The world of the guru is gone

The world of the guru is gone. So told us Doug Hall, as he opened the conference with huge energy and passion.

Creativity in business is innovation – and innovation, he told us, can no longer be a random art, rather it must be based on a reliable system.

As marketers our job is to lead a change to how we innovate – to increase the speed of innovation and decrease the risks associated.

Doug went on to talk about how we must ensure our brands are meaningfully unique – without meaningful uniqueness we have to rely on price and price alone to sell our brands. We must innovate to create that meaningful uniqueness and we must innovate to grow – because it is meaningful uniqueness that will deliver profitability. Ultimately it is innovation that will stop our brands following the inevitable life cycle – it is innovation he promised us, that will deliver eternal life!

He splits innovations into those that are core – they keep us competitive, and those that are leap – they create the future. 85% of innovations in our world are in the core category, 15% in the leap. And it’s the leap innovations that deliver profit growth.

Doug’s innovation system is based on three core pillars – Create, Communicate and Commercialise. It is an approach to innovation that is grounded in factual data – it’s more than an approach, it is a system for innovation.

Innovation comes from exploring a variety of stimuli. Just looking at customer insights is not enough. Doug recommends technical mining, market mining, insight mining and future mining. He uses the US patents record to understand latest technology and what is available.

As a Brit I was a little embarrassed to see the stat he shared which told us that the UK sits at number 18 in the global patent applications per capita league tables. Perhaps between us the Marketing Society membership can feed off Doug’s advice and create some reliable systems for innovation, achieving meaningful uniqueness, profitability and eternal life for our brands. And in doing so push us up a few places in those patents per capita league tables.

What is the world’s fastest growing currency? I couldn’t answer that when posed the question by Paul Kemp-Robertson of Contagious – but many of my fellow audience members could. It is the Bitcoin - a peer-to-peer ‘crypto currency’, regulated by its network rather than any central authority. So why is this the case?

Technology, he explained, is trumping our faith in traditional organisations and institutions. Our trust is becoming more and more decentralized. A recent survey shows that whilst 61% of people say they trust a person like themselves only 38% trust government, officials and regulators. (And perhaps worrying for us in business only 43% trust CEOs). Hence the rise of Bitcoin. This shift in what and whom we trust, Paul pointed out, must be an opportunity for brands; and took him into the first of four future facing trends that he shared with us.

Trend 1: Loyalty is becoming a micro economy
Brands stand or fall based on their reputation – they are built on trust, transparency and consistency. Reputation in effect is a currency. He told us this has always been the case – think Green Shield stamps and Tesco Club Card. However his suggestion was that the obvious trajectory now, would be for these things to become secondary or shadow currencies. In some places it is already happening – he told us the story of Tide being traded for crack cocaine and Nike encouraging people to trade their sweat for Nike fuel points. He told us about the Vodafone system of Fakka in Egypt, where the shopkeepers in local markets, working with Vodafone, have moved to giving Vodafone credits instead of small change.

Trend 2 : Pragmatic Purpose
We expect brands to replace the institutions we used to trust. The social purpose agenda is much discussed, and to be really successful brands must be doing some good in this world. He shared the examples of Unilever’s Lifebuoy campaign – saving lives by encouraging hand washing; and Coca-Cola with their EkoCentre project, providing employment for female entrepeneurs, not to mention wi-fi and clean water in under privileged local communities.

Trend 3:  Contextual Integration
We don’t live our lives in media silos. Brands need to have big ideas that will stretch across multiple platforms. However this isn’t about brands looking the same and acting the same wherever they appear. Our persona is affected by our context, the time and place where we are. Brands need to understand that and adapt to those different persona.

Trend 4: Living Services
The market for context-aware computing is growing by 30% per year and the fastest growing services are those that add value by learning from the individual user and adapting to their needs. He cited Delta Airlines as a business that has understood this seeing marketing’s role as being focused on service design, understanding that the experience of flying is the thing that defines the brand for their consumer, not the metal tube that carries them. He referenced Turkish bank Garantie with their smartphone app for banking that will behave as a digital wallet, allowing for withdrawal from ATMs, delivering voice recognition and creating it to respond to the needs of their consumers.

Paul told us that the desire for personalization outweighs our desire for privacy – 61% of millennial shoppers would trade privacy for personalisation - they lose their concerns regarding privacy precisely because of the level of trust that is created by brands that offer personalization.

He finished with a graphic image of staying in touch with the individual needs of people. We heard the story of the tribe that literally links man and woman during childbirth. Feel Their Tugs he told us... You had to be there!

Vicky reviewed sessions with Doug Hall and Paul Kemp-Robertson from our Annual Conference 2013. She is CEO at brand design agency Coley Porter Bell. Read more in our Library and visit their website.

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