Brand Architect

Dove Back on Track with Real Beauty Sketches

Brilliantly conceived and executed campaign for Dove. Dove describe the campaign as “Women are their own worst beauty critics. Only 4% of women around the world consider themselves beautiful. At Dove, we are committed to creating a world where beauty is a source of confidence, not anxiety. So, we decided to conduct a compelling social experiment that explores how women view their own beauty in contrast to what others see.”

Designing Responsive Strategy for Creative Agencies

Strategy Playbook from Ana Andjelic

I like this presentation by digital strategy director Ana Andjelic. In her notes, she says “Strategy in creative agencies often isn’t taken seriously - and deservedly so. We aren’t doing it right. In a world that’s connected, open and interactive, strategy needs to be the same. Strategy isn't an isolated discipline or a tucked-away department that makes a cameo in the agency process by drafting a brand architecture or summarizing a competitive opportunity. It's a problem-solving approach and a methodology that can help companies grow. It can turn agencies into growth hackers for brands by pointing the way for their business in the emerging digital markets. To get into this value matchmaking game, we first need to expand what strategy (and strategists) must do.”

When Brands Don’t Innovate, They Die

The above cartoon by the always brilliant Tom Fishburne drives home the point that brands that fail to innovate will end up in the graveyard with tombstones recording how they stagnated or failed to adapt to changing markets.

Managing innovation is the most important task a brand manager or strategist can do: far more important than signing off on an advertising campaign, making sure the brand manual is up-to-date, or tweaking a logo in the hope that it will change the fortunes of the company.

Innovation is also misunderstood by many who see it purely as the eureka moment emerging from the R&D laboratory. Managing innovation is a far broader and more strategic function that determines the relevance and success of a brand over time.

To understand more, brand managers should expand their business book library to include the works of innovation authors such as Clayton Christensen.

Tom’s notes on his cartoon deal with a specific aspect of innovation management namely the importance of the challenger mentality. His notes can be read here.

Why Newsrooms are an Agile | Adaptive Answer for Agencies

Several months ago I wrote that agile | adaptive strategies are well suited for marketing departments as they face increasingly volatile socio-economic environments. Agile | adaptive strategies also offer advertising and communication agencies a future business model.

The traditional campaign communication model is rigid and ill-equipped to deal with the flexibility and uncertainity of today’s environment where consumers demand communication that is timely and relevant.

"The need for relevance will drive consumer demand and shape advertising supply. There will be billions of interaction points that will place enormous demands on brands to create and deliver just the right piece of content," Jacques Bughin and David Edelman of McKinsey & Company wrote in their submission to Wharton Future of Advertising Program.

The brand newsroom is emerging as a potential future model for advertising agencies. Like the traditional editorial newsroom the brand newsroom would react in real-time to events that interest the newsroom’s audience and produce a stream of content aligned with the evolving event.

“Brands will have to leave behind organizations and thinking built solely around the campaign model, and instead adopt the defining characteristics of the real-time, data-driven newsroom — a model that's prolific, agile and audience-centric,” Newsweek CEO Baba Shetty  and Wharton Marketing Professor Jerry Wind wrote for the Harvard Business Review.

“Consumers have new expectations. Social media and digital news offer a continuously-updated reflection of the culture consumers live within.The overwhelming consensus from the Wharton Future of Advertising panel is that the current campaign-based model is ill-equipped to deal with this new reality,” Shetty and Wind added.

“We believe the newsroom metaphor offers a powerful way to rethink the way advertising content is being developed and delivered, the roles of the advertiser, agencies, the users and other content generators, and the entire organizational architecture of advertising and marketing.”

Adapting to a newsroom model won’t be easy for advertising agencies that have spent decades perfecting their campaign business model. However, implementing some sort of agile | adaptive strategy / business model will be essential.

Calle Sjoenell, Chief Creative Office at O&M, predicts that by 2020 at least half of the advertising production budget will be spent while the campaign is running to adapt it in real time instead of blowing it all in one go, before the campaign runs.

The Fickleness of Brand Loyalty

Tom Fishburne’s cartoon on brand loyalty is very accurate. In his notes, Tom states “Brand loyalty can be pretty fickle. Marketers often overestimate the motivations of their brand loyalists and how prominent their brands are in their consumers' lives. This is particularly apparent when more than half of all grocery items are sold on price promotion. We train consumers to buy our brands on deal and then wonder why we have so many brand switchers. To exacerbate the challenge, many categories feature very little difference across competing products, making it even easier to substitute brands.” To read his full notes, click here.

Content is Blurring the Lines

The above quote comes from a company that “powers the intersection of marketing, social media and journalism”, so one can expected it to be biased towards the business offering of /newsrooms. The quote is, however, also accurate and identifies the emergence of brand journalism as a key communication channel for brands. Key to the success of brand journalism is not going to be writing exclusively about the client brand but also objectively about the interests it shares with its target market, including objective reportage about competitors and developments that may not include the client brand (I believe the client brand should appear less than 30% of the time). Brand journalism will succeed when brands are brave enough to sponsor objective coverage based on the best principles of journalism.

Digital and Social Marketing Outlook for 2013

DeepFocus_2013Outlook

This time of the year is flush with predictions for the coming months. Some are insightful, more are not. I liked this list of 15 developments to watch for in the digital, social and mobile media arenas. The list was complied by digital agency Deep Focus.

The Implications of Not Knowing the Future, and Thinking You Do

The first 2013 edition of The New York Times carried two articles that dealt with a key aspect of agile | adaptive strategies: how to incorporate what you know or don’t know about the future into your business strategy.

The first article titled “Outmaneuvered at Their Own Game, Antivirus Makers Struggle to Adapt” wrote about the fact that antivirus software is often not very good at stopping virus and “these programs rarely, if ever, block freshly minted computer viruses”.

Adapting to their proven inability to detect future viruses, the term antivirus is being dropped from product names and some players in the industry are moving from trying to defeat future virus to identifying and preventing unusual software behaviour (often through the use of whitelisting or isolating suspicious activity) or cleaning up breached software systems.

Acknowledging their inability to predict the future, the industry’s answer has been to adapt to reality and “turn the whole notion of security on its head.”

The second piece that caught my attention was a column by Steve Lohr titled “Sure, Big Data Is Great. But So Is Intuition”.

Essentially, Lohr argued that whilst many technologists, businessmen and forecasters are getting excited by the potential of Big Data to predict useful, and therefore profitable, trends, the algorithms identifying the trends are too simple-minded.

“The problem is that a math model, like a metaphor, is a simplification. This type of modelling came out of the sciences, where the behaviour of particles in a fluid, for example, is predictable according to the laws of physics.

“In so many Big Data applications, a math model attaches a crisp number to human behaviour, interests and preferences…” This focused simplification, as readers of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book The Black Swan will know, effectively shields us from considering the complexity and unknown from where the most far-reaching changes emerge.

Lohr doesn’t argue that Big Data should be ignored, and neither do I. Quoting leaders in the field of data analysis he writes that the asking the right questions that the data must answer and comparing the answers to reality is important.

He adds “Listening to the data is important...but so is experience and intuition. After all, what is intuition at its best but large amounts of data filtered through a human brain rather than a math model?”

The first article dealt the adaption of an industry to the realization that it was increasingly bad at predicting future events, the second warns against focused simplification of predicting : both are key to agile | adaptive strategies.

From Creation to Listening to Engagement

Far too many South African brands still don’t get social media and use it as a one-to-many loudhailer, little different from broadcast and print marketing in the last century. The key aspect of social media today is engagement and that only really succeeds when a brand listens to what its intended and unintended audience is saying and engages with them.

The above example from UK tampon brand Bodyform is a classic example of a brand listening and engaging. In October this year, Bodyform was gently lampooned in a Facebook post for misleading men about what happens to women when they get their period. The post received more than 100,000 likes and generated over 4,500 comments. Bodyform responded quickly in a way that continued the conversation. That is how social media should be handled.

Weak Signals are More Important Than Blatant Trends

Not too long ago, one of my business associates declined a project brief by the marketing director of a large FMCG retailer to produce an image board of trends identified by popular consumer magazines. He declined it because the brief offered no value to the retailer.

If a magazine reports about a trend, chances are the trend has been in existence for a while. If an image board of reported trends is how a brand is deciding where to position itself, then it has missed an opportunity to take full advantage of the trend and, by focusing on the known, is missing other emerging trends.

Rather than search for the bold strokes of an existent trends, brands should be looking for the weak signals of what the future holds. A weak signal is a small disruption or innovation, often initially confined to a specific location or demographic but with the potential to spread and grow in importance.

We look for weak signals, not in the pages of a glossy magazine, but on the peripheries of the socio-economic environment. “As with human peripheral vision, these signals are difficult to see and interpret but can be vital to success or survival,” academics George Day and Paul Schoemaker wrote in Harvard Business Review seven years ago.

There are numerous ways of looking for and analyzing weak signals. One of these approaches is to talk to extreme users of a brand or product and not the average users. Sense Worldwide is a strategy consultancy that does just that. It’s strategy director Brian Millar wrote insightfully in Fast Company earlier this year:

“At first, it seemed strange for me to take mainstream brands to fringe people. But it works. Kenyan microlenders and global retail bankers can learn a tremendous amount from each other. Health insurers and medical tourists can create services that benefit both of them. Running shoe design has been revolutionized by studying people who have never worn them. Now it seems strange to talk to regular people. What are they going to tell you that you don’t already know?

It takes a degree of professional courage to leave one’s comfort zone and look to the fringe for weak signals. But that is where the answers about future trends are.

Why Skills Transfer | Consulting is the Future

Strategy is a hard sell. It is also a tough buy.

Common to both is that strategy remains an underestimated skill with many executives believing they and their team should be able guide their company to growth and prosperity; and, secondly, even the best strategy in the world is worthless if it can't be implemented.

Regarding the first point, senior executives and their teams should be able to develop strategies for their companies. However, the reality is they are often so enveloped in the operation side of their businesses that strategy is a rushed afterthought confined to annual strategy sessions where outdated strategic tools and methodologies are often badly implemented.

Strategy should be constantly evolving and adapting to realities of the socio-economic environment. This requires the dedication of time and thought, observation and adaptation: the domain and value add of the strategy consultant.

The second problem facing the sale / purchase of strategy is one of implementation. Even the most successful strategy consultancies have learnt that a deck of impressive strategic insight means little to the client if it is not implemented and managed properly.

To address this many strategy consultancies are offering implementation. However, if there were concerns about executives and managers not being able to devise strategy for their own companies there will be more about the inability to implement it.

Against this backdrop a viable offering for strategic consulting lies in what I term in skills transfer I consulting. The vertical separator between skills skills transfer and consulting is important: this is not about consulting how to transfer skills. Rather it is the parallel and simultaneous acts of delivering a solution to a challenge and/or opportunity and training the client in the development and implementation of that solution.

The skills transfer | consulting process starts with assembling the internal team that client would choose to tackle the challenge at hand. Into this team a small group of senior consultants are embedded to work with the team to fully define the challenge and sketch the outline of the solution.

The output of this initial stage to two-fold: a project plan to develop and implement a strategic solution to the challenge as well as a plan to impart skills the client team / specific individuals require to develop and implement the strategy.

The end result is a win-win situation for the client. A strategic solution to the challenge and/or opportunity facing the brand, and an up-skilled team that a) understands how the strategy was arrived at, b) can implement and refine the strategy, and c) and tackle similar projects on their own in the future.

The future of strategic consulting is far less about telling and more about teaching.

When Strategy is Left to Post-Production

The above cartoon from the always-brilliant Tom Fishburne is, unfortunately, too often, true. As Tom writes in the notes that accompany the cartoon that “a marketing campaign is only as strong as the strategy that drives it. Yet sometimes we treat marketing strategy as an afterthought” and “...advertising can’t fix a bad marketing strategy”. However, advertising and brand agencies may be trying to to correct that with the appointment of strategists that go beyond the traditional role played by the planner and look to advise the client on the marketing strategy itself.