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.

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Vivaldi’s CEO Erich Joachimsthaler discusses the modern relationship between brands and consumers with Pierre-Laurent Baudey, a former 22-year veteran of Nike, a member of Tillamook’s Advisory board, and founder of his own practice, PLB LAB. In this episode of The Business of Platforms, these two passionate brand-builders discuss what it takes to build a strong brand, from evergreen principles to the three fundamental and consumer-centric pillars for brand growth. Tune in to the conversation and find highlights below:

Episode 19: On Driving Brand Growth, with Pierre-Laurent Baudey on Vimeo.

Some things in brand growth will never change. First: a consumer-centric strategy and execution (however, as you’ll see later in this post, the level of centricity has turned into obsession). Second, failing for success: there’s no failure, only feedback. Top brands own their outcomes and use failure as an opportunity to learn, grow, and succeed. Lastly, the art of brand storytelling. Humans crave stories, and the best brands amplify personal stories that people can project themselves into. 

In today’s highly competitive market, brands must build relationships through trust, and the way to build trust is by being authentic and standing for values. As a result, the best brands have the guts to stand for something bold and attach themselves to a larger purpose. Pierre-Laurent shares how strong brands have implemented three fundamental pillars to achieve long-lasting brand growth, which we can call “KIIS” Model. 

3 pillars to achieve long-lasting brand growth

1. Know Me. Brands are obsessed with comprehensively and deeply understanding their consumers. 
2. Inspire and Innovate For Me. Brands should take every opportunity to continuously provide inspiring stories and innovative products to their consumers. 
3. Serve Me. Brands must focus on creating a long-term two-way relationship with the consumer by providing relevant ecosystems that generate value for the consumer and enable their lives. 

These three pillars form a feedback loop thanks to digital technologies and platforms. By creating a digital ecosystem around their consumers, under regulation, brands can collect data from the platforms and generate insights about the consumers. As a result, the more brands interact with a consumer and the more consumers interact back, the more brands know about consumers and the more relevant their inspiration and innovation becomes, and the more consumers interact with them as a result.

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The platform world goes beyond transactional business models by valuing transparency, collaboration, and shared value creation with the consumer at the center of it all. Platform thinking bears enormous appeal and potential for the CPG space, Erich and JP explore examples of the opportunities unlocked from brands like Apple to Mars Petcare. The question now remains how and when brands will embrace and deliver on this mindset and business shift?

To further discuss the platform opportunity in CPG, email Vivaldi at hello@vivaldigroup.com. 

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The platform world goes beyond transactional business models by valuing transparency, collaboration, and shared value creation with the consumer at the center of it all. Platform thinking bears enormous appeal and potential for the CPG space, Erich and JP explore examples of the opportunities unlocked from brands like Apple to Mars Petcare. The question now remains how and when brands will embrace and deliver on this mindset and business shift?

To further discuss the platform opportunity in CPG, email Vivaldi at hello@vivaldigroup.com. 

The post Embracing Change in the CPG Industry, with JP Kuelwhein (Part I) appeared first on Vivaldi.

“If you can start aligning interests as the world is organizing itself towards a more sustainable goal, there will be a plethora of interesting new business models that open up in front of us.” – Emil Stigsgaard Fuglsang, Co-Founder of Matter

In our latest episode, we are joined by Emil Fuglsang, Co-Founder of Matter, a Copenhagen-based FinTech startup that is building crowdsource-inspired tools to literally invest in a better, sustainable future. In conversation with Vivaldi Founder and CEO Erich Joachimsthaler, Emil stresses society’s dire need of a sustainable future without fossil fuels, weapons or tobacco, and emphasizes the importance of investing in a world you wish to retire in. Further, Matter has built an AI-powered screening tool that looks at a range of sustainability criteria across various reliable data sources. Tune in to learn about how Matter utilizes real-time data to promise transparency and the startup’s unique value proposition that allows clients to witness the tangible impact of their retirement savings.

See below for highlights from their conversation: 

Q: Please introduce us to Matter.

A: Matter is a FinTech company based out of Copenhagen, and we do two things:

1. We work in collaboration with big financial institutions, typically pension funds, to offer sustainable pension savings to individuals. We do that by helping them create sustainable investment funds and by offering a digital engaging experience that’s catered to delivering promises and customer experiences around sustainability. So we are a B2C-based business model.
2. We are also suppliers of software to the financial services industry. We do that by helping screen portfolios on a range of sustainability criteria and report on a range of impact metrics, from the carbon intensity of your investments to the share of your portfolio that could be invested in harmful or beneficial companies.

Both of these business models run on the same core engine that is based on a lot of analysis, powered by quite a few AI features that help us navigate the complex landscape of data on sustainability.

We specialize in sourcing data from a range of NGOs, research agencies and academics around the world that publish data on, for example, companies that act in problematic way in terms of deforestation or companies that are weapons producers, etc. So where we really differ is that we’ve found a way to collect all this data and synthesize it into a framework for sustainable investments that we can use to screen investment portfolios.

Q: As 1 of 500 FinTech startups, how have you been able to cut through and tell your story?

A: I think I would point to two things. The first relates to our approach to developing a compelling customer experience. So we’ve worked a lot with gaining insights into how people relate to finance, how people think about planning for the future, think about sustainability, and we’ve tried to build a custom experience around that. And that’s new. The financial industry, even though it is very tech driven right now, doesn’t innovate that fast when it comes to new value propositions. For once, we can promise you something normative about your money. We can actually give you a concrete promise, which is the experience of not being required to be financially literate or be a high net worth individual, but just making one decision and suddenly having this empowerment that is normally reserved for rich individuals and seeing yourself as a stockholder, an investor, someone who’s impacting the world with your money. Delivering on that also requires an underlying ICE platform that can provide complete transparency into what’s in the portfolio, but also run an early warning system, which is: What is the world actually saying about an investment?

Secondly, I think we’ve received attention due to the logic of how we’ve built the underlying analysis and the software we are selling to financial service providers. We’ve tried to combine some competencies – I have a background in management consulting, my co-founder Niels’ experience working in the United Nations, and our other members are engineers. Bringing all our expertise together helped design a system that is dedicated to delivering analysis for companies that want to create sustainable investment profiles and deliver promises.

Q: On one hand, you are also sending pensions to Millennials. How has that experience been?

A: I think there’s been a tendency to also criticized the generation of Millennials for being irresponsible. Before we started even building the first concepts for Matter, we interviewed more than 200 people, which I think is also a bit odd for FinTech. Typically, you start off with a hypothesis, do a few interviews, and then you just get going. But before we started building the logic of delivering a promise around sustainability, we spoke to so many people. What we realized was that Millennials actually really want to feel responsible financially. They have quite a lot of strategies in place, but the financial industry isn’t set up to deliver very well on it. I think if you stop talking about the money you have in a world of climate change anxiety, but start discussing the power you have in affecting the course today, Millennials will see the huge responsibility they have. I was very surprised and touched that people actually care so much. There’s so much good and so many good intentions, so it’s just a matter of finding a way to deliver on it.

Q: Are you suggesting a mindset shift? It is not just about the platform business, the startup or FinTech, it is about a new definition for the firm, right?

A: Yes, I agree, it’s a chance to also rewire some of the structures. If you look at the role of NGOs today, they are just a watchdog. What if we could pay them for their valuable data and analyses? The question is then, who is to pay them? Typically, you would never think of a bank. Why would a bank pay World Wildlife Foundation for something? But if you can start aligning interests as the world normatively organizes itself towards a more sustainable goal, I think there are a plethora of interesting new business models that open up in front of us and ours is just one of them.

Tune into more of The Business of Platforms podcast here. If you’d like to learn more about Vivaldi’s platform strategy offering, contact us at hello@vivaldigroup.com.

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Stay tuned for more episodes by visiting: vivaldigroup.com/podcasts/business-of-platforms/

See below for highlights from their conversation:

Q: What is a platform and how does it work?

A: Platforms are an amazing new opportunity. It’s a new way of creating value for customers. You need to start by thinking: How do we typically create value for consumers? For hundreds of years, we’ve created value through a value chain, in a sequential step of activities from R&D, manufacturing, sourcing, to marketing and selling products. We create a business that adds value and then delivers a product or service to the consumer, and for which the consumer is willing to pay an extra price. That’s a pipeline model, which is the traditional model. Platforms are not built through manufacturing, not through that linear step, platforms are built through interaction and collaboration. Platforms facilitate an interaction, a connection, through which value is created for the consumer.

Q: What’s an example of a platform?

A: The most valuable companies right now – Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Google, Amazon – are all platforms. But any other company you can imagine can also become platforms – Sephora, John Deere, and so many others.

Apple is a good example because we all know it very well. Apple has the iPhone and many other devices, but the platform part of is really the App Store. The App Store is an easy way for customers to make their iPhone useful and to do a lot of new things, and Apple started that in 2011, that’s why platforms are so recent. The value Apple creates here is for consumers, but the platform part is that on the other side, there are app developers that code and write software. Today, more than 2 million apps are on the App Store, which creates value for the app developers, because they no longer have to do marketing anymore. They can focus on what they really good at, namely creating awesome apps, so Apple has basically created a marketplace for them.

Q: As you said, Apple has removed the need for the developer themselves to market the products and build out a store, because consumers are able to download those apps. This sounds very tech-enabled. Do you need to be a tech company or in the software space in order to be a platform?

A: It is a fact that these platforms started in the tech world, but especially over the last three or four years, traditional companies and brands have realized the need to build on top of the existing business a platform business. For example, John Deere is a very traditional company. On one side, they have farmers, which are their customers, and on the other side, they have pesticides manufacturers, fertilizer manufacturers, crop manufacturers like Monsanto, buyers, and many other participants. John Deere facilitates a platform that brings together all participants in order to make a farm really productive.

Q: How is value created in John Deere’s platform?

A: The key is to understand that value is not created by John Deere, the buyers, or Monsanto alone. Value is created by the farmers who share data about their farms, their productivity, soil conditions, weather conditions, when they seeded, and data of all their practices. Because farmers collectively come together and share this data on the “John Deere Open Platform,” John Deere can use this data and work together with manufacturers like Monsanto to determine factors such as: the best type of crop, the best time of fertilizing, how deep should farmers seed their crops in order to optimize the productivity of the farm, etc. So the value is created by farmers sharing their experiences and data with John Deere.

Q: Can you explain network effects in detail?

A: Network effects happen when a company’s product becomes more valuable as more people use it and participate in the network. The more users the network has, the more valuable the data becomes to every participant. For example, the more farmers participate in John Deere’s network, the more data there is, and the more value is added to every platform participant. The beautiful part of the network effect is that it scales exponentially, which is why I am a big believer in power of platforms.

Q: Would you say that the platform opportunity is for companies across industries or are there specific spaces in which platforms have most potential?

A: Right now we are still in the early stages of that evolution, but we see very traditional companies, such as ones in the metal manufacturing, steel distribution, industrial gases space, that have adopted platforms. So platforms are moving across industries and categories, and is solving some important problems and challenges that companies, industries and society at large have.

Tune into more of The Business of Platforms podcast here. If you’d like to learn more about Vivaldi’s platform strategy offering, contact us at hello@vivaldigroup.com.

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See below for highlights from their conversation: 

Q: Can you share a little bit more about the concept, the idea, where it came from, and what you offer today?

A: Pinna is the first audio on-demand service for kids offering podcasts, music and audiobooks all in one place, making it really convenient for parents, teachers, kids, and students to easily discover across audio formats. Before Pinna, you would discover audiobooks through a variety of different services or a la carte purchases on Barnes & Noble or Amazon. You would stream music either through a streaming service of choice or on the radio. Podcasts were fairly difficult to discover for kids and we really believed that there was an opportunity to…
1) bring all those formats together into a service that makes everything easily discoverable,
2) elevate the understanding and awareness of podcasts for kids,
3) produce podcasts at scale, offering a new format in the audio space, and
4) capitalize on the popularity and growth of podcasts at the adult level.

Q: How do you make sure that that content is really meaningful and fits what kids want to be listening to today?

A: There are a couple different criteria that go into how we think about what content makes sense for Pinna. First, it’s really important for us, longer-term, to ensure that our portfolio of content is reflective of all kids, that all kids can see themselves in our stories, our songs, our podcasts, and audio shows. With that lens, we’re constantly looking for a diverse portfolio of content representative of all different interests, passion, topics, and personalities that kids have.

We do two things when aggregating content. We acquire content from very well-known, high quality, reputable partners like Scholastic, American Public Media, WNYC, Highlights and Random House. We also produce original content for the Pinna platform. And our team all hail from the kids media space, whether they were game designers, print authors, television show developers, etc., which is a lovely cross-section of capabilities, all bringing a real lens on what makes sense for kids to the table. In all of our Pinna originals, we hypothesize about what will make kids laugh, giggle, wonder, or puzzle, and then we kid test it.

Q: How did you decide on a subscription model? What are the some of the other financial models that you looked at?

A: The most common model before the launch of Pinna was an ad-based model. When you think about Pinna, we’re bringing three different formats that live in three different places today in the marketplace all with varying models behind them. So audible has a subscription service, but it’s not just for kids. It’s not cordoned off, COPPA compliant, it’s not a walled garden where I can hand over the device for kids to browse freely. Then there are streamers like Spotify, Pandora and Apple Music that have a freemium model. You either get the service with or without ads. In the audio books and podcast space, especially on the kids level, there is no service. Nobody has created a service other than putting kids podcasts out onto Stitcher, Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts, and monetizing it through advertising.

We looked at this plethora of choices and what really led our decision was quantitative research with moms and teachers across the country. We talked to a 1012 moms and 400 teachers, and really dug into the value propositions of the service. Then, we tested fee structures and our pricing model. We had well over 50% in both moms and teachers saying they would prefer an ad-free model with an extremely palatable price point. One of the biggest value propositions to moms and teachers who already have very busy lives is having a reputable team curating the best content and bringing it into one place that’s easily discoverable and safe for kids.

Q: What are you able to do today at Pinna that you wouldn’t have been able to do at Scholastic? What are the differences in terms of the model, the marketing, the objectives that you have?

A: There are such big differences. Even in the digital sector at Scholastic, so much of what we did needed to ensure that there was a tie-in to our tactile book business, and that’s a whole different model and expense base. So you might have a fantastic idea, but when you’re putting the PnL together and thinking about how to drive sales in brick-and-mortar stores or through our clubs channel, there are some gates. It created a whole different set of considerations for how to best market or drive penetration at Pinna. We have one format which is audio and we know what the economics are, and the hurdle is really the the paywall. It’s more about how we elevate Pinna’s content in the app experience and how to aid discovery. The velocity with which we can create an audio show and get it to market is really different than print publishing. While we were launching digital products at Scholastic, there was a bigger infrastructure, a lot more decision-makers, so that is also a big difference in terms of the pace with which we can move in a small startup environment, which is understandable.

Tune into more of The Business of Platforms podcast here. If you’d like to learn more about Vivaldi’s platform strategy offering, contact us at hello@vivaldigroup.com.

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In conversation with Vivaldi CCO Tom Ajello, Entrepreneur and growth advisor Aaron Schildkrout reveals the importance of encouraging entrepreneurialism in companies that truly want to thrive. With Aaron’s insights as founder of HowAboutWe and top marketing and data executive at Uber, you’ll be ready to empower your team for the future.

See below for highlights from the conversation:

Q: I’d love for you to start with your experience at HowAboutWe. What’s changed, what’s the same, where the watch-outs are, and just in general you reactions to the space we’re in today.

A: The last 10 years I’ve basically spent working on platforms in marketplaces of various kinds. The first company I created it was called HowAboutWe, it was a online dating site, which was very much a two-sided marketplace. I worked in Uber which is an archetypical marketplace and platform, and I advise many companies and a lot of them are building marketplaces and platforms. I’m personally very attracted to those kinds of businesses and those kinds of projects because of the profound value that they unlock that was previously nascent, hidden, underutilized. The power of building a network of people or institutions that can interact in ways that are facilitated by technology again and again has been shown particularly I think in the last 10 years to facilitate this incredible unwrapping of value that was previously locked in the system. So if you’re an Uber driver, you’re able to spend all this time earning money driving folks around who request through the app, as opposed to in a world where there was an enormous amount of overhead to provide that service which would distract from the creation of that pure value.

We also think a lot about participants in the platform contributing to the greater good of the data that gets shared amongst the other participants. To use a very subtle example, every additional ride in Uber provides a ton of additional data about things like routing mapping, pricing, etc., so it can happen in a very obvious way or in deep subtle ways that allow the core infrastructure that powers the platform to get incrementally better.

Q: How do businesses weather the storm? How do they participate in a world that basically Gen Z is creating around us?

A: The way that you work as an organization has a massive impact on whether you’re able to unlock the value that’s sitting within your organization. Really amazing entrepreneurial innovative execution and wannabe innovation is night and day. If you get it right, it will unlock amazing potential; if you get it wrong, you will have mediocre ideas that fall flat. It’s subtle: getting that right. Unlocking that entrepreneurial spirit inside of a company is very hard, but that is the critical thing. You have to find a way to work that unlocks entrepreneurialism because it is entrepreneurs – people with ideas and vision – that are incentivized and supported to create breakthroughs with the assets they have at hand. That is how innovation occurs, again and again. It’s hard for companies that make money and increase through incrementalism, through the steady effort of cutting costs, increasing margins, and slowly staying ahead of the game. That is the death knell of innovation.

You have to talk to your customers. The worst thing is a bunch of people sitting in a room thinking they have a great idea and spending a long time working on that idea and getting it right and never talking to the people who actually matter – customers.

Q: What’s the common thread across all the CEOs you’ve helped?

A: There’s some fundamental hunger, core drive, ambition to make something and have something that’s theirs manifest in the world that empowers them to deal with the incredible challenges that come with this very particular job. It is more than one order of magnitude. It’s almost like a different dimensional of hardness to run a company – like really run and build a company – than it is to operate at a very senior level. You need to have this unquenchable need to create.

Q: What is the new business world, the new set of business dynamics? What are the promises they offer?

A: Unlock hidden value. Fractionalize that value into the smallest usable pieces that are possible so that people can specialize and do the thing they’re great at, so that tech can take over and do the things that don’t require people, with a lot of guardrails to make that safe for our children and our planet. Create new forms of art that wouldn’t otherwise have existed. Massive efficiency gains for everybody, more access to things we wouldn’t have had previously. Empowering people to become creators and entrepreneurs. Transforming industries that are less obvious targets for the tech set – every industry on the planet is ripe for disruption along these lines. That will bring more efficiency and better quality of life to those people working there.

Tune into more of The Business of Platforms podcast here. If you’d like to learn more about Vivaldi’s platform strategy offering, contact us at hello@vivaldigroup.com.

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In conversation with Vivaldi Founder & CEO Erich Joachimsthaler, best-selling author Eddie Yoon reveals how superconsumers can shake up any industry, from office supply manufacturers to TV binge-watchers. With Eddie’s fun and practical insights, you’ll be inspired to care about the customers that care the most.

See below for highlights from their conversation: 

Q: In your book, you say superconsumers are those who buy a lot and also care a lot, so they are not simply heavy users of a product?

A: I think it it’s a great distinction you’re calling out, because it’s not just that you buy a lot and care a lot, it also has to be at the category level. I think often people assume that it is about a brand, but I observed that superconsumers buy multiple brands across the most expensive and the least expensive private labels, and they are the most honest about the good, bad and the ugly about your category and your brand. That honest feedback that has a real depth of knowledge, and I found that to be pretty rare.

Q: Are there markets or categories with no superconsumers or can any company read your book and identify a reasonable set of consumer?

A: I can’t say definitively that there is one that has no superconsumers, but the part I find interesting is that as long as you hold on to the philosophy and the values of what it means to people who buy a lot, use a lot, and care a lot, then you actually can be free from constraints of typical assumptions. So I’ll give you an example of Generac, a #1 manufacturer of standby generators. A superconsumer of generators would make no sense, unless you have two houses. Why would you buy more than one generator for the same house, right? But what we had discovered was that the vast majority of people who bought generators bought them because of a bad event – their power went out and it was freezing, or there was a bad hurricane and they were sweltering. But there were a small set of people who were buying these generators with no clear reason why, so we explored what is going on there. We found that the people who were proactive about buying generators tended to have more life insurance than they needed, they tended to be vitamin super consumers, which has the same idea of insurance, and they tended to have more than two refrigerators and freezers. Therefore, the way that you sold and marketed to these consumers was very simple. Why would this consumer spend $10,000 for a generator that they don’t need? Well, they also have $3,000 worth of food stored in their fridge. And that’s a clear ROI for companies.

Q: With the commoditization of markets due to the digital revolution, is it possible that your book on superconsumers may be right for companies today, but perhaps not in the next couple of years to come?

A: The interesting thing about commoditization of markets is that oftentimes, it can be superconsumers driving the commoditization in the sense that they have determined that a particular category is greatest value to them and is the lowest cost version of it, because it serves a very basic need. Then they discover that there is an adjacent category that wasn’t on their radar that serves their same need better. Superconsumers are the ones that I believe are at the root of every disruption. Whether it’s one category being commoditized, another one being created, there’s a superconsumer in the mix there that has caused that shift.

Q: In building a strong platform business, what is the role of superconsumers?

A: Any platform has a beginning and you want to show proof of concept. Superconsumers are often overlapping with lead users and early adopters in a way that’s important to that. The example of Uber is an interesting one, because I have heard other podcasts talk about Uber in areas like LA, which don’t have a lot of public transportation, has really revitalized the restaurant industry, because you can go out and drink. If you add a bottle of wine to your bill, then the margin goes up and that can make or break a restaurant. Someone might use an Uber to get to the airport, but to say: “Let’s go out and thanks to Uber, we can both enjoy ourselves since none of us have to be a designated driver,” has created growth in the restaurant industry while creating growth for Uber.

Tune into more of The Business of Platforms podcast here. If you’d like to learn more about Vivaldi’s platform strategy offering, contact us at hello@vivaldigroup.com.

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