THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION PLAYBOOK

How Stories build Ecosystems

by Graham Brown

version 2.0

INTRODUCTION
This book is about digital transformation of industries and how
storytelling is key to successful change.

As I write this book, following my podcast conversation with Tony

Fernandes CEO AirAsia, two things struck me:

Firstly, digital transformation is happening and doesn’t come

with a label on it.

It’s happening right here with brands like AirAsia. 

Tony isn’t talking about “Digital Transformation”, he’s telling a story of

what the future company looks like.

At the heart of the push is the need for long term economic growth
stories. Airlines can only fly to so many destinations and each new
fringe destination will offer diminishing returns. Add to that airlines are
highly regulated and exposed to political events.

Tourism will grow a further 53% in Asia to $625 billion by 2024

according to PATA. By 2030 2/3rds of the world’s middle class will be
living in Asia. Asia now does more trade with itself than the rest of the
world. 

AirAsia doesn’t have to sell just airline tickets. It can sell other airline's
tickets too. It can sell hotels, taxis, insurance, music, esports, banking,
media content and beauty products. 

AirAsia.com will launch as a separate business, a business that

ultimately may end up being its own competition, sitting under its own
venture arm, RedBeat ventures.

Secondly, digital transformation isn’t about digital, it’s about

people.

In his book “The Startup Way”, author Eric Ries writes, 

“A modern company is one in which every employee has the

opportunity to be an entrepreneur. It respects its employees and ideas
at a fundamental level.” 

Navigating change successfully isn’t about owning all the pieces, it’s
about how companies give their people a voice. 

90% of the AirAsia ecosystem will end up being off payroll.

This is the modern Platform.

In this ecosystem, AirAsia owns the platform but not the content or
services that sit on the platform. They’ll take a cut from every
transaction but cannot force providers to belong. They might even end
up not owning their planes.

The rule shift will be experienced in how brands like AirAsia

communicate. In the old model, where businesses were organized like
factories, into neat departments with their pipeline processes, we hired
ad agencies with their celebrity influencers and clever logos to
communicate with people who might eventually become customers. 

But, if AirAsia ends up with 100 million customers signed up to to their

BigPay service, they already know who these people are. Why waste
millions with an agency to start from zero? Big Data replaces the need
for most advertising.

Which begs the question who’s communicating and to whom about

what?

Communication shifts from awareness to attention and from external to

internal.

No longer does AirAsia need to blast strangers with sales messages.

Why target strangers when you have 100 million people on your
platform? The real communication challenge now shifts to how AirAsia
connects their ecosystem. All those partners who aren’t on payroll need
a cohesive and believable story to bind them together.

Through storytelling, and podcasting, I believe brands like AirAsia can

join the dots of such an ecosystem. Authentic, human stories that
create movements and small highly effective tribes that create
change.

Internal tribes replace old fashioned departments, joining the dots

between Alan in procurement, Janice in the Philippines and Erik from
their payments partner.

This is the modern brand, a diaspora of connected projects and ideas

that slices through the vertical alignment of traditional pipelines. 

AirAsia is the digital transformation case study because they

understand it’s not how they organize their digital assets, but how
they organize their human ones.

If you want to understand Digital Transformation in progress, look at

how brands are changing the way they communicate.

Are they talking up digital transformation yet still promoting the stories
of celebrities or logos?

Are they still chasing awareness or trying to earn your attention?

Companies ready for the challenge get this. They are gearing up to give
a voice to everyone within their ecosystem. They understand that it’s
not about collecting vast sets of data about customers, but how you
use that data to win customer attention.

WELCOME TO THE NEW ECONOMY


Toaster Economics

Building your own toaster is hard.

In 2008, designer Thomas Thwaite set out to build a toaster from

scratch. To research the necessary components he bought a £4 Argos
toaster and opened it up to find 400 parts made of 100 different
materials. His year long quest to source the parts led him across time
zones and in one instance to an active iron mine.

This is the miracle of the Industrial Age. You can enjoy a complex end
product that individually could cost you $1000s for just 6 bucks.  The
Industrial Model is more efficient, you don’t need to spend a year of
your life to make toast. 

Similarly, if you want to fly to Singapore, we built an airline for you

already. You don’t need to phone Airbus to lease one. If you want
medical insurance, or pizza delivery, we got that covered too.

In the world of Toaster Economics, the companies that organized best

around Function, created the most Efficiency. General Electric has 1225
attorneys in its legal department. Even though any such large
department with its own watercoolers and culture has issues - e.g lack
of coordination in internal communication - it’s still more efficient than
GE hiring its own law-firm.

This is the Toaster Economics playbook.

Departments are more efficient than the open market.

The more you can atomize, isolate and improve functions within the
value chain, the more efficient you can produce the product. Efficiency
can be passed onto the consumer as cheaper goods (Walmart), money
invested in service (Zappos) or brand (Louis Vuitton). 

Pipelines to Platforms

Platform is a buzz-word in business today. Let’s unpack what it really is

and understand it better in the context of where we are coming from.

In the Industrial Model, the most effective business structure if a

Pipeline. A Pipeline is like a factory process, and it produces cheap
toasters:

• Sourcing: raw materials

• Production: making the toaster

• Distribution: shipping toasters to stores

• Marketing: hiring an ad agency to create demand

• End Customer

Many old business text books present “waterfall” models of business,

often called “value chains” which are in effect Pipelines. Goods are
pushed from one end of the Pipe to the other - from digging raw
material out of the Earth to end customer.

GE has its own “six sigma” quality system which aims to reduce
product defects to below 3.4 per million. A good Pipe is highly efficient
i.e. it doesn’t leak.

Until now.

I can now rent the factors of production e.g. lawyers, developers,

machines, that used to belong to departments. Teenagers can get 1
million Youtube eyeballs cheaper than an ad agency, a car owner can
give you a ride cheaper than a taxi company and you don’t need to go
to a hotel to get a room for the night.

Thanks to digital, the open market is now more efficient than the
department.

This means a new playbook with a new formation. Rather than

departments, companies need ecosystems that slice through functions
and exist both on and off the payroll.

Enter the Platform.

Digital Transformation in a nutshell:

MODEL PIPELINE (past) PLATFORM (future)

Organization Deparments Ecosystem
Shape Vertical, hierarchical Horizontal, flat
Competitiveness Control Authenticity
Mission Shared company Shared purpose
Cohesion Payroll Story
Innovation Waterfall Rapid Validation
Competition Beat it Be it
Acquisition Big Idea Big Data
Use of data Build picture of company Build picture of customer
Communication External, agency driven Internal, storytelling
Digital Transformation Explained

Digital Transformation is shift in company structure from Industrial to

Digital Era.

If you were to visualise Digital Transformation, it is the shift from

Pipeline to Platform.

In the Industrial Era, where the laws of Toaster Economics prevailed,

companies became Pipelines. The more a company could organize
resources around function, the more competitive it became. This
structure created large self-contained departments and roles.

In the Digital Era, Toaster Economics no longer dominate. The open

market is now as competitive as the pooled resource, often more so.
Companies are learning that a new structure is needed - a Platform that
harnesses the open market, and teams grouped not by department but
but by purpose.

If moving from Pipeline to Platform were easy, there would be no reason

to discuss Digital Transformation - it would be a seamless process but
it isn’t.

You see, Digital Transformation isn’t about digital at all, it’s about
people. It’s about us, the slowest moving and most difficult part of the
whole story.

The End of Benchmarking

I once presented to Nokia back in the late 2000’s. 

The subject was how young people used mobile phones. To highlight
how brands engaged this segment I shared case studies of MTV,
Disney and Red Bull. After the presentation, their marketing director
pulled me aside and confessed,

“This is all very well Graham but we’re not a cool lifestyle brand, we
make mobile phones and these case studies aren’t relevant to us. We
benchmark ourselves against Blackberry and Samsung.”

To which I answered, “that’s your problem not theirs.” 

Over the next 5 years Nokia slid from being one of the world’s most
recognizable brands to a has-been. The challenge facing companies in
the Digital Era is that it’s not your competition you should be worrying.
Your competitors are all looking at each other, benchmarking their
performance accordingly.

Yet…

 • Ping An Good Doctor has over 100 million customers. Ping An

financial is an insurance company yet they’ve built a platform to
help connect cusotmers with doctors via online bookings,
diagnosis and treatment. An insurance company now provides
medical services. 


• A ride sharing company from Malaysia, Grab, is now one of the

biggest payments companies in Southeast Asia. 


• One of the fastest growing international payments providers is not

a bank but TransferWise the brainchild of Skype’s first employee. 


• The most exciting cars aren’t made in Detroit or Toyota City but in
Silicon Valley. 


“Better than the other banks” is not longer good enough.

The New Customer Experience

30 years ago when I was a teenager, you ordered a vinyl record from a
fan magazine by mailing a check. 

The magazine inevitably said “please allow 28 days for delivery”. 28

days later, your check came back saying “sorry, out of stock.” 

Back then, the whole experience was broken but we couldn’t do

anything about it. And, more importantly, we don’t know there was a
better way. Both customer and company were happy playing in their
own local league.

Today, however. if you see a dinner choice at the Alibaba Hema store in
China and you live within 3km of the store, you can have that food
delivered to your home within 30 minutes.

Platforms like Amazon are dominating the landscape of the Digital Era
because they have learned how to build massive ecosystems. We all
know Amazon but they are possibly the least of your worries.

As my friend Geoffrey Handley, a VC based in Shanghai, once said to

me on my podcast, “China might not be part of your plans, but you’re
certainly part of China’s plans.”

Alibaba, JD, Bytedance, SenseTime, Xiaomi, Tencent - these new

Platform companies aren’t just eating the competition’s lunch, for them
the competition is lunch.

What happens when __________ starts selling _______ ?

[insert your platform & product above]

Expectations have changed.

This is the New Customer Experience: people aren’t comparing your

brand to your nearest in-category competitor - they are comparing you
to Amazon or Apple or Alibaba. 

You Can’t Rewire Corporate DNA

They say a human being and a chimpanzee share 98% of the same
DNA. A 2% change can create not only a radically different physical
structure but also mental capacity for language and thought.

Both chimps and humans cannot easily change their DNA if they
wanted to. A human being cannot breathe underwater and a chimp
cannot speak any verbal language, despite years of being taught
signing.

TransferWise sends payments from A to B. But unlike most “banks”,

TransferWise has successfully lowered its fees 27 times in just one year.
Their goal is to charge zero bucks for every transfer and make the
money on arbitrage. TransferWise can transfer the money from one
country to another hours. Most banks take days.

What kind of a bank thinks like this? One founded by the first employee
of Skype, Taavet Hinrikus, not a banker.

Changing an organism is hard even when it knows it has to change.

The only way to change is often to start again with a different DNA
structure.

At some point in time, competition is going to beat you. Successful

Digital Transformation requires a different mindset:

Either you wait for the competition to put you out of business, or you
become it.

The Kodak Moment

Steve Sasson was a young Kodak engineer who back in 1974 invented
the world’s first digital camera but the traditional linear supply chain had
other ideas.

The camera, as large as an old school computer monitor, recorded

images onto tape. Once captured, it took several minutes for the tape
to relay a 100 x 100 pixel graphic onto a TV screen. 

For a company who had one of the most beautiful mission statements
ever “Share moments, share life”, digital cameras could have heralded
a revolution. But Kodak had a core business to protect. It owned 90%
of the hugely profitable printed paper market.

So, when Sasson presented the idea, management told him, “that’s
cute, but don’t tell anyone about it.”

By 2011, Kodak filed for Bankruptcy, ending 120 years of history. 

Less than 12 months before Kodak’s demise, Instagram launched with

the promise of doing a better job at sharing moments than Kodak.
Within 5 years, Instagram grew to 1 billion users. Instagram should have
been a Kodak company. 

Kodak should have become a mobile company like Apple. But it didn’t
because Kodak wanted to protect the past more than it wanted to own
the future. 

In every business you have a profitable core. Apple manufactured

computers and Alibaba connected buyers with Chinese factories.
These cores generate a lot of positive cashflow.

In the Ernest Hemingway book “The Sun Also Rises”, the hero Mike is
asked how he went bankrupt, to which he answers: 

“Two ways. Gradually, and then suddenly.”

When generating cash becomes easy, companies get lazy. Their

malaise is gradual until it’s sudden.



What do you do with that cash:

- protect the core or build the competition?

The End of the (Pipe)Line

In Jan 2019, CEO Lei Jun announced that Xiaomi was investing $1.5
billion in its AI powered smart home ecosystem. Features will include
smart voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa or “Hey Google” which will
connect you to Alibaba retail stores and restock your supply of organic
sourdough or Ikea light bulbs. 

Chinese Xiaomi, recently floated on the Hong Kong stock exchange

priced at $54 billion, wrote in their IPO filings:  "We are an internet
company with smartphones and smart hardware connected by an IoT
platform at its core”.

"Platform at its core.”

As a Pipeline, Xiaomi cannot compete. Instead it’s building a Platform

that sells a multitude of products and services, many of which come
from outside the payroll of Xiaomi. 

Xiaomi makes toasters.

Now you might be thinking, “I don’t need an IOT or AI powered toaster,

I’m doing just fine.” Which is probably true, for now, like all those “IOT
powered fridges” we keep seeing at industry presentations that will
order your food as you eat it. Most of these ideas are fantasy until they
become reality.

Within a generation, it’s quite feasible that we’ll wonder how our parents
and grandparents ever drove cars. People will still drive cars, as people
still do ride horses. We struggle to visualise the New Customer
Experience changing the more mundane aspects of our lives because
that’s how they always were.

Transferwise will soon offer zero rate transfers, making money on the
arbitrage. Xiaomi could offer a free toaster, making money by
suggesting which brand of bread you should order when you run out.

“Hey, Xiaomi, I need bread”.

Now you’re in trouble.


Beat the Competition by Being Them

AirAsia CEO Tony Fernandes says their future lies in not being an
airline, but in being a digital travel company.

AirAsia’s airline is their profitable core.

A digital travel company, by contrast, is a more open platform that

potentially invites in the competition. AirAsia could sell competitor
Scoot or Singapore Airlines tickets. It could also sell travel experiences,
hotels, ride sharing, food and beauty products. 

If AirAsia had to wait for Steve Sasson to show up with the ticket into
the future, they would already be doomed.

Fortunately their CEO has given them the green light for change. Before
the Kodak Moment, before Mike’s “gradual” bankruptcy, AirAsia has
stepped up to become the competition before someone else does.

This is the Digital Transformation playbook - you win with a radically

different mindset, one not commonly found in your industry. Tony
Fernandes is a self-confessed music guy who knew nothing about
airlines. Alibaba’s Jack Ma was an English teacher. And the future of
banks may come from the world of Blockchain or an ex-Skype
employee.

THE NEW COMPANY STRUCTURE


The Startup Way

How do you compete when the bar for the New Customer Experience
is so high?

You can’t wait for Steve Sasson to show up at your office with a new
gadget he’s been tinkering with in the labs.

You need to preempt it.

Tony Fernandes set up AirAsia.com - the home of the “digital travel

comapny” as a separate company to AirAsia. That means running its
own P&L and potentially competing with the airline.

This is the Digital Transformation playbook in practise. Preempt your

competition by setting it up inside your own company.

In his book, “The Startup Way” Eric Ries describes how corporates can
innovate by adopting startup culture. The challenge with this has
always been the superficial adoption of startups but with the same old
DNA. That’s like a bank manager coming to work on a skateboard
wearing a baseball cap, but his employees still call him “Mr. Brown”

Ries says corporates can benefit from these cultures by creating

standalone startups within the organization. Where the “core” generates
its cash with established reporting structures, the internal startup has
bandwidth to operate by its own rules.

Peak Efficiency

Henry Ford said of his cars, 

“you can have any color, as long as it’s black.”

The little known reason why Ford said this is that black paint dried
faster.

Ford is the father of modern industrial thought. Although it may not be

apparent at first glance, every factory, airline, university, VC fund, law
firm or ad agency owes a lot to Henry Ford. 

In you run a factory, your goal is to become more profitable through

efficiency.   Unfortunately, the least efficient part of the factory is the
human being. Humans need lunch breaks, paternity leave and spend
most of their life not working. 

If you run a factory, you do not want "weirdos”. 

These are line workers who do things differently or ask questions. 

Psychological profiling, university grades, MBA schools, high potential

management programs and recruitment workflows do a good job of
helping identify these “inefficiencies" early on and allow employers to
nix them before they get into the Pipeline.

Yet, every Platform now needs weirdos. They are curious,

communicative question-asking, vocal, risk-taking, creative, challenging
and ultimately entrepreneurial.  Weirdos are the innovators, the ones
who think of different ways to The New Customer Experience, or ask
“what if?” when building a bank.

If you want to build a Platform you have to first start with your people.

If you’re successful in a Pipeline business, you were good at playing the

game of Pipelines. If you want Platform people you need to not only
change how you source your talent, but how you reward them.

The Corporate Dropout

One of the biggest revelations I’ve had through working with 100s of
startups and investors on my Pitchdeck Asia show is that most
startup founders aren’t 19 year old kids or computer engineers straight
out of Stanford in a pair of sandals.

Harvard Business Review recently vindicated this observation, saying

that the most successful age for a startup founder was in fact 45.
Where Zuckerberg and Gates epitomised the “University Dropout” this
new breed of entrepreneurs, I call the “Corporate Dropouts”.

Often Corporate Dropouts are accidental entrepreneurs.

They started their own business not to change the world but because
they saw something broken and they wanted to fix it. That could have
come from 20 years in banking or HR.

Every company is full of potential Corporate Dropouts.

These are the talented “weirdos” needed to transform their organization

long term. The challenge is encouraging them to “dropout” inside and
creating a culture where they can take risks without compromising their
career.

What do you do? Penalise them? Wait for “natural wastage”? Or do you
harness their skills inside your internal startup before they become the
competition?

Failure is an option

"Failure is Not an Option" is a phrase associated with Gene Kranz and

the Apollo 13 Moon landing mission.

When you’re launching men to the Moon, you can’t fail. You only get
one shot. Billions of dollars, reputations and lives are on the line.

Pipelines associate risk with leakage. Companies used internal

functions like legal, IT and finance to mitigate risk. 

But today, innovation is not a Moon Shot where failure is not an option.
Innovation not an all-or-nothing paradigm. If you gave up the first time
you learned to walk as a toddler, you’d never get out the baby car. But
your parents kept encouraging you and praising you every time you fell.
That’s how we all learn.

Innovation is the same. Many small tries. 

Systems like GE’s Six Sigma assume that through diligent planning, we
can avoid failure. If I was flying to the Moon, I’d like my engineers to be
reading from the Six Sigma manual. But let’s say I wasn’t in a do or die
situation but we were testing unmanned drones that cost $1000 to
make. We’d take a lot more risks, and innovate faster. We’d launch and
fail every single day, not once a year. 

Don’t hit the roof when your team member gets it wrong or screws it
up. Ask, “what did we learn here?”

Your reaction sets the tone for their next move. If they get chastised for
failing, they play it safe. If they get praised, they feel emboldened to try
something new. 

If we don’t allow for failure, we don’t allow for innovation.

"Failure is not an option” is not an option.

Rapid Validation

Amazon practises the 2 pizza rule - if you can feed a team with 2
pizzas, it’s too big. 

Corporates get comfortable in long time lines but that’s their problem,
not the customers. In 6 months, Amazon has already launched 8 major
initiatives. 6 months! 

In 2014, just a regular year at Amazon, they launched 17 major new

initiatives in the UK alone. That’s one major iniative every 3 weeks. Take
a look at their list of launches (not all worked out of course). Take any
one announcement and consider it in the context that it was launched
just 3 weeks after another one just like it.

• Launches Men’s Grooming Store

• Launches Sunday deliveries via the Amazon Logistics service

• Launches Luxury Beauty Store

• Launches Amazon Student

• Launches Prime Instant Video (later renamed Amazon Prime Video)

• Launches Home Automation Store

• Launches Amazon Student TfL

• Launches Amazon Lockers on London Underground

• Launches Appstore Developer Select Programme in the UK

• Launches Two-Day Delivery for UK customers for products stored

in Amazon Fulfilment Centres across Europe

• Launches Login and Pay with Amazon in Europe

• Launches Two All-New Kindles

• Launches the All-New Fire HDX

• Launches Kindle Unlimited: Unlimited Reading and Listening on

Any Device

• Launches Kindle First – Exclusive Early Access to New Books

Every Month

• Launches Amazon Fire Smartphone in the UK

• Launches more than 16,000 Pickup Locations in the UK –

including Post Office branches 


Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said, “I’ve made billions of dollars of failures at
Amazon” yet Amazon is one of the most successful companies of our
generation.

Get to the Moment of Truth

The distance between zero and one is bigger than one to one
thousand. 

I’ll take 1 customer paying $1 over 1000 who are “interested” in my

product. All startups learn the power of rapid validation.

Get to the “moment of truth” fast.

You don’t need 6 months to work on a project launch. Validate fast, ask
someone to open their wallet. 

Here’s a test.

Take $500 and spend it on a Facebook or Google Adword campaign for

a new cat carry cot you’ve manufactured. You want to learn which of
your ad messages people engage with, so you create a bunch of
messages that the ad algorithm will split test for you.

Now, the natural tendency is to take the $500 and split it over a number
of days e.g. $100 a day for 5 days or $50 a day for 10 but there is little
rationale for this behavior. Why not spend $500 in 1 day? You’ll get to
your result with the same amount of money a lot faster.

The reason we hesitate is fear of making mistakes. We fear spending

the money and realizing we screwed up on the ad copy later on, but
this can happen over 5 or 10 days anyway. 

Execute fast and get to the moment of truth faster.

Ideas vs Execution

Imagine you have the worst business idea in the world.   What would
that be?

• Selling bikinis in the Antarctic?

• A heart attack museum or

• Cockroach sushi

You’d think that these businesses are dead in the water. But, what if
they weren’t? What if you had to make them work? That’s the challenge
Tina Seelig, Professor of Entrepreneurship at Stanford University, set
her students.

Bikinis in the antarctic becomes a health bootcamp in challenging

conditions. The heart attack museum becomes an interactive journey
into health and preventative medicine. And, cockroach sushi becomes
a go-to destination for adventurous diners.

What we learn from this exercise is that there is no such a thing as a

bad or good idea. There are just ideas and good or bad execution.

Don’t get hung up on finding the perfect idea, it doesn’t matter anyway.
In time you’ll refine it.  

Culture eats strategy.

Stop wasting time sitting in board rooms strategising or ideating.

What matters is execution.

There are no bad ideas. So get over yours.


Build Small Tribes

Small tightly knit tribes with singular goals always outperform large,
distracted and loosely connected teams. They execute fast, validate
their hypothesis, learn from their mistakes then do it all again a few
hours later.

One enduring image I had of working with RIM who made Blackberry in
the early 2000s was just how overstretched everyone was. At a meeting
in their Waterloo HQ Canada, execs looked agitated, constantly
checking their phones or walking out to take calls. Everyone’s attention
was so split between multiple tasks and agendas, they failed to excel at
one.

Last week, Blackberry finally sunset its messenger app BBM after a 10
year decline. BBM could have been WeChat, but RIM failed to innovate.

Startup founders are busy too.

But, by contrast tend to focus obsessively on one thing and doing that
well. That one thing could be customer service, or collecting data, or
even raising money. And while they will be the first to confess they also
do everything from emptying the office garbage or fixing the website
CSS at night, their goals are clearly defined. 

Startups innovate rapidly because they are small tribes that can pivot
fast and stay close to Customer Experience.

THE NEW RULES OF MARKETING


The New Golden Rule

In 2018, more than half (54%) of all payments made by Chinese were
through a non-traditional channel (e.g. AliPay, WeChat Pay etc). 25%
used a card and 21% cash. 

The last time I visited Shanghai, the airport McDonald’s was empty
because their new payment screens were down and the clerks were
only accepting cash. In China, very few people use cash.

Starbucks is one of the largest mobile payment providers globally. Ride

sharing app Grab has GrabPay and AirAsia BigPay. 

Technology may come and go, but since the earliest human history
power has always followed the Golden Rule and that is - he who has
the gold, makes the rules.

Banks have existed for 1000s of years simply because they controlled
money.

That is, until today.

From the Big Idea to Big Data

In the 1989, Pepsi spent $7.5 million on single ad with Madonna,

promoting “The Pepsi Generation" on MTV. It was fun, cool, sexy.

This is the “Big Idea” - a monolithic narrative created by a “Mad Men”

ad agency that gave your brand life. If people knew your brand, it was
because of a memorable campaign like “Diamonds are Forever”, Tony
the Tiger or Meowmix “so good cats ask for it by name."

Every time you bought a product, you handed money to a clerk. The
company didn’t know who you were or why you bought. So, every time
they wanted you to buy again, they needed to advertise. Hence, the
relentless start-stop cycle of ad campaign planning.

Big Ideas, like company departments, are byproducts of the Industrial

Era. Change the economics, and you change how we communicate
with customers.

Today, if an airline like AirAsia has data on 100 million customers, it

doesn’t need a Big Idea to find them anymore.

Ride sharing app Grab in Southeast Asia makes around 50 million

bookings a day. Let’s assume 100 million people have Grab accounts,
all with credit card or bank details attached. Grab doesn’t need to
spend millions on finding these customers.



The same applies to Alibaba or Amazon. Apple has launched its own
payment card too.

To understand Big Data, look at the function it’s replacing - advertising.

Big Data is the new advertising, and it will make or break brands like
the Mad Men of the Industrial Era.

People Like You Bought Things Like This

In 1989, we bought Pepsi because we believed in the Pepsi Generation.

It was Social Proof. Because it cost millions to hire Madonna, we
believed that lots of people “like us” must be buying Pepsi. It worked.



Today, however, we know that hiring a celeb or seeing a brand
everywhere doesn’t equate to people like us. Today, I know that people
like me buy Asics Gel Kayano running shoes because Amazon tells me
(I’ve been looking at Rich Roll books again).

What was once a feature unique to Amazon is now everywhere.

The New Customer Experience has moved on.

Alibaba can recognise your face as you check into a hair salon. The Ali
platform run by the store not only can scan customer IDs, it can
connect those IDs with your Alipay account and entire customer history.

Tencent claims it has 5000 discrete tags to label customer behavior -

information about you on which celebs you follow, which news topics
matters to you etc. 

Teens don’t use Facebook these days because “people like you” have
found better things to occupy their time.

ByteDance’s Tik Tok is one of the most popular apps with teenagers
globally. They’re from China in case you didn’t know, and they grew to
500 million users in less than a year, without a cent spent in advertising.
They put their success down to understanding what “people like you”
would look at from relentless crunching of the numbers.

Awareness vs Attention

Cadillac is one of the most well know brands globally, but who actually
owns one?

Being aware of a brand and paying attention to it are two very different
concepts. Let me explain.

People are aware of your brand, but they are not paying attention to
your message.

Notice the language itself. BE aware vs PAY attention. PAY. When

someone pays attention there is an exchange. We pay with our focus
and energy, therefore we only attend to what’s relevant.

The average consumer is good at gating out the noise. She grows up
seeing 17,000 marketing messages by her 17th birthday.

In the Industrial Era we could buy your Attention easily on TV, radio,
magazines and the internet. But, now we have to earn it.

When first introduced into the English language, the word priority was
singular. There were never “priorities”. Today, however, your pitch, your
meeting, your idea is just one of 1000 priorities we all have.

Alibaba can entice you to the Hema store because you already use on
Alibaba’s many e-commerce platforms, or even their Alipay app.

Pipelines bought attention through Big Idea advertising. Pipelines have

attention baked into their platforms.

In the New Rules of Marketing, Attention is your biggest cost.

Attention (not Data) is the New Oil

They say in the era of Big Data, that “Data is the New Oil” but I
fundamentally disagree.

Oil is valuable because it’s a limited resource. If everyone could extract

and refine it for the market, there would be no Exxon, Oil Shock or Gulf
Wars. Oil is limited, and valuable and the control of oil has cost millions
of lives.

Data is widely available. You downloaded this PDF, I have limited data
on you (like your email address or who you are). Anyone can generate
this data.

Attention, however, is a scarce resource. You cannot pay attention to

this book and watch a Youtube video at the same time. Sure some try
but you end up doing neither very well.

My point is that we use Big Data to compete in The New Customer

Experience. We collect billions of data sets not because that in itself is
valuable, but because that allows us to win your attention. Data allows
us to tell you “People like you buy things like this”.

Imagine I gave you $10,000 in $100 x $100 bills.

Now go stand outside the train station, handing those $100 bills to
random strangers. What would happen? It won’t be long before they
call the cops and you get frogmarched away.

You could be a startup founder, a consultant or a marketer. Every day

you’re standing outside the station handing out $100 bills, because you
believe you’re trying to help other people make their lives better.

And what do they do? Most push on by, busy busy. A few crazy ones
take up your offer. That can be frustrating. Don’t blame the commuters.
They’ve seen it all before. 

People are aware of you but they are not paying attention. When
someone pays attention, they’ll stop and listen to you. Data will help
you get there e.g. this person’s a student and could use a $100, but it’s
not the goal. The goal is Attention.

Marketing in the Digital Era

MODEL PIPELINE (past) PLATFORM (future)

Goal Awareness Attention
Model Big Ideas Big Data
Tools Advertising, PR Storytelling
Social Proof Visibility Relevance
Focus External Internal
Be more Human

When Attention is the New Oil, and winning the war of attention is
based on how you use potentially billions of data sets, much of the
heavy lifting in the Digital Era will be driven by AI.

What role is there left for humans?

Machines are getting very good at many things we thought beyond their
capabilities. AI can drive a car safer than a human being, so much so
that future insurance premiums might be negligible. A bot was recently
outed on Amazon, having written 10,000 books. 

How do you compete with that?

In a world of gamed headlines, 8 second attention spans and

algorithms that can out-trade, out-translate and out-play you at almost
every imaginable game, what is left of being human?

Being human is what’s left.

Here are a list of jobs that machine will soon do better than man:

• lawyer

• doctor

• coding 


And here is a list of skills that man can do better than machine:

• listening

• care

• leadership

• empathy

• storytelling 


Take medicine for example. A machine may soon do a better job at

diagnosing disease than a doctor but it can’t hold your hand at the
bedside and make you feel comfortable and increasingly this is
something we will pay for. 

Spreadsheets to Storytellers
Unless you were born royalty or a priest, the best job you could have
hoped for in the pre-Industrial era was to be born to an artisan family of
weavers.

Weavers were highly paid, skilled professionals of their era. They could
own smallholdings of land. Most could work 3 days a week to feed their
family.

When the Industrial Revolution came, it was the weavers who were
transformed from highly paid professionals into low paid factory
workers. Some weavers - know as the Luddites - were also the first to
take their tools and smash the machines. 

There is a lot of talk about AI destroying jobs, and that will happen. But,
let’s look at history again.

Where Machines destroyed one profession, they created another.

All those machines wove fancy textile designs for a burgeoning middle
class in London and Manchester creating a new industry - retail, an
industry built around storytelling.  

The wealthy madames that patronised the new retail of London sough
out never-seen-before intricate textile patterns and the stories they
helped tell. 

If you job is essentially a spreadsheet based job and that could mean
sifting through case law, preparing company accounts, studying ERG
scans or even coding, then you will one day soon be replaced by a
machine.

Digital transformation is not about digital, it’s about people. The people
who compete with digital will be the ones who lose. Those who double
down on the analog, will win.

A machine can write a book, but it can’t tell a story.

The Power of Storytelling

Little Red Riding Hood, 3 Little Pigs, The Facebook Story or How Steve
and Woz built Apple.

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, signalling the end of the Cold War, it
wasn’t because tanks liberated East Berlin from communism, but
because its people stopped believing in a story. Trump got elected
because he united the pain of his voters as a collective story, pitting
himself as the heroic outsider against the elites. Obama did the same,
“Change”. Steve Jobs used the narrative of George Orwell’s 1984 to
position Apple as the human spirit fighting the conformity of Big Brother
i.e. IBM.

Religion, marketing, #metoo, The Tour de France, being Indian, The

American Dream, The Reformation, CEO, marriage, motherhood, The
20th Century - these are all stories that shape our lives to differing
degrees.

Stories aren’t just “once upon a time”, they are how we make sense of
the world. Stories aren’t make-believe, they are how we package
seemingly disparate facts and events.

Stories are how leaders lead and how we navigate change.

Digital Transformation is a Story

When you ask an employee at Disneyworld the way to the Tea Cups,
she won’t point out a vague direction but physically walk you there.

Disney employees are “cast members”.

When you think of “cast” you think of movies, shows and performances
to delight the audience. 

Like all labels, it's a story, a shorthand to help people understand where
they fit into the world and how they relate to others.

Ping An Good Doctor has over 100 million customers. Ping An financial
is an insurance company yet they’ve built a platform to help connect
cusotmers with doctors via online bookings, diagnosis and treatment.
Note how we don’t use the word “patient” but “customer” in the Ping
An story. 

• Words are stories

• Stories are expectations

• Expectations are behavior

You can choose to be an airline or you can choose to be a digital travel

company.

This is Digital Transformation, it’s a story told by people to people.

Like all labels, it’s a choice.

Catch Somebody Doing Something Right

Henry Ford employed 200 people in his “culture department”, a team of

internal “spies” who would police the workforce.

These feared managers could randomly show up at an employee’s

house, check the condition of their furniture, their cleanliness, their
marital status or their drinking habits.

Although not as severe as Ford’s example, management still polices

efficiency. The word “Boss” itself comes from the Dutch “Base”
meaning Master. 

Now leaders need to “catch somebody doing something right.”

That means celebrating those who take risks. In one survey, 92% of
employees who said they were “highly engaged” at work also said of
the management that "Someone talked about my progress." By
contrast, only 13% of lowly engaged employees reported this.

You can tell stories about your company, you can also give others a
Platform to tell theirs. 

Rockstars vs Politicians

“She Loves You” is the Beatles’ best selling song ever. Simple.

When Politicians speak about relationships, they are affairs, loverats

and scandals. 

When Keith Flint, lead singer of The Prodigy, died the media outpouring
lasted days. Crowds lined the street during his funeral in Essex. In the
grand scheme of things, The Prodigy is a lesser known act. They’ve
sold over 20 million albums, which is a lot, but it’s still not enough to
rank in the all time top 100.

When you got given the microphone did you play the Politician or the
Rock Star?

    

Rock stars speak from the heart, they speak of our inner hurt. Flint's
lines, "I'm the bitch you hated, filth infatuated” may not mean much to
you and I but for many these lines gave a voice to deep feelings they
could not articulate.

By contrast, Politicians are clipped, edited and polished. Politicians

avoid controversy. They speak for “everyone” but noone. They win by
garnering 51% of the vote. That’s why we won’t miss them.

A real rock star lives from the heart and takes huge risks. Men wear
make up. Women flaunt their sexuality. They win by finding 10% of the
market and devoting their lives to them. Rockstars are unapologetic.
And we need them.

No one cries when a politician dies.

Pick yourself

These are the voices in our head. 

“Can I do this?" or "maybe I'm too old" or "maybe I'm too

inexperienced.” "Who am I to step up to the mic?"

This is the "impostor syndrome” that holds us back. But we’re not
impostors. We belong.  Culturally, however, we’ve been trained to be
picked.

In school, we held up our hands if we wanted to say anything. We

waited for the teacher to pick us.

In work, we held up our hands when we they put out the recruitment
ads. We waited for the HR manager to pick us.

If you were a band, you got picked by record label A&R guys. 

If you were a startup, you got picked by pitch competitions or VCs.

But today, you don’t need to be qualified, you don’t need to be an

expert, you don’t need to be famous.

You just need to step up to the mic.

About Graham D Brown

• Podcast host of  Pitchdeck Asia, The Podcast Show  and  Asia Tech
Podcast.

• Founder of  Pitch Media Asia – Asia’s largest Podcast Media House

• Published author: titles include “Brand Love: How to Build a Brand

Worth Talking About”, “The Mobile Youth: Voices of the Mobile
Generation”, “Public Speaking Like a Pro” and “The Asia Matters
Report”.

• Education: BA Cog Psy & Artificial Intelligence (University of Sussex

| UK), Entrepreneurship (Harvard Business School | HBX)

• Founded mobileYouth in 2000, the world’s first youth focused

telecoms company, growing the company to 35 staff, with 620
clients in 45 countries and appearing on CNN, CNBC, BBC TV, in the
Financial Times, The Guardian and Wall Street Journal. Graham
spoke at Mobile World Congress and at the UN. mobileYouth shaped
 the marketing strategy of clients such as UNICEF, MTV, The
European Commission, Disney and Monster Energy Drinks.

• Moved to Tokyo in 1995 at the end of the Japanese Bubble era and
participated in the rollout of the world’s first consumer mobile
internet services (NTT DoCoMo’s iMode).

• Speaks Japanese, Spanish and English and has been traveling the
world full time with his family since 2012, living in New Zealand, the
UK, the Canary Islands in Spain, Okinawa in the East China Sea,
Japan and Singapore.

• Ironman Triathlon finisher

>> More: www.GrahamDBrown.com <<