So what exactly might ‘Adaptive Brand Marketing’ be?
16th October 09
Posted in Brands, social media, transformational change
(Jointly authored with Greg Andersen, our MD in BBH New York)
The imminent publication of Forrester’s new report on the challenges facing clients – “Adaptive Brand Marketing: Rethinking Your Approach to Branding in the Digital Age” is a welcome turning of the spotlight toward client organizations. Without question agencies of all sizes, shapes and persuasions need to get their collective acts together and transform into leaner, more agile, more creative, & more technology- and data-fuelled businesses. The best in the business are no doubt all plotting how they can come out of this recession leaner, meaner, quicker, better.
But that’s kind of pointless unless clients adapt too.
We’ve not got hold of the report yet; we’re looking forward to getting stuck in, and are intrigued by the ‘new 4 Ps’ presented in the report: permission, proximity, perception, participation (AdAge covered some more of the detail in this piece from last week). But the idea of adaptive brand marketing is something we’ve been kicking around for a while at BBH.
We believe marketing communications are already being forced to become increasingly agile; particularly for more youth-oriented brands. In such a fast paced and dynamic media environment, relevance is increasingly determined in the moment. Recency matters. Audience and attention are fleeting. Fame spikes … even for the famous. For brands to achieve and maintain fame in this context, it’s our view that communications for certain types of brands must make a dramatic shift from highly polished epic launches to a continuous and diverse stream of messaging and content designed to ride hyper-current cultural trends, consumer attitudes and competitive maneuvering. The performance of this diverse activity continuously monitored and optimized like a portfolio of stocks … kill the under-performers and reinvest in the ones showing returns. However, this ‘continuous beta’ mentality is a big leap from 18-month planning cycles and dogmatic, rigid testing protocols, despite its more real-time and real-world feedback.
Just as this is culturally challenging for many agencies, so it will prove for marketing organizations. As marketing becomes more technology-powered, with learning more real-time, it will be critical to identify who is responsible for leading within marketing organizations … and more importantly, who is empowered to make decisions on the fly. Committee decision making and hierarchical organizational structures, for all their perceived benefits, won’t hold up to the strain of an accelerated process.
So in advance of the full report, here are some of our starters for ten (or seven, actually) on how client structures, skill sets and approaches might adapt to deliver ‘adaptive branding’. We’re learning as we’re going, and as usual we’d value your input, opinions, builds or disagreements.
We’d particularly like to hear about clients that are exploring new ways of engaging agencies, and new forms of leaner, faster, more iterative & curatorial process. Again, there’s much we can learn from these pioneers.
1. Consumer intelligence at the center
We wholeheartedly agree with Forrester’s points around a more prominent role for research. We all have an increasing number of highly sophisticated, real-time and granular measurement tools at our disposal, especially in interactive environments. Adopting an agile approach to using this data becomes more significant; if one can measure everything, one must decide what really matters to avoid drowning or becoming paralyzed. Less, but better measurement, enabling more responsive data-powered marketing, should be the ambition (what Tim @ Made By Many called ‘Agile Measurement‘). These observations suggest an elevated role for the insight & research functions that can quickly distribute and integrate learning in real time.
2. Marketing as a catalyst for change within the broader company
This points to a potentially larger opportunity. It’s not just the marketing organization that needs to reorient itself given the now normal digital age, but the company itself should consider how it reorients itself around its marketing organization. In most progressive companies, it is the marketing function that has most quickly and deeply engaged with the new interactive toolkit. This expertise can play a role well beyond the traditional confines of marketing communications. For example, a proper understanding of social media tools and the proper employment of resulting insights could impact everything from new product/service innovation to customer service to crisis management.
What some, such as Dachis, are calling ‘social business design‘ is a significant opportunity in which marketing teams could play a leading role in driving efficiencies and creating new models internally. Marketing as a revenue source and a genuine competitive advantage, not just a cost. If marketers want a seat back at the big boys’ table, this is one potential way of getting it.
3. The networked organization
The structural definitions of, and relationships between, agencies and marketing organizations must change if companies are to ensure access to the very highest quality and leading-edge partners delivering at speed. With the emergence of what Forrester call “the federated organization” (we prefer ‘networked’) Global brand leaders and directors need to be able to cast elite teams of people (talent that spans several departments, companies or geographies) to get best results and avoid capacity bottlenecks.
This places special emphasis on an evolved role for ‘lead agency’ partners, both providing the conventionally critical services around quality control and coordination, but also performing a new casting director role for marketing directors; knowing whom to bring into a project, and when, and then managing that engagement. Further, client organizations must foster a culture of generosity and collaboration both within their organizations and across multi-agency teams to get the most out of them. Just as dogs and owners look alike, so do clients and the culture of their agency roster (but let’s stop right there with that analogy).
4. Brand leaders as curators
Without question, global brand leaders do need to become more responsible for evolving marketing assets and them adapting to local markets (in many cases this is already happening, for example with some of the Unilever brands with whom BBH works). However, we believe this evolved role needs to go well beyond adaptation and coordination. We envisage an increasing role for both client and agency organizations as not just creators of content, but as curators as well. In a world awash in content, time can be saved by smart curation and the hacking of existing properties. Not everything needs to be conceived of, crafted and produced from the ground up every time. This is particularly important as brands move beyond the development of the traditional ‘campaign’ and start evolving more ongoing platforms that need growing, managing, sustaining and refreshing.
5. Reframing investment timelines
With campaigns evolving into programs and platforms, the annual planning & budgeting framework currently used to allocate monies needs revamping. This is clearly challenging, but if some marketing activity is designed to build long-term enduring platforms and other marketing is to be more opportunistic, then it seems sensible to begin to think about marketing investment in a parallel fashion. We agree that a more active and fluid approach to marketing investment is the correct approach, but this places even greater emphasis on agile and, as much as possible, live measurement.
6. To fail is to learn
We think client organizations need to find new comfort in failure and place increased value in learning as long as both happen for real, and in close to real time. Embracing more of a continuous beta mentality means getting communications into market more quickly and less expensively … with early real learning as the result. This beta learning can help redirect the program while it’s still being developed instead of after its finished. A marketer can spend 10 months of theoretical testing in artificial environments and a highly polished, highly researched program still has a chance of failure, or in many cases creates no real impact one way or another. What good is the post-program audit? The budget is gone and the market has moved on.
7. The time is now
Historically, recessions have proven to be crucibles of change. The current recession is already turning out to be rather more of a complete reset for the industry than a temporary dip in revenues. Structurally, the smartest agencies and agency groups have been quietly plotting not only their future size, but also rebuilding their capabilities, simplifying their processes and gently retooling their skillsets. The smartest marketing organizations must ensure they are doing the same.
So who’s doing this well?
No doubt the Forrester report will be full of strong cases of where this is already happening. We look forward to that.
But we’re after your examples of clients re-inventing process, resourcing models, cultures in the pursuit of better work, produced more efficiently. Whilst it’s perhaps easier to highlight examples of where this *isn’t* happening, let’s try and stay focused on things we can learn from.
Let us know.
Love the analogy to managing brand equities in the same way you’d manage a stock portfolio. Genius way of getting the point across that brands need to constantly evaluate & consider what works & what doesn’t.
If you’re going to really excel (just like in the stock market), you’ll work toward figuring out why things that work do so well, and why things that don’t work fail.
Exactly right Jordan. Lots of ideas = lots of opportunities to learn and reapply for the next time. It seems those DM practitioners had the right mentality oh so long ago…put a lot out there, then continuously try to beat the top performer with the learnings from other failures.
Great post. I’m also interested in hearing more about yet another set of P’s: permission, proximity, perception, participation.
It all boils down to this, I think; success is never a guarantee and you certainly can’t buy success with huge budgets (which are shrinking and/or shifting, anyway.) It all boils down to kick-ass ideas, using the right technology and channels, and engaged brands and consumers who interact and participate in a conversation (not a monologue – the days of Web 1.0 are gone.)
[...] 1 Share Comment source So what exactly might ‘Adaptive Brand Marketing’ be? First shared by: Joakim Vars [...]
Thanks Ben.
Killer post. Completely agree on several fronts:
1. A continuous stream of diverse messaging will replace the big, all purpose launch. Living beta!
2. Breaking down and instituting new organizational structures are key. Marketing will be key as response time to the marketplace is more critical than ever.
3. Territorial boundaries between marketing partners must dissolve. Consumers are both snipers and indians right now so everyone needs to circle the wagons.
4. Communications should be framed in terms of relationships not campaigns.
5. Real-time is your friend and enemy. It demands to be fed but failures are quickly forgotten.
6. The industry shift has happened. It’s past and gone. The measure of that fact is not whether existing companies have changed with it. The old way of doing things no longer drives the new. The new is faster, impatient and doesn’t need the old. It’s moved on already.
Thanks to you guys for leading the way and being so generous in sharing your changes.
Simon
Ben:
There is, of course, a difference between knowing the obvious and actually implementing it. If we all were starting from scratch, none of us would build what we have. I keep hearing people talk about scale, when in many cases scale has nothing to do with it. As everything becomes more and more consumer centric it’s only a matter of time before consumers issue RFP’s for their purchases.
Agree with both the agile and consumer at center, though the decision making progress of both agencies and clients will need a dramatic transformation.
Secondly, for marketers to truly become catalysts of change will not only call for their increased knowledge of new tools, but their own skill at marketing themselves internally.
So much of this sounds good on paper but is harder in real life. The networked organization? I remember the failed matrix model of Digital Equipment Corp. Perhaps the P&G’s of the world can figure it out, but many other smaller brands with less marketing focus will take years to do this right. Politics, budgets, questions about who gets credit abound.
That being said, I think you’ve nailed much of what we/they should aspire to. For me the biggest one, and the one most easily implemented for the non-global brand is “reframing investment timelines.” Crazy the time we put into creating and finalizing anything in when we’re in the middle of what Wired calls the “Good Enough Revolution.” Also, all indications are that consumers have less patience and greater demands. Witness everything from their unwillingness to sit through pre-roll to their intolerance for inflexible customer service (United Airlines) to their insistence on producing their own content in response to a brand’s advertising (it’s posted on YouTube within hours.)
I’m probably rambling, but if a brand follows this approach they may be OK.
1. Bake the brand story into the product. (thank you Alex and John)
2. Embrace the consumer’s desire to participate and allow them to co-create
3. Forget about one size fits all: watch Gladwell on Ted.com re spaghetti sauce and realize that customization and versions are the way to go.
4. Understand that one of your most important products is your content that lives in the social media space.
5. Build more UX into everything, not just websites, but every encounter with the brand
6. Understand your consumer’s relationship not only with you and your category but with media and content and let that inform how you engage.
If this were a blog post, I might edit and focus this comment. But I’m reframing my investment timeline and am willing to fail.
Build more UX into everything, not just websites, but every encounter with the brand
Love it!
Loved this thinking Edward. Thanks. Lots to think about in terms of us moving this forward.
All very interesting thoughts. But early on in this proposition, a sentence reads: “We believe marketing communications are already being forced to become increasingly agile; particularly for more youth-oriented brands.”
So how does that and all that follows relate to the demographic fact that America is steadily skewing older, NOT younger? How does “agile” apply to AARP?
Hi Paul. Thanks for the provocation. We certainly don’t have this all the way sorted through yet, nor do we believe there are blanket beliefs/approaches that are right for every marketer.
One thing we noticed in developing a campaign for one of our youth oriented brands was the number of things that the target described as ‘must see’ just in the time we were developing the work. From there we knew the brand needed to be more prolific than epic in its content creation to stay fresh and relevant in that type of environment.
We guess it comes down to knowing what role a brand plays and where it’s value is in the full life of a customer, then where the brand needs the constancy of a platform and where it needs to be more prolific with a more continuous stream of communications.
Thanks again. Greg
[...] So what exactly might ‘Adaptive Brand Marketing’ be? « BBH Labs "We believe marketing communications are already being forced to become increasingly agile; particularly for more youth-oriented brands. In such a fast paced and dynamic media environment, relevance is increasingly determined in the moment. Recency matters. Audience and attention are fleeting. Fame spikes … even for the famous. For brands to achieve and maintain fame in this context, it’s our view that communications for certain types of brands must make a dramatic shift from highly polished epic launches to a continuous and diverse stream of messaging and content designed to ride hyper-current cultural trends, consumer attitudes and competitive maneuvering. The performance of this diverse activity continuously monitored and optimized like a portfolio of stocks … kill the under-performers and reinvest in the ones showing returns. However, this ‘continuous beta’ mentality is a big leap from 18-month planning cycles and dogmatic, rigid testing protocols, despite its more real-time and r (tags: marketing branding advertising digital business via:mento.info) AKPC_IDS += “2839,”; Verwandte Artikel [...]
Really interesting and thought provoking stuff. Thank you.
I’m not sure if all this stuff is entirely *new* (although clearly we have now arrived a very significant ‘moment’). The clues have been there since the beginning – perhaps hidden in plain view.
I’m thinking of businesses built using the Web, or broadly augmented by Web applications/platforms that became very significant parts of their businesses over the past 10 years, and not just ecommerce.
Two that I have worked with are the global risks consultancy Control Risks (http://www.controlrisks.com) and The London Stock Exchange (http://www.londonstockexchange.com).
In both cases, the new ‘digital’ components acted as a catalyst for big changes in business processes and a whole raft of client (internal) behaviours right across the business. The impact of these changes was, to a great extent, unforseen – and I remember us discussing the fact (a few years back now, at Interesource) that we were in the change management game, not just designing and building Web apps.
Whilst those two are both examples of businesses that had a pre-existing culture to be changed, it’s also interesting to look at pureplay start-ups who had the luxury of being able to build that culture from the ground up. We can all – including clients – learn a great deal from both types of antecedent of today’s ‘mass-adoption event’.
The recession is perhaps having the same effect as the dot-com apocalypse did within the first wave of digital disruption. The survivors of that re-boot are amongst the most dynamic companies on the planet. This is a supreme moment of creative destruction. Embrace it.
Cheers Tim. Loved the articulation of us experiencing a ‘supreme moment of creative destruction’. As we’ve noted before in many other discussions, when *everything* changes because of the internet, there are almost an infinite number of challenges that face marketers. The smart people work out what really matters and deal with that first.
The mistake made by many companies (including agencies) is to restrict thinking to the idea of the internet as a channel for distribution rather than a re-boot for just about everything.
[...] el mundo empresarial y por eso me ha parecido interesante la relación que hay con el post de BBH Labs “So what exactly might ‘Adaptive Brand Marketing’ be?” y los puntos que aquí se [...]
[...] el mundo empresarial y por eso me ha parecido interesante la relación que hay con el post de BBH Labs “So what exactly might ‘Adaptive Brand Marketing’ be?” y los puntos que aquí se [...]
Great point regarding the need for clients to be more adaptive. The problem I’ve seen is this: If you manufacture a product, say consumer electronics or farm equipment, the first item off the assembly line has to be perfect. Getting it right down the road doesn’t cut it and that’s a mentality that lives deep within a company – and rightly so. Now, SocMed comes along and these companies have to learn to ‘go with the flow’ and learn on the fly and it freaks them out. It’s going to take a while for some companies to make the cognitive leap.
Thanks Rick
I think it’s about more than social media, but I agree with your point about perfection.
People like throwing around terms like ‘constant beta’ and ‘iterative creativity’, but to live them is much trickier than to type them.
How true. We need to keep the nuts and bolts production people onside.
Really thought provoking article, thanks. We’ve also been thinking about this for some time at Digit for a number of our clients. It just makes sense that brands start behaving in this way, doesn’t it? We are very interested in exploring adaptive branding, as well as adaptive brand marketing – shifting how we think about brand identity from static logos to something more dynamic and contextual. We’ve written a paper about it, in case anyone wants to read more, which you can find here: http://www.digitlondon.com/#/approach/Adaptive_Branding . Looking forward to hearing more of this discussion!
Ben and team…
So, wow… and wow again. I’m just coming back from traveling – and ran across the AdAge article – so I know I’m late to this post.
But, you guys have succinctly put into one post – something I’ve been feeling and assembling for the last two years. So, I’m someone who came from the agency side, went to the client side, and am now hanging up my own shingle to practice exactly this idea.
I’ve personally spent the last few years on the client-side learning the value of these six principles (and the new four p’s), working with clients (where available) and blogging about it where I could… I know it works – because I’ve lived it and seen it work; on both sides of the table.
Just a couple of thoughts here…
On living in beta with small experiments and getting permission to fail:
http://www.rrsquared.com/experimentation-getting-to-121-jigawatts-in-your-online-marketing.html
On centering and balancing the measurement equation:
http://www.rrsquared.com/stop-being-a-data-driven-marketer-part-1-of-3.html
I really do believe that it is the agencies that will have to change first. There exists a rare opportunity to redefine what the new digital agency does for a living. Just like record companies are now just discovering that their old business model has to be completely re-defined – the agency has that opportunity now.
Thank you for this introduction to your thinking… I’m looking forward to following all of your progress.
Thanks for the comments and links Rob. Glad it parallels your thinking, and looking forward to digging around on your blog. Ben
Excellent, readable post. Thank you. When first hearing Forrester was publishing the study I was concerned it would be a little misdirected, but it sounds like it chases some pretty tight thinking.
Your points about measurement are right on: too much measuring and analysis can slow things down. ROI is about measuring tactics, what we really need is to measure strategy. A little less ROI and a little more ROS (return on strategy). Marketers need to know if their product and brand strategies are right or in your words, they need to measure what’s most important. (It’s okay to fail tactically, strategically not so much.)
As for campaigns vs. platforms, when RGA talks about the notion it makes me uncomfortable. It feels a little soul-less. Your explanation certainly warms it up. I, too, believe campaigns come and go but do favor a powerful branding idea over a platform any day. Peace!
Thanks for the comments Steve. Loved the notion of ROS. B
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just a quick one, cuz as a futurist, im all for changing biz practices in both traditional clients and agencies, but in all of this we should take note of what is the baby in the bathwater.
I never thought “epic” launches and campaigns we a product of looooong planing and timelines, but more so a product of fantastic storytelling.
as such, storytelling is even more useful in this world of immediacy, context, a sticky/spreadable content. We just dont need 18 months to do it like we maybe thought we did. Most of that time might have been pre-production with way too many meetings, approvals, post rationalisation, yada yada yada.
we can keep the epic and still be constant beta. I dont think either will resonate as much as they can without the other.
ah, case in point: Nike’s 180 Air ad. suitably epic when it came out and widely regarded as one of the company’s best.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEFxdbl2SXc
as far as I know, this one was done last minute, yet still has that epic multisport storytelling aspects to it that resonates. kk its friday im out!
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Most logos these days are not following conventional logo standards! is it due to advancement in technology ?…
In addition to Ed, John and Tom’s contributions, I’d add that designers are becoming increasingly aware that their work is able to be easily manipulated and adapted once it passes beyond the boundaries of an organisation thanks to technology. So, yes…