For the first week of our Wicked Wednesday Speakers’ Series, we were privileged to have Ms Tiziana Tan share her experiences building communities in today’s digital age. Tiziana is a serial entrepreneur who started her first business at the age of 20, and is the Founder and current CEO of Brain Juice Collective, the first youth-run impact marketing agency seeking to change the way digital education is conducted. Brain Juice Collective also serves as a venture ecosystem builder that leverages on its diverse youth talent network to launch start-ups; the likes of which include an online grocer and artist-driven range. Tiziana has kindly volunteered her time for us at N-House that evening to give us greater insights into how development of hands-on activities and clear digital communication matrixes enable brands to better engage with their digital product loyalists. Tiziana also conducted some of the hands-on activities that her agency often conducts for brand marketing teams, for us to gain a better understanding of what we often missed out when it comes to digital communications.
Through her first activity “Can’t take my eyes off you”, Tiziana shared that in her experiences interacting with brands and clients alike, with the advent of online communication channels we often forget about attending to the offline magic that creates the spark for lasting relationships between brands and their consumers. She emphasized upon the importance of brands engaging with consumers on a more intimate, personable level through mediums such as offline events, dialogue participatory sessions, etc. for it is essential that brands remain personably relevant to the individual consumer.
In her second activity “Stay True”, Tiziana sought to highlight the necessity for brands to stay true to their mission of providing established-from-the-beginning values and reiterated that maintaining a consistent brand voice can help to communicate this act of brands staying true to their rooted values to their stakeholders. She quipped that a consistent brand voice also has the added benefit of enabling brands to retain and enhance long-lasting relationships with their most important advocates — their consumers. As an afterthought, she acknowledges that the oft-mentioned ‘maintaining a consistent brand voice’ mantra is easy to theorize but difficult for brands to execute in reality.
To prove her point, another activity was conducted where we as the audience were tasked to come up with three positive character-trait words about ourselves, and the extremes of those characteristics. The objective was to get us as the audience to recognise the challenges to do with brands’ establishment and maintenance of voice control, which can be defined as the ‘sweet-spot’ medium to contain an emotionally-charged situation with the public where entities and organizational representatives tend to veer towards the extreme end of their voices. Tiziana summed up the activity by surmising that knowing the extreme version of a value reaction output will help one veer in their voice especially in light of controversial business situations.
Tying the concept of voice control back to maintaining brand voice consistency, Tiziana reckoned that investing in voice control is of utmost important when it comes to brand communications, compared to brands’ throwing in of resources to be valuable and of relevance to consumers. She elaborated that since the latter two are difficult to achieve as ‘valuable’ and ‘relevance’ are subjective to different trains of thinking of different audience demographics, it would make most economical sense for brands to devote assets towards the continuation of a positively-persistent image, voice and values. Of course, it is essential that from the get-go, brands establish who they want to be for their stakeholders in the long-term, and work towards that goal.
She concluded the evening by reigning in the essentiality of bands developing a lasting long-term relationship with external stakeholders, to within the organization itself. In the same way she posits that it is vital brands stick to the foundational purposes of providing rooted values to external parties, she too feels that this should be carried to the in-house development of a sound, strong purpose for the organization. She expounded upon this intrapolation through the “3 Levels of Why” theory, which is as follows: (1) Clarity in the Purpose of the Business (2) The Whys of the Purpose (3) The Motivations behind the Whys of the Purpose. Speaking from her experiences, she shared that an organization’s rooted purpose may get lose along the way as things get extremely operational as part of maintaining the survivability of the business. Going back to the “3 Levels of Why” — clarifying the larger picture of where the team is headed and rooting out issues that detracts the team from embarking on this ‘larger picture’ journey successfully will help the team gear up and get back on track.
All in all, the session left everyone enlightened to the insights behind common ‘marketing gimmicks’ that we are so often surrounded with in our everyday lives. It also challenged our habits and perceptions of looking at things from a micro ‘as-it-is’ lens through exposing us to the deeper, long-term ‘Whys’ that goes on behind-the-scenes. We are fortunate to have Tiziana grace our first Wicked Wednesday session, and wish her every success in her entrepreneurial endeavours!
