TED’s always on the hunt for new speakers with new ideas. But in our latest project, we’re offering speakers something unprecedented: anonymity. Our hunch? Inviting people to share ideas without having to reveal their identity might allow for an entirely new category of talks.
Today TED and Audible announce the release of Sincerely, X, an original audio series that features speakers sharing their important ideas in TED’s signature format, anonymously.
Episodes include speakers who need to separate their professional ideas from their personal lives; those who want to share an idea, but fear it would hurt someone in their family if they did so publicly; and quiet idealists whose solutions could transform lives.
Hosted by June Cohen and executive produced by Deron Triff, both TED veterans, along with executive producer Collin Campbell from Audible, each episode is shaped to bring out the importance of the idea.
“The reach of TED Talks has expanded wildly over the years,” said Cohen. “But one question always nagged us: How many ideas worth spreading remain hidden because people can’t speak publicly about the very thing they feel the world needs to hear? It’s an exciting moment for us to now have Sincerely, X as a vehicle for unearthing and sharing just this kind of idea.”
The first three episodes are now available within the Audible Channels experience, with additional episodes coming out every week. (Get the Audible app.) You can listen with an Audible or Amazon Prime subscription. Learn more here … and watch the trailer:
The temptation for most businesses and indeed most brand managers is to look for growth right across their portfolios. But that’s far harder and far less effective than it sounds. The secret, it seems, is focus.
The paths to extracting greater value and growth for brands are well-trodden. Perhaps too well-trodden – because many are now unquestioned assumptions. Brands looking to grow are expected to advertise heavily, grind out efficiencies, invest in areas that show promise and push their portfolio out to demographic segments in the hope of gaining their attention and their loyalty.
The problem, according to Strategy+Business, is that flat economies have stalled market growth, cost cutting has become more difficult, and the cash to drive meaningful innovation has become harder to source as investors look for returns within timeframes that are increasingly short. So fewer and fewer brands can afford to blindly speculate across their entire portfolios in the hope that some areas will prosper and that those wins will make up for losses elsewhere. Yet they persist.
“In many markets, one-third of customers or products typically generate more than 100 percent of the company’s value, while one-third create no value and the remaining third actually consume value,” the authors note. Lovers of segmentation may see this as a repudiation of Dr Sharp’s views on brand growth. But, before you rejoice, look a little closer. The secret is not segmentation, per se. It’s profitable segmentation: resourcing those areas of the portfolio that deliver the greatest returns with services and experiences that help those customers feel recognized and rewarded.
The observations are timely because they remind marketers that brand lift is never uniform, and for that reason, brand managers and owners should be careful in how they identify and support the brands that are in their care. Instead of treating all their brands as precious, brands should work from heat maps that reveal where and why value is concentrated in terms of return on internal resourcing, comparative market profitability and likely future value based on dependable market trends.
In the ebb and flow of today’s markets, some brands will thrive, some will remain steady, some will stall and some will decline. By investing in those brands that are displaying the strongest growth and rethinking those that are not hitting their benchmarks, brand owners can ensure that every brand is working to its full potential. That’s important because it turns brand portfolios into meritocracies, driven by a 6 point framework of actions:
1. Resource generously – winning brands should be rewarded with priority. They should receive a greater share of the resources to achieve targets that are set higher than other brands in the portfolio.
2. Maintain strongly – steady evergreens should be tasked with keeping the middle-earning part of the portfolio accelerating over at a good period. Done right, these brands underpin returns and provide much-needed reliability.
3. Re-energize decisively – brands that are flagging should be restructured so that they are able to better achieve their returns. That may mean actively looking for new efficiencies, repositioning of the brand to appeal to a part of the market with higher yields, or the injection of new value to boost market interest.
4. Simplify aggressively – too many brands can cause a company to lose focus. I often find that businesses are reluctant to rationalize their portfolios because they don’t want to send a signal to the market that they are cutting back. The key to distilling your portfolio is to do so confidently and with intent.
5. Remove objectively – these are the hardest decisions, but often the most important. Taking the brands that are holding you back out of your portfolio via divesting, parking or dis-establishing not only lifts your returns, it also enables you to redirect those resources to your top performers.
6. Introduce regularly – just as your sales teams must look to bring in new leads, so you should be looking to extend or expand your current brands where that makes sense, and to introduce new brands to test market viability. Those extensions, expansions or new brands should then be evaluated via the five criteria above to determine next actions.
Interesting to see Revlon choosing to prioritize their brands over their distribution as their key growth driver. Reach is vital – no-one’s denying that – but at a time when consumers are less picky about where they shop, ownership of targeted relationships through brands matters more than ever. You need to be as close to your customers as you can. But you also must represent as much of what your customers want as possible. Valuable is much more profitable than available. More brands really need to get that.
Don’t let the future leave you behind. Join us in Hollywood, California for Brand Leadership in the Age of Disruption, our 5th annual competitive-learning event designed around brand strategy.
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
The titles we give to people are incredibly important indicators of what we consider their role to be within a certain context. Doctor, partner, mother, father, supplier, recipient, driver, pilot – the list is endless but has a common theme. A title indicates what we expect from someone, which is why the term ‘consumer’ is not only inaccurate but is irrelevant for any business who wants to develop beyond an industrial era model.
The Industrial Economy
In the industrial economy the prevailing value chain was simple.
Production > Market > Consumption
Roles were clearly defined, where businesses would produce goods or products, these would be brought to a market, and would then be ‘consumed’ by consumers. This linear process was simple in its structure, if not always in practice. Each actor in the process would be responsible to either creating value or consuming value. In the industrial era value chain the consumer would ‘eat’ value, being the final link and end of the chain of value.
Even within this seemly simple industrial value chain, the consumer began to derive value themselves from their consumption. In contemporary consumer culture, the development of self-identity became an important function of consumption, where ‘identity is defined through the exchange, possession and use of goods’. As people shaped their identity through consumption, they identified themselves partly through their role as consumers. The consumer itself became an ‘important social ‘role’ or ‘identity’, the economic analogue of the ‘citizen.
Post-modern individuals are on a never-ending identity quest; a quest to define the meaning of their lives. Consumers go to markets to produce their identity – specifically their self-images.
As the role of the consumer developed, we began to see the introduction of what was termed the ‘productive consumer’ or the ‘active consumer’. This label acknowledged and indicated that the consumers role was no longer solely that of ‘consuming’ value but that they also had an active, productive role too.
The role of the active consumer has been defined in many ways, ‘co-creation’, ‘peer production’, ‘immaterial labor’, ‘crowdsourcing’, ‘prosumer’ (‘prosumer’ being producer/consumer) and the ‘value constellation’. These approaches primarily consider the active consumer as contributing ‘human capital’ or ‘intellectual capital’, which can be described as ‘knowledge that can be converted into profit’.
As the economy and the roles of consumers have developed, so the economy has become increasingly intertwined with culture, making the role of the ‘consumer’ multi-faceted. Economic life has become increasingly ‘culturalized’ and culture is more ‘economically inflected’.
A Digital Era
The capitalist economy is no longer structured through the temporal sequence of production, markets and consumption, as the economists and Marxists still teach us. So the term consumer was fine for the era of the factories of Smith and Marx, whose products would be destructively consumed, but when consumers are productive and active is the term ‘consumer’ actually useful or helpful as a definition?
Value Creators
As outlined previously, the ‘active consumer’ now creates value in a number of ways. Take, for example, the ‘immaterial labor’ of self-service which has effectively turned people into creators of value for businesses. From people collecting, delivering and building their own IKEA furniture, to the self-service utility of ATMs, to the dispensing of the need for waitering realized so effectively by the likes of McDonalds and Burger King et al.
This type of value creation is primarily focused on the direct and specific benefit to the person involved, and has little in the way of interaction with the organization of production. However, there are further types of value creation which go beyond immaterial labor and see people providing essential productive capital, ripping up the industrial era value chain model in the process.
By productive capital, we mean that people will contribute assets or resources which can then be used by a business from which to gain profit or advantage.
Examples of these include:
contributed wealth – crowdfunding is a great example of where the finance contributed by people is the productive capital by which a business can derive a profit. Without the contributed wealth the production could not happen, and therefore the industrial era value chain is turned on its head. Here people are contributors, not consumers.
co-create identity through content – businesses who make products have found smart ways of encouraging people to go beyond simply ‘consuming’, by enabling them to then share how they use the product. A prime example of this is Go-Pro, which selects peoples created footage of how they are using the camera to show to the world how great their product is. This is ‘consumers’ creating marketing aimed at further consumers, so not really consumers then.
essential content – one of the most important shifts in the role of people to create rather than simply consume value is in the creation of essential content. Some of the largest companies in the digital age have their most valuable, if not all of their, content created by people. The value of Facebook, Twitter, AirBnB, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc, is not so much in the platforms they create but in the content people produce on these platforms. Without this content the platforms would be worthless, so are people consumers here or actually the producers of the value?
The Third Wave
This shift away from people simply being consumers was predicted by the futurist and author Alvin Toffler, in his book The Third Wave. He describes The First Wave as being the Agricultural revolution, where there was no producer and consumer and people mainly produced and consumed what they required. The Second Wave was the industrial age, in which the producer and consumer became primarily two separate entities, with the ‘market’ in the middle. The Third Wave is the digital age, in which we are seeing the collapse of the producer – consumer dichotomy and the re-emergence of the prosumer.
As Toffler put it, ‘“Just as the feudal manor was replaced by the business corporation when agrarian societies were transformed into industrial societies, so too should the older model of the firm be replaced by a new form of economic institution.” This new institution will combine economic and trans-economic objectives. It will have multiple bottom lines. Crowdfunded projects, the co-creation of identity and shared content, the ‘platforms’ on which people create essential content – these are all excellent examples of where we find what Toffler termed prosumers (producer consumers).
So what does this mean for businesses who want to treat people not simply as the consumers who ‘eat’ the value at the end of the industrial era value chain, but instead want to involve people in producing some form of value? Well, here George Ritzer and Niels Jurgenson have four very insightful pieces of wisdom on the prosumer.
’The first is the inability of capitalists to control contemporary prosumers in the way – and to the degree – that they have been able to control producers, consumers, and traditional prosumers’
’Second, it is difficult to think of prosumers as being exploited in the same ways as producers and even consumers are exploited. The idea that the prosumer is exploited is contradicted by, among other things, the fact that prosumers seem to enjoy, even love, what they are doing and are willing to devote long hours to it for no pay’
’ Third, there is at least the possibility of the emergence of a whole new economic form, especially on the internet. Capitalism involves the exchange of money for goods and services, and profits are made in those exchanges. However, little or no money changes hands between the users and the owners of many websites (for instance, users do not pay Facebook or Twitter to use the services)’
’Fourth, traditional capitalism, either producer or consumer capitalism, is based on scarcity, but prosumer capitalism online is increasingly a world of abundance.’
Forget About Consumers
The labels we give to people will affect what we, and they, expect their role to be within a certain context. If you want to move your business and brand beyond the industrial era model, forget about treating people as consumers. Maybe consider people as prosumers. Or better still, simply treat them as people.
Don’t let the future leave you behind. Join us in Hollywood, California for Brand Leadership in the Age of Disruption, our 5th annual competitive-learning event designed around brand strategy.
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
If you’re new to marketing or if you work at a start-up or small business and don’t have the extensive experience and resources that other marketing professionals may have, you need some “Marketing How To” information and instruction. So I recently ran a #MarketingMondays series LinkedIn. Each week I provided a post and infographic on an essential marketing topic. Now all five Marketing How To posts are here:
ANA’s Ask the Expert research service answers the question, “How do I ensure my team is paying competitive salaries to recruit (and retain) top talent?”
Febreze wants to help you get ready for Super Bowl 51, is your bathroom ready, America? Prep your busiest room at the #SB51 party with a new Febreze SMALL SPACES for the Halftime Bathroom Break. Then tune in to the Big Game to see our ad in action (if you can hold it that long).
Artist Olalekan Jeyifous kicks off the night at TEDNYC Idea Search 2017 with a gallery of his hyper-detailed and gloriously complex imaginary cities. The event took place January 26, 2017, at TED’s New York headquarters. Photo: Anyssa Samari / TED
Here at TED headquarters, we are constantly looking for new voices, new ideas — and late last year, we opened a challenge to the world: Make a one-minute audition video that makes the case for your TED Talk. On Thursday night, January 26, at our New York office, co-hosts Kelly Stoetzel and Cloe Shasha presented us with eleven audition finalists in a fast-paced program that took us from imaginary shanty towns to the cyborg uprising. (It’s all part of our Idea Search project, and Thursday’s event was the first of three evenings planned — the next two are in Lagos, Nigeria, and Nairobi, Kenya.) Here are voices you may not have heard before — but that you’ll want to hear more from soon …
Dystopian design. Artist Olalekan Jeyifous creates speculative architectural interventions — fantastical, sci-fi-inspired designs that spur inquiry and discourse about the places we live. In an image-packed talk (seriously, check out his work), Jeyifous shows us his future vision for cities like Lagos, Nigeria, where millions of people live and work in improvised buildings cheek-by-jowl with luxury megastructures. With elegant lines and colors, and the kind of detail you could get lost in for days, his work celebrates the organic, eye-popping complexity of our cities.
Designing the “how” conversation. Ask a group of people whether something should happen, and you’ll get a discussion where people take sides and likely end in a stalemate; but ask them how something might happen, and you’ll get a design discussion with room for many voices and, possibly, a solution. In his six-minute talk, David Dylan Thomas suggests that too much of our discourse, both online and off, focuses on telling people what they’re doing wrong instead of on how they could be doing better. “The best thing we can do is ask the right question in the first place,” Thomas says. “The next time you see someone doing it wrong, ask yourself, is there a How conversation to be had?”
Journalist and “industrious optimist” Lara Setrakian runs Syria Deeply, a news site that covers complex and difficult — and vastly important — global news. As she says, we must “embrace complexity to make sense of a complex world.” Photo: Ryan Lash / TED
The news, deeply. Lara Setrakian was working as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East when she noticed the stories all around her, from conflict zones to climate change, that were going untold by the news industry. Determined not to let Syria become another forgotten story, she left ABC News to found Syria Deeply, a news site that’s dedicated to helping people understand current events in all their complexity. With trust in the media at an all-time low, Setrakian offers a three-point manifesto for fixing the news, never wavering from her belief that for journalism, today is “a time of reawakening and reimagining.”
Life lessons from NYTimes obituaries. By analyzing 2,000 obituaries over a 20-month period, Lux Narayan uncovers the lessons and values that obituaries can teach us about our everyday lives. He found that, when condensed into an obit headline, people are celebrated much more often for their impact on others than for their personal, material success; in fact, one of the most common verbs in an obituary headline is “helped.” The most powerful lesson, he concludes, is that “if more people lived their lives trying to be famous in death, the world would be a much better place.”
How to use an AED, as explained by Star Wars. If Yoda goes into cardiac arrest, will you know what to do? Artist and first-aid enthusiast Todd Scott breaks down everything you need to know about using an Automated External Defibrillator, or AED, in the Star Wars universe (or ours). Everyone in the audience is now prepared to save the life of Yoda, the Ewoks and even Chewbacca the Wookiee (he’ll need a quick shave first).
Olivia Hallisey won the 2015 Google Science Fair with this elegant, low-cost diagnostic tool for Ebola. It could someday be used to detect even more conditions, from Lyme disease to certain cancers. Photo: Ryan Lash / TED
A better diagnostic tool for Ebola. Olivia Hallisey was a high school student during the Ebola outbreak, but instead of buying into the media hysteria and public fear, she set out to help by creating a better diagnostic tool. ELISA, the best test available, relied on constant refrigeration, from the moment of manufacture to the moment of testing, and Hallisey was determined to make an Ebola test that was easier to give and take. Her paper-based Ebola Assay uses a technique she learned about in a TED Talk (Fiorenzo Omenetto’s “Silk, the ancient material of the future“) — and it not only requires no refrigeration, but it’s cheap, fast, portable and doesn’t require trained medical personnel.
Standing up to ageism. I want to live in a world, says Ashton Applewhite, where people do not age out of having value as human beings. The founder of the blog Yo, Is This Ageist? and author of This Chair Rocks, Applewhite confronts our socially constructed ideas about old people and asks us instead to celebrate the self-knowledge that comes with maturity. “The longer we live,” she points out, “the more different from one another we become.” She challenges us to stop assuming there’s a line between old and young “after which it is all downhill.”
Break the trap of imposter syndrome. Want to stop feeling like an imposter? Stop thinking like one, says Valerie Young. Many of us have a tendency to discount and downplay our own abilities, a bad habit that can have real consequences on our success. The best way to step out of the imposter syndrome trap, Young says, is to reframe how we see ourselves and our accomplishments — and she shares a few tips for doing just that. The trick? Learn to talk yourself out of your shame spiral and over time, your feelings will follow. As she puts it: “You don’t have to feel confident to act confident.”
Ben Mirin makes beats out of birdsong and other sounds from the natural world. He DJed a set of whalesong, dolphin beeps, frog croaks and more at TEDNYC Idea Search 2017. Photo: Ryan Lash / TED
The sound of conservation. A lifelong birdwatcher, sound artist and musician Ben Mirin found himself in need of nature after moving to New York City. Using birdsong recordings he found online, he began to put the sounds down to some beats. Now, he travels the world to record the sounds of nature, using the recordings not only for scientific research but to make music that celebrates the beauty and musicality of our world. “Music and art can connect us all to the wild world,” says Mirin; “it turns conservation into an international language that anybody can dance to.”
Searching Watson for ourselves. Nearly every dystopian script related to the future of artificial intelligence involves a conversation about the dangers AI poses for the human race. But according to Elizabeth Kiehner, these fears belong to a future far distant from where we are today. The real concern, she says, lies with our own ethical systems, and how we embed those values in the AI of today — the biases, prejudices, and beliefs we form during our lifetimes. If we’re creating artificial intelligence in our own image, then we need to be careful about the ways in which we actually program it.
Take back our digital DNA. “I used to fear a cyborg uprising,” says Evgeny Chereshnev,“but now I am one.” Two years ago, he had a biochip implanted in his hand. The chip gives him some cool Jedi skills like opening doors and unlocking phones, but it also tracks and records his every move. And it turns out, tracking every second of his digital life has transformed the way he views the collection of our private data — collection that’s happening constantly, often without our notice or permission, and whether or not we have a chip in our hand. Our collected digital habits collected from credit-card shopping, mobile phone records, browsing histories, etc., become a kind of digital DNA, offering marketers “a cheatsheet to your brain, to your life.” He offers a rousing call to take back our privacy, which is “another word for freedom.”
Technologist Evgeny Chereshnev implanted a microchip in his hand so that he’d know what it felt like to be part of the Internet of Things. Photo: Anyssa Samari / TED
Editor Bora Barroso created this pretty cool video for Shrek movie lovers. The video is 3 minutes of all the movie references found in the Shrek films.
Films Used: – Sleeping Beauty (1959) – Pinocho (1940) – Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) – Peter Pan (1953) – Gladiator (2000) – Hercules (1997) – Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) – The Matrix (1999) – Dumbo (1941) – Jurassic Park (1993) – Cinderella (1950) – The Lion King (1994) – From Here to Eternity (1953) – The Little Mermaid (1989) – The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the ring (2001) – Spiderman (2002) – The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) – The Seven Year Itch (1955) – Alien (1979) – The Mask of Zorro (1998) – Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) – Mission Impossible (1996) – Ghostbusters (1984) – The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989) – Flashdance (1983) – Cops (1989) Music: Really Slow Motion – Riding the light.
See more of Bora Barroso’s videos on Vimeo here and find him on Twitter @BoraBarroso
The year was 1997. Apple’s prospects were dim. It had suffered more than $1 billion in losses in the prior four quarters, demand for the Mac, its biggest moneymaker, was sinking, and the Cupertino, California-based company was on the brink of bankruptcy.
Steve Jobs was back as CEO with the task of finding a path for survival. He would find it in renewed, unwavering focus and a disruptive campaign known as “Think Different”. Time would reveal just how critical it was to pulling Apple out of the darkness.
Jobs closing remarks at Macworld in August of that year were designed to rally the faithful and reinforce the campaign that resonated with so many. “I think you still have to think differently to buy an Apple computer and I think the people that do buy them do think differently. And they are the creative spirits in this world. They are the people that are not just out to get a job done, they’re out to change the world. And they’re out to change the world using whatever great tools they can get. And we make tools for those kinds of people.”
From Flame To Fame
When the “Think different” campaign launched, Apple immediately felt the boost despite having no significant new products. Within 12 months, Apple’s stock price tripled. A year after the “Think different” launch, Apple introduced their multi-colored iMacs. The computers represented revolutionary design and they became some of the best selling computers in history. But without the “Think different” campaign preceding and supporting them, it’s likely the jellybean colored and gumdrop shaped machines would have been viewed by the press and general public as just more “toys” from Apple.
Nearly twenty years have passed yet the lessons of Apple’s meteoric return to relevance are far from fading. Today, where disruption looms in every direction, deep, disruptive campaigns can help earn brands the future they seek. Rob Siltanen was Creative Director and Managing Partner at TBWA/Chiat/Day and at the center of the “Think different” campaign. The copywriter for “Here’s to the Crazy Ones” will share its DNA, his methods for gaining buy-in with Steve Jobs and the requirements for building a disruptive campaign at marketing’s only issues-based, problem-solving event.
For 50 marketers that see themselves among the crazy ones, The Blake Project and Branding Strategy Insider have designed a uniquely powerful experience for brand leadership in the age of disruption. We call it The Un-Conference: 360 Degrees of Brand Strategy for a Changing World.
Everyone in the room is an expert and gains from the sum of the expertise in the room.
Our competitive learning format is fun, energized and impactful.
The walls are down, there are no podiums or stages, there is no hierarchy – your uniform is jeans.
The focus is on learning outcomes, not ticket sales.
Small is powerful, with only 50 marketers participating in hands on learning.
As in your marketplace, some will win, some will lose, all will learn.
No Attendees. Only Participants.
The best pathway for learning is through participation, not observation. The Un-Conference: 360 Degrees of Brand Strategy for a Changing World will challenge your thinking about brands and brand management. To do that, we’ll put you on a team of 10 and offer you opportunities to compete, lead and learn alongside other marketers in a unique environment. The challenges you’ll tackle are based on and influenced by the actual issues that you and other participants are facing.
In May of 2017, our 5th event, we are focused on: Disruptive Marketing Trends, Building Emotional Connections, Encoding Brands In The Mind, Brand Storytelling, Brand Leadership, Digital Strategy, Customer Experience, B2B Brand Strategy and more.
It all takes place at The London Hotel in West Hollywood, California May 1 – 3, 2017.
Our schedule…
Monday, May 1st – Kickoff Mixer: 7- 9pm at The London Hotel Rooftop Pool
Tuesday, May 2nd – Day 1: 8am – 5pm, at The London Hotel / 6:30pm – ? Team building event and dinner
Wednesday, May 3rd – Day 2: 8am – 5pm, at The London Hotel
Who Should Participate?
We have reserved these two days (and a kickoff mixer on the evening of the 1st) for 50 senior B2C and B2B marketers who see professional growth and value creation as a mandate for success and who seek a learning experience superior to last century’s format of marketing conferences:
-Marketing oriented leaders
-Marketing professionals (brand managers, product managers, directors, vice presidents, CMO’s, brand strategists etc.)
-Advertising agency professionals (account executives, planners, creatives, agency heads)
-Marketers facing brand strategy issues
-Marketers seeking a competitive advantage
-Professionals in charge of brand building, brand management, human resources
-Professional brand consultants, digital consultants and researchers
-Marketers who prefer participation over observation
-Marketers who don’t believe that last century’s format of marketing conferences advances them as leaders.
Every year a wide range of marketing oriented leaders and professionals from around the world join us representing startups, emerging, regional, national and global brands. Past participants include AAA, Bayer, Bloomberg, Humana, Land O’ Lakes, Liberty Mutual, Pilot/Flying J, RJ Reynolds, TD Ameritrade, GlaxoSmithKlein, Wounded Warrior Project, Monsanto, Ogilvy, Kawasaki, GE and many more.
Brands with the mindset of evolve, innovate and disrupt, are best suited to defend themselves against the overthrows and revolutions on the horizon.
What can be done right now if you are not one of those brands?
1. Evolve: Understand customer sentiment at all times and adjust to it. Sentiment isn’t just about surveys or polls you deploy yearly. It’s understanding the marketplace all of the time. This means understanding both what your customers love and dislike about you. The latter is difficult because brands do not like to respond to criticism. But this is how we learn and grow.
What should replace polls and surveys? Let’s look at three alternatives that all brands intent on relevance should be using.
Social Listening Tools – Social listening powered by big data science gives us the ability to harvest the discussion around us and use it to understand what people think from a brand health perspective. Most good social listening tools allow you to mine positive and negative conversations. It’s the latter conversations you want to key in on. Those that reveal raw opinions like, “This product sucks, I wish they would do…” or “How terrible is this service?” Remember, service is part of your product now. It’s not a separate entity. Brands must realize that they are the sum of the customer experience. Brands may try and manage product and service as separate entities but to customers they are not.
Customer Interviews – Brands that earn a place in the future will share one critical characteristic – great listening skills. Listening to learn is how to prevent getting caught up in the know it all mindset that often leads brands into irrelevance. When you know everything, you lack curiosity, when you lack curiosity you miss the opportunities and threats circling your brand. When you miss those, well, you’re dead or dying. As Bill Gates said so eloquently, “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest sources of learning.”
Customer Think Tanks – These are not focus groups. These are groups of people who love your brand and talk about it at all times. They are true influencers, not the type you pay who could care less about what your brand represents. The reason you create think tanks is to gather information from highly influential customers – your super users to figure out tweaks and moonshots. No longer do we live in a world where employees are the know-it-all’s. Especially if those employees are biased based on the fact the brand employs them. Think tanks are also great places to show you really care about your diehard customers and don’t take them for granted. Public companies treat their shareholders well, why shouldn’t we treat those who share and influence in the same manner?
2. Innovate: When we talk about brand innovation this covers a variety of areas from your products, services, solutions and branding but it also is in the people you hire and how you unleash their power into the marketplace. Today, where it’s impossible to talk to a real person but easier to chat with a bot we need to understand the touchpoints of the customer experience so we can improve everything as a holistic customer experience. This means it’s not enough to simply rebrand if your products still don’t work. Or to improve your products without raising your customer service in the process.
3. Disrupt: Don’t settle on conventions. In our social by design network connected world, information travels quickly. One of the best forms of discussion in this era is one we’ve been taught to never be a part of. It goes like this: “I can’t believe that so and so did that!” Your parents probably said to never be the “so and so” in those conversations. Well guess what? You need to be part of those conversations. Don’t sit idly, push the boundaries of creativity and new possibilities, the world rewards brands who do. When they speak about you, your brand name travels and begins to influence others. Think of some of these conversations, some of them went like this: “I can’t believe Microsoft built the Surface Studio.” Or, “I can’t believe Spotify now has The Beatles catalog.” Or this famous one, “I can’t believe it’s not butter.”
The more you can defy the conventional, the better chance you have of being in the hearts and minds of your target audiences no matter what happens in the world around us.
Learn how to keep your brand relevant in the 21st Century in my new book Disruptive Marketing.
Don’t let the future leave you behind. Join us in Hollywood, California for Brand Leadership in the Age of Disruption, our 5th annual competitive-learning event designed around brand strategy.
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
Ed Faruolo’s knowledge of the health industry, coupled with his keen insights and access to the most formidable industry leaders enabled MD Insider to jump start its early stage strategies.
When WomenHeart needed a unique world class program to put us on the map we turned to Ed Faruolo who conceptualized, created, and drove a breakthrough program with Cigna Corporation. He utilized his BrandBreath methodology that allowed both WomenHeart and Cigna to engage the public, congressional leaders, healthcare, and business communities in a way that garnered greater attention and results than larger organizations with greater funding. But more importantly, as I like to say, “we saved some lives together!”
Transforming Cause Marketing to Purposeful Branding
Ed's strategic talents, creativity, and unique approach provide invaluable insights and distinctiveness to our cause marketing and thought leadership programs...
Laura HuntPresidentFirst Degree Marketing
Driving Employee Engagement Through Your Brand
Ed exemplifies what contemporary marketing executives need to do in today's competitive environment. He has provided break through thinking that utilizes External and Internal branding concepts. Throughout his career Ed has championed the need for employees to live the brand.
Through his visionary leadership and extraordinary connections, Ed Faruolo helped us establish a highly unique and successful leader development program designed for minority executives in the news media industry. As a result attendees are developing critical skills and their companies are benefitting from increased talent.
Mark CarterCo-FounderThe Diverse Future
Clear Growth Paths for Legacy and Start Ups
I hired Ed Faruolo back in my CIGNA days to help establish a strong vision, clarity and new brand strategy that would make the company a tier 1 brand in the healthcare and the other businesses they were in at the time — that’s exactly what we did… fast forward to my involvement with BuildingBlok and our need to develop an early stage strategy, it is no wonder that my first call was to Ed. His clarity of thinking during unclear times is a critical asset...
Sanford MillerFormer CMO & Corporate Strategist, CIGNA Corporation, and a former Partner in BuildingBlok LLCBuildingBlok
Employee Engagement & Ownership During Management Change & Turmoil
When my company was going through a management transition my first call was to VitaLincs… having worked closely with Ed Faruolo over the years I knew he had the inner working knowledge of our industry, coupled with his excellent resources and deep insights to help engage our employees with major operational changes underway. His efforts helped gain ownership and support among my employee base that was critical to our ongoing success.
Building a Loyal Franchise and Revenue In The Entertainment Biz
VitaLincs is an indispensable partner that helps me take my original content and programming, and optimize it through various audiences and channels for far greater impact. As a result, we get to build a stronger franchise and greater revenue potential for our original shows and programming. Plus, Ed’s incredible rolodex is proof of his talents and the desire of talented people to want to work with him.
Robert L. Robinson Jr.Founder & Chief Imagination Officer, Arupt Entertainment and Co-President, Framelight Productionshttp://framelightproductions.com
Accelerating the Accelerators…
VitaLinc’s seminar on Values Segmentation and Ed Faruolo’s mentoring of our social enterprise innovators is an exceptional resource providing amazing insights and knowledge for our clients in an hour that would otherwise take years of experience to realize.
*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.
At Maranatha we provide services for the developmentally disabled and disenfranchised population in New York City. Ed and his VitaLincs team have helped us to revitalize our agency by crafting fresh strategies and programs that allow us to engage and reach our consumers in creative new ways. He’s been a wonderful asset to our agency and a pleasure to collaborate with.
