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

“Be All You Can Be”

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Assignment

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

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

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

Brand Discovery

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

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

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

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

Consumer Research

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

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

Positioning Insight

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

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

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

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

An Army of One

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

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

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

The Context Changes

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

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

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

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

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

Brand Learning

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

My thesis is a simple one. If you want to assess whether these new technologies are important to you, where there are opportunities for your company to create a competitive advantage, connect with consumers, build a sustainable new business or achieve new growth, you need to analyze and understand how these technologies will change how consumers live, play and work in the future. Fortunately, we can already see glimpses of these changes on consumers today.

Download the article series

This first article aims to establish whether the metaverse or Web 3+ is a thing, and whether we really should bother at all. I’ll offer a brief recursion in the recent past. I think this is helpful in the sense of what Albert Einstein once said: “If you want to know the future, look at the past.”

The second article will introduce a framework and model that we at Vivaldi find helpful. It is a way to understand these technologies, how they help achieve business goals, and how they affect consumer behavior and society. This framework is the interaction field model. A model or framework is a way of choosing what information is important and which information is not. The model I propose helps to sort out what really matters, what you should attend to and look out for, and what is merely noise, hubris, hucksterism, hype, speculation, gambling, unsavory works or even criminality, so often reported by the press.

The third article will describe actual applications and case studies of how the metaverse or the Web3+ technologies impact companies and industries and how value is created for consumers and society. That is, how it impacts the rest of us, beyond those that make it a business such as the speculators, futurists, boosters, thrill seekers, experts, fortune tellers and others. But before we get there, allow me to first briefly describe how we got here. This will set the stage and answer a simple question: Is the metaverse or Web3+ a thing or not?

The answer is: yes. This chart from CBInsights, which shows the frequency with which the word “metaverse” was mentioned on earning calls, shows when it became at least a very exciting movement; a lofty vision with enormous energy and enthusiasm —even if it is still not quite real.

Earnings Call Mentions of “metaverse”

October 21, 2021 is when this hypothetical, notional, alternative lofty vision and digital domain, called the metaverse became a thing. That day is the Metaverse’s equivalent of the Mayflower touching shore near Plymouth Rock. That’s when then-Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg rebranded the firm “Meta,” to signify the seriousness with which the company was taking “the next generation of the Internet.” At the stroke of a press release, Zuckerberg pulled the metaverse from the further reaches of futurist fantasy into the here and now. In the coming years, he predicted, “People will transition from seeing us primarily as a social media company to seeing us as a metaverse company.”[2] To which, those of us more deeply engaged with all things IRL (tech-speak for “In the Real World”) could be forgiven for scratching our heads.

No sooner had brands and businesses cottoned on to the idea that the metaverse might just be the next big thing, when Microsoft jumped into the fray, in a big way. Analysts applauded its bold $70 billion bet on gaming juggernaut Activision Blizzard as a major metaverse play, in light of the golden opportunity it presented to marry software — games like World of Warcraft and Call of Duty – to hardware. Microsoft’s HoloLens VR/AR technology up until then had been mainly a B-to-B tool. Driving the point home, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella used the term “metaverse” five times on the analyst’s call, extolling it as primarily a 3D gaming experience. 

The metaverse is…about creating games…To me, being great at game building gives us the permission to build this next platform, which is essentially the next internet: the embodied presence. Today, I play a game, but I’m not in the game. Now, we can start dreaming [that] through these metaverses: I can literally be in the game, just like I can be in a conference room with you in a meeting. That metaphor and the technology . . . will manifest itself in different contexts.”[3] 

Zuckerberg, for his part, dealt out a dueling definition:

You can think of the metaverse as an embodied internet, where instead of just viewing content — you are in it. You feel present with other people as if you were in other places, having different experiences that you couldn’t necessarily do on a 2D app or webpage, like dancing…or different types of fitness.[4] 

In a “Meta Founder’s Letter,” he delved deeper into the details:  

The defining quality of the metaverse will be a feeling of presence. It will feel like you are right there with another person or in another place. Feeling truly present with another person is the ultimate dream of social technology…In this future, you will be able to teleport instantly as a hologram to be at the office without a commute, be at a concert with friends, or be in your parents’ living room to catch up. This will open up more opportunity no matter where you live. You’ll be able to spend more time on what matters to you, cut down time in traffic, and reduce your carbon footprint.[5] 

Travis Scott on Fortnite

As if on cue, these blue-sky pipe dreams were reified by a succession of major Metaverse moments. An anonymous bidder laid out $450,000 in cryptocurrency for a plot of virtual land adjacent to rapper Snoop Dogg’s virtual estate, both “located” in an upscale district of a self-styled metaverse called Sandbox. A Travis Scott concert held in the gaming metaverse of Fortnite pulled in 27.7 million attendees, vastly outdrawing any conceivable real-world counterpart. JPM Morgan Chase, most unabashedly bullish of the big banks, approvingly noted: “In Decentraland, a user-owned Ethereum-based virtual world, 21,000 real estate transactions totaled $110 million in 12 months. Virtual real estate is a growing market. The average price of a parcel of land doubled in a six-month window in 2021. It jumped from $6,000 in June to $12,000 by December across the four main Web 3.0 metaverses.”[6] The concept gained real credibility on Wall Street with the $40 billion blockbuster IPO of Roblox, a firm famed in Fortune for creating “an immersive virtual world of gamers with a following that has spread far beyond young STEM nerds.”[7] What made Roblox stock so hot was that a holy host of consumer brands, including Disney, Nike, the NFL, and Chipotle, had lately staked out first-mover claims on its virtual frontier. The buzz only intensified after the digital pop-up store Gucci Garden sold a limited-edition virtual version of its exclusive Queen Bee Dionysus handbag for a higher price than in IRL: $4000 over $3600.[8] Also on Roblox NIKELAND offered a virtual version of Nike HQ, with the added attraction of visitors using accelerometers on their phones to “translate activity in the physical world into longer jumps or faster speeds” in the metaverse.[9]  

As the buzz and hype amplified to deafening levels, a chorus of skeptics pushed back. Leading the contrarian pack, Elon Musk dismissed the concept as “all hype and no substance,” if for no other reason than the current crop of AR/VR headsets were clunky, costly, and dorky. “You can put a TV on your nose but I’m not sure that puts you `in the metaverse’” Musk scoffed. “I don’t see somebody wearing a frigging screen on their face all day and refusing to leave…I don’t believe we’re on the verge of slipping into the metaverse. It has the ring of a buzzword.”[10] 

Pushing back on the pushback, not so surprisingly, was the sector best positioned to benefit from the vision becoming reality: consumer electronics companies. Forever on a quest for the next big thing to replace maturing legacy technologies in the hearts and minds of consumers, in early 2022 over 2,000 tech companies descended on the IRL fantasy land of Las Vegas for the first in-person CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in two long pandemic years. 

Samsung’s NFT TV

Observing from the sidelines, Axios tech journalist Ina Fried dryly noted: “Many CES observers suggested a drinking game in which keynote watchers took a shot every time the metaverse was mentioned. But that would have been a recipe for alcohol poisoning.”[11] Boosters prowling the booths, however, could point to, touch, feel and in some use-cases wear tangible products tailored to meet the moment. From Panasonic subsidiary Shiftall: a body tracking suit designed to extend VR experiences beyond the head and torso. From startup Pebble Feel: a body-worn accessory that lets its wearer “feel” virtual heat and cold; from yet another startup: a “haptic jacket” that permit wearers to “feel” virtual sensations. From Sony: PlayStation VR2, complete with “new sensory features” like eye-tracking, enabling users to swivel their vision from right to left. From Microsoft: a partnership with Qualcomm to develop lightweight AR glasses. From Hyundai: grand plans to build “digital twin” factories, yet another key facet of the evolving metaverse, touted as potentially re-inventing manufacturing. From Samsung: a TV to display your growing collection of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) for the bros on the block. 

The Dawn of Web3 

Samsung’s NFT TV was one of the only tangible hardware nods there to a potentially competing paradigm, Web3, whose proponents argue with a quasi-religious fervor that the “3D immersive experience” is not the main act but a side-show compared to the radically transformative economics of shared value among and between digital denizens. Web3+ seeks to unshackle the digital economy from sovereign authorities like central banks and private enterprises that thrive within the current global financial ecosystem. In Web3+ future world, late-stage capitalism withers away, to be replaced by decentralized, self-governing, anonymized forms of finance, of which the current crop of cryptocurrencies are merely the first crude iterations.  

The term Web3 was first coined in a 2014 online treatise by Ethereum blockchain cryptocurrency co-founder Gavin Wood, who contended that this new and improved digital domain’s defining attribute, “pervasive privacy,” was only attainable through the adoption of “identity-based” pseudonyms. A core tenet of Web3 is that key to tapping into the magic of financial disintermediation and decentralization is unpierceable anonymity. [12] As a purely practical matter, however, IRL protocols aiming to protect privacy by promoting anonymity have succeeded thus far mainly to put widely speculative and in some cases, quasi-criminal forms of finance at the heart of a putatively noble experiment. An unrelenting focus on safeguarding anonymity at all costs has, to its critics, served mainly to amplify abuses, including but not limited to hacking, groping, snooping, and stealing, which have turned Web2 into a moral and social cesspool over the past two decades. 

In the eyes of those critics, the most damning dark side of Web3 is that its most conspicuous beneficiaries are younger, scruffier versions of the original Silicon Valley male mafia. In Vice, early Web3 adopter Tim O’Reilly conveyed his dismay that “blockchain has turned out to be the most rapid recentralization of a decentralized technology I’ve seen in my lifetime.”  

Accounting for its vested interest in advising large enterprises on how to dispense the staggering tech investments needed to make the big leap into the digital unknown, Accenture insists the two trends – Metaverse and web3 – are converging.  “Either Metaverse or Web3 alone would be enough to draw hype and attention,” Accenture maintains. “But the fact that they are unfurling simultaneously is what demands enterprise leaders take notice.”[13] The firm draws a useful distinction between the two trends:

“These evolutions are taking place on two fronts: metaverse [is] the re-platforming of digital experiences…Web3 is reinventing how data moves through that system.” 

Prophets of the Metaverse 

Venture capitalist Matthew Ball, the most fluent prophet-protagonist of what he calls a “quasi-successor state to the mobile internet,” defines its realization as predicated on a specific set of prerequisites. His top three: scaling, to exponentially increase the number of potential participants to “infinite”; persistence, enabled by pervasive 5G networks to “improve immersion and create new experiences”; and interoperability, to enable economic value, experiences, and identities to be portable among multiple metaverses.  

Counterpoint to the prophesizing and proselytizing came again from Axios’s Ina Fried, who did a quick reality check on the metamorphosis’ minimum timeline from the sidelines of the 2022 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona: 

The full vision of a shared, 3D digital dimension…is probably still a decade away — but it won’t arrive out of nowhere in one piece. Instead, it will show up in bits and chunks, clunky and disjointed, before coalescing into something both functional and useful. Unless, of course, all this turns out to be another false start for a VR industry that has been promising us one metaverse or another for three decades now.[14]

By Way of Background 

In his 1992 fantasy novel Snow Crash, science fiction author Neal Stephenson (three decades on, fittingly, a futurist at pioneering virtual reality firm Magic Leap) concocted a compelling mash-up of utopia and dystopia, ushering the term “metaverse” into the vocabulary of tech-geekery and elevating it to canonical status among self-styled Silicon Valley visionaries. In the book’s fictional IRL, Los Angeles is no longer part of the United States because the federal government has ceded much of its power and territory to private enterprises in the wake of a global economic and social collapse. Across what is left of the nation, mercenary armies compete for defense contracts while elites hunker down in guarded gated housing developments known as burbclaves.  

The 1992 fantasy novel that used the term “metaverse”

The City of Angels, where the story is set, is threatened by waves of hungry Eurasian refugees approaching a Gold Coast densely settled by billionaires who live the high life on obscenely huge yachts.[15] In this bifurcated collision of “real” and “virtual” worlds, the ironically named Hiro Protagonist is a loser-slacker-computer hacker who lives in a shabby shipping container and delivers pizza IRL. Upon entering the metaverse, however, he transforms into a hero on a mission: tracking down the source of a nasty computer virus inflicting brain damage on users IRL. Thirty years later, Stephenson modestly admitted to “just making shit up.”[16] Still, Snowcrash’s metaverse uncannily prefigures today’s Roblox and Decentraland, among other proto-metaverses. It’s an urban fantasy amusement park, where virtual visitors spend vast amounts of cryptocurrency on speculative real estate and trivial pursuits and patronize boutiques along a Main Street thousands of miles long. Avid participants develop unhealthy addictions to the virtual world, and escape to the metaverse to disconnect from dystopian reality.  

To today’s thinkers pondering the pros and cons of this virtual vision ever becoming reality, it’s hard to deny its potential to turn in on itself, as a digital extension of all-powerful of surveillance states, ruled by big government, big business, or worst-case scenario, both. Whether it’s Big Brother or Big Boss, The Wall Street Journal cites Electronic Frontier Foundation general counsel Kurt Opsahl on the disturbing prospect of your supervisor being equipped with the ability to track and record with uncanny accuracy the attitudinal implications of your subtlest eyeroll or shrug being monitored in a virtual meeting. “If coupled with data about body temperature or heart rate from a smart watch, the information could be used to try to infer a worker’s emotional state.” [17]    

Small solace on that front may be gained from some sobering research conducted by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCHD), a nonprofit that analyzes and seeks to disrupt online hate and misinformation. After staffers spent 12 hours recording activity on VRChat, the proprietary virtual world platform accessible via Meta’s Oculus headset, “the group logged an average of one infringement every seven minutes, including instances of sexual content, racism, abuse, hate, homophobia and misogyny, often with minors present.”[18] Nina Jane Patel, vice president of metaverse research for Kabuni, an immersive technology company based in the U.K., was, by her own account which promptly went viral, happily immersed in Meta’s Horizon Venues when her female avatar was “virtually groped and harassed” by a group of three avatars with male voices. “Before I knew it,” Patel maintained, “they were groping my avatar…[and] touching [its] upper and middle portion of my avatar…while a fourth male avatar was taking selfie photos of what was happening.”  

In response to her sordid user experience, Meta rapidly rolled out a “default personal boundary” requiring avatars to stay nearly 4 feet apart from each other. That said and done, how is that enforceable in perpetuity? Given Meta’s checkered track record pitting profit up against the costs associated with safeguarding users’ privacy and dignity on Facebook, Meta’s baby step, however well intentioned, was anything but reassuring.  

Fast Forward

If the metaverse and Web3+ is a world we dream of, and is indeed still years off, the lure of it has been unstoppable despite some enormous headwinds and dire turmoil in recent weeks and months.

All major crypto currencies have declined over the months with Bitcoin losing over 70%, and Ethereum losing as much in just four months, while a number of firms, including Celsius, the biggest lending platform, stopped trading due to insolvency risk. Terra UST and stablecoin LUNA wiped out over $40 billion of investors’ wealth in just 24 hours.

Some enthusiasts will quickly point out that crypto has survived major crashes before. It dropped 99.9% in 2011, and it dropped from $1,100 to $200 in 2013, in just a month. And then again, it dropped from $20,000 to $4,000 in 2017. Every time it dropped, it kept coming back stronger. Alex Dovbnya asked “Black Swan” author Nassim Nicholas Taleb whether the crash is just another crypto winter or a full-blown ice age. [19]

Others will say that we need to look beyond crypto, and even beyond the core technology of Web3+, namely the blockchain. This is a fair point. There are two ways to think about this one. First is to confide in experts, those that study the metaverse and the future more profoundly than everyone else. From this perspective, the metaverse will be a thing. McKinsey estimates it to be a $5 trillion economy. Goldman Sachs believes the metaverse will be a $8 trillion opportunity and Citi even estimates it to be worth $13 billion by 2030. These are staggering numbers. In order to get a sense of how big these numbers are, remember that today’s fashion industry is a $1.5 trillion global industry, and retail is about $6.6 trillion in the US. Even while these industries are so much smaller than the metaverse, they’re pervasive and important in our lives, which will make the metaverse a real thing for consumers and society.[20]

The second perspective is a personal one. I came to this country in 1995 and was told there was a company that had started to sell books online and we’d all read books and publish online. I smiled in disbelief wondering whether I missed something in translation. Some said that we’d buy cars and houses online, and even work there. They talked about an internet where you could find everything thanks to a search engine such as Google. A sort of goldrush took place, but by 2000, all this came to an end with the stock markets crashing, and dotcom companies rebranded as “dotbomb” companies.

But while many companies disappeared, the internet did not, and technologies associated with the internet evolved. The ecommerce pioneered by Amazon got better and better. Of dozens of search engines, Google emerged as the most useful one. This reminds me of Web3 today. Try to buy land on Decentraland for example, and it is a cumbersome experience. Currently Web3 is slow, reminiscent of AOL dial-up. And for what use?

Therefore, while I believe the metaverse or Web3+ is not a thing yet, it will be a thing that will change the way we live our lives, the way we work, and play.  This translates into enormous opportunities for companies and brands — but only those that solve real problems and major challenges. This is something I explained in my last book (The Interaction Field, PublicAffairs 2020).

Look at the companies that have thrived over the years — Amazon solved a real problem and made shopping for anything much more efficient via ecommerce. Google helped you find things on the internet via the technology of search engines. Uber and Lyft helped us get around town in a relatively cheap, convenient way that beats waiting for a taxi, especially in NYC when it rains.

The problem with the metaverse and Web3+ seems to be that we’ve forgotten this simple principle of solving something for consumers and society. Buying a Bored Ape or selling an NFT collectible or dressing up your avatar with your favorite fashion label is something we’re doing not because we should but because we can. Currently we’re trying too hard to be amazing, rather than being amazingly useful, as Jaer Baer, a branding strategist, has said before.

In the next article, I’ll introduce a framework and model to really see the big opportunities that these emerging technologies associated with the metaverse or Web3+ present for companies and brands.

 To be continued in Part 2. 

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[1]  “Why is Snoop Dogg talking about Web 6.0”

[2] Other tech luminaries have followed Zuckerberg’s lead. By December, Jack Dorsey co-founder of Twitter and Square announced rebranding it to Block in an effort to position the payments company on new technologies that underlie the metaverse, such as blockchain.

[3] “Microsoft Chief Hails $75 billion Deal for Activision as Grand Step Into the Metaverse,” Financial Times, February 2, 2022 

[4] “Facebook’s CEO on Why the Social Network is Becoming ‘a Metaverse Company” Casey Newton, The Verge, Jul 22, 2021  

[5] Meta Founder’s Letter, October 28, 2021, Mark Zuckerberg, https://about.fb.com/news/2021/10/founders-letter/October 28, 2021 

[6] “Opportunities in the metaverse: How businesses can explore the metaverse and navigate the hype vs. reality” JP Morgan Onyx by JP Morgan February 15, 2022 

[7] “Why Wall Street thinks the metaverse will be worth trillions,” Bernard Warner, Fortune, January 27, 2022  

[8] Ibid. 

[9] “Meet Me in the Metaverse,” Technology Vision 2020, Accenture  

[10] Elon Musk Interview, Babylon Bee, December 22, 2021 

[11] “CES 2022 brought pieces of the metaverse into view,” Ina Fried, Axios, January 7, 2022  

[12] “Bored Apes, BuzzFeed and the Battle for the Future of the Internet,” Maxwell Strachan, Vice, February 14, 2022 

[13] “Meet Me In the Universe,” Technology Vision 2022 Accenture 2022 

[14] “CES 2022 brought pieces of the metaverse into view,” Ina Fried, Axios, January 7, 2022 

[15] Wikipedia description of Snow Crash 

[16] “The Sci-Fi Guru Who Predicted Google Earth Explains Silicon Valley’s Latest Obsession”; Joanna Robinson, Vanity Fair, June 23, 2017 

[17] “Why the Metaverse Will Change the Way You Work,” Sarah E. Needleman, The Wall Street Journal, Feb. 7, 2022 

[18] “Metaverse virtual worlds lack adequate safety precautions, critics say,” Maura Barrett and Douglas Forte, NBCNews.com, Feb. 9, 2022 

[19] Alex Dovbnya (2022), “Crypto Winter? “Black Swan” Author Predics Full-Blown Ice Age,” UToday, June 2022

[20] See McKinsey; CBInsights 2022: Metaverse of Madness and Fahri Karakas (The Goldrush has started in the metaverse….)

[21] Thank you to Alberto Velasco and Luis Geradin for valuable comments on earlier drafts of this article  

The post Making the Metaverse Work for the Rest of Us: Part I appeared first on Vivaldi.

Kevin Lane Keller and Erich Joachimsthaler discussed modern marketing strategies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

Watch the full event here:

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

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

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

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

The post Is Your Brand Ready for the Post-COVID World? 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.

In February 2016, our CEO Erich Joachimsthaler wrote an article for Forbes.com analyzing when it would make sense for advertisers to pay for a Super Bowl ad. He presented cases for buying ad space, but also argued the case for why the Super Bowl may not be the best avenue for most brands. Read the full article here.

The post Is the Super Bowl Really the Route to Take? appeared first on Vivaldi.

Transition 

Happy Fall! As the seasons change, our team has transition on the mind. More than ever before, our industry is witnessing a shift in the role brand plays in consumers lives. The marketing world is brimming with opportunity to enable their brand to not only provide information and utility but create conversation, space for expression, modes for affiliation and help build the personal and social identities of their consumers.

In this exciting time of reinvention and innovation in marketing, we’re thrilled every time we get to carve out time and find the space to share perspectives with our fellow marketers. And in this special edition of the Vivaldi Weekly Roundup, we wanted to share the highlights and memorable takeaways from our event on just this topic.

An Evening with NYAMA and Vivaldi

Last night, we were honored to partner with the New York American Marketing Association to host a signature event titled, “Putting the Focus Back on Consumers” at the beautiful Scandinavia House in New York. We were honored to have a panel discussion with leaders having worked for leading brands AB-InBev, Cadillac, and Saks. We had a great time talking to our savvy panelists and attendees at the sold-out event on the importance of understanding consumers today given the social, mobile, and digital context in which we live and how understanding their behavior will help increase the success of any business and brand transformation.

One Guest’s Notes 

Our own Brand Analyst, Zenia Tangri shares her impressions of the event:

So, how do Saks, AB-InBev and Cadillac keep up and create value for the always-connected, always-online customer? Well for one, AB InBev and Cadillac both have new addresses – having recently picked up from Missouri and Detroit and moved to the happening and pulsating New York City. Cadillac has the second highest median age of buyers in the industry, and to quote Philip Dauchy of Cadillac are “in the midst of a crisis”. But they embraced this challenge and are willing to take risks to make the product and brand more pertinent to GenX and GenY. They opened the Cadillac House, a low-pressure environment where you can interact with the brand and its cars. It’s a perfect example of selling not just a product, but a lifestyle – the space also houses a retail lab featuring upcoming fashion designers and artists’ exhibitions, so social millennials, who might not even be potential buyers, can ‘hang out’. At AB InBev too, they’re all about innovation by putting the focus back on consumers. Panelist Jodi Harris explained how crowdsourcing and customer labs are great ways to inspire and test new products – and shared the Lime-A-Rita success story. And panelist Denise Anza shared how Saks has successfully integrated their digital and physical stores so they’re no longer cannibalizing each other’s market shares.

For the Record

Some key takeaways word for word from the night’s speakers:

“We’re bringing the heart of the consumer to everything we’re doing… and inch by inch it’s making a difference.”  – Jodi Harris, AB-InBev

“Customers are giving up a lot of personal information, so they expect customization in return.” – Denise Anza, formerly of Saks

“Consumer demands are expanding so rapidly and our challenge is to evolve with them.” – Philip Dauchy, Cadillac

“How do you really build a sustainable advantage? We found that you can leverage Social Currency to do so.” – Erich Joachimsthaler, Vivaldi

Stay Tuned 

We’re compiling some great photos and a full recap of the event on our blog, so be sure to check out our thinking section in the coming days! We’ll back with the latest on business and brands next week.

The post Social Currency, Unlocking Growth, and More This Week at Vivaldi appeared first on Vivaldi.