How the game will change in the year ahead – our predictions, with links!
1. Profit from me > Pay me
As consumers’ engagement – even more than their money – becomes even more intensely coveted by brands, consumers will demand compensation, monetary or otherwise. The cat’s out of the bag: consumers have an ever-increasing suspicion of targeted online marketing and a sharp awareness that their participation is a crucial commodity for brands.
The age-old spaces of marketing, like bus stop shelters, will make way for interactive, shoppable walls, screens, and codes, as urban transit will develop into a key “3rd place” for retail. “Urban culture is retail culture”: as urbanization explodes globally, and shopping becomes increasingly ambient, mobility and retail will converge, with both consumers and shops on the move.
This is an age-old question for anyone who works in the often-murky world of brand. Defining exactly it is what we do and what our role is in an industry, which isn’t shy of a buzzword or brand blah blah, isn’t always the easiest of tasks. But returning to it every now and again is definitely a useful exercise.
So Wolff Olins has a heritage in doing great, sometimes even game-changing branding. For me, branding is about creating really distinctive design (systems), which are led by and help represent a bigger idea about what an organization stands for.
So RED’s branding is guided by the idea of a new model of conscientious commerce, the principle that you can help raise money to fights AIDS in Africa by doing something as everyday as buying a t-shirt or a coffee. So London 2012’s branding is defined by the idea that the London Olympics will be like no other Olympic games – everyone Olympic, everyone’s Olympics. And Tate’s branding – an organization who re-invented the idea of gallery – is about making art more accessible without dumbing it down.
At our best these big ideas have gone beyond purely influencing the branding of an organization, beyond how it looks, beyond how it communicates to the world. These big ideas inform what the organization actually does.
Sometimes this happens by intent, sometimes by chance. For example, with Mercedes Benz we created three new businesses for them – beyond their core strength of selling cars - in ten short months, but we haven’t had enough of these projects, as we would have liked. This is now starting to change.
After an internal exercise at Wolff Olins – which we called the Growth Plan – we’ve decided to be much more intentional about the type of work we do and the way we approach it. It’s still a work in progress but has a different starting point to other projects we’ve done.
Today, we work from the mindset of defining a clear role for a brand, put simply what role does or should a given organization play in people’s lives. Instead of our next step being branding, creating a distinctive design, our next step is increasingly business design.
That means focusing on answering deeper questions about the links between brand and business. Highlighting specifically the connection between the role a brand wants to play and the type and nature of products a business makes. More and more we’re envisioning the individual features and functionality a business will need to develop in order to change. We’re stretching this to include the services they’ll need to provide and the business model required to support these changes. We’re also experimenting with creating our own digital product, check out the beta version http://whtespace.com
Design still plays a fundamental part in helping visualize, imagine and realize these connections, branding as we knew it far less so. This is less and less about doing better branding, instead it’s about making better products, services and businesses that have a clear and useful role in commerce and society.
These aren’t necessarily new questions, nor is this rocket science, we’re just much more focused on the fact that this needs to be our mindset and approach in order to create game-changing brands.
“I’ve got the brains, you’ve got the looks, let’s make lots of money”
Is collaboration better than competition? I think it probably is when taken as a fundamental business operating system i.e. when brands that share a common belief get together to explore new opportunities together.
What we mean by collaboration as an operating model is a root and branch rethink of the way business actually works – away from a market share driven approach to something based around share of wallet.
Old school thinking:
Define a competitive position and defend it
Grow by increasing market share i.e. selling what you do to more people
Keep resources such as smarts, technology, talent to yourself (see them as a source of competitive advantage)
New school:
Define the role you play in people’s lives and seek out others who share that role
Grow by increasing share of wallet i.e. extend what you do in order to meet the needs of your constituents
Share resources with other like minded organisations who share the same belief system – who share your aims
Adidas + 2012 not Ebay + Skype Bono + RED not Will.I.am + Intel Tata Docomo not Nokia Microsoft
Maybe it’s a new way to think about collaboration – a match based on belief rather than capability. A union based on love rather than convenience?
