This Week in Business and Brands: Runaway Runways, Little Giants, and More

In the Vivaldi weekly roundup, you’ll find everything you need to keep up with what’s going down in the world of marketing. Sign up to have it delivered to your inbox every week.

Disruption Eruption

These days, there seems to be an unspoken rule in the world of business and brands: “If it exists, it can be disrupted.” And if you think that’s limited to the tech industry, think again, as no brand is safe and it is not just about noise.

CMOs are finding their roles evolving to cover the shifting ground, as their responsibilities grow to include P&L, cultural engagement, and even product design — while the CMO’s playbook is being used by others, as demonstrated by Walgreens CIO Abhi Dhar, who’s starting from the outside customer and working inwards to fine-tune the company’s infrastructure and mobile app. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the changes to expect in our fast-evolving world. If you’re looking for a good book to read, you’ll want to check out Digital Context 2.0, hot off the presses offering seven lessons in business strategy, consumer behavior, and the Internet of Things.

Fashion, Forward

What do you do when Snapchat and Instagram make your formerly exclusive events accessible to the entire world? If you’re Burberry, you embrace the change and rewrite the calendar. The massive brand is now making seasonal lines available as soon as they hit the runway instead of six months down the road, and other major fashion brands are beginning to follow suit.

We should all take heed: in an age where social reigns supreme and there’s no stopping users from sharing, you’ve got to join them. And that strategy’s not restricted to fashionistas — even B2B marketers should pay attention. We were intrigued to find out that globally we spend $9 billion on customer service but only about $500 million on marketing, which begs the question, are you taking full advantage of your B2B advocates?

Micro-Moments and Mini-Mammoths

And not to beat a dead horse here, but when the average attention span is “what, eight seconds?”, every moment counts. And thanks to the personal location devices (disguised as phones) found in everyone’s pockets, it’s not just when you connect that matters, it’s where. Catching your customers at the right time is one thing; catching them when they’re in the right place is what’s now accounting for 85% of one agency’s clients’ mobile ad spend.

When it comes to making gains, “lean and mean” growth tactics may be the best way to grow strong and fast. Take a tip from little giants like WhatsApp and keep your headcount down, stay nimble, and don’t worry about size. That said, what do you do if you’re already 125 years old and 108,000 employees strong? Look at how our client Philips works to get all 10 internal businesses on the digital marketing track and syncing up the speed. No small task, CMO Blake Cahill is working to create unifying measurement standards for all arms of the company, eventually achieving real-time optimization for the entire corporation.

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That’s all for this week! We’ll leave you with a look back at a two-man startup that truly embodies the lean-and-mean approach. It quadrupled its user rate in just a year, and is the reason why, if you’re having trouble putting your props into words, there’s a GIF for that.