How to think like a brand punk

When people are asked to describe what elements are needed to set up a company, the answers often tend to come in boxes – a leadership box, a finance box, a manufacturing box and a selling box.

However, in today’s multichannel world, traditional methods of operating a company and marketing and selling its products have changed. The very definition of each department has altered beyond what people in the mid 20th century would have thought of as normal.

The UK public relations industry has always nervously eyed the role of sales in its organizational structure because, well, we should walk the talk. We should attract new business by doing what we do best, which is raising our brand and our profile through the subtle art of media management and influence.

But if all of your competitors are also doing this, how do you become “different”? How do you stand out?

Phil Lewis runs a management consultancy called Corporate Punk. Every day, he meets expert leaders seeking to plow a different furrow. Looking for new ways to shape their business and improve its position through a clever retooling of the company collective mindset.

I asked Phil whether it was possible to create a culture of selling across an entire organization, tailored for the 21st Century. How does he help companies take a different view of their commercial ecosystem and help them to make the best of it and have his entire team on board?

Years ago, when we first met, you were looking after strategy for an advertising agency. Even then, your focus on the intent and purpose of any campaign was refreshingly different. How does this approach parlay into the bigger picture of management consultancy and what is Corporate Punk’s ‘special sauce’?

“I’m not sure we could have developed our approach without our collective creative industry experience. Watching agencies succeeding and failing to bring the creative and innovative best out of their people over many years was the inspiration behind Corporate Punk.

“Traditional management consultants interpret people as figures in a spreadsheet. Rational units who work in uniform ways. Robots needing a tune-up! That was fine in the 20th century, where success was driven by efficiency – by optimising performance on the factory floor. But these days success is driven by increasing revenues not decreasing costs, and by competing on differentiators other than price. That means that the humanity and creativity of people is most business’s biggest asset. Most management consultancies have no idea how to maximise this. We do.”

How does a company maximize its potential to attract new business and grow in an increasingly noisy cluttered marketplace?

“You have to be unafraid to be radically different. That doesn’t mean looking different, it means behaving differently to everyone else. The world does not need another mediocre creative industry or consulting business.

“Take your convictions to their end point: explore them, state them firmly, and build what you do around them. Most businesses lack the courage to do this. In turn, they end up missing their mark. People think that it’s brave to be different. I’d argue it’s braver to be bland: your survival chances are lower.”

What do you think has been the biggest millstone for companies that traditionally rely on their sales people to be its only selling tool?

“Businesses only have two functions; to make things and to sell things. These are company-wide responsibilities: if you are not doing or supporting one or the other (occasionally both), you are not really contributing. People’s failure to grasp this fundamental truth is a major millstone in my experience. Within the creative industries, a belief that selling is not critical to success – or that it’s someone else’s responsibility – has long held many businesses back.”

How does a company get all of its employees to buy in to the idea of being part of its selling culture, and what are the advantages of doing so?

“I remember hearing Alan Weiss, a famous US consultant, describing selling as ‘identifying whether we have an opportunity to contribute’. And that was a major lightbulb moment for me. I went from perceiving sales as a grubby, ‘wide boy’ style endeavour to a process that can be genuinely additive to both parties involved. Overnight, it pretty much cured me of my fear of selling.

“Businesses that have a strong and healthy sales culture are those that can mobilise most effectively to achieve new, interesting and disruptive things. Find a successful disruptor that can’t sell! No-one at Corporate Punk gets away without selling. And they wouldn’t want to. That’s how it should be.”

When employees tell you “I’m not a sales person” or “I can’t sell” how do you respond?

“Seek to understand what’s driving their fear of sales – because fear is all that’s holding them back. Fear of rejection is the most common problem. But if the sales process is about identifying opportunities to contribute, then by definition it’s two-way. A client that needs your contribution will rarely reject you if that need is clear. A client that doesn’t need your contribution is one that you should be happy to walk away from. Fear plays no part in that equation.”

Companies love to say “We’re different” but it’s often the case that they are all saying the same thing. How do you help companies to identify their unique elements and turn them into selling points?

“I think it starts with understanding what – if anything – an organisation is doing that is genuinely different. Difference can’t come from personality or promises; it is only driven by expertise and experience. In my mentoring practice I work with agencies and other creative businesses who need to uncover this. You might be surprised by the extent to which companies bury, ignore or walk away from their actual points of difference. That’s another common way that fear shows up.”

What gives you the most reward when you have completed a project?

“I only care about the answer to one question: were things better as a result of my and the team’s involvement? I don’t care how hard the journey is, if the answer’s yes, that’s reward enough for me. Corporate Punk is my attempt to cut away everything that doesn’t directly deliver that outcome. “

There is a maxim in the world of sales that goes “Always be selling”. In this commercial world of multiple, noisy routes to market, PR agencies need to create not just a point of difference in their communications, they need to create a point of difference in their mindset; the whole approach to the generation of new prospects and opportunities.

That difference comes when a company has a visible personality and – to quote another sales aphorism: “The buyer buys the seller, not the salt”.

Phil Lewis runs Corporate Punk, a management consultancy… that isn’t. Because it doesn’t slash for efficiency. It helps clients build for innovation, resilience, growth. Instilling agility, embedding better, happier ways of working. You can contact him on 07972 143966 or by email.

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Using data responsibly

Back in the 90’s, I worked for a very famous advertising agency owner who told me a story about his work on the Mercedes Benz account.

His agency used to use a market researcher, who used to kick off his meetings with “So what do you want to prove?”

This story was nearly as popular as the one about my boss storming into the office of a client that owed him money and planting a fire axe through his desk with a note pinned to it that read “Where’s my fucking money?”

The first story was a great illustration of the perils of relying on data. You don’t have to look very hard or far to find data to support any theory you want. Actually so is the second one, but more of that later.

Anyone who relies purely on data to drive sales, ends up with digital ads selling light fixtures to people that have just bought light fixtures. It’s an algorithm of the crudest data.

As someone with a keen interest in the sales process, I can absolutely confirm that data only gets you 80% of the way to closing a deal. It gives you the who? what? when? and where? but never the why?

The why? is the creative bit. It’s the bit that opens the door. It’s the bit that closes the sale, it’s the bit that makes you immediately drop what you are doing and go straight to a company’s web site to order.

Name me a hit song that has been composed on data. Name me an Oscar-winning movie directed with data. Data is cold. Creative is the thing that triggers your emotions. This is why we will never completely replace humans with cyborgs, because cyborgs don’t know how to push our emotional buttons. CMOs do.

A good CMO or a good sales person will use data to get them into position and then, at the right time deploy the creative to seal the deal.

A great sale begins with great targeting; the right person, with the right product at the right time in the right place. But it is always quickly followed by superb empathy and emotional triggers. A trigger could be fear of missing out, or how good someone will look driving a particular car, or how much younger a person would look using this make-up. Or in the case of my former boss, a trigger could be a fire axe through a desk that follows months of finely targeted letters and invoices.

The actor Edward Norton summed it up beautifully recently, talking about his movie ‘Motherless in Brooklyn’: “What audiences want is an experience, where they enter into a thing that feels authentic on its own terms. They want characters they can connect with and get carried through worlds that take them away. People get hung up on the wrong metrics. I don’t think audiences think about [a film’s] length or comprehension.” He’s right. If a film – or a piece of music for that matter – is powerful enough and drives our emotions, then we’ll go with it and attach all sorts of emotions to it.

And this is what I believe the art of being a good CMO or even a great sales person; emotion. Data cannot tell you what I’m feeling or why I might be tempted to buy your product. Data might have told you where I am, who I am, what I might want and when I might want it but only creativity will provide my emotions with a reason to take the next step. The why?

The reason we have data is not so that we can dispense with creativity. It’s not a binary choice, ironically. It can be a lovely blend of data and creativity. Techniques honed on both ends of the proposition – beautifully targeted and the right message with the right trigger.

Please don’t ever be afraid of being creative. It’s the personality behind your brand. If you rely wholly on data to do your marketing, you find the personality behind the brand is Mark Zuckerberg and personally, I could think of nothing scarier than those eyes, staring unblinkingly back at me. He’s got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll’s eyes…

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    How to avoid brand bullshit

    If the three founding partners at Beehive were likened to a band, it would have to be a supergroup.

    Like most of these epic collaborations have done to the music industry, Martin Galton, Greg Jordan and Tim Hollins’ roots in the creative industry have had seismic effects on where it is now.

    Galton is a magnet for creative awards, having picked up over 120 global gongs for his creative direction. He’s also a poet and when he’s not coming up with alliterative couplets, he’s running his creative oasis – Beehive.

    Jordan is a celluloid sensei. His knowledge of working in film and TV is unparalleled. From Hollywood to Hoxton, Jordan’s canny production skills have earned him cult status in the ad world.

    Hollins’ brand planning expertise and his ability to simplify, means he’s in demand for brand consulting coaching all around the world.

    Together, they represent an awesomely knowledgeable and seasoned triumvirate that has the power to make the jargon and complication go away and say something original.

    So it behooves every CMO reading this, to take responsibility for owning their own copy of The Beehive team’s creative compendium – How to Avoid Brand Bullshit, a no-nonsense guide to branding. Like modern day Lightermen, Galton, Jordan and Hollins will help you steer your brand ship, through today’s acronym-riddled, jargon-infested marketing waters.

    And I’ve got copies of this book to give away, free (well for the price of a few keystrokes anyway). But more of that later, allow me to whet your appetite further.

    This book is a must-read for brand managers, offering quick reference bon mots that will help any modern brand-savvy manager filter out the white noise and hone in on the perfect pitch. But it’s more than that; it’s a general guide to running a business too. In today’s marketing-driven business world, there’s something for everyone. There are innovative ideas you may not have thought about and there are neat aphorisms that you need to be reminded about.

    How to Avoid Brand Bullshit is a stripped-down, full of wisdom, no-nonsense book to help businesses and brands. It’s a pocket-sized tool box, designed to be practical. It’s also been art directed by the legendary Paul Belford, who has commanded the creative wellspring of agencies such as TBWA, Ogilvy and AMV BBDO, to name but a few.

    The book simply breaks down the subject of ‘Brand’ into its four main components: The Brand thing, the Communication thing, the Creative thing and the Production thing. Each section is seasoned with the essence of each “thing”, allowing the reader to shoot their particular brand issue through the prism of our elders, betters and wisers.

    Simply put, Galton, Jordan and Hollins run a factory that makes creative things whose buyers are agencies and in-house brand teams seeking the exceptional. When their advice is given, it’s worth lending your ear.

    You can buy their witty tome at Amazon or direct from their website: www.workingbeehive.co.uk

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    Are you working with a Psycho-Billy Cadillac sales department? If so, you’re not alone.

    “Now the headlight was another sight

    We had two on the left and one on the right

    But when we pulled out the switch all three of ’em come on.”

    It’s only natural that after a few years, a company’s sales effort might require an a-dapter kit, just like the song “One Piece at a Time” – a humorous tale about a man trying to build his own Cadillac by stealing occasional parts from the assembly factory where he worked.

    In the rush to fill order books, a company might be willing to take on new business that meets a financial deadline but at the same time, places the resources of the business under unnecessary strain. So much strain that when the right piece of business does come along, the company’s departments are so stretched that they can’t do the job that they really want to do.

    It’s a direct result of an uncoordinated sales strategy, or perhaps no sales strategy at all. Without a firm hand on the sales tiller, any ship can go adrift and before you know it the course correction required is drastic.

    Sitting down with new business expert Alex Kirkpatrick, who runs one of the UK’s most successful new business generation agencies, Incite, it becomes clear that a company needs to focus on sales from the get-go. Working with a well-planned marketing drive, sales can literally make themselves, but working in an uncoordinated fashion, they might end up costing more than money.

    Alex’s consultancy works with the most demanding of client types – marketing and advertising agencies, but his principles have been learned over the course of more than two decades and can easily be parlayed into any b2b or b2c environment.

    Firstly, any new business isn’t necessarily good new business. As Alex says, there are many forms of bad new business but this number is far outweighed by the number of potentially bad clients: “Looking at long lists of data, making notes such as:  ‘likely no money’, ‘would never work with us’, is a surefire way to curtail your market and destroy any chance of winning great clients from outside of your usual target suspect list.”

    Alex recommends creating a client profile – an imaginary client that has all the features your company would find attractive: “from the type of person and internal culture you like working with, all the way through to the kind of product they sell and buyers they target.”

    “The back end looked kinda funny too
    But we put it together and when we got through
    Well, that’s when we noticed that we only had one tail-fin”

    Obviously, not all prospective clients have the same degree of appeal, so Alex always advises his clients to divide them up into three categories: ‘Must work with’, ‘Should work with’ and ‘Could work with,’ and typically, this list would be like a Chevvy tail fin: sharp at the top and thicker at the bottom.

    When you don’t have a coordinated strategy, you can end up with ‘Frankenstein’ sales. These are sales without a framework or, as Alex sometimes finds, they are over-complicated by converging activities on social media and in different channels at different times: “If you think about the Must, Should, Could structure, then there are three established approaches to effectively target these markets: Account Based Marketing (ABM), InBound Marketing and Outbound Marketing.”

    The Must category (the thinnest) tends to be more one-to-one marketing-based. Creative and personal. However these take time and patience and could potentially take up to three years to come to fruition, depending on review anniversaries.

    The Should category can be broken down into common sectors and given the outbound marketing treatment, so sales calls and/or direct marketing using case studies of similar work or in similar sectors.

    The Could category is your widest possible audience and the right marketing treatment for this is usually inbound. However, as Alex advises, this is where the science part comes in because you know less about these prospects than you do the other ones, so you’ll need to create content tailored to very specific personas and you don’t know these people.

    And while this may seem like a lot of work, don’t worry, help is at hand. In fact help might actually be in the same building as you, so it’s always worth introducing internal sales incentive programs to draw out any prospective closers working in the same company as you.

    Now gettin’ caught meant gettin’ fired

    But I figured I’d have it all by the time I retired

    I’d have me a car worth at least a hundred grand.”

    If your plan is to use just word-of-mouth to sustain your business, think again there Red Ryder. As Alex says: “90% of agencies rely on referral new business for at least some part of their journey.  Sadly for too many it is often how they start and grow and why they decline and ultimately fail.”

    You will always need an ongoing new business or sales program because if you don’t, when you need it, it’s not there. If you rely on referrals all the time, you are not in control of your destiny and companies that do this “..are whatever they are referred to be,” according to Alex.

    Alex suggests taking charge of your own sales destiny and to add proactive marketing campaigns that best enhance your company’s brand values: “Marketing your own brand effectively allows you to test technologies and tactics, creating cases and expertise that can be proved and sold to clients.”

    “So we drove up town just to get the tags

    And I headed her right on down main drag

    I could hear everybody laughin’ for blocks around

    But up there at the court house they didn’t laugh

    ‘Cause to type it up it took the whole staff

    And when they got through, the title weighed sixty pounds.”

    So the moral to the story is to be prepared for all new business eventualities. A company needs to be agile enough to be able to effectively react to all potential new business events – be it a cold request, a meeting follow-up, a call, an email, whatever the circumstance; your business needs a response that flatters the new business prospect.

    “Make it look amazing,” said Alex. “Graphic design is so important, irrespective of whether your output is an aesthetic one, client buyers still care about design.”

    You can adjust the response according to the type of lead, but don’t over-egg the omelet: “Better to get something good faster, than something amazing late,” says Alex. “Ultimately, look at your deck as a person.” Don’t drone on about your own accomplishments. Keep it tight. Keep it focused and keep it short because the prospect can always ask for more if they’re interested.

    And as a CMO, it is absolutely part of your role to be contributing to the direction of your company’s new business strategy, working hand in hand with the business development or sales team: “CMOs should have a responsibility to sit at the heart of a company’s growth plan, to help develop a position, a proposition, build awareness, create cut though and increase conversation,” said Alex.

    To help your company maximize its sales effectiveness, the following areas can be included as part of your bailiwick:

    • Top (blogs and content), mid (case studies) and bottom funnel (products, process, proposals) content creation and promotion
    • Search engine marketing
    • Social outreach and management
    • Events and Webinars
    • Re-targeting through biddable media
    • Lists and directories
    • Intermediaries
    • PR and speaker opps.
    • Shows and expos
    • CRM
    • InBound platforms
    • Product development
    • Trends and innovations
    • Compliance

    When all is said and done, marketing and sales need to be as harmonious as Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash. One works so much better with the other when they both have the same intent.

    Piecing sales campaigns together and being reactive, not proactive can wrong foot any company.

    But when sales and marketing work hand-in-hand the effect can be stunning – as stunning as a jet black, fin-tailed 1960 Cadillac.

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    #Ad – how the influencers influence

    It appears that the PR industry has now successfully managed to become a measurable part of the sales process.

    After all, what sales person wouldn’t want to prove to a buyer that the market for their product already exists? No more of those annoying “We’ll take a few – just to see how it sells..” conversations.

    This article started out life as a way of proving that ‘Influencers’ in ‘Influencer marketing’ are nothing more than modern day pitchmen.

    But I stand corrected. They are way more than pitchmen and women. In fact they are as close as you can possibly get to the PR industry being able to have considerable ownership of a company’s sales process.

    Game on for the PR industry, eh?

    Influencer marketing is peer-to-peer selling in the digital age and it all hinges on the term ‘authenticity’. If it’s not authentic, then it’s not going to influence anyone.

    These influencers have spent a lot of time building their audience, like any publisher or broadcaster would. They speak in terms their audience understands, they do things that their audience likes to do, or wants to do and their audience is the measure of their value to brands.

    But like any nascent industry, it is still figuring out what it wants to be. And on the other side of the coin, there are plenty of marketing and communications professionals and trade bodies that are trying to work out what role they can play as influencer marketing steps into the big league.

    So let’s break the concept of influencer marketing down to its basic function. A person – let’s call him Chad – develops a fascination for playing computer games. Chad is really rather good at it and occasionally, he posts his skills online on, say YouTube and Instagram. Over time, Chad develops a small following. They converse with Chad, who shares tips, tricks and hints and perhaps even gets small favours given to him by the games publisher, like a free studio tour, or pressing some flesh with the stars, which makes Chad aspirational to his followers. Chad is now what you might call a micro influencer.

    Let’s follow this rabbit down the hole…

    Chad’s reviews and posts begin to get a lot of engagement because he is authentic and relatable. His followers like the cut of his jib and they tell their friends etcetera and before Chad knows it, his audience has grown from 5,000 followers to 50,000. Now Chad is heading into the big league. Other brands associated with Chad’s lifestyle want to get on board. Here comes Pizza Hut which wants to send their products for his games nights, they even want Chad to host a show at one of their outlets and they’re prepared to pay for this. Now Chad is a macro influencer. He’s a bit too busy to engage with all of his followers but he’s still authentic, just not quite as relateable.

    According to the highly knowledgeable Isobel Arrowsmith at the Public Relations and Communications Association (or PRCA), what has happened is inevitable for any hard-working influencer. Chad’s engagement rate has dropped from an industry average of 5.8% as a micro influencer, to 0.5% as a macro influencer but that’s not a problem because Chad’s 0.5% is still a huge number of potential customers for any brand.

    In fact, when you consider some macro influencers have around 200,000 followers, it’s a massive number of potential purchases of whatever product they are promoting – just off one tweet, or video. In summary, micro influencers are ‘in reach’, more kind of boy or girl next door, while macro influencers are celebrities.

    And it’s important that – to maintain credibility and authenticity, a micro influencer like Chad lets his audience know that he’s promoting products: “The public needs to be more informed about the transactional nature of influencer marketing,” says Isobel “Because in recent research, 80% of business leaders said they would like to get to know about products through articles or someone they know.” It’s like, we don’t mind if someone we admire is selling something we might like but just be open and honest about it.

    According to a recent survey by social influencer platform Takumi, who polled over 4,000 consumers, marketers and influencers in the UK, US and Germany, 86% said they trust influencers to do the job.

    62% of influencers say they have been pressured by brands to breach regulatory ad guidelines at least once.

    1/5 of consumers trust influencer recommendations, more than their friends, however, they still lose trust easily. The top reasons for unfollowing influencers are: disingenuous endorsements (72%); promotion of unrealistic/unsuitable lifestyle or body images (69%); misrepresentation of lifestyle or character (69%), and discovering the purchase of fake followers (68%).

    As we can see, there are many pitfalls and potential problems associated with developing an influencer marketing campaign but fear not, there are also highly skilled agencies out there to manage the process.

    Dan Lambden heads up the campaign planning department of Red Consultancy, a highly accomplished PR agency that happens to be one of the leaders in the field of influencer marketing. Dan says that because the industry is still in its infancy, there are a lot of grey areas in the rules, but an experienced agency like Red can call on its broadcast experience to help keep things under control.

    “We are incredibly strict with ensuring our influencer partners follow the ASA guidelines and ensure they are appropriate. More importantly, that their follower data reflects the audience we wish to communicate with,” says Dan. Most established influencers actually have agents that manage contracts and keep user and audience statistics on hand, to help brands identify the appropriate ambassador.

    But the function, management and creation of successful influencer campaigns goes right to the heart of the PR function. Essentially, influencers aren’t paid-for billboards, nor are they there to follow a creative ad-agency brief. They have needs and nuances, which Dan says puts them in the PR wheelhouse: “ PR agencies have the traditional comms and media liaison skills needed for working with multiple influencer stakeholders at one time. Influencer outreach is a natural evolution and extension of media relations. Plus, we always have an earned media approach first, helping drive costs down!”

    So why should you consider launching an influencer campaign?

    • Awareness building?
    • Shifting boxes?
    • Loyalty?
    • Driving traffic?

    In fact influencers can be used to help with all of the above but we do need to remind ourselves what all of the above are trying to do, which is sell.

    Influencers can be especially useful when it comes to creating hype for products, pre-launch. They can create FOMO with audiences with a first look or a test drive and they can also be used to point out the benefits to their particular community, meaning you can achieve highly relevant promotions to vertical markets.

    If you’re still thinking of embarking upon an influencer campaign, then Dan at Red Consultancy has his top 6 tips for you:

    1. Create a strategy based on a set objective. Never put the cart before the horse. Never draw up an influencer marketing strategy without previously determining the objectives and how you plan to measure them.

    2.  Have an audience-first approach. It doesn’t matter what you say if you’re speaking to the wrong audience. Define your audience, then use this clear definition as a filter and criteria for who should and shouldn’t, be considered for a collaboration.

    3. Use tools or agency partners to help. At Red Consultancy we use tools like audiense and Pulsar to find online audiences for our clients and then identify the key influencers within those networks. Alternatively, if you’re looking for help on scale, a social influencer platform like Takumi or Relatable can help find exactly the right people for your marketing campaign from their network of vetted creators.

    If you’re unable to use tools or an agency partner, before agreeing to work with an influencer request their audience breakdown data. Ensure you have info on the engagement rate (more followers does not mean better results!), gender split, age breakdown and nationality/geography of their followers. We often find influencers have huge follower numbers, but from other countries, which if you’re working on a UK launch will be wastage.

    4.  Make sure you’re not just looking at the numbers. It’s crucial to look at the type of content influencers create, plus the types of comments they receive on their content. Always align your selection with your set objective. You may choose a different creator depending on if you’re looking for mass awareness or if you’re looking for the audience opinion and therefore content of comments would be key.

    5. Respect the rules. When a brand rewards an influencer with a payment, free gift, or other perk, any resulting posts become subject to consumer protection law. When a brand also has control over the content, they become subject to the UK Advertising Code as well. Make sure you’re fully up to date on the correct guidelines. You can read more here: https://www.asa.org.uk/news/new-guidance-launched-for-social-influencers.html

    6. Be creative. Influencers are creators. Putting content out into the world is at the heart of what they do and they know their audience and what works for them better than anyone else. So brief them and work WITH them to create incredible outputs. And don’t forget, creators come in all shapes and sizes with a huge variety of passion points and interests. They are photographers, directors, writers, musicians, artists, filmmakers, stylists, chefs, athletes and crafters. If not a combination of all the above.

    Also don’t forget they are probably your consumers too. So use their skills, enthusiasm and passion to authentically celebrate your brand.

    In this era of influencer commerce, it’s crucial that like any channel to market, you have all the bases covered. Don’t engage in it lightly; have a plan, talk to some experts and do your due diligence. Moreover, after counselling some of my industry sources, it appears that today’s CMO needs to treat an influencer campaign with an approach that’s rooted more in public relations than advertising, which requires a different mind-set.

    Influencers can be a wonderful addition to your sales and marketing plan but they won’t achieve the results you need on their own – unless you are exceptionally lucky.

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    Nothing lasts forever, of that I’m sure

    What a complex animal we are. We’re full of contradictions and ironies; it’s what makes us human, after all.

    One week, we’re heading helter-skelter towards new technological frontiers and the very next day, we’re moaning because our online bank has changed the login process and we’re suddenly greeted with the unfamiliar when it should be the familiar.

    “Why do they keep changing things?” we say. Only yesterday, we were pushing the envelope but today, we literally wish we still used envelopes.

    We wake up every day to an increasingly unfamiliar world.

    So why do we feel so torn between what we know and what we want? When we get what we want it’s often like trying to take a drink from a fire hose and we’re presented with multiple changes to multiple areas of our lives.

    So many changes, sometimes that we begin to feel overwhelmed.

    If you’ve ever read 1970’s book Future Shock by futurist Alvin Toffler, you’ll see a pattern so familiar that it’s as relevant today as it was when your mother was hot stuff.

    Change is accelerating. Changes bombard our nervous systems, requiring quick decisions. New values and new technologies flood into our lives. The pressure of fast change forces us to question all we’ve been taught.

    And if products and services, people and their lifestyles, employers and work life change so rapidly, how do the experts slow that roll to a manageable rate that doesn’t shock our system?

    There is a maxim in the world of Futurism:

    To sell something familiar, you have to make it surprising; to sell something surprising, you have to make it familiar.

    It speaks for itself but it implies that too much change, too quickly can lose consumers. Change needs to mature like wine and it needs references that consumers can identify with.

    I was chatting recently with leading UK brand expert Rob Bloxham, who runs the recently enlarged Orb brand design agency and he offered some insight into this increasingly rapid rate of evolution in our lives – specifically, the question of how to future-proof a brand and whether the experts build redundancy into a brand’s lifespan:

    “I think we need to look at disposability from two lenses,” he said. “There is one lens where we are looking at an actual product or service that customers use and there is another that goes beyond the tangible and into the emotional connection that brands have with users.

    Rob continued: “When we are building a brand for an organisation, we’re looking to create something that doesn’t have a shelf life; One that’s built on a clear set of values and a purpose that serves as the basis for inspiration for all the products and services to come. You future-proof this through thorough research—if you can build a brand after one session then it’s probably not going to be something that sticks around for long.

    “You have to do immersive internal and external research to match what inspires the team with what inspires customers. When it comes to products or services, that’s a conversation we need to have with the client up front, e.g. how long do you think this will last in the current market? You want and need to be savvy with your investment. If it’s a trendy product then we can build a brand that fades along with the trend. If it’s a company with ambition to last 100 years then we need to think as forward as we can.”

    And there is a unique difference between B2C brands and B2B brands. B2C brands usually require a lot more research and evaluation before launching onto the market.

    Rob explains: “The process is the same it’s just the methodology that slightly changes. We start with internal research and then challenge those insights with external research. Therefore, with B2B we might facilitate 1:1 client interviews to gauge the audience needs, whereas with B2C we might need to look at focus groups, surveys or a new innovative way of capturing insight. “

    With B2B brands, there tends to be a greater degree of permanence, not affected by quickly evolving generations of users, whereas consumer brands need agility. Rob cites the case of British Home Stores, which was a great brand that ultimately failed to adapt to the modern British shopper.

    And it’s not just products, but entire organisations that evolve, morph and rebuild more rapidly than ever. At the time of writing Future Shock in 1970’s, Toffler reported that McKinsey & Company proposed internal restructuring for the Top 100 companies every two years. These days, says Bloxham it needs to be prioritised a lot more regularly: “Strong brands will make brand an item on every management meeting agenda–monthly, half-yearly, annually, whatever your organisation’s timings look like. If you wait two years to figure out whether or not you’ve upheld your brand promises you’ll turn off both staff and customers.

    “You’ve got to create proof every day that your brand is more than words and pretty pictures. Your brand spells out your purpose as an organisation outside of the nuts and bolts. If you’re not using that purpose to motivate your staff and inspire better customer experiences then you’re wasting your investment.”

    Future Shock also highlights the speed of decision making as a contributor to this illness of progress. In days of old, hierarchical structures meant that decisions made on the front line, needed approving and referring up the food chain to the Directors and then actions to be taken were bounced back down the chain, causing a natural lag between cause and effect. These days, with more flat, open company structures and delegation skills in play, decisions can be made and acted upon in real time. This means that brands and products can evolve at a quicker pace for some and not so for others. So how does this impact on the branding process?

    “Flat structures tend to be much quicker,” says Bloxham “[but] even hierarchical structures can make quick decisions if they prioritise the project and put the right people in the room when new information is presented and recommendations are suggested.”

    Bloxham is adamant that focus is the key to executing a quick, relatively painless brand evolution; “Projects slow down when businesses get their heads stuck back into the day-to-day and stop paying attention. Every phone call, meeting, report, and presentation could change the future of your business. Make those touch points matter and you’ll be in for a smooth ride.”

    This brings us back to the fear of change: the scary view of all the things to be considered during a rebrand. What started out as a neat idea in the boardroom suddenly seems too big of a project to complete. Professionals like Bloxham usually undertake research insights, which gives the branding group an accurate portrayal of where the business is, “warts and all,” says Bloxham.

    Some changes impact a company right across its business. Clients can sometimes find this too daunting to undertake but, like all of us wishing we still operated with hand-written letters, we need to realise that growth means change and companies like Orb are geared up to help guide a company through those changes.

    As Bloxham says, his clients often don’t realise how connected they are to the old brand and they forget to think about all of the things they liked – probably like Jerry Hall felt about leaving Bryan Ferry – especially when we compare him against old Ebenezer Murdoch.

    It’s a big decision, not to be taken lightly but necessary all the same. Fear of change can be alleviated by preparing yourself for change: “If you wanted the same design just slightly tweaked you wouldn’t have come to a brand agency,” says Bloxham.

    Assemble your team, choose only the key people that need to be involved and make it clear who has the final decision.

    Your brand’s Avalon can be reached if you apply more haste and less speed, which is, I think, the key to avoiding Future Shock.

    Always be prepared to accept change in all areas of your life – especially in business but embrace it with due diligence, focus, and attention to detail.

    Rushing into Mick Jagger’s arms from the Ferry man’s warm caress could well end in Sticky Fingers and leave you Stranded.

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