ブランドの再興
This is Reinamoto's podcast, The Creative Mindset.
Hi everyone, welcome to The Creative Mindset, a podcast about what the future holds at the
intersection of creativity and technology. I'm Reinamoto, the founding partner of I&CO,
a global innovation firm based in New York and Tokyo. The topic of branding is one of the
recurring themes of this podcast. While we've seen many new brands become an overnight success
in the age of TikTok, we've also seen some old ones become new again. Today's guest,
Ana Angelic, is someone who knows a thing or two about branding in this new age of brand marketing.
Named twice to Forbes' top CMO list, Ana Angelic is a brand executive, doctor of sociology,
and author of The Business of Aspiration. Most recently, she was the global chief brand officer
of Esprit, responsible for Esprit's new brand vision and repositioning strategy in Europe
and market re-entry in North America and Asia Pacific. Prior to Esprit, Ana led the successful
rebrand of Banana Republic, resulting in a 27% year-on-year comparable sales increase.
Ana also held positions as the CMO of Monceau Gavriel and chief brand officer of Rebecca Minkoff,
where she introduced the female founder's collective platform. Early in her career,
Ana worked at top global advertising agencies. She's a widely read columnist, speaker, and advisor,
and writes a popular weekly newsletter, The Sociology of Business. Although we had never met,
Ana and I happened to cross paths in the same creative agency but in different offices almost
20 years ago. You'll hear us exchange our collective memories way back when. Today's conversation
centers around reviving brands. Having gone through several rebranding efforts in the last decade,
she was the perfect person to talk to. So, let's get started. Ana, good to see you.
Good to see you too, Ray. Thanks for having me.
Where do I find you? Where are you joining this conversation from?
This conversation right now is from Miami. Yeah. So, you've been, instead of a bi-coastal,
you've been a New York-Miami double city resident. Yes, yes. I mean, it was a lot of back and forth.
I think like I spent 10 days and it's probably the longest I spent in Miami.
Oh, wow. Okay. Because the weather in New York has been so bad.
I know. And then I miss the earthquake and the eclipse
and the rain. So, I'm hiding from biblical malaise.
That's right. Yeah, the sky is quite literally falling down in New York.
Actually, I'm more productive here. That's why I'm like, hey, I have stuff to do. I'm just like,
because you know, in New York, there's a thousand things that are happening all the time and
thousand people to see. Yeah.
You know, it's just, and here it's just more like, okay, focus work, you know, that's it.
Oh, that's a good strategy. Yeah.
I'm making a mental note. Maybe I'll try that kind of lifestyle in the near future.
So, just to get this conversation going and before I go into the questions that I wanted to ask you,
I want to trace back our memory a little bit because you and I overlapped very briefly and
not, you know, very closely, but we happen to be at the same agency, gosh, back in 2005, 2006?
2006. I never saw you in New York office.
No, no. So, just for the sake of our listeners, I had just started working at this agency called
AKQA in New York in 2005. And I was in the New York office only for about 10, 11 months or so.
And then I relocated to San Francisco in 2005. So, we didn't, we were in the same company,
but we were in different offices. By the time that you had joined, I had moved to San Francisco.
So, we never really got to work together, but, you know, just being in this industry,
you've gone on to work at a few different agencies and particularly in the past decade or so,
you've been the brand officer, chief brand officer at really storied brands, particularly in the
fashion industry. And some of the brands that you've been part of most recently at Esprit,
you were part of Venom Republic, you were part of Rebecca Minkoff, a lot of brands that have
interesting and different journeys in the past couple of decades or so, but at a very high level,
when you go into these brands at different stages and different sort of phases of their history,
what do you do to start this revival of a brand? Absolutely. And I think that Banana Republic is
probably the richest example because they had the most imaginative origin story, so to speak.
So, the first thing that one needs to do, it's really a sociological experiment. It's an
anthropological experiment. It's also a psychological experiment because it's easy to go
down to the archives and be like, oh my God, let's revive the archives. But it's also unbelievably
unimaginative in a sense because you really need to go further back and you need to figure out what
the intention was because all those brands, when they were created, they had some intention of the
founders. Founders were unique people in a sense that they recognized, they looked at the world and
then they saw, oh, this is what we want to contribute, this is what is missing, or this is
what we want to do differently. So, there is that invention that is always present in those
those brands. And you need to unlock, as a chief brand officer, you need to unlock what that invention
Banana Republicの起源とブランドの進化
was, what that impact was, what that intention was. So, for Banana Republic, it's easy to get
lost in the idea of... Banana Republic is a horrible name and even has always been even more so
today. But then when you really go back and you see who were the Zieglers, Mel and Patricia Ziegler,
the founders, they were a journalist and a graphic designer, and they were inventing
this imagined world. They were hand-drawing the maps themselves. So, imagine that level of
imagination that you say, hey, we're going to create a safari brand, but we're going to hand-draw
the maps, we're going to put palm trees in a store, they put a jeep in a store. And we're talking
about late 70s here. Experiential retail has not been invented yet, at all. So, you see like that
is kind of, and you kind of latch on to that originality, and you build around that.
So, the original idea of Banana Republic was imagined worlds. Adventure is part of it, but it's not the
core promise. The core promise was, if we imagine a world, who are those people who
live there? What do they wear? Where are they going? Who are they? And that becomes a
rich creative territory to then say, hey, when you have Banana Republic, look, what is that look about?
Humans have always been drawn by what is behind that bush, what is behind the horizon.
So, that's kind of like that one of those basic truths that you kind of riff off
through that imagination, which allowed us to go and be more surreal, and one day there
in a desert, the other day there in a castle in Wales. And it kind of allows you to really
tell a story, to build a world. It made the brand popular and famous, but I would imagine also
that those topics and interests would go in and out of fashion. Safari was one expression of those
imagined worlds. Oh, okay. So, can you dig deeper into that a little bit? Absolutely. And I mean,
I think that's unbelievably astute that what you picked up on, they started with the Safari,
they started the Banana Republic as a company, hey, this is the imagined world, they're like
exploring somewhere, there are those catalogs, and they're like almost like the prep guide,
how people dress. And Safari was one expression of that. And then they sold the company, and after
that to Gap, and then after that, Mickey Drexel came and he did this metrosexual look and work
for Banana Republic, which was also unbelievably smart, because you own that part. But then the
origins of the brand were lost, because Mickey was a merchant, an unbelievable one, the most famous
one. But it was about the product, it was about that product selection that's about to work,
where Banana Republic was unbelievably successful. But then after that successful period,
it's kind of started to go down for a series of business decisions, and so on. So if you kind of
want to reverse that trend, and mind you, you don't have a lot of time. When you're reversing the
trend, there is only so much big window opportunity for the initial impetus when you put forward the
new brand image. The brand renewal takes time. It's not just about the brand marketing, the
creative, it's going to take three to five years, at least it's a series of operational decisions,
business decisions, every product decisions, everything needs to work in sync. But for the
first momentum to capture culture's attention, you need to move really fast. So that was the idea,
kind of like, no, no, no, it's about imagined worlds, that was Safari, was the first expression
of that imagined world. And then Banana Republic is really about American sportswear, because a lot
of brands that exist in that, in between crappy, Banana Republic is not crappy, never has been.
And on the other side, you have workwear, and it was not workwear either. But what allows you to,
when you have that imagined world, is to kind of say, hey, no, we're not speaking in fashion genres,
because our customers are not speaking in fashion genres. You can actually mix everything you can,
because you can see, like, if you have that imagined world, they're like, however their
dressing is, you know, it's part of that world. So in that sense, we moved away from Safari, but we
kept the cues of Safari, like oversized pockets, like cinched waist, like multifunctionality.
That's why I say American sportswear, it's really that functional maximalism, if you want to
want to speak about, because you have a lot of attitude in clothes, but it's also very much
functional. So you have double belts, you have pants that can be worn during the day or evening.
So that opened up a really big, rich design territory for the product, a lot of layering, a lot
of oversized. And that was what actually pushed the Banana Republic product into relevance.
And I believe that Banana Republic is now pursuing quite luxury, a lot, but again, it allows
to go in many different directions. When I was there, we really pushed for that post-genre,
and that functionality and utility of Safari, when you have 35 pockets that all have different
purpose, and then you have this layering, and you can wear a vest over different things to kind of
give us a direction, not literally Safari look, but that utilitarian direction to clothes.
ブランドリバイバルの挑戦
Yeah, given your position, when you come in as a brand or marketing person, and especially at these
fashion houses, there are strong characters, i.e. designers, who might have their own vision
of what the brand should be. So what's the balance being a marketer and brand builder,
working with, say, in this context, a designer who may have their own point of view on what
they want to make the brand about? How do you negotiate what you think from a cultural and,
in your case, sociological perspective, as well as from a creative craftsmanship perspective?
That's really valid, and it really depends on an environment. For example, when I was with
Rebecca Minkoff, she had her point of view and design, and she knew her audience,
and it was very defined. And then my job is not that, my job is to provide a story around that,
and to provide different contexts when those clothes are going to be worn. But when you have
companies like Gap or Esprit, design teams are different. Design teams, they may have been there
a long time, they're very merchandising-driven often. Sometimes, like for example, now with
Zac Posen, they come in and they have their big point of view, but usually in those more commercial
operations, that sort of conceptual is maybe missing a bit, or there is room for collaboration.
So in that sense, I had wonderful collaboration with Banana Republic, heads of design,
and their concept. So we were all working together. The whole idea, however, with the brand revival,
which Rebecca Minkoff was not the challenge that they had, but Banana and Esprit
do and did, is that you need to synchronize the product proposition and the brand proposition.
So in a sense, the brand message and the product message need to be the same. So it's
absolutely necessary, actually, for someone to connect those two, marketing, communication,
creative expression, and product creative expression, because too much of this connect,
and you will have fake advertising, not as pictured. So in absolute sense,
those two things need to operate at least at the same annual concept, annual message, and then
アメリカンスポーツウェアのブランディングとマーケティング
quarterly messages. So in the case of Banana Republic, you talked about this idea of
American sportswear with what you said, functional maximalism, right? So a lot of
parts of a garment that have a similar function, but say slightly different functions for this
pocket versus that pocket. What are the things that you did in order to deepen this product
proposition of American sportswear in the branding and marketing sense?
So that's why it's important to have that concept, because American sportswear is a product
proposition. And yet the brand goes upon that, but the brand proposition was imagined world,
expedition in imagination. And the way you sort of conduct that, you have to see like that there
is also that middleware, so to speak. Middleware is visual merchandising, retail experience,
styling is unbelievably important, various scenarios, selection of models, selection of
art direction, creative direction. So that is how you actually convey that functional maximalism,
because you hire a photographer who has rich colors. You don't go for someone who's going
to shoot in black and white portraits or very simple. You just look for ensembles of people
when a lot is going on. You use a lot of props. You use a location as a prop. So that is how it
comes through. And then that is then translated in a specific art direction for the website,
which means e-commerce photography is shot in a similar way with a lot of props, with the lighting
that is more soft than it's like if something was minimalistic. So you see, it's very specific
creative decisions, but also very tactical creative decisions. When it comes to overarching
creative concept, you can't be bound by like the execution is functional maximalism. But the idea
of the brand, it has to be that those imagined worlds, because that's overarching idea. So we
had for the first year, we had expedition in imagination. This was like legacy of the past,
legacy of the present and legacy of the future as a narrative arc. And that's how you do the
product selection and assortment. How is the product selection and assortment going to tell
the story? How is the language going to tell the story and so on? So in the case of Banana Republic,
this idea of American sportswear, that idea, was it there already that you identify and
spot it? You spot it and say, hey, that's the brand idea that we should amplify? Or was it
through the conversation that, hey, this should be the idea for the brand? No, no, no. It was not there.
Absolutely not. Like none of that was there. But you're right. Like every brand needs to have
their imagined world. Every brand needs to have their specific product direction.
But most brands don't. Like mass brands have been there for a long time. And that sort of became
very merchandising driven, very commercial driven. So that's like when you do a rebrand, you really
need to take a step back and look at all of that. But no, it wasn't. I see. I see. So when you say
American sportswear, that could be interpreted as a pretty broad set of topics. And in this
Banana Republicのアメリカンスポーツウェアの定義と要素
particular case, Banana Republic, what is Banana Republic's American sportswear that's different
from, let's say, you briefly mentioned about Polo or even in a more extreme case, say like Nike,
that could be also American sportswear. But in the case of Banana Republic, what do you mean by that?
There is a strong tradition of Ralph Lauren and American Prep and Ivy League. And that is that
imagination of East Coast aristocracy, the colleges and trust funds and leisure enabled by
inheritance and entire WASP culture. And then Ralph took that and created his imagined world.
That's basically, oh, how do people who are third or fourth generation
imagine American aristocracy? What do they wear? How do they behave? So that's a very strong
tradition of that. That's number one. Yeah. On the other side, you have work, which is more like
card, for example, or Timberland. It's more, you know, those like checkered, it's like Marlboro
men, if you will. It's like Bruce and so on. So you have on that side, it's about that working
class and the honest, hardworking, working with hands of the working class. Those guys are in the
West. This is East Coast. This is West Coast. They're laying down railroads and they have the
aspiration to, you know, like do an honest work, go home and relax. That's a specific image. And
Ralph's genius was that he bridged the two because he has his ranch and that iconography of American
West, but he has also East Coast prep purple label and so on. But anyway, those are the two main ones.
And then in the middle, you had American sportswear, which is like Donna Karan, Calvin Klein, Halston.
And then before them, it was not called like that, but you had Bonnie Cashin, Claire McArdle.
They were female designers. They designed for women in the urban setting because both prep
and workwear are about how do you, what do you wear when you go outdoors? It's about being outdoors.
This is very urban, very city dwellers. And that's where that modularity comes in. Donna Karan,
seven easy pieces, for example, how you put those different things together. Oversized, it's for that
creative class, basically. So when you zoom in on that middle, younger creative class, you get
that new American sportswear. And because I don't want to inspect the old American sportswear, but
the new one is really that post-genre, the very modular, very versatile, very uniform dressing,
very oversized, very everything goes. I see, I see. It's different from Nike. It's not technical wear.
It's a performance wear. You don't wear something from Esprit or Banana Republic to go run. You may,
but it's your strength. Yeah, that's the imagined world that you are posing onto the everyday
use as opposed to actually running or actually playing basketball. I mean, I know that Nike
has a fashion division as well. Yeah, sure, sure, sure, sure. That's definitely an overlap, if you will.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So once you help them define this idea of American sportswear for Banana Republic,
Banana Republicの成功の鍵
and you mentioned it gets executed in different ways, whether it's at the brand level,
or the retail level, or the art direction, or even styling of these items in a way that
projects a certain image. And in the case of Banana Republic, in a few years that you were there,
if I understood the information correctly, there was a 27% increase in terms of their
business while you were there. And at the same time, those things could take time for the business
to respond to and see that kind of increase. But why do you think was so key in creating such a
dramatic increase? What do you think was the key to create that kind of growth?
That result was one quarter after the rebrand. And that's usually a revenue-lagging indicator
of brand. And that means that we did a series, the website was redesigned, a new product
proposition was put forward, new campaigns were widely distributed through media, so it was a big
media buy. So you have this orchestrated, concentrated push. That push led quickly to
great business results. However, that's not enough. You need to do that quarter after quarter after
quarter in order to get the machine going. So that's a really legitimate question. After that
first push, the first push was mostly marketing push, and that creative brand push. But of course,
you need to reassess your stores, you need to reassess your operations, logistics, business,
and you need to keep the product going and improve the fit, keep improving the quality,
and so on. That is what takes time. Yeah, yeah. Having been in the brand marketing world for quite
some time, both outside of the company, outside of these brands, as well as inside these companies,
パフォーマンスマーケティングからブランドマーケティングへのシフト
in the recent years, there's a lot of chatter around the shift away from performance marketing
and more towards brand marketing. The question, it's a multi-part question, but number one,
do you think that's the right move? And number two, if so, why do you think that's happening now?
It's not either or, it's both, number one, and that requires a more strategic approach towards
the full funnel, or if you want, customer experience journey, and really understanding
where performance marketing can amplify brand marketing, and where the combination of,
it has to be one media strategy. And I'm just really unsure how it, like, I understand
brand marketing is more expensive, it takes longer to unfold, it takes longer to see any
results, results are not as directly measurable. So all of that makes it very unattractive with
the CFOs, and in terms of quarterly results, because you don't see it in one quarter,
there is always a lag, if it's done well. And then, why is it happening now? Because
obviously, you have a lot of diminishing returns. Like the first banner, whatever it was in 2005,
2006, was 44% click-through rate. I mean, that's like, nice.
That's crazy, when you think about it.
Yeah, because people are like, what is this? And that kind of novelty, and you have like,
we paid social, and then we search, and so on. But it becomes more and more and more and more
expensive to get the same results. So it's really competing as a commodity or competing on price,
like where are you in terms of Google results? And you know how people like, look, if they don't go
towards a brand, if they don't say, hey, I want a Nike sweatshirt or something, they're going to be
like, I need a sweatshirt. And they're going to look at it and see where is the, even where is
the cheapest one. And even now with the Nike sweatshirt, they find the Nike sweatshirt,
they go to Google and see where is the cheapest one, where they're going to buy from. So in that
sense, brands realize that they can't compete like that. And that probably the customers that are
more valuable are those who are going to be deeper in the funnel, not those that are going to attract
through sales or promotions or something. These are low quality customers that are just going
to whatever is the cheapest. And then they figured out in the space where the loyalty is so low,
and the loyalty is low even in luxury fashion brands, you have people who are not that loyal.
So imagine if you go down to CPG or something that is more functional, more everyday. So in
that entire environment, I think that people realize they need, like the marketing people
realize they need to take a step back and to create a unified strategy. They're going to lose
some customers, but those who keep, they're going to be more valuable ones in terms of the repeat
visits or average order value, because you're going to give them a membership program, a loyalty
program, a specific rewards, and you're going to talk to them specifically. And in that sense,
I think that we do have a lot of opportunities with personalization now with AI that is coming
in that realm to bridge the gap between performance marketing and brand marketing.
I don't think there ever should have been that gap because as I said, performance marketing can
be very successfully used to promote an event, which is brand marketing. To give campaign
legs with using the same campaign, creative campaign, creative, for example, or marketing
creative. Or if you have out of home, you use performance marketing to drive traffic there or
measure traffic or to connect it. But for whatever reason, it was not part of one strategy. It was
very separate. Where do you think then it went wrong in terms of the separation between performance
marketing and brand marketing? It's interesting that you mentioned that it should have never been
separated, but why do you think it went, not necessarily wrong, but why did they go separate ways?
I think budget allocation and measurement. Because I'm sure you experienced in your own work,
it's like you always need to provide quarterly results and you need to provide immediate results
and you say, hey, traffic to the site was X, Y, Z. And brand marketing is just not going to give
you that. And when you have a limited budget, you're going to be like, hey, I'm going to spend
my budget on, I don't know, paid social and some search. I'm not going to spend money without
having ROI in any foreseeable future. So I think in that sense, brand marketing got pushed out
just by pure logistics. But I do think that it's now coming back because, again,
if you have diminishing returns and if it's more and more and more expensive, people are looking
マーケティングの新たなルール
what else can I do? Yeah. I want to pick up on the newsletter that you write, the Sociology of
Business, and really insightful articles that you write. One of the ones that stood out for me was
an article that was titled The New Rules of Marketing. And I think you published it a few
months ago. And in it, you had, I think, 12 different shifts. And I have the list here.
So shifting from top of the funnel to the entire funnel, shifting from advertising to entertainment,
shifting from awareness to awareness and retention and so forth. So you have 12 different shifts that
you indicated. But again, just for the sake of listeners, when you say the new rules of marketing,
at a macro level, what changed, say, between 2005, 2006, or even 2010, or even 2015,
which is not that long ago. But in between, we had a pandemic and there were a lot of political
and cultural things that have happened. But just to simplify that conversation,
what are the fundamental big shifts that are forcing these new rules of marketing?
Well, there are two, and I'll be curious to hear what you think as well, because there are two
parts of this question. The first one is, you know how marketing preferences are very cyclical,
you know? So there is brand marketing is in favor, and then it's performance market,
it's brand marketing. You know what I mean? It's like pendulum always shifts in different ways.
At one point, it's social media, the other is, I don't know, at home or TV or whatnot.
So the reason I wrote that analysis is like, yes, but that's not one of those cyclical things.
It's actually about the new operating system, which means we have a completely new environment
in terms of how retail sells stuff, how consumers are buying stuff, and how culture connects it to
what is the cultural influence that informs consumers' decisions. So that's why I sort of
looked at the wider cultural landscape that brand marketing is part of. So the title is
New Rules of Brand Marketing, not overall. I don't know enough about performance marketing
to be an expert there, but marketing is more comfortable talking about. So when I did those
shifts, I was like, you need a more holistic approach, number one. That was the whole idea.
The second, it needs to, you have to have business and product and marketing working together.
So that was almost a proposition for the new process, a new organization internally in order
to address the cultural environment that people really don't distinguish between advertising
and content and creative and TV and entertainment and art and design and so on. So you see a lot of
those shifts are about like, oh, you create merch or you collaborate or you create a hospitality
experience. So all of a sudden, that entire expression, you're not bound by your discipline.
You look for creative expression across different disciplines.
And what do you think as someone who is the top creative in this global advertising industry?
First of all, thanks for sharing your point of view in terms of this shift that we are seeing.
But what happens over time, and when I say over time, a long period of time, not just, you know,
5, 10, 15 years, but say 50 or even 500 years, the one constant thing that changes
is information technology and how people consume information and narrative from the outside world.
So in the past, say, 25 years that we've been in industry, in 2005-ish and before,
there was a fundamental shift from the traditional TV, radio, print world to this
internet world. And then around 2010, when mobile became a thing, the communication vehicle
changed from say desktop to mobile, and then social and so forth. And we are in the midst of
this AI revolution. I don't know yet how that's going to fundamentally or at least impact the way
we consume information. But I think when there is a fairly, sometimes gradual, sometimes sudden,
but there is a change in the use of technology and how people consume and collect information,
then I think the perception, the way people perceive the world and the way people perceive brands
changes. I think what's really tricky about the era that we are in right now is that increasingly,
more and more, what's real versus what's fake, I think it's going to be difficult to decipher.
I think what was great about the internet age in the past, say 20 years or so, is that
before the internet age, say the traditional media age, brands and companies were able to
create this imagined world and project that in a very singular narrative. And then the internet age
came and then that veil was removed to an extent. And then I think what you talk a lot about is how
brands need to be part of or need to be culture to create that imagined world. And that imagined
world needed to be as authentic as possible because otherwise, people will find out, oh,
this is fake and this is fake. I think what's going to be tricky moving forward in the next
five years or so is deciphering what's real and what's fake could be tricky.
And I think the first test that we'll see is the presidential election that we'll see
later this year. Yeah. And I think that could be one indicator of how people either consciously
or subconsciously consume information that then becomes the view of the world
around us, including brands. But anyway, to simplify what I was talking about,
it's the evolution of technology that influences the perception of the world and the brands.
Right. And then I have another question for you.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like it. Because, you know, like technology doesn't live,
doesn't exist in isolation of the economics, the society and the culture. And, you know,
like the values are designed in technology. For example, with Facebook privacy or lack thereof
is designed in technology. With Apple, the privacy, again, is designed because it literally
doesn't track certain things. So I do think that and when you see with AI algorithms, how
we design our biases into it, cultural biases, sociological, psychological and so on.
So, you know, you see, for me, it's more interesting that context that shapes
in both how technology is designed and how we use technology, because you see,
like with TikTok, for example, that changed how we consume content. But then we also send
技術と文化
that back and invent new technologies based on that new behavior. So for me,
it's very hard to isolate technology from culture, from society.
Yeah, definitely, definitely.
How do you see that? You know, like I'm just saying innovation doesn't help in a vacuum.
It's looking at the evolution and advancement of technology. Some technologies take off very
quickly and some technology take a while to really be part of the everyday culture.
And I've used this example and I'll use it as a point of discussion. And this sounds like a
random topic, but I'll use it. You know, elevators that you take every day, right?
You press a button and it goes to a certain floor and we do it mindlessly. But for that technology
to be part of our everyday life, it actually took more than 50 years. It was initially invented
way back in like 1890s, right? And it was introduced actually at a convention. Before that,
it was a person asking, hey, what floor would you like to go? And then you operate the elevator to
go to the 10th floor or the 20th floor, right? When that technology was introduced, people were
scared that, oh, wow, like this isn't operated by a person. So therefore it must be dangerous.
When it was introduced, the company and the collection of companies, they actually
introduced another kind of technology, which was a safety technology. So even when something
happens to the elevator, it would stop and people wouldn't die. There was a safety mechanism,
but it still took 50 years for society to adapt to a very simple and very convenient
and obviously better technology, right? Do I think it's going to take 50 years for AI to
be part of our everyday lives? No, I think it will happen much more quickly. At the same time,
I'm noticing that it's going to be a lot more subtle than we think. I mean, there's a lot of
talk about, oh, you know, chat, GPT, this and AI, that sort of thing. But I think the inclusion of
technology and specifically AI in everyday cultural context will be a lot more subtle
and a lot more gradual. And also, I think, at least I'm finding that there's some amazing
things that you can do with AI, but also at the same time, the limitation of AI when it comes to
knowledge work. So for instance, I teach a graduate course at Cornell here. And
last time that I taught a course was back in 2022. I took a year break and I came back this year to
teach. And in that one year break, AI or the chat GPT happened. So I said to my students,
I have 50 students, I said to my students, you know what, I'm not going to tell you to not use
AI because even if I told you, you will use AI. So use as much AI as you want and just be transparent
how you use it. And looking at them, some people are very transparent and some people are not
transparent. Literally, I was spending a couple hours yesterday grading the work
and it becomes a pattern. If I look at say three to five people's assignments, I can see a pattern
and they all sound the same. They all sound the same. So again, I think technology and AI,
they are good in raising the standard to a certain extent. But I also think going above that
standard to be different, to be a brand, to be successful, you have to be different from everybody
else. Yeah. And that I think takes human creativity and human intelligence to make that difference.
So the good news with technology is that the standard raises and the average becomes higher
than it was five years ago, 10 years ago. Yeah. But I think to answer your question,
AIの普及
I think it's absolutely true that technology and culture or innovation can happen in a vacuum.
It doesn't. I mean, that's what your elevator example is and I love it because it's actually,
you need to figure out the laws, you need to figure out the unions, are those people who are
like, you know, like operating the elevator is going to lose a job, you know, then you're going
to see how do you create a network, who's going to repair that if it doesn't have, what if something
happens, who's going to be there? And I mean, the big example is also like adoption of like
two side current or like Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla. And Edison was really good
in changing policy and changing laws in finding those intermission stations. He created the entire
network to allow that innovation to flourish. So that's the same thing with AI. You're not talking
about that network that may allow AI, because I believe AI is going to become more intelligent
and therefore more differentiated. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, they sound the same right now
because they all, the JPPT uses the same source of information. I think one of the things that
becomes a barrier is this psychological barrier that people have about a certain type of technology,
like, you know, electric vehicle is one example, you know, speaking of Tesla,
or autonomous driving is another psychological barrier that people have and it's taken.
Which is illogical if autonomous vehicle runs over someone, who goes to court?
Exactly, exactly. You know, that needs to be figured out.
Yeah, yeah. But the thing is, on that note, you know, one autonomous vehicle running over a person,
even if it's just one example, people freak out about it when, you know, hundreds of...
That's it, that's the JCPT, exactly. We all know about it because like, what happens then,
you know, like we don't think about all those hundred thousand other rides when it actually was
beneficial. Yeah, yeah. As it relates to, say, the impact of technology on marketing and branding.
And, you know, in your writing, you talk quite a bit about branding and marketing.
You don't talk too much about technology, but technology is sort of the undercurrent
of these changes that are happening. So can you talk a little bit about, like, your view on
technology and how it influences brand marketing? Yes, and I will first explain my
approach overall, and it's probably a good idea to go back to NFTs and blockchain and cryptocurrency,
because that's like, it's very foreign to me to seize on technology in itself without
actually writing sociologically or about business or about culture. So it's like, for me,
the approach is even when those, to look at the things that existed before, that maybe this
technology put to the fore, or maybe the problem that this technology is solving, like with NFTs,
that they're immutable, for example, and that they actually allow you a lot of micro
interactions to be recorded. What does that mean? What does it mean how we buy things?
If our specific percentage of ownership can be recorded, which has not been before,
before it was like handshake. So you see, like, you just look at the specific behaviors
that are enabled, or a specific, and then you go from there. And say, if you say,
have social shopping, then, oh, but then you can gamify it, because people love to compete with
each other. And they're like, I'll do each other. So all of a sudden, it becomes like a board game,
or a social game, when you say, hey, I'm going to be the first one to bring 10 more people to buy a
specific item. And the more people are being the price goes down, but they have only 24 hours
to recruit those people. So that is what interests me more. In a sense, how do you again, put that in
a context of human dynamic and behavioral economics? And, and, yeah, maybe, how do you say,
in sociology at the end of the day? Yeah, that was part one of my conversation with Anna Angelic,
a brand executive, a doctor of sociology, the author of the Business Aspiration and the popular
newsletter, the Sociology of Business. Anna is a rare breed in the industry in that she's able to
apply her academic background in sociology to the commercial world, particularly in fashion,
very seamlessly. As you heard, I asked her to help me understand how she does this in a practical
way in her commercial roles. And here are my three key takeaways from my conversation with Anna.
ユニークセリングポイントからポイントオブビューへ
Key takeaway number one, from unique selling proposition, USP to point of view, POV,
from USP to POV. Key takeaway number two, inside out versus outside in. Key takeaway number three,
performance marketing and brand marketing should never have been separated.
Key takeaway number one, from unique selling proposition to point of view. This is something
that I've been talking about for quite some time now, as it relates to the shift that we see in
the world of marketing and branding. In her case, she's somebody who's practicing this on a daily
basis in her commercial roles. One example that she highlighted was her experience at Bono Republic.
In the two short years that she was there, she was able to help the brand revive and achieve
a 27% year-on-year increase in sales. When she came on board at Bono Republic back in 2021,
she said that she spoke to various people at the company, all the way from executives to
the day-to-day people on the ground, and there were some observations that she made. From there,
she was able to identify and articulate the point of view that Bono Republic should have explicitly,
which was this notion of American sportswear. And it's not just talking about the brand,
she was able to connect that high-level philosophy of the brand into a specific
way of making things and specific point of view as it relates to the product themselves. She talked
about this idea of functionalist maximalism, where a piece of clothing would have, say, a pocket,
but not just one pocket, but many, many pockets, maximizing a certain functionality as part of
not just function, but also the aesthetic of the product. So it's that kind of point of view
rooted in American sportswear, but having a unique spin, in this case, with the products
and the way the brand, and Anna helped see the brand, see its point of view in the form of
functional maximalism and express that idea in a tangible way in the end product. Before, it was
sort of the other way around, where a brand would make a product, tries to distill that unique
selling proposition, and that's a technique that's been around for many, many decades since 1970s.
And that had been the golden standard of marketing, to find and articulate a specific unique selling
proposition of the given product or given brand and market and communicate the hell out of it.
But in the recent years, particularly in the past, say, five to 10 years or so, the shift or the
emphasis has been moving to what the brand stands for and the point of view that a particular brand
Banana Republicのアイデンティティー変更
might have that then gets reflected in the product. So from my conversation, the way she was able to
find a unique, honorable point of view for Banana Republic, and then able to work with the product
designers to connect the dots between that high-level brand thought and the specific product
execution that then led to the audience becoming fans and accepting Banana Republic as its new,
accepting Banana Republic with the new interpretation of the brand.
Key takeaway number two, inside out versus outside in. She talks quite a bit about culture and the
role of culture that plays in the formation and the building of a brand, but also the role that
a brand should play in the context of culture. Before, a brand could have a product that you
want to sell or a thing that they want to say, and again, would use marketing and advertising
as a way to spread that message. But now, in the age of TikTok and real-time communication and
transparency, just saying things for the sake of saying it and expecting the audience would
accept the message is no longer viable. Instead, brands should be always at least observing culture
and try to take in from outside in what's happening in the outside of the boardrooms
and meeting rooms of a brand and take the inspirations and specific cues from culture
and then be able to reflect quickly into the brand and the products. So this approach, thinking
パフォーマンスマーケティングとブランドマーケティングの関連性
outside in versus inside out, it's something that's been said in the past decade or so, but now
that's the reality of brand marketing in the 21st century. Key takeaway number three, performance
marketing and brand marketing should never have been separated. After realizing that performance
marketing in the short term might be able to achieve certain results, but in the long term, it's
possibly damaging to the brand itself. So a few brands have either shifted back or leaned more
into brand marketing versus performance marketing. With that, when I ask another question,
hey, is this what you're seeing? Is this the pattern, the new pattern that we are witnessing
as marketing and branding evolve in this age? She said that, and this is something that I didn't
expect her to say, which is performance marketing and brand marketing should have never been
separated. And in hindsight, that may be a very straightforward thing to think about, but it was
refreshing to hear from a brand marketer that these things should never have been separated.
As a brand marketer, performance marketing is something Ana pays close attention to. She might
not write about it as much, but it is something that is a vehicle and a tool for any brand marketer
to turn on when they need in order to achieve certain results that they need to achieve.
So the three key takeaways from my conversation with Ana Angelic today,
key takeaway number one, from unique selling proposition to point of view. Number two,
inside out versus outside in. And key takeaway number three, performance marketing and brand
marketing should never have been separated. If you are listening to this on Spotify,
there's a Q&A field, so please do send us your questions and comments. And if you like our
podcast, please leave us a five-star rating. We'd be so grateful. In the next episode,
we talk about her thoughts on the new rules of brand marketing. Stay tuned.
I'm Reiner Moro, and this is The Creative Mindset. See you next time.
