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Digital Darwinism, or How to Win With Today’s Consumer

By Vivaldi, February 4, 2015

The digital revolution has changed the game: building a strong brand, driving the innovation agenda, and achieving sustainable growth are now determined by our capacity to adapt to the digital age. With opportunities and challenges to connect with consumers evolving faster than ever, brands that use today’s tools to establish a relationship with and create meaningful value for consumers gain a necessary competitive edge.

CEOs, CMOs, and marketers across industries face a wide range of challenges posed by the digital transformation, ranging from how to leverage social, mobile and digital data to how to extract meaning from the Internet of Things, all to better serve their customers. The volume of options, risks, and the potential complexity of implementation are enough to send executives into a vortex of paralyzing confusion. At Vivaldi Partners Group, we understand the scope of the challenge and have spent over a decade advancing our thinking to help our clients thrive in this cutthroat digital environment.

Inspired by the term Digital Darwinism — coined by Evan I. Schwartz in 1999 and popularized in recent years by Brian Solis in the context of digital transformation—Vivaldi applied the concept to its core area of expertise of creating demand-driven growth strategies. Over the years, we’ve refined our perspective on the evolution of industries, categories and brands by continuing to explore how the increasing digitalization of people’s daily activities, goals and contexts are integral to driving growth.

Starting 2005, we put a spotlight on social technologies and how they aid consumers in connecting with brands and others. This led to our research pioneering the concept of Social Currency, which we defined as the extent to which people share the brand, or information about the brand, as part of their everyday social lives.

In 2010, Vivaldi invested significant efforts in advancing Big Data solutions by integrating unstructured data from digital and social sources with structured data, using analytic methodologies and tools to better understand consumers, create new consumer insights and drive brand strategies, marketing, and new innovations. This was done using sophisticated data integration through the PowerViz platform and DataViz, a library of data visualization, data analytics, and data management techniques.

Since 2012, Vivaldi has invested in mobile technologies by understanding how data from mobile device movement across time and space can provide new insights into contextualizing a brand or marketing strategy, create new segmentation and targeting opportunities, and discover the consumer decision journey.

In our work with clients, we help build strong brands, develop innovation playbooks and formulate growth strategies across industries by connecting business strategy with a deep understanding of changing customer contexts. Vivaldi differentiates its consulting services by combining a deep understanding of new technologies together with data analytics and consumer research to empower clients to become more agile and enable the digital enterprise to meet business objectives.

Our annual Digital Darwinism Summit has become a magnet for forward-thinking executives to discuss, assess and write the next chapter of marketing. Every year we’re delighted to host luminaries from leading companies, such as Google, Tesla, BMW, Philips, and Siemens.

Vivaldi Founder and CEO Erich Joachimsthaler says, “The power of information at the hands of consumers is what makes the world so disruptive for marketing. Digital Darwinism doesn’t affect just a few industries, but all of us.”

Do you have the survival skills to thrive in the digital age?