Taking Insights from SXSW to the Boardroom

Returning from any conference or festival presents a bit of a honeymoon situation: having absorbed insights and ideas, your brain is firing on all cylinders for ways to implement them into your organization or workflow. It’s important to carry that momentum while it’s fresh in your mind, so use this time to reflect on opportunities and raise them with leadership.

If you’re not sure where to begin, consider wise words from MediaMonks founder Wesley ter Haar, who presented his “Top Techtonic Trends” talk at the Brand Innovators Summit at SXSW. In the talk, ter Haar asks a crucial question: “Will we be relevant in X?” It’s something MediaMonks asks itself each day, and every department or team within an organization should likewise reflect on how they can maintain relevancy during a time where means of interaction are always in flux.

Often, this boils down to how one can provide a greater customer experience with the technology available. “When you talk about how you deliver exceptional experience, those are the companies that will win,” SAP’s CMO Alicia Tillman offered in a fireside chat at the event. But that’s easier said than done; how can brands actually execute better experiences?

At the “Behind the Brand: Johnson & Johnson” panel, moderated by MediaMonks Head of Growth Joe Olsen and hosted at SXSW’s Brand Innovators Summit, key players within one of the world’s biggest home and pharmaceutical brands gave their insights on how to drive innovation internally to meet the growing needs and expectations of consumers.

“When you think of innovation with CPG, it’s usually about what’s on the shelf: the physical good,” Sarah Debolt, Manager at Johnson & Johnson’s Marketing Accelerator, told the panel audience. “What my team is trying to encourage—and where the market is going—is thinking about the digital products and services that surround the tangible products that you’re using.” According to Debolt, organizations have to look beyond the products they offer and instead focus on adding value to customers’ lives and how they engage with the brand.

Innovation is About Value, Not Perception

Consumers can tell whether a brand is innovating or merely seeking the perception of innovation. Whether out of concern for budget or brand reputation, leadership aren’t likely to sign off on innovation for innovation’s sake. “People in the industry feel like there’s a first-mover’s advantage to these technologies,” said Mike Summers, Brand Manager and Digital Strategist at Listerine. “’Let me get there first.’ But there’s really not an advantage unless you have a reason to be there.” The attitude that Summers hints at is why many organizations stumble awkwardly into the emerging tech space, like when Kodak hopped on the blockchain bandwagon before falling right off of it.

These missteps lend to leadership’s skepticism of innovation’s value. So how do you break through that? By thinking like the C-suite and identifying innovation’s clear business value. The best way to ensure your initiative is on the right path is to invite key stakeholders from across the organization to the planning table, then working together to seek out opportunities for emerging technology to meet those needs.

For example, a request to better invest in data for stronger customer targeting first requires an understanding of what data is needed and why. The key is to identify pain points first, then apply the best tech solutions that solve them. That’s something that challenger brands have understood for a while. At a challenger brands fireside chat session, Sr. Director of Consumer Marketing at Invisalign Kamal Bhandal noted that “Believe it or not, we position ourselves as a technology company, and data fuels so much of our business.”

Make a Case by Speaking Leadership’s Language

If you’ve selected the best technology to solve a specific business need, you’ll have a much easier time explaining its value to decision makers in your organization. Matthew Fantazier, Senior Brand Manager and Digital Strategist of Johnson’s Baby, explained how this business-first focus helps sell digital innovation within Johnson & Johnson. “We don’t have a chatbot strategy or an AI strategy,” he told the audience. “We have business strategies. If there’s something cool that Sarah and her team are working on and I have this problem I need to solve, my job is to find a way to integrate that, to make it meaningful and impactful.”

That last point about developing meaningful solutions is the most important; by highlighting the impact any given tech will have on improving the customer experience, you can better speak to its value across different levels of the organization. It’s all about looping the conversation back to the value for the customer value. As ter Haar said in his talk, “Mix empathy with engineering for the future. It’s not just about the data, but how the data is being used.”

Innovating isn’t easy—if it were, there wouldn’t be so much urgency surrounding it. But that urgency shouldn’t come from rushing to lead with “the next big thing.” Instead, set your focus on discovering ways that emerging technology can enhance the relationship your brand has with new and existing customers. By maintaining this focus in your innovation initiatives, you’ll have no problem framing it in a way that promotes a clear value to leadership and stakeholders throughout the organization.