Author Archives: Uri Baruchin

About Uri Baruchin

Uri is an international creative strategist based in London, specialising in brand, proposition development, CX and content. He runs a boutique agency, teaches the D&AD's masterclass in strategy, mentors in a variety of programmes and writes about marketing and culture.

Between your Brand and your Employer Brand

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employer brandBusinesses are always looking for new competitive advantage and have started to catch on to the employer value proposition (EVP) as an attractive differentiator. This is a powerful tool for attracting and retaining talent, but is fraught with problems if handled badly.

However, there are really only three aspects of successful EVP that need considering:

The EVP must work together with your brand strategy

Just like a successful brand strategy, a successful EVP doesn’t just reach out, it reaches out to the right audience, so you can engage not only with the best talent, but the right talent that is best for you.

The war for talent, however, isn’t won on recruitment alone. For your existing workforce it serves as a reinforcement that they are at the right place; and it fuels their commitment to a long term career with you. With the cost of finding and replacing senior talent easily matching twice their annual salary, a strong employer brand is not just a nice to have, it’s an essential investment.

Your overall brand strategy already defines what your company is about. It taps into your history and culture and leverages your tone and points of difference. If you develop an EVP independently of your brand strategy, you will essentially split your brand in two. Instead, create a platform consistent with your brand strategy that clearly communicates what it means for talent. With multiple strategic frameworks involved it can get tricky. Continue reading →

3 Marketing Trends for 2017

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3+marketing+trends.gifIt is most likely that the universe and its trends don’t really care that the calendar digits have flipped over. That being the case, here are some wider trends that I believe we saw starting in 2016 and will go into 2017 and beyond.

Inter-agency collaboration making for better marketing, and also making marketing better

With the rising importance of interconnected media on the one hand, and budget pressures on the other, clients are expecting agencies to work together.

At WPP it’s called ‘horizontality’. Ad agencies join forces with their clients’ technology partners and digital agencies. Media agencies, using their scale, have tried to make the most of this trend by building in-house planning, creative and digital capabilities. However, more often than not they find themselves as the hubs of cross-agency collaboration. In a few cases large integrated marketing and PR agencies, are heading that way too.

As they go through those changes, all agencies also need to collaborate with growing in-house teams of tech people, designers and content people – partly due to clients looking for agile and efficient ways to respond to the market. I wonder if agencies have done enough to put in place cost-effective, agile response mechanisms.

An unexpected but positive side effect to this trend is a return to radical simplicity in brand strategy. The basic principles of most brand platforms and frameworks are the same, but agencies working to differentiate themselves give rise to superficial differences with models evolving into increasingly questionable metaphors. Onions, Temples, Keys, Keyholes, Bulbs, Fish, you name it. Worse yet, they are often clumped together, forming chimera-like creatures combining the ugliest, most scrupulous aspects of both marketing and organisational politics.

A method-salad starting point doesn’t allow agencies to stay focused and work in concert. As agencies and clients both now have to keep multiple teams on the same page, they are forced to go back to the fundamental elements that everyone can agree on and understand. This creates a natural distillation process that is very healthy for brands as well as for marketing as a discipline.

Social media is finally maturing

After a period of social media overhype, that work is being refocused around pragmatic goals and accountable measurements. As social media becomes more ubiquitous, the market stops seeing it as an end-all-be-all shiny-new solution that you either buy into or no. Continue reading →

Are career paths still relevant?

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People used to think career paths are to be selected like a holiday from a stack of brochures, now it’s clear we must forge our own

image by: The Partners

 

According to that old-fashioned approach, your career path was something you chose, like selecting a holiday from a stack of brochures. Maybe things were once this straightforward; maybe it’s all a cultural myth. Nonetheless, this type of model hasn’t been applicable for the last couple of decades, and the way careers are shaped now, it’s likely to move even further away from it in the future.

In today’s work environment, and in the foreseeable future, your career path is something you have to forge. There are many reasons behind this change. Let’s start with the digital tools that have become prevalent in the corporate world — word processing, spreadsheets, presentation software and general information management. A new base business literacy has emerged: everyone is expected to master these tools. It’s no longer enough to be able to work with and on multiple platforms: these tools constantly develop and change and employees are expected to adapt quickly to the new software.

The pace of technological change is compounded by the financial volatility we’ve seen over the last two decades. The cycles of boom and bust are becoming shorter and whole industries are experiencing disruption to their business models. Many of us will encounter instances of working for a business that goes under. And even if your company survives, redundancies are common: many will know the feeling of being made redundant by a changing business, despite strong personal performance.

Continue reading →

Marketing helped create post-truth politics, but must resist their lure

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 This year’s political campaigns hold an ugly mirror to marketing. In an era where many marketers are obsessed with questions of purpose and social responsibility, politics have run away in the opposite direction, embracing the bad habits marketing is trying to leave behind

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The results of the US election draw a line under a shift in political discourse. The rise of post-truth politics is here regardless of who won. The story of this shift is very much intertwined in the role marketing plays in popular culture.

Despite being coined in 2010, the term post-truth politics has only entered mainstream public debate in the past year. The twin shocks of the British EU referendum campaigns and the US presidential election have intersected with a series of compounding factors that are amplifying this specific type of discourse. Continue reading →

Steve Barron: the cultural impact of one 80s music video director

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This is going to get sentimental…
A few months back I went to a music video showcase I’ve been going to for about a decade BUG (#50!) which had a very special guest. One who is an example of the cultural ripples creativity can send.
It’s a guy I guess most of you have never heard of, and yet he’s touched your life in more ways than you imagine.
Steve Barron is a director who started as a tea boy on sets and by the late 70s was directing videos for bands like The Jam.
He was quite humble in Adam Buxton‘s interview, saying that many of today’s videos would have won ‘video of the year’ from MTV back then because the form (and production values) evolved so much.
Back then, labels didn’t really believe videos made a difference to an artist’s success. Most of them were shot in 16mm.
But then, in 1981, he managed to convince the execs to let him shoot in 32mm and the result was this little triple-inception-meta Truffaut homage.
But wait, it gets SO much better. So much better that I just had to write a whole post… With some help from the BUG programme notes, the interview and wikipedia.

Continue reading →

Why Gin is a marketer’s dream

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(Short comment written for an article about the rise of craft gin. not sure if it was ever used, so here it is)

Q: how can craft gin brands stand out, and how is branding/packaging helping to differentiate artisanal/craft/small batch products?
Gin is a marketer’s dream. It offers more aspects of brand storytelling than your typical spirits, and the craft angle adds more.
Like  other spirits, you can use history. Many craft gins will look to that as the nexus of their brand. If they don’t wish to take on established brands on heritage, there are many alternatives.  If distilled in a surprising place, provenance could play a part. If that’s too close to heritage, they could explore the botanicals. Gins use a long lists of potential ingredients beyond juniper. Each ingredient, be it lemon peel or coriander seed, presents opportunities for differentiation and story-telling. Monkey 47, uses the sheer number of ingredients to define the brand.
If none of the botanical is interesting enough, the story of traditional small batch methods is often what makes ‘craft’. If there isn’t much in that, there are drinking rituals. Hendrick’s use of the humble cucumber is a  case in point.
Finally, you could  tell the story of the people behind the gin. With the big producers increasingly using the term ‘craft’ to describe their own premium spirits, that personal touch is one thing they can’t take away from the smaller distilleries.
Give it an intriguing name which embodies the essence of the brand. Add a premium carefully designed bottle, label and communications that sing the praises of the product in harmony, and you may just come up the next big name in spirits.

British food brands and the world

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(originally written for a piece published last year) 

I was recently asked to comment about the international success of British food brands in the The Times’ The Raconteur. As often is the case with things like that I’ve had a lot more to say than the article allows, so here’s a link to the article and here are my original thoughts, lightly edited. (oh, and BTW ‘Made in Britain’ isn’t a government project).
Q: What is it about ‘brands’ such as Gordon Ramsey, Jamie Oliver, Pret, Costa and co that makes them appealing? What part does Britishness have to play in this success – any at all?
A: While all four Brands are strong examples of British success abroad, they relate to Britishness in different ways. Pret and Costa excel through a business model that meets consumer needs quickly and efficiently. The first providing a healthier, fresher alternative to fast food, the latter riding the increased savvy of coffee drinkers. British business innovation if you will, but they aren’t particularly British in any explicit way, despite Costa’s nods to some nostalgic bakery and biscuits. When it comes to Ramsey and Oliver, however, both are ambassadors of our changing relationship with food, despite not being quintessentially British in the way a brand like Paul smith, for example, is.
First, we should keep in mind that for large parts of the world, British accent and mannerism are enough to make a brand British. As their brand stories develop, Oliver becomes the plucky young cockney while Ramsey combines a gruff disciplinarian perfectionist angle mixed with his colourful language. Beyond style, they have become ambassadors to the changing relationship of Britain with food – Oliver with his commitment to fresh and healthy ingredients; Ramsey with his meticulous attention to ingredients. Both almost a direct opposite of the stereotypical stodgy British grub. The one made with cheap ingredients with no fresh vegetable in sight that foreigners used to think of, and which to be fair, is mostly the result of post world war(s) recession years.

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