Also thanks to YouStory for covering it.

P.S. There is some issue with the text on the page, so watching the video might be a better idea.

It’s technically a new year, but as the quip goes, it does feel like December 93rd 2020. More like a sequel than a new movie. Familiar characters and themes, with some new plotlines. And hence the title, for a short take on learnings in 2020, and the trends expected in 2021. 

In light of the pandemic, what narratives are good for the brand?

The consumer’s needs might not have changed, but the relative priorities, ways of achieving them, and expectations from brands most definitely have. At least in the medium term, health and safety (physical, mental and financial) will remain important themes. That would explain why many brands have attempted to hop on to these narratives. While it works easily for say, water purifiers, it might be a threadbare argument for mattresses and shirts. But yes, Ayur is arguably the most powerful four letter word in business now!

The abruptness of 2020 has also given us time for reflection and recalibration. One of the related changes has been increased participation in societal issues. But a brand pursuing cause marketing because everyone else is doing it might result in some caustic feedback!

What has also changed are rituals – commute to family time to entertainment and so on. The narratives might not have changed yet, but the contexts have. Social screening (movies) and Zoommates are all adaptations to these contexts. But soon, radical redesigning of products and experiences will lead to narrative shifts as well. 

With chimeras all around, how do we frame it better?

Many aspects of our life are chimeral now – still retaining their individuality, and yet to find the balance of a hybrid. Think about it – working from home, but recreating the office online. Digital transformation, and craving physical interaction. Learning new skills, while trying to avoid burnout at work. This operates at societal levels too. On social channels, we talk about being more empathetic. But we also have mobs that seem to have been born outraged! 

These chimeral contexts have an impact on segments and personas, as well as how narratives can be delivered. If we go by Superbowl ads, humour is making a comeback, but we aren’t LOL yet. Brands are still playing Minesweeper because they, and their endorsers are susceptible to cancel culture. Even a logo needed to dress up because one person insisted we all share the perception! Narrative control is a chimera, an illusion. I expect brands to soon have influencers on stand-by to combat trolls and bots! 

And if the action is everywhere, where is the narrative best delivered?

“There is no mainstream, there are many streams”. With mobile screen time continuing to rise, and OTTs having a dream run, both branded content and product placements will spike. Even more immersive is gaming – you can have an epic life in Fortnite, and (ironically) join the war to save reality! But we are un-screening too. From podcasts to the ambient, and omniscient Alexa. Does your brand have an Alexa Skill yet? 

Newer platforms offer further scope for narrative renditions in all forms of reality – mixed, augmented, virtual in addition to our normal agreed upon version. And as digital transformation accelerates, marketers are being empowered with automation and no code tools to deliver these. But the tech landscape is also rapidly changing with impending regulation, and privacy concerns. 

We’re going through an era of institutional realignment – political, societal, financial and so on. The points I have made are more possibilities than spoilers. We might think we have seen this movie before, but we should wait for the release. Multiplex or OTT, you think?

1. Cosmetic proportions: We’re at level 1, and that’s where Fair & Lovely chooses to rename itself, or shaadi.com removes its filters. My cynicism tells me that the brand and the final user are both at the same level, in terms of how much they really care. I think what has actually happened is that brands have gotten smart at watching a sort of “Overton window” for mainstream adoption of a communication. And many of them have gotten the timing right. There’s a phrase I heard in a meeting recently that applies here – cultivated authenticity. Some customers have caught on to the virtue signalling and they are the small minority asking the questions, but more on that in a bit.

2. The business of brand:  As Karthik rightly pointed out, brands exist to make money. And to quote Bill Bernbach,  it’s not a principle until it costs you money. Hence, boycotting Facebook, to me, is virtue signalling once you look at multiple factors. We’ve seen this movie before. But it’s not going to be that easy when brands realise the cost of doing good. The R&D for sourcing materials and services in a way that doesn’t involve trampling human rights or the environment, making sure that salary and wages are fair, the non-predatory strategies for market domination and customer acquisition – none of this is going to come cheap.

And then there are collaborations. Say, the relationship with big tech – GAFA, all of whom are fighting their own demons – tax shelters, unfair employee practices, anti-competition moves, privacy, and so on. How many brands will say no to Facebook and Google for advertising, Amazon for commerce, Apple and Google (again) for presence in the app ecosystem? Not every brand has the wherewithal to be a Spotify or Epic. And what happens to entertainment tie-ups when an actor playing a character in a Marvel movie or a Netflix show either says something that offends a certain audience, or has skeletons tumbling out of his/her closet? What is the appropriate response for a brand when nations take antagonistic stances, nationalism gets into the debate and it is operating in both countries? Not easy, any of these decisions, and we’re seeing the beginning of all these. Stance can be quite a complex dance!

3. The complexity of consumerism: Supply can’t succeed if there is no demand, as Lakshmipathy Bhat points out in his post on the subject. There is a market for fairness products because fair privilege exists. (read) We live in a time when almost everything is treated like a political statement. Actors, sportspersons, artists and even stand-up comedians are held to the highest standards, but the nation’s institutions and their personnel get a bye. Maybe we don’t have a choice on the latter, so we take it out with cancel/call-out culture on the former. Many studies state that the younger generation prefers brands that espouse causes. For now though, I think the ‘we’, I think, is a minority. The diagram below, courtesy @faris articulates exactly what I think.

Which brings me to the paradox. The Fair & Lovely customer is buying the product precisely to access fair privilege. And Twitter warriors are anyway going to call the name change superficial. Like I half-jokingly said on Twitter, maybe HUL will now ladder itself up to “conceptual fairness” for this product. So who is this stance really for? I just chose this as an example, an equal number of tough questions will emerge for brands that choose to take a stance. Any stance.

At a broader level, it will be a long while before an individual consumer will have to justify his/her consumption vis-a-vis his/her public stance on social platforms. And we are all smart enough to justify these narratives to our conscience. Therefore, public posturing and calling out of brands by individuals wiltsl largely co-exist with consumption of the same brands! The consumer’s own woke narrative will continue, and the onus is therefore on the brands to make its choices. The lifecycle of a brand will inevitably get to a point when distribution strength, price efficiency and product commoditisation have been maxed out and the brand needs to play the lead role. Stand has great relationship with prepositions – stand for, stand against, stand on, stand with, stand off and so on, but I don’t think any of them can really be a stand-in for a brand proposition.

What this essentially does is further the character’s presence beyond the show, surface him in instances where his audience is likely to be paying attention, but at the same time not being intrusive. In this world of many streams, that, to me, is the way a brand should manifest in consumer lives. In addition to doing its job as a product, do some great storytelling. I remember writing about this back in 2009 (Tata Sky – Aamir- Ghajini) and 2011 (Nescafe – Karan Johar, Deepika Padukone) and wondering if storylines would be carried forward on Twitter. Never saw it, though to be fair, Aamir does go beyond the standard merchandise, games, TV show appearances route. (read, also for Alia Bhatt’s tweet for 2 States, which is more in line with what I’m talking about!)

In the 2011 afaqs article (linked to earlier) I had cited a few examples of some great brand storylines – Audi, WWE. But the guys whom I’ve seen totally nail this in 2015 is Hollywood. Earlier this year, Ava (character in Ex Machina) used both Tinder and LinkedIn for promoting the movie. Ava happens to be a gynoid (Artificial Intelligence, female form) and basically pretended to be a human on both these platforms. To be noted that x.ai, a (real life) personal assistant – artificial intelligence startup was involved in this as well. (if you haven’t checked x.ai by now, you really must!)

More recently, billionaire Lex Luthor (Jr) was interviewed by Fortune, and provided free WiFi. Standard, except he is a fictional character in DC Comics, soon to be appearing in Batman vs Superman : Dawn of Justice. One brand which loves Easter eggs is Google, and their hat tip to popular show Silicon Valley during the Alphabet announcement is evidence of that.  While these are initiated by the ‘brand’ (movie/show producers in the above examples) check out this GoFundMe campaign by a user to bring back Matt Damon from Mars! Another fantastic user generated storyline I saw recently was Socality Barbie, which is just insanely good Instagram (+hipster) satire! What could Mattel do with this, or even with their own recent commercial that tells quite a story.

Though the above examples are largely movies/shows, there is a lesson for brands as well. In an era of controlled media, it was possible for brand storytelling to operate in a linear way – advertising. But we live in an ever expanding multi dimensional world now – consuming content across devices, services, and streams. For brands, this is a challenge as well as an opportunity – to explore and expose facets of the brand’s persona in ways and places most relevant to the audience and itself. After all, who doesn’t like a good story, right?

However, I recently realised that I am probably more active on Whatsapp, Instagram and Pinterest than Facebook and Twitter. I am also reasonably active on Secret. That made me dig a bit deeper.

(via)

What is changing? From my observations, there are at least two factors that are driving the change.

Perspectives on connectivity: The early era was fueled by the need to connect. Facebook is soaring well beyond a billion users, and its longevity is (also) because the need still exists. It continues to look for better ways to do this, manifested through front end and back end changes. But despite this, and my own curation of my newsfeed by sending signals to Facebook, I am regularly overwhelmed by the volume. This goes for Twitter too. Personally, I have treated these platforms as a means of self expression. I would also like to choose the people whose perspectives I want, and who are entitled to a judgment, if any. But that’s not so easily done on popular platforms.

That’s when I start to look at the many ways to handle this – from social networks to messaging apps. I could go to where the crowds are relatively less and/or are more ‘focused’ – by domain or use cases, (LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram) I could interact with smaller groups, (WhatsApp) use ephemerality (Snapchat) or be anonymous (Secret) As I mentioned, at least three of these work for me. A wonderful nuance I caught in Mitch Joel ‘s prophetic ‘The Next Big Thing Online Could Well Be Anonymity‘, is that it may not just be ‘something to hide’ that makes some prefer anonymity, but it could also be so that ‘who they are will not become a focal point within that discussion’. Anonymity on the web is not new, but many of its enablers are.

Devices: The networks of an earlier era (eg.Facebook) were made for desktop and had to adapt for mobile. On the other hand, Instagram, Whatsapp, Secret, Snapchat etc are mobile natives. Given the increasing ubiquity of smartphones, their growth is not surprising.

What are the possible business models and what’s a brand to do? As more and more users flock to these new platforms, they would need to mature, with business models which could mean associations with brands – the journey from social network to social media.

Instagram and Pinterest are already social media, making advertising at least one of their revenue sources. WhatsApp does not like advertising and already makes money on downloads. Its competitors like Line, KakaoTalk, WeChat etc, however, have found various other means – virtual items, (stickers, in app purchases in free video games) promotional messages, baby steps in electronic payment handling fees, and interesting tie-ups. Snapchat already has many marketers on it and is likely to offer promotion options too, probably tied to a time bound event.

Secret has a lot of negativity surrounding it – s3x talk and startup malice and being just a fad – and there are comparisons to Formspring and its demise despite funding. But beyond advertising and in app puchases, maybe, there’s also potential for insights on a brand and its use cases? Things that cannot be found on indexed platforms. Also, Whisper already has a content deal with Buzzfeed.

Analytics for such platforms haven’t even really begun yet, but it can’t be far away. But more importantly, all of these platforms are potential enablers for a brand to take forward its narrative and become relevant to its users. It continues to be about storytelling, and digital.

Rather than going for my standard long form text, I thought I’d play it differently and take the help of my favourite pop culture phenomena in the process. The disclaimer is that this is meant to be a primer on how to tackle this issue rather than a comprehensive silver bullet.

until next time, Like?

I think I used ‘dis-aggregated social network‘ on this blog for the first time in 2009, referring to Google’s basket of services that were connected relatively flimsily then. IMO, Google has always been that way, even including Google+. (read) I remembered it when I tweeted this about Facebook – around the time news of their Fan Audience Network started trickling in.

FB’s move to disaggregate apps, now seen in conjunction with FAN makes magnificent strategic sense. #digital Oh, it’s a Saturday. Laters.

— manu prasad (@manuscrypts) April 26, 2014

It got me thinking (again) on ‘scale’, a recurring theme here. In a less complicated world, where the trends in the business landscape were significantly more linear, (growth, competition, consumption, economy) scale was a powerful weapon to wield. But it’s a different world now. Artificial Intelligence, 3D Printing, Internet of Things, Wearables  and a hundred other things might completely disrupt the status quo and the need an incumbent brand satisfies. These are the known ones, and then there are the conceptually invisible (at this point) ones. Surviving (let alone thriving) in this shifting scenario requires agility, and it is difficult (though not impossible) to see scale and agility together. I looked to Google and Facebook for an approach towards this because not only are they surviving, they seem to be thriving. Yes, we’ll get to Amazon in a while.

What does it take to be agile at scale? I can think of four ingredients, the last three repurposed from the title of this post by JP Rangaswami.

Purpose

I remember talking about re-defining of scale at the Dachis Social Business Summit. The thrust of the presentation was that brands could engage consumers at scale only if they use currencies that create value for the user in the context of a shared purpose. I have elaborated it in this post at Medianama. Recently, I saw that Hugh MacLeod has brought it out beautifully here. Simply put

(via)

Possibilities

The purpose need not have one constant rendition. As the landscape changes, a business will need to adapt it to suit changing circumstances. For that, a business needs to understand the possibilities. I saw a very good line in this post about being a maker – the more you work in the future, the less competition you will have. How much into the future a business needs to be working is subjective and depends on its dynamics, but if it doesn’t disrupt itself, someone else will gladly do it for them. (“The Jeff Bezos School of Long-Term Thinking” is a good read in this context)

Platforms

While purpose and possibilities are all good at high altitudes, a business also needs strong operational  platforms to back it up. As organisations scale, I have seen two things that affect agility. One, the processes that are introduced to create efficiency @ scale more often than not, become the goal instead of a means, slowing things down and taking away from actual goals. Two, as processes and manpower increase, silos are created. The good news is that it is easy to see technology platforms bringing more efficiency into processes as well as an iterative way of thinking in the near future. It is already happening in marketing. This, and many other factors are also dictating a consumer experience driven approach and are forcing organisations to break silos. As the entire brand/organisation becomes a platform (read) that regularly revisits its context and purpose in the life of a consumer, ‘everything becomes a node on the network‘

People

HuffPo had a post sometime back, citing Zappos, calling 2014 the year of workplace reinvention. It is interesting to note that parent company Amazon has apparently aped Zappos’ ‘pay to quit’ policy, even as more and more stories about working there being a ‘soul crushing experience‘ are coming out. Meanwhile, the two points it mentioned for this to happen are purpose and trust. These I’d say are the bedrock of culture. It’s intuitive that a workforce mindful of the organisation’s purpose and their role in it would keep an eye out for the business’ possibilities, be ready to work beyond silos towards a great consumer experience, and bring in others who would help the business scale. This, along with purpose, has to be the glue that holds it all together, enabling the organisation to move fast without cracking.

While different sectors are at disparate distances from a radical shift necessitated by technological developments, it is, I think, inevitable. In this fantastic post titled ‘Knowledge is faster than mortar‘, which looks at scale through a different lens, the author makes the point that ‘the old mechanisms don’t fit the new social structure.‘ Old mechanisms were built to scale stability, new ones will have to be built to scale despite instability. Anti-fragile, so to speak. Indeed, we will see many manifestations as existing structures try to adapt – internal mechanisms like Amazon’s 2 pizza rule, consumer facing disaggregation like Facebook that have a corresponding internal wiring, or brands tweaking their 4Ps even further for different contexts. But whatever paths businesses choose, this will hold true

until next time, the fast and the curious

LinkedIn recently opened up its publishing platform, and since it’s a contextually relevant platform to publish my ‘work’ posts, I was immediately interested. Thanks to Gautam, I discovered this link, applied, and soon got publishing rights. It was a harder task to write something though! I have finally managed something that is a differently framed version of concepts that I have written on the blog already. Do take a look here.