TRUTH AND AUTHENTICITY AS BRAND ATTRIBUTES

No matter what market you’re in, authenticity as a brand attribute is nothing new. But until the past years, it has been only one of a set of approaches for a strategy. The other option - ignoring the truth altogether, or at the very least interpreting it "creatively" – has for a long time been the preferred choice. And with that, the role of advertising agencies has often been to find a way to spin the truth (or to, at least, distract from it.)

Once upon a time, this was fine, so long as the primary voice to the consumer was above-the-line (advertising-led) and therefore controllable. This is no longer the case. In our current age, a brand's image is not solely dependent on a carefully crafted advertising message, but on the conversations and experiences of millions of consumers. Moreover, those experiences and conversations are always-on and public.

Brands MUST therefore adapt. Today, messaging and positioning MUST match the consumer experience or risk extinction. Truth and transparency are the new currency, and consumers want brands to have a point of view on the world. Political but not partisan.

Leading brands and agencies are putting this into practice through a strategy that features meaningful storytelling and high-quality content, portraying a genuine, empathetic understanding of the consumer. Not only does this place more emphasis on the need to be real, but equally, on the need for proof.  Bottom line?  Consumers are empowered today, and their expectations are high. There is nowhere for brands to hide.

David Ogilvy knew this over fifty years ago when he said that "The consumer is not a moron, she is your wife".  More appropriate to our modern day and age, she is also an expert with a smartphone who can find out as much as she wants about a brand in a matter of minutes. If that doesn't match what the advertising says, then the brand hasn't just lost a sale but also (potentially) a lifetime customer. Consider the implications of this.

COMMUNICATING TRUTH

Your ultimate goal is to make truth both memorable and sharable, and there are three broad ways to prioritize intentions.

1. FOCUS YOUR CAMPAIGN ON A SINGLE BRAND TRUTH

The days of nuance are over. There must be a declarative truth about your brand that you know or believe matters most to your customers. If you don't have one, your problem is far more significant than anything marketing can fix.

There may be dozens of things the world should know and appreciate about your brand, but you really only have a few seconds to tell people something that might matter to them.  Prioritize what you want to say (and then delete everything after the first point.)

2. MAKE IT TANGIBLY REAL NOT A REFERENCE OR ILLUSION

Your consumer's starting point is going to be suspicion and disbelief for anything you choose to share with them. So, the structure of your communication, irrespective of format, should be designed to substantiate your truth.  

Be creatively insane, funny or overcome with pathos, but do so with the sole purpose of transferring your single brand truth. Ruthlessly focus on your truth and don't let your execution get distracted by a great joke or otherwise excellent idea. You have a short time to prove something. Do it, don't just say it.  

3. PRIORITIZE YOUR EXPECTATIONS BY WHAT GETS YOU CLOSEST TO SALES

Make sure that you have some motivator for purchase behaviour in whatever you produce. Make sure you’ve answered the “why?”  There are a broad range of ideas you can rely upon to make it clear to your consumer that you have a purpose beyond being their friend and that you're willing to be transparent about it.  After all, telling the truth means telling the truth. 

IN PRACTICE

The starting point for communications should, therefore, not be what the consumer insights team has identified as a "nice approach" for the brand. It's also not what the brand owners want the world to believe on a "corporate level" about it (delivered beautifully or cleverly.)

The starting point MUST be about articulating what is true about the brand: what cannot be denied about it, and how it can be delivered in a clear, intuitive way. The brands that have a process for telling their truth will sell more products, make more money, keep more customers, and, most importantly, ensure customer and employee loyalty.

ADMIT YOUR LIMITATIONS
It's finally time to eradicate any notion that our job is to put lipstick on a pig. Instead, consider a “blemished sell” that acknowledges the potential downsides of your brand. Why?  It feels more human and builds consumer confidence.

A few years back, German car marque OPEL used this approach to re-energise its tired image after consumers described the brand as “old fashioned, boring and dusty”. Rather than trying to cover it up, Opel chose to hit the problem head-on by owning its flaws.

After updating its ageing vehicle portfolio, Opel looked to change people’s perceptions by daring to talk about their bad brand image and low social acceptance in a humorous way.

Through a series of executions, the car marque addressed the negative preconceptions people had by first running an unbranded out-of-home teaser campaign that encouraged people to be more open-minded, with messages such as ‘18% of German people hate olives, but 60% have never tasted one’, followed by the strapline ‘Repark your mind’.

After revealing that Opel was behind the campaign, the brand then enlisted German celebrities to share their views of the brand for a TV ad before test driving one of the new models and giving their honest impressions, which were also shared via a digital content hub.

Opel achieved an uplift in market share for the first time in more than a decade and is keeping up that momentum. Between January and April this year, sales increased by 3.3% while the overall European car market grew by only 2.6%. Opel’s CMO attributed the success to being consumer centric, radically honest and authentic, bringing in new products and publishing consumer feedback on digital channels - including criticism.

WALK THE WALK
PATAGONIA, for example, shares the progress of all its various activities via The Cleanest Line blog.  A recent post explained how a deeper dive into its supply chain revealed migrant workers in Taiwan were having to pay extortionate fees to labour brokers in order to get a job, which led to the creation of a new procurement standard at the company.

Yet Patagonia believes an honest approach to sustainability efforts, which includes revealing difficulties and missteps, pays off in the long term.

Adam Fetcher, Director of Global Communication, explaines, “Showing there’s good and bad in everything we do as a global company – even as a company that tries hard to be responsible – shouldn’t be defined as ‘exposing’ anything. We should all know from our experience as humans that nothing is perfect and we can only strive harder to soften the footprint we have on our planet and on the people involved in the production of our products. Transparent communication is easy once you start with that assumption.”

Patagonia is taking impressive action to reduce their environmental impact. All of their cotton is certified organic by the Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS), and they’re Bluesign® certified for 56% of their fabrics. A high proportion of their materials are made from recycled fabrics, including their polyester, nylon, and wool. Patagonia belongs to both the Sustainable Apparel Coalition and 1% For The Planet. They reject fast fashion by creating high-quality, long-lasting products and offer a repair and reuse program. They even go so far as to discourage customers from purchasing too many of their products.

Ultimately, brands have two paths - radical honesty or an eventual (terminal) loss of trust. Why not start today?

THE GENIUS OF KLM’S CHATBOT EXPERIENCE

One of the first big brands in the world to wholeheartedly embrace chatbots was KLM, the national Dutch airline, which is often hailed for being an early adopter to new technology.

The company has one of the best chatbots available, and it has a good reason for caring so much about it: the company employs more than 230 dedicated agents to reply on social media. With more than 100,000 mentions publicly every week, the sheer impact of being able to quickly solve simple questions with the use of artificial intelligence and chatbots is clear.

KLM has invested heavily in both chatbots and A.I. tools to solve messages as quickly and precisely as possible, but has spent a lot on developing marketing tools as well — to the point that you can book almost your entire flight via Facebook Messenger!

Not only is the KLM chatbot a fantastic thing to use, it actually seems easier than booking via the website, which can often be clumsy and confusing as you're trying to figure out which button will do what you want it to. Here's what makes KLM's bot so good, and how other brands could learn.

DON'T JUST ASSUME A SINGLE INTENT

This often leads to high failure rates as people just argue with the bot, which doesn't understand their request, or they close the conversation immediately. KLM's bot understands this risk, so immediately offers the user a choice of where to go; is the query about support, booking a flight or something else? Even if the other options end up with a human, this is a fantastic way to figure out where to route the user internally without any humans involved.

HANDLE AMBIGUOUS RESPONSES

If you choose Book Your Flight, which is what this bot is made for, KLM lets you type where you'd like to go. This is basically every bot developer's worst nightmare, because users could say anything right now, and the bot is left to interpret it based on a very limited understanding of what could happen next.

Even if you get the user to write something you’re expecting into the text box, most people tend to type something vaguer than you’d hope at this point — leaving it with you to figure out the specifics of their answer. A good bot development project — particularly from the UX writing side — will consider all of the different weirdness that could eventuate here, and KLM did this right.

Not only did KLM ask for more specifics politely, they nailed combining the two separate data points to figure out what I meant, rather than forcing me to enter the full destination myself all over again.

YOUR WORDS ARE EVERYTHING

When you’re building a chatbot, your words are everything. They’re the beginning and end of your user’s experience with you, so you can’t afford any misinterpretations, dead ends or confusing phrasing.

Having written copy for a number of chatbots, and your use of language should be the principle consideration before writing a single line of code. I noted a number of places that KLM uses great copy to guide the user, so let’s walk through them.

1.   KLM sets expectations immediately by making it clear it’s a bot through the use of an emoji and in a friendly tone explaining its own limitations. By doing this, the user already feels comfortable, but understands something might go wrong, so is far more willing to be patient because they know it’s not perfect yet.

2.   KLM uses a smart, subtle trick to win points from users: repeating what the bot understands to be the correct query back to them before continuing. Once you’ve figured out dates and destination, for example, KLM spells the search out, offering an opportunity to correct any mistakes. This may seem tedious, but there’s a great trick behind this.

Think of the times you’ve used Siri and how frustrating it is when she gets it wrong; if a computer is trying to be human and makes a mistake, the illusion is ruined immediately. By leveraging subtle language cues, KLM able to avoid the computer giving the wrong answer before it happens, and maintain the illusion that we’re getting everything right, even if it isn’t perfect.

3.   KLM does a great job of helping you along the way with the wording it uses. When you’re given the chance to respond in free form, the chatbot guides you on how it expects you to respond. Dates are particularly hard, because there’s so many formats humans can respond in.

These types of cues avoid frustration on the user’s part and make it easier on the developer’s side: predictable input is the best input, and trying to figure out if 11/04/2018 is the 11th of April 2018, or 4th of November 2018 is impossible if you’ve got customers around the world.

IT’S USEFUL BEYOND THE FIRST INTERACTION

A common area these bots fall over in is a lack of awareness of the user beyond that first interaction. Often chatbots don’t understand who you actually are because they are unable to access data from existing backends.

KLM thought of this, and their bot is able to be useful beyond day one: you can choose to receive travel updates in one place and get your boarding pass without leaving it. While it’s still fairly limited, this a great example of extending a conversational interface beyond just that first chat, and keeping users engaged long-term.

IT’S HARDER THAN YOU THINK

When Facebook launched its chatbot platform, there was a deluge of different bots to try, but many of them were a frustrating experience. As it turned out, many brands jumped on the hype train without really considering the nuances involved in building a great experience.

KLM is a rare example of a chatbot done well. While it’s not perfect, it’s a fantastic way to search for flights that doesn’t feel more cumbersome to use than its app or website — which is the entire point in the first place.

If you’re considering building a chatbot, sweat the details and more than anything else, focus on the words you use. Your phrasing is the beginning and end of a great chatbot story, and it’s key to whether or not it succeeds.

But, don’t take our word for it. You can try KLM’s chatbot here.

------------------------------------------------

The Changing Face of Wealth Management Brands

As we are sure you’re aware, consumers have become increasingly connected and data-driven. They use the Internet to research and buy products and services, and their use of social media is disrupting patterns of loyalty, creating new forms of commercial communities and recreating the purchasing process.

Companies can no longer focus on the “where” and the “who” of selling. They are unable to continue only targeting “emerging markets” or certain demographic groups. Instead, they must pay new attention to the “how” and the “why” of consumption. The always-on, networked consumer is the new “how”, and the independent, cooperative and socially conscientious consumer is the “why”.

It is, therefore, imperative that companies invest in capabilities that help them better understand and act on these changes. That includes embracing advanced analytic tools that interpret rapidly changing data and assist in identifying opportunities.

Businesses should also consider adopting more agile business models and partnerships to improve their strategic and operational responsiveness. These steps can help them, for example, to deliver more tailored services and to shift from traditional products to the more experiential offerings that consumers expect today.

We are in a moment of unprecedented experimentation. Consumers are far more open to test-driving new brands, products, and experiences today (and the phenomenon is global.) This context is redefining how consumers trust brands. With near-infinite access to resources, consumers no longer rely on centralised institutions for direction.

Moreover, consumers are willing to try almost anything when their networks are also experimenting and when a brand’s reputation stays intact. This means that a brand’s illustrious history is less critical to cultivating consumer trust than its ability to feel personal. But a willingness to experiment can all too quickly morph into a state of mindless distraction where messages don’t register with consumers and the barrier for creating powerful emotional memories rises.

Companies that bank on consumers’ “almost infinite appetite for distractions” (credit to Aldous Huxley) are only successful when they also offer the remedy of product curation that eases consumer decision stress. This is the modern tug of war between consumers’ pursuit of novelty and craving for familiarity.

FINANCIAL SERVICES + WEALTH MANAGEMENT

The wealth management industry is in the midst of significant change. As the industry is re-shaped, one positive outcome will be that more people will have access to a greater quantity and quality of investment strategies and advice that was traditionally reserved for high net worth individuals. Two drivers that will accelerate this democratisation of wealth management are a shift in investor preferences and advances in technology.

The younger generation of investors typically likes digital solutions, demands convenience and desires transparency and control over their finances. Those preferences are also increasingly shared by other demographic groups. The user experience they desire is shaped by their experiences with companies such as Apple, Facebook, Google, and Amazon. The result is a growing need for wealth management offerings that deliver tailored investment advice, are accessible through multiple channels, allow for social/peer input, and are intuitive to use.

Technology has already disrupted and transformed industries such as transportation, travel and many others. It has already had an impact on wealth management and will continue to transform it. Access to more data, the ability to quickly convert that information into useful models and algorithms, and applying that intelligence to decision making enables science to play a more significant role in investing.

By using technology to simplify asset allocation, facilitate exchange-traded funds (ETF) or mutual fund research and selection, and deliver other common investment activities, costs can be reduced and services made more affordable.

Another significant trend is that as smartphones and tablets become ubiquitous, clients expect to be able to monitor their portfolio, undertake research, transact and get advice – all in real time and on-the-go.

The demand for mobile app services is so acute that 80% of high net worth individuals under 40 years of age indicated they would leave their wealth management firm if it fails to provide an integrated-channel experience. It’s clear that modern technology allows for fiduciary advice to be delivered affordably, at scale, in real-time and with exceptional client experience.

Companies such as Wealthfront, WealthSimple, Nutmeg, and Betterment have successfully raised millions of dollars and used that funding to take their technology-driven solutions to market and rapidly build significant asset bases. Traditional players such as Schwab and Vanguard have responded with their own advisory tools.

Whether you believe the startups or the traditional players will lead the industry into the future, investors will still want exceptional user experiences and advanced security across all channels. Solutions such as mobile app development platforms can be strategically used to ensure design and back-end services of mobile wealth management apps meet all of the user experience, security, regulatory and compliance requirements for both investors and asset managers. 

It is the convergence of demographic trends and advances in technology that provide a unique opportunity for previously underserved market segments to benefit from the democratisation of wealth management. For those who could not previously afford a personal financial advisor or weren’t as comfortable with human-based advice, there are now more options to achieve their financial and life goals.

Some so-called “Robo advisors” or automated advisors are already gaining traction and attracting new clients, but future innovations in service are certain to provide additional opportunities to reach more wealth bands. There will always be a place for human-based advice to complement science-based advice, but it’s exciting that high-quality advice, regardless of the form it takes, will be available to more and more people.

It’s clear that there are forces and innovations changing how consumers invest. As a result, established wealth management providers have worked hard to extend their products and services to customers who've moved onto digital touch points. They are evolving product-focused approaches to digital-centric strategies and services designed around customer outcomes.

This new paradigm earns loyalty by delivering consistently excellent experiences across flexible and extensible platforms, enhanced by third-party apps and integrated channels.

Digital technologies empower customers like never before, transforming their relationships with wealth management providers and their use of financial products and services. The speed that customers embrace new touch points and service models is only getting faster, blindsiding traditional companies that still struggle to adapt.

According to Forrester Research, “Superior service and low or no fees are more important to customers than specific banking products themselves. To acquire and retain customers in a competitive field, wealth management companies must build trustworthiness and invest in support capabilities to ensure that they remain relevant in customers' lives.“

As wealth management products and services move into the consumer arena, they will need to create brand identities with an emotional bond between the consumer and the product. Inadvertently, these identities will, therefore, shift to the social meanings consumers have attached to the wealth management product or service.

THE CONSUMERS PAIN POINTS

Most of us seem to understand the inherent value of saving for our future. However, wealth management seems like something for people with more (notable) disposable income. None of us ever seem to have enough to save for our future and there is always something unexpected to pay for.

What’s clear is that people have considerable anxiety about managing their finances.  Moreover, the fact that wealth management products and services are largely considered to be complex, complicated, intimidating and confusing – and you begin to see the challenge.

POSITIONING

As a result of the evolving landscape and consumer, the trend is to reinforce positioning as a Wealth Management brand that understands clients’ struggles and can help them relax with its simple solutions. This while showing the positive side of investing, thus, shifting the consumer from feelings of financial anxiety to demonstrating a path to success.

By partnering with the brand, consumers are optimistic because they have found a path to financial success, stability, and peace of mind.  Savvy brands, therefore, need to cut through the noise and focus on the broader human lifestyle experience while empowering people to have control over their finances. They can do this by showing they have products that solve the anxieties of consumers who value clarity, simplicity, flexibility, and accessibility. The importance of bringing a more human perspective to the world of finance cannot be overstated.

Resources

How Financial Services Firms Can Get Creative with Content

Inside Wealthfront’s Content Marketing Strategy

How Marketing Financial Services to Millennials Revealed a Winning Formula for Digital Audiences

Digital bank Monzo plans ‘Hargreaves Lansdown for millennials’ with low-cost funds

Major Banks Are Speaking A Language Their Customers Don't Understand

 

Brand Strategy: Whoever Has The Best Data Wins.

We've all heard by now that companies are using artificial intelligence to streamline the way they do business, but an influx of more intimately personal data has opened doors to even greater brand benefits.

This year, a number of companies made use of impossibly detailed personal information. Not just age, name or location, but details gathered from saliva samples and body tracking sensors.

Biometric information, for example, like your genomic profile, has become more easily accessible.  This due to the increased efficiency and falling costs of the technology involved in obtaining it. This has given brands in various categories, from luxury fashion to fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG,) the opportunity to use biometric information to both add value to their product and strengthen their marketing messages.

Today’s savvy consumers only consider brands that demonstrate that they understand and care about “me”.’ And what better way to do that than build bespoke products and campaigns for each customer?

BESPOKE PRODUCTS
In September, Nike launched its Advanced Apparel Exploration 1.0 capsule collection, a line of clothing based on the personal data of several athletes. The sportswear brand used sensors to track how the athletes’ bodies reacted to different environments, measuring heat, sweat and airflow in various urban settings – from the subway to the office to a club – and converted the data into body maps.

The entire collection was formed around these data insights – so every item was constructed to provide extra ventilation or coverage in the areas it was needed. Using biometric data, the brand aims to design clothing with extra value for the wearer.

Other companies have taken it a step further, personalising their products to each customer’s genetic makeup. Fitness platform Lose It! partnered with startup Helix to use genomic information to create diet plans tailored to people’s genetic profiles. And wine delivery platform Vinome followed a similar system to offer personalised wine selections.

As well as using personal data to aid product development, companies are also using genetic testing to ramp up their marketing. These campaigns and product developments could not have happened without significant technological advances. And as startups continue to innovate, even more meaningful data will become available.

New York’s Loomia, for example, is developing technology that will allow people to track the way they wear their clothes and sell that data to brands. To this end, Loomia has created a smart clothing ecosystem that can track when clothes are being worn, what setting they’re being worn in and what other clothes they’re being paired with.

Loomia’s smart fabrics collect and store environmental data specific to individual pieces of clothing, like what temperature it was outside when someone wore it. When it comes to market, people will be able to trade this data with brands for rewards – giving apparel brands a unique opportunity to track how their products are used. As startups like Loomia continue to develop new forms of data, brands will be able to strengthen their creative offering with insights that were unheard of until now.

Though these are early examples, they point to a future where companies infuse their offerings with intricate data gathered from both products and customers. For brands and marketers, customer data is like oxygen — nobody survives very long without it. Used intelligently, this data will help shape campaigns, inspire new products, build loyalty, and drive business strategy.

Welcome to the future.

Brand Strategy: Politics And Purpose

Pepsi’s Kendall Jenner advert was a car wreck, but its social conscience insight was sound. That insight is that lifestyles are the central focus of brands today.  Ergo, politics and lifestyles can no longer be treated separately. 

So, what’s a brand to do in an increasingly polarising world?  Stay neutral and risk becoming irrelevant or wade into the debate and risk a backlash? 

Nowhere is this division more evident than in the US, under Donald Trump’s presidency. Just a sniff of partisanship could rouse pitch-fork-wielding masses, as numerous brands have discovered. Also, any brand hoping to lay low until better times arrive will be waiting a long time for three reasons. The first is social media, which is amplifying people’s fears and entrenching their beliefs. The second is the lack of accountability among those in power and the third is rising inequality across the world.

The fact that brands are more comfortable getting active politically today is an extension of a larger trend to use morality as marketing. Brands today are taking that to another level, tapping into our sense of what’s right and wrong.

By advocating for causes and incorporating them into their business models, brands allow consumers to vote with their wallets on the kind of world they want to support. These feel-good purchases of self-expression have earned a catchy name: cause-sumption.

These are admittedly heavy subjects for a soap brand or sportswear label to contend with. But those that have spent the past decade differentiating themselves through purpose and cultural relevance can’t go back to saying: ‘It’s all about the product.’ So, what can they do?

Increasingly there is a responsibility to make a social stand on the things that your consumer base cares about. The brands that got to grips with the new political lifestyle vocabulary most successfully were those that picked specific social issues – as opposed to overtly political ones – tied to their stated purpose.

None of this guarantees an easy ride, but an honest position that reinforces a brand’s purpose can be very profitable. In the first ten years of Dove’s Real Beauty campaign, from 2004-2014, sales reportedly grew from $2.5 billion to $4 billion, and the award-winning “Evolution” ad spot earned an estimated $150 million worth of media time.

Ultimately, the pros of cause-sumption marketing often outweigh the cons, making for memorable brand messages that connect well with consumers. And the revenue speaks for itself.

THE BIG PICTURE

Without a doubt, a brand that takes a political stance risks irritating consumers who disagree. But it’s also an opportunity to stand up for values that are consistent with the brand’s messaging, earning further respect from consumers who are increasingly looking to vote with their wallets.

Just remember - if you don’t stand for something, you stand for nothing. Brands should, therefore, be politically active to the extent that doing so is consistent with their values, messaging, and worldview. The key is knowing when to speak up and when to stay silent - and there is a fine line between political activism that feels meaningful versus selfish.

Once you determine why consumers and employees feel an affinity for your brand, it will become clear whether or not that affinity is relevant to the political issue at hand.

Brand Strategy: Radical Transparency

Consumers are more suspicious of companies than ever. Edelman’s 2017 Trust Barometer found that faith in the big four institutions – government, the media, business and NGOs – is at an all-time low. And to make matters worse for brands, a slew of startups are embracing transparency and creating new expectation levels that companies of all sizes will soon have to match – or risk their relevance.

Setting expectations

Online apparel retailer Everlane is the poster child for the radical transparency movement. Since launching in 2010, the brand has displayed a breakdown of costs for each item on its website. This includes things like materials, hardware, labour, duties and transport. It is an approach that has earned the fashion brand an army of socially conscious and style-savvy followers.

But over the past year, this transparent way of working has spread to just about every sector imaginable. Cosmetics startup Beauty Pie, for example, gives people a price breakdown of the factory costs for each product it sells. Insurance startup Lemonade publishes statistics on the revenue it’s generating, the number of policies sold and the average monthly charges.

Emerging companies in the financial industry – one of the sectors most distrusted by consumers – are also putting transparency at the heart of their operations. New US bank Aspiration gives customers an insight into the impact of their purchases by scoring companies based on how they treat their staff and the planet. The bank also rates companies against their closest competitors so customers can easily see which brands best reflect their own personal values. 

Similarly, Clarity Money is an app that analyses users’ spending to recommend better deals and even negotiate lower subscription fees for them – forcing companies to be clear and upfront about their pricing strategies.

Who do you trust?

With startups redefining what it means to be honest and open, brands will soon face increased pressure to meet these new expectation benchmarks and highlight their own transparency credentials. For example, research conducted by J. Walter Thompson, London, found that transparency is one of the key ingredients in earning people’s trust (along with honesty, integrity and reliability). And according to research by Label Insight, 39% of people would switch to a new brand if it offered complete transparency and 73% would pay more for such products.

The message is clear: transparency is moving from a ‘nice-to-have’ option that helps startups create differentiation and into a need-to-have asset that all companies must consider. Today, being open and honest is an effective way of building trust. Tomorrow, it will be an essential means of boosting your bottom line.

THE POWER OF BRAND CONTROVERSY

The power of controversy is unquestionable. Controversy attracts attention. Even those with opposing views will share a controversial position. Since the beginning of time, controversies have had a subtle appeal to them.

Benford’s law of controversy states that “passion is inversely proportional to the amount of true information available.” In other words, the fewer facts known and agreed on, the more controversy there is.  Conversely, the more facts that are known, the less controversy there is.

Humans crave controversy for three reasons. First, controversy makes our lives seem more interesting. Life would be pretty boring if everyone shared the same opinion, so a little polarization activates and stimulates our interest. 

Controversy also polarizes and separates us into communities based on our position.  Psychologically, ‘sense of community’ is one of the major tenants of self-definition. To be part of the group gives meaning and association with a larger group and provides emotional safety and a sense of belonging and identification.  

Controversy disrupts and grabs our attention. In a modern world where it’s so easy to get lost in the noise, controversy breaks through. Challenging someone’s belief or faith causes them naturally to either seek to confirm or disprove the position. But they cannot ignore it. Controversy means you're connecting with people. Controversy means you're leveraging tension and you're creating sides. Controversy means you're relevant, and you're modern, and you're interesting. And modern, relevant and interesting have high ROIs.

While strong opinions do polarize, they also make for strong brands and loyal followers. This largely because taking sides against the “other” is a potent uniting force psychologically.  Even more so if there is an identifiable enemy, as it gives us the chance to not only showcase and articulate our faith but also to unite ourselves with our fellow believers. A community united by a common enemy.

We would certainly not suggest a controversial strategy for all brands. Many brands would not benefit from any controversy.  On the other hand, there are many other brands where we may suggest, what have you got to lose? 

Executed intelligently, contrarian messaging can drive awareness and attention. It just needs to be thoughtfully investigated, well-conceived and perfectly positioned. It’s not for the risk-averse. However, when executed properly can drive far more organic engagement.

P. T. Barnum, the 19th-century American showman and circus owner once said, 'There's no such thing as bad publicity.'  Barnum was a self-promoter of the highest order and never missed an opportunity to get people talking.  While things may have changed significantly since the days of P. T. Barnum, word of mouth marketing still requires people talking about your brand.

Alan Sorensen, an economics professor at Stanford, looked at book reviews featured in The New York Times. He determined that even when reviews were negative, previously unknown authors saw a one-third bump in sales. We believe his findings can be applied beyond authors to all “small” challenger brands fighting to make names for themselves.

We say “small” because these brands have little to no brand equity to lose. One reason is that, for lesser-known brands, negative perceptions fade more quickly in consumers’ minds than their general awareness of the product," The Economist writes. "With established brands, on the other hand, the whiff of bad publicity lingers longer."

To be clear, there is such a thing as bad publicity. Just ask BP, Nike, Toyota, Volkswagen, or Gillette. When Sanlu was revealed to be selling poisonous milk, it went bankrupt, and its top executives were put in jail. But, if your brands starting point is obscurity, even bad publicity may be helpful.

Today, more than ever, brands need to break through the noise, and one of the most effective ways is by playing the role of an agent provocateur.  By creating intelligent controversy, they can guarantee that, while they may be reviled, they’ll not be ignored.

What better example of this than the current President of the United States, Donald Trump? His entire presidency is a (P. T. Barnum’esque) theatrical production designed to keep the nation glued to the media. 

The entire spectacle is filled with controversy, conspiracy, collusion and drama all designed for one thing - to keep us watching.  It’s all a carefully contrived illusion to keep us focused, and it works. Without risk, there is no reward. 

Media 2025 | The Connected Society

Today, the term “media” can mean different things to different people.  Ultimately, however, media is mass communication regarded collectively. Media today can be the message, the medium, or the messenger; and to complicate things, the lines between them are becoming very blurry. 

Social Media is participatory and connected media.  One might argue that once all media is participatory and connected that the term ‘social’ is redundant.  Media is simply media.  The future of social media, therefore, is a discussion on the future of media itself. To that end, social will just be folded into the broader marketing discipline.

Social Media today is focused on driving real-time engagement, (unedited and unfiltered) live streaming video, Virtual Reality (VR), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Augmented Reality (AR), Internet of Things (IoT), social commerce, mobile wallets, metadata, search/visibility, data-driven decisions, content marketing and mobile devices.

Moving into 2018, more and more users are using messenger apps (e.g. Facebook Messenger, Slack, and WhatsApp) but there’s still a lot of growth happening in social networks. Social platforms, social customs, and communication standards are all in a constant process of evolution.

Transparency is the new black, and there is a clear shift from talking at the world to making the world talk. To wit, most branded content in the next years will come from consumers, and user-generated content will far exceed branded content.  The next wave of media apps will help filter the clutter.

Ultimately, everything that can be connected to the Internet will be by 2025 (i.e. homes, humans/ wearable tech, TVs, cars, jet engines, locomotives, lights, appliances, etc.) That said, people will care increasingly more about culture than products.  

MOVING AHEAD

The future of media is inextricably linked to technology. The promise of technology was always to improve the way people live and to make our lives simpler and easier.  Around the world, people are utilising technology to create new communities, engage across boundaries, make the world more inclusive, and change the way we interact.  This transformation is happening everywhere and in every culture, country, and industry. 

Integrated mobile devices like Google Glass and the Apple Watch are already taking major steps to eliminate the gap between “technology” and “life.”  What is clear is that we have quickly evolved from the age of industrialisation to the connected society.

The connected society transforms everything. Information and communications technology (ICT) and big data are also fueling the rise of a new economy in which new market actors – commercial, "indiepreneurial," and crowd-sourced – are empowered with new models of production and exchange, as well as automated, frictionless and highly personalised consumption. 

In this new economy, consumers become curators rather than receivers, products give way to services, and consumers adopt more and more complex roles as citizens, users, co-creators, specialists, and actors.  Collaboration, crowd funding, crafting and sharing are just some of the hallmarks of the modern, involved consumer. 

The connected society encourages a rise of meritocracy and the formation of a creative elite.  Within this order, merit is increasingly defined by a new set of emerging values, such as knowledge, transparency, fairness, quality of experience, authenticity, sociality, healthiness, and simplicity.  The ability to make informed choices, to a very large extent, will drive the consumers of the connected society.

Fast-forward to the future, and we should see global media usage continue on its upward trajectory.  By 2020, eMarketer projects that 2.44 billion of the world's population will be on connected networks. Media usage will be ubiquitous, seamless, and integrated into our daily lives in a multitude of ways.

The ways we both input and observe media will also shift. Holographic displays will be shifting into the mainstream and keyboards on desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones will become increasingly irrelevant, as interactions on what was once called social media will largely be voice-controlled.

Driven by continued advancements in technology and rapid rollouts of commercial products, the future will be shaped by an information ecosystem that’s increasingly more intuitive, anticipatory, transparent and personalised. Some very fundamental human activities like learning, thinking, working, and being “present” with others will be transformed by these changes.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies such as machine learning and natural language processing will also play an integral role in shaping the future. Over time, the computer itself - whatever its form factor - will be an intelligent assistant helping you through your day. Your phone, for example, will proactively bring up the right documents, schedule and map your meetings, let people know if you are late, suggest responses to messages, handle your payments and expenses. Technology won’t just serve as tools for you, but they’ll even serve as your stand-in in some cases.

Even today, Google’s new messaging app, Allo, scans your texts; understand the context and supplies readymade human-like responses for you (“Cute dog!” and “That’s good!”). Not just when you were sent words, but even when you were sent pictures.  Just imagine how much more dynamic and robust these technologies will become.

As a result, Social Media will become far more specialised and personalised to the actual needs and interests of each audience member. By 2025, social media sites will have adapted their platform for each user so that it would appear by today’s standards that people live in their own universe.

Social Media platforms will compete to maintain their share of the audience.  Users of social media will gradually only expose themselves to the news that affects them. Future platforms will be even more equipped to predict exactly what users will need to keep them engaged.

Social media platforms will connect advertisers with potential customers by using multiple regression analysis and correlation analysis.  When a consumer behaves differently than the formula predicted, the formula will automatically adjust.  The connected society will know when you are tired, hungry, thirsty, stressed, or even low on Vitamin C. 

In the connected society envisioned in 2025 people will increasingly seek out a sense of belonging and social media platforms will provide “fireplaces” for people to gather around and topics for interaction, conversation and relationship building.  Products, services and brands will be instilled with meaning more through the crowd than through branding and marketing efforts.

Products and services infused with a social component of some kind can more easily move from product/service status to an experience. For the 2025 consumer, an experience will always be more original than the actual product or service. This means that consumers will be looking for original experiences delivered by humans and which are embedded in a social context, rather than searching for specific products and services. Subsequently, a value will be grafted onto products and services by how a network of users – or a network of peers – decides to use them.

Human beings are inherently social animals, and we are ultimately at the centre of our own universes. On average, people spend 60 percent of conversations talking about themselves—and this figure jumps to 80 percent when communicating via social media platforms.  As a result, our social media platforms will increasingly place us at the centre of our unique, personalised ecosystem. Parents in 2025 won’t be complaining about their children spending too much time texting.  They'll be complaining that their son or daughter seldom step out of their own self-made virtual-world.

Social Media in 2025 will be a ubiquitous enabler, producer and facilitator that shift the consumer from receiver to curator.  This is a natural evolution of a sharing economy and change in values, preferring services and access to function, rather than ownership. This means that businesses will have to engage and collaborate with users in different roles rather than as passive consumers.

Social Media will continue to create and connect new communities, engage across boundaries, make the world more inclusive and fundamentally change the way we live. As William Gibson espoused, (Neuromancer, 1984) this brave new world will be “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation.”

 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Written by Andrew B. Giles. Andrew is the head of digital innovation and strategy at Goodbuzz Inc. You can follow him @Goodbuzz and on Facebook. 

 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Goodbuzz is a digital agency based in Toronto, Canada. We help brands create and capture value from emerging trends in technology, society and the workplace. We prototype the future - and believe the best way to predict it - is to create it.  Follow us on Facebook or Twitter or if you have any questions contact us directly.