In recent years, streaming has gone from being the ad industry’s shiny new thing to a core content consumption channel. So much so, that Australians have begun to see streaming as a ‘household utility’, according to Deloitte. 

Linear TV is still a huge part of the picture – linear campaigns still possess great reach on the most important screen in the home. However, audiences are flocking to streaming services in ever greater numbers. We know 78 percent of Australian Samsung Smart TV owners watch linear TV, but 18 percent exclusively use streaming. Key here is that 75 percent tune in to both. 

On average, Australians spend 51 hours per month watching linear and 88 hours streaming content. This means that to reach audiences on the premium screen, marketers have to think beyond linear alone. 

Connected TV advertising is a key solution that allows brands to reach audiences that marketers cannot reach through a linear TV campaign. Reach has been a staple of TV buying for brands, but in an increasingly fragmented landscape, some consumers are harder to reach just through traditional channels. 

Switching viewing habits

As marketers, we’ve witnessed a marked change in the last 12 months across our device-level data in Australia. It’s shown that 44 percent of Samsung Smart TVs consumed little to no linear TV in the second quarter of this year. 

Yet this isn’t the whole story. We’ve been monitoring growing trends across all our markets and have found that some viewers are on either extreme end of the TV viewing spectrum – ‘only streamers’ and ‘heavy linears’. The latter group is described as such because 33 percent of the entire Samsung TV population consumed 74 percent of all linear minutes. Those who view traditional linear TV campaigns can either be heavy linear viewers or occasional watchers of terrestrial TV. However those that are ‘only streamers’ or ‘light linears’ represent the incremental reach opportunity for marketers through CTV campaigns. 

Much like in the rest of our lives, there’s a balance that needs to be struck. And it’s not a simple choice between linear and streaming as the two are complementary. Here’s why.

Excitement from marketers is evident

The ability to apply the sophisticated measurement and targeting capabilities of digital marketing into the TV environment has attracted a large interest from media planners and brands. They’re seeing the potential of TV’s reach, combined with the measurability of digital, and are doubling down. 

This is mirrored by the investment from brand managers as CTV ad spending in the US will rise by almost 50 percent again this year to US$13.41 billion. Similar rises in the appetite are expected here in Australia, too. In Australia, The Trade Desk found that 23 percent of adults under 34 are cord-cutters. And over in the US, a recent survey found that 47 percent of US TV viewers were already cordless. 

 It’s why 85 percent of US digital advertising professionals are making CTV a key part of their video strategy. 

Best of both worlds

Marketers are drawn to TV for a number of reasons. Scale and reach is one, for sure. It’s also a trusted ‘brand safe’ environment where marketers can be confident of where their message is going to run. 

And now, for the first time, there is the potential for measuring the impact of a campaign on connected devices. This measurability is leading to a more accurate picture of attribution as many campaigns include click throughs, or at least call to actions within the ad itself. 

The proliferation of QR code use in our daily lives, has led to an increasing number of campaigns using that as its call to action. The power and reach of TV can now be quantified, at least the CTV portion. 

It is now also possible to more accurately measure campaign delivery. Similar to the digital video environment, Smart TVs can provide data around viewability, completion, view-throughs and clicks. This makes it easy to ascertain reach and control frequency.

Brands should be looking to target using the industry standard tools available and then augment that with additional knowledge. Smart TVs have unlocked new datasets, which enable the sophisticated reach for campaigns. Now, advertisers are able to reach all of their target audiences, including those who potentially fell through before.  

Think both

When planning campaigns, it’s worth remembering that some Smart TV owners will never see an ad on linear television. Conversely, a large portion of the audience is still to adopt content consumption via streaming services. Having a media strategy to reach your target audience across platforms remains vital in determining the success of a campaign.

 Alex Spurzem is the general manager of Samsung Ads Australia.

Marketing can become a participatory platform by putting the citizen in the centre

Over a decade ago CNN reported on a road in a state park in Kauai that was flooded, and the state government said it didn’t have the money to fix it. The park would be closed. Understanding the impact on the local economy, a group of local businesses chipped in, organised a group of volunteers and fixed the road themselves. From isolated cases of ‘civic DIY’, UBU can normalise a ‘Do it Ourselves’ (DIO) practice and become an engine for civic action, with commercial outcomes and enabled by brand communications.

Interestingly, in September 2016, the City of Gainesville in Florida and innovation firm IDEO, co-created the Department of Doing, aiming at creating a more competitive economy and becoming more citizen responsive. Advertising is not part of the equation, but the idea of marketing agencies working more closely with government departments may not be that far-fetched. To make the idea scalable, however, a digitised mechanism – as opposed to IDEO’s ‘private-public bureau’ – would be required.

Just like the ancient public Greek squares (the agoras) where direct democracy was born, this emerging participatory media can effectively collect complaints and suggestions for cities’ improvement, in real time. The next step for this would then be the matching of brands that align with a specific urban challenge. This way, the traditional public-private-partnership is flipped on its head. Instead of top-down municipal contracts, issues are identified by local constituents, informing future UBU programs that are requested by the people and enabled by advertising media.

Coupled with the hardware (e.g. brands’ touch points) is the requirement for an UBU operating system, provisionally named αgorα. According to Steve Ressler, CMO of Granicus (formerly GovDelivery), the only digital communications platform exclusively for government – serving over 1000 public sector organisations and 100 million citizens around the world – there are a few success factors to achieving public-private-people-platform solutions, being:

• online and offline collaboration
• seamlessness between citizens and government, and
• segmentation built for participation.

The αgorα proof of concept has been outlined as a machine learning-powered platform able to automate the many UBU tasks:

• citizen photojournalism participation, with geotagged and time-stamped complaints and ideas from cities’ residents anywhere in the world, allowing to segment citizens based on degree of participation
• passive collection of data via social media (word and image scrapping) and publisher partnerships
• complaints categorised in relation to local public utility services categories (e.g. water, education, leisure) and the UN’s global Sustainable Development Goals
• ideas categorised in relation to the Principles for Better Cities
• local constituents voting for what they consider to be the most critical issues, as well as the most appropriate ideas to solving those same issues or different ones
• matching of most voted issues and ideas with brands through a series of questions, algorithmically verified, including but not limited to category, target audiences, positioning, core values, marketing budget and broader business objectives where, essentially, the brand’s positioning is aligned with an urban initiative, and
• recommendations for UBU programs (e.g. media schedules) generated as the final output.

[quote style=’1′ cite=”]From self to city and civic participation to commercial transactions, boundaries keep blurring. CMayors, advertisers, media owners and citizen-consumers have a unique opportunity to write the guidelines that will help UBU flourish as a regenerative solution to cities, citizens and commerce.[/quote] When access to choices and opportunities of engagement are much more vital in driving economic prosperity, the traditional infrastructure along with the thinking of those times becomes obsolete. The visibility of values and how they connect at a systemic level becomes all the more important. Hence the uberfication of brand identity in making it not only meaningful, but also one that adds value to experience.

Perhaps there’s a need to find a new vocabulary for brands so marketers can adopt regenerative strategies, interested in improving overall well-being. Industry can no longer be separated from society; it has to demonstrate its viability in times of happiness and crisis. And when there is a global crisis what is interesting to observe is how brands communicate in such times. If the agenda is not human-centric but corporate-driven then the message can easily be lost in the world of data, as public bureaucracy has taught us so well.

The marketing of ideas for the ‘long now’

The UBU journey is one that started in 2015, in an article originally published by Marketing mag, when the concept, still in formation, didn’t even have a name. A few years later, accompanied by plenty of test-and-learn experiments, UBU has never felt stronger. Strong ideas eventually materialise. Charles Darwin, for instance, waited 20 years between completing The Origin of Species to publishing it in 1859. Yet, evolution by natural selection is regarded as humanity’s most powerful idea of the last century or so – perhaps just as powerful as Abraham’s radical monotheism or Sumerians’ invention of writing. As exciting as it is to be ahead of time, it can also feel like a lonely place where the future longs to meet present.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Particularly when the future seems so close, giving the impression we are living in a long now or as deemed by the UN, a decade of action. Few brands have been able to express this sense of urgency as well as Greenpeace, through its recent campaign showing how our actions of today are impacting the next five minutes, weeks, months and years into the future. Time feels compressed like never before.

If the question is how, the answer is marketing. We must market the better ideas and influence more prosperous outcomes and make profitability a longer-term pursuit and not an instant gratification game – repeating Professor Gad Saad’s maxim, ‘Marketing is life and life is marketing’. It is because of marketing that turkey is eaten on Thanksgiving, that clan tartans and kilts became an identifier of Scottish Highlanders, that cultural norms are created and legitimised and so many ‘immemorial’ traditions, were actually invented. [quote style=’1′ cite=”]Marketing can create demand for the things that matter most in our lives.[/quote]

Journalists whose work is trustworthy have a greater influence on public opinion and if there’s a limitation set in the print or broadcast media that they work for, the digital platform gives them the prospect of augmenting their message and reaching out to people, engaging them by generating valuable content. In such cases, the journalist becomes the brand and not the organisation that they represent. Similarly, every professional under the marketing umbrella of activities can make use of their knowledge and toolbox and champion a new, broader meaning to the idea of brand and, by extension, enable the idea of a better world. After all, influence is a marketer’s most valuable currency.

In fact, a study published by Science Journal quantified the number of people who need to take a stand before they can affect societal change on topics considered universally important (e.g. social inequality, climate change, human rights, etc). And the magic number is a mere 25 percent of any group. Only a quarter of people need to adopt a new social norm to create an inflection point where everyone in the group follows.

Peer pressure plays a key role to effect change. The project’s researchers created a series of small online communities of 20 people and actually paid them to agree on a social norm. Once each group was in agreement, they paid a select few people in those groups to push for change, but also paid the remaining 75 percent twice or three times as much to resist the change. Surprisingly, social pressure to change was so great that minorities invariably converted majorities towards a new consensus.

Damon Centola, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the lead author of the whitepaper, said: “When a community is close to a tipping point to cause large-scale social change, there’s no way they would know this. And if they’re just below a tipping point, their efforts will fail. But, remarkably, just by adding one more person, and getting above the 25 percent tipping point, their efforts can have rapid success in changing the entire population’s opinion.”

In this sense, UBU needs to first own 25 percent of the global media spend to eventually mainstream and then reinvent the playbook. In other words, sharing an idea with a personal take on social media or in real life may be more effective than we think. Social pressure is, in fact, measurably meaningful. And unknowingly we may be the one person who stands between business as usual and real change for our world.

What change are you willing to market in our decade of action?

Authors:

	Sérgio Brodsky is the executive producer of Futurecast and a leading brand and foresight strategist.
	Jo Whyte is the Head of the Marketing and Communications at TAC.
	Puruesh Chaudhary is a futures researcher and strategic narrative professional and the founder and President of AGAHI.

Cover Artwork:

Original illustration and artwork by Rafael Medeiros.

Marketing and advertising activity has, on one hand, greatly contributed to economic development, generation of jobs, innovation and market efficiencies, as well as greater access to culture and entertainment. On the other hand, it has polluted cities, annoyed consumers and jeopardised its own existence from the constant interruption in people’s attention with little perceived value to provide in exchange. From a societal perspective, our global media and advertising footprint also comes with a hefty toll.

In the UK, advertising is responsible for two million tonnes of CO2 emissions annually, equivalent to heating 50 percent of London’s social housing. The findings came from CarbonTrack, the world’s first credible, universal tool designed to calculate the carbon footprint of an advertising campaign throughout its entire life cycle. This is a superb measurement tool, but we are still missing the management piece so metrics can represent more than just statistics.

When considering the management of brands and the incredible rise in the valuation of intangible assets, it is not surprising that the idea of brand purpose has been the chief response to our zeitgeist. Still, the approach – despite of its best intentions – has not been able to fully replace other fiscal instruments (e.g. taxes) and effectively make brands play a more meaningful role to ensure a greener, more equitable and more harmonious society.

Even the promotion of climate action is as questionable as the promotion of anything else. For example, Milton Glaser, creator of the seminal ‘INY’ logo and one of the most celebrated graphic designers in the world, came up with a logo for climate change in 2014. In an awareness effort, Glaser’s logo was amplified through billboards (around New York City), collectible buttons and some other merchandise. Despite its clear emotional appeal, the logo could not effectively be translated into action. In fact, its carbon footprint alone may have justified its abandonment.

The same applies to the more commercial advertising attempts at jumping on the sustainability ‘brandwagon’. To encourage people to buy its electric vehicle ‘Zoe’, Renault deployed a digital billboard connected to pollution sensors created to give price discounts corresponding to levels of pollution at any given time of day. Clever communications undoubtedly, but does it solve the issue of air pollution?

Colin Mayer, professor of Management Studies at the Saїd Business School at the University of Oxford, along with the British Academy, has been leading the ongoing Future of the Corporation research project, aimed at understanding how business may be able to solve the problems it has created. In Mayer’s view, it begins with redefining the very purpose of business to “produce profitable solutions to the problems of people and planet, and, in the process, it produces profits”.

Mayer’s view brings a much sharper focus to the loftiness of brand purpose. It does not reduce the importance of profit to generate prosperity, but ensures the utility of a higher-order mission. Interestingly, ‘effective altruism’, a new philosophical idea, has recently emerged with the exact purpose of addressing the lack of rigour and the confusion between what we feel is good with what is effectively good.

Yet, with so much to address and with such a powerful arsenal of marketing tools to deploy, how may we find a shared focus able to deliver as much impact to as many people as possible, while still delivering on the kingly ROI?

An alternative and desirable outlook to widening the role of marketing

Although cities only occupy two percent of the Earth’s landmass, they are where 75 percent of resource consumption and most brand communications are concentrated. Further, the United Nations has projected that, by 2050, about 64 percent of the developing world, and 86 percent of the developed world, will be urbanised. That is equivalent to approximately three billion metropolitan residents by that date. Even when considering the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), urbanisation is the megatrend seemingly underpinning all others.

Due to increased demand for ever more comfortable lifestyles, the existing urban infrastructures have been feeling their ‘growing pains’ for decades now. From energy to education, health, waste management or safety, cities’ services are struggling to keep up with their larger, older and ‘hungrier’ populations. This is an important insight for marketers, where UN Sustainable Goal 11 ‘Sustainable Cities and Communities’ becomes the key to countering the narrowness that marketing has acquired over the last decade.

As important as it is to reduce the number of clicks on a consumer journey, marketers need to understand what people are really interested in. A way for brands to become a more integral part of people’s urban life-journeys is to address issues like: reducing violence in the streets, pollution, unemployment or enhancing opportunities for entertainment, human connections and so much more.

[quote style=’1′ cite=”]Such logic can turn advertising into a regenerative force for cities, where the promotion of goods and services is not only more profitable, but also environmentally enriching and socially virtuous . Markets, choice and competition are not just a consumer’s best friend, but their political representation. Brands with some level of foresight are able to broaden audiences from customers to citizens, and revenue models from sales to the creation of shared value. These transformations will be the game-changers driving our industry forward.[/quote]

To do good, we must also do well. Advertising is the soul of the capitalist system and the best incentive to upgrading it is by generating surpluses. For example, in Moscow, Sberbank was approached by major Russian real estate developers to collaborate on better infrastructure planning in residential areas. People’s opinions on local needs powered targeted campaigns, promoting loans for small businesses. The Neighbourhoods campaign generated nine times as many small business responses than traditional loan advertising.

In other words, people are having their needs addressed with neighbourhoods becoming more attractive and safer. The city increases tax collection from the new businesses being set up, which also reduces the cost related to having to deal with derelict areas. For the biggest Russian bank, caring about citizens is not just a nice thing to do, but also an effective way for Sberbank to positively impact its bottom line.

Urban Brand-Utility: a regenerative protopia to invigorate our industry narrative

The idea of a ‘circular economy’ was first raised by British environmental economists David W Pearce and R Kerry Turner in 1989. In Economics of Natural Resources and the Environment, they pointed out that a traditional open-ended economy was developed with no built-in tendency to recycle, which was reflected by treating the environment as a waste reservoir.

Since then, many approaches to transform our linear ‘take, make, dispose’ economy into one that turns waste into new resources have been tested. According to research from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, only around 20 percent of emissions for which we are responsible come from direct usage, such as driving cars or running showers. The rest is all hidden in the supply chains of what we buy. In the marketing supply chain, products can now be conceived in ways that eliminate waste and obsolescence (e.g. Cradle-to-Cradle), while places and people can be magnified through platform strategies and technologies, but what about the fourth and most notable ‘Marketing P’, that of promotion?

Rather than just minimising externalities, how may we maximise the benefit that brand touch points can deliver beyond transactional messages? According to Emma Forster, Smart City projects officer for City of Melbourne, “If brands need to think outside the box, cities need to think beyond the grid.”

Within this series of tensions Urban Brand-Utility (UBU) was born. Just like the idea of a circular economy, where products and services go beyond an end user’s finite life cycle, UBU looks at brand communications as closed loops by designing a system bigger than fixed campaign periods, target audiences and business as usual KPIs. As a ‘marketing protopia*’, UBU aims to reframe brand communications as a catalyst for sustainable development via public-private-people partnerships and radically innovative use of media through the adoption of three core objectives:

• enable savings or new earnings for cities
• create urban shared value to the cities’ inhabitants, and
• deliver superior return on brand objectives.

Here’s a hypothetical situation. Let’s assume that Sberbank’s Neighbourhoods campaign is turned into a bigger initiative, generating a large surplus to the city of Moscow by minimising the costs from dealing with unemployment, dereliction, vandalism and lower tax collection. Rather than treating this as a one-off campaign, smart mayors would try and create a virtuous cycle. In this thought experiment, 50 percent of the surplus is retained by the city, 25 percent is returned to the advertiser and 25 percent to the agency and media owner – a value unlocked only by repeating the approach.

The more advertisers communicate their messages in a way that benefits brand, people and city, the cheaper it becomes to do more of it. The more cities encourage such an approach, the faster societal problems would be addressed. In other words, UBU’s circular revenue model enables the creation of shared value by enhancing, instead of interrupting, people’s moments, turning marketing budgets into investment funds, as shown on the model below:

[quote style=’1′ cite=”]In this more useful and integrated new world, agencies and their clients would partner with cities and media owners via open data, matching brands with specific urban challenges and forming the foundations of a network of creative, urban resiliency.[/quote]

CMayors and citizen-consumers can help grow the pie 

Demonstrations of how the private sector can – through their brand communications – creatively fix what big government is failing to address, and make a profit, have not yet reached a tipping point, but isolated cases keep emerging. Domino’s Pizza is one of those brands that looked beyond the traditional path-to-purchase to permeate people’s life-journeys.

Aware that potholes, cracks and bumps in the road can cause irreversible damage to people’s pizzas during the drive home, Domino’s decided to pave towns across the US to save their customers’ pizzas from the bad roads. Obviously, not only Domino’s customers are benefited from this effort, but those using and maintaining the newly paved roads and, of course, the intangible value of the brand.

This may sound silly but, according to the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission of the US Congress, the annual investment required by all levels of government to simply maintain the US’s highways, roads and bridges is now estimated to be US$185 billion per year for the next 50 years. Today, the nation annually invests about US$68 billion.

Mayors and city managers from the municipalities where ‘paving for pizza’ has taken place have acknowledged the creation of shared value. In this sense, a new breed of mayors with a marketing mind, or CMayors (CMO plus mayor), are equally empowered to driving the UBU vision.

According to Bill Scherer, Mayor of Bartonville in Texas, “This unique, innovative partnership allowed the town of Bartonville to accomplish more potholes repairs.”

The city manager of Milford in Delaware, Eric Norenberg, said, “We appreciated the extra Paving for Pizza funds to stretch our street repair budget as we addressed more potholes than usual.”

Much more is required to create a reliable network of creative, urban resiliency. But, according to the 2015 World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Future of Cities, “Cities will always need large infrastructure projects, but sometimes small-scale infrastructure can also have a big impact on an urban area.”

As such, UBU can be operationalised by following six strategic imperatives:

1. Translate the big idea that defines your brand into a big utility that can deliver its impact.
2. Replace interruptive interactions with enhancing ones by delivering a public utility service.
3. Turn any existing utility of a communications effort from a stunt into a sustained practice.
4. Shift your business focus from short-term sales results to longer-term profitability and prosperity.
5. Broaden your audiences from customers to citizens, expanding paths-to-purchase onto life journeys.
6. Diversify revenue from sales to the creation of shared value and surpluses.

By considering advertising media as not only communication channels, but channels that can deliver public utility services, we can grow the size of the media spend pie and, by extension, the size and influence of the marketing, advertising, media, communications and creative industries.

As a comparison, in 2020 global media spend in brand communications accounted for almost US$517 billion, an almost 12 percent decline (due to COVID-19) when compared with 2019. Parallel to that, investment in Smart City infrastructure has amounted to US$124 billion, representing an increase of 18.9 percent over 2019 spending. When putting one next to the other, what we see is a 4:1 ratio, approximately. This means that for every dollar spent to improve our cities mobility, energy systems, safety, culture and entertainment, quality of air, water and so much more, four dollars are spent to sell us more stuff.

Through the UBU approach, the current US$517 billion spend could be increased by another US$25 trillion, which represents the much larger pie of global welfare and security spend, a figure obtained by dividing 2020’s Gross World Product (GWP) by the 30 percent global average spent on welfare and security as per the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

The above provides a plausible scenario for advertisers to become key players in public-private-partnerships to completely reinvent the industry and transform society for the better. [quote style=’1′ cite=”]Even though we cannot shop our way into sustainability, citizen-consumers are important players to enabling business to tackle the issues that matter most. [/quote]Where and how we spend our money does matter. But how much it matters depends on what else we do with our money and what governments and corporations do with their (considerably larger) pots. The big problem, though, is that individual monetary action – even when performed collectively – is only the beginning and, perhaps, an expensive distraction from the real work at hand.

The Consumer Citizen, a book by political scientist Ethan Porter, makes a provocative claim: “The conventional idea of citizenship is a fantasy, and the only language the vast majority of people understand is consumerism.” If that’s true, then we need a new mechanism that accepts this reality and tries to leverage it to produce the best possible outcomes. Whereas individual product swaps will do little to nothing to impact legislation and corporate responsibility, could it be different if not only products, but the media promoting those, is repurposed? That’s UBU’s big bet.

Authors:

	Sérgio Brodsky is the executive producer of Futurecast and a leading brand and foresight strategist.
	Jo Whyte is the Head of the Marketing and Communications at TAC.
	Puruesh Chaudhary is a futures researcher and strategic narrative professional and the founder and President of AGAHI.

Cover Artwork:

Original illustration and artwork by Rafael Medeiros.

Essayist Anaïs Nin famously said: “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

Although this may sound metaphorical, recent research across academic fields ranging from neuroscience to cognitive psychology to linguistics has revealed just how true this adage is. Quite literally, the narratives we use to organise and understand the world determine, to a large extent, our perceptions of, our interactions with and our emotions towards, the world.

Our feelings are not only an integral part of our moral, social and personal well-being, but also are vital tools for solving the complex challenges we face individually, organisationally and even as a species. As Emiliana Simon-Thomas of the University of Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Centre says, “[Emotions] provide us with quintessential information about what’s important and what to do next, and how to do it and who to do it with.”

In recent decades, an array of scientific insights has reshaped the way we view emotions, particularly in the way they affect how we think about the future.

As a simple example, there is evidence that mere exposure to the Apple logo can briefly enhance an individual’s creativity. This is because of the narrative that has long supported that image: a simple bitten apple represents change, innovation and individual expression (as established via deliberate advertising and slogans urging people to ‘think different’ and ensure ‘creativity goes on’).

Importantly, the impact of narrative and metaphors is not confined to the present. According to Professor Sohail Inayatullah, UNESCO’s chair in Futures Studies: “Metaphors present themselves as the main causation drivers of the future.” In other words, our narratives not only shape our current social milieu, but are the primary drivers behind its evolution.

Back in 2009, Oscar-winning animated short Logorama encapsulated almost a century of corporate greed, animated by its myriad brands. The film’s lack of a coherent story is in itself a nod to brainless entertainment, our social decline due to an inundation of consumer culture that feeds on the one thing it promotes, consumption. The sheer intended chaos expressing the words that have been creating our world were the alarm bells that many keep ignoring.

Now, if we are to truly shift course, to make individual commitments that allow us to build better futures, we need to find a big and emotionally satisfying story that makes sense of the world in which we now live and points the way towards a brighter future.

A call-to-arms is not the call-to-action we need to reframe this pandemic from tragedy to opportunity

With regards to COVID-19, researchers, journalists and politicos have primarily utilised the narrative of ‘war’ structured under the warrior archetype. Chinese premier Xi Jinping swore to wage a ‘people’s war’ on the coronavirus; US President Donald Trump described himself as a ‘wartime president’; Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi invoked the imagery of the 18-day battle from the Hindu epic Mahabharata when commencing the country’s lockdown.

Moving to the world of business, Burger King released a ‘call-to-arms’ campaign urging ‘couch potatriots’ to make orders through the Burger King app. Furthermore, as a ‘salute’ to those on the ‘frontline fighting’ the COVID-19 pandemic, this company also gave away 250,000 Whoppers to nurses across the US.

The problem with the wartime narrative is that the warrior archetype wins their battle not through adaptation or change, but merely through recognising and tapping into the power and strength they have had all along. Interestingly, war has been waged on everything from crime, cancer, drugs and terrorism, to Christmas and now COVID and, as a narrative, it has proven itself more often than not ineffective. The narrative is so strongly embedded and evocative of rivalry and conquest that it would have prevented the West – not faring much better than less developed and less wealthy countries in Africa and Asia – from calling upon their wisdom and experience from having dealt with Ebola and SARS outbreaks. And despite this being a global pandemic, requiring global cooperation, many countries are still not being invited to a seat at the table.

When we use this narrative to frame the current pandemic, we can expect to see little to no long-term social change once COVID-19 comes under control. The reason for this is that the narrative demands we’ve always had the resources to succeed: if we already have the power to beat this enemy, why change a thing? In fact, pundits have pointed out that when this narrative has been used in the past to characterise a crisis, that return to the status quo was swift and no lasting change occurred.

If we want the outcome of this crisis to be different – if we want to establish enduring cultural change – then we must shift the narrative that we are employing. Rather than ‘war’, we must select a narrative that focuses on adaptation, evolution and future betterment.

To this end, we propose the archetype of Gaia that, according to Greek mythology, is the ancestral mother of all life. [quote style=’1′ cite=”]A more mature and developed alternative to the war narrative, the Gaian narrative focuses largely on collective development and interconnectedness, it elevates service above winning and it extols the virtues of establishing an abiding legacy beyond the present.[/quote]

As a social catalyst, COVID-19 has led to a few interesting examples of positive change. For instance, Amsterdam has formally embraced the Doughnut economics model, a breakthrough and holistic alternative to the destructive, growth economics employed over the last few centuries. Similarly, in Spain, progressive steps are being taken towards the implementation of a universal basic income. In Milan, one of Europe’s most ambitious schemes reallocating street space from cars to pedestrians is being introduced in response to COVID. In an attempt to improve the world, Princess Sofia of Sweden has been volunteering to clean and cook at a local hospital, having exchanged her royal attire for a white and blue uniform.

Likewise, brands have been beginning to adopt more holistically considered behaviours, retooling themselves in response to COVID out of a sense of public responsibility. For instance, in the UK Burberry announced it would use its global supply network to deliver 100,000 surgical masks to NHS workers and repurpose its trench coat factory in Yorkshire to manufacture gowns for hospital patients.. In March 2020, the British Honey Company announced it would use spare capacity in its Buckinghamshire distillery to produce hand sanitiser. And independent craft brewer BrewDog is currently in talks with the UK government about turning its closed bars into temporary COVID vaccination centres.

These examples highlight that a shift in narrative can occur and, if we want to see lasting change following this pandemic, we must collectively change the COVID narrative. If we want to avoid a reversion to the status quo – a world marked by social inequality, climate change avoidance, scarcity of resources and the Kardashians – then the media must work to change the narrative. [quote style=’1′ cite=”]How can the media adopt the Gaian narrative? In this instance, the virus would stop being referenced as an ‘enemy’ (something to be defeated before returning back to normal) and would start being referenced to as a ‘catalyst’ (something instigating change requiring adaptation).[/quote] Pushing further, the focus of newscasts would no longer be disaster and tragedy. Rather, the focus would shift to healing and the measures being taken to engender protection and improvement. Finally, the media would not simply look backwards on the events of the day; it would begin to look forward to the larger impacts of our daily actions and decisions.

Conclusion

One of the most unfortunate and widely accepted ideas about historical thinking is that ‘history is written by the victors’. This maxim asserts that the truth of the past is shaped by the might of political and cultural leaders on the ‘winning’ side of history. The winners exploit the power of historical narratives mediatised through school textbooks, public iconography, movies, etc., to achieve their own ends.

In his book ‘Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century’, historian John Bodnar discusses the concept of ‘official cultural expressions’ that aim to shape how people remember the past. These expressions originate from social leaders and official authorities that seek to shape society’s historical understanding in ways that promote “social unity, the continuity of existing institutions, and loyalty to the status quo”. In other words, those in power have an interest in maintaining their power, and a “useable past” that conforms to their vision of present-day conditions can function as a strong tool in upholding their status.

It is a mistake (and rather defeatist) however, to assume that only the ‘winners’ of history have the power to manipulate the past to attain their present-day and future goals. This is especially the case in an age where the internet wields enormous potential for a person from any walk of life to build a powerful platform for spouting their beliefs and opinions. That was the case with Malala Yousafzai, Greta Thunberg, Joshua Wong and, why not, you!

We must do away with this fiction that history is only written by the winners to start winning back our preferred future.

	Sérgio Brodsky is the executive producer of Futurecast and a leading brand and foresight strategist.
	Sophia Bazile is an independent foresight researcher and Founder of FLYP (Futures Literate Youth and Professionals)
	Dr. Susann Roth is the foresight and futures lead at the Asian Development Bank.
	Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath is a Harvard Neuroscientist and the Director at LME.

Artwork:

Feature illustration and original artwork by Francisco Zuccato (Chico).

Done well, design, brand, marketing and communications already bring the user’s perspective to strategic innovation. Combining multiple approaches and mindsets in a structured way enables the development of meaningful new offerings, based on multiple possible future perspectives, not just the current state.

Knowing how and when to select and use foresight tools is complex (some call it a ‘black art’). Overall the goal is to develop holistic understandings of complex and multilevel challenges through time and space, deepen the rigour of existing programs and processes, and develop collaborations within and across teams, business units, departments, sectors and industries – all with an aim to provide new opportunities to innovate and improve. Futures thinking and foresight processes are inclusive and participatory by design – they go beyond key stakeholders and engage voices beyond the usual ‘system’, so that diverse perspectives can be shared and collectively held to identify long-term issues, inform strategy and support implementation.

1. Causal Layered Analysis (CLA): go deep to surface beliefs and create new narratives

Causal Layered Analysis – CLA for short – is a futures research technique introduced by Professor Sohail Inayatullah in the 1990s. CLA allows for a range of perspectives about an issue or strategic option to be explored to identify driving forces and worldviews shaping that issue. It is particularly useful when different groups hold different perspectives on ‘the future’ of something and what decisions or strategy should be actioned.

CLA is a way to create new futures through new narratives and systems that support these stories and new measurements that ensure the stories are grounded in empirical reality. As shown in the figure above, the framework is workshopped from top to bottom, allowing a holistic view of reality, both in the present and future, with actionable outputs throughout.

2. Horizon scanning: trends are not your friends

Trends are current state and based on historical patterns – recent, yes – but still past. For almost any kind of futures project, horizon scanning (or environmental scanning) is one of the early stage processes that focuses on understanding factors that could change or affect the future of an organisation or brand.

Horizon scanning describes a process for monitoring an organisation’s internal and external environments for different signals of change that could surface new threats and opportunities. It focuses on ‘weak signals’ or single examples of change observed in the present that may seem to be limited in geographical, cultural or political terms yet show potential to become forces of change in the future.

Insights, research and innovation teams could build a scanning capability to identify weak signals – those things that may become forces of change before a trend or change arrives – to help anticipate and prepare for proactive responses to that change. But scanning is not routine market research, looking at current issues or doing a competitive frame analysis.

The key to any scanning process is framing, analysis and synthesis, and requires those doing the scanning to remain open-minded about what may be important, so that there is no initial evaluation bias or elimination of data, ideas and information that could be collected before scanning begins.

Also, because the scanning topic(s) chosen to be explored may dictate research areas, it’s important to leave the scope broad enough to discover things that you did not set out to find and may perhaps uncover things that were not expected.

3. Futures Wheel: considering (un)intended consequences

If you’ve ever needed to explore the impact of a possible change, issue or event, you’ll know how hard it can be to identify all possible outcomes. More often than not, we write down the first consequences we can think of, and compile a list that’s shallow, incomplete, tricky to analyse and, well, linear – and lacks the nuanced interconnectedness of the indirect consequences that trip us up down the track.

Devised by Jerome C Glenn in 1971, the Futures Wheel is a way of questioning and then organising thinking about futures and especially uncovering all those impacts or consequences. A Futures Wheel (or impacts wheel) uncovers deeper understanding of the particular problem domain being analysed, so that any generated future model may be as accurate as possible. The process and structure of a futures wheel provides an overview of what may happen as a result of an event, change or decisions. It’s a visual tool that gives structure to collaboration or brainstorming and reveals interrelationships of causes and resulting changes through discussion.

4. Harman Fan: take a walk through (im)possible or (im)plausible futures

Consciously or not, we frequently engage notions of futures, whether they are tangible futures (designing possible artefacts of any kind) or intangible futures (designing possible interactions or services). And while marketing and design could be considered inherently futures-oriented (through conceiving, prototyping and creating things that do not yet exist) humans are functionally limited by our capacity to imagine much more than three to five years out in time.

The Harman Fan is a simple method for creating quick scenarios that describe how futures could unfold. The Harman Fan is a group activity that draws on imagination, creativity and brainstorming to draw out expansive critical thinking over a 20-year or so time-frame. By deliberately invoking uncertainty, the method allows imaginative, and fun, exploration of the crazy and wild headlines that we think we may never read or hear – and also shows the pathways that could get us there.

The Harman Fan can help with ‘anticipatory planning’ and identifying patterns, trends and emerging issues of change. Drawing on design fiction and experiential futures tools and methods, participants engage in co-creating radical alternative futures to start that conversation about how easily the ridiculous and preposterous can unfold. [quote style=’1′ cite=”]Run as part of a new product development process or kick-off workshop – before any strategy or creative begins – this method provides a brief entry into futuring and an opportunity to explore collective rapid prototyping of future visions and the artefacts that may populate those visions.[/quote]

5. Scenario thinking and scenario planning

Fundamental to using strategic foresight to guide anything (corporate strategy, business plans, investments, policy, brand strategy or longer-range R&D) is the development and use of scenarios. Scenarios are provocative views of futures that are emerging: stories and narratives of what could be, depictions of alternative futures, rather than predictions of what will be.

The use of scenarios goes back to Herman Kahn’s work at RAND in the 1950s. Often dubbed scenario planning, it’s actually more about scenario thinking – as noted by Henry Mintzberg, who makes the distinction between strategic planning, strategy development and strategic thinking.

Scenarios are one aspect of an integrated and ongoing foresight process – they are not the only output or the only tool. [quote style=’1′ cite=”]Scenarios are usually created after a rigorous and detailed program of scanning, information gathering, considered analysis, discussion and critical interpretation. They are images of futures grounded in research; they’re neither design scenarios nor speculation for speculation’s sake.[/quote]

The deeper the analysis and interpretation, the more robust those scenarios created are likely to be. Basing scenarios solely on trends, ‘big data’ and forecasts risks a very narrow range of alternative potential futures, which in turn can have an unintended impact on the continued viability of a strategy, product, service, brand or organisation. For them to be truly useful, biases, assumptions and the influence of the perceived or accepted wisdom of decision-makers (and preferences for hard facts and quantitative methods) need to be surfaced and addressed in scenarios work.

Most importantly, while scenarios are a valuable part of foresight work, there are multiple frameworks, approaches and methods in the futures toolkit for creating them, and they are always intended to be part of an ongoing, long-term, structured and embedded foresight efforts.

Conclusion

It’s hard to accept that our world is changing radically, especially if we acknowledge this means serious and large-scale changes to business, brand and operating models. But those doom and gloom dystopias we shy away from are closer to reality than many want to believe. [quote style=’1′ cite=”]Chasing one singular future – utopian or dystopian – is redundant, especially as most dominant narratives of ‘the future’ do not convey the global diversity of lives, voices, cultures and experiences now nor reflect how they may change over time.[/quote]

Marketing won’t fix this. Design won’t fix it either. (And as standard approaches have contributed to our current dilemma, they could just make it worse.) Design sprints, innovation workshops, strategy and a crew of consultants will only go so far. Some organisations have reached an impasse on long-term innovation strategies; some don’t have them. And the impetus for change has changed or waned.

Foresight as a discipline enables us to navigate futures and make sense of the possibilities so we can use it as a source of inspiration for what we do now, in the present. The tools and outputs can be applied in marketing and brand strategy and development – whether to develop products and services that anticipate needs, add meaning that improves people’s lives, prevent issues that impair our health and well-being, or help people make sense of changes in markets, contexts and ecosystems that brands may be part of or shape in years to come.

Authors:

	Sérgio Brodsky is the executive producer of Futurecast and a leading brand and foresight strategist.
	Bridgette Engeler is a Futurist, Senior Lecturer in Strategic Design, Foresight, Entrepreneurship and Innovation.
	Norike Ganhão is the General Manager Strategy at Powerlink Queensland.

Artwork:

Original title illustration and artwork by Ken Shadbolt.

Figures created by Karl Dyer.

A crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic has rightly forced urgent and frequently changing responses. Despite the best of intentions, this erratic behaviour from both the private and public sectors often results in inappropriate responses.

Of course, the current global pandemic makes the inadequate all the more obvious. And that’s a more fundamental problem. For too long we’ve relied on ‘data’ and predictive modelling – projections and promises of so-called certainty. Being agile and responsive has been interpreted as being ready to react – or too quick to think twice – and as a characteristic and a consequence of short-term thinking, it often brings outcomes that further inhibit our ability to think and act for the longer term.

While a ‘watch and wait’ approach may not seem any more viable or practical in what is perceived as increasing uncertainty, we need to direct our efforts to adapting and navigating the unknown and anticipating the unexpected. [quote style=’1′ cite=”]Uncertainty is the underlying context for our world, not certainty – and least of all the assumed all-too-comfortable certainty of ‘the market’.[/quote]

Indeed, for the kind of changes we are experiencing, the usual strategic planning does not cut it. We need something to help us imagine what could be in an unconstrained way, while providing enough structure to create a clear yet adaptive way forward. This is where foresight can play a meaningful role in helping us make sense of, and even shape, what comes next. Satisfying the imagined future needs of a customer or client is a tough starting point. But it’s a necessary challenge. Adding foresight to the marketing mix, and an ‘F’ to the ‘4Ps’ extends time-frames and possibilities, giving a broader understanding of how different futures may possibly evolve. Perhaps it’s time for a fifth P – Potential, Possible, Preferred or Preposterous?

On the application of Foresight and Futures Studies: longer-term thinking over short-term ‘fixes’

Whether you’re an agency or a brand owner, strategist or creative, the ‘business as usual’ (BAU) reductionist, simplistic viewpoint may sell in the short term, but it won’t create real value in the long term.

[quote style=’1′ cite=”]This is where futures thinking and foresight comes in: being focused but not inflexible, aware but not too easily distracted by trends or whatever is being pitched as the ‘next big thing’, and especially thinking beyond the next brand launch, sales cycle, quarterly report or financial year.[/quote]

Strategic foresight and futures thinking are research-based ways to investigate, not predict, the future – indeed nothing can – but they do help us think more deeply about multiple alternative ‘futures’, our role or agency in creating them, and how to make better decisions about what may lie ahead.

Strategic foresight and futures thinking are learned disciplines just as strategy, design, marketing and economics are. It draws on global knowledge bases built over time with tools, methods and theories that can be applied with proficiency and elegance, so they need more than this read or a boot camp to be learned and understood. Responsibility comes with risk. Would you consider yourself an expert in a field after reading one article or ready to influence a global strategy following a one-day course?

Confessions of a foresight convert: reassured by structured thinking, compelled by unconstrained by Norike Ganhão (General Manager Strategy at Powerlink Queensland)

I was introduced to futures studies when I attended a ‘Leading for Strategic Success’ course at the Melbourne Business School. Specifically, a TEDx talk on Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) by Professor Sohail Inayatullah resonated with me, as it seemed to have both structure and soul. From a personal perspective, the nature of the work spoke to both my logical engineering side and my creative lateral thinking side. As a power systems engineer I understand the need for structure and systems that are designed in an integrated way and that can shift and adapt as the environment changes, just like the power system. As a creative human, I understand the need to connect to your purpose and your soul, as well as being part of creating a better future rather than just responding to the environment. Futures studies provided both of these things. I was particularly drawn to CLA because it addresses the change needed at all the levels required. The power of metaphor truly sets us free to properly understand who we want and need to be in the future. CLA understands that change is required, not only at the litany level (what we observe on a day-to-day basis), but also at the systems level. CLA grasps the machine of people, process and technology that produces the outcomes on a day-to-day basis. CLA then goes deeper still to help us understand who we need to be for our customers and other stakeholders – the cultural shift required at the worldview level and then brings it back to metaphor. Once we connect through metaphor to who we need and want to be, all levels of an organisation are examined, so we can assess what needs to be done at every level to achieve change.

Brands and organisations can thrive if they learn to adapt amid change
[quote style=’1′ cite=”]No brand is static. And making decisions on a brand’s future based on only past and current performance data and analytics means you’re starting from behind.[/quote] Unfortunately, there are no ‘future facts’ to work with, so we have to use our imaginations and foresight tools – and avoid making predictions, projections and big decisions – based only on large amounts of historical data.

Create space for strategic conversations about preferred futures
Don’t limit conversations or scenarios to plausible or probable. Be brave. Foresight methods not only ask questions about what people (and other stakeholders in our world) want and need, but also how belief and behaviour may change over time in response to social, cultural and technological forces. This helps us understand how people (and the market) may react and change, what new products or services may have meaning and utility, and how a brand and value proposition must evolve to adapt to emerging realities.

Purpose, truth, sustainability, transparency, storytelling, human-centred design, imaginaries, disruption – whatever the latest term is, it needs to be more than a buzzword
An organisation’s bigger vision to be sustainable (whatever that means) or to reduce emissions, or some other valid goal, can be thwarted by those who still prioritise the short-term wins in revenue or market share in other divisions or business units.

Building on analytical and strategic thinking to integrate more critical thinking Ask better questions, tap into weak signals of change and use that to anticipate what may be in our futures. We still need to get used to working in complexity, but over time we’ll learn to stop chasing certainty.

Brand and Foresight: don’t be shy, neither shine… wedge in instead

It is not always the case that organisations will engage with strategic foresight practitioners or futurists to help take their businesses into the future. Despite a lack in futures literacy, in many cases, marketing agencies can be commissioned to do this type of work. The creative brainpower, analytical tools and deep understanding of their clients will often position agencies as innovation partners. The same is true for those in corporate strategy roles where future business forecasting is an ongoing exercise. However, this should be no impediment to those in agencies or in-house teams learning about and making good use of futures methods. Futures frameworks and methodologies can be ‘baked into’ the process of redefining a brand’s strategy, calibrating its budget, unearthing its purpose, repositioning for changing markets or when redesigning a brand’s architecture. In short, anything that relates to a brand’s future can be supported and enhanced by futures frameworks and tools.

For example, working with an incumbent energy company – not Powerlink – the task was to help redefine its enterprise-wide purpose. From the generic ‘keeping the lights on’ to something else able to ensure the company’s long-term relevance and alignment with its evolving corporate and product strategies. Importantly, with both business futures and corporate strategy units, the company’s vision was substantially formed and the journey that followed helped structure and crystallise its desired future, particularly in a category with, possibly, the most challenging and complex context.

It is not exaggerating to say that the world’s energy systems are transforming, and Australia’s energy landscape is undergoing the greatest transformation of the last century. It entails transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy, from centralised to distributed generation, from forecasting demand to supply with a regulatory and market system that was designed for a vastly different world. This is reflective, not just of market dynamics more broadly, but of fundamental change at a societal level. The transition is already underway with customers being offered more choice by new technology and service providers in the market, and advocacy from younger generations focused on renewable energies.

The transition to the new energy futures is seen as unprecedented generational change. It is moving rapidly and at the same time will extend over a long period, with the choices we make today setting direction for decades to come. These changes have turned an historically slow and stable industry for an essential service on its head, forcing the category to pause and rethink its role into the future – what it wants and needs to be and how to repurpose to make the biggest difference. [quote style=’1′ cite=”]With this, the approach to strategy needs to adapt to allow unconstrained thinking about future possibilities and pathways, and to create clarity about how to create a preferred future.[/quote]

The engagement was heavily consultative, allowing the most disparate points of view to provide a few hypothetical scenarios; however, before elaborating scenarios their ‘perimeters of meaning’ were also defined.

It was important not to alienate employees and the market about the company’s heritage in trading energy commodities. It was also important to create an innovative edge through product innovations, but without becoming a product-led company at the expense of brand. Third, parallel market acquisitions also meant that from one or few services, the new default offering had to be a multiservice one. Lastly, internal stakeholders agreed that the biggest competitive advantage would come from the deployment of experiences, not just the convenience of aggregated services.

Once defined, each ‘narrative quadrant’ (i.e. commodity, product, multiservice or experience) was stretched, helping envisage implications and possibilities within domains of meaning and required support to turning those into a desired future. This visualisation allowed participants to understand how to pull ‘meaning levers’ able to inform and communicate the company’s unfolding new futures.

From a total of eight scenarios, three were further refined. Mood boards were utilised to express the abstraction of energy, decommoditising it and creating new meaning able to point the organisation into distinctively different directions or, as we like saying, possible futures. Each image was purposefully chosen to express desirable factors within scenarios. The choice of images was informed by previous consultations and the analysis of the energy category. Mood boards were also paired with short purpose statements – two to three words able to encapsulate the meaning each scenario could potentially convey. The value of this approach lies in creating boundaries without necessarily imposing business limitations; they are all about meaning, hence all about brand. This way, participants are encouraged to bring their individual and collective responsibilities in a way that expands the development of scenarios, as opposed to contriving those due to specific mergers, divestments, corporate agendas, product innovation horizons and more. These factors are also considered and repurposed within each scenario.

By converting the scenarios into value propositions, those in the room realised they were just as essential as their ideas to make the company’s foresight narrative a possibility. Further, the exercise proved extremely pragmatic and grounded once scenarios were complemented with respective strategies and translated into customer storytelling.

The client who sponsored the project made an insightful point about the positioning of brand foresight towards its conclusion:

“I think something to consider is that the conversation we have been having about the future of the business is a massive strategic business conversation. One of the challenges you and I face is that these narratives and brand strategy decisions are driven by brand and marketing, but are actually quite senior competitive decisions, so with the demise of the CMO and CMOs frequently being pushed to be short-term focused and with high turnovers, who then leads that conversation? The CEO? That’s been a challenge. It is like the modern corporate structure no longer supports brand management as strategic enterprise marketing – where should brand foresight sit? Food for thought – no easy answers, just one of the challenges for those of us on the inside!”

	Sérgio Brodsky is the executive producer of Futurecast and a leading brand and foresight strategist.
	Bridgette Engeler is a Futurist, Senior Lecturer in Strategic Design, Foresight, Entrepreneurship and Innovation.
	Norike Ganhão is the General Manager Strategy at Powerlink Queensland.

Artwork:

Original illustrations and artwork by Ken Shadbolt.

In an increasingly digital world, this is the area that will require continued focus from those looking to thrive and succeed in the profession. The key differentiator though is ensuring marketers are picking up digital skills that demand creative input or interpretation. Simple data processing and repeatable tasks will either disappear altogether or be increasingly automated and marketers will be able to hand over the mundane elements and simple analytics to algorithms, leaving them freer to conduct detailed and in depth analysis, practise blue sky thinking and connect the dots that their research will uncover.

Indeed, it will be the capabilities currently regarded as niche that will emerge as the most important tools in a marketer’s skillset. At the top of these in-demand skills will be those in the field of insights and data, with customer experience (CX), user experience (UX), user interface (UI), AI (artificial intelligence) and machine learning all gaining in importance. To call marketing 2025 a technology hub would not be overstating it.

The most significant of those is one that not that long ago dwelt in the realms of science fiction. When Stephen Spielberg released the movie AI in 2001, having taken over the film project from its originator Stanley Kubrick six years earlier, it’s unlikely anyone would have foreseen that 20 years later marketers would say the need for having AI capabilities will rise from six percent to an astonishing 60 percent over the next five years.

Likewise, neuromarketing skills, which are predicted to rise from a very specialised eight percent niche to a majority 52 percent by 2025.

What is behind both of these trends is sophisticated data analytics, of course – the requisite enabling technology to put them into effect. Accordingly, survey respondents pinpoint this as the absolute priority skill marketing teams will need to have by 2025.

The following marketing skills are all predicted to rise in importance over the next five years.

• AI/machine learning +54 percent
• neuromarketing/buyer behaviour +44 percent
• CX/UX/UI +31 percent
• experiential marketing +23 percent
• analytics/data/insights +19 percent
• influencer marketing +12 percent
• marketing technology/operations +8 percent
• programmatic buying +7 percent
• ecommerce +2 percent

Declining skills

The laws of physics mean that as some things ascend and take on greater importance it’s only to be expected that others will naturally lose their current place in the pecking order, falling away and out of favour. In marketing, this means that some of the current areas of focus will lose relevance. Marketers predict that some of today’s most requested skills, such as digital marketing and media, while not disappearing, are expected to drop over 20 percentage points, from 73 to 52 percent. Social media marketing and content marketing are looking at even less rosy futures, predicted to halve in relevance from 66 to 33 percent and 63 to 39 percent respectively.

Facing even greater irrelevance are the most traditional capabilities – the general marketing skills that are looking at avalanche-like figures of 65 to just 13 percent in 2025. And there are notable differences depending on the sector involved. Retail C-suite respondents to the survey see the importance of these skills diminishing from 70 percent today to just seven percent in five years’ time. But manufacturing related marketing is even more pronounced, with general marketing skills expected to disappear completely – going from a healthy 73 percent today to absolute zero.

The following marketing skills are those predicted to decline in importance:

• web/app development -0.4percent
• shopper marketing -3 percent
• segment marketing -10 percent
• telemarketing -12 percent
• market research -12 percent
• digital marketing and media -21 percent
• content marketing -24 percent
• public relations/corporate communications -29 percent
• social media marketing -32 percent
• field marketing/events -34 percent
• product marketing -35 percent
• generalist marketing – 53 percent

To learn more about the future skills marketers will need over the next five years, plus marketers’ expectations for the way the industry will change, download Marketo’s Marketing 2025.

Photo by Octavian Rosca on Unsplash.

Future-back is a competence that can be developed by first creating a vision and then threading it back to the present

by Mark W Johnson, founding partner at Innosight

Transformation is not possible without coordinated, bold leadership that brings future horizons into the present. In recent years, newspapers, grocery stores, music, movies and TV have all been disrupted. It’s not that the leaders of incumbent industries don’t have sharp strategies and plans. The problem is that they extrapolate their current model into the future instead of envisioning the possibilities. Facing the ‘innovator’s dilemma’, corporations tend to work to improve their margins and please their best customers by allocating the bulk of their investments toward improvements that sustain, enhance and make their existing businesses more efficient. New, exciting and potentially disruptive growth initiatives may get a lot of buzz, but they rarely receive the funding they need.

[quote style=’1′ cite=”]Developing and deploying an inspiring and actionable vision is a skill that can be learned. [/quote] Beyond that, it can be driven into the cultures of even the most hidebound organisations, reigniting their entrepreneurial fires and infusing them with a renewed sense of purpose, direction and commercial breakthroughs.

To develop your vision, your first task is to explore what the future is likely to hold, targeting the right time horizon.

Then, you grapple with the implications of that future for your organisation, developing a high-level view of what your customers will value and how market dynamics will work, characterising the major threats and opportunities that are likely to emerge and assessing where ‘business as usual’ would likely lead.

Visioning the future
The online Macmillan Dictionary defines vision as the ability to “think about or plan for the future, using intelligence and imagination”, an “idea or hope of how something should be done, or how it will be in the future” and simply the “ability to see”. Visioning, in a business context, is about having a clear worldview on the markets of the future and the role that your organisation can play in that new and different world. Having a really powerful vision can unleash the potential to transform whole industries. When we call a business leader a visionary, we mean they have a vivid understanding of their organisation’s best possible future – one that can potentially transform whole industries. Vision is the ‘what’ not the ‘how’. Vision is made actionable through strategy, which is the means to achieve it.

Future-back is all about anticipating and shaping the markets of the future

It is what you need when you must play a new game, with a different set of rules. To recognise developments that threaten your existing paradigm, you need to set your planning horizon much further out than most companies do. To leverage those developments to your full advantage, you need to think and lead from the future back.

Image: Lead from the Future by Mark W. Johnson and Josh Suskewicz

To do this, you must assert a point of view on how to best respond to and shape that future, defining the desired future state of your enterprise inclusive of both the evolution of its current businesses and the development of new ones. Put it all together and you have got a vision that’s ready to be translated into a future-back strategy.

Image: Lead from the Future by Mark W. Johnson and Josh Suskewicz

More specifically, you need to think in terms of filling and balancing a set of three linked and interdependent portfolios: 1) the future state portfolio, which is a financial projection of your enterprise at your target end date, 2) the innovation portfolio, which captures programs and initiatives in the present that set you up to evolve into the future state, and 3) the investment portfolio, which specifies the resources that fund the innovation portfolio.

Future-back thinking needs to be embraced by a whole leadership team, emphasising the importance of skillful stakeholder management. This is particularly true for CMOs who, according to a recent Marketo report about marketers’ views of the future, are almost six times more likely to identify executive buy-in as the core problem compared to CEOs.

For that to happen it is critical to ensure your company’s leadership spends enough time together thinking in both ways: present-forward and future-back thinking. Quarterly future-back reviews can be great opportunities for collective thinking and for keeping strategy efforts on track.

For future-back thinking and doing to truly take root in an organisation, look to nurture these four ingredients:

• the understanding that successful enterprise leadership is as much about exploring and envisioning as executing and operating
• a willingness on the part of its members to change their behaviour, even if they’re not ready to change their minds
• a willingness to ‘dance’ with each other, guided by the structure of a shared vision for the enterprise, and
• a strong, independent board and the willingness to collaborate with it.

Just as vision needs to be translated into a strategy, a strategy must be carefully programmed into an organisation before it can be effectively implemented.

When programming a breakthrough strategy, you must design and assemble a set of components that ultimately come together as an integrated system that 1) formalises the roles and responsibilities of the senior leadership team as champions of the strategy, 2) sets up an organisation model that protects breakthrough innovation teams from the countervailing influences of the core, and 3) manages initiatives with a process that incentivises a faster pace of learning.

Image: Lead from the Future by Mark W. Johnson and Josh Suskewicz

What to listen to when trying to foresee future breakthroughs.                                                                                                       
Great economic paradigm shifts occur when, in a given moment in time, three defining technologies emerge and converge, creating a new infrastructure that changes the way that society manages, powers and moves its economic activity, social life and governance. These are new means of communication, new sources of energy and new modes of mobility and logistics that, combined, result in changes to our built environment, our spatial-temporal orientation, our business models, our governance and, fundamentally, our narrative. To achieve breakthrough growth, map out how these three types of tech – communications, mobility and energy – are evolving and where and how they converge. That’s your sweet spot.

To achieve and sustain breakthrough growth, leaders are encouraged to master the future-back managerial approach, one that is more intuitive but no less rigorous. On that same Marketo report, only three percent of marketers considered their teams to be cutting edge, compared to nine percent of CMOs and, while investments in tech can provide serious value, the ability to create disruptive offerings can be exponentially greater. Embracing the future and threading it back to the present gives you a competitive advantage.

As Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has said:

[quote style=’1′ cite=”]It’s all about the long term. As a company, we are cultural pioneers, and we like to disrupt even our own business. If everything you do needs to work on a three-year horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people. But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that.[/quote]

From agency leader to humanitarian leader: the power of perspective to redefine the future

by Saul Betmead de Chasteigner, global CMO at United Nations World Food Programme

I could talk about how perception, positioning and politics are often more important than the actual innovations themselves, and that the success of those interventions is often driven by an organisation’s ability to claim, demarcate and control the category when successfully taking a new product or a new service on the path to becoming the dominant design. I could explore how remarkable the tools that marketers and their agencies now have at their disposal. These are tools that can not only augment existing products and services, but also create entirely new ones – capabilities that in under a decade have transformed the face of marketing, putting it firmly in the driving seat of distinctive, valuable customer experiences. But I suspect most of the readers of this article will already have heard a lot about these things, and on reflection it would also be something that I could have written before I started at the United Nations World Food Programme (UNWFP). So I decided on a different tack.

So, what’s new? How have my perspectives on foresight, innovation and leadership changed over the last year?

Working at the UNWFP has taught me a great deal about innovation. It’s been humbling but also inspiring, and those lessons come down to a fundamental idea, captured by one of my favourite authors, American William Gibson: “The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed.” It speaks to me because I now work for an organisation that in any given year can feed over 100 million of the most vulnerable people on earth.

It is an organisation that is the logistical backbone of the global humanitarian system, and an organisation that has just been awarded the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize for its impact in the world. Part of that Nobel recognition I think is because the organisation is the logistical backbone of the global humanitarian system, driven by its capability in more traditional technologies: the aeroplanes, the trucks and the remarkable Sherp. But at the same time, it is one of the most innovative organisations I have ever seen, it has taught me to treat innovation simply as a potential solution to a difficult problem, even when those innovations feel like they belong exclusively in the richer, more developed nations.

It’s taught me the importance of being able to sense where and what those innovations are, and to be open minded. They could come from within the organisations remarkable 17,000-plus staff, from our partners or beyond.

[quote style=’1′ cite=”]It has also taught me to constantly push to find ways to shape them into scalable solutions, even in the most challenging places on earth, and critically to be able to pivot when the unexpected happens – enter COVID-19. [/quote]

One particularly good example for me is in the world’s largest refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. With no means to earn an income, many of those in the camp depend entirely on agencies such as UNWFP to survive. Each month the recipients of food assistance are told when to collect their assistance from a variety of humanitarian organisations stationed within the sprawling camp, juggling a range of authentication forms for the various agencies.

UNWFP introduced blockchain technology to allow recipients to collect assistance from multiple humanitarian organisations, including UNWFP, in one go. The system is designed to be touch-operated but, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, a digital QR (quick response) code was issued, allowing people to collect assistance without having to handle potentially contagious devices. As of September 2020, blockchain is serving over 500,000 of the 855,000 Rohingya refugees in Cox’s Bazar, and we are working to extend its use to all of them before the year’s end. There are countless examples like this – from creating new kinds of high-altitude food delivery drop systems to get to the remotest of places, to hydroponics for smallhold farmers that can transform a community’s futures.

This experience has helped stop me being bound by what the Gestalt psychologists called ‘functional fixedness’, a condition from which we all suffer – struggling to see something from a different perspective to that in which it was originally used.

[quote style=’1′ cite=”]It has made me think that in creating a better future for those who have fallen the furthest behind, rather than thinking about innovation as the next disruptive big thing, it’s perhaps much more about context model innovation – where ideas in one place, whether they are the latest technologies or those used for thousands of years, can find an important, life-saving and life-changing role in another.[/quote]

Conclusion

by Sérgio Brodsky, executive producer at Futurecast

There is no greater fear than the fear of the unknown. Strategic foresight and futures thinking exist to help tame the imaginary line connecting now and then. Competence alone is not enough; character and perspective are also required in equal doses. This means that working with the future needs a lot more than hype cycle analyses and predictions about the future of this and that from self-anointed guru-ninja-hackers without any proper training in foresight. Developing strong characters is fundamental to ensuring an ethos of good ancestry. Practising future-back management is critical to enabling breakthrough innovation and leapfrogs when the road ahead seems rather foggy. [quote style=’1′ cite=”]Nurturing a sense of perspective becomes the antidote from getting stuck in antiquated ways of working, thinking and behaving.[/quote]

Marketing’s new research and developments can indeed be quite distracting given their high frequency and volume. In trying to make sense of the new and generate brand buzz from it, marketers end up missing out on rather transformational opportunities – those where the future can be more evenly distributed.

This is rather disconcerting since marketers are often some of the most well-rounded and best-informed professionals in their organisations, with a sharp sense of ‘what’s next’. Still, many get caught by the glitz of the novel, instead of putting their energy in the grittiness of the foresight process. In fact, when it comes to crystalising the definition of the 21^st century marketer, Google conducted an experiment that involved interviewing 30 board members from Fortune 1000 companies, having accumulated more than 1300 minutes of audio and over 100,000 words about the role of the CMO (Think with Google 2020), which was then summarised in one long, important paragraph:

“The 21st century CMO is expected to be a marketing miracle worker, an alchemist who combines classic art of branding with the latest advances in data and measurement. All this while you serve as the connective tissue of the C-suite and stay a step ahead of the rapidly changing landscape of digital technology, cultural trends and shifting consumer expectations – things becoming ever more important to the stock price. Customers matter more than ever and, since you’re responsible for them, your role should matter more than ever too. But board members do not seem to have one cohesive definition of the role. So, what are you to do? Internally, steer expectations for your role by defining growth, you have some control over. And recognise that the talent of your team is half the battle to achieving that growth. Hire the best measurement people, because marketing will be held to some metric that is currently beyond reach, and you’ll need them to invent it. There are many ways you can impact revenue – but be prepared to show the ‘I’m indispensable’ maths. And do not forget the most visible CMOs also take big risks. Only three percent of board members interviewed were marketers. Likely, they do not hear you. Listen closely and find the overlap between what the board is interested in and your responsibilities. And, instead of building slides about everything you do, build one slide that puts you in a position to start a conversation around those common interests and goals.”

What is interesting to note is that futures thinking is all over the paragraph and yet, nowhere on it. As haiku-esque as a statement, this is the closest to the truth. Strategic foresight and futures thinking are not explicitly mentioned, but implicitly dominate the subtext, with clear emphasis on character, competence and perspective too. Therefore, the opportunity is to nurture the Futurecast seed, and develop the gravitas required for marketers and their peers to encourage and normalise the allocation of foresight investment. If education is key to opening more doors for foresight, appropriate use of language is the red carpet welcoming the long-awaited guests that can help reshape the future for the better.

For the ambitious marketers out there, this is just the beginning of your futures literacy. Use it and pierce the future through the present.

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	Sérgio Brodsky is the executive producer of Futurecast and a leading brand and foresight strategist.
	Saul Betmead de Chasteigner is the chief marketing officer at the United Nations World Food Programme.
	Mark Johnson is co-founder and Senior Partner of Innosight.

Artwork:

Original illustrations and artwork by Tobi Laniyan.

Other images are excerpts from ‘Lead from the Future’ by Mark W. Johnson and Josh Suskewicz.