By Katie Paine Although Twitter has been around for a decade, never in its history has 140 characters had the power and influence it’s enjoyed since November 9th. Sure, when the Pope began tweeting it made headlines. But it didn’t impact markets the way @realdonaldtrump has in the last few months. One outlet estimated that […]

In this webinar, Ben Brown, Senior Global Strategic Sourcing Manager – Intuit Inc., focused on what prompted them to begin this journey, what their selection criteria was and the considerations they needed to keep in mind in the selection process. He also shared key learnings from their journey, suggested any pitfalls one can avoid and shared how marketing automation and CRM has helped their marketing teams.

At a recent event my colleague Kristopher Hull looked at advertising in an enlightening way: despite all the speed and complexity in the world today, marketers still need to reach the same brain. A consumer can be hit by up to 3,000 advertising impressions a day from hundreds of brands, but can process only a limited amount of this information.

Conventional wisdom suggests that the attention span of consumers is getting shorter. But going against this wisdom is the fact that people of all ages binge-watch shows for hours on Netflix. Further, Gen Z and Millennials, often stigmatized for suffering from Attention Deficit Disorder, spend hours on end at music festivals, mesmerized by the performers on stage.

Indeed, people pay attention to information (and brands) that are relevant and meaningful to them and ignore everything else. Neuroscience-based research conducted by Kantar TNS brought to light the fact that in a typical consumer journey only 20% of touchpoints account for 80% of the decision.

To succeed, brands must deliver a message that is meaningful to their audience across all these touchpoints.

1. Educate Your Customer

This starts at the top of the funnel, where brands must provide value beyond the product by educating consumers. Indeed, 73% of consumers say that getting useful information from an advertiser is the most important attribute when they are selecting a brand (Google Analytics).

This information can be related to the product itself or to the universe of the brand. For example, luxury jeweler de Grisogono recently created an interactive tourist guide to St Moritz. This chatbot provides users with insider advice and points out unique and hidden venues at this famous ski resort. From the brand’s standpoint, it celebrates de Grisogono’s Swiss heritage and contributes to its image of creativity and glamour. The chatbot also enables the brand to interact directly with consumers.

Rather than creating content themselves, a brand can save time and money by leveraging content created by its users. Ritz-Carlton guests can share their travel photos on its Ritz-Carlton Memories website. Photos are then localized to each specific hotel, providing valuable travel information and engaging content to other guests. The luxury hotelier also encourages guests to use hashtags and amplifies their message through one of its 12 social channels.

The Ritz-Carlton website now hosts over 30,000 pages of information, photos and videos. Most of these are generated by its hotel guests. When planning their future travel, prospective guests can live their experience vicariously through the pictures and videos posted by other members. This content inspires these prospective guest to create new memories, which ultimately may lead them to book a room and companion services such as Spa treatments and dining experiences.

2. Leverage Or Create Heritage

To be meaningful, a brand must also come across as genuine. One way to achieve this is by emphasizing the brand’s heritage. The likes of Louis Vuitton and Burberry are at an advantage in this arena, thanks to their older European heritage. Although more recent, brands such as Patagonia (founded in 1973) and L.L Bean (founded in 1912) have been very successful by leveraging their American heritage. Both clothing companies play up their roots in their branding to capture their share of the newly-booming “Athleisure” market. Patagonia was initially known for its tools for climbers and L.L Bean began as an outfitter for fishing and hunting supplies. Today, both brands market extensive product lines that include both everyday wears along with their original hardcore products.

If your brand does not have any heritage, it is up to you to create one. Herschel Supply Co. has been making backpacks, luggage and duffle bags since…2009. Their old-time logo, apparent leather-straps and rustic colors all contribute to creating a sense of American nostalgia. By using this strategy and aiming at 18-35 years old hipsters, the brand has now expanded to 10,000 point-of-sales in 70 countries.

3. Build Consumer Tribes

Beyond educating consumers and leveraging their heritage, what all these successful brands have in common is they give people something to belong to. In his presentation on the inclusive future of engagement, J. Walker Smith suggests that our desire to belong provides the basis for everything we stand for.

In line with his work, academic research has brought to light that experiences shared with others are some of the most anticipated, enjoyable and memorable. Sharing emotions provides the foundation for a community. In a similar vein, Bernard Cova argues that consumers become members of “tribes” that are defined by hobbies, passions and shared emotions rather than demographics such as age, gender and income.

These “consumer tribes” do not simply consume goods in the sense of using and destroying them, but also contribute to shaping the meanings behind the products. Tribes give priority to human connections, which are always the core source of emotional value. Products on the other hand simply help facilitate linkages between these consumers. Indeed, social relationships (the “links”) are more important than things (products, brands, ideas and experiences).

Unlike traditional tribes that are bound by kinship and geography, today’s consumers belong to “neo-tribes” that don’t rely on historical tradition and are not bound by geography. Consumers do not belong to only one tribe, but to many little tribes. The core meaning of human social life can be found in the multiple social groupings we all become involved in throughout our lives. Successful brands foster these neo-tribes, turning prospects into loyal customers and advocates. These brands leverage their tribes to expand quickly all over the world and cross-sell companion products and services.

Airbnb exemplifies the power of this model, in less than ten years it has grown from a single apartment in San Francisco to over 2 million listings in 190 countries. This social marketplace is now expanding its service beyond offering only accommodation by matching travelers with the neighborhoods, homes and experiences that meet their needs. Airbnb’s ultimate goal is to deliver a much broader travel offering and have the core of its brand value proposition surpass accommodation.

To sum up, brands no longer stand out with more advertising, more products or more customization. And thanks to Amazon, consumers now take quality, service and speed for granted. Brands must give consumers something to dream about, something to believe in and most importantly something to belong to. In the words of J. Walker Smith, the value in the market place is now relationships.

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Ten years ago a young American entrepreneur and business school graduate took a gamble. Frustrated with jewelers who appeared to exclusively target male customers when promoting female jewelry, she set out to create a collection of rings, necklaces and bracelets that were inspired by and created for successful modern women who choose their own jeweler.

A year later and the success of the initial business led her to extend her brand into women’s footwear, then accessories and finally fashion. Distribution in the top American department stores followed and by 2013, only six years after she launched her brand, the company was reportedly generating $250m in revenues.

And then her dad became President and everything changed.

Ivanka Trump might have thought that the first 10 years of her Ivanka brand were tumultuous, but nothing could have prepared her for the past six months. First, her father was recorded extolling the virtues of grabbing women by their genitals. In response, a San Francisco based web designer, Shannon Coulter, started a campaign called #grabyourwallet. Coulter listed each and every brand that had any formal business connection with Donald Trump and his family and encouraged angry women to boycott all of them until those links with Trump were severed.

Among the brands targeted was Ivanka and, despite the fact most high-end stores stocked some of the brand’s products, it was the department store Nordstrom that quickly became the main target for female ire. Initially the store defended its right to offer shoppers a choice. Then it announced in February that due to the brand’s poor sales performance in 2016, it would not be buying any Ivanka stock for the upcoming season.

President Trump was unhappy with this turn of events and resorted to Twitter, first from his private account and then from his official presidential account. He tweeted that his daughter had been treated “unfairly” by Nordstrom and that the outcome was “terrible”, exclamation mark.

Trump’s senior political advisor Kellyanne Conway was challenged about the apparent ethical quandary of a president wading into a trade dispute involving his own daughter. Conway responded by openly promoting the Ivanka brand on live national TV.

“Go buy Ivanka’s stuff, is what I would tell you,” Conway exhorted a clearly alarmed political interviewer. “It’s a wonderful line. I own some of it. I fully…I’m going to just, I’m going to give a free commercial here: go buy it today, everybody. You can find it online.”

Political Storm

Nordstrom, the usually low-profile department store, was increasingly and uneasily finding itself entering the eye of a political storm. The company’s decision to delist Ivanka was rapidly becoming one of the most debated topics on American news and was even discussed during presidential press briefings. In apparent desperation Nordstrom released a statement describing the “great relationship” the company had with Ivanka Trump but pointed out that sales of the brand in 2016 had “steadily declined to the point where it didn’t make good business sense for us to continue with the line for now”.

But it was too late for rational, objective argument. This, after all, is America 2017. For left-wing anti-Trump zealots the Nordstrom/Ivanka case was clear evidence that the President continued to defy ethical requirements to separate his business interests form his presidential affairs. For right-wing Trump supporters it was another example of liberal bias against Trump and his daughter and they applauded his defense of his child.

Saturday Night Live weighed in with sketches in which Trump’s press secretary is seen hawking Trump merchandise on live TV and a more serious take-down in which Scarlett Johansson plays Ivanka in her own perfume ad, which, as the ad reveals at the very end, is called Complicit.

With so much negative publicity and the boycott beginning to have a genuine influence on distributors there has been widespread speculation that the Ivanka brand is “in crisis”. As the Washington Post asked in February: “How exactly did the Ivanka Trump brand fall so hard, so fast – particularly in the Nordstrom ecosystem? And where does the brand go from here?”

Given that Ivanka’s target market is young professional women aged 25 to 34 and that this demographic is two thirds opposed to the Trump Presidency those questions do appear to be pertinent.

Awareness Trumps All

But dig a little deeper and it’s clear that the Ivanka brand is going to win big not despite, but because, of the scandal that now surrounds the brand. Ivanka Trump is about to triumph for two major reasons. First, most marketers underestimate the power of brand awareness.

Your average CMO is so obsessed with missions and beliefs and purpose they have entirely overlooked the most important brand building block of all: awareness. If the customer does not know you exist then all other perceptual and behavioral bets are off. Most brands have tiny brand awareness among their target market but they are unaware of this deficit because they do not measure or track their brand properly in the first place.

Even if you have awareness, whether the brand is salient to a shopper as she gazes around a department store or looks at the blinking cursor against a blank box on Amazon is an entirely different matter again. Put simply, unless you’re a brand like Ford or Apple, most of your target customers do not know that you exist.

The Ivanka scandal has propelled the brand to extremely high levels of brand awareness. For a brand that prior to last year would have been looking at sub-1% unaided awareness among its target shoppers that is a rare and invaluable coup.

At this point, however, you might want to argue that awareness might be high but the associated image that new-found awareness is attached to will turn off a significant number of these newly cognizant customers. And you’d be right. If the polling numbers are correct around two thirds of the target market who now know about the Ivanka brand are also repelled by it.

But so what? There are 20 million women in America aged between 25 and 34. Until now almost none of them knew about the Ivanka brand. We can now assume that most have heard of it and most disapprove. But that still leaves us with a fertile, brand aware and entirely positive army of just under seven million American women who are suddenly hell-bent on buying Ivanka items.

Triumph Through Targeting

That sudden surge might explain the remarkable spike in sales that Ivanka recently experienced. At the start of the year, for example, the brand languished in 550th place for orders on Lyst.com – the largest fashion ecommerce site in America. But by mid-February, when the Ivanka debate was propelling the brand to its “crisis”, it became the 11th most popular brand on the site. “We’ve never seen such a large uptick,” a Lyst spokesperson explained earlier this week. “Typically, she’s not in our top 100 sellers.”

Orders of Ivanka branded goods on Lyst.com, February 2017 (Chart: Lyst)

Again, there is a good lesson here for marketers. Don’t try to make everyone happy. You’ll end up becoming vanilla and while nobody hates vanilla, it’s never the flavor that anyone chooses when there a dozen options at the ice cream shop. Too many marketers practice their art too conservatively. You can’t make everyone happy so focus on the people you can delight.

Ivanka Trump does not need everyone to love her brand. What she needs is everyone to know it exists, to know it stands for something and for a small segment of the market to find that something attractive enough to make a purchase. And that’s exactly what happened in February. She created enormous awareness, enormous antipathy and enormous desire and made money as a result.

The only catch, and of course there has to be one, is that the Goddess of Marketing giveth and taketh away in equal measure. The political firestorm about scandals and boycotts is fading as America becomes desensitized to the Trump presidency. And as the furor fades, so too does brand awareness. Apparently after a gigantic February, sales of Ivanka products have dropped somewhat, although they are still significantly ahead of 2016 numbers.

Perhaps a new scandal is what’s needed to create the next sales spike.

This thought piece is featured courtesy of Marketing Week, the United Kingdom’s leading marketing publication.

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This panel will explore promotions and privacy law issues for augmented reality games and marketing.

My team and I were once summoned to the home office in New York to review the final pitch to a highly coveted account that we had managed to lure for their national business. There, in the large but tightly packed theater at our office on Lexington Ave., we were shown the PowerPoint that would delineate the various points of our strategy. Immediately, I noticed a problem.

“Excuse me,” I said, sheepishly raising my hand like the new kid in class. “You’ve used the color blue all throughout these slides. That’s the color of their chief competitor. Our client’s color is red.”

I no sooner had I got the word “red” out, than the account supervisor shot up out of his seat in the front row and exclaimed “I warned you guys about the blue … now change it!” Then all hell broke loose, of course.

The point is simply that to think like a creative director, or a brand marketer for that matter, you must have the ability to judge well – you must practice discernment. That requires doing two things consistently: 1) Think critically, and 2) Being willing to challenge ideas, even if makes you a pain in the ass.

There’s a quote I often refer to from Sergio Zyman of Coca-Cola fame that I picked up in his book “Building Brandwidth”: “Every detail either makes a sale or breaks a sale.” Sometimes that detail can be as simple as overruling an art director’s color choice, because you know that strategically it’s a disaster waiting to happen.

Creative directors are not only called to be brilliant conceptually within the framework of the strategy, they are also called on to be brilliant judges of the creative product itself. Ideally, they will have absorbed the strategy deep down so that they can pick a winner or a loser idea within about five seconds of coming eye to eye with it, and challenge it without reservation.

The question to ask yourself, as a brand marketer, do you know your brand strategy just as well? Would you be able to articulate or even argue your brand positioning to your agency team? Would you be ready to challenge or champion ideas that support your brand marketing to anyone, including your own management?

To that end, what evaluation criteria should we, as marketers, use to practice strategic discernment for concepts that support the positioning and communication of our brands as a creative director would? Here are seven simple filters to employ for making that all-important judgment about the ideas you are presented.

1. Is the idea strategic? This, of course, is fundamental. The work should, at the very least, be defendable on its adherence to the creative brief. That’s hardly a guarantee for a “big idea” but it’s the minimum price of entry for consideration.

2. Is it simple to understand? Many so-called great ideas are simply too complicated for the target to grasp quickly. “Too obtuse,” “too nebulous,” or “esoteric” are often labels creative directors put on these failed efforts.

3. Is the idea relevant to the target? Relevancy is a quality that may not be easily discerned from the strategy, but it is nevertheless critical. This has a lot to do with having empathy, which is often revealed in the execution of the idea. For example, what mother can’t identify with the mom seen snatching a bottle of wine off the supermarket shelf, knowing that she’ll be cooped-up with her kids during an impending blizzard, as in a recent Campbell Soup campaign? That’s purely relevant and resonates with the target audience, creating enormous empathy between the brand and customer. The brand isn’t solely about nutrition, it’s about caring and nurturing – even for adults.

4. Does it solve a problem or convey a benefit? There must always be something “in it for me” from the customer’s vantage point, otherwise it’s nothing more than self-serving to the brand.

5. Does it have a call to action, preferably with urgency? This may simply be a phone number or a URL for some messages, but the inference to take action is there.

6. Is it original and memorable? OK, so there’s nothing truly original under the sun. (Wasn’t it Steve Jobs who quoted Picasso as saying, “Good artists copy. Great artists steal.”) This one is tough because most people want to move this criterion to the front of the line. After all, the first job of any ad is to get noticed. Failing that, everything else is, as they say, academic. Ideas that are clever, bold, funny, outrageous, and pushing the edge should all be encouraged and expected … strategically, that is. When Delta Airlines borrowed the “High-Ho” Disney tune from “Snow White” to celebrate the “early risers who truly change the world” (and happen to fly Delta, of course) they “stole” (see Picasso’s quote) and created an original, memorable message for the brand.

7. Does it have legs? Creative directors more often than not think in campaign mode. Big ideas can leverage lots of media vehicles to reach targets at multiple angles with plenty of repetition and frequency.

Brands must be built on a strategic foundation, and they can only soar when every detail falls into place. Your job, as the brand marketer, is to master strategic discernment to help ensure that happens.

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Social media experts from Dell will discuss the brand’s social media policy; specifically, how the company established rules for employee disclosure in social media; created an employee advocacy training program; and most importantly, identified best practices.

Designers solve problems and bring beauty to the world. At TEDNYC Design Lab, a night of talks at TED HQ in New York City hosted by design curator Chee Pearlman with content producer Cloe Shasha, six speakers pulled back the curtain to reveal the hard work and creative process behind great design. Speakers covered a range of topics, including the numbing monotony of modern cities (and how to break it), the power of a single image to tell a story and the challenge of building a sacred space in a secular age.

First up was Pulitzer-winning music and architecture critic Justin Davidson.

The touchable city. Shiny buildings are an invasive species, says Pulitzer-winning architecture critic Justin Davidson. In recent years, cities have become smooth, bright and reflective, as new downtowns sprout clusters of tall buildings that are almost always made of steel and glass. While glass can be beautiful (and easily transported, installed and replaced), the rejection of wood, sandstone, terra cotta, copper and marble as building materials has led to the simplification and impoverishment of the architecture in cities — as if we wanted to reduce all of the world’s cuisines to the blandness of airline food. “The need for shelter is bound up with the human desire for beauty,” Davidson says. “A city’s surfaces affect the way we live in it.” Buildings create the spaces around them; ravishing public places such as the Plaza Mayor in Salamanca, Spain, and the 17th-century Place des Vosges in Paris draw people in and make life look like an opera set, while glass towers push people away. Davidson warns of the dangers of this global trend: “When a city defaults to glass as it grows, it becomes a hall of mirrors: uneasy, disquiet and cold.” By offering a series of contemporary examples, Davidson call for “an urban architecture that honors the full range of urban experience.”

“The main thing we need right now is a good cartoon,” says Françoise Mouly. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

The power of an image to capture a moment. The first cover of The New Yorker depicted a dandy looking at a butterfly through a monocle. Now referred to as “Eustace Tilley,” this iconic image was a tongue-in-cheek response to the stuffy aristocrats of the Jazz Age. When Françoise Mouly joined the magazine as art editor in 1993, she sought to restore the same spirit of humor to a magazine that had grown staid. In doing so, Mouly looked back into how The New Yorker covers reflected moments in history, finding that covers from the Great Depression revealed what made people laugh in times of hardship. For every anniversary edition of The New Yorker, a new version of the Eustace Tilley appears on the cover. This year, we see Vladimir Putin as the monocled Eustace Tilley peering at his butterfly, Donald Trump. For Mouly, “Free press is essential to our democracy. Artists can capture what is going on — with just ink and watercolor, they can capture and enter into a cultural dialogue, putting artists at the center of culture.”

Sinéad Burke shared insights into a world that many designers don’t see, challenging the idea that design is only a tool to create function and beauty. “Design can inflict vulnerability on a group whose needs aren’t considered,” she says. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

What is accessible design? “Design inhibits my independence and autonomy,” says educator and fashion blogger Sinéad Burke, who was born with achondroplasia (which translates as “without cartilage formation”) the most common form of dwarfism. At 105 centimeters (or 3 feet 5 inches) tall, Burke is acutely aware of details that are practically invisible to the rest of us — like the height of the lock in a bathroom stall or the range of available shoe sizes. So-called “accessible spaces” like bathrooms for people in wheelchairs are barely any better. In a stellar talk, Burke offers us a new perspective on the physical world we live in and asks us to consider the limits and biases of accessible design.

The beat of the Book Tree. Sofi Tukker brought the audience to their feet with hits “Hey Lion” and “Awoo,” featuring Betta Lemme. For the New York City–based duo, physical performance is a crucial element of their onstage presence, demonstrated through the use of a unique standing instrument they designed call “Book Tree,” made from actual books attached to a sampler — with each percussion comes a beat. Their debut album, Soft Animals, was released in July 2016, and their single “Drinkee” was nominated for Best Dance Recording at the 2017 Grammys.

Finding ourselves in data. Giorgia Lupi was 13 when Silvio Berlusconi shocked many in Italy by becoming prime minister in 1994. Why was that election result so surprising, she wondered? And as she learned, it’s because of incomplete data that had been gathered during the campaign. The available data was simply too limited and imprecise, too skewed to give any real picture of what was going on. In the aftermath of America’s 2016 election, where most data analysts predicted the wrong outcome, Lupi, the co-founder of data firm Accurat, suggests that such events highlight larger problems behind data’s representation. When we focus on creating powerful headlines and simple messages, we often lose the point completely, forgetting that data alone cannot represent reality; that beneath these numbers, human stories transform the abstract and the uncountable into something that can be seen, felt and directly reconnected to our lives and to our behaviors. What we need, she says, is data humanism. “To make data [sets] faithfully representative of our human nature, and to make sure they won’t mislead us anymore, we need to start designing new ways to include empathy, imperfection and human qualities in how we collect, process, analyze and display them.”

Siamak Hariri describes his project, the Bahá’í Temple of South America in Santiago: “A prayer answered, open in all directions, capturing the blue light of dawn, the tent-like white light of day, the gold light of the afternoon, and at night, the reversal … catching the light in all kinds of mysterious ways.” (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

Can you design a sacred experience? Starting in 2006, architect Siamak Hariri attempted to do just that when he began his work on the Bahá’í Temple of South America in Santiago, Chile. He describes how he designed for a feeling that is at once essential and ineffable by focusing on illumination and creating a structure that captures the movement of light across the day. Hariri journeys from the quarries of Portugal, where his team found the precious stone to line the inside of the building like the silk of a jacket, to the temple’s splendid opening ceremony for an architectural experience unlike any other.

In the final talk of the night, Michael Bierut told a story of consequences, both intended and unintended. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)

Unintended consequences are often the best consequences. A few years ago, designer Michael Bierut was tapped by the Robin Hood Foundation to design a logo for a project to improve libraries in New York City public schools. Beruit is a legendary designer and critic — recent projects include rebranding the MIT Media Lab, reimagining the Saks Fifth Avenue logo and creating the logo for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. So after some iterating, he came upon a simple idea: replacing the “i” in “library” with an exclamation point: L!BRARY, or The L!BRARY Initiative. His work on the project wasn’t over. One of the architects working on the libraries came to Bierut with a problem: the space between the library shelves, which had to be low to be accessible for kids, and the ceilings, which are often very high in the older school buildings, were calling out for design attention. After tapping his wife, a photographer, to fill in this space with a mural of beautiful portraits of schoolchildren, other schools took notice and wanted art of their own. Bierut brought in other illustrators, painters and artists to fill in the spaces with one-of-a-kind murals and art installations. As the new libraries opened, Bierut had a chance to visit them and the librarians who worked there, where he discovered the unintended consequences of his work. Far from designing only a logo, Bierut’s involvement in this project snowballed into a quest to bring energy, learning, art and graphics into these school libraries, where librarians dedicate themselves to excite new generations of readers and thinkers.

The concept of strategy originates in war, where the objective is to destroy the enemy. In business, if the enemy is your competitor, then the objective of strategy must be to crush the competition. Michael Porter gave academic standing to this way of thinking when he made popular the idea of “competitive advantage” with his best-selling textbook, Competitive Strategy, published in 1980. A decade and a half later, Microsoft gave corporate life to the “crush your competition” version of strategy when CEO Bill Gates very publicly went after Netscape as the dot-com era was just heating up.

Today, we see military metaphors used everywhere in business: price “wars,” market share “battles,” marketing “campaigns,” promotional “blitzes,” and even “bullet” points. Books on war are often cited as sources of great wisdom for business strategy. Even Tony Soprano, the TV mob boss, got into the act when he argued that Sun Tzu, who wrote The Art of War, was a better strategist than Machiavelli.

But war is mostly a zero-sum game, and business is mostly not. Companies are disproportionately rewarded when they create new value for customers and grow the market for everyone. None benefited more than Pan Am from its early adoption of the jet airliner, but that move also expanded the market for all airlines. The iPhone didn’t just make Apple a leader in smartphones; it also greatly expanded the market for mobile voice and data telephony. Sierra Nevada’s Pale Ale made it the first national—even global—brewer of craft beer while simultaneously growing the market for premium beer. Thanks in large part to novelties such as the Frappucino, Starbucks became a global icon in less than 20 years; but it also created millions of new customers for a whole slew of premium coffee purveyors. And George Mitchell—the “father of fracking”—who injected new life into the U.S. oil and gas industry, not only benefited hundreds of companies but also his own entrepreneurial efforts. In each case, the new value created for customers expanded the pie for everyone while giving the company a bigger slice of the pie. Business never has to be a zero-sum game, particularly beyond the very short term, because there’s no limit to creating new customer value.

On the other hand, when leaders think of business as a war with their competitors—and many continue to do just that—they inevitably seek to beat their rivals in ways that don’t meaningfully enhance customer-perceived benefits—such as with product-feature frenzy or predatory pricing. Such moves rarely grow the total market and almost always produce lower margins and losing products. This is what happened when GM and Ford went to war with the Japanese in the late 1970s and ’80s and, as I wrote here, when the mainstream airlines took a costly wrong turn because they tried to beat JetBlue and Southwest Airlines with their own discount airlines. When strategy is about competitors, leaders lose focus on the unlimited opportunities to grow customer value. Even the revered Steve Jobs made a big mistake when he declared “thermonuclear war” on Google, pledged to destroy the Android operating system, and subsequently introduced Apple’s own version of Google Maps, a clearly inferior product whose only real purpose was to inflict harm on the competition. His customers revolted, his successor was forced to apologize, and Apple’s halo became a bit dimmer.

Whereas making strategy about competitors can be highly destructive, making it about the customer encourages leaders to find ways to win without having to pay the price for their victories. Does this mean that competitors can be safely ignored when it comes to strategy? No. Understanding competitors’ value propositions is one effective way to generate new thinking on how to improve your own value propositions. For example, JetBlue systematically studied traditional airline offerings and what customers liked, disliked, and didn’t care about them. This led to a strategy of “focus on what really matters.” Out went free meals and first-class seating. In came media consoles for every passenger; comfortable leather upholstery with more legroom for every seat; and multiple healthy or indulgent food options for purchase. The idea was to give a “premium travel experience at a discount price.” Fliers love the value proposition and have helped JetBlue penetrate a highly competitive market with formidable incumbents that have decades more operating experience.

As an inherently competitive species, we are greatly tempted to think of business as war or sport where one’s gains can only come at the expense of our rivals—where winning means the other guy is losing. (Or as Genghis Khan is often quoted: “It is not enough that I succeed. Everyone else must fail.”) Indeed, there are strong motivational benefits to rallying around “beat Coke” if you are Pepsi, “buy Detroit” if you are Chrysler, or a “holy war with Google” if you are Apple. But such “strategies” will only be successful if they spur their organizations to bring better products and total value propositions to their target customers.

Business is not war or sport. Strategy in business is different than strategy in war and sport. It’s not about competitors. It’s about the customer, your value proposition, and the capabilities you need to deliver it better than anyone else. It’s that simple—and that difficult.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Ken Favaro, Act2. © 2014 PwC. All rights reserved. PwC refers to the PwC network and/or one or more of its member firms, each of which is a separate legal entity. Please see here for further details. No reproduction is permitted in whole or part without written permission of PwC. “strategy+business” is a trademark of PwC.

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Looking for great CX quotes?  Quotes on storytelling?  Quotes on competition?  Quotes on grit?  The Qualtrics Insight Summit 2017 was full of soundbites from thought-leaders and celebrities including Clay Christensen, Angela Duckworth, Joe Pine, Omar Johnson (former CEO of BEATS by Dr. Dre), and Qualtrics’s very own CEO Ryan Smith.  Check out these great CX quotes and more:

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