Think about your business. How many of these boxes can you check off?
[ ] everything’s working well in our marketplace, and customer needs are being fully met
[ ] we have a fair share of the market, we’re growing steadily, and there’s plenty of room for innovation and expansion in the years ahead
[ ] our industry is doing well, growing healthily, and is admired by society, with no reputational risks hovering around
[ ] nobody is imposing any kind of radical change in our marketplace – for instance, there’s no regulatory change going on, and there are no new entrants from other countries or industries or technologies
[ ] we’re turning all our capabilities into revenue – we have no hidden skills or technologies that could be exploited
If you can only check one or two of these boxes, you should be thinking seriously about changing game: transforming yourself so that you can compete on different things from your rivals.
Otherwise, don’t change game.
2
And if you’re thinking about game change, how many of these statements are true?
[ ] we have all the skills and people we need to make the change – we can replace enough of our managers, processes or investors to make it practicable
[ ] our brand is broad and deep enough to allow us to do something different
[ ] we have companies we can partner with to mitigate the risk
[ ] we can experiment in a low-risk way, perhaps through a pilot or spin-off
[ ] we have the resources to invest enough fast enough to get a sustainable lead on our competitors, who may also try game-change.
If three or more of these are true, you’re in a good position to change your game. If not, there’s plenty of advisors, trainers, bankers, brokers and brand people who can help.
But failing all of that, you’re safest (for now) sticking to the old rules: don’t change game.
Want to read more on what we mean by changing the game? Check out Game Changers, our investigation of the behaviors shaping the future of business.
Robert Jones is Head of New Thinking at Wolff Olins London. Charles Wright is Director of Wolff Olins Dubai.
Turn on the radio in the morning, and one company or another is getting it in the neck. Amazon for allegedly not paying taxes. Barclays for bonuses. Last week, it was British Gas for pushing up prices.
If businesses increasingly need to create social value as well as commercial value (if only to keep Radio 4 off their back), what’s the role of brand in this?
We know brands in the short term can help generate sales revenue. Think about Coca-Cola. And that they can create the internal focus that increases efficiency and so cuts costs: GE might be a good example. Brands also have a longer-term commercial impact. They create permission in the marketplace for innovation and expansion - as with Google. And they protect companies against risk - millions still buy Toyota cars in spite of successive recalls.
Could all this work for social value too? A brand like Fairtrade encourages people to buy in a way that improves conditions for producers: it pushes up wellbeing. Brands can also help minimise the harm companies do, by holding them to account: Innocent famously chose its name so that consumers couldn’t attack it if it ever did anything guilty.
And brands can work towards longer-term social value too. A brand like Wikipedia creates the commitment of thousands of contributors to build an unprecedented resource of knowledge for us all - on everything from LTE technology to Game of Thrones (my two most recent searches). And a brand like Zipcar motivates people to share rather than own a car. In these ways, brands drive behaviour that maximises the creation, and minimises the destruction, of resources, human and natural.
Two questions arise.
How many brands are great across the board? At driving revenue up, costs down, new opportunities up, risks down? And at increasing wellbeing, decreasing harm, maximising resource creation, minimising resource destruction? Can anyone really hit all eight of these? Google, maybe?
And how do the eight interact? Is innovation more effective if aimed at wellbeing? If you’re seen to be increasing human resources, will your revenues go up? Click on the image below to see my first pass at mapping this all out. More investigation needed.
Robert Jonesis visiting professor at University of East Anglia and Head of New Thinking at Wolff Olins.
There’s now a widespread belief that talking about brand in the conventional sense slows everything down, and that all those brand strategies, brand models, brand onions and brand guidelines just get in the way.
And we’re finding in our work with clients that the old ‘positioning + visual identity’ formula no longer helps – it doesn’t answer the most pressing questions of the CEO and CMO. If you’re trying to kick-start growth, or digitize your business, or reach the next generation of customers (and talent), why waste time exploring your positioning, or tweaking your logo?
Increasingly, we’re finding that it’s better to think of brand not as cause, but as effect. Obsessing about your brand won’t somehow cause growth to happen. But doing the right things will create growth, and a strong brand will follow as the effect.
Let’s take Airbnb as an example of a brand that’s grown out of doing the right things. Committed to changing the way people travel, Airbnb offers an alternative to traditional accommodations. As a result, a unique experience based on active participation between travellers and hosts comes to life – and adapts accordingly. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, Airbnb was able to quickly adapt its platform for good, waiving all of their fees on properties near hurricane-affected areas and urging their renters to temporarily reduce or waive their charges too. A long-time opponent of the service, New York City’s Mayor Bloomberg announced that he supported the effort.
In this case, Airbnb’s connection to its community, and its nimbleness and willingness to experiment in public, show that a strong brand isn’t just something in your CMO’s head. It’s something in the minds of your consumers, and all the other people your organization touches. It’s theirs, not yours. It is the effect of what you do, not the cause.
So, what should you do?
For another clue, it’s worth looking at what may be the most important brand news of the past year, even though it isn’t in a conventional sense a brand – Microsoft’s new user interface.
It’s a user interface, but more than that, it’s also a design philosophy (Bauhaus inspired, in favor of purity, against pastiching stuff from the analogue world, as Apple often does).
And more than that, it’s a whole approach to interaction (a different, much more liberated, more enjoyable way for people to experience Microsoft).
Imagine if all big brands thought this way – thought of themselves as, literally or metaphorically, a user interface. Or even better, a user interplay, where ‘user’ doesn’t just mean consumer, but also colleague, neighbor, investor, supplier, partner. We don’t mean they should have a good user interface (of course they should), but they should be a good user interface.
If we think this way, and think about what we do as effect and not cause, we must do three things. And all three are about design.
1) Abolish positioning. Think purpose.
Don’t try to manufacture a place in the world. Don’t obsess about the competition and differentiating from them. Instead, as with all good design, start with the question ‘why?’. Why do we exist? Why would anybody need us? Why is what we do useful? Why would people pay (in time or money or whatever) for it? Why is it valuable (in all the senses of that word)? In other words, define a sense of purpose – the difference you want to make, socially and commercially.
Think, for example, how powerful GE’s sense of purpose – imagination at work – has been in creating growth. Or how Google’s greatest inventions have come from its commitment and encouragement of experimental behavior among its employees. The high-growth businesses of the future will all be, at heart, purposeful. And purpose is the source of value-creativity.
2) Forget identity. Think experience.
Don’t start with name, logo, tagline, sonic identity, or any of these things. Instead, design whole experiences for people – joined-up experiences across all the things you do. Think user interface, in the biggest sense: not the skin around the outside of your organization, but the layer where you interplay with people.
Think Microsoft. Or a really great retailer like John Lewis, consistently the UK’s favorite. Or a fast-growing start-up like India’s IndiGo airline. All understand that growth comes from experiences that are, simply, useful. And experiences aren’t things you create and then transmit to people – they’re things people shape for themselves.
Thinking ‘experience, not identity’ means looking at your organization from the outside in, not the inside out, and seeing people as creators, not consumers.
3) Stop controlling. Think changing.
Don’t try to maintain a status quo, don’t police your brand. Instead, keep experimenting, keep connecting up with new people and new organizations. Let things grow from the roots: revolutions rarely start from the top.
Don’t try to pin down the future: prototype it. Replace ownership with sharing, and control with creativity. Look at brands like Airbnb and Zopa, the world’s first peer-to-peer money lending service, to consider how you can connect your customers directly to each other and have them create mutual value. Tomorrow’s high-growth businesses will be constantly experimental and completely boundaryless.
And when you get all this right, the effect is a (contemporary) brand.
This is increasingly how we think and work at Wolff OIins. It’s essential if we’re to do genuinely game-changing work. But it’s a million miles from the corporate identity design world we sprang from.
Yet at our heart – more important than ever – is the spirit of design. All great design grows out of a purpose. All great design makes an experience that goes beyond mere product. And today, great design can’t be static: it’s evolving, experimenting, perpetually in beta. Which makes it more exciting than ever to be in the new world of brand.
It’s a grey December evening in Copenhagen. Just the place to be flicking through a utopian book called Betterness: Economics for Humans on my Kindle app. In it, Umair Haque makes an over-the-top case for businesses to create social value – natural, human, emotional, intellectual, creative capital. Which made me think: what’s the role of brands in this?
We all know brands create huge commercial value – which places like Interbrand try to put a dollar value on. And we can imagine the chain of cause and effect that creates the value.
But can we do the same for social value?
If commercial value is a product of short-term (profit) and long-term (growth prospects), can we think about social value in the same kind of way? As the product of short-term happiness and long-term sustainability?
This diagram suggests how it could work. Improvements, please:
And here’s how the model maps to the five key behaviors of today’s game changing brands.
Robert Jonesis visiting professor at University of East Anglia and Head of New Thinking at Wolff Olins.
This is an excerpt from the Journal of Brand Management, the latest edition of which has been edited by Robert Jones, head of new thinking at Wolff Olins and visiting professor at UEA. As a special offer to the Wolff Olins community, the publisher is offering free access to entire issue for 7 days only. Click here to access.
As a practitioner at the brand consultancy Wolff Olins, I see many signs around me that branding is changing. The work we’re doing now, the preoccupations of our clients, and above all the technological climate in which everything happens, are substantially different from the world I encountered when I started as a brand consultant 20 years ago.
Of course, many things also remain the same, and practitioners tend to over-emphasise change, in the interests of keeping what they do exciting and urgent. Nevertheless, there are big tectonic shifts, which the theory of branding is struggling to keep up with.
These shifts are happening in many ways, in many places, in many sectors – and at different speeds, and to varying depths. But our experience as practitioners suggests five things are happening, all with the potential to be revolutionary…
Click here to accessthe full piece and the latest edition of The Journal of Brand Management.
On 25 October we held our first summit on brand growth, ‘How to grow and change the game’. This video is the second in a series showing the highlights of the day.
In the part of the day entitled “how to grow everywhere” Allan Pamba of GSK, Frederik Ottesen on Little Sun and James Turner of Dyson discuss how to reach new customers in new places. The discussion is facilitated by Robert Jones, visiting professor at University of East Anglia and Head of New Thinking at Wolff Olins.
Wolff Olins is in many ways a child of the 1960s. Among other things, that means we think our work should have a positive social impact as well as a commercial one.
Indeed, we think that it’s through providing a social impact (getting good things to more people) that you best achieve a commercial impact (revenue and growth). This is in contrast to the prevailing view that a positive social impact usually comes at the cost of a negative impact on profits.
Over the years, we’ve achieved this kind of thing with commercial clients like GE and Tata DOCOMO, and with social enterprises like (RED). More and more, we believe commercial enterprises should have a social purpose. And that, conversely, social enterprise should generate profits.
But how exactly does that dynamic work?
We’re collaborating with the Young Foundation to try to map this out. In advance of a conclusion, here’s my first go. Improvements to the model welcome.
Robert Jones is visiting professor at University of East Anglia and Head of New Thinking at Wolff Olins.
On Thursday 25 October Wolff Olins held its first brand summit, “How to Grow and change the game”- an event that welcomed twelve speakers from some of the UK’s most progressive brands and over sixty guests from great established brands and innovative start-ups.
The summit revealed a host of game-changing ways to spark growth. Here are my top twenty things I learned from the panelists at yesterday’s How to Grow event at Wolff Olins in London.
Getting everywhere
1. Be a start-up – however old or young you are (EE, Dyson, Little Sun, GlaxoSmithKline)
2. Don’t chase the money, let the money find you (GlaxoSmithKline)
3. Take a hit on profit in the short term, to create long-term market growth (GlaxoSmithKline)
4. Be hated as well as loved – the deepest responses are created by brands that polarize opinion (Dyson, Little Sun)
5. Enjoy inventive competitors, but not mere copy-cats (Dyson, Little Sun)
6. Use tech to outsmart the counterfeiters (GlaxoSmithKline)
7. Change the model – whatever market you’re entering, do things very differently and (through design) much better (Dyson, Little Sun)
Becoming everyday
8. To earn a place in consumers’ daily lives, understand those lives (Faber, National Trust, Skype, Virgin Media)
9. Be canny about free – make sure there’s a strategic dose of free stuff in what you offer (Virgin Media, Skype, National Trust)
10. Use ‘social’ literally – events where you meet your consumers face-to-face (Faber)
11. Use ‘social’ virtually – the fastest way to learn about the good and the bad from your consumers (Virgin Media, National Trust, Skype)
12. Adopt the latest tech – but give consumers a choice to use the gadgets that work best for them (Skype, Faber)
13. If you have content, make it as widely available as you can (Faber, National Trust)
14. Stay restless (Faber, National Trust, Skype, Virgin Media)
Growing better
15. Go beyond the fashionable idea of ‘exchange’ (of goods or skills) and think about ‘giving’ (Impossible)
16. To get things done, match ‘bees’ (small, buzzy organisations) with ‘trees’ (big, rooted ones) (Young Foundation)
17. Offer your employees shared parental leave, to help both women and men climb the career ladder (Fawett Society)
18. And get more women at the top of your business (Fawcett Society)
19. Plan your business to operate within the ‘doughnut’ (maximizing social impact while minimizing environmental harm) (Oxfam)
20. Be optimistic (Fawcett Society, Impossible, Oxfam, Young Foundation)
Robert Jones is visiting professor at University of East Anglia and Head of New Thinking at Wolff Olins.
A couple of weeks ago, my friend Jonathan needed to move some arts-and-crafts furniture. He found a website called Anyvan. Sounds mundane – but actually this service represents a reinvention of classical capitalism. How?
240 years ago, the economist Adam Smith imagined an ‘invisible hand’. In his book The Wealth of Nations, he said that the market forces that create growth would also magically create good social impact. It would be as if an invisible hand was directing economic activity in a positive direction.
The banking crisis means that few now believe this.
So what’s the alternative to full-on market capitalism?
One possible answer is to go back to the state capitalism of the pre-Thatcher/Regan years. State capitalism is still around in continental Europe, and it’s the dominant model in many of the newly-emerged economies. This model may be better at creating equality, though even that is arguable. It’s certainly no better at, for example, protecting the environment.
Or is there a spread of ground-up alternatives?
Instead of consumption, resource sharing: new enterprises like airbnb, WhipCar, Zopa.
Instead of rich-world businesses making money out of the poor world, new models like Little Sun.
Instead of conventional working, volunteering: through new businesses like The Amazings and Impossible, or through long-standing movements like the National Trust.
Instead of the public company, the co-operative: retailers like John Lewis, or industrial groups like Mondragon.
Instead of short-termist, greedy capitalism, new rules like those proposed by Richard Branson’s B team.
One thing all these examples have in common is that they’re cleverly branded. They all understand that branding is about purpose, and that you can build an alternative kind of business by sharing that purpose widely and compellingly.
Our bet is this combination of new ideas, large and small, is the better way.
And technology now makes it easier than ever for large numbers of people to come together and achieve something that’s positive, both commercially and socially.
At #HowToGrow, you’ll hear more about Little Sun, National Trust, Impossible and more.
But an even simpler example is AnyVan. If you need to move something, you post your requirement, and van owners pitch to do your job. The best price, backed up by the best recommendations, wins. Vans that would have returned from a job empty can now pick up another job and go home full. Everyone saves or makes money, resources are better deployed, and less diesel gets used up.
You could say that brand-led, tech-infused services like this are the new form of the invisible hand.
Robert Jones is visiting professor at University of East Anglia and Head of New Thinking at Wolff Olins.
To be part of our unique conversation on growth, join the summit LinkedIn group. Or follow our twitter stream #HowToGrow. For more information visit How To Grow.
Oxfam has come up with a neat model for thinking about good economic growth.
Picture a doughnut: good growth is the kind that doesn’t damage the planet (the space outside the doughnut) or people (the hole in the middle of the doughnut).
Outside the doughnut are things like climate change, biodiversity loss and ocean acidification. In the middle are things like jobs, income, health and equality. It’s an unprecedentedly comprehensive model, a great tool for policy makers.
But the model has implications for us branding people too.
After all, branding was invented to create growth – to get people to buy things. And while the western world, particularly Europe, is searching for growth, most people also recognize that we need a different kind of growth from the last ten years or so – more substantial than a credit-based bubble, and ideally something less destructive of the planet’s resources.
So what kinds of brands generate good growth? What would a doughnut brand be like? Is your brand a doughnut?
It would be easy to imagine some external, planetary factors. For example, doughnut brands might encourage re-use of resources, like eBay. Or sharing of resources, like ZipCar. Or encourage use of local resources, like CittaSlow. Or make things digital rather than physical, like iTunes.
And then you could imagine internal, people factors too. For example, doughnut brands might make worthwhile things more accessible, like Tate. Or make work more purposeful, like GE. Or just give people decent jobs, like Fairtrade. Or support small businesses, like Grameen. Or bring people together, like Facebook. Or simply raise money for a worthwhile cause, like (RED).
Interface is a brand that takes both parts of the doughnut model very seriously, with both EcoMetrics and SocioMetrics tracking.
The model needs much more precise definition, like Oxfam’s. But as the world searches for the right kind of growth, and as brands play a role in that, this thought-experiment might just turn out to be essential.
Robert Jones is visiting professor at University of East Anglia and Head of New Thinking at Wolff Olins.
By Wolff Olins CEO 
