Since this column is called Reinvention Notes, I thought that this month we would look at Brand Reinvention. Recently I read an article about how the US Army is bringing back their classic, “Be All You Can Be” brand advertising campaign, as they struggle to meet their recruiting numbers. I thought, who better to explore this than someone who helped kill this strategy over 23 years ago.

“Be All You Can Be”

Before we get started, I want to establish that I liked the old “Be All You Can Be” advertising. Growing up as an ‘80s teen, the Army’s ad campaign was deeply ingrained in my subconscious – it even drove the plot of the classic ‘80s movie “Stripes.” At the time I don’t recall feeling that the campaign compelled me to visit a recruiting center, but I was in Canada back then and I wasn’t entirely sure that we had an army.

For those of you who haven’t seen it, the advertising was full of people jumping out of planes, crawling under barbed wire, and doing stuff that “teen me” thought was really cool. And that was the target: young people deciding what to do with their lives. The big chunk of young America for whom college may have been out of reach, those who hadn’t yet found their thing. The Army was positioned as an exciting alternative that challenged you to push past your limits. It would help you figure out what you want to do with the rest of your life, and maybe give you a free ride to college (of course nothing is really free).

And then something happened. The cold war ended. The battle that the US Army had spent half a century preparing for was abruptly cancelled. People went on with their lives. But as it turns out, even without a big enemy, an Army still needs a lot of soldiers.

The US still had troop commitments to Germany, Korea and elsewhere, and instead of fighting one big war, the US preparedness strategy was now about being ready to fight two mid-sized wars simultaneously. At the turn of the millennium this amounted to the need for about 100,000 new recruits every year, just to stay even with those who left the service or retired.

So, what’s this got to do with branding? As it turns out, a lot. Just as the Army described itself as “the toughest job you’ll ever love,” it was also one of the toughest brands to have to sell. Think about what is being sold…you will have to work very hard, in often unpleasant conditions, you will be bossed around and may be yelled at, the hairstyle you like – gone, you will be paid very little, and there is the ever-present risk of serious injury or death. Now just sign here.

Until the end of the cold war, the US Army recruiting mission relied on the brand intangibles created by having an imposing enemy – duty, honor, and patriotism. With America’s enemies apparently vanquished, these intangibles were pushed to the background, and the Army missed its recruiting mission every year from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the turn of the century. Sure, there were still young people primarily motivated by duty, honor, and patriotism, but many of these were sopped up by the niche but very well targeted brand, the Marines. There was no surplus to feed the biggest recruiting need, the US Army.

The Assignment

The engagement had 3 primary deliverables (the third deliverable is a story for another day):

• Develop the Army’s brand strategy and positioning
• Identify the new Army advertising agency
• Build a modern marketing organization and capability for US Army recruiting

Despite the scope and scale of this work the core team was remarkably small – myself as the Senior Engagement Manager, along with an insights consultant, and a consultant with an ad agency background.

Brand Discovery

Freshly laminated security passes in hand, we met our client “handler” at the Pentagon – a Lieutenant with a southern drawl, whose name I genuinely remember as “Bubba.” He showed us around the massive Pentagon complex, ending the tour in a center courtyard with a small stone building. We were told that during the cold war the Soviets targeted this building with ICMBs, believing it to be the entrance to the high command’s bunker. In actuality it was a hot dog stand where we had lunch. Maybe this was just a southern tall tale Bubba was telling us, but it’s never good to question your clients too much on your first day.

We were given an office near our clients that was filled with abandoned office furniture from what we imagined was the Truman administration. Inside the drawer of one of the desks was a stack of blank commendation forms, which I didn’t want responsibility for and quickly handed off to Bubba. As I looked around the place I came to the realization that while the US military may command a budget that now approaches $2 trillion dollars, they weren’t spending it on their creature comforts.

Our discovery work involved interviewing a great number of stakeholders, both military and civilian, who were lovely to us. On one general’s wall was a picture of President George H. W. Bush skydiving with the US Army’s Golden Knights. I was looking at the photo as our meeting was wrapping up and the general said something like, “Looks like fun, doesn’t it?” Without thinking too much, I said, “sure.” He immediately made a phone call and 3 days later we were at Fort Bragg jumping out of an airplane – an amazing experience that I will never do again. To this day, I don’t know if this was an incredible act of hospitality by the general, or a failed attempt to get rid of the consultants.

The discovery tour continued on to the US Army Recruiting Command, Fort Hood, and at Fort Knox we got to operate the tank simulators that Tank Drivers train on (and yes, they are called Tank Drivers).

Consumer Research

When it came time to conduct the consumer segmentation research which would drive our brand strategy, we were asked by the Army’s civilian leaders to collaborate with the RAND Corporation, which is a storied “think tank” closely affiliated with the Department of Defense. While we didn’t really need help with segmentation research, I was very intrigued about learning what goes on at a “think tank,” and it helped that RAND’s HQ was across the street from the wonderful, Shutters on the Beach in Santa Monica.

One of RAND’s recommendations which we were encouraged to adopt, was that the research sample should be well over 10,000 respondents. Up to then, I had never worked with such a large sample in my life, for two good reasons: 1) corporate clients would never fund such extravagance, and 2) statistically, it was completely unnecessary to get to 6-8 actionable segments. I just assumed it was part of the “$600 toilet seat” type of overkill that the DoD was known for and moved forward.

Positioning Insight

10,000 surveys in hand, we set about creating the segmentation. Right off the bat, some segments fell off as potential targets, including the ones who would never consider the Army, as well as the ones who would always prefer the Marines or other branches.

Two of the remaining segments shared characteristics that made them interesting as targets. They weren’t looking for the Army to shape or transform them, they just needed a leg up. They wanted to build a better future for themselves but didn’t necessarily have all the options that you or I might have had at that age. For these young men and women, the Army had a compelling story that wasn’t being told.

We learned that the Army wasn’t “one” type of job but actually over 220. A great many of these Military Occupational Specialties (MOS’s, as they called them), were “real-world” jobs with analogies outside of the Army – surveyors, mechanics, programmers, and countless other vocations. Since the Army can’t win the war for this talent against employers paying market wages, it trains its people in these professions. These are skills that could seamlessly transition to a civilian career after a few years in the service. This was exactly the leg up these segments were looking for but didn’t realize the Army offered.

We crafted the positioning to speak to these young people with their “eyes on the horizon,” and set out to educate them about this unsung Army value proposition. To validate the strategy, we took existing Army television advertising and reedited it with a voiceover of our story and put it into testing, along with current and historic advertising. The messaging tested 2X stronger with our target than what the Army had been airing, including “Be All You Can Be.”

An Army of One

If an animatic tested that well, imagine what results you could get with a real production budget. Bringing to life the new positioning involved selecting a new advertising agency. McCann came to the pitch with presentations bound in cool stainless-steel boxes, so there was little doubt who win this assignment.

There is always a little loss of fidelity in translating brand strategy to creative strategy. Sometimes this process elevates everything, sometimes not. You are probably familiar with the Army of One advertising that resulted from this work — it even became the title of a Sopranos episode.

I thought the campaign was good but misinterpreted the target segment somewhat. Their focus on their future didn’t make them a lone-wolf – these were team players wanting everyone to succeed. But the strategy and advertising worked as intended. Within a matter of months, a decades-long decline in recruiting was starting to turn the corner.

The Context Changes

The consulting team involved in the Army branding effort went on to successful careers and full lives. Some of our clients didn’t get that opportunity. On September 11, 2001, a plane crashed into the west side of the pentagon, which housed the Army Office of Personnel, killing our senior Army client.

Lieutenant General Tim Maude was the highest-ranking military officer killed in the 9/11 attacks, and the most senior American officer killed in action since World War II. He was the U.S. Army’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel, who had recently relocated his office directly into the path of American Airlines Flight 77. The consulting team’s former office was just down the hall.

I can’t say I knew General Maude very well, but what I observed was a soft spoken and kind man who was deeply respected by the people he led. He was laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery, befitting of a hero who gave his life in service to his country.

The core of the team that served the Army had gone on to rebranding work for a Caribbean financial service conglomerate. We saw the attacks play out on a small TV outside a board room in Barbados as our final review was taking place. After some time, the CEO suggested that we continue the meeting.

9/11 changed the recruiting mission of the United States. The enlistment ranks swelled with those drawn by a sense of urgency to protect their country, and the career “MOAs” shifted disproportionally to the battlefield roles.

Brand Learning

Maybe it’s a fool’s errand to attempt to find generalizable learning from this most unusual of brand stories, but I’m just the fool to try. One obvious takeaway is that context changes – sometimes dramatically, and brands must adapt. It’s hard for me to think of other category analogies that compare to just how much and how quickly the US Army brand’s context can shift, but it’s a matter of degree.

Most business categories today are confronting some form of disruption that is requiring companies to embrace reinvention. But brands are in many ways more difficult to change than business models. They can pivot, they can stretch, but how far and how fast depends on what lies at the brand’s core.

Vivaldi’s Brand Identity System helps us understand what lies at the core of a brand that is enduring, versus the elements of the brand that are more temporal and subject to change. Duty, honor and patriotism lie at the core of the Army’s brand identity. While what is going on in the world may make these more or less top of mind, they are never far from the surface.

These values and the character of the men and women who serve the Army are enduring, even while the context shifts from focusing on careers to prosecuting wars. Communicating this proposition effectively to meet the Army’s recruiting mission in times of both war and peace is one of the toughest branding assignments out there.

***

To all the men and women serving in the Army – thank you for your service.

The post When A Brand Isn’t Being All It Can Be appeared first on Vivaldi.

If you want to achieve extraordinary impact for customers, investors, and society, we can help with strategies to do that.  

Here are 10 questions that can help to steer internal conversations with teams to help your business get ahead.  

1) What is your business’s field of play? 

A “field of play” refers to where your brand might reasonably fit, unencumbered by the boundaries of categories. For instance, Tesla’s field of play is not just cars, or transport, but intelligent energy. Rather than being bound by strict category definitions, consider how your business might exist in a larger context.  

2) How are you using technology to evolve around your consumers? 

Today technology is reinventing the core of businesses. Consumers are now empowered decisionmakers. In what areas could your business benefit from better utilizing technology? How would your consumer relationships change? What would be the impact on your business’s category? Finding new tech solutions can have wide-ranging implications.  

3) Are you experimenting? 

Those who can achieve transformational growth do so by experimenting at scale and integrating learnings as a systemic capability. Does your business test out new ideas regularly? Do you have a process for utilizing feedback from experiments? Think about how you can incorporate experimentation into your regular processes to help identify new areas for growth or improvement.  

4) How are you taking your strategy beyond transactions? 

The focus of value creation has shifted from driving transactions to driving interactions. It’s not enough to simply accomplish a task for a customer. Brands and businesses deliver real value when they achieve something more or create greater connections. Consider how your company uses brand technology, ownable experiences, data, purpose, and hyper-personalization.  

5) How would you reimagine the structure of your organization to be ambidextrous? 

Now more than ever, organizations need to learn how to optimize their current business model, while building a new one. So called “ambidextrous organizations” are those that can compete in the present while creating possibilities for the future.  

6) If someone evaluated your brand’s actions, would they be consistent with its strategy? 

Strategy is nothing without action. But how often is your company engaging in actions that aren’t aligned with your strategy? Or vice versa? How much strategic thinking does your business have simply sitting in PowerPoint decks? Figure out how to activate this thinking in the real world. 

7) Does your brand harness the power of others to create a more rewarding ecosystem of shared value? 

The value chain doesn’t just end with your product or service. There are opportunities to grow beyond your brand through collaborating with other businesses, or even starting other businesses to create shared value. Applying an ecosystem lens may open opportunities you hadn’t previously considered.  

8) Can all your employees/colleagues articulate what your business stands for in under 20 seconds? 

Every business needs a North Star to guide what they do, and how they do it. Powerful brands and businesses are the ones who can quickly articulate why they do what they do. Going beyond that are brands who have a higher purpose, or a mission that society can connect to. How strong is your North Star?  

9) What is your strategy to retain your top talent? 

We are in an ongoing war for talent. As companies look to retain and attract top talent, it’s not enough to think about what’s working well enough today. Think about what you will have to do in the next three years to keep your team motivated.   

10) Will your consumers be able to relate to your offering this time next year if you don’t change anything you are doing today? 

In a world of changing technology and consumer needs, companies that fail to reinvent themselves or parts of their business get left behind. How could your business anticipate what’s coming next? How can you build something for the future? 

Vivaldi’s team of strategists is always happy to discuss these questions in depth with you. We want to help create the next generation of your business. Reach out to our team.  

The post 10 essential questions businesses must ask to stay competitive appeared first on Vivaldi.

Remote Work 

Remote work is here to stay. By the end of 2022, it’s expected that 25% of all professional jobs in North America will be remote, according to Ladders Inc. career management company. That’s compared to just 4% in 2019. This huge increase requires companies to make necessary adjustments. 

Employers are investing in making remote work more sustainable and rewarding​. According to PWC, 83% of employers now say the shift to remote work has been successful for their company, compared to 73% in 2020. But to ensure long-term success, employers need to address remote work deficits, as 87% of employees feel that the office is important for collaboration and relationship-building, which is a top priority. 

Flexible remote work with optional office time has enabled people to move out of urban cores, while remaining close to cities. There have been dramatic shifts from city centers towards the suburbs, yet movers remain within metropolitan areas.  

According to Bloomberg, in the San Francisco Bay Area and San Jose, permanent moves increased by 23% and 17% respectively in 2021, compared to 3% nationally – caused by expensive housing. And in the New York City area, masses shifted from the urban core to the smaller cities, yet 79% of permanent movers remained in the metropolitan area.  

Companies will need to embrace the best of both worlds with constructive flexibility, which enhances productivity both personally and professionally. 

Hyperconscious Time Management 

The pandemic streamlined people’s calendars, freeing up time in the workday and making people more conscious of time management. As work, commuting, social, and travel behaviors have changed, many people have optimized their schedules and now have extra “free-time” on their hands.  

According to BLS, working hours have declined from 36 hours per week pre-pandemic, to 32 per week post-pandemic. Additionally, average commute times dropped from 1 hour 12 minutes in 2019 to 47 minutes in 2020, and those who spent time traveling on a given day did so for a shorter duration — 1.5 hours pre-pandemic, compared with 1.2 hours in 2020. People also spent more time alone. Among Americans ages 15+, time spent alone each day rose by 1 hour on average; 1.7 hours for ages 15-19, and 8 hours for ages 55+.  

With more flexible time, people have reassessed their priorities and re-allocated time resources toward mental and physical health. According to Ipsos, 62% of Americans say that their health is more important now than pre-pandemic, and Forbes reports that investments in health tech in products such as Fitbits, smart air purifiers, humidity sensors, smart water filtration systems have continued to increase. Mental health apps have grown by 32% from 2019- 2020 and are projected to continue to grow by 20% annually, according to Deloitte.  

These new considerations around time have made consumers more eager to prioritize products and services that increase efficiency, wellbeing, and peace of mind.  

Home as a Tool 

During the pandemic, our homes became our offices, gyms, restaurants, movie theaters… everything. This puts an emphasis on expanding the home’s capabilities, efficiency, and flexibility to better meet people’s needs.  

This readjustment means that companies need to keep up, and homes themselves need to better serve people and meet the demand. As a Home Industry Advisor at NPD explained, “The home industry needs to be prepared to address the new needs that emerge as the consumer moves toward post-pandemic living.”  

The rising demand for smart home products and services is expected to top $150 billion by 2024, according to Statista. Technological needs have also expanded, including those for wifi systems like mesh networks, which eliminate dead zones and expand reliability. The home mesh network market is expected to grow by a compound annual growth rate of 11.6% by 2027.  

 Overall, people have a reconceptualized idea of home, while many pandemic-induced behaviors such as at-home exercise, shopping, streaming, and cooking are here to stay. Online shopping demand has remained 30% higher than pre-pandemic levels, according to McKinsey, and home delivery options, from Amazon to Instacart to medicine deliveries, have expanded.  

Given all these changes and realignments, there are opportunities in multiple sectors for businesses that are willing to meet the consumer where they now are. Advances in home delivery, telemedicine, and wireless networks are enabling people to live their lives in new ways.   

While remote work has created a greater sense of flexibility, for it to deliver real value, it must meet the needs of both employers and employees. If it doesn’t, a Faustian bargain is created, with technology working as a detraction. But when it does, everyone will win. 

Larry Lucas is a Senior Partner at Vivaldi who specializes in business and brand transformation and driving change within organizations.  

Ben Kuenzle is a Partner at Vivaldi who specializes in growth and innovation, brand/marketing strategy, and product marketing. 

The post The Future of Hybrid Work appeared first on Vivaldi.

Social, cultural and technological trends have changed consumer behaviours and expectations beyond recognition. And the revolution is still ongoing. This is challenging companies in every aspect of their business and brand strategies. They need to be able to respond quickly with innovative approaches to customer experiences and marketing communications.

If your brand and marketing communications still centre around pushing out messages to potential customers, you’re going to be left behind. In today’s marketplace, the ability to engage consumers and pull them into your sphere of influence is vital for any brand that wants to maximise growth.

Those who understand how to create this irresistible force of attraction – or Gravitational Pull – between brand and consumer will succeed in the modern digital-first world. However, while some brands have undeniably got it, many others are struggling. In this article we’ll share some valuable insights, uncovering the nature of Gravitational Pull, its impact on brands and how you can evolve your marketing communications in order to create it.

What is Gravitational Pull?

Gravitational Pull is created when a brand acts, communicates and creates experiences in ways that allow people to more deeply connect with its mission, vision and values.

The theory draws on the concepts of attention, relevance and network effects to create a deep consumer affinity with the brand. Brands with gravitational pull deeply empathise with the reasons why a person has turned to them for a solution, and understand how to create a connection on a deeper, emotional level.

This results in a level of customer loyalty and advocacy with the brand that naturally pulls more and more people into their orbit. With powerful brands we often see consumers not only freely share their love for it with others but also defend the brand when it comes under scrutiny or receives criticism.

Gravitational pull doesn’t just attract people to brands, it helps to retain them as customers. Customers will look to the brands that are most relevant in their lives for new solutions as the need arises. Brands that integrate well into people’s lives are harder to switch away from. This can be a result of compelling ease of use, or it can be the effect of different elements working together. Apple is a familiar example. Their products work well together. Once you have the phone, the laptop is worth considering. Once you have those an Apple Watch looks like a good purchase. And when it comes to replacing your phone? Well, it’s so much nicer when everything works together, isn’t it? Why suffer the inconvenience of switching to a different platform?

This level of engagement may have been difficult to quantify in the past. However the data-driven nature of digital communications means we can start to learn how to track this phenomena in real time and even predict its impact on the bottom line.

The Impact of Gravitational Pull

For Les Binet, one of the godfathers of marketing effectiveness, really smart marketers focus on building ‘memory structures’ that bias consumers’ behaviours into the future. This builds the brand long-term, creating a natural preference for it that can then be converted efficiently into revenues through smart activations.

Binet recently unveiled the results of six years’ worth of research that has started to create some data-driven evidence pointing towards the effectiveness of creating gravitational pull. His work shows a connection between a brand’s share of organic search (arguably a proxy for an aspect of gravitational pull), and future market share.

This reveals that share of online search is a key indicator of brand power, both in the short and long term. Perhaps most interestingly this long-term prediction can also act as an early warning system for brands. An example of this is appliances brand LG. LG’s share of search fell and, in turn, both search volume and then market share followed a downward trajectory.

Binet’s research starts to reveal a key financial correlation between having an effective gravitational pull and market share. However it doesn’t explain how to create the phenomenon.

How to Create Gravitational Pull

So, how can you create the conditions required to enable the deeper level of connection with consumers that will help you to evolve as a brand, stay relevant and navigate in a rapidly changing marketplace? There are three key principles underlying this.

1. Understand That Everything is Brand

The conditions for creating gravitational pull are rooted deep within the organisation and brand’s reason for being. The core of the brand – its mission, vision and values – are what give it weight, creating the ability to draw people into its orbit.

For this to happen, there needs to be absolute clarity in the brand’s DNA. If a brand has an unclear purpose, is relying on smoke and mirrors, or hasn’t truly developed these foundational aspects of its structure, consumers will sense the disconnect and won’t invite themselves in.

There is perhaps no better example of gravitational pull being baked into the DNA than Nike. Nike’s brand mission states that ‘if you have a body, you are an athlete’ and this organising principle runs through all its activations.

While the brand is associated with professional performance, it also bridges the gap to connect with culture. For many people, when you wear Nike you are associating with and saying something much deeper about your own values.

When Nike hired Colin Kaepernick for their 30th anniversary ‘Just Do It’ campaign they upped the ante even further. Using Kaepernick, who took the knee during the national anthem before NFL games to protest police brutality, put what the brand believed in front and centre.
The campaign ran with the strapline “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything.” Some hated the bold brand position and burned their trainers. However, many more loved it and became even more connected to the brand because of their shared values. The gamble also paid off commercially. Nike’s stock soared over the following year, seeing a five percent increase over the next twelve months.

2. Connect brand strategy seamlessly to all customer interactions

If brand is the interface of your business strategy, it needs to be fully represented in all your customer interactions. Creating a gravitational pull relies on a seamless connection between brand and every interaction, experience and communication.

All too often there are fractures in this process and it takes time to interpret and translate the brand strategy. Marketers can often get very tactical very quickly and do not align closely enough to the brand strategy. They need to consider their long- term marketing strategy to communicate the brand strategy.

Each and every touch point matters and has the power to either build or erode the brand’s ability to create the pull. Take, for example, when the same social media post is shared across multiple channels without thinking about the appropriate activation and voice for that channel. People switch off or even worse think negatively about the brand and its ability to engage effectively with them.

Now look again at Apple. The queues around the block for each new release and the hyped up audiences focused on their every announcement are no happy accident. They are carefully planned and hard earned.

At the heart of Apple’s success is a relentless focus on creating consistency across the brand experience. As a result, they can sell more smartphones and at a higher margin than others in the sector. It’s purely because of the power of the brand.

The emotional connection pulling you into the brand is baked into every touchpoint. When they advertise, the ads focus on showing the consumer the unique value proposition, as opposed to telling them about it. It is also realised through the in-store experience. The Genius bar makes you feel empowered and its radical reshaping of the in-store experience, emphasising Apple’s disruptive spirit. And the brand journey continues when you get home with the premium unpackaging experience.

3. Shorten the distance between you and your customers

The greater the distance a magnet is away from its target, the less its ability to create attraction. So, getting closer to your consumers seems a no brainer. In fact, many brands will say they do this already.

However, relatively few understand how to build fluid organic relationships that pull customers in. Even more challenging is how to activate and empower consumers to be advocates who share the brand mission, vision and values more broadly.

CMOs need to think more empathetically about their consumers. They need to understand their wants, needs, expectations and purchasing motivations in order to create better connections, interactions and experiences with consumers, not for them.

By doing this and increasing the impact consumers can have on the brand, you stimulate powerful advocacy and pull consumers deep into the brand ecosystem.

Take Lego, for example. This remarkable brand has topped the Superbrands ranking of the U.K.’s strongest consumer brands for the last two years. In such a fickle fast moving industry this is an enormous feat.

Their success is, in part, due to an organisational culture of customer-centricity. Their deep understanding of their consumers’ motivations means the brand does not frame itself as a toy company. Instead their business is built around the concept of ‘free play’, opening up the opportunity to create interactions across a broader range of contexts, from gaming to theme parks and film franchises.

The brand has adapted to the social age brilliantly, creating engaging content across all platforms. As one of the most digitally engaged brands in the world, it is the second most watched brand channel on YouTube with a large proportion of the content created by participants.

User-generated content extends their reach. The ‘Beyond the Brick’ fan YouTube channel, for example, was created by two teenagers and features the incredible Lego creations of builders from across the globe. The channel has grown to worldwide phenomena with over 530,000 subscribers and over 200 million views.

Another source of Lego’s enormous gravitational pull comes from its Lego Ideas platform where users can submit, comment and vote on ideas for Lego products. By shortening the distance between the brand and their most valuable consumers, Lego not only created a continuous dialogue but gained a valuable source of amazing consumer insight.

It is Lego’s ability to connect with its customers in diverse and meaningful ways that contributes to creating such ardent brand advocates. Lego’s customers are keen to join up, contribute and become fully enmeshed in the brand.

Evolving Your Strategic Approach

How can brands begin to build gravitational pull? All brands exist somewhere along a spectrum when it comes to how they engage with their customers and their understanding of creating gravitational pull. Their communication models range from the simple outbound communications of traditional push marketing, and ladder up to the multichannel, participative brand communities of platform business models and interaction fields.

It’s easy to admire the skill and dexterity of brands like Lego, but if you’re a CMO tasked with emulating their success it can feel overwhelming. However, there are ways to progress, gaining sophistication along your evolutionary journey, at a sustainable pace. To understand this, let’s look at each of the communication models in turn. Placing your own organisation’s evolution along this spectrum can show you how far you have come, and provide pointers for the next steps to take.

1. Outbound Communications

Outbound communicators are engaged in traditional push marketing strategies. These companies commonly have a one-way communication model and haven’t framed their offering in a social way. They share product or service messages with customers, but offer limited opportunities for consumers to interact.

This is probably a model of communications that most brands believe they need to move away from, since it is often characterized as a simple and out-dated broadcast model. Whilst this approach can no longer be the long-term option for any modern brand, there is still a role for direct outbound communications, and a sensible evolution for a legacy business attempting to modernise how its brand engages with people is to stop broadcasting and start personalising outbound communications using what you already know about your customers to build a better relationship. In this way you build a strong foundation for more relevant approaches.

To build up the brand and evolve the consumer relationship, it may be time to start thinking about a back and forth communication system for customers.

2. Two Way Dialogue

Adding a layer of interaction with customers allows for two way dialogue. Two-way communication allows a company to start better understanding how their product or service solves a problem for their customer.

A company needs to have some way to allow customers to speak back to enter two- way communication. This could involve cultivating a presence on social media to open up conversations with customers and providing mechanisms for customer feedback.

There are two key challenges with implementing two-way dialogue well. The first is operational – you need to have the scale of organisation and operation to be able to field customer requests and solve issues for them. Your social media managers will need to have the skills and resources of customer support agents. The second is to do with delivering brand experience – the quality and tone of your interactions has to reinforce your brand.

3. Encouraging Sharing

When a brand understands how and where customer interactions are happening they can actively support the sharing of information and ideas and become a facilitator within their category.

In this mode of communication, the brand understands its role in the lives of its top consumers in order to add value to this core group. While this community and interaction are not owned by the brand, their participation is valued in a way that allows the brand to get closer to its customers.

At this stage, it is beneficial for a brand to start thinking about social influence and creating the motivation for consumers to become brand advocates. This allows the brand to evolve once again in order to extend their reach in the ecosystem.

Organisations who wish to operate at this level can move things along by actively providing opportunities and spaces for people to share. That can be by encouraging creative use of products and services and inviting people to showcase their own results, and by ensuring that sharing buttons, hashtags, events and channels are in place and well publicized so that people can be confident that they will find the right audience. Actively engaging with professional influencers can play an important role in this kind of communications strategy.

4. Audience Voice

Customers like to share their experiences. In order to benefit from these interactions, brands must understand where they are happening and actively participate.

By supporting and encouraging customers to continue to connect and communicate, brands can start to build social currency at this level. Creating platforms for consumers to share their ideas, both with the brand and with like- minded individuals, creates loyalty and advocacy that starts to draw in more and more people. The Lego case study we mentioned earlier is a great example of how passionate consumer brand advocates can become part of the product development lifecycle.

To get to this stage, your brand needs a strong marketing communication strategy. The focus must be on the ability to share not only within the brand’s nucleus but also externally, thereby creating a community. Having too narrow an information-sharing system at this stage will slow velocity and make it difficult to create that pull.

Your brand must have clear framing, branding and definition to continue to hear and be the audience’s voice. After these factors have been solidified and are owned by the entire organization your brand can start moving into the interaction field.

5. Participant in Brand Community

The world is created through interactions. By connecting people, information and data we can create higher quality and more consistent interactions that build brand value past a simple product or service.

In this final stage, your brand is creating an interaction field pulling in the nucleus, ecosystem and even other brands to assist in interactions and information sharing. Having other brands in the interaction field will help improve the ecosystem size and create velocity.

Your brand needs to be at the core of, and a direct participant in (if not the owner of), the interaction field. A direct line of communication between the brand and the interaction field must exist where active and consistent participation encourages sharing, both internally and externally.

Conclusion

In a challenging marketplace where everything is in flux, the need to connect with your consumers remains constant. However, as we’ve seen, how we connect and the relationships we create needs to evolve.

The concept of gravitational pull gives us a way to design an overarching marketing strategy that creates deeper, more profitable connections with our customers.

As American astronomer Andrea M Ghez puts it: “Gravity wins over all other known forces.”

In order to succeed, organisations must make sure gravitational pull originates deep within the brand and is connected to all interactions. They also need to shorten the distance between the brand and its customers.

This is what Vivaldi does and we’d love to have a conversation with you about it. Contact us.

The post A Force of Attraction: How You Can Create More Gravitational Pull for Your Brand appeared first on Vivaldi.

Vivaldi CFO, Richard Rolka, joined new Senior Partner, Chris Halsall [see bio], for a virtual Q&A to welcome him to the Vivaldi team.

Richard: Welcome to Vivaldi, we are very excited to have you.

Chris: Thank you, I’m very excited to be here.

We thought this Q&A would be a good opportunity for everyone to learn a little more about you and the work you do. You have a very interesting consulting background – at McKinsey, Prophet, and Ogilvy Consulting. Can you tell us a bit about how your focus has evolved over your career?

Sure. I like to describe my focus as driving growth and change at the intersection of business and brand strategy. I have been interested in marketing and innovation from a very early age, and it has influenced my career choices to ultimately bring me here today. I started out in brand management with P&G, which at the time was a wonderful place to learn the fundamentals of marketing.

The transition into consulting was really a desire to tackle a broader set of business challenges. My choices of consulting firms over the years have moved me progressively closer to the customer, which is where the real value creation and innovation is happening. Just creating a strategy deck that sits on a shelf gets old very fast — I wanted to help make the change happen, which is what brought me to Vivaldi.

So tell us a bit more about your decision to join Vivaldi.

Vivaldi gives me the ability to connect all the dots needed to help clients transform and grow — from leading edge brand and business strategy, to actionable innovation, new digital experiences and creative expression. Some shops have similar scope, but Vivaldi is the first one I’ve seen that has genuinely “de-siloed” these capabilities in how they work with clients.

So what is your “super power”?

I guess the ability to see around corners, which is not as amazing as it sounds — it’s just a new type of pattern recognition. It’s about seeing what’s happening in other categories – where new technologies and customer behaviors have shaken up the status quo – and then applying that to shape the change with clients in their categories. A great example of this is with Erich’s new book, The Interaction Field [Erich Joachimsthaler is Vivaldi’s founder and CEO]. The Interaction Field unpacks how a new breed of company has been able to achieve unstoppable growth, and then demonstrates how almost any business or brand can apply this formula. It’s very cool.

I think we have all heard the expression, “seeing around corners”, but what does it really mean?

Traditional consulting created a multi-billion dollar industry in the late 20th century by monetizing their pattern recognition of “best practices”, observed across many clients within the same sector. Essentially helping companies skate to where the puck is — if you will allow a hockey reference. Today, that is often the last thing you want to do, as it just makes you more vulnerable to having your business eroded by more nimble attackers.

Now more than ever, companies need to, “skate to where the puck is going”. Often this means putting aside what is best practice in their industry, as that becomes increasingly irrelevant. Irrelevant because customer and consumer expectations are no longer being defined separately in each category, but rather collectively across all categories. They want all the brands they engage with to deliver the choice of Amazon, the convenience of Uber, the experience of…well you get the idea.

When you accept the premise of this convergence of systems – of expectations, behaviors, technologies, and this new type of pattern recognition, it gives you much more line of sight into what is next for your brand and business.

Take Bitcoin as an example. You didn’t have to be Nostradamus to see that recent correction coming. Examined narrowly, there was no reason to believe the market enthusiasm for Bitcoin should abate. But when you take a holistic, systems view, how could Bitcoin maintain its rate of growth, without addressing the huge carbon footprint it is creating?

“We can’t just skate to where the puck is. Now more than ever, companies need to skate to where the puck is going.” – Chris Halsall

Can you describe an example of a sector where you have applied this new type of pattern recognition?

Sure, I think automotive is a great example of an industry that has had to fundamentally transform very quickly. Everyone is familiar with the big technology shifts there, around BEV and AV, but these are just a part of many more changes to come.

With any significant transformation, it really has to start with “framing” — essentially, what business are you in? If you hear a CEO or an analyst call refer to their business as “carmaker”, that’s probably not a long-term stock to hold. While manufacturing will represent the bulk of the sector’s revenues for at least another decade, we reached peak auto 5 years ago, and there is no turning back. This is why you are increasingly seeing auto makers reframe what they do as being a, “mobility services provider”.

Once you have reframed what your reason for being is, now you can start to look around the corner and plan where you need to go. Applying our convergence principle, we can identify several forces that will fundamentally reshape the sector. Some of these have already begun to take hold and others have not yet reached a tipping point. I will describe just a few here.

Why is that you can buy anything online — literally anything, but it’s still a very painful process to do that with automobiles. Carvana showed what was possible, but that was limited to used vehicles. New vehicle ecommerce in the US has been slowed artificially by regulations, that I won’t get into here. But now that Tesla has found a workaround, the genie is out of the bottle and won’t go back. Much more of these transactions will shift to digital, which sets off the next ripple of foreseeable implications.

One implication of auto ecommerce, is that it will result in the move to a single, non-negotiable price for each new vehicle. It just won’t be sustainable for manufacturers and dealers to “race to the bottom” with inconsistent pricing. In the short-term manufacturers and dealers are trying to preserve negotiated price with an ecommerce-light experience but it won’t be possible for that to survive long-term. Which of course sets off the next ripple.

If you are a dealer and you have lost your ability to negotiate extra margin on a sale, what does that mean for the future of your business? What if at the same time you are losing this profit, you are also being impacted by the move from internal combustion vehicles to battery electric vehicles, which require a small fraction of the dealer service visits that dealer profitability once depended upon? Now you see the next ripples of implications — around the need for new offsetting revenue streams, etc.

I could go on and on but you get the point. And this was just chasing down the highly predictable implications of one thread of convergence around online sales. We haven’t even gotten into the implications of the move away from “owning” things, what happens in an AV world, etc. Seeing around corners, is not a parlor trick, it’s just about putting in the work to look at the forest and not just the trees.

Is this just about new business models and innovation, or can it be applied to things like brand?

Absolutely, although it’s probably not too wise to only focus on brand without adapting your business. We can apply the same principles to skate where the puck is going on brand building. While this is a whole, rich topic on its own, let’s talk about some of the bigger shifts.

This convergence in expectations has profound implications for the role of brands and how they are built. It is no longer enough to just make a great widget and overlay it with some emotional benefits. Consumers are demanding more value than brands are providing, and this value needs to show up in many more places. This is forcing brands and businesses to begin to focus more on the quantity and quality of “interactions”, rather than just on the “transaction” alone. The days of monolithic brands that just pushed ads and engagement are drawing to a close. Brands now need to reframe their role, and construct an ecosystem of new direct interactions around their consumers — interactions with real, reciprocal value exchanges. Anyway, this is a big topic, so let’s set up another time to dive into this further.

“The days of monolithic brands are drawing to a close. Brands now construct an ecosystem of new direct interactions — interactions with real, reciprocal value exchanges”  – Chris Halsall

Thanks for sharing your thoughts today Chris, and once again, welcome to Vivaldi.

Thanks Richard.

The post Seeing Around Corners: A Q&A With Senior Partner Chris Halsall appeared first on Vivaldi.

Kevin Lane Keller and Erich Joachimsthaler discussed modern marketing strategies.

Here are some of the key principles of Kevin’s Marketing expertise:

1. It is critical to define your product and services, then to determine collaborations. The intent of your company must be clear before considering potential partnerships. All companies are part of a broad ecosystem that serves a purpose and relates to one another.

Collaborating is not something new and has been done frequently in the past, but Kevin expresses how the function of collaboration has evolved into an integral part of marketing. Partnerships tell a story behind the companies. There is a resulting creation of new customer segments with fortified and enhanced offerings.

“It’s really important to not think of yourself as a marketer or as a company selling products or services, but that you’re satisfying needs, supplying benefits and solving problems.” – Kevin

2. With customers driving the company’s purpose and direction, marketers are no longer in control as they were in the old push-pull world. In the past, marketers are the ones prescribing how customers consume their products and services. Currently and in the foreseeable future, the customers are the ones creating a culture around the product and services through their natural response.

Kevin stresses how “Marketing Myopia” should still be a solid foundation. There is less of the traditional structure nowadays because of the organic synergies that take place through the audience. It is imperative to pay attention to these interactions that produce signals and opportunities to integrate them into the marketing strategy.

“We as marketers are really orchestrating value creation— orchestrating communications and orchestrating your Four P’s rather than designing them all.” – Erich

3. The Engagement Forum is the main ingredient in modern marketing. Word of mouth has been migrating to the digital world, but not entirely. When we interact through interest-driven communities in real life, it also becomes a marketing platform. Setting up a forum for these interpersonal interactions, both digitally and physically, has become one of the primary responsibilities of Marketing Managers.

As Kevin and Erich discussed, each of these niche interest-driven communities have varying dynamics and operations. Keeping track of people’s social and emotional signals in these communities and responding to them allows relationship building while making it feel less transactional.

“I’m changing knowledge and changing the way people think, feel, and act in a way that is going to help my brand and or help the mission of my brand. I’ve got to make sure that that happens.” – Kevin

Companies need to consider having a “Customer-First” mindset:

• Building communities as part of the business model: In the world of hyperconnectivity, value creation is synergetic and not one-sided. The culture built around company offerings and the consumption habits within communities become essential components of the business model.
• Letting consumers create the brand: Making customers feel like they are part of the brand’s co-creation process will increase their brand loyalty. The resulting interaction themes could be reinforced to help lead new insights and new practices.
• Creating value that withstands constant change in the consumer landscape: Companies must connect a business to a brand, not only with the value proposition but also with their promise to the customers. Marketing has evolved over the years, but its value proposition must have an adaptable quality with customers’ relationship as the foundation for decision-making.

Conclusion

The rules of marketing are changing as platforms and interactions become more democratized and digitalized. The connection culture of communities, collaborations, and customers have grown to be key players in creating successful company offerings. Orchestrating the organic synergies among these audiences provides informative trends and signals that will allow them to acclimate and demonstrate resilience in marketing’s ever-evolving consumer landscape.

Watch the full event here:

• 9:56 – The next steps in terms of brand marketing  
• 15:24 – The whole is greater than the sum of the parts in building an ecosystem 
• 18:14 – The consumer creates the brand 
• 31:36 – The importance of brand purpose and communicating it to your audience 
• 36:52 – Beyond branding and new opportunities 

This segment was part of The Interaction Field Series of our LinkedIn Live Events. Please connect with us on our LinkedIn page to stay updated with our upcoming conversations.

The post Customers & Communities First: The New Drivers of Marketing with Dartmouth College’s Kevin Lane Keller appeared first on Vivaldi.

In 2013, our CEO Erich Joachimsthaler was featured in a MarketWatch article announcing the rollout of video on Instagram and the importance of this update from a strategic standpoint. Read the full article here.

The post Facebook Challenges Vine with Instagram Video appeared first on Vivaldi.

In 2013, Vivaldi_ CEO Erich Joachimsthaler met with FiveMileRiver Marketing to discuss the importance of staying on top of the ever-changing nature of consumerism and got to the nitty-gritty of what innovation truly means. Read the full article here.

The post A Discussion on Perpetual Innovation appeared first on Vivaldi.

I leave the conference every year with lots of insights and inspiration and also some practical tools about how to build platform businesses.

One of these practical tools presented this year was by Marshall Van Alstyne who briefly mentioned the case of Quibi, the high profile launch by Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman, and Quibi has so far failed to live up to expectations of subscriber growth.

Van Alstyne defines a platform as an open architecture with rules of governance designed to facilitate interactions.[ii] He explained that in designing a platform you either want to have high-value interactions, examples are Games of Thrones, Breaking Bad or Sopranos or high volume interactions, examples are YouTube or TikTok.

Quibi is the “watch bite-sized content on your phone” streaming platform that offers entirely new content, dramatic shows, comedic shows, reality TV and news bites intended to be watched while on a subway, between breakfast and your daily exercise, or while riding a Peloton bike, any brief breaks from the activities of the day.

Courtesy of MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy

In the introductory speech of the 2020 MIT Platform Summit – Platform Review and Forecast, about minute 39:50 onwards, Van Alstyne explains how to use this tool for designing interactions.[iii] Quibi, unfortunately, chose a low value, low volume interaction strategy. They are neither “fish nor fowl” as he explains.

I have used this tool in a number of applications over the years. It is really useful when designing a platform and having to make the three key decisions: Interactions, Architecture and Governance.

I found the tool useful not just to designing interactions but also deciding on the type of architecture for the platform. For example, Van Alstyne mentions that TikTok and YouTube have the added advantage that third-parties are creating the content which is the “inverted firm” concept of Van Alstyne and Parker.

How to define value of interactions

In my work on platforms and digital ecosystems, I find it helpful to think of at least three steps: framing, designing, and building the platform or digital ecosystem. Until now I have described the digital tool that Van Alstyne presented in terms of the Designing phase: Interactions, Architecture and Governance.

I also think that the tool helps in the other two phases, namely framing the platform business and in building the platform business. Framing is about what problem you are solving for the customer, the industry or society. From a customer perspective, it is defining what you aspire to stand for, how you connect in their lives, and what meaning you intend to create. In short, it is about the value proposition or brand promise that you deliver or intend to deliver.

Quibi might have missed a beat here. Did it really solve a problem that consumers have by pushing out one episode a day over weeks, when consumers have become used to binge watching entire seasons or watch movies all in one sitting. For more on this, see here.[iv]

The third phase also matters, that of actually building the platform. BCG in a study of 100 platform businesses for example found that seven of ten failed in this phase.[v] That is, a key part of building is scaling the platform in an efficient way. Van Alstyne and Parker discussed this issue as well in numerous articles and books.

I find that it is important that building the platform business requires carefully weighing how to take advantage of network effects, learning effects and viral effects.

Therefore, when I look at the value of interactions, I look at them in three ways: meaning, shared or new value or benefits, and reciprocity. A few examples:

·      Meaning

o  LEGO’s brand promise is about the joy of building and the pride of creation. When LEGO launched its LEGO Ideas platform where fans of LEGO can submit their own creations and share them with a large network of other LEGO fans, LEGO builds interaction value that reinforces the meaning of the overall brand promise of LEGO.

o  Mars Petcare is about creating a better world for pets. Mars launched Kinship which is a business division of Mars and collaboration platform for entrepreneurs, innovators and industry partners to create new products and services to further pet care. The interactions that Kinship creates a meaning for Mars Petcare.[vi]

·      New and shared benefits

o  When John Deere collects farm data on soil condition and farm productivity data from thousands of farmers, it can use data, analytics and technology to improve productivity per hectare for farmers, but it also can make the data available to Bayer or Dow to optimize crop and fertilizer utilization that creates shared benefits for the industry.

o  When Kloeckner, a metal trading firm in Germany introduced XOM, a trading platform, it creates price transparency and also solves for major inefficiencies and frictions in the industry concerning inventory management, hence delivering shared value or benefits for everyone.[vii]

·      Reciprocity

o  GoPro is best known for its action cameras but its continued success has less to do with camera technology and more with its mobile apps and video-editing capabilities that enables a content platform among millions of passionate GoPro users who create content, upload and share content on the GoPro network. It is the reciprocity of the interactions between users and GoPro that creates enormous value.

o  Vitality is an insurance company and program that rewards members for better living, more healthy living. This South African company has figured out that in order to reduce health costs, it isn’t just about cost reductions among providers, payers or pharmaceutical companies, it can also be done by actively involving its members. That is the interactions are designed so that all major participants including patients engage in reciprocal ways to improve health outcomes and reduce overall healthcare costs.

In short, in order to get the maximum impact from network effects, learning effects and viral effects, and to maximize the chances that a platform business is successful, its worthwhile to look at the value of interactions in terms of meaning, benefits, and reciprocity, and frequency or volume, as discussed by Van Alstyne.

For more details, see my new book: https://www.amazon.com/-/es/Erich-Joachimsthaler/dp/1541730518?language=en_US

[i] http://ide.mit.edu/events/2020-mit-platform-strategy-summit

[ii] https://www.weforum.org/whitepapers/platforms-and-ecosystems-enabling-the-digital-economy, page 9

[iii] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUQaqMILuKQ&list=PLNmZUX7tW6t-iapgvuNhHInsUhgu7JyV8&index=2&t=2461s

[iv] https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottmendelson/2020/06/15/why-jeffrey-katzenberg-and-meg-whitman-quibi-was-always-doomed-to-fail/#85d12fb745e9

[v] Ulrich Pidun, Martin Reeves, and Maximilian Schuessler, Why Do Most Business Ecosystems Fail, BCG Henderson Institute whitepaper, https://www.bcg.com/publications/2020/why-do-most-business-ecosystems-fail

[vi] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/first-of-its-kind-coalition-launches-to-drive-pet-care-innovation-300823376.html#:~:text=Kinship%20is%20a%20business%20division,About%20Mars%20Petcare; see also: Thomas W. Malnight, Ivy Buche, and Charles Dhanaraj (2019), “Put Purpose At the Core of Your Strategy,” Harvard Business Review, September – October.

[vii] See for example, Rita Gunther McGrath and Ryan McManus, Discovery-driven Digital Transformation, May-June 2020, Harvard Business Review, https://hbr.org/2020/05/discovery-driven-digital-transformation

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In July, our CEO Erich Joachimsthaler spoke with ETBrandEquity.com to break down the new rules of branding in a post-COVID world. He also discussed the importance of creating shared value for everyone, rather than exclusively for customers. Read the full article here.

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