The first ten years of digital was (to a large extent) the same siloed ideas that we’d already been exploiting for decades on other content and messaging transportation infrastructures (media). It was a carbon copy.

It is only in the last 2-4 years something interesting and revolutionary has surfaced through the emergence of social media (the collective exchange of ideas) and digital utilities.

This creates a new currency for marketing online, not replacing traditional advertising / messaging but competing for the same budget and offering a completely different set of returns.

Since posting this presentation two days ago, I’ve added some ideas to it, relating to Time and Direct Relationships.

Apologies for re-posting, but this is the conclusion to my series on the new currency online, with special focus on opportunities for media companies.

- What is value in Everyday Life marketing
- A New Business Model, for content that Grows, Connects and Augments
- The Direct relationship Business

Find the Slideshow below, or here.
(If you have already seen the first version the second one might not cache, there should be a yellow ribbon in the upper left corner if you are watching the updated version).

We are as marketers and digital strategists to focused on the tools and arenas we want to be “on” rater than our job; to connect consumers and participants to the brand.

Marketing and brand building is not about being “on” anything. It’s about uniquely communicating our ideas to the customer in a situation where your brand is given the opportunity to mean something with the result of establishing a relationship with the participant.

We need to approach digital marketing value first. Not selecting platforms first, and then try to uncover value through a clever choice of strategy.

In order for us to understand the New Brand Landscape we HAVE TO deconstruct our linear models for distributing content, take one step back, and start understanding how and WHERE people connect to our brand, and then start putting the pieces together in the right order – if there is any order at all?

I attended a brilliant talk Thursday by Jess Greenwood, Deputy Editor at Contagious Magazine. The talk ran through a range of ideas and exemplified them with campaigns, many represented in Most Contagious 2008, and all exploring the new digital landscape. But after seeing all this, we are stuck with wondering how and why do I get there? How do I come up with these great ideas, and not limit myself to the regular receipt:

Old model: Campaign site + banners + Facebook + mobile + large amounts of expensive media = Great Success

as compared to the

New model: value + situation + incentive + existing landscape = arena
(although it’s not linear like this)

Understanding the New Mindset:

1. Brand building is about communicating a unique value with the goal of connecting to people, resulting in extended loyalty and preference.

Communicating value is THE purpose of a value driven company, not banners, display ads, Facebook or blogging. The tools are not the goal, the purpose is. And the purpose is: Value, communication, loyalty and preference.

2. People only care about brands in situations where they are relevant. If I’m baking a cake, I don’t care about Nike, but if I’m exercising, Nike is everything.

This gives that brands need to focus on identifying the situation in which they mean something – the situations are the only events where customers would give a damn, and they are the arenas where the competition between brands occur.

3. Identify your value in the situation where you are important, it’s still not about your product, it’s about identity. Whirpool figured out that no one would hang around talking about dishwashers for weeks on end, and created The American Family Podcast, where Whirpool talks about the Family – for the 264 episodes. Beat that!

4. Figure out how to become accessible. How do participants and customers get a hold of you when they care.

This is where many brands fail, choosing only to be accessible online, via the laptop’s browser, when the customer is at home, after putting his children to sleep. Brands need to shed the notion of having an appearance, and start thinking about accessibility.

5. Landscape. What your competitors are doing are just as important to you as your own activities.

First of all “you can’t out-amazon amazon”; unimaginatively trying to challenge a market leader at their own game has failed many. Secondly, as Dove has demonstrated when developing their Real Beauty campaign, a result of admitting that their old adverts where so similar to their competition that changing the product shot inside an ad with a competitors product, made the ad seem for them, rather than Dove. And thirdly, if everyone else is doing it already, it’s probably easier to win by creating a new idea. In the food world everyone wants to become an online distributor of receipts, but there seems to be little understanding that many food brands are not about food, (like Whirpool being about the family, not cleanliness or appliances)?

So the golden rule of the new marketing landscape would be, given that the uniqueness of communicating your values will be as important as the values themselves: Build your own game.

6. Small successes, it’s all about moving your competitor through the snakes and ladders game board, every step is a success. Make sure you build and measure for all the small steps, with your eye on the final price.

Held a presentation for APGNorway yesterday where I lightly touched upon five interesting topics concerning Digital Marketing:

1. Mobile: Which perspectives bring possibilities and which bring stagnation.
2. Finance: Where are the possibilities and where is the vacuum.
3. Services: Experience design, creating use-scenarios and reinforcing the brands core-purpose.
4. Emotions: A rational explanation to how it works, inheritance and manipulation.
5. Participants: Why they are important to business in both marketing and innovation.

If you view the presentation over at slideshare and click the tab called “Comments on slide 1 (0)”, there is a supplementing comment to many of the slides.

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Jill Bolte Taylor tells the story of her stroke insight (as a brain scientist). This is strong.

Her description of her feeling of “Nirvana”, as the part of the brain which remembers context shuts off during th stroke, reminds me a lot of the situations described in the youtube video In my language, by autist Amanda Baggs.

Two main traits of the human brain work together when creating brand preference: Energy conservancy and emotions.

Where as the brains need to create preference stems from it’s need to conserve energy / survival instinct (read more…). Emotions help us create this preference.

The important thing here is that emotions is not the brain being lazy, it’s the brains way of evaluating and labeling a choice (and then being able identify preference.)

How does this work? Let’s again look to Daniel Gilbert:

Gilbert says that great psychologists in the end are measured by how they finish the sentence “men differ from monkeys because they …”. And Gilberts claim is that they synthesize future.

What does this mean? “synthesize future”?

When faced with a decision of a specific proportion we imagine ourselves “using” the product or the product being in “use”. We do this by recalling previous experiences that we find relevant and that helps us understand. Images based on our previous experiences which we collect because we find them relevant to the situation. Our emotions connected to these previous images are then mixed and creates an end-state emotion that we connect to the choice at hand.

Now the brain works in such a way that emotion created from imagining things has the same effect as real situation emotion.

Some quotes to support this:

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Brandt and Berge both explain a lot of human (marketing related) behavior with the core message: “The brain is lazy”. Although the brains ability to ignore information is an important feature, it doesn’t explain all marketing related scenarios, and it doesn’t explain WHY it is lazy.

If the brains end state is that it its lazy, then why does it stress itself to find a reason for a purchase when it was impulse and emotional (not rational)?:

“In the choice between changing one’s mind and proving there’s no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof”.
- John Kenneth Galbraith, http://www.gresham.ac.uk/event.asp?EventId=512&PageId=108

If the brain is lazy, then why is it extreme at detecting minute changes in everything from graphic detail, objects in motion in the distance or unexpected outcomes of events?

“The human brain is a difference detector”
- Stephen M. Kosslyn, http://io9.com/357063/how-cognitive-science-can-improve-your-powerpoint-presentations

Looking at a lot of references we can see that the brain doesn’t relax in order to not get “overheated”, it relaxes in order to conserve energy in case something unexpected happens. The brain does everything it can to stay in control of its surroundings (so that it can stay alive longer).

If one starts looking at the behaviors of the brain from the perspective of it’s in built ability to survive, it makes a lot more sense:

Our ability to conserve and focus energy in order to stay alive:

1. Gladwell writes in his book Blink about our ability to “shut of” some senses in extreme situations in order to concentrate all our energy on the important ones. His example is of police officers remembering seeing the trajectory of the bullet they fired, but can’t remember any sound.
2. Chip and Dan Heath writes in their book Made to Stick about how humans react when they are surprised, eyebrows lift in order to open the eyes to the maximum for larger vision, at the same time the jaw drops, and mouth opens so that no processing is needed to maintain that function.
3. The dog often does everything it can to avoid trouble (often misunderstood by humans because of difference in sign systems). In order to avoid a fight it barks to say “stay of my territory” and it goes to a great length to show submission.

At the same time we can see that the brain does everything to remain in a constant (and safe) status quo:

1. We naturally reject change as it will force us to use energy in order to redefine our present stand.
2. If being bullied we will invent reasons to make the bullies comments become untrue. The same thing does not happen if it is a friend being bullied, which is why we feel worse when being a spectator to bullying. (Gilbert)
3. We synthesize happiness in order to be happy. People who lost a leg rate themselves as just as happy as lottery winners a year later. (Gilbert)
4. On the other hand we look up to risk takers and embrace novelty, the reason being Darwinism. In order to survive we know that it is the species more adaptable by change that will survive. Therefore, even though most people are focused on just remaining in the status quo, we admire and adore risk averse people, as they are the ones who will take the species forward.

On control and discovery in order to control the surroundings to stay alive:

1. According to Gilbert the brain wants to exceed control, not for anything other than control itself. People who are given control are better of, people who loose control are worse of than not having had control at all.
2. Instinctively we want to figure out how things work, in order to predict its outcome (Godin). Children can watch the same TV-programs over and over again – because they want to be able to accurately predict what is going to happen. Adults are the same, if we are exposed to something new, we try to figure it out in order to being able to aanticipate it’s outcome.
3. We bet more money on the outcome when we throw the dice ourselves and before the dice has been thrown. The only people who don’t are the manically depressed. (Gilbert)

The brain uses a lot of energy when something disrupts the existing “real”.

1. In order to use as little energy as possible, the brain creates “schemas”. These are predefined interpretations of stimulus from the senses and are stored in Wernickes triangle. As soon as new information from the senses reach this part of the brain it is recognized and puzzled together to create a response. Most processing capacity in the brain is done by almostsubconscious “puzzling”. (Eisenberg)
2. But, every time the puzzling is disrupted by unexpected pieces, the brain turns on it’s attention in order to understand, and create a new predictable schema.

My statement is that although the brain often acts as lazy, the reason for this is that it conserves energy when it can in order to have the reserves available when something new or unexpected happens – so that it can invest in figuring it out, predicting and controlling it – which it does to a great extent.

So the brain is not lazy, it is a very selective energetic survival mechanism…