The Social Commerce Dream

Social Commerce is the dream of impulse buying on digital media come real. Careless, flawless, and not least frictionless shopping on mobile, tablet, surface and yet-to-be-invented digital interaction devices with augmented reality. You may agree that we are still a bit far from it in 2021, or perhaps you are one of the pioneering consumers trying out every new way of shopping available.

With social media, brands can interact directly with consumers. So, marketing has become interactive, the customer voice has become audible, and social commerce could have the power to make shopping great again.

What is social commerce?

The concept of Social Commerce was coined by Yahoo back in 2005. It represents the activation of a purchase behaviour triggered by social media interactions. But Yahoo couldn’t make it work, and more than 16 years later, it is still looking for its final form. Ecommerce first emerged out of dusty distance-buying post-order catalogues. Its first embodiment on the internet was text-rich, image-poor and devote of any emotional dimension. In a parallel trend of comparison shopping, rational buying became the default for internet shopping and deals-sites were the most fun places around.

In recent years, the internet has become more commercial, and by projection both more fun and more superficial. Social media helped make a shift away from human-to-machine relations and back to human-to-human relations. At least we got that far. Emojis conquered text messages crying out loud, that “emotions are back”. 📢❤💥

Perhaps these are indications that full-scale social commerce is actually possible despite its long journey in the dark.

What features will make social commerce successful?

The features of social commerce allow for a wholesome social experience within in a full ecommerce journey. We propose to define its components as the following list of commerce-enabling elements:

• A product catalogue (also called a product feed)
• A product selection and check-out feature
• Peer-to-peer (social) communications related to products and services
• Influencer integration
• Live video
• Behaviour-based ad targeting
• Shopping enablement in rich media (such as product tagging in images or video)
• Reviews, ratings
• Recommendations
• Fulfillment
• Client services

Social commerce today emerges from two different horizons: On the one hand, you have the social media-enabled ecommerce into which Amazon falls. And on the other hand, you have the ecommerce-enabled social media such as Instagram and the Facebook Shop. Let’s have a look at these species in more detail.

Social-media enabled ecommerce

Most ecommerce platforms integrate a number of the elements we mentioned, but Amazon is the most advanced social media-enabled ecommerce model with reviews and ratings, peer recommendations and “people also bought” as driving elements. We can also put Etsy, Vinted and Shein in that category. To take the example of Amazon, it is pushing further into social media and hoisting itself up the funnel with things like the following:

• Amazon posts: social posts on “brand stores” and now coming to product detail pages
• Influencer integrations: activating the ecommerce dimension of influencer partnerships by allowing them to build a store front directly on Amazon with products from their partners
• Live commerce: live video product presentations of products on Amazon Live. Around the clock Shoppingtainment.

Where Amazon is still very much at the end of the purchase journey for most users, it is trying to build a more entertaining user journey opening up for upsells and impulse buys. It’s social gaming platform Twitch may come to play an important role in the set-up moving forward. The strongest element in Amazon’s social commerce play is clearly the Live commerce initiative. It feels like the return of TV Shopping and merchants are flocking to the opportunity to present their products in a live stream on the platform. Build more awareness, give their products a more humane touch, show the founders, reach new audiences, nudge users further towards the purchase. Real humans, real emotions, real persuasion.

Ecommerce-enabled social media

On the other extreme of the spectrum, Pinterest and Instagram have long been considered the most advanced social commerce players. With slowing user growth, it has become essential to monetize their audiences more strongly in order to survive, and ecommerce seems like a much more powerful economic model than advertising.

Instagram has the power to recommend fashion items that make people buy. At least that is the case for Andreas Reiffen, founder of Crealytics and heavy internet users. Where traditional commerce was always based on the location, location, location paradigm whereby the location of a business and its flow of traffic was determining for its’ success, the success parameter for social commerce could be closer related to the quality of the recommendation.

Instagram’s Mothership, Facebook has picked up the challenge in a serious manner with Facebook Shops, a new commerce-oriented solution after their Places and Marketplace. One of the strongest motivators for advertising spend being ecommerce, it is crucial for Facebook to make the connection, especially in a world where cross-platform data integration becomes increasingly difficult (read more about the battle of the cookies here). The impact of advertising higher up the funnel is becoming more difficult to measure and prove.

The most significant step for Facebook Shops is the integration of a payment solution which is already operational in the US market. This will allow for an end-to-end shopping experience from discovery to purchase without leaving the platform. It also opens up for an interesting opportunity: A Facebook Shop with Amazon fulfillment at the back end (combining a Facebook Shop with payment and an Amazon Multi-Channel Fulfillment solution). Ecommerce without a webshop, who would have expected that?

And let’s not forget Snapchat and TikTok. TikTok is building out its advertising offering and is already integrating shopping functionality into the mix. TikTok Shopping, however, is mainly an integration with Shopify enabling for a simple pass-through from the social media to the shop. It looks like social commerce-enablement is becoming a mainstream feature for all platforms. Snapchat has long been integrating its offering with ecommerce solutions and has a similar force of persuasion to TikTok among its users. Snapchats social commerce case studies are an interesting read. Its main tool for ecommerce enablement is a deeplinking feature for linking ads to shops. For younger audiences, these platforms have an enormous persuasion power, but the ecommerce-enablement still requires jumping to another channel.

Ecommerce everywhere

Over at Google, there is pondering as well. Already three years ago, Google went on a mission to provide “shopping everywhere”. I called it an Ozone-approach to shopping (ozone is a variety of oxygen present everywhere around us in the air and with the interesting characteristic that too high doses can be lethal to human beings).

The ozone initiative aimed to provide ecommerce activation in all of Google’s media channels. In search marketing it is already present via Google Shopping and product ads which appear in an integrated manner into search results. But Google is pushing this further with a purchase button and an integration with Google Pay. I call it the Google Buy button although it appears to have a less Amazon-like name in Google documentation.

It is also working on an integration of a purchase function inside videos on YouTube and in images. The approach is similar to the tags Instagram has enabled in its images to link to a product page, but it is reasonable to assume that Google might push this further via image recognition and propose purchases of practically anything you see.

There is an app for it

But what if it all ended up in an app instead. With the open internet being closed up and user journeys more restricted, the place to be is in an app. The superapp phenomenon is expanding beyond China, where WeChat has always been the app to offer everything: Uber, Paypal, Spotify, Messenger, eh I mean WeChat transport, WeChat payment, WeChat Music, WeChat just chat etc.

Superapps are social media by definition and some are natively ecommerce enabled. Perhaps social commerce is already here.

Social Commerce Champions

Taking a first look at the various contenders to the title of social commerce champion and giving them a first rough rating on the features listed at the beginning of the article, the top contenders seem to be Amazon, Instagram (Facebook) and Google. The triopoly of digital advertising are seriously addressing this.

Rough rating of the main emerging platforms for social commerce. Please disagree and contact the author for improvement 🙂

Get social proof, inspire and reach your audience via ads or influencers

Instagram and the Facebook Shop seem like interesting places to go in 2021. For ecommerce players strongly anchored in Amazon, there is social turn to take and a live commerce opportunity to seize where available (US so far). The key will be to understand end users better and engage them with content earlier in the user journey. For brands with little ecommerce penetration, it will be about learning how to drive users to the sale and to take the purchase and fulfilment experience into consideration. An impulse-buy with a 7 day deliver span may not be a viable solution for social commerce. Social commerce is fast, fluid, frictionless and fulfilling.

And in the future, augmented reality may allow for immersive experiences merging the online and offline user experience and creating an entertaining and fulfilling user experience. Facebook heading for the Metaverse and Snapchat activating Augmented Reality in its campaigns, may be signs of an emerging social commerce paradigm.

Native Ecommerce

Native Ecommerce will power the shopping craze of the 2020’s. Watch a film and be attracted by a dress the actress is wearing. Pause, click, purchase right there, then resume your film. See a designer watch in an influencers’ feed on Instagram, click, purchase and scroll along. Watch a start-up founders’ live demonstration of an innovative product and buy it on the spot. Native Ecommerce is the future of impulse buying. Making the user experience great again.

Native ecommerce is when then entire shopping process from product discovery to purchase and checkout happens natively on the same platform. Such a process is already native to Amazon, but in most other online purchase journeys online, you still jump to another platform when it comes to the final purchase of a product. This disrupts the user journey, puts tracking off and represents a monetization loss for the platform you left.

Over the past few years, industry observers have described a trend known as social commerce, whereby more and more of the purchase journey is integrated into social media platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest. Social commerce, however, is no longer the only type of native ecommerce on the rise. Native ecommerce is coming to most of your existing online platforms, changing the nature of the online purchasing journey and making ecommerce into a feature applicable to any existing platform. Facebook shops are accepting payment and Google now has a buy button which we will find in videos on YoutTube, on it’s shopping experience and even in search results. Every online platform is working to complete its’ range of features for online shopping so that you no longer have to click through to an ecommerce site or go over to Amazon to buy products. Stay put, native ecommerce is coming to you making shopping a feature of any online experience.

The Trinet and the compartmentalisation of the internet

Some will consider this trend of compartmentalisation of the internet a disturbing trend. It certainly wasn’t the way the internet was conceived to be. With the strong growth of Apple, Google and Facebook and the walled gardens they raise around their users, the internet of the 2010’s started to be called the trinet, as each of the three players were pretty much building their own internet and raising barriers around it to avoid users and data to flow between them. In these Data Wars, the end user has a seamless experience within each of those walled gardens, and an inconsistent one when the boundaries are crossed which is perfectly natural user behaviour. The marketers nightmare.

When I launch a Facebook or LinkedIn page, I am much less concerned about feeling blind. I am more concerned of being misled by the stats I receive from the platforms and not receiving the ones I am interested in. The first time business owners are confronted with the reality of their Facebook page can be a bit awkward. They have heard so much about all the data Facebook holds on users. Didn’t Cambridge Analytica have 5000 data points on each user thanks to data collected via Facebook? Then how come you can’t even know who the  fans of your business page are, and less so contact them?

You can access the data for marketing purposes. Show advertising to all your fans, to all the fans of your fans, to people in specific demographics, geographic segments, those interested in footwear, or those who are likely to buy insurance. Facebook has the most powerful targeting machine on the internet due to that user data, but you don’t get it, you can only rent it, even if it was built with your own contribution.

In the 2020’ies the compartmentalisation is much broader than a trinet. Most online platforms are using similar same techniques of impeding user leaks and blocking data flows. Amazon, Microsoft, Snapchat, TikTok. Each platform will penalize the distribution of content taking the users outside of their platforms and will impede most tracking of activity from any other platforms.

How tracking and data restrictions are reinforcing this trend

When I launch a new website I always feel entirely blind until an analytics tool such as Google Analytics is active. Imagine you opened a fashion retail shop and you would stand in the middle of the shop and not be able to see any of your visitors nor hear when the door opens. The only thing you could know would be when the till rings a new sale. People have come to hate cookies across the board but sometimes miss some of the essential things they help us do. Please don’t remove first party cookies! Please don’t block all cookies when you go to a website. Don’t prick out the eyes of the store owner!

On the expanded trinet, platforms don’t allow you to do any tracking on their own. You have no raw data, can’t extract it, can’t consolidate with any other platform data you may have. Don’t say you didn’t know, it was in the terms and conditions you accepted when you created your page!

If marketers could get their right, they would ask for tags to be placed on every page of their brand’s presence. These tags would allow them to understand how their marketing impacts end-users, and especially allow them to use automated optimization allowing for advertising to be efficient. But those signals are absent from any cross-platform advertising, except traffic sent to your own website.

The end of cookies is one of the big topics in our digital marketing report.

The opportunity for online merchants

Whereas marketers are struggling with this segmentation of the internet into closed circuits, it might actually provide an opportunity for online merchants because of the desire of each of these platforms to provide all the functionality necessary to complete a purchase.

It is already quite common to have an ecommerce website and an Amazon store in parallel. Merchants are managing the challenge of maintaining a catalogue in two places and driving traffic and optimizing each of them.

In order for such a dual approach to work, a number of opportunities present themselves to merchants:

• Maintain a single source of catalogue, for example by using a PIM (Product Information Management) tool, and upload the catalogue to each ecommerce channel.
• Optimize inventory and fulfillment, for example by using MCF (Multi-Channel Fulfillment) from Amazon whereby you hold one FBA inventory (Fulfillment by Amazon) and pass orders from other channels to Amazon

Being an omnimerchant is not something reserved for large ecommerce operations. The tools and processes are constantly improving to make this possible.

A blueprint for operating native ecommerce

In a small ecommerce set-up, a catalogue can be managed via an excel file. Perhaps taking a first step further and making this a shared online version would be a great idea. Google Sheets can do wonders. With one single source of the catalogue, each native ecommerce channel will be fed the same information.

For large catalogues, a product information management tools becomes necessary. It can maintain the latest product information and ensure consistency between channels.

For driving traffic to each ecommerce channel, the job of the marketer suddenly became much easier. For a Facebook shop, advertise on Facebook and Instagram, for a Google Shopping set-up advertise on YouTube and Google, for an Amazon store, no need to look for external traffic.

One of the big challenges for ecommerce has always been the checkout. This is where a large part of the current revolution is taking place. Google and Facebook are starting to do the checkout. Facebook probably even has its own currency on the roadmap. Other players such as TikTok, may move in the same direction dragging Pinterest and Snapchat with them. Payment on Google and Facebook is currently only possible in the US market, and in other markets, the solution may be an ecommerce solution such as Shopify allowing you to run your own ecommerce website and provide the checkout for Facebook and Google operations.

In the future, however, an ecommerce operation may not need a site. This changes the nature of a merchants’ infrastructure and budgeting.

Remains to be see whether agile ecommerce corresponds to what users want

The infrastructure for the omnimerchant is here. All the big marketing platforms are enabling native commerce and raising their walled gardens. The only ones who weren’t asked their opinion were the end-users. Do you really want to buy that dress in an instant while you are watching a film? There is an opposite trend of buying less, recyclying and sharing. Of giving it a good think before you do your purchase in order to not overconsume. And many users cherish their freedom, doing what they can to not be locked into the user journey the marketing platforms laid out for them.

Native ecommerce is definitely a trend, and it can bring efficiency to merchants, and consistency to marketing operations. But whether users will go all the way remains to be seen.

Johnny was weary. He felt caught between countering forces demanding his allegiance. He had fought in the Battle of the Browser and knew that the long-term consequences of which side he chose to support could be important. It was still the same war the giants were fighting. The War of Data. The giants had an insatiable thirst for more data. They would ingest petabytes of data in one draw and spill it into their inner lakes of data patterns, enriching here and there, invalidating in other parts. But having acquired the data once was not enough, they constantly needed fresh data to ensure the value of the data they already had.

In the Battle of the Browser, it had been the soft components which had been important to win subjects over to their cause, but in the Battle of the Cookies, it was privacy that was at stake. The White front were eloquently addressing their subjects describing how they would do anything to protect them and that the Blue front was out to exploit them. The argument was compelling. After all, subjects had grown fearful, like Johnny, of constantly risking cookie attacks, and weary of repeatedly moving through checkpoints to allow or disallow dataflows. It provided them with a feeling of false security.

It was certain giants’ practices of covertly harvesting data in the other giants’ gardens that had triggered the Battle of the Cookies. The White front had adopted a defensive strategy dubbed internally as the antibiotics initiative. They were willing to partially break down and renew their own systems if this remedy could harm the other giants in greater proportion than themselves. Who had the most to lose? Clearly the Blue front. But in reality, removing the cookies didn’t enhance privacy, tracking didn’t go away and the total sum of data would not diminish, only be redistributed. Johnny couldn’t help feeling that was a hypocrite stance.

For a while, Johnny had considered joining the rebel front over at Adblocking, but he feared their leitmotivs too. Who financed them? When they only partially blocked data flows, how were those deals struck? And then he was not ready to wear their special outfits which felt a bit like deprivation of freedom to roam.

The easy choice seemed to reject the Blue front who had been known to greatly surpass their remit in exchange for their wonderful, fun and engaging experiences. They harvested all the data they could and by any means possible. There were rumours of shadow profiles, of master databases, of initiatives influencing presidential elections, even. It was ugly and an abuse of trust.

Johnny felt squeezed between hypocrisy and abusive practices. The digital revolution was far from what he had imagined. It was supposed to bring more freedom, more equality of opportunity, more literacy, more intelligence to all. Instead it was creating a divide, it was becoming compartmentalized and entirely driven by commercial interest. This Cyberspace is not quite the superconsciousness we were expecting to encounter at the end of the journey.

Battle of the Cookies

Apple has released its IOS 14.6 which effectively allows users to disallow third-party cookies on iPhones, Ipads and anywhere the Safari browser is used. Google has announced the phasing out of third-party cookies too. This is despite using them heavily in its own advertising solutions. A new targeting solution based on “cohorts” – groupings of similar profiles – going under the name of FloC is to replace the third-party cookies for Google. Microsoft Advertising on their side is working on a similar alternative named Parakeet. Facebook has the webs’ most advanced targeting engine for advertising which is its sole revenue source. It relies in large part on third-party cookie data in many ways, same as Google, Amazon and the entire digital advertising industry.

Marketers are having great challenges with these platforms. This is not new. And it is not even because of cookies. Ever since Facebook disallowed Google analytics on a company’s page, being able to understand user interactivity across a brands own content across the web is virtually impossible. The issue probably reaches even further back than this barrier between Google and Facebook. Digital marketing platforms are blocking data flows between them.

It is scary for an end-user to discover just how much information these platforms know about them. I have experienced this by showing their Google Ads Settings or Facebook Ads Settings to people during training sessions. And we also had laughs when someone would try to figure out why something they hated was showing as an interest, or why everybody is supposedly interested in American Football and BMW cars if we were to believe those settings. Facebook thinks I like penguins and the River Thames, so we are clearly far from George Orwell’s Big Brother. These platforms don’t share the data and cannot really understand the data they are monetizing. They repackage these partial data views and sell them off to marketers.

Third-party cookies were one of the few ways marketers could build up a richer view of a user journey across the internet. That capability which becomes creepy when it addresses one user or a small user group, is something marketers will no longer have access to. Maybe this is a good thing.

However, the tracking doesn’t go away. Simply the access will now be reserved for these digital marketing platforms themselves to monetize. The battle is not so much about protecting users’ privacy as it is about owning their data for monetization purposes. Clearly not the internet Tim Berners Lee envisaged when he invented the world wide web.

Marketers will survive. They just need to resaddle and rethink the way digital advertising works. Hopefully this will be for the better.

The question remains whether respect of users’ privacy will improve in any way. I am crossing fingers for that while I am expecting cost of digital advertising to go up in coming years.

“Branding is not about creativity, Don! It is all about the data!”.

Being a father of four, I discovered myself a certain creative talent for inventing doudou stories on the fly. A doudou is a teddy bear in French and some of my youngest sons favourite teddies are owls with large shiny eyes. So, as a person I may have creative qualities, but as a child of the digital age and a marketer, any professional advice I give is typically built on data or at the very least datamodels.

It is only natural that brand positioning in the 2020’ies should be a process of optimization, rather than one of creativity. 

As my good friend and digital visionary Igor Beuker puts it: “the future is for Math Men not for Mad Men“, referencing the awesome TV series about Madison Avenue, the craddle of advertising.

Brand SERPs

The idea behing the term of scientific brand positioning, emerged as a funny way to describe the experience I had building my brand SERPs and in discussions with the “Brand Serp guy”, Jason Barnard. SERP is the abbreviation of search engine results page and brand SERPs are the results pages that appear when you type in your company name or your personal name. In my case “Anders Hjorth” for my personal brand on one hand, and “Innovell” for my company brand on the other.

Ranking on my name was actually one of the first things I succeeded in SEO when I first started working with it around 1997. At the time, the major search engine was Altavista, and the trick to ranking was keyword density; the number of times your keyword occured divided with the total number of words in a page. Making a personal page describing who I am in 4 different languages did the trick back then. Of course, today the target is no longer Altavista but Google search results, and repetition is no longer the trick.

For Innovell, the brand SERP is not well controlled. The Kalicube Pro SaaS platform which Jason Barnard built focuses on just that. It monitors how much control I have of that page, which isn’t much at this stage – another site is ranking in first position, I get a grade C for securing the second position.

Most people understand that backlinks; links from other pages pointing to yours, are important to rank in a high position. And they are. But. That’s not all. There is a broader aspect of authority and popularity in relation with the links, and sometimes without the links, which we will come back to.

What is a brand?

Controlling a brand SERP is an exercice of positioning your brand. But what is a brand, really?

It started with cattle and cowboys. Cattle was branded with the initials of their owner. Today, knowing which cow belongs to whom would probably be better solved with NFC chips and blockchain applications, but at the time, the visual and persistent mark was of outmost importance.

The notion of brand was carried into the industrial era and became increasingly important in retail for products to stand out. They became the carrier of identity and the connection manufacturers could create between advertising and product sales. And this is still the case today both offline and online. A stronger brand typically drives higher conversion rates when a user is looking for a product.

Today, it is often considered that your brand is your reputation. Your brand is what it represents to the general public. Jeff Bezos is famous for having said that “your reputation is what people say about you when you are not in the room”. Accepting that idea, would make it sensible to let Google’s results page be the mirror of that reputation.

What is brand positioning

Brands are an incredibly value intangible asset. The notion of branding carries a veil of mystery. Building brands is about values, about emotional cues and associations. The exercice of building and positioning brands is done incrementally by some. When a company sells a product or a service, its reputation increases. It becomes more famous. It becomes the brand.

Others build brands for specific purposes. They analyze their target audience and position the values, the imagery, the message it conveys. There is employer branding, product branding, personal branding. For most businesses, it remains an area for Mad Men to analyze and define.

Scientific brand positioning

But here comes the digital age, and if you accept the notion of the Brand SERP, then you can enter the univers of semantic analysis. Find brand attributes through entity searches, improve your positioning by aligning with the collective mindset. It may sound a bit wild, but Kalicube has made it very concete with its technical platform.

I have had the priviledge of being invited to try it out. The process is fairly simple – well, with the help of Jason and his team at least. You define an anchor point for your brand, work on an ideal description, provide some fundamental facts and the platform then builds something called schema markup to insert into your anchor page. Once that is done, you go through all the places on the internet which influence your brand and try to make them more homogeneous so they can convey and reinforce your brand positioning.

The most fascinating stage in the process is when you submit your description to Google’s natural language processing interface to see what the machine understood.

You can rewrite and resubmit this description to perfect it. You are tweaking your brand positioining in the process. Something I didn’t imagine would be even possible. Even small changes can radically change Google’s interpretation or shall we say understanding of your brand. In my case, “Innovell” was understood as a person until I added Ltd to the name in the subtitle which made Google understand that it is a company. This in turn made my entire brand positioning more intelligeble for the platform. I am tweaking my brand.

Once you feel your description is final, the platform helps you use the same wording across the most significant places in which your brand is mentioned. The effect of this is more control of your brand, more consistency in the way it is presented and more chances of being put in knowledge panels, of tying all the different information about it together so that users get a clearer picture of your brand.

Yes, you can tweak your brand

I have worked more or less seriously on my personal brand for the more than 20 years that I have worked in digital marketing. I became aware of it when I first started presenting on conferences, which was in reality something I did with the intention of making my former company more visible.

From a brand positioning perspective, conferences are interesting in that they promote you to promote themselves. They try to make your profile as attractive as possible. I gave extra care to provide a good “bio” and a high quality photo.

What I have discovered with the systematic approach to optimizing brand profiles is that you can actually both influence and take control of your personal brand and your company brand. I probably already knew this intuitively, but I didn’t know where to start and what was the most important things to do to achieve this.

For my company profile, this helped me redisover Crunchbase which is probably quite important for company profiles. For my personal profile, I found I had an author profile referencing some of my articles on Muckbase which I could update and use to my advantage.

The work you do when you tweak your brand SERP is very far apart from brand positioning exercices companies did in the past. It will be interesting to see where and how those two worlds meet and overlap. The creative and inductive approach from branding experts, and the data-driven and semantically based approach from a brand SERP guy like Jason.

Brand optimization is a case of high marginal benefits

It can sometimes feel pointless to build a brand. The return on your investment always seems so far away. I usually say that any real value you get out of speaking at a conference appears three years after. I haven’t even bothered working on building the Innovell brand outside of our digital marketing insights reports. However, as for anything that can be optimized, when you actually make some investment in a brand, it would be silly to not optimize the outcome of that investment with tweaking and optimizing once’s wording and all the places in which it is being shared. Perhaps this is where scientific brand positioning fills a gap.

I am hoping the work I do on this will help my brand win a “knowledge panel” on the right side of SERP and become ten times more visible on Google when people search for it. Wish me luck!

Thanks to Jason Barnard for providing an access to his Kalicube.pro platform and assisting on tweaking my personal brand as well as that of Innovell.

Searching for Purpose? Here comes Marketing with Purpose, starring Responsibility, Values and Inclusion

“It starts with Why“, doesn’t it? It explains why Apple and Nike are so successful because they have such a strong mission statement at the core of their business. Simon Sinek explains this brilliantly in his presentations and his books. He presents us with the golden circle, an illustration of concentric circles of What and How surrounding the core purpose in the central Why.

But it is harder when you are just a local accounting firm or an undertaker, isn’t it? “Some guys just wanna drive a forklift”, as Colm Regan puts it in the Late Late Show. They don’t need a vision or to be passionate about a cause, or innovation, do they? (Good laugh for you in that short video, and more about passionate tax optimizers, passionate sofa retailers and accountants from David Mitchell’s Soapbox here).

What is purpose?

Where Simon Sinek explains the purpose of a business as “The Why”, Microsoft Advertising makes it more concret and tangible in their “Marketing with Purpose” framework which was kicked off at the Elevate event these last few days.

The Marketing with Purpose framework breaks the Why down into values, responsibilities and inclusion. The effect these factors jointly create on users is to make a brand more authentic. Perhaps authenticity is what Simon Sinek calls “consumers don’t buy your products’ functionality, they buy your reason for producing it”.

In one of Microsoft Advertising’s research studies, it was found that 72% of consumers were more likely to support brands that are authentic in their advertising.

Towards a more ethical marketing

The rise of this trend comes at a time where users have become distrustful of digital marketing and perhaps somewhat tired of the shear number of ads they see every day. The Cambridge Analytica scandal was the symbol for misuse of user data. The interests, affinities and behaviours of millions of users were logged and cross-referenced in a giant database that was used to exerce influence believed to have affected elections across the world, including the US Presidential election. The one that surprisingly instated Donald Trump as what was once called “the leader of the free world”. Fake news proliferated out of control.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal was about uncontrolled use of covertly obtained user data. This was based on the same priniciples on which brands have been retrieving data via digital marketing channels over the past years.

In the world of marketing, users turned to ad blocking and anonymous browsing as the only means they had to fight back. As one would expect, users also began to lose trust in brands that were felt to misuse their data or disrespect their privacy. A Microsoft research study focused on Generation Z showed that 48% of users stopped purchasing from a brand because it didn’t represent their values. (“The Psychology of Inclusion and the Effects in Advertising: Gen Z“)

In 2021 a number of things are happening. GDPR, the European privacy legislation and CCPA, California’s privacy regulation, are leading regulatory frameworks starting to set a standard for what user data can be collected and how. Whereas they are far from perfect from a functionality standpoint, they are setting a standard for what is acceptable and what is overstepping, and thus are helping end users know where to put their own limits. And from the end-user perspective, the pandemic has caused a great disruption in both end-user behaviour and marketing techniques, as we described recently in our article about user unpredictability and marketing in the 20’ies.

Within the big online platforms, Apple is on a crusade to kill third party cookies in the name of privacy. And Google is following in their footsteps for this noble cause, and with a much higher impact on marketers. For outsiders, it frankly does look a bit like internal fighting between GAFAMs (the data driven companies Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft). Apple is in a dogfight with Facebook, Google is fighting Amazon. They do this to regain user trust while providing a sizable blow to their competitors. This will have great impact on the way marketers work in the future as they are directly affected by these impacts. This is addressed more in detail in Innovell’s digital marketing report: “Digital Marketing in Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous Times” (commercial report not freely available).

Oh, and Microsoft? Well, here is an interesting initiative where Microsoft Advertising is taking an altruistic and entirely positive approach to the topic by publishing a playbook and setting up a course with accompanying certification: “Marketing with Purpose” which we are looking closer at in this article.

An authentic brand uses responsibility, values and inclusion principles

In the Marketing with Purpose framework set forth by Microsoft Advertising, the core building blocks are responsibility, values and inclusion. And meeting best practices and enhancing these factors leads to higher brand loyalty.

The brand loyalty curve from the Marketing with Purpose framework

The three components of marketing with purpose help to build an authentic brand which in turn translates into consumer trust trigger a higher propensity to purchase that brand’s products. Supporting the entire framework is a number of Microsoft Advertising research studies.

Let’s have a look at the three big components one by one:

Responsibility: Brand’s need to both be and communicate responsibility to their audiences:

• Respect user data and privacy
• Be transparent in their communication
• Apply brand safety control to their advertising
• Make their communication media accessible to all categories of users

Values: A brand is built on a mission statement carrying it’s values. When these values overlap and resonate with users’ values, brand trust and loyalty increases.

• Establishing a brands ethical foundation
• Knowing and communicating a brands’ values
• Understanding consumers’ values
• Removing or reducing data bias from the equation

Inclusion: The openness and inclusivity a brand exercices in its’ practice and its’ communication.

• Knowing the 9 feelings of inclusion: celebration, zest, hope, relaxation, relief, safety, confidence, acceptance and clarity
• Using inclusive keywords in search campaigns
• Aplying proximity, empahty, insights and innovation to communication

Better and more responsible marketing drives better performance

Many advertisers care more for marketing with performance than marketing with purpose, maybe because goodwill is harder to measure than sales. After all, any business is by definition geared towards generating profits. That is the purpose of a business.

Advertising has long been aiming to be on wavelength with the values of its audiences, but in the past not many studies or metrics pointed to the importance of advertiser responsibility or inclusivity. Those have become building bricks for authentic marketing which is in user demand.

Perhaps this is a wakeup call for those who have had a too narrow focus on short term business metrics and who have neglected the greater good and the image of their brands in the long run.

If you want to dig deeper into the Marketing with Purpose framework, you can download the Marketing with Purpose playbook here and you can access the course and the (rather fun) certification. The course is a 2-3 hour investment well worth your time.

Have we reached the End of More? Or is it only the End of Cookies? Will Buy Nothing, Fly Shame, Reuse Recycle and the Planet, People, Profit paradigm be trendsetting for the 20ies?

The COVID19 pandemic marks a pivot for user behaviour. We are all hopeful that we are currently (spring 2021) seeing the end of what seems to have been an endless struggle, a war against an invisible enemy, a challenge to our social patterns. But what about behavioural patterns?

In digital marketing, “mobile” and “touch” have been major revolutions of user behaviour over the past 10 years, brought about thanks to technological change. But the pandemic struck them both down. Touching has become a contamination risk. Mobility was taken to a halt. We do not yet know for certain what fundamental changes will continue once the world returns to a new normal, but we can see a lot of indicators already. Let’s explore.

How was marketing affected by the pandemic?

My good friend and co-author of the Amazon Marketing Report, Dan Saunders, kindly shared some before vs after screenshots from his Amazon homepage with me last year. Yeah, you guessed it: toilet paper, coffee, cleaning products were all over that homepage during the pandemic. Essentials. Once the first lockdown was over, it returned to some normality including his favourite tech devices. But things didn’t return to pre-pandemic conditions on the high street. We still have not come to any normality, and our behaviours are changing.

In digital marketing, the pandemic first struck budgets down. In the research for our most recent report, agencies responding indicated budget reductions of around 40%. When there is uncertainty, one of the first things to suffer is media spending. Advertising plunged. Agencies took a hit.

Next there was the great data disruption of 2020. For over a decade, the paradigm for digital advertising has been “machine learning applied to audience data”. Artificial intelligence would use behavioural patterns to predict the best forms of advertising based on real-time user behaviour.

Machine learning is a powerful tool. Its weakness is that it is expecting data to be homogenous and truths to be universal. Nobody helped the machines learn there was a pandemic. With broken data, marketers had to resaddle campaigns and acquire new data. Stop, take a step back, rethink, redeploy.

In 2021, the first impact of the data disruption is past us, but marketers are facing many more challenges: the end of cookies, removing access to some of the behavioural data, the continuing rise of AI and the increasing opacity of its predictions: search terms reports, broader matching, imposed automated bidding. Marketers can no longer expect to see the raw data.

And remote work has additionally impacted their organisations. Digital marketing is extremely well suited to work from home and even to #workfromanywhere. Agencies sent their people home, but they remained connected to the virtual enterprise, and some may never return to an office.

For a more in-depth analysis of these trends, check out our 2020 Digital Marketing Report.

How is consumer behaviour changing?

Even more fascinating is consumer trends that emerged or expanded during the pandemic. Microsoft Advertising and the Suzy research initiative looked more deeply at those in the 2021 Consumer Trends report.

Some of these trends resonate strongly with me. They even make my wish to stop calling people “consumers” stronger. People are people, and successful marketers understand that and look for motives rather than impulsions. Enough of a terminology rant, let’s look at some of the emerging user trends in 2021

The End of More. Our economies are built on a growth paradigm. Economic growth is the solution to poverty, unemployment and inequality. The pandemic created negative growth in most economies. Some are eagerly looking towards the return of growth whereas others consider it the end of a cycle. The end of more. Have I ever been more grateful to have a garden? The pandemic has not pushed be to have a bigger garden, but to appreciate what I have and feel priviledged because so many others are suffering.

Buy Nothing. Even more radical. Recycle, reuse, share, repurpose. Vinted is one of the strongest ecommerce platform if you feel you have to buy. Buy nothing is a sign of circular economies reducing waste and limiting new production. Preserve the plane, use less raw materials, less energy.

Local not global. It seems almost symptomatic that the Suez canal would be blocked and making global commerce suffer. 15 years ago, it was all about the “global consumer” desiring strawberry desert at any time of the year and drinking orange juice every morning. But global circulation of goods requires logistics which were put under dire pressure during the pandemic due to restrictions, sick people, distancing, precautions. We refound “local” and starting appreciating it. European economies have started “relocating” certain industries that were massively “delocating” 15 years ago. It is the end user who is driving this trend.

Sustainable travel. Fly shame pre-existed the pandemic, but how could anyone imagine a world without flying. Now we have seen that world, and whereas we may not be entirely comfortable with the perspective of a different setup, we can also see new models emerge. Travelling can be about the trip and not just the destination. It doesn’t have to be fast. It is of course quite a trip to cross the pacific by boat rather than plane, but the experience of it, might be put at the front of the scene.

Nostalgia tripping. I don’t know how many times has this crossed my mind over the past months. If only I could go back to New Zealand to revisit the most beautiful country in the world. Or if only I could do another road trip to Spain under the baking sun. Oh wow, would love to take my wife to Istanbul to experience the gate between East and West. Nostalgia is entering my mind, and I think this will be a trend when and if the world opens up again.

There are more trends to discover and their explanations in the Microsoft Advertising report mentioned below. The research was carried out in collaboration with Suzy. The ones above resonated with me and may not with others. Download the report to get a chance to discover the in-depth research on consumer trends in 2021.

The Many Challenges of Marketing in the 20’s

Our own digital marketing report stresses the need for marketers to be proactive with change and embrace it but not with closed eyes. Keep an eye on the AI. The Microsoft report announces the new business paradigm they call “People, Planet and Profit”.  Virtual enterprise is rising, social distancing has entered our consciousness, user motivations are changing, the “consumer” is mutation. And in all of that, we are waiting for the pandemic to phase out and the new normal to crystalize. Marketing in the 20’s is quite something.

Read more about how the digital marketing landscape is changing in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world in the Innovell digital marketing report: Digital Marketing in a VUCA World. 

Download the 2021 Consumer Trends Report from Microsoft Advertising and Suzy here.

I wonder if people today know the film Matrix better than Plato’s allegory of the cave. They illustrate the same concept of a superficial reality projected onto us, from which only the fearless can escape. This is the image that we used to illustrate the state of digital marketing in 2020. Digital marketers staring at a wall onto which digital marketing providers are projecting images of end-users. Those images are not nearly as perfect as in our illustration. They are expressed as data sets, as interest categories, as intent.

For how long will we be calling it digital marketing, I wonder? We could already rebaptise it to Data marketing, for that is all it is about. Using data, to direct and optimize a campaigns executed by algorithms onto digital media. A few months back, Google removed more of the transparency in their data. They are of course far behind Facebook in that game: “No tracking allowed, here is the data you need”.

It made me think about the troubled waters data marketers are navigating in. We know that a lot of the digital activity that goes on behind the scenes is automated bot traffic. We know that we cannot track users from one marketing channel to the other, unless we are inside one of the big media players’s universe. We know that some users have installed ad blockers, that some are using incognito browsing windows, and in the future, third-party cookies will completely disappear. It is a wonder data marketers have any insight into the data at all.

Thinking like Plato and Neo: Does the data really provide insights? 

Nothing like a little philosophical step back to look at the bigger picture. The big worrying characteristic of the big marketing providers is that they are dictating the rules of the game, while they are providing the data on the basis of which you make decisions. By definition, the arbitrage is carried out by algorithms, not engineers fiddling with your data. This provides us with no guarantee whatsoever, that the data is free of bias. A very simple example from my days running a digital media agency: Google Analytics (the abiter) by default attributes conversions to paid search (the commercial offering) more favourably than organic (free) traffic.

Digital marketers are not dealing with raw data most of the time. It is interpreted data, and the interpretation has commercial intent. This is why the most important direction for digital marketers in these challenging times is to build proprietary data. If the entire user journey takes place within Amazon, or within the Google universe, or withing Facebook, you should be aware that you are not seeing raw data, but interpreted data. Building proprietary data means getting users to your own website, it means capturing tangible user data like email addresses, phone numbers and names, rather than relying on retargeting lists and intent audiences.

Read the full article on PPC Hero here:  https://www.ppchero.com/digital-marketing-in-a-vuca-world-is-it-time-to-emerge-from-platos-cave/

“When I think of Paris, I always think of Dan Brown’s intergalactic comedy science fiction Davinci picture. I think of Jean Reno’s delivery of “The scar on the face of Paris” line in reference to Louvre Pyramid. And now, I think of mountains of ridiculous electric scooters piled up everywhere. If the Pyramid is the scar, the scooter menace is full bloom acne.”

Kevin Ryan

I felt very honoured to be interviewed by a man I respect a bunch, Kevin Ryan. We met many years ago in relation with the Search Engine Strategies conferences. Kevin was the Chief of Editorial and I was pitching to speak.

In his podcast on TMI, we came back to that question of “pitching” quite a few time. It seems like we are not just living in the post-truth era and are part of a real-time attention economy, but we are also in the midst of the Pitching Age, an age where pitching is more important than anything. Maybe it is the business reflection of what is happening on social media for people.

Both Kevin and I of course agree that that is utter BS but it led into a great discussion about Innovation about agencies and M&A dynamics. About the dilemma of Earn-outs  versus Integration, of knowledge acquisition and knowledge sharing, of company cultures and people management. And much more 🙂

Listen to the podcast here: http://www.tmikmr.com/2019/08/13/innovation-awards-and-search-in-paris/

When I go to speak on conferences I also benefit from being there to listen to other speakers and I was fascinated on one hand by the evidence Marc Poirier from Acquisio was giving of how those who applied machine-learning to campaign performance had very significantly better results than those that didn’t. This was across a very large sample of campaigns and the uplift was between 30% and 200%. You could of course argue that perhaps those who apply machine-learning are also the ones that do everything else right on their campaigns but the evidence made a big impression on me. Machine-learning can really have a huge impact on campaign performance.

I was also inspired by Fred Vallaeys take on Artificial Intelligence and how it can change our world and our workplaces. AI in its first iteration needs to learn by Humans so there is nothing to fear, but as he clearly stated: AI in its second iteration can learn from itself and no longer needs the Human precedence. In my own research of the leading paid search teams across the world, I have noticed a very forthcoming attitude to both automation, machine-learning tools. The search marketers embraces it all, tries it out, picks the bits that are useful and sometimes updates his/her organisation to correspond to a new status quo. That is how I came to think of Schumpeter’s concept of Creative Destruction: of how in the process of disruption and innovation, things are broken down and out of that wave of destruction something else comes out. I do believe the Search Industry is well armed for this, or as I wrote in the article:

“The Search Industry is at the forefront of the upcoming revolution of work. We work directly on the platforms of some of the biggest AI players on the globe: Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon. And we all feel it as our duty to try the “latest functionality” to “join a Beta”, to “try new things for our campaigns”. We are more than willing to try machine-learning and AI-driven features and functionalities and probably have our activity x-rayed and monitored for results.”

The dilemma between Learning and Performing

What seems important to me is to consider the dilemma between learning and performing. If we blindly turn to AI and let the machines do the job, we will learn nothing and render ourselves worthless. If we use AI, as with any tool, to try and test and to take us further, then we are adding value to the equation. This sometimes requires to update your organisation as well. And it requires companies to be extremely agile.

To read the full article, follow this link to PPC Hero: https://www.ppchero.com/surfing-the-waves-of-creative-destruction/

Or to simply jump to the conclusion:

“Search Marketers are AI Natives, they were bred with constant change. In a certain manner, the Search Industry is already being disrupted but we only realize this clearly today because of the AI hype of 2018. Other industries are only just starting to face this new challenge but in Search we are better prepared. This doesn’t mean that we have nothing to worry about. If we blindly trust the machines to optimize our campaigns and no longer learn, then we will have lost our added value and commoditized ourselves. I don’t see that happening. Actually, I quite like to watch the way the resilient Search Marketers constantly reinvent themselves, like surfers on the waves of creative destruction.”

Illustration: Robert Toth.

The battle for biosignals http://t.co/SObuhSxFfI @soanders #leweb #wearabletech

— CMO.com (@CMO_com) December 22, 2014

(the original article published December 2014 on CMO.com)

Frédéric spoke at the Leweb Conference in Paris in December 2014 together with some of the most advanced “Wearable Tech” specialists in the world: David Rose of MIT, JP Gownder of Forrester Research and Cedric Hutchings, CEO of Withings.

There was a strong focus on Health-related wearables and we have seen numerous companies and solutions emerge in this space over the past years. Nike connected their shoes, Fitbit created their connected wristband, Withings launched the connected weight Scales and OM Signals have built the connected shirts and then of course we have the Apple Watch with its cardio functions.

OK, so where is the war going on? Well, there is of course a commercial battle between competing products but the underlying battle may be more important. The one where the big players are fighting for control of your biosignals – data collected from your body and used in intelligent ways for your own benefit. All the above mentioned applications are fun and useful but we may expect more serious health-improving solutions for all ages to arrive on the market shortly.

At the end of the 90’s we witnessed the Browser wars. Netscape had taken a large share of the web browser market and Microsoft woke up to take a fight back in the market for “access to information” with the launch of Internet Explorer. I believe it was the first time Microsoft invested heavily in a product they were giving away for free. They had been owning the access to computing space with the DOS and later Windows operating system for a long time and were challenged by a new and stronger user need: access to information. Later the same type of battle appeared in Mobile operating systems. The battle announced today is for the control of the access to your biosignals.

But the battle field is wide and mined with privacy issues. In essence, our biosignals are intimate private data points although their value is only expressed once they are processed. Monitoring the vitality of an elderly person for the purpose of coming to aid in case of disturbance is a life-saving application and connecting your scales to monitor the evolution of your body weight can be a health-improving application. But for someone else to be hacking my weight on verifying my vital signals is scary and for someone to use that information for commercial purposes seems even worse. Where credit scoring is a common practice today and reputation scoring is being discussed, perhaps one day our bankers and insurance agents will be checking our health score before doing business with us. The main re will be a battle for this information because it is of high value

Considering to what extent geolocation data has had an impact on marketing, we should expect biosignals to have an even stronger impact on marketing in the future. Not necessarily at the personal level but at the aggregate level.

And the usual suspects are already be positioning themselves for the battle. Google is investing in connected objects, like Nest and has an ambitious project for health-related technologies. They are also seeking to federate developers around a platform, Android Wear. Microsoft are investing in e-health management platforms, Facebook did their first health-related investment with a fitness-tracking company in 2014 and Apple are integrating health-monitoring capabilities into their own products but more importantly, have built the Healthbook, an ambitious app meant to centralize your biosignals acquired from various data points: Heart rate, Bloodwork, Hydration, Blood pressure, Activity, Nutrition, Blood sugar, Sleep, Respiratory rate, Oxygen saturation, Weight. A full view of your health situation in one app.

Still, the biosignals are only just starting to be produced via products and apps from the thousands of health wearable start-ups investing the space. And most of the time, the data remains in closed loops. The market is not monetizable yet but we should expect a lot of investment and many acquisitions in the space in 2015.

Forrester have predicted 10 million sales of Apple watches in 2015 and together with the Withings Activité watch which incorporates biosignals into the equation, this year could be the Year of the Watch and will be the year when our biosignals upload massively into the cloud.