It’s a Wrap! BRITE ’12 Conference

First of all, a huge thanks to all the speakers, attendees, sponsors, volunteers and staff who made the BRITE ’12 conference possible!

We were pleased to host 400 attendees and 35 speakers for a wonderful day-and-a-half of presentations, interactive content and networking.

Whether you were at BRITE ’12 or not, we encourage you to visit:

• The wonderfully curated Storify summary of Day 1;
• Numerous articles and blog posts about the conference;
• Our Twitter lists of BRITE ’12 attendees & BRITE ’12 speakers; and,
• Our first two speaker videos:Marc Speichert (CMO, L’Oreal) and Julie Cottineau (Virgin USA)

More online summaries, videos, and photos, will be posted over the course of the next month or so. You’ll, of course, get to read about these updates here.

We look forward to seeing more friendly faces at BRITE ’13 next year!

BY MATTHEW QUINT

The Effects of Choice: Columbia Research

People love choices, but at times they can also find them quite overwhelming. Sheena Iyengar, S.T. Lee Professor of Business at Columbia Business School and author of The Art of Choosing, spoke at BRITE ’11 about how an organization can best create a mutually beneficial, collaborative relationship between the choices they provide and their consumers. Iyengar’s research shows that what people want most is to have a great choosing experience, that allows them to trust and enjoy their ultimate choice. Watch the full video of her talk below.

Additional research at Columbia suggests that the complexities of choice impact us even more when the decisions are bigger. Rom Schrift, PhD ’11, and Professors Oded Netzer and Ran Kivetz conducted several studies analyzing this situation. In one instance they found that subjects who had initially rated the quality of two peices of artwork quite far apart ended up re-rating them as being much closer in quality when told that their ratings would impact the selection of these pieces for a museum’s collection.

“There’s a feeling of needing to do due diligence for important decisions,” Netzer says. “And if we don’t feel like we have done due diligence, we find ways to artificially create such a process.” Read more about these studies and how their underlying principles may help marketers at Columbia’s Ideas at Work.

BY MATTHEW QUINT

Visa’s Commitment to an Audience First Approach

Visa’s global chief marketing officer, Antonio Lucio, centered his key note speech on the first day of the BRITE ’11 conference around Visa’s journey from traditional marketing to a new model, guided by the principals of online communications and social media, an “audience first” approach. In response to today’s changing media consumption landscape he noted that,

Thirty-percent of our media weight is going to digital. Now we have a justification to take that to 40-percent.

Antonio has restructured Visa’s advertising strategy to begin with a strategic media plan, targeting consumers at digital sites where they spend the most time. Based on this plan, the company then begins its creative development along the following three principles:

• Sharing is the new giving
• Participation is the new consumption
• Recommendation is the new advertising

At the end of his talk, Antonio exclaimed, “I’ve been doing this for a very long time, and I have to say I’ve never been as excited to be a marketer as I am today with all the changes and all the opportunity that technology provides.”

BY MATTHEW QUINT

Think Disruptively to Transform Your Business

“The old mantra, ‘differentiate or die,’ is no longer relevant,” Luke Williams (a BRITE ’11 speaker) claims in his recently published Disrupt: Think the Unthinkable to Spark Transformation in Your Business. “The real mantra should be ‘differentiate all you want, but figure out a way to be the only one who does what you do, or die.’” Disrupt reflects Luke’s immense experience creating breakthrough solutions while working at frog design, one of the world’s leading innovation firms.  Luke has more than a decade of international strategy and design experience working with industry leaders like American Express, GE, Sony, Crocs, Virgin and Disney to develop new products, services and brands.

Disruptive thinking is “a way of thinking that turns consumer expectations upside down and takes an industry into its next generation.”  In his work with clients and as an Adjunct Professor of Innovation at NYU Stern School of Business, Luke provides a disruptive thinking framework that helps solve problems and create opportunities.

Reminiscent of our own Faculty Director Bernd Schmitt’s process of “killing sacred cows,” Luke details in an article for Mashable how to create disruptive hypothesis that smash your industry’s clichés to uncover innovative products and marketing strategies. In one example, he highlights Red Bull’s inversion of two standards in the soda category: that “soda is inexpensive” and that “soda tastes good.” Instead, “[Red Bull] placed absolutely no importance on taste, the product is double the price of Coca-Cola, and it dispensed with marketing aspirational images. The message was that Red Bull may not necessarily make you feel happy, but it’ll definitely give you a shot of energy when you need it.”

Hear Luke Williams speak at our BRITE ’11 conference (March 2-3, 2011). Register now!

BY MATTHEW QUINT

The Value of Great Social Customer Service

Called “the most famous customer service manager in the U.S., possibly in the world” by Businessweek.com, Frank Eliason (a BRITE ’11 speaker) is a social media pioneer. Frank, formerly the well-known voice behind @ComcastCares, is now SVP of Social Media at Citi where he and his team are using social media to humanize the brand and build a dialogue and rapport with customers.  While at Comcast, Frank built an incredible amount of customer loyalty and industry admiration through customer service work using social media.

The changes Frank has found through social customer service go beyond just answering a few complaints via Twitter.  ”Many people don’t realize that ‘social’ will really change the dynamics of your whole company,” Frank told cms wire.  He noted, for example, an occasion a few years back where the NHL playoffs blacked-out and customer calls and complaints started coming in.  Through searching Twitter posts, Comcast realized within just a few minutes that the problem was caused by a lightning strike affecting the sports network. Frank estimates that because this allowed Comcast to make a quick adjustment to its automated call center message, the company saved around $1.2 million by avoiding what would have been extended customer service calls.

And just this month at our Sobel-BRITE “The Network Is Your Customer” panel discussion (video below), Frank spoke about the importance of the people behind corporate social media initiatives. “I don’t connect with a logo.  I connect with people.  If you look at the most successful [companies] in social media, you know the people behind it.”

Hear Frank Eliason speak at our BRITE ’11 conference (March 2-3, 2011). Register now!

BY MATTHEW QUINT