WolffOlins Blog

We are looking for strategy interns to join us in our London office for a 3 month period starting immediately.

We work with ambitious clients to challenge convention, helping them find new ways to grow and succeed. We offer our clients a creative approach to business growth, backed up by razor sharp thinking. It’s an approach that has made us the world’s most influential brand business for over 40 years. 

What does the experience offer you?
You’ll be straight in at the deep end – working as a strategist, probably on two or three projects. You’ll be expected to help shape and frame the thinking, interpret data into valuable insight, form opinions and make them known. Your analysis needs to be cut-through – nothing less than big impact will do. You will need to work closely and collaboratively with the whole team (strategists, designers and account managers). Please don’t expect any hand holding. 

Who are we looking for?
Crystal clear thinkers who are passionate about brand and inquisitive about the world.  Convinced that the world can be better, and enthusiastic about making it happen. Highly rigorous, collaborative and inventive. Don’t take themselves too seriously, but would lay themselves on the line for the team. Able to get their point across in a challenging and unstructured environment. Worldly and open minded – ideally with at least a couple of years of real world experience behind them. 

Is this you?
Please send us in no more than 100 words, why you are perfect  for this opportunity, along with your CV and your eligibility to work in the UK to peoplelondon@wolffolins.com 

BRANDS THAT WON’T DISAPPEAR

While some companies such as Interbrand, Millward Brown Optimor, and FutureBrand are focused on establishing a ranking of the strongest brands worldwide and estimating their value, 24/7 Wall Street takes quite the opposite approach. Every year, the publication compiles a report of brands that are likely to disappear in the near-term. Both approaches are interesting, and confirm that success of the business is often correlated to health of Brand.

Unfortunately, many brands disappear every decade. Sometimes the economic context plays against them, but most of the times the brand is not able to capture opportunities from the market, the customer, or innovation.

So how do you build a strong brand?

Everyday, keep in mind these three basic principles when you manage your brand. Big or small, strategic or tactical, national or international, no matter how important the decision is, don’t forget these three principles:

Put your brand at the middle of your business strategy. Brand is not a badge you stick on your offer. Brand is a tool that sits at the heart of your organization and helps you drive every decision you make about your offer, your capabilities, your culture or your image. In order to be a powerful tool, you need to have a strong idea behind your brand.

Deliver on customer expectations. It’s not what you say that matters; it’s what you do. Listen to your customers, surprise and delight them with experiences that make their lives better. Your brand is not what keeps people loyal - the product itself is what drives people to buy.

Be transparent. Communicate with your employees and use Brand to engage with them. Invite your customers to be part of the creation of your offer. Use Brand as a platform to empower people to co-create the experience. For example, use social media to create a conversation with your audience and build relationships with them. 

(Jean-Yves Minet)

We are a brand and innovation business.
 
At Wolff Olins we advise organizations to create a new future that delivers spectacular growth.  Branding has changed. Consumers no longer believe what brands say, but what they do. So growth means not just looking different, but creating new. New businesses, new experiences, new products, and new services. All together inspired by the brand.

We do branding: brand strategy, brand architecture, brand naming and identity, and brand management.

We do innovation: idea generation, pilots and prototypes, online and retail design, service design and packaging.

We’re 140 people ambitious for clients and optimistic for the world, and we need another smart brain.

ROLE: Content Manager

Support our marketing team to ramp up Wolff Olins’ social media presence. Be our SM producer, commentator, gatherer, joiner and observer. Optimize and execute our SM strategy and utilize each platform to its full potential. Open up dialogue with WO’s online community. Manage content and coordinate updates in real time from all our offices: New York, London and Dubai.  

 
RESPONSIBILITIES:
Day-to-day management of WO’s social media platforms. Collect, create, manage & maintain content for Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, LinkedIn, SlideShare and WO blog.
 
Define and establish the best approach, tools and tactics to manage our SM footprint. Assure that the content is accurate, appropriate, legally sound and of high quality.
 
Assess and improve community engagement. Discover, aggregate, escalate, participate, track and archive online conversations.
 
Develop and execute plans to increase page views, visitors, dwell time, p2p endorsements and platform’s stickiness to encourage repeat usage.
 
Improve the design, usability and sharability.
 
Develop capabilities, encourage participation, educate and train staff.
Establish WO’s social media policies and communicate policies internally.
 
Use monitoring and analytic tools to measure engagement. Report results and measure against set objectives. Assess data, adjust our strategy and test new ideas. Explore and keep WO abreast of latest trends and respond accordingly.
 
 
QUALIFICATIONS:
- Degree in relevant field

- Knowledge and passion for digital media

- Proven experience of digital content management (+/- 3 years) from related positions. i.e. social media manger, community manager, webmaster, digital content director, content editor, social media curator, online community manager, web content manager, online content manager, social media strategist (ideally within our broader industry)

- Experience in writing social media content

- Proofing and copyediting skills


REQUIREMENTS:
- Positive work ethic with a willingness to engage and a love for branding and innovation
- Passionate and enthusiastic attitude and good team player
- Respond effectively to unpredictable flows of content
- Excellent communications and interpersonal skills
- Good organizational skills with great attention to detail
- Dynamic, self-motivated individual with ability to self prioritize
 
 
KEY INTERFACES:
PR/marketing, new business, strategy, design and production.
 
COMPENSATION: Depending on experience

CONTRACT: Temp to Perm
 
START DATE: ASAP; early / mid July
 
RESPOND: peoplenewyork@wolffolins.com

An article in the latest Wired Magazine makes some good points on the challenge posed by the late-adopter. In the search for new markets and new consumers, the late-adopter market is a seductive one. Imagine a large cross section of society that refuses to buy the latest device or change to the newest technology. From the point of view of the marketer this demographic represents a massive challenge to growth. Yet the decision to leapfrog isn’t something that can be forecast and projected. It’s affected by lifestyle, by broken devices that can’t be fixed and by external forces like Santa Claus showing up with your first iPod (you’re welcome Dad.)

However I think there is one consistent element in the buyer’s decision of when to leapfrog, usability.

I think it’s fair to say that the more complex a technology is to use, the slower the adoption rate is for it. For example, as computers became less and less complex through the 90s, the adoption rate became exponential in the consumer market. Yet I was in a taxi recently with a cabbie who had just gotten the latest Android phone because his wife suggested it. He was baffled by it. Couldn’t figure out how to do the things that his old phone did and didn’t know why he would want “apps”. In this case, the usability of the device didn’t facilitate the leapfrog for the late adopter.

In contrast, Apple’s products (and advertising) center around usability. Devices that just do what you want them too. It makes for a powerful message. Harmon Kardon is another example of product and marketing that is centered around usability (only the buttons you need) and not overwhelming the consumer. It may sound like a lowest-common-denominator method of development but both of these examples are of products that still provide advanced features to the “super user” while simplifying the interface for the late-adopter.

What we, as innovators, should keep in mind is that this isn’t just about devices, usability affects the adoption of any new technology. Because as users we have to be able to figure out a service, product, or offer before we can want it. We have to know, or imaging we can know, where we’ll land when we make that leap.

You can read the article here.

[Jacob]

It’s not that often I talk about new websites for corporate holding companies, but I have to admit the new MDC Partners site is great, and for lots of reasons.

MDC have taken their idea - that they are where the best talent lives (which of course I’d have to dispute somewhat) and made a demonstration of it. By demonstrating rather than communicating, they’re showing that they ‘get’ digital and our increasingly mobile, socially connected world. They’re also showing quite viscerally that their business is about the people, and wrapped it all in a package that doesn’t take itself at all seriously.

No easy feat.

In simple terms this is a potentially brilliant move in an increasingly fragmented world where the holding companies often matter to clients.

It’s not perfect, and who knows it’s longevity, but bravo for putting something interesting and different into the world.

By way of comparison, take a look at some of the other Marketing Services holding company sites: Omnicom (which Wolff Olins is a part of) WPP, Interpublic and Publicis.

(Paul Worthington)

I was interviewed last week by Brand Week magazine who were writing an article about the sales success of Special K over the past year.

I’ve never really considered myself a CPG expert, we just don’t do that much work in this arena, but what really interested me about the subject is that this is a typical low-growth category.

The challenge for Special K, and anyone else in similar categories, is that innovations in new flavors and product types are usually destined to create marginal improvements in revenue at best, and dangerously fragmented low (or no) profitability extensions at worst.

Add to this the unsustainable levels of promotional spend that are required to create uplifts in market share and you’ve got some pretty dangerous economic factors at play:

- Micro segmentation of brand/product portfolios creating chaos on the shelf and increased marketing management and operational costs

- Unsustainable advertising costs and value destroying sales promotions designed to drive share (but usually at the expense of profits)

What this means is that it doesn’t really matter how good your advertising creative is, or how engaged in your campaign the consumer becomes, the net result tends to be a falling back to the status quo once the unsustainable level of marketing spend reduces to normal levels.

Which creates a massive growth conundrum faced by many, many brands. What do you do when incremental product extensions and marketing promotions are no longer enough to drive meaningful and sustainable growth?

Clearly there isn’t a silver bullet answer for this (if there was, I wouldn’t be here writing this) but one solution that more brands should consider is the leverage of their brand into new, higher growth categories that may require a new business model.

Mercedes Driving Academy is a great example of this that Wolff Olins worked with Mercedes to create. Here, the idea is to leverage existing infrastructure owned by Mercedes (test track and cars) and leverage it into a completely different growth model (a service to provide driving instruction for children)

One wonders what the Special K brand could leverage into?

If you take the view that Special K isn’t really a cereal or food brand, but is instead about healthy living, then this is a brand which could potentially leverage into dieting, fitness, wellness and more.

What the growth potential of these is I don’t know. But I suspect that if the US Military see obesity as a risk to national security because 27% of potential solidiers are too fat to fight, then there’s probably significant upside potential.

And if memory serves, I believe Curves was the fastest growing franchise in America for some time.

Just imagine if Special K had done that?

(Paul Worthington)

So, with the launch of the new iPhone 4 yesterday the big question shouldn’t be whether we’ll all get one. I’m sure we will.

While the hardware looks typically powerful, beautiful and lustworthy it seems that Apple has a major cloud problem.

Syncing with iTunes has become such an anachronistic idea that I’m surprised that it comes from Apple. If we weren’t already used to it and someone launched this today, there’s no doubt there’d be a lot of head scratching going on.

MobileMe, which is their attempt at cloud services is also pretty much terrible to use.

Ford, in contrast, just launched a pretty amazing cloud service to demonstrate what our lives will increasingly be like. It takes a Google maps address from your phone and connects it with your sat-nav via bluetooth, calculating the optimum route in the cloud. To quote their press release “Printing paper directions from a website is a relic in our digital age.”

Which, in a slightly roundabout way brings me to Microsoft.

Often written off in terms of the mobile market, there is no doubt that Microsoft let Apple, RIM and Android overtake them. As Steve Ballmer said, “we missed a whole cycle” which in technology terms is a huge statement.

However, as this article demonstrates, the new Windows Phone 7 is going to pack a major punch. Enterprise integration through Office and Exchange, the world’s largest gaming network through Xbox Live! and arguably superior entertainment software with Zune (including the definitely superior Zunepass).

The killer app, however, probably won’t be any of these directly. For the first time we’re going to see the whole Microsoft ecosystem in the hands of the consumer on their phone. And not only that, but MIcrosoft are betting on the cloud, and they are betting big.

Cloud services like the one described above from Ford (or the awesome Kin Studio) represent a level of utility we couldn’t have conceptualized even a couple of years ago, and will increasingly define what we look for in a phone.

Just like a computer, the hardware itself will quickly become something which you just don’t need to be any faster, bigger or better. Instead you’ll worry more about how useful it is and how easy it makes your life.

So while I’m sure that Apple will sell boatloads of their new phone, I’m much more interested in how the cloud will change the future.

And if Apple are going to win there, they’ll not just need a sexy new device that lets you make video calls, they’ll need to revolutionize their approach to the cloud.

(Paul Worthington)

There has been lots of chatter of what the agency of the future may be. Today within the overall marketing industry business models are influx, capabilities are disparate and the selection process is rocky at best.

Looking at the marketing landscape, there are many firms clamouring to help companies create preference.  Generally speaking there are three types of areas where companies can influence in order to help customers decide.  They are brand purpose, brand experiences and brand messaging.

It’s important to note that offers between agency lines are blurring with each area building off of the other.  In these times of shifting technologies and consumer preference, it would seem that clients need one lead agency across these three fields to create a consistent brand experience.

In a nutshell here is how each of these sectors break out…

Brand Purpose

Primarily functions as an internal tool to help employees understand why a business exists and what role each employee plays within an organization. In this instance brand is used to help a company define what its offer is to the world as a point of distinction.

This space has traditionally been where brand consultancies and design shops have lived to help define or clarify a business offer.  But today these firms are looking to work more downstream to help define and create branded experiences. Firms like Anomaly, WhatIF and Landor are all moving in this direction.

Brand Experiences

Are the things a brand creates to deliver on a brand promise. The better experiences brands create the greater chance they have of influencing preference.  Digital shops and production studios have traditionally lived in this space by translating brand values into physical or virtual destinations that consumers can interact with.

Out of this need production studios have emerged and are looking to become more strategic.  On the digital side companies like R/GA, The Barbarian Group and HUGE are looking to get smarter about the experiences they create. On the studio side companies like Fitch have developed expertise in packaging, and site build outs.  In common digital shops and production studios are looking to work more upstream to help craft the brand purpose by using customer insights to define what the experience should be.

Brand Messaging 

Are the actions that a brand wants it customers to take.  Messaging serves to guide actions and create a dialogue to build on the experiences and purpose of a brand.  Traditionally PR firms and advertising agencies have crafted the messaging to drive loyalty or build awareness.

This has often taken shape in a campaign that is defined by where a customer lives.  The preferred medium has traditionally been TV but has quickly moved online.  These agencies are looking to work upstream to help companies define consumer culture to help influence how brands should speak to the world.  This is where the Crispin Porter’s and Widen + Kennedy’s of the world have sought to define themselves.

In each instance all companies are looking to use brand as means to create preference.  Consulting firms are using brand to define a business purpose.  Digital shops are using brand to translate business objectives into branded experience and advertising agencies are using brand messaging to influence the actions they want customers to take.

The question is who provides the most value for a business?

From an organizational standpoint I would argue that the brand consultancy does.  From the outset they help to define the offer and how an organization should deliver on their brand promise.

The challenge that the latter two groups face is one of re-education. All agencies need to be briefed and indoctrinated into an organization’s culture if they are to successfully create experiences and messages that are on brand.  This creates breaks in the process that cost money and valuable time.

Consultancies have the advantage of setting parameters for business growth. But unfortunately consultancies are not yet full scale shops. They can not yet develop branded experiences.  More often than not, they lack the in-house facilities and expertise to build, prototype and deliver physical assets. While on the other hand, production studios lack strategic focus which often results in disparate consumer experiences.

Then there are the advertising agencies and PR firms.  Often the messages they create either over deliver on the brand promise or do not enhance the brand at all.  Target’s advertising does this.  Their agencies develop  beautiful imagery and tell great brand stories, but the reality of the in-store experience always falls short of the messaging. On the other side of the spectrum brands like Cadillac has amazing brand stories. Cadillac’s brand is positioned to blend art and science to create iconic vehicles, yet this story doesn’t come across in  their advertising, leaving customers to draw their own conclusions about what they think the brand is.

These missteps are often a direct result of the agency hand-off process, which can be cumbersome at best. As it stands today, no one agency is adequately equipped to lead as a full service partner, but a few key strategic agencies can help to coordinate the process like a brand consulting firm. 

The agency of the future many not be one lead agency but a handful of strategically led businesses that act and coordinate as one brand ambassador for a client.

(George)