The travel industry has taken a big hit through the recent bushfires and now the uncertainty within the industry has doubled with the global coronavirus concerns.

Australians have a fantastic optimism bias, where we sometimes choose to bury our heads in the sand and hope it will all go away. Unfortunately, this is not one of those times.

It’s a time for travel brands and the industry to step up and take action.

Here three starting thoughts from a business and content perspective:

1. Build Trust through Transparency

Loyalty begins with trust, and the best way to build trust is by highlighting the steps your business is taking to ensure customers who travel with you will be as safe as possible in this uncertain time.

 

 

2. Don’t Hold Back

Customers are constantly looking at new inspiration and content. While the first reaction may be to cut back on your marketing and content creation, it’s a time to dial up your content presence. Hold true to your tone of voice and the product attributes your brand offers customers.

People are still engaging with content and planning – they may decide to put off the trip in the next 6 months, but book for ’21. So, it’s important that you are top of mind as ever. By continuing to deliver the same level or dial up marketing & content during a downturn, you’ll already be ahead of the race to reap the benefits at the start of the upswing.

 

3. More than an Offer

Now is the time to highlight your points of difference and entice audiences to engage with the brand. While competitors may retreat and approach with caution, one of the best approaches to surviving uncertainty is to set yourself apart and dialling up the experience and added value that comes with your brand – the things your business is famous for. Think about this beyond a discount offer. Who can you collaborate with? What other innovations do you have in the pipeline that you can fast track?

 

 

At 3rdspace, we talk about helping brands with purpose create content that provokes action. Now is a time for dialling up why your business exists (your core purpose) and creating compelling and authentic content that brings that purpose to life, so that your potential customers want to engage and book with you when they do decide to take that holiday

If you’re interested in finding out more about this approach and how your brand can come through this storm in good shape, please drop me a line.

We’d love to discuss your business.

Rob Logan is the founder and Content Director at 3rdspace - The Content Company.

Change is inevitable. It’s what has shaped every aspect of life as we know it. Whilst change can seem scary at first, the most successful people are those who take opportunities for change and use it to their advantage by forcing themselves out of the comfort zone.  

 Establishing and enforcing new process and ways of thinking can seem unnecessary and resource inefficient – particularly when current processes are working. However, it is important to remember that failure to change means that your business will be left behind.  

At 3rdspace we’re always looking to reignite our purpose, learning from our wins and most definitely our mistakes. Here’s three key drivers to fostering an open-minded, change-centric culture.  

ONE: Just because it works for you, it doesn’t mean there isn’t a better way of doing things.  

We’re all guilty of it. We have a strategy, a way of thinking or one route that gets us to where we want to go. But what if there was an express route? Starting small and considering new perspectives will harness your change-centric mindset and allow you to personalize whatever it is you chose to apply this mindset to. From a content perspective engage in thought provoking conversations with specialists in the field to understand the perspectives and processes of thought leaders and gain knowledge to shape your content strategy to drive greater results.  

TWO: Foster a data-centric culture.  

Almost every single day, we hear about the importance of data. However, it isn’t the data which will benefit your business- it's the way in which it’s used. Analyze data and use it to establish and shape the identities of your audience personas. Determine who your audience is, not by assuming from industry, but rather, understanding who is engaging with your content, on what platforms and how that engagement is nurturing new clients for your business.  

Adobe pledged to stay ahead of the game, implementing the concept of the ‘subscription economy’. Whilst most businesses neglected change, Adobe has taken advantage of an eager market hungry for doing things differently and its sales skyrocketed. Fostering this data centric culture allowed Adobe to understand the value of this investment assisted by data backed forecasts. The results speak for themselves! 

THREE: Look at the scoreboard. 

It’s easy to think that our ways are the best- at least the best for ourselves. It’s not uncommon to hear businesses preaching about their great strategy or product that you need. From a content perspective brands often get caught up in vanity metrics. We need to be thinking about results results results, How those engagement metrics and brand building content campaigns are also nurturing new data – new leads and new opportunities for the business. 

In 2020 it’s one of the most exciting times in content marketing, so if you’d like a fresh opinion and some more information on what we see happening in the world of content, we’d love to chat about how your content can provoke consumer action  

Talk to us here

If you’re a marketer with a few grey hairs you’ll be aware of the marketing classic by Ries & Trout Positioning the Battle for your mind.

It’s one book that in the ever evolving world of marketing has some truths that still ring true and can be a good jumping off point when creating your content marketing strategy.

Reis & Trout talked about the fact, that with the barrage of information we are fed, our minds need to filter it somehow. So as a way to cope we automatically rank brands and place them on a METAPHORICAL ladder. 

What this means today,  is the brand with the most effective content marketing strategy, will take the top spot on the audiences ladder, meaning they will engage with the brand on their social feeds, which in turn is going to relegate competitors to lower rungs.

The key thing that still resonates from POSITIONING is if you want to be noticed in what has become a highly crowded social feed your content marketing strategy needs to stand out against all other brands in your competitive set - otherwise consumers will simply forget about you.

Be the first in the fish pond:

The first in consumers minds rings true when it comes to content marketing strategies.

The brand that comes out with a first from a content perspective and executes it with tenacity, will enjoy a competitive advantage. The other advantage is you can shape the customers perception of the brand by introducing a completely new line of content that is fresh, relevant and taps into their lifestyle or adds value by informing them in a compelling way.

This is why it’s important with millennial focussed brands to take the story into platforms such as Tik Tok in innovative ways, and why it’s important for every brand to create content that resonates their brand purpose in a way that has cultural context, ..... away from the pack.

Once you have defined an effective content marketing approach ....STICK TO IT.

By developing your content marketing position for the long term, you will create more cut through, higher recall, sales and advocacy. This is a challenge with the high turnover of teams members in marketing and content roles for brands. It helps to have a content marketing agency that can help the business not abandon the content marketing positioning that brought the business success in the first place.

Finally, to be successful today you must touch base with reality and the only reality that counts is what is already in the prospects mind. If you are a challenger brand in a competitive category your content marketing strategy needs to find a niche that plugs into consumers minds, not ride on the coattails with similar content to the leading brands.

It’s far from rocket science - but it does need a commitment to position your content marketing strategy to be different and the courage to look at the competitive set and if yours looks like me-too content, revisit your content marketing strategy to reframe the conversation.

If you’d like to know more, drop us a note here.

The higher education sector and vocational providers are already re-shaping their courses, making a shift from the traditional three-year degree to micro-credentials and flexible study.

The game at play

This ‘just-in-time’ mode of learning is gaining ground, giving access to knowledge just when you need it, while study via digital platforms is a crucial - ‘anywhere, anytime, on any device’.

We’re also seeing dramatic change in how higher education engages with industry to provide life-long learning opportunities for workers to constantly upskill and reskill.

It will be higher education facilities that offer work-integrated learning, that will lead the way. If educational institutions shift quickly to help individuals move from one job or career to another as they build a portfolio of skills, these institutions can spearhead the opening up of new markets for life-long learning.

Educational institutions from overseas with digital delivery will increase competition in the Australian market with their short, sharp learning experiences and offerings, catered toward the generation that is best suited to this style of learning. 

It’s important for education groups to work together to define the educational landscape in Australia or in their local area, as international students are such an important part of survival for education in Australia. We need to understand these audiences and their decision making cues and give the story cultural context.

At 3rdspace, we’ve worked with a range of educational institutions and education groups to increase their appeal to both local and international students.

Our work with IEAA revolved around changing perception of international students within Australia, with a content strategy and a range of films and white papers addressing these perceptions and highlighting the benefits international students bring to Australia.  

Similarly, our Study Gold Coast campaign was created to change the perception of what living and studying on the Gold Coast is like. Students were placed at the heart of this campaign, to reinforce a welcoming and safe message for both local and international students. The students were involved in the thinking and became the face of the campaign internationally that represented all education facilities on the Gold Coast.

When bringing this thinking into telling the story of content institutions we believe there are 3 factors to consider;

  1. As a way for institutions to define their purpose and their education facility against their competitive set, this is not about what courses we offer and our campus, but by highlighting they are aware of the changing ways of education, with inspiring content that involves the students in a way potential students can relate to.
  2. Using multi-segmented content to desired student personas. Those interested in the arts or creativity are going to engage with different content to those who want to follow a path in data science. The first step is to create a multi-segmented content strategy, followed by the creation of inspiring content. Putting this focus on each persona group will highlight how your institution understands and can help them the best. 
  3. Content learning. Students are spending more than one third of their entire day consuming media content, with almost 90% of the millennial population watching video content. Therefore, learning platforms need to be interactive and video-rich so students can learn at their own pace, on their own device, or discover supporting content for their degrees. For education leaders to create innovative learning successfully they need to ensure that content is immersive, it utilises relevant experts and it provides stories that follow a guided model. 

 

WIN WIN WIN 

With such dynamic time in education everyone in the education ecosystem from institutions, government and independent providers, need to look for new ways to work together with different industries and stakeholders, to offer agile, adaptable offerings so that continuous, on-demand and self-directed learning becomes the new normal.

To find out more about the changing face of education and what it means to you and your business, we’d love to have a chat. 

We’ve recently been working with a range of senior partners at Ernst & Young developing a content platform asking better questions of our nation. 

As part of the immersion with the business we have been talking about some of the most pressing questions that our nation needs to be thinking about through the digital transformation era we live in. 

One of the themes we uncovered, involves improving consumers’ digital experience, and how to ensure that your employees don’t get left behind. 

Kurt Solarte, Leading Digital and Emerging Technologies Partner for EY Oceania, believes that the most vulnerable point does not directly deal with the customer themselves, but is more to do with the employees not being adequately enabled to win the customer over. Kurt explains that an employee can be easily ‘exposed’ in front of a customer, no matter how advanced or complex their toolset is. 

“The customer now has more information about their service than the customer service person behind the desk or at the other end of the phone. Millions are spent on websites, apps and marketing, but staff are often working in the dark.” 

“Employees are customers too - we should be turning them into valuable advocates for the brand.” 

One of the approaches we have found highly successful is by not only looking at the research and data, but also immersing ourselves within the business, talking to the people who are on the front line.

From there developing a content mission to communicate internally the vision values and purpose of the business supported by a range of content pillars.

This includes content that brings the values to life, using visually rich content such as inspiring films to tell the story;

NRMA Values Case Study

The content pillar that always gets plenty of love is the brand pillar....

But a powerful brand campaign should win them in the corridors before it goes to market and begins driving awareness and engagement with consumers. By doing this when customers do click on the website or come into your business, your staff will be on an empowered playing field to develop that relationship further with your customer…..instead of giving the customer that dreaded blank stare.

In the age of digital and social content the other key content pillar is learning and training.

Using content for training allows team members to stay up to date with product knowledge and initiatives within the business.

We find building interactive content platforms that allow team members to learn on any device at their own time and pace is the 3rd pillar that needs as much strategy and creative storytelling as a brand campaign and should always be executed in the brands tone of voice:

 WLG Drinks Academy

The old “the customer always come first” adage should be re thought as a people led approach.

Both customer and team centric, using the great content through the best digital channels, in a way that enables your team to have as much knowledge as the senior team of the business and allows them to become as great an advocate for your business as your most passionate customers.

To find out more about this inside out approach, please get in touch.

 

In the last 2 years we’ve seen more content generated than in the entire history of mankind.

...And yes a lot of that content is highly disposable.

However, in that time, we’ve also seen a lot of brands jump on the quick fix list of getting influencers to create the content - and while they may get some vanity metrics and potentially some increase in awareness, the content is often not aligned to the brand tone of voice, disparate and does not drive consumer action.

The other timeless marketing strategy has been to align brands to the original influencers, high profile sport, or sponsorship of high profile lifestyle events - whether it be music, fashion or the good old celebrity endorsement.

This is all about brand fit, not what the CEO is a fan of, (which still is sometimes the case!) To do this we use a range of data tools that takes the brand purpose, values and personality to find the right partnership opportunity.

Going down this path is a tried and true approach, but have a think about for example, the Australian Open, and try and name 7 brands who were partners in this years open?

...I bet you get stuck at 2 or 3.

And the ones you remember were gold partners plastered everywhere, OR the brands who took the time and had the courage to play the sponsorship game differently.

This is where finding the athletes in the sport who align with your values and personality is crucial. This is also where taking the time to craft a story that highlights this shared purpose comes into play.

We recently did a campaign with NEC, bringing their core value of lets play to win to life with Dylan Alcott and Joe Deng, with some powerful results:

https://3rdspace.com.au/portfolio_page/nec-lets-play-to-win/

The other brave way to play the game differently is what Guinness have done with the 'Made of More' series, which champions real people around the globe, instead of high-profile sports people. REAL PEOPLE who act with extraordinary integrity and character, to enrich the world around them. Previous films have included ‘Sisters,’ which told the story of two sisters who rose through rugby to eventually play for opposing England and Scotland national teams, and ‘Never Alone,’ which recounted the poignant story ofGareth Thomas, who, through the strength he received from his team, had the courage to become the first openly gay professional rugby union player.

We love the recent chapter in this series of mini documentaries, where in a year, men’s rugby will dominate the headlines, Guinness has unveiled the inspirational story of a Japanese women’s rugby team who stood together, in the face of societal pressure and pursued their passion for the game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=238&v=-V1XvowvjY8

'Liberty Fields' tells the remarkable tale of a group of women who defied the social conventions of 80s Japan, by forming an ultimately indomitable rugby team. In 1989 Tokyo, women’s rugby was almost unheard of, and the team faced ridicule and hostility from all angles. Despite their humble beginnings, they soon became one of the strongest sides around, with many being selected to represent their country in the Women’s World Cup.

Liberty Fields RFC played at this level despite having no coach, no doctor and very little support, instead relying on what they did have – a team. Balancing training with jobs and families, they set a new level for women’s sport in Japan, showing what you can achieve with grit, determination, and an unbreakable spirit.

What a fantastic way to share the brand’s purpose and values.

The other brave element, is that they have been far from overt about brand-telling the story as opposed to their approach of enabling the story to be told - then taking time to craft the story into a 5 minute mini documentary.

Our writers and directors love the way they have utilised the good old vox pop which needed to be used - but then have worked with the team to source old footage and then re create both game moments, and moment in the teams lives that highlight the struggles they went through during the elation of their journey.

If you enjoy this work and feel it is something that your brand should be doing, we would be delighted to get involved.

Contact us here.

One of the reasons we focus on our client's purpose is this: when a value or belief resonates from the inside out it has the power to define, unite and propel a business to great growth. Purpose doesn’t need to be charity or cause marketing, but it needs to encapsulate how the business adds value to people’s lives and it needs be owned by the senior team and the board of a business.

The best brands we work with know their purpose and live it through every part of the business. They use that purpose not as an advertising strap line or a content campaign burst, but as a guiding light for everything they do.

We’ve been working with the team at The NRMA for almost five years and the reason the content we create with them resonates is because it lives their purpose.

Rohan Lund, his talented team and the board make big decisions around their purpose: “To keep people moving”. This drives their major acquisitions, from investing in holiday parks to the Manly Fast Ferry service. It also helps us, as content creators, generate a content mission and relevant content-led campaigns.

Whether it be an internal welcome clip for new staff:

or a content-led campaign that highlights the work they do in the community.

The P word in Europe

This year in Cannes the P word came up a lot. And the notion that when you’re running your business and telling your purpose story, you can’t be partly committed.

Unilever CEO Alan Jope wrote a blog that called out brands for cause-washing and woke-washing, which pollutes purpose.

"It’s putting in peril the very thing which offers us the opportunity to help tackle many of the world’s issues and, in doing so, to build our brands,” he said. "What’s more, it threatens to further destroy trust in our industry, when it’s already in short supply. Marketing has a titanic trust problem." 

The proof is in the numbers. On June 11 in London, Big Al announced that their purpose-led, Sustainable Living Brands are growing 69% faster than the rest of the business and delivering 75% of the company’s growth. Addressing the Deutsche Bank conference, Alan said:

“Two-thirds of consumers around the world say they choose brands because of their stand on social issues, and over 90% of millennials say they would switch brands for one which champions a shared belief or cause... Purpose creates relevance for a brand, it drives talkability, builds penetration and reduces price elasticity,”

Unilever’s commitment is so strong that in the future, he says,  every Unilever brand will be a brand with purpose.

Back in our patch

In a catch-up I had last week with the CMO of a big FMCG group, he mentioned the Purpose word had become over used – probably owing to some marketers and agencies giving it lip service and then serving up tactical price-point or product-proof solutions.

Personally I believe you have to nurture your purpose, live it through every action the brand takes, and tell the story in a way that is compelling and relevant to your audience, so they want to get involved and join your brand’s crusade.

So have a think about your why, how it aligns to your personal values and the cultural context of your customers. Then ask yourself whether you’re nurturing your brand purpose to its full potential, or just giving it lip service.

Our goal at 3rdspace is to help more businesses define their purpose with our content mission process. If you’d like to find out more drop us a note.

Rob Logan is the founder and head of content at 3rdspace - The Content Company

All across socials last night were images and tributes to Robert J. Hawke.  

Why?

Because Bob had purpose.

Bob was plugged in to cultural context and had great insight.

Bob had a distinct personality and tone of voice.

Bob was a person of action and courage.

Like a good content strategy, he and what his team set out to achieve was to tell a story and create positive change in the world.

Unfortunately, I’m not sure if the main contenders for this election, will have the same impact and unfortunately the parties behind them are surrounded by very un-purposeful tacticians, that have got trapped into a lobbyist way of thinking.

In a nutshell their model is:

What do we stand for?  A good start.

What will they say about it and us. (= fear)

What will we say about them (=The lowest hanging fruit for campaigning)

Unfortunately, the “leaders” are letting the highly paid and insight-less tacticians run their race - including social tactics using micro influencers with negative, foundless smear content.

In an age where brands, leaders and political parties have so many fantastic personalised resources available to them – they treat their audiences with a lack of respect and resort to the most basic of messaging and lack of imagination in telling their story.

All we can hope is that the memory of Bob inspires new potential leaders to step up and have a go, with a focus on what our culture and community needs. Hopefully having a clearly defined purpose to create positive action in our country.

If you can find them on Saturday, I think you may have to look outside the brat pack.

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The views of the author are the views of 3rdspace.com.au

Recently I got into a bit of a debate on LinkedIn with a very experienced strategist about how purpose was a cop out for brands.

The debate went like a little like this:

 

We see purpose as why a brand exists, and indeed how it adds value to people’s lives, but it doesn’t mean that purpose or the supporting content strategy needs to be all about a cause.

Disney has been built on a purpose of “making people happy.” The team at Boost Juice, whom we worked with for years in the early days of 3rdspace (now they are so good at content they do it all in house), are another business who just ‘get it’ with their purpose: “To make you feel just that little bit better.”

That’s why we always start with the brand purpose, as how brands can align their content with not only the values of consumers, but how consumers love to live their lives.

If you have a fun brand, your purpose should drive to a goal such as making you feel just that little bit better through every interaction with the brand, including your content.

We’ve built a strategic process and framework that has worked time and time again to elevate brand scores quickly and most importantly, provoke involvement and action from consumers… it’s what we call a content mission, which we’d be very happy to share with anyone who is interested.

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Rob Logan is founder and head of content @ 3rdspace – The Content Company

Often brands jump at the chance to use new technology without thinking about the bigger picture. What’s this content trying to achieve and why are we doing it? Is it just making new content using new (ish) media platforms, just for the sake of it?

 

Here at 3rdspace we’re all about content with purpose, every time a brief comes across our desk – We ask how this content will add value to peoples lives and what is the best way to bring that content to life to have true impact.

 

One such buzz platform, is that of Virtual Reality. It seems like everyone these days is trying to get a piece of the VR pie, often without thinking about the WHY, and just jumping on the train to give it a go just because everyone else is, to add that string to their bow. VR can be an incredible storytelling tool, if used in the right way, to really share a story in an immersive way, that was previously impossible. It’s with this in mind that we decided to use VR to create a highly emotive series of VR experiences for Vinnies as part of the CEO Sleepout, working with our partners at PWC.

 

On any given night in Australia one in 200 people are homeless – that is a total of 105,237 people.

 

It’s heartbreaking to read these statistics, but with Vinnies and PWC we felt we had to go beyond the statistics to enable people to understand the impact.

 

We produced a series of three VR experiences around Domestic Violence, Homelessness and Mental Illness, collaborating with PWC’s content production team, so some of Australia’s leading CEOs could be placed in the middle of a situation in a fully immersive and somewhat confronting situation.

 

Feedback on the night can only be described as highly thought provoking, and poignant as the CEO’s were brought into real-life scenarios facing many Australian’s every day.

 

For us, this is the powerful way for VR to be used to its full advantage, an immersive story  that creates a lasting impact. We’re looking forward to making more content that utilises this technology, where appropriate and we are very honoured to be working alongside an organisation of passionate people that are committed to creating positive change.

 

Thanks to all at Vinnies and PWC on this very special collaboration.

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