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Reshape the world or shape a new world? The new work plan of the meta-brands Israel today

2022-12-08T12:28:01.091Z


The leading brands in the world are no longer satisfied with a marketing strategy no matter how good it may be, nor even with a flashy digital strategy • The new strategy of the brands is to strive to make a change in the world, or to be a significant player in the next world


Why play children's games when you can reshape the world?

Caring is back in fashion.

This was the sensational news that came out of the

Web Summit

, the largest digital conference in Europe that took place in Lisbon in 2019, shortly before the outbreak of the epidemic.

The corporations in the world then realized that "doing good" is not only the concern of the corporate responsibility manager, which should be marked with a V, but also the marketing manager's opportunity to strengthen the brand image and even influence the profit line.

The consumer products giant Unilever already showed 69% more growth among its brands focused on the social purpose compared to the other brands of the company.

The seed of the calamity, or rather the reduction of the calamity, was sown even then.

Fast forward three years.

Lisbon airport, night.

I probably should have been suspicious even then: the second I opened Uber I was offered a choice between a normal taxi and a "green" taxi, meaning one that pollutes less.

The price, if you were wondering, is the same.

Availability - significantly lower, obviously.

Want to test how green you really are?

Try to think how many extra minutes you will be willing to wait for a green taxi compared to a normal taxi.

If the answer is longer than six minutes, you will probably deserve an electric taxi, and also a pat on the back.

The morning opened with a storm with the VP of Marketing of

Lego

. In previous years, the lectures of the world's favorite brand were an example and model of polished branding, innovation, and viral moves. This time, social agendas, communities and partners took their place.

Lego does not shy away from any agenda and embraces them all: BLM, female empowerment and LGBTQ are only a partial list, on recycled paper of course.

To understand how deep the change is, it is enough to examine the strategy that the company stated: Rebuild the world.

And if you were wondering, the intention is not to rebuild the world from Lego bricks, as much as that may sound like an interesting idea, but to try and build a better world.

If that's not activist for a brand dealing in children's games, I don't know what is.

To rebuild the world, photo: Lego

Where does the arrogance of the brands come from not only to influence their marketing but to change the world?

When you dig a little further back, it turns out that the roots of corporate care are much older than 2019: the origin of the word Corporate is from the word corp, body, or "body of people".

Since the dawn of humanity, corporations have worked for the public and have been responsible for it, while the commitment to the line of profit was born only later.

A study by Professor Michael Porter from Harvard from 2011 already showed a direct connection between the two: the existence of a Purpose (social purpose) for a company may affect its Profit line (profit) in the long run.

But for the companies, this is about additional added values: it turns out that companies that have engraved social goals on their banner are a magnet for recruiting and retaining employees, especially young people.

But not only employees, investors also tend to show more interest in Purpose Driven companies.

The renewed revival of care and the corporations' understanding of the enormous potential it holds for them, also brought with it a respectable portion of imposters, or "wolves in sheep's clothing" as they called it at the conference.

Old wolves like

Amazon, Spotify

and others have already received red caps, or at the very least cold showers, when they were caught red-handed doing greenwash - claiming to be social while doing the de facto reverse.

The most severe punishment in the unwritten rule book for such conduct is without a doubt the cancellation (all rights reserved for Generation Z), which at least for some companies may be challenging to the point of being very expensive to recover from.

So how do you do good to the world and through it also to your company?

It seems that the common denominator for most companies that do it right is mainly in the following parameters:

  • Striving for all company departments to work on it, meaning that it will not be the property of specific company departments but of the company as a whole.

  • Setting success indicators and targets to examine the progress of assimilation and implementation.

  • But there are examples of application that are much simpler and sometimes hidden from view.

    For example through user interface design.

    Airbnb

    , for example, encourages its users who have been hosted, to write their review of the hosting not only publicly, but also privately, for the host's eyes only.

    In the "to wash the dirty laundry at home" exam.

    This is in contrast to TripAdvisor or Yelp, for example, which encourage behavior of public criticism even at the cost of sometimes unjustified shaming of businesses.

    In this way, Airbnb promotes constructive and positive human behavior, which is sometimes just as important as saving carbon.

    Why redesign the world if you can design a new world

    ?

    While some corporations are engaged in reshaping the world, others focus on integrating into a parallel universe, or at least an alternative reality -

    the Metaverse

    of course.

    How is it possible that even though Meta itself is laying off a tenth of a company, the buzz is on the decline (searches for the term "metatowers" on Google are far from the peak of two years ago) and the shares of the metatowers companies have been plunging for some time, yet more and more companies are looking for a way to enter and integrate there?

    The reason lies, at least according to the advertising agency RG/A, in something much more basic, perhaps even the most basic: human behavior.

    User studies presented show that for over two-thirds of the public who use any

    avatar

    , the avatar expresses a side of them that cannot be expressed in the physical world, a kind of "extension" of themselves.

    In other words: the avatars allow users to meet new people and allow people to get to know them exactly as they would like.

    The avatar is not a mirror of the user, but a window to his inner world.

    72% of users claimed to feel a sense of belonging to their Metaverse community.

    Of course, all of the above is worth money.

    and a lot

    Avatar - express another side, photo: Web Summit

    how much

    Last year, Metaverse users paid $110 billion for completely virtual accessories.

    It's money that could have gone to invest in the appearance of your avatar, instead of the appearance of yourself.

    And we haven't said a word about the huge savings for the environment.

    Existence, did we already say?

    In front of the optimists there are, as always, the skeptics.

    Those who believe that the metaverse is doomed to collapse in on itself, being a spontaneous substitute for life itself: devoid (at the moment) of the ability to smell, taste and touch.

    How can a branded virtual event, as creative and innovative as it may be, replace the traditional extreme events of

    Red Bull

    or the summer festivals of

    Coca Cola

    ?

    Not sure you should.

    The founder of the branding company FNDR, the agency that built the branding for Airbnb and Snap and today builds brands for Metaverse, talks about how the secret is in the connection between offline and online, between the physical and the meta.

    A good example of this connection can already be seen in the NFT worlds, the possibility of buying a completely virtual work and receiving in return not only virtual ownership, but also rights and benefits in the real world, such as a physical face-to-face meeting with the artist.

    One of the subjects of the Metaverse news today is

    Sandbox

    , whose CEO was one of the prominent speakers at the

    Web Summit

    . This is a young company, with its own currency, which is already building virtual lands bustling with life, communities, avatars and brands, hosting mass events, parties and performances, Including a particularly famous one of Snoop Dogg.

    And if that sounds strange to you, wait until you hear it: Sandbox allows businesses to open virtual stores.

    Probably no one at Sandbox imagined that the small business that will open next to Snoop's concert will be a (virtual) stand selling cannabis for the audience's enjoyment at the concert.

    Sandbox - hundreds of brands and communities are already there, photo: Web Summit

    And if you're still not convinced, wait until you receive an invitation to a Metaverse wedding, one of many that take place every day, in the Sandbox virtual universe.

    And in case you were wondering - yes, the checks at the wedding are actually completely real. 

    Itai Tzmir is a digital strategist, a consultant for companies and a lecturer at the academy

    were we wrong

    We will fix it!

    If you found an error in the article, we would appreciate it if you shared it with us

    Source: israelhayom

    All tech articles on 2022-12-08

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