The Future Ready Brand: Insights from Top CMOs – with Mitch Duckler | S4 E03

Mitch: 1:09

And oh, by the way, if you don't want to try it on, we have an augmented reality app here that will actually show what that specific makeup or that specific shade of that brand will look like on you without you even having to try it on.

Joeri: 1:22

Hello everyone and welcome to the Web3 CMO Stories podcast. My name is Joeri Billast and I'm your podcast host, and today I'm really honored to be joined by a best-selling author, hi Mitch. How are you doing? Hi, Joeri? How are you? I'm well? Thanks.

Joeri: 1:41

I'm good too. As we said, I always love to talk to people from all over the world, and also people that are writing books or have written books. You have already written some books. So, guys, if you don't know Mitch Duckler, he's also a TEDX speaker. He's a founder, he's a managing partner of his own company, he is a brand consultant and, like I said, a best-selling author, and he's now on the show because he has exciting news for us. He has written a new book, which is called The Future Ready Brands How the World's Most Influential CMOs Are Navigating Societal Forces and Emerging Technologies Always exciting to write a new book. Mitch, I know that you have a lot of. There is a lot of things to tell about your background, but why don't you introduce yourself shortly and explain a bit what was actually the thing that inspired you to write this book?

Mitch: 2:39

Absolutely. Yeah, I'll start a little bit with my background. I have about 30 years of experience in brand and marketing strategy. About 10 years of that I was on the client side, so I started my career in brand management with Coca-Cola and Unilever, so classic CPG or FMCG companies, if you will. I said for about 10 years and then the last 20 or so I've been consulting, but in those exact same areas, in brand and marketing strategy. So that would include things like brand positioning, brand architecture, brand portfolio strategy and extension, things like that, and, as you mentioned, my own firm, full Surge.

Mitch: 3:19

The book that you referenced is called The Future Ready Brand and for that what I did is I interviewed 43 chief marketing officers. They're almost all Fortune 500. So they're major brands and they were all CMOs, EVPS of marketing. And the topics that we discussed really cut across three broad areas societal trends, technological trends and commercial and activation trends, and there are three topics in each of those three areas. So nine chapters in the total book and I can tell you real briefly about each one real quickly, and then I know we'll dive into a few individually.

Mitch: 3:58

But the first section, as I said, is societal trends, and there I have a chapter on transparency and purpose and how that's impacting brand. Changing attitudes towards health and wellness is the second, and then the third is around Gen Z, the emergence of Generation Z. The second section is all around technology, and there I have a chapter on predictive analytics machine learning, a second one on realities, so extended reality, vr, ar, mr, in the metaverse, and then a third chapter on Web3, which are things like blockchain and tokenomics and NFTs and so forth. So that, collectively, is the second section of the book technology. And then the third is how are those technologies that we just talked about in the second section impacting brand activation in particular? And there are three chapters also content marketing, gamification and influencer marketing. So I don't profess to be a subject matter expert in any of these, which is why I went out and interviewed 40 plus CMOs and got a lot smarter and had them tell me what their thoughts are on those topics.

Joeri: 5:07

You know what, mitch? We are doing a bit the same. So you have interviewed CMOs for your book, I'm interviewing them for my podcast, so I get also a lot smarter with every guest that comes on the show. And a big part of your book and what we also have been talking on my show with other guests is, of course, AI, because the technology part of your book, that's something that resonates the most with me. But now my listeners list. There is a lot of things in your book, a lot of subjects, a lot of content, but about AI, lots of people talk about the AI and marketing. How can we now, as a CMO, as a marketer, as an entrepreneur, embrace marketing AI for competitive advantages?

Mitch: 5:51

Yeah. So there's a number of ways, but I think what one of the most powerful that comes to mind is, as I talked about CMOs and they use different language and had different use cases, but they talked about a couple of things that I think pair well together the concept of micro segmentation and then hyper personalization, personalization. So by micro-segmentation, I think we all on this call know what segmentation is right. You take a big market and you cluster it right. You develop five or six segments that are somehow similar, based on their attitudes, their behaviors, their demographics or some combination. Right, that's segmentation.

Mitch: 6:30

What AI has allowed is micro-se segmentation. The technology and its advanced, sophisticated computing power allows you to almost come up with virtually an unlimited number of segments. There can be dozens or hundreds, even thousands of segments that you almost begin to approach this notion of one-to-one marketing and that obviously was not scalable or possible before technology. And then, once you have that segmentation that's the first piece right People at a very fine level and how they're different from others. You can hyper-personalize your offer, right? So you're tailoring every aspect of the offer itself, even the pricing of it and the experience that surrounds it, to that individual based on what you know about that, and I think that there's certainly a lot of other things right that the AI can enable, including generative AI and content and so forth, but that, to me, is one of the most exciting areas that came across in my interviews.

Joeri: 7:28

Yeah, I will come back to that later, but for me, indeed, it's also personalization and also productivity parts for communication and so on. I would like to come back to that a bit later, but that's also something that you talk about in your book. But where there are opportunities, there are also challenges, of course. People you talk about ai and people are a bit afraid too, depending on their experience. Yeah, you have been doing those interviews. So what are the top three challenges that brand marketers face with AI and how can CMOs mitigate those risks?

Mitch: 8:04

Yes, so in the book I actually point out I think it's nine, but I would say there are three that I believe I heard most consistently and with the most concern. The first is around data integrity, and this is one of these situations of it's garbage in, garbage out the data that AI is leveraging, or that the solutions, right, the outputs, deliverables that result from AI are only as good as the data that goes into it. As you can imagine, just like anything else, and as we know, there are some inaccuracies, especially in generative AI, right, where we've all heard of the concept of hallucinations, where a content generation, the AI, doesn't necessarily know what they want to say or can't think of a good example, so they make it up and it looks like it's right, but it's not right, it's a hallucination. That's one of the more innocent ones. But then there's also systemic biases and that are there some biases that actually go into the algorithms that underlie these large language models? So that's one that I would group under data integrity, large language models so that's one that I would group under data integrity.

Mitch: 9:18

Another one I would put is just is there going to be a loss of creativity and the human touch? And I interviewed the CMO of Accenture, jill Kramer. I think she said it best. She said AI should be an amplifier of human talent, it's not a replacement of it. And there are things that AI can do much better than human beings, especially the efficiencies that you mentioned earlier and the productivity. But also there are things that humans can do far better than any AI, right, and that is things like empathy, emotion and creativity, and you just have to keep that in mind.

Mitch: 9:52

Right, that you can't lose that or we will gravitate to a very homogenous world very quickly. Right, all brands will start to look like because we're all leveraging the same data and coming up with the same conclusions, et cetera. Right, you can't lose that human touch. And I think the third, and something is very near and dear to me as a brand consultant is brand fit and authenticity. Right, so you can come up with interesting content or is interesting solutions, but are they true and authentic to your brand positioning? And I think that's somewhere where that we are making progress. From what I understand, there are plugins that can ensure adherence to a brand personality, a brand tone, brand voice, brand persona, et cetera brand positioning, but I still think that those are in the early days right, and we do run a risk of, especially in the area of content generation, coming up with solutions that might all be well and good, but not necessarily consistent with your brand. So those are three areas that I would point to off the top of my head.

Joeri: 10:50

Yeah, yeah, I would totally agree too, and indeed, if you want to write a book or you want to create content and you use AI for that, you will have average content, nothing that stands out. That's actually, and I I like to make the comparison with what you're doing with the book. You're interviewing people so you get original content that you're putting together. Now, as people know, for my podcast, every podcast episode has show notes, has an article which is actually I use ai for that. People know that based on the content that we are creating now, but it's unique content that just ai transforms in a text format, and I said it in the beginning. I want to talk to you about that too, about content creation. So for me, that's something I do use AI to create content that I produce and put it in other format. But maybe, yeah, can you name or give us some best practices for incorporating AI in content creation?

Mitch: 11:49

Sure, yeah, because one of the things I write about in that there's an entire chapter, portion of a chapter, dedicated to AI in content marketing and creation is certainly one area, right, the one you just mentioned, but it really can inform a lot of different areas of content marketing research, for example. So, even before you get to the creation, developing titles and headers, doing editing and proofing of the content. Beyond that, there's personalization, which includes things like versioning, so you take content and can you create different versions, for example, off of the same piece. Can you do one for seven different verticals, or can you do a content piece in five different languages right, that's versioning, and it's been a huge help there because it is just a massive time saver and efficiency generator.

Mitch: 13:01

Curation right, so content curation is huge and AI has been very effective at locating and leveraging, especially UGC, user-generated content that is brand relevant. And then, lastly, optimization, which is related to what we talked about before, which is taking content and making sure that it's on brand, it's readable, it's got the right tonality, style, format and so forth. So I think I would generally encourage you to think about all those areas right, yes, it's creation, but it's really every facet of content marketing is being impacted by AI in a largely positive way, absolutely, so you need to see the positive side of it.

Joeri: 13:41

Yes, also, I was reading your book and I saw this whole list of tools that is out there already. So I know you are not really putting one tool in front of the other, but there are so many tools. How are you using for your daily work, your content creation, your book writing? Are you using these tools too, or what is the impact of those tools? If you didn't have those tools, would it be way more difficult to, for instance, write a book?

Mitch: 14:10

Yeah, I've been using some of them, mostly the generative. I use it more for my own benefit and my own work as opposed to like on client work. I haven't gotten that to the point where it's necessarily worked its way into my service delivery. As you can imagine, as a consultant, I do a lot of content generation myself and I've been using some of these tools, and one of the things I talk about in the book is just the ability to customize content creation from AI. So custom chat GBT, for example, is something that I've experimented with taking I've written two books now and I've got years of blogging behind me how can I take that content and actually train a model around it to generate blog posts, linkedin posts, things like that, even longer form thought leadership pieces and I've been experimenting with that with the aid of some really good tech partners and, yeah, I've found it very useful and I think eventually all consultants, if they're not already doing it, are going to find a way for it to work into service delivery, absolutely.

Joeri: 15:12

And just before, a few hours before we recorded this podcast episode, I was in an event and we did an AI art exhibition and so I already organized like more than 10 events. And this time it was led by another person in our community and he's also experimenting with a lot of AI. It was an AI art exhibition and he said you know, every one of us was using the journey, but they said let's now use the Adobe tools and see what we can do. And this was a whole new experience because I'm here in Belgium, some people are in the US or different places, others are other places in Europe or in Asia, so this immersive aspect is really yeah for me. I love that. I did those possibilities you also are talking in your book. Yeah, for brands. I would like to hear your thoughts about the world of extended reality. Let's call it like that VR, AR, MR. Yeah, how can brands benefit from them for their customers?

Mitch: 16:13

Yeah. So again here I'll go back to some of the headline findings, if you will, from my interviews. And one of the things that probably should have been more evident to me maybe, but wasn't is just this notion that there's been a lot of talk about the better version, how hiked up it was and how it's under delivery right and it's not meeting up to the hype was and how it's under delivery right and it's not meeting up to the hype. And largely it's driven by a few things the technology, right, especially the lenses, the devices themselves. The goggles are very clunky, they're not very practical. Things like the bandwidth that's required to support a full metaverse is challenging.

Mitch: 16:49

But what is happening is this idea of metaverse, like Web 2.5 is what some of the CMOs are calling it, and they're talking about it as in two different ways. One is just extended reality, so either virtual reality or augmented reality. That's not necessarily metaverse based, but as part of the consumer experience or the client experience in B2B, and then the other is non-goggle or non-device oriented websites. So in other words, it's metaverse but it's not necessarily tied to your Oculus goggles, right, it's got some of those, it's 2.5, right, and the message there is in both cases, those are improved experiences. Those are experiences that are more than two-dimensional, certainly in the case of XR, and more immersive in the case of the 2.5 metaverse, but they're not necessarily the full-blown metaverse that I think people were projecting two, three years ago two, three years ago and I think that what I was hearing from CMOs is the importance of not waiting to see how this all shakes out.

Mitch: 17:57

Right, there's a temptation to say, oh, you know what, it's too early and we're going to wait and see. Is it one metaverse or multiple metaverses? And what platforms are the winning platforms? And before we started investing? And what I'm hearing is you can't, right, Just get involved right now. You have to start experimenting, saying that the early experimenters versus early movers will be rewarded by this, and I can see that. I think I definitely understand. Certainly, proceed with caution, but proceed.

Joeri: 18:25

Absolutely, that's what I've been doing too. It was just at the moment that Facebook changed their name to Meta Looking into what is all this and just try to experiment, organizing stuff, see how people react. But indeed it's also. Every year there is another hype word NFTs, Metaverse, now AI. We will see how everything evolves. Now Web 2.5, actually, I think the previous author that I had on the podcast, Amanda Cassatt she talks about Web 3.0, marketing, marketing, and she's also talking about Web 2.5. So that's exactly for me also.

Mitch: 18:59

Yeah, I think that's a very appropriate term. So the one example that I thought was fascinating and it's actually a combination, just if you're looking for kind of a real world application of it today it's a combination of AI and XR and that was in my interview with Sephora, the cosmetic company Sephora. We have in any good store. We might have 300 brands and 5,000 products. So you can imagine the complexity. And this also ties back to the whole micro segmentation and hyper-personalization. So he was saying imagine a consumer comes in and they say I'm looking for a product that will treat for its oily skin and my skin is very sensitive and I'm fairly complected and I have hazel eyes and dark hair, high cheekbones. I would like to have something with an SPF in it, right, what do you recommend? With 5,000 products? Right, and 300 brands, it can be overwhelming. But AI can sift through it like that and say you know what? We've narrowed it down to three or four through it like that and say you know what? We've narrowed it down to three or four.

Joeri: 20:11

And here are the three or four that make sense given all of those different permutations you gave me Absolutely, and because that's something that the bigger audience, the bigger public, they can understand. They see the practicalities, how that could work, Because we can talk about Web3 and so on, NFTs, where people say what is this all about? But this is something really concrete. Something else I've read in the book and influencer marketing. Now I think I also read and I agree with that creator economy is becoming maybe more the term. So you talk about human influencers versus virtual influencers and, yeah, can you explain a bit more about that?

Mitch: 20:54

Yeah, I think that there is. It's still in the early days. In my conversations with most, all of them are using influencer marketing to some extent, then more so in some cases than others. However, I don't think they're as far along with virtual influencers as they are with AI, but the ones that are experimenting with them are definitely seeing a trend or a rise in the virtual influencers, especially in some of the more entertainment and consumer-oriented categories.

Mitch: 21:25

One of the people I interviewed said they talk about virtually humans and they epitomize this concept of and I'm probably going to butcher this pronunciation Spresitura. What's that? It's the art of making something highly planned, seems spontaneous and casual, and I think that's really what a lot of these virtual influencers can do right, and that's why they make them very engaging and very entertaining and even something that you'd want to emulate. And yeah, it's again, I think it's a long way off from replacing human influencers, but it's also a way that one of the biggest reasons it's taken on Populator, I believe and as I've talked to CMOs, they've agreed to is your ability to control them right. You have a little more control over a virtual influencer than you do over a human.

Mitch: 22:12

There's a lot of debate whether that's good or not, because a lot of the CMOs that I've talked to said you know what. You shouldn't try to control influencers. Right, let them do their thing. They know their audience. Don't try to script them. Don't over-script them. Let them communicate and build relationships in a way that makes most sense to them. But at the same time, that requires releasing some control and having some comfort and, as we know, things can sometimes go astray. You do reduce some of that risk with virtual influencers, but at the end of the day, there are some things that virtual influencers just are not as effective as human influencers. I think some of that are categories that are a little bit more emotive and a little less rational in nature, though they tend to skew better, stay better with human influencers, whereas categories that might be a little bit more rational in nature, like think insurance and the Geico Gecko right, that's where a virtual influencer can make sense for you.

Joeri: 23:13

You spoke with a lot of people, mitch, but if you look at all these conversations and probably there were a lot of exciting, memorable moments Is there one conversation or maybe an insight that made you like that created some excitement with you, that was memorable, that creates some excitement with you, that was memorable that you could share?

Mitch: 23:35

Yeah, one of the things that I found most inspiring is several of them talk about the emerging technologies and, probably most specifically, artificial intelligence.

Mitch: 23:48

What it has the ability to do is elevate the function of marketing to a level that I think a lot of marketers would love to see but really isn't happening today, to the extent possible, and that is getting a seat at the strategy table, being seen as an equal part contributor in the C-suite, just like the CFO, the CIO, the CHRO, et cetera.

Mitch: 24:14

And AI has the ability to do that because, if you think about its capabilities, a lot of which we just talked about, identifying consumer needs and addressing those needs at a much more granular and effective manner, identifying growth opportunities and markets with much more precision and dependability and accuracy these are all things that elevate the very nature and capabilities of the marketing function and just open up opportunities that may not be as easily accessed today.

Mitch: 24:49

And I think that's really the most exciting thing that these technologies represent, and I think one of the CMOs I interviewed nailed it best you don't have to be a data scientist, right, but you need to understand the applicability of these technologies and the capabilities, what it enables you to do, and make sure that the CIO is your best friend. Right, because they can enable you to be so much more influential and impactful in your day-to-day job. And all of a sudden, you're not just marketing communications, you're not just a tactician, but you own or you co-own the growth agenda, which is a very different role, right, and the role that I think most marketers aspire to. Right, most really good marketers.

Joeri: 25:30

Absolutely. We could talk for ages, I think. If you, there is a lot, of, a lot more content in your book, yeah, now, yeah, we focus a bit more on technology, of course, because that's what my podcast is about. Yeah, Mitch, if people are now curious about the book, or you're curious about everything that you're doing, where would you like me to send them?

Mitch: 25:54

sure. So, as I mentioned, I am a consultant. I would love for you to check out my firm. It's called Fullsurge f-u-l-l-s-u-r-g-e, so it's at full surgecom. The book which is future ready brand, and I also wrote another book called the Indispensable Brand. The Indispensable Brand is available on Amazon right now. It was published in 2019. And the Future Ready Brand, the second book, which is what we were talking about today, will be available on Amazon and other retailers on May 14th, but it is available today actually for pre-orders. So I would encourage you to check out either Amazon and or on Fulsurge.

Joeri: 26:36

Great. We will put the links, of course, in the show notes as people, because maybe they are listening in their car. You can go to our website and check out the blog article. Mitch, it was such a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you so much.

Mitch: 26:46

Thank you. I enjoyed the conversation, Joeri. Thank you.

Joeri: 26:50

Guys, again a really interesting interview on the show, again an author. I always love to get authors on the show because there is so much knowledge that has been shared. If you think that this book or the podcast episode is useful for people around you, be sure to share the link with them. If you're not yet subscribed to the podcast, this is a really good moment to do this and, of course, I would like to see you back next time, take care.