It will be the difference maker in securing more successful business outcomes!

To begin, set your ambitions at a high level, striving to create the brand standard that other companies benchmark against.

• The brand consumers talk about
• The well-known innovator
• The one referenced in best practice case studies

However, in the absence of a strong strategic platform, a business will inevitably drift, often due to a near constant state of uncertainty because all marketing “bets” are regularly hedged. Competition is fierce and without a real strategic compass, companies usually relegate themselves to pursuing what they already know – tactics. Often including endless rounds of profit sapping price promotion to meet volume targets. Tactics can masquerade as strategies.

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Thus, tactically driven brands…

• End up living with brand positioning confusion
• Struggle to stand out, resulting in higher levels of media spend
• Realize uninspiring profit margins
• Users that aren’t all that invested in the brand value proposition
• Hence switching on deal is rampant as adjacent brands are seen as interchangeable

It’s all too common – authentic strategy creation will consistently demand more of us.

What Is Sound Strategy?

Strategy describes what you do differently. It is instruction and a guide intended to separate and elevate your business, ideally within a new category you’ve created while authoring your own rules to govern relevant brand and category behavior.

You’ll recognize sound strategy because it –

1. Enables bravery
2. Commands an emotional response
3. Delivers clarity and passion
4. It is grounded in a sense of conviction
5. Focuses on where you are going and builds from your brand “why”
6. Provides hard evidence of how you are different
7. Informs every action you take and decision you make

Higher Purpose And Mission Can Help Clear A Path To Real Differentiation

We are advocates of deeper brand meaning, values and purpose, for the very reason it provides a solid, bank-able roadmap to improved strategy. After all, what is business but a system designed to deliver value. To increase the value you collect, you increase the value you give. It must be a unique value that consumers aren’t getting from anywhere else.

Our preferred role as strategic guide and coach can help you define or refine what that “why” is while pushing outward on the edges of (radical) differentiation. Strategy is creating “different” in response to your systemic and always present enemy — sameness.

Let’s dispel the myths that often surround the definition of sound strategy…

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Myth #1: Strategy Is (Never) About Being Better Than Brand X

In truth brands with a strong strategic foundation operate differently because…

They don’t compete.
They don’t compare.
They don’t define their bona fides against another brand’s offering.

You shouldn’t pursue the same customers with a similar product and a similar story, which is a recipe for declining profit over time due to the growing pressures of commoditization. As we’ve said, better strategy is about creating difference. Better isn’t different. Better is the same, “but we try harder.” This is not a sustainable model and creates a slippery slope to comparisons and, yes, similarity. Instead, your goal is to provide value that competing brands don’t or won’t offer.

Myth #2: Sound Strategy Must Be Complicated, Sophisticated And Data Driven

Strategy is NOT a cold-blooded scientific download.

Some believe the path to improved strategy is served through dense technical analysis in an attempt to “manufacture” rightness. Great strategy is steeped in meaning, passion and conviction. This is the fuel that pushes great brands to go further, harder, deeper and braver than others. Their unrelenting goal: always over-deliver on your core brand promise.

Myth #3: Strategy Is Lurking In Improved Marketing Communication

There’s a tendency in the marketing field to conflate strategy with messaging, tag lines and ads. Strategy isn’t just a message. Rather it’s guidance and a statement of what the business does differently, why and how. Communicating a similar offering more creatively isn’t a lasting proposition and will force media spending levels upward to maintain baseline awareness over time.

On the other hand, “different with a strong why” is naturally alluring, captivating and automatically attractive.

• A great strategic platform will inspire meaning, belief, membership and advocacy. In the end it is a blueprint for how the business operates top to bottom – springing from your “why” – founded in deeper meaning and differentiation. This will help you better define the right product mix and inform a powerful and compelling brand narrative.

Data Graphs Can’t Replace Imagination

Strong strategic ideas are more like life in general; they reward boldness and distinctive concepts over reductive reasoning. Here’s a connect the dots moment: ultimately, people are the consumers of your strategic concept. Just remember all humans are irrational. Our decisions are never made based on consideration of analytical, fact-based arguments.

That’s why you want to pursue a strategy that gets your heart racing. It will impact what you do, how you organize the business while informing communication that engages and inspires others to join you on the adventure. If your approach seems sensible, it’s probably wrong.

You Are Looking For The Unique Value Only You Can Deliver.

The Path To Sound Strategy

Asking better questions leads to improved thinking about strategy and its cousin, brand mission.

Here are ten examples we use in planning:

1. What do you stand for?
2. How relevant and differentiating is it?
3. How compelling and credible is it?
4. What promise are you making?
5. Do you have the right products to deliver on that promise?
6. How are they positioned to deliver on your promise?
7. Are corporate goals and objectives aligned with the mission?
8. How does this impact your most important sources of business growth?
9. Based on this, who are your most valuable customers?
10. What should customers believe to help you achieve your goals?

Here’s a way to visualize it:

The strategic game plan has shifted completely from command and control (persuasion around overt feature/benefit selling) to the Relationship Era.

Consumers are your strategic compass:

Because the world and culture has changed, the consumer relationship with brands they care about is now fundamentally the same thing as relating to another person.

• Authentic brand relationships are built on admiration and trust and will deliver significant financial premiums. They represent goodwill that can be isolated as a component of business value. They also work to reduce the cost of promotion, thus improving ROI and bottom-line performance.

Here’s The Magic…

Relationships built on trust create the amazing opportunity for transcendence – the state of being admired – where consumers “join” your brand as members, not merely users. Knowing this we have a responsibility to push added meaning, trust and belief to the forefront of the brand-to-consumer relationship. This is the foundation on which improved strategy is built.

Consider The Value Only You Can Offer, Then Go Large:

Sound strategy doesn’t ask questions, it answers them. Your ability to define difference springs from a refined sense of your mission that pushes your value proposition in new directions. Audacious goals and ambitions inhabit sound strategy. Our best advice overall: think big. It should make you feel a little uncomfortable.

Guidance On Crafting A Strong Strategy Statement:

While the real work resides in determining what your brand will be and become, there is a template you can use to craft a strategy statement that will anchor your work on the right trajectory. This approach helps you ask the right questions, so you’re better equipped to determine the right answers.

Strategy statement Ingredients:

• We are the only (your company type that exclusively provides something of value)
• Who offer (something people want but can’t get from anyone else. Your entire business exists in fulfillment of this promise)
• By doing (the hard facts and evidence of a differentiating product/service/capability that will enable the promises you have made)

Use this template to help center your thinking on what your brand should become that is unique, different and own-able.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Robert Wheatley, CEO of Chicago-based Emergent, The Healthy Living Agency.

At The Blake Project, we help clients worldwide, in all stages of development, define and articulate what makes them competitive and valuable. Please email us to learn how we can help you compete differently.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education

One of the most iconic products of this food revolution was Red Zinger tea from Mo Siegel and Wyck Hay. Introduced in 1972, Red Zinger and its very popular sibling, Sleepytime, became the basis for Celestial Seasonings, a brand offering herbal teas, eventually adding other black, white, green, and chai teas as the brand grew. According to its website, Red Zinger tea combines hibiscus leaves, peppermint, orange, lemongrass, and wild cherry bark.

For a healthy brand, Celestial Seasonings has a rather hellish history. Over decades, the Celestial Seasonings brand suffered from being a pawn in a less than edenic, serpentine financial engineering game.

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Celestial Seasonings went public in in 1983. In 1984, Kraft Foods purchased Celestial Seasonings. Whatever the financial benefits of this sale, for serious, long-time drinkers of Red Zinger, it was a negative. The taste of Red Zinger changed.

Kraft Foods put Celestial Seasonings up for sale in 1986 intending to off-load Celestial Seasonings to Lipton Tea. Bigelow Tea stopped the Lipton purchase, appealing to US antitrust laws. In 1988, Kraft Foods eventually sold Celestial Seasonings to a venture capital firm.

The taste of Red Zinger returned to its roots (literally and figuratively) in 1991 when original founder Mo Siegel returned as CEO and Chairman.

The firm owning Celestial Seasonings merged Celestial Seasonings with Hain Food Group in 2000. Hain Food Group, founded in 1993, was an international food and personal care company. At the merger, the Hain Food Group company name changed to Hain Celestial.

Hain Food is another example of a company suffering from the poison of financial engineering.

Founded in 1993, Hain Food Group went public that year. In 1999, Heinz acquired close to 20% of Hain Food, but the brand in 2005. (During the interim, in 2000, Hain purchased Celestial Seasonings for just under $400 million, changing its corporate name to Hain Celestial.) Later in 2012, there were  some financial discrepancies and Hain Celestial restated some numbers. At the same time, Hain Celestial was part of a class action suit in California. Hain Celestial apparently, and allegedly, mislabeled its personal care offerings violating California laws. Settled out of court, this was an expensive, millions-of-dollars experience for the company.

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(It is fascinating to notice that both Kraft Foods and HJ Heinz were both complicit in the financial shenanigans of both Celestial Seasonings and Hain Food Group. When these two massive food companies became Kraft Heinz, the owners instituted zero-based budgeting that basically disintegrated the iconic American brands in the combined portfolio. It took years, before management woke up to the fact that were no other places to cut costs. Some of the brands have not recovered to their glory days pre-merger due to incredible brand mismanagement.)

As reported in The Wall Street Journal, Hain Celestial now recognizes that years of financial engineering, redundancies in suppliers, divestitures, accumulation of debt, lack of resources for necessary brand building and multiple acquisitions (39 brands at last count) has created shareholder unrest due to underperformance.

The Hain Celestial CFO admitted this, “When you’re going through and doing all of these acquisitions and then divestitures, you’re not focusing necessarily on things like innovation. You’re not focusing on marketing.”

Investors, analysts and Wall Street want “improved margins and organic sales growth.” As one analyst stated to The Wall Street Journal, “ How much can they (Hain Celestial) extract out of the gross margin line?”

A focus on brand building, defined by Hain Celestial as innovation, distribution and marketing, is good news for the Hain Celestial portfolio. However, there is a sense from the public reporting that marketing means advertising. Innovation, distribution and advertising are not going to save the Celestial Seasonings brand.

Hopefully, Hain Celestial will focus on revitalizing the Celestial Seasonings brand. Adding melatonin or biotin to Sleepytime tea sounds interesting. But, first, work needs to happen on modernizing, contemporizing and rejuvenating the Celestial Seasonings brand which now sits on shelves laden with medicinal, wellness and body-health teas.

Here are three critical factors for high quality revenue growth. Yes, Hain Celestial is under pressure to focus on growth. But, there is high quality growth and there is low-quality growth. Low-quality growth can actually destroy a brand’s value even while revenues increase.

1. Restore Celestial Seasonings’ Brand Relevance

Remaining relevant in a changing world is critical to a brand’s health. Relevance is a key driver of purchase intent. Relevance means the brand is up-to-date and current in customers’ minds. Relevance means customers and potential customers see the brand as addressing their current needs. Relevance, along with differentiation, is necessary for defining brand value. “Is the branded experience I receive or expect to receive relevant and differentiated relative to other brands?”

Restoring relevance means knowing Celestial Seasonings’ market and articulating the relevant, differentiated, compelling brand promise. A brand promise describes what the brand is intended to stand for in the mind of a specific group of customers or prospective customers.

Why should a customer buy Celestial Seasonings? How is Celestial Seasonings relevant and differentiated from Yogi, Lipton, Bigelow, Stash, Traditional Medicinals, Tazo, Twining, Pukka brands? Why Sleepytime with Melatonin when there is Traditional Medicinals Nighty Night Extra with Valerian Root?

2. Reinvent The Celestial Seasonings Total Brand Experience

A brand’s total brand experience combines the brand’s functional benefits, emotional and social rewards, the values of its customer and the brand’s personality relative to the brand’s combined total costs of price, time and effort. In other words, “Buy this brand. Get this experience.”

Once there is articulation and agreement to the brand promise, focus on innovation, renovation, marketing, generation of trustworthy and fair brand value. Innovation and renovation are customer-based. That is, you begin with the customer needs or problems. Remember that marketing is all about profitably satisfying customer needs (problems). And, do this in a relevant, differentiated manner.

Again, relative to competition, Celestial Seasonings’ total brand experience probably needs to be re-articulated and communicated, internally and externally.

3. Rebuild Celestial Seasonings’ Brand Trust

Building trust as a source of organizational wealth is an important driver for enduring, profitable growth. A powerful brand is more than a trademark; it is a trustmark. Trust is an important prerequisite for building long-term brand loyalty. Without trust, there can be no brand loyalty. When you trust a brand, you become committed to it. Trust is the most important pre-requisite for building long-term brand loyalty. It facilitates persuasion and the acceptance of new information. Trust is a relationship criterion more than a transaction criterion.

An important contribution is Celestial Seasonings’ brand provenance. Celestial Seasonings’ provenance is its consistent, motivating, relevant, distinctive heritage, based on its past theme. The power of provenance is not about preserving everything from the past; it is about preserving the best of the past for the present and the future.

Provenance acts as a foundational source of confidence. Powerful brand relationships derive strength from provenance, connecting with a brand’s heritage and history.

A strong and relevant heritage helps to build credibility. Credibility builds trust. A brand’s history and heritage provides customers with richer, authoritative information, giving credence to a brand’s message. Provenance provides continuity and consistency across all platforms.

Provenance answers this customer question, “Why should I believe the promise you are making to me?” Why should I believe in Celestial Seasonings?

Provenance is not just theoretical. Provenance helps make money. There is a virtuous provenance chain. Provenance influences perceived value, contributing to increased brand preference, which generates Trust Capital – a leading form of organizational wealth based on the confidence stakeholders have in the goodwill of an organization to consistently deliver promises of value – leading to high quality revenue growth.

Hain Celestial has a responsibility to Celestial Seasonings. The new, publicized remit to focus on brand building should actually build brands rather than merely satisfy shareholders, analysts and Wall Street. There are not that many “food revolution” brands from the 1960’s. Celestial Seasonings should be revitalized. The three critical actions listed above are a great start.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Joan Kiddon, Partner, The Blake Project, Author of The Paradox Planet: Creating Brand Experiences For The Age Of I

At The Blake Project, we help clients worldwide, in all stages of development, define or redefine and articulate what makes them competitive at critical moments of change, including co-creating plans to win that propel their businesses and brands forward. Please email us to learn how we can help you compete differently.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education

To help, we’ve distilled the most pressing brand health issues that keep bubbling up for further examination. The outcome is a list of 10 prominent “strength conditioning” questions to amplify your brand’s relevance and resonance.

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1. Role of emotion in marketing effectiveness. What are the planning and strategy implications of neuroscience reports that affirm the limbic brain (emotion) controls consumer actions on the path to purchase?
2. Mitigating the presence of perceived risk in purchase. Have we fully mitigated any perceptions of risk and uncertainty in how consumers assess and interact with our brand and its value proposition?
3. Optimizing brand differentiation. Is our brand sufficiently differentiated from other adjacent category choices, in ways that are immediately recognizable and appreciated by our target customers?
4. New category creation and ownership. Have we pushed brand strategy far enough to establish a new “category of one” that we own, while offering real solutions people can’t get anywhere else?
5. Enhancing trade customer relationships. Are our trade customers sufficiently equipped and trained to help consumers understand our brand value proposition, product story and higher purpose (your why) narrative?
6. Updating and refining brand positioning. Is our brand positioning and messaging optimized for relevance and resonance to embrace shifts in the influence of cultural change on consumer behavior?
7. Leveraging sustainable choice. Have we assessed and addressed the rise in conscious consumption, while fine-tuning best practices for our sustainability targets and verifiable outcomes?
8. Maximizing social channel proof and community. Have we exploited our social channel strategies to engage and grow a community of brand ambassadors, while encouraging users to convey their authentic experiences?
9. Deploying employees in strategic communication. Are we leveraging the credibility and passion of our employees as evangelists for our brand story and product narrative?
10. Activating advocacy to validate brand promises. Have we fully developed creative, compelling brand content and education outreach strategy that validates what we want consumers to believe about our company and products?

These 10 matter because simply throwing more dollars at chasing awareness, especially when there are potential dents in the brand fabric, is a less than optimal approach. Shining a bright spotlight on a weakened brand value proposition risks exposing the flaws.

To objectively answer these questions requires more consideration than meets the eye – in part because the effort must seamlessly bridge from an analysis all the way to the ground on how these tools are executed. That said, when properly fine-tuned, you’ve just inoculated your business against the raging environmental conditions that pop up to throw your marketing off its game.

This Top 10 list is a brand health regimen that will require added investment of time and resources. The outcome is improved brand resilience and that’s entirely worth the effort.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Robert Wheatley, CEO of Chicago-based Emergent, The Healthy Living Agency.

At The Blake Project, we help clients worldwide, in all stages of development, define and articulate what makes them competitive and valuable. Please email us to learn how we can help you compete differently.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education

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It is true that Macy’s is – and has been – struggling against the powers of “e-commerce giants, big-box retailers and direct-to-consumer brands.” Broad, general retail, such as Macy’s, has suffered for some time. For a while, it seemed that Macy’s was actually making progress in a difficult retail environment. In fact, prior to the pandemic, Macy’s was implementing a turnaround strategy, an initial part of which was a specific focus on the 10% of loyalists who account for close to 50% of Macy’s sales.

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To be fair, Macy’s is not the only mall retailer having difficulties. The Wall Street Journal observes that Abercrombie & Fitch, Foot Locker, Kohl’s and Nordstrom are struggling with mixed performances. Retailers say that cautious shoppers seeking lower prices are the main reason for dimmer guidance for the near future.

Clearly, Macy’s problems are not mere brand problems. The operations and fiscal issues are overwhelming. Macy’s has focused on cost-cutting including closing underperforming stores. Having said this, even if Macy’s figured out its operational and financial problems, Macy’s would still have cloudy future guidance. Macy’s executives say that the brand is improving its brand experience by increasing marketing spend and reimaging its displays. Nice. But, displays and marketing need a basis, a brand brief for these changes. Macy’s needs to figure out what the Macy’s brand means to its target customers.

Macy’s needs a brand promise.

A brand promise is the relevant, differentiated, expected total brand experience. Brand promise is not a generic statement. A brand promise articulates who is the brand’s target audience in terms of their personal values? What it is that these customers seek – the emotional and social rewards of using the brand? What is the personality of the brand that is so attractive to these customers? And, what is it that the brand Macy’s does so well, the brand’s functional benefits? Only when these questions are addressed can Macy’s identify the brand features that support the articulated expected experience.

The current Macy CEO believes that Macy’s offers quiet luxury. Quiet luxury is apparently associated with the purchase of handbags and shoes. Luxury is a difficult level to achieve. Macy’s heritage has never been one of a luxury experience no matter how quiet. Furthermore, attempting to reach a luxury proposition is a challenge for a brand that is not really perceived as luxury. Just ask Burberry, a brand that has spent a few years trying to reposition itself as luxury and not succeeding. Assigning more staff and having more varieties of shoes and handbags, as Macy’s is now implementing, is not particularly relevant and differentiated. Just ask Nordstrom.

Macy’s has a storied history. And, it once had a galvanizing, appealing brand promise.

Macy’s has always been one of those brands that satisfied a paradox promise by offering both high-end products along with mass products and services. The high-end products provided an aura of quality and style to the Macy’s brand. The mass products provided accessibility and affordability for the majority of their customers. The optimization of these two conflicting benefits made Macy’s a powerful brand with a promise of affordable glamour.

In its heyday, women flocked to Macy’s because of this brand promise. Buying something from Macy’s gave even the cash strapped buyer a sense of style. Women also shopped at Macy’s because it was a very comfortable and friendly place to be. Macy’s treated women well, whether you were a customer or an employee. Brands need to deliver on more than just functional benefits: brands must deliver on emotional and social benefits as well as personal values. And, brands today, must deliver to customers and employees.

Macy’s did this.

Macy’s was a training ground for, and a promoter of, women in business. This distinctive heritage is timely and relevant today. Even though the majority of Macy’s most profitable customers are women, it is important to recognize that Macy’s was also serious about employing women and promoting them.

In the 1940’s, R. H. Macy & Co. established an Executive Training Squad. In 1947, it hired a young woman with a law degree from Columbia University – one of only 6 females in Columbia’s law class. At the time, law firms did not see a reason to hire female lawyers, so this young woman thought Macy’s program would be a good fit as the store employed a disproportionate number of women.

Instead of being at a law firm, this woman thought she might become an executive where she could use her legal training and law degree. Soon after joining the Squad, the young woman became the assistant to Macy’s labor-relations director. Fifteen years later, she was vice president for employee personnel. By 1970, she was Macy’s senior vice president of Macy’s New York division for labor and consumer relations, the only woman in the division with this title. She spent her hours negotiating with the Teamsters and other unions on behalf of Macy’s 20,000 employees, most of whom were women. She also became a Director in 1970.

During her career at Macy’s, she was a mentor to many women forging careers and looking to work in management in or out of retail. She loved seeing these women advance to leadership positions. She knew hundreds of rank-and-file Macy’s employees, many of whom she helped in numerous ways and who were incredibly loyal to her over the decades. All along the way, Macy’s supported her, promoted her while supporting and promoting other women into executive ranks.

This woman, G. G. Michelson (Gertrude Geraldine), stayed at Macy’s for her entire career. But, over the years, she also joined the Boards of many other companies such as General Electric, Goodyear Tire & Rubber, Quaker Oats, Chubb Insurance, Spellman College, The RAND Corporation, The Stanley Works, Irving Trust and Harper & Row. She was often the only female on these Boards. In her obituary in 2015, The New York Times stated that she was the “Macy’s Executive Who Broke the Glass Ceiling.” And she did. She was able to do this because Macy’s provided an environment where her skills and drive were able to flourish. Her gender was not an issue. Her abilities did not scare off Macy’s other executives. She won over people who were skeptical of and unaccustomed to work with women executives.

Recently, Molly Ball observed in The Wall Street Journal that women are increasingly wielding power in politics. Without being political, Macy’s might reconsider recognizing its powerful promised experience by updating or modernizing its provenance. As Macy’s seeks to revitalize and turn around the brand, Macy’s should not forget that its brand promise of providing a shopping venue for affordable glamour should also include its history of fostering employment and opportunity for women.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Joan Kiddon, Author of The Paradox Planet: Creating Brand Experiences For The Age Of I

The Blake Project Can Help You Differentiate Your Brand With An Ownable Promise In: The Brand Positioning Workshop

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You can learn and view its developments here at the online Computer History Museum.

After many ups and downs, false dawns and surviving many winters AI or what Ted Chiang, the author calls “Applied Statistics” has arrived due to a combination of access to swaths of training data available on the Internet, massive increases in computing power and several breakthroughs in neural network design.

Today a combination of daily breakthroughs and exponential improvements combined with tens of billions of dollars of capital means that every company, every job and every one of us will be impacted by AI.

How do individuals and firms adapt and thrive in what clearly will be a new landscape?

3 steps.

1. Embrace. 2. Adapt. 3. Complement.

Embrace

It’s 1977 and a new movie titled Star Wars: A New Hope is released and in it a General Dodonna ends a briefing to his fighters (which includes Luke Skywalker) with the words “May the Force Be With You” (watch this scene from what is now nearly five decades ago not just for the line but how far film making technology has advanced and hear the line first time it was said…it was not Obi-Won Kenobi or Yoda.)

It’s 1599 and somewhere in England a play by William Shakespeare is staged during which the following lines are spoken (listen to them voiced by John Gieguld to understand why Shakespeare is best heard and not just read):

“We at the height are ready to decline.
There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.”

Both Shakespeare over 500 years ago and George Lucas 50 years ago shared the first rules of thriving in changing times.

Align with the force.

Go with the flow.

Every individual and organization should and must spend time learning and understanding the AI tsunami.

It is real. It is powerful and it is moving extremely fast.

Yes, there are lots of issues from copyright to impact on employment to a terminator like bot getting all of humanity, but the genie is out of the bottle, there is no going back or time for individuals or organizations to dither.

As an individual it is essential to begin to understand Re-Generative AI including prompt to text (e.g., GPT-4), prompt to image (e.g., Mid Journey), prompt to audio (e.g., Voice lab) and prompt to video (e.g.  Runway ML).

A good place to start experimenting with prompt to text is here at Pi (Inflection AI a one-year-old company which powers Pi raised 1.3 billion dollars from Microsoft and Nvidia among others.)

Adapt

Organizations need to re-think and re-visit every aspect of their products and services to see where productivity can be enhanced, product and services augmented, and completely new innovations launched.

And it is not as simple as automating and speeding up things as we have learned from a lawyer using AI to help in a legal case only to find that the AI had made things up (and increasingly this will be a huge issue) but a far deeper re-architecting of the business versus just a re-skinning or a re-structuring to cut costs.

The three big questions are:

1. What can be AI enhanced and what should not?
2. How will the AI product be built/trained and what quality control will ensure that the result is safe and legal among other things?
3. How will the organizational design and talent allocation change to incorporate these new capabilities?

For most companies there is good chance that AI technology itself will become a commodity like ingredient.

In fact, smaller companies (outside of the mega cap tech companies that are funding and driving AI investments) are likely to benefit more from AI since it will now make amazing capabilities affordable to everybody.

Size maybe less of a competitive advantage.

Well thought out processes for yesterday may become anchors to change.

And even senior management who cannot adapt fast (AI is scaling so quickly it is wishful thinking for senior folks to believe one can delay things till retirement) will become a competitive disadvantage.

But a key to adaptation will be how to attract and retain talent to work in new ways to complement the AI.

Because the future will not be just an AI age but an HI age

HI= Human Inspired.

Complement

Successful individuals and companies will complement the power of computing machines and software.

They will do this by enhancing, training, and bending what the technology can enable with creativity, storytelling, empathy, provenance, humanity, insight and imagination.

There will be a premium on building and attracting talent who are strong in the 6 C’s.

Three of these have to do with individual competence (Cognition, Creativity, Curiosity) and three how we connect with each other and the world outside our minds (Collaborate, Communicate, Convince).

Cognition is simply learning to think and keeping our mental operating system constantly upgraded. This requires deliberate practice and sustained work. Improved cognition is achievable and essential in a world where the computing operating systems are constantly improving.

Creativity is connecting dots in new ways, looking beyond the obvious and this skill will be key as AI powered computers, data crunch and co-relate faster than we ever will.

To be human is to be creative.

Creativity is at its heart the way we deal with a world of change by adapting, evolving, and re-inventing.

We need to learn and feed this inside us. The future will be about data driven storytelling and not just data or storytelling and the ability to leverage modern machines and algorithms to unleash connection and meaning will depend on creativity.

Curiosity is simply being alive to possibilities, questioning the status quo and asking what if? Today the key competitor or opportunity in any category comes from outside it.

Being cognitively gifted, creative, and curious will not be enough since we are living in a connected world where eco-systems, teams and linkages is how ideas are born, value created, and long-term careers forged. For these we need to hone and build and train for three other skills which are key since a great part of Human Inspired work is not just how to work alongside the machine but work alongside other humans.

Collaborate: Collaboration is key to work in a world where API’s (Application Protocol Interfaces) are not just about handshakes between software/hardware but between individuals with different skills, teams in different countries, partners, suppliers and much more.

Communicate: Learn to write. Learn to speak. Learn to present. It may be so old school but watch the people who succeed, and they are good at communication. And all of these can be taught and learned. One can use GPT to write the first draft and have Mid-Journey come up with great visuals for presentations and use other AI tools to provide amazing starter ideas and be a great co-pilot but Human Inspired means taking these outputs to the next level and requires communication skills.

But communication is not a one-way street and as important as it to write, speak and present it is as critical to be able to listen, to hear and to understand what others are saying with an open mind and a sense of empathy since this will also be a differentiating advantage in an AI age.

Convince: Every one of us is a salesperson regardless of what we believe our title is. This is true even if we do not sell anything at work. We must convince colleagues of our points of view.

We all must learn to convince and learn to sell often finding ways to sell something different than what the machines may recommend.

Time has proven that technology while bringing with it risks and downsides over time is a massive positive force for humanity.

The future is bright and all we must do is open our eyes, heart and minds and seize the benefits of this amazing era.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Rishad Tobaccowala, Author of Restoring The Soul Of Business: Staying Human In The Age Of Data

At The Blake Project, we help clients worldwide, in all stages of development, define and articulate what makes them competitive and valuable.  Please email us to learn how we can help you compete differently.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth and Brand Education

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