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5 Ways to Become a More Inspired Brand

Thinking small matters as much as thinking big. So does taking a stand.

Inspiration is a word companies love to throw around to describe their businesses and brands, but guess what? Most businesses and brands are not inspired or inspiring. They live in functional worlds, providing functional benefits – competing on price, features and share of voice; never truly feeling confident about their decisions.

“They surprise and delight at moments that matter, stay true to their values and turn consumers into passionate brand advocates.”

The brands that stand at the top of Prophet’s Brand Relevance IndexTM, brands like Southwest, LEGO and Starbucks, for example, are inspired brands. They strive for a higher purpose and capture our imagination. They surprise and delight at moments that matter, stay true to their values and turn consumers into passionate brand advocates. And sometimes even more importantly, they inspire the people that come to work for them every day.

5 Ways Smart Companies Find Inspiration

Look beyond your company’s walls and learn from what has worked for others.

1. Smart companies obsess about their customers and deliver what matters.

At Panera, the food is good and priced competitively, while the service is fast and friendly. But it’s the commitment to good-for-you foods—clean, simple, and healthy—that makes Panera an inspired brand. As Americans’ concerns about food and farming have expanded, Panera has led the way in education about agriculture and ingredients. (The new “No-No List” is a great example.) It has earned the credibility to cast itself in a coveted role—a trusted teacher. Customer obsession was covered deeply in our first blog in this series and remains the number one source of inspiration for companies.

2. They “thief and doctor” best practices both inside and outside their category.

We often ask the question of our clients, “If you were more like Disney or Uber or Zappos, what would you take from what they are doing to drive change in your organization?” The answers are always surprising. The best healthcare companies, for instance, aren’t just looking to the Mayo Clinic or Cleveland Clinic for inspiration. They are just as likely to be asking how they can provide amenities as luxurious as the Four Seasons, service as consistent as Nordstrom or experiences as magical as Disney. They understand that inspiration usually requires more than imitation. They infuse borrowed ideas with their own brand identity to create a distinctive offering or experience.

3. They explore their own heritage.

Consumers crave authenticity, so brand history can offer an almost endless source of lessons. We often take clients out on what we call “brand safaris” to delve into the stories of companies such as Levi Strauss and Ford Motor Co. Studying how these great American brands honor their heritage, yet still inspire customers today always sparks fresh thinking. Levi’s found its mojo again when the 529 was reinvented into the “hot skinny” jean, and Ford inspired all of us by fully reimagining its F-150. Don’t disregard the past for future inspiration simply because it’s in the past.

4. They think big and small.

Responding to large demographic changes is essential. If you don’t respect Gen Y’s demand to do everything on their phones, you won’t win. But it also means listening to the growing desire for personalization across every customer segment. That trend has inspired companies that range from Birchbox, with its curated beauty offerings, to GE Healthcare, which continues to lead the field with its innovative DoseWatch, leveraging cloud technology to individualize radiation therapy.

5. They take a stand—even a risky one—to stay true to their mission.

As a company, sometimes it’s what you don’t do that becomes the most inspirational. CVS generated a great deal of publicity for its decision to stop selling tobacco products and was in the news again when it resigned its seat on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over the group’s pro-smoking stance. And it did so without apology: tobacco use conflicts with the company’s commitment to helping people on their path to better health.

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These five sources of inspiration are critical for a brand’s long-term success. To stay relevant, companies must continue to innovate, creating new and valuable experiences for its customers. To do so, brands must step outside the functional and dare to be inspirational.

This blog originally appeared on CMO.com.

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How Stadiums Enhance the Sports Fan Customer Experience

People are hungry for events that are friendly, fun and enriched with unexpected partnerships.

Nothing energizes sports fans like a brand-new stadium and behind-the-scenes access. So who better for Prophet to partner with to talk about customer experience than the Atlanta Braves, who made enriching the fan experience the focal point of their newly opened SunTrust Park?

A few weeks ago Prophet hosted approximately 40 clients and guests from companies like Coca-Cola, Equifax, UPS and Yahoo at SunTrust Park. Starting out in the expansive Hank Aaron Terrace, we took in a spectacular view of the ballpark from left field. Then we toured the dugout, clubhouse and even the ritzy Delta SKY360 Club, with behind-home-plate seating that offers the best game views in the Major Leagues.

Put the Fan Experience First

The $622 million park made a great spot to talk about what Prophet calls “next-generation customer experience,” especially as it’s lived by the Atlanta Braves staff. As the organization has been preparing for the move from Turner Field to the new park over the last four years, its also been rethinking what it wants a baseball game to mean to fans, adding exciting new elements to its rich game traditions.

This guests-first approach grew out of research that 40 percent more people in the Atlanta area rate the fan experience at a Braves’ game as ‘friendly,’ compared to other Atlanta sporting events, says Greg Mize, the Braves’ director of digital marketing, and Chandler Faccento, the guest services manager.

Enhance the Fan Experience with New Technology

People also rate the Braves as better value and more innovative. So the team is working to strengthen this notion with helpful new apps, such as a partnership with Waze and Uber that provides up-to-the-minute traffic and parking info and helps shuttle fans from parking to seats.

And it has also created a new, proprietary app called “Remedy,” which enhances the fan experience and provides guests with better customer service during games. In past years, the Braves would only hear about guest complaints at the ballpark in the days and weeks after an incident occurred. Now with Remedy, fans can report issues via the app in real-time, so the Braves and its guest services department can find a way to help the fan in the moment.

“If someone didn’t have an experience at SunTrust Park that met his or her standards, or our standards, it’s an opportunity for them to raise their hand, and for us, an opportunity to “remedy” the situation,” said Mize.

“If someone didn’t have an experience at SunTrust Park that met his or her standards, or our standards, it’s an opportunity for them to raise their hand, and for us, an opportunity to “remedy” the situation,” said Mize.

These digital connections go a long way toward enriching customer experience and resetting people’s expectations, says Peter Dixon, Prophet’s Chief Creative Officer. “Customer experience is the holistic end-to-end set of interactions–and resulting emotions and perceptions–that customers have with brands,” he says. That includes all the waypoints on the path to purchase, from how people buy tickets and park right down to the best mustard for their hot dogs.

But experience improvements have to extend beyond the obvious. “Brands need to understand what the customer is experiencing in all aspects of their lives and especially in the use of–and engagement with–their products and services,” he says. “This richer view of the customer experience will enable companies to provide greater customer value and drive sales impact.”

5 Critical Traits to Improving the Sports Fan Experience

When trying to improve customer experience, Prophet’s work with some 500 brands has shown that there are five critical traits:

  • Discipline: Customer experience won’t improve with hit or miss initiatives, but requires thorough and exhaustive efforts to reach every touch point.
  • Empathy: Putting yourself in people’s shoes means thinking about their entire lives, not just the few moments they interact with your brand.
  • Relevance: What will make your customers feel like your brand is indispensable?
  • Innovation: Brands must be constantly finding new ways to surprise and delight customers.
  • Intelligence: Leveraging tech-enabled data throughout the customer experience will make the experience more personal and more valuable.

And while some of these considerations are functional, the underlying emotional components can’t be overlooked.

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The Braves are well aware of that, and it’s no accident that they’ve made Walter Banks, who has been an usher for Braves games for 52 years, a sort of fan experience ambassador. He was on hand at the event to explain how important it is to show people to their seats with warmth. He says:

“I ask them where they are from, and how they are liking Atlanta… It’s so important that when they leave here, they think we are friendly and easy to get along with.”

No wonder the Braves have summed up their expectations with a simple two-word slogan. Welcome home. At SunTrust Park, that says it all.

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Creating a New Subcategory: A Story of Two Pizza Brands

How these brands regained their relevance, one slice at a time.

I have long argued in the book “Brand Relevance” and elsewhere that the only way to grow, with rare exceptions, is to develop customer “must-haves” that define a new brand subcategory and then manage that subcategory to success. Marketing and branding then become one of subcategory competition instead of “my brand is better than your brand” competition, and the winning brand will be the one that is most relevant. The pizza world provides two examples.

Kraft’s DiGiorno introduced in 1995 its “rising crust” pizza, the first pizza with a fresh-frozen, no pre-cooked crust. Rather than competing in the frozen pizza section, DiGiorno chose to create a new subcategory, frozen pizza brand that could deliver the same quality as delivered pizza, the only relevant brand being DiGiorno. The result was not only strong growth in sales but a 50 percent repurchase rate and a substantial price premium.

The DiGiorno positioning was developed with a series of stories delivered in a long-term advertising campaign all around the tagline of “It’s not delivery, it’s DiGiorno.” The rising crust was usually connected to the story. In one story, a person was recruited to be the DiGiorno deliveryman, a position that requires no work. In another, four people are watching a football game enjoying a DiGiorno pizza and comparing it to a delivery pizza that has a soggy crust. In still another, a couple enjoying a pizza observes that they do not have to tip the delivery boy. Over two decades the stories keep coming, all making the point that people experience as good or even better pizza than delivered pizza if they use DiGiorno and they don’t have the inconvenience nor the higher price point. The new brand subcategory thus appears to differentiate with a compelling value proposition.

“The new brand subcategory thus appears differentiating with a compelling value proposition.”

Domino’s Pizza went from a 9 percent share (and falling) of the pizza restaurant business in 2009 to 15 percent in 2016 by first reframing its brand to be relevant and then reframing the category using a host of stories along the way.[i] Its stock went up 700 percent during that time.

The story started with the “cardboard crusts” comments from customers, taste tests in which the brand finished last, and the use of frozen or canned ingredients. In response, the company decided to completely reinvent their pizza from the crust up. The effort culminated in a product that won taste tests, a PizzaTurnaround.com website that documented customers’ responses to the new pizzas, a 2009 “Oh yes we did” video and an ad that showed Domino’s chef personally delivering the completely reformulated pizza to some of their biggest critics.

During that time, Domino’s created a new brand subcategory defined by “must-haves” around the ordering and delivery of pizza created by a new 30-person technology team hired in 2009. Domino’s provided a dozen ordering options involving “Easy order” apps, Facebook, Twitter, Apple Watch, voice-activated, “zero-click”, and more. Several provided content for user stories. Its online Pizza Tracker service allowed customers to track the status of their pizza in real-time. In 2016, half the orders were placed online, up from 20 percent in 2009. Delivering innovations include a modified car that holds 80 pizzas in a warming oven and keeps beverages cold as well as experiments with drones and robots made for interesting stories. The story of a drone delivering a pizza in the UK got nearly 2 million views.

i Susan Berfield, “Delivering a $9 Billion Empire,” Bloomberg Businessweek, March 20-29, 2017, pp. 42-47.

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It is remarkable that growth surges in any product category are almost always explained by the creation of a brand subcategory. The lesson is to devote some resources to “must-have” innovations to take some risks when the opportunity to create and leverage a new subcategory emerges, and to think of subcategories instead of “my brand is better than your brand” competition.

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Three Ways Innovation Can Keep Your Brand Relentlessly Relevant

New ideas should explore ways to create more value for people, targeting loyal customers for fast learning.

On their mission to stay relentlessly relevant, the best brands are constantly scrutinizing their innovation goals, objectives, approach and track record. They are obsessed with what their competitors are doing and what their customers are yearning for. They know that without innovation, their organizations will not be able to grow and thrive.

While innovation may once have been the sole purview of R&D, the best companies pursue innovation through a much wider lens. They look for transformation everywhere—in new experiences, channels, value propositions, content and communications.

“Digital technology has rewritten many of the rules of innovation, enabling brands to get ideas from new sources in nonlinear ways.”

Where should we look for models of success? In Prophet’s Brand Relevance Index®, we see brands like PlayStation, WeChat and Apple rise to top as examples of brands that aren’t resting on their laurels. They push the status quo, engage with customers in new and creative ways and find new ways to address unmet needs.

To drive innovation and transformational change, companies must embrace three important traits:

  1. Pursue a higher calling.

Many companies are boxed in by constraints of their own making—stubborn ideas about who they are and how they should compete, based solely on what they’ve done in the past. That rigidity crushes breakthrough innovation before it can even be considered. But when leaders understand the why of their businesses—their higher purpose—new ideas surface and push aside old assumptions.

Evernote, for example, is continually improving the way it organizes people’s personal and professional lives by synching information across devices. (Showcased in the total revamp of its version 8.0 which cleaned up the app by making it faster and simpler to use.)

Even established brands, such as Walt Disney, can deliver exceptional results when it stays true to their higher purpose. Witness Walt Disney’s sweeping My Magic+ digital upgrade to its parks, which is pumping up customer satisfaction by creating a happier, more memorable experience for its guests.

These companies don’t innovate just for innovation’s sake. Instead, they ensure every potential initiative will create value for customers. They make smart decisions based on their companies’ higher purpose, and by doing so they achieve relentless relevance for their brands.

  1. Stake the future on the unknown.

Innovation requires opening the aperture, taking a broader, deeper and potentially longer view of your customers’ underlying wants and needs, even the ones they can’t articulate yet. And while history and past performance should influence an organization’s decisions, free-thinking companies don’t allow that legacy to squash new ideas. They step beyond their past, finding new ways to interact in the marketplace.

In some respects, it’s easier for newer companies to do this. A company such as Birchbox can be nimbler than, let’s say, 3M. But that doesn’t matter when a company’s leadership commits to empowering a more innovative culture. Beginning in the 1950s, 3M urged its employees to spend 15% of work hours pursuing their own ideas, many of which became viable new businesses. This strategy has inspired many tech companies, including Apple’s BlueSky and LinkedIn’s InCubator. Because these companies push employees to think outside of the traditional framework of their roles, they’re more open to new ideas.

Additionally, digital technology has rewritten many of the rules of innovation, enabling brands to get ideas from new sources in nonlinear ways. Companies such as GE pioneered open innovation, and open development has become the norm for Silicon Valley.

As companies embrace ideas from external sources, they are shaking up internal structures in response, as well. Often, that involves expanding the reach of the marketing team. But, as a 2014 U.K. study found, a solid majority of marketers (77%) believe their innovation was blocked by a risk-averse culture. This may be a current organizational reality, but since marketers are often closest to customers’ pain points as well as competitors’ moves, they must increasingly make the effort to break down silos and propel their organizations to progress.

  1. Apply lessons quickly, confidently and continuously.

Only the most innovative companies—and, yes, those with the most digital dexterity—have truly mastered a test-and-learn approach. As an innovation speeds through iterative cycles, the company gathers valuable input at every stage.

This fast learning usually comes from the company’s most loyal customers. Video-game makers preview new titles with the toughest reviewers. Fashion brands offer influential bloggers sneak peeks of new collections. And craft beer makers organize “insider” tastings.

That feedback creates a virtuous cycle, providing an unparalleled level of confidence. The conviction of knowing what customers want at a deeper level makes these companies more agile.

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3 Strategies to Achieve Customer Obsession – and the Brands Doing it Right

Companies like GoPro, LEGO and Netflix see customers as people, not transactions.

Today’s consumers are experts at ignoring the tens of thousands of brands that don’t interest them. But for their favorites, they go above and beyond what “rational” people do. What makes these rare brands—stalwarts such as Apple and Starbucks, or emerging favorites such as Stitchfix and Snap—stand out from the competition?

These brands, as noted in our Prophet Brand Relevance IndexTM, have made it their mission to continually find new ways to engage and delight customers. We call these relentlessly relevant brands. These brands religiously commit to four big principles: customer obsession, distinctive inspiration, pervasive innovation and ruthless pragmatism.

In this blog, we’ll look at the first tenet: Customer obsession.

It’s The Customer’s World; Brands Are Simply Living in It

Today, customers respond to brands that respond to them. It’s not just about what they buy, it’s how they buy it; getting what they want, how and where they want it. And they want to buy from brands that “get” them. Brands that fail to embrace a profound customer-centric “outside-in” approach are at risk of being quickly dismissed and overtaken by challengers, potentially overnight.

Building a relentlessly relevant brand begins with adopting a customer-obsessed mindset. Being customer-obsessed requires a pervasive focus on not just what customers want, but brands must also gain a greater customer understanding, and especially, empathy for what is important in customers’ whole lives, not just the narrow slice where brands interact with them. It is with this view that a brand can make itself relevant in the moments that matter.

Three Simple Steps to Customer Obsession

1. See your customers as people, not transactions.

Most marketers approach customer insights by asking, “What will it take to get our customers to buy more?” They are using a transactional lens, making their focus too narrow. They are listening to customers but not really hearing what’s important: what customers are saying to each other online, on social media, in reviews and in context with the greater world around them. This leaves most companies deaf to the deeper conversations that can reveal opportunities to build true and profound relevance with their customers. Marketers need to understand a complete view of their customers’ world in order to gain more attention, intention, and engagement.

Marketing agility will be a term you will hear often over the next few years, forcing marketers to move from broad to focused and back again, allowing them to truly understand the whole customer, and giving them the power to inspire breakthrough innovation rather than incremental progress.

Let’s take Netflix, for example. This brand has reshaped its category by embracing customer obsession and becoming an indispensable part of customers’ lives in 50 countries with nearly 33.3 million subscribers worldwide, according to Statista. Netflix built its success on developing a keen sense of what people love to watch and how they love to watch it. The micro understanding of customers is delivered through hyper-personalization and recommendations based on behavioral algorithms.

Customer obsession allowed Netflix to create the category breakthroughs that traditional media never thought was possible. Unlike traditional media, Netflix understood its customers’ hunger to binge-watch new TV series and pivoted its content release strategy. It wasn’t long before HBO, Amazon and Hulu followed suit.

2. Seek common ground and shared interests with customers.

Most marketers approach brand building by asking, “How can we differentiate from our competitors?” Customer-obsessed marketers understand that brands have the power to create deeper connections and motivations by finding common ground – shared interests between what matters in their customers’ lives and what they do as a company.

Facing a heavy-hitting competitive set, GoPro set out to be an adventurous lifestyle brand that made technology products, rather than a tech company marketing to athletes. It created products specifically designed to equip adrenaline junkies for whom the sharing of their stories from adventures in surfing, snowboarding, sky-diving and auto racing was almost as important as doing them. GoPro ignited its customers’ desire to capture their own epic feats and bring family and friends along for the ride.

With user-generated content pouring in, the customers themselves became the marketing engine to build the brand. And it worked: The company increased its marketing cost by only $41,000 in 2013 but made $28 million more in net income than it did in 2012.

3. Embrace the change your customers demand.

Most marketers ask, “How can we sell customers what we’ve got today?” Customer-obsessed brands welcome change because they understand maintaining relevance means thinking dynamically and staying nimble to anticipate customer demand. Customer-obsessed marketers seek to anticipate where the puck is heading by asking, “What will our customers be looking for next, and how can we deliver?”

Customers’ needs and attitudes will inevitably shift, and competitors will attempt to emulate other brands’ success. Customer-obsessed brands anticipate the need for change by more actively sensing what is changing in what customers value. This obsessed focus on what’s changing in customers’ attitudes will allow brands to lean forward and act with an agile mindset, ahead of their competition.

LEGO’s focus on being customer-obsessed has enabled it to continue building relevance by imagining new possibilities for kids and their parents. Dubbed “the Apple of toys” by Fast Company, the Danish toy company knows a lot about the future of play. LEGO’s Future Lab analyzes massive amounts of global data and conducts deep ethnographic research to understand what’s next. Its diverse product portfolio has grown to keep builders engaged as they grow.

When LEGO faced increasing competition from digital entertainment, it successfully partnered with Harry Potter, Star Wars and Ninjago to keep customers engaged. LEGO puts customers at the helm of their own innovation with LEGO Ideas–an online community that invites builders to submit their own ideas for the next LEGO set. The community votes to pick their favorites and LEGO selects winners to create actual products, giving the inventor a portion of sales. With storylines, characters and humor that entertains kids and adults alike, LEGO proves when it comes to creative play, their brand will be relentlessly relevant.

Being customer-obsessed requires a pervasive focus on not just what customers want, but brands must also gain a greater customer understanding, and especially, empathy for what is important in customers’ whole lives, not just the narrow slice where brands interact with them.

This post originally appeared on CMO.com.

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Customer-obsessed companies realize that the world and the lives their customers are leading are changing fast. The notion of “adapt or die” could not be more critical for companies when it comes to embracing the idea of customer obsession. If they don’t, they will never achieve relentless relevance and may be facing the exact opposite – irrelevancy – the worst fate a brand can suffer.

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5 Strategies to Improve Retail Customer Experience

Even small changes can make shopping more fun, immersive, rewarding and convenient.

There is no doubt that Amazon is upending the retail landscape.  The number of retailers filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2017 is headed toward its highest annual tally since the Great Recession. Brands like HHGregg, The Limited, Wet Seal and Gander Mountain have already filed, and Sears recently stated it doesn’t know how much longer it can survive.

Consumers’ love for Amazon is echoed in Prophet’s Brand Relevance IndexTM, which ranks Amazon as No. 2 among more than 300 brands.

But a closer look at our research reveals that many brands are, in effect, making themselves Amazon-proof. They gain relevance by excelling at aspects of retailing that Amazon—for all its pragmatic brilliance—just can’t touch. (At least not yet.)

Sephora, for example, places 10th overall but moves even higher on our measures of customer obsession. So does Costco (No. 30). And while Etsy is No. 23, it zooms to No. 2 when ranked on the sentiment “makes me feel inspired.” Only Pinterest did better.

These brands are making themselves relevant to consumers in ways Amazon finds difficult since it is still (at the time of print at least!) primarily an online retailer.

5 Strategies to Improve Retail Customer Experience

Here are five lessons retailers—and in fact, many brands—can adapt to protect themselves against the Amazon effect:

1. Create a More Immersive, Engaging Customer Experience

The bliss of Amazon Prime, of course, is getting exactly what you want in a few clicks. But sometimes, people want to spend more time shopping, not less, and brands that understand that are way ahead of competitors. This is where retailers need to up the ante with customer experience.

Women want bras that fit, for instance. Based on that insight, Victoria’s Secret (No. 43) equips all associates with a tape measure, training and plenty of product solutions. Nike (No. 7) hosts weekly run clubs out of its stores, while Lululemon offers in-store yoga classes.

This engagement extends beyond the store, too, with digital technology that makes shopping more meaningful. For example:

  • Sephora uses augmented reality to let women experiment with false eyelashes or learn how to use contouring makeup. Lowe’s has created holographic rooms for DIYers to explore layouts, fixtures and colors before they pick up a sledgehammer.
  • Nike stores include run analyzers and basketball courts to photograph people in action, using the images to make more specific product recommendations.
  • At The North Face (No. 46), IBM Watson’s AI capabilities help customers find the perfect product. Mirroring in-store conversations, Watson can take unstructured text such as “I need a jacket for biking in Chicago winters” and deliver personalized recommendations.

2. Reward the Treasure Hunters

Some shoppers love to think of themselves as treasure hunters, with each trip to a favorite store giving them a chance to “win” by finding something unexpected, beautiful, rare or maybe just a tremendous value.

Knowing how to reward these dedicated hunters is what fuels the success of brands as diverse as Etsy, Costco, Target, eBay and T.J.Maxx. These brands make the chase meaningful by constantly showcasing new merchandise, sharing valuable content about its source and making it clear that it won’t be available forever.

Target is reimagining its store with two entrances, each with a specific guest need in mind. For the guests that want to browse and discover, they’ll be able to enter through one entrance to find displays of exclusive brands and inspiring seasonal moments.

3. Inspire Consumers

The ability to distinctively inspire consumers is one of the four key drivers of relevance, and it is nearly as powerful as pragmatism. Specialty retailers have an innate advantage here because they’re steeped in passion points that no mass brand can match. The smart ones fuel those passions.

Visitors to the North Face stores, for example, get a chance to experience a world-class hiking experience through a virtual reality headset. At L.L.Bean, shoppers can watch speckled and rainbow trout swim in a vast aquarium.

Meaningful content creation also inspires, from the deeply educational (like Lowe’s how-to videos) to advocacy and purpose (such as Patagonia’s messages about protecting the planet). Content creates emotional connections. Retailers can learn from storytellers about building those bonds, and then stay current by delivering them on the best digital platforms: Victoria’s Secret is using 10-second clips to create stories on Snapchat, for example.

4. Shopping is Social, So Make It More Fun

Often, people want to share their shopping experiences with friends and family. A Chicago Nordstrom has added a bar to its menswear department, for example, making it even more fun to linger over that tie selection. Digitally, this works too: Smart mirrors in stores make it easy to send an image from a dressing room to a BFF for a second opinion.

5. Find New Ways to Save Customers’ Time

There’s no denying that the retail industry is undergoing painful contractions, due in large part to the scramble toward omnichannel retailing. Large department stores have spent aggressively to build up their e-commerce sites, and many are doing too little, too late—and they can’t match Amazon’s prices anyway. (While it’s still early, Walmart may be the exception.)

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of ways to save people time and that retailers shouldn’t be trying to aggressively close the gap with Amazon. Besides trying to establish itself in the “order online, pick up in store” grocery space, Walmart is exploring ways to save and enhance time in stores, too. A deli kiosk lets customers select meats and cheeses, choose the quantity either by weight or number of slices and select the thickness preference of each slice. Customers then can continue shopping while deli staff fill the order and place it in a special cooler next to the kiosk where the customer can pick it up.

Will it work? Eventually, we think, it will. “We’ve always been about saving people money,” a Walmart exec recently told investors. “Now we’re about saving people time.”

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It’s often said that Amazon is devouring the retail universe. While there is some truth to that statement, there are plenty of ways retailers – and other brands – can carve out a niche to stay relevant to consumers in the age of Amazon.

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Building Relevance in Financial Services – It’s All About Customer Experience

People crave the kind of holistic experiences that can only come from cross-collaboration and plenty of data.

We believe relevance—how meaningful brands are in people’s daily lives—is the single biggest determining factor of a brand’s long-term success. It’s what makes companies like Amazon, Android and Netflix, which are at the top of Prophet’s Brand Relevance Index™ (BRI), successful. They have made themselves so indispensable that their fans can’t imagine a day without them. But relevance is a currency most financial brands just don’t have. Only three financial services companies crack our top 50: PayPal, TurboTax and Visa. And the bottom of the list is a different story – it is jammed with banks, insurance companies and wealth-management firms that struggle to achieve meaningful engagement with their customers.

The Pragmatism of Financial Brands

The BRI, which is based on a survey of 15,000 U.S. consumers, measures what we believe are the four drivers of relevance: customer obsession, distinctive inspiration, pervasive innovation and ruthless pragmatism. Financial brands scored the best in ruthless pragmatism—as they should. Pragmatism is measured by consumer responses to statements like “I know I can depend on this brand,” “it makes my life easier” and “it’s available when and where I need it.” Consumers are sending the message that basics matter: if a bank can’t handle mobile deposits or an insurance company doesn’t pay claims, what good is it?

But this pragmatism doesn’t stand on its own, and for the brands that ranked higher than most,  pragmatism was coupled with high levels of customer obsession. Meaning they took the millions of data points at their disposal and translated them into relevant services, products and experiences that make consumers’ lives run a little more smoothly.

Examples of Successful Financial Customer Experiences

The financial brands that embrace ruthless pragmatism and customer obsession can be just as fiercely beloved as those in other categories. Let’s look at three brand examples:

  1. Most people only turn to TurboTax once a year, but they love how it makes a difficult task in their lives easier. More people in the U.S. said TurboTax “meets an important need in my life” than any of the 300-plus brands we measured.
  2. Visa is an “old reliable” that has become a digital-first thinker.
  3. PayPal, which emerged as a super-dependable way to make online payments when it was still on the eBay platform, is safer and faster than ever.

All three excel in mobile technology. And most of all, they understand that they are not in the business of creating financial products. They know their role is enabling better customer experiences.

Build Experiences, Not Products

In our work with financial companies, we push toward experience-led thinking by asking our clients to reimagine the industry and what their brand would look like if they were starting from scratch today.

It would probably look something like Mint, Intuit’s personal finance software, which lets customers see all their money and expenses in one place.

It would likely include something like Venmo, the PayPal-owned payment app millennials love so much, or SnapCash, the payment platform preferred by Gen Z.

It might even borrow elements from WeChat, which ranks as the second most relevant brand in our Brand Relevance Index in China. (Started as a chat app, WeChat added digital payments, e-commerce, fundraising and microloans.) From this platform, what’s needed next is translating all that information into personalized products, services and experiences.

It’s the Holy Grail. No one has done it yet, and many branding experts can’t believe mainstream financial services companies, with all that marketing muscle, are still so behind the curve.

“Internally, there is no unified view, which makes creating one for their customers very difficult.

That’s a little glib. Those of us working in the industry know that the obstacles are real. For one thing, changing regulations, like the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010, have created challenges. For another, unlike start-ups from Silicon Valley that can get away with years of losing money, the investors who own these established companies demand profits, not losses.

But the biggest problem they face is their own organizational structures. Historically, each type of product—retail banking, mortgages, retirement, and various policies—are housed in distinct silos, governed by separate profit-and-loss statements. Internally, there is no unified view, which makes creating one for their customers very difficult. And the reality is that employees are incented to focus on products, not experiences, in order to meet their product sales goals.

Think Holistically About Customer Experience

Solutions can only come from thinking holistically. At companies that are becoming more customer-obsessed, there’s a growing understanding that “brand” isn’t something that comes from the marketing department. It develops and grows in every department—sales, distribution, product, and technology. Similarly, the mindset throughout the organization needs to shift from “what can we sell?” to “what value exchange can we create?” In building long-term relationships with customers, what types of products and services make people say, “This brand isn’t just out to make a quick sale—it really has my back?”

This requires taking giant steps away from “business as usual” thinking. Ford CEO Mark Fields, for example, shook up the automotive world with the announcement that the company is striving to be “a mobility company,” not just a car manufacturer. This has enabled it to develop brand-new approaches to the way today’s consumers think about urban transportation. What will be the equivalent shift in financial services?

The most important step financial companies can take to gain relevance is getting every division on the same page: Improving customer experience and engagement. And that can only come from customer obsession, constantly pushing all departments to work harder to see things from the consumer’s point of view.

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Most financial companies aren’t able to do this yet, but they are trying. That’s evident in the widespread acceptance of multichannel offerings, with banks understanding that customers expect to be able to have their needs met no matter where they are or what time it is. And many are closer to making their offerings channel-agnostic, with ultra-pragmatic mobile solutions.

Sometimes, companies ask us about increasing the other drivers of relevance– distinctive inspiration and pervasive innovation. We discourage them unless they are already performing well on more pragmatic measures and customer obsession. If a bank is staffed by surly tellers or brokers who provide confusing statements, even the best performance on other measures can’t help. These may seem like table stakes, but our rankings prove otherwise.

For today’s consumers, relevance requires delivering useful and engaging experiences powered by technology. The only thing that will work is improving the experience at every touchpoint, providing relevant content and taking the broadest view of customers. It’s not about making a better financial product. It’s about making consumers’ lives better. Relevance doesn’t come through branding. It’s built on these rewarding experiences.

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Why the Failed Unilever-Kraft Heinz Merger is a Very Good Thing

Had it succeeded, the merger likely would have ended Unilever’s admirable social programs.

The Brazilian private equity group, 3G Capital, who own Kraft Heinz and InBev, and whose strategy was summarized by Fortune as “Buy Squeeze Repeat,” were rebuffed in their effort to buy Unilever. Thank goodness.

Unilever is a shining light. In 2010, Unilever launched USLP (Unilever Sustainable Living Plan) with the vision of addressing the environmental and social problems in the world. Unilever has a host of specific environmental goals dedicated to reducing its footprint (cutting it in half), getting people access to safe water, increasing the use of renewable energy and stopping hazardous waste from going to landfills. Social programs abound at Unilever, like Dove’s programs to raise girls’ and women’s self-esteem and Lifebuoy’s program to change handwashing habits to reduce infant deaths throughout the world (they are halfway toward the goal).

Unilever’s Belief in Corporate Responsibility

The rationale, as explained by CEO Paul Polman, is fascinating. He notes that (in part) because of the limits of capitalism, we have created an unsustainable set of problems which include global warming, resource depletion and an increasing gap between the rich and poor. He believes that businesses have a responsibility to address these related issues. The Unilever business model calls on the firm to be an active contributor in finding solutions. Toward that end, the needs of citizens and communities carry the same weight as the demands of shareholders at Unilever.

“The Unilever business model calls on the firm to be an active contributor in finding solutions.”

Polman argues that such actions will help businesses in the end. Better employees, especially millennials, will be attracted. Enough customers will respect – even admire – you to make a difference. And, brands will get more visibility and energy, key determinants of long-term success. By raising the living standards of third-world counties, new markets will open. The risk of catastrophic damage to the environmental, social and economic framework will be reduced; which should objectively be a plus for business.

The Kraft Heinz Difference

In sharp contrast, 3G Capital strategy acquires and merges firms, and then ruthlessly reduces headcount and operational expenses to sharply improve operating margins, profits and, most important, per-share earnings. During the first 15 months after buying Kraft, the employee count went from 46,600 to 41,000 and overhead went from 18.1% to 11.1%. Just days after the purchase, ten top executives were fired, office refrigerators were removed, company planes were gone, everyone flew coach, people even shared hotel rooms—all in the name of creating a cost-reduction-first culture. All programs and people were placed on a zero-based budgeting system with a “justify what you are worth” ongoing evaluation.

Because of these changes, the Kraft Heinz market cap went up sharply. Wall Street is impressed by cost moves. This strategy may work short-term, but cost-oriented strategies can and have run out of steam requiring firms to change – sometimes painfully – to invest in rebuilding brands and finding growth avenues. Maybe that will happen at Kraft Heinz and maybe not. Perhaps the lack of a higher purpose will inhibit them from hiring the best people, and adversely affect the loyalty of a part of the customer base. Or maybe not.

It seems unlikely that over time 3G will champion a higher purpose or develop substantial programs to protect the environment or address social issues to the extent that Unilever and many other firms are doing. They may be right in setting their priorities and the result may be a financial success. Or maybe not.

Unilever invests in solutions to social problems in the context of running a business. I submit that we are better off because of the Unilever’s of the world, which incidentally, include many, if not most, major firms.

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The opinion of Polman and hundreds of boards and CEOs like him is both amazing and instructive. They give credibility to the view that there are serious environmental and social problems and the private sector needs to be and can be part of the solutions facing our world today. They also provide inspiration that however dysfunctional our political systems are, the vitality, innovativeness and values of the private sector will help all of us prevail.

Want to build a higher-purpose program for your business? Prophet experts can help you build your brand through corporate responsibility.

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How to Power Brand Growth After a Merger

Prioritizing customers and employees through a merger can help you keep winning.

A merger is a unique opportunity to reimagine your business and brand. But the reality is stark: 70%-90% of mergers and acquisitions fall short of expectations. Prophet’s approach to M&A not only ensures that brand equity isn’t degraded but creates a new platform for growth through the development of a relentlessly relevant brand. This demand-driven approach is complimentary to driving efficiency of costs post-merger.

Relevance is the most reliable indicator of a brand’s long-term success. In fact, data from our latest Prophet Brand Relevance Index™ reveals that revenue growth of the most relevant brands have outperformed the S&P 500 average by 12% over the last decade on profitable growth.

It’s important to understand how to navigate this process, and mitigate the pitfalls that can derail or sub-optimize an M&A effort. This article will illustrate the key areas to focus on, and the opportunities and risks your business is likely to encounter.

The following potential pitfalls can be navigated if anticipated and addressed with a proper strategy:

  • Inadequate alignment with business strategy – Brand strategy must be informed by business strategy and designed to support strategic objectives and intent.
  • Too narrowly framing the merger as a “re-branding” effort – Mergers present a rare point-in-time opportunity to drive broader cultural and experiential change for a new brand or company.
  • Minimal internal orientation and focus – Successfully informing, engaging and enabling employees BEFORE launching externally is critical.
  • Approaching launch as a “one and done” effort – The initial launch is really only the beginning of creating a meaningful brand that is understood by consumers and valued by stakeholders.
  • Lack of coordination, integration and cohesion – Centralized planning and rigorous program management are essential to ensure success across numerous, concurrent efforts.

After all, a successful merger is defined by the value it creates in the marketplace. Effective business and brand integration goes beyond eliminating redundancies, merging teams and unveiling a new name and logo. While short-term profits can be achieved through efficiencies and cost reductions, long-term shareholder value is created through a deep understanding of customers and the power of the brand.

Developing relevant offerings that appeal to your customers will accelerate top-line growth. Additionally, creating a relentlessly relevant brand will inspire, influence and compel consumer behavior.

4 Key Areas to Prioritize for Brand Growth

Over decades of M&A work, Prophet has identified four key areas a company should prioritize to power M&A growth:

  1. Create a compelling “how-to-win plan.” This plan builds a comprehensive portfolio of company moves and customer-facing offers and experiences that deliver on unmet or underserved needs.
  2. Develop a transformative brand purpose. Building a powerful brand purpose and narrative can unify a company and establish an aspirational north star.
  3. Establish a motivating employee value proposition. This drives growth by engaging and inspiring employees to achieve their full potential and increasing the acquisition and retention of talent.
  4. Prepare to activate your brand. Ensure that your brand’s external activation shapes perceptions, changes behaviors and drives business impact.

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CONSISTENCY WITH CLOSE. To successfully integrate two companies, the M&A plan for your business and brand to win in the market must be done well and done early. It’s important to guide the newly merged company’s actions towards customers, shareholders, employees and partners not just for the duration of the merger but for many years into the future.

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Using the 5 Content Archetypes to Build a Successful B2B Content Strategy

Refining your goals intensifies the impact of this important marketing tool.

B2B businesses continue to embrace the value of content marketing to position their brands, products, and services in more relevant ways with customers and prospects. In fact, B2B companies are ideally positioned to benefit from content marketing, given the inherent nature that expertise plays and the high degree of consideration and complexity that goes into buying decisions.

However, while many B2B businesses have compelling content, most lack a clear understanding of what should drive their content strategy. Every company needs a clear focus on the kind of content they will create and who it is intended for. We call these content archetypes. These archetypes are important because they bring focus, consistency, and scalability to content in a way that gives B2B brands a distinct voice, purpose, and platform on which to speak.

In our experience, the brands that take an approach like this make stronger connections with the right audience and get significantly better returns on their investment in content marketing.

Identify Your Brand’s Content Archetype

Altimeter, the research arm of Prophet, recently published a report, “Key Elements For Building a Content Strategy” that uncovers five distinct content archetypes that guide the content strategies of the strongest B2B brands. Before diving into each, it is important to note that the best companies pick one, maybe two, archetypes as the primary focus of their strategy. Driven by their core marketing objectives, they commit to this archetype for a period of time (maybe 1-2 years) while evaluating how they are doing and evolving their approach as needed.

The 5 Content Archetypes

Let’s take a closer look at these five content archetypes:

1. Content as Presence

The first is Content as Presence. This type of content is about engaging a broad audience while promoting brand awareness and brand health. It’s typically best used to help reposition a brand in a target’s mind or expand what customers think they know about the business.

For example, IBM has done a great job using Watson content to convey a more progressive and analytical IBM, to expand what customers think IBM can assist them with, and to demonstrate how Watson is already helping a wide array of customers.

2. Content as a Window

A second archetype is Content as a Window. This type of content is about giving customers and other audiences, such as prospective employees, a view inside the company that they otherwise would not have. This content is best used for businesses that want to humanize their brand or those that believe showing how they work is a key part of their brand promise.

The global shipping and logistics business, Maersk, is a great example of this archetype. It has built one of the best B2B content positions with its focus on giving people an inside look at the company, its operations and its people. By taking down the walls around its business, Maersk provides customers, regulators and prospective employees a view into its capabilities, purpose, and global scale.

“The best companies pick one, maybe two, archetypes as the primary focus of their strategy.”

3. Content as Currency

The third content archetype is Content as Currency. This is for brands that want to be seen as subject matter experts. This type of content helps consumers make better decisions for their business. It is particularly beneficial when used to augment the expertise of a sales team, who can educate customers on the right questions to ask, provide insight into how other companies are dealing with similar challenges, and help them move forward with a complex buying process.

GE, with its Industrial Internet platform, is an excellent example of how to deliver content that helps customers move forward. With self-assessments, relevant case studies, and points of view, GE is helping businesses understand the Internet of Things and what it means for their company.

4. Content as Support

The fourth archetype is Content as Support. This one is all about helping customers extract greater value and utility from the solutions you provide. It is best used in highly technical categories when product usage is complex, and ongoing loyalty and share of wallet of existing customers is marketing’s top priority. B2B companies following this strategy should focus on educating customers and partners about how to get the most out of their products by sharing tips on installation, product usage, troubleshooting and integration.

Schneider Electric, a global provider of energy management and automation solutions, is one of the leaders with this content archetype. It publishes content about design, installation and how to lower the total cost of ownership that is helpful to both its contract partners and end-customers. This strategy enables Schneider’s sales and service teams to stay as productive as possible by giving its customers an alternative way of accessing their expertise.

5. Content as Community

And finally, we have Content as Community. This content focuses on fostering a community of customers or other stakeholders with similar needs. This approach is best suited for B2B brands in highly collaborative categories such as healthcare and technology, or those with extremely engaged and loyal customers who can serve as brand advocates.

American Express, with their OPEN platform, used content to build a community of small and medium-sized businesses. For more than 10 years, it has served as a destination for entrepreneurs to learn from American Express, and each other, about what it takes to grow and run a healthy business. OPEN is a great example a content community that creates value, without explicitly selling.

Questions to Ask When Determining the Best Type of Content for Your Brand

As you think through what archetype is best suited for your business, consider the following:

  1. What are your top marketing priorities? What part of the purchase funnel is most important to you right now – increasing awareness, winning more business or driving greater loyalty?
  2. What content will your customers find most relevant? What information do they need to help them better run their businesses?
  3. What type of content platform could you build that reinforces your brand’s promise? How can your content strategy work in concert with your sales and operations departments to drive more efficiencies and value for your customers?

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Focus Your Content Efforts

Keep in mind the key to content marketing is selecting the right archetype is focus on. The best B2B brands have figured out which one, or maybe two, of these archetypes is the best path for them to follow to create scale and deliver the best possible return on their marketing investment.

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How To Kill The Social Media Accounts You Don’t Need

Account proliferation is hobbling digital and social strategies. Social account territories can help.

As early as 2012—which seems like ancient history in social media—Altimeter researched the uncontrolled spread of brand pages on social. The first sentence of our 2012 report captured our message:

“Like a disease, social media proliferation will leave companies crippled — unless they develop a strategy to manage now.”

Problem solved? No. The problem still resonates with social business leaders today, including Alison Herzog, Director of Social Business Strategy at Dell. Herzog said, “Global businesses like Dell are complex – they’re made up of many regions, varying languages and cultures, diverse audiences and interests and wide-ranging areas of internal focus. Creating a focused, scalable social architecture and implementing this with a governing body is paramount. We knew that centering on customer experience, strategic pillars and where the real impact was possible matched with the appropriate resources would guide this, which became imperative when we completed the largest tech acquisition in history.” Prophet had the opportunity to work with the exceptional team at Dell to solve this challenge.

Social teams keep growing the number of owned accounts to keep up with continuous changes in social platforms, consumer behavior and business priorities. The result is a growing operational burden and a decrease in effectiveness per account. For many firms, like Dell, optimizing social account architecture is a requirement for effective social media innovation and performance.

Reinforcing the need for a solution is a telling data point from Altimeter’s 2016 State of Social Business report: 79% of the more than 500 strategists surveyed globally reported that “the social team is becoming more operational and a platform for other innovation teams.”

As a former social business leader at a major brand, that result didn’t surprise me. But, it heightened the importance of getting to the root of account proliferation. Business units will have a hard time using social platforms for business if they are too fragmented.  As a mature practice, we can expect the scope of social business operational responsibilities to grow, but an unchecked proliferation of pages amplifies this burden needlessly.

Can this be solved? Why hasn’t it?

Lack of governance lies at the heart of the problem. As a community of social business strategists, our “test & learn” approach has led to many impactful innovations, but rarely do we take the time to look back and decommission ideas that aren’t meeting objectives (especially individual pages/accounts that are perhaps perceived as low risk to leave abandoned).

There is a disconnect between the business objectives that initiated the page and the social team tasked with managing it. Or, the page’s creator may have left the company, making it difficult to remove. For many brands without an account management team for the social platform, filing a DMCA notice of copyright infringement may be the only option.

Another key issue is the low bar required to create a new branded page—especially if listening tools or rogue page trackers aren’t in place. Well-meaning employees may create pages for their store, an event or as a test. A few abandoned or underperforming pages may incur a little financial cost, but they quickly add up: crowding social metrics, complicating listening, confusing prospective customers with conflicting messages and – worst of all – creating the user perception that the brand doesn’t care or understand social media.

Simplifying a complex problem

As a governance problem, this is solvable—but it’s more than that. Not only do we need to fix the problem before it gets out of control, but better yet, this is the time to rethink the brand’s architecture of social media accounts.

Make a quick mental shift from today’s situation: If your current company had never implemented social media before, and had the benefit of starting from scratch, what would your social media brand architecture look like? You would want to consider the following:

  1. The Customer’s Journey. How do my social media pages fit within our broader, omnichannel customer journey? What pages do customers need and how do we create an intuitive experience that results in the outcomes we’re focused on? Does each organizational unit determine its own accounts in a silo, or is there a higher-level perspective where fewer, broader accounts could make the journey feel seamless? When is an account so broad that it loses effectiveness?
  2. The Social Network Landscape. Where is there alignment between my business goals and the capabilities, culture, user demographics and consumer behavior of social networks? It may be easy to name Linkedin for recruiting, thought leadership or B2B sales needs, but what if alignment like this isn’t so obvious?
  3. Your Team & Resources. What social account architecture meets customer needs and has teams in my organization who are ready to commit to ongoing content and engagement? While internal reorganizations may be a constant challenge, finding teams who have strong alignment between goals and a new social page (that they can run with) is ideal. Of course, the danger to avoid here is an “inside-out” architecture, where your pages reflect your internal organizational structure, rather than the market and customer you’re serving.
  4. Your influence. Beyond the issues above, if you manage social for your company, you know the decision to take down an underperforming page can be problematic. How do you convince that leader that set up a Twitter handle she rarely uses that she should re-invest or decommission the account?  What if you only have a single page in Chinese for that market, but it isn’t performing?  Do you take it down, merge with others or reinvest? These are just some “tip of the iceberg” issues that emerge.

3 steps to redefining social account architecture

In our work with Dell, we found the secret to success is to work on three fronts:

1) Identify “social account territories” that reflect coherent customer journey needs. Once identified, it is possible to optimize the social account architecture (steps 2 and 3 below) one territory at a time;

2) use a data-driven, quantitative model for making easy decisions (e.g., those pages showing great or very poor results); and

3) use a decision tree—based on governance principles that leadership supports—to make tough decisions. Decisions range from removing the page, maintaining as is, re-investing, creating a new page where there is a missed opportunity, or merging the page with another.

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With Altimeter’s deep research on this issue and Prophet’s brand strategy expertise, we’ve together developed a process that has delivered terrific results. For Dell, we helped to reduce the social team’s operational burden while allowing them to do what they do best: innovate and be a growth engine for the business. We’re grateful to Dell for working with us on this approach and pushing our thinking.

If you’re seeking guidance on your social account architecture or advice on how to re-architect your branded accounts, look no further.

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Brand Transformation: A New Approach in the Digital Age

Cultivating flexibility, adding partners and understanding new brand stakeholders can all accelerate change.

Brand Transformation: A New Approach in the Digital Age

While auto manufacturing techniques are far more advanced today than when Henry Ford opened his first factory a century ago, one thing has remained consistent over time: the assembly line. What’s different today are the components of the assembly line itself: from humans to hardware, and increasingly today, software. The average car today has more computing power than the system that guided the Apollo astronauts to the moon. This astounding reality has largely underpinned the revolution we’ve witnessed in the auto industry — from vehicle-based hardware to software-based mobility.

Just as the methods utilized to build cars has been modernized, it’s time we updated how we transform brands as well. The legacy constructs of visual and verbal expressions of a brand, coherently organized into a consistent and distinctive system, are overdue for a refresh in today’s digital context, where digital is changing what a brand looks and sounds like, as well as how it behaves —and what it can do.

How is brand transformation accomplished? Let’s first take a deeper look first at why it’s imperative, then look at the new approach and tools necessary in this time of digital disruption.

Why is Brand Transformation Necessary?

Codified in guidelines, protected by marketing departments, adopted by employees, obeyed by vendors and absorbed by customers — for more than 150 years, traditional brand identity has been painstakingly crafted and translated into an elegant, fixed systems of architecture, pillars, visual-verbal elements and more. And it worked. This exhaustive and storied approach has helped countless brands from AT&T to Zurich successfully navigate, endure and grow with consistency through decades of customer evolutions and media revolutions.

But today’s increasingly digital world demands new ways to build and manage brands. The next wave of growth for brand looks different in a world where brand is experienced through platforms and ecosystems other than its own; where touchpoints and channels multiply daily; where interfaces become invisible; where machines are increasingly responsible for deciding preference. In this new ecosystem of data, algorithm and context, what is the role of brand? And more importantly, how do we build and manage a brand in this new paradigm?

In this disruptive, digital era of customer empowerment and interactivity, brands are now growing better when they are built to be relentlessly relevant to their consumers and against their competitors.

Brand Operating System: A New Approach to Brand Transformation

To deliver relentless relevance, brands require new levels of organizational readiness and responsiveness than ever before. Rapid cycle times driven by prototyping and ongoing releases mean relevance has an ever-shrinking shelf life. Stickier networks and ecosystems make it harder to win over consumers who reside elsewhere. Participatory experiences require brands to think in terms of relevant creation—and reaction. Massive sources of data offer endless opportunities for insight.

“Today’s increasingly digital world demands new ways to build and manage brands.”

These changes call for a new approach — from a static, two-dimensional system (preserved in a PDF) to a dynamic system that connects brand across and between experiences and ecosystems, versus just across physical spaces: A Brand Operating System (BOS). A system encompassing the tools, policies and processes that create the internal infrastructure needed to develop and deliver responsive, adaptive and intelligent brand behaviors and experiences in market.

The strategic and operational challenge is that a BOS is not static. However, most companies are not yet set up to deliver in this way, still approaching brand via PDF toolkits, guidelines, siloed asset management systems and siloed governance.

How to Transform a Brand in Light of Digital Disruption

Here are three ways to transform a brand and build brand relevance:

1) Leverage New Tools

The static, inflexible, PDF guidelines of the past are insufficient. Their contents — visual, verbal and spatial considerations — still remain integral ingredients, but they must be updated for digital applications and platforms. Managing brand across new digital spaces requires new platform integrations, content and asset management systems, dashboards and tools that help you design, maintain and deploy brands in these new environments.  Your message pillars, for example, can’t be rigid. Say a new and relevant conversation is heated in the social space, a brand manager needs a flexible language platform from which (s)he can adapt or even add a pillar to recognize the current conversation. Retail environments are shifting rapidly, requiring imaginative ways to express brand in spaces as screens, beacons, biometrics and NFC proliferate. Flexible brand assets are key to staying relevant.

Furthermore, a BOS requires entirely new ingredients, namely around behavioral guidelines that assert how the brand behaves and engages. For example, a chatbot assisting customers on a brand’s site must not only take on the brand’s tone of voice but be programmed to dynamically respond to questions and queries for each unique question — and get smarter from each question asked.

That classic PDF thus becomes an inadequate format for the Brand Operating System. As a fluid system, the BOS must be able to allow for new elements to be added all the time in order to allow it to be responsive to the world in which it operates. The most precious asset thus becomes not a PDF, but a set of platforms, code, tools and ways of working, like software, that enables regular updates.

2) Brand Defines the Means Not the Motives

There’s a need to broaden the definition of brand from an articulation of a company’s motives and ambitions towards an actionable policy that concretely guides decision-making internally to shape (data-driven) behaviors. A tangible and directional positioning enables front-line/customer-facing employees (e.g. customer service, sales) to have more concrete direction on how to behave. For example, Coca Cola’s positioning of “happiness within arm’s reach” sends a clear signal to salespeople about where the product needs to be (within arm’s reach); Disney’s positioning of “magic” translates concretely into quality standards that direct specific employee behavior: courtesy (smile), safety (seat belt checks), efficiency (fast service) and show (costumes).

Means vs. motives also inform the specific code and command engineers and data scientists use to program-specific branded triggers and behaviors. With a means vs. motives approach, digital and other “behavioral” teams (engineers, data scientists, designers, customer service, sales and other front-line roles) have a more concrete point around which to activate the brand. Looking at Coke again, “within arm’s reach” a UX designer translates that brand policy to inform the information architecture of the site, or where buy buttons are placed (within a click’s reach).

3) Embrace New Brand Stakeholders

To deliver on these new touchpoints and enablers, companies must broaden the skillsets they hire for — beyond marketers, brand managers and communications planners to UX/UI interaction designers, front-end and mobile engineers, MarTech and full-stack architects, scrum masters, DevOps and systems architects, to name a few. This has implications for where you look — Glassdoor, Hacker News, StackOverflow and social media become new networks to leverage — as well as how you look. UPS, for example, shifted from 90% print budget in 2005 to 97% in social media in 2010. The result was better quality hires — the interview/hire ratio was 2:1 for applications from Facebook and Twitter compared to all other media — and a reduction in overall costs, with the cost of a new hire going from $600/700 to $60/70 each.

These new skill sets enable companies to in-source a greater number of activities that were either previously managed by agencies, or simply did not exist, in order to better control and execute the brand behaviors and experiences. An in-sourcing approach is not at the expense of outsourcing — agency support is still valuable for production and other intermittent campaigns — however, the presence of new skill sets now creates the mechanisms needed to be more agile and facile with how agencies are briefed and managed.

Cultivate Flexibility and Create New Partnerships

Increasingly, the people, processes and structures that enable relevant brand behaviors matter as much as the brand design and positioning itself. This extends beyond developing a brand management framework and instead calls for a detailed governance model that creates the skills and culture needed for a flexible, always upgrading approach to manage and activate the Brand Operating System.

For example, Buzzfeed editors are paired up with data scientists to make data-driven decisions about their editorial approach. By tracking cookies, pixels and IP addresses, Buzzfeed can understand not just individual preferences (and in turn personalize your experience), but it can better understand “clusters,” which may reveal that a population’s interest in a celebrity actress also correlates with their interest in content about a cute animal. Editors on their own wouldn’t produce this knowledge; it’s the combination of traditional (editors) and new (data scientists) that lead to powerful insights to power relevant content, and thus grow the business.

How to Get Started on Transforming Your Brand

Here are the key questions to ask as companies begin to think about the Brand Operating System approach:

  1. As the brand, do we have the right tools in our toolkit?
    • Is there access to the right technologies and tools to capture what’s necessary to deliver on behavioral brand?
    • Is brand set up in a flexible way to modify to allow for pivots as consumer and competitor dynamics shift?
    • Are the right tools in place to handle these shifts?
  2. Where can we add agility to our brand and empower employees?
    • Are the right agile approaches embedded into key points where it matters most (e.g. product and service innovation, marketing, customer service, etc.)?
    • Where else can these principles be used throughout the company to enhance relevance?
    • Are the right incentives institutionalized to encourage new behaviors across the employee base?
  3. Do we have the right organization and people in place?
    • Is the company organized internally to align the different parts of the brand’s ecosystem with more points of integration (e.g., suppliers, partners, vendors, consumers)?
    • Do employees have the right skillsets and capabilities to deliver the brand and relevant experiences?
    • Are they organized and empowered to be stewards of brand and experience via the right governance structures?

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Building a Brand Operating System takes a truly multi-disciplinary approach. At Prophet, we support our clients by combining the expertise of practitioners from Brand and Activation and Digital Transformation expertise to bring the right intersection of thinking to not only develop a new way of designing brands but also a new way of managing and deploying them (day in and day out) in service of today’s new digital experience standards.

Looking to update your brand for the digital age? Talk to our team about how and where to start.

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