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.

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Recently, our CEO Erich Joachimsthaler spoke with ETBrandEquity.com to discuss how personalization is becoming the key factor in developing a more competitive edge and building a new brand. Read the full article here.

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The traditional way of thinking of markets is in terms of producers and consumers. Producers create value by optimizing a range of activities from procurement, design, manufacturing, branding, marketing to sales and service. The differences in the activities of competitors create their competitive advantage. A BMW becomes the ultimate driving machine or ultimate driving experience relative to Mercedes, Audi and others. The producer creates value for which the consumer is willing to pay a price. This is also called a “pipeline model” or “pipeline thinking” because a company competes by controlling and adding value along the activities or along the pipeline or value chain.

The new way of thinking about markets is in terms of participants that interact to create and consume value. Consumers are not just recipients of value, but active producers or participants of creating value and so are one or more producers. Value is created through collaboration, engagement, and interaction between participants.

If there is one group of producers and consumers, the business model is typically called a “platform.” Uber is an example. The participants are riders and drivers who create value which is orchestrated by Uber through a set of rules of governance. With Airbnb, there are travelers and hosts. A platform, then, is an open architecture with rules of governance designed to facilitate interactions.[ii] With more than one producer and various consumers, we typically talk about a digital ecosystem.

A digital ecosystem may be defined as interacting organizations that are digital connected and enabled by modularity, and are not managed by hierarchical authority.[iii] It is a way of providing adjacent products or services by collaborating with other companies or business units. One mechanism to create value is to share data generated on the platform. Uber entered food delivery with Uber Eats, which adds restaurants as an additional participant in the Uber ecosystem, and then built out the ecosystem to include Uber Health, Uber Freight, and Jump bike and scooter sharing, for example. The data and analytics applied to the sheer number of transactions helps optimize the platform and ecosystem and create value.

Digital ecosystems change the nature of competition from being firm-focused to being ecosystem-focused.[iv] Strategically, the decision is either to create an ecosystem and orchestrate it or to join an existing ecosystem. The Android ecosystem competes against the Apple ecosystem, a typical example of ecosystem competition.

A third business model is the interaction field.[v] Unlike platforms and digital ecosystems, an interaction field is not transactional but interactional. It feeds on continuous engagement, participation and collaboration between multiple groups; not just discrete transactions such as another ride with an Uber, or another booking on Airbnb. It delivers shared value to everyone; not just the platform owners or ecosystem partners. It creates new value that solves entirely new problems, rather than merely solving existing problems better or more efficiently, or merely taking out frictions or pain points in commerce or shopping experiences.

Flatiron Health, a Roche Pharma company, enables an interaction field that brings together patients, care providers and even competing pharmaceutical companies and regulators like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in a continuous interactions of millions of patients, care providers sharing data about every single instance of cancer treatment. The interactions are rich exchanges of learning with depth that has enabled a larger network of companies like pharmaceutical companies and life science companies to collaborate with the FDA to approve therapeutic solutions earlier and more effectively treat cancer patients.

Like all new business models that have emerged in recent years, this new model creates value through three major effects: network effects, virality and learning effects. Network effects kick in when a product or service on offer becomes more valuable as more people contribute to it. Think Airbnb. The more Londoners offer their spare rooms or stately homes or canal barges to travelers through Airbnb, the more valuable the service becomes—greater selection, increased availability, more variety and choices.

Second is virality – as people find value in the offering they voluntarily become advocates for it and encourage others to join. Think GoPro, the action camera that has a commanding market share among extreme sports enthusiasts, surfers and snowboarders. GoPro benefits from the viral effect. It encourages surfers to share their pictures or videos on the GoPro channel which posts them on many social media sites and other channels. This creates virality because like-minded surfers share the content with others, which makes more people want to shoot videos or content, with translates to more sales of cameras, hopefully via GoPro cameras.

Third, as the brand applies human knowledge and artificial intelligence to the great amounts of data being collected, the learning effects emerges – that is, the more information the brand or product gathers and synthesizes, the more valuable it becomes. Tesla cars collect more data through sensors and cameras than other manufacturers which enable machine learning in its Autopilot software which increases driver safety. Tesla gets smarter as you drive. And even smarter the more Tesla drivers there are.

Platform thinking, hence, is a way to rethink, reimagine, and reset how companies and brands create value, and how to build and scale companies and brands. Platform thinking is a new way of how companies innovate. Innovation is no longer an exclusive effort within a larger array of companies, startups and a financial system of venture capitalists, etc. Platform thinking makes the much-hyped open innovation movement a reality in an agile and efficient way.

Platform thinking also impacts how customer experiences are created and delivered. Consumers or customers are no longer just recipient of customer experiences, but experiences are cocreated and shaped by consumers.

Platform thinking changes how we connect with consumers or customers. No longer is marketing or communications about pushing messages on to audiences. No longer is selling about converting consumers along the various stages of the funnel toward purchase. Marketing, communications and selling are about connection – engagement and interaction, and creating a gravitational force that pulls consumers in and empowers them.

Platform thinking affects every function of a business, every department of an organization, and every stakeholder in a society. It even changes the nature of the firm, what Marshall Van Alstyne calls the “Inverted Firm” which shifts “production” from the inside to the outside.[vi] It is a form of rethinking capitalism from focusing on shareholder value to shared value maximization.

[i] The first use of the term can be found in: Sangeet Paul Choudary (2014), “A Platform-Thinking Approach to Innovation,” Wired.com, https://www.wired.com/insights/2014/01/platform-thinking-approach-innovation/

[ii] Marshall Van Alstyne, Geoffrey Parker and Sangeet Paul Choudary (2016), “Pipelines, Platforms, and the New Rule of Strategy,” Harvard Business Review, vol. 94, no. 4, pp. 54 – 62. Geoffrey Parker, Marshall Van Alstyne, and Sangeet Paul Choudary (2016), Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy – and How to Make Them Work for You, W. W. Norton & Company.

[iii] Michael G. Jacobides, Arun Sundararajan, and Marshall Van Alstyne (2019), “Platforms and Ecosystems: Enabling the Digital Economy,” World Economic Forum Briefing Paper, February, p. 14.

[iv] Michael G. Jacobides (2019), “In the Ecosystem Economy, What’s Your Strategy?” Harvard Business Review, September-October.

[v] Erich Joachimsthaler (2020), The Interaction Field: The Revolutionary New Way to Create Shared Value for Companies, Customers and Society, Public Affairs, New York.

[vi] Michael G. Jacobides, Arun Sundararajan, and Marshall Van Alstyne (2019), “Platforms and Ecosystems: Enabling the Digital Economy,” World Economic Forum Briefing Paper, February, p. 8.

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