If you want to understand what C2 Montréal’s organizers meant by their theme, “The Many,” you could read their online essay on the subject, which suggests the power to influence is shifting from brands and agencies to mass consumers. Or you could just talk to executives at companies like PepsiCo and InterContinental Hotels, who are living this theme every single day.
“We almost have to redefine some of the language we’ve always used,” said Emily Chang, chief commercial officer at InterContinental Hotels Group, during a panel discussion called “Collaborate or Die” that dove deep into the event theme. “I don’t think in this world we manage brands anymore. We orchestrate the dialogue among our brands. Now we’re pursuing passionate advocates of our business.”
Carla Zakhem‐Hassan, PepsiCo’s senior vice-president of brand management, said this shift was already achieving results. She referenced Dorito’s “Crash the Super Bowl” contest, where consumers were able to not only create, but vote on a 30-second spot that ran during one of the most-watched TV moments of the year. However, that kind of approach isn’t possible if brands aren’t equally collaborative with the way they work internally, she said.
“The role I have is the diplomat’s role. You’ve got to know when to reach out and collaborate (with other parts of the business),” she said. “Otherwise it’s only the company itself that loses. If we don’t do it quickly enough, someone else is going to come disrupt us.”
Chang agreed. While InterCon has call centres to deal with customer issues, it also maintains support desks for hotels specifically for general managers to ask questions or report problems.
“They’re the first ones to tell me if something’s not up to standard,” she said. From an external perspective, she said acknowledging “the many” goes beyond using tools to listen about what’s being said on social media, but maintaining a direct line with your audience.
“In hospitality, one of the greatest gifts is our guests trust us with their safety and comfort. They give us feedback constantly. It makes the experience better, it makes us better,” she said.
Though “the many” also includes ad agencies and other third parties, responding to the decentralization of business processes means thinking about and creating content differently. For example, PepsiCo recently opened its own in-house content studio in downtown New York, Zakhem‐Hassan said, but it’s not just a place where artists and athletes are brought in to work on a commercial. They are also welcome to pursue their own projects.
“We’re opening the doors and saying, ‘This is a collaborative space for you.’ It’s more than just partnership on a brand level, it’s a question of, how can we create a space that’s really creative for our partners to collaborate with us?” she said.
Though PepsiCo will still work with traditional agencies on content, she said the process has to work much faster than a six-month cycle where a TV spot is conceived and developed for thousands or millions of dollars.
“We can’t farm all of that out. We have to be the creative curators of our brands,” she said.
Chang said these kinds of relationships reflected the fact that everyone a brand works with — whether it’s an agency or a customer — had both a personal and professional persona that needs to be recognized. This is another way of thinking about “the many,” she suggested.
“We talk about the business and the leisure traveller. But, it’s the same person,” she said. “You go one day with a briefcase in your hand and one day with a child in your arms. It’s all about the labels we put on things. Because we do that, we look in a limited way at the potential of what we could be.”
