Contagious ideas is spotting trends. By Jeremy DUMONT, french strategic planner : interactive communications. Join PSST (opinion and trends) www.PSST.fr

Strategic planner and project manager with 15 years experience looking forward to change the world through consumer led innovation for social and environment impact

 

LINKEDIN

 

I would like to address humanities grand challenges through product innovation and new consumer experiences to contribute to a better future. My experience in strategic planning and project management makes me a great candidate to initiate, plan and manage innovation projets in design consultancies and R&D departments. I am also interested to lead brand communications for a fast forward company embracing digital, social and environmental change.

 

To deliver on business targets I challenge current perceptions with consumers daily life insights to design :
- usefull, desirable, sustainable brands
- valuable products and services
- breakthrough digital acquisition strategies
- engaging prospect and client communications
- relevant research and data analysis enabling decision

 

Managing teams towards the realization of a common project with strong stakes is challenging, I completed a master in INNOVATION & TRANSFORMATION to :
- plan projects exploring new business models and reconciling financial, human, techs constraints
- pose complex problems with method, structure and rigor to convince decision makers
- design relevant and creative responses through design thinking to remain connected to consumer reality
- communicate the value proposition and the results effectively to concerned publics, including Comex

 

I have clarified my approach in a serie of methodological articles:
1- To (re) engage employees digital transformation must make sense #socialinnovation #purpose
2 - Experience design to create value and collectively visualize the customer experience to deliver #experiencedesign
3- Brand entertainment the new way to communicate with the -35 years on line and on TV # brandcontent
4- The animation of the collective to envision and deliver an exceptional customer experience # engagement
5 - The account planner and the designer, actors of corporate innovation and transformation #planner

 

My resume + portfolio as well as my articles are here : www.pourquoitucours.fr

 

 

GAME CHANGING & IMPACTFUL BRAND EXPERIENCES FOR THE FUTURE #socialinnovation #experiencedesign #collectiveintelligence

My experience in strategic planning and project management leads me to manage innovation projets in design consultancies or open innovation hubs. I am also interested to manage brand communications for a company embracing digital, social and environmental changes.

My strengths :
🙋‍ — Market, consumer, usage & habits research
⚡️ — Experience design applied to brands, products, spaces, campaigns...
🚀 — Innovation & transformation project management
😀 — C suite advisory and satisfaction
👪 — Collective intelligence and Open Innovation (parners / consumers)

🔍 — My articles :
1- To (re) engage employees digital transformation must make sense #socialinnovation #purpose
2 - Social innovation to meet client expectations with a positive impact on society and environment #innovationsociale
3 - Experience design to create value and collectively visualize the customer experience to be delivered #experiencedesign
4 - Brand entertainment the new way to communicate to millennials # brandcontent
5 - The account planner and the designer, actors of corporate innovation and transformation #planner

My book and articles are here : www.pourquoitucours.fr

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CV de Jeremy dumont from Jeremy dumont

Where’s the story in my company?

Over the past years one word kept popping up whenever people talked about advertising and marketing: ‘Storytelling’. And for anyone hoping this trend would one day fade away, we have some bad news. It’s not going anywhere.

We live in an age where traditional advertising is losing its power, where the younger generation is obsessed with sharing personal stories through social media, and all of us are addicted at some level to what the streaming giants have to offer. Obviously brands and companies want in on the action. Brand stories, brand narratives, purpose films, manifests, branded content, branded entertainment, viral marketing. All branches of the same tree, which trunk stems from the fundamental art of storytelling. 

Why do we even tell stories?

Most scientists will agree that life is essentially just a sequence of random moments. You are born, random stuff happens and then you die. But ever since the dawn of human intelligence we have tried to make sense of the meaninglessness of our lives. We’ve trained our brains to form patterns that connect random moments and inject meaning into them. That’s what storytelling is. It’s a way for us to get a grip on the endless chaos that would otherwise consume us. If you understand this, then you might also realize why storytelling is so much more than just entertainment. It’s an essential part of our survival, because without the ability to tell stories we would all be lost. 

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.

— Joan Didion

So how does this translate to selling a yoghurt drink? 

When Yakult asked us to help share their story to a larger audience they had no idea what that story really was. Neither did we. Because a story is not just a string of facts. We all learn at some point that “And then, and then” stories are boring and tedious. No matter how interesting the origin of your brand might be, that’s not a story in itself. The best way to find where the real gold is would be by reverse-engineering the storytelling mechanism. “Connecting dots gives meaning to life”. Find that “Meaning” and you’ll know where to look for the those dots. 

Wait, purpose?

It’s not easy to formulate your company’s or brand’s purpose, because let’s be honest nine out of ten times companies started because someone saw an opportunity to make a buck. Nothing wrong with that of course, but it’s not the stuff of stories. Purpose is often obscured and you’ll need to scrape away the bullshit to get to it. 

Almost a hundred years ago a Japanese microbiologist (Minoru Shirota) created a beverage that offered “daily health for an affordable price”. That’s good business, but also purposeful. Because not only did he create the product, he also thought about a way to get it to people who need it the most. Enter the Yakult Ladies. A group of hardworking dedicated women who ride their bikes (nowadays scooters) to clients, offering their daily portion of health in a bottle. 

Great story! All we needed to do was to show how the work of Yakult and their ladies helped Japanese people reach old age in health. Wrong. If only it was so simple. In Europe Yakult is not considered a medical product and therefor not allowed to make or even imply any health claims associated with their product. So now what?

We needed a different story

Going back to the Yakult Ladies, we found something even more powerful than the product they offer and that’s the dedication to their clients. Because as much as you want to debate the effectiveness of Yakult, you cannot deny that millions of people swear by it and cannot imagine starting their day without the tiny bottle. You could dismiss this as placebo, but perhaps there’s something more meaningful underneath? A daily ritual, a conscious moment of caring for your digestive system and if that bottle is a part of it, who’s to argue that it doesn’t work? The truth is that Japanese people reach higher ages than any other nationality. 

Sadly, old age comes with a down side. A lot of those elderly Japanese people live in solitude and are often lonely. So, you can imagine how this reoccurring visit of the Yakult Lady is of tremendous value to them, because next to suppling their weekly ration of the yoghurt drink, they offer something more valuable: attention. This is meaningful. Going back to connect the dots and this four minute film is the result of our collective search for purpose. It’s the story of Yukie, a Yakult lady who forms a special bond with one of her oldest clients and in the process discovers herself.

What could initially be considered repetitive and insignificant work, now reveals its deeper meaning and purpose. That’s why we love to tell stories: not to make stuff up, but to help people see what was always there.

https://www.miketeevee.com/blog/2019/3/8/wheres-the-story-in-my-company

BRAND PURPOSE. Positioning brands around a functional or emotional benefit isn't enough anymore, with purpose instead emerging as the heartbeat of modern brands and as a key ingredient in what makes a brand become — and stay — relevant.

 

When brand executives come to us with what they think is a positioning problem these days, we typically have an entirely different diagnosis. Usually, it's a purpose problem.

Positioning around a functional or emotional benefit isn't enough anymore, with purpose instead emerging as the heartbeat of modern brands and as a key ingredient in what makes a brand become — and stay — relevant. Brands with purpose stand for something beyond their product or service, and consumers know it. These are brands that can always answer two questions: What do we believe? And why do we exist

Purpose has become one of the best ways to inspire people, both internally and externally. And it's essential to creating shared value. Brands with purpose don't just transact with people; they deliver something more, an intangible element that becomes part of an ongoing relationship.

By the numbers 

Industry research backs this assertion up, including a recent study that found that brands with a strong sense of purpose grow at rate 2x that of those that don't. Our own Prophet Brand Relevance Index shows time and time again that components connected to how consumers interpret brand purpose propel "meaningful" brands to the top, led by the likes of Amazon, Netflix and Apple. Brands like Pinterest are beloved, while others lacking a strategic purpose may be used but lack relevance. Facebook, for instance, doesn't even crack the top 100 in our latest ranking.

Consumers can name many coffee brands, but they know Starbucks. When they lace up their sneakers or use Nike+ to track their morning run, they believe Nike is hoping to inspire the athlete inside them.

This sense of purpose isn't just about winning with customers. It's the No. 1 reason millennials choose to work for a given employer, studies have found — sometimes even trumping salary. It is then through a clear purpose that companies can attract and retain exceptional talent. It's also essential to appeal to potential partners and is the foundation for creating a meaningful experience.

Of course, this is not to say that purpose is the only thing that builds relevance, or that it immediately translates to higher sales. Brands must do many things right to succeed. But it's increasingly clear that the brands that fare the best and are the most differentiated from their competition are those with a crystallized strategic purpose. 

How to find true purpose

It's important to point out that brand purpose can, and often should, be different than a corporate mission. Unilever, for example, has staked its claim in sustainability and supported that through its portfolio of brands. But Axe's purpose is to help guys look, feel and smell their best, while Dove strives to turn beauty into a source of confidence, not anxiety.

Some brands are lucky enough to have been based on purpose from the very beginning. Parents can buy many types of toys, but their favorites are likely Fisher-Price, because they share the belief that play is learning, or LEGO, which sees all children as the builders of tomorrow. Others, such as Ford, GE and Bank of America, have reshaped their purpose to hold more meaning for today's audiences.

Centering your brand on a strategic purpose isn't easy, but the intersection of a few lenses can put you well on your way to achieving this goal:

• Societal impact — where does the world need help and you can make a difference?
• Major capabilities — what are you good at beyond the products and services provided?
• Passion point — what is your organization most passionate about?

The first step when examining these issues is to ask the question that goes to the heart of a brand's sense of itself: What do we believe? It's the value closest to the center of an enterprise, one so fiercely held that it sets it apart from peers. Many companies believe in being good corporate citizens. Only State Farm believes in being a good neighbor.

Put in simpler terms, how does your brand see the world? What makes that viewpoint different?

Examining tough questions 

The second question marketers need to answer is harder: Why does our brand exist?

This comes bundled with a few other points, such as what tensions do we want to do address? What experiences do our customers love or couldn't live without? What do our employees think we do best? A purpose is only valid if it's known, shared and prized by everyone within and around the enterprise — from potential employees to core customers to investors.

Answering this second question is a logical leap from the first. Bank of America, for example, believes in the power of meaningful connections. Its reason for existing is connecting individuals, families and businesses to make their financial lives better. GE's core belief is that with imagination, anything is possible. It exists to use that imagination to invent the next industrial era, one that will build, move, power and cure.

Answering this second question also delves into the ways your organization delivers on promises. A commitment to purpose, once crystallized and communicated to all parts of the organization, is what inspires a steadily evolving array of services and products.

Following through

Once the answers to those two questions have been synthesized and articulated into a clear and succinct brand purpose, that purpose needs to be infused in several ways throughout the organization. The smallest details matter, but so do high-level strategies. In 2014, CVS stunned many observers with its decision to stop selling tobacco products. It told customers it needed to do this to better deliver on its purpose of striving "to improve the quality of human life."

In hindsight, the retailer had to make that call in order for employees, customers and business partners to take its commitment seriously.

Finally, it's essential to continually validate your brand's purpose. While purpose reflects deep and enduring values that shouldn't change much over time, it's still essential to track the purpose of competitors. Without finding new ways to engage customers through living brand experiences, competitors can hijack your purpose and take customers with them. Is the purpose still clear and evident in every way? Are there new ways it can be conveyed more meaningfully?

Preserving relevance

By the same token, brands need to continually take the pulse of core consumers and stakeholders, monitoring shifts in the way they interpret purpose. Many concerns about sustainability, for example, have evolved to be as much about people as the planet, expanding the purpose to address issues of fair trade and human rights.

Great care must be paid to delivering on brand purpose. Ingredient scandals are destructive for all food brands, for example, but they're crippling for those positioned as especially healthy. And while Volkswagen has bounced back from #dieselgate, the damage was precisely because the fraud involved faked emissions results, negating its purpose of environmentally-sound engines. Consumers virtually always dislike bad corporate behavior, but they're especially fierce in punishing what they perceive as brand hypocrisy.

Is a strong purpose enough to make a brand soar? No. But combined with a commitment to creating living, evolving brand experiences and the recognition that brands must be powered from the inside out through culture, capabilities and engagement, it's an essential ingredient of relevance. And in today's fast-moving world, that's the currency that matters most.

source : https://www.marketingdive.com/news/how-marketers-can-find-and-convey-true-brand-purpose/521960/

 

Experience Thinking: The New Shift

In the Age of Experience, customer expectation has been transformed. It’s not just a good idea for a company or a brand to deliver an experience with their product: it is imperative when you want to have a real impact on the market. This is changing the scope of what it means to Design.

Design has evolved beyond modeling products. Products used to be the direct expression of the design intent, defined under the physical constraints of available technologies, materials, ergonomics and well defined tasks and functions. But in the Age of Experience, products are dematerialized, reduced to “black boxes”, while integrating the realm of our augmented life.

The scope and value of Design is now at a critical place.

Design’s perspective is moving from designing products to designing experiences, engaging final users in a totally new way. It goes beyond aesthetics to genuine social means, investing in a larger scope of actions across a large spectrum of new disciplines. This “transdisciplinarity” of Design impacts business models, creates new offerings and new social engagement, and convokes new uses of science for designing meaningful and sustainable experiences.

We traditionally consider “Design Thinking” as placing the “human” at the center of the project or value proposition and deciphering what people really want, but fail to express. Design Thinking was the first visible step of Design transformation, moving from the individual designer’s subjective concept towards an empathic model of engagement, leveraging a social participative approach and multiple viewpoints.

Businesses use Design Thinking to identify market opportunity and build a solution that delivers customer value.  It’s an improvement for designing a better product with clear identity, efficiency, and well-defined utilities. But the world and Design have quickly moved on to broader and more holistic issues, tackling complex systems and considering the full technological and service ecosystem by co-defining with users what makes up a unique and continuous experience.

This broader realm of “Experience Thinking” encompasses a new scope for designers, going beyond functions and harnessing the emotive power of customer experience. They script future scenarios and craft real-time 3D prototypes, use immersive technologies and virtual universes, and develop 3D digital masters with integrated information.  Designers are acquiring abilities to access new information, including knowledge gathered from studies, but also a large variety of Data captured from sensors. These combined social and science-based data provide new material for designer creativity.

Digital content is the new nexus for thoughts, interpretation and decision making. The right tools and platform for ideation, virtualization, manufacturability and sustainability enable designers and businesses to view and validate experiential designs at any stage of the development process. Designers can craft the links between products and their interactions, making visible the emotional connections and their use. Data and senses combine for new balanced proposals.

Where we go from here depends on how we use Design to transform companies’ business ecosystems to create designs that captivate users, accelerate technology adoption and deliver ethical and sustainable experiences. Users will “co-design”, modifying deeply our life experiences and changing forever the way people live, travel and interact with technology in the future.

Design professionals across industries (such as architects, industrial designers and transportation specialists) can today transform their processes, methodologies and applications for experience thinking to imagine, design and fabricate innovative proposals.

Collaborating within this new innovation environment, experience thinking can help a business build its brand’s promise and the accompanying emotions it evokes. Then, each customer experience stands on its own as a singular achievement, but also provides a perfect center of gravity that builds brand loyalty and customer satisfaction.

Discover more about Design in the Age of Experience at our event website.

Find out about Dassault Systèmes’ Design Studio here.

By Anne Asensio

New Power offers a new roadmap to build movements, spread ideas, cultivate communities, lead differently, and shift established organizations in our radically altered world.

On April 3, my first book New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--and How to Make It Work for You, is finally out from Knopf-Doubleday! And I am writing today to ask for your help. Over the last three years I’ve been working with Henry Timms – founder of #GivingTuesday – to develop the ideas we first laid out in HBR and in my TED talk. We’ve learned so much from many of you – the activists, entrepreneurs, leaders and philanthropists who are using new forms of participation to shape a better world. New Power offers a new roadmap to build movements, spread ideas, cultivate communities, lead differently, and shift established organizations in our radically altered world. We’ve had some wonderful early reactions to the book, including from Jane Goodall ("this book will inform and inspire all those wanting to make change”); Alicia Garza ("a must-read ... a gift to our movements"); Reid Hoffman (“essential and extremely insightful”) and Richard Branson (“could not be coming at a better time”). As a friend of mine and of Purpose, I’d love for you to have New Power in your hands on publication day. But we also know that these pre-orders will make a *huge* difference to the trajectory and reach of this book — a strong opening week has a major impact on how many people ultimately engage with these ideas. Your help now will help New Power take off. Your support means a lot. And if you pre-order New Power in the next five days, we’ll send you a chapter you can read right away — and an impossibly cute new power tote bag :) If you’re interested in buying 5-500 copies of the book or gifting it to activists who need these tools to fight the good fight, you can bulk order at a significantly reduced cost here.

Brands embrace a new masculinity in which big boys do cry

 

• UK rapper Professor Green's recent documentary on the scourge of male suicide made the headlines for lots of reasons. First and foremost, it shone a light on the shocking statistics: in the UK, suicide is the biggest killer of men under 45. And it got people thinking, let’s hope in a long-term way, about stereotypical forms of masculinity – stiff upper lips and the demands of "laddishness" – and the potential harm they can do.

  In fact, Pro Green himself came under the spotlight for crying on a Newsnight appearance to promote the show. He used the opportunity to tell people, including men of course, not to be ashamed of showing emotion like this.

  

  It’s not too much to say that the cultural expectations that our society places on men, and that are strongly self-policed, are literally killing them. Men are far less likely than women to admit to or seek help for depression. And even when they do, they risk not being taken seriously, told to get over it, to ‘man up’.

  The hope is that seeing mainstream role models like Professor Green speaking out will gradually start to chip away at these stereotypical expectations. Because what’s going on in culture isn’t just an interesting tangent to this debate – it’s a key driver of the appalling facts. In-culture prevention is therefore just as critical as targeted intervention, especially as cuts to mental heath services start to bite.

  All of us have a responsibility to reconsider our view of what it means to be a ‘real man’. And this includes brands, which, as we know, can be very powerful forces for shifting the cultural discourse. We’ve seen lots of female-focused brands, from Always to Sport England, taking on stereotypes of femininity. What about products and services targeted at men?

  Dove Men Care has taken the lead with its #realstrength campaign, which launched at this year’s Super Bowl. Even the famously laddy Lynx is partnering with CALM, a charity dedicated to preventing male suicide, encouraging men to talk about the #biggerissues. Let’s hope this is just the start of a new wave of stereotype bashing.

   

  source

Service Design as a unique discipline? Written by Scott Sullivan, Applied Designer, Adaptive [email protected] One

 

Todd Wilkens

After leaving Adaptive Path in 2012, Todd Wilkens has been focused on one of the biggest issues in Service Design: building a Service Design practice on a massive scale. In the past four years, Todd has been a pivotal part of design initiatives at Mayo Clinic, the enormous design transformation initiative at IBM, Atlassian the enterprise software developer, and is now starting a new position as the head of WooCommerce. Todd is speaking at Adaptive Path’s upcoming Service Experience Conference in San Francisco, and is bringing his hard-won expertise to explain why we need to sacrifice Service Design as a unique discipline in order to build great services.

Scott Sullivan (SS): So looking over your recent work history, it seems like it’s focused on building a design practice within massive, massive places.

Todd Wilkens (TW): In the last few years, that’s for sure. I’ve been going to places, trying to help build design practice in big organizations.

SS: The scale of what you were doing at IBM is just — is insane, right? I mean, everybody was just like, “I can’t believe they’re actually attempting to do that there,” but it seems to be working out really well.

TW: Yeah, that was why I originally went to go take that job was because it just, it was crazy. It was crazy what Phil Gilbert and the team he was putting together were trying to do, and it just seemed like, you can’t just not — if you have a chance to try that, you gotta give it a shot, right?

SS: Absolutely! And IBM is doing great now. They’re getting stuff done, consistently publishing really great insights and tools, really useful stuff. Would you consider that, from your current perspective, mission accomplished? Or well on the way?

TW: Yeah, you know, it’s funny. Something that I learned from working at Adaptive Path in the past was, people used to come to Adaptive Path for help transforming their organizations a lot of times. They’re trying to understand how to do design or Service Design or planned thinking or whatever phrase they use — trying to bring that in, make it strategically impactful. How do we do it?

We’ve talked to lots of large organizations about that, and the one thing you always realize is that this is a task that is never completed. You start working on that, but it’s never like “it’s done, okay, we can hang up our hats and it’s going to be fine for the next 10 years.” Transformation almost never just “happens” — it’s always moving in the right direction.

IBM is one of the places where the basic idea for my talk was cemented, which is that you have to stop focusing on being a designer and owning design. You have to recognize that, in order to make great products and services around the world, designers don’t do that by themselves, right? It’s these whole multidisciplinary teams that actually get things out into the world to have impact. That was one of the first places where I realized I had to kind of give up the ownership of design. It couldn’t be this precious thing and this precious identity to myself and the people on our team. We had to prioritize getting good things shipped out the door over ourselves as design people. The output, the impact in the world and the impact on the world was much more important than us continuing to own or even get credit for everything.

SS: So would designers be seen as more of a gatekeeper? When you’re working with multiple lines of businesses on multiple touchpoints, what’s the service designer’s responsibility?

TW: It’s interesting that you say, “the gatekeeper,” that’s a conversation that we had at Atlassian, sometimes people use the word gatekeeper, sometimes they say “Is this some kind of stage-gate that everybody has to get approval before we build a thing?” Sometimes the word ownership gets used in those kinds of conversations as well, asking “Who is the owner that has to make the decisions and has to be consulted before a decision is made.” And, what’s interesting is that, this happened at IBM, and this is one of the lessons I’ve learned at Atlassian, the sort of trite thing to say is that software products and services are never done, right? They’re just in their current state, and you’re trying to make each state of their release better than the last, but they’re never done, and they’re also never perfect. And even if you got something that was “perfect”, the world would change enough that it would stop being perfect as a match for that world within three to six months.

So we’re always evolving everything that we release, whether software or service. I say that because it’s actually an interesting thing when it comes to design, in my experience, and the role of design. If you ask most designers “should we be iterating on things?” they will say, “Of course you’re iterating on things! It’s never perfect, you’re always iterating, always improving, you’re always duh-duh-duh-duh-duh.” But most designers talk about that within the studio, “as long as I’m ‘in the prototyping phase’ — yes, of course, it’s iterating. But then there’s a point where I have to feel like it’s done and I’m releasing something to the world. They tend to choose their criteria for success when something is released out into the world. It needs to be better, more perfect. And then there’s this kind of real hesitance, I’ve found, around how you handle iteration once something is out in the world. Designers are really comfortable with that iteration idea, but I find that they get more uncomfortable once it’s released into the world.

I want to change the conversation and start saying, “Well, yes, there are some things we can learn and improve on when it’s kind of in our control in the studio,” and I use the word studio in a sort of generic sense, not out in the world. But there’s this sense that we aren’t really learning if it’s working until we’ve made it and gotten it out in the hands of people that use it. Yes, we can do generative research. Yes, we can do evaluative research before it’s out. But oftentimes, especially with services, which tend to have complex touchpoints — you know, it’s one of those things that we can’t actually completely understand all the implications before it’s out and being used. The sooner you get it out into the world, and the better you are at quickly iterating it once it’s out in the world, it’s actually a better way of reducing risk and getting to success than spending time up front. One of the things I’ve learned is that, in some cases, that skill set is actually more important than all the design thinking that goes on.

So what that means is, designers need to stop seeing themselves as a gatekeeper and more as a conductor. You could say it like a train conductor, or like a music conductor. Both cases are actually accurate in some sense as a metaphor. It’s like being a conductor or a jazz musician with improvisational jazz. You don’t know what the next thing that is going to happen is, and you need to empower your people to respond to things, even when you’re not there telling them what to do.

Join Todd to learn more about Service Design as a unique discipline within organizations at the Service Experience Conference on November 3 & 4 in San Francisco. Todd will be joined by a line-up of premier leaders in Service Design and workshop teachers with practical take-home tools and know-how.

 

source : https://medium.com/@adaptivepath/service-design-as-a-unique-discipline-97330039d806

What's Next: A closer look at Amazon

What's Next: A closer look at Amazon [Recording] from OgilvyRED

The new politics of branding

Top 4 ways brands can win when taking a political stance on an issue

Here are four ways brands can win when taking a political stance on an issue:

1. Encourage participation

Part of being involved in the political cultural conversation is also asking consumers to get involved too. Encouraging wider voter participation has been done for many years (see every Rock The Vote campaign ever) but we’re starting to see brands leverage this in interesting ways. For the most recent UK general election Brewdog encouraged voter participation by offering a free pint of Punk IPA to those who could prove they had voted.

Brands should recognise that they can use their unique personalities and capabilities to encourage consumer participation in political issues.

Credit: Brewdog

2. Inspire a community

By taking a strong political stance brands can reflect the opinions and beliefs of the people they serve and work to make their lives better. In the last US election gay dating app Grindr not only encouraged its users to register to vote through in-app notifications, but also presented each candidates LGBT+ policies clearly. They have also encouraged users in specific states to vote against Anti-LGBT issues, inspiring a community of politically engaged users.

To truly inspire a community brands must ensure that they reflect the opinions and politics of their target consumers when taking on a political issue.

Credit: Project Q Atlanta

3. Be authentic

The strongest political stances ring true when they connect to your brand truth and feel organic and authentic. During the EU referendum in the UK last year we saw Lush come out in favour of the remain campaign, but rather than just taking a pro-EU stance, they aligned it with their other activist efforts by encouraging people to ‘Vote remain for animals’. By staying true to the history of their brand they garnered more respect from consumers, whilst also encouraging them to stand for something and champion their political views.

When brands take a political stance they should ensure that it feels connected to their brand’s personality to ensure that it rings true for consumers and doesn’t feel like they are jumping onto a bandwagon.

Credit: Bournemouth Echo

4. Think global

In an increasingly globalised world it is important to look at global political issues as well as those on a smaller scale. After President Trump decided to take the US out of the Paris Climate Change Agreement 25 companies bought full page ads in various US media outlets to make public their disagreements with Trump and his policy. Elon Musk of Tesla also publicly said he would leave an advisory council for Mr Trump, whilst other companies made clear that they would continue their efforts to fight climate change in spite of the new US policy.

Brands must recognise that they have a wide ranging, global reach, and that they can tackle global issues.

Credit: Twitter @elonmusk

This article was written Hannah Robbins, Project Executive, Kantar Added Value, with support from our Cultural Insight team in the UK.

... Read More

The new politics of branding

As the political climate continues to grow more divisive, brands are getting thrust into the middle of debates many would prefer to avoid. In January, Toyota was attacked for expanding in Mexico to sell more vehicles to Americans. More recently, Nordstrom experienced whiplash for dropping Ivanka Trump’s clothing line. Corporations and brands typically like to remain apolitical. But in this highly polarized, culturally-charged and social-mediatized moment, where people expect their brands to represent them and their values, can brands sidestep politics entirely? Saying and doing nothing can unintentionally send a message to stakeholders, employees and consumers that the company or brand is indifferent to the issue at hand. And many of the issues being raised have direct implications for businesses. Brands and their CEOs, often the most concrete manifestations of a brand, are having their actions, announcements and affiliations put under the microscope like never before.

The recent executive order regarding the immigrant travel ban and the rhetoric around it is a case in point. The ban, which took place a week prior to the Super Bowl, resulted in brands wading deeply into political waters on both sides of the aisle. From celebration of Mexican avocados to a rerun of Coke’s ‘it’s beautiful’ campaign, immigration was all the rage… literally. Take Anheuser-Busch: Although the American immigrant story of the founder Adolphus Busch was apparently in the works for months prior to the travel ban, its airing led to a call for boycott by those who felt the ad was overtly political. 84 Lumber, a relatively unknown building supply company, ran ‘the Journey’, an ad considered so political by FOX that they refused to air the long version. The edited teaser, which suggested that viewers check out the full story on their website, crashed their site as 6 million attempts were made during the first hour to view the entire ad. The ensuing debate pitted the company’s intention to ‘symbolize the grit, dedication and sacrifice’ of their employees with anger at the promotion of illegal immigration.

Image credit: 84 Lumber

With so much contestation on both sides, it can seem like there is no right way for brands to take part in the conversation without fear of reprisal. We at Kantar Added Value don’t believe things are quite that black and white. A brand’s decision on whether to take a bold stand, try to reconcile opposing points of view or stay entirely out of the fray will quite naturally depend on who that brand is. It’s not about politics. It’s about Purpose.

Airbnb’s campaign #weaccept, which explicitly promoted diversity and acceptance, aired during the same Super Bowl as the controversial ads mentioned above. Yet it, along with their initiative to provide short-term housing for displaced people in need, was mostly met with praise. Sure, a few Twitter trolls expressed outrage at what they deemed a ‘politically charged’ message. But all in all, Airbnb got off relatively unscathed. Why?
For one, this pioneer in the sharing economy has built its entire brand around the idea of belonging and community. It therefore was perfectly coherent, to see them take a stand against an order that runs counter to everything they stand for. And Airbnb’s young urban cosmopolitan target would expect no less.

Image credit: Airbnb

Of course, in any situation, brand owners will want to measure the risks and rewards of speaking up. But risk mitigation isn’t as simple as it used to be. With the rise of social media and real-time communications, brands are expected to behave more like humans. And humans don’t just do what they think will maximize their ROI in the short term. Their behaviors are rooted in values and personality and so should any brand worth its EPS be. Brands, like humans, need to know what they stand for. The clearer a brand is about its raison d’être, the easier it will be to align quickly and convincingly on a course of action.

A brands’ position on a given issue should weigh four key considerations:

1. The brand’s core/most loyal consumers: who are they and what matters to them? If you are Hobby Lobby, your right-leaning consumers will be expecting you to stand up for family values, just as a Ben & Jerry’s core consumer will be sensitive to climate change issues. Some brands don’t know where their consumers stand until they find out the hard way. When Uber chose not to hold up the one-hour taxi strike at JFK airport during the height of the airport protests, their users were enraged. When it then came to light that Uber CEO, Travis Kalanick, was also a member of President Trump’s economic advisory committee, the #deleteUber movement on Twitter was born. Uber, a brand that has successfully positioned themselves as ‘your private driver’ is increasingly out of sync with the cultural moment- evoking elitism and selfishness vs. Lyft whose purpose is to be ‘your friend with a car’. Both drivers and passengers appear to increasingly prefer the latter mindset.  Brands must also be forward thinking about their consumer base. Earlier this year, a Fox News radio host dubbed Chick-fil-A “the official chicken of Jesus“. The company’s CEO, who previously took a strong stand against same sex marriage, now seeks to expand northward to NY and other left leaning cities. Consumers and employees in these zipcodes have different attitudes and affiliations, thus requiring a rethink on brand targeting.

2. The brand’s values: what is most important to the brand? What does it stand for and what would it be willing to fight for?  There was a time when brands didn’t need to know the answer to these questions. No longer. CVS, the pharmacy brand that took the first strong stand against tobacco, logically stood up for affordable care. Patagonia and Black Diamond, long-time supporters of environmental protection, are publicly appealing to the entire outdoors industry to move their trade show out of Utah State, if its leaders continue to support Republican efforts in Congress to transfer or sell federal lands to states. For brands with strong values, doing nothing, or even taking a tepid position, is not an option.

3. The brand’s competencies: Where does the brand have expertise that might be applied to or provide perspective on the issue at hand?  A recent report by Weber Shandwick, entitled “The Dawn of CEO Activism,” found that people saw CEOs more favorably if they took a public stance on current issues — as long as the topic was related to the company’s business. (If it wasn’t, the numbers reversed.). In this vein, Mark Weinberger, CEO of EY has offered his company’s expertise to ‘educate’ President Trump on all things related to job creation in the US. Nike, a brand that has promoted women’s participation in sports for two decades, is addressing the Muslim issue from a different angle: their recent launch of a lightweight, highly wearable hijab that doesn’t come untucked when working out or during competitions, is intended to reach a growing market of Muslim shoppers.  Another global brand, IKEA, working through its foundation, has developed refugee shelters made from recycled plastic that can be easily assembled in just a few hours (see innovation section for details). Interestingly, IKEA’s DIY expertise has been hijacked by designers seeking to make an anti-Muslim ban statement via a tongue-in-cheek ad for a “Börder Wåll“, offering a fake flat-pack wall, sold with 5,659,344 screws, and a single allen wrench, for a bargain price of : $9,999,999,999.99.

4. The brand’s personality: Finally, the way a brand chooses to address an issue must be coherent with that brand’s personality. A brand’s willingness to get out in front on contentious topics should reflect its placement on the spectrum of boldness. Is the brand an Innocent or a Nurturer, in which case it will likely avoid direct conflict?  Or is it a Hero, willing to fight for what is right? Starbucks CEO, Howard Schultz, was one of the first to speak out against the immigrant travel ban with zeal, announcing a decision to employ 10,000 refugees in protest. While the press has suggested that Starbucks is risking business, Kantar Millward Brown (full disclosure – sister Kantar company) reported last week that there has been no substantive impact on any key performance metrics. Jeep, more of an Explorer brand, decided to straddle the fence with their  ‘Free to Be,’ campaign, launched around the final presidential debate last year. The campaign featured a split screen showing their latest models half in red, half in blue, delivering a message of unification that cut across party lines. To showcase the parallel park assist, one ad proposed to help you “position yourself between two sides.” Lane departure warning ads reminded you that “The left and the right are closer than you think.”

Image credit: Jeep

It could be argued that such an attempt to rise above the divisive rhetoric and avoid taking sides is too safe…that such an approach isn’t bold enough to stand out. But the real question is whether the brand is acting in a way that is coherent with what you know, love and expect from it. And whether it is aligning with the core values of its target. Because the only thing worse for a brand today than being invisible is to be inauthentic or irrelevant.

Written by Leslie Pascaud, Executive Vice President Branding and Sustainable Innovation, and Teiko Uyekawa, Brand, Kantar Added Value.

Headline image credit: Kantar Added Value

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Looking Back on 2016

It has been a cataclysmic year. From shake-ups in the world of brand marketing and advertising, to unimaginable political outcomes in the US and the UK, to continuing devastation in war-torn cities like Aleppo, the shock of the year’s events have reverberated around the globe in real-time.

Here are 5 emerging themes shaped by the events of 2016, and questions every brand should consider in relationship to them, as our organizations seek to play a role in supporting human flourishing:

OUR OLD ORGANIZING PRINCIPLES ARE BROKEN
Traditional dividing lines are blurring and no longer have the predictive power they once did. In a world where news travels at the speed of the internet, geography, age, race, sex, gender, religion, income, education have all become less salient as indicators. We see this playing out in the use of psychographic profiling to micro-target news consumers in both the Brexit vote and the US presidential election, and we see it in the reimagining of masculine gender roles, as exemplified by America’s first CoverBoy. The organizing principles we’ve relied on in the past and have come to accept as fact can no longer reliably guide us in understanding a person’s experiences, preferences and assumed choices.
Question for your brand: How might you need to understand and conceptualize your targets differently, both today and in the future?

IF EVERYONE IS THE MEDIA, NO ONE IS THE MEDIA
The monolith of the fourth estate no longer speaks with a singular voice. “Traditional” media outlets still exist, but they now compete with start-ups, independent outlets, brands and individuals to tell the story of what’s happening in the world and why. Issues of roles, rights, and responsibilities, truth and propaganda have come into play as everyone jockeys to deliver “content” and drive the 24/7 news cycle and the ad dollars attached to it. Increasingly, we’re coming to see that media sources are aimed at not just page views but also the power to shape world views, and thus drive the cultural narrative that frames reality.
Question for your brand: How can your brand best shape influencers, and what unified message can your brand deliver that speaks into a fragmented media landscape?

POLARIZATION IS THE NEW NORMAL
From heated exchanges between strangers on social media, to families divided down political lines, polarization can start to feel like the only thing we all share in common. When it’s easy to surround yourself with only opinions that confirm your own biases, this polarization can seem even more pronounced. In the US, not since the first Civil Rights movement has the country seen such a groundswell of efforts in the direction of furthering racial equality, while simultaneously we see extremist, nationalist groups also come to the forefront. We are all being forced to take a hard look at who we are as a people and a culture, and there are no easy answers. Some take this as a sign of hope, believing that this self-examination, though painful, is necessary for us to move forward as a society. But we are surely at a cultural precipice, with many wondering which forces will prevail.
Question for your brand: In a polarized climate, what can your brand truly stand for that allows your brand’s voice to be heard above the fray and connect with universal human truths?

RECKONING WITH TECH
The promise of technology as an elegant solution to the age-old problem of human error, pride and greed, hasn’t quite worked out that way. Yes, technology has made our lives dramatically easier in many ways but this has not come without cost. Indeed we are just beginning to recognize that the fruits of technology’s labors have far-reaching consequences that must be grappled with. Just this week, news of a massive cyber-forgery ring that fraudulently costs advertisers up to $5M a day to pay for fake video views serves as yet another reminder that technology can hurt as much as it can help. The industry and the world at large will have to reckon with how technology can be shaped toward its most humane, ethical ends while protecting us from own our worst impulses to exploit others through it.
Question for your brand: How can your brand leverage the power of technology, while working to mitigate its potential negative impacts for all?

BALANCING SECURITY AND LIBERTY
As the global world is more connected, the tenuous relationship between security and liberty becomes more fraught. In many democratic countries, enshrined individual rights are strained in the face of efforts to ensure safety of the collective. How much oversight is too much? At what point can we opt out of a “Big Brother” existence that often we know nothing about? Add to that the vulnerability inherent in increasing amounts of data – personal and corporate — stored online and in the cloud, and what seem like endless hacks into what we were told are secure systems. Distrust of all entities meant to secure our safety, both virtual and physical, grows deeper, even as we need these entities more and more.
Question for your brand: How might your brand provide consumers with a sense of security amidst tumult, in both traditional and creative ways?

Written by Joanna Franchini, Kantar Added Value US.

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The new Publicis Conseil : Following its fusion with Nurun, the Paris-based agency has devised a new structure that keeps clients at the core while promising consumers a “full brand experience”.

(From left to right, Patrick Lara, Valérie Hénaff, Jean-Guy Saulou)

 

If you’re going to meet the leading lights of Publicis Conseil, it might as well be on the roof terrace of their iconic building at 133 Avenue des Champs-Élysées. The Publicis story has been unfolding at this address since 1958. Now, as we gather around a table on an unexpectedly sunny spring day, the agency has embarked on its next chapter.

With me on the rooftop are Valérie Henaff, president of Publicis Conseil, along with director generals Patrick Lara and Jean-Guy Saulou (who was the former DG of Nurun). The agency’s transformation was sparked by the merging of Publicis Conseil with Nurun Paris. In other words, the integration of 250 digital and tech experts with existing Publicis Conseil staff, bringing the total number up to 650.

 

“Our philosophy for some time now has been ‘lead the change’,” says Valérie Henaff. “Our clients are constantly confronted by change, so rather than being intimidated by that, our view is that in order to grow one should embrace it and be inspired by it.”

This philosophy has driven the agency’s international presence (“We are the most international of French agencies,” remarks Valérie) as well as its widely reported digital transformation. In that respect, the latest evolution is a logical one.

Publicis Conseil refers to its new incarnation as “the first full brand experience agency”. So what exactly does that mean? Valérie explains: “What Nurun brought to us specifically was its expertise in the realm of the customer experience. Along with our clients we have become aware that one can no longer separate what a brand says – the communication – from the way the customer actually experiences that brand. A bad customer experience can undermine all the brand’s communications investment.”

In other words, Publicis Conseil must now be able to oversee the customer journey from A to Z, whether that means the website user experience, its social media presence, or even the store interior. Because as we all know, there’s nothing more disappointing than a brand that fails to live up to its promises.

Practically speaking, the agency will be organised around nine business units – almost mini-agencies – of around 80 people, each dedicated to one or several clients. As everyone in French adland knows, Publicis Conseil works for some the country’s most emblematic brands, including AccorHotels, BNP Paribas, Carrefour, AXA, Engie, L’Oréal, Nestlé, Orange, Renault, Sanofi, Groupe Seb... Each of the nine entities will be headed by a duo, one from Publicis Conseil and one from the former Nurun.

“We’ve always put clients at the core of our business, but now our internal organization reflects that approach,” says Valérie.

TRANSVERSAL TALENTS

If it sounds as though Publicis might be creating silos while other agencies are breaking them, Valérie assures us that all its clients will be able to benefit from “transversal talents” who can intervene whenever and wherever required. These include data scientists, UX specialists, social media coordinators and many more.

Jean-Guy Saulou says: “We’ll ensure that digital skills are available to all our clients. The advantage of being 650 people is that we’re capable of bringing together the equivalent of a specialist agency for every circumstance. With the difference that we can combine our long-term client vision with these often very niche skills.”

There’s also a further transversal unit called The Strategic Studio, which incorporates strategic planners, channel planners, engagement planners and data analysts, among others. One of the most compelling elements of the new structure is the Social Media News Desk that sits at the heart of the agency. Publicis Conseil also has its own digital production studio so that it can match output with the rate of demand for content.

The agency’s creative output will be overseen by four “creative poles” headed respectively by Olivier Desmettre and Fabrice Delacourt, Marcelo Vergara, Elie Trotignon (former executive creative director of Nurun Paris).

A LAB CALLED “LE LOFT”

Another symbol of the agency’s evolution is Le Loft, a combination of mobile brand content lab and workshop which brings together experts from within Publicis and external talents – for instance YouTube stars and social influencers.

Le Loft is described as “multidisciplinary, open, agile and data-driven”. The teams assemble around a specific client, for one month, each time in a different location. During that time they’re given one brief every day.

The entire team works on the brief at the same time, “a collective discipline that allows the hatching of dozens of creative ideas a day”, according to the agency’s official literature.

Less officially, director general Patrick Lara says: “It’s astonishing to observe this mixture of different talents in the same space for a defined period. The client is deeply integrated in the process and regularly comes to work alongside us. Sometimes they discover hidden talents!”

The content is actually produced within the Loft, Patrick stresses: “It’s not just a space for ideation and conception. We have animators, illustrators and other craftspeople who can bring the ideas to life, there and then.”

It must be one of the rare times an advertising creative gets to work with a YouTuber on a brief for electric vehicles. Valérie Henaff adds: “We sought outside talents not to hire them, but to work with them and most importantly to learn from them.”

Initially created for Renault, Le Loft has also worked with BNP Paribas, Garnier, Nestlé and Groupe Seb. “The experience was supposed to be a one-off, but the results were so rich that we decided to continue.”

DRIVING CREATIVITY

An agency is still paid for its ideas, and Patrick Lara insists that the new organization will enhance their delivery. “What’s interesting is that the full brand experience, because it involves truly listening to and engaging with the consumer, brings us unexpected insights that generate creativity in their wake.”

The more the agency listens to customers, he says, the more it enables brands to respond to their needs. “Providing solutions is also part of the brand experience.”

One concrete example was the insight that new parents often drive their babies around in the car in order to send them off to sleep. But driving around town at three in the morning has obvious inconveniences – not least when you have to stop and the little one starts crying again.

“So we created the first static baby seat that recreates the sensation of being in a car,” Patrick smiles. The Baby Seat was a joint project by Publicis in Paris, Argentina and Italy for Renault and is now available all over the world. “That’s not an ad, but a product, based on our knowledge of the consumer – something we would perhaps never have done ten years ago.”

Valérie Henaff concludes: “In a way, everything we’ve been talking about this afternoon is inherently linked to creativity. Today we can say that we’ve invented a new way of working, collaborating and thinking.”

Perhaps not so much a new chapter, then, as the start of an entirely new story. 

 

source : https://fr.adforum.com/interviews/the-new-publicis-conseil