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The desire for brands to improve the lives of their consumers was present throughout the entire conference. How could it not be? Innovation sparks change and disruption allows for new products and rituals to be created, which can affect generations and social systems.
That’s exactly the space occupied by “taboo” brands like Thinx, a breakthrough brand that makes period-proof underwear, and Sustain Natural, the maker of all natural and organic condom and sexual health products. The founders of each brand, Miki Agrawal and Meika Hollender respectively, each spoke of frustration in their daily lives which led to innovation. The key is that they both refused to accept the status quo and turned frustration into inspiration. The insights they had has allowed their brands to have a direct effect on the lives of their consumers. Grindr’s Equality Director, Jack Harrison-Quintana, was on stage with Agrawal and Hollender and spoke of leveraging his brand’s position as a “safe space” for an “underserved market.” While Grindr is not a political service, he spoke of Grindr’s ability to extend beyond its origins. “We have an ability to speak to voters. So we use that as a platform to educate.”
While observations make for entertaining origin stories, education drives change just as well. This is especially true with challenging issues like our global food crisis. Jonathan Neman, Co-CEO of Sweetgreen said, “[t]he issues aren’t black and white. There’s no grading system for food. So we need more informed decisions, and then communicate why we made that decision.” The sharing of this education is naturally complicit. Numerous speakers touched on this, but Miki Agrawal summarized it well when she said “[b]usiness follows strong values and education.”
And yet…Samantha Bee of Full Frontal doesn’t think that hard about it, at least from a competitive perspective. She doesn’t “navel-gaze”, evaluating herself or her competitors, citing that she finds it harmful and distracting to do so. She “just wanted to make a show that would kick the door in.” Staying focused on her personal insights, as well as those added of her team, gave her the defense against the networks when they drew obvious comparisons with the show that brought her first to late-night shows. “I didn’t know how [my] show would be different from The Daily Show, but I knew it would be. Because I see the world differently.”
In conclusion, the strongest brands and propositions are those that tap into all of four themes examined in this series. Empowering an internal team creates a strong brand culture, which is further fueled by diversity. This diversity can be found internally, but external collaboration across different industries also yields new insight and innovation. And this insight drives change, frequently disrupting a category or even a society. Which means imitators will follow. How does a brand stand apart? By valorizing their employees … and the cycle continues.
The Innovation Fest was a wonderful week of intermingling themes, conversations popping up in one panel, only to be continued a day later in another by completely different people. My biggest takeaway from the conference was that brands and businesses are no longer interested in performance alone. Instead, they’re evaluating all the varying channels where performance might stem from. It isn’t supply chains or marketing or analytics. It comes from themselves, their teams, and friends. It comes from the belief that they can change the world. And hopefully they do.
It’s easy to be caught in the trap of “expertise isolation”. Yet many of the panels at the Innovation Festival demonstrated that collaborating with creators in other sectors can spark a brand’s understanding of itself and open up new opportunities of what it can do.
At its core, Squarespace is nothing more than customizable coding that allows customers to create their own websites. But as David Lee, the CCO of Squarespace has seen, by working with creative collaborators like photographer David Guttenfelder or comedians Key and Peele he able to change how he viewed his own product. “We want to see what the web can be and we use these collaborations to boost that horsepower. Whenever you reach the ceiling, build another.” After seeing new ways that Squarespace could be used, Lee adjusted his business offering.
Another way to create authentic connections with consumers is to gain perspective on how they are actually living. SoulCycle has become a lifestyle for many people. (Perhaps even a cult?). Melanie Whelan, it’s CEO, wouldn’t disagree with that assessment. In fact, she embraces it, wanting to provide even more for the members of SoulCycle, or “riders” as she prefers to refer to them. Yet she knows there is more to their lives. SoulCycle features events with other brands, capitalizing on all the interests of her riders. Each SoulCycle boutique also offers products that extend beyond riding, again leveraging other industries to ingrain her own brand even more deeply into her riders’ lives. Whelan doesn’t view other boutique gyms as her competition: “Our biggest competitor is Netflix. We want to be the best part of riders’ days.”
Many products are increasingly fulfilling more than one role in consumer’s lives. Brands that recognize their products as multidimensional have a harder challenge, but the result is more rewarding and long lasting. Those in the food industry face a complex set of dilemmas. Together with Sam Kass, Food Innovator and former White House chef, and Kirst Saenz Tobey, Founder of Revolution Foods, Jonathan Nema, Co-CEO of Sweetgreen, said, “So much is broken. This is an industry that is produced for price and taste, not for what it does to our bodies. We face health, seasonality, education, waste, and climate change.” Together, these three shed light on many issues, but they insisted that solutions for the food industry (and the brands that seek uniqueness and longevity) come from all corners. From lawyers learning to speak about agriculture to marketers making fiber sexy, Kass pointed out, “[t]hese problems and solutions are more nuanced.”
It is difficult to become an expert in a field. For many brands, that ivory tower of excellence is their only claim. But brands that push beyond, seeking inspiration from other experts and sources, can gain the added value of creating an innovation that speaks to consumers in more ways than one. When layered upon our first two learnings of internal valorization and diversity, cross-industry collaboration can place a brand within a consumer’s life in an irreplaceable way.
Authored by CBA Brand Strategist, Chelsea Brown
The second most common theme at FastCo’s Innovation Festival was diversity. This has long been a trending topic in the public discourse and it was refreshing to see diversity unabashedly taken up by many of the presenters at FCNY. Instead of looking at diversity as a morally or socially driven priority, those who brought it up cited diversity as a critical factor in driving innovation.
Samantha Bee, host of TBS’ hit late night show Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, laid it all bare when she said, “[h]iring people like you actually hurts you. It limits you.” A writer’s room with a diverse group of people around the table will produce jokes, insights, and commentary that not only better reflect the audience, but also pushes the team itself. Bee’s show covers a wide breadth of topics, but she says that, “[t]he best stories are the ones where we’re all learning.” Instead of living in an echo chamber of similar senses of humor, Bee and her team thrive on the inspiration that comes from exposure to a variety of perspectives.
While it makes sense that comedy would benefit from diversity, it might seem that obstacle courses are a tougher sell. And yet the value of a diverse staff is not lost on Founder and CEO Will Dean and his team at Tough Mudder. His brand is notorious for revealing new and exciting obstacles each year. Dean credited this ingenuity to diversity: “Coming up with interesting new challenges every year comes from diversity where people question the rules.” This appreciation was carried forth by his President and COO Adam Slutsky, who praised the “amazing things” their diverse staff does for their culture and communities. Much like internal valorization, the benefits of a diverse team ripple out to consumers.
And different backgrounds don’t just breed different perspectives, (in turn enabling innovation). Frequently, diversity within a brand creates room for consumers seeking vastly different entertainment. WNYC’s portfolio of radio programs and podcasts spans from Radiolab to 2 Dope Queens to Note to Self. Hiring and featuring a diverse array of voices enables the broadcasting program to reach people where they are in the increasingly saturated market of podcasts in a way the radio station wouldn’t if they focused on a singular type of voice. And WNYC isn’t stopping at what they have now. When asked what keeps WNYC’s Chief Content Officer Dean Cappello at night, he simply responded, “[f]inding talent.”
What these leaders made clear is that diversity does not only have a commercial value. While talking about rebuilding trust between communities and the judicial system, panelists (including the surprise guest musician and activist John Legend) spoke to the role tech can have in surmounting the barriers between people. Malika Saada Saar, Google’s senior counsel on civil and human rights, insisted that, “ [e]very act of human rights violation […] happens in silence and isolation. The more digitally connected we are, the more we can see how eachother lives. We can digitally bear witness.” Ignoring the tech focus, Saada Saar’s driving idea is that diversity provides a platform to more and more voices, connecting and ensuring the continued well-being of all.
Arguably an extension of our first principle, diversity in a brand inspires innovation, connection, and social progress. As such, it is a powerful take away from Fast Company’s Innovation Festival. Next week we’ll be looking at the third learning we gathered: cross industry collaboration.
Authored by CBA Brand Strategist, Chelsea Brown
As each theme is quite weighty on its own, I’ll be tackling them in installments. It’s important to note that when these themes work in concert, they guide some of the world’s most powerful brands, and can play a role in changing the very fabric of our culture, impacting the way we interact with the world around us.
Many of the companies and brands at Fast Company’s Innovation Festival placed an unusually high value on people, and not necessarily in the traditional business sense. Many of the speakers remarked that an empathetic culture towards internal teams means that the team carries that culture forward, reverberating through each touchpoint of the brand. Susan Reilly Salgado, the Managing Partner of Hospitality Quotient, specializes in hospitality and making consumers feel cherished, and yet even Salgado spoke about the importance of internal valorization: “[W]e first get all our benefits by curating a great place for our employees.”
A common tool for creating a strong internal culture was the “skeleton” method, and it came up often. Susan Reilly Salgado, Alli Webb, Co-Founder of Drybar, Melanie Whelan, CEO of SoulCycle, Rachel Holt, General Manager of Uber North America, and Jonathan Neman, Co-CEO of Sweetgreen all spoke about the skeleton method, wherein employees are given the skeletal framework of who their brand is, but are trusted to flesh out their own work as they see fit. Give employees – or local branches – the goal, but let each team determine the method to achieve it. According to these speakers, the skeleton method is especially fruitful for brands who have local outposts across the country.
To further the emphasis on personal focus, Both Salgado and Whelan made a point that they don’t hire based on technical skill, but rather on emotional aptitude. Their perspective was that how the employee fits with and speaks to the brand’s culture is much more critical to a business’s success than how efficient they are at accomplishing tasks. While this seems to fit best with our idea of smaller, local companies, Uber has proven that this works best with large scale companies as well. Holt says, “[w]e’ve had, as we’ve grown, to create more structure, but structures which allow local best practices to be rolled out easily.”
Samantha Bee, host of TBS’ hit late night show Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, embodies this principle of internal empathy the most. In fact, the comedian doesn’t really care about anyone else outside of the team creating her show. “We’re only on once a week and we only have 21 minutes, which are so precious to us, so the last thing on our minds is ‘how is this affecting people.’ We are here for the 65 of us in the building, making the show. We want to make a show we’d watch.” And while Samantha’s point of view is blunt, her perspective makes a lot of sense. Placing internal teams at the top allows brands to cultivate their own particular, ownable culture, which can then trickle down. That internal team “lives” the brand first and foremost and can become true brand ambassadors, a strong driver in developing long-lasting consumer engagement. As Will Dean, the Founder and CEO of Tough Mudder views it, “I founded the company and hired the first few people, but everyone you see here is building the brand.”
Valuing internal teams is but the foundation in creating an impactful brand, and over the next three weeks I’ll be adding more layers. Check back in next week when I dive into the second core theme from Fast Company’s Innovation Festival: diversity!
Authored by CBA Brand Strategist, Chelsea Brown
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