editor, Author at Mediastreet

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How Curiosity Will Strengthen Your Brand Leadership

April 21, 2023 No Comments

I’m curious, what’s better, an ok solution that is developed quickly, or a great solution that takes longer?

I was in a pitch meeting recently where a potential client told me that another group came into the room with compelling brand ideas. They wanted to know if I had any ideas to share. Instead, I asked questions.

I was curious about how they got to those ideas. Did they already study the brand and unearth consumer insights? Did they do strategy work on spec? Were they making educated guesses based on industry trends and competitive observations without yet speaking with the client team or the brand’s consumers? Were they charging for strategy after they pitched the answer, or to confirm what they already came up with?

I said, “Well, I don’t have the answers yet, and I won’t be making any guesses to try and win the project.” I promised them that if we work together, they will not hear any strategy recommendations until after I ask a lot of questions and the discovery phase of work is complete. As it turns out, that brand leader was more interested in shiny objects and fast answers. I did not get the work, nor did I want it after that meeting.

The value of curiosity

Albert Einstein once said, “Curiosity is more important than knowledge.” Do you agree? He also claimed to have no special talents, and that he was just passionately curious.

Curiosity is not a step in the process that should be shortcut. It’s a vital component of strategy, and strategy is not a box to check just so that the creative team can get started.

I recognize that typical brand strategy often makes many of us feel overwhelmed with information that’s not always helpful. I’ve been told by brand leaders that typical brand strategy sometimes feels like the strategists selling their ideas based on their experience, gut instinct, and observations, as opposed to deep curiosity, reserved judgment, and insight-rich revelations shared in compelling narratives that get everyone inspired.

The value of curiosity is a broader perspective, a deeper understanding, and the opportunity to develop more effective paths forward. Strategy is often described as a plan of action designed to achieve an objective, with varying levels of uncertainty. Curiosity is at the foundation of developing the most effective strategies. Ongoing, curiosity can help you go beyond the status quo into new areas of thought and action and evolve in relevant ways over time as new insights emerge.

3 ways curiosity will strengthen your brand leadership

1. Avoid confirmation bias

Companies are entrenched in knowledge, and that often comes with inherent biases and preconceived instincts. The status quo is, if nothing else, predictable, but it’s often built on layers and layers of confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias is a tendency people have that is opposite of curiosity and it closes more doors than it opens. Think about how you interpret information from social media or the news. If you’re like most people, you view information that you agree with as support for your point of view, and you dismiss information that is contrary to your point of view. This happens to all of us, and it takes a disciplined approach to break free of this inherent behaviour.

Once we recognize that we are most likely reverting to confirmation bias, we can then take a step back to challenge long-held assumptions. Curiosity is the cure for confirmation bias. Why are we doing things this way? Is there current data to back up this assumption? Are there new and better ways to move forward

2. Gain deeper understanding

Typical brand strategy often relies on surface-level consumer understanding and is devoid of deep psychographic understanding of what people need, want, and desire. One of the most challenging things to learn about are people’s true feelings and unarticulated needs. When it comes to sharing feelings, social conformity bias often gets in the way. It’s another behavioural tendency that humans have, to adapt what we say and how we behave based on how we want to be perceived. It’s why not asking the right questions in the right way or using the wrong research techniques can lead to unreliable information.

One-on-one interviews are a fantastic and easy way to gain deeper understanding, especially when the questions are designed to evoke illustrative answers.

Some of my favourite questions to ask brand leaders include:

What’s the most gratifying customer feedback you’ve heard?
If there was one thing that you could improve about the customer experience, what would it be?
What are 3 words to describe how you want people to feel after interacting with your brand?

Some of my favourite questions to ask a brand’s consumers include:

What is the best thing that this brand does for you?
What have been the biggest surprises when interacting with this brand?
What are 3 words to describe how it makes you feel using this brand’s products or services?

Another way to gain reliable information and deeper understanding is by using metaphor elicitation, a quantitative approach I’ve used in collaboration with a behavioural science research company. This methodology gets people to open up, first by having them select an image that conveys their feelings and/or desires on a topic, and then asking them to explain why they selected the image. By using this two-step approach, respondents are not over-rationalizing the situation or sharing guarded answers. They are emoting feelings and ideas that reveal deeper understanding and give fodder for how the experience affects their life or can be improved beyond what they would say if asked overtly. In some cases, this can be the right curiosity tool for the job.

3. Spark inspiration and alignment

Ultimately, curiosity is about bringing people together. People in organizations want to feel valued and that their opinion matters. Everyone in the organization has perspective, whether it’s the CEO, the sales representative, or the customer support person. Data is everywhere and insights are waiting to be found.

As brand leaders know, our work is not just about selling the big ideas. It’s not about arts and crafts. It’s not about having big rah-rah sessions and launches. Brand leadership is about developing strategies and activations that strengthen an organization’s ability to achieve business objectives.

The most successful brand leaders are inherently curious. They are curious about what matters most to people within their company. They are curious about what matters most to consumers. They are skilled at connecting the dots to envision new possibilities, and a new foundation for moving forward that brings these two sets of motivations together. Most importantly, their curiosity, and understanding of various perspectives, enables them to spark inspiration and alignment so that everyone is energized about moving forward in the same direction.

It’s time to be curious

My instinct is to move fast. I’m a solver, but I’ve learned the value of slowing down, being curious, connecting the dots, and inspiring people with compelling narratives that they feel a part of. Here’s what’s so genius about Einstein’s reliance on curiosity: Obvious ideas are typically not unique ideas. Big decisions based on old perspectives & old data are a big risk.

The best way to create strong consumer connections that drive growth is to deeply understand and address what people care most about. The most successful brand leaders recognize that curiosity, and asking the right questions, is far more important than having fast answers. Aren’t you curious about what being more curious can do for you?

Feature Image Credit: Artem

By Kevin Perlmutter

Kevin Perlmutter is chief strategist & founder of Limbic Brand Evolution – a brand strategy and neuromarketing consultancy. He loves to work with CMOs, brand and business leaders who have set out to make people’s lives better – helping them create stronger connections between their brand and the people who they want to reach. He’s created the Limbic Sparks® approach to brand strategy, and turns emotional insight into a competitive advantage to more effectively evolve brand strategy, messaging, offerings, and experiences that deepen brand engagement and loyalty. Prior, Kevin led strategy, innovation, and research at a sonic branding studio where he created an award-winning neuroscience research capability to assess the subconscious impact of stimulus on emotion, brand, and behavior. Earlier at Interbrand, he led client strategy and identity evolution, and created Interbrand’s customer experience practice. Kevin is a frequent writer and speaker.

Sourced from Brandingmag

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14 Coach-Approved Methods For Improving PR As A Start-up

April 21, 2023 No Comments

Sourced from Forbes

For start-ups, public relations is an essential component of building brand awareness and attracting customers. However, developing a successful PR strategy can be challenging, especially for new and emerging businesses.

Some of the best ways for start-ups to improve their PR efforts include developing a carefully crafted digital footprint, sharing a compelling story and working with the right partners and specialists to achieve their goals. Below, 14 Forbes Coaches Council members explore these strategies and more for start-ups that want to enhance their visibility and build trust with customers through a solid approach to PR.

1. Be A Storyteller

Share your own story—address the challenges you have overcome, how they helped you get where you are today and the problems your start-up is helping to solve. When I was starting out, I shared a short story as a guest contributor, which helped me secure my first coaching contract and clients. – Adriana Kosovska, Zero To Dream Job

2. Carefully Craft Your Digital Footprint

A digital footprint with consistent messaging and leadership visibility is a must for every organization, especially start-ups. Connecting the company’s vision and mission with exceptional storytelling of solutions offered, such as sustainability and social impact, is an excellent start to crafting PR and enhancing a start-up’s visibility by leading with value. – Izabela Lundberg, Legacy Leaders Institute

3. Use Your Core Values To Shape Your Presence

Define your core values, create a culture you desire, embody that culture and then begin to build a presence. Visibility is key. I began building a presence through podcast interviews, creating my own podcast and being a part of professional communities. Building relationships with the right people while engaging thoughtfully with influencers on social media is also effective. – Dr. Sharon H. Porter, Vision & Purpose LifeStyle Magazine and Media

4. Share Success Stories To Gain Earned Media

A start-up can share its success stories to gain earned media. By sharing my company’s work with the Minnesota Business Coalition for Racial Equity, we’ve attracted more clients who are interested in taking action on social issues. One of the benefits of PR is in attracting mission-aligned work. Potential clients and employees find brands that align with their values. – Meredith Leigh Moore, Leverette Weekes

5. Partner With Those Whose Mission Aligns With Yours

Finding a great charity, cause and/or marketing campaign partner to support your reach and influence can prove to be incredibly beneficial. When aligning with the right partner—one whose mission, values or purpose is synergistic with yours—you can work on a win-win strategy to support each other’s causes and elevate your company’s mission and reach. – Joshua Miller, Joshua Miller Executive Coaching

6. Ensure PR Campaigns Incorporate Brand Values

What I saw to be effective in a particular PR campaign was building resonance with the brand values of that particular start-up organization. It was anchored in the brand’s purpose, vision and value and the promise thereof when a customer engaged the company. In this case, the espoused value was sustainability-related, and the campaign connected with the intended audience. – Thomas Lim, Technicorum Holdings

7. Humanize And Personalize Your Brand

When starting up, it’s important to recognize that customers won’t identify with your brand unless you personalize and humanize it. I have found that it is important for the founder to be very visible across all the brand’s digital properties, showcasing their story, mission and values to connect with their audience in an authentic voice. – Ana Reed, Newmanity

8. Focus On The CEO’s Vision And Expertise

The CEO should be the focal point in your PR. Develop and evolve your digital footprint strategy to help build your brand visibility and unique value proposition. Reinforce with content that aligns with the vision, purpose and values of who you are, what you are communicating and how you are helping. Through various media, showcase the expertise you have that resonates with your ideal customer. – Dennis Foo, Pu Xin ASPIRA Advisory Limited – Shanghai | Hong Kong

9. Enlist The Help Of A PR Specialist

Work with a PR specialist who hears and understands your proposition, can effectively represent you to your target segment, has reach, and works toward your desired outcome. It proved invaluable to me to work with someone capable; they offered ideas that I could question, and I selected which to move ahead on. It cut down time, was cost-effective and, ultimately, delivered the outcome I hoped to achieve. – Arthi Rabikrisson, Prerna Advisory

10. Gain An Understanding Of Your Audiences

Develop personae for your audiences and tailor your messaging to them. For example, as a start-up, you’ll be expected to be all over social media, using the latest and greatest channels for PR; on the other hand, your customers may be old-school and respond to traditional PR. Smart companies leverage both and use them strategically. – Emily Grandinetta, Grandinetta Group, LLC

11. Leverage HARO

Use the free site HARO (Help A Reporter Out) to connect with journalists looking for sources. There are over 100 requests a day from journalists who need an expert. I’ve used this site for years and have been featured in Shape magazine, Associated Press stories and hundreds of blogs. It is the fastest and easiest way to gain PR exposure that I’ve ever found. – Krista Neher, Boot Camp Digital

12. Establish The Right Relationships

To improve PR, a start-up should focus on establishing relationships with journalists and influencers in the industry. I have succeeded by engaging in mutual collaborations and doing interviews to showcase our product. It has increased brand recognition and visibility by leveraging existing audiences. Additionally, it has improved our website traffic, as more users are drawn to us due to media buzz. – Peter Boolkah, The Transition Guy

13. Speak Directly To Your Audience

When the founder (or founders) speaks directly to the consumer, it adds real value to the start-up’s PR. It’s highly beneficial, especially during the early stages. I used this strategy in the past when I was building my own service start-up—it helped us attract, keep and further develop a more diverse audience while understanding them more deeply than before. – Alla Adam, Alla Adam Coaching

14. Support Your Local Community

Start-ups can improve their PR by providing free services to local non-profit organizations. If you do enough good in this world, it will come back to you twofold. I’ve done it and I continue to do it, and it has been very beneficial to my brand. – Jay Garcia, Jay Garcia Group

Sourced from Forbes

In News

It has never been more important for marketers to be clear about what they believe in

April 20, 2023 No Comments

Adam Holloway of Emperor reminds marketers that one of the most important things in creating impactful work is knowing what your beliefs are.

When I say ‘believe’, I’m not talking about personal preferences regarding religion, UFOs, or star signs. I’m talking about creativity. How do you do your best work? What do you expect from your clients and colleagues? What can they expect from you?

Why now?

The creative industry is changing. We’re still feeling the impact of the pandemic and remote working. Artificial intelligence (AI) has burst back onto the scene, and everyone is on code red about how it will affect our industry and our jobs. In addition, there are evolving ideas around what it means to be ethical. As a B Corp-certified business, we see just how important this is to potential talent and clients.

We also find ourselves in an increasingly noisy communications landscape. Organizations are facing challenges presented by macroeconomic conditions – challenges that are complex and, in some cases, urgent. The need to communicate clearly, authentically, and with total transparency has never been greater.

With more noise, our work must be distinctive, intelligent, and relevant. Creativity is the secret weapon when it comes to thumb-stopping and attention-grabbing communications. But that doesn’t just mean bold ideas and communications that make a visual impact; it’s also about skilfully connecting an organization’s strategy with its people and customers, to establish an emotional connection with a narrative that sticks.

None of this is easy, and sometimes it’s easy to get lost in the weeds. Which brings me back to the importance of being clear about what you believe in.

What do you believe?

You may believe in the need for deep understanding. Encouraging your team and your clients to think about the continual process of learning more about a project, situation, or relationship. Not just what they understand, but how they can understand better. This might mean sharing knowledge and encouraging new habits, specifically in briefings. It could also mean creating opportunities and making spaces where better understanding can happen.

You may believe in the importance of having fun. Proactively making the time to be creative in your thinking. Making people feel confident enough to push boundaries and feel they can take risks on their way to getting things right. Making ‘playtime’ part of the process and encouraging ‘play for play’s sake’. Understanding ideas can happen anywhere, anytime, and playfulness is great for morale and mental health.

You may believe in the power of simplification. Exploring the beauty and effectiveness of simplicity and expressing ideas in the most focused way they can. The practice of simplicity is a valuable discipline, useful in any situation and wonderfully satisfying. Simplicity is the antidote to confusion, uncertainty, boredom, and bullshit.

The belief to break down silos

You may believe in the necessity to keep up. Being transparent about the learning process, so that knowledge is shared faster and more easily. With more collaboration and visibility, this can become a part of company culture.

People with different skill sets can learn from one another and find similarities between tasks and processes. Silos are broken down, gatekeeping is avoided, and new connections are made.

You may believe it’s essential to know your audience. Getting people to step outside their own heads, lose their ego, refocus on what’s best for the audience, and see things from other perspectives. Actively listening to external voices to gain more insight: generationally, financially, and societally, as well as attitudes about accessibility, inclusivity and sustainability.

You may believe in the value of workmanship. Celebrating the craft, expertise, and hard work that goes into creating a finished product. This is about educating each other in the processes, knowledge, time and passion that go into creativity. Challenging the myths about ‘sprinkling magic’ or ‘pressing a special button’, and instead revealing something more profound and inspiring about how you, and those around you, work.

Say it loud and proud

Whatever you believe, make sure you live by it. Say it loud and proud. Use it as a driver and a measure of your creativity. Use it to demand more from others. All in the pursuit of truly impactful and effective work.

Feature Image Credit: Raimond Klavins

By Adam Holloway

Sourced from The Drum

In News

How to Use the 5 Senses — Plus a Secret 6th One — to Catapult Your Brand Experience

April 20, 2023 No Comments

By Pete Lankarge

When it comes to “brand experience,” harnessing the power of the five senses in your brand strategy will completely change how your customers respond to you. Here’s how.

Brand experience is a cornerstone of business, especially for those with a brick-and-mortar presence. Without a strong and consistent brand experience, it would be difficult to attract customers. So what are the individual building blocks of brand experience?

Let’s zoom out for a moment to consider what “experience” actually means. We humans “experience” life through our five senses. Right. Duh. But here’s the catch: Many brands fail to capitalize on all five.

As someone curating the physical experience of your brand, you can more powerfully impact customers by appealing to all five of their senses in your brand strategy. This multi-sensory approach to brand marketing and brand execution is referred to as “sensory branding.”

Let’s take a tour of the five senses from a branding perspective, and look at some ways that brands can expand their use of sensory branding in their brick-and-mortar locations which are, in truth, their theatres of brand experience.

Sight

Of all the senses, sight gets the most press, but typically the spotlight shines on imagery and iconography. The golden arches of McDonald’s. The green silhouette of the Starbucks mermaid. The kind visage of Colonel Sanders on a bucket of KFC fried chicken. These icons are so indelibly linked to these brands that they’ve permeated our collective imagination.

Let’s instead open up the hood and peek at the colour psychology that turns this engine. Just as soft lighting or harsh lighting can drastically alter the mood of a room, colours set the tempo of a branded environment.

The ubiquitous presence of yellow in McDonald’s branding conjures notions of sunshine, warmth and joy, making you think of childhood and smiley faces. The green of Starbucks and Whole Foods suggests robust health and a oneness with nature.

Recommendation: Use colour theory to your advantage. Understand what feelings your brand intends to evoke, then deploy colours in your environments like secret agents, tasked with covertly pacing the moods and emotions of your guests.

Smell

The sense of smell — the “emotional sense” — travels a unique pathway into the human brain which connects it deeply to memory. Brands that are successfully married to pleasant scents within their customers’ memories have an added layer of seductive ability.

Consider Abercrombie & Fitch. The garments that fill its stores are drenched in its signature fragrances, creating powerful associations between these fierce, outdoorsy scents and the brand, as well as the lifestyle that’s suggested by the brand.

Upon your escape from the Abercrombie store in the mall, you may be subsequently lured by another powerful scent emanating from Cinnabon. The aroma of cinnamon just happens to be associated with warmth, comfort and perhaps guilty pleasure.

Fitness brands — to be certain — lack this kind of natural olfactory advantage, but there are pre-emptive measures that can be taken to offset this. For example, a scent diffuser can be employed to pump the energizing smell of eucalyptus into a gym or the relaxing scent of lavender into a spa.

Recommendation: Face it — to some extent, your brand probably smells already. Assess whether that can be amplified for your benefit or whether other scents should be deployed as defensive agents.

Sound

Sound is often thought of in terms of music. Along these lines, brands like Starbucks use playlists like audio wallpaper in their locations, suggesting certain moods and lifestyles to be associated with their brands.

But sound impacts brand experience in a number of other ways. As audio engineers and good architects know, the reverberance levels of interior spaces can significantly affect the quality of one’s experience in that space.

Speech intelligibility is significantly impaired in highly reverberant spaces. If you can’t understand what your dinner companions are saying, you likely won’t take them back to that same restaurant. On the flip side, if there’s too little reverberance in a dining space, there may be a creepy feeling of closeness with surrounding tables. It’s all about striking the right balance. Depending on the kind of environment you’re looking to create, elements can be added to either absorb or reflect sound.

You can also flip the script on bad sounds. For example, Planet Fitness features “Lunk Alarms” on its walls. The net effect here is that by incorporating an occasional alarm sound into its brand experience, it deters certain other sounds that it explicitly doesn’t want in its brand experience — namely, the beastly grunting and loud weight-dropping of “lunks,” common to other gyms.

Recommendation: Go to one of your competitor’s locations and sit quietly for a moment with your eyes closed; take note of what you hear — and also what you don’t hear — then apply those thoughts to your brand. Is the banging of the metaphorical pots and pans something you want to hide or emphasize for energy’s sake? Dealer’s choice.

Touch

Often overlooked, the sense of touch can have a powerful impact on brand experience — ranging from feelings of temperature comfort and the texture of furniture to the use of hands-on experience with products or even other humans.

Consider how Apple deliberately has a very hands-on experience in its retail locations, intended for you to have the tactile experience of feeling the newest iProduct in your hands, manifesting its attachment to those very hands — until the next model comes out, of course.

Recommendation: Think about what textures people will encounter as they interact with your brand and the duration of time for which they will be interacting with them. Be consistent with your temperatures, your furniture and your high-fives.

Taste

Admittedly, taste is the sense most often confined to a single vertical — food service. However, outliers exist. Consider Ikea, famous for furniture, but also the Swedish meatballs you’re likely embarrassed to admit you love. These are indeed part of the Ikea brand experience, rolling a touch of savoury Swedish kindness into the mix.

But getting back to food service, strategic freebies can go a long way in the taste department. If you go to your local Friendly’s or DQ, you’re likely to be offered free samples of different ice cream flavours, activating your sweet tooth — and shortly thereafter, your wallet.

Also think of the warm, soft, unlimited signature breadsticks you get after ordering your meal at Olive Garden. After stuffing your face with those, odds are high that you’ll be taking half of your entrée home, but also that you’ll be returning to the OG.

Recommendation: Consider ways that you can intertwine the sense of taste into your brand experience; but if you’re offering to put something in your customer’s mouth, please be sure that it tastes good. In other words, if you’re an oil change franchise serving coffee in the waiting room, be sure that the coffee doesn’t taste like your motor oil.

Final thought: ‘The 6th sense’

Lastly, one overarching bit of advice pertaining to your sensory branding efforts: Be knowledgeable, be intentional and be consistent!

Certain brands that master the weaving of all five senses into the mosaic of their brand experience can capture that elusive “sixth sense” — the clairvoyance of being in the presence of the master touch.

By Pete Lankarge

Entrepreneur Leadership Network Contributor. Business Development Executive at Northeast Color. Pete Lankarge is a business development executive with Northeast Color, where he works with franchisors to create consistent brand experiences for brick & mortar. He is also the lead singer of Pete LaGrange & the Ghost Riders, who have appeared on a Grammy ballot.

Sourced from Entrepreneur

In News

These marketing tricks have kept Barbie’s brand alive for over 60 years

April 20, 2023 No Comments

By Sameer Hosany

A branding expert explains how the controversial doll has gone from teenage reject to movie star.

Rejected by the toy industry at first, Barbie is now one of America’s most trusted brands. “She” – the 11.5 inch blonde doll, but also her brand persona – generated worldwide sales of around $1.5 billion (1.3 billion pounds) in 2022, and has a brand value of $590 million.

Barbie debuted on March 9, 1959, at the New York International Toy Fair as Barbie Teenage Fashion Model. Sixty-four years later, the doll continues to be the subject of cultural, sociological and psychological interest. By creating an iconic brand with special meaning for fans of all ages (Barbie is marketed to children aged three and older), toy company Mattel has successfully extended the lifecycle of the Barbie brand for well over half a century.

Barbie is also a polarising figure. The brand embodies the notion of a “double bind”, celebrated as an inspirational role model while at the same time blamed for creating unrealistic expectations of women, particularly when it comes to how they should look.

But while most toys remain popular for only two or three years, Barbie’s long-term success reflects Mattel’s responsiveness and adaptability to the changing cultural and political discourse in society and around this doll. So how has the company done it?

Credit: Victoria Borodinova/publicdomainpictures

A Barbie world

Research shows there are many ways to build and sustain brand characters, but Mattel has used a “multiply” strategy for Barbie. This has involved introducing other characters that play supporting roles in Barbie’s “world”.

Over the years, these supporting acts were introduced to portray Barbie’s relationship with friends and family. First there was Ken (1961), Barbie’s boyfriend, then her younger sister Skipper (1964), followed by friends including Midge (1963) and Christie (1968), the first black Barbie character.

The storylines and individual characteristics of these additional characters connect to Barbie’s persona and increase brand visibility. Mattel has also used storytelling tactics such as announcing that Barbie and Ken had officially broken up on Valentine’s Day in 2004 (they got back together in 2011). Such stories resonate with fans’ emotions, sustaining interest in the brand.

These tactics typically work for a while, but how has Mattel sustained true brand longevity for this long? There are many strategies designed to revitalise mature brands. Mattel successfully extended Barbie’s brand to capture new audiences, drive growth and expand into new types of products beyond dolls.

This is a risky endeavour if the brand is stretched too far. But Barbie’s brand has been successfully extended into other profitable categories such as clothes, accessories, cosmetics and entertainment (music, movies and games). And now, after several computer-animated, direct-to-video and streaming television films, Barbie’s first big budget, live action movie will be released in cinemas in July.

Early reports suggest the movie – helmed by Oscar-nominee Greta Gerwig, who also directed Little Women (2019) and Lady Bird (2017) – is likely to be rated PG-13. This is not the “universal” rating you might expect for a film about a popular toy. It hints at another strand of Mattel’s successful Barbie branding strategy: nostalgia.

Life in plastic

Alongside ongoing efforts to appeal to young girls, Mattel also deliberately targets older consumers. Specific objects – not just toys but clothes, food such as sweets, or even items like vinyl records – can give a physical form to a set of attitudes, relationships and circumstances for people. This evokes a powerful sense of the past.

This kind of nostalgia generates trust and positive attitudes towards a brand, influencing consumer preferences when it comes to choosing between toys.

In addition to the upcoming film, Mattel has attempted to capitalise on the nostalgia Barbie evokes in other ways. It sells more sophisticated designer and limited edition lines of collectible dolls aimed at adult fans, for example. These items are typically sold in speciality or boutique stores, and carry higher price tags than the average doll.

Designer Charlotte Johnson with a 1965 doll. Credit: Nelson Tiffany, Los Angeles Times/Wikimedia Commons

Criticism of Barbie

As Barbie’s brand has expanded and evolved, the doll has also encountered criticism. Over the years, Barbie went through many transformations to look more confident, and was marketed as having many life options, particularly when it comes to work. There are now Barbie dolls representing more than 200 careers – from astronaut, surgeon, paratrooper, game developer, architect and entrepreneur to film director and even US president.

But critics have argued that these career dolls are a “misfire attempt at inspiring girls”. This negative perception of the brand’s moral vision is linked to the notion that Barbie is rooted in an ideal of femininity that still characterises women by their physical appearance.

Barbie has been accused of promoting unrealistic body standards, stereotyping and objectification of women, as well as having a negative influence on girls’ self-esteem and body image.

So, faced with declining sales and competition from smaller brands offering dolls with more realistic body types (such as Lottie and Lammily), Mattel launched “Project Dawn” in 2016. This included the launch of Fashionistas, a line of Barbie dolls with different body types (curvy, petite and tall) and abilities, skin tones and eye colours, as well as hairstyles and outfits.

But research suggested that young girls aged between three and ten prefered the original tall and petite dolls. They were negative about “curvy” Barbie, and this doll also received intense public scrutiny.

In 2017, Mattel took another significant step by introducing ethnically and racially diverse dolls of different nationalities, including the first hijab-wearing Barbie doll. However, this approach prompted criticism that Mattel was treating race and ethnic differences as “collectible”, and commodifying culture.

Despite this, Barbie continues to be a toy that many children play with. The longevity and iconic status of the doll is a tribute to Mattel’s astute marketing and reinvention efforts. These have helped the brand remain relevant even now, 64 years after it was launched.

Sameer Hosany is Professor of Marketing, Royal Holloway University of London.

This article first appeared on The Conversation.

Feature Image Credit: Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters

By Sameer Hosany

Sourced from Scroll.in

In News

What YouTube hustle gurus are really selling you

April 19, 2023 No Comments

By Rebecca Jennings

YouTube and TikTok are plagued with 20-something “passive income” bros who want your attention — and your money.

Sebastian Ghiorghiu hates excuses. He’s only 24, yet runs a “seven-figure marketing agency.” He owns multiple “dream cars” and is currently building his “luxury dream house” in Scottsdale, Arizona. Ghiorghiu is productive, he says, for 98 percent of every day. He went from “skinny fat” to “jacked.” He believes in God. He was born to a poor family who immigrated from Romania and got rich simply because he decided to. If he could do it, why can’t you?

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“If you’re a guy in your 20s and you don’t have a Lamborghini, you should actually sit down and have, like, a serious discussion with yourself as to why you don’t have a Lambo,” he said on a podcast in January. “It is so incredibly easy, and there’s so much money out there.”

He’s right, at least on the last bit. There really is so much money out there, and Ghiorghiu is just one of countless influencers online who are devoted to teaching other men how to get a piece of it. These self-anointed gurus often share interests — sports cars, wristwatches, combat sports, strict diets, rocket ship emoji, lengthy Twitter threads, Sun Belt states with relatively low tax burdens — but tend to make their millions in a few different ways. For Ghiorghiu, it was a combination of most, if not all, of the most common revenue streams for this class of entrepreneur: flipping houses and cars, selling online courses, crypto gambling, digital marketing, YouTube ads, and, crucially, drop shipping. (I reached out to Ghiorghiu for an interview but never heard back.)

Drop shipping, or the practice of purchasing cheap goods, usually from China, and selling them on a legitimate-seeming website for profit, is an industry valued at $225 billion, according to one report, and is expected to grow to $1.2 trillion by 2030. Framed as an easy way to earn “passive income” by YouTube influencers, the videos are often used as funnels for viewers to sign up for an influencer’s multi-thousand dollar online course that may or may not actually teach you anything; a casual scroll through drop shipping forums will reveal plenty of people who spent everything they had on Facebook and Google ads to market their products, only to rack up thousands in debt (or literal children asking about how to start their drop shipping business)

But according to Ghiorghiu and the other rich-guy lifestyle influencers like him — Alex Hormozi, Iman Gadzhi, Jordan Welch, Andrei Jikh, Max Maher, Brett Malinowski, Mike Vestil, Tan Choudhury, there are so many more — making passive income is as easy as watching a YouTube video. Many of them title their posts with some variation of “44 PASSIVE INCOME BUSINESS IDEAS TO START WITH JUST $1K” or “Watch these 55 minutes if you want to be a millionaire in 2022.” Watch hustle bro content for long enough and you’ll get the sense that you’re an idiot for never having flipped a rental property before or not starting your own AI marketing company (these guys are very into AI right now, for obvious reasons. A sampling of some recent YouTube headings: “7 Untapped AI Businesses to Start Right Now,” “I Found the EASIEST Way to Make $1000 with AI,” “Use AI to get ahead while others panic (PREPARE NOW)”). That’s sort of their whole thing, though: Any time or money you’re not using to make even more money is time wasted.

It’s easy to mock this worldview, which is as corny as it is unpleasant. A typical hustle bro meme might feature an image macro of Leonardo DiCaprio as Jordan Belfort or Cillian Murphy as his character in Peaky Blinders alongside platitudes like “your network is your net worth” that promote the prioritization of money and self-improvement over relationships and free time. Several popular parody accounts, like the intentionally misspelled @entrapranure, skewer this corner of the influencer world, using terms like “sigma male grindset” as a shorthand for the movement at large.

The idolization of the hustle bro is arguably the masculine-coded version of what the writer Jia Tolentino describes as millennial women’s drive to “always be optimizing.” In short, it’s the feeling that our primary aim as people is to make our lives as effective and efficient as possible. For millennial women, an “optimized” life might look like athleisure, Sweetgreen, and barre class. Men, free from the feminine requirement of seeming as though they’ve barely even tried to look so perfect, but restricted by the delicate balance of posting to the internet while still seeming masculine, tend to be a lot more straightforward. Hustle gurus encourage their followers not only to become unfathomably wealthy, but also to maximize time spent “bettering themselves,” by which they often mean intense exercise routines, extreme restrictive diets, or refraining from porn and masturbation. They are inherently mistrustful of any institution or intellectual movement that is not solely about the pursuit of money and quantitative gain.

Who young get-rich-quick gurus really owe their popularity to, however, are the elder statesmen of motivational speakers: Tony Robbins, Grant Cardone, and Gary Vaynerchuk, who built fortunes telling other people how to replicate their own business successes. Like their younger counterparts, these men often espouse deep mistrust of higher education and government, encouraging followers to devote their time and money to learn how to market themselves and their entrepreneurial ventures. Sometimes, that can be exactly what people want to hear.

Steve Machuga, a 46-year-old veteran in Los Angeles, discovered Grant Cardone through Audible during a time when both his business and his marriage were crumbling. “I’m a big fan of taking responsibility for one’s own actions, because it gives you the ability to dig yourself out of any hole you’ve dug yourself into,” he says. “As opposed to ‘I got dealt a bad hand of cards, but that’s life.’ A lot of people, my ex-wife included, just live their lives like that.” Through Cardone, he discovered veterans-turned-motivational influencers like Jocko Willink and David Goggins, as well as Joe Rogan, whose messages encouraged him to re-launch his charity that helps veterans with mental health through gaming.

What he doesn’t love, however, are the younger generation of YouTube gurus who seem more interested in exploiting their followers with online courses to learn drop shipping or get-rich-quick schemes. “I don’t follow most of those 23-year-old tech bros and crypto kids,” he says. “I’m 46. It’s like, ‘Okay, 23-year-old, please tell me with all your vast experience of just having gotten out of high school a couple weeks ago, how you’re going to teach me how to live my life.’”

The problem is that it’s never been easier to seem like a billionaire business guru. Lambos can be rented, after all, and all it takes is a single viral video for potentially millions of people to believe you can help them get rich. Within the drop shipping community, for instance, it’s fairly common knowledge that the best time to get in the business was in the early 2010s, before the market became completely saturated. Nowadays, it’s too difficult to build up the kind of SEO needed to make your product populate the first page of Google, and Facebook ads aren’t seeing the same ROIs as they used to. But interest in drop shipping has only grown over the past decade, particularly within the past five years. Jarvis Johnson, a popular 30-year-old YouTuber and podcaster, blames at least part of this rise on TikTok, where it’s much easier to get seen by millions of people regardless of how many followers you have or SEO you’ve built up. In other words, it’s easy to go viral by casually mentioning the fact that you made a million dollars drop shipping, and hopefully convert those viewers into people who will pay you thousands of dollars for your “intro to drop shipping” online course. “It’s like if Mark Zuckerberg had one of those podcasts and was like, ‘Just start a social network!’ But nobody can replicate that, because the lane is closing,” he says.

Johnson understands the appeal of motivational influencers — he says he listened to a lot of Vaynerchuk when he was early in his tech career and felt like he wasn’t accomplishing enough — and especially the way that platforms like YouTube and TikTok make viewers feel like they can trust the person they’re looking at. “You have individuals pantomiming the billionaire playboy philanthropist attitude, which then becomes more attainable because you’ve combined that with the parasocial element,” he explains. “There are lots of young men who feel very aggrieved and under-cared for by the world, and here’s somebody who looks like he’s winning. But it’s all aesthetic.”

The claims of gurus like Ghiorghiu and other young YouTube millionaires are often vague and unsubstantiated. Recently the real estate YouTuber Anthony Vicino published a thorough (yet polite) debunking of many of the strategies used by these types, which include conflating different definitions of “millionaire,” using risky wins in crypto to prove their investing expertise, and implying that “anyone” can do what they did and get rich if they simply work hard enough (as Vicino points out: A lot of people work hard!).

The minutiae of Ghiorghiu’s claims are far less compelling than the fact that he’s a young, good-looking, and charismatic guy who seems to have it all. Whether or not his followers will bristle at some of his other opinions — that a man’s wife should not have male friends or work outside the home, that he would “have a hard time getting along with someone who was extremely overweight,” that there are only two genders, that men in their 20s who don’t own hundred-thousand-dollar sports cars are stupid — are practically besides the point (and who knows how much he really believes any of them or just says them for attention.) “People will say that I’m out of touch with reality,” he said in the infamous Lambo video, “and they can suck it.”

He’s still right about there being so much money in the world. But increasingly, that money is remaining in the hands of the ultra-wealthy. If you’re taking AI or drop shipping startup ideas from online videos with hundreds of thousands of views, you’ve already lost. This is a truth of media literacy, not business or science, and it’s a lot more difficult to learn than watching a YouTube video that basically amounts to “eight easy ways to lose your life savings.”

Feature Image Credit: Sebastian Ghiorghiu/YouTube

By Rebecca Jennings

Rebecca Jennings is a senior correspondent covering social platforms, influencers, and the creator economy. She has reported on TikTok since its introduction to the US in 2018. @rebexxxxa

Sourced from VOX

In News

News publishers lament the role of verification firms in the programmatic market

April 19, 2023 No Comments

By Kayleigh Barber

Media buyers keep insisting that the role of third-party verification firms are critical when assessing everything from brand safety to viewability in the programmatic market. But news publishers feel powerless when their content is misclassified and subsequently demonetized by upwards of 30% compared to inventory deemed as “safe,” according to Luis Romero, svp and head of sales in North America for The Guardian.

It makes sense to buyers why publishers are concerned about their grades, according to a media buyer who spoke on the condition of anonymity, because those numbers are determined outside of the publishers’ control and are still used as a fundamental baseline for whether they get paid.

“We start to trust [verification firms’] metrics as a currency,” the buyer continued, but that currency seems to have a poor exchange rate when it eventually lands in the pockets of news publishers.

Many publishers have been fed up for a while over how much their programmatic inventory gets demonetized by verification firms’ ratings or by over-generalized keyword blocklists, but the latest hits to programmatic pricing overall seems to be piling on. What’s more, in the past year, the war in Ukraine, the overturning of Roe v. Wade and coverage of the pending recession have joined the keyword block lists, and between that and the rise of contextual targeting, news publishers worry that the problem will only be exacerbated by the layers of optimization that buyers apply to their programmatic buys going forward.

In January, the average cost that an advertiser would pay per thousand views of their ads (CPMs) was $1.21 in the open marketplace — the lowest it’s been since May 2020, per Operative’s STAQ Benchmarking Data. Comparatively, the average CPMs for private auctions (PMP) was $3.46 in January and $10 for programmatic guaranteed deals (PG) — the lowest monthly averages since June 2020 and August 2020, respectively. The four-week average CPM for the open marketplace in February rose slightly at $1.28, but the average PG CPM fell to $9.74 and the average PMP CPM was down to $3.20, indicating that publishers’ programmatic revenue is still being impacted by the economic slowdown.

So while being a news publisher in the open programmatic marketplace has never been easy, the past year it seems to have gotten even more difficult to compete for advertiser dollars in those venues.

“As an overall news publication — despite having food sections, sports sections and entertainment sections — we have been faced with, especially in the past year, a lot of buyers just not wanting to run on a news publication at all. Or [they’re] getting a corporate mandate to not run on news publishers, despite section targeting and or contextual targeting,” said Camille Murphy, LA Times’ executive sales director who oversees programmatic guaranteed and private marketplace advertising within the company.

A nuanced problem for news publishers

The hits to revenue because of this are not minute, according to Romero. When the Black Lives Matter movement was re-sparked following the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, he said that paper’s coverage of the movement led to that content being under monetized by 30% because of blocklists.

On average, The Guardian’s U.K. programmatic business sees a 26% decrease in its CPMs when the content is flagged as unsafe but when fill rate is taken into account, that number becomes worse at 37%, according to Katherine Le Ruez, the director of commercial strategy and operations at The Guardian. And on an average day, about 1% of the site’s inventory is flagged as unsafe, she added, but during the recent earthquake in Syria and Turkey, that percentage increased to 10 to 15%.

Increasingly, there’s been a lean toward contextual targeting in the programmatic market, which is conducted through verification firms scraping publishers’ sites and then categorizing the data in a way that Le Ruez said “could never be accurate” when done by machine learning on its own.

Third parties “will sell things like sentiment and emotion targeting but one person’s election win for Donald Trump is a great triumph [while] for another person it’s a total disaster. So the idea that you can apply that level of human reading by an AI is obviously a challenge,” Le Ruez said.

Beyond the actual categorization and grading of The Guardian’s content, Le Ruez claims that the ongoing data scraping that occurs from third-party verification firms, which siphons their content into the various brand safety measurement funnels, creates a variety of issues on the publisher’s backend. These issues include slowing down page and ad load times, which can impact user experience and ultimately viewability and monetization of ads.

“It’s not something that we offer through our direct business, because we don’t believe it really stands up. So you have these third parties offering services that we don’t really believe in, using our website, our intellectual property, without necessarily having our permission, and selling the services directly to our customers without us endorsing it, or indeed, making any money from it,” said Le Ruez.

The Guardian and The Independent both have contracts with IAS while the LA Times has a partnership with Verity, GumGum’s contextual brand safety product. And it appears that one contract is plenty.

At the end of the day, however, those intermediaries are involving themselves in publishers’ advertising businesses with or without permission. Advertisers come to each publisher using different verification firms and DSPs so the brand safety ratings and viewability data from every firm is going to impact their ability to sell programmatically to some degree.

And the more that buyers try to verify the data on their end to their specifications, layering that on top of the publishers’ own verification strategies can lead to inconsistencies within the data sets causing a reduction in inventory that a publisher has to sell within a DSP.

“People are having trouble letting go of those keyword lists, even though they’re also trying these contextual targeting tactics and I [think] you need to separate those tactics and test those separately. But I don’t think that’s happening as much as you would think,” said Murphy.

The Independent is letting the clients’ data sets take precedence to limit the amount of layering that takes place.

“Where we’ve seen that rub is when a client’s appending data, we’re appending data, the datasets aren’t matching [and it] becomes essentially like a clog in the pipe,” said Blair Tapper, svp of The Independent U.S. “Our preference would always be to see to what the client wants, and if they’re appending brand safety on there, we will not also [do so] on our end. If they want us to set it up, we’ll do it on our end. But I think it’s where there’s competing safety tools, that it essentially cross cuts the inventory.”

Buy programmatic directly through us, please

Publishers are hoping to persuade more agencies and advertisers to do more of their programmatic buying directly through them in hopes that the issues of inconsistent brand safety ratings and mismatched data gets resolved before they lose out on that money.

LA Times has been prioritizing PMP and PG deals since Murphy joined the team, if not before, she said, because the relationships that her team is able to form with the agencies and advertisers is critical for working through these brand safety issues. But recently, PG deals have been even more desirable because that is when her team has the most granular control over targeting.

“When we [apply Verity’s contextual targeting and apply our own keyword blocklists] through a PMP deal, a lot of times we’re still seeing buyers apply their brand safety targeting, so then it’s doubled targeted and the scale is even smaller,” said Murphy.

At The Independent, the volatility in the programmatic space has caused the sales team to prioritize direct advertising outside of programmatic, both through video and branded content, according to Tapper. But sorting out the programmatic techstack internally has been a top priority over the past year, she added.

“We’ve done a lot of work on the site in terms of the [user experience] and so a lot of that has caused us to pause and reprioritize the partnerships that we have with programmatic partners,” Tapper said.

The Guardian’s strategy for circumventing the blocklist and contextual targeting issues is to continually educate agencies and advertisers about why buying programmatic directly is the better choice for news publishers, and while that’s worked to a degree — Romero said that direct sales in the U.S. increased by 40% year over year in fiscal year 2022 — “we have to come up with a solution for brands and advertisers other than just buying direct,” he added.

The never-ending campaign

The ongoing job for Deven Choi, manager of programmatic revenue at the LA Times who oversees the open programmatic marketplace, is to work with the SSPs directly to try and untether LA Times’ lifestyle, sports and entertainment sections from its hard news coverage, but that’s not a perfect solution.

“Even if an SSP does that, there’s no guarantee that the DSP for the end advertiser uses the SSP’s classification method. They might just use a vendor to classify any inventory with a URL from LATimes.com as all news, so it’s all unsafe,” said Choi.

Choi’s team will also go to those vendors and try to convince them to separate out its news content from its other sections and in some cases, they will tweak their models and use contextual models as well as keywords in order to determine brand safety. “That’s helped a little bit, but it hasn’t made a noticeable impact,” he said.

It comes down to the nuances of the vendors’ models and whether or not they can classify content outside of the root domain.

The Guardian is also campaigning to limit the access that verification firms have when it comes to data scraping and is also entering into a partnership with a contextual data partner, whom Le Ruez declined to name, in order to have more control over that piece of their business, as well as building a proprietary tech stack for contextual categorization.

Feature Image Credit: Ivy Liu

By Kayleigh Barber

Sourced from DIGIDAY

In News

The best free website builders in 2023

April 19, 2023 No Comments

By Ritoban Mukherjee

Create a website quickly and easily with the best free website builders.

Welcome to our guide to the best free website builders. Creating a website doesn’t always have to mean spending a ton of precious time and money. In this guide, we look at website builders that allow creative professionals to build websites quickly, and without parting with cash.

Of course, there are strings attached with even the best free website builders. They don’t offer the same range of features or as much support as paid services. Website builders also tend to restrict the storage and bandwidth in their free plans to encourage people to upgrade. Free website builders also tend not to come with a top-level domain name. That means you often have to make do with a subdomain, such as yourwebsite.weebly.com, which can look a little unprofessional.

If you are serious about building your own website to further your career in the creative world or to promote your own creative business, we highly recommend opting for one of the paid-for best website builders, at least in the long run. But if you want to test the waters before you make that kind of commitment, this list of free website builders is a good place to start.

The best free website builders today

Why you can trust Creative Bloq

Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.

A screenshot from Wix, one of the best free website builders — (Image credit: Wix)

01. Wix

The best free website builder overall

Specifications

Storage: 500MB

Bandwidth: 1GB

Subdomain: .wix.com

Advertisements: Yes

Reasons to buy

+Drag-and-drop site builder
+800+ pre-defined templates
+Built-in artificial intelligence

Reasons to avoid

–Limited storage with free plan
–Displays banner ads

Wix (opens in new tab) offers website development services to individuals and businesses of all sizes. The primary appeal of its website builder is the versatility of the platform, which allows you to pick from a vast collection of pre-built templates and customise the look and feel of your website to find something that suits, whether you’re a construction company or a graphic designer.

Wix uses a drag-and-drop website builder, and it’s one of the most intuitive that we’ve tried. It comes with a collection of over 800 templates to choose from, and all templates can be further customised using the simple drag-and-drop UI.

For those looking for an even simpler option, Wix’s built-in artificial intelligence allows you to create a website by answering a series of questions. While this approach lacks customisation, it’s great if you want to get started super quickly. Wix also has its own free blogging platform, but ecommerce features require a paid subscription.

Sadly the free plan does have some substantial limitations. You’re restricted to using a subdomain, such as yourwebsite.wix.com, you have no more than 500MB storage and 1GB bandwidth. Finally, a free Wix site displays a banner ad on every page.

See our full Wix review for more details.

A screenshot from Weebly, one of the best free website builders — (Image credit: Weebly)