What Shipped: Issue 4, 2021
Future Super is a superannuation fund that helps people use the power of their money to build a future worth retiring into. We’re building our product and brand in-house and documenting what we learn in the process.
Here’s what we’ve been up to in the past few weeks:
- Don’t be woo-d by false certainty
Improving visibility while not setting things in stone - Inclusive marketing
We got some honest feedback, and this is what we did about it - Meme ads
Can funny meme-based ads actually get more people to join?
Projects: Deciding what’s next
Six-week bets
As a marketing team, we make bets of what will grow Future Super within a 6 week timeframe. We we sense what’s happening in the business, the market, our customers lives, immediately before the work starts, decide the biggest opportunity, work on it as hard as we can and then ship it.
Anything longer than that and the momentum is likely to be lost (both internally and externally).
Wait — don’t you have an annual plan that lays out what all our projects will be this year? The short answer is: no. And no one should.
The false certainty of planning
No matter how you look at it a “plan” makes things feel certain. That is, until reality gets in the way. In the words of Mike Tyson, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face”.
Most plans within a corporate context lead to false comfort. People see certainty in the plan so they ignore (I’d argue unconsciously) any new information that should change what the team is doing. They become stuck on the plan rather than the goal.
This false certainty led Kodak to spend a useless 12 months developing an analog camera rather than pivoting to the digital world. It leads companies to get out of step with their customers and market movements.
No one knew 2020 would be plagued by COVID-19 or that in June FriendlyJordies fans would be joining Future Super in droves. If we put lots of work into planning at the end of 2019, it would have been harder for us as a team to have pivoted what we were working on when these things happened and changed the landscape.
We wouldn’t have been able to easily put together a campaign when the bushfires started to help impacted members. When we received a stimulus payment during COVID-19 and wanted to pay it forward, it would have felt like we were going against the previous certainty we had set in ‘the plan’ and we would have struggled to do our best work on the new campaign idea.
Adding a Project Backlog
While I hope to never revert back to the falsity of annual planning in my career, a few months ago as a team we felt like our numerous ideas for what might be next weren’t getting captured in a shared place. So we decided to try a project backlog. The purpose of the backlog was to scope projects clearly (making tradeoffs explicit upfront) and help us make calls that continued to align with the market.
It was at risk of giving us false certainty or becoming a laundry list but we figured we’d try it and scrap if it didn’t help us steer the work.
Full disclosure: Most of the team was also skeptical of backlogs. Backlogs can have the same personality of plans. They can reduce the amount of sensing a team does of the consumer, cultural and company needs to guide their work.
4 months on: The backlog isn’t really working.
Sure, projects are getting done. Good work is happening. But are we doing the best things we possibly could do, to go as fast as possible towards our mission?
Probably not. So we’re putting more thought into how the process, using this experience as input and will be making it better.
How? Not sure yet.
Learn from us
I do not have all the answers yet for our team backlog but I have learned some things that might help others in the same situation:
- Focus on showing what’s happening NOW, too many backlogs put too much time into work that will start far into the future. Principle: give your energy in accordance to how soon the work will happen
- Set expectations that future projects in the backlog are ideas, not plans. Be ruthless with reorganising and bringing proposals for changing the list based on new market, customer and business information.
- Have a clear owner(s) who have the explicit role to cut ideas that are unlikely to happen in the next few months so the list stays easy to digest.
— Grace
Inclusive Marketing
Last year we got some feedback that our marketing could be more inclusive. Here’s some things we’ve been doing in service of more inclusive marketing.
Last year, when the marketing team was in the process of revamping our website, we got an audit from SuperSpectrum - our employee resource group for people of colour. Some of the great questions raised were:
- How can we make our acknowledgement of country more prominent on our website and socials?
- We reference ‘Australians’ a lot — can we be more inclusive of people who don’t identify themselves as ‘Australian’?
- White / monocultural imagery — How do we represent diversity without becoming tokenistic?
- Careers — Can we explicitly reiterate that Future Super is seeking diverse and divergent perspectives and that we encourage applications from Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander peoples, people with disability, people from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds, mature age workers and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, etc. (LGBTI+) people?
Hold up, you’re a brand, why does this matter?
Brands communicate to us about ourselves and our aspirational selves — often with enormous media budgets behind the messaging. The influence is strong enough to affect our culture.
We should be asking ourselves: how are we representing and shifting culture? Is it representative of the world we want to see?
What we’ve done as a business
As a business, Future Super has drastically reduced our racial and gender pay gap, introduced de-identified recruitment, and provided anti-racism training — all these things contribute to building a more inclusive workplace.
But, even in an inclusive, progressive workplace, there’s still room for improvement in how we represent people in our marketing and communications.
The truth is that no matter how much of an effort we make to be sensitive, empathic, etc — there is no substitute for actually having people with different backgrounds and perspectives in the room making decisions about who and how we represent people in our marketing.
What we’ve done as a marketing team
There is plenty more we can still do, but here are some of the things we’ve done so far:
- We developed an Inclusive Language Guide, which is a tool for anyone in the business to gut check (you can read more about how and why it was developed here). This tool is open source, evolving and growing as we are. Case in point: Jackie added this piece on why we steer clear of the language of empowerment, which was instructive for me (and will now give new perspective to anyone using the guide)
- We also began including image captions on our social media (example: here), which are textual descriptions of images to support the inclusion of blind, low vision and low-tech users
- We’ve developed a ‘How to Share your work’ guide. We got feedback that our LinkedIn was predominantly white voices.
What I’d tell other marketers who want to be more inclusive (and myself if I could go back in time):
- Be honest. Don’t waste time feeling bad. Get moving. Saying “we are not a diverse team” opens up room to figure out how to change.
- Take a hard look at how you’re hiring (this is a whole separate article, but our ops team have done a fantastic job over the last year on de-identifying recruitment and reaching a more diverse talent pool)
- Bring other perspectives in (and pay them for their time, listen, and be open to challenging yourself) — don’t think you can do this alone. You can’t!
- Think beyond language and pictures — what information gets shared by your org? Who’s sharing it? Whose voice isn’t being heard?
- How can you invite others to develop solutions with you?
What’s next?
Are we making progress? Yes. Are we there yet? Of course not. But that doesn’t mean we give up, or slow our pace.
The important thing to note here is that this isn’t just “representation” or replacing some stock photos of white folks by the marketing team. The efforts outlined above, and more importantly, a mindset shift were possible because of a group of people with divergent and different perspectives.
More perspectives, different perspectives = more inclusive.
— Amanda
Meme ads
Most of the ads we run on Facebook and Instagram are polished, text based ads… But we had a theory: that ads based on common memes could also work well.
So we created some; 100 in fact.
It took 8 people less than hour, to create 100 meme ads, thanks mainly to some online meme generators.
But did they work? You betcha.
Some of the ads we came up with in the session were our best performing over the last few months.
Below are just a few of them!
— Andrew
