Creating brand experiences for and with consumers requires technology. Obvious right? Then why do marketers and their IT departments still remain segregated in so many businesses today?

Internet week in New York (the East Coast’s response to Silicon Valley – some have even dubbed it Silicon Alley – a gathering of all the digi-heads and tech fanatics on this half of the country) has just finished (now in its 5^th year).

One of the seminars I attended looked at digital disruption, and not just in how digital has disrupted consumers, or given headaches to marketers as they attempt to find new and innovative avenues in which to speak to these new hyper-consumers (ahem, please see our nVitro The Hyper Individual).  It also addressed the change among the C-Suite – no longer can the suits at the top carry on with life in the business world as usual.  Their window office will not protect them from the digital age and those who ignore the call of digital integration will feel it  -  most acutely on their bottom lines…

Thus, the CM-I-O is born (chief marketing and information officer).

While in the analog world, information technology specialists and marketers remained decidedly and determinedly separate within the company walls, this brave new world, with its rising and unending importance of digital technology, requires these Chiefs Of to become increasingly integrated. Meaning that IT must now jump in bed with their ad and marketing teams – merging marketing practice with the technology that supports it in order to create a consumer-friendly, fast paced and effective brand interface for engagement.

Both sides of the corporate brain -  the creatives and the techies  – now form the internal power couple put  on the quest to engage the consumer in ways meaningful to their life today and tomorrow.  And the reason for this internal merger is simple: excellence in marketing ideas (driven by the CMO) requires excellence in the delivery of ideas (driven by the CTO/CIO).  And as data increasingly becomes more of an business asset, silos of information within a company can cause chronic illness that will only lead to early brand death.

And it makes sense, an obvious and natural transition. Transparency is increasing faster and cost is decreasing faster now than at any other time. So why keep the IT team in the basement when good IT can facilitate new systems of customer engagement? IT enables things such as Concierge Living to be brought to life, allowing for brand transparency and excellence in our demanding 24 hour consumer society. This shift in corporate leadership and co-operation is strategic and we expect increasing numbers of brands to join in – and rapidly so.  As Matthew Jauchius, CMO of Nationwide Insurance, put it – “What can you do without technology?”.  The number of activities is shrinking almost daily.  More, responding in real time across social media is marketing GOLD – technologists can empower marketers to respond, effectively and timely, through these social mediums.

The lesson? Technology should not be viewed any longer as simply an expense, but used strategically as a business asset and enabled to drive competitive advantage from within. Marketers do the dreaming and then work with IT to find a way to make those dreams come true.

Some big brands have already seen the light, blending these roles or forming unique partnerships – internal Bro-mances and Sisterhoods, if you like – in an attempt to bring the 21^st century customer into focus and streamline their processes. Motorola, Nationwide, International Hotel Group… are just a few of the big names speaking at Internet Week who are pioneering the world of the CM(I)O  -  and according to them, with great success.

Innovation needs the consumer and the consumer today is integrating digital into all aspects of their life.  Marketers must now do the same.

Are IT and marketing meshing in your organisation?  If so, what differences has your brand seen?  If not, do you think this should become a critical part of the agenda moving forward?  We’d love to hear your thoughts.

The Future Foundation’s first event of 2013 will take place on 14th May – get in touch to book your place!

WHERE THE TRUTH LIES : Interpreting your global consumer’s inner life for profit

Led by Future Foundation CEO Christophe Jouan and MD Meabh Quoirin, we will -

• Trail Future Foundation’s forthcoming book The Big Lie and present implications of the story for brand management and insight development
• Address current business challenges – specifically identified by our client community in advance of the event – via our top nVision trends
• Introduce guest contributors to help put our stories and our forecasts under extreme scrutiny – and let you, our clients, do the same in both formal and informal forums
• Supply ever more nutritious takeaways, slicing out the consequences of individual trends for sales and marketing, for new product formulation, for corporate communications, for strategic planning
• Offer a choice of fringe events and networking opportunities – and demonstrate all of the very latest service innovations from inside nVision.
• Make this the most colourfully multi-media event yet – video, live streaming, tweets, noise and fun

Book your place
Clients receive complimentary tickets and can purchase extra tickets at the discounted rate of £400 + VAT per delegate. For non-clients, the standard ticket charge is £800 + VAT per delegate.  To book your place, email events@futurefoundation.net.  Book early, our events always sell out!

Details

14th May 2013 | 08.30 – 16.00
Congress Centre, 28 Great Russell Street, London WC1B3LS

Last week we were guinea pigs for a brand new course being developed by Craft of Communication, a theatre-based communications training agency.  It was on storytelling – the art of telling a good story (in this instance, for brand engagement).  Storytelling is the mot du jour among marketing circles – the idea of developing a narrative that engages consumers, pulls them into a brand’s sphere and creates new routes to a lasting relationship is irresistible.  But do many marketers understand what a good story really entails?  Is it as literal as telling your brand’s history – like The Lego story, made in 2012 for its 80th birthday?  Is it about using different media to engage with consumers wherever and whenever they are?

The story of stories – as old as humanity

The workshop took us on a journey to understand the history of the story and the profound way that storytelling is woven into humanity’s cultural narrative.  And it was fascinating.  Did you know, for instance, that Romeo & Juliet (which, rather preciously, was the first story I remember being told – one of the exercises we did) is based on a series of motifs that are old as humanity itself?  The story of winter vs summer, dark vs light, the beauty and potential of youth.  Or that every fable and nursery rhyme you can name has a vast folklore tradition?  We looked at Cinderella, which is estimated to have over 1,000 different versions across the world – the theme of a wicked stepmother is grounded in the reality of a past where childbirth was extremely dangerous, mothers often died and children were left in the care of other women, while men remarried for financial gain.  Although there is no evidence of glass slippers.

Dialogue – not just a two way street

We also explored Greek theatre – the Ancient Greeks invented the Second Actor, opening up a world of possibility in narrative development.  For many thousands of years, folklore tales were passed down through oral tradition – in other words, monologues via one protagonist.  But the Greeks brought in deuteragonists (two voices) and tritagonists (three voices), breathing life into “dialogue” (literally = the flow of meaning).  This also made me think that while we business types use the word “dialogue” as a catch-all for ensuring we’re not just shouting messages at consumers, there is a lot more depth involved – dialogue is about conveying meaning, about owning the story.

Brand as hero

Finally, we had a think about the ‘hero’s journey’ – the narrative journey from ordinary world, via crossing a threshold and lots of sword seizing, to returning with an elixir – a story that George Lucas’ Star Wars took entirely literally.  Our final task for the day was to recast our brand as the hero, exploring ways that we could take Future Foundation on a hero’s journey of its own.  How could we tell our story as compellingly as Star Wars? (Answer: lots of Ewoks and NO Jar Jar Binks).

So what does all this mean for brands?  I think it means that we can learn a lot from taking a step back and thinking about storytelling, not as a marketing buzzword but as a profound, inbuilt human prerogative.  When you’re thinking about how to tell your brand’s story, think about your audience – how can you create empathy and genuine, meaningful connections?  What do your characters look like and how can you make them loveable? Think about the archetypal narratives such as comedy, tragedy, overcoming an obstacle, a quest and see whether they create new narrative (obviously I am not suggesting you suddenly start casting your organisation as a Hobbit).  Consider how you can communicate your story – new technologies, platforms, devices?

I’d love to hear your brand stories. In fact, Ernest Hemingway once won a bet by crafting a complete story in just six words – it was simply “For sale: baby shoes.  Never worn”.  Absolutely beautiful. What’s your brand’s six word story?

Have you seen the Future Foundations’s Native Marketing trend on storytelling?  It’s packed with thoughts and data on creativity, storytelling and brand engagement.  Contact Karen Canty for more karenc@futurefoundation.net

Some links for more thoughts on storytelling that I found interesting:

http://www.fastcompany.com/3002379/brands-2012-year-story-so-whos-telling-it-best

http://www.forbes.com/sites/work-in-progress/2013/02/05/5-secrets-to-using-storytelling-for-brand-marketing-success/

Along with 800 others I came away from the IAB Engage 2012 conference, held last week at the Barbican, (http://www.iabuk.net/events/engage) with a full notebook, a significant addition to my tweet count, and much to think about.

The overarching theme of the event, Digital by Design, was a call to arms for both marketers and advertisers to put digital thinking at the heart of how they message to consumers instead of being, as it all too often still is, an afterthought: a case of ticking the box. New campaign? Have we included a social media element? Tick. Job done.

Nowadays this won’t do, and marketers need to think about a cross-media strategy from the outset of any new campaign, with clear ideas of what each element of the campaign should achieve and how it will do so.  As Fru Hazlitt of ITV put it, “I wish people would stop saying ‘digital’, everything’s digital nowadays, there’s no such thing as analogue anymore”

In addition, successful consumer engagement is not about the platform, it’s about the content, as it always has been. With all the focus on innovation and exciting new bells and whistles over the past decade, it’s been all too easy to lose sight of the consumer in all of this. Dave Coplin, Chief Envisioning Officer of Microsoft  talked of the evolution from the World Wide Web to a “web of the world”, which is composed of a Web of Places , a Web of Knowledge and a Web of People, one that focuses much more on the individual relevance of information, rather than the sheer accumulation of “hits”. He gave an example, of searching for sushi. Nowadays we can easily generate lists of nearby sushi restaurants but what the consumer of today wants is that search to recognise my own preferences in that search – the cheapest sushi places, the best sushi places or the sushi places that will offer me special deals based on my loyalty programmes or my foursquare check-in habits.

This shift is about fundamentally turning web-based design and thinking on its head to put the ordinary consumer right at the heart of it. In Future Foundation language this reflects ideas that we’ve been actively talking about over the past couple of years: consumers want things done their way (our “Demanding Consumers” trend); consumers increasingly want to use technology to keep track of their lives (our “Quantified Self” trend); and they are becoming open to accepting recommendations from intelligent agents acting on their behalf (our “End of Inefficiency” nVitro trend).

Marketers and advertisers need to keep in mind though that, as comedian Dave Gorman pointed out very passionately and engagingly, ultimately consumers care less about some of the specifics (what brand name sits on the device they own or the service they are using) than the marketing community wants them to.  Instead what they ultimately care about what they can do with devices and services and how their lives can be improved. Digital by design is, in part, about bridging this gap.

Nick Chiarelli is Key Account Director at Future Foundation.  This article can also be found on Nick’s blog http://www.trendsgetreal.blogspot.co.uk/