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.

By Rob Wu The internet and 24/7 connectivity to the world around us have changed our relationships with people, businesses, and nonprofits in ways we couldn’t have imagined just a few years ago. Today, the ways in which we eat, drink, shop, and travel are shaped by companies like eBay, etsy, Airbnb, Craigslist, Uber, Lyft, […]

CBS joins Hulu’s new live-streaming service, Spotify offers Obama a job, the Minnesota Mitsubishi White Bear makes it big, and more.

New findings show TV is still the most trusted, and most viewed, medium out there.

Dan Jaffe, group executive vice president of government relations at ANA, provided an overview of the political environment since Donald Trump’s election and what advertisers need to watch as the new President and Congress formulate their agenda.

In 2017, are you looking to grow significantly?  Expand your scope?  Hit a new milestone?  If you’re a small- or mid-sized business that’s planning to grow into a larger enterprise — or maybe you run a later-stage start-up that’s headed toward a Series C or even an IPO — you need a solid strategic brand platform.  To help you, I’ve developed a new workbook, Scale-Up Your Brand:  How To Set Up Your Brand for Success in 5 Steps.  This new workbook is a step-by-step guide to help you develop a strong, valuable, sustainable brand strategy.  In it, I lay out the five steps plus a bonus brand assessment tool.   Available in digital ($6.99 each) and print ($9.99) form, you can get your copy of this new Scale-Up Your Brand workbook here.

You may recall last year, I ran a series of posts on this very topic — it was one of the most popular series I’ve published.  Now, I’ve compiled all that content and improved on and synthesized it into 36 pages packed with exercises, instructions, and helpful tips, plus room for note-taking and documenting your progress and decisions.  In addition to the workbook, I’m also introducing a workshop in which I will take you and your team through the workbook exercises and other valuable content in a experience custom-tailored to your specific needs.  Learn more about this one-day, hands-on, fast-paced workshop here and special introductory pricing here.

I’ve spending so much time and energy on helping companies that want to scale because I’ve seen too many organizations fail to cross the chasm between their humble beginnings and their grand aspirations.  While many different dynamics cause such a high failure rate, one of the most critical is the lack of a clear, robust, vital brand strategy.   When you don’t have a strong strategic brand platform, you end up with problems of scaling companies like these:

• Over reliance on product strategy.  In this scenario, your first product is a hit but you have nothing else to sustain that initial bump — or everything else in your pipeline fails to match initial demand levels.  To establish your brand, you’ve relied on product attributes or functionality that can be easily copied or de-valued by the next new thing, so your brand hasn’t developed deep customer connections and doesn’t sustain resonance.
• Lack of alignment in your organization.  Your employees, investors, and sometimes even partners disagree on how to grow and evolve the company.  You think everyone is on the same page about where you’re going and how to get there, but now people are making decisions that detract from that vision or contradict each other.  It’s only going to get worse as you add people who are being recruited, trained, and directed at cross-purposes.
• No true north to guide your own decision-making.  Founders in this scenario struggle with decisions about what to say “yes” and “no” to.  You had an original product idea and for awhile that seemed to be the right track, but now it seems you might be better off going in a different direction.  Or maybe a new opportunity has arisen and you’re not sure if it makes sense for you to pursue it.
• Competitive vulnerability.  You started with a unique value proposition, but now there are many more players and your brand is getting lost in the clutter.  You no longer know the optimal position for your brand in the competitive landscape — or even who you should be competing with.
• Disparate communications and offerings.  You’ve added lots of different products, programs, channels, and/or touchpoints.  Each has a slightly different emphasis and some seem to be more relevant to their context than to your core brand idea.  In this scenario, your customers — and sometimes your employees — get confused about what your brand stands for.

Maybe you see yourself in one — or all — of these scenarios?!  Please understand that my intention is not to shame or scare you into developing a strategic brand platform.   On the contrary, my goal is to help you do it.

Thankfully, brand strategy isn’t as complicated as brain surgery.  I’ve found almost every business leader is capable of developing a strong brand strategy, but a little experience and perspective does help.  So I’ve taken all the learnings I’ve gleaned from working on brands for the past 25+ years and packaged them into this workbook and workshop.  I’ve actually learned a lot more — and am still learning — so I hope to add to and improve these resources going forward.  But for now, I hope you will find them helpful.

Please let me know about your experiences working through the workbook and any questions you might have about scaling.

related:

brand book bites from “Scaling Up” by Verne Harnish

VCs Are From Mars, Female Entrepreneurs Are From Venus

Startup With Passion, Purpose, and People

The post a new scale-up your brand workbook to solve the problems of scaling companies appeared first on Denise Lee Yohn.

Each year at this time we gorge ourselves on the dazzling tech developments coming from CES. And heading into SXSW season this March, we should expect to see more about connected technology, conversation platforms, virtual and augmented reality, connected devices, and how marketers can leverage all of it. But, set against the melodic line of innovation is an equally interesting counterpoint in the form of techno-resistance.

While such resistance is not new, these sentiments are becoming more mainstream in a more discerning, more mature, and less polarized way. Mobile-phone free zones, tech-less travel, and mindful living have been buzzing in the background as emerging trends for a few years. But, the general mood of more people seems to be making the modern techno-resistance question not one about “whether to tech, or not to tech.” It’s all about balance.

A few brands are taking aim at our technology-obsessed society in clever ways.

Nike’s new “Time is Precious” campaign takes aim at smart phone and social media users, reminding them of how much time they spent glued to their screens (when they could be outside running). The videos use a Siri-like voice to tell us how much time we’re wasting “watching other people’s picture of their cafe macchiato, or their dog, or their baby,” while single words flash up on a black screen.

All topics are fair game — hashtags, cat videos, photographing food, reality shows, Tinder, and online petitions – which come off as refreshingly human and authentic. And while it is likely many Nike customers use technology to track their fitness, technology is not the target, obsession with technology is. The message shows the brand understands people.

We’re hearing a lot about virtual reality and augmented reality. Despite the technology continuing to advance in leaps and bounds, Jaguar New Zealand showed that technology still can’t replicate the acceleration, speed and thrill of experiencing an F-TYPE.

In a clever ambient ad called “Actual Reality” Jaguar invites passengers to step into what looks like an F-Type mounted on 6 hydraulic arms. Passengers put on a head set and strap in, while unbeknownst to them, a Jaguar Precision Driver takes the driver’s seat and then takes the car on an actual racing track hidden behind the platform. The passenger is wearing the headset the whole time and thinks the experience is totally virtual. At the end of the journey, the surprise on passengers’ faces is priceless. Jaguar shows us that while there’s a lot of hype about what VR can do, there’s still a lot of value in experiencing real reality.

Finally, in the news last week, Medium’s founder and CEO Evan Williams laid off one-third of the staff and closed two offices. Williams (who co-founded Twitter) created Medium as a new model for media on the Internet. But when they began rolling out native ads and sponsored content in October, they realized they were off-mission. Williams said, “Upon further reflection, it’s clear that the broken system is ad-driven media on the internet. It simply doesn’t serve people. ….so, we are shifting our resources and attention to defining a new model for writers and creators to be rewarded, based on the value they’re creating for people. And toward building a transformational product for curious humans who want to get smarter about the world every day.”

It’s likely they took a page from Facebook’s playbook where there’s been more and more a decline in original sharing which no-doubt correlates with the increase of professional and promoted content. It’s changed the nature of the platform from conversation, to content aggregators. Users still visit Facebook daily, but are moving their conversation to other apps and platforms.

It remains to be seen how Medium will fund itself, which is itself a separate discussion on developing a platform without understanding how it can be business-viable. But what Williams observes is key: Ad-driven media does not serve people.

For brands capitalizing on techno-resistance, consider the following:

• Have a point of view on technology: Where does it fit into your customers’ lives? Can your brand find a way to acknowledge the reality of how humans use technology in a memorable way? Nike goes for the candid and witty direct dialogue with runners. What about parents? Google Wi-Fi launched in October includes a “family pause” switch to disrupt Wi-Fi signals during ‘family time’. The more real the POV, the better it will resonate.
• Don’t innovate, Invent: As digital platforms (like Medium) look for better ways to support their communities, what is the role brands might play in connecting with these platforms. To some extent, sponsored content and native ads can be indistinguishable from fake news. Medium knows there is a better way (even if it doesn’t know what that looks like). Brands should find ways to create that ‘better way’ in partnership with the platform to offer the best experience for customers.
• High-contrast reality: Explore ideas that allow real-life to be contrasted with technology in fun ways. Play off current technology trends in fun ways that encourage customers to do the real thing. I recently wrote about how France’s Monoprix ran a counter-technology ad versus the Amazon Go concept, “You don’t need an app to go shopping. Just put your phone down, and shop.”

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