Key themes from SXSW

SXSW has come to a close and ideas are buzzing around. Key themes I noted from the conference this year:

DIVERSITY & FUTURE DESIGN

Melinda Gates and the London Mayor Sadiq Khan both talked at length about the need for diversity and representation from people of all genders, identity and culture. It came up in conversations of workplace and innovation. The theme was strong and on all fronts, using Sheryl Sandberg’s term, the message was to lean in. All signs indicate massive upheaval in the upcoming decades in workforce deployment, growing gig economy, generational shifts of power to ‘digital natives’ and all of this will challenge our ethics, equality and the social structures of our society. The message is loud and clear that diversity is key to creating equity for the future so now is the time to lean in to discussions on the future, its opportunities and also its unintended consequences.

“THE BEST WAY TO PREDICT THE FUTURE IS TO CREATE IT”

Peter Drucker

TRIBES

The shift to move our marketing strategies from quantity to quality is happening globally across all industries. There is a significant trend towards marketing and development spend being invested in the ‘moment that matters’. The moments are defined as those providing value and key attitudinal shifts to influence behaviour. Proctor & Gamble, one of the largest advertisers globally, has slashed investment by $750m and intend to cut another $400m along with halving its number of agencies. The era of maintain existing budgets to deliver baseline growth is no longer an assumption so rigorous analysis of ROI is evolving along with the tools to measure it.

Secondly, there is acknowledgement that with technology has come increased isolation and depression as digital connectedness can also lead to increased self comparison and reduced physical activities. As someone from the ‘Analogue generation’ I find it quite entertaining that one of the trends is the evolution of ‘Human Mode’ as defined by Rohit Bhargava, and yet it is an important trend and one to highlight when conversations of technology seem to always be at the forefront. Whenever we start moving towards strategies that are too digitally focussed, we compromise our human connectedness. Therefore, there is a balancing act in how we activate our tribes physically and digitally. Overall our heavy reliance on email journeys for retention seems to be at the cost of not engaging in deep conversations, connected conversations and more broadly ignoring people who do not meet our RFV models of behaviour, let’s make sure our influencers (financial and non financial contributors) are not overlooked of their true potential.

CONVERSATION  

Connecting tribes effectively requires consistent conversation at multiple touchpoints and while people are getting busier they are also willing to engage in deeper for meaningful conversations if the conversation resonates. I remember the case study Martin Lindstrom presented on Lego and that the turning point for success was when they realised their environmental analysis of their audience had led to the wrong conclusions. In a busy world with shorter attention spans they had simplified the Lego packs to make them quicker and faster to build, but in fact, the strength of Lego is the complexity and time they take for children (and adults!) to accomplish the goal of building their Lego. Once they implemented this strategy it reversed their declining trend and the complexity and revenue for Lego increased exponential. Today this is a consistent message in commercial marketing and it is particularly focused on our brand advocates.  It is an important message for the NFP sector as our causes are deeply engaging and certainly breadth and depth of message is important. When we consider our supporter journeys we should consider channels but we should also consider the depth of which the conversation should match our audiences.

In a technology dominant conference there were many innovations on how to create 1:1 conversations. I’ll dive in to some of these solutions in later posts, but the overarching insights to consider are the strategies that will sit behind the ever-increasing technology solutions. There are four key points for consideration:

1. Design strategies based on tighter audience targeting especially attitudinal and values driven. Design the right conversations at the right time using the right channel to the right person.
2. Design the personality of your brand. This needs to go well beyond our traditional brand attributes as we must be in a position where our brands has a voice for  authentic conversation with people
3. Consider the ethics and adoption lifecycle in design. How does your organisation want to handle the intersection of the bot/people conversations and the transparency of the handover point?
4. Understand the intersection of rational and irrational thought, a good place to start is behavioural economics. People make emotional decisions 90% of the time, in reverse AI will be designed to make rational decisions 100% of the time unless technology adapts to create more human interactions.

VALUES AND ETHICS

Millennials are values driven purchasers so commercial organisations are harnessing cause opportunities to create these value-connected relationships. Most examples I saw demonstrate how they are harnessing cause areas but to the exclusion of NFPs. We are also witnessing the emergence of profit-led mission organisations. There is a loud and growing voice dominating the discussion which excludes NFPs and presents the commercial sector as well equipped to tackle the world’s major problems. I’m not going to debate the validity of this assumption now but for those interested it is worth reading the recently published article “Social Enterprise is not Social Change” published by the Stanford Social Innovation Review. What we are witnessing is a lack of debate and learning between the sectors so that collectively we can do more for our causes. I anticipate this trend will continue to grow and certainly disrupt our sector more than we’ve seen historically.

The ethics conversation is so deep and complex, but it is useful to revisit the trolley dilemma originally introduced in 1967 by Philippa Foot. We can use this simple experiment to highlight the difference between rational AI and irrational human decision and the difficult ethical decisions we’ll be faced with. In this experiment people were told that there was a trolley on the lines hurtling towards five people who cannot move and will be killed. You are standing on a bridge over the line where the trolley will go and you know that it will be stopped by putting something very heavy in front of it. There is a very fat man next to you. If you push him off the bridge he will stop the trolley and save 5 people but he will die. The mathematics of this would see a rationally programmed AI decide to push the man off the bridge with a net saving of 4 people, in contrast most people say they would not make the decision to push the man off the bridge as intentional death is morally wrong. While not all our ethical decisions will be as significant as this, it will be the grey areas and the topics we view as inconsequential that over time are likely to have significant impact and changes on society, often ones we don’t initially see. Who will be responsible for observing these trends, policing the trends and deciding how our companies and organisations respond are all yet undetermined, however, the Uber / London debate is one to keep watching on where the lines are drawn.