5. Sharing - The Trust Iteration (Practice)

So how do brands/agencies do this?

1. Ensure that any communication fits into an overall strategy and business imperative and does not become determined in isolation
2. Ensure that any communication takes into account the previous and next touch points (micro-interactions)with a person
3. Ensure communication can be instigated as needed and therefore be relevant

Below is what I call the Trust Iteration, a simple overview of what we need to do as agencies or companies to best service the needs of the individual with our brands. Being able to go through this loop time and time again with each micro-interation or touch point between and brand and a consumer in a way that addresses the above three points is the key to effective communication for brands.




How does this work?

1. Understand
• It starts with People. Human insight is crucial, we have to understand and keep learning about people, not just general demographic data.
• We have to understand people based on their motivations, needs, desires, culture, their loves, their hates. We have to know it now and we have to have a view how it is going to change over time.
• Note that people touch all elements of the Trust Iteration. Everything that follows must be done with people (the consumer) in mind.

2. Envision, Justify, Plan
• Vision: A strategic direction irrespective of media
• Rationale: A business rationale for the above, why bother?
• Tactics: A strategy to implement the vision re: brand, planning and media. What will this provide the business? How will the business need to evolve to deliver on this?
• Success definition and measurement: what is success (in business and consumer terms)? How will we qualitatively and quantitatively measure it?

3. Innovate, Inspire, Create
• Relationship Design – construct the chain of touch points between consumer and brand and how people move, or brands move people, between them (note this is a non-linear series of points)
• Creative & Content strategy - how we bring the above to life by inspiring innovative effective creativity across all relevant media

4. Attract, Activate, Engage, Enable, Empower
• Stimulate awareness and interest in creative execution/pr etc and start engagement
• Beyond Engagement; Enable & empower the consumer (I shall come back to digital being “Beyond Engagement” in a later post)
• Other Production - bring the vision to life through words, images, motion, objects (or whatever else works)

5 Convert, Learn, Retain, Measure
• Once we have the consumers interest make sure that converts into sales
• Process the inputs from dialogues and apply those learnings back into the next iteration of Steps 1&2
• By doing the above improve the experience of each consumer with the brand to keep them loyal, consider mechanics and incentives to aid this process
• Finally accurately measure how you have done (not in reach and awards) so that on the next iteration you can eliminate the bad and do more of the good

That seems a lot of things to do if you are to iterate effectively and efficiently but the reality is that once you have established the key strategic drivers and direction and once you have started the process it is a case of subtle changes and tweaks or ending streams of communication and starting new ones or even just a set of mental check points when considering instigating another micro-interaction or having to create on as a response to an event.

The bottom line is if someone is in control of their communication and the overarching dialogue they are looking to have with a consumer they can insert and change the subject matter relatively easily, just as a person would in a sales meeting when responding to questions or on a date or in a job interview…you have an objective, you know your subject matter and if you are to be successful you will apply that in a way your audience is satisfied, and using this model will ensure communication is effective and not wasted.


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