This essay was submitted to, and shortlisted for, the Admap Prize 2014 and is reproduced with the kind permission of warc.
This essay is an argument for a new shape. In order to
recognize how to now shape a brand in the post-digital world one needs to
acknowledge the shape of events around it. I will argue that everything in the
communications world should now take on a triangular
shape. Brands are no longer built in a bilateral way by building
relationships with consumers alone; they are now built in a triangular way by
building relationships with three partners: consumers, government/regulators
and the wider community. In order to build the triangular brands of the future, we are going to need triangular
skillsets, and that means nurturing and recruiting triangular people.
People Build Brands
Are brands built by people or built by ideas? We most often
reference the Brand Idea or the Advertising Idea as the best method to build a
brand, and much commentary has been devoted to how these ideas, big or small,
and their models and frameworks, have changed since the coming of the
information age and communications became ‘digital’. But it is an often
over-looked fact that brands are as much built and sustained by people, as they are built and sustained
by an idea.
When I recently interviewed around twenty of the
first-generation planners who had worked in JWT and BMP around 1968 to
investigate the origins of planning, I was struck by just how much these
planners moulded, influenced and in some cases created the brands they worked
with. Brands like Persil, Oxo, Kellogs’s Cornflakes, whose fate often lay in the
imagination of the planner, alongside their understanding of consumer
behaviour, in order to drive what the brand would say and do. It made me reconsider the importance of the
people who build brands, particularly with regard to the post-digital era of
communication in which we now find ourselves.
Now more so than ever,
brands have people behind them. That is to say not only visible
spokespeople but also the invisible hoards of people literally behind the brand
communication, typing away on Twitter and Facebook and all kinds of other
social media, posing as the human side of the corporate brand and having a
‘personal’ or ‘one to one’ conversation with anyone who wants to engage. Who
are these people? How much control do they have over what the brand says? And
to whom it speaks? It sounds a trivial question but it isn’t at all. These days
every idea is pumped out into social media in the form of ‘beta’ testing and if
it is taken up immediately by enough people it is considered a success. It
certainly is one way to create momentum and ‘noise’ around a brand but is it
the right way to build a brand, in a
digital world?
I would argue that the industry has lost its brand-building
leaders. In the hands of social media or community managers, brands have become
reactive rather than responsive; have sacrificed depth of meaning for breadth
of attention; and in many cases are always-on rather than
always-to-be-counted-on. And the net effect is like that of a wind-tunnel test
in the car market: brands are increasingly all looking and sounding the same.
It’s time to fix that. Let’s create a new generation of brand leaders to build
and maintain brands in the digital world and let’s allow them to do this
important job properly. As we now enter the fully digital world in which
everything and everyone is connected, there has been no more important job in
the history of brands, than the one to be done now.
I say this because I believe that, in a digital world,
brands are no longer built in a bilateral way through a simplistic relationship
between a manufacturer and a consumer. That was the case for many years in a
world in which products, in particular, fast moving consumer goods products,
dominated our lives; a world in which efficiency was our primary need and the
solution that brands could supply. Now we don’t seek efficiency so much as we
seek connectivity. In a digital world we need to be connected in order to make
anything work for us or around us. In a connected world, at any moment at which
you are ‘disconnected’ you are vulnerable. And that goes for brands too.
In the last few years we have seen a few brands become
literally ‘disconnected’. And the net effect of this is a feeling that they have
somehow been ‘caught out’. They deserve to be
punished by consumers if government isn’t going to meter out
any retribution. Do I really want to
place my savings in a bank that has been found guilty of fixing the Libor rate?
Do I really want to buy my books and DVDs from an online general store that
avoids paying tax? Do I really want to spend 1 in 8 of my hard-earned pounds at
a supermarket that serves me horsemeat in my ready meals rather than the beef
its packaging claims is inside? Do I want to spend my money anywhere that is
not prepared to pay its employees a living wage?
The reason these situations have become so public and have
continued to form part of the discussion and debate is because we now expect everything, including brands, to be connected.
The world of brands is now interconnected, and in a digitally interconnected
world a brand cannot wear two faces. It cannot show one face to consumers and
then another to the local community it impacts or employs, and perhaps yet
other face to government and regulators. In a connected world it only has
permission to show one face, the same face, to all and everyone.
The Rise of the
Triangular Brand
Hence the emergence of what I would call the Triangular
Brand: the brand that has three
sides, three corners, points in three separate directions but itself has a
congruent, stable and honest shape. A brand that is the same from every angle
you look at it. In fact, in ancient history or philosophical terms, the
triangle is the shape that symbolizes harmony
and creativity. And that is what
brand-builders in the digital world of the 21st Century should be
aiming for when they steward a brand, they should be ‘building’ into their
brand, harmony and creativity. They should be building a Triangular Brand.
How can one build a triangular brand? A brand that is
connected and has truth and consistency across its consumer, government and
social community communication?
I am reminded of some classic Toblerone advertising:
“Toblerone out on its own.
Triangular chocolate, that’s Toblerone.
Made from triangular honey from triangular bees
and triangular almonds from triangular trees”
If you want to build a triangular brand, you have to build
it using elements that are themselves, triangular.
That means people who have the skill-set to bridge the
current divides between consumer, government and society. One could argue I
suppose that all one needs to do is find individuals from each of these areas
and build a super-triangular team. But as I argued earlier, what is lacking in
the digital world, is not collaboration across teams of diverse people; what is
lacking is leadership. A ‘fish rots from the head down’ as the Chinese would
say, and if your leader is not triangular themself, then what hope is there for
those that take their direction from him or her; what hope is there for the
brand that they are building? A triangular brand needs a triangular element at
the top: it needs a triangular leader.
To investigate this further, we need to go on a slight
detour, via the Harvard Business Review, into the world of management
science. In an article entitled ‘Triple
Strength Leadership’, Nick Grove and Matthew Thomas highlighted why and how
executives need to move easily amongst business, government and social spheres.
They used an example of a Coca-Cola executive solving a major problem the
company was facing in South India. The company was facing opposition to its
water consumption and had been banned from soft-drink production in the region
as a result. An external consultant, Jeff Seabright, was brought into Coca-Cola
to develop a strategy for sustainable water stewardship in the position of Head
of Environment. To cut a long story short, he solved the problem but much of
his success was put down to, what the authors would call, tri-sector skills. To
quote them:
‘Jeff Seabright is a rare breed. He epitomizes
what Joseph Nye has called a “tri-sector athlete”, someone who can engage and
collaborate across the private, public and social sectors. Drawing on his
cross-sector experience, Seabright can appreciate the needs, aspirations and
incentives of people in all three sectors and speak their language”.
And indeed, we should be building brands in the digital age,
that themselves are connected across all three spheres, and can speak all three
languages. But it will take leaders who are triangular themselves to create
these kinds of triangular brands.
Jeff Seabright’s career had taken him from working in policy
planning at Texaco, to that of a diplomat within the Foreign Service, the US
Senate and on President Clinton’s task force on Climate Change. He had also
worked within USAID, and in his proposals to Coca-Cola used this to good effect
when he established some joint projects with USAID as part of a sustainability
initiative. Contrast this with most of
the CMOs responsible for brand-building today, or the heads of advertising
agencies, media groups, or even planners. How many can say that they have
triangular experience? Are they then fit
to build brands today, let alone those of the future?
There are some examples though. Here in the UK, Martha
Lane-Fox, started her career at an IT and media consultancy firm where her
first project was for British Telecom, and was called ‘what is the internet?’
She then founded her own company called Lastminute.com, an online travel and
gift business and successfully floated it.
She then joined the boards of Marks & Spencer and Channel 4 and was
later appointed as the UK Government’s Digital Inclusion Champion to head a
two-year campaign to make the British public more computer literate. She then
launched the charity GO ON UK to make the UK the world’s most digitally skilled
nation. She joined the House of Lords last year becoming its youngest female
member. As stunning as her career has been imagine if some of this experience,
and its triangulation, could be used to build a brand. In some ways, it is: it
is building Brand GB, but in terms of corporate life, if she was leading the
development of a food conglomerate brand or the world’s biggest technology
platform, how coherent, how meaningful and how influential would that brand be?
Just imagine.
Searching for the
Triangular People of Tomorrow
In a time when friction between the three sectors is at an
all time high (a cursory look at the recent TFL tube strikes in London, gives
one a glimpse of the never-ending blame game that continues, between the
government, the service providers and unions, and the end users - businesses
and consumers). Businesses often regard
NGOs and government as bureaucratic and inept; government often see the private
sector as individualistic and opportunistic, and
society at large has lost trust in both government and
business with regard to their ability to build in any sense of care towards
people or planet. It is one reason that Cameron’s ‘Big Society’, hypothetically
a big thought, went nowhere. No-one could envisage the three different species
of people working together. That was because Big Society was an objective that
had the wrong strategy behind it. The right strategy would have been to find
triangular leaders who could bridge the divides and make sense of it all for
each side.
Likewise for brands, if built properly for the 21st
Century, actually brands that could broker these different positions, and in
particular should be built by triangular people with the tri-sector experience
who can speak all sectors’ language. If I were Eric Schmidt or Tim Cooke, or
Mark Zuckerburg, I would be looking to engage leaders with this kind of
triangular experience as the themes of data privacy, advertising to children,
illiteracy, and pornography come to the fore for everyone - consumers,
governments and social communities – and must be answered, rather than ignored,
by these brands
But this is not just a concern for the technology brands,
born in the digital world, in some ways it is of most concern for some of the
most established 20th Century brands responsible for one of our most
precious global resources: our food. And if I were Nestle, Unilever, or P&G I
would be looking at who has the triangulation of experience that could ensure
the brands in my portfolio were triangular too. As issues of health,
wellness and nutrition escalate in a world in which more people are now dying
from obesity than starvation, I would be seeking brand-builders who have the
triangular experience to build me one
brand that can speak three languages
that says the same thing, to consumers, government regulators and social
communities.
In summary, I have not argued for the new position of a
Chief Triangulation Officer because that would just be an adjunct to an
existing team. I am arguing for a rethink of the team. In fact not the team,
but a complete re-think of the kind of leader that is now required to build
brands in the digital world. There are
many layers of leadership that exist as one builds a brand: the CEO, the CMO,
the brand manager, the planner, the customer experience manager, the innovation
or NPD manager, and the head of PR and communications. I am arguing that
alongside the CEO or CMO having a triangular CV, at every one of the other
layers triangulation should be encouraged.
If I am to think about career advice that I would now be giving to
planners in my own department, I would be suggesting they seriously consider how,
if they have only ever worked in the private sector, they find ways to gain
government experience and become involved in more social and community
initiatives, whether those be local or global. Today, on 16th
February, an article in the Sunday Times quotes the recent DEMOS report
findings that today’s teenagers are more highly aware than ever of social
issues, are keen to volunteer and are determined to use their digital skills to
change society for the better. In a separate survey of teachers, 66% found that
the most popular words they use to describe this generation are ‘caring’,
‘enthusiastic’ and ‘hard-working’ If we
believe that these Millennials are also the most marketing-savvy too, then we
can see a generation of triangular people ready to build triangular brands, on
the horizon. And what a great portent that spells for all of us for tomorrow.
References
“Triple-Strength Leadership”, Nick Lovegrove and Matthew
Thomas, in Harvard Business Review, published September 2013
Wikipedia, entry on ‘Martha Lane-Fox’ as at 16th
February 2014
“Today’s Teenagers do give a damn” Sunday Times, 16th
February 2014
Brand, CMO, Coca Cola, culture, Demos, digital, future, HBR, martha lane-fox, skills, toblerone, trends
