ブランドの変革を支援するために必要な要素
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 Nyokan, Tokyo.
Today's guest, Anna Angelic, is someone who knows a thing or two about branding in this
new age of brand marketing. This is part two of my conversation with Anna, a brand executive,
a doctor of sociology and the author of The Business of Aspiration and the popular newsletter,
The Sociology of Business. If you haven't listened to part one, please do have a listen.
In part two, I asked her thoughts on what it takes for someone like her to help transform a brand,
as well as my takeaways from her writing on the new rules of brand marketing.
So let's get started.
Especially in the past 10 years, as you went into these fashion
houses to bring about a change and you've helped these brands grow and change,
when you join a conversation or when you see an organization, what are the tells of an organization
that are, okay, if I go into this organization, I'm able to make a meaningful change?
What are the tells and signs of a company that are going to be, okay, the change can happen?
Honestly, if I thought about that, I think that's unbelievably intelligent to think about that.
But at the same time, as a practitioner, theoretically, it's unbelievable. You have to
think. But as a practitioner, if I thought about it, I would never do anything.
You know? You have to have that dumbness at the end of the day. I need to go in dumbly believing
that this organization can change, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Because otherwise, I would just get caught up in ways to change it, and that would become my job.
And instead, I just assume, and it's so wrong. It has to be a working hypothesis, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
That is proved right or wrong or something else. You need to say, no, no, no, it's actually,
this is where we are going. And then obviously, that's a harder way, because there are some
things that are in every Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Brands Officer, that they can shape the
organization the way they think they're going to deliver the vision, the strategy, the promise,
the results, the business results they need to deliver. So that's almost the easy part,
again, theoretically. When you say, hey, I'm going to redo this, there is a brand strategy,
there is brand creative, there is cultural influence, and now the process is break down
the silos, the process is like this. This is how you work with merchandising, with design,
with retail, with channels, with e-commerce, so on, you know? So that part can be done.
And then the hard part is to actually inspire people, to motivate people who've been there
maybe 17 years, 15 years, 10 years, to do things differently. So in that sense, that is like you
have, again, to be naive there and assume that people want to change, which is not true for a
number of different reasons. But then you, at least you need to have a critical mass. And that
is when actually becomes clear who actually does want to embrace and change and grow, who believes
and who doesn't. That information is actually not actionable.
It's just manageable. You can't actually say, hey, you know, like you're not part of this
organization anymore. No, you need to manage that. Yeah, yeah. So I'm assuming that Banana Republic
組織変革を成功させるためには
was one of those successful cases where you were able to effectively introduce change. But to your
point, in any of the organizations, especially, you know, legacy organizations, there may be people
who have been there for a decade, two decades, or even more. So whether it's Banana Republic or any
other organizations that you've been part of, what did you do to change the minds of those people?
Especially, you know, if they are, they have been at the company for a long time, or they've had
some senior positions, I would assume that they might be a little bit uncomfortable with change.
I don't think you can change people's minds unless they decide that they want their minds
changed. So you just don't, it's just going against the wall if you do that. But what is good
is that there is a rationale for creating a new process, new way of working, there is a rationale.
So at least rationally, they understand that there is, you know, there is rhyme and reason of doing
certain things in a certain way. And it's never a good idea to say, hey, this is like a North Star,
and it's a gigantic, no, no, no, break it down. Like do something very quick, very measurable,
so people can change what you actually mean. So that's number one. And also, it's a good
idea going in to say, hey, what exactly do you want to change? So you force the people who are
in charge to kind of commit and say, hey, no, no, no, no, remember, it was in writing, you really
want to change this. So now we actually have to do that. Because otherwise, it's very,
very generic, very unspecified, very abstract. But then it really comes down to trust,
it comes down to that personal connection that you have with someone. And even if they don't believe
that they may do it because they like you, or because they trust that this person is here
brought in to do what they're supposed to be doing. At the end of the day, we may get a bonus,
it may be better, you know. So it is really like that. What's your experience?
変化に対するマインドの変化
My experience with change?
Yeah, because you're changing and companies bring you in.
Yeah.
For that particular reason. They do the same.
Yeah, I do this in two different ways. One is what I've been doing in the past
seven, eight years or so that I've been running my company, that we are hired by
CEOs, COOs, the C-suites, and or business leaders. And sometimes there's a specific ask,
hey, you know, can you make this? Or can you come up with an idea for that? And sometimes
it's a much broader ask, hey, you know what, I think as a CEO, we may need to do things differently.
Can you be our advisor and see what we can do? And to your point, it takes a long time.
And especially like a lot of my clientele, I am based in New York, but probably half of my
clientele is Japan-based. They're global organizations, right? But they're Japan-based.
And the C-suites are based in Japan, or the executives are based in Japan, or Japanese
people. And Japan and Japanese culture are notoriously traditional and slow to change.
I guess the good news with that is the relationships that we've been able to build as a firm,
we've kept them for, you know, five, six, seven, say, eight years. And you know,
I've been running my company for the past eight years or so, but it does take time. It takes a
lot of patience. It takes time to build trust. But I would say in my personal case, and I think
the niche that we've been able to create for ourselves is to bridge the gap between
組織変革の挑戦と信頼関係
high-level abstract business goals and challenges that they have with tangible,
you say practice, like the theory and the practice aspect of it. So turning high-level
abstract theories into tangible practice. And we do this by way of design and creative outputs
and strategic outputs that are visual and visible, and something that are tangible.
And that's sort of the gap that we feel, the bridge that we've become to connect
the management and the day-to-day. And that bridge is in the form of a presentation or a campaign or
what's, how does it look, that bridge, that middleware?
That's a really good question. And the answer would be all of it. So it's not one thing.
And I would say campaign is the least thing that we do. It's not that we don't do campaigns,
but it's usually like the last thing that we do, if we do it. Yeah. It starts with a conversation
and then it becomes, even before presentation, thought starters. Hey, what about this? What
about that? And just bouncing ideas off of us and the leaders. And then over time,
usually it takes a couple of months to go from abstract conversations to,
hey, and then that's when we bring, hey, what if we did this initiative? And that quote unquote
initiative could be in the form of, let's say, a new membership program or a new service design
or in the form of retail. And like I said, it's rarely a campaign, campaign activities. Oh, wow.
I'm getting far. What's going on? You know what? I guess my hand gestures.
Yes. Yes. Yeah. So going from very abstract conversations and our job is to turn those
abstract conversations into, okay, what can we do in the next six, 12, 18 months?
Right. And all right. So that's a thousand percent. So my question then for you, and we can then move
on, is what do you leave? That's not the challenge. The challenge is continuous adoption, because there
is such thing as organizational muscle memory. So you come in, you design a new membership program,
new service design, and so new retail experience, but then you leave. How do you ensure that
organization keeps implementing that? That is the biggest challenge, even when you're inside.
Yeah, I would say what's been most successful for us is to, and it takes a long time,
but to establish a relationship with the C-suites, particularly the CEO.
So say like Uniqlo, we've been working with them for eight years, and it probably took us and took
me the first three years to win the trust of Mr. Yanai. And we just renewed our contract
with them a couple of months ago. And yeah, I speak to him on a monthly basis.
And so for instance, when I was in the big agency world under AKQA or WPP or those places,
we would rarely have access to the CEOs. And now our MO is to establish a relationship with the
CEOs and having those conversations over time, but frequently enough that we bring ideas to them.
What do you think? Yeah. And once that we have, at least not necessarily the binds, but we say
the trust from the CEOs, then the team under him or her trust us to help them.
Yes. But you see that's more maybe like, this is a relevant conversation because it's about
organizational change. And here in organizations that are more hierarchical, of course, the buying
from a CEO or even just from me as chief brand officer should be enough, but it's not. Because
people then you really need to win trust, not just from your boss or my boss, CEO, but also
プレゼンテーションの作成
people under. Yeah. One very specific thing that wasn't just about the CEO, but I think something
that we did was very critical in instilling a mindset into the rest of the organization.
And if I were to make it very tactical, it was a presentation that we helped craft for the
investors meeting. So the CEO and the corporate strategy team came to us and asked us to help
craft the presentation. So we worked with them for three months or so to craft this presentation.
And the presentation wasn't delivered by the CEO, but was delivered by like a mid-level
manager director. And it was to the investors, but also it was shared internally at this company.
They didn't even know that it was us, but the message and the content and the strategy in it,
which was delivered in a form of a presentation, very different from the previous presentation
that they've done. The previous presentations, particularly to investors were charts, tables,
numbers, and bullet points. And what we did was take that and make it into narratives and tangible
examples, visual examples. And then that was shared with the investors and the rest of the
organization. And this was probably back in 2020, yeah, 2020 was the fall of 2020. It was with the
ASICs. And we worked with ASICs for six, seven years now. But that particular thing,
and it wasn't a campaign, it wasn't a membership program, it was a presentation. So the moment that
組織への影響を確認
I knew that what we did three, four years ago did resonate in the organization was that I was
talking to another client and that client happened to have had a meeting with somebody from ASICs.
And while we included in the presentation, this other client said that, oh, so-and-so from ASICs
actually talked about it. So I was like, okay, that means like what we did is really part of
the fabric of that organization. Right, right, right. No, that's exactly it. I mean,
those are small wins that accumulate. It's like 1% rule. You change everything just a little bit
and you have that cumulative gain at the end. Yeah, yeah. So I guess to summarize what you're
asking me, the way we've been most effective working with brands is a lot of the things
are behind the scenes. A lot of the things that we do are under the surface and they wouldn't see
the public's eye. Some of the things that they do, but a lot of things, but those are the things,
it's both the public-facing, customer-facing things that we do, but also it's behind the scenes,
bridging the gap between the management and the day-to-day. And these types of sort of,
like a creative agency would never take on an assignment to do a presentation for investors.
Right, no. Yeah, yeah. It's not sexy enough, right? Yeah. But what I do, what we do
is to bring meaningful change to these organizations. And those are the unsexy things
that do make the difference. It is. And it goes back to what we talked about before,
how the field of creative expression is broadened. So that was your creative expression.
Yeah. Because at the end of the day, and that is, again, how I look at technology,
it's about problem solving, but not just problems. Oh, I need to do this more efficient. That's the
least of those that interest me. It's how to have more fun, how to have more entertainment, how to
be more, that's what I write about the business of aspiration. How do you feel belong in part
of community, signal your status? So that's for me that like how brands that imagine worlds of
組織変革のスピード
brands are really, how do we help someone signal their status, show their taste, show their knowledge,
show their belonging. That is the overarching theme when I do that. Right, right. Another
question that I want to ask you more about your career and your profession and what you do,
what has been the biggest challenge for you working with these organizations?
There are different challenges and I think speed of change. Organizations want transformation,
but nobody wants to change. So they say they want to change, but they actually don't.
You know what I mean? Yeah, I do.
And then, oh, we want disruption to disrupt. Yeah. You know what I mean? It's kind of like
that is more even with those who are kind of adopting that they're not willing to kind of
be in a war mode for a year or so. You know what I mean? Yeah. So I think that is actually
what organizations say and what they actually feel are two different things. And I'm sure you
encounter that as well. Yeah, yeah. That's why now I'm like, OK, guys, I don't care what you say.
I don't believe you. It's going to take five years and it's not going to take a year. And
we're just not going to do that because I know you say you want to do that, but you actually
don't want to do that. And I've also done before and I'm not falling for it. So that is that is
ブランドオフィサーの役割
challenging. And then what is challenging to me personally is tediousness of when you know,
it's it's kind of lack of stimulation that is that is inherent part of those roles,
which everyone thinks going brand side, you're just like doing all of this. God, no, it's hands on.
It's a grind. They often feel like you need to be very hands on in a sense that you need to be part
of all those meetings, all those processes. If you're a brand officer, you're responsible for
the entire creative output. And it's like every week review all social posts, all websites,
all emails. I mean, it becomes you know what I mean? It is it is a grind. It's not fun and games
and you are photoshoots like even that is becomes a grind because you're like, oh, is this consistently
as executed? So I become like that the person for sure is consistent execution of the vision.
So once the fun part, once the vision is set, the strategy is that day to day hands on. Maybe I
should become a different kind of maybe I should become less hands on. Maybe I'm doing this wrong.
But you know what I mean? You sell things and every day you have sales reports, you know, like
it's kind of responsibility. It's really big that you can't you kind of like become tactical by
default. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So what's next for you? What's next for Angelic? I mean, you've moved on
次のステップ
from Esprit. I have moved on. I absolutely have moved on. Yeah. And you know, that's that's kind
of like at this stage of my career. Again, I'm very considered about my next step because I kind
of feel like I've done my due. Yeah. In a sense, I've done a couple of times and I know the drill.
So now it's more like I'm probably looking for a more stable environment, less less entrepreneurial.
No, that's that's a that's a joke. But I'm looking for a longer time horizon. I'm looking
for a longer time horizon when CEOs or when the change is more expanded and probably not brand
turnaround, but maybe brand growth. I see, I see, I see. Like brand is already doing well,
so how do we take it to the next step? That would be a new challenge for me. I see, I see. Because
you said I'm like what I said about Banana Republic is like regression towards the means,
which means banana was doing so bad that it was not doing so well afterwards. It was just
doing so that's what it sounded like. It didn't sound the results where there should have been
like a long time ago. You know, so it's like, but what if I actually have someone who's doing great,
but they have a challenge? Hey, we want to we want to create a brand world or we want to become
a lifestyle brand. I want to have a more buffering between menswear, womenswear,
accessories, so on. It can be like more stable challenge. I see, I see, I see. It's going to
take more time. That that is what I'm actually more keen to do next. I see. Interesting. So
do I read this correctly if I said you don't know your next place yet? Well, I'm not telling you,
but... I was subtly trying to pull that out of you. You were, but I was not falling for it.
Stay tuned. Okay. Yeah, maybe, you know, next time we'll have a conversation that could be
サブリ
you can tell more about it. Yeah. Lightning questions.
During the interview, we dig deep into different topics surrounding creativity.
On the contrary, with this section, we ask the same questions to the guests to react on the spot,
and we don't let them see the questions in advance. Question number one, if you weren't
doing this brand building, brand marketing, and even, you know, writing about business,
what else could you see yourself doing? I was really into film direction,
like when I was younger. So I really maybe I would have had like more courage to pursue that.
Cool. Question number two, if you could live anywhere in the world, where would you live?
Still New York. Still New York? Because, you know, like you have to remember, I'm not from the US.
I'm from Belgrade, Sydney. So for me, it was like I wanted to live in New York. And that was my
question. If you were everywhere to live, I was like, I made my pick. I see. The next place you
would travel to for fun, where would you like to travel to? I'm longing to go back to Japan.
We haven't been there since 2020. Yeah. Miss so much Japan. Question number four, what's your
favorite food, dish, cuisine? I think Serbian food, but because just, you know, like you grew up on
that. Yeah. But like I didn't even grow up, but like traditional Serbian food. Yeah. What's a
typical Serbian dish? You have all the sausages, all the roasts, all the sort of little like
cevapi sauce. It's very heavy, but it's also very aromatic, very spicy. Oh, I want to eat some now.
Question number five, what's your favorite song? Oh, I don't know if I have a favorite song.
And honestly, it also probably goes back to like Serbian songs. So I think I probably have some
from high school or something. So if I hear that it was complete. But honestly, I can't tell you one.
But let's just say Serbian music, but not nationally, just more like Serbian bands from the 90s.
Okay. Question number six, what was your turning point in your life and or career? I think maybe
the biggest turning point was professionally, you know, you kind of feel at some point that you're
on the other side somehow, because before you have no idea what you're doing. You just keep doing
like mania. You're just like, and then there is a moment when you also all of a sudden, you know
what you're doing. Right, right, right. What was that moment that you felt like, okay, I'm on the
ショーンとアナの設定をおさらい
other side? I think it was maybe during Banana Republic, maybe after Banana Republic. It's like
fairly recently. It's not one moment. It's just all of a sudden. Right, right, right. You become
somewhat like chill and calm down. And it's like, I got this. Question number seven,
what is your superpower? Oh, I can like, and that's what I realized over time. I didn't know
this until maybe a couple of years ago. I can read the zeitgeist. Like I know exactly how a brand
should be. Why is the right proposition for esprit rules don't apply or Banana Republic imagined world
or like I can read culture. I have a feeling like the things what I write about. I know that's in
the air. So I say I don't have many talents, but I can read culture. Last question for you, Anangelic.
What is creativity? Creativity is seeing hidden connections. Seeing hidden connections.
Kind of connecting to things that no one thought to connect before. That was part two of my
conversation with Anangelic, a brand executive, a doctor of sociology, the author of the book,
The Business of Aspiration, and the popular newsletter, The Sociology of Business. Towards
the end of the conversation, we did our usual rapid fire questions and I asked her what her
superpower was. To which she answered, seeing the patterns in the zeitgeist. This is what academics
and professors tend to do. But what makes Anna unique is her ability to see these patterns
and make them relatable and tangible in the commercial world, particularly in fashion.
In one of her most popular posts of her newsletter, she writes about the new rules of
brand marketing. In it, she outlines 12 shifts in the patterns of brand marketing. I'd like to
highlight three that I think relate to my chat with her in this and last episodes. These three
are the most relevant rules today. Rule number one, from product to styling. Number two, celebrity
person to celebrity product. And number three, brand strategy to cultural strategy. Rule number
one, from product to styling. When it comes to marketing, whether it's performance marketing
or brand marketing, the job of a marketer is to tell the product feature or the benefits to the
audience so that they would buy into the specific benefit or the feature. Instead, Anna argues
that it's less important to focus on the product or the product benefits, but it's more important
to let the audience mix and match those products in their own ways and in their own imagination.
In the age of TikTok and Instagram, where anybody can be a stylist, you never know what combination
of different products, whether it's multiple products from one brand, rarely the case, but more
likely multiple products from multiple brands or using a product in a way that the brand may not
have anticipated, that's really going to be what captures the imagination of the general public as
opposed to brands trying to manufacture that imagination. Since it's difficult for brands to know
which styling is going to win, what they can do is seeding those products into certain communities
so that those community members can mix and match those products in authentic and unexpected ways
that brands couldn't do. In her writing, she says, quote, more important than a skirt or a pair of boots
is how they come together thanks to TikTok and Instagram, where people buy from other people,
get inspired by them, and emulate their style. Rule number two, celebrity person to celebrity product.
セレブリティが製品に
Celebrities have long been a huge driver in creating awareness and building brands. As we saw
in, say, this year's Super Bowl commercials, there were a ton of celebrities endorsing not just one
brand but multiple brands. Of course, that will continue to be one of the ways brands can rely
in order to increase their business, but the problem with that kind of approach is that it
gets expensive very quickly. Having to pay millions of dollars to a celebrity in just one
spot or one season, it's just not a sustainable strategy, especially when a lot of the organizations
are trying to be more and more frugal. Instead, if you can create a celebrity out of the product
lineup that you have, not only is it going to be cost-effective but also it will be a revenue driver
in a direct and tangible way. One such example is a case from Uniqlo a couple years ago. There was
a bag, a shoulder bag, that they introduced for a season, and after the product was introduced,
just a regular teenage girl in Europe took that product, did a quick product demonstration on TikTok
that went viral, and then 18 to 24 months later, Uniqlo keeps introducing different versions of
the same product. Initially, they didn't expect this product to be such a hit product. It's one
of the many, many utility items, not even the main utility item they would have in the lineup. A bag
is not their specialty. They are a fashion apparel brand, so they make shirts, they make pants, they
make socks, and other things, but a bag wasn't in their main lineup. They just happened to create
this bag because the product designers at Uniqlo thought something like this would be convenient
and useful for their audience. Turns out that it was more convenient and more useful than the product
designers thought, and a regular person in her authentic voice happens to do a product demo,
and the rest is history. So sometimes it's difficult to create this kind of phenomenon
intentionally, but the point is you need to be listening to what's happening in culture, in the
market, and being able to respond with the product as much as possible. In Uniqlo's case, when they
were creating, it's not that they responded to a specific product need, but it's after the fact
that they responded with different versions of the same product month after season after season,
and four, five, six seasons later, they're still introducing new versions of the same product,
creating a massive revenue opportunity beyond the imagination. So this notion of the shift from
ブランド戦略から文化戦略へ
celebrity person to celebrity product, it's not easy to do intentionally, but if you can do it,
it can be a cost-effective and revenue-generating driver. Rule number three, from brand strategy to
culture strategy. What was good about the old way of creating a brand strategy was that we didn't
have to be so reactive to culture. We could have a certain point of view, certain product lineup,
and certain goals, and create a strategy around it and for it so that we can drive the conversation.
But that power dynamic has completely shifted in the past two decades, and it's really culture
and people who drive the conversation. So instead of brands trying to drive the strategy, brands need
to be aware of what's happening in culture as much as possible, real-time, so that they can respond
to culture as quickly as possible. Repeating the cycle, then brands can become part of culture,
and instead of reacting to noise or trying to stand out in the noise, they can then become
the one to create that noise. So the old way of doing brand strategy is to find a certain
positioning for a given product or brand and create a strategy around it. Instead, what I think
Ana is arguing or making a case for is for a brand to be aware of the culture around it and find a
strategic way to be part of that culture. So rule number three, the shift from brand strategy to
culture strategy. So to summarize, three of the 12 shifts or the rules of new brand marketing
as described by Ana. One, the shift from product to styling. Two, the shift from celebrity person
to celebrity product. And three, brand strategy to cultural strategy. There are nine remaining other
shifts that she argues for, so I encourage you to check out her newsletter, Sociology of Business.
That was part two of my conversation with Ana Angelic, a brand executive, a doctor of sociology,
and the author of the Business of Aspiration and the popular newsletter, the Sociology of Business.
If you're 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 in whatever app you're
listening to. We'd be so grateful. I'm Reina Moro, and this is The Query Mindset. See you next time.
