We inherit the wisdom of those who came before us. It is then up to us to challenge this and add to it, with the intent of leaving something more valuable for the ones who will take on our wisdom.

This does not happen half as often as it should.

Take the word ‘brand’ itself. We have inherited this word from the farmer who thought that using a red-hot piece of metal to mark his cattle was a good way of keeping tabs on his property. It was a barbaric practice, but we just carry on using the word regardless.

It is also a slightly useless word. To some it means ‘logo’. To others it means ‘the very fundamentals upon which a company’s reputation is built’. Until we have a single definition that we can all abide by, it remains a little too broad for comfort.

Brand is not marketing

Today we will start with another myth about brand – that the responsibility for brand resides with the marketing department.

In the beginning, brand was lumped with marketing because it included a logo and a colour palette – traditionally the marketing people were weird enough to enjoy that stuff – and there it stuck. In time, the word ‘brand’ and the word ‘logo’ were used interchangeably.

However, brand is much more than a visual expression. 

Brand is behavioural. It is the sum total of the behaviours of every individual who works for the company (or product), if we want to get a little more specific. That, along with the product/service itself, make up the totality of the brand.

While this might sound like a very inclusive definition – it is. In reality, brand also resides in the hearts and minds of its audiences. It is what they say it is. And they perceive our brand as a result of their experiences with our product and the humans they interact with along the journey from demand to purchase to post-purchase.

Brand does have an aspect of it that is handled by marketing but it is a small part of what the term represents. We can trace all the elements that a brand is composed of and figure out which parts should reside with the marketing people.

It starts in the boardroom

Working from the inside out, brand makes its way to marketing this way:

• Every team member is motivated by the reason for the existence of the company – this is brand purpose. Brand purpose starts in the boardroom and trickles outwards from there.
• Every team member behaves in accordance with the brand’s core values or principles. This, too, must be lived by the board and executive branch of the company.
• Products and services are designed to fulfil the brand’s purpose.
• Products and services are aligned with the brand’s values.
• Communication is designed and produced in accordance with the brand’s values as well as its personality and tone of voice.
• Communication is finally given the brand identity treatment – its colours and logo and fonts and all other aspects of its expression are prepared in accordance with the brand guidelines

Using this journey from the boardroom to the billboard, we can see that it’s the last two steps in the journey that are the responsibility of the marketers.

If your boardroom does not get brand, there is a strong chance that your organisation is not growing at least at the pace of the market. In many cases, this is equivalent to a slow slide backwards.

The boardroom is also solely responsible for growth of brand equity. Trying to pawn this enormous burden onto the marketing department is tantamount to abdication.

I was chatting with a friend and the subject of running shoes came up. I suggested a brand and a model that I felt would be the best ‘fit’, as it were, for the purpose. She said she’d never purchase a shoe of that brand locally and that she either orders them online or buys the brand when she’s abroad. I was intrigued and asked for a detailed reason why. It turned out that the brand is represented by a chain of sports stores that ran a body shaming campaign about five years ago. The campaign, in her memory, said something like ‘your ass looks big in those shorts’.

This account shows us that clients view marketing as the final expression of the way a company thinks and behaves. The campaign tells us that the boardroom is fine with this kind of thinking.

Someone thought about this campaign, someone approved the production and the budget, someone saw it in the wild and was fine with it. The company simply wasn’t aligned with the values of its audience. And now, if it is to win a client back, it has to work at least twice as hard to change their mind.

Truth be told

Brand starts in the boardroom. It is an honest manifestation of the core beliefs of the organisation’s leadership. Whether the executive arm of the company is aware of it or not, they are responsible for the way every person at every touchpoint conveys the spirit of the organisation. It is indeed a great burden and the biggest brands in the world are the ones where this awareness drives every decision.

From the boardroom, the principles and the ethos work their way, steadily and deliberately, to marketing. The reverse direction is a recipe for eventual dilution of brand equity, and this is a best-case scenario. At worst, it can spell disaster for a brand – and when it does spell disaster, reparations will, once again, start in the boardroom and then make their way to marketing.

We should indeed update the wisdom we’ve inherited. The sooner we shift the responsibility of brand from anywhere in the company onto the boardroom table, the sooner that organisation can see a steady and sustainable growth in brand equity.

And we know that brand equity counts. While it falls under the appalling misnomer of ‘intangibles’ in accounting terms, it accounts for the largest proportion of value of the most powerful companies on earth.

The post Brand is Not Marketing appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

When you start any business, you need an audience to speak to, and that audience is determined partially by your product and partially by who you, as a business, decide to address. Understanding that audience is fundamental when it comes to getting your business off the ground. It’s also essential to maintaining a steady state of growth that will keep pushing your business forward. 

We have access to heaps of tools that allow us to know a lot about the kind of audiences that suit our business.

However, collecting that data isn’t always as easy. Ongoing data privacy laws have critically reduced the utility of third-party data, which means that brands have to look elsewhere to obtain valuable information about their customers. 

And, increasingly, the data that does exist online is data that customers don’t want to share with you. Over 66% of consumers believe tech companies have too much information on them – and might be more reluctant to share information that matters.

There is a way around that. 

Here’s how first party data works. 

What is first-party data?

First party data is data you collect yourself, through newsletters, a form on your website, a subscription service, a sign-up page, etc. It’s data that the consumer is willing to give you in exchange for a service, such as access to more content. 

What are the benefits of first party data?

First party data is owned by you and it’s directly taken from your audience. This means it offers far more significant insights into your audience. Which also means it’s easier to understand what you can offer your consumers. With first party data, you can personalise your customer experience and optimise your campaigns for higher efficacy. First party data that you collect yourself also might fill in the data gaps that could be hard to get in the form of third-party data. 

Is first party data important for SMBs?

First party data is crucial for SMBs. 

With first party data, SMBs have data that is invaluable to their business, because it comes from the audiences that matter the most to them – an audience that is ready to purchase or otherwise use their services. 

But say they’re not ready to purchase yet. Say they’re interested in your content or in your business, but they’re still weighing their options.

SMBs that use first-party data can tailor their content to appeal to their audience regardless at what stage of the buyer’s journey they’re at. They can personalise their content to create a marketing campaign that feels organic, approachable, and more likely to result in conversions. For businesses that are still on the lower end of their growth, this is an invaluable opportunity to create a communication strategy that benefits your business from the outset. 

This is important for a couple of different reasons. 

SMBs need every advantage that they can get as quickly as possible, especially if they’re competing against much bigger businesses with much more to offer consumers than they do or that simply leverage significantly larger resources. Creating a communication strategy that connects with audiences quickly is one level where SMBs can compete, regardless of their size. 

Secondly, first party data can help SMBs cater to their current consumers, and make sure that their satisfaction doesn’t waver. First party data can help you retarget or address the current concerns for your consumers and find new touchpoints you can work on. 

Do I need first party data as an SMB?

It’s very difficult to get by without any kind of data, whether it’s third party or first party – and the more intricate data privacy laws become, the harder it is to find usable third-party data that will speak to your specific case. 

Data in general is necessary if you want to navigate the internet as it is – the way the online sphere is growing, and changing, means that finding the right consumers to talk to at the right time has become harder, even as it’s given companies a bigger audience to speak to.  

If you’re struggling to understand how first party data works for you, drop us a line – we’ll be happy to talk about first party data for your business.  

The post The importance of first-party data for SMBs appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

In an increasingly divisive world, where massive global issues are affecting consumers’ livelihoods, the last bastion of trust lies with businesses. Over 62% of global citizens consider businesses as the most worthy of trust – but this doesn’t mean that they’re going to trust your brand, especially if you haven’t put in the effort to generate that credibility. 

Building credibility and trust as a business should be one of your first priorities. This is especially true for tech businesses, an industry in which bad news travels uncannily fast. Tech has the problem of a sector which is both plagued by bad operators and also can be impenetrable to the outsider. One negative experience can quickly affect the way people think about all tech companies across the board, no matter if you have something to do with that aspect of the industry or not. Just think of what happened when the Cambridge Analytica scandal came to light, and you’ll understand how important generating trust for tech should be. 

However, there’s a caveat. 

Trust is not a value you can hard-code into your brand. Trust is earned. Trust takes time to build. Trust can be easily lost. Simply saying that your brand is trustworthy won’t make people trust you. 

It takes proof. 

Why do I care if my clients trust me or not if they still provide me with business?

If your clients provide you with business for now, it’s not necessarily a guarantee that they’ll stay with you. Businesses of any size are not infallible, and while it’s hopeful that your business won’t go through a scandal, the truth is this: businesses go through scandals. Something, no matter how big or small it is in the great scheme of things, will come to light that will affect the way that your consumers look at you, and that means that you need to prepare for the eventuality that you will lose business as a result of this. 

Trust mitigates a lot of the risk of losing business. 

Having clients that trust your business means having clients that understand that, sometimes, bad things just happen, and that you can take steps to rectify it and make sure this will not happen again. Clients who trust you will keep coming back to you, even if it’s a service you’re not strictly advertising. Clients who trust you will recommend your business to their friends. 

Consider the Net Promoter Score. 

The Net Promoter Score is a metric that measures customer loyalty. A high NPS is worth its weight in gold, and outweighs any money you spend on marketing – and earning trust will go a long way towards building high NPS. Having a high NPS also has other benefits: it’s not only cost-effective, it’s a growth strategy that pays indefinitely – provided you maintain that same level of trust for your consumers. 

Clients who trust you won’t look at the one negative review out of thousands and turn away from purchasing your products and services. Clients who trust you have the personal experience that they need to make that decision without relying on external factors or additional reviews. 

How do I build that trust and credibility?

It takes time to build up your company as one to trust, but it’s worth the effort and the time you take into making your company a trustworthy company. 

Bear in mind that trust is built, not bought. Trust is a result of your actions and the way you treat your consumers. Trust is what you value. If you understand that as a first point, the rest will become far easier to implement. 

Maintain consistent results.

This is true for every business, and it’s true for every tip on this list: you need to maintain the same results as when you started, or improve on them. This makes you reliable, which makes you more trustworthy, which makes clients more likely to sign on. 

Explain the way you work.

Tech is a business that has a tendency to be difficult to understand, and making sure your client understands and taking the extra time to really drive that understanding home will make a big difference in whether or not your client will come back for repeat services. 

Put testimonials on your site.

Tech is expensive to invest in, particularly for small businesses, and so having proof of the positive experiences your clients have is important. More importantly, reviews from other consumers matter – and it’s far more likely for your customers to go looking for other peoples’ opinions before they take the plunge and make a purchase from your business. 

Rectify mistakes immediately.

Listen, it happens: sometimes you plan for an outcome and the unintended happens. Tech has an undeserved reputation for being purposefully difficult to fix, so be the outlier and make sure any mistakes made, regardless of whose fault it is, are fixed immediately. 

Use your platform to showcase your thinking.

Clients might not fully understand what you’re talking about, but thought leadership is important: not only does it show that you’re up to date, but it also shows that you have opinions on what’s happening – you’re a thought leader. This is crucial in tech’s fast-changing environment, particularly if you know your clients will immediately want to try whatever new technology is coming to the market.

Have a professional, easy-to-navigate way to contact you.

Whether this is a business, an app, or a LinkedIn profile, you should have a place online where any potential client can see what you do, how you do it, and the way you do things differently. This will let the client get to know you before they’ve even formulated what they want out of your business, and might make it easier for them to take the final plunge into contacting you. 

Treat every client like a new client.

It happens to the best of us: once you get comfortable with a client, things can get a little more relaxed, which isn’t a bad thing – however, maintaining that professionalism in the face of friendliness is even more critical when you’re familiar and friendly with your client, as it limits the risk that things get pushed back unnecessarily. 

Building trust isn’t a race: it’s a process, a long one, that takes time and effort to get right – but the rewards are more than worth the initial work you put into it. 

The post Why Trust Matters: Insights for Tech Business Owners 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.

If you haven’t opened Twitter for a couple of days, we invite you to do so now: just log onto the webpage, and look in the upper left corner. If you’re seeing the new logo for the first time, sit with it for a moment. 

This is the new phase of Twitter, one that’s moving forward without its eponymous blue bird. 

For twelve years, Twitter has been the place where people went to talk. Then Jack Dorsey left, Elon Musk took over, and the new vision for Twitter has been in play since then. A little over one year into his tenure as Twitter CEO, the first of some massive, divisive changes have rolled out – and it started before the blue bird’s departure. 

Here’s what it means for your business, and what we’re looking at for the future. 

Twitter: A Timeline

Let’s go back to the beginning. 

2006: Twitter launches and CEO Jack Dorsey sends the first tweet. 

2007: The South by Southwest conference sees a ballooning of Tweets from 20,000 per day to 60,000 per day, starting a period of cascading growth. 

2008: Hashtags are officially supported. 

2010: Twitter launches ‘promoted tweets’, kicking off its potential as an advertising platform, though it never quite catches on. 

2011: Twitter overhauls its design. 

2012: Twitter purchases Vine, a shortform video platform, bumping its rating up to 17+ in Apple’s app store. 

2013: Twitter launches Twitter Music, an app for the iPhone. 

2014: Twitter announces the release of new anti-harassment tools to combat one of its main growing issues – rampant abuse on the platform.

2015: Twitter showcases its new marketing platform partners, opening up the opportunity for marketers to target ads to specific audiences. Tweets are now seen in Google’s search results. 

2016: Vine discontinued and the Twitter Dashboard, its business app, is shut down. 

2017: Twitter launches the Explore tab, combining their trends, live video streams, search, and Moments, a way for people to get an overview of important tweets or threads. 

2018: Jack Dorsey testifies before the Senate about election meddling for the 2016 elections alongside current Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. 

2019: Twitter reveals that it has suspended 4,800 accounts linked to the Iran government. 

2022: Elon Musk takes over Twitter. 

That brings us to 2023. Here’s an overview of all the platform’s changes from the beginning of the year to now. 

January: 

• Third-party API access is revoked. This means apps and websites that relied on third-party APIs to share content to and from Twitter, such as WordPress, no longer function. (For WordPress, this was later fixed, but other third-party APIs are still inoperable). 

February: 

• Twitter aims to change its ad targeting to function like Google’s search ads. 
• Further layoffs were executed, continuing the trend from November 2022. 
• The Twitter algorithm is changed to boost Elon Musk’s personal tweets by a factor of 1000. 

March: 

• The Twitter press team stops responding to enquiries. Elon Musk announces that all press communications will be auto-responded with ?.
• Twitter releases its algorithm to the public on Github. 

April: 

• New labels are launched for state-affiliated media, which are applied to broadcasting companies such as NPR, BBC, and PBS – notably not state-affiliated. 
• Verification is now a paid service under Twitter Blue. 
• Cessation of the policy to label state-affiliated media, including for Chinese and Russian state media. 

June:

• Measures were implemented to limit the amount of tweets that could be seen per day. 

July: 

• Twitter is rebranded and renamed ‘X’.  

Is the Twitter rebrand that bad?

It’s too early to tell if it’ll be bad or good for Twitter. 

What we can say is this: 

In 2013, the Oxford English Dictionary expanded its definition of ‘tweet’ – a word in use since the 1800s – to specifically refer to posting on Twitter. When a brand has become so entrenched in daily life that it becomes part of daily conversation to the point where it introduces a new word into the lexicon, it’s powerful. Only a few brands have managed it successfully – we Google things, we retweet someone’s opinion, we check out someone’s Insta. 

We can also say this: Twitter’s recognisability as a brand is a poisoned chalice. Yes, it has the reputation of being the public town square – a place where you go to learn. A lot of historical events played out on Twitter, and people around the world had a front row seat to them via updates from verified sources. 

Think of the Ukrainian war. Think of the Black Lives Matters protests. Think of the January 6th riots on the Capitol. 

But here’s the other side of it: Twitter also has a notable reputation for being a place where content moderation is fast and loose, and harassment is particularly bad and something they’ve been struggling to control since 2015, to limited efficacy.

Rebranding to X will not necessarily remove that negative reputation – but if you’re playing the long game, it’s possible it could help. 

Now that the Twitter brand is dead, is it the end of the platform for good?

It’s possible, but it’s also unlikely. 

Social media platforms that have grown and grown to Twitter’s size and userbase have a unique selling point that other social media platforms just don’t have. The reason they’ve managed to grow so much is because of that unique selling point – and it’s what Twitter still has going for it, even with the rebrand, even with all the API changes, even with the declining interest by advertisers. 

Twitter is losing money. Twitter has always been losing money. It’s never managed to achieve the same advertising revenue as Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, or Youtube – but it’s far from being the only social media platform that haemorrhages money. Tumblr and Reddit, two of the most popular platforms, also lose significant cash.  

Elon Musk’s divisive practices have hastened the dropping user numbers, but Twitter is still functioning, Twitter still has people using it as their primary platform, and Twitter is unlikely to go away overnight. 

And that unique selling point is why: no other site does microblogging quite as well. The new ones that have cropped up – Mastodon, Bluesky, Misskey – are still too new to see whether or not they’ll be any good. 

Twitter was a very good platform for artists to advertise their products. It was a platform where journalists crowdsourced information that would otherwise be difficult to obtain. We watched elections play out on Twitter, coordinated information from countries where obtaining information was difficult. 

Twitter’s reputation was never great, but it was never any worse than other social media platforms. 

And what it had in spades was brand equity. 

With the rebrand, that recognition is gone. 

But the general consensus on the platform itself is this: whatever it’s going to be called, it’s still Twitter in their minds. 

Facebook went through something similar – although officially it’s now called Meta, people still use Facebook to refer to the company at large, and the scandals that plagued Facebook to begin with followed them through. If it is an attempt to wipe the slate clean of Twitter’s previous issues and start anew, it’s not a gambit that works well when the issues are big enough. 

What about the idea of an everything app?

Allegedly, part of the rebrand is because Twitter wants to move into becoming the Western equivalent of an everything app – similar to WeChat, in China. 

The theory is sound. Several apps do more than one thing: Tiktok, for example, allows you to show their products within the app. 

Where it might falter is in practice. 

Forget the difficulties of creating a secure payment service that will work with X. Forget the server impacts of turning Twitter into an app where you can do everything – hosting images, videos, longform content, mini apps. 

Regulators don’t want Western tech companies to know so much of your information. European privacy laws alone would slice Twitter’s everything app to ribbons. WeChat in China is a case study that might not be possible to repeat outside of China, and it’s all because of the legal ramifications of data privacy and breaking up tech monopolies. 

Beyond that, Twitter’s reputation comes back into play for this – consumers just don’t trust the app itself in its current state. To launch an everything app that can do, well, everything, there needs to be a baseline belief in the app to perform those functions well, and for Twitter, that doesn’t seem to exist. 

Twitter was the place where academics could talk about their research, journalists could speak freely, and internet users could go somewhere that wasn’t bloated down with ads and sponsors the way Meta apps were.

It has also been the place you go to to vent about small things, things that were on your mind but didn’t merit the effort of a Facebook post, things that you could complain about in peace to the global public.

That opinion hasn’t shifted, even under the Musk leadership. 

What else could happen with the rebrand?

Here’s the thing: it’s so early to tell what could happen with the rebrand that opinions vary greatly.

Let’s see what the team has to say: 

Ed

It is too early. One thing we have learned in the world of tech is to never say never. Of course, the regulatory hurdles in the way of achieving the new vision for X are significant, driven by a slumbering bureaucratic giant that the EU keeps ballooning into. Do I agree with wiping out billions in brand equity by killing the Twitter name? I find that a hard one to swallow in these early days. Will the brand X ever rebuild that equity? It really depends on how users take to the platform if they steadily increase the time spent in-app. That’s up to the unpredictable misfiring of Musk’s brain and the team he appoints to steward the brand and the product as it boldly goes where other apps have gone before. And knowing who is behind it, the outcome will either be a catastrophic failure we’d enjoy watching from a distance or a success we couldn’t possibly have predicted. As always, it’s up to us to keep an open mind and a watchful eye. This way we retain the agility to make the best of either situation.

Lisa

This really doesn’t affect me, I’ve never really paid attention to Twitter. But, looking at both logos side by side, the new one looks much less welcoming. I’m wondering if that’s a reflection of a new policy. As a completely unbiased outsider I’m interested to see how this is going to pan out, changing the brand at this stage after you’ve built so much equity could go either way, and it’s probably going to be wildly entertaining whichever way it goes.

Kim

I think we need diversity online as much as we need it in the real world. With Elon Musk taking over so many organisations that we use frequently and practically live on, I feel like that has the effect of flattening out the overall feel of these brands and our online experience. I think Twitter as a brand, with its cute blue bird, represented something that still had some form of diversity in it. With the ‘X’ rebrand and its echoing of so many other tech-obsessed brand imagery and ethos, I feel like it’s taken what Twitter might stand for for a lot of people, and chucked it out the window. With any kind of monopoly, we run the risk of homogenising the type of messaging and voices we’re exposed to, and instead of providing a platform for diversity it becomes one where only those opinions that fit within the brand’s idea will be favoured. Think of Disney and its hold on the media we consume; it has shaped a lot of our thinking in a way that’s probably more vanilla, conservative, and binary than it is (or should be) in real life.

Luke

This is definitely not how I pictured the Twitter brand meeting its downfall. Even though it had its struggles, it was an incredibly valuable resource and entertainment hub, especially with the improvements that were being made in recent years to the way misinformation was being handled. It formed part of a very select group of brands that had their name turned into a verb – I Xeroxed, Googled, Hoovered, Tweeted. I see this as the definitive end of this social media platform as we know it, and X is going to be a different beast altogether. But the beauty of the internet is that the real-estate is endless. The communities that inhabit it remain basically the same, and will flock from place to place like a cat fitting into different cardboard boxes. The question for businesses is, where will they flock to next if they don’t like the further inevitable changes that Musk is going to implement in the coming years?

Cam

Underneath the rebrand is a new direction for the social platform. Twitter has been a great resource for people needing to share info in situations where sharing information is throttled (like in the 2023 Turkish elections) – I’m afraid that the direction Musk is taking the platform in is diametrically opposite to this freedom of speech. 

Ernesta

The recent rebrand feels very hasty to me for a few reasons. One, it literally happened overnight without much warning. Nothing wrong with that, if it’s done well, though. Secondly, it doesn’t seem that the whole platform and processes were ready for it – the rollout of the brand seems to be lagging across platforms and devices. Three, the new logo. Using a single character from an existing font on a flat black background feels totally rushed, low-budget and quite disappointing, considering how much time, thought and effort it takes to develop a strong visual brand identity. And I have to agree with Lisa, it does not feel inviting at all. It gives that ‘taken over by the dark side’ vibe.

Andrea

I’ve followed very little at this point, and I can’t say i used twitter regularly. But, I think, we’re still looking at a logo and have not seen the overall impact of the changes that are coming to the platform. Personally, I think the biggest shock is coming from the shift from an approachable blue bird to a very ‘masculine’ X plastered on black. Can such a large platform make many drastic changes at one go? Probably not – so I think, or hope, that we are not seeing the full picture yet. For the sake of my homescreen, I hope that there’s more work to be done on the X though. 

Sam

I have never really been a Twitter user, so I don’t feel too strongly about this. I did notice that the new logo looks a lot more bland, cold, and doesn’t stand out compared to the old logo. The old logo was very distinguishable and easy to tell that it belonged to Twitter. If someone saw the new logo without knowing about the change, I don’t think they would know what brand it belongs to. I do think that rebranding is giving them a presence in the press and gets people’s attention because it will be talked about. Even though it might not be positive awareness, it is awareness, nonetheless. However, once the talk about this shift blows over, their equity might continue to decline, especially with the recent introduction of Threads. Ultimately, I think it might be too soon to forecast the direction of Twitter’s future. 

Thomas

I find it hard to believe Musk’s goal of making X the WeChat of the West will come to fruition. WeChat is notoriously used as a tool for spying on the Chinese by the government, something that will encounter a lot of resistance on our side of the world, especially with the EU’s stringent personal protection laws. Besides that, the conglomeration of all aspects of services offered by WeChat could never fly in the West with competition and anti-market-dominance laws.

Ranson

Look, Twitter has always been kind of THE place for a bit of craziness (Degeneracy is a strong word, although I wanted to use it), however, it has always been the place for news, whistleblowers, leakers and entertainment. I used to use it to get information about things before Youtube, Instagram and the news could report about it. I figure that that specific use will still not stop. 

Like Ed said, the change is ultimately unpredictable. The same person who made this decision made Paypal and Tesla into the giants they are today. So it could kind of make sense to wipe Twitter as a whole. But as Luke said, it became a verb, it’s a very exclusive and strong brand equity that’s hard to compete with. To say that they’re venturing into the deep is an understatement. My opinion is that the whole decision will be beneficial for reputation, however, it will bear fruit in the far future, which may be too late because of Tiktok and their increasing influence.

What does this mean for businesses?

At this not much. Could Twitter become the next hot thing in business advertising? Eh. Its purpose as an everything app sort of precludes the idea that you can use it for advertising, and while it’s trying to package something of LinkedIn in its new direction, Twitter is probably going to remain fundamentally Twitter. 

That doesn’t mean it’s bad for business. It just means you might need a different way of approaching how you use Twitter – and that’s fine. 

Twitter’s not going anywhere yet. We think it’s not going to go anywhere for a long time, rebrand notwithstanding. After that – who knows? The story’s changing quickly. 

But we’ll be keeping up with it. This kind of shift doesn’t happen often – and if Twitter really does succeed in changing to an everything app, it could definitely open up avenues for a new kind of marketing. 

For now, it’s time to watch and wait. 

The post RIP, Twitter, or the future of X appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

New tools have come and gone and the way we think of design has, while zigging and zagging, remained consistent over millennia. From the first tools and temples to the cities designed by the Greeks and the Romans and the Mayans, we have endeavoured to keep a healthy balance between form and function to solve the problems that surround us.

The printing press did not change the way we think about reading but it did give reading to the masses. A single new ‘design’ gave way to widespread literacy, changing the world and arguably leading directly to the internet.

But the longer answer relates to how we engage with design. It deals with the way the new tools are heading our way and how these could result in a significant shift in the way we perceive our roles in the design process.

Design thinking is expanding in scope

Design is a term with an immense scope. From drug design to graphic design, from residential interiors to Mars rovers, and from movie sets to fashion design, designers the world over apply their knowledge and the principles of good design to coming up with the stuff that shapes our world. All of these areas of practice are already making use of AI assistance. We have been successful in training machines to take on the problems that are too big for us to solve and to leverage huge computational power into solving the issue for us.

This is not new thinking. When we ran out of the limitations of our arms and legs, we designed and built the machines that carved out the industrial revolution. We could build taller structures, make more stuff and do so quickly, travel faster and farther, and in general unshackle ourselves from the physical limitations of our species.

Now, with AI taking a shape that more of us can use and understand, we are taking the next logical step and reaching beyond the limitations of our minds.

AI has been around for a while

AI is not new and it has been in use for a relatively long time in tech terms. If you use banking, social media, air travel, even the power grids in more advanced countries, you have been making use of neural networks with machine learning ability. The most efficient and hard-working systems that silently make our lives easier and more convenient are running some form of artificial intelligence but we are not able to look under the hood and notice.

What’s changed is that we can now ‘talk to’ an AI and get it to do our bidding. You’ve probably heard of DALL-E – the first image generator that we could speak to using plain English and that would generate images in a matter of seconds. A few months later it was the time for ChatGPT to make waves.

AI tools are more accessible than ever

But there are many, many more examples of AI-powered tools that are available to us, most of which have the ability to perform a single function very well. The easiest to get to grips with are the tools that exist as a subset of tools we use every day.

Take all the new neural filters that are inside Photoshop, or the integration of ChatGPT within Notion and Bing, the way photography stock libraries are giving access to generative image AI services, and other examples of the ready availability of AI that’s already making our lives easier.

There are also the useful tools that are making our workflow quicker and easier, the apps that take the repetitive or the boring and just make it happen while we’re doing other things. Designs.ai, Adobe Sensei, UIzard, Sketch2code, and all the apps out there that put a machine learning system at your disposal to automate the drudgery are there to give our minds better things to do. One could argue that these tools should and will become more pervasive as we apply our minds to really creative work.

Shifting behaviours

From a design perspective, there are more creative tools out there that are changing the way we work and, sometimes, the process with which we reach creative choices. Take using Midjourney or ChatGPT as a sparring partner, as a tool with which you can share ideas and dump the contents of an absurd idea onto to see what comes out. This is a behavioural shift. We previously ‘edited’ these ideas and then shared them with our peers. We pitched writing prompts, shared early sketch work, showed prototype models, sent over advanced drafts of a research paper… usually when it got to a point where we were seeking affirmation of our thinking more than anything.

Of course, doing so with an open mind, and selecting the people who we consider like-minded, made the process an integral part of the creative journey. Most design adds onto the work of our peers or of those who came before us.

Machines don’t judge, don’t get tired…

In the case of using AI as a member of the creative team, there is no need for affirmation, there is no fear of exhaustion or rejection or judgement – one can simply dump their intentions on whatever tool is available and see what comes out at the other end. Many times, it’s rubbish. Sometimes it’s predictable. But there are those times when the AI misfires in a way that is genuinely inspiring and this is where the magic can happen. At its least useful, it shortens the delay between thought and execution. And when we see it at its best it is a beautiful synergy between human and machine that creates what we’re already calling art.

This has been seen across the world of design. The impossible architecture, fashion, urban contexts, graphic art, and photography that is being created by the sudden rise of the AI artist is already an inspiration. It sows fear in those afraid of change but, to those with a grasp of the way the world works, it is a source of inspiration and imagination.

Work with the tools, not against them

The best work out there is being created by those who have taken to the tools like a fish takes to the sea and they have learned how to wrangle these unpredictable, often infuriating tools into submission, coaxing beauty out of the right combination of seed images and text prompts.

Once again, this is not new. Given the same paintbrush used to paint the Mona Lisa, I will still create a terrible stick figure. The best design has never been about the tools. It has always been about the brains that put the tool to task.

This time around, it’s a more complex and almost literally a more cerebral set of tools we’re dealing with so the knee-jerk reactions will be stronger. But it doesn’t change the way we think about design. It changes the way we integrate with the tools. And the sooner we realise that it’s up to us to make our silicon-based progeny help us create our best work, the sooner we will get to sharing it with the world.

The post 2023 is the year of AI. Could it change the way we think of design? appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

OpenAI, the latest tech darling, might fully remove operations in Europe following the ratification of the EU AI law. Meta has just been fined €1.2BN – the largest ever – for violating GDPR. New acts such as the Digital Market Act, which regulates the activity of search engines and social media platforms, are opening up new avenues for big tech corporations in the United States to stumble over – and we’re still in the first few months of 2023. 

If it feels like a lot of things have changed about the idea of Europe: it has. 

When the European Union was founded way back in 1993, the internet was just fifty separate web pages and about ten years old. Flash forward thirty years later, and we have roughly 1.13 billion active websites, only 18% of which are active. We have countless social media platforms with users tuning in every day to communicate with others. The technology we are used to now has become more complex, more capable, and more nuanced.

But in the forward march towards profit and innovation, other things such as privacy were slowly eroded by companies looking to squeeze the last little bit of important information out of their product.

As a result, the world wide web now has a significant additional function: as a money-making entity that is intrinsically designed as the infrastructure for a global market. While it still works as an information highway, as a connecting point, as a bridge between countries, the internet remains a marketplace where the cost of participation turns out to be a little bit of user privacy. A price that seems to have been accepted by the market as it crept up on us – slowly at first and then accelerating as the world became more connected. 

However, the European Union has put forward laws that actively prevent this from happening, and as a result, the very landscape of Europe and tech is changing. 

Here’s how the future of Europe might work: 

A shift away from Silicon Valley

In the beginning, there was Silicon Valley. 

With fantastically easy access to Stanford University graduates, computer firms, semiconductor companies, and a heap of industrial and residential spaces going cheap, Silicon Valley grew as the unfettered hub of technological innovation from about the early 70s onwards. The internet started out there, as ARPANET; the idea of venture capital took place on Sand Hill Road. 

Tech, and Silicon Valley, are intrinsically tied together, and will be. 

But the European Union’s stringent data regulation laws have been one of the claws that’s hooked Silicon Valley from growing further. The global recession, collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, and the widening gap between what organisations want to do and the pushback from a user-base progressively more concerned with their own privacy are other matters that are concerning for Silicon Valley’s continued growth. 

However, it doesn’t change the fact that EU regulations and Silicon Valley practices no longer mesh. 

What this means is: tech companies will still exist, but their base might shift to Europe. 

We’ve already seen a lot of this over the years. Revolut, one of the biggest financial service companies with over 330 million transactions a month, is based in the United Kingdom. Bolt, a rideshare service competing with the likes of Uber, is in Estonia, Tallinn. Vinted is a Lithuanian startup with a 40% share of the European second-hand market. Hello Fresh, a German recipe box startup, eclipsed U.S.-founded Blue Apron within three years of it entering the United States. 

There’s more. 

Think of Mastodon, Germany, which hasn’t caught on yet, but which is poised to become a serious contender to the social media platforms that we have available – particularly with the troubles that Twitter is facing. Think of Evernote, a Silicon Valley staple that is now being run by Italian company Bending Spoons. Proton, an encrypted mail service with servers in Switzerland, can become a Google competitor if the current EU direction is anything to go by. 

European companies are eminently attractive for several reasons, but primarily: they adhere to laws that are actively looking out for the consumer. 

For over a decade, we’ve heard about the way tech giants are fine with sacrificing customer privacy in exchange for revenue. To have laws in place that protect against this ties into a growing trend for even more protective measures, with ⅔ of global consumers believing that tech companies hold too much control over their personal data. 

Does this mean that Silicon Valley will no longer be relevant?

Absolutely not. Silicon Valley has a history of ups and downs: if anything, this is only a blip in its current iteration. 

What needs to be highly identified is that the world we live in is constantly shrinking. Any tech that is created will invariably go global: the nature of the internet as we know it is that if any one place has developed something that looks interesting, other countries will pick up and plan out their own version of the same. 

Silicon Valley will always be a technology hub, and will still put out innovative creations – but it will no longer be performing this in isolation. Several cities in Europe already have the infrastructure to become smaller Silicon Valleys, and with the tech world becoming smaller – partially due to layoffs, partially due to laws, and partially due to the recession – there will likely be less of a divide between tech made in the United States and tech created in Europe. 

What we can see as a potential hurdle is that tech created in Europe will be held to a different standard to tech created in the United States, and this will be a potential area where communication between agencies becomes vital. 

What about companies who own multiple products?

Famously, the EU isn’t a fan of monopolies – and mergers which give an already-sizeable tech company an unfair advantage over its competitors have already attracted negative attention in Europe. Any company favouring its own product without the opportunity for competition will run the gamut of European law, which puts pressure on tech companies to choose their acquisitions wisely.

In theory, this approach is supposed to create a much fairer environment overall, and it’s something that’s currently lacking. It should also limit the control that companies hold over consumers, allowing them to pick and choose the elements that they wish to support without being tied into an expensive and unnecessary ecosystem that locks them out of other things. 

For example, take Apple. Apple is notorious for keeping users embedded within the iOS ecosystem, however new laws in Europe could mean that users who want to use third-party apps outside of their app store now have the opportunity to do so. 

In short, it is working towards a tech environment that looks out for the consumer. 

How will this affect the world in the long run?

If we’re looking at several European technology hubs coming into their own in the next few years, then a few things are certain for sure. 

The dissemination of data is going to be a considerable challenge for several industries: we’re already operating with a fragmented data landscape, and further fragmentation is on the way. For those companies relying on third party data, this will be the final straw that pushes them into collecting first party data for their own use. 

Stricter control over what these corporations can do to their consumers is another key aspect to keep in mind. At the moment, tech companies in the United States are still running on the borrowed currency of being the first on the scene, but that goodwill is rapidly running out, and we’re likely to see a complete change of attitude by the end of the decade. The reason that these corporations have been able to do so much for so long is the unprecedented amount of data that they were working with seemingly ballooned overnight, and laws took years to catch up, by which point the damage had already been done. The EU is imposing fines on US tech companies in an attempt to curb what it considers anti-consumer behaviour. If these fines grow in scale, or if the EU resorts to more drastic measures, this will accelerate the rate at which tech moves away from the US.

What does this mean for Europe?

It means growth. It means a greater connection between European countries who – equivocally – have a lot less to work with than the United States. It means more data, but more nuanced data that caters to specific countries. It means that the idea of a global village might change from the way we’ve been thinking of it. It means that marketers will have to learn to cater their approaches to specific companies. 

It means opportunity for greater collaboration. 

What it doesn’t mean is that corporations in the United States will be wholesale chased out of Europe, but they might set up hubs in the European Union to try and adhere to the same laws that govern the continent. This is prosperity for those countries, and a chance to work far more closely with each other. 

What does this mean for businesses?

Businesses have to adapt to a new environment – but this is nothing new. Businesses have been adapting to new environments ever since the very first notion of a ‘business’. 

There is a choice to be made here that will determine the way businesses could function, and there’s one of two paths available. 

For businesses who want to widen their scope and create a cross-border organisation, the name of the game is going to be collaborations. Unless they’re a massive corporation which can afford setting up two distinctive operations, one in the United States and one in Europe, it’s likely that collaborations will be the way forward for organisations looking to cater to both audiences across the water. 

If those organisations prefer to focus, then the choice is clear: focusing on US services, and therefore using US organisations, or focusing on Europe. 

Is it likely that big corporations such as Google and Meta will pull out of Europe?

No. 

Google and Meta are global corporations: fines notwithstanding, they get a significant amount of business in Europe – more than enough to make setting up European hubs a far more attractive prospect than it is to just fully draw away from Europe.

As a result, if you’re using several of Google’s services, those might not really experience any interruption. 

That said, that only covers technology that has been in Europe for decades. New technologies – such as Google’s BARD, which isn’t available in Europe, but is available in over 180 countries outside of the EU – might just never come to Europe from those tech giants to start with. Google hasn’t said why, but the speculation is that it could be a power move to try forcing the EU’s hand on legislation.

On the one hand, this could potentially put millions of EU-based businesses at a disadvantage if they don’t have access to the same tools as the rest of the world. On the other hand, it could be a blessing in disguise.  

In theory, it should lead to a much better playing field to work with. European-led Google derivatives are at the right position to start cultivating their audiences from now. This will have them at the ready for the period of unrest that will come once Europe strengthens its resolve against the way the United States deals with privacy and consumer rights. 

Upheaval is coming. Setting up European hubs for American businesses is a process that will take time, and will bring its own set of logistical problems. Although Google has superior market share at the moment, if new laws affecting the use of that data are put into place, smaller companies may be priced out of using Google to start with – and will look for alternatives closer to home and with less of a financial risk. 

Are there any opportunities for European-led companies right now?

There’s an opportunity to start building a customer base from now. 

Consumers know that their data has been for sale for a very long time, and their dissatisfaction with that just keeps getting stronger. 

Companies set up in Europe – which are prone to stricter regulations to start with – have a golden opportunity to position themselves as the anti-Google, the anti-Meta, the anti-exploitation tech company that is based far closer to home and, potentially, with a better understanding of local audiences. 

This doesn’t change the fact that bigger corporations have a much better chance of attaining business than smaller ones – but it’s not the only chance. Smaller companies positioning themselves on the side of user rights might be surprised at how dedicated businesses are to doing the right thing, if only for greater profits than any other reason. 

Should I, as a business, look at alternatives to grow?

Using alternatives to grow your business is a risky strategy with a high payoff. It can work – but it might be difficult to see the benefit of it this early in the game. 

Remember: these big tech companies are big for a reason. They’ve had years and years and years to acquire a lot of data that is now forming the basis for several of the KPIs that businesses chase after. Pivoting from that into European or smaller alternatives is not an easy, or small, decision to make. 

However, the benefits are undoubtedly high. 

This boils down to what you want your business’ legacy to be. It boils down to whether your business can sustain itself if it opts for the smaller, niche company over the larger corporates that knows every member of its audiences. It boils down to whether you are in a position to take a slower growth period over a faster, though riskier, rise. 

Here’s our take on it: at this it’s early. It’s unlikely that you’ll be able to fully divest your business from the stranglehold that tech giants like Google and Meta have on the industry – but it doesn’t mean you have to be locked into those systems forever. Keeping an eye out, and moving small aspects away from the overall United States tech ecosystem, is a sustainable choice. 

As these companies grow, then you can move more of your business away from that ecosystem. 

But it won’t be a quick process. This is a game for the long-haul. 

What about web hosting?

It’s a similar issue. 

You can use the bigger companies. You can also decide to branch out. 

Websites are still a massively important part of having a business, but it’s one small aspect of your business that you can use as a testing ground for whether a smaller host would work for you, and whether you can start pulling away from the established tech ecosystem into something that might be more fine-tuned for your audiences – or, at the very least, might give you a better chance of connecting with your audiences in a way that matters to them fundamentally: with regards to their privacy, safety, and data. 

Is there anything else I need to keep in mind?

These are early predictions, so the landscape might fully change by this time next month – but it’s unlikely. 

The European tech expansion isn’t just an individual effort set up by companies scattered throughout the continent: it’s an actual bolstered effort championed by the European Union itself, looking into creating its own tech hub the same as Silicon Valley, just on a much smaller scale. Its startup culture has taken a lot to get into its own, but now that it’s here, it won’t slow down. 

The choice for how this impacts your business is yours. 

What we can say is this: keep an eye on the news. The fines are just the beginning of an overhaul in the way that tech corporations will function, and while it’s unlikely that they’re going to cease European operations, their power may become limited – and your business might benefit from working with corporations closer to home.

But it’s not happening yet. You have a lot of time to think about what this means for you – and to identify what kind of business you want to run in the future. 

The post The Future of Europe appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Three years ago, in the throes of a worldwide pandemic, we launched a partnership that would take us past the woes of a country in complete lockdown into a learning experience about e-commerce.

Switch has a particular name for situations like the birth of Lucy’s online store.  

We call it being *RIKMAed.* This situation comes about when Rik drops a particularly impossible task in your lap with a seemingly insane deadline and tells you “we’ll do it ta, I have a plan!” 

And when he says we, he means we. 

With Lucy, we had 3 weeks to build and design the online store, organise a category system that made sense, load all the products (about 1000 to start with) with the correct tags and images, set up ads and accounts and design a launch campaign. 

After the Launch

The numbers show us that the Lucy online store was a success.

But to us the success of this partnership isn’t in the growth or sales or profit, it’s in the lessons we learned and will keep learning.

When we started working on the Lucy online store, stores were shut nationwide, and all shopping was funnelled into online channels. As a result, the Lucy online store was an instant success. 

But the lockdown wouldn’t last forever. And we knew we needed to keep that same momentum going once the physical stores opened back up and life went back to semi-normal. 

The Lucy team helped a lot with how we went about pushing the online store as yet another avenue for their sales. 

Working With your Client

One of the great things about the Lucy team is that the online store is seen as yet another store: it isn’t in competition with the brick-and-mortar outlets, but an opportunity to reach new customers and build new audiences. This means that we could look at all the sales channels as supporting each other, running promotions across all outlets, selling online tickets to live events and providing online support in-store. It all works seamlessly. 

From the start, the entire Lucy team recognised the value in changing people’s behaviour and buying patterns. 

Maltese people were not used to buying online. For the first year and a half in the life of the online store, we almost always had a special offer, discount or competition going. This kept people going back to the store to see what was coming next and it slowly changed buying patterns, even if the change was just slight enough to allow for more revenue in the online store.

Today, many people do their research online and then go in-store to purchase, or vice versa: the Lucy experience works seamlessly. Whether you’re shopping online or in-store, the Lucy experience is the same throughout, which has helped significantly and allowed us to pull back a little on offers and discounts to work on other ways of providing value to Lucy clients. 

So far,  we’ve introduced a loyalty club, seasonal subscription boxes, and a Diamond Club that rewards our best customers.

Lessons Learned

Even without the special offers, the Lucy store still reports strong numbers because our digital efforts are backed by a strong brand. The Lucy team knows who Lucy is: she’s practically a real person with a big personality and a very particular voice. When Lucy talks, she talks based on a very real set of values that is echoed by everyone on the team. 

It’s one of our most important lessons tactical communication is important, but not every piece of communication from a brand needs to be about sales. Use your comms to build community, to speak about who the brand is, what it likes and what it stands for. Lucy does a great job of mixing informational, tactical, and brand comms in a way that has created a fan base that is loyal to Lucy like she is a friend and not a brand.

There’s another important lesson we learned from working on Lucy.

 Plan everything ahead so that when you need to be spontaneous you have the space and time to dedicate to a fun, last-minute idea. 

At Lucy, we have monthly planning meetings in which we communicate any offers, new brands, product launches and sales efforts. These are put into a calendar and we structure communication and events around them. Then we brainstorm fun things like offers for lipstick day or decorating for Christmas or new Merch ideas. 

We plan so we can have fun.

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The premise was this: following worldwide societal collapse, the protagonist spent most of their time escaping from their dismal reality into the Metaverse, a cornucopia of virtual delights where users control avatars -and they can be whatever they want to be. Your status in the metaverse relies on where you can go, what you can do online, and how your avatar looks. 

In 2021, Mark Zuckerberg wrote a letter. 

The premise was this: technology has come far enough that we can do more than just use it, we can totally inhabit the internet as whatever we choose to be, do whatever we want to do, and participate in experiences that real life cannot supply. 

If it sounds familiar, it’s because this is the metaverse. 

And while it isn’t ready yet, this is the future that Mark Zuckerberg sees for his company – to the tune of a $3.7bn loss in the previous three months, and a total of $9.4bn since its inception: a loss that Mark Zuckerberg is happy to pay as an investment in an internet of the future. 

But the metaverse is here. You’ve seen your favourite companies engage in it, create activations in it, make their mark on it. 

It just looks entirely different from what we, and Mark Zuckerberg, expected. 

As a result, there’s a lot of confusion over what is, and isn’t, the metaverse. 

There’s a lot of confusion over whether this is a temporary fad, like 3D televisions, or something that will outlast us all, like Blu-Ray. 

And there’s a lot of confusion over how you even use something like the metaverse, and what it can do for you, your business, and your reputation. 

We get it. Every piece of technology we’re used to was new once, and these questions crop up when the cycle repeats itself, and something comes to the market that hasn’t been seen before – and it’s hard to understand it without someone explaining it to you, or doing a ton of research yourself. Nobody’s got time for that. 

We do. 

So here’s everything you need to know about the metaverse, and all the questions you have, answered. 

Let’s start from the beginning. 

What is the metaverse?

The metaverse is the internet, made three-dimensional. 

If you’re one of those people who game, you’re already part of a kind of metaverse: anyone who plays online with an avatar forms part of one version of the metaverse. Essentially, what Mark Zuckerberg wants to build is a giant playground where people can interact through fictional avatars. 

But it’s a little more complicated than that. 

The metaverse is real life. The metaverse is a fictional life. It is an experience. It curates the experiences for you. It sells products. 

There are products specifically made and designed to be sold by metaverse entities, which before the introduction of the metaverse, did not exist in the same permutation. 

The biggest comparison to the metaverse is Second Life or Playstation Home: online games where you are both yourself and better than yourself, where you can connect and interact with people on a global platform in a virtual space as though they are right next to you.

This is a reductionist’s view of what the Metaverse is actually supposed to be – but it is a very accurate read of what the metaverse currently is, and will remain so, for some time. To that end, we’ve already attained the idea of the metaverse, but not the idea of the metaverse that Mark Zuckerberg debuted in his fantastical video way back in 2021. 

That has a few more years in development. 

So the metaverse is an online universe?

The idea of the metaverse can be split into two distinct categories: 

1. The true metaverse, or what Mark Zuckerberg proposed and has not yet been attained. 
2. The actual metaverse, or what we are seeing at this moment. 

To paraphrase Matthew C. Bell’s excellent work, the metaverse has elements of everything it’s been compared to. Like online multiplayer games, the metaverse is live, experiential, and persistent. Like social media, it has its own internal economy and content ready for plumbing. Like virtual reality, you can hop into any experience you desire and participate in events. 

This version of the metaverse isn’t yet something we’ve seen. It’s likely not going to be around for years, and for a few reasons. 

The true metaverse that Zuckerberg showcased in his debut video, and the one that Matthew C. Bell identifies, is more like a synchronous, infinite 24-hour cruise ship. Visit at any point and something is happening; need something at any point, and you can probably get it then and there. It’s a sense of place. It’s a sense of being part of something bigger than you. 

It’s a sense of never really missing out and being able – regardless of where you are – to take part in something greater.

Naturally, this makes it attractive for all businesses. 

But the metaverse we are currently capable of now is a much smaller version of what it’s supposed to be.

What’s the difference between Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse and what we have now?

The key difference between them is immersion. 

The metaverse that Mark Zuckerberg proposed will be fully immersive. Touch something, and you’ll feel it in your hand. Attend a concert, and you’ll get all the concert noises: the music, but also the people singing along to the songs next to you, or the press of voices. Go through a lobby, and you’ll hear people talking at different volumes depending on how close you are to them. 

Some of these features have already been seen elsewhere. Skittish, the online meeting app, is no longer available, but it had audio that varied depending on how close you were to other speakers. Haptic feedback is likewise old technology. 

However, these instances of interaction are kept much smaller. When we see 3D audio or haptic feedback, it’s because we’re engaging in something that uses those features and plays out in the same way for everyone, such as a videogame. 

Zuckerberg’s metaverse isn’t a single unified experience. The metaverse that Mark Zuckerberg proposes caters itself to you, and the experience you engage in is also catered to you. This requires technology that hasn’t yet been perfected – full immersion hardware is difficult, and pricy, to create, despite attempts going back to 1968 – and therefore it isn’t widely available.

This means that the metaverse Mark Zuckerberg wants isn’t here yet. 

The metaverse that we have now isn’t as immersive. We have 3D spatial audio. We have the haptic feedback. We have a ton of little adjustments that you can make to cater a particular online experience to yourself – but at its core, it won’t be fully immersive if you don’t have the hardware to make it immersive. 

And with virtual reality headsets carrying a significant price tag, the hardware will need to become a lot more accessible before Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of the metaverse is a reality. 

The metaverse Mark Zuckerberg envisioned is accessible. The metaverse that Neal Stephenson wrote about is accessible. A metaverse where only the people who can afford to pay out the prices to play is not a metaverse – it’s an exclusive club where the price of admission is a product in itself. If only people who can afford to pay participate in the metaverse, there’s no metaverse: there’s a paywalled internet. 

And that’s effective for anyone: for the consumers, for brands, and for the people who are building the metaverse. 

So—what’s the metaverse we have now like?

In a word: fractured. 

Although Horizon Worlds is one of the biggest metaverses available, there are several different ones that have cropped up to take advantage of the hype. 

Besides Meta, there’s also The Sandbox and Decentraland, a ‘desktop’ metaverse that ties in crypto and the blockchain into their foundation and don’t require a VR-headset to log on. Apple, Google, and Microsoft are also working on their own metaverse projects, though little information is available about them at this time. Other, smaller metaverses, like Illuvium, Sorare, Upland, and Somnium Space, are either in development or in early beta testing. 

More are on the way, and with over 500 companies throwing their hat in the metaverse game, we’re likely going to see a lot more of them develop year-on-year. 

Currently, the most popular platforms are: 

Horizon Worlds: 

• Meta’s VR-based social networking zone. 

• Available activities include small multiplayer games, building, or live events. 

• Mostly used as a kind of living Facebook, with people meeting up to talk to others. 

Decentraland: 

• Built to create and sell digital assets in the form of real estate.

• Do not need a VR headset to use but you do need a crypto wallet to access the full list of features.

The Sandbox: 

• Built to create and sell digital assets with a digital real estate component: each LAND allows you to build interactive experiences, creating a metaverse within the Sandbox metaverse. 

• Do not need a VR headset to use. 

Axie Infinity: 

• Breed, collect, and trade small creatures. 

• Requires a digital wallet to use. 

Ultra: 

• A digital asset marketplace and web3 gaming platform. 

• Also has a social component with livestreams, tournaments, and a dedicated chat service. 

Somnium Space

• A digital platform focusing on its own economy and currency, with its own dedicated marketplace, games, and social experiences. 

• Available on PC or VR. 

Illuvium: 

• Auto-fighting roleplaying game with play-to-earn mechanics.

• Avatars double as NFTs to be sold and traded on the marketplace. 

Wait, platform? What’s the difference between the metaverse and a metaverse platform?

Think of it like a housing estate. 

The metaverse itself is the estate: an encompassing environment and a set of ideals. 

A metaverse platform is one of the houses making up that estate. You can only have one metaverse, but several platforms can form part of the metaverse. 

So it’s not just a Facebook thing?

Meta’s idea of the metaverse is the most well-known, but it’s neither the first nor the only company that’s working on the next stage of the internet. 

Other companies have their own idea of a more immersive internet. Other companies have started making the technology that you can use to fully engage with metaverse platforms. 

And other companies have started creating activations or events online that are inspired by or have elements of the metaverse. 

Decentraland, one of the primary metaverse platforms available today, was launched a year before Facebook became Meta, and has been in development since 2015. 

The metaverse is not just a Facebook thing. 

And other companies have started creating activations or events online that are inspired by or have elements of the metaverse. 

Besides games, what can you do in the metaverse?

Games are a big part of why the metaverse has attracted so much attention: besides the actual games on various metaverse platforms, there’s also the fact that a lot of what happens on the metaverse is gamified in a way that will appeal to wider audience than just those who enjoy videogames, especially with the focus on integrating blockchain technology within the metaverse.

However, not all metaverse platforms are created equally. 

Take Horizon Worlds. 

Horizon Worlds has less of an emphasis on NFTs and blockchain technology than some of the other metaverse platforms mentioned before, such as Illuvium or Decentraland. Part of this is due to the fact that Horizon Worlds is intended to appeal to children as well as adults, and though the app says that it’s only for kids aged 18 and up, kids younger than that have still hopped onto the platform. Additionally, Horizon Worlds is created solely as a way to interact with people across boundaries. It’s a pandemic product that was released after the notable interest in experiences and connections that didn’t rely on physical time and place.

Other metaverse platforms have a greater emphasis on trading, NFTs, and creating an experience that’s a little more like real life. With Horizon Worlds, the lure is connection. With platforms such as Decentraland, part of the lure is monetary: what can you get for what you invest. 

Virtual art galleries where you can click and purchase any NFT you like, provided you have the money. Concerts with real artists that take place on a stage floating above the heads of the crowd. Games where what you win can be found in real life. 

The limitations of the metaverse platforms are obvious. 

But so are the possibilities. 

What does the metaverse have to do with NFTs?

You can have the metaverse, and NFTs, as a separate concept. 

But they work better together. 

In the metaverse, there’s a lot of emphasis placed on who you are: what you like, what you don’t like, what you support, what you own. 

Especially what you own. 

Mark Zuckerberg’s idea of the metaverse hasn’t introduced the idea of digital asset ownership yet, but it will. Other metaverse platforms, like Decentraland, are built around the idea of ‘you are what you own’ – whether it’s virtual land, an in-universe representation of a brand you really like, or something that you can only get online. Like the real world, owning the digital idea of something has inherent value, and it’s one of the things that the metaverse can do with aplomb. It might not be on the level of NFTs, but digital ownership in metaverse platforms is the clearest indication of status in-world that currently exists. Those who shell out real money for digital assets showcase their worth in ways that are impossible to ignore. Others, who prefer not to, will stand out precisely because they do not stand out: they’ll become a crowd of people who opt for the free assets or prefer to only look, and not participate, in the metaverse platform culture. 

And given how people like to stand out, this is where digital assets will prove their value. Those digital assets are solely theirs: they can trade them, resell them, build on their capital using them, invest and re-invest to grow their fortune. The scarcity of these assets is built into them – once they’re gone, they’re gone for good. 

This develops a demand for them. It develops a need to make your mark. Call it FOMO. Call it investing in the future. 

Whatever drives people to purchase online assets, it’s powerful. And while not everyone is sold on owning things digitally, there are enough who are that it has become the core of several metaverse platforms. 

Is the metaverse good for business?

Yes, provided that the business investing in the metaverse understands that this is a long game, and not one that they’re going to see a massive profit from until it’s refined a little further. 

This doesn’t mean that there’s no profit to be had. 

Do you remember when the internet was new? When the idea of advertising online – not on billboards, prints, television, or radio – seemed ridiculous and a waste of money?

We know today that that thinking is flawed. We know that the internet ushered in an age of globalisation that companies are still trying to catch up to. 

The metaverse is a similar situation. Advertising on the metaverse now isn’t going to give you a wider audience or a more global presence; the fans of your brand that might also be interested in the metaverse will be a much smaller subset of your already-existing audience. 

But they’ll be an important part of your brand’s early adventures into the metaverse. And once the metaverse becomes more prevalent – because it likely will – they’ll be the catalyst that will help you grow your audience in the metaverse. 

Just like the first fans on your Facebook helped grow your Facebook page or found you again on Instagram. 

Is the metaverse necessary for business?

Not yet. 

Think of it in terms of audiences. 

Say your brand has 10,000 die-hard fanatics: the kind of people who buy every product, follow you on every social media, and attend every event. Of those fans, perhaps only 1,000 will have the capacity and time to actually hop onto metaverse-themed events. If those events require products that they don’t possess, such as a crypto wallet or a VR headset, that number will reduce further. 

If your concern is purely getting more people invested in your brand, then getting into the metaverse from this early stage might not necessarily give you what you need. 

However, if you’re playing the long game – and we always suggest playing the long game when it comes to advertising – then it’s necessary to start investing, and if it’s not investing in the metaverse, it’s investing in activations that go online, activations that partner with videogames, and activations that turn your brand into something people can experience beyond boundaries. 

What if I don’t want to invest in the metaverse?

That’s still an option for you at this  

Later, it depends on what the metaverse will turn into: if it will follow Mark Zuckerberg’s vision, or the present reality. 

If it turns into a version of what Mark Zuckerberg envisioned – as an experience, rather than as a giant marketplace – then there’s no reason why interacting within the metaverse should be something that brands avoid, provided that there’s an understanding that their service or activation within the metaverse should be offered freely. 

The state of the consumer as we’re looking at today is increasingly bombarded by constant incentives to spend. There are few opportunities for consumers to entertain themselves for free, and it’s very likely that as 2023 plays out, we’re going to see an even bigger decline in those services. This means that brands offering entertainment for free, or at a freemium, will see a marked interest in those consumers who don’t want to be left out, but can’t justify the cost. 

Is the metaverse why Meta has lost so much money and laid off workers?

It’s a part of it, but it isn’t the underlying cause.

At this the metaverse doesn’t really exist the way it should. To make his vision a reality, Mark Zuckerberg not only needs to develop the metaverse itself, but the underpinning technology that can support the metaverse. 

To do that, you need to invest money: money that, at this point, is not coming in from other avenues. 

But the metaverse investments alone aren’t why Meta is struggling. The layoffs from earlier this year highlighted an interesting aspect of Meta that gets forgotten underneath the latest round of Facebook controversies: as a company, Meta has had a long and storied history of starting projects that are later shelved or put on hold indefinitely. The people hired to pioneer those projects have – up until last year – remained employed at Meta, so while the layoffs are a significant number, it’s not a surprising number for a company that has hired on staff for projects without then reassigning them other work when the projects are rescinded. 

As the post-pandemic then brought Facebook’s profits to a screeching halt – in addition to yet more controversies and EU law headaches – Meta had no choice but to overcorrect its hiring procedures by culling 11,000 of its staff members. 

This is not because of the metaverse initiative. This is solely because Facebook itself has grown too large, and it’s part of a larger tech-based movement where layoffs have become the norm. 

Will the metaverse end up shelved like Libra, Shops, or other failed Meta products?

The metaverse is happening, with Mark Zuckerberg’s influence or without. Despite the financial dip in 2022, Meta is still committed to seeing its ‘embodied internet’ become a reality, and is increasing the investments into Reality Labs, the branch of Meta that focuses on creating the hardware and software for the metaverse.

But the metaverse – or the idea of the metaverse – is bigger than Meta. 

And it has already started gaining the kind of widespread investments that make it an eventuality, regardless of whether Meta stays their course or not. 

Why is it taking so long to see an actualised metaverse?

Mostly: the technology isn’t there yet. The pricing for the technology isn’t widespread enough yet. The logistics haven’t been decided yet. 

The metaverse is a completely different reiteration of the internet. Do you remember the beginning of the internet, and how long it took to go from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0?

20 years. 

Up until 2005, we still had the ‘read only’ web that Tim Berners-Lee created. To get to the interactive, social-media-based web we have now, it took twenty years.

It won’t take twenty years for the metaverse. The metaverse is already here. 

However, the technology that props up the metaverse – the VR headsets that push the immersive aspect – might well take that much. Before we can have a fully actualised, fully immersive VR experience, the headsets need to shrink, need to run on stronger batteries, and need to take up less space. 

That hasn’t been developed yet. Once it is, there is a wider conversation about pricing to be had. As we stated earlier, a metaverse that only the ones who can afford it can play in is not a metaverse: it’s an exclusive club where development will stagnate over time. For true innovation, and to realise the metaverse that is posited by the same companies who are building it, the metaverse has to be open to all – and it has to be accessible to everyone. 

And then there’s the logistics to work out. 

Who are you in the metaverse? Are you signing on with your Meta account, or your Roblox account? Do the platforms interconnect? Would it unduly strain servers, or is there a way of spreading out the presence of several thousand people trying to connect all at once?

That is a lesser problem – but it’s still a problem that has slowed down development. 

How will the metaverse help brand-consumer connections?

In theory, it will narrow the distance between brands and their consumers. 

Social media already does some of this. A social media account for a brand can go a long way towards building a consumer-brand relationship that thrives in spite of brand behaviour – to a certain extent. 

Brands still need to hold themselves accountable for their actions, after all. And building a relationship with your consumers goes beyond just social media. 

But interacting meaningfully with consumers online is difficult. Social media can narrow the distance, but it can’t fully close the gap between brand and consumer. 

The metaverse can provide ample opportunities to limit that distance. Activations built for die-hard fanatics. In-universe events that you have to be there to reap the exclusive benefits. A way of seeing a different side of your favourite brand, without leaving your house, without paying out a lot of money for the benefit, without worrying that you’re going to miss out. 

Theoretically, the metaverse is limitless. Theoretically, any consumer that wants to connect with their favourite brand during an activation can do so. Theoretically, a relationship can be built through that, nurtured through that, made stronger through that. 

It will take some time to get to that point – but there are already brands that have put on metaverse-lite applications. 

The results are very promising. 

What does the metaverse mean for marketers?

Immersion. Connection. The opportunity to experiment with your brand. The opportunity to be perpetually active, and to build a presence that goes beyond image, text, and video. To bring the brand to life. 

To have that life be accessible to an audience that is captive. 

For marketers, the metaverse is a new avenue of opportunities. It’s a way of thinking outside what advertising is, a shift on the level of moving from billboards to online messaging. Other forms of advertising won’t be obsolete, but everything that happens in the metaverse will push those efforts far more than marketers are used to – and have ramifications on what will become the expected brand experience. 

This means more time spent planning that brand experience. It means nailing down what the brand means, and how people can approach it, and maybe figuring out anew which part of the brand experience is the most fundamental to bring forward. 

Furthermore, it means changing the way that brands communicate again when marketers have only just become attuned to communicating on social media. 

It will take a little time. 

But as more brands turn into the metaverse and create their own little worlds, the absence of a brand on the platform will make it more difficult for that brand to connect with its audience. If most brands create valuable experiences online that allow consumers to interact with and achieve a connection with their favourite brands, then those that opt out of the platform will constantly play catch-up to what is an immersive all-hands experience that consumers will seek out because of sheer innovation. 

However, marketing in the metaverse is likely not going to become the only way of marketing. Marketers will still need to hone their other channels, to opt for marketing outside of the metaverse, and to recalibrate what they know about their audiences. As with any other new platform, the metaverse isn’t a one-size-fits-all situation for brands: rather, it depends on marketers to identify what platform is going to suit their needs best. 

At the moment, there isn’t much variation between platforms. Those that skew towards younger audiences, such as Horizon Worlds, have to lean into the age-appropriateness of that platform itself, even if it includes the digital ownership aspects. Those that cater for more adult pursuits, such as digital ownership, bring forward a different audience segment to monitor. 

None of this is new. Marketing on social media took similar steps and the rewards it reaped had similar benefits. 

For marketers, the metaverse is opportunity to start communicating with an audience in a new way. As social media and the internet become increasingly inundated with chatter, the metaverse offers a chance to try again, and at its current stage of newness, conversations happening online are amplified. The widespread appeal isn’t quite there yet. 

But it will be.

And marketers should start preparing for it from now. 

Look at your brand. See what’s available out there. Start planning. The stories that you have to tell on the metaverse are more than the stories you can tell on social media: they’re three dimensional, living experiences. 

What does the metaverse mean for consumers?

There are three different ways consumers approach the metaverse. 

Ownership

For consumers who are interested in digital ownership, the metaverse is an opportunity to get in early on investment opportunities and to acquire capital that they can then reinvest, sell, or trade, a little like the dotcom and social media investment cycle. For this subclass of consumers, ownership is the primary force behind any experience they have in the metaverse, so brands will need to keep in mind that their presence there is tied into something tangible, such as an exclusive skin or a limited edition artwork that is only available for certain individuals who meet specific criteria for ownership. For these consumers, their presence in the metaverse is intrinsically locked into what they possess, and they’ll build their collection online with fervour – though it does mean that brands who don’t opt for digital exclusives might not be able to retain this consumer class’ attention for long. 

Think of the same people who invest in NFTs, cryptocurrencies, and who keep a thumb on the pulse of what’s going on on social media. They’re highly dedicated to the possibilities of the metaverse, and will serve as the vanguard for the metaverse: most of them have already started dabbling in one or all of the aforementioned activities, and associate the ownership of digital assets with their own identity. While this audience can definitely elevate a brand’s positioning in the metaverse, they’re highly susceptible to brand-jumping, and keeping their ownership will tie in with other forms of communication and the perceived rarity of the products you put out on the metaverse. 

Entertainment

The other aspect of the metaverse for consumers is much simpler: entertainment. These people don’t really care if they have the latest digital asset or if they’ve managed to fulfill any criteria to own a specific item, and they’re unlikely to spend the same amount of money as the audience above in order to use the metaverse. Their purpose is simpler: they want entertainment, and the metaverse promises a form of entertainment that is easy to get into. It doesn’t require any practice or any previous experience: the metaverse is as plug-and-play as you can get for people who had no prior interest in playing videogames or online communities. 

This audience skews a little younger, and a little more on the side of the metaverse as a platform for fun rather than the metaverse as an investment opportunity. They’re easier to hold onto, but similar to the audience above, they’ll brand-jump from one activity to another to find something that will truly captivate their attention. That said, if you do create an activation that will hold onto their interest, it’s likely that they’ll revisit it more than once, and while their price-consicousness is a key aspect of this audience, it’s a limit that can be overcome with the right brand and the right messaging. 

Connection

The rarest of the audience segments, connection-driven audiences use the metaverse as a big chatroom, and a way of forging new relationships in a space where you can put the best aspect of yourself forward and meet as many new people as your internet connection allows. This audience is rapidly growing with the onset of remote working, and while brands are going to struggle to address this audience specifically – as they might not really care about brand experiences unless they provide a way of connecting with others – they’re a valuable audience segment to keep in mind. This audience are the ones who’ll encourage others to hop on and try an activation; they’re the ones who will populate the metaverse without having a specific driver to hop into a particular brand’s world, and the ones who can be swayed into an experience based on whether or not it sounds like a good time. There’s a lot of overlap between the entertainment and the connection audience segments, however it’s worth keeping in mind that this particular audience will skew older than the entertainment segment. These are working professionals who don’t have the time to hop on and invest, or the interest to hop between activities. Their interest lies in relationships, and in creating their own circle of connection online, a little like early chat rooms and forums. Given enough time, this audience segment will create its own tribe, which can then be a little more amenable to attending different activities – but before then, they’re the audience who will be the hardest to approach within the metaverse. 

What else do I need to keep in mind for the metaverse?

This is a lot of information. Most of it is speculation and research. 

So our final note on the metaverse is this: at this nobody know what the final product is going to look like, and nobody knows when it’s going to actually happen. Real life circumstances will wax and wane, and the metaverse’s progress will similarly wax and wane, so while we can consider that the metaverse is an experiential platform, the way that experience will play out is going to be very different from the final product. 

When we think of the internet, a lot of us think of the early days of the internet: AOL chatrooms, geocities websites, AskJeeves, private forums. The ones that came after us, who created social media and who built an internet that runs on interaction and connection and conversation, will think of Instagram, reddit subformums for every concievable hobby, and the astronomical rise of fanworks and their presence in pop culture and entertainment. 

Those two internets coexist. 

The early metaverse that we have now and the final product that we’ll see later on will also coexist. It will give us an opportunity to rediscover what we loved about being online in the early nineties: the beauty of logging on to a world that was unlimited by anything but your own knowledge. 

And it will give us an opportunity to create our own presence online, build our own entertainment, make our own mark, like what we loved about being online in the early 2010s. 

But anything beyond – and besides – that is unknown. 

What we know concretely is this: the metaverse is going to happen. It’s best to start thinking now about the way you want to approach this platform, to figure out the story you want to tell, to identify where that story is going to take you. 

And if you need help with that, we’re here. 

And we’re always happy to help. 

The post The Metaverse, Explained appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

94% of the first impression any client gets about a brand website comes from web design. 

Immersive imagery. Playful shapes. Moving elements. 

Web design has come a long way from the flickering, pastelly brightness of the nineties, the tiny-text minimalism of the early 2000s, and the sleek rebrandings of the late 2010s. We’re looking at websites now that fulfil a function far more than just a place to park your brand and hope for the best: we’re looking at websites that exist on their own merit as an essential pillar of your brand’s personality. 

This is not new. 

What is new is this: we have social media platforms that now struggle to maintain the same level of engagement as they did previously. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Tiktok are all inundated with their own issues, and so a greater proportion of brands are turning to older ways of communicating with their consumers. 

That means websites. It means forums. It means web design. 

For 2023, we’re going to see more websites. 

Here’s what they’re going to look like.

What’s here to stay: 

Vanillafication 

Some people might not have a fully-kitted out desktop or laptop computer. 

But they will have a phone. 

Websites that prioritise clean, effortless aesthetics that load fast and look good are poised to see an even greater boost as consumers’ shrinking attention span means they will pivot away from any brand website that takes ages to load on the device they use the most: their mobile phone. The age of instant gratification and hyper-speed responses is only giving rise to faster websites, and in 2023, speed is going to be an increasingly important element in web design. 

Inclusion through typography

2022 showcased some excellent advances in typography: from 70s-inspired curls to user-set sizes, typography gained new importance as a unifier across all capabilities. Adaptable colour schemes, alt-text, keyboard navigation, and captions will see a greater focus in 2023 as companies strive to create a more inclusive internet experience for everyone. 

The Return of Experimental

Web design can be fun. 

In 2022, websites that introduced an element of enjoyment to consumers did well, and in 2023, it won’t be any different. Bold colours, beautiful typography, and stunning animations still draw significant attention, and with the growing return to the nostalgic, websites in 2023 can really benefit from turning the clock back to move forwards. 

Trends 2023

It’s not all about the past. 

2023 is looking forward to a bright future. 

Here’s some of the highlights. 

1. Hanging a(round)

Sharp, angular lines aren’t going anywhere. The days of brute minimalism are still on us. 

However, more and more platforms are opting to take their sharp edges away and replace them with squovals, squircles, and rounded corners. Google and Youtube have already hopped onto the circular see-saw, and with Google and Youtube settled as two of the platforms used daily, we’re likely to see this trend cropping up in other websites sooner rather than later. 

2. Micro-interactions

We’ve already mentioned micro-movements. 

This is a step beyond that. 

Consumer attention spans are growing shorter. Their focus is narrower. 

The web is huge, noisy, and chaotic, and it’s only getting more so as brands try and grab hold of as many consumers as possible – and they’re trying to do so by injecting their websites full of character and expression. 

Beautiful imagery. Text that sings. 

Animation.

A little animation goes a long way towards connecting a brand and its audience. Throw in ‘hidden’ animations – ones that only appear when the consumer interacts a certain way with the website – and you can definitely see repeat visits from your closest fans. 

According to Andrea, our lead designer, “gratifying animations can give users a micro-dopamine kick”, keeping them coming back to your website for the pleasure as much as the product. However, it’s important that all your animations don’t slow down the way your website loads. In 2023, speed is still the biggest factor for website success, and clunky, slow-loading sites that look beautiful will not benefit from any micro-interactions added to the site – no matter how expressive they are. 

3. Interactive gradients

Whether you’re a fan or not quite sold on gradients, their presence in 2023 is undeniable: not only will we see more static gradient design, but websites that want to add movement to their site without limiting their loading speed may opt to add warping gradients to their page as a form of expression. For sites where speed is the greatest concern, adding animated gradients and shifting gradients is the best of both worlds: you’ll add character to your web design without limiting what your web page can do. 

4. Lazy Loading

Think of your website as a book. 

Your user can only look at one page at a time. Lazy loading is a way of making sure that that page – the only page that they’re looking at – loads up fast. The rest can come later. 

Does it matter in the long run? It does if you’re a site with a lot of content to go through, particularly if that content is imagery, animation, or video. Your consumers only have milliseconds to decide whether or not they want to stay on your webpage long enough for it to make an impression, and lazy loading will keep those precious milliseconds focused on the things that matter: the content that’s drawing your customers in.

5. Reassuring Reality

The web is a global platform. 

Some days, there is more bad news than good news to read about. 

Web design can help with that. Keeping your web design light, your typography calm, and your users in control is a way of combatting the growing cynicism of the web – and no, it doesn’t have to be happy. People who go on the internet are used to having very little control over their viewing habits: from GDPR to hiding the unsubscribe button in typographic loopholes, hostile web design to keep people pinned to the page or the brand is not new. 

But it’s no longer the norm. 

Calming calls to action. Visible controls: unsubscribe, increase the text, remove all tracking. 

Andrea says, “the web has the duty of making its audience a little calmer, but it’s not about whimsical, on-the-nose, super-happy illustrations or animations: that’s a sign of cynicism. But we’ll see the trend of letting users know that they are in control.”

6. AI-bstract imagery

AI-generated art sparks a lot of opinions on both sides of the argument. 

But it definitely has its place in web design in 2023. 

Partially, it’s because we’re still in the early stages of refining AI art generation. Partially, it’s because it’s an innovation to the art world that has opened up access to creation to people who don’t have the technical training for art or design. 

Either way, AI art has a distinctive uncanny-valley style to it that web designers can use to their advantage. From strange proportions to questionable colour choices, AI-generated art can be an interesting stylistic choice for brands that want to set their opinion down on a controversial topic – and for those not in the know, it’s setting a style that can quickly set them apart from the rest. 

7. AI Know You

Your online experience is unique to you. What you watch, what you read, and what you look for is going to vary – and AI can bring it all to the forefront. 

What AI can do is still in its infancy. AI can be taught to create experiences that change depending on the person who views the advertisement, but it will take time before it’s ready to make these changes. 

DALL-E was a taster of what can happen when AI is made available to the public. 

Now we can build on it. 

Andrea says, “the next step for AI is to have it actually create on-demand virtual experiences: for example, Google knows what I like and what I don’t like, and tailors my advertisement based on that knowledge. Tone of voice, imagery, vocabulary use – even pop culture references – can all be tweaked to create content on the fly.”

8. 3D Dreams

In 2021, a living billboard caught the attention of pedestrians in Shinjuku. In 2022, more animated billboards took over public spaces: Times Square, Piccadilly Circus, Shenzhen. 

Websites will see more of the same: images that seem superimposed on your screen depending on how you tilt your phone. Images that follow you. Text that seems to stand apart from the rest. While the technology is relatively new, consumers are already used to images that stand out as larger than life, and careful use of 3D imagery can only add to an immersive experience. 

9. Frasurbane

This is not a new trend – but it’s taken on new life in the latter half of 2022. Initially a 90s interior design trend, Frasurbane is all about beige and earth, softened elements that focus on muted colours and larger-than-life fonts. With the nineties and Y2K aesthetic already drawing focus to the possibilities of the past, it’s no surprise that Frasurbane is coming back as a design style – or that it lends itself so well to so many different brands. Add in the sudden turn towards natural and earthy design, and Frasurbane can inspire a lot of comfort to consumers looking for a brand that speaks to them. 

 10. Claymorphism

Life, larger: it’s a key component of design thinking in 2023. We’ve already mentioned 3D imagery, shifting gradients, and micro-movements. 

Here’s another. 

Claymorphism. 

Think of the corporate design aesthetic from a few years back: the rounded shapes, the featureless faces. Now, make it 3D. 

Claymorphism is pastel. Claymorphism is rounded. Claymorphism has depth and shadow, and it looks like it’s moving when you look at it. Web design in 2023 is seeking out movement and colour, and claymorphism is the best of both worlds: an aesthetic that both appeals and inspires. 

11. Memphis Design

Here’s another blast from the past. 

Memphis design originated in the 80s: the decade of cartoons, bright pops of colour, and repeating patterns. However, it’s not quite the same as what we’re used to seeing: it’s evolved into a sleeker, sharper version of itself where the colours are deeper, the contrast sharper, and the choices made more deliberate. 

According to Sorina, “Memphis is much more than just a design trend, it breaks the typical norm and encourages freshness, creativity, and uniqueness through the design. Also, it motivates boldness and bravery, not just in design but in life, and reminds us that our time on this earth should be fun. Thus, it can actually help you deliver the best impression.”

2022 had plenty of reasons for us to stay understated. 

2023 will not be the same. 

12. Visible borders

For something completely different: realism. 

But not for imagery. 

Borders. 

Websites exist in a virtual space, and that is an unavoidable fact. However, adding borders irons the website down flat, giving it an easier, smoother look for the easily-scattered consumer. The shrinking attention span we mentioned earlier? It’s aided well by borders and shapes that guide the eye along. 

A lot of what happens on the internet doesn’t feel real to us. Borders are a way to help combat that unrealism and make the viewer more present. 

Conclusion

For 2023, we’re looking at movement and our childhood, up in lights.

Design is past and present and future.

The trends we mentioned today aren’t the only trends you’ll see in 2023. 

With so much of the world spending a growing amount of time on the internet, it’s no wonder that the internet we see now has started to resemble what we were used to when we were young. Nostalgia is powerful. For many, the web is still a place of comfort, even with the negative press around it. 

Design trends will always reflect that. 

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