Co-opting the Corporation

The jury is still out as to whether the indigenous culture of the internet and the corporate world sit easily with each other.

Sometimes the chemistry seems wrong. The big corporates often look self-conscious, not sure quite how to behave. And aside from the few internet mega brands like Google, many web businesses stumble and sometimes fall at the hurdle how to make money online. The relationship between commerce and the web is a fractious one.

People speculate about whether the internet will become ever more corporate or if instead corporates themselves will become more de-corporatised? There is a power struggle yet to come. On the internet, major brands can seem vulnerable; they don’t have the skills of the open sourcers, the web-in-the-blood instincts of generation Y, and as events in China have recently proven, they can’t keep up with the cyber-terrorists.

This challenge to big business is undoubtedly a good thing. They can’t just set up camp online. Many have had to borrow the techniques of viral, P2P and buzz, the brightest offline businesses have had to become a little bit guerrilla themselves –  acknowledging that the online world is not a place originally created for them. Thinking in this way has created the most productive period of progress in the commercial world in decades.

Now we’re entering a new phase. We’re moving beyond web 2.0, characterised by global conversation and participation -albeit in often pre-prepared experiences. Now, somehow, the opportunity has been blown open. If customers aren’t just happy to be receivers, or customisers, or participants, but are instead making the web on their own (with the iphone, Apple has its customers making its product. Aol is about to do the same.) then the web is presumably about to go through another innovation surge. In this new scenario, there are new rules, to free up thinking rather than constrain it. 

The digital and actual are equivalent

For a long time, the digital world has been treated as a copy of the real world. The add-on bit. The truth is, its impact on our lives is as material as anything else – this will become more obvious as geolocation and real time become dominant features. Better still than the actual world, digital space is reality that can be moved around, distorted, injected with imagination.

Great brands will not then be simply extending their businesses on line. They’ll be starting from the fictional possibilities of the online world, in order to re-boot the hum drum of daily life –  in terms of business models, products, services and environments. Gaming scriptwriters have something to offer the brand and innovation managers of online business.

In commercial terms, this is not just a nice idea. If brands online simply set out to replicate the off line world and take advantage of the web’s easy distribution, they do everyone a disservice. It’s the quick way to commoditisation. Poor versions of offline originals will have their value whittled away to zero. Instead, it is singular and new products and experiences, which are imaginative and immersive, which will hold their value and provide the greatest financial return. As web world and ‘real’ life merge, there is only one option: innovate, don’t replicate. Don’t make the mistake of Second Life.

Get precise with the media

All brands can benefit hugely from digital but some are much better at using digital than others. It’s entirely right to jump in, to revel in the technical possibilities – they are what make the internet magical – but imagination has to be accompanied by real identification with the user. Technology shouldn’t block the relationship between the experience you are offering and the person on the other side of the screen.

It is easy to overlook context, to forget how technology slots in with daily life. The challenge is to know the mood, habits, pre-conceptions, time of day, stress levels, time pressures that users bring to their relationship with you and then to choose the exactly the right feature to delight, ease, speed up, or organise, fulfill their needs.  The more you know about the user, the more imagination can be pointed in the right direction.

The obsession should be with the right imaginative fit between medium, message and audience. Enhanced editions online books expands the concept on a book in line with the possibilities of the medium in the right way – it is much more imaginative that a replica of a digital book, but it doesn’t tip into features for the sake of it. It leverages the technology to create a unique experience and keeps a close eye on what things feel like for the user.

Draw a crowd not a herd

There is no greater sign of a result on line than critical mass audience. But let the crowd rule itself, and herd-like, mindless behaviour can take over. Some people say the app market has already gotten too free-form and that beautiful ones are being tarnished by ‘crappy apps’. There’s now the phrase ‘loser generated content’.

The challenge is to keep a crowd a crowd – a self organising, mutually supportive system, pointed towards a common goal. Steer the crowd, inspire them, curate, shape and edit for them. The challenge is not allowing a crowd to drown in all kinds of everything, or else it could end producing all kinds of nothing. This leads to lost and unsatisfied users, and a brand which has lost its bite.

The role of a good digital brand is to keep making its presence felt, to keep dropping things in that change the dynamic, the conversations and actions. This means never fading away. Brand presence takes on a new meaning in the digital space – keep asserting it, not just managing it.

The groundswell of the internet today is an active and turbulent one, fuelled by pro-active, self-motivated, impassionate, social people. Brands need to find them. And people need brands to be thinking about more things than the size of their wallet. The best new rules of the internet come from its users and builders which is why, of all the scenarios for the future of the internet, corporates dropping the front, finding some imagination and properly joining in is the best scenario of all.

16 February 2010, posted by Suzanne Livingston

Five marketing principles for 2010

Most of the marketing rules we lived by just five years ago are practically obsolete. The industry has faced more changes in the last five years than in the previous 50. Let's face it, there's no point in improving broken legacy models. Since necessity is the mother of invention, let's not waste this recession and instead use it to rethink how we go about branding in this new decade. Here are five key ways:

1. Create better realities: A Bain & Co. survey notes that 80 percent of CEOs believe their product to be differentiated, but only 8 percent of consumers agree. And Y&R's recent Brand Asset Valuator found a 90 percent erosion in brand differentiation over the last 10 years. These are not just sad examples of illusory superiority, but a staggering statement of our industry's failure to add value in the past decade. It's critical that marketers realize that the product itself is the most powerful brand-building tool. We've all heard it before: 'innovate or die.' But today's hyper-connected society adds a sense of urgency to this broadly accepted mantra because mediocrity is getting extinguished with increasing speed via social networks. Because reality always trumps image, marketing needs to create real value versus just adding a perceived value. Marketers need to shape the offer -- the product, service and experiences consumer buy -- not just communicate it. Marketing becomes the product and the product becomes the marketing.

2. Don't be design blind: With design driving innovation, we need to challenge our understanding of design. The Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon noted that "everyone is a designer who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones." Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management, equally challenged our perspective when he said, "Today's businesspeople don't need to understand designers better, they need to become a designer.' The concept of design thinking has become highly regarded and commonly understood, but it has yet to infiltrate corporate culture. When design thinking is practiced, creative problem solving happens more successfully, leading to truly innovative business solutions versus the incremental improvements left-brain-driven analytical thinking leads to.

3. Be 'brand led': While brands need to apply the same rigor the human-centric approach design thinking requires and while actionable insights are key, they're only half of the equation. Being solely consumer led does not allow you to be differentiated. Be brand led and consumer informed -- not the other way around. Being brand led allows innovation to be true to, and guided by, the purpose of the brand, making it more credible and in line with what the brand is capable of.

4. Think 365 -- not 360: Shift from singular, consistent messages to multiple coherent ideas, from simplistic, one dimensional, reduced executions to complex, multidimensional, rich executions. Stop striving for perfection and go for progress by iteration. Join the movement shifting from campaign thinking to conversation thinking. At the same time, a brand must build long-term platforms to become an indispensable part of people's daily lives by providing continued entertainment and utility. Brands can't afford to go dark any more. Instead, stimulate brand conversations with more initiatives, more often. Just like people, brands are a sum of their experience.

5. Be interesting: This you know -- but do you practice it? A brand that generates little or no conversations will be killed by one that does. In a world where it's more important what people say about your brand than what brands say about themselves, give people something to talk about.

Let's stop confusing excuses with reasons. Let's use this recession as a reset button. Let's make business more innovative and the world a more interesting place. 

18 January 2010, posted by Frank Striefler

Brand Agnosticism in the Middle East

The Middle East. Could it be the source of the world’s next big brands? Even if you’ve been a long-term resident here, you would be hard pressed to recall five great Arab brands off the top of your head. If anything, Emirates Airlines and Al Jazeera are perhaps the only ones that quickly come to mind.

When we shift our thoughts westwards, however, our responses are both expansive and instantaneous: Google, Pepsi, Marlboro, Nokia, BMW, Facebook, Adidas, and Starbucks are just some of the great brands that come to mind. The list of these ‘top-of-mind’ brands is virtually endless, mainly because these are businesses we are constantly in touch with. If we don’t use their products and services ourselves, our peers do. If they don’t, we’ll definitely read of them, hear of them, see them used by others, or experience them in some other way.

So why have such few Arab brands made a similar impact, both outside the region and within it? Many large Arab firms have superb financial records and an undeniable capacity to expand. In fact, many have tried to enter new markets, with mostly lackluster results.

The truth is, most Arab companies harbor a holding company attitude towards business expansion, and the resulting brand agnosticism serves to chain most potentially great Arab brands to the ground.

Arab firms focus mainly on traditional business processes and do not yet see brand as a cornerstone element that can propel a company towards far greater business. To date we’ve seen some large Arab companies try to go global through M&A activities, yet very few have put the required frameworks in place to actually manage these acquisitions, let alone the brands. As a result, we’ve seen a lot of these initiatives fail to fully capitalize on their potential.

However, there are some Arab brands that have begun taking the necessary steps to become competitive on the world stage, at least from a business point of view.

Take Almarai, the Saudi Arabian dairy producer, for example. With $1.3 billion in 2008 revenues (up 33% on 2007) and around $250 million in net income for the same year, the company has, unarguably, done quite well. The difference between Almarai and most of the other regional titans is that this company has widened its scope and is set on exploring greener pastures, beyond the sands of the gulf where its cash cows roam. Recent deals with PepsiCo and others will see it expand from its dairy roots into a full-fledged food conglomerate serving a far wider market than it currently does. The next step will be to develop the Almarai brand to make it work for both for the GCC and international markets.

The key here is for Arab firms to broaden their vision, put brand on the agenda, and obtain a much better view of the world; there’s a huge market out there to dip into, and they cannot remain complacent forever. As the region liberalizes further and, step by step, integrates even deeper into the world community, local brands will be forced to become more proactive and view business through a truly global lens. If these brands don’t go international, there will be an additional wave of international brands that venture here and make a significant impact in the Middle East’s seemingly safe home markets.

After all, it’s not just Arab brands that want to go global… 

1 September 2009, posted by Jamil Armanazi