Spending the day at #iStrategy, global marketing conference. I won’t summarise the keynote sessions. You will be able to find most of them on iStrategy site.  However, I am extracting the common themes I find throughout the multiple presentations.
Amazing line up to start day 1 Ken Segall (ex Apple creative director, the man responsible for “I” everywhere, follow up by Jason Hincks (co founder & CEO of Movember), as well as a Panel of retailers etc…

The leanrings behind their success stories can be summarised in 5 themes:

1-Simplicity is what makes people fall in love with brands:
This was very much, Steve Jobs’ philosophy and how he drove Apple from near bankruptcy to global success. Making users love Apple and its products was all he truly cared about. Why? He turned computer users into Apple fans by making simplicity the ultimate sophistication.
From his experience, Ken Segall explained that being simple is not easy. A pure idea is battled by over populated meetings, negativity current affairs, competitors fighting back… all these currents push you to complexity…  He summarised how to achieve simplicity by a quote from Antoine de Saint Exupery “ Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add but when there is nothing else to remove”.
My French touch says: Simplicity is sexy!

This trend is also reflected in the way retail is changing. Technology is actually making the customer journey longer and ever more complex: discovery> search>buy>acquire>use & share>relationship. There are now more channels than ever before, the role of retailers is to bring them together into a seamless customer experience. In store influences online behaviour and vice versa. The key is to make it simple & compelling. John Batistich (Director Marketing, Westfiled) shopping world tour showed some great shopping experiences from Eataly food theater to Nike wearable devices, Burberry Flagship store and Uniqlo clothes to change the world. From his point of view, the next big change is location profiling. This is simple: bring customer, content and context together!

2-Be authentic:
I have talked about that in many of my posts as it is an absolute pillar of social media success. It came out strongly again in the beautiful Movember story. Authenticity is  what prevents Movember from turning into white noise on the marketplace . How have the Movember team managed to keep their idea growing over 10 years and across multiple countries? Simply (ahha) by putting the fun factor as a priority over raising funds (of course raising funds is important, but is not the main reason why guys join!) and by refreshing their brand every year with a campaign theme that is true to Men’s health. This has driven them to always defend their brand vigorously (selective partnership, not expanding into growing Mos all year long…)

How women can support Movemver

On a side note, I will also highlight the importance of social media. Just to nail the point that social is  taking on search #justsaying: Facebook is the number one referral of traffic and donation (brings 31% Movember traffic and 15% of donation) and is ahead of Google…

Also, when you are Authentic you can do stuff like Scoopertino without creating a crisis…

3-Passion:
Certainly true for anyone who worked with Steve Jobs at Apple, but also true for the Movember crew who turned a mates catch up at the pub into a multi-million dollar fund raiser.
Nick Baker (Executive General Manager Marketing) also talked about how Tourism Australia took passion to the next level by making their 4.2 Million fans the heros in the community. In doing so, they created the biggest, most engaged social media team in the world.
My take on it is: if you are not passionate about what you do, ask yourself why you are doing it?

4- Take some risks:
Confirmation from executives that the only way to grow is to challenge the status quo and take risks.
From Tourism Australia shifting from advertising to socially amplified advocacy. Easier said than done but over the years they have done it! From photo Fridays, to newsjacking the social media team now plays a central role into the communication planning. Their latest campaign Best jobs in the world collected over 620K application from all around the globe. Surely better engagement than a TVC!
Again, Steve Job’s example “here is to the crazy ones ad (voice over by Jobs but that actually never got released) is the best illustration of achieving greatness by not following but leading the way

Marie Sornin