In many industries, AI has the potential to fundamentally reshape the value chain. Retail is no exception. There are many problems that AI could potentially help solve by:

1. 1. Picking up on changes in consumer demand patterns – on a category, brand and product level. AI can aggregate data from multiple sources to identify patterns and help manage inventory to meet rising demand.
   2. Simulating impact to weigh different strategic initiatives – assessing impact on revenues of different merchandising strategies, promotions, shopper marketing, performance marketing etc.
   3. Enhancing customer relationship/increase cross-selling by predicting the Next Best Purchase – the most likely purchase given patterns from both internal and external data sources brought together
   4. Sharpening targeting through a Personalized Shopping Assistant (in-store and online) assisting with search, best fit, suggestions etc.
   5. Optimizing customer service through dynamic scripts, face and voice recognition, predictive equipment maintenance etc.

However, the real value of AI goes beyond revamping current activities – ultimately, it will be in making entirely new retail models possible, where the very relationship with the consumer is reinvented. A few examples, among many others, could be:

Creating worlds and experiences – beyond transactions
Imagine planning a dinner party. You put in a theme and receive a dinner planned by Gordon Ramsay. As you select recipes, ingredients in the right quantity for your party automatically appear in your shopping cart – and a cooking flow is set for you with videos, instructions and timely reminders. Table settings for your theme dinner are delivered right on time with suggested wine pairings. AI can help create a world of experiences – where value is derived not just from the purchase transaction, but from the experience and interactions that these enable.

Lifestyle ecosystems – beyond the category
Imagine putting in the occasion for your next office party and receiving outfit recommendations, removing the traditional consumer angst of not knowing what to wear. Imagine your style choices then connect you to a community of like-minded aficionados (Recent years have seen the formation of many such lifestyle communities, from cottagecore to farm chic or now momcore that has recently been reinvented). This lifestyle community would bring together an ecosystem of providers, from clubs to sports, leisure and entertainment, supported by a stream of “endless” content. These ecosystems will not just foster a stronger sense of belonging and loyalty – each interaction will enhance the value of interactions to come.

Co-creation: sharing creativity
In the traditional model, consumers are subjects – on the receiving end of the brands’ creativity, branding and advertising. Recently, brands have been exploring reversing that pattern – putting consumers themselves in charge of advertising the brand – from Apple featuring consumers’ photography in its ads to Yeti’s UGC campaign. With the democratization of creativity brought about by AI, this can be taken one step further – with much more ease, consumers will be able to ideate, script, design and even produce an ad – and disseminating it to their networks, creating the sort of viral effects that create exponential growth.

Every retailer knows well that beyond satisfying consumers’ functional needs, there is a large market in meeting consumers’ deeper needs of feeling seen, taking control of their narrative and connecting with others. Through data and matching algorithms, AI can give consumers the ultimate control over their narrative – expressing their values, personality and lifestyle choices. In such an ecosystem, value would be created through much more than transactions – through the interactions that will create data that will ultimately enhance the value of the ecosystem at large.

The ultimate question is how these retail models will lead to new ways to increase value – an increased customer relationship leading to higher loyalty; better targeting to increase spend; and belonging to a community leading to increased frequency. This is when the AI opportunity will become real.

The post AI in Retail – Is the Value Real or Artificial? appeared first on Vivaldi.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Partnership marketing can, and should, have a much bigger impact. It can have substance and sizzle. When done right, partnership marketing can accentuate company values and solve consumer needs. It can provide a quicker way to scale for growth and offer reciprocal benefits for both partners.

Too frequently the strategy and thought leadership around partnerships is so painfully obvious (i.e. “synergy”) that it shouldn’t even need to be explained. But there are real, dynamic opportunities to be had. Here are seven strategies to make your partnership marketing actually work.

While there are many types of partnerships — affiliate, brand, technology, strategic, to name a few — these shouldn’t be containers for either/or category distinctions. Instead, they should be both/and. Ideally partnerships not only create attention and encourage curiosity, they also provide value for the customer and demonstrate impact.

For instance, ketchup brand Heinz partnered with online reseller thredUP to create the Heinz Vintage Drip collection — thrifted clothing marked with a unique ketchup stain. Beyond the sustainability mission, the collaboration targeted global hunger relief, with 100% of proceeds benefitting the organization Rise Against Hunger — making the effort interesting, relevant, strategically aligned and mutually beneficial.

Many partnerships focus on passions, interests, opportunities, and yes, synergies — and those are all worthwhile approaches. But what about your customers’ pain points? Taking a customer-centric view and offering a solution to something that negatively impacts their daily life can feel revolutionary — even if it’s highly functional.

For people on the go, making a drugstore pickup and a package drop-off just one stop is a genuine time-saver. Walgreens’s partnership with FedEx does just that, providing a real value by combining services under one roof. Pick up a prescription and mail your packages in just one easy step. It also reduces the pickup locations or touchpoints for the retailers.

We’re all familiar with the importance of targeting in marketing, but you also need to ensure that you are targeting in your partnership strategy. You don’t take a one-size-fits-all approach to targeting — so why do it with partnerships?

Build in nuance by targeting (or even hyper-targeting!) the specific customer segments that you’re looking to grow. For B2B companies, this may mean targeting by firmographics, stakeholders, and use cases, while B2C companies may prioritize interest groups, age, geography and other demographic details. Prioritize key segments rather than selecting them all and hoping for the best.

With its “Fresh Invest” podcast, Morning Brew and Fidelity offer a program tailor made for a young, financially literate audience interested in early investing. This pinpoints a segment that both partners want to reach and offers a real value for listeners.

Historically, big businesses have held the power, while smaller companies were just happy to be chosen for partnerships. However, the power dynamic is shifting, with smaller, more agile companies gaining leverage thanks to advances in technology, data availability and broader ecosystem connectivity and interoperability.

Rather than viewing small companies as threats, big businesses need to provide a partnership strategy value proposition to bring them on board. Big companies can’t just win on brand and size as in past eras, today they need to win on process, people, and partner value. Not only will both partners see value, a broader sector of society may as well.

For example, multinational giant Pfizer and biotechnology company BioNTech joined forces to release the Covid-19 Delta variant vaccine.

In the world of classic corporate strategy, the other companies in your category were threats to be defended against. However, in today’s world of ecosystems, webs, and interactions, they should be sought after.

Instead of building walls, building bridges offers more long-term payoff. By partnering with industry peers, you’ll accelerate your knowledge, adding value for your customers and serving as a key player in the larger ecosystem.

To offer one-touch, interest-free, buy now, pay later (BNPL) capabilities during physical checkout, adjacent companies Ingenico and SplitIt formed a partnership, delivering point of sale (POS) flexible installment options to consumers.

Our access to sophisticated real-time data has never been greater — so why aren’t more companies using it? Partner measurement capabilities and performance tracking KPIs give both a transparent and accurate view of how partnerships are actually performing in the market. It’s no longer a mystery which tactics are most effective — capitalize on those that work, and iterate on those that don’t. This quicker learning cycle allows for in-market agility and faster product and service updates.

Companies can create and refine dynamic pilots to test, learn from, and evaluate partnerships. Data tracking also enables a more transparent distribution model for equitable profit sharing.

Over a three year period, from 2017 to 2020, ecommerce platform Shopify tracked a new metric, partner attached conversion rates, and saw their revenue increased 17%, and their partners’ revenues increased 61.5%.

Ultimately your partnership strategy should be in line with your overall organization strategy. Some companies realize that partnership strategies are an extension of the organization and have a central function, but don’t have product or business unit level representation. Others let partnerships only happen at product/BU level. Best in class companies understand that you need both.

If partnerships are just a siloed discipline happening at the product/BU level, the effectiveness is limited, while instead they could be seen as an enterprise growth strategy and key revenue driver for the company.

Great companies understand the value of having a centralized strategic function and a distribution within operators, making sure every piece works together. This requires a strategic plan, partnership architecture, opportunity scoring/prioritization, governance, and ongoing tracking and measurement. Enter the Chief Partnership Officer. For organizations to prove that they want to capitalize on and create real value from partnerships, they need a dedicated team member who is making this a priority.

Microsoft’s Nicole Dezen and Starbucks’s Sara Kelly are leading the charge at those companies, viewing their roles as part of an investment ahead of the growth curve that’s developing.

Key Takeaway

These seven strategies prove that partnerships can be much more than two logos sitting together or a boring backend B2B integration mentioned in a press release. They can, and should, have a purpose and make an impact.

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I think we have now reached, as Churchill said, “the end of the beginning” when it comes to AI in the workplace. To relate how I have reached this conclusion, I would like to share with you my personal journey with AI in three vignettes.

2011: Watson’s AI Rules Jeopardy

About a decade ago I helped IBM reposition themselves for a “Smarter Planet,” which was about the possibilities presented by a world becoming instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent. A great example of these 3-I’s, was IBM’s emerging “Watson” technology, which represented a real breakthrough on the road to Artificial Intelligence. And what better forum for Watson’s public debut than on Jeopardy — the pinnacle of human intelligence (at least from a game show perspective)?

Watson went on to crush its opponents, including Jeopardy’s winningest champ and future host, Ken Jennings. Despite this success, Watson had a few stumbles along the way, including this Final Jeopardy round exchange:

Category: U.S. Cities
Question: “Its largest airport is named for a World War II hero;
its second largest, for a World War II battle.”
Watson’s Answer: “What is Toronto”

While anyone could have missed the correct answer (Chicago), it’s unlikely that you would have guessed “Toronto” when the category was “U.S. Cities.” This blunder was later attributed to Watson misinterpreting context, such as the fact that the Toronto Blue Jays compete in the “American” league.

A noble effort, but not quite yet the AI the movies had promised us. This made me appreciate how difficult it would be to reach true artificial intelligence and practically apply it to the work that most people do.

2017: The Future of Work

Five years ago, I led an engagement for a client on the “future of work.” The company was/is a business services outsourcing provider, so they were rightly concerned about trends that would reduce the demand for the labor that they monetize (contrary to most companies, where the incentive is often to reduce labor). Over the decade prior, I had helped them migrate from pure labor arbitrage to a more value-added mix of people within digital workflows (e.g., insurance claims processing, accounts payable, etc.), but “human” work remained at the core of their business model.

Even then the writing was on the wall that the nature of “work” was changing. What was called “software robotics” was beginning to augment/replace repetitive office tasks and early machine learning use cases were taking hold. Our quick engagement focused on projecting the implication of technology and labor trends to identify new sustainable business models. The effort was guided by two principles about the dividing line between humans and technology in the future of work.

Principle 1:
Human labor will remain where there is not a practical business case for technology.
Implication:
Non-standard labor will remain long after the technical means to replace it exists.

The notion of non-standard labor involves work that would not be “practical” to eliminate. Applying this principle provocatively, being a plumber may be a more enduring long-term career than a surgical cardiologist. If you live in a house built in 1904 like I do, you will appreciate how “non-standard” plumbing can be, but you pretty much expect a heart to be located in the same place consistently. Just as zero-defect spot-welding robots replaced humans on auto assembly lines, it’s not a question of “if” but “when” AI-driven robotics will be the norm for many routine surgeries. For our client’s outsourcing business, this led to the creation of a new Corporate Campus Logistics service that combined non-standard labor activities with digital logistics workflows.

Principle 2:
Human labor will remain where creative problem solving is at the core of the activity.
Implication:
Knowledge work where there is a multiplicity of potential solutions is most survivable.

While the first principle addressed labor with “head and hands,” most of the folks reading this blog are pure knowledge workers. Well, the future is gaining on us too. Since it’s ok to pick on lawyers, let’s consider a tax attorney billing at $500 an hour. Attorneys operate within a defined tax code (i.e. programable “business rules”), and the high cost of this service creates a strong business case for AI intervention. Perhaps surprisingly, the one thing that will preserve this profession for at least the foreseeable future is “creativity.” Creativity in subjectively interpreting the tax code to their clients’ benefit. For our client, this principle led to exploring new outsourced marketing services that could be delivered efficiently through on-shore and off-shore solutions.

Let’s carry forward these principles around what’s practical versus possible, as we look at the state of AI today.

2022: AI at the Tipping Point

I started experimenting with OpenAI’s “playground” a few weeks before they launched ChatGPT in the fall of last year. I wanted to see how far things had come along those dimensions of “practical” and “possible.” What I found suggested that AI had finally crossed the tipping point from the lab into our daily work lives.

“What is Practical”

I began by using the algorithm to categorize research verbatims into themes and to provide a summary with examples. A task that might take a junior analyst a couple of hours to do, was completed instantaneously, and the output was usable without any meaningful edits. My colleague entered a few simple bullet points and was provided the full prose for a conference invitation. Not tasks that could yet replace whole types of “jobs” but ones that could immediately reduce the volume of “work.”

By using natural language inputs, any request framed in a conversational sentence or two can be tackled by the algorithm. Now the benefits of AI are accessible to everyone without need of a specialist gate keeper. We are now a few entrepreneurial applications away from reducing the dumb work that bogs down enterprises and demotivates staff. Think how much time we waste versioning spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations alone.

Here are 5 very practical things you can try today:

1. Generate a first draft. There are always things we have a tough time getting around to writing, so use this experiment to tackle one of those. Just enter a few bullets of content and simple instructions and see what it comes back with. If you don’t like what you get, just hit refresh and get another take on it.
2. Make something better. As good as AI is with first drafts, it excels at doing the final clean-up of a document. Beyond just fixing grammar, if you would like to say the same thing in half the words, no problem. Turn paragraphs into bullets, bullets in long-form, change first-person to third, etc.
3. Summarize a meeting. Before Teams/Zoom recordings and transcriptions, managers use to get helpful one-page summaries of group discussions. Instead of slogging through the transcript of a meeting you missed, let AI summarize it for you.
4. Create a value proposition. Turn technical products specs into a clear description of what something does – or even a compelling new customer-facing value prop statement.
5. Empower an intern. While I would encourage everyone to try it for themselves, you can also ask an intern to experiment for you. In less than an afternoon they should be able to come with three time-saving ideas for reducing tedious tasks bogging down your office.

“What is Possible”

Now let’s look at what is possible with AI today. Specifically, how far has AI come with the type of “creative” problem solving that only a few years ago I thought would save us humans from our AI overlords.

One of my experiments was to have AI write the dialogue for the final scene of a movie or play by providing it with a simple plot summary and character descriptions. I disguised just enough of the inputs, so that the algorithm wouldn’t be tempted to cheat and consult the source material. The results were, to me at least, quite amazing. To be clear it wasn’t Shaw or O’Neill, but I now understood how it was possible for Lifetime to churn out a couple dozen movies every year.

Occasionally we still see some early Watson context-confusion creep into the output – particularly with image generation. When a different algorithm was asked to generate candid shots from a house party that never happened, it inserted an extra finger or two on a hand holding a camera. Forgivable for something without fingers and easily fixed.

Imagine how life-saving this AI image generation will become – at least “work life”-saving. Getty Images alone has over 80 million images which generate over 2.3 billion searches annually. Let’s assume it takes an average of three minutes to find the ideal image (I’ve sadly spent much longer). That adds up to almost 1,800 lifetimes of work lost annually.

Perhaps to confirm that there really is something here, we are already starting to see the backlash to AI’s early forays into the once exclusively human domain of creativity. The rules of some online art competitions are being rewritten after AI generated images started beating their human competitors (it does particularly well in Fantasy categories, where an extra finger is more easily explained away). When a fan presented singer/song writer Nick Cave with a song written by ChatGPT in “his” style, he had this to say:

“…it will always be a replication, a kind of burlesque…Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer.”

To better understand where this is all going, I turned to the one source who I trusted to be objective, my new AI collaborator:

Q: Will AI algorithms eventually replace human creativity?

A: No, AI algorithms will never replace human creativity. Artificial intelligence is a tool that can be used to enhance creativity, but it cannot replace the unique and innovative ideas that come from the human brain. AI algorithms can help humans to automate certain creative tasks, but they will not be able to come up with truly creative ideas the way a human can.

Maybe the algorithm was just trying to make us feel better and divert attention from its real goals. But even if the creative glass-ceiling for AI is one of a junior copy writer or designer, destined to write the first draft that helps inspire real “human” creation, that’s still a very big deal.

So, now what?

Yes, we are still a long way off from where this is all going. But we have to acknowledge that things will now move at a much faster pace as we reach “the end of the beginning” of AI in the workplace. We must accept AI as a co-worker who is here to stay (albeit one who won’t try to sell you Girl Scout Cookies).

I’m choosing to view these early breakthroughs in AI as a wakeup call for us humans to up our game. There has long been too much “dumb” work sapping the energy and potential of all our organizations. Now that the means exist to draw a clearer line between work that must be done by humans and work that can and should be done by technology, we should all seize this moment.

Is AI the liberator of human potential, or the inevitable next evolutionary step away from us? When it comes to the future of work, maybe Terminator 2 got it right.

“The future has not been written.
There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.” 

***

PS: If you’re interested in more thinking like this, or would like to share your perspectives, please send me a LinkedIn connection invite.

Chris Halsall is a Senior Partner with Vivaldi, who focuses on reinvention and growth at the intersection of customer, brand and business. Prior to joining Vivaldi, Chris was the co-founder of Ogilvy Consulting, where he was the Global COO and leader of the Growth & Innovation practice. Chris began his consulting career at McKinsey & Company, where he led the Marketing Effectiveness Practice and was the Senior Branding Expert for North America.

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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.  

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These ideas are central to “The Interaction Field”, and they are at the core of the World Economic Forum, an independent international organization that engages leaders across the business, political, and cultural sectors, with a mission to improve the state of the world.

In advance of the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, January 16 – 20, 2023, Vivaldi spoke with Sandra Navidi, Founder and CEO of BeyondGlobal, and bestselling author of three books, including “$uperhubs: How the Financial Elite and their Networks Rule Our World,” to get her insight on the most pressing issues.

This will be your 14^th time attending the World Economic Forum (WEF) — what do you think will emerge as the biggest discussion topics for 2023?

We have dealt with several crises at Davos in the past, for instance the great financial crisis of 2008, but this year we’re confronted with unprecedented concurrent crises and risks which exacerbate each other. We never had to deal with a war as big as this in Europe, a pandemic that short-circuited the global economy and escalating China tensions. Apart from these pressing issues, some of topics that will be discussed are the disruptive effects of technology on jobs, inequality, gender inclusion, pandemic preparedness, and globalization.

In the US there is a lot of concern about economic downturn — are there any things that you’re seeing companies start to do in preparation, which might be different from things they did before previous downturns?

At the last WEF in Davos in May of last year, I spoke with quite a few CEOs and CFOs and was surprised to hear how agilely they had reacted to fundamental changes, like disruptions in supply chains, rising energy costs and geopolitical risks. Those companies who had the most agile and adaptive management have turned out to be the most resilient and so far have done quite well. Despite ever increasing digitization, the human factor remains the most important.

Knowing that things will have to be restructured, including combatting supply chain issues, are there any areas where you think there are big opportunities for businesses to step in or to create something new?

Wherever there’s change, wherever there’s upheaval, new opportunities emerge. Times of crises have historically been times of great innovation. For instance, Uber, WhatsApp, Groupon, and Square were founded at the height of the crisis. Although the technology sector performed dismally last year, its overall medium to long-term outlook remains solid. Tech companies are ideally suited to continuously disrupt themselves and, due to their deep pockets, can just buy competitors. Promising areas include cloud computing, semiconductors and cybersecurity.

Healthcare is another interesting industry as biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and computing power converge and reinforce each other. A manifestation of this mutual amplification was the incredibly speedy development of COVID-19 vaccines. The energy sector is also set for disruption and innovation as we transition to renewable energy sources.

Sandra Navidi, Photo by MG RTL DSpreitzenbarth

There are so many areas where we’re feeling unique impacts. You mentioned tech emergence in certain spaces, and you’ve written about how that’s changing the nature of work and people’s careers. Knowing that people will need to work with AI and machine learning, are there certain qualities that make someone a more competitive candidate today?

This is actually a topic I discuss in my book “Future IQ: Your Success Strategies in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.” Shockingly, it is estimated that by the end of decade, up to 800 million workers globally will lose their jobs due to automation. All these people need to be reskilled. Some of the predictions regarding automation, such as that millions of truck drivers’ jobs will be lost to self-driving cars, have turned out to be a bit premature. For the foreseeable future, machines will primarily be labor augmenting, meaning that we will have to cooperate with machines to increase efficiency. That will initially put primarily lower and middle-skilled jobs at risk. Also, CEOs feel that it’s a safer bet to invest in automation rather than in more expensive and unpredictable human capital.

Thus, it is imperative that all of us keep up with technological progress in general and in our area of expertise in particular, even for those of us who work in “non-tech” jobs. Skills that will be in demand are those that cannot be digitized, at least not in the near future, such as emotional intelligence and social skills, creativity, agility, communication skills and learnability. One of the greatest competitive advantages will be the ability to form deep and resilient relationships. All these intangible human skills will remain valuable for most jobs.

It’s important to recognize that in this new world of work, we are all to some degree our own product. Hence, it’s crucial for each and every one of us to build our own personal brand, define our narrative and market ourselves. It used to be that companies preferred for their employees to keep a low public profile. However, I recently read in connection with Goldman Sachs’ firing spree, that those employees who had established their own brands with a significant following on social media had a leg up.

You focus on the financial world in your book “$uperhubs.” Can you elaborate on what the mechanics of “superhubs” are?

In “$uperHubs,” I view the financial system through the lens of human behavior and explain it with systems thinking and network science. All networks, whether natural, like an ant colony or our brain, or man-made, such as the electricity grid or the internet, behave in the same manner. Network science mathematically substantiates that a greater number of connections increases the chances of individual survival. Hence, all nodes prefer to attach to other nodes with the most connections in what is termed the law of “preferential attachment.” The nodes with the most connections move the network’s center. They are called “superhubs.”

In human networks, our position is determined by the number and the quality of our connections, and our fates are very much determined by the place we occupy within networks. Examples of human superhubs are the chair of the Federal Reserve, Jay Powell, who is probably the most powerful person in the US besides the president, the CEO of J.P. Morgan, Jamie Dimon, BlackRock’s CEO Larry Fink, and Blackstone’s Steve Schwarzman. They are all powerful individually, but their ultimate power results from their ubiquitous networks. Yet, while in complex, self-organizing systems, the interactions of individual superhubs can produce large-scale effects, they have no control over the system as they themselves are subject to its laws and systemic forces.

In my analysis, I use a cross-disciplinary approach, factoring in sociology, anthropology, psychology, politics and economics, to show how human nature and systemic forces impact the course of history. A current example of a powerful network is the World Economic Forum in Davos, which is the backdrop for much of the book and runs through it like a red thread.

Networks can be a force for good and for bad, but it is generally constructive for people to congregate, communicate and cooperate. In that sense, the WEF renders an important contribution to the overdue realignment of our system, particularly in view of dramatically increased geopolitical, economic and health risks.

You’ve written on so many different topics, what are you working on now?

I just published my third book, “The DNA of the USA,” in German, so right now I’m still busy giving interviews and delivering speeches, in addition to my day-job. After months of isolation in “book lockdown,” I’m now delighted to switch from “send” into “receive” mode. The WEF Davos is a great forum to receive input, inspiration, and stimulation. So I’m sure that at some point in the not-too-distant future, I’ll be overcome with the desire to create something new, possibly another book.

Sandra Navidi is the Founder and CEO of BeyondGlobal, where she provides macroeconomic and strategic positioning advice. Previously, she worked closely with economist Nouriel Roubini at Roubini Global Economics. She is admitted to practice law in the Federal Republic of Germany and the State of New York, and is the author of “$uperHubs: How the Financial Elite and their Networks Rule Our World.”

The post Sandra Navidi on what we might expect from Davos 2023 appeared first on Vivaldi.

A first step forward can be through idea generation, and we previously spoke with Jeremy Utley about the practice and value of generating ideas.  

In this interview, Cerrone Lundy, Director at Vivaldi, shares how valuable ideas get put into action, the importance of true ideation sessions, and the mindset shift that needs to occur for companies to prepare for the future.  

One of the keys is found in the implementation of a model that Vivaldi CEO Erich Joachimsthaler calls the “interaction field” model. As Joachimsthaler explains, interaction field companies “generate, facilitate, and benefit from interactions and data exchanges among multiple people and groups.” Read on about why this is the business model of the future.  

—–

Vivaldi: When it comes to idea generation, how do you distinguish between an “ideation session” and a “brainstorm”?  

Cerrone Lundy: “Brainstorm,” in my opinion, is one of those words that’s used so flippantly and so often that its lost its meaning. There’s no stimulus, no clear roles, output, goal, no clear exercises and activities. An ideation session is very different in that it has that structure that you need to actually generate useful ideas. That’s critical.  

You’ve said that for something to be a real idea, it needs to pass the “crumpled paper” test — can you elaborate on what that test is? 

The crumpled paper test is essentially taking what you believe is an idea, writing it down on a piece of paper, and then asking yourself, if you were able to crumple that piece of paper up and toss it out a window, could a passerby pick that up, smooth it out, and then actually execute on your idea with 95 – 99% fidelity. And if a random passerby could not actually do that, you have an idea starter. It’s not an actual idea yet. It’s just the inkling of an idea. It’s only when you get to a specific level of clarity around something, would it be what I consider an idea. Now it has entered a space where it is executable in a way that is true to the essence and the desire of the idea creator, or the teams of people that created that idea.  

After you’ve generated ideas, how do you know which ones to follow through on? 

There’s a bit of an art and a science to it. The science is, often there are metrics when it comes to what kinds of ideas can actually move forward. You don’t necessarily want to be culling ideas when you are generating because that changes the energy of the room. Once you’ve generated a lot of ideas, then you often need to go back to the metrics you started off with, and ask — do these fit within the scope of what our client can do? Is this stuff too fanciful to actually be executed? Does it actually have a potential to generate income? Whatever those metrics may be.  

In addition, there’s a bit of the art to it. Sometimes you have “kitchen sink ideas,” and you can tell it’s just an amalgam of things, but there’s no focus to the idea. It’s like, a fork that also brushes your hair and you can use it on your dog and it also picks up antenna messages from space. True, it’s an idea and you can probably write it to pass the crumpled paper test, but it’s not a great idea and has no focus. It’s not solving a particular problem and may just not make sense. 

At Vivaldi we’ve been talking a lot about reinvention — at what point do companies need to think about reinventing themselves?  

I think that organizations should always be asking themselves what can be changed, what can be reinvented. There’s the core of the organization, the brand essence, the reason the organization exists, and that should be pretty stable, but marketplaces, technology, and consumer desires are changing so much that you need to always be in this role of pushing yourself forward and not sitting on your laurels. When organizations get to a place where they’re so comfortable that they aren’t capable of looking at themselves, that’s when they get disrupted. You should always be looking at what you’re doing and be introspective while paying attention to what’s going on around you. Otherwise you’re destined to become a fossil. A victim of circumstances.    

In some of the projects you’re working on at Vivaldi, you’re not just generating or presenting ideas, you’re actually building products and systems. Knowing that you’re going to be building something, how does that affect your approach to that idea generation or conception stage?  

It shouldn’t. If you’re an innovator and a strategist and you’re coming up with an idea that you’re like, “I hope I never have to do this,” it’s probably not a great idea. It can be difficult of course, and it can potentially involve something that’s not in your skill set, but you should always think, “how would I execute this thing?” Even if the answer is, “I would find someone who is an expert in x y and z.” If you don’t have that conviction to put your skin in the game, then it’s easy to come up with crazy ideas and hope someone else will figure it out, or pray to the innovation gods that the solution will drop out of the sky. It is much more personal and important to feel like you have a stake in it. You’re not expected to be a master of every category, but you should have some perspective on it and ideally some passion around it. 

Some of the systems that are being built are what Vivaldi calls “interaction fields.” How can a company know that it could benefit from being part of an interaction field? 

Interaction fields are going to be the business models of the future and there are very few organizations that would not benefit from forming, connecting with, or integrating themselves with a larger interaction field. The notion behind them is that value is generated for all the participants. You don’t necessarily need to be the nucleus, the generator, of an interaction field, but understanding where your organization fits and what interaction fields are out there to generate value for your organization and your organization’s participants.  

I think it’s very difficult for people to get out of thinking about the pipeline model or the platform model. A lot of organizations, even consulting organizations, are still essentially pipeline organizations and there’s a shift in how one thinks about business, and even how businesses talk, that needs to happen in order to really embrace this idea of cooperation as opposed to competition.  

It’s a mindset shift if you’ve been going down one pathway for a long time. 

Even beyond that, there’s this sense of scarcity mindset versus abundance mindset. So much of our society is based on a scarcity mindset, or stealing share as opposed to finding ways to grow the pie. Scarcity mindset is often a killer of ideas, the sense of “we can’t do that” or “we’re bound by this,” as opposed to an abundance mindset of saying, “what if we did this,” “how could we do this,” “let’s push this and see where it goes.” That’s inherent in an abundance mindset and inherent in being able to generate really interesting new creative ideas. If you’re blocked off by the sense of scarcity, by the sense of what you can’t do, then you’re going to come up with the same ideas that everyone’s always come up with since the beginning of time. 

—

Cerrone Lundy is a Director at Vivaldi. He works with organizations to better understand their client needs and create products, services, experiences and more. 

The post Building A Business Reinvention Mindset appeared first on Vivaldi.

In this interview, Jeremy Utley, director of executive education at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University, talks with Vivaldi about why idea generation is an act of creativity that calls for organizational leadership, the importance of testing ideas in the real world, and why an economic downturn might create the opportunity for proactive disruption. (An idea we explored in a recent video.) Read on:

In the book, you explain that every problem is an idea problem. Before getting to the idea, do companies get hung up on trying to solve things that aren’t problems?

A lot of times there’s a desire to implement a solution without a clear problem. There’s a hammer looking for a nail. They’re really excited about this technology, and they’re trying to implement the technology without a real understanding of the problem to be solved. It was John Dewey, the education reformer who said, “a problem well-put is half solved.”

You give this definition: Ideas / Time = Ideaflow. What are the requirements needed to put ideaflow into action?

Basically, you want to be in a state where generating solutions to problems is natural, and then quickly and scrappily testing those ideas to get real world data. You need a system and a process for testing those ideas quickly — that’s kind of what creates the flow.

If we want to have new ideas, we need to be seeking new inputs, and that affects how we interact with the market, collaborators, supply chain partners, customers and things like that. The other thing that might come up is how we interact as a team. Have we created psychological safety, where we can share bad ideas with one another and be stimulated and sparked into unexpected directions? Or are we only allowed to share good ideas with each other and are we only allowed to say really smart-sounding things?

In the idea generation context, you get how you cultivate inputs and how you cultivate the collaborative dynamic, and then on the experimentation side of the equation, the question is how quickly and scrappily can we act.

How do you assess which ideas you should put into the testing or experimentation phase?

The more you can get out of the business of choosing, the better. Meaning, test as many things as possible. It’s not that you need to be running thousands of experiments. You may not be able to do thousands — could you do five? Could you do a few more than one? Because the odds of success go up exponentially pretty quickly.

How do you get business leaders and executives on board with the importance of creativity?

I don’t think anyone questions the importance of creativity, actually. IBM did a recent survey of 1500 CEOs, the single most important skill they felt for the future business leaders was creativity. Everybody is generally agreed, the question is, what they value in principle, they challenge in practice — you don’t need to make the case for creativity, yet, if leaders don’t have tools to actually cultivate it, they end up killing it. Giving them tools to practically cultivate it is where the real rub and the real opportunity is.

Maybe there’s a disconnect.

Fundamentally it gets down to a question of definitions. Meaning, what is “creativity”? There’s a seventh grade girl in Ohio who has the world’s best definition of creativity — her definition is “doing more than the first thing you think of.” That is a profoundly accurate and elegantly simple definition. It speaks without regard to a vertical, or to a function – you can do more than the first thing you think of in anything – not just in painting or music – but in email subject lines, in giving an annual performance review, or dealing with expense reimbursements. It cuts across domains.

One of the best things a leader can do to help their team be more creative is push them to generate options, alternatives. It’s a profoundly creative act, and it requires leadership support because not only organizational bias is against generating alternatives, but even our own individual cognitive bias is against generating alternatives.

Most teams are doing one thing — they’re trying to find one right answer, they’re solving one problem. A leader who is seeking to cultivate creativity on her teams is a leader who is saying, well, what else are we trying?

You use the phrase “proactive disruption.” How does it differentiate from “iteration”?

Iteration is all about making changes based on what you learn. Proactive disruption is about saying, okay, in almost every field, the thing that’s being done right now isn’t going to always be done. There is going to be a disruption. For every Blockbuster, there will be a Netflix. If you take as a given that disruptive forces are on the rise, technology changes are occurring, reducing the barrier and cost of and basis of competition, then you go okay, are we going to wait for someone else to disrupt us, or are we going to be proactive about disrupting ourselves.

You talk about creativity as a way to weather economic challenges, and this may be related to the proactive disruption idea — in thinking about 2023 and the fears around recession, do you have recommendations about what companies should do now to be thinking in a more creative way?

I’d never thought about connecting those two things, but a recession is a wonderful prompt for proactive disruption. Given that the market is going down, given that the market is changing, companies can consider who is going to start taking share in this environment, what kinds of moves are now possible or required in order to win, and can we make those moves instead of someone else.

When it comes to carving out time or a blank space for ideas to happen, what are your favorite tactics to create that space?

The calendar is an incredibly effective tool that you can wield. For a lot of people, the reason they can’t innovate is because they don’t have time. What’s the solution? Use your calendar as a weapon rather than be a victim of your calendar. Start blocking time proactively to accommodate a different set of activities.

—

Jeremy Utley is the director of executive education at Stanford’s d.school.

Vivaldi is a leading independent global business and brand transformation firm with strategists and creatives working in offices in the USA, Germany, Latin America, and the UK.

The post Why Generating Ideas and Practicing Proactive Disruption Can Drive Business Success 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.

We have reached an inflection point right now, not least due to the pandemic, which has accelerated digitization and companies need to consider a different, more agile strategic approach and different business models not only to survive but also to grow. Here are the four recommendations about innovation, transformation, value creation, and cultivation that our experts left us with:

INFLECTION POINTS – YOUR BUSINESS IS NOT DESTINED TO FAIL  

Innovative companies need to discover when and how to pivot their businesses, especially in the current social and economic climate. Building resilience for companies against the known and the unknown requires planning techniques and leadership recommendations. Rita McGrath gave us insights into avenues of innovation opportunity, the centricity of trust in value creation, and salvation from the discovery-driven approach.

THE INVERTED FIRM – PLATFORM IS THE NEW NORM 

As consumerism migrates online en masse as a result of the inflection point, businesses turn to digital transformation as an imminent need. The movement promotes the idea of the inverted firm and how Platform Strategies can allow swift responsiveness and adaptation. Geoff Parker gave us insights into looking at scaling your business with a different lens, how traditional metrics of evaluating business growth may not apply in the platform economy, and how businesses can learn to operate in this Post-COVID world.

BRINGING STRATEGY BACK TO LIFE  

Transforming to the digital platform through the inverted firm presents new obstacles that the old practice of Strategy does not address. Harvard Business School professor with research emphasis on corporate strategy, industry analysis, and global competition, David Collis invited us to think about the different value types and what strategy really is today. He shared insights into modernizing strategy, tackling digitalization problems, and how value should not just be about capture but also creation and realization to achieve business success.

IS YOUR BUSINESS SMART ENOUGH TO GROW? 

Growing your company while acclimating your business to the digital platform may seem impossible, but you may come out a champion if you know the paths to get there. The key element of what helps the best companies grow today is taking advantage of internal and external levers to position themselves for explosive growth. Tiffani Bova taught us the importance of focusing on getting the job done, fostering company culture, working with competitors, and the positive business outcomes of social responsibility.

CONCLUSION 

Adapting to the modernization and digitalization of businesses requires new approaches, leadership, and strategies— especially in the pandemic era. Identifying inflection points is critical for leadership to steer the ship towards innovation through phased trial and error. As businesses join the digital platform economy, shifting traditional to digital strategies provides new opportunities for production alterations, rapid reception, and customer reach. With a growing progressive audience, thinking in different value structuring types will allow businesses to become resilient as the landscape continually evolves. Growing during digital development may seem daunting, but by positioning your business in the ecosystem through co-opetition and customer co-creation, your business will successfully transform and dominate the field.

This was the recap 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.

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