Tag Archives: Brian Solis

Blessed Are the Change Agents

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Years ago, an agency asked me to define its target buyer as part of a brand repositioning. My client wanted to do business with companies eager to innovate. I recommended that my client stop thinking of its buyer in terms of a formal title such as CMO and instead seek out a persona I referred to as the change agent — which I described as a leader who is in a position to effect behavioral change needed for a business to grow and innovate. Find the change agents, I reasoned, and you find the wellsprings of innovation inside a company.

So I read with interest a new report from Brian Solis, The Digital Change Agent’s Manifesto. It turns out that over the past few years, Brian has been interviewing about 30 change agents (with a focus on digital change agents) to better understand them – and to provide a road map for change agents to flourish.

A Revelation

Brian’s report is a revelation. Here is a report that helps businesses identify change agents inside their own organization and set them up for success. His report is also a rallying cry for people who believe they are change agents or on the path to becoming one. Brian maps out the attributes of a change agents, calls out stumbling blocks to success, and identifies 10 mandates for change agents to prosper. Although he focuses on digital change agents — because of the distinct challenges and opportunities digital presents — the report is a manifesto for change agents of any type.

Why You Should Read Brian’s Report

Business leaders should read Brian’s report for one simple reason: at a time when digital disruption has become the norm, companies that can find and support change agents more quickly than their competitors will possess a distinct advantage. Companies that fail to nurture and support change agents will lose these visionaries to someone else who can. And change agents don’t exactly walk around wearing “Ask Me about Change” buttons.  In fact, they might be flying beneath the radar screen, by choice. Brian’s report will help a C-level executive find and uplift them.

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Fyre Festival Debacle Shows the Difference between Marketing and Branding

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The Fyre Festival has become the train wreck you can’t ignore. The event organizers, rapper Ja Rule and entrepreneur Billy McFarland, promised attendees “two unforgettable weekends of mystery and music” with acts such as Blink-182 and Major Lazer appearing on a private island in the Exumas April 28-30 and then May 5-7. But by early morning April 28, the event was trending on Twitter as “the luxury party that turned into the Hunger Games,” with attendees reporting massive disorganization, inadequate housing, food shortages, and unbelievable chaos. The Fyre Festival is now scrambling to evacuate stranded attendees after canceling the event.

Here we have a painful reminder of the difference between marketing and branding. When synchronized well, marketing creates a promise, and the brand delivers on that promise through an experience. The Fyre Festival certainly created quite a promise. The festival marketed itself as an exclusive event “for those with uncompromising taste and a burning desire for adventure” with tickets reportedly costing as much as $12,000 and some VIP packages costing as much as $250,000. Attendees were promised luxury cabanas, sumptuous meals, private island parties, cool music, and generally the most decadent experience money could buy. “Set against the surreal island backdrop of the Exumas where ordinary rules don’t apply, Fyre ignites the best in music, cuisine, innovation and hospitality,” according to the event’s Facebook page. To build awareness, the festival relied on high-profile influencers, including Victoria’s Secret models, to post teaser content on their Instagram accounts. And teaser videos such as this one certainly looked appealing enough to those with enough cash:

But it quickly became apparent that the experience was not living up to the advertising, as the first attendees to arrive complained of spartan living conditions in disaster relief tents. Many took to social media to report what was going on:

As reported in Variety, “According to reports from would-be concertgoers, the site is more like a hurricane disaster staging area, with incomplete tents and boxed lunches instead of luxury accommodations and celebrity chef-prepared meals.” Meanwhile, Blink-182 canceled its appearance. Within hours, the organizers abandoned any hope of putting on the event and turned their focus to evacuating stranded travelers.

Now, if you’ve been to enough music festivals, you expect to pay for a bit of discomfort. Enduring crowds and inclement weather is just part of the deal when a festival promises you access to cool music. In fact, enduring some discomfort is sort of a badge of honor — the price you pay to say you were there when Kendrick Lamar tore up the stage. But the Fyre Festival promised an elite experience. And as Brian Solis has argued passionately, your brand is all about the experience.

Your brand is also all about delivering the experience you promise. A promise creates an expectation. You can proclaim your marketing a massive success when your promise of private cabanas on a luxury retreat results in concert goers willing to fork over thousands of dollars to spend their weekends with you. But when the experience fails to deliver on a promise, you fail to meet expectations, and your brand dies a quick death.

The rapidly unfolding disaster is also an embarrassment for Ja Rule. How much damage to his personal brand results remains to be seen, but his Fyre Media company, founded in 2015, now faces a crisis of epic proportions. United Airlines may have dragged a passenger kicking and screaming off an airplane. But when you create huge buzz by relying on supermodels and influencers to hype an event and then anger an island crawling with affluent millennials with access to social media, you’ve created a whole new level of pain.

Will Fyre Media now show us how to recover from a brand disaster? Stay tuned.

Empathy at Trader Joe’s

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In X: The Experience When Business Meets Design, Brian Solis asserts that experience is the new brand, and he devotes an entire book discussing how companies can create “memorable moments for your customers through every encounter they have with your brand — all day, every day.” He says that customers want empathy, not impersonal treatment, and companies that know how to be empathic enjoy a huge competitive advantage over those that don’t.

Empathy comes from humans, not technology. And empathy happens in everyday moments. Let me give you an example.

As tax day approached April 14, I glumly mailed two checks to the U.S. Treasury and the Illinois Department of Revenue and then decided to overcome the depressing with the mundane: I ran an errand at a Trader Joe’s near my home in Downers Grove, Illinois. Rendering unto Caesar is important; but so is restocking skim milk and coffee.

I filled my cart with the usual assortment of TJ’s bagels, juice, fruit, and other goodies, jumped into a check-out lane, and inserted my debit card for payment. A cashier named Stephan greeted me with a warm smile, like just another dude trying to spread good cheer.

“How you doing?” he asked.

“Ah, well, you know . . . ” I replied with an unhelpful shrug.

While Stephan took care of business behind the counter, my ears detected a sweet funky vibe overhead courtesy of the in-store music play. I thought I recognized the tune from the 1970s playing, but I could not place it. I looked up at the ceiling where the music was coming from. So did Stephan.

“I know that song,” I said. “Kind of like Stevie Wonder’s ‘Superstition . . .'”

“But not quite,” he completed the sentence. “I know what you mean.”

I know what you mean: suddenly I looked at Stephan in a new light, as a member of the universal brotherhood of music.

“The song might be Billy Preston,” I said. “I think the music source is too far away for Shazam to recognize it. But isn’t it a great tune?”

He smiled in agreement, pulled out his own phone, and found the Shazam music discovery app on it.

“Hang on,” he said. “I know I’ve heard this song, too. I think I’m tall enough to get Shazam to pick up the song from the ceiling.”

The app didn’t load right away on his phone. A customer was behind me in line.

“I don’t want to hold you up,” I said.

He nodded his head and smiled. “We got this.”

We got this. Now we were a team on a quest to uncover a funky musical mystery.

He got Shazam to work, held up his phone to the ceiling, waited a moment, and smiled victoriously.

“You’re right! “Outa-Space’ by Billy Preston!”

We smiled and high fived like two guys at a concert, not at a Trader Joe’s checkout line. I even jumped up and down. Man, I had not heard that song for some time.

Little moments of empathy. Like Stephan empathizing with my love of music, and, I think, sensing that perhaps I was not having the best of days. A human connection made.

If you shop at Trader Joe’s, you’re probably not surprised to hear my story. Its stores are more than attractive products with reasonable prices. They’re all about the human experience. The people who work at the Trader Joe’s near me (its address is 122 Ogden Avenue, Downers Grove) always seem like nice folks.

In X, Brian Solis writes, “All business is personal.” It sure is. Trader Joe’s is a $9.4 billion business consisting of hundreds of stores. All it takes is a personal dose of empathy from a cool guy named Stephan to humanize the brand.

Rihanna and Samsung Create an “Anti” Moment

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Rihanna’s Anti went platinum in 15 hours. But before you think, “albums are back!” bear in mind a big caveat: Samsung bought one million copies of the album and gave them away. For Rihanna and Samsung, Anti going platinum is not about record sales — it’s about creating a moment that earns attention for two giant brands at a time when attention is currency, as Brian Solis has noted. There are many more moments to come, as prepares to launch her Anti World Tour, where the real money will be made.

What $25 Million Will Buy a Brand

A platinum album is certified by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) as selling at least one million copies — a difficult feat to achieve in the digital age. Only three albums released in 2015 went platinum: Adele’s 25; Drake’s If You’re Reading This, It’s Too Late; and Justin Bieber’s Purpose. Adele, Drake, and Justin Bieber all earned their sales the traditional way: by releasing and promoting music for consumers to buy, stream, and download (with the exception of 25).

But Rihanna rolls differently. In 2015, she signed a $25 million deal with Samsung, through which Samsung sponsors her album and tour, and Rihanna promotes Samsung’s Galaxy line of products. As part of their relationship, Rihanna and Samsung have been creating digital content together including video, website, and social media posts. Oh, and Samsung agreed to buy 1 million copies of Anti.

Samsung, in turn, gave away 1 million free download codes to its customers. Each of those downloads came with a 60-day free trial to Tidal, the high-end streaming service that counts Rihanna as one of its owners. The entire album was available on Tidal before any other streaming service could have access to it.

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Billy Corgan, Brian Solis, and the personal touch at SXSW

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My experience at SXSW Interactive this week was marked by catching up with friends, a massive amount of networking, very little sleep, and some inspirational content, most notably the Billy Corgan/Brian Solis session about Corgan’s uneasy relationship with a music-buying public that (in Corgan’s view) uses social media to attack artists rather than support them. I provided real-time coverage of the session from my Twitter account, @davidjdeal; you can see how the discussion unfolded by following hashtag #EndofUsual on Twitter. Amid Corgan’s f-bombs and rants, a compelling theme emerged: artists need their audiences, but in order to prosper and grow, they cannot allow themselves to be led around the nose by the same people who call themselves their fans. As Corgan said to a recalcitrant SXSW audience member, “I can’t survive by accommodating your Twitter feed with my music.” The Corgan/Solis session brings to mind a post I wrote in 2010, “Would ‘Exile on Main St.’ have survived Twitter?” in which I questioned whether the seminal but initially misunderstood Rolling Stones album would have held up amid the withering glare of Twitter had social media been around in 1972.

I was also struck by the convergence of branding, entertainment, and technology that increasingly defines not only SXSW but also the future of marketing. The most obvious example of this convergence from SXSW Interactive was the March 11 Jay-Z concert held to promote the launch of a new American Express service offered through Twitter. I discuss this phenomenon more fully in an iCrossing Great Finds blog post, “SXSW and the Rise of the Co-Branding Economy.”

The personal connections were, as usual, incredibly fulfilling, whether comparing notes about music and writing with my iCrossing colleague Todd Pruzan, laughing at life’s absurdities with Kristen Deye (a rock star who managed iCrossing’s presence at the event), reuniting with some of my former Razorfish colleagues and friends like Margaret Francis and Heather Gately, meeting Brian Solis and Scott Monty, hanging out with Jeremiah Owyang, seeing David Armano, meeting with Allen Weiner, or finding some time to relax over drinks with Cortney Harding and her husband Jeff Stokvis.

People always trump interactive technology in my book.