Where is your north?

Renaissance woman: Lauren Laverne has drawn from her own experience as a busy, working mum to launch The Pool.

As Cannes Lions 2015 gets under way, Jez Nelson, CEO of Somethin’ Else, examines how brands can play a meaningful role in the lives of their customers when their world is moving faster than the marketing industry can keep up with.

I’m of a generation of brand loyalists. I know what I like and I love what I know. Music, football, news, shopping all have their trusted sources. Except lately I’m feeling a little bit frisky and even, well, promiscuous.

If I’m honest I’m confused. I can’t always keep up with what my brands are offering me anymore – it’s like they’re changing and either they’re outgrowing me or I’m tired of them. I’m not sure I love them anymore, or maybe they don’t love me?

It seems I’m not alone. According to the much touted recent Havas research if 92% of brands disappeared tomorrow the majority of people in Europe wouldn’t care.

All brands are facing the same challenge. Rate of change. Change in how they reach us, what they tell us, what we want to hear and how we want to hear it. Superficial explosive contact is still possible with enough fire power and cash. But how can brands play a meaningful role in the lives of their customers when their world is moving faster than the marketing industry can keep up with? When everything is changing and choice is abundant why should, even the most brand loyal, stay faithful?

Lost in the wilderness our natural inclination has been to look east and west. To follow the ideas and technologies that are coming from Silicon Valley and China.

In a desperate attempt to keep up communications plans are constantly turbo-charged with innovation. Dazzle the audience with the new and perhaps they’ll be impressed and stay true. The trouble is what’s new is always the newest thing. Not the new thing that’s now old. So true innovation is always at the periphery.

Of course innovation is good and change essential. We don’t want to get too cosy. But in a dizzying world of uncertainty it’s about choosing the right change at the right time. So as well as looking selectively to the East and the West, we should remember that our audiences, our customers, are the True North.

As their worlds change and become both more exciting and complex there’s an opportunity for visionary brands to play an even greater role in their lives. Rather than changing at the edges, the bold move is to seek bigger behavioural change at the centre; looking beyond modifying your product or communications plan, surpassing the cult of the new to offer genuine value.

Be guided by purpose not change. If your focus is genuinely to service your audience then perhaps staying relevant means fundamental change in what you produce, what you do.

Understanding your audience is key. For this reason, three guests will be joining me on stage at Cannes Lions: Ben Cooper, controller of BBC Radio 1, Tom Standage digital editor of The Economist, and broadcaster and journalist Lauren Laverne – who has recently launched her new digital editorial venture, The Pool.

They are each grasping the challenge of brand loyalty in their own ways, and there are lessons to be learned for the industry on how you retain your brand’s following and continue to grow it in a fragmented landscape.

Radio 1 is confronted with the stark reality of changing audience behaviour in the full glare of the public spotlight. It has to justify its public service role for a young audience whilst taking sniper fire from politicians, rival broadcasters and the press.

Then there’s the small matter of Spotify and Apple. All this while the generation it’s charged with engaging is not only spoilt for choice but has the mental wiring to play the field.

Cooper and his team have done something perhaps unthinkable not that long ago. They’ve realised that radio is only part of the solution for keeping a radio station relevant. Because they know that serving their audience is more important than serving their medium they are diverting funds in to mobile and video.

Speaking at the recent Worldwide Radio Summit, Cooper began with the words “Radio is dead”. And of course the traditional radio model is.

Whilst one in three children in the UK have a tablet only one in seven have a radio. Cooper’s Radio 1 does actually still reach 10.5 million listeners a week. But the real death is happening in the number of hours they listen for.

The average listener is now tuning in for a staggering three hours less a week than they once were. Anyone with a teenager will tell you where that audience has gone – to You Tube. Which is why Radio 1 has followed them there impressively becoming the first radio station in the world to have 1 million subscribers, a figure that now tops 2 million with over 1 billion views. “The audience is getting value from the brand in another way,” says Cooper.

Ironically part of The Economist’s success in hanging on to its very different audience has been a move in to audio. The publisher of one of the world’s most iconic, distinct and beautiful print brands has turned to audio content to keep its customers loyal.

Realising the likes of Angela Merkel and Barack Obama are occasionally too busy to actually read their magazine, The Economist now provides every single word of their weekly not just in print but also as downloadable audio files delivered through an app.

Alongside the listen-as-you-drive-run, look out the plane window The Economist comes the aptly named Espresso. A daily news-short infused through e-mail or app. So while The Economist’s paid circulation fell for the first time ever in 2014, the combined print and digital reach is 1.5 million which is some 64 per cent up on the last decade.

Speaking to journalist Joseph Lichterman of niemanlab.org, Tom Standage said “what we do, what our mission is, does not depend on the medium with which you deliver it…because what we actually sell is what I like to call the feeling of being informed when you get to the very end.

“So we sell the antidote to information overload – we sell a finite, finishable, very tightly curated bundle of content. And we did that initially as a weekly print product. Then it turns out you can take that same content and deliver it through an app.”

Lauren Laverne is a renaissance woman who has proved herself equally adept in the worlds of broadcast and print media. She’s taken inspiration from both for her new venture – an online platform called The Pool.

Most significantly, though, you sense she’s drawn from her own experience, and that of her friends, as busy women with jobs and children and social lives but no lesser desire to stay in touch with their passions.

So The Pool mimics radio in its personal one-to-one feel whilst delivering bite-size content bundles that even pre-warn you how long they will take to consume. If a function that allows you to search by how much time you have feels a little, well, sad it is no less a reflection of how many of us feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of stuff we could ingest.

The Economist was in danger of losing readers because they felt guilty they couldn’t finish the magazine, and so they gave them an easy-listen audio option. So The Pool recognises up-front that time is short and sets about enriching you in chunks you can handle.

Radio 1, The Economist and The Pool have all looked beyond how their audiences relate to their products and examined the more fundamental business of how their lives have changed. They have recognised that whilst the technologies and ideas of the East and West are tools to be employed it is the true north of their customers’ changing lives that they must follow.