SXSW 2011 – Congratulations! Your Brand is About to Become Obsolete
http://schedule.sxsw.com/events/event_IAP7110
Andrea Ring, Managing Director of Planning, R/GA
William Charnock, Chief Strategy Officer, R/GA
It’s Sunday morning, and I think I’m hitting the wall big-time for this conference, feeling pretty worn down. Damn that Lisa Barone, she makes this look waaay too easy. Two cups of Starbucks didn’t even make a dent. Now I’m in the packed conference room and they are testing the mics. BUZZZZ RIIINNGGGG!! Wow, massive sound feedback problems assaulting our ears! We’re awake, we’re awake! Please make it stop! We’ll buy whatever you’re selling!
William starts: Our agency has a digital bias. Our relationship with our clients has changed over the past two years. Rather than being project focused, clients are looking for help in terms of the future of brand from the digital perspective.
Who is their brand, in the digital perspective. But people are stuck thinking about Brands using the old model from 30 or so years ago. A brand is the money you get that people pay that’s more than just a commodity.
ANDREA: Interbrands notes in a chart that strong brands beat the S&P 500. However, Ford is reducing in value year over year. Kodak is the same issue, falling off the face of the earth, Borders was another. So why is this happening?
A common perception is obsolesce is just what happens and there’s nothing you can do about it. Cunard cruises disappeared after airplanes came out. Fur stores used to be everywhere, but that almost disappeared due to PETA and other social influences. Kodak had trouble shifting out of the film businesses, when everything went digital. Ford said they were blindsided by competitors.
But who survived? There are some brands in the Interbrand chart that survived. We think they were so big they were able to block and own channels. In the 60s in broadcast, brands that owned the airwaves ruled, relying on their scale to dominate the channel. Scale used to be the advantage, but.
WILLIAM: We now have universal distribution of communication, everyone is now a broadcaster. There’s no longer a competitive advantage in this space. Also, everyone now has ubiquitous information, so people have the tools they need to get information from experts, get data, and make up their own minds about Brands, not just what Brands were saying.
Reality shift, we’ve moved from perception to reality, we have emotional relationships with Brands, these need to be what’s going on in the realworld. I believe marketers are spending too much time outside the real world. Consider, gathering data takes 6 months for qualitative and quantitative data, but that makes it out of date. Focus groups are not real data, there are customers you can gather data from now in realtime. This era is not about perfection and Broadcast quality standards, instead create something and let it iterate over time.
So, the closest point to obsolescence is when the Brand is at the highest point of success (middle of a bell-curve chart). We’ve been trained to maintain consistency when you’re at the top, but this is the point where Brands need to change most. When you are most successful, that’s when you need to drive change.
ANDREA: The biggest point of obsolescence is when Brands can’t recognize the need for change, that’s a sign. Ideas like bank aggregation, which became Mint.com. Application store became iTunes.
WILLIAM: The root cause of obsolescence is Brand itself, the structure of it and the obsession of being rear-view focused. So ask a Brand:
1. What are you doing that’s new and interesting? Those brands that were thinking in the future were able to answer that, backward brands couldn’t.
2. Why are you in business? You’re not in the business of making money, What’s your purpose beyond selling a product or service?
These two questions are more helpful for defining a brand.
In traditional marketing, there was a lot of talk about Brand as a story, it was metaphor based, overly so.
In digital marketing, there is a lot of talk about brand systems, utility, information.
Where these two worlds come together, between system thinking and story thinking, Brands can have success. Advertising is more about showing people what can be possible, and what’s available somewhere else. Sites are moving away from intensive and heavy to lighter and easy consumption of information.
We think where both worlds come together is “play.” Storytelling doesn’t go into this, but this is where we are going. Play is the glue that sticks us together as a community. A playground is about people, purpose and objects. This idea of play is not fixed, but something that can build and grow over time. What’s the territory of the playground for the Brand? The purpose helps us define that. What objects and tools and people we invite into the playground is the digital platform.
| WHO: | Audience | Participant | User |
| WHAT: | Intention | Action | Information |
| WHY: | Empathy | Solidarity | Utility |
The center of the spectrum above, Participant, Action, Solidarity is where to be.
If we can get people playing together we can, especially with participant, action, and solidarity (think of Call of Duty) that can become a very powerful Brand platform.
Brand Purpose = Why you are in business, helps identify the direction of innovation. This pushes people into understanding the business they are in, beyond products and services.
ANDREA: Products become obsolete, don’t focus on products, that takes you down the backside of the obsolescence curve. By focusing on purpose you can move above and beyond the obsolescence curve. Example of Ford, what if they are in the mobility business, not just car business. What about transport like trains, public transport, other mobility playgrounds. Barnes and Noble, don’t focus on books, see yourself as being in the reading industry. That’ how Nook was born, unlike Borders. Google is doing it right. They are not about search engines, they are about organizing the worlds information, about useful information. Nike is doing this very well, they are not about sneakers, they are about performance.
What is it about Brands that people will pay for? It’s about purposeful play, everyone in the brand needs to get behind the idea of what the business is about, and create something customers can do with the brand to play and build together.
WILLIAM: The brands that are doing well in Interbrands study are Google, Netflix, Amazon. These companies change in realtime, they use data more than any other brands. You see it in their everyday decisions, they are not doing 6 or 12 month iterations. You can invite more people to participate and play, and that grows the brand.
5 rules of play, seeing your brand as a system:
1. Be interesting: Example, Chapstick, created a facebook fan page. We wanted to figure out what interests people about the Brand, what’s interesting to them? We invited people to a contest of Sing Your Love, we got hundreds of amazing videos on Youtube from people (shows videos that have very high production value from regular people).
We wanted to know who the fans were and what they thought about the brand.
2. Be Surprising: Play actually gets better when unusual things happen. That’s why play is a learning experience. Surprising is better than being expected. Try new and unexpected things. The digital space allows small, easy to use things to try. I’d like to see Brands doing things that are a little unexpected.
3. Get real, in real time: Don’t’ wait for labs, get out in the real world with realtime data and real people.
4. Open your experiments: Netflix gave out a $1M prize for a better recommendation. Not only were they experimenting, they were reaching out to their greatest users. Look at your power users for any Brand, they are probably already out there experimenting already, get involved with them.
5. Shift before shift happens: Just when you’re feeling comfortable, it’s already too late. Example being Nike +, it’s been around since 2006 but now it’s so different than what it was. There were shifts that happened back then that would have rendered them obsolete, but they changed. (shows video from Nike+ about the new Nike with GPS to track progress. Accelerometer to track stationery running, crowd yell when FB likes your comment, other cool engagement things).
And with that, this session is over and we’re heading into questions. And I’m looking for an energy boost.
