• Your Media Measurement is Broken – Here’s How Matter Can Help

    Your Media Measurement is Broken – Here’s How Matter Can Help

    If you’re noticing that B2B buyer behavior is becoming harder to keep up with, you’re not alone. Buyers are under pressure to move fast, but they also can’t afford to make the wrong call. Reports from G2, Gartner, TrustRadius, 6sense, and McKinsey all highlight the same trend: B2B buyers want safe choices they can feel confident about, tools that help align their teams and buying experiences that don’t slow them down.

    Here’s a breakdown of the latest shifts in buyer behavior and what marketers can do to make it easier for buyers to say yes.

    Tired of guessing whether your marketing budget is actually working? Does your board ask for deeper insights than what the monthly click-through rate is? If you’re starting to think you need better answers, you’re not wrong. Basic reporting metrics like clicks and impressions are no longer cutting it. They don’t tell you what’s working, what’s not, or where to go from here.

    In a fragmented, privacy-first digital world, businesses and marketers need measurement strategies that deliver actual insight, not just surface-level stats.

    At Matter Communications, we’re focused on more than just proving ROI. We’re here to help you advertise strategically, adapt more efficiently, and scale sustainably. Here’s how we approach media measurement that drives meaningful results:

    Define Success with Strategic Clarity

    1. Establish clear objectives (growth, awareness, conversions, efficiency)
    2. Collaborate across teams (marketing, media, product, strategy) to deliver on shared goals
    3. Build a measurement framework that’s actionable

    Why?

    When clients and agencies align on clear goals, measurement and strategy become tools for growth, not just boxes to check. Before you start measuring, make sure everyone agrees on what success actually looks like.

    Build for Scale and Adaptability

    1. Use third-party solutions for efficient implementation and added capabilities
    2. Enable “real-time” reporting for campaign optimization
    3. Create customizable dashboards deliver a fuller picture and empower clients with insights

    Why?

    Measurement should be accurate and actionable. Our tech stack is built on tools like Looker Studio, Supermetrics, Google Meridian and more, that help teams evaluate performance and effectively optimize their programs.

    Prioritize Data Quality and Integration

    1. Automate data integration across platforms to reduce errors and fragmentation
    2. Implement data governance for consistent naming conventions, formatting and more accurate reporting
    3. Conduct regular audits to catch discrepancies early

    Why?

    Flawed data leads to flawed decisions – and wasted budget. Clean, integrated data builds trust with clients by providing clear narratives and better outcomes.

    Adopt a Layered Measurement Framework

    1. Recognize that there is no single source of truth – and that’s okay
    2. Blend attribution models (multi-touch, time decay, last click) with a mix modeling (MMM) and incrementality testing
    3. Use brand lift studies to evaluate top-of-funnel efforts offered by media partners

    Why?

    No single attribution model tells the whole story. We use a layered framework to deliver a fuller picture while respecting privacy and platform limitations.

    Design for Incrementality, Not Correlation

    1. Use geo-testing, audience segmentation or test groups and conversion lift studies to prove true media impact
    2. Design campaigns with testing in mind from the start
    3. Focus on demonstrating causal impact, not just correlation

    Why?

    Vanity metrics can’t tell you what’s actually driving campaign lift. Incrementality testing can. It helps you build the story your stakeholders actually care about.

    TL; DR:

    Media measurement today demands more than counting clicks and impressions. At Matter, we help brands build media programs with strategic alignment, layered methodologies, and data quality from the start. We help you move beyond reporting to uncover what truly drives results, so you can spend your marketing dollars where they’ll deliver the biggest return. Ready to transform your media measurement and unlock the true impact of your marketing?

    Ready to transform your media measurement and unlock the true impact of your marketing? Let’s talk!

    Jordan Pinelli

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  • Building a Strong Brand Strategy: The Key to Business Success

    Building a Strong Brand Strategy: The Key to Business Success

    A well-defined brand strategy is more than just a nice-to-have—it’s a fundamental element for everything your brand does. It communicates your brand’s mission, what makes it different, and why your buyers should care. We take brand strategy very seriously, using a research-heavy approach to uncover key insights and determine exactly what your customers are looking for or what is currently missing from the market to drive winning brand positioning strategies. Let’s dive into the seven critical components of a robust brand strategy and explore how each element contributes to your brand’s overall success.

     .1 Understanding Your Brand Identity

    The first step in building a brand strategy is determining who you are and want to be as a company. What purpose does your business serve? What are your values? These are the questions you need to determine to build the foundation of your brand strategy.

    Core Brand Purpose

    Your brand’s core purpose is its reason for existence beyond making a profit. It’s the driving force that inspires your team and resonates with your customers. By clearly defining this purpose and aligning it with your customers’ needs, you lay the foundation for a brand that truly matters. When your purpose speaks directly to what your audience cares about, it fosters a deep, emotional connection.

    Brand Values

    Your brand values are the guiding principles that define your brand’s character and decision-making. These values should reflect your brand’s personality and be evident in everything you do. Whether it’s integrity, innovation, or sustainability, your core values should resonate with your audience, building trust and loyalty over time.

    Brand Personality

    A distinct brand personality is crucial for creating a unique identity in the marketplace. This personality is the human side of your brand—how you “speak” and “behave” as an entity. By developing a brand character that your audience can relate to, you strengthen the bond between a customer and your brand. Having a distinct personality has become especially important in the digital age of artificial intelligence and automation.

    Brand Voice

    Your brand voice is how you communicate with your audience. It’s essential to establish a consistent tone and style that reflects your brand’s personality across all platforms. Whether your brand is formal and authoritative or casual and playful, maintaining consistency in your brand voice ensures that your communication always feels authentic and on-brand.

    2. Defining Your Target Audience

    Understanding who your audience is and what they are looking for is imperative to constructing a thoughtful brand strategy that will resonate with them. That is why leveraging insights provided directly from your key target audiences through surveys and real-time testing is key to determining if your messaging is the best fit.

    Deep Audience Understanding

    Understanding your target audience is a non-negotiable step in crafting an effective brand strategy. Conducting thorough qualitative and quantitative market research on your brand, competitive landscape, and buyer profiles allows you to get inside the minds of your customers. This deep understanding enables you to tailor your messaging and offerings to meet their specific needs, desires, and pain points.

    Building Empathy

    Empathy is key to creating emotional connections with your audience. By genuinely understanding your customers’ challenges and aspirations, you can position your brand as a trusted ally in their journey. This connection is what turns one-time buyers into loyal, repeat customers.

    Ensuring Relevance

    To stay relevant, your brand must evolve alongside your customers’ expectations. Tailoring your brand messaging and offerings to address current customer needs and emerging trends ensures that your brand remains top-of-mind in a crowded market.

    3. Crafting Your Brand Positioning

    When crafting your brand positioning, it is important to combine qualitative and quantitative research to uncover what differentiates your brand from what is already out there. It is important to conduct a thorough analysis of your competitors, determine where there is whitespace in the industry and craft meaningful, unique brand positioning and messaging strategies.

    Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

    Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is what sets your brand apart from the competition. It’s the distinct value that only your brand offers. By clearly identifying and communicating your USP, you give customers a compelling reason to choose your brand over others.

    Value Proposition

    Your value proposition goes hand-in-hand with your USP. It clearly articulates the benefits your customers receive by choosing your brand. A strong value proposition shows how your brand solves problems or improves your customers’ lives, making your offering irresistible.

    Competitive Analysis

    Understanding your competitive landscape  is crucial for effective brand positioning. By analyzing your competitors, you can identify opportunities to differentiate your brand. This differentiation is what will make your brand stand out in a saturated market.

    4. Developing Effective Brand Messaging

    It can be tough to stand out in a crowded marketplace, and turning your brand positioning into a captivating story can be even tougher. The key is to develop creative messaging that addresses your strategic insights while also bringing your brand position to life.

    Clear and Consistent Messaging

    Consistency is key when it comes to brand messaging. Your key messages should align with your brand identity and be consistently communicated across all channels. This consistency helps reinforce your brand’s value in the minds of your customers.

    Compelling Storytelling

    Storytelling is a powerful tool for engaging your audience. By developing brand narratives that resonate with your audience’s experiences and emotions, you can create a deeper connection. Stories make your brand relatable and memorable.

    Visual Identity

    Your brand’s visual identity—logos, color schemes, typography, and imagery—plays a significant role in brand recognition. A strong visual identity  enhances your brand’s visibility and ensures that your brand is easily recognizable across all platforms.

    5. Delivering Exceptional Brand Experiences

    Once your brand’s story is brought to life, it is important to determine how and where you will share the message with your target audience and ensure it is consistent throughout every interaction your user has with your brand.

    Mapping the Customer Journey

    Understanding your customers’ interactions with your brand from start to finish is essential for delivering exceptional brand experiences. By mapping out how you wish for your customers to interact with your brand whether it be email, your social accounts, etc. and identifying key touchpoints, you can ensure that every interaction reflects your brand’s values and meets customer expectations.

    Ensuring Consistency

    Consistency in your brand experience is crucial for building trust and loyalty. From the first interaction to post-purchase support, every touchpoint should deliver a seamless and positive experience that reinforces your brand’s promises.

    Prioritizing Customer Satisfaction

    Customer satisfaction is the ultimate goal of any brand strategy. By prioritizing customer feedback and continuously improving your offerings, you can build a loyal customer base that advocates for your brand.

    6. Measuring and Adapting Your Brand Strategy

    We believe the proof is in the data, so we constantly evaluate, re-evaluate and optimize to improve our KPIs and ensure our brand strategy is leading to better results.

    Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

    Tracking the right KPIs is vital for measuring the effectiveness of your brand strategy. Whether it’s brand awareness, customer engagement, or conversion rates, these metrics provide valuable insights into your brand’s performance.

    Market Analysis

    Staying updated on industry trends and emerging opportunities allows your brand to remain agile. Advanced market research tools allow brands to analyze millions of websites and assess brand sentiment, emerging industry trends, and more to inform data-driven content, media, and messaging strategies. Regular market analysis helps you identify areas for improvement and ensures that your brand evolves with changing market conditions.

    Brand Agility

    Continuously adapting your brand strategy to align with new challenges and opportunities ensures that your brand stays relevant and competitive.

    7. Additional Considerations for Brand Success

    Below are some other areas to consider when launching a new brand strategy. It is important to craft brand narratives that will drive future campaign concepts, ensure your internal team is up to speed and in support of your brand strategy, and that it filters down to all of your digital assets and campaigns.

    Brand Storytelling

    Leveraging storytelling to build relationships is a powerful way to humanize your brand. Engaging brand narratives can make your brand more relatable, helping you connect with your audience on a deeper level.

    Employee Advocacy

    Your employees are your brand’s most significant ambassadors. Empowering them to live and breathe your brand values fosters a strong internal culture and amplifies your brand message externally.

    Digital Strategy

    In the digital age, a robust online presence is non-negotiable. Effectively utilizing digital channels ensures that your brand reaches its target audience and remains top-of-mind in a competitive landscape.

    _______

    A well-defined brand strategy is the cornerstone of business success. By understanding and integrating the various elements—from brand identity to customer experience—you create a cohesive and compelling brand that resonates with your audience. Implementing these strategies will elevate your brand, ensuring long-term success and growth.

    Interested in Brand Strategy Services? Matter’s strategy department specializes in ideating impactful campaigns based on data-driven insights. Learn more about our Brand Strategy services.

    Matter

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  • Top 10 Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Best Practices to Elevate Your Marketing Strategy

    Top 10 Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Best Practices to Elevate Your Marketing Strategy

    In today’s digital landscape, the belief that marketing programs can always be refined is fundamental. Capturing, synthesizing and understanding all available data is crucial for identifying areas of improvement whether you are targeting consumers directly or influencing the C-suite buying committee. Marketing performance typically lags in three key areas: brand strategy, awareness and the marketing funnel.

    Why Every Marketing Program Needs Continuous Improvement

    No matter how advanced your marketing strategy is, there’s always room for improvement. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the key to analyzing the performance of your marketing tactics across the conversion funnel, helping you identify steps to boost the percentage of site visitors converting on landing pages or from one stage of the funnel to the next. By leveraging a set of tools and harnessing the vast campaign data they are already generating, marketers can significantly enhance their marketing programs’ performance.

    Before diving into your optimization efforts, it’s essential to conduct a thorough marketing strategy audit. This will help you pinpoint any gaps in your marketing programs and identify key areas for improvement. Once you’ve identified these areas, it’s time to start optimizing your marketing performance. Here are 10 conversion rate optimization best practices MatterMKTG prioritizes for clients:

    Brand Strategy: Setting the Foundation for Success

    1. Evaluate Your Competition

    To ensure your brand stands out, regularly assess your competition. Are you differentiating your message effectively? By identifying the core messaging of your competitors, you should see how you can make your messaging unique and stand out in a crowded marketplace. 

    2. Re-evaluate Your Audience

    Knowing your audience is key. Are you addressing their needs and concerns? If you aren’t speaking directly to your buyer’s most critical pain points, no mix of media and content will help improve conversions. Re-evaluate your messaging and buyer personas to ensure it resonates with what they care about. Once you are confident you know your audience and what your competition is doing, bring these insights together to develop new brand messaging that is meaningful (important to the audience) and unique (stands out from your competitors).

    3. Test Your Messaging

    Experiment with different messages to see what resonates best with your audience. This could involve split testing headlines, value propositions, or CTA buttons either on your website or through user testing tools. The audience must be intrigued by your messaging to want to learn more and be provided with enough information to know what you do and how you can help them.

    Brand Awareness: Maximizing Your Reach

    4. Media Mix Analysis

    Examine your media mix to spot weaknesses. Are you leveraging SEO, social media, PR and paid advertising effectively? Each channel plays a critical role in driving brand awareness. If you aren’t getting the impressions or website traffic you expect, you may need to rethink your media strategy.

    5. SEO Strategy

    Revisit your content and keyword strategy. Are you optimizing your product pages and campaign landing pages? Consider using SEO tools like SEMrush or Moz to identify opportunities for improvement.

    6. Paid Media Campaigns

    Many brands make the mistake of thinking their organic channels can drive new leads alone. Paid campaigns play a critical role in reaching the desired audiences directly and more frequently. Even a small paid media campaign can drive significant traffic to key landing pages. Invest strategically to boost visibility where it matters most.

    Marketing Funnel and Conversions: Driving Results

    7. Conduct a Closed-Won Audit

    Analyze your successful deals to identify which industries, job titles or media channels are driving the most business. Understanding the factors behind these wins can inform your CRO strategy. Go a step further and analyze what drives conversions in each step of your funnel. This process will uncover patterns, such as a certain piece of content that consistently converts with certain job titles or industries.

    8. Heat Mapping and Website Flow

    Utilize heat mapping tools to understand user behavior and how site visitors interact with your website. Heatmapping can reveal deeper user insights, like what information a visitor is spending time reading or which CTAs they click. This data can highlight areas for improvement helping you enhance user experience and improve conversions.

    9. A/B Testing Lower Funnel Offers

    Split testing is crucial for optimizing conversion points. Experiment with different offers and CTAs in the lower funnel, limiting your variables to one focus area at a time to see what drives higher conversion rates.

     10. Implementing CRO Best Practices

    Effective CRO requires a strategic approach, focusing on continuous testing and optimization efforts. By regularly evaluating your brand strategy, enhancing brand awareness, and fine-tuning your marketing funnel, you can achieve higher conversion rates and overall marketing success.

    Remember, every element of your marketing strategy can be optimized. By leveraging data, testing different approaches, and refining your tactics, you can elevate your brand and achieve better results. Start your CRO journey today and see the difference it can make for your website visitors and long-term growth.

    Wyatt Craig

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  • How to Drive Your Business Forward with Data-Backed Intelligence

    How to Drive Your Business Forward with Data-Backed Intelligence

    In a Harvard Business Review Survey of 10,000 senior business leaders, 97 percent believe that being strategic is the leadership behavior most important to their organization’s success — yet 96 percent lack the time for it. We hear this firsthand from marketing leaders and their teams who struggle to step out of daily execution and into deep, strategic thinking to position themselves for long-term success. So what’s the best way to kickoff that moonshot marketing plan?  

    The answer is: data.  

    With this powerful tool, CMOs can help guide their brand to success using the roadmap of actionable insights developed by a team of strategists leveraging real-time customer, industry and competitor data. Sounds great! But before we begin the countdown to your brand’s ignition, let’s start with the basics. 

    What is data intelligence?

    According to Brandwatch, data intelligence, “enables organizations to adapt to a fast-changing world by connecting decision makers to strategic insights derived from a combination of real-time online data, customer data and marketing intelligence.” This means brands can gather information across all media publications, social media, blogs, forums, reviews and any other internet source, and turn this data into actionable insights that drive real business impact for their brand. Marketing intelligence gives brands a holistic approach, combining all key performance indicators across earned, owned and paid media to develop strategic, data-backed insights. 

    Why is a data-backed strategy so important?

    Basing strategy on data removes guess work — validating decision-making, yielding more successes, increasing program ROI and minimizing risk. 

    Data-backed strategies guide marketing teams on how best to optimize program ROI by consistently measuring against key KPIs. Data uncovered from intelligence programs can reveal how a company is positioned and where there are areas of opportunity. This concrete information grounds a strategy in truth, minimizing a company’s risk.  

    competitive landscape data

    In this industry, nothing is set it and forget it.

    The market and competitive landscape are constantly evolving, so it’s essential that strategies remain agile to ensure they’re resonating with your target audience, reaching KPIs and optimizing ROI. Every integrated marketing campaign, creative asset and tactical activation should be continuously analyzed, measured and adjusted to hit your indicators. An effective strategy and intelligence team knows how to act nimbly and shift budgets to maximize each tactic and boost every channel, ensuring the program continues to reach the client’s main goals. By constantly assessing campaign effectiveness and holistic business trends, brands can meet their goals in an efficient, affordable manner – no matter how the market evolves.

    trending hashtags across key brands

    Putting data intelligence to work

    Regardless of your vertical, your brand or your offerings, the marketplace is a maelstrom of competing brands struggling to stand out to an increasingly fractured audience. Whatever channels or tactics you turn to, you’re up against your direct business competitors and countless others to capture your audience’s attention and differentiate your brand. In today’s dynamic and ever-evolving landscape, brands are always looking for ways to remain nimble and align with messaging that captures their target’s attention. That’s why top brands across B2B and B2C are increasingly leveraging marketing intelligence to inform their strategies.

    Through foundational competitive research and continuous data analysis, strategies can be adapted, ensuring they are optimized against the competition. Whether making a micro adjustment to monthly or quarterly spend or a yearly modification to the plan, strategy and intelligence teams leverage data insights to ensure the brand’s goals are achieved. 

    audience entertainment data

    Here are the six ways decision makers are leveraging intelligence to drive real impact for their brands:

    • Brand Analysis: Glean critical insights about your brand and products from your target market. Quickly analyze brand sentiment and message penetration, evaluate top-branded mentions, and measure brand affinity to benchmark your brand’s overall health.
    • Competitive Analysis: Review competitive SOV broken down by channel and analyze key competitive messaging, positioning and campaigns, so you can develop a unique market position.
    • Communications + Crisis Management: Identify any major flash points, controversies or spikes in negative sentiment in real-time, so you can craft a response immediately and accurately measure its impact.
    • Campaign + Event Analysis: Evaluate sentiment around key events or activations; measure organic reach, conversation volume and buzz; and identify key media pickup, reach and impressions.
    • Target Audience Analysis: Identify the channels, websites and publications where your consumers talk about your brand and the industry. Identify key topics, keywords and hashtags relevant to your industry. Understand your target’s media consumption habits, wants, needs, as well as any myths and stigmas they hold about your brand or your industry.
    • Industry + Trend Analysis: Keep a pulse on key industry trends in real time; benchmark trends year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter to inform future campaign strategies; identify key influencers and authors in the space.
    target audience analysis data

    Strategies work best when they are constantly being optimized. Our intelligence programs give us a clear view of your company, the industry and your competitive set, so we can position your business to stand out in an ever-changing market. Whether it’s understanding the intricacies of your key personas, assessing public sentiment and conversation on industry topics, or uncovering emerging industry trends in real time, Matter’s highly knowledgeable Strategy + Intelligence team ensures every decision is data-driven to optimize ROI.

    With countless successful missions under our belt, leading B2B and B2C companies partner with us to plan, create, launch and optimize their campaign success.

    Interested in seeing how marketing intelligence can elevate your brand’s strategy? Check out our Intelligence page or reach out below to learn more.

    Matter

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  • Why Every Marketing Strategy Should Start with an Audit

    Why Every Marketing Strategy Should Start with an Audit

    Before you go to the grocery store, you check your fridge to make sure you don’t wind up with four cartons of eggs – again. When you build a marketing plan for your brand, you’re going to want to conduct an audit. Brand audits are the fridge-checks of marketing. 

    In marketing, audits reveal areas of opportunity, trends in the market, background on an industry, target audience information and unique brand features. The details and insights your brand may uncover during an audit are extremely valuable when it comes to developing your brand and marketing strategy. Similar to taking fridge inventory before shopping, you may review your brand’s Instagram posts to get a sense of the messages, images and brand info that’s been shared to determine if it’s resonating with your target audience, if it’s following best practices and if it’s driving results for KPIs.

    Ultimately, the goal of a brand audit is to provide a holistic view of your marketing operation, analyze your competition and inform a brand and marketing strategy that positions you to reach your goals. 

    Main types of marketing audits:

    An audit can include many things, and the type of audits you execute may vary depending on your brand’s needs or project goals. When beginning any form of an audit, it’s important to conduct one-on-one interviews, focus groups or research studies with both internal subject matter experts at your organization and with your customers. You should ask them questions about your brand and products or services, and try to learn more about their experiences. Additionally, ask them about their pain points, goals and values. Gathering information directly from your customers can help you build buyer persons, plan for messaging and more.  

    Next, you’ll want to conduct various audits of your existing marketing. For our fully integrated clients, we recommend the following types of audits:  

    1. Messaging Audit: Analyze the messages and sentiments in the marketplace about your brand and your products or services. Understanding how your brand is being portrayed will help to identify areas of opportunity, as well as highlight what’s being done successfully. ​ 
    2. Content Audit: Review the content assets being used to drive your marketing objectives. Whether it’s to educate prospects on your solutions or drive leads to convert, this is a crucial step in understanding how to best leverage your current content, and how you can improve new content. All these details will inform your content marketing strategy.
    3. SEO/SEM Audit​: Assess your website’s organic and paid search rank in a search engine to provide insights and optimizations that will improve how your prospects find your brand. Additionally, you’ll be able to understand where you rank for the keywords that are relevant to your industry. An SEO/SEM audit can also provide insights into what your audience is searching for.  
    4. Social Media Audit​: A brand’s social media presence often influences a prospect’s first impression of the brand, meaning it can provide key insights for important optimizations. The audit should include both paid and organic social media to provide a holistic view of how the brand comes across to your customers.  
    5. Email/Marketing Automation Audit​: A lead-nurturing program using email is one of the best tactics to include in your overall marketing strategy to reach your goals. Review your current CRM/MAP to look for areas of opportunity to optimize emails, workflows, lists and your overall marketing automation system that fits in with the larger lead nurture strategy, content promotion plan or customer engagement efforts. 
    6. Website Audit​: This can encompass a variety of exercises, from audits of a website’s messaging and content, to branding and design, to UX and technical audits. This in-depth exercise provides a 360-degree view of how your brand comes to life on one of the most important owned channels: your website.  
    7. Competitive Audit: After you’ve conducted the above audits for your brand, it’s important to  take an in-depth look at your competitors so you know where you stand against them — and how you can stand out in the market. Look at their website, messaging, positioning in the market, content and media channels (organic and paid search and social) to provide insights into how you can improve your presence and representation in each area. This can be as intricate as necessary and should focus on providing insights for the main goals for your marketing strategy.

    To gather the details necessary for a holistic marketing strategy that will help you achieve your goals, consider tapping into third-party research tools. These tools can provide the data needed to fully round out your strategy and support the insights gathered for the internal and external interviews and other audit findings.  

    Once you complete your audit, you’ll have a holistic understanding of your position in the market, how best to highlight your unique value propositions to resonate with your buyer personas, clear direction on content and messaging, and so much more. 

    Brand audits are highly strategic and can be a cumbersome project for an in-house team to produce. Audits require a large time commitment, the right third-party tools and the brand strategy experts to conduct stakeholder interviews and research, analyze the marketing efforts, contextualize the data, and produce actionable insights that will help you develop a strong brand and marketing strategy. At Matter, our team of strategists help brands at all stages achieve their goals through these methods. Interested in learning more? Contact us today!  

    Sara Roberts

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  • With Great Power: How Hard Questions Improve Brands & Products

    I recently read Motherboard’s article on the wave of destruction our increasingly networked lives could usher in. It got me thinking about responsibility – where it begins, where it ends, and which individuals and companies should endeavor to carry the most weight. No matter how novel our ‘smart’ devices may be, they are all contributors to an expanding web; how confident can users be that all of these brands, large or small, are keeping an eye on the big, scary picture?

    The truth is a lot of brands, regardless of industry, have never been tasked with answering brutally provoking questions. They’ve never been forced to examine their place in an ecosystem far grander, or farther in the future, than the daily routines of their ideal customers. And here’s why that’s a problem: refusing to imagine your brand’s potential pitfalls not only undermines your ability to respond to crises, it keeps you from thinking about how the brand should continuously adapt to our world’s relentless, hurried evolution. By burying your head in the sand, you are actively planning your obsolescence.

    And this, in the age of collaboration, when we the users want our brands to work together to fill in the gaps and do us the best possible good.

    You won’t just be doing your brand and your business a favor by regularly taking a hard look in the mirror. You’ll be demonstrating that you place your customers’ well-being above all else, which will earn you a level of lasting goodwill that literally can’t be bought. So before you launch your latest product update, settle on a new logo, finalize product features or even finish your business plan, make sure you and your colleagues have wondered OUT LOUD:

    1. How does our product fall short? How would we improve it, if we could?
    2. How might our product be corrupted? Who would corrupt it, and why?
    3. What happens if our product breaks or fails today? Next year? Five years from now?
    4. What do we do to protect our customers? What could we do if we had more resources?
    5. How do we express our mission in a way that makes sense? How do we build the relationships we need to get better?

    Feel like you could use some help? There’s people for that.

    Vanessa Boynton

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