If you didn’t join live and would like to access the recording, click the Access Recording button below.

This webinar explores what commoditisation is, why it’s a trap, and, most importantly, how to escape it.

It covers:

• Understanding commoditisation
• Recognising the symptoms
• Strategies for de-commoditisation
• Switch’s Journey & the CATALYST Framework
• Q&A

Presented by Richard Muscat Azzopardi, CEO at Switch

The post A Guide to De-commoditisation for B2B Businesses [Webinar] appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

It also covers the common symptoms of being commoditised, so you can identify if you’re heading down that path (and hopefully correct your course early enough in the process).

The post A Deep-Dive into De-Commoditisation [eBook] appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

I’m not an engineer or a mathematician, but I appreciate that if you make a number of small improvements to your system, the cumulative benefits can be monumental given enough time and progress.

For years on end we focused on this, tweaking parts of the engine to squeeze out some profitability here and there, to reduce costs, to increase efficiency. We looked at every aspect of our business until we got to a stage of diminishing returns. 

As we made progress, the market changed. There was more competition and budgets were squeezed from clients who constantly seemed to be going through a cost-cutting exercise. The tiny incremental moves we made were just about helping us keep afloat. They were changes that became necessary to keep us in business, not to thrive.

And there’s very little you can do to squeeze out more when you’ve been improving incrementally year on year and you’ve looked at every aspect of the business.

Evolution is important, but from time to time you need a revolution. Sometimes you need to strip your business down to its core and make some bold moves to get yourself out of a rut. Because, as someone bright once said, the definition of insanity is trying the same thing twice and hoping for a different outcome.

Over the course of the next few paragraphs, I want to share some lessons I learned from one of our boldest moves ever as an agency, definitely one of the boldest moves I’ve ever made in my career, and seeing it pay off has been extremely satisfying. It’s also been a good lesson on the importance of bold moves, the pitfalls around them, and the benefits you can reap. Looking back, there are a few lessons that I wish I had known before.

Should we make bold moves? How should we make bold moves? What are they, and how can we know if we’re prepared for them?

Let’s start at the beginning.

The Bold Move at Switch

Our bold move was pretty radical, and it was multifaceted, we had to make multiple moves at once for it to all make sense together. First, we took a decision to reduce the number of services we offer to just two, then we also chose to only focus on one type of business to offer it to (B2B clients). The benefits we saw were major, but they would take a great amount of courage because to get to our destination we had to accept that we’d be refusing business from our traditional client base.

It’s been a couple of years now, and it’s not always been easy, but now we can confidently say that we’ve moved past the hardest thresholds of the bold move, we’re now only onboarding clients in the two areas we’ve chosen to focus on, and it’s put us in a position where we’ve effectively moved away from being seen as a commoditised service provider. There are far fewer potential clients for us locally, but we’ve built a reputation that allows us to go after our ideal clients no matter where they are in the world.

Triggers for bold moves

Triggers for bold moves can be both internal and external:

On a macro level, external triggers that might signal the need for a bold move include geopolitical ones, and larger events outside your control (wars, pandemics). These can be easy enough to spot when they’re as dramatic as a war or a pandemic, but there are other signals that creep up on you at a much slower pace (a country’s ethnic mix changing gradually). Other external factors include changes in the market, or new technological shifts (generative AI, anyone?). On a smaller scale, you can have opportunities opening up more directly, such as a competitor going out of business or, on the other extreme, buying out another of your competitors and consolidating.

Internally you can have quite a few catalysts that might require bold moves. An employee (or a whole department) resigning can be devastating, especially if they had a skill that was unique to your business. You could have too much cash in the bank, or not enough (this is always riskier, but potentially a better catalyst for change), or you could have simply witnessed a plateau for a few years and want to jolt the company out of it.

Each one of these motivators has a different effect on us, as business leaders, yet in most cases, each one of them can be equal parts terrifying and exciting. Rocking the boat is never something that most of us are naturally inclined to do, so we’ll make all the excuses we can to keep things as is, improving ever so slightly wherever we can.

Building the courage to act

This can be the hardest part. The fear of pain is often even worse than the pain itself. Think about all the time you spent thinking about your next dentist’s appointment. I’m pretty sure you spent far more time anticipating, and fearing, the pain than the time you actually spent in pain. And I’m also pretty sure you felt much better once you were done, too (or at least I hope so, for your sake).

Bold moves with business are pretty much the same. We tend to spend too much time overthinking them and fearing failure than we do actually taking decisive action. This is not to say that you should rush into major decisions without giving them the proper consideration, but neither should you postpone the move indefinitely.

Prepare yourself psychologically, and if you can place proper risk management strategies in place. In some cases, if you’re lucky enough, you can run a test, or a series of tests and mitigate the risk. On our end, for example, we effectively ran a small separate agency within Switch that specialised in our new areas before actually shifting all our business externally.

The benefit of breaking the move into smaller pieces is obvious. It makes it easier to test out your hypothesis. However, this brings a major drawback with it: it can potentially slow down how well you can judge the changes you’re making. Once again, looking back at our bold move, the longer we took to make the shift, the harder it was to serve both kinds of clients, to attract both kinds of clients, and crucially, to work on both sets of services at once.

Types of Bold Moves

I can’t possibly list every kind of bold move for every possible business, but in general, some of the bold moves I’ve seen when working with businesses across all walks of life include mergers and acquisitions, shifting products or services sold (or, as in our case, reducing the number of products or services to specialise), exploring new distribution channels or simply deciding to hire someone new to start on your journey to expansion.

And in the end…

Bold moves aren’t about reckless risk-taking – they’re about calculated actions that can transform your business. You have to have the courage to implement something that might feel like it’s out of your comfort zone, but if you do you’ll find success. 

The post Revolution or Evolution: Choosing a New Beginning appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

We’ve all either said or heard someone say that at work, and it usually stems from a fundamental misalignment or miscommunication between stakeholders about what should be considered a priority or about the way things should be done at a basic level. If you’ve had an experience such as this with a business partner, it’s usually an omen of things to come.

Tension is a natural part of growing a business. Without a little bit of the right kind of pain, businesses remain static. But that pain should be related to building skillsets, pushing boundaries, and improving internal processes. It’s the muscle soreness you feel after a challenging run or session at the gym.

Unfortunately, the kind of tension we’re often subjected to at work stems from a less productive place. It’s usually around incompatibility with those we’re working with – either internally or externally. If it’s an internal issue, then that’s governed by the company culture you’ve built over time and the way HR conflicts are resolved. The external side of things is where things get murky. 

Do you sacrifice a profitable relationship with a client or supplier simply because they stress your team out?

I’d argue that you should. That is, if you value growing your business via quality of work rather than just volume.

If your business’s financial situation relies on these existing high-stress partnerships, then removing them immediately to avoid stress is an obvious no-go. But building a plan to eventually replace these high-stress partnerships with more productive and fulfilling ones should be your next step. 

And that starts with a manifesto. One about what kind of external partners you want to work with. Not based on their industry or specialisation, but rather on what they stand for and what they value in a working relationship. One that you’re confident enough in to make public.

How do you build an effective manifesto? 

If you haven’t already, articulate your core beliefs around how you think business should be done. This set of principles will serve as the foundation of your manifesto. They should cover your collective attitude towards the way you feel businesses should treat each other. 

For example, at Switch, we believe that business can, and should be a force for good – that focusing on purpose and people inevitably leads to profit. We believe in kindness and empathy as a strategy. We think that true success is measured in the positive impact we have on our people, our clients, our planet, and our bottom line. And we’ve taken concrete actions that align with these beliefs.

As a result of that, we can easily outline the kinds of partnerships we’re looking for. We want to work with people who embody genuine kindness in and outside of work, that strive to revolutionise their industry efficiently and responsibly, that truly prioritise their team’s wellbeing, and that have taken real steps towards embodying these virtues.

We want to work with people who share our beliefs. We want better business.

Every time these beliefs have been aligned, the relationship has been fruitful for both sides – both financially and in terms of internal growth because of the fact that everyone involved is aligned in terms of attitude and priorities. Operating from the get-go on a basis of mutual respect and equal standing makes any relationship near-seamless, and even difficult situations are significantly easier to deal with and overcome. 

As a result, we’ve learned that leading with these beliefs in both our external communications and during chemistry meetings with potential partners allows us to attract the right kind of business and more easily detect whether a relationship will turn sour in the long run, and nip it in the bud.

Potential clients and partners are desperate for a value match as well. The right alignment always increases our value proposition and ends up being the major deciding factor for the partner in question when they have other options on the table that, from a technical point of view, tick more boxes. 

The bottom line

Running a business this way isn’t easy, and it doesn’t happen overnight. Companies often need to take on work that isn’t perfectly aligned with their values because payroll needs to be met. 

Slowly replacing stress-inducing partnerships with ones that complement your values can be financially daunting, but it is worth it in the long run. A happier, less stressed team is more productive, more easily retained, produces better results, and brings innovation. As long as you can back up your talk with the right walk, getting good business will lead to more good business. 

The post A Manifesto on Manifestos: Minimising Stress via Business Development appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Of the 5% of businesses that are ready to make a purchase, it is statistically unlikely that they are on the initial day-one list that B2B buyers have in mind when seeking out vendors. 90% of B2B purchases are made off that initial list, where companies land as a result of marketing, strategic influential partnerships, and a robust content marketing plan. 

Challenges for Small and Mid-Sized B2B Organizations

For larger B2B organisations, the cost of doing business, while exponentially higher, can be readily absorbed by ongoing business. Larger B2B organisations are in a better position to play the long game, providing more opportunity to take their time to reach marketing leads, and pivoting when planned returns do not materialise. Smaller B2B organisations, in their initial start-up phase, do not have the luxury of pivoting or big-spend marketing, so the client acquisition decisions are removed from operations until they reach a point where leads start to dwindle. 

The problems arise when those smaller businesses do grow into a mid-sized entity. To move from a mid-sized business to a larger one requires more business, and to escalate to more business, more clients are needed — however the statistics of new client acquisition are far from ideal. 

Smaller and mid-sized entities, with less of a marketing budget, and facing a marketing landscape that is outright difficult to break into, can thus decide that the cost of professional marketing is too high, and attempt to advertise the business themselves. While it’s an effort worth trying for smaller businesses that have some room to grow, mid-sized entities will not see the greatest benefits of marketing with DIY efforts. 

The Importance of Content Marketing and Brand

To quantify the value of marketing, it’s prudent to identify the value of a good brand and a good content marketing plan. 

• Companies that excel in personalisation generate 40% more revenue from those with little or no personalisation. 
• 89% of B2B buyers engage with content before talking to a sales rep. 
• 49% of B2B spending happens online. 
• There is a 55% increase of buyers relying on content to research and make purchasing decisions.  

Content marketing and brand are increasingly serving as differentiators in a crowded and noisy B2B marketing landscape. They function in similar ways to B2C marketing, primarily because the variations between B2C and B2B marketing are narrowing as a new cohort of B2B buyers – millennials and Gen Z – take over decision-making roles.

B2B buyers are online, overwhelmed, and looking for easier decisions to make. Marketing and a strong brand have become a non-negotiable aspect of B2B. 

DIY Marketing: a consideration of price

The reality is that, while B2B brand and content marketing is a non-negotiable aspect, smaller brands can be priced out of the conversation or have to rely on DIY marketing just to get by. This will work until the next growth stage is reached, at which point professional marketing becomes a necessity to continue meeting business demand and scale outside of existing clients. 

While DIY marketing can definitely have a short-term benefit of growth, there are some things that hamstring its efficacy in the long-run for larger businesses. 

1. Time spent on marketing. 

On average, B2B marketers at medium-and-large enterprises spend 82% of their work hours on creating content, including social media posts, newsletters, and blog posts. In addition, they send a significant amount of their time on content strategy creation, managing existing campaigns, and posting content. 

Social media and blogs alone take, on average, 3.4 and 4.7 hours respectively; ebooks, whitepapers, videos, and webinars all average nearly 5 hours. This is a significant amount of time to take out of a packed work day to create content. The hours also do not average out when taking into account that it takes upwards of seven interactions with a brand before purchasing. 

2. Lack of expertise across marketing disciplines.

Effective marketing requires expertise across disciplines, and an eye on current research, trends, and consumer shifts. For an untrained professional to specialise in one aspect of marketing, such as SEO or Google Ads, is possible, but the efficacy of those campaigns can be limited. As the discipline becomes more complex, the reality is that it will be harder for DIY marketing to reach the same level of benefit as professional marketing. 

3. Fundamental misalignment. 

A misalignment between sales and marketing can be difficult to overcome, primarily because it might be considerably harder for a non-professional to identify which of their marketing efforts is producing the misalignment. Regardless of understanding the root cause, a misalignment between sales and marketing can lead to a 10% revenue decline, as discovered by Hubspot. 

It is also one of the most common issues for B2B organisations, with 92% of companies admitting to weak alignment between sales and marketing to Forrester Research, and 52.2% of sales professionals citing lost sales and revenue as a direct cause of misalignment.

4. Inconsistency in marketing efforts 

The B2B buying cycle is fundamentally a personal one, and consistency is key to attracting high-quality leads and triggering the purchase process. Businesses that prioritise lead nurturing and engagement can generate up to 50% more sales-ready leads that they can continue to grow as a result.

Furthermore, brand consistency is another key metric that DIY marketing can struggle with, with consistent brands seeing 10-20% more revenue but more than 47% of brands admitting that they publish off-brand content a few times per year.   

5. Lack of strategic approach.

92% of B2B marketing budgets are spent on short-term, bottom funnel objectives such as lead generation, which has little effect on future buyers, and does not take into account future developments for your business. By targeting engagements that focus only on bringing short-term opportunities through the door, it is likely that the B2B marketing cycle will eventually stop producing leads and new clients, which can be difficult for a smaller business to overcome. A strategic approach ensures that clients trickle in at a steady, manageable pace that allows for the business to scale reasonably. 

6. Cost-effectiveness in the long run.

With an understanding of the right tools to use, the right metrics to monitor, and the time taken to ensure that campaigns are continuously maintained to deliver high results, professional marketing is cost-effective, a promise that is far harder to achieve with DIY marketing. On average, professional marketing will base any marketing on information generated through business operations, allowing them to tailor marketing tactics to generate the greatest possible opportunity for sales. DIY marketing may have access to the same information but without the necessary skills to adapt marketing tactics to serve that information, therefore leading to lost costs. 

Misconceptions about marketing for DIY marketers

While 67% of companies outsource their marketing needs as a matter of course, the ones that prefer to DIY their marketing have specific considerations for why they opt to keep control of their marketing. 

The top two reasons appear to be based on misconceptions. 

1. Lack of control over brand. 
2. Lack of discretionary budget to conform to agency fees. 

These matters are considerable worries, however they can be easily amended by finding the right agency to partner with. Effective marketing partnerships can allow a growing business control over the fundamental aspects of their identity, and merely strategise and build communication around what already exists. 

Budgetary concerns, on the other hand, are a little harder to overcome. For businesses that are still in the primary start-up it can be effective to retain all marketing efforts and keep them in-house – but as the business does start to grow, marketing in-house will lead to a lot of missed opportunities. 

The opportunity to outsource

Over half of B2B marketing teams outsource at least one aspect of content marketing. What this provides the company is the flexibility to prioritise their in-house operations while simultaneously benefitting from the expertise of a fractional agency. Outsourcing marketing activities allows for a better opportunity to generate content that drives leads, and leave the internal team free to continue with the work of running the business. It takes the pressure of the intensive, day-to-day monitoring and content creation away from upper management and puts it into the hands of experts who can focus solely on your content. 

For B2B organisations to thrive within shrinking market share, there needs to be an adjustment made for the state of the industry at the moment. The B2B buying cycle is long and complex, and communicating at the right time and with the right idea will make a significant difference to the business — but that path is time-consuming, and complex in itself. 

Outsourcing your marketing will at least enable you to both prioritise your business and your marketing, without one sacrificed for the other. It’s the most sustainable, economical way forward, particularly for businesses who want to pay for proven results. 

And all it takes to start with this path is the right partner. Get in touch to see how we can help you create lasting growth and success through strategic, results-driven marketing.

The post The Cost of DIY Marketing appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

The right and wrong ways to implement AI into your business.

It’s becoming harder and harder to ignore AI in your business. If you use any sort of software, the likelihood is that it’s currently integrating some form of generative AI. Heck, even fridges and microwaves are injecting AI into their software, let alone your favourite software.

It’s a great time to be alive, and it’s incredibly exciting to see all the benefits we’re reaping from AI tools, but it can also be scary.

How do you keep up? How do you know which tool to use? How do you discuss the tools you’re using with your clients? How do you control what your employees are doing on AI?

There’s no easy answer. 

But I can practically guarantee that most of these questions are being asked by your peers, so do not feel like you’re the only one who’s confused.

Before getting into some specific advice, however, I just want to give one word of warning. Don’t assume this is just going to go away. This is not the Metaverse. This is not AR and VR. This is not 360-degree videos. Their time may still come, but they exploded onto the scene before the world was ready for them. AI is here today, and here to stay and its transformational effects on businesses are profound.

And while I don’t think that you’ll lose your job (or your clients) to AI just yet, I am pretty certain that you’re going to lose your job (or your clients) to a company that’s leveraging AI better than you are.

It’s like living through the industrial revolution and ignoring automation of manufacture. Sure, there’s still room for small-scale artisans, but the people with big machines are always going to outgun anyone manufacturing manually.

Right ways to implement AI tools

Overall, the first thing to look at when considering AI tools and technology is that these are tools to help you do your job better or more efficiently. You should look for areas of your business that could do with assistance in automation or in making sense of large swathes of data. In general, any task that’s heavily process driven and is repeated can probably be helped by some AI tool or another.

I’m not going to cover many examples of good ways to use AI because most of the tools that make your life easier are industry-specific, but if you go over the few examples I’ve chosen below, you can see the thought process.

Help with Research

Most of our work needs a deep understanding of the industry we’re working in with our clients. AI tools can be invaluable at quickly getting up to speed with industries, markets or areas of specialisation. This can be true for any industry, I can’t think of any industry in which a better understanding of your industry will not prove to be useful.

It’s also an excellent way to learn more about other roles within your company. Especially as a business leader, if you can learn to leverage AI tools well you can ask far better questions of your more technical reports.

Help with Decision Making

If you have large swathes of data or a large amount of information about a specific subject, AI is an excellent way to make sense of it all, to query it and to help collect all the background information you need to make a decision about something. Think about the benefit you could extract from dumping all your meeting notes about a subject, or all the historical data from something, into one large dataset and having the ability to query it in easy to understand, human commands.

Help with Automation of Repetitive Tasks

AI is excellent at helping with repetitive tasks. Think transcribing voice notes, for example. Or recognising text and handwriting in large volumes. These are tasks that an AI tool can do in minutes what a human can do in days or weeks. As long as you can describe the process well, then you can probably find someone to leverage existing AI tools to do the job for you. 

Help with Time Management

One of our favourite tools to use at Switch is Clockwise, a calendar tool that saves us hours of time every week to find time in our schedules. It also looks at your individual calendar and optimises it to give you more focus time. You can always override its suggestions manually, but the benefit of using it has been massive for us.

Help with Customer Service

If you have a good enough description of all the normal queries you usually get with customer support, then it’s relatively easy to teach an AI tool to answer your customer queries online. This won’t replace human interactions when needed, but AI can offer an amazing customer experience if it can solve most of your customer queries in seconds. Your customers can get a much better service if most of their queries are answered quickly.

Wrong ways to implement AI tools

There are many more ways to leverage AI tools than the ones I covered above, and I’d be happy to discuss them in more detail if you want to reach out to me at any point. But I’m even more concerned about people looking at AI tools and seeing them in the wrong light. Just like they can be extremely helpful, they can be extremely dangerous (or downright stupid).

To Save on HR Costs

This is more of a question of approach than of actual implementation. If you’re looking at AI tools as a way to cut down on your HR costs, then you’re probably looking at it from the wrong perspective. Yes, by looking at the massive layoffs that big tech companies are making, you might be inclined to think that AI is definitely going to help with savings, but that’s just missing the woods for the trees. Big tech companies are laying off people from non-AI areas because it’s a business decision to focus on AI tools, not because AI tools are replacing humans. In most cases, they had overhired for growth and are actually now just doubling down on AI solutions instead, clearing out people from other divisions.

AI tools still need humans to make sense of them, and if you think otherwise you’re going to be very disappointed.

To Take Decisions on Your Behalf

AI tools are excellent at helping you make sense of information to make better decisions, but they should not be relied on to make decisions themselves (at this point in time), especially with tools that are more generic in nature. AI tools can definitely make better decisions in specialised scenarios. But don’t use AI tools to make decisions on your behalf when screening CVs, or when figuring out who to hire or fire, for example. Don’t rely on generic AI tools to tell you where to invest or where to spend your money. Use them to gather and make sense of information, but you should be the ultimate decision-maker.

To Produce Content on Your Behalf

I’ve seen so much obviously AI-generated content that it’s scary. It’s even worse when the person generating the content has clearly not even bothered to learn how to prompt well or how to make sense of the content that’s being output. I recently received an email from a potential supplier who very obviously just asked ChatGPT to write an email to help sell me something. The email could be seen as a ChatGPT effort from miles away, and what made it even worse was that the context of the email made no sense, so if the person sending the email had even bothered for a minute or two to read the email they were sending out, they’d have smelt a rat before sending it.

Think about the content you’re putting out there on behalf of your brand. Think about what your audience thinks of you. If you’re going to rely on a tool to create your content, at the very least take the time to learn how to prompt well and how to edit your content to make it make sense, but by the time you do that you can probably have produced the content yourself.

And in the end…

There are hundreds of ways to use AI to try to get ahead of the game (or at the very least to not be left behind). Not all of them are good. Not all of them will offer you a real advantage. 

Think about the sustainability of your decisions, learn as much as you can about the tools there are out there, keep up to date and keep an open mind.

It might seem scary, especially because there’s so much happening at any given time, but trust me, it’s just as exciting as it is frightening. Once you start seeing the real benefits of finding tools to take the boring bits of your work away, you’ll be a convert.

The post Using AI tools for better business appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

If you don’t have the time to read this article now, you can download the PDF version of Trends That Will Shape Your Business in 2024 and Beyond for free by clicking below. Otherwise, just keep reading.

Integrating our trendwatching practice into our daily operations isn’t just wise, it’s essential. As a consultancy that is well-known for our trendwatching work, we very rarely talk about how we integrate the practice within our own business. 

Like our trend-focused client consultancy, we scrutinise our own business throughout the year to identify actionable trends. We consider these trends across three critical levels:

• Trends that impact our business operationally (such as increased remote working)
• Trends that affect the services we offer (the rise of authenticity in external communications)
• And finally trends that we research to help our clients stay ahead of the curve and their competition.

We focus on the last one in our external posts (see them all here), but today I’ll cover the ones that I’m looking at as a business leader who’s interested in taking our own business forward.

I aim to achieve a simple goal: I’d love to help you apply our trend articles to your business and benefit from the insight on a daily basis. How to take the theoretical and apply it in a practical fashion that will help you drive your business ahead of your competition’s.

We can monitor a vast number of trends professionally, but we can’t apply all we learn to our business, otherwise we’d be floating around in eternity. This is why we choose three trends that help give us focus (or help us fix what we’re doing) operationally and another three to help us direct the services that we’re offering.

The three that affect us operationally are:

• AI & the AI revolution
• The New Work Revolution – or talent acquisition & retention in a world in which we have remote work & increased flexibility
• An increasingly connected post-pandemic world

In terms of how we’re adjusting our services to focus on needs that become more acute as time goes by, we’ve been taking a long, hard look at the following trends:

• Authentically Human 
• Human Made
• Collaborative Marketing

Trends Affecting How Switch Works

AI & the AI Revolution

We’ve discussed this at length. To a certain extent it is the trend that’s impacting all trends, and a trend that will impact the ways in which we live and work over the next few years. There are so many ways in which this is affecting every aspect of work that it would take more than a paragraph or two to cover how we’re including this megatrend in our daily lives here at Switch.

Because it’s changing our daily lives. We use AI transcription tools to record and archive our calls. We use other tools to synthesise our conversations and others to build knowledge-banks for subjects or clients. We’re looking into AI to help improve the creative process and we’re looking at AI tools to help us produce better outputs across the board. We’re also pretty sure that we’ll look at this paragraph in a year’s time and think how basic our usage was.

And that’s where I’m getting to. What we’re doing around the AI megatrend is opening up ourselves to learning about new AI tools as they come along. We’ve set up a working group to look for new tools and to identify whether they can help us do better work. We’ve set a budget aside for tools we don’t even know exist yet. We’re preparing for a series of major shifts in our industry in ways that we are not even expecting. As cliche as it might sound, we’re expecting the unexpected, and we’re excited about it!

How you can benefit from this trend: This is a somewhat universal trend, one that crosses verticals and horizontals. At this stage our advice is to make a conscious decision to be on the lookout for AI innovations that could impact your industry and to be ready to adopt new tools and ways of working as quickly as possible.

The New Work Revolution

The world of work changed in the couple of years of the pandemic, and it’s still changing as we speak. At Switch we are constantly looking out to see how we can be better employers. We want to ensure that our employees are getting the best conditions possible, and at the moment that’s not the easiest task, which is why trendwatching is critical here.

People expect much more out of their jobs now -they want good conditions and they want great wages-  but they are also on the hunt for working conditions that respect them as human beings, that give them the flexibility to work from wherever they want to and to live a life that’s more fulfilling. 

Running a completely distributed team is not easy, working fewer hours every week is not easy, either, but we understand that if we want to secure the best talent and, more importantly, if we want to keep our people happy, we have to make the extra effort it takes to work on both.

We’re working 4-day weeks for more than half the year, and we encourage the team to work from practically anywhere in the world. This has allowed us to consistently keep an extremely low employee turnover. The benefits to this are immeasurable. We get consistency in the people we’re working with. Our training program centres around upskilling, not re-training people on things we’re already familiar with. And with a fully-distributed model, it’s also allowed us to not lose people when they decide to move homes. We also cast a far wider net when we recruit.

How you can benefit from this trend: Even with all the innovation and automation we’re seeing, human capital is still immensely valuable, so you need a workforce that’s nimble and dedicated. Take a long hard look at how you treat your people and challenge every notion you have that might make you be perceived as an inflexible or an inconsiderate employer. You might decide to change nothing, but at the very least you’d have considered all options.

Increased Worldwide Connectivity

The other major change in a post-pandemic world was the increased connections between people around the world. These barriers had made it very hard for us to specialise in an area of business that we wanted to focus on, but as times changed, so did Switch. We’re now working with clients from all over the world, specialising in high-quality content and strategies for B2B businesses across 22 different time zones. 

Our clients rarely care about where we are, because during the pandemic they got used to working with suppliers over calls, no matter where they were. And in that spirit, if we were the best fit for their needs, it made no difference if we were 20km away from them or 5,000 km away – as long as we’re OK to take calls in their time zone, we’re only judged on the quality of our work, not where we’re sitting while we’re on a call.

How you can benefit from this trend: Is your business as geographically dependent as you think it is? Are you looking beyond your immediate catchment area to see whether there could be opportunities beyond your traditional area of business? Have you tried recruiting from beyond your postcode?

Trends Affecting What Switch Does

Authentically Human / HumanMade

If you can’t beat them, join them, someone wise once said. We’re not sure we agree, and in that spirit, we’re tackling the big AI revolution sideways. While, as you read earlier, we’re embracing AI innovation wholeheartedly, we’re also conscious of the fact that we have to stand out in a sea of AI created (and curated) content.

It’s easy for any one of our clients (or potential clients) to simply use one of the hundreds of AI tools that can churn out vast volumes of content, so as an agency we have to focus on the areas in which we can bring real value, not the areas that can easily be replaced by a machine.

Anyone who’s used an AI tool to generate content will tell you that it probably takes as much time to get the machine to create something that you’re happy with as it would take you to write something out. But that will become faster.

Humans, especially the humans at Switch, however, can bring something completely different to the table. We can make sense of things in ways that Machines can’t (yet). We have context and we have a broader knowledge of the people we work with, the industries they’re in, and the peculiarities of each and every person we work with.

This allows us to work on strategies and to create content that’s highly personalised and that’s deeper than you could (currently) get from a machine. And we’re constantly on the lookout for ways to innovate that will keep us relevant in a sea of automation.

How you can benefit from this trend: Which parts of your business can be automated? Which parts of what you do can be easily replaceable by machines? This is the time to automate and replace as quickly as possible, all while elevating the areas in which a human touch makes all the difference. 

Immersion over Innovation

Even though this is primarily a B2C trend, this is one we can learn a lot from in our daily interactions with the brands we partner up with to create strategies and content for. In a sea of rapid innovation, we have to accept that our scope for innovation is relatively limited. 

We can (and do) innovate with the strategies we work on, and we’re constantly innovating in the ways we package our products, in the ways we communicate on behalf of our clients and in the ways we deliver our services, however these are relatively small innovations in comparison to the innovations happening in the world at the moment.

So our biggest strength, at the moment, is our level of immersion with the brands we’re working with. We’re partnering up with fewer brands than we used to, and we’re immersing ourselves much more deeply than we ever have in the past. We’re also allowing the clients we work with to immerse themselves much more deeply into our processes and with the people they’re working closely with at Switch. We’re breaking down walls that existed in the past, giving more direct access to the people clients are working with, to the processes we’re using, to the inner workings of the agency that we’d intentionally obfuscated in the past.

This gives the people using our services a much more immersive experience, and while it puts the onus on us to run a much tighter ship, it makes the process of working with us feel much more authentic.

How you can benefit from this trend: Like the trend above, this is an area in which you can benefit greatly from deeper human connections and deeper integrations with your clients. Are there areas of your service offering that can forge stronger connections? These would be the ones I’d be looking at improving and growing in 2024.

Collaborative Marketing in B2B

Collaborative marketing has been a thing for decades, so why am I bringing it up as a trend now? The change that we’re seeing is the new application of collaboration in B2B. And we’re not talking about influencers, here. This is not a collaboration between someone who’s making it their life goal to achieve influence and monetise it.

We’re seeing collaborations between business leaders and marketers from all businesses. People and brands who see that their area of influence can be used to grow other brands’ reach in a way that benefits everyone involved. This is a new currency of influence that’s created from scratch, and when used correctly it actually amplifies the reach of everyone involved and offers a great service to the audiences who are being reached, too. 

This trend is still on the rise, we haven’t officially identified it as a trend that’s going to dominate the marketing landscape yet, but it’s one we’re keeping tabs on and will probably include it officially as a trend in a year or two.

As time goes by we’re seeing that more and more B2B brands and business leaders are reaching out to others to grow their businesses by collaborating with others, using the people they’re collaborating with to also help spread the content that’s been created once it’s ready to be spread.

This emerging trend requires wider adoption before we officially recognize it, but it’s already on our radar.

How you can benefit from this trend: Who are the people in your industry who have the loudest voice (both online and in real life)? Can you reach out to them to create content with them? Mostly you’re going to be looking for people in areas that complement your business, but there might also be benefits in collaborating with people who you might traditionally see as your competition. It’s not a zero sum game, and there’s enough business to go around…

And in the end…

Trends are critical to running your business if you want to stay relevant. Sometimes it might seem overwhelming to make sense of all the changes that are happening around us. And when we’re overwhelmed we tend to go into ostrich-mode, hiding our head in the sand and hoping that if we hunker down and just work harder, we’ll get ahead because that’s what we always did.

It’s becoming tougher and tougher to justify that stance, so I’m hoping that by giving you practical and tangible uses of trendwatching in how we run our own business you can see ways of implementing this content in yours.

And if you’re stuck – reach out. We’re always happy to help brands identify the trends that could be game changers for them in the future.

The post Trends That Will Shape Your Business in 2024 and Beyond appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

We’ve been working on trendwatching for the past five or six years. We look at trends consistently in our day to day work, but once a year we compile the top trends in major industries and verticals into a series of documents and eventually into a large book of trends for the year.

In all our years of working on them, we’ve never had such a major shift from one year to the next. Generative AI has taken the world by storm.

What seemed like a soft launch of a new tool by OpenAI at the end of 2022 served as the catalyst for a whole new world, affecting every industry in some way or another.

There seems to be a gold-rush by businesses to accelerate the process of automation, using machines to save on wage costs and the complexities of managing teams. This is, in my opinion, a very short-sighted way of looking at things. If you’re only seeing the rise of AI as a way to save on salaries, then you’re probably looking at it in the wrong way. You might save in the short term, but you’ll be bitten in the backside before too long.

Human behaviour is changing at a much more moderate speed, so we still see overlaps from one year to another around what people expect from businesses, however the dawn of generative AI has brought AI (in all of its forms) to the forefront – making it front and centre on people’s minds as they plan for 2024.

The biggest issue with AI is that it’s moving at such a rapid speed that most people tend to be scared of it. On the one hand you feel like you’re missing out if you don’t keep abreast with everything that’s going on in the industry, on the other you’re overwhelmed by the constant changes, and it makes it kind of tempting to just bury your head in the sand and wait for it all to settle down.

I’m not holding my breath. I don’t think it will settle down any time soon, so my advice to businesses is to really keep on top of things in every way you possibly can.

The revolution is coming and you don’t want to be on the guillotine when the blade drops.

Today we’ll look at what becomes ever more important as we head into a world of constant change.

As every business around you gets access and knowledge of the AI tools around them, you have to work even harder to figure out what makes you special. What makes you stand out, either in a crowded market or in a market that’s being taken over by AI tools.

Humanity

It might seem bleedingly obvious, but as we move into a world of extreme automation, our humanity comes at a premium. There are tools out there that make it easy to personalise messaging at scale. Tools that help us create the mythical “audience of one”, but these are tools. 

Within areas of your business that you can easily automate, using technology makes perfect sense. But in parallel ensure to use the time you’re saving there to create better interactions with your customers and clients. Don’t see the time savings from automation as an opportunity to save money, see them as a great opportunity to give your people more time to build and maintain authentic relationships with your customers.

This will help you stand out from a crowd that is increasingly looking for efficiencies and ways to save money. They’re pushing themselves into extreme commoditisation, effectively creating the perfect environment to be replaced entirely by machines.

Brand

We have been preaching the importance of brand from the inception of the agency, but the need for a great brand and a deliberate brand narrative has never been as acute.

And as you work on your brand, look for the aspects that make you stand out, the elements that add that touch of authenticity that people out there are so desperately looking for.

Don’t hide behind broad strokes statements. Don’t try to be everything for everyone. That time has gone, people can build individual chatbots to do exactly what they want, they expect specialisation, and it will only become more important as time goes on.

People

As we forge ahead with including AI and automation in every aspect of our business, there’s one aspect that we should never neglect or automate parts of, and that’s the relationships that we have with the people around us. 

Your team is, and should remain, one of the aspects that deserves most of your real attention. The people who work with you should always feel as if they’re being treated with decency and authenticity. They are at the core of what makes you unique and, if you neglect them, they’ll quickly find that they can move on.

It might seem tempting to let them do so as you automate more and more, however you have to remember that your clients want to interact with humans, and even if machines can do so much, there’s always an element of bringing everything together that only humans can do (for now, I know).

While it might seem to be extra work to keep them motivated and excited about your brand, they’re the ones who will drive it forward because they can feel an affinity to it (and to you, hopefully) that can’t be felt by machines that are built to automate.

Handmade/humanmade

If we look at the industrial revolution we can quickly see that there will be a great percentage of tasks that will be automated, and this will happen at a much faster pace given the technologies we’re seeing on the market today.

But over the past decade, we’ve seen a resurgence of importance being placed on human-made products and services. This will become more acute as services become increasingly automated. Tasks that can be automated will invariably be automated, but that puts even more value on things that have been made, designed, written, or shot by humans.

Take a long hard look at the aspects of your business that benefit from being made by people, and concentrate on becoming better at them, and in the process becoming better-known for them.

And in the end…

Look at the aspects of your business (and life) that can be automated. Work hard on getting the advantages that AI will give you, but keep one thing in mind: focus on the stuff that you’re good at. Don’t let the AI revolution blind you. Remember what makes you you, what gives your business the edge, and focus on making that better, no matter whether it can be automated or not.

The post AI & The Big Reset appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

“AI is not just the most important technology of our lifetime, but probably the most important in any lifetime. It’s going to be a new world of technology that’s as exciting as all the other worlds put together.”

Marc Bienoff, Salesforce CEO

That’s not a statement you can take lightly, especially since it’s coming from someone who knows a thing or two about the future of business: Salesforce powers a significant number of the world’s leading businesses, and it has access to the cores of the businesses that use it, so Bienoff’s visibility is pretty unrivalled.

The problem with statements like these, coming from men like him, however, is that they can be seen as the kind of comment you read somewhere but can’t ever dream of implementing.

Big data comes to mind as a classic example. There was a time, around 5 years ago, when everyone was extolling the virtues of big data, but it was the kind of thing that you couldn’t really envisage using if you were a small to medium-sized business. There were very few applications for us mere mortals, and even if we could find ways to use big data, there was no hope for us ever affording an implementation.

The same can be said of many of the other big transformative technologies that have seen the light of day over the past decade or so. The marketing world did see an element of democratisation in the form of cheap and easy-to-build websites, social media and ecommerce, but even then, our access to the tools didn’t mean that we, as small business owners, could compete toe-to-toe with brands that can throw much more money and resources behind the problem.

But generative AI is different. It’s true that there are massive benefits for custom applications built by corporate giants, but you and I have access to some of the most powerful tools available, either for free or for a very modest fee.

It’s becoming easier and easier to transform your business using AI applications, and you don’t need a technical background or any knowledge of programming to reap the rewards, all you need is an open mind and a healthy dose of curiosity.

How can I use AI for my small business?

There are hundreds of applications you could look for, and by the time this article is published the specific tools I’m using at the moment might have changed or have been superseded, so I’ll talk in broad strokes, rather than in specific instructions. Nevertheless, if you find any of the following tasks interesting, I’m sure that you can find the tools to leverage the lessons you can glean from here.

Here are some of the roles that I’ve used AI for to improve my processes dramatically. These have all helped me in one of two ways – they’ve either allowed me to do my job better or to save copious amounts of time on tasks I already did. In some cases, “doing my job better” was quite dramatic. I’ve done things over the past few months that I thought I could only ever do if I could afford expensive consultants (or little luxuries that I can’t justify, like a PA).

I’ll keep this list very simple, listing tools and processes that anyone can benefit from, even if you’re a solopreneur. We can delve into other, more complex ways to integrate AI in businesses in future issues, however today I want to keep this at a level where anyone can take this article and implement all the processes with very little effort and little to no cost.

What is Generative AI?

Before proceeding any further, though, I have to assume that some readers haven’t heard of, or maybe have heard of but haven’t used, generative AI at all. In a nutshell, Generative AI tools are tools that can create content from prompts you give it. Text-based ones, like ChatGPT (the most popular text-based Generative AI), can work on your prompts and give you text-based results. The wonder of these tools is that you speak to them in human language, just like you’d chat on email or messenger. So, you could give it a simple task like “Please explain why the sea is blue” and it will give you the answer, in conversational format, in text.

Image-based generative AI tools do the same but can output images instead – so you can ask for a beach scene with palm trees on the side of the picture, and the tool will create that image for you from scratch.

You can change the prompts and you’ll get different results, so you could ask it to explain why the sea is blue as if it was talking to a five-year-old kid, and the explanation would be simplified dramatically. If you wanted a much more detailed answer you could ask it to explain as if it was explaining it in a scientific journal.

Note: I’ll list a number of tools at the bottom of the article, with some differences and benefits. Keep in mind that when I use a name of a specific tool I’m generally referring to any of its competitors, too (so you can usually use ChatGPT, Google Bard, Claude.ai, HuggingFace Chat or Bing Chat for the same tasks and get similar results).

Using AI as a Business Consultant

This might seem like a big ask, but it’s actually one of the most powerful uses that I’ve found of ChatGPT is to ask it to brainstorm business ideas. The tool itself can’t take decisions on your behalf, but if you ask it to debate the pros and cons of the idea as if it were a business consultant, you’ll get a good starting point. Take the content with a pinch of salt, naturally, but I’ve found that it’s given me great ideas, it’s highlighted points that I hadn’t considered and in some cases, it actually changed my mind about some subjects.

You can also give it specific problems and ask for solutions – “I have issues with client retention, what would you advise? Imagine you’re a business consultant when you answer the question.”

Using AI as a Content Planning Assistant

This is one of the first, and most obvious uses of text-based tools. Well, actually, people ask the tool to actually write out content from scratch for them, but I think I’m a bit too particular about my writing to trust a machine to write for me (yet).

But I find ChatGPT and its competitors to be excellent content planning tools. I ask it to tell me what a popular article would include if I was writing about a specific subject. I’ll also ask it for an article outline, for some in-depth explanations, for some anecdotes to help me understand and for some potential pitfalls to avoid when writing an article about a subject.

I’ve also asked it to write out drafts for me, and even though I never used any of them, they’ve been helpful in my understanding of what should come next.

ChatGPT is also a fantastic assistant for title ideas and as an assistant for repurposing content (you can copy and paste an article and ask it to suggest a few LinkedIn posts from it, for example.)

Using AI for QA & Feedback

Once you’re done writing whatever you’re writing, whether you did it manually or with the help of a machine, you can paste your final content into the tool and ask it to proofread it. It can help with basic stuff like finding grammatical mistakes, but the real power, I find, is in the more analytical feedback I get from the tools. Sometimes they spot inconsistencies in my writing or actual issues with the content itself – recently it told me that I was bouncing between concepts in one of my linkedIn posts, so ChatGPT helped me write a more focused post.

Using AI tools as a Business Analyst

This is a slightly more advanced use, because you need ChatGPT Plus (which costs €20+VAT / Month), but boy is it worth it. ChatGPT Plus gives you access to slightly more advanced tools – first off you get access to ChatGPT 4, which is a more advanced engine. You also get the possibility to use plugins with ChatGPT – and one of them is built by OpenAI themselves: Code Interpreter.

If you upload an excel sheet to the code interpreter it will take all the data and make sense of it. First it will ask you a few basic questions about the data to ensure that it’s understanding it correctly. Once it’s confident that it’s figured it out you can ask it questions about the data, looking for relationships between numbers that would take you hours, or years, of tinkering if you were to do this in spreadsheets.

And the beauty of it all is that, just like we mentioned earlier, you’re only communicating with it in human language, there’s no training needed. As long as you ask the right questions it will answer them, and even if you don’t have questions – it can suggest a few highlights about your data that you might have missed.

And yes, I know that this doesn’t replace using a proper business intelligence solution, but for some companies, a proper business intelligence solution seems like an investment too steep to justify.

Using AI as a Virtual Assistant

I love this. I love how you can be simultaneously lazy and more productive in one simple action. I’ve started recording all my calls (on Fathom). This gives me transcripts of the whole call and a simple summary of the call. I usually take the full transcript and upload it to Claude.ai (I find Claude much better than ChatGPT for this use-case). The conversation is analysed and Claude gives you a summary of all that was said, the main points, and who raised them, and any action points that were agreed to on the call.

This has been a game changer for me in more ways than one. Having access to recordings has always been an option, but I never found the energy (or time) to go through them all. This way I can see a 5 minute summary of an hour-long call.

It’s also been transformative (no pun intended) in that I can now be completely present in a call, I don’t have the distraction of note-taking. Now I just take notes when I think of connections or new approaches, so I still keep my notepad open during calls.

Using AI to learn Something New

One of the last use cases I’m listing is also one of the most powerful. I’ve found that ChatGPT is great at creating course outlines for you, and can usually expand enough about subjects to give you a solid base to start looking further.

Just ask it to develop a course for you, give it the number of days or hours that you have and then ask it to give you the skeleton of the course. You can even ask it to start developing lessons, but while it’s great for less technical answers, there’s a point at which you should be handed over to books or more advanced literature.

I’ve used it a few times, and I must admit that I was impressed both by the depth it went into and by how good it was at explaining a complicated subject in layman’s terms. This is really one of my favourite use cases, because it gives me the capability to get up to speed with the basics of a subject before heading into a call with a client.

And in the end…

“Generative AI’s impact on productivity could add trillions of dollars in value to the global economy—and the era is just beginning.”

McKinsey

It’s important to note that this is a tiny, tiny portion of workflows that I’m using myself with zero input from external assistance. I got to these stages without pulling in developers, without disrupting any other members of the team or creating any new processes.

We’re using AI in other areas, and AI is embedded in a few of the tools that we’re already using, but I wanted to keep this as simple as possible to make it easy to kick off the AI revolution inside your organisation.

Just go for it. 

Some of the tools that I find invaluable

Generative AI tools – Text

• ChatGPT
• Google Bard
• Bing Chat
• HuggingFace Chat
• Claude AI (via VPN)

Recording

• Fathom.ai
• Google Meet

Visual

• Dall-E
• MidJourney
• Google Bard
• ChatGPT Plus (with Code Interpreter enabled)

AI-powered Search

• Bing
• Perplexity.ai

The post Generative AI for Marketing in B2B appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

We’d like to build a small, but profitable, firm that partners up with great brands all over the world helping them grow sustainably.

And when we say sustainably, we mean it in the widest possible sense. We mean that we want to work with people who look around them and find opportunities to grow a steady and solid business. People who are in it for the long term, not for crashing and burning.

So when we look beyond the confines of the island that we were set up on, we don’t look because we feel that there’s more money to be made. We look outside our shores because we understand that we’re looking for a very niche client.

And if you want to find clients who match the profile you’re looking for, then you have to look all over the world to find them.

It’s working – over the past couple of years we’ve partnered up with brands from across 22 time zones – from Melbourne to Honolulu, we have been working with brands who see business our way.

Brands that are ready to grow sustainably, and ideally brands who are doing their best to somehow leave a positive impact on the world around them – whether locally or globally.

When we had this conversation with Abraham and Ephraim from Tactical Logistic, who we’ve been working with for a few years now, they suggested that a good place to meet other like-minded brands would be Prosper – a convention for Amazon Sellers in Las Vegas.

Las Vegas also happens to be relatively close to one of our other clients in the US, Tepia – who are based in Orange County. 

The trip made perfect sense – I got to meet two clients in person, I set up a number of meetings with other Vistage Members and I reconnected with an ex-colleague of ours at Switch – Elias, who’s now living in Las Vegas.

But this is not a holiday report.

The trip was one which taught me many lessons, and I’m doing my best to share them with you here.

Conventions / Conferences are a great place to meet people

It might sound bleedingly obvious, but if you want to get immersed in a world that you’re not yet part of, going to a convention (or conference) about the subject is a great way of accelerating your immersion.

By heading to a place that was teeming with people working in (and around) the Amazon ecosystem, I was given a crash course in the subject in ways that replaced months and months of reading, probably making connections I would never have made before.

A moustache helps you meet people

It might seem stupid, but it’s a lesson I’ll keep with me. I’m not talking specifically about a moustache (it might be a bit of a tough ask for some), however if you can wear something that stands out or carry something with you that can help you stand out from the crowd, then go for it.

In my case it was a lucky break. My suitcase got stuck on the way there, so I bought a different wax to what I usually use, and I had to go clean shaven since my trimmer was not there. Result: a curly moustache on a clean-shaven face. It stood out.

People would just randomly stop me in the hall to make a comment about it – but it was the perfect way to break the ice.

It’s not for everyone, I can understand that, but if you’re heading somewhere to make new connections you should consider having something that helps you stand out from the crowd (in a way that represents you well, naturally).

Everything can be done if you put your head to it

I’m not a big fan of the American Dream, but Prosper showed me the good side of that. The number of people who were there with small or even tiny businesses, building stuff around small niches, solving problems that most others would ignore.

If the ecosystem you’re working in is large enough, then you can definitely find enough people to pay you to do something in it.

This was one of the most fascinating aspects of Prosper in my opinion. There were people who specialised in so many different aspects of Amazon selling that I kept being in awe of how niche businesses can get.

There were people who specialised in Tax across borders for Amazon sellers, dozen of dashboards to help sellers figure out how they’re doing, people who built tools to help you upload quicker, people who take photos at scale, and the best one I saw was a guy who set up a layer of customer service to give you answers quicker than Amazon’s own customer service.

Cultural differences exist, but we’re all driven by the same basic needs

This was my first trip to the US in a few years. In that period the global political landscape changed dramatically, and divisions have been consistently highlighted by the media and on social media.

What I found out in the days I spent in the US, talking to Americans from all walks of life, is that we’re all just people trying to get by in life. Whether you’re a cow farmer from Montana who’s headed down to Arizona to find work in the winter, a Turkish immigrant who’s on the way to leading his company to unicorn status or the son of immigrants who’s running his own business in a completely different field – we’re all trying to get by.

We’re all trying to do the best we can, and to create a better life for ourselves and for the people around us.

And in doing so, our lives take us down different paths, and we have a set of expectations that are determined by the paths our lives have taken.

This sent me back to Malta with a much more open mind, ready to do even more business internationally, but also with an understanding that there’s more to learn each and every day.

And finally, if you’re wondering about Vegas’ effect on me. I failed. Las Vegas failed me.

I kept a dollar to gamble in one of the casinos but then I forgot. So I left the city without betting a single dollar.

I don’t make a good gambler. That much is certain.

The post Leaving Las Vegas appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.