Summer’s arrived early, so for some summer madness, here’s how the C-suite should rethink itself, for game-changing growth:
Chief Usefulness Officer (CUO)
Used to be CMO. Now, it’s not advertising and sales promotions but: what do our customers want to do? How can we be more useful to them?
Chief Experimentation Officer (CXO)
Used to be Chief Technology Officer. No longer tech upgrades and support, but: using new tech, how can we try out new things faster?
Chief Boundary Breaker (CBB)
Used to be Chief HR Officer. Forget performance frameworks or recruitment criteria. Instead: how can we find talent pools inside and outside the organisation? How can we get rid of silos and remove the barriers to collaboration?
Chief Value-Creator (CVC)
Used to be CFO. No longer about the numbers and the risks. Now: what if our main revenue stream died out? What alternatives do we have? What are the new ways we could make money, for ourselves and our customers?
Chief Purpose Officer (CPO)
Used to be COO. No longer efficiency but effectiveness. These days: how can we raise our people’s game by giving them a stronger sense of why we’re doing it?
The Yahoo! Advertising blog recently asked several agency leaders one question: “What are some key trends you’re seeing in political advertising this election season?” Angela Riley, Strategy Director for Wolff Olins, talked about what brands and politicians can learn from each other to better engage consumers—-and constituents.
Here’s a snippet from the piece:
For Politicians and Brands, It’s Essential to Be Clear, Consistent and Authentic.
Like a short-lived advertising campaign, political messaging platforms can evaporate into the ether without ever resonating with the voting public. Perhaps, like the all-too-common one-off approach of a glossy advertising campaign to appeal to an audience, politicians react to public sentiment and rush to get a message out before they’ve figured out what they really stand for.
Politicians can take a page from well-loved brands, which stand for something clear, authentic and desirable. Think Target and the democratization of chic, or BMW - the ultimate driving machine. Think too of the Obama-Biden presidential campaign of 2008 standing for “Hope” and “Change” — similarly clear, authentic and hugely desirable (given the public sentiment at the time).
So how can a political candidate get at the authentic, aspirational heart of what they stand for? Keep reading the full piece here.
We know that the New York Times are infographics geniuses. They visualize data to track sentiment on a topic, while inviting you to participate in the conversation or even start a new one. Sorting features allow you to find “your people” and compare ideas.
The one above was an instant response to an extremely timely topic—that’s NYT’s bread and butter—but it’s a lesson for other brands who trade in social currency.
From media to retail to cultural institutions to healthcare, creating timely, engaging experiences like this can keep your finger on the pulse of what your consumers are thinking, helping you stay relevant and useful.
The other day I sat in a brainstorm with a bunch of fellow graphic designers, discussing the future direction of an international business. Someone in the team made a flippant joke about the moment: Most of us had gone to art school, not business school.
As designers we sometimes worry about engaging in the “business side” of things. But today’s businesses are desperate to find experimental and creative solutions and designers are just the problem-solvers they need. We’ve been trained to take a brief, assess the problem, instinctively create different directions, analyse the positives and negatives, reject one, create another, see what works, see what doesn’t.
We can rapidly create visual concepts that test how products, communications, experiences and interfaces can work together. And we can test multiple directions. It allows businesses to take risks they couldn’t imagine, because they can see tangible possibilities. That, is business prototyping.
There’s an opportunity now as designers to get beneath the veneer of subjective aesthetics and establish design, and design thinking, at the heart of tomorrow’s businesses – an opportunity we should grab with both hands.
So, am I a graphic designer anymore?
Campbell Butler is a Senior Designer at Wolff Olins.
The book that first got me interested in the whole idea of management was Tom Peters’ In Search of Excellence, and one of its mantras was ‘stick to the knitting.’ But is that still good advice, 30 years on? Kodak, Xerox, Nokia, Kmart and Blockbuster all did, and look what’s happened to them. By sticking to their core activity, they failed to react to rivals coming from somewhere else. Google, on the other hand, has moved from its original search-engine knitting into every other handicraft, including self-driving cars.
We explored this topic at a breakfast discussion I hosted last week, exploring our view of the five habits that make 21st century businesses game-changing – which include ‘experimental’ and ‘value-creative’, by which we mean constantly searching for new strategies and revenue streams.
It’s also the topic of Repeatability by Chris Zook and James Allen, two consultants from Bain & Company. They say, in contrast: identify your core, simplify it, and repeat it.
So who’s right? We asked our excellent breakfast panellists came from Zipcar, Zopa and Google. Their view was that experimentation has always been important, and that the Internet now makes it easy to test new things very rapidly, with a huge population of testers. They believe that this kind of testing is natural to a 21st-century business, and that it’s so common that fear of failure – indeed, use of the word ‘failure’ – hardly exists any more. They also say that open experimentation – trying things out in the marketplace – is a great way to be transparent, to involve customers, and so to earn trust.
Where they differ depends on the life stage of their business. In the early years, they say, experiment around the edges until your core idea is proved, but stick to the core idea. ‘It’s a big enough battle,’ said one, ‘to establish our model’. In older age (and Google is a geriatric 14 years old), it become OK to experiment more widely and more radically. ‘Google is always in beta,’ said a panellist.
All three panellists, though, agreed that fruitful experimentation needsto be driven by a purpose. And that purpose can be hugely ambitious: Zipcar has its eyes on the day when there are more car sharers than owners, and Zopa on the moment when peer-to-peer loans outnumber bank loans. Zipcar, Zopa and Google all want to change the world for the better.
So maybe the answer to the conundrum is that Tom Peters was right. You do need to stick to the knitting – but don’t think of your knitting as your activity (which should change over time), but your purpose (whichshouldn’t).
Many businesses miss the point with brand architecture and see it as an organizational chart and a way of tidying up their brand to save on marketing costs.
However when used in the right way, it can become a powerful business tool for connecting people, both customer and employees, to your future ambition, to help you get there quicker.
It can provide people with the inspiration they need to get passionate about your future vision and the tools they need to make it a reality.
Good architecture can help in 3 ways
Your brand architecture can help your business:
1. Reach customers in more valuable ways
As digital becomes ubiquitous, brands need to work harder to engage people in new ways: brand architecture can enable your brand to stretch further into your customers’ lives and help them find what they need more easily to boost the bottom line.
2. Enable your people to create this future
As the war for talent heats up, the best people increasingly want to contribute to a business mission that goes beyond profit: brand architecture can explain how your people can help create this new future and give them the tools to make it a reality.
3. Get investors excited by where you are headed
Investors are looking for sustainable growth to ensure they buy into a company with an exciting and stable future in this changing world: brand architecture gives you a way of demonstrating your new strategy and getting investors to buy into it, over the long-term.
Good architecture = good business
Two fantastic examples of how companies have used their brand architecture to make their futures a reality are GE and IBM.
IBM moved from a hardware producer to a technology platform for solving the world’s problems through its brand architecture. They first identified the world’s big challenges, and then built their services and capabilities around these client issues. This has resulted in doubling their clients’ likelihood of choosing IBM for more services and expanding their overall market by an amazing 40% or $2.3bn.
So good architecture can mean good business, not just a neater organisational chart.
Popuphood, launched last year in Oakland by Sarah Filley and Alfonso Dominguez, is an urban planning project with an unusual strategy for revitalizing depressed urban centers: the pop-up store.
“Ms. Filley and Mr. Dominguez persuaded a landlord to offer pop-up stores free six-month leases in locations that, in some cases, have been vacant for years. The merchants have a goal of turning a profit during the six months and then signing a longer-term lease, at a price to be negotiated. The landlord, Peter Sullivan Associates, is hoping that the free short-term leases will turn into longer-term revenue.”
Compared to the proliferation of pop-up retail by any big player from Target to Gucci, Popuphood’s approach harnesses the David and Goliath effect of rooting for the underdog - and the sense of possibility that comes with it.
Drawing on what seems like a tired marketing strategy for a solution that’s experimental, transient, urgent, novel and efficient, Popuphood’s strategy is a great example of boundaryless and constant beta behaviors we described in our recent Gamechangers report.
The Popuphood project made us wonder:
+ What can city planners learn from retailers?
+ What are other examples of success being redefined as fluid versus fixed experiences?
+ As more categories look to transform themselves from B2B to B2C – like healthcare and financial services – what can they learn from a pop up mentality?
Related:
+ Artist Julia Christensen’s Big Box Reuse project: how communities are repurpose abandoned retail spaces
+ Generation Sell: “Today’s ideal social form is not the commune or the movement or even the individual creator as such; it’s the small business” (New York Times)
+ London’s Boxpark, a pop-up mall made of old shipping containers
+ “Urban culture is retail culture” (Trendwatching, Retail Renaissance)
Since Splash.FM had its public launch a few weeks ago, co-founder Jason Fiedler has been busy watching the start-up grow and making constant changes.A friend of Wolff Olins, he took a few minutes to chat with strategist Sam Liebeskind about the early-stage site and his plans to engage more listeners and brands.
If you haven’t yet read about Splash.FM in TechCrunch, Rolling Stone, and Gizmodo or stumbled onto it on your own, put it on your radar.This young social startup helps you find new music that you’ll love based on what your friends and go-to sources are loving.It joins a crowded space of sites claiming to do just this (Big hitters like Pandora, Last.fm, iTunes Genius, to name a few), but unlike most others, Splash rejects algorithm-based suggestions in favor of human recommendation, pulling together the best features of sites like Twitter, Klout, and HypeMachine.
SAM: First, the basics. What is Splash and who would use it?
JASON: At its core, it’s a social network— ‘a Twitter for music discovery.’You create an account, you splash (post) music you like, and you follow others whose taste you trust.It’s an easy way to stay on top of the latest music. Most people don’t like the stress of deciding what to listen to, but they want music they like.
At the same time, it’s a place where artists and tastemakers can prove their influence.We recognized that for everyone who has trouble finding music, there’s someone that thinks they have the best music.So each user has a “Splash Score” that’s based on how successful they are as a recommender.It’s really powerful, and really addicting.
I could imagine.So is that why people should use splash instead of Spotify or Rhapsody?
They shouldn’t use Splash instead of those guys.They should use it in addition to them.We’re not really trying to play in mainstream music, to compete with Spotify or Rhapsody.We don’t want to be an all access music provider for people who know exactly what they’re looking for.
Paint me a picture of Splash.FM’s personality?
The company is really just [co-founder Alex Gatof] and me so the brand doesn’t fake anything.It’s just us, so that makes it easy.You want to be fun and social.But you don’t want to make too much of a personality of your site because you don’t want to alienate any type of person.Look at Twitter and Facebook- they’re innocent. You want to be subtle without being sterile.
On the platform, to splash means to share a song (think ‘tweet’).Ripple means to like/re-share a song (think ‘retweet’). I love the name and terminology.How did that come about?
After trying to just come up with a name for the site for like, 3 days, I stopped thinking on that level.I needed to think bigger- more about the concept- and put that into words.I just talked out loud to myself and I was like, ‘Domino effect, one person affecting another…then all of a sudden I got onto waves and thought, its like someone just splashed [into water].’Right when I heard that word, I just knew the whole analogy would work.
Right.And the interface of the site carries the analogy through.Can you talk a little about the site’s design?
We never sacrificed the interface and the look.We invested heavily on that. And spent a lot of time on the logo too.I came up with the idea for it after a lot of research. [Some startups] might want to try to skip it but you have to really put time in there early. I audited the logos of all the other music sites out there before designing the concept of ours.
Tone of voice was also really important for us.I took a course [at Penn] on writing copy…It really is an art.You have to always remember that people are reading all this.So I thought, what would I want to read?
I see Barstool U currently has the highest Splash Score. What opportunities are there for other established ‘non-music’ brands to leverage your platform?
Splash gives lifestyle brands specifically an additional channel to express themselves and cultivate their image. If you go with the notion of brand as a personality, the type of music you listen to and like is pretty core to that. You can imagine Nike splashing a lot of workout music, Lululemon splashing tranquil yoga tunes… The goal is the same as Twitter- to amass and connect with a large userbase, build and maintain a loyal following. With Splash.FM, lifestyle brands can add depth to their brand perception that they previously couldn’t.
BarstoolU specifically has influence in the college demographic, and as a result they’ve resonated really well with our current user base. We’ve featured them, and will continue to feature similar brands that make sense.
You’ve read our Game Changers report.Which of the 5 qualities do you think Splash really nails?
Definitely experimental.To be a good product guy you just have to never be satisfied.Actually, if we didn’t have a hard date that we set, we’d still be in private beta, and probably would be forever.That’s how we still think today.
So what’s the future of Splash?
Eventually, we want it to be about more than just finding music.
One way to potentially expand in the future is this “cannonball” idea that we’ve been playing with.In theory, you’d get a cannonball if a song you uploaded or rippled early really went big.They would accumulate and turn into a virtual currency that you could use to get concert tickets.Or maybe it’s just about having a high Splash Score.This might be used to get you into bars/clubs (we’ve already done a few things with clubs where if you have a splash store above 70, you get to cut the line).Ultimately, your splash store is going to be a big deal.
What does success look like for you guys?
The ultimate success is to have people using our words beyond the site—make “splash” synonymous with liking a song.
If you sign up for Splash, be sure to follow Jason (@Jason) and me(@sam_liebeskind).Give us some ripples!
Last Wednesday members of London’s business community gathered together at Wolff Olins Kings Cross office space to hear Google, Zopa and Zipcar talk about how the five behaviours identified in Wolff Olins’ recent report manifest in their businesses. The lively breakfast produced rich learnings and ‘how to’s’ for the audience to take back to their day to day roles. Better still, we think the discussion might have unearthed a sixth category of Game Changing behaviours …. keep checking back here for more info.
Check #Gamechangers tweets to understand more about the event.
Visual art museums–Should they be a peaceful sanctuary to escape from the always-on, back-lit, digital world in which we all now work and play? Places to appreciate the spiritual energy of something raw and “real”?
Or, should directors and curators be looking to integrate cutting edge technology into museum spaces- to make the experience somehow more educational and accessible, interactive and fun? And if so, how?
It’s an interesting question, and one we’ve kicked around internally and with a numberofclients over the years.It’s also one that big tech guys like Google (Art Project and Google goggles-> maybe Google Glasses in the future?) are rapidly trying to digest and influence.
This month the Louvre followed in the experimental footsteps of the Brooklyn Museum, the Met, and a host of other world class institutions with their own future-looking answer.As part of an ongoing partnership with Nintendo, the museum created a handheld console aimed at evolving the age-old “audio guide” into something more fit for our hyperdigital expectations.If you haven’t seen it, you can check out pics and video here.
I find this incredibly exciting for a number of reasons. On the most basic level, it’s useful. The console simplifies the logistic challenges of a visit to the Louvre, allowing its operator to focus less on navigating the famous labyrinth and more on the art itself. It also offers flexibility in the level of info each user consumes- a nice middle ground between basic didactics and the commitment of signing up for a tour.
But maybe more importantly, it communicates that the Louvre is serious about designing an experience that’s not so far removed from people’s everyday lives.It’s an attempt to shift the institution from a sacred place you visit once a year (or once a lifetime?) to a space for continued learning and relevance.Hervé Barbaret, Managing Director of the Louvre says “the new audio guide is a valuable tool that will help make visiting the Louvre a more dynamic and rewarding experience, particularly for those that are not so familiar with a museum environment.” It’s a conscious move to get fit for the future and it will resonate with new, younger audiences.
Regardless of this program’s success, the Louvre has taken their shot at answering that fundamental “role of technology” question.Considering the way they’ve answered it though, maybe the issue isn’t as black & white as I originally posed.The challenge for cultural institutions might instead be more subtle: How do you integrate technology into the experience in a way that’s useful to those who want to take advantage of it, without distracting those who don’t?
Have you recently visited the Louvre and had a chance to test this thing out?We’d love to hear your thoughts here or on Twitter.And if not, feel free to weigh in on how technology is enhancing/destroying the experience of visiting your favorite museum. @wolffolins
