It's the question that's on everyone's lips. We look at the role brands and brand experience can to play in building a brave new world.

In this episode:

We wrap up Season 1 of the Total Experience Podcast a.k.a. 'Brand Experience in the Age of Corona' by looking at what brands can do to shape our uncertain future in a positive way. With Richard Cable.

A frame of reference

The hero's journey

The region of supernatural wonder

The Spanish Flu of 1918, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the global protests of 1968 all rolled into one

A world facing economic catastrophe, global pandemic, racial injustice and inequality

Planning for total victory

Why it's not ridiculous to talk about brand experience at a time like this.

Constructive thinking

Seismic change

History's horrible precedents

Shaping the world for good

The bandwagon is the place to be

Brands and social progress

Courageous individuals and grassroots movements - George Floyd and the humiliation of Donald Trump

The purpose of a brand

Embracing, normalising and amplify positive change.

Brand purpose is still bollocks

Creating bandwagons of our own

Branded cynicism

Aligning what you do and what you say

Revenge spending and the slump to come

Lockdown easing and rising optimism

"Revenge spending"

Government debt and small to medium business meltdown

Where brands add value

Enterprise value and powerful brands

Recklessness of neglecting your brand

Why brand experience is so important: brand, people, touchpoints and creative

Brand

Digital transformation and innovation

The inherent dangers of short-termism and neglecting your brand

Adidas as one to watch

People

Radically altered customer demographics - new skills, asymmetrical effects, the positive effects of lockdown

Touchpoints

Reweighting your brand ecosystem

The rise of social commerce

The re-rise of AR and VR

Only as strong as your weakest touchpoint

Creative

Crises and creativity

Creative red herrings

Glitz and glamour vs grit and grime

The birth of the anti-hero

Smashing shibboleths

Summary

The positive role for brands in unfucking the world

Being on the right side of history

The engine of recovery

In this episode:

The scale of the McDonald's business

- A dynamic and complex business

- Product and experience

- Diversity of touchpoints

- Geographical diversity

- Menu diversity

- Segment diversity

- Guest counts and sales

- Speed of the feedback loop

- DDB and McDonald's

From advertising to strategic planning and tactical activation

- Market to market activation

- Digital transformation

- Focus on convenience - experience, accuracy and efficiency

- Optimising process in a process driven company

- Changing consumer tastes and experience

- Artificial intelligence

- Creating interconnected, intelligent touchpoints

- Preference and transactional data

- Loyalty and longitudinal data

- Data driven marketing, analytics and experience design

- Creating a coherent brand experience

Maximising the interaction

- The balance between delivering the most value for customer and business

- Short term (activation) vs long term drivers (brand)

- Constantly adapting to circumstance - a very responsive business

McDonald's and the Coronavirus crisis

- Restaurant closures

- Cautious reopening

- Focus on crew

- The perils of getting it wrong

- A return to the foundational elements of the business

- People needing the basics more than ever - Quality, Service, Cleanliness

- The 'bubble of happy'

- Producing 40 million Big Macs all the same

- Switch to drive thru, changes to menu, delivery changes, dark kitchens

- The benefits of being a 'known quantity'

Creating intergenerational connections

- Happy Meals and birthday parties

- No longer a family mealtime

- Screen distractions

- Matching the brand with the next generation

Innovation and brand experience

- Entrepreneurship vs innovation

- Bazaars vs cathedrals

- The difficulties of tech mediated brand experience

- A gap that needs closing

- Giving franchisees and restaurant managers the capacity

In this episode:

Verity Ayling-Smith, training and consultancy advisor with Leonard Cheshire and the 'Change 100' programme, and Priyanca Desouza, user research and Change 100 intern.

What disability is

- Protected characteristics, diversity and inclusion

- Disability as a normal and common thing

- Bringing down the barriers in recruitment and the work environment

- A wide range of accessibility needs

The visibility of disability

- Disability more prevalent than we realise

- The duty of employers to remove barriers

- Choosing whether or not to disclose your disability

- Employers missing out on fantastic talent

- The inexplicable employment gap for disabled people

Change 100 and Leonard Cheshire

- Leonard Cheshire's mission to support disabled people

- Change 100's mission to close the employment gap for disabled graduates and students

- Matching skills to roles

- A highly competitive programme

- The popularity of marketing and communications

The challenging language of job descriptions

The value of different life experiences

- Resilience, creativity and difference by default

- The danger of the agency bubble and cookie-cutter thinking

- Actively welcoming and valuing a difference life experience

- Championing inclusive experience design

The 'amplified self'

- The problem with traditional recruitment

- Jim Carroll and the amplified self

- Excellence vs mediocrity

The positives of the lockdown (for us all)

- How remoteness has brought colleagues closer

- A more personalised way of working

- It's not where you work but how - challenging office culture

- Business investment in agile, remote working and management

- A more autonomous, liberated and creative workforce

In this episode:

January 1998: casting for a new show

- The luck of the draw

- Meet Nasubi

- A secret destination

'

'A life out of prizes'

- Naked and alone with only a phone

- The million yen target

- Eggplants and modesty

The physical impact of isolation

- A starvation diet

- The first roll of toilet paper

- What you own but can't use

The mental impact of isolation

- Curtailed stimulus

- Compensating for lack of emotional feedback

- Anthropomorphising

- Radical deterioration and mental suffering

Doubling down on the cruelty

- An unwitting megastar

- Victory - suspended

- Nasubi in Korea

- Nasubi flies home

- The brutal show finale

We are all Nasubi

- Parallel experiences

- The impact of isolation

An analogy for brand experience

- More anxious, more cautious, more socially isolated and lonelier

- The practicalities of a post-Covid economy

- Not making isolation worse

- Be more 'Great British Bake Off"

- Enhancing what makes us human

- Brands not just claiming human qualities but exhibiting them

In this episode:

Leigh Baker, founder of New York creative brand consultancy we@leighbaker, talks to us about the different approaches US and UK brands have taken to the Coronavirus crisis and what we can learn from both.

How the US does brands differently

- Marketing at scale

- Immediate impact

- The hard sell

- Wearing your heart on your sleeve

The US special relationship with brands

- The Super Bowl

- Clint Eastwood and "It's half time for America"

Brands stepping into the breach

- Weak institutions leaving a vacuum

The 3 different approaches of American brands

- Branding the moment - Nike

- Do something, but what? - American banks

- Good, honest promotional utility - Burger King

The US reaction to the crisis

- Why American brands don't stop

- Creative perils of group think

- Lockdown fatigue and reactive marketing

Green shoots of a new US brand behaviour

- A shift in tone - the new optimism

- It's OK to be funny - Geico

- Hard times and escapism

What the US can learn from the UK

- Brand experience beyond the advertising

- Getting your digital act together

- A unified response from strong institutions

Strategic research has a vital role to play in navigating brands out of the current crisis, but not if we're not doing any. One for the strategists, with planners extraordinaire, Roger McKerr and Darren Savage.

In this episode:

Roger McKerr, founder of insight and strategy agency Davies McKerr, and Darren Savage, chief strategy officer at Tribal London and lecturer at the Oxford Business School, discuss the crucial role of research in shaping brand strategy as we emerge from the Covid 19 crisis.

How the world has changed

- Ever-shifting points of reference

- Doing the unthinkable

- Forget getting back to 'normal'

Imposed behaviour change and new social norms

- Imposed behaviours

- Forming new rituals and habits

- How crisis exposes differences

- Challenges to strategy

- A much more complex audience profile

How brands have responded to the crisis

- Shutting down 'non-essential' activity

- The IPA Bellweather Report

- Halting strategic research

The dangers of strategic short-termism

- Paralysis through lack of analysis

- Brands that are doing well

- Nike's integrated brand experience

- Brands that are doing badly

- Primark's devastating lack of ecommerce

Insight as an enabler of action

- Building new insight

- Creating confidence

What brands should do next

The 5 point plan

- Identifying new consumer needs/preferences

- Getting your tone of voice right

- Reviewing and revising media plans

- Thinking about what your brand stands for

- Combining behaviours and communications

Positives coming out of the crisis

- Positivity and human nature

- Leveraging our intuitive gifts

- Innovation and experimentation

In this episode:

Producers Flo Clive and Paris Palmer talk about how to keep making great work despite the lockdown.

How hard has production been hit?

- The agency view

- The freelancer view

What are the lockdown regulations for producers?

- Government regulations

- Agency policy

- Safety first

What type of work is getting done?

- Adaptations and reworking

- Home studios

- Post production's defining moment

- Pro bono

The future is documentary style shooting

- UGC

- Self shooting

- Remote directing

The importance of continuing to invest in marketing through a crisis

- Helping clients get back on the horse

- The need for contingency and understanding

Good work that's getting made

- Tesco Food Love Stories

- Ohio Department Of Health PSA

- Lucozade and Anthony Joshua

- Joe Wicks' PE Lesson feat. George Ezra

How brands should react to the crisis

- Deeds not words

- Can-do attitude

- Power of the people

- Quality vs quantity

- Don't be silent

- Do good things

This episode:

Why is the colleague experience so important?

An introduction to the three components of great brand experience.

1) Customer experience

2) Colleague experience

3) Operational enablers - the tools to do the job.

A cautionary tale about poor colleague experience.

- A much-loved heritage cheese brand neglects its colleague experience with devastating results.

What the Coronavirus can teach us about the colleague experience.

1) Distance. Do we need to be in the office? The modern office is a product of the Industrial Revolution, and doesn't reflect the changing nature of work and “the declining cost of distance”. Do we need to be in the office?

2) Decompression. The emergency brakes have just been slammed on our just-in-time 21st century lives, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. How slowing down and allowing ourselves time to think will improve our quality of life and produce better work.

3) Dispensing with the digital distinction. In the modern workplace there shouldn't be a distinction between colleague experience (physical) and colleague experience (digital). They just need the right tools to do their jobs. Why the lockdown is the ultimate acid test for how future proof your business is.

A persuasive tale about good colleague experience.

- A much-loved heritage cheese brand creates a best in class colleague experience that sees them through the greatest crisis of their 450 years of history.

Why diseases need branding - and rebranding.

- A short but sordid history of 19th century 'freak shows'

- Stigmatising names we still use today

- Gay Related Immunodeficiency (GRID) - a masterclass in the worst possible brand you can give a disease

The pharma business and 'disease awareness' campaigns.

- Why they exist

- Pros and cons

The tricky business of naming a disease that's new to science.

- Naming the pathogens vs naming the disease

- The World Health Organisation's guidance on what you can and can't call a disease

- Novel diseases and how often they occur

How Coronavirus got its name.

- SARS-CoV-2

- COVID 19

- Coronavirus

What happens to a brand when it shares a name with a disease.

- Corona beer versus Coronavirus

- Can panic-buyers tell the difference?

In this episode:

Why the distinction between your physical and digital brand is dead.

- The three key questions that dictate how heavily a brand is being impacted by the Coronavirus crisis.

- Why the crisis is a hugely valuable learning experience from a brand experience point of view.

Why your brand can't afford to shut down marketing activity during the crisis.

- The scientific consensus against reducing investment in marketing.

- Marketing effectiveness guru Peter Field's 4 key lessons about the benefits of continuing to invest in marketing during an economic downturn:

1) Cutting marketing budget in a downturn only helps defend profits in the very short term.

2) If you do choose to cut budgets, your brand will emerge from the downturn in a weaker and much less profitable position.

3) During a downturn, you should aim to maintain your share of voice, at or above your share of market during a downturn. Evidence shows that this delivers a longer-term improvement in profitability that outweighs any benefit gained from short-term reduction of investment.

4) If your competitors are cutting budgets during a crisis, the benefit of maintaining your investment in marketing expenditure will be even greater. In short, if your competitors go quiet, it’s easier to make yourself heard.

Why you need to make use of your entire marketing mix - the '4Ps' - Product, Price, Promotion and Place.

- Why Promotion (Communications) may not be the right play.

- The power of Product, Price and Place, with examples.

The 5th P - 'People' - and how it can make or break your brand.

- Doing the right thing by your people.

- We're all in this together and brands need to act like it.