In this webinar, learn how IBM started to transform their marketing based on analytics. In the process, the brand learned seven simple but remarkably effective truths that every company can use to improve business outcomes.

It’s strange to think of sleeping as something you can get better at. But in the latest IKEA advert, and this instalment of the #WonderfulEveryday, they are rallying the nation to raise their game at bedtime so you can win at sleeping.

Just like an athlete can beat their personal best, you can improve your sleeping performance. Not only will you feel healthier and happier but you’ll also be on the ball. All it takes is the right kit, the right bed (one that’s big enough to stretch out in but cosy enough to snuggle up tight) and a little preparation.

CREATIVE CREDITS:
Agency: Mother, London

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); –ADVERTISEMENT–

We have always believed that the word marketing should be written as market-ing.

Writing it that way reminds us that marketing is about dealing with the ever-changing market, and that to understand cutting-edge marketing, we should understand how the market has been evolving in recent years.

The clues and trends are there for us to see. A new breed of customer, the one that will be the majority in the near future, is emerging globally—young, urban, middle-class with strong mobility and connectivity. While the mature markets are dealing with an aging population, the emerging market is enjoying the demographic dividend of a younger, more productive population. They are not only young, they are also rapidly migrating to urban areas and embracing a big-city lifestyle. The majority of them are in the middle class or above and thus have a sizable income to spend. Moving up from a lower socioeconomic status, they aspire to accomplish greater goals, experience finer things, and emulate behaviors of people in higher classes. These traits make them a compelling market for marketers to pursue.

But what distinguishes this new type of customer from other markets we have seen before is their tendency to be mobile. They move around a lot, often commute, and live life at a faster pace. Everything should be instant and time-efficient. When they are interested in things they see on television, they search for them on their mobile devices. When they are deciding whether to buy something in-store, they research price and quality online. Being digital natives, they can make purchase decisions anywhere and anytime, involving a wide range of devices. Despite their Internet savvy, they love to experience things physically. They value high-touch engagement when interacting with brands. They are also very social; they communicate with and trust one another. In fact, they trust their network of friends and family more than they trust corporations and brands. In short, they are highly connected.

Breaking The Myths Of Connectivity

Connectivity is arguably the most important game changer in the history of marketing. Granted, it can no longer be considered a new buzzword, but it has been changing many facets of marketing and is not showing signs of slowing down.

Connectivity has made us question many mainstream theories and major assumptions that we have learned about customer, product, and brand management. Connectivity significantly reduces the costs of interaction among companies, employees, channel partners, customers, and other relevant parties. This in turn lowers the barriers to entering new markets, enables concurrent product development, and shortens the time frame for brand building.

There have been various cases of how connectivity quickly disrupted long-established industries with seemingly high entry barriers. Amazon has disrupted the brick-and-mortar bookstores and later the publishing industry. Likewise, Netflix has disturbed the brick-and- mortar video rental stores and, along with the likes of Hulu, has shaken up the satellite and cable TV services. In a similar fashion, Spotify and Apple Music have changed the way music distribution works.

Connectivity also changes the way we see the competition and customers. Today, collaboration with competitors and co-creation with customers are central. Competition is no longer a zero-sum game. Customers are no longer the passive receivers of a company’s segmentation, targeting, and positioning moves. Connectivity accelerates market dynamics to the point where it is virtually impossible for a company to stand alone and rely on internal resources to win. A company must face the reality that to win it must collaborate with external parties and even involve customer participation.

The success of Procter and Gamble’s (P&G’s) Connect + Develop program exemplifies this. Instead of protecting the brand equity of Febreze as its own competitive advantage, P&G licenses the trademark for new categories. Partner companies such as Kaz and Bissell launched Honeywell scented fans and odor-removing vacuum bag filters that carry the Febreze brand.

Despite the obvious influence, connectivity is often underrated as a mere application of technology that marketers need to deal with. Seeing connectivity from a technological viewpoint alone would often be misleading. In the context of strategy, many marketers view connectivity simply as an enabling platform and infrastructure that support the overall direction. A bigger-picture view of connectivity allows marketers to avoid this trap. While it is true that connectivity has been driven by technology—namely “screen technology and the internet”—its importance is far more strategic.

A survey by Google reveals that 90 percent of our interactions with media are now facilitated by screens: smartphone, tablet, laptop, and television screens. Screens are becoming so important in our lives that we spend more than four hours of our leisure time daily to use multiple screens sequentially and simultaneously. And behind these screen- based interactions, the internet has been the backbone. Global internet traffic has grown by a factor of 30 from 2000 to 2014, connecting four out of ten people in the world. According to a Cisco forecast, we will see another ten-fold jump of global internet traffic by 2019, powered by more than 11 billion connected mobile devices.

With such a massive reach, connectivity transforms the way customers behave. When shopping in-store, most customers would search for price comparison and product reviews. Google research shows that eight out of ten smartphone users in the United States do mobile research in-store. Even when watching television advertising, more than half of the TV audience in Indonesia conducts mobile search. This is a trend affecting customers globally.

Derivative products of the internet also enable transparency. Social media such as Twitter and Instagram enable customers to show and share their customer experience, which further inspires other customers from the same or a lower class to emulate and pursue a similar experience. Communal rating sites such as TripAdvisor and Yelp empower customers to make informed choices based on the wisdom of the crowd.

Thus, to fully embrace connectivity we need to view it holistically. While mobile connectivity—through mobile devices—is important, it is the most basic level of connectivity, in which the internet serves only as a communications infrastructure. The next level is experiential connectivity, in which the internet is used to deliver a superior customer experience in touchpoints between customers and brands. In this stage, we are no longer concerned only about the width but also about the depth of the connectivity. The ultimate level is social connectivity, which is about the strength of connection in communities of customers.

Since connectivity is closely related to the youth segment, it is also often considered relevant only for the younger generation of customers. As a result, many marketers implement “connected” marketing as a separate youth strategy without fully understanding how it fits with the overall marketing strategy. It is true that being digital natives, younger customers are the first to adopt connectivity, but they inspire their seniors to adopt connectivity as well. Moreover, as the world population ages over time, digital natives will become the majority and connectivity eventually will become the new normal.

The importance of connectivity will transcend technology and demographic segment. Connectivity changes the key foundation of marketing: the market itself.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Philip Kotler, excerpted from his book, Marketing 4.0 with permission from Wiley Publishing.

Meet the requirements of a changing world. Join us in Hollywood, California for Brand Leadership in the Age of Disruption, our 5th annual competitive-learning event designed around brand strategy.

The Blake Project Can Help: The Brand Positioning Workshop

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

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

In 2014, IBM started to transform their marketing based on analytics. In the process, the brand learned seven simple but remarkably effective truths that every company can use to improve business outcomes. In this webinar the attendees will learn the 7 Truths of B-to-B Marketing that can transform your business.

Here are four examples of B-to-B marketing campaigns that help to dispel some of the myths surrounding multicultural marketing.

Apple’s latest ad follows a young woman who returns to her home village in Greece, bringing along her iPhone 7 Plus. While catching up, she takes a picture of her grandmother, who is amazed at how the image comes out. Before too long, the young woman is taking pictures of everyone in the entire village.

The iPhone ad also features the song ‘Take Mine’ by Bezos’ Hawaiian Orchestra

CREATIVE CREDITS:
Ad Agency: TBWA Chiat Day

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); –ADVERTISEMENT–

It’s important to realize why the world of marketing is disruptive at this point of the 21^st Century.

We’ve reached a certain convergence where everyday people have control of media, content, conversations and decision-making journeys once defined solely by brands. This new era requires collaboration between brand and consumer and yet most brands seem tone deaf to the change upon them, thinking if they only shout louder they will matter more.

One way they do this and have been doing this for more than 100 years is through the vessel known as advertising. Yet, ads are simply one way to reach people in  and are clearly seen as a hostile enemy based on the rise of ad blockers and premium subscription models that remove ads altogether.

We then have the camp of marketers who feel automation is the answer. Programmatic advertising after all allows messages to scale, but does that help when people don’t want to be interrupted to consume content?

Maybe the term disruptive should be applied to all of the things we’ve held to be true in the world of branding the last ten decades. Most of it we assume works, but a lot of it is noise.

What we as brand marketers really need to understand is that disruption in marketing doesn’t have a concrete meaning because it is always based on the context of the world around us. That context changes. At one time the transistor radios were an amazing technology because a radio could become transported and portable. Now transistors are an antiquated form of technology. If we apply this logic to marketing, what we perceived at one time to be highly valuable: TV, radio, newspaper, email, banner ads may be to marketing as the transistor radio was to technology. Antiquated.

So, what is the definition of disruptive marketing? I think these three bullet points help define what it is currently in an ever-changing world of reshaped behavior and remixed content, where businesses that once survived 100 years are more likely to last only 16 years at most and where consumers want more relationships and innovation from brands yet still suffer through 30 second advertisements.

1. Disruptive Marketing Is Rooted In Creative Disruption And Disruptive Innovation

Creative disruption is doing things in the creative process differently from before. Disruptive innovation is an advance that helps create a new market that eventually topples an existing market, displacing an earlier technology. There are many examples of disruptive innovation in the history of technology: the transistor radio (which displaced high-fidelity players), mini steel mills (which displaced vertically integrated steel mills), ultrasound (which displaced radiography), downloadable digital media (Which displaced physical products like CDs and DVDs/Blu-Rays), and Wikipedia (which displaced printed encyclopedias). When we talk about disruptive marketing, we mean the act of crafting brand strategy differently from how it was previously created.

2. Disruptive Marketing Focuses On Design

The goal of disruptive marketing is the future state. It’s not that the present state is bad for certain brands, but customers are more demanding and have more abundance of choice. As a result, service isn’t the only factor in the equation for how people judge brands. Most of them now take into account both service and products in addition to how those products get better via sustaining and/or disruptive innovation. The majority of brands that are thought of as the defining brands of the disruptive era are those that place design at the center of user experience. How are the products/services/solutions designed? How is a customer’s interaction with a brand designed? These are questions that are answered based on where a brand wants to be.

3. Disruptive Marketing Embraces Unusual Behavior

Many brand strategies are mistakenly designed for linear journeys with the hopes that people will make rational decisions. Disruptive marketers look for what people are missing in their lives in order to discover a better way of reaching them. They also look for unusual signals from customer data and question what is causing those outliers. One of the best examples of this was a quick service restaurant that noted they sold more milkshakes between 7am and 9am than at any other time of the day. Instead of shrugging their shoulders and accepting the data and enjoying the revenue, the marketers dove deeper and realized this customer misbehavior existed because people were driving to work and didn’t want to have to eat food with both hands while they drove. By embracing this behavior instead of reneging it, this Quick Service Restaurant could adapt its menu to be more suitable to its patronage (customer-centric) rather than simply pushing their own agenda or narrative.

Learn how to keep your brand relevant in the 21^st 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.

The Blake Project Can Help: The Brand Positioning Workshop

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

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

Apple never invested heavily in marketing, preferring to build great products and save money on fixed costs. Then something strange happened: Samsung phones, which feature a different operating system (the open-source and Google-owned Android) and a bigger screen, began to pick up market share in 2013. Soon, as Samsung was seeing major adoption across various markets, Apple moved toward television commercials in an attempt to differentiate its products from the competition. One ad, at the end of 2014, showed the iPhone not simply as a phone but instead as a mobile creative tool featuring a user who was an artist. Shortly after this ad aired, Apple reported that iPhone sales boomed, while Samsung reported at sales or marginal growth.

Creativity in the new economy isn’t simply about selling; it’s also about how you can stand out. How does a brand survive in a world filled with copycats, reverse-engineered products, and free intellectual property and still be relevant? Much of this answer is going to come from a new way of thinking that involves art, science, math, psychology, and media. It doesn’t align with the resounding corporate or higher education culture that says MBAs are the best qualified to occupy marketing roles.

Richard Florida explains what the creative economy means from a commodity-meets-people perspective:

“Creativity is multidimensional and comes in many mutually reinforcing forms. It is a mistake to think, as many do, that creativity can be reduced to the creation of new blockbuster inventions, new products and new firms. In today’s economy, creativity is pervasive and ongoing: We constantly revise and enhance every product, process and activity imaginable, and t them together in new ways. Moreover, technological and economic creativity are nurtured by and interact with artistic and cultural creativity. This kind of interplay is evident in the rise of whole new industries from computer graphics to digital music and animation. Creativity also requires a social and economic environment that can nurture its many forms. Max Weber said long ago that the Protestant ethic provided the underlying spirit of thrift, hard work and efficiency that motivated the rise of early capitalism. In similar fashion, the shared commitment to the creative spirit in its many, varied manifestations underpins the new creative ethos that powers our age.”

The majority of advanced marketing positions are always advertised with the phrase “MBA preferred.” While this made sense for much of the knowledge economy, it makes less sense in the creative economy. Once upon a time, the MBA was the shining beacon of the corporate hierarchy.

Today, more and more that beacon is lit by the creative types who come from graphic design, copywriting, video production, and photography. Alas, the MBA is a dated badge of honor, while the creative types (many of whom hold another kind of master’s degree, an MFA) are the darlings of the workplace.

What caused this shift? For one thing, MBAs are no longer different from other people in the work environment. They might not all have coding or data experience, and they might not know how to design. Many might not even know how to manipulate media to their advantage. Some aspire to strategic roles, but they don’t want to execute.

Laura Stack, author of Execution Is the Strategy, explains that when MBAs want only to strategize, both the organization and the individual fail. Stack says that “pie in the sky” strategies created by people with no boots on the ground won’t succeed as often as strategies created by those who can execute for desirable results from end to end.

The disruptive marketer isn’t just a 50/50 analytical/creative hybrid; he or she is also a strategy/execution/analyst expert who can do it all. And creativity is an essential skill for these roles. That’s why an MFA can be more powerful than an MBA, especially if that MFA learns code!

The exciting new world of the creative economy is just the tip of a very large economic opportunity. Creatives possess new skills. And businesses want more of them because creativity isn’t just a nice discipline to add to a team; it’s a matter of economic life or death.

Complex, challenging creative work is difficult to automate or outsource cheaply. Indeed, creativity is what transforms utilitarian, indistinctive products like Windows 10 into devices that people actually need, love, and use creatively. Those who can transform creativity into actual disruptive execution have the potential to be the future leaders of this new world. More than ever, those with imagination are outpacing those with process.

Technology is driving this boom. Smartphones, cheap sensors, and cloud computing have enabled a raft of new Internet-connected services that are infiltrating the most tech-averse industries: Uber is roiling the taxi universe; Airbnb is disrupting the hotels industry; Spotify has upended the music MP3 model after Napster upended the compact disc model.

In commerce, disruption is the norm and conventional brand marketing approaches won’t work anymore. A business that will upend a legacy titan in the next five years probably hasn’t even been born yet. But when it is, it will come from the mind of a new creative, possibly an outsider to marketing—maybe a musician or an artist who dabbles in building iOS apps.

It won’t be someone armed strictly with an MBA.

Learn how to keep your brand relevant in the 21^st Century in my new book Disruptive Marketing.

Meet the requirements of a changing world. Join us in Hollywood, California for Brand Leadership in the Age of Disruption, our 5th annual competitive-learning event designed around brand strategy.

The Blake Project Can Help: The Brand Positioning Workshop

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

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

What marketers and the advertising industry can expect from the new Trump Administration

Welcome the class of TED2017 Fellows! Representing 12 countries, one tribal nation and an incredible range of disciplines, this year’s Fellows are all leaders in their fields who constantly find new ways to collaborate and bring about positive change. Among those selected are an Ecuadorian neurobiologist working to uncover the neural circuits that connect the gut and the brain, an Afrofuturist filmmaker from Kenya who tells modern stories about Africa, a Chinese entrepreneur and venture capitalist tackling global food system challenges, an Indian investigative journalist exploring discrimination around the world, and many more.

Below, meet the new group of Fellows who will join us at TED2017, April 24-28 in Vancouver, BC.

TED2017 Fellows

Karim Abouelnaga (USA)
Education entrepreneur
Founder and CEO of Practice Makes Perfect, a summer school operator, which addresses the summer learning loss in low-income communities by connecting younger students with mentors from their neighborhood for leadership development, academic instruction and career training.

Karim Abouelnaga speaks to a group of students participating in the Practice Makes Perfect summer program.

Christopher Ategeka (Uganda + USA)
Healthcare entrepreneur
Ugandan founder of Health Access Corps, which is addressing the uneven distribution of health professionals across the African continent by compensating and supporting trained healthcare professionals to stay and serve their local communities.

Diego Bohorquez (Ecuador + USA)
Gut-brain neurobiologist
Ecuadorian neuroscientist studying the neural pathways linking the brain and the gut, and how these connections affect human behavior and disease, from Parkinson’s to autism.

Rebecca Brachman (USA)
Neuroscientist + entrepreneur
Neuroscientist studying how the brain, immune system, and stress interact and co-founder of a biotech startup working to develop the first prophylactic drugs to prevent mental illness and increase resilience to stress.

Kayla Briët (Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation + USA)
Filmmaker + composer
Mixed-cultural artist infusing her Neshnaabe, Chinese, and Dutch-Indonesian heritage in multiple mediums of storytelling: film, virtual reality, and music – from orchestral to electronic.

Armando Azua-Bustos (Chile)
Astrobiologist
Chilean astrobiologist studying how microbial life has adapted to survive in the Atacama Desert, the driest place on Earth, and what this means for our search for life on Mars.

The extremely low water availability, high salinity and high UV radiation present in the Atacama Desert make it the closest analog to Mars on Earth. (Photo: Clair Popkin)

Reid Davenport (USA)
Documentary filmmaker
Documentary filmmaker focused on telling stories about people with disabilities, who incorporates the physicality of his own disability into his craft.

Damon Davis (USA)
Interdisciplinary artist
Musician, visual artist and filmmaker working at the intersection of art and activism, exploring the experience of contemporary Black Americans. His documentary Whose Streets, which will premiere at Sundance 2017, tells the story of the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri from the perspective of those who lived it.

Matilda Ho (China)
Food entrepreneur + investor
Chinese founder of Bits x Bites, China’s first food tech-focused accelerator VC that invests in startups solving systematic food challenges. She also founded Yimishiji, China’s first online farmers market that has engineered food education and transparency into the entire supply chain and customer experience.

Wanuri Kahiu (Kenya)
Filmmaker
Kenyan Afro-futurist filmmaker using the science fiction and fantasy genres to tell modern African stories.

Mei Lin Neo (Singapore)
Marine biologist
Singaporean marine ecologist and conservationist studying the endangered giant clams of the Indo-Pacific, and promoting ways to protect these rare marine species from going extinct.

A giant clam in the wild, which can grow to weigh more than 440 pounds and have an average lifespan 100 years. Singaporean marine ecologist Mei Lin Neo studies these endangered species in an effort to protect them from going extinct. (Photo: Mei Lin Neo)

Lauren Sallan (USA)
Paleobiologist
Paleobiologist using the vast fossil record as a deep time database to explore how global events, environmental change and ecological interactions affect long-term evolution. She is particularly interested in what past mass extinctions of fish can tell us about modern climate change.

Anjan Sundaram (India)
Author + investigative journalist
Author and investigative journalist reporting on 21st century dictatorships, forgotten conflicts and discrimination around the world – from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Rwanda and India.

Stanford Thompson (USA)
Trumpeter + music educator
Founder and CEO of Play on Philly, a music education and social development program that engages underserved Philadelphia youth in ensemble music-making. Stanford is an award-winning trumpeter who has performed and soloed with major orchestras around the world while actively performing chamber music and jazz.

A young student learns to play the flute with Play on Philly, a music education and social development program founded by Stanford Thompson that engages underserved Philadelphia youth in ensemble music-making. (Photo: David DeBalko)

Elizabeth Wayne (USA)
Biomedical engineer + STEM advocate
Biomedical engineer working to enhance the ability of immune cells to deliver genetic material to tumors and co-host of PhDivas, a podcast about about women in higher education.

2017 Senior Fellows

We’re also excited to share our new class of Senior Fellows for TED2017. We honor our Senior Fellows with an additional two years of engagement in the TED community, offering continued support to their work while they, in turn, give back and mentor new Fellows and enrich the community as a whole. They embody the values of the TED Fellows program.

Laura Boykin (USA + Australia)
Computational biologist
Biologist using genomics and supercomputing to combat hunger in sub-Saharan Africa and increase food security. Laura helps smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa control whiteflies and the viruses they transmit which have caused devastation of local cassava crops, a staple food in many countries.

Computational biologist Laura Boykin works with local farmers and scientists in Zambia to study the effects of whiteflies and viruses on cassava crops. Pictured from left to right: Dr. Titus Alicai, Dr. Monica Kehoe, Dr. Joseph Ndunguru, Dr. Peter Sseruwagi, Dr. Laura Boykin, Prof. Elijah Ateka. (Photo: Monica Kehoe)

Jedidah Isler (USA)
Astrophysicist + inclusion activist
Award-winning astrophysicist and advocate for inclusive STEM education. In 2014, she became the first African American woman to receive a PhD in astrophysics from Yale. Jedidah founded VanguardSTEM, a nonprofit committed to creating conversations between emerging and established women of color in STEM.

Amanda Nguyen (USA)
Policymaker
Founder and president of Rise, a national nonprofit working with state legislatures to implement a Sexual Assault Survivor Bill of Rights. Her bill was recently passed unanimously in Congress making it only the 21st bill to be passed unanimously in United States history.

Andrew Pelling (Canada)
Scientist + biohacker
Canadian scientist using novel, low-cost, open source materials – such as LEGOs and apples – for next generation medical innovations and founder of pHacktory, a community-driven research lab.

Sarah Sandman (USA)
Artist + designer
Artist and designer creating experiences to amplify messages of social and environmental justice, such as Brick x Brick, a public art performance inspired by the 2016 US election that builds human “walls” against the language of misogyny.

Participants of Brick x Brick, a public art performance co-organized by designer Sarah Sandman, stand outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art in protest to misogynistic language in contemporary US politics. (Photo: Joey Foster Ellis)

Parmesh Shahani (India)
Writer + LGBTQ activist
Indian writer and founder of the Godrej India Culture Lab – an experimental ideas space that works on innovation and diversity in corporate India.

Trevor Timm (USA)
Investigative journalist + free speech advocate
Co-founder and executive director of Freedom of the Press Foundation, a non-profit that supports and defends journalism dedicated to transparency and accountability.

E Roon Kang (USA + South Korea)
Graphic designer
Korean graphic designer and artist operating Math Practice, a design and research studio in New York City that explores computational techniques and studies their implications in graphic design. E Roon, whose work In Search of Personalized Time was acquired by LACMA, is an assistant professor at Parsons School of Design.

A collection of custom, personal timekeepers outside LACMA — a part of E Roon Kang’s collaboration project In Search of Personalized Time, aiming to recalibrate time based on personal perceptions. (Photo: E Roon Kang and Taeyoon Choi)

Prumsodun Ok (Cambodia)
Interdisciplinary artist
Choreographer whose work is dedicated to the ancient art of Cambodian classical dance that was nearly annihilated by the Khmer Rouge. Prumsodun founded Cambodia’s first all-male and gay-identified dance company, whose work merges classical Cambodian and modern dance to subvert gender norms and stereotypes.

Janet Iwasa (USA)
Molecular animator
Biologist and molecular animator at the University of Utah and founder of 1 μm Illustration, Janet uses 3D animation software to create molecular and cellular visualizations – such as how the HIV virus hijacks human cells – used by researchers around the world to visualize, explore and communicate their hypotheses.