KEY TAKE OUTS

• Full funnel. We know that balancing long term brand building and short term sales activation is fundamental to success for brands but in today's world, we rarely see them working in unison. They fight against each other for priority, budget, and resource. The solution lies in bringing brand and performance together by unlocking the full funnel, from top to bottom.
• Channel clusters. We know that marketing is a numbers game: increase your penetration, reaching as many potential buyers in the category as you can, and don't get distracted with focusing on the heavy buyers. But we also know that attention is more fragmented than ever, across channels, formats, and devices. Tomorrow's brands will adopt a Channel Cluster approach, achieving scale in layers, by building clusters of complementary channels.
• Build with community. We know the importance of being consistently distinctive, it's how brands build and reinforce mental availability. But digital has led to a decentralisation of ‘brand’. It’s no longer just about what the brand itself says or does, audiences, influencers, and publishers carry just as much, if not more, weight. The route forward lies in building with community, a bottom-up approach which incentivises consistency.
• Scaling subcultures. Strong brands don't exist on a one-to-one basis, they occupy a space in the collective understanding. There's a shared context about what the brand represents and stands for. But filter bubbles and echo chambers have put us all on a path of our own hyper-personalised, individualistic, and idealistic pursuits and as a result, monoculture has splintered into an ever-growing number of subcultures. Tomorrow's brands recognise this, and build their collective understanding by committing to subcultures, rather than monoculture.