On Friday, October 23, after the final presidential debate, President Donald Trump held a rally in Florida that featured something rare even for a Trump event. At the rally, there were large screens showing video clips that he would reference like colossal visual aides during his speech. Don’t take my word for it, he seemed to be saying, here, listen to Biden say it himself.
This was the culmination of a four year arc of a trend Trump has largely blazed himself, shifting away from the traditional politician’s carefully polished and scripted stump speech and towards an unscripted, unfiltered, raw…
The coronavirus has managed to do what all the product demos, ad campaigns, and sales pitches couldn’t: It’s forcing businesses to actually shift their corporate cultures so that people can collaborate and be productive when commuting to the office is no longer an option.
The promise of unified communications — integrated internet-enabled chat, messaging, voice, and video — has always been to bridge the gap between knowledge workers, no matter where they are in the world. Cloud-based service providers and platforms give us access to everything people used to need to go to “the office” for. …
It dawned on me after connecting a new domain and email account to MailChimp and having my first test email come back with a “we’re not sure who sent this email” error message that identity is the new currency in the digital world.
This isn’t a hard sell, I’m sure. Look in your junk mail folder. We are inundated with spoofing attacks, phishing attempts, spam, and more, some of it misguided and most of it nefarious. …
The integration of technology into the workplace has created a whole new slew of changes leaders. Workers no longer show up at 9AM ready to be instructed, old notions of command and control fail in a distributed workplace (and with younger generations) and much of today’s thinking revolves around leveraging collaboration technology to solve many of these problems. Additionally, each worker considers themselves to be an independent entity, replete with a brand image, a media consumption preference, and prioritized decision triggers, all run through a personal technology stack.
My company began studying the impact of technology on culture back in…
What are we, as brand stewards, supposed to do when faced with the tension between trying to align ourselves with social or political causes on one hand and a navigating a deeply divided — and at times outright hostile — public? Some tell us we are supposed to embrace controversial and divisive positions on social or political issues. But there’s more to this story.
My company recently completed its Culture & Technology Intersection 2019–2020 study, and the data gives us a deeper perspective on this issue. The study, now in its fourth year, surveyed 1,500 U.S. adults, 18 years and…
“We’ll dispose of brands that don’t stand for something,” Unilever’s CEO Alan Jope said in an interview this summer with The Drum, echoing the echo chamber that reverberates across the halls of virtually every business with an internet connection today. It may be a bit rhetorical in this day and age to ask whether it is good to align your brand — or your company, regardless of its size — with a larger “brand purpose.” What could be the downside?
You can’t really throw a stone in 2019 and not hit a few dozen brands that have attached themselves to…
The Business Roundtable’s recent pronouncement that they’ve changed their stance on “the purpose of the corporation” — from maximizing shareholder equity to something more akin to recognizing the broad array of stakeholder interests, from employees to the environment to communities — has quickly made the rounds, with both kudos and catcalls coming from different places.
The Wall Street Journal suggests that business leaders in this highly politicized age are all now politicians at heart and have made this new statement to distance themselves from their ownership.
Our position here is simple: one can’t really maximize shareholder value in the long…
Why — and when — do you bring macro trend research into play for your business? The answer is simple: you bring trend research in when you’re in a cycle that needs big picture input or when something important has changed and you need a broader worldview to deal with the ramifications.
I’ve spoken to many professionals over the years about this, from the C-suite to the front lines, and while many are simply hand-raisers who intuitively understand how to use it, others are less certain. It seems smart to put a quick cheat-sheet together so we can look at…
ESPN made a mistake. In believing that the network stood for something far bigger than sports reporting, it decided that its real role in American culture was political militancy. It paid a heavy price for this misstep, losing 15 million subscribers over a period of 8 years. Now, with its brand and finances in tatters, its management made the decision, quite late, to attempt to right the ship.
Gillette made a mistake. In believing that the men’s grooming brand should take a more militant stand against “toxic masculinity,” it launched what was to be a Super Bowl campaign hectoring men…
Stephen Denny
Stephen Denny is an author, speaker, and marketing consultant — lives just south of Denver, CO. New book, Unfiltered Marketing, comes out in November 2020.
