Transcript: Marketing Predictions for 2019

This is the transcript for our webinar event C42D Crystal Ball: Marketing Predictions for 2019. We know everyone loves transcripts, and this one is amazing.

All right, let’s get started. Thanks for joining us on this lovely snowy day here in New York. Couldn’t be a better time to sit back and join a nice webinar. Right. We’re glad you’re here. I am so pumped for this first webinar of the year. I’ve burned a lot of calories thinking about this topic, put a lot of research into it, and really thought deeply about where things are going for marketing in 2019, in particular how that affects those of you in the B2B field, which is something specialized here at C42D.

So, quick note, C42D webinars cover a different marketing topic every quarter. The format is as follows. I will cover my prepared remarks for about 30 or 45 minutes. At the end, there will be time for questions. If you have a question at any time you may type it in the Q&A box. The video of this webinar will be available on the C42D.com blog by the end of the day. All right, let’s get into it.

So our agenda, you can see I’ve used up my allotment of horrible stock photos on slide one already, which is great. We actually don’t have an agenda, we’re not going to have any spoilers today, so you’re going to have to stay tuned for the whole event if you want to hear all of our predictions for 2019. Again, as I mentioned, it’s primarily through that B2B lens. So, ready? Let’s get into it.

Number one, data privacy is the earthquake that will reshape marketing. I’m leading with this prediction because, in all seriousness, I think this will be the number one issue facing digital marketers in 2019. Up until now, what was more or less the wild west. Anything goes, right. But issues over the past 12 months have raised public awareness around personal data, and privacy, and it’s not going away, I predict. So, between GDPR and other similar laws pending in the US, top executives at Facebook and Google appearing before Congress, et cetera. We’re looking at a potential tectonic shift in how we market. Or at the very least, a real pain in the neck as far as compliance goes.

So, each prediction is going to have a little quote with it. Actually, I did the predictions first and then found quotes that seemed to support them from top thought leaders in the marketing world. “Consumers will use their new privacy rights to make themselves harder to track, leaving marketers scrambling to keep personalization alive.” That’s from Fatemeh, who’s a Principal Analyst at the research from Forrester. Okay, so earthquake has hit.

We all remember May 25th of last year, don’t we? That was the day that we all scrambled to update our privacy policies, make sure we were complying with GDPR, put up our little cookies dialogue box that everybody has, well, guess what? Now, California is doing the same thing. They passed this last year, and it doesn’t go into effect until 2020. But there’s actually a 12-month look-back provision that may apply to things you’re doing right now.

So as the year went on, the wolves continue to circle, you can see Mark not looking too thrilled to be in front of Congress there. Tim Cook wrote a great piece that appeared in Time Magazine, let’s zero in on what Tim said. “Consumers shouldn’t have to tolerate another year of companies irresponsibly amassing huge user profiles, data breaches that seem out of control, and the vanishing ability to control our own digital lives.” The wolves are circling. But wait. It gets worse.

Coming soon to a sales funnel near you. The American Data Dissemination Act, The Social Media Privacy and Consumer Rights Act of 2019, The Washington Privacy Act, and New York’s Right To Know Act of 2019. This is all real pending legislation that could come to fruition, all congressional gridlock aside, these are real laws that people are debating and looking about, looking into rolling out. So what’s that all mean? Means increasingly complicated and potentially confusing rules. It means that if you process personal information, and remember that could be just an email address and somebody’s name, you need to remain diligent about privacy and security. It’s all changing quickly, so it’s something that we’re going to have to stay on top of.

So, as we mentioned, GDPR and California, plus the federal rules, will create confusion and exposure to risks. Hiding under the covers is not a strategy, it’s something we need to deal with now. We actually had a situation where a client was thinking about locking an entire geographic area from accessing the website, and yeah, I mean, you can do that, that’s easy enough. There’s plugins that’ll do that. But it’s my opinion, it’s my prediction that eventually you’ll have to block the entire Earth. Because people are taking this seriously, and this is not going away.

Things to think about is your privacy policy correctly worded, and are you following it? Are you actually doing the things that you say you’ll be doing? Is your business model itself or your marketing methods, are they threatened by this? Think about on your iPhone every time you install a new app, you get this little dialogue box… And so app to access your location while you’re using the app, this app needs to access your location. What happens when this dialogue box says, “This app needs to access your location so it can sell your data to third parties?” How many people are clicking allow on that dialogue box?

That’s something I could see seriously happening. There’s already some complaints out there about people having their third party data used and sold to other companies. They’re like, “No, no. Wait a minute. I didn’t click on that when I allowed it in the dialogue box.” So, things are shifting. Things are changing. I think overall it’s about keeping trust at center stage, and maintaining that trust with your customers and with your prospects. Bear with me for one second. Great.

This whole issue of trust sort of segues to our next prediction, which is going to be about Blockchain. So, next prediction, Blockchain crawls out of the ocean. So, if Blockchain is sort of this prehistoric amphibian fish, whatever you want to call it, I think this is the year that Blockchain grows legs and learns to crawl, walks on the land, et cetera. So, we’ve all seen the hyper on crypto, but we predict that this is the year you’ll start to see real applications of this technology start to take off. At the very least, the investments from VCs will continue as this is a very active technology that lots of people are pursuing.

Quote from Jeffrey Penner, “I am watching how customer data and a company’s ability to collect and protect that data influences and affects consumer trust and relationships with brands. The Trust Economy is here.” So think about that. The Trust Economy is here. We all know the hype cycle, right. This is a little thing that Gartner put together. It talks about how the hype around emerging technologies goes through this predictable cycle where a new technology is launched, it reaches very rapidly the peak of inflated expectations, then quickly crashes into the trough of disillusionment, so this looks kind of like the price chart for Bitcoin, right.

From there, it crawls up the slope of enlightenment as real applications of the technology start to mature, people start to use it for other things and you realize that, “All right, it’s not going to save the world over night. But there is some interesting stuff here.” Then eventually the technology flattens into the plateau of productivity. I would say Bitcoin, or crypto, whatever you want to call it, Blockchain, is right about here on the chart. It’s just starting to crawl of the depressing trough, and we’re starting to see some real serious applications of the technology. At the right, you can see a screenshot from IBM’s website. They’ve got lots of interesting applications of how you can use Blockchain technology around logistics, around agriculture, trading finance, things like that.

So, Microsoft and IBM both have Blockchain as a service offerings right now. So we’re also seeing 65% of enterprises with over 10,000 employees are considering or actively engaged in Blockchain deployment. So definitely a lot of action around that. JPMorgan Chase is tokenizing gold bars, so take from that what you will, but it’s another thing that’s happening. Again, the applications in logistics, agriculture, health records, patient data. These are all serious real world applications that are going to help advance and mature the technology, help to develop standards and things along those lines.

What are some of the implications? Well, if you ask some thought leaders, they’ll say utilizing Blockchain and search engine marketing will eliminate the digital middle man like Facebook and Google, and Look, Google and Facebook, they’re not going anywhere, folks. Combine their 1.2 trillion market cap and all of this year’s horrible news notwithstanding, they have some great, super smart minds working there. Their combined scale, their technology advantage, it’s going to be really hard to overcome.

We do think for brand marketers, Blockchain itself, keep of authentication and trust, consumers, specially millennials, really value this clarity, so that’s a point we’re going to hit on a couple times in this webinar. If you play by the rules, you’re going to be on the right side of things, and you’re going to know that the information you have is truly personalized, it’s current, it’s accurate, and that’s win for everybody. Hey, if you don’t, you’re facing potential exposure, or even worse, eroded trust in your customers and consumers.

So these applications, they’re still rolling out, they’re still experimental. But I would say now is the time to decide how you can leverage this inevitable shift in culture and technology. It’s definitely a cultural shift. One way people are experimenting with this is a application called BAT, which is the Basic Attention Token, it’s put out by Brave Software. It allows advertisers to pay people directly for viewing their ads. So that’s sort of turning the business model on its head. You can see in their beautiful triangular chart here, the user is protected behind a shield of anonymity, they’re rewarded for viewing ads, and they get tokens in exchange for that.

Advertisers get a better return on their investment, they get better targeting because they’ve got more specific information. They’ve got reduced fraud, because we know the real people. The publishers, hey, they make out too. They get BATs based on user attention, revenue increases, inefficiencies decrease, it’s a win for everybody. Another application is lead generation built on Blockchain. This will allow customers to sell their personal data by exchanging tokens, they get control over their data, and marketers get a massive database of up to date high quality leads, you know, perhaps at a price that might cost more for exchanging token for these, but we’re going to know the quality is there, and we all know that quality when it comes to a database of potential prospects or customers is everything. So having that high quality database is great.

All right, let’s get into our next prediction. Voice is changing. No, I’m not talking about your voice changing, I’m talking about voice assistants like Alexa, Google Home, I believe Apple has one too, right. Record holiday sales of voice-activated devices will accelerate voice command usage. Expect well-designed, secure, voice-first experience to be on top of your customers’ wishlist in 2019. These quotes are all courtesy of CMO.com, which is a great website if you’re looking for all news related to things marketing, great resources there, check it out.

Okay, so some quick statistics here. By 2020, 50% of all searches across the internet will be voice-based. And by 2020, 30% of all searches will be done using a device without a screen. So think about that. No screen involved. How do you rank for that? And 28% of enterprises have already adopted voice technology to improve the customer experience and if they haven’t done it, well, 57% are planning to deploy in the next 12 months. So yeah. Everyone is doing it, it’s going to be voice-based, it’s going to be screenless, although there are assistants rolling out like Google Home that do have a screen and some of the other Alexa products do as well. I think primarily you want to think about voice marketing and what are some of the ways you can use that.

So here are some not so far out use cases. In the travel industry. Okay, Google, I’m flying to San Jose next Tuesday, can you find me a hotel for under $300? We know if you can find a hotel on San Jose for under $300 you’re doing good. Catering, Alexa, order me coffee and doughnuts and have them delivered ASAP. Human resources, Alexa, can you email me the profiles of five WordPress developers who have a 4.8 or better rating for $50 an hour or less? Wouldn’t that be great? Service. Okay, Google, get me Verizon customer service, wait you can’t, because my internet is down and that’s why I want to talk to them.

Real estate. Alexa, what’s the best deal on the coworking spaces in Chicago? Hospitality, we’re starting to see this roll out. Amazon has some guidelines and structure around hospitality marketing on Alexa right now, I think it’s a request to opt into that, or they have to invite you. But hospitality. Okay, Google, order champagne from room service and book me a 8:00 a.m. Tee time, and you know what, throw in some caviar too. This one is kind of interesting, so even internally, in maybe like a large enterprise business, Alexa, when does open on Tuesday for 30 minutes, so scheduling meetings, I think companies like can really leverage this, like wouldn’t it be great if you can just have a voice assistant and book a conference room? That would be cool.

How about having a guest registered at the front desk down stairs? Great. So another implication of voice is Google Duplex. Yeah, Dave, what about Google Duplex? Well, Siri, I’m glad you asked. In fact, we wrote an article about this on the C42D blog, that’s C42D.com/blog. It’s called The Google Duplex Future is Crazier Than We Thought. You can see here is a photo from the event where they first introduced this technology. In case you missed it, Google Duplex is a artificial intelligence chat agent that can carry out specific verbal tasks, like making a reservation or an appointment, and it does it all over the phone.

It’s built on a recurrent neural network using something called TensorFlow Extended, which is a general purpose algorithm used at Google. So the cool thing about this is you can’t really tell you’re talking to a computer or a robot, whatever you want to call it. And it mixes in little things like, hm-mm-hmm (affirmative), yeah, okay, yeah, you know, yeah. So, hard to tell that you’re talking to a computer and really mimics real world speech. So some interesting things that could happen here, and when we thought about this, we thought, “Could this technology replace your outbound, your outreach calls? Can it replace customer service or maybe even research studies?”

So think about that for a second, right. Everybody robocalls, but the novelty of this technology, I think it might keep people more engaged, at least in the short term for now. We’re really looking at evolving the whole idea of conversational marketing, which is a big topic now, it’s a whole new level. This blows away everything that has happened up until now. But a few things need to happen. The technology, it has to become smart enough to require a less or even no human oversight. So I think what we’re talking about there is the AI part of it maturing a little bit more. Definitely putting in a large amount of front-end programming, but that’s going to pay off in the long term, when you can fire your whole sales team and your customer service department.

Then, another interesting aspect, you know we always look at things through a branding lens here at C42D, so the aspects like vocabulary, tone, syntax, like how the words are spoken, is going to have to be on brand and it’s going to become part of any major branding initiative is how your voice marketing comes across to be on brand. So, like we said, that technology is still maturing, but now is a great time to start thinking about it.

All right. Number four, B2B and B2C barriers continue to crumble. Earthquakes, crumbling, a lot of action on this webinar. What the heck do I mean by this? Let’s look at Josh, who’s the Head of Marketing at Dun & Bradstreet. He says, “Customer experiences will stop viewing individuals as a B2C consumer through one lens and a B2B buyer through another lens. Individuals don’t turn off a part of themselves and brands will no longer have to make the distinction.”

So this is a graphic I’d put in an article where we touched on this topic earlier last year. The point I was making here is these are all Instagram ads, they’re all B2B, even though at least three of them really look like consumer marketing. So the point is where there were once clearly differentiated strategies and creative for these two verticals, now we’re starting to see a blurring in the line between B2C and B2B. Those B2C experiences have shaped B2B buyer expectations. So, as we’re going around and we’re on Instagram, we’re having all these incredibly well-curated B2C experiences, that’s setting a bar for what we expect on the B2B side. That bar is going up every day as the user experiences continue to improve.

As a result, marketing and business product or service with a lifestyle approach it’s no longer off limits anymore. This applies to brands seeking to market to a younger demographic. The future decision makers. So we had a client come to us and, it’s a client that we’ve worked with over the past year. They made a point that really stuck with me, which was, “We want to resonate with the Millennial generation because they might be in their 30s right now, but in another 10 years, they’re going to be in the C-Suite, they’re going to be the decision makers, and we want them to think of us first.” Which I thought was a really, really great point.

Okay, the kings of this, Rework, with their Eric B. And Rakim quote on the wall there, they’ve definitely taken what was once a really boring and stale industry, commercial real estate, and made it much more fun. Bear with me one second while I take a sip of my water. I’m not spiked with anything today. And Adobe, their marketing is very aspirational, they’re champions of the individual, but they sell business software, right. So, brands like Rework and Adobe have realized B2B marketers, they market to businesses, but human beings make the purchasing decisions.

Those human beings are consumers just like the rest of us, and what you want to do is find those moments in the customer journey where you can deliver delightful experiences, just make your entire product a delightful experience, like Rework. B2B, B2C, no longer mutually exclusive. Which then leads into this, premium digital experiences, they’re now table stakes, this is just getting you a seat at the table, you have to be premium in 2019. These next couple predictions you’ll start to see a little bit of a synergy here, and they all kind of relate to each other.

All right, quote, “Customers will become increasingly design-sensitive, they will gravitate to businesses that create personalized, crafted digital experiences. They expect delightfulness, such as what they get from Uber or Airbnb. Customers will equate great execution to credibility.” So like I said, this is getting you in the door, this is establishing trust and credibility, which is just the level of your experience. So, we’ve got our nice little premium work environment there. So let’s look at some stats around this.

95% of B2B leaders say customer experience is their gateway to growth. 90% of them see customer experiences as critical committing their strategic priorities. B2B brands, leading the customer experience charge are experiencing higher margins, higher client satisfaction scores, and greater employee satisfaction. So it’s a win all around. What’s interesting to us, and I’ve seen this in the past year, is we’re having these smaller clients reaching out to us, you know whether looking for branding, or digital or whatever. I’ve had a solo insurance practitioner, a place that basically leases office equipment and IT consultants, so these are typical folks we wouldn’t think are thinking this way, and they’re coming to us and saying, “We want a premium experience for our customers. We get it, we know what they’re looking for.”

This is really coming to a head here in 2019, and like I said, it’s the new table stake, so a few more points. The average B2B customer, they move through six uniques channel as they make their purchase decision. So it’s more of an omnichannel experience. It must be seamless, consistent and simple, and you can see we’ve got our seven unique channels over there. I think we threw in an extra one, maybe that’s the hot dog stand, I’m not sure that that’s an important channel. So yeah, like I said, keep it seamless, keep it easy across all the channels.

Having mixed messages, off brand content, outdated content, that can cause disengagement, and that can lower their trust. Remember, trust is very important these days as we talked about in some of the earlier points. Make your messages clear, make your UX intuitive, and make your content valuable. Make it something they’re going to love. So, this kind of rolls into our next prediction, social is no longer a B2B afterthought.

What do I mean by this? Consumers are using social to interact with brands, make buying decisions and get support. It’s critical that brands build social into their strategy to deliver a compelling customer experience and achieve business results. So, for some reason, there’s this misperception out there, I’m not sure why, that social is not serious enough to be effective for B2B marketing, I don’t know where people get that from. But in reality, 83% of executives are using social media in their decision making to hire vendors. Of those executives, 92% say that social media influenced a recent purchasing decision.

So, what’s that mean? Yes, they are looking, they’re checking out your Facebook, they’re checking out your LinkedIn, and social is a primary channel in how your business is evaluated. Okay, what do you not want to do? This is a Facebook page, I just kind of googled up a random CPA firm, and you can see the last post was November 2016, and it’s about their email account being hacked. Okay, so yeah, not a very premium experience here. Folks, this isn’t winning any business. Some great posts over on the right side from PricewaterhouseCoopers, and a couple other folks I follow on LinkedIn showing us some useful content, some good practices there. Post quality, useful content and do it consistently so people know when to expect stuff from you.

Reinforcing our whole thing about premium experiences, brand messaging, et cetera, keeping things on brand, so neglect is not a strategy, and no more out of date feeds, okay, people? No more lame content. This is the year where you take it seriously, I don’t know if you need to hire a content person, or put someone on your staff to own this, but this is the time to give people valuable content that’s on brand and reinforces the messaging that you’re putting out in your other channels. On that note, everything should be remaining clear, you know, all these premium experiences and social posts, they’re going to fall flat without a great story behind your brand.

I can hear some of you already, you’re like, “All right, Dave, this is old news, people have been talking about brand stories for a long time. Is this really a prediction?” Well  Nancy Naysayer, my answer to you is why are there so many bad websites still out there that, why are we still getting clients? Obviously, there’s more work to be done, which is why I predict this concept will become more commonly known, more mainstream, in 2019.

Mark says, “To become a better storyteller and brand steward, a business must first understand their customers’ needs. Then, the business owner can position their customers as the hero of the brands on story. The story should then be told so that the brand is the exact solution the hero requires to successfully complete their quest.” So if that sounds familiar to any of you, you’re basically talking about a framework that we use here at C42D, it’s called story brand, it’s a great framework for putting your business messaging together, and you can learn more about that, just google it.

But basically the way it works is you’ve got a character, and that character is your prospect, it’s your customer, and he’s the main character in your brand story. Character has a problem, sales are down, the competition is killing us, investors are angry, et cetera, et cetera. I’ve got a problem and I’m needing a guide, and that guide is going to lead them to a plan to solve the problem. Then they’re going to call them to take action, which will result in success or failure. So I’m not going to drill down super deep into this, but this is the same underlying structure that you see in Hollywood blockbusters, it’s Star Wars, it’s Harry Potter, any great novel out there, or novelists, is following a similar structure.

It’s a way to frame your story that creates loops in the customer’s mind where they want something filled in like, “Okay, yeah, you’ve right. I’ve got a problem. Yeah, the guys, he’s got a plan, okay. What’s the plan? What’s going to happen if I take the plan?” So you’re always on this what’s next? What’s next? What’s next? And it keeps you really engaged. So it’s a great way to frame your message.

Along those lines, you want to keep it clear, right. Keep it crystal clear. B2B sales, by definition, they’re more complicated, you’ve got multiple stakeholders, you’ve got complicated products. It’s all a big mess sometimes. But they’re still expecting the premium experience including your brand story. So regardless of how complicated it is, or how many different customer segments you have, how many different products, you still got to keep it simple. It’s an opportunity to build trust and a stronger following through your clearly articulated values. This is a great way to bring out transparency too, so we pledge to you like this is what we’re going to give you. You can always count on us to do this, this, and this. Keep it clear, keep it simple.

How do you do it? Build profiles of all the buyers that are going to be involved in making a decision. So from the IT guy who first found to your website, to the VP of Marketing, to the CMO, the CEO, whoever is involved in the decision, you’re going to want to know who they are. You’re going to want to have a story crafted for each one. Then have them all live under an overarching brand story. Then, have all of your marketing messages come from this framework. So it’s all coming from the same place, it all makes sense, and all relates to each other. So, consistency and simplicity.

All right, that’s our seven predictions. But hey, we got a bonus, number eight, right. Startup branding breaks out of a rut. So, what am I talking about here? Natasha Jen, a partner at Pentagram says, “Think about the startup look. Hyper clean, sans-serif fonts typed out literally as a logotype, placed on solid-colored background with a silhouetted product shot. It’s kind of amusing and alarming that we ended up at a point where one look can be applied to anything, sell anything. Luggage, toothbrush, shoes, cosmetics, pet products, insurance. You name it.”

What’s that look? Something that I identified earlier in an article I put on C42D.com. So yeah. Now listen, I think all of these are incredibly well executed. The photography is great. The sites are good, they work. Heck, some of us have probably bought stuff off some of these. But, I think like she mentioned in her quote, you’re kind of losing your differentiation. After a while, it all starts to look the same. We’re as guilty as any other design firm of following trends, using the cool fonts. We’ve seen in the branding world over the past year or so, some really distinctive brands are all kind of looking the same.

So what’s the solution? Where are things going to go in the next year? I can’t really say because creativity by nature is always evolving and changing, and new ideas come from everywhere. But I will just restate the point that when it comes to positioning your brand, and creating a distinctive brand identity, you want to have something that doesn’t necessarily look like everyone else, that’s ownable, that’s specific to your brand, that reinforces your key messages, and ideally your design language is in synergy with all of the attributes that your brand stands for.

So again, I don’t know what it’s going to look like, but I did happen to see this literally an hour before this webinar. So this is a homepage from a university. I believe it’s in Dublin, Ireland. I just saw this before the webinar. It’s like, I’m like, “That’s kind of what I’m thinking of.” It’s a page that totally breaks the grid, the navigation is ridiculously large, but it really speak to the idea of applying to college. They’ve got this sort of handwritten penciled circling things going on. They’ve got some really great imagery, that’s actually a video on the right. The right side of this scrolls. You can click and the information pops in to the right side. It works good on mobile.

I don’t know, is this the future? I can’t tell you. But it does look a little bit different. It does speak to some of the brand values that I think the university that’s trying to appeal to a younger generation would have. Who knows? Maybe things are going this way. Get creative and break new ground in 2019, all you designers out there. All right, let’s sum it up.

Summing up our predictions. Number one, data privacy is the earthquake that will reshape marketing, digital marketing in particular. Blockchain crawls out of the ocean and becomes useful to build trust with consumers. Voice is changing for the better. B2B, B2C barriers continue to crumble. Number five, premium digital experience are now table stakes, that’s just going to get you to the table, folks. Number six, social is no longer a B2B afterthought. We’re all going to keep our feeds current and full of useful stuff that people want to read. Number seven, clarity and storytelling takes center stage so you can’t have any of the above if you don’t clear message. And number eight, startup branding breaks out of a rut.

So, let’s boil it all down. I think in summary, your customers, they’re demanding a few things. They’re looking for trust, they’re looking for transparency, and they’re looking for a frictionless premium experience in 2019. So, do right by your customers, let them know where you stand, and give them the best experience possible with your brand. Do all that and good things will come to you in the coming year.

All right. So that wraps up our webinar. Let’s just look real quick here what’s coming up next. We wouldn’t stop with just three webinars, right, of course not, it’s our goal at C42D to deliver these once per quarter. Next quarter will be examining one of my favorite knots to untangle, what is your message, bringing clarity to your brand story. So I talked about it a little bit today, we’re going to dive deep into it. You can learn more about how to bring clarity to all these complex brand and marketing messages that are mucking up your homepage.

Do it all before lunch, it’ll be a good time, please join us. This must see webinar takes place on May 14th 2019 at 11:00 a.m. Eastern. To register, visit C42D.com/blog and look for the sign up link which will be up by the end of the week. And please note in case you missed anything, we’ll have a copy of this webinar along with the transcript up on C42D.com by the end of the day. We do it quick around here, not the end of the week. You’ll have it today. We also have lots of great content, so check out our blog, it’s C42D.com/blog, for more thought leadership. Our someway startup series, which is great, it’s funny, it’s a good read. Something to do on your lunch hour. Of course, great webinars like this.

All right, so we’re going to do some Q&A, let me see if I can get the question box, if you guys have any questions, feel free to jump in. And I’ll just pause for a second. Okay, let me see, let me see who. All right, Walter says, “Can you explain what the hype cycle is about again? I think it was in the Blockchain slides.” Yeah, Walter. Hype cycle, maybe you’re not familiar with it, but that’s a … it’s like an infographic or I would call like a framework that Gartner put out, and what they did is, they started noticing this pattern every time a new technology comes out. It kind of goes through this cycle where everybody thinks it’s going to save the world, expectations go way, way, way up, and then all of a sudden it comes crashing to the ground, and everyone thinks, “That was just a terrible idea. Nothing is ever going to happen with that.”

But then slowly it starts to become more useful. And it goes through that trough and disillusion. I can’t remember the other two parts. But basically the technology becomes more useful. That’s a great framework for explaining a complex idea. That’s something that we’re interested in here, which is relates to your brand messaging as well, so it’s always cool to take a complicated idea and turn it into something that’s easy to understand at a glance. So yeah, it’s the hype cycle and you’ll learn more about that from Gartner. Let me see what other questions we have here.

Kim says, “You went kind of fast in the brand story part. Are you saying we need more than one brand story?” Okay, all right. So, Kim, what I was trying to say there, you might need more than one brand story, you might not. It really depends on what your business is, what you’re selling, who you’re selling to, and what the message is for each consumer segment. So if you have multiple products, or multiple segments, then you’re going to want to craft specific messaging stories for each one. Ideally, this lives under an umbrella brand story, something that kind of speaks to everybody at once. So it’s a little more aspirational. I wouldn’t say generic, but it’s something that just is not very granular as compared to the customer specific messages. So did that help? Maybe not at all, I don’t know.

Let’s see, I’ll give it another minute, see if we have any more questions. No more, only two today. Well, all right. I appreciate it. Thanks to everyone for joining in, taking a little bit of time out of your snowy Tuesday for us. If you have any feedback, my email address is right there, it’s [email protected], I’d love to hear any thoughts, agreements, disagreements on this webinar, and I hope you all got something out of it. Thanks for joining. We’ll talk to you soon. Bye.

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