audi, Vodafone, SoftBank, to name a few.

What causes brands to take a beating?

While many marketers point to fears of a brand bubble burst, the fault, dear marketers, lies not in our stars but in ourselves.

In its list of battered brands, the CMO Council highlighted some of the missteps that often derail brands: advertising and marketing snafus, health and safety concerns, data privacy and service delivery failures, corruption and embezzlement.

Feelings of unfairness seem to hit brands hardest. For example, plagued by huge financial losses, WeWork withdrew from its planned IPO, announced it will lay off 2,400 workers, and awarded former CEO and co-founder Adam Neumann an exit package worth roughly $1 billion.

But this story isn’t just about Uber. Among Brand Finance’s top 100 global brands, a whopping 42 slipped in the rankings, including Apple, which came in third this year, down from second last year. A game of Snakes & Ladders, indeed. More tellingly, Apple’s brand valuation fell from $153,634 million to $140,524 million.

All of which brings us back to Uber. A string of scandals and allegations of a culture of sexual harassment in 2017 started Uber’s slide. Who can forget #DeleteUber trending on social networks? Despite Uber pouring half-a-billion dollars into rebuilding its image, signs point to a brand struggling to recover.

Losers came from all sorts of industries, with Telecom suffering the most. “Squeezed by OTT (over-the-top) competition and challenger brands, four out of five telecoms in ranking lose brand value, with AT&T fastest-falling — down 32 percent,” Brand Finance says.

In Uber’s filing prior to its IPO in May, Uber issued a warning.

“We have previously received significant media coverage and negative publicity, particularly in 2017, regarding our brand and reputation, and failure to rehabilitate our brand and reputation will cause our business to suffer,” Uber said.

In actual dollars, AT&T’s brand valuation fell from $87,005 million to $59,103 million. Among the top 25 brands, nine

When it comes to safeguarding your brand, Uber’s message is clear: drive safely.

Loyalty Lasts if the Customer Comes First

By Div Manickam

How do you distinguish a transactional relationship from an emotional one? The report, Loyalty That Lasts published jointly

by Cheetah Digital and CMO Council brings an important aspect of customer behavior to light: emotional loyalty. What is the intention behind your customer interactions? Is it just to make a sale? Or to establish a lasting bond—a bond that is not “predicated on savings, rewards or promotions”?

The expert commentary by Judd Marcello of Cheetah Digital delves into the foundational elements of emotional loyalty (affinity, alignment and trust), emphasises the complexity involved in achieving it and outlines the benefits for both brands and customers. Executive perspectives from senior marketers explore how loyalty is redefined from the customer’s perspective and shows that proper, consistent and reciprocal use of customer voice can help progress from transactional to emotional loyalty.

Based on insights from 170 senior marketers, the report indicates a fundamental disconnect between marketers’

efforts to deliver brand experience and their initiatives to drive customer engagement at both strategic and tactical levels.

There are three fundamental shifts that need to occur in the way we ‘think and do’ marketing. These shifts are contrary to our traditional views and challenge well-entrenched paradigms but are nevertheless necessary.

Reformulate the marketing mix The purpose of marketing is, no doubt, to deliver sustainable profits for the business and should never be overlooked. Even so, for a discipline that is founded on customer orientation, it is somewhat odd that business priorities dictate marketing strategy more than customer interests do.

The marketing mix is a great framework to organize the function.

Anchoring marketing operations to the notorious “Four Ps” may have inadvertently relegated to second place, the

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primacy of the “Four Cs,” namely customer core needs, cost to customer, customer conversation and customer convenience.

companies traditionally view loyalty from their perspective, not from the consumer’s point of view.

When making day-to-day marketing mix decisions, pausing and thinking about the 4 Cs can be the initial, crucial step needed to put the customer first and—ideally—pave the way for lasting loyalty.

Three core metrics measured loyalty for many years: recency, frequency and monetary value. Additionally, rewards, cursory (card-based) recognition and repeat purchase characterized that loyalty. This approach largely promotes transactional loyalty…but what about emotional loyalty? If organizations aim to create real, emotionally loyal relationships with their customers, respect and role reversal must underpin the bond between brand and customer.

(For those reluctant to let go of the 4 Ps scaffold, a previous Spotlight article in the June edition of Marketing Magnified introduces a fifth ‘P’ that provides a fresh approach to deploying the elements of the marketing mix).

Reframe the definition of a customer Too often, marketing activity treats customers as targets, not as a people. These efforts emphasize a commercially valid motive: making the customer buy more, more often. However, if the sale is not a result of memorable brand experiences and intimate customer engagement, such behavior can be short-lived.

In researching customers’ needs as buyers, seldom is there an attempt to understand them as individuals. What role does the product or service play in making their lives more efficient and more fulfilling? More enjoyable? Marketers go to great lengths to understand buyer motives, attitudes and usages without observing the big picture.

Customers are people first, not just buyers.

Revamp the 3 Rs of Loyalty A reoccurring theme throughout Loyalty That Lasts is how

Real relationships require cultural shifts in marketing.

More than merely making a sale, marketers also need to build a bridge. Respect involves regarding a customer’s time, information, likes and needs as paramount, while role reversal means putting ourselves in the shoes of the customer—making sure we take off our own in the process Respect requires showing empathy, honesty and integrity while treating the customer as an equal.

The bottom-line Customers are not targets to be locked in or prospects to be peddled to. They are partners with whom a value exchange must occur in an environment of mutual trust and respect.

That is the very foundation of emotional loyalty that lasts.

Mahesh Enjeti, Managing Director, SAI Marketing Counsel and Advisor, Bubblefish, has an Honours degree in Physics and an MBA from IIM Kolkata. He has spent over four decades in India and Australia as a seasoned marketer, strategist, brand builder, and game changer across diverse industries.

Markets Do It Vertically.

Consumers Do It Horizontally

By Michael R. Solomon, PhD.

Quick: What do white wine, Brie cheese, a squash racquet, a Brooks Brothers suit, fresh pesto, a Rolex and a BMW have in common?

If you’ve been exposed to U.S. popular culture for a while, you can probably come up with the answer quite quickly: these are products that define the infamous, affluent “Yuppie” consumer of the 1980s.

This cluster of ostensibly unrelated products is an example of a consumption constellation, a set of symbolically related brands that jointly define a social role. But why should marketers care about an outdated media invention from the last century?

Quite simply, this consumption constellation reminds us that while marketers sell vertically, consumers buy horizontally.

Many CMOs lose sleep over market share within a product category, while benchmarking their initiatives based on what their main competitors in that category do. This is vertical thinking.

But alas, this is not the way your customers think about what you sell. A marketer sells a lamp, but a consumer buys a living room; a marketer sells a blouse, but a consumer buys an outfit. The buyer evaluates each item not just in terms of how it stacks up to other direct substitutes, but also in terms of how it harmonizes with the other products and services that collectively express his or her preferences and social identity. Just as the ancient Greeks invented astronomical constellations by linking unrelated stars together to create a story, modern consumers make sense of unrelated products in terms of how they fit together to define a social role. This is horizontal thinking.

Studies show when consumers encounter a brand that is

part of a consumption constellation, they expect to see other (functionally unrelated) brands that belong to it as well.

When prompted with a constellation brand, respondents’ reaction times are faster when exposed to other constellation members than unrelated brands. This research suggests that cross-category associations have become part of a memory network. And these inter-brand associations start early; additional studies show similar effects present in children.

So, what does a shift from a vertical to a horizontal perspective mean for strategic thinking? After all, lifestyle marketing already is a well-oiled weapon in the marketer’s arsenal.

When Courvoisier partners with Def Jam Recordings because cognac is part of the hip-hop subculture, or Pringles creates a “Hunger Hammer” device that feeds chips into a gamer’s mouth while they shoot at trolls, it’s a healthy start toward linking a brand with a consumer’s broader experience.

This common approach to lifestyle marketing barely scratches the surface of what marketers should be doing to expand their brand equity.

Start by identifying a key social role like “Struggling College Student, “Tree-Hugger,” “Hipster,” “Jock” or “Geek” that relies upon your brand to define its identity. Then look for products in other categories that play a similar function— even though they don’t remotely overlap with your industry vertical. If you can’t identify a relevant constellation for your brand, this may be a sign that you’re not resonating as well as you should. You can find a list of ways to link your brand more vibrantly to consumers’ experiences here.

A constellation perspective proves to be invaluable when we know some of a consumer’s preferences and we can more easily predict they will like in other product categories as well.

Remember, companies may sell products, but consumers buy identities.

VETERAN CMO JEANNIEY MULLEN ON THE FOUR CMO TYPES AND WHY SHE’S A HYBRID

By Lucy Koch

The first-ever CMO of a young company has to do something slightly different from one stepping into the same role for a legacy brand. When DailyPay’s Jeanniey Mullen was appointed as the financial tech company’s first CMO in July 2019, she wanted to transform the payroll landscape.

As a former global CMO of human resources consulting firm Mercer and marketing lead for Nook by Barnes & Noble and JCPenney, Mullen’s tenures have shaped her understanding and approach to the diverse responsibilities of a CMO. She spoke with us about what it takes to be the first person in that position at a company, the four types of CMOs, and why she considers herself a “hybrid.”

How did you do this at DailyPay? My role at DailyPay is that of a hybrid CMO, because the company is focused on high growth but eventual innovation.

[At just three weeks in], with the backing of my CEO and the board, I was able to identify and develop what the goforward strategy will be over four phases in five years. I also determined the incremental changes that need to be made to seamlessly evolve the culture and keep the whole team excited, especially in this fast-paced environment.

How do you define “hybrid CMO”?

I define a CMO’s role in four ways. Either you’re a brand CMO, data-driven CMO, hybrid CMO or innovative/creative

What is unique about being the first CMO of a

CMO. At DailyPay, I’m a hybrid CMO because I’m focused

company?

on both brand and demand gen, but each position has its

The first CMO of any company has to be as good at demand

own definition:

generation as they are at brand. This is because they have to

Brand CMO

continue to educate and build the brand, but if they take their

These people are brand-building geniuses. Brand CMOs

foot off the gas of the demand gen, then the company isn’t

are able to create personalities and personas out of an

going to grow. The first CMO needs to come in and establish

organization that prompts masses of people to immediately

process, build a technical foundation and look at what the

identify personally with the brand or feel emotion when they

company’s needs are.

see its logo. They don’t care too much about data analytics

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or get into the demand-gen side of the house. They hire incredible people to do that for them. Instead, they are brand innovators—people who work at companies like Coca-Cola or Chick-fil-A—companies that would be done if the brand didn’t stay at the top of its game.

gen because you’ve already established brand. When you

Data-Driven CMO

around a long time, but also have launched a new product.

This role is for people who live and die on personas, analytics and predictive capabilities. They walk in and immediately need that serious dashboard in front of them with every metric under the sun. They run the business based on predictive modeling, user/buyer behaviors and retention models.

They’re good at understanding data but hire brand geniuses or big agencies to help with the vision. Data-driven CMOs are generally most successful in companies where there’s an established market, or in the high-tech industry where you have to be super analytical to earn that extra 1% and get ahead. This role is fit for companies like IBM or Oracle, where the CMO is looking at server sales and comparing market shares, or at companies where there is a technical purchase involved and a need to understand the buyer.

hybrid CMO because he or she understands how to evolve.

Hybrid CMO These people know the process of evolving. Hybrid CMOs have to start with brand, while simultaneously building a demand-gen strategy. Then you focus heavily on demand

reach a certain point in the market where the company has to evolve its product and services to the next level, brand focus resurfaces. This CMO is typically most successful in highgrowth scenarios like startups or companies that have been Companies that are focused relentlessly on growth need a

Innovative/Creative CMO This person is in a company that’s growing well and has an established brand but is looking to re-energize who it is.

These people are risk-takers, they’re innovative, they know they’ve got to do something crazy. They need to know their buyers, but it’s less about the brand and more about creating a new market for a new set of products, or figuring out how to effectively sell whatever it is you’re trying to sell.

What does the future of the CMO role look like?

There is no cookie cutter for the CMO—it’s whatever role the business needs that person to play. So, a CMO is always going to have a role, but I don’t know that it’s ever going to be consistently defined again. Knowing that, it’s important to figure out what kind of CMO you are based on your strengths and the needs of your company.

Eight Tips for Building, Maintaining, and Leveraging Your Professional Relationships A LEADERSHIP COACH SHOWS HOW YOU CAN GET THE MOST OUT OF YOUR NETWORK.

By Sachin Waikar

“Building relationships is not just a critical career skill but a critical life skill,” says Rebecca Zucker, Stanford Graduate School of Business alumna and partner at leadership development consultancy Next Step Partners.

my group. That ensured I met those I didn’t already know.

“One of the biggest mistakes people make is to bifurcate their personal and professional relationships,” she continues.

“Our relationships are our relationships. They actually help us live longer, so they’re important not just to our careers but to our health.”

with Uber — because his spin instructor’s husband knew the

Here, Zucker, who earned her MBA in 1994, provides interrelated best practices and perspectives for building, maintaining, and accessing your network of relationships for your benefit and that of others.

building is that the effects tend to build on one another,

Take a Broad Approach

introduce you to others and you’re more likely to find what

“Never assume who will or won’t be helpful,” Zucker says. The mentality supports taking as broad an approach as possible to building relationships by putting yourself out there, across settings.

you’re looking for. Getting one ball rolling in your search

Zucker, for example, followed her own advice while in business school: “Every time I was on a new group project, I’d go up to people I didn’t know and invite them to be in

colleague for an informational interview. The two hit it off,

Besides, who wouldn’t want someone to come up and say, ‘I want you to be in my group’?”

Similarly, an acquaintance of hers ultimately got to an interview Uber hiring manager for a position he was interested in.

Momentum Is Multiplicative One of the benefits of making an effort toward relationship creating momentum that can lead to fast network growth.

Zucker says, “Whether you’re looking for clients or a new job, if you get introductions to new people, they can then

leads to others.” It adds up to potentially multiplicative growth.

For example, Zucker introduced one of her clients to a former and the ex-colleague quickly introduced the client to multiple others who could be of help in her search.

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Harness the Strength of Weak Ties Zucker points to often-cited research by Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter on the value of “weak ties” — acquaintances, friends of friends, and the like — versus people we know best. She says, “He found that people who relied on weak ties in their job searches ultimately found better, more satisfying work.”

Why? “Our strong ties have much of the same information we have,” Zucker says. “But the weak ties can provide new information and bridge us to new networks. The research was pre-internet but it holds in the post-LinkedIn era, too.”

Reaching out to weak ties can also benefit those looking for career pivots. As Zucker notes, “If your strong ties know you as a capable salesperson but you want to move to a different area, weak ties won’t have those pre-existing ideas about your skill set, so you can position yourself differently to them.”

Don’t Be Afraid to Reconnect It can be easy to talk yourself out of contacting those you’ve lost touch with, even if they might be helpful to you today.

Don’t give in to that fear, Zucker says. “Don’t be afraid of a ’no.’ Put something like ‘Blast from the past’ or ‘Reconnecting’ in the email subject line. Acknowledge the absence of contact. They most likely haven’t reached out either and may be pleased to hear from you. Make sure you don’t sound desperate or entitled, and always give the other person an out — such as ‘if it’s not a good time for you…’ ” Zucker herself came across the email of a network contact she hadn’t been in touch with for five years and sent a brief invite for coffee. They met soon after, and Zucker’s firm is now doing a large consulting project for that contact’s business.

Our strong ties have much of the same information we have. But the weak ties can provide new information and bridge us to new networks.

Rebecca Zucker Identify Yourself You wouldn’t leave a voicemail for someone without making clear who you are and the nature of your connection. The same courtesy applies to online relationship building.

“I’m part of a community of recognized experts, so I get a lot of inbound LinkedIn requests from people whose names I don’t recognize,” Zucker says. “I’ve requested that people take the additional 10 seconds to write an intro note like ‘I’m also part of this expert community’ or ‘I read your article in

this publication and found it valuable.’ Make sure people know where you know them from.”

Do Double Opt-In Introductions If you’d like to connect two people in your network, it can be tempting to fire off an email linking both parties. Resist that temptation!

Related to the previous tip about identifying yourself, here it’s about providing context for people. “I’ve received blind introductions with no background,” Zucker says. “It’s not great, and it can create awkwardness. Do a double opt-in by checking with both parties to make sure they’re interested and explaining why it makes sense for them to connect.”

Aim for Diversity — and Evolution “Diversity is really important in relationship building,” Zucker advises. “It’s important to be regularly connecting with people from different demographic backgrounds. You can learn a ton.”

This can apply to diversity of industries, function, geography, and others. One example is when younger and older people connect. “An older client of mine got great feedback on his resume from a younger person in the tech industry,” Zucker says. “He helped my client understand what would or wouldn’t speak to particular companies my client was targeting, to help him position himself.” Her client, in turn, brings valuable experience and maturity to his network.

Zucker also notes the importance of evolving your network as your career progresses: “Periodically examine what’s working and what’s not in your network — where might you be over- or underinvested? If you’re in consulting and all of your contacts are too, but you want to move to another field, that has to change. Or it could be that you need to connect with senior-level people as you look to move up in your field.”

Think Beyond Yourself Ultimately, networking, like many other professional activities, is about looking beyond yourself.

“It shouldn’t be mostly about self-interest,” Zucker says. “It’s thinking things like ‘What can I do for this person? How can I help?’ ” One of the best things you can do, she suggests, is to build your network to be a connector for others: “Generosity is a critical part of networking — being able to offer something others find helpful.”

In the end, the key is to think of networking not as a professional skill but a life skill, one that should be carried out with respect, care, and generosity. When you approach relationship building that way, it’s sure to pay off across domains.

8 Considerations When Selecting an AI Marketing Vendor

By Dom Nicastro

Does a landscape for artificial intelligence (AI) marketing vendors exist? You’d think so, with all the hype for what AI and machine learning can do for marketers. And, after all, half of companies are using some form of AI in marketing initiatives, according to a Deloitte report last month. So where is that formal grouping of such vendors? The Gartner Magic Quadrant? The Forrester Wave? Even Scott Brinker’s Martech Supergraphic has no category for AI vendors.

“You really have to be able to ask different questions to these vendors,” said Paul Roetzer, founder and CEO of PR 20/20 and creator of the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute.

“At the end of the day, is it smarter technology than what you have now? You don’t go buy AI technology. You’re not trying to find an AI solution. You’re trying to find a smarter solution to a problem you have or an activity you’re trying to execute.”

Of course, there are hundreds, probably thousands, of vendors claiming they can power marketing processes, campaigns and content with some form of AI or machine learning. “Virtually every marketing technology vendor has an AI story,” Gartner researchers Andrew Frank, Mike McGuire and Jason McNellis found in their Cool Vendors in AI for Marketing report published last October.

There is no denying marketers have already invested in AI capabilities for their marketing stacks. Gartner’s 2018 Marketing Technology Survey found 41% of marketers use AI or machine learning to support predictive analytics. That was the number one answer ahead of:

But is AI in marketing at the capability stage, or do vendors provide all-in-one AI marketing suites? You don’t see vendors branding themselves as “drag-and-drops,” right? They’re a Web Content Management (WCM) vendor that has dragand-drop. It’s one of many questions marketers need to ask in their AI marketing vendor selection process.

• Text analytics (31%)

It’s Going to Take Some Work So, what can marketers do when they’re in the market for “smarter” technology for their martech stacks beyond Google Search? They need to work, and it’s a lot. For marketers on the hunt for “smarter” technology, nothing will come easy in terms of selection. If you’re a marketer thinking of investing in AI capabilities, experts told CMSWire you’ll need a deep, thoughtful selection process that includes knowing how smart your vendor’s technology actually is, who’s on their team for engineers, what specific uses case you want to improve and knowing the impacts on your marketing organization in the near- and long-term.

Where Marketers Find AI Valuable

• Marketing campaign decisioning (34%)

• Personalization (30%) • Prescriptive analytics (27%) • Diagnostic analytics (27%) • Conversational user interfaces (26%) • Object detection/recognition (23%) • Speech recognition (23%) • Machine translation/localization (23%) • Paid media optimization (20%) • Logo detection/recognition (19%) • Facial detection/recognition (19%) • Emotion detection/recognition (16%) And, according to the IDC, the AI software platforms

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market experienced steady growth in 2018, growing 26.6% to $2.6 billion. “AI thrives in conditions where there is an abundance of cause-and-effect data, a large number of possible actions, and little time to analyze complex decisions.

Marketers routinely struggle with these kinds of conditions, so marketing is fertile ground for AI solutions,” Gartner found in their “Cool Vendors in AI for Marketing Report.” Gartner profiled what it found as “new and innovative vendors” in that report: conDati, Course5 Intelligence and YouScan, by no means, in Gartner’s own words, an exhaustive list.

But it does demonstrate there are vendors focusing on AI in marketing.

Recognize the Iterative Experience Yet still, despite the “cool” technology emerging, marketers have a long way to go — and a lot of work to do — in truly understanding what AI and machine learning can do for their marketing processes and campaigns, according to McGuire.

“Don’t get totally disillusioned with this,” McGuire cautioned marketers about investing in AI capabilities, “This is going to be an ongoing, iterative experience. You’re going to find some applications of AI, but it’s a matter of maintaining balance, if you will. If you’re a marketing technology executive, keep your eye on the long term, don’t get caught up in the negative stories, but take them in context… We have to figure out as marketers and as organized societies how we want to deal with this technology. We’re still kind learning as we go.” AI in Marketing Won’t Change Everything The first thing in integrating some form of smart software into your martech stack is to recognize you can’t just build around AI to “change everything,” according to McGuire. “It needs to learn before it can work with us across all of our marketing disciplines,” McGuire said. “But as far as an investment, if you’ve got an existing martech stack, adding some of those AI capabilities can be really particularly useful, especially if

we can start reducing very manual processes we’ve done in the past.”

However, he added, marketers need to understand that just because your new smart technology builds around a core use case, it may not be ready to integrate with an execution system that sends messages, for instance. “That’s important for the buyer to understand: if we’re starting with it as the core and we’re building some of our other marketing requirements on top of that, that could take a while. So it’s about trying to understand what it is you’re really trying to accomplish with it, because … it’s not going to fix everything right now.”

How Will the Tech Impact People, Processes?

That comes back to having a deep understanding of your processes, existing skill sets within the marketing organization and beyond and resources needed to execute integrating AI into your marketing stacks, according to McGuire. If you don’t try to understand how AI in marketing will change the nature of the work and the processes in your organization, you’re going to end up imbalanced, McGuire said. “You may have too few or too many or wrong types of folks or you haven’t trained your existing staff enough to understand.”

The good news? Companies are recognizing the need for this kind of talent. Hiring growth for AI and machine learning roles have grown 74% annually in the past four years and encompasses a few different titles within the space that all have a very specific set of skills despite being spread across industries, including artificial intelligence and machine learning engineer, according to the LinkedIn’s 2020 Emerging Jobs report. Skills in those roles include machine learning, deep learning, TensorFlow, Python and natural language processing. Do your marketers have access to engineers with those skill sets, or possess those themselves? “We have to be able to look at the implications on the organization and the processes,” McGuire said. “… How is that going to

change my marketing organization? Is this going to mean less emphasis of me having to use agencies for a lot of my creative? What am I going to need in terms of my internal staffing? Do I just need to hire a bunch of data scientists?

Probably not. Looking at our campaign directors, how are their roles going to change based on our utilization of this maturing technology?”

Can Your AI Marketing Vendor Explain AI? Those aren’t the only questions you should be asking.

Vendors need to be vetted thoroughly. Likely, this is advice you’ve heard before in selecting marketing technology. But with those who promise marketing outcomes through AI or machine learning, too often there’s a “disconnect” between what vendors promise and their ability to explain the type of AI they offer, according to PR 20/20’s Roetzer. Remember that MMC report that found 40 percent of European startups billed as AI companies don’t actually use AI “in a way that is ‘material’ to their businesses”?

You’ve got to know what’s behind your AI marketing vendor’s technology “because all machine learning isn’t equal,” Roetzer said. McGuire of Gartner suggested marketers be on the lookout for developments in “explainable AI,” something that Google champions, among others. Roetzer cited the example of content intelligence vendors. “Almost all of them are going to use some variation in their messaging of AI: natural language processing, machine learning,” Roetzer told CMSWire. “But then when you talk to that vendor, very rarely can the salesperson actually explain what any of that means. They know they do content strategy. They know their tool enables you to figure your content strategy out. But they can’t tell you what machine learning piece of it is. And they can’t explain natural language processing and they don’t really even know the definition of AI… Most of their sales reps and marketing people don’t understand AI. And most marketers don’t know how to simplify what they’re trying to get out of the vendor.”

Specific Use Cases Always the Best Route Therefore, if you’re a marketer and you do content strategy for a living, go to your potential vendor with very tangible use cases: I spend 25 hours a month, figuring out what topics for our writers to write about. And here’s the process I go through right now. How does your software make it smarter?

“It’s great if they’re using natural image processing and machine learning and whatever they want to explain it as,” Roetzer said. But is the tech making your process “smarter,” in other words, do you save tons of money with it? And does it give you a greater chance of achieving your goals? “That’s really the only reason you would buy AI technology no matter what kind of marketing you’re doing,” Roetzer said. “It needs to save time and money by eliminating repetitive data-driven tasks. And it needs to improve your chance of achieving your goal.”

Grill Your AI Marketing Vendor No one actually assesses how smart the AI tech is when examining a vendor, Roetzer added. The biggest problem in the future of buying AI marketing software, Roetzer said, is knowing which software offering is actually smarter. “As a marketer, do I know who is actually smarter and is going to save me the most time and money or give me the greatest chance to achieve my goals and answers?” he asked. “There is no way to do that right now. You have to as an individual marketer, learn all this stuff to be able to properly assess vendors.” What does the founding team look like? Who’s on the team? How many AI engineers do they have? “How many machine learning engineers do they actually have on staff because there’s a lot of vaporware,” Roetzer said.

“It’s like they’re claiming to do this and then you dig in and you’re like, you have two engineers and neither of them are machine learning engineers? That is how are you planning to do advanced AI? Who’s doing it? Because nobody on your team appears even be an AI person. And there’s a lot of that but the vast majority of marketers would have no idea what questions to ask a vendor that’s claiming to have AI.”

Client Thoughts On The Advertising Agency Rfp Process THE ADVERTISING AGENCY CLIENT RFP – GO OR NO GO

By PETER

As an agency owner and business development director at Saatchi, I received many RFP’s — Request For Proposals. The reaction to receiving an RFP ranged from delight (YES, a big brand and client is interested in us) to dismay (a brand is asking us to respond to what is clearly an assignment that is not predicated on the client’s understanding of what we do for a living (example, asking us to build Android apps when we didn’t).

Responding to an RFP can be very time consuming and expensive for any agency. The costs include direct labor, out of pocket costs and the cost of deflecting staff attention from existing client and business development work. I outlined the cost of responding to RFI’s, RFP’s and actual pitches in my book “The Levitan Pitch. Buy This Book. Win More Pitches”.

Believe me, the costs can easily go into the thousands.

The bottom line is for your agency to have a clear set of rules that dictate when you should respond to an incoming RFP. Swinging at every ball is not a great way to hit home runs and manage your business.

Some RFP Related Expert Opinions I am a member of a primarily senior client Slack group. I asked the group for their thoughts about the RFP process. My question was about how many agencies are sent an RFP for a given program.

THE PETER RFP QUESTION: “Here’s a quick question for people that have asked advertising / design etc. agencies to respond to an RFP… How many shops did you ask when you sent out the RFP? I have an agency client that is now sitting on 3 RFP’s and is a bit overwhelmed. I’m helping them cull the list but have this general question. Thank you in advance for any help.”

ANSWERS: Note, in the interest of privacy, I scrubbed out the name of the group members.

• Typically you go to 5-6, then cull to 3 agencies for a proposal. If it was a mailed RFP with no calls or capabilities first, don’t go after it.

• You can also ask the client how many RFP’s were sent out and they should respond to you. But when a client sends out to 20 shops for proposals, you can typically smell that out and it’s highly recommended an agency does not play in that space OR requests a more intimate process.

• Usually easy to spot the mass outreach RFP’s, they’re often sloppy documents with not much thought/consideration.

Big red flag in my experience. Worth identifying which feel as though they have had most time invested in them for a measure on how ‘real’ the opportunity is.

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• I’d also add from the agency side — try to get an intro call with the prospective client to talk through the RFP before you decide to submit and put the team through the proposal rigor. Sometimes once you get them on the phone — you often get a much better sense if you’ll be successful with each other.

• Also, it’s telling if they won’t speak to you before receiving a proposal :slightly_smiling_face: • Agree. Clients should do their homework and find the shops that they respect, thinking or work you admire vs. a fishing expedition. I usually advise around sending in the area of 6-7 with the expectation that 1-2 agencies will drop out / decline • I agree. Somewhere in the 5-8 range feels right for an RFP. As a client, it is too much work to do more than that. If the client is not invested to really spend the time

to determine if the fit is right, that tells you something.

Personally, I have always liked our agency partners to feel like an extension of our team and respect what they bring to the table and the effort required to do the work.

PETER AGAIN I agree that it is up to agency management to really look hard at an incoming RFP and determine if this is an account you really want, can get and is worth the big effort. As my friends mentioned, it is incumbent on agency leadership to learn more from the prospective client before answering the RFP. If the client does not have the time for a call… drop it.

BEING MR. NICE GUY… If you have an RFP on your desk today and are not sure if you should respond, give me a shout. I’ll spend a few minutes helping you make that decision. Gratis.

‘Misbehaving’: When Psychology Meets Economics

By Richard Thaler

Katherine Milkman: When we chatted recently, you told me that the book you originally pitched when you began the journey of writing this in no way resembled the book you actually wrote. How did the book you pitched morph into Misbehaving?

Richard Thaler: I have an agent, John Brockman, who is an agent to many academic authors like Dan Gilbert and Steven Pinker, and he’s very good at conning academics into writing books. He pulled this trick on me. The book I was intending to write, the title was Snags. The idea was stuff we would trip on. I thought of it as a prequel to Nudge, using my George Lucas [Star Wars creator] strategy of writing things backwards.

The problem I had was I worked on it off and on for a couple of years, and the book had no spine. It had no organizing principle, unlike Nudge, which had really two core principles.

One was libertarian paternalism and the other was choice architecture, and those held the book together. Snags was a collection of things that I found interesting. I stumbled around for a while and then I consulted with some of my friends who are professional writers, like Michael Lewis, and he encouraged me to try to write the book in the way I did, which was structured as more of a memoir. But it’s just a sneaky way of talking about behavioral economics and telling a lot of stories.

it’s always good to read about somebody’s struggles and the mistakes they made along the way and some of the success — of what, why and where.

But of course, what the book is really about is the field of behavioral economics and the evidence that supports it. I use the same terms that I used in Nudge, which is humans and “econs,” and the idea is that standard economics has this mythical creature, “homo economicus” that I call an econ for short, and nobody’s ever met an econ. Even economists aren’t econs. So these econs are super smart, have no emotions, no self-control problems. They go to the gym exactly the right amount of times. They drink exactly the right quantities and never binge on chocolate or booze and save exactly the right amount for retirement and so forth and so on.

They are also complete jerks. They would never leave a tip at a restaurant they don’t intend to go back to. Those people are fictional creatures, and I wanted economics to be about real people. The lesson for businesses is you are dealing with real people. Those are your customers, those are your employees, those are your bosses, and the better you understand how real people tick, the more successfully you will be able to accomplish your goals.

Milkman: I think it works beautifully…. One of the things I wanted to ask you about is what you think the most important lessons are for business readers.

“The book is really a story about disruption. I had an idea 40 years ago that there might be another way of doing economics.”

Thaler: The book is really a story about disruption. I had an idea 40 years ago that there might be another way of doing economics, and it was a very subversive idea. I had to try to figure out a way to get tradition-bound economists to take my idea seriously and then to corrupt young people like you into carrying the flag. Lots of businesses are in the situation I was in 40 years ago. It’s not that I have a recipe, but I think

Milkman: This book is really the story of successfully changing the way a lot of very smart, confident, stubborn people — traditional economists — see the world. I’m curious if you have any thoughts based on that about some of the most important transferrable lessons you’ve learned about how to convince colleagues what they’re missing and need to change their views.

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Thaler: The truth is that I don’t think I’ve changed anybody’s mind or, if so, it’s a very small number of people. Even the people who have changed their minds won’t admit they have changed their minds. As I alluded to earlier, my strategy has been to try to — I sometimes say, corrupt the youth — get young people interested in the fields who don’t have a vested interest in the way things have always been done. There’s a reason why start-ups, especially disruptive start-ups, like Google or Amazon or Uber, are full of young people. That’s because young people are not as wedded to the old fashioned ways of doing things. In some ways, I succeeded by not trying to change everybody’s minds, but by recruiting others to help build up a body of evidence. But the second answer would be in the end, the only thing that convinces anybody is data.

So there were lots of excuses economists made for continuing with their ways.

My friend {Harvard economist] Matthew Rabin sometimes refers to these as “explain-away-tions” — which is a great line. They would say, “Okay, people make these mistakes in the lab, but if you raised the stakes, then everything is going to be fine.” Then we’re still emerging from a crisis that was caused by essentially everybody making mistakes about mortgages — lenders, borrowers, people who were securitizing loans. High stakes don’t make people smart. If there’s one important lesson from behavioral economics, it’s that. People make just as many mistakes when the stakes go up, maybe more.

“My mantra is, ‘If you want to help people, make it easy.’”

Milkman: At the end of the book, you spend a little bit of time talking about where behavioral economics has had the biggest impact and why you think that is. I was particularly interested to learn that you felt behavioral economics has had the biggest impact on finance, where the stakes are extremely high. I was wondering if you could explain to our audience why you think that’s the case.

Thaler: The reason is that finance has a combination of two things that made the debate more interesting and more focal. One is fantastic data. We have daily prices on stocks, going back to 1926 in the U.S. and other countries around the world, and we have theories, which make precise predictions. Many of those predictions turned out to be false.

It was possible to generate studies that just were right in your face. You say the following thing cannot happen, and it happened. In the academic field of finance, I think that’s why the field succeeded. There’s another part of finance where the field has had a big impact, and that’s in the design of retirement savings plans, like 401K plans. Here, it was basically taking the principles of behavioral economics — we’re dealing with humans — and then using what my friend Danny Kahneman calls “first grade psychology” to improve the plans, to incorporate things like automatic enrollment or what I call “save more tomorrow,” which is giving people the opportunity to commit themselves now to saving more later, like when they get the next raise, defaulting people into sensible investment plans. My mantra is, “If you want to help people, make it easy.” We’ve made a lot of progress in 401K

plans on making them safe for humans.

Milkman: I posted a call for questions to ask during this interview on Twitter, where you’re very active, and … I got lots of great suggestions. One was actually a repeat of a question that your friend, Danny Kahneman, a Nobel Laureate and behavioral economist, answered recently during an interview.

He was asked, “What’s the behavioral bias or reliable error made by decision makers that you would remove if you had a magic wand?” Danny answered, “Overconfidence,” and his answer was widely discussed in the Twittersphere and the blogosphere. The question that I was asked to ask you is the same one. What bias would you remove if you had a magic wand?

Thaler: It’s never a good idea to disagree with Danny. I think that would also be at the top of my list. Let’s add some related biases that contribute to overconfidence, like the confirmation bias. One of the reasons we’re overconfident is that we actively seek evidence that supports our views. That’s true of everybody, that’s part of human nature, so that’s one reason we’re overconfident; we’re out there looking for support that we’re right. We rarely go out of our way to seek evidence that would contradict us. If people want to make a New Year’s resolution, it should be to test their strong beliefs by asking what would convince them that they were wrong, then looking around and seeing whether they might find some evidence for that.

“The evidence for hindsight bias is overwhelming, and this has huge managerial implications.”

The other one would be a hindsight bias, a notion that was first introduced by Baruch Fischhoff, who was a graduate student of [University of Minnesota psychology professor] Paul E. Meehl. Hindsight bias is the [inclination to believe] that after the fact we all think things were obvious. Now, if you ask people, “What did they think 10 years ago was the prospect that we would have an African-American president before we would have a woman president?” People would say, “Oh, yeah, well, that could have happened. All you needed was the right guy to come along at the right time.”

Or some people, of course, will say the wrong guy, but in any case…. In truth, no one thought that back then. The evidence for hindsight bias is overwhelming, and this has huge managerial implications because when managers evaluate the decisions of their employees, they do so with hindsight.

So some project failed and after the fact it’s obvious why it failed and it’s obvious that the employee should have thought of it. Whereas, before the fact, it wasn’t obvious to anybody; otherwise, we wouldn’t have done it. The advice I always give my students in dealing with hindsight bias is before big decisions, get everybody to write stuff down — including the boss — and agree on what the criteria are for good and bad decisions. That will help at least a little bit — after the fact — when things blow up. We’ll have it on record that nobody anticipated the fact that our competitor was going to introduce a better version of our great idea two months before the launch, and we had no way of knowing that was going to happen.

How Search Engines Use Artificial Intelligence

By Mike Kaput

Search engines are incredible. You pop onto your favorite one, type in a few keywords, and magically the search engine has scoured the entire internet to find the most relevant content. Except it’s not magic, of course. It’s algorithms and a lot of ideas from a lot of brilliant people. And we’ve started to wonder: With all the brilliant minds behind them, to what extent are search engines using artificial intelligence?

Thanks to those same search engines, I was able to find some great research explaining how search engines use artificial intelligence.

Search Engines Use Artificial Intelligence For Quality Control Back in the day, certain SEO “specialists” beat the system with shady practices that we’ve come to know as “black hat SEO techniques.” These include aggressive keyword stuffing, cloaking, invisible text—the list goes on.

Of course, this was damaging to search engines because the pages that were at the top of their results weren’t necessarily the highest quality content.

Nowadays, they’ve updated their algorithms and use AI to separate the high quality content from the low quality spam.

We suspect that as AI progresses, it will completely take over this responsibility and remove the need for human quality raters entirely.

Search Engines Algorithms

Use

AI

To

Create

Ranking

Not only does artificial intelligence protect search engines from manipulation, but it also helps them with their ranking algorithms.

It’s impossible to tell how big of a role AI plays in this, but search engines definitely use artificial intelligence to improve their ranking algorithms.

To get a little more technical, this specific area of artificial intelligence involves learning to rank algorithms. Machines are taught to create an optimal list from a set of possible outcomes, learning from each of the variables over time.

For example, if one result on a search engine is ranking third

but has a higher click through rate than the options above it, the search engine would learn from this anomaly and bump that result to the top.

Search Engines Use NLP and Image Analysis To Understand Search Queries Search engines are computer applications, but they need to be able to understand human language in order to find users the information they’re looking for.

That’s a textbook application of natural language processing (NLP), a field of AI dedicated to teaching computers to understand our written language.

At the very least, both Google and Microsoft are using NLP to understand their users.

A University of Washington study looked at Yandex, the world’s fourth largest search engine, and noticed that it has some advanced applications of NLP and machine learning.

Yandex developers found that they could take all of their users’ previous searches and use them to optimize future searches. By creating these personalized search results, they’ve increased click through rate by about 10%.

Search Engine Journal also points out that Google uses some of the same practices by optimizing search engine results based on recent previous queries, and allows users to conduct a search with nothing more than a photo (which uses another field of artificial intelligence).

What Does This Mean For SEO? Here’s the big question for marketers: how will AI change the way we we optimize for SEO? It’s pretty simple. Search engines are meant to find users what they’re looking for. With machine learning, it will get to the point where they will find exactly that.

That’s great for marketers because it means that the best, most relevant content will win. Choosing the right keywords and following best SEO practices will remain important, but, as search engines become more intelligent, the relevancy and quality of content will be the top ranking factors.

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Sweeping Away Sludge: How Consumers and Firms Can Find a Barrier-free Path SLUDGE NOT ONLY DRIVES CONSUMERS AWAY, IT ALSO KILLS ANY GOODWILL THAT THEY MIGHT TAKE WITH THEM.

By Cait Lamberton

Though the short-term gains from buying or selling a socalled sludgey product may seem alluring, we would argue that just as with Vision, this is building success on a house of very sticky cards. Sludge not only drives consumers away, it also kills any goodwill that they might take with them. Three types of sludge can clearly be seen in the Vision story – and they’re nearly endemic in business. Finding and busting them should be a priority for consumers and businesses alike.

Open the Door: Bust ‘Access Sludge’ The Vision rent-to-own plan was intended to create access, particularly to prospective homeowners who might otherwise have been left in the cold. But the renovation requirements, long repair procedures, and complicated permitting processes effectively slammed the door on their dreams.

Access sludge like this creeps up easily. Start with the physical environment where a business operates. Are doors accessible for all? Virtual and communication barriers are just as real.

Difficult-to-recall passwords, multiple sign-ons and singlelanguage communication all present access sludge.

Once people get in the door, businesses still have to make sure they can navigate the hallways. In the case of the Free

Application for Student Aid, substantial sludge exists for lower-income and first-generation students hoping to access higher education funding since they lack access to parental tax forms or a permanent address.

Even if people can navigate the hallways, businesses also need to make them psychologically comfortable. For example, the Federal McKinney-Vento Act mandates that school districts identify students experiencing homelessness, so they can access resources to help them succeed. However, the process of identification alone may be stigmatizing, pushing students away from access to resources with long-term positive effects on their lives.

Not all problems are sludge – but almost all sludge is a problem.

Help Them Navigate: Bust ‘Complexity Sludge’ For the Vision customers who faced a thick lease agreement and old wiring, complexity was likely a necessary part of the purchase. While not all complexity is necessarily bad, too much effort will lower people’s likelihood to reach their goals.

Complexity sludge takes many forms, such as repetitive

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processes or the need to switch devices to complete a process. To bust this sludge, businesses can pre-populate forms with information already gathered, explain reasons behind processes, and ensure everything can be done using one device or in one location.

A recent survey by VisaHQ showed that a simple travel visa application process is riddled with complexities including 30 different visas types, missing information about requirements, interactions with multiple consulates and outsourcing partners, and submissions in multiple formats.

Cheer Them On: Bust ‘Insecurity Sludge’ Even if Vision had made it easy for homeowners to get in the door or rewarded them for starting the long process of fixing up their new home, everything can still fall apart with insecurity sludge.

This sludge introduces doubt, leading people to wonder if they’ve made the right choice. Insecurity prompts regret, abandonment, and bad word-of-mouth. In the Vision case, it led to abandonment of the projects and half-finished eyesores in the community.

An overwhelming number of choices means people are more likely to question decisions, experience regret, and be less satisfied with what they have chosen. Businesses should give consumers control over the choices they consider and the amount of information they see. Spelling out the impacts that different choices might have on their lives give people

confidence to make the right decision.

Lastly, insecure consumers want off-ramps so they can make choices without fear of long-term misery. Even feeling that they don’t have the option to leave can trigger the desire to bolt.

A Clear Path Forward While former Vision customers will receive clean titles and restitutions, they have also learned an important lesson in sniffing out and seeing through some very thick sludge. For companies, Vision provides an important warning: Not all problems are sludge – but almost all sludge is a problem.

Fortunately, firms are being both encouraged and empowered to remove sludge. For example, the UK’s Office of Fair Trading’s investigation led multiple airlines to remove the “sludge” that previously obscured their actual pricing practices, leaving consumers with higher travel costs than anticipated. The Behavioral Economics in Action Center has released a dashboard to help firms find and reduce sludge.

And those billions of paperwork hours? H&R Block partnered with researchers to pre-populate Free Application for Student Aid forms, helping people to complete the paperwork in less than 10 minutes. As a result, enrollment rose by about 30% for high school seniors.

Removing sludge may be a first step in making the most of marketing investments, and in seeing a clearer, faster path forward.

Social ad strategies from the top brands on Facebook and Twitter

By William Merchan

Top advertisers on Twitter and Facebook There are several interesting comparisons among types of brands advertising across Twitter and Facebook. For starters, the industries that spend the most on Facebook advertising are food & drink; retail; and style, fashion & beauty. No surprise, given how the rise of Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) and the prevalence of consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands.

While food & drink also takes the top industry spot on Twitter’s biggest advertisers, media and financial services companies follow. Twitter has a heavier focus on real-time news and business updates, which is why media and financial services companies lead the way on Twitter advertising.

The food & drink industries are spending heavily across Twitter and Facebook, and CPG brands top the list of top Twitter advertisers. Consider the top five advertisers by spend on both platforms since June 1: Top Facebook advertisers include a telecom carrier, a big box retailer, and a storied tech company. Top Twitter advertisers, however, are much less diverse, as they are all CPG brands. This comparison also shows a compelling trend from Facebook to Twitter advertising, as the top five brands advertising on Facebook have averaged an estimated spend of $96M, whereas the top five on Twitter have only averaged $15M since June 1. This huge difference in spend is likely because Facebook has broader reach to varying demographics, whereas Twitter’s user base skews younger.

What’s trending in social advertising Despite the differences in ad spend across Twitter and Facebook, social media advertising trends are quite similar from platform to platform. A few examples: Advertising purpose, not just products. Consumers require the brands they do business with to communicate authentically and with integrity. As such, brands are advertising their involvement within the local community with regionalized ads, or with national nonprofit organizations that tie into the advertising brands’ core messages. Take Walmart, for example: Several of the company’s top ads feature a call to action for consumers to look for the Fight Hunger labels on food items in its stores, which supports local food banks.

Hashtags and emojis galore. Given social media’s obsession with hashtags and emojis, it’s no wonder why the two are a staple among social ads — especially on Twitter. Emoji usage in tweets garner about 25 percent more engagement than those without, and on Facebook, using emojis results in 57 percent more likes, 33 percent more comments, and 33 percent more shares.

Hello, video. One surprising trend that Pathmatics found is how prevalent video ads are on Twitter. In fact, it’s the top ad format for each of the top five Twitter advertisers since June 1. Given that video tweets attract 10 times more engagement over those without, and also save brands more than 50 percent of cost-per-engagement, video ads have proven to be an excellent ad method on the platform. Conversely, the top Facebook advertisers have a much different mix, using link, photo, and carousel posts more frequently than video posts.

2020 vision: Social advertising’s future A brand’s decision to spend on Facebook advertising versus Twitter isn’t as clear cut as it seems. Though Facebook has about six times as many users as Twitter, and owns the lion’s share of social media advertising — 57 percent to Twitter’s 13 percent, to be exact — Facebook’s advertising business is beginning to show signs of stagnation.

The platform’s lack of transparency across political ads, poorly regulated targeting practices, and propensity to propel fake news to the top of users’ newsfeeds are making brands second guess how much of their social media budget to spend with the platform. And as Facebook doubles down on privacy to address federal and consumer concerns, the company expects its ad revenue growth to decelerate into 2020.

As a result, Pathmatics anticipates there will soon be a changing of the guard in terms of advertisers’ preferred social media marketing mix.

William Merchan is a data science, marketing analytics, advertising technology and startup veteran. He currently serves as chief revenue officer at marketing intelligence company Pathmatics, where he is responsible for brand growth and awareness.

Durex rebrands with flat logo and “sex positive” campaign

By Natashah Hitti

Creative agency Havas has designed a new brand identity for British condom manufacturer Durex, which features a flattened logo written in One Night Sans typeface in a bid to challenge “repressive” sexual norms.

Havas has designed the visual identity to accompany its updated brand strategy of showcasing the “positive reality” of sex.

The rebrand includes a refined logo and sans-serif typeface – wittily named One Night Sans as a play on words of the term “one night stand” – alongside posters advertising honest facts and figures about sexual health.

The new campaign aims to reposition the condom company as a “mainstream activist” against sexual stigmas and taboos. ”This might be the most important piece of work we ever do,” said Elliot Harris, creative director at Havas.

“Durex is a huge brand with a unique and vital role in culture.

It has genuine influence, and the capability to enact real change. And make no mistake, this is a proper commitment.”

“This new brand purpose will lead to healthier conversations around, and attitudes towards, sex, but also greater inclusion and acceptance for those who might not always experience it,” he added.

“To have a brand like Durex publicly and proudly on your side makes a difference.” The former three-dimensional Durex logo featured a light-reflective effect, used to make the symbol look convex, encapsulated in a lozenge-shaped border.

The new emblem has done away with the raised effect in favour of a flat design, but still retains the brand’s classic blue and white colourway fronted on a pill-shaped form.

This lozenge design has been extended across the Durex campaign posters, which feature photographs of couples kissing and people lying on beds.

Laid over the top of the faces in each image is a pill-shaped cut-out depicting an enlarged version of the section it is covering. The posters also include facts informed by the brand’s 2017 Global Sex Survey, including “2/3 of us are not fully satisfied with our sex lives”, “1 in 2 of us have never been tested for STD’s” and “71 per cent of young guys go online for inspiration in the bedroom”. These facts have also been made into more catchy, rhyming phrases, like “porn’s not the norm”.

Durex specifically chose the launch date as 14 February – Valentine’s Day – as it is on this occasion that these sexual conventions and misconceptions are endorsed the most. ”While the exponential growth of the internet has brought positives including openness, discussion, exploration and access, its consequences, including misconnection, myths, lack of education and confusion, are substantial,” said the brand.

“Ultimately, the findings pointed to an underlying sexual anxiousness, driven primarily by unrealistic representations of sex throughout culture.”

“It is those unrealistic representations – as well as the stigma and taboos they exacerbate – that Durex is rallying against,” it

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added. According to the 91-year-old brand, the campaign is centred around an “inclusive open letter to all”, which writes about the need to challenge unrealistic sexual expectations.

call out the taboos placed on sexual health by launching a campaign to raise awareness about the bias selection process of adverts.

“So what if we take a stand for sex? Worry less about how it ‘should’ look. Celebrate how it can feel. Where porn’s not the norm. And STDs are kinda real.” the poem-style letter reads.

Called Approved, Not Approved, the campaign included an online quiz that aims to help the public understand how ad guidelines are “selectively enforced” when it comes to sexrelated content – particularly those targeted at women.

“Throw out definitions and let go of traditions. You do you.

Or he, she, them, they, us and we. Love is love, no matter orientation. Isn’t it time we challenge sexpectations?” Sex-toy designers Polly Rodriguez and Alexandra Fine also aimed to

Durex is just one of the brands following the trend of flat graphic design. Volkswagen recently rebranded to a twodimensional logo to mark the launch of a new line of fully electric cars, alongside Mozilla’s minimal overhaul in 2017.

Netflix, the New York Times & the Evils of Advertising

By Tien Tzuo

In the 1970s the average U.S consumer was exposed to

Here’s how media used to work: content providers like

about 500 ads a day. Today that number is around 5,000.

television studios and radio stations and online news sites

Ads are everywhere, and they are designed to make you feel

offered you their work for “free,” and in return you had to

bad about yourself.

sit through a stream of irrelevant advertisements or a scroll

Ads show parties that you aren’t invited to, houses that you’ll

through page full of crappy display ads.

never live in, bodies that you’ll never have. They prey on your

Here’s how good media works today: streaming services

self-esteem in order to sell more stuff. They are particularly

and news organizations ask you to support the work of their

toxic for teenagers and young people.

content creators directly through digital subscriptions. That’s

Advertising helped bring us the smoking and obesity and

it. Nice and simple.

prescription drug epidemics. Political ads contribute to a

Ten years ago The New York Times, for example, made a

degraded public discourse at best, and outright disinformation

deliberate decision to shift from focusing on advertising

at worst (thank you, Facebook!). I could go on.

revenue to digital subscription revenue, and today it’s a huge

Fortunately, you don’t need advertisements to run a successful

success story. I remember when the Atlantic declared in 2009

media business anymore.

that “at some point soon—sooner than most of us think—the

Case in point: Netflix.

longer exist.”

Lots of advertising companies are

dying to run ads on Netflix, according to last week’s Adweek article “Media Buyers to Netflix: Take Our Money!”

Netflix, to its credit, is saying no. In the company’s most recent investor video, Reed Hastings had this to say about competing against Google and Facebook for targeted advertising dollars: “There’s not easy money there. If we don’t have exposure to that, the positive side is we’re a much simpler place. We’re not integrating everybody’s data. We’re not controversial

print edition, and with it The Times as we know it, will no

Last week they announced that and that their digital subscription growth is actually accelerating (they now have over five million subscribers), but here’s the quote that stood out for me: “The company said it expected to continue generating revenue more from readers than from the advertisers that were once integral to the newspaper business.” Did you catch that?

Advertising is no longer integral to the newspaper business.

that way. We’ve got a much simpler business model, which is

But let me go one step forward with a prediction: I think that

just focused on streaming and customer pleasure.”

one day the New York Times will stop running ads altogether.

Netflix developed a massive, loyal audience because it focused on great programming with no ads. And now all

Like Netflix, they’ll find that an ad-free product is a massive differentiator in a crowded market.

the advertisers are knocking on their door! Some people just

Ads are evil. And smart media companies don’t need them

don’t get it.

anymore. Good riddance.

Book,

&

Line

Sinker

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

Identity Designed: The Definitive Guide to Visual Branding

By Radim Malinic

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

Written by best-selling writer and renowned designer David Airey, Identity Designed formalizes the process and the benefits of brand identity design and includes a substantial collection of high-caliber projects from a variety of the world’s most talented design studios.

Book of Branding is an essential addition to the start-up toolkit, designed for entrepreneurs, founders, visual designers, brand creators and anyone seeking to decode the complicated world of brand identity.

The conversational, jargon free, tone of the book helps the reader to understand essential elements of the brand identity process.

Brand New: The Shape of Brands to Come

By Wally Olins What is the future for brands and branding? Does globalization mean that variety and individuality will be crushed out of existence by massive multinationals? Will everywhere and everything become similar, like the world of airports today?

Or will there still be room for brands that thrive on being different? What about the impact of digital technology and increasing customer feedback through the internet and social media?

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

By James B. Twitchell Branding has become so successful and so ubiquitous that even cultural institutions have embraced it. In this witty and trenchant social analysis, James Twitchell shows how churches, universities, and museums have learned to embrace Madison Avenue rather than risk losing market share.

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

By Dechay Watts, Debbie Williams, Said Baaghil (Contributor) From mom-and-pop shops to mega brands, from B2B to B2C, one common theme exists: consumers are leading the course of marketing.

Today, successful companies do not talk “at” the customer; they talk “with” them, honestly and humanly.

By David Airey

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

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

Yes, traffic is very important for getting your prospects to find you online. However, most social psychologists would agree the secret sauce...

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

By Joeri Van den Bergh, Mattias Behrer While the first two editions of How Cool Brands Stay Hot focused exclusively on Generation Y (Millennials), this fully revised third edition looks at both Generations Y and Z. Using new market research to map and quantify the spending power of Generation Z, branding experts Joeri Van den Bergh and Mattias Behrer provide hard evidence on the impact of this generation and suggest ways to market effectively to them.

Content Marketing For Traffic And Sales: How To Use Direct Response Copywriting, For More Effective Content Marketing Kindle Edition

By Daniel Daines-Hutt In this book we walk you through the exact same strategy that we use for our OWN marketing

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63

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.

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.”

The Social Photo: On Photography and Social Media

Building Strong Brands Kindle Edition

By Nathan Jurgenson

By David A. Aaker

In The Social Photo, social theorist Nathan Jurgenson develops bold new ways of understanding photography in the age of social media and the new kinds of images that have emerged: the selfie, the faux-vintage photo, the self-destructing image, the food photo. Jurgenson shows how these devices and platforms have remade the world and our understanding of ourselves within it.

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

Overthrow: 10 ways to tell a challenger story Kindle Edition

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

By Mark Holden, Malcolm Devoy, Adam Morgan

By Michael Lewis

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...

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.