ECCEAM Team - 1st Part of Agency’s Series; Google, Reputation & Trust
The Analysis
Proceeding to our second article and especially, to our first part of these marketing-oriented series regarding our work during this semester. In this article we shall talk about our Start Line, Google, Reputation & Trust.
Start Line
Our journey began at 22nd of March with a project titled “ECCEAM team”, named after our team, as an attempt to be presented and acknowledged in the marketing world both as a start-up consultant agency and as individuals and at the same time in the wider public. We made our values, vision and individual roles known, while also presenting briefly our first collaboration with the small business named “Fetch”.
Google’s Creatability Campaign
More specifically, we continued by focusing on Google’s innovative, social-issues orientated Creatability campaign presented at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. This particular project was one of the festival’s winners and its purpose was to provide accessible, easy-to-use technological tools, allowing people with unique abilities around the world to enjoy and create art in an inclusive artistic environment. Google characteristically pointed out; “Open-source experiments bring creativity to an audience that is traditionally shut out of the process”. Partnered with multiple creators, artists, visioners and tech experts, such as the musician, engineer and designer Luisa Pereira and the hearing-impaired composer Jay Albert Zimmerman, who experimented with likewise music educators in Columbia, brainstorming about what a musical curriculum would look like for such an audience. Google also collaborated with organizations, companies and volunteer developers who worked on an open-source program designing wed tools and AI technology. Google Creative Lab in partnership with such creators and supporters of the accessibility community, created 7 artistic experiments online mainly for hard of hearing, hard of seeing and differently-abled people to explore, discover and understand art in a more personal level. The goal of this campaign was to make the concept accessible at any time by anyone with a variety of inputs, providing a large amount of creative web tools, while also serving as a great foundation, a building stone, inspiration and open invitation to the community of developers to step in. The project had a social, political, cultural and environmental impact resetting the way we look at technology, art and people with disabilities, promoting messages such as “Everyone is included”, “Everyone can create” and “Everyone is allowed to be creative”. This partnership with Google’s Creatability Campaign was one of our team’s most memorable moments. Its main goal was making technology accessible for people excluded from the community of art and expression, making everyone feel accepted and included. This initiative inspired us to contribute to this on-growing solidary community of visioners that brings people closer and fight for a brighter, a more steady future.
Reputation & Trust
We then focused our work as a team on the concepts of “Reputation” and “Trust” and digged deeper into their importance, perspectives, aspects and value for a brand. Reputation affects sales and marketing, aids the focus on the marketing and public opinion, adds value to the company’s brand, drives business outcomes, introduces actionable insights while also measuring the effectiveness of programs over time and developing essential strategies for a company’s survival. Everything begins and ends with the customer. A business cannot either get into people minds or predict what people will think of when facing an idea, a product, a service or a content. However, what a company can do is to provide the public, its customers, and potential customers with targeted, specific content so as to control what people see, thus think. We, as a business, have control over what the customer sees and these initial strong impressions and assumptions that are created, combined with the emotional involvement of the person, the way a brand makes them feel, equals to the understanding of what kind of actions the customers desire to take. So, this equation (THINK + FEEL= DO) in a way depicts how people’s thoughts on a brand or idea influence everything about that firm. On another level we studied the reputation drivers, which vary according to the company’s practices and operation tactics. These tactics are being measured by the RepTrak Score, which generates a specifically calculated business outcome, divided in 10 categories (purchases, recommendations, crisis proof, verbal support, invest, work, admiration, esteem, trust and feeling).
Other than reputation we also focused a lot on the key-concept of “Trust”, studying Edelman’s BarOmeter, where we discovered that the severe impact in the trust factor was the management of the pandemic, where the leaders are needed to stand out and make a difference, raising the question of “who is capable of taking the lead in these troublesome times?”. In addition, we found out that the fall of the media has agitated the community in ways that affect public health along with that CEOs and mega corporations are more trusted than governments and politics. We further studied in detail the importance of good information hygiene and the insights provided by Edelman’s Barometer report of 2021 regarding matters, such as Declaring Information Bankruptcy and Science & Public Health; Transparency is the road to trust amongst others.
We concluded after our research that new demands have surfaced in our time which require the institutions to focus on societal engagement and which the leaders need to come up with new ways to involve the audience and build a relationship around their partnership. As a Gen Z start-up agency, we took into consideration all the trust-related findings and insights above in order to develop our own strategies and values accordingly. Firstly, we decided that no matter the circumstances, one of our strict policies, especially as a social issues-focused agency, is to always speak out as a team when we see the need for changes and reforms, to try and understand deeply how the public functions while also what people need. Our team has decided to start focusing on job automation in a more freeing, inclusive way in an organized environment.
Botsman’s Trust
Based on the previous context, we continued our research in relevance to the concept of trust, focusing on the work and ethics of the writer and lecturer, Rachel Botsman. The trust expert taught us both the value of trust as a foundation for any kind of business and marketing initiative, and how transparency not only is not needed for a business, but also could be potentially harmful for its growth. We followed her journey and tactics through her social media accounts, by studying her personal website, videos and podcasts and especially, her speeches about trust. We learned for Botsman that trust is “a confident relationship with the unknown”, which everyone is obliged to leap into and place their faith, particularly in today’s media-dominated society. Moreover, we studied in detail the economy of trust, we unraveled the elements of it and how much this has changed as a dynamic, non-linear concept over the years. We were mainly impressed by the “trust stack” that Botsman suggests; TRUST THE IDEA, TRUST THE PLATFORM, TRUST THE OTHER USER. It refers to a 3-dimensional scale which conveys that trust always begins with a keen idea, a concept that is appealing, that seems safe, efficient, worth- trying and effective with potential of growth and development, proposing that the trustworthiness of the idea itself is the basis and foundation of the process. Afterwards, these ideas are being presented, explained, and applied in the platform, where the potential customer is getting convinced by the environment and the atmosphere of the company or brand, which then leads to the 3D and final step; to trust the other user, the person. People tend to listen to other peoples’ recommendations, instructions and comments about services or products, an element which was quite eye-opening for us as a newly created agency.
04/07/21 — Athens, Greece
By; Chrysakarytinou, Elias Kkamari, ΜΠΑΜΠΗΣ ΝΤΖΙΑΝΟΣ, Kostantinos Raptis, 'Νασιαλια Ταφ'
Authorized by; Betty Tsakarestou
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