Brands must help us live easier and more meaningful lives

Brands should forget chasing likes and followers and instead start with the consumer, says Mindshare UK’s head of creation Laura Scanlon. The future is marked for the brands that can create ideas routed in real human understanding; that can close a pain gap or enhance a love to ultimately make our lives better, happier and easier.

Today, working in advertising feels like living in a science fiction convention – our wildest, futuristic fantasies projected back at us via blogs, videos, PowerPoint slides and keynote speeches.

Except these aren’t the dreamy abstract thoughts of sci-fi writers, but updates and launches from technology and media companies. 3D printing is being used to create human kidneys, eradicating the desperate, often tragic wait for suitable transplants.

The reusable rocket making space travel a reality for the non-astronauts among us.

And this week, Google announced Google Loons, which will bring a wireless internet service to the whole world via a solar powered, airborne ‘Loon’ network of balloons.

It’s a time of optimism and opportunity. Never before have companies been able to play a bigger, better and more meaningful role in people’s lives.

And never before have people needed it more. We are more stressed, anxious and, surprisingly, lonelier than ever.

In light of this cultural context, brands should be thinking about how they can utilise technological advancement to make their consumers’ lives a little bit easier, a little bit better and a little bit happier.

And yet unfortunately, the majority of brands are too busy launching apps, chasing likes and buying views to notice; too obsessed with winning the never-ending, incremental technology arms race to be the first to market to make the fastest, quickest, most original next big thing; forgetting that technology’s original purpose was to enhance quality of life, oblivious to the fact that there’s never been a better time to do this.

For example, several weeks ago Volkswagen launched its Smileage app – an in-car app that automatically tracks journeys; tagging passengers and socialising updates and photos of the journey. The app also rates journeys with a ‘fun score’ based on details such as the number of interactions and weather.

Just because the technology exists that allows us to do this, it doesn’t mean we should. It’s a superfluous layer that distracts, rather than enhances the driving experience. Because, ultimately, how many people want to socially track their journeys and more importantly, how many people care about other people’s daily car journeys?

If instead, VW had started with asking itself how it could use technology and data to make the drivers’ experience better, it would have no doubt reached a different conclusion. It might, for instance, have launched a service that pre-identified parking spaces in busy cities – just as BMW has with its Park Life app.

VW isn’t the only one guilty with its technology rather than consumer first approach to innovation. Today it feels like everything from our car to our toaster is smart and wants to talk to us – and wants us to ‘like’ it.

A recent Havas study revealed that only 20% of brands currently play a meaningful role in consumers’ lives. Pertinently, the same study revealed that the public wouldn’t care if 73% of brands disappeared tomorrow.

Playing a meaningful role in consumers’ lives isn’t just a nice CSR box ticking exercise either. Meaningful brands outperform the stock market by 120%.

It’s no coincidence that Nike, the brand responsible for creating a never-ending suite of meaningful assets and experiences from Nike Run London to Nike Fuel Band, is one of top 10 meaningful brands in the UK.

At this year’s SXSW, tellingly, it wasn’t a new social platform, but useful hardware and software innovation that attracted the most attention. Jawbone’s UP.

UP is a wristband and app that quantifies how you sleep, move and eat.

Post SXSW, when I returned back to the UK, I bought one, and two interesting things have happened since;

1) I’ve become a data fanatic and this is socially decisive. Not everybody enjoys chatting about my previous night’s sleep performance.

2) More importantly, I’ve become healthier. By quantifying how many steps I take each day and how much sleep I’m getting, I’ve begun stepping and sleeping more. I now walk to work every day.

This isn’t surprising. Behavioural economic studies dictate that quantifying behaviour is a powerful way to make positive changes and Jawbone’s UP is a brilliant example of the power of technology today.

It’s this clarity that should form the basis of our thinking for brand behaviour. Forget chasing likes and followers; instead start with the consumer. Create ideas routed in real human understanding and big data driven insight – ideas that close a pain gap or enhance a love to ultimately make our consumers’ lives better, happier, easier.

Ideas executed through the magical powers of today’s technology world.

Ideas for good.