FOR MARKETERS?

By Will Novosedlik

There seems to be more upheaval and uncertainty than ever as we head into planning. How are ads on streaming services changing the offering? What about DEI efforts and sustainability? What impact will the recession have?

Marketing hits the mark when brands speak a customer’s language. But what if language is just the start? When it comes to cultural diversity and inclusion in marketing and branding, a newly released Canadian Media Fund report indicates that First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples collectively account for about 5% of our population – a significant audience that continues to be overlooked, underrepresented and underserved.

Shaun Vincent, owner of Vincent Design, a marketing agency and leader in Indigenous design out of Winnipeg, has identified a significant barrier in how brands connect with Indigenous peoples. “First Nations is mindblowing in terms of its diversity, languages, teachings and stories,” Vincent explains. “How do you incorporate everything into a symbol or purpose?”

The focus is often on language, he notes, “but language is on the back burner in terms of branding.

“It’s really about symbology and how the actual brand is going to resonate with that particular nation or nations. That’s what works. Making it relatable and having themselves be seen.”

Jennifer Tabak, president of Sudbury-based Design de Plume, a women-led, Indigenous-owned design firm, says the complexity of each community is “more than one person can handle.” Certain words and symbols mean different things to different cultures, so it only works when there is “an investment in using people who understand the nuances, or in running it by that community,” to ensure the creative and messaging is captured in an authentic, meaningful way.

She emphasizes a top-down approach, noting that larger organizations need to lead the way: “How can they support [Indigenous inclusion and diversity] in bigger ways, like providing language services, mentoring opportunities or hiring? Who in their organization is actually an Indigenous person, or in the agency that’s helping to support the messaging?”

Vincent offers an illustrative example: he was asked to create the logo for the Pope’s visit to Canada in Summer 2022. He acknowledges that he had to come to terms with what role he should play in representing the Papal visit and the apology that came with it. It required consultation with elders, survivors and his family.

The result was a design consisting of caribou, eagles and salmon, all moving together in a blue circle. Eagles and painted turtles are prevalent symbols across Canada, Vincent says, but their meanings may vary, “but something as simple as a Saskatoon bush that resonates with everybody, or Crowberry, that represents the Inuit,” can be a respectful way of letting communities see themselves in the symbology.

So, how do you figure it out? Ultimately, he says, “consultation with elders is fundamental. Consultation with communities is fundamental.” He says it’s all about looking towards the bigger picture, which is change: “Someone once told me that it takes a generation to change a generation. We’re in that process now. Today, we’re walking in both worlds, Indigenous and non-Indigenous. And we have to go forward together for things to change.”

So many questions... We wanted to better understand the priorities guiding their thinking and decisionmaking, so we asked Bob Park of GE Appliances Canada, Nicole German of Tangerine Bank and Julie Gelinas of Les producteurs de lait du Québec for their top marketing priorities.

BOB PARK, CHIEF BRAND OFFICER, GE APPLIANCES CANADA

Streaming services: We’ve been engaged in the evolution of streaming services as it pertains to our soccer sponsorships. Apple TV recently partnered with Major League Soccer to offer streaming and we’re working through what that looks like from an advertising perspective. I think it comes down to two simple components: The first is obviously providing the consumer with content in the way they want. The second is finding ways to integrate brands in nontraditional ways as streaming does away with the usual “30-second spot.”

DEI: The real emphasis isn’t on DEI campaign or promotion but rather change through action. Brands today must be more genuine in their involvement on any level. It’s much more than painting your logo rainbow during Pride week. I’d like us to get to a point where our brands represent true DEI in all of our communications and sponsorships, right down to our own corporate mandate.

Consumer centricity: High inflation and the looming recession have made it difficult for anyone to think about a kitchen renovation. So we’ve been laser-focused on a consumer-centric strategy. The age-old way to look at an appliance sale has been a standard “white-box CPG” approach. Today we’re pushing those boundaries, mapping the end to end consumer experience. Most recently we launched our GEappliances.ca website to sell direct to consumer.

NICOLE GERMAN, CHIEF MARKETING AND DIGITAL EXPERIENCE OFFICER, TANGERINE BANK

Consumer centricity: We need to ensure we are right beside Canadians in the changing landscape they are managing through – from inflation, layoffs, recession and volatile markets as well as saving for life events and the future, while balancing everyday life needs. We’re focused on presenting the best financial products and services coupled with tools and financial wellness advice.

Enhance self-service capabilities: In a world of increasing mobile adoption and digital natives, we are focused on empowering our customers and prospects to have the autonomy and control right from the mobile device in their hand – from acquiring a new product, to learning about financial wellness, to preventing scams, to investing, savings, borrowing and spending.

Modernization and optimization: These are priorities in our marketing technology stack and data strategy to prepare for the cookieless future. We aim to ensure relevance for prospects and customers alike – the best message, in the best channel, at the best moment.

JULIE

GELINAS, DIRECTOR OF MARKETING,

LES PRODUCTEURS DE LAIT DU QUÉBEC

Marketing mix: Fragmentation of targets over multiple media channels and social platforms has forced PLQ to rethink its approach in order to obtain a complete picture of the impact of our marketing efforts. In this day and age, ads are increasingly ignored or avoided altogether.

Recently appointed PepsiCo Foods Canada’s CMO, Jess Spaulding arrived in Canada from the U.S. earlier this year to take her new role. Here, she lets us in on the media influencing her work.

LISTEN: After Hours

Hosted by Harvard Business School professors Youngme Moon, Mihir Desai and Felix Oberholzer-Gee, this podcast discusses culture and current events happening globally. When you work in advertising or marketing, you need to understand what’s happening not just in your market, but across the world, and the forces that are shaping our society.

READ: It Was Vulgar and It Was Beautiful by Jack Lowery

This book examines Grand Fury, an art collective that was born out of the activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) during the peak of the AIDS pandemic. As the author examines the group’s art and activism, you’ll learn a ton about their profound impact on the AIDS crisis and the kinds of activist tactics used in contemporary movements.

WATCH: The Defiant Ones

Serious about sustainability: Making more responsible decisions also means acknowledging the environmental footprint of our marketing strategies and working to reduce it. It’s critical that we listen to our consumers as we navigate an economic climate where the values of citizens and organizations take precedence. This is a top priority for 2023 and for many years to come. The challenge is to balance the needs of both stakeholders and consumers.

The Defiant Ones explores the friendship between Jimmy Lovine and Dr. Dre – two music legends I love. Both come from different worlds, but together defied norms and transformed contemporary culture with their work. The four-part documentary follows their life story with interviews from Lovine and Dr. Dre, and a variety of other amazing music icons.

PREDICTING THE FUTURE IS IMPOSSIBLE, BUT IMAGINING IT IS CRITICAL.

BY WILL NOVOSEDLIK

Rejecting Complexity

Brands operate in a world of ever-increasing complexity. Like people, they gravitate towards simplification.

Marketing’s own obsession with simplicity, rooted in the religion of operational efficiency, has historically been aimed at reaching the greatest number of people with the same message so as to maximize sales and achieve the greatest ROMI. Brands are the tools business has used to train us to expect communications and ideas to be as simple as possible. Ergo, they’ve been busy dumbing us down for over a hundred years.

This obsession with operational efficiency has also diminished the quality of research. Market research has historically classified humans into clusters with similarly perceived needs, interests and behaviours, but only just enough perceived similarity as is necessary to achieve conversion at a scale large enough to justify the investment.

We live in extraordinary times. The ground beneath our feet is shifting. It feels like we’re between worlds – the one we used to know and the one we don’t yet understand.

On a macro scale, a complex cluster of overlapping forces – the global pandemic, rampant inflation, energy scarcity, war, migration, technological disruption and climate change – is working to destabilize and reshape the world we thought we knew. And, in times like these, we desperately yearn for certainty and simplicity.

The world of marketing is no exception. It has been profoundly destabilized by technological change. It’s in a broad transition from a one-sizefits-all, limbic form of mass communications to the hyper-personalized, algorithmic form of individuated experience. The question is: are we headed into the unknown with a toolkit that was designed for a world that no longer exists? If so, what tools do marketers need to navigate increasing instability, complexity and uncertainty?

To discuss that question, we’ve collaborated with experts in strategic insight and foresight, advertising and artificial intelligence. We’ll take a look at the world we’re in as marketers and what kinds of questions we should be asking now to be future-proofed later.

“Brands have depended on simplifying these clusters so that they’re easy to manage, which results in a kind of overgeneralization that immediately renders these clusters useless,” asserts Paul Hartley, anthropologist and co-founder of strategic foresight firm Human Futures Studio. “This kind of oversimplification is creating a