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My Decade-Long Journey To This 'Existential Moment' In Corporate Comms

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So great to see the “existential moment” corporate communications is facing as dubbed by the Page Society in their new CCO study. According to the new research: "One of the things we found was that the majority of CCOs we spoke with now have formal responsibility for their corporate brand or the master brand of their companies," said Jon Iwata, head of thought leadership at the Page Society and former CCO of IBM. "Historically, the brand was the responsibility of the chief marketing officer. In the quantitative portion of the survey, 66% of the CCOs who responded said they have formal responsibility for corporate brand."

About a decade ago when I was leading the Global Strategic Media group at Weber Shandwick, I saw a massive shift coming in the need for brands to step up as purveyors of content as much as product, along with the evolving definition of what a brand was, and how it needed to be managed as much by corporate communications professionals as marketers.

As a result I did two key things. I founded one of the industry’s first practices dedicated to Brand Innovation at an MDC owned PR agency and also set out to write a book on the collaborative economy called WE-Commerce. The idea of both was to get ahead of the shifts above, along with the rising need for brands to convey as much about the why of their organizations as the what, and begin a push from mass communication to hyper-focused micro-content and bespoke experiences.

I must admit, it was not an easy lift. Years ago people in PR looked at me as if I had ten heads when I wanted to talk brand instead of media. Marketers had a similar reaction, including a look of wonder, at why I was interested in customer data. Not a fun time for sure! However, as they say, “never stop fighting until you arrive at your destined place” and now, seven years later, I co-own BRANDthrō, (originally BRANDthropologie a firm focused on strategic use of purpose and content) a marketing and communications consultancy that uses proprietary emotion AI and neuroscience to create a richer understanding of a brand, their targets and content through the lens of personality, emotion and language. We are founded on the simple belief we feel must inform all brand efforts today: emotion is a significant driver of behavior.

Why? Because for successful brands, it’s no longer just about understanding what customers will do, but rather how they feel and how we can best get them to act. This is what pundits are calling the “emotion economy,” and recent advances in science and technology have already put us on the path towards it.  Understanding how this ecosystem works, and learning how to draw value from it, will become vital to the success of any organization that is looking to better emotionally engage with key stakeholders and stay at the front of the pack amongst competitors.

This thinking all further aligns with another area the study highlights about how as CCOs adjust to their growing roles, they are reaching for the data-based tools and techniques used by their marketing cousins, creating a new data discipline that the study called "commtech." Iwata added that commtech combines the data and analysis tools used by marketers with the tools and skills of comms pros for creating content.

"Historically, we dealt with stakeholders as broad segments of the population, and the only way to reach them was through intermediaries like the press. Now we can get to them directly, which is why you’re seeing the huge wave of content creation," Iwata explained. " The big shift with commtech is we are able to target and understand stakeholders as individuals, and that is increasingly a source of competitive advantage ."

As I continue to write my next book entitled Wet Marketing + The New Age of Brand Alchemy, it is exceptionally rewarding to witness these new paradigms unfold as my team and I work to uncover the best methods of combining AI, neuro-science and data inspired insights to create the emotional engagement required across all key stakeholder groups today. It was a thrilling endeavor before, but now feels even more empowering as we work to have a small role in helping pioneer this new “commtech” category amidst this era of brand metamorphosis.

Around the study former Text 100 CEO Aedhmar Hayes said the following: "To me, it feels like one of the big shifts in the brand experience is how do all stakeholders experience the brand across every touch point of an organization, from a call with the customer service department through to how comms communicates through the media.”

This expansion has been accompanied by the rise of corporate purpose and the increasing expectations that consumers and employees have of corporations. CCOs are in the middle of that change, the study’s authors wrote and are "helping to define an enterprise commitment to societal value."

I couldn’t have said any of it better myself. I applaud Jon Iwata and the Page Society for this incredible piece of research which will be so vital to all brands looking for a roadmap of how to successfully evolve in today’s new emotion economy.

I will be launching a new series within my Forbes Ask the CMO platform to speak with the top CCOs in the world to better understand this shift and its broader implications on both business and brand. Stay tuned.

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