The Conference Board’s newly released Sustainability Practices 2016 Key Findings report shows there is a significant uptick in the number of companies including sustainability metrics as part of their executive compensation schemes. While globally disclosure of most practices remained fairly flat this year, this particular practice saw an increase in disclosure across all indexes, sectors, […]
To ensure proper oversight of cybersecurity issues, boards should consider either establishing a special committee of the board of directors or securing access by directors to the objective advice of a cyber-expert. That is one of the lessons learned from interviews with five corporate board members conducted by The Conference Board for the recent Director […]
Saki Mafundikwa prepares to speak at the TED@Nairobi auditions in 2013, aiming for a slot on the TED mainstage. (Spoiler: He made it.) Photo: whattookyousolong.org
Do you have a TED Talk you’ve always wanted to try out in front of an audience? We’re thrilled to announce that applications are open for two new events in Africa: TEDLagos and TEDNairobi 2017 Idea Search!
Anyone with an idea worth spreading is invited to apply to either of those two events; around 25 finalists at each event will share their risky, quirky, fascinating ideas in under 6 minutes, in early February, onstage at beautiful venues in Lagos, Nigeria, and Nairobi, Kenya.
The TED Idea Search is a chance for us to find fresh voices to ring out on the TEDGlobal stage. Some of these talks will be posted on the online TED platform; other speakers will be invited to expand on their talks on the TEDGlobal 2017 main stage in Arusha, Tanzania, in the summer of 2017, themed Builders. Truth-tellers. Catalysts. We are looking for speakers whose talks fit well within that theme. Saki Mafundikwa, Richard Turere, Zak Ebrahim, Sally Kohn, Hyeonseo Lee — all these speakers are fantastic finds from previous TED talent searches.
The deadline to apply is December 13, 2016, at 6pm Lagos time / 8pm Nairobi time. To apply, you’ll need to fill out a form and make a 1-minute video describing your talk idea. Quick notes: We can’t cover travel for finalists who live far from the cities where these events are taking place; we encourage local applicants to Lagos and Nairobi. Please choose only one event to apply to — applying to both events will not increase your chances of being selected to speak.
Apply to speak at the TED Africa Idea Search 2017
Raj Panjabi was born in Liberia, but his family fled civil war when he was nine. He returned as a medical student — and went on to found Last Mile Health. Photo: Courtesy of Last Mile Health
It sounds simple enough: If you’re sick, you make an appointment with a doctor, and if it’s an emergency, you head to the nearest hospital. But for more than a billion people around the world, it’s a real challenge — because they live too far from a medical facility.
Where Raj Panjabi’s nonprofit, Last Mile Health, operates in Liberia, people in remote communities hike for hours or even days — sometimes canoeing through the jungle or motorbiking over rough terrain — to get medical care. Many will go their entire lives without visiting a doctor, which puts them at high risk of dying from diseases that are easily treated. Last Mile Health has created a model for expanding healthcare access to remote regions by training, employing and equipping community health workers. The organization’s work has shown impressive results in Liberia, and could be replicated elsewhere. That’s why TED is thrilled to announce Raj Panjabi as the winner of the 2017 TED Prize.
On April 25, 2017, at the annual TED Conference, Panjabi will reveal a $1 million wish for the world, related to this work. “I’m shocked and humbled, because I feel in many ways our work is only just beginning,” he said. “But it feels very right to me that this cause is worthy of the TED community’s efforts. Illness has been universal for the entire length of human history — but universal access to care has not been. Now, because of the advances in modern medical science and technology over the past 50 to 100 years, we have the chance to end that inequality.”
Reaching remote communities in Grand Gedeh County, Liberia, often involves long hikes or traveling by motorbike. Last Mile Health trains community health workers to serve these remote areas. Photo: Courtesy of Last Mile Health
Since 2007, Last Mile Health has partnered with the government of Liberia to train, equip, employ and support community health workers. These community health workers are nominated by local leaders, and trained, with support from nurses, to diagnose and treat a wide range of medical problems. In the past year, these health workers have conducted more than 42,000 patient visits in their regions, and treated nearly 22,000 cases of malaria, pneumonia and diarrhea in children. They’ve also proven themselves to be a powerful line of defense against pandemics. During the Ebola outbreak, Last Mile Health assisted the government of Liberia in its response, helping to train 1,300 health workers and community members to prevent the spread of the disease in the southeastern region of the country. This year, Panjabi, who’s also a physician in the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital at Harvard Medical School, was named to TIME’s list of the “100 Most Influential People in the World” for Last Mile Health’s part in helping contain the Ebola epidemic.
And it feels especially fitting to announce him as the next TED Prize winner on World AIDS Day, since Last Mile Health began as Liberia’s first rural public HIV program, helping patients in the war-torn area of Zwedru who could not make the trek to the capital, Monrovia, for care.
“I want to see a health worker for everyone, everywhere, every day,” says Panjabi. “I’m honored and excited by the opportunity to amplify the work of these inspiring community health workers.”
Sign up to receive updates as Panjabi readies to reveal his wish at TED2017. And learn more about the TED Prize, a $1 million grant given annually to a bold leader with a wish to solve a pressing global problem. Past winners include Sylvia Earle, Jamie Oliver, JR, Dave Isay and Sarah Parcak, whose citizen-science platform for archaeology will launch in the new year.
Quantcast has an e-learning portal with comparable content and slides from the training available at http://rtaacademy.com/. The e-learning portal also offers a free certification. A glossary and links to industry trades is available for download on the right side of this page. The Wall Street Journal article on the Mediasmith study referenced during the training is available here.
A few months back, when Marriott International was given government approval to acquire Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide, there was no question that this was the biggest deal in the history of the modern hotel business.
Aside from the $13bn price tag, the acquisition turned Marriott into the largest hotel group in the world overnight with more than 1 million rooms worldwide. One in every 15 hotel rooms is now Marriott-operated.
When a clearly delighted Arne Sorenson announced the deal in September, the CEO of Marriott International was quick to highlight the scale and range of the new group that he would lead. “We have got an ability to offer just that much more choice. A choice in locations, a choice in the kind of hotel, a choice in the amount a customer needs to spend,” he told The Associated Press on launch day.
Sorenson was not making an idle boast. The deal means that Marriott operates 30 hotel brands around the world. And these aren’t niche hotel brands you have never heard of. The portfolio includes Sheraton, Westin, The Ritz Carlton, W Hotels and Marriott to name but five.
Not so long ago, owning and operating a large portfolio of brands made sense. The bigger the better. But with globalization and the ever-increasing cost of building and protecting brand equity, the fascination with adding more brands has been reversed in recent years. These days it’s the challenge of learning how to kill a brand and keep a customer, as the famous Harvard Business Review article puts it, that occupies most senior managers.
Compare the brand portfolio of any major organization today with how it looked a decade ago and, almost without exception, you will see a leaner and less diversified list of brands than was once the case. Everyone from P&G and Coca-Cola to Ford has moved away from multiple brands and sub-brands towards a simpler, more parsimonious brand architecture in which the number of brands is as tight as strategically possible.
The theory of brand killing could not be more simple. If you want more profit, more focus and stronger brands, you get rid of the weaker ones that compete with your other, stronger offers. Rather than simply kill a few weak and pointless brands on the periphery of the portfolio, the optimum way to approach brand consolidation is to assume you obviously need one brand and then try to make a very good case for having need of a second.
Such is the strategic power of a single branded house that many organizations would be significantly better off sacrificing the versatility and range of multiple brands for the dead-eyed focus and operational efficiencies of a single branded offer.
That logic is all well and good for guys like me who are legends in their own lecture hall. But try making the case to Marriott that it clearly needs the corporate brand but doesn’t need any of the other brands in the portfolio. We’re talking hundreds of millions in financial brand equity, customer affection, brand heritage and loyalty programs. The idea of killing a couple of the portfolio of brands that Marriott now owns is a daunting prospect despite the fact that there are clear overlaps in the newly merged portfolio.
The person facing this unenviable challenge is chief brand officer Tina Edmundson. She will have to work out how many brands Marriott actually needs and then how to silently kill the unwanted options and ensure customers are efficiently passed to one of Marriott’s surviving offers.
So far, Marriott, perhaps understandably, has moved slowly and not entirely impressively. Its new corporate website, for example, divides up the hotel portfolio into different categories, including classic luxury (Ritz Carlton or St Regis), distinctive luxury (W Hotels), classic premium (Marriott or Sheraton) and distinctive premium (Westin or Le Meridien). I’m not sure what purpose these arbitrary groupings play but like most category thinking it will mostly serve to get in the way of seeing how customers select hotels.
Categories do not actually exist and they usually blind us to the real structure of customer thinking and competitors – competitors that invariably attack us from outside the category we spent 18 months inventing and outside the rival brands we mistakenly assumed we were up against. One of the main reasons Marriott and Starwood committed to the deal is the stellar growth of Airbnb – a brand that is happily taking a lion’s share of the hotel market without ever considering itself to be a hotel.
It’s early days and you can be sure that Edmundson is, as we speak, scouring perceptual maps and segmentation charts to ascertain which brands she will kill and which she will keep. It’s certainly one of the biggest jobs in branding right now and also one of the most daunting. Irrespective of where she plans to stay in the months ahead, Tina Edmundson should not plan on getting much sleep.
This thought piece is featured courtesy of Marketing Week, the United Kingdom’s leading marketing publication.
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If you read any self-help books on how to be productive, efficient and excel in the last 50 years there are always three main themes within such books. They go like this:
While I’ll save why I find these rules outdated for another article in the future, what I want to call your attention to is the one thing many of these books never do is tell you, “Never tell anyone else how to do any of this.” Because in a printed format, distributed for anyone to read, that is impossible when these recommendations are of the public record.
While many probably note what to do when they read a book or an article in terms of actionable tactics, what is never told is to “share this with everyone you know and share it now.” That is inherent. It is a biological trait that has existed long before social media. You will share because humans are collaborative and social by design. We feel if sharing helps, we will do it, not out of self-interest, but for the benefit of the group. Social media now allows companies to scale sharing. If we look and diagnose prehistoric civilizations, they shared information because they had to to survive. You shared how you built fire because you needed others to build fire so they wouldn’t freeze to death. You didn’t want them to freeze to death because groups can get more done than any individual being. Everything was centered around the civilization or the group. The evolution of society was important through openness and sharing of information.
But in our world starting somewhere during post-World War II based on new systems of engagement, people and companies went rogue. It was better to not tell anyone what you were doing or how you did it. Much of this had to do with intellectual property laws, but much of it also dealt with brand facades and economics. If the public could see under the microscope what was really going on at many of these companies, they would be horrified and possibly never support them again.
In addition, scarcity became the big way to drive value. And when things are scarce, walls are built and information is neither leaked out or allowed in. The value one derived for much of this time was transactional. “If you want this information, well, you have to pay me for it.”
Now this behavior has been pivoting for the last two decades back to one grouped around society once again. Mainly due to openness demanded of a more “open source” communicative culture based on social networks and digital media. People want to know why companies make the decisions that they do, they want to know what they are doing in terms of innovation, they want to know where they donate their money to in terms of philanthropy. Also customers don’t simply buy what brands offer, they want to act as consultants. If you doubt this, look at any comment section on Facebook for a brand post.
It makes sense, we are coming full circle once again where society is just as important as the self.
What this means for brands is if you want to go beyond simply advertising in a newsfeed or on television to build that societal configuration with others you cannot do this by simply offering coupons or incentives. While people will always be self-motivated that won’t win the hearts of non-loyal customers who want to know what culture they are buying into by supporting you. They can’t understand what your culture is if you aren’t transparent. If you aren’t open. If you aren’t trustworthy and admit mistakes, failures, wins and innovations that benefit all and not simply some.
So how do brands do this? Follow these three rules:
1. If you demand customers to be open with you, you better be just as open with those customers. Customers give you their data in so many ways now. The least you can do is be open with how you’re using it, how you plan to use it and what you plan to do as a company within regulatory limitations. Relationships that are open and honest are highly sustainable, yet business relationships we treat as transactional. It’s no wonder there is so much brand divorce™.
2. Be so honest that when you make mistakes, admit it and when you do great things, be humble. Nobody likes humblebrags. I see it all the time by so many brands on Twitter or in their terrible television ads. “We’re so great, everyone loves us, our competitors stink.” You are asking for a karmic payback.
3. Beyond what can be told publicly from regulatory standpoints, be so open that what you tell your staff shouldn’t require “internal only” disclaimers. If you really want to operate like an open source company and build trust, then build trust by being open and honest and transparent with your working staff. And note to them that what you share they should share with customers. When you have internal vs. external politics, nobody wins and ultimately the managed systems internally leak out to the external world and shows how inauthentic you really are.
Learn how to keep your brand relevant in the 21st Century in my new book Disruptive Marketing.
Meet the requirements for Brand Leadership in the Age of Disruption. Join us in Hollywood, California for our 5th annual competitive-learning event designed around brand strategy.
The Blake Project Can Help: Accelerate Brand Growth Through Powerful Emotional Connections
Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education
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*reSET is the only Connecticut organization to receive the U.S. Small Business Administration for the Growth Accelerator Competition Award, announced by President Obama on August 4th, 2015.
