Join us for weekly conversations that range from, how brands can thrive in a COVID era, to the disruptors emerging in a virtual economy, to how companies are trailblazing a road towards commitment to sustainability. In our new LinkedIn Live series, our strategy consultants, creatives, and virtual problem solvers from around the world dive deep on topics core to business. Follow along on LinkedIn and get to know our team! 

Let us know what’s on your mind here and we might cover it on our next edition of “Ask Vivaldi.” 

Below find our past events: 

Past Events:

Thursday, October 15th – 11:00am EDT

• Topic: Force of Attraction & Gravitational Pull
• Questions: How can your marketing communications help you get your consumers to connect and associate with your brand on a deeper emotional level, resulting in valuable loyalty and advocacy?
• Participants: Andrew Roberts & Stephen Firth

Tuesday, October 6th – 11:00am EDT

• Topic: Trends in Communications Strategy
• Questions: What can brands actually learn from the last 6 months to take forward into future communications strategy?
• Participants: Jane Hovey, Kelly Dempsey, & Tallulah Dyer

Thursday, October 1st – 11:00am EDT

• Topic: Securing Innovation Opportunities 
• Questions: Why do so many businesses fail with their approach to innovation? How can businesses better leverage changes in culture & technology to improve innovation?
• Participants: Lee Powney
• Host: Dave Birss 

Thursday, August 20th – 9:30am EDT 

• Topic: Interactions, Sustainability and Social Responsibility 
• Questions: How can we tackle the sustainability issue right? How do we create real impact in terms of sustainability?  
• Participants: Mario Bartels & Jana Justa  
• Host: Dave Birss 

Tuesday, August 18th – 9:30am EDT 

• Topic: Customer Centricity
• Questions: What does customer-first approach mean in the platform economy? Why the quality is even more important than the quantity of interactions? 
• Participants: Ben Kuenzle & Jennie Hoppe 
• Host: Dave Birss 

Thursday, August 13th – 9:30am EDT  

• Topic: Sources of Inspiration  
• Questions: What disruptors are catching your attention? How has Fortnite changed the landscape of esports? Who are the leaders in adopting their business that relied on live interactions to virtual interactions? 
• Participants: Tom Ajello
• Host: Dave Birss 

Tuesday, August 11th – 9:30am EDT 

• Topic: Rethinking Education 
• Questions: How is Covid-19 changing the world of education? Are we seeing a rise of those people that are very good at self directed learning? 
• Participants: Anne Olderog & Tracy Huser 
• Host: Dave Birss 

Thursday, July 31st – 9:30am EDT

• Topic: Introducing “Ask Vivaldi”
• Questions: How can a company make the shift to platform model? How has the world of business changed in the last year? What has been the impact of Covid-19?
• Participants: Tom Ajello & Christian Wank
• Host: Dave Birss 

Stay Tuned for Upcoming Events! 

The post Ask Vivaldi: Our New LinkedIn Live Event Series appeared first on Vivaldi.

Our CEO Erich Joachimsthaler spoke with Brand Driven Digital in November 2016 to discuss recent updates in brand strategy and its constantly changing nature. Read the full article and listen to the accompanying podcast episode here.

The post Using Social Currency to Build a Brand! appeared first on Vivaldi.

The conclusions reached as to why consumers follow brands provided a considerable amount of insight. It was learned that 77% of consumers use social networks and seven out of ten connect with brands. However, only 43% of consumers are motivated to share ideas for new products or services on social media and only 33% want to engage and connect with other consumers. The most critical finding was that the top reasons consumers have for connecting with brands on social networks are primarily personal. To dive deeper, eight of 12 reasons are self-interested motivations, for example, getting a discount.

Understanding why consumers stop connecting with brands can provide critical insight that could improve consumer retention rates. 56% of consumers split up from brands or companies on social networks, while 39% never split up from a brand. The top reasons for why people split up with brands were that they neglected to see any real value in continuing to connect with brands, they felt the content became either repetitive or boring and they only connected with brands for discounts and deals which were discontinued.

The last area that the study addressed is what brands can do better. Engaging consumers through social networking is absolutely critical to succeeding as a brand in this era. Thus, any ways in which brands can improve their social interactions with consumers, they must. The study explored this area by assessing the performance of brands across six different forms of social currency. The definition of social currency being; the degree to which consumers share a brand or information about a brand with others. The results and other research unveiled six social behaviors: advocacy, conversation, affiliation, utility, information and identity. They also revealed the enormous opportunity for improvement, with only 38% of consumers believing that brands provide them with the tools that they need to defend or promote a brand on social media, and only 35% believing that brands provide enough motive and incentive for consumers converse with others about a brand.

The conclusions of the study provided in-depth information about the connections between consumers and brands as understood through the lens of social media. The value a brand has is directly related to the strength of the relationships it has with consumers and consumer communities, which explains the critical nature of social networking. The study has shown that contemporary brands are still falling short of consumers’ expectations. They are still not doing enough to leverage their social currency into brand equity. Consequently, the brands that are able to establish and maintain strong connections with consumers will certainly outlast those that are unable to.

The post Brands and Social Networks: New Findings on How Consumers Connect with Brands appeared first on Vivaldi.

The post 11 Industry Leaders Ready For Platformization appeared first on Vivaldi.

Vivaldi’s Platformization Potential Study is a forward-looking, comprehensive report that introduces the top S&P 500 companies such as Netflix, Pfizer, MGM Resorts, Nike, etc. with the most potential to capture exponential growth. We divided our analysis into two lenses: (1) the brand relationship between a company and its stakeholders and (2) how the company performs across the following five factors: The “Customer Centricity PLUS” Mindset, Value through Data and Analytics, Social Currency, Industry Position and Ecosystem Potential, and Agile Experimentation with New Technologies. Below we highlight the third factor.

FACTOR 03: Social Currency 

The post Factor 03 in Platformization: Social Currency appeared first on Vivaldi.

Back then, we weren’t far off with our convictions. Social currency indeed has become a really important concept. More than 2.56 billion social media users exist today. When it comes to younger consumers, one out of every three millennials prefers social media to interact with brands and companies.

I’d like to describe some of the most prominent impacts of social currency on brands, companies, industry and consumers.

First, the impact on brands and companies: Nearly every company and brand today invests in social media, and some companies have seen outstanding success—think Burberry in luxury, GoPro and its amazing Hero action cameras or Red Bull.

That is, social media has a strong impact and significant role in brand-building efforts.

It even has a measured impact on sales. A landmark study of online and offline consumer conversations and recommendations found that they accounted for 13 percent of consumer sales, on average, and 20 percent of sales in higher-price-point categories.

Second, the impact on consumers and what catches on in culture: In the book Contagious, Jonah Berger tells us that six factors make products contagious or make ideas viral. The first factor is social currency. The professor explains why pictures of cats or dogs go viral, or why Justin Bieber reaches the top of the Billboard charts.

One of the most interesting phenomena of social media is powering something from the fringe and making it mainstream. The “clean eating” movement is a good example. Its basic and strict tenet is not to eat anything but “whole” or “unprocessed” foods. It is not just a diet, but a belief system that stands as a challenge to mainstream ways of eating.

Social media enabled this movement to build a mainstream following with large audiences and large numbers of influencers, blogger and experts. One, Jordan Younger, took it to such an extreme that it caused her to suffer from serious eating disorders and orthorexia.

Social media is so powerful that it can even make us do things against our own best interests.

Third, the impact on companies, categories and even entire industries: Economists and business strategists have studied this impact with intense interest over recent years. They refer to demand-side economies of scale or network effects, which represent a new source of economic value creation and which occur when a product or service becomes more valuable to its users as more people use it.

In plain English, Apple’s iPhone becomes more valuable to consumers the more people use it. It helps people connect via FaceTime, for example.

Uber or Lyft are more valuable to people the more riders or demand there is. This is because the more riders there are, the more drivers Uber or Lyft attract, which makes the ride more available. This minimizes the estimated time of arrival of a car for riders.

Business has now noticed that the most valuable companies in the world are all built on these powerful network effects. The most valuable startup in the world did so, which is Uber at nearly $70 billion. The most valuable and disruptive companies—FANGA, or Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google and Apple—are all based on these effects.

What these companies do have in common is one simple requirement for its success, and that is social currency.

There is no value creation unless there are consumers that are willing to share. And in this way, the future welfare and prosperity of industries and consumers depend on social currency.

Erich Joachimsthaler’s opinion piece was originally published in Adweek. 

The post The Power of Social Currency appeared first on Vivaldi.

In this mini-report, we do a deep dive into 19 QSR brands including Chipotle, Wendy’s, Starbucks, and Subway, to learn how consumers’ behaviors drive Social Currency of these brands. We are excited to share our findings and help you uncover best practices in order to transform your business and brand through the power of Social Currency. Click here to read the full report.

To learn more about Social Currency and how it applies to other industries, download the full report here.

The post Cooking Up Business Transformation Through QSR Brand Ranking appeared first on Vivaldi.

As consumer attention has become increasingly fleeting, the need for more creative and engaging branding has grown significantly. Erich mentions that, “previously we could make people believe certain things easier but in this day and age where consumers have the attention span of a bumblebee or goldfish, in a day and age where we all multitask in front of television, just creating that exposure with consumers, creating a brand no longer works [the way it used to].” The concept of the consumer as a bumblebee is a new one; the advent of social media and the internet has irrevocably changed how consumers interact with any and everything and as a result, companies, their brands, and the strategies that support them, must adjust if they expect to stay relevant.

When asked on his perspective on the right framework to approach brand strategy, Erich explained the timeline of how brands have changed throughout the decades since the onset of television to the creation of the mobile phone and more importantly, why a proper strategy is essential:

We went through several evolutions in branding. The first evolution was where brands were simply a means of making advertising effective. It was the golden day of advertising in the 60s and 70s where brands were built through this new medium called television. In the 90s, David Aaker, Kevin Lane Keller, myself and many other academics said this is not how you think about brands. You’ve got to have a strategic framework about branding; branding is not the color and the design on the name of your logo. A brand is the face of your business strategy and we, from this academic business school perspective, took a strategic perspective to brand management and said brand is all about what you aspire to create; it’s the front and back end of your strategy; the front end is your brand and the back end is your business strategy.

With the pressure for proper methods of branding mounting and competition for consumer attention increasing, it’s important for companies to develop brands that not only engage consumers uniquely, but that also align with their overall business strategy. Now, in 2016, brand building and the role a brand plays within a strategy must adapt if it expects to be successful. Now, according to Erich, “Brands are much more of a means of making business strategy actually work. We at Vivaldi work with this idea of Social Currency. We believe that social is a very powerful brand building mechanism. Those things are digital, mobile, and when you bring branding together at the level of strategy as a significant lever for driving your growth strategy, then you are in a very different ball game. That’s where the future is right now.”

To hear more on how social currency is revolutionizing modern branding, click here.

The post The Social Currency Impact on Branding appeared first on Vivaldi.

Branding Magazine: Digital is such a broad topic. I know that you have invested in addressing it in a number of different ways, including your Digital Darwinism Summit, and your various digitally-related reports, such as your recent study on social currency. But I’d like to back up a bit and explore some of the thinking in “Bridging the CMO/CIO Gap,” which you produced in conjunction with SAP.

It raises five key issues, the first being new methods to understand customers and their use of technology. Since we often hear marketers dismiss digital insights gathering as merely “shiny new objects” for consumer research, can you share what you see as the most profitable or even transformative ways that digital is helping us understand customers?

Erich Joachimsthaler: Let me give you a good example. We work with a platform that is part mobile diary, part social network, and part community, with which we can actually track the daily life of consumers and interact with a large group in real time. The participants engage with each other, and we map how consumers really live and buy and shop.

BM: Your report also speaks to the second point, which is how digital creates new business models and ideas on how to generate sales. Do you have any favorite examples of this?

EJ: Yes, absolutely. What’s important is that business models need to be distinguished between demand side models and how you create new value on the supply side. These are two different things, and we always forget the supply side and how do you really capture the value.

A good example is the car industry. Almost every large car company today knows that consumers no longer want a car, they want somebody to sell them mobility. Everyone is experimenting with additional services, specifically mobility services, often times associated with the electric car.

Think about BMW and its i Division; it has a small car called the i3, and a larger car, the i8.

The point about these electric vehicles is not the cars themselves, even though they are amazingly beautiful (especially the i8, with its wing-style doors). The most beautiful part is that they are connected devices, like your mobile phone, connected to the cloud, wherever the car goes.

When you think of the business model here, you think of a future where the car is actually sold at cost, much as you buy a mobile phone today. BMW or other car companies make the money on the services that they sell over the months and years of usage of that car.

There are services such as DriveNow or ParkAtMyHouse, which are like Airbnb, but offered in a car. Now you can park at another person’s garage instead of in public parking, at a much cheaper rate. The service automatically identifies your car as you drive into Munich and tells you what private car garages are available for the day or for that weekend, so you can actually park share.

BM: So the whole paradigm of looking at people as customers — is that irrelevant now? Is that inherently too transactional if we need to connect to people as human beings on a more essential level?

EJ: Looking at people as customers is an outmoded notion. You need to look at people as humans. Today, one of the hardest topics in customer experience is customer journey mapping. Everybody maps a customer journey, whether they still map the funnel or they map several loops, a customer decision journey or whatever other methodology they use.

But 95% of a person’s day is not lived on that journey, so you’re really only studying the 5% when people are in a buying mode. That’s not where the action lies.

Click here for the full interview.

The post A Fresh Perspective on Customer Expectations in the Digital World appeared first on Vivaldi.

In this mini-report, we do a deep dive into 20 automotive brands, including Honda, Toyota, Mercedes, Nissan, and Ford, to learn how automotive consumers’ behaviors drive Social Currency of these brands. We are excited to share our findings and help you uncover best practices in order to transform your business and brand through the power of Social Currency.  

To learn more about Social Currency and how it applies to other industries, please click here for the full report.

The post Consumer Behavior Revs Up Automotive Business Transformation appeared first on Vivaldi.