A portrait of Shawn Schrader taken by his friend Kimihiro Hoshino

Last month Tokyo’s international creative community lost one of its brightest stars, Shawn Schrader, after he lost a battle with cancer. He was in his mid thirties and leaves behind a young family.

I first met Shawn in 2010 when he was working as a designer for a small Japanese production company and my company was looking to hire a junior designer. For a western creative in Tokyo his interest in and passion for Japanese culture, and his language ability, made him a rare talent even then. His maturity towards professional relationships for someone his age was also quite striking. I also remember discussing the state of American politics with him over lunch on that first occasion and noted his clear mindedness, passion for ideas and compassion for others.

Frankly I would have loved to have been able to hire him but in the context of my little enterprise back then he would have been anything but junior, and so we went our separate ways for a while meaning that the next time we met it was as peers, which felt much more appropriate.

By that time he was working at TBWA\Media Arts Lab where he was clearly thriving professionally. We would meet up fairly infrequently, but with zeal, to discuss the state of the industry we shared, invariably touching on brands doing interesting things, great work, talented people, Japanese culture, family life and occasionally politics. He was more informed than me on most of those topics so I really appreciated our meetings as chances to learn and become better connected as often Shawn would follow-up with an intro to someone he “thought I should meet”.

It has become even clearer since his passing just how prolific Shawn was in knowing and interacting with his professional community, and actually, without once projecting himself as a leader of it, has done more than anyone I know to connect it together and nurture it. As the teams he helped grow at TBWA and subsequently at Google’s Brand Studio can no doubt testify, his actions always seemed to be driven by the desire to see what might happen if creative people he liked and respected collaborated fruitfully, and those actions were all the more influential for their selflessness.

In terms of his creative craft his achievements speak for themselves, and there were many. During his time at TBWA\Media Arts Lab Shawn worked on a number of campaigns for Apple that required a strong creative idea, a lot of crafting and attention to detail. At Google’s Brand Studio he worked as creative director across a number of socially impactful campaigns in Japan and Asia of which he seemed rightly proud, although he was incapable of haughtiness. He was featured in Campaign Asia’s 2016 “40 under 40” which profiles the rising stars to watch in the industry, highlighting his achievements in “winning over 40 industry awards including the Cannes Grand Prix” in the preceding 3 years.

When Shawn and I met in the last year or two there was more shared intent to work on something together, that it was overdue, but there was never a sense of urgency either. It would come at some point, I had assumed.

As foreigners in Tokyo we are accustomed to impermanence, people come and go, but having both of us grown roots here, embraced a family-first life, knowing how much he too enjoyed the hectic professional scene with Tokyo’s unique mix of timelessness and yet constant change as a backdrop, my friendship with Shawn was I felt for the long haul, and all the more important for that.

The last thing Shawn published online was this article on LinkedIn entitled “What it takes to be a foreign creative in Tokyo – A little advice for those with their eye on Japan” in which he described his own journey into the creative world in Tokyo, and then with his usual modesty had 11 ECDs and CDs from Tokyo agencies write a paragraph on the topic, and concluded with paragraphs of his own on these 4 areas of advice: “Be committed”. “Be in Tokyo”. “Be unique”. “Learn the language”.  The piece is thoughtful, generous, pragmatic and inspiring. Shawn all over. I really hope it has the effect he intended and I get to work with some of the people it inspires.

Over the last few weeks it has been hard to come to terms with the fact that I cannot look forward to future conversations and collaborations with Shawn, but the more of our shared friends I speak to since his passing the more it is clear that we must instead reflect on and be grateful for how much he gave while he was with us, and ensure that his spirit lives on in our work and play.

Thank you Shawn. Rest in peace my friend.

For anyone who would like to record a tribute to Shawn please use this form.

The post Tokyo loses one of its brightest stars: A Tribute to Shawn Schrader appeared first on James Hollow's Blog about Hybrid Thinking.

The Japanese advertising industry is not well understood from the outside. In fact, I am not sure it is that well understood from the inside. In a post I published in 2014 called “The Japanese Advertising Industry in a Nutshell” I tried to sum up what makes it unique, the characteristics of the advertising itself, and explain why it has remained dominated by domestic agencies.

In the context of my readership the post “went viral”, still gets a lot of traffic, led to a bunch of speaking offers, and sparked off a lot discussion among my peers who work in advertising here in Tokyo. From all of this I learned a tremendous amount and it helped to solidify the ideas, and hence this post is an overdue follow up that aims to:

• Summarise the original article’s assertions
• Describe the context within which the advertising industry has come about, and so help to explain why it is
• Address the question of whether Japanese consumerism is fundamentally different or not
• Revisit the claim that the western agency planning model does not work in Japan, explain where I stand now on this point
• Bring the story up to date – what if anything has happened in the last few years to suggest that change is afoot

1. The Japanese advertising scene has been “captured” by a sort of cartel made up of the TV stations (who make the programming that creates the celebrities), the talent agencies (who “manage” the celebrities’ commercial contracts) and the advertising agencies (the dominant one being Dentsu, who effectively auction off access to programming and celebrities).
2. The most powerful entity in this symbiotic ecosystem is Dentsu (the middleman prevails!), and most outsiders assume it is based on exclusive access to media, but actually it is just as much to do with controlling access to the celebrities
3. The rise of CyberAgent is a proof point of this reality: the web media company (actually today it is essentially a Dentsu style agency for the web) which rose to prominence off the back of AMEBA, the celebrity studded blogging platform, are the upstarts that beat the agency establishment at their own game, but on the web, by creating a business model based around access to celebrities and selling its associated media and influence
4. Because of Japan’s relatively more homogeneous society and consumer mindset of wanting to be integrated into the whole of society, Japanese advertising aims more to fit brands into the communal cultural zeitgeist, to feel “of the now”, than it does to make them stand out in a conceptual way
5. Hence Japanese executions tend to have lots of small cultural references, thematic and aesthetic, that make them “highly crafted” in a way that obviously foreign creative directors and award show judging panels will always struggle to appreciate
6. Casting TV talents who are currently a la mode (and these trends are rapid) is an expedient way to achieve “of the now”, make the brands relevant to consumers here and now, especially those who like watching TV, without having to think too hard about communication strategy, while keeping the client happy and excited at the same time.

Japanese celebrities are typically manufactured on TV, and access to their endorsement is controlled by the big agencies

This brand sponsored-entertainment complex is a monster, and it’s not budging. Since I first arrived in Japan the decline and fall of its lead protagonist, the chief bully in this old-boys playground, DENTSU, has been confidently predicted but it has not happened yet.  Such a complex cannot exist in isolation from the broader consumer economy, but rather it sits on top of it, dependent on it for all the string-pulling it gets away with. And there are characteristics of the system that allow the model to be sustained and help explain its robustness.

Japanese advertising’s broader context

1. Japanese manufacturing is more agile, so product variants come to market at a much higher frequency than in other countries, so many brands can stay salient through announcing new products regularly without having to think much about long term brand positioning or making advertising that supports a long term emotional role
2. Fed on this diet of product innovation (continuous functional evolution) the trade / retailers have a less than sophisticated appreciation of the potential role of advertising to sharpen emotional relevance, and generally like to see i) high awareness campaigns ii) with big celebrities iii) announcing product news, and will reward this formula with more shelf space or equivalent priority status.
3. Advertising space in Japan tends to be cut up into smaller chunks, because the media-revenue-driven agencies can make more money that way and it fits the expectations of the retailers. Taking TV as a case in point, the vast majority of TV spots in Japan are 15secs, rather than mix of 15, 30 and 60secs you see in most other developed markets. Creative execution quality being equal, a 15sec spot-based media spend provides perhaps a 10% increment in awareness over a 30sec based media flight, so for short term salience-grabbing campaigns, the 15sec model is pushed by media planners and tends to prevail.
4. 15secs gives the creative teams less options to create a conceptually-driven ad, particularly when the client is keen to see the celebrity that they have just been sold by the agency at vast expense in every single frame of the 15secs (not to mention the other media channels) if at all possible. Since TV is still in general the central spend, this tends to drag everything else down.
5. Japanese TV is almost pure escapism, and tends to be dominated by “noisy” programming (variety shows, celebrity panel discussion shows, stand up comedy, edutainment style shows also with talent panels, with some fantastical dramas thrown in), combined with the fact that most households have digital TVs with recording functions that allows ad-skipping on playback, hence advertising needs to be entertaining and eye catching first and foremost, and there is truth in the idea that some viewers are interested in seeing what the celebs are up to in their endorsements

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A cylindrical gift is wrapped beautifully in a Japanese department store

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4 or 5 years ago Facebook’s strength was seen to be the number of ways OTHER than advertising it could monetise its users, at least from the point of view of tech industry savants and savvy investors. Now, post IPO and obligated to maximises profits for its shareholders, Facebook is riding high on its advertising revenues, comprising over 90% of its total, and the tools it provides to its ad publishers like us are getting better all the time. Social game-derived revenue, the promise of social gifting.. all these have fallen by the wayside, and worryingly both users and advertisers are concerned about all the noise in the timeline and the fact that brands and users’ aims are often at odds on the platform.

LINE is making a ton of money, albeit not yet on the scale of Facebook, but its revenues are growing ~20% quarter-on-quarter and it seems that less than 20% of it is coming through brand sponsors, and a good chunk of that is from branded stamps, typically the mascot characters that have been adapted and expanded into a full spectrum of emotive icons.

Branded stamps are a great example of the sort of “willing complicity” that those of us in the advertising industry love since a platform imbibed with this spirit provides the fertile soils in which to nurture positive, 2 way relationships with users. The rest of the sponsored content is basically opt-in newsletters, which can also contain fun and entertaining content, but typically are driven by retail coupons. In other words, LINE has an opt-in Groupon-type model inside it. Again, more brand-user complicity. And blocking updates from brands is as easy as you like.

In contrast to Facebook, LINE makes the vast majority of its money through game sales and non-brand stamp sales, and recently opened a creators market for stamps, analogous to what Apple did for apps with the App Store, discussed in detail in this recent post “The App Store Gold Rush”. Establishing a creators’ marketplace, like an app store, or like YouTube channels combined with content discovery engine, turns the 2-way dynamic between sponsors and users into a triangular one, that Facebook does not really have, but which is really valuable in maintaining a healthy culture.

YouTube seems to be the biggest advertising platform that has got this balance right. Since day one YouTube has understood that they are only as strong as their content creators are motivated to contribute to the community, and the way they share ad revenues with those creators, not to mention hold award shows and put on fan events for them, is the most powerful example of the “attention economy” model that the world is shifting towards.

Right now I would guess that it is the YouTubes and LINEs of the world that own the future, and Facebook is going to burn out and fade away within the next 5 years, and it this idea of willing complicity between users and the platforms’ way of monetising them that is key to long term success. Snapchat would do well to take note if they want a long-lived popularity. Of course if short term profits are the objective, they may have different ideas.

The Campaign Asia article:

Still from a Snapchat promotional video

“It’s the first time we’ve done anything like this because it’s the first time we’ve been paid to put content in that space,” the company said on its blog. “It’s going to feel a little weird at first, but we’re taking the plunge.”

The sponsored post for the film Ouija was edited specifically for the platform to mimick a Snapchat story.

The ads are optional; users don’t have to watch them if they don’t want to. They also disappear after viewing or within 24 hours, just like Stories. Users have no choice when it comes to receiving the ads, but unlike the approach chosen by Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, the ads do not play automatically.

It is unclear when Snapchat plans to roll out to other markets or how exactly it charges for ads. In its blog, Snapchat stressed that it wouldn’t put ads in personal communication, things like Snaps or Chats. “That would be totally rude,” the statement said. “We want to see if we can deliver an experience that’s fun and informative, the way ads used to be, before they got creepy and targeted.”

“As Snapchat starts down the advertising path, it needs to make sure that it creates a culture in which advertiser and users’ wishes are aligned,” said James Hollow, president at Lowe Profero Tokyo. “The way YouTube have succeeded in doing, and Line seems to be trying hard to sustain.”

According to Hollow, post-IPO, Facebook is riding high on its media revenues, but both users and advertisers are concerned about all the noise in the timeline and the fact that brands and user aims are often at odds.

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“Everything they don’t teach you at school because they are afraid it will blow your mind!”

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I want to take you on a whirlwind journey through time, from the big bang to the present, and across science, from astro-physics to evolutionary biology, and along the way highlight some of the discoveries, ideas and unanswered questions that have thrilled me in my explorations since leaving education and that I do not believe are on the school syllabus yet.

Try to note the subjects that I skim across, most of them hybrid sciences, and let’s try to join some dots between them. Be assured that there are many subjects out there to be explore and one of them might just be right hybrid of skills and approaches for you. Also note that while at school you learn mostly stuff that everyone is agreed on, there are an awful lot of big questions that have yet to been answered, or where there is little agreement on the answer, and of course many more questions that no one has thought to ask yet, so you may spot somewhere to make a name for yourself.

Finally be aware that your teachers are I bet clued up on these ideas and topics, a lot more than me, so do ask about them even after this session.

The Universe has a direction

Probably the biggest point I want to make today is that the Universe has a direction. It started with the big bang and ever since certain trends have been, taken across the whole, on the increase. I have listed some of these here. Things like complexity, specialization, evolvability itself are on the increase, whether we look at start and galaxy formation, the history of life on Earth, bacteria in a petri dish or the technologies that humans have co-evolved with, we can see these core traits shaping the process. Not dictating every little detail, quite the opposite, but guiding the general direction of change.

Big Bang & expanding Universe 

All the energy in the Universe is created. At first there is no space for difference. But it expands rapidly, and some areas are cooler than others. This uneveness means that there is “potential energy” – a gradient down which energy will always leak. This is called entropy, and it is the only rule that we are sure always applies anywhere in time and space. The unevenness shortly after the Big Bang in the spread of energy is the origin of all the structure we see in the Universe today, including life on Earth, since over vast stretches of time extremely complex organisation can emerge from the smallest of initial unevenness.

The formation of Galaxies & inferred Dark Matter

At the same time as the universe is flying apart with entropy increasing, energy begins to clump together in the form of stars and galaxies. There are lots of different types of galaxies, lots of different types of stars too. In fact, the structuring of the energy and matter in the universe is a form or self-organisations that emerges from the laws of physics and chemistry. We do not have a clear  definition in science yet of the opposite of entropy. Some call it extropy, or exotropy. It describes a process of increasing concentration of energy and increasing order and organisation. If one of you can explain how organised systems emerge you will be the next Einstein or Darwin.

Planets and the emergence of life on Earth

There are likely to be billions of planets in the universe. We have already found several thousand planets orbiting stars near us. But how many can sustain life? There are many factors that seem to favour life on earth. The perfect distance from the sun. A magnetic core which creates a magnetic deflector shield from the harmful stream of ions from the sun, thanks to the fact that we are not too far away from the centre of the galaxy, but not too close that we get soaked in dangerous radiation, a huge planet like Jupiter near us that attracts comets full of ice that the earth has absorbed giving us water.
You can look at these “goldie locks” outcomes as ither we are very lucky, or else it was always going to happen this way. This does not mean that we are likely to be on the only life-bearing planet in the Universe, but that where theres is life, it is likely to have emerged from the same sort of conditions that the Earth has enjoyed. And this same thought applies right down from the scale of solar systems to the arrangement of atoms on long protein molecules (amino acids) that govern biological life.

The invention of DNA and what it meant for life

DNA is nature’s way of passing the information required to build living creatures down through time. There is no other way that information is encoded and transferred down through time in biological systems. And the properties of DNA make it perfect to play this role. It is like two sides of a zip that have been twisted into a spiral, meaning that it can unzip itself and make copies of itself by grabbing molecules from a soup of proteins around it to make the other side of the zip. We call tho “self replication”, and  it is at the heart of how all life on Earth.

There are around 10^39 possible molecular shapes that the organic proteins can form. That is more than the number of stars in the Universe. Although 4billion years of life on Earth is a long time for evolution to try out different molecules, the odds are extremely small that DNA was struck upon by luck. We have generated billions of these other possible configurations in computer simulations and tested them for the properties needed to play the role that DNA does, and found that none even come close to ticking all the boxes that DNA does.

This does not imply a hand of God, at least not directly, since it appears very much like the constraints applied by the laws of physics and chemistry on the emergent, self-organising structure of the organic molecules that govern life pre-dictate certain paths that lead to higher levels of order and organisation.
What this suggests is that if there is life on other planets, it is more than likely to be DNA based.

Eusociality and the dominance of social insects

DNA allows nature to program the behaviour of living creatures, from the single celled, to trees, marine and land animals, the lot. We all know how natural selection works to design the traits of species so that they fit the niches available to them in the biosphere, like the shape of beaks of Finches on the Galapagos islands that Darwin researched nearly 150years ago. But encoded in DNA are far more subtle and complex traits, including behavioural traits that dictate higher level organisation than physical characteristics. This is because natural selection can also work on the level of groups and colonies, not just individuals.

One beautiful example of this is the social behaviour of certain insects, such as ants, termites, bees and wasps. The so called social insects all went through a threshold of organisation that bio-geneticists call “eusociality” – which basically means that they form a nest  for the rearing of their young, protected by individuals whose role it is to care and guard for them, while others go out and get food and resources, build and repair, wage war on other colonies or intruders. This is not a conscious decision. It is genetically hard wired. In fact, in a termite mound the number of genetically defined roles is in the region of 40~45, which is a higher level of division of labour than in Elizabethan England. This level of cooperation gives them such an advantage that these social insects have dominated the biosphere for about 1.5bn years, in some ecosystems making up 50% of the total biomass.

Agriculture before humans

Many people believe that humans invented agriculture, but as you probably already know the leaf cutter ants have been “farming” for billions of years. They carry chopped up leaves that they themselves cannot eat back to their nest, and lay it down in underground fields where it is consumed by a fungus, and the ants eat the fungus. This is not unlike the relationship we enjoy with the few Kg of bacteria that line our gut – our “micro-biome”, that helps us digest our food.

Animal Herding

Likewise it is falsely believed that humans invented the farming of other animals for yummy drinks like milk. Well ants also beat us to that too. Some species of ants have had a symbiotic relationship with aphids for well over a billion years. Aphids are sap-suckers. But to suck sap they have to have their noses stuck into a tree all day, making them easy pickings for insects likes lady birds and their ancestors. Sap is not as thick as blood, and in order to extract enough nutrients from it sap suckers need to process a lot of sap, and the waste from this process is dozens of globules of goo everyday that come out of the bum of the aphids and that ants just love. 2 billion years ago these balls fell to the ground under trees where ants collected them and said thanks very much.

This harvest gave ant colonies a competitive advantage, and it was thus a big disadvantage when the aphids on a tree all got eaten by predators. So the ants evolved to protect the aphids from predators. A few hundred million years later colonies of ants and aphids had co-evolved to the extent that the aphids would no longer excrete the globule of sap until an ant gives it a top on the back so the ant could pick it up there and then, a bit like going shop to pick up a carton of milk. The ants even evolved to pick up the aphids and move them to other trees when the tree got unhealthy or else was being overrun by predators. This symbiotic relationship continues to this day, quite possibly in your garden, and is one of the most successful partnerships in nature, but their are billions more relationships like this.

The ways that species cooperate to gain mutual advantage is as rich as the ways that species compete and prey each other, something that both Darwin and Alfred Lord Wallace, the other British scientist who independently explained evolution through natural selection, observed and wrote a lot about in their papers. But it was the competition, the “nature is red in tooth and claw” side that Victorian society focused on, perhaps to justify their less than friendly activities, and this bias in perception still persists I think.

All this complex behaviour is programmed into the DNA of living things. It is mind-bogglingly elegant important for us humans to understand, and yet we are destroying much of this beauty today by decimating so many ecosystems.

Human’s ancestors go “eusocial” 

Archaeology has been able to trace the human genetic line back pretty accurately. Let’s go back one or two million years – our ancestors living in Africa were not yet the homo-sapiens that we are today, but they were standing on two feet like us, they were manipulating tools with dextrous hands, and about this time had started to use fire to pre-digest food before eating it, and to keep themselves warm.

Crucially by this time they had made that leap to eusociality, joining the bees and the ants and the other social insects, by setting up camps where they could rear young in relative safety, and allow division of labour that gave them a big advantage over other species. The main difference compared to us now was brain size – roughly half the size compared to anatomically modern sapiens, but from this point on it grew very rapidly compared to speed that anatomies tend to change over time through evolution.

Homo becomes “sapiens” (brainy)

There is a lot of debate among evolutionary biologist today as to what caused this “explosion” in braininess. Some say it was due to our manipulation of tools that kicked everything off. For instance, that simulating the path of a spear to intersect a fleeing animal uses the same sort of mental agility that is required for manipulating language. So tools begat language. Some say it was the other way round. Some say it was through needing to fathom the complexities of social interaction in the clans of humans.

What is sure is that by definition human nature evolved during this time of getting brainy (sapience!), albeit on top of the nature of primitive apes, who were also social, but not eusocial. Hence our human nature is a product of this period after we became eusocial, and during which we began to use tools in clever ways, and develop complex language, and that is evolved through selection pressures. In other words, being human gave us advantages, and that does not just mean spears and tools etc, but our emotional capacity, our ability to empathise, the ability to bond with each other through music, to share common beliefs however fanciful, these are all evolved traits.

Selfishness vs Altruism

One of the most unique things about being human is the fact that sometimes we can act in very selfish ways, and sometimes we can act in very selfless ways. If you think about it most animals are either individuals looking out for #1 (the lone predators like sharks, tigers etc spring to mind), or else totally selfless like ants or bees that will sacrifice themselves for the benefit of the colony. In contrast most humans teeter in between, react to the situation, always adapting to the context, not necessarily consciously.

This Jekyll and Hyde quality is a direct result of the fact that in our case evolutionary pressure acted on us at both an individual level, as members of a clan had to compete within a group for access to resources and mates, and at a group level, as clans fought it out for access to resources and mates, and by no means not just in direct combat, but that as well. A clan that was full of selfish individuals who would never put themselves on the line for the team, would always lose out in the end to one that could pull together in a crisis, that could communicate and collaborate productively together, that was bonded emotionally through common beliefs and rituals. But competition within groups was throughout also an advantage to the group as a whole. It is also certain that clans would splinter, merge, conquer and be conquered and individuals would have to adapt to their new situation pretty rapidly. They still do in many ways.

All these contradictory selective pressures acted on a brain that was already quite big, and able to get bigger, and hence we were able to evolve into this ultimately nimble, creative and adaptive species. That does not mean we are the best species. I really don’t think nature has favourites and we are definitely turning out to be a problem child in some ways.

Human nature

To conclude, our ability to adapt our behaviour and emotions, from selfish to altruistic, and many more dimensions besides, is at the heart of human nature. But it comes at somewhat of a price, since the flip side of the coin is that we are destined to be always torn between conflicting loyalties and urges. This is also something we just have to come to terms with.

But I do believe we are the most adaptive. Our ability to adapt our behaviour, and our emotions to rapidly changing contexts is at the heart of what makes humans unique, that is human nature.

Although I have only described on few episodes in the epic story that lead to the emergence of our species, I hope you can see the sort of process by which layers of structure emerge on top of each other leading to the sort of rich tapestries in nature that can see today, as well as our own complex behaviours and interrelations.

The story really speeds up now. The human brain has kicked off an incredibly rapid and disruptive shift in the realm of evolution. It is now not just biological species that are evolving, but also technological ones.

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(The second half of this lecture will be published shortly once I have formatted my notes!)

CREDITS: I have borrowed a lot from 2 authors in particular in pulling this together:

– Edward O. Wilson: “Concilience” (1997) “The Social Conquest of Earth” (2012)

– Kevin Kelly: What Technology Wants (2011)

Links and other info on these books can be found on my favourite books page.

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An initiative aimed at supporting international web / mobile brands grow in Japan, and developing Japanese growth hacking talent

I was recently interviewed for a Japanese creative industry magazine “Project Design” to talk about the relevance of “Growth Hacking” (Japanese article here), the approach to growing web and mobile startups that has come to prominence in recent years, to established and non-web businesses. I was interviewed in Japanese, but wrote up the main threads of the conversation in English below.

First of all though some context. Why was I being interviewed about Growth Hacking? I have been a involved a lot with startups one way or another. I have had numerous startups as clients over the years, companies with a good product-market-fit for Japan for whom my company has effectively been the growth team for the Japan market. Also through my role as a mentor for 500 Startups, Silicon Valley’s top accelerator program, where I offer advice to founders and growth hackers on how to grow in in particular, but anywhere for that matter. I also run Growth Hacking Japan University, a 7 week lecture course in Japanese that I have run twice now, and plan to run again soon, teaching growth hacking techniques and strategies to Japanese founders and aspiring growth hackers, and learning a lot from the participants at the same time.

Most of the time I work with bigger established brands, including cloud tech companies and web services, for whom we (Profero Tokyo) position ourselves as “the performance engine” that drives incremental results in one or a combination of marketing areas. I would not describe this work as “growth hacking” per se, but being so focused on KPIs and striving to create operational efficiencies, actually the work has a lot in common with what a growth team in a web startup would be doing, and this is recognised by several of our client partners. Ginger-Software, the disruptive native English writing technology, founded in Israel, is one brand for whom we fulfil this role in Japan.

At Profero Tokyo we are very conscious of the hybrid team we bring to each brand partner, the skill sets that combine when our specialists work together to create additional value, both through coming up with ideas that cross disciplines, as well as synergies that drive efficiencies for our clients, and in this sense we have embraced the growth hacking philosophy.

Here are my notes from the interview:

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Growth hacking can inform the philosophy, techniques and most importantly the hybrid teams that established companies should bring to new business models.

Growth hacking needs an agile environment

The whole point of Growth Hacking is to grow a new business model as quickly as possible. That objective is shared by many established companies when they start a new business division or launch new products, so in principle there is nothing stopping big companies from “growth hacking”. However, growth hacking works best in the purest sense when nothing is held sacred, allowing the product-market fit to be established without constraints, such as “brand XXX’s target are always YYYY type of consumers”. Nurturing this sort of agility into the culture and environment of a big company is very hard to do, hence why companies tend to become less innovative as they get bigger.

One way of looking at what changes when you go from a small agile startup to a big established company with many stakeholders, existing customers and partners, is to think in terms of where the efficiencies are coming from, since all business models need to be creating efficiencies of scale of some kind or another if they are to grow.

In small companies with very little baggage and a small cohesive team internal efficiencies should be off the chart, but because the business model has no scale yet in the market, it enjoys minimal external efficiencies. As companies grow and gain momentum in their market they go through a tipping point beyond which they have broad awareness among their audience, people know what to expect, they can enjoy economies of scale when purchasing, and in general external efficiencies get better. But at the same time they tend to become more complex internally with multiple management levels, physical and social distance between employees in different departments, more complicated decision making processes and more friction in general.

So a lack of agility within some big companies would likely prevent a growth hacking type model to whir within it. But in its purest ‘bootstrapping’ sense growth hacking is not always necessary or the most efficient route to success anyway. Where a new business division can leverage the strength of established business models and a symbiotic ecosystem can be created, such as Apple succeeded in doing across its hardware and software business, then that is the quickest route to success, and Growth Hacking doctrine would demand that that is the route taken. iTunes was never a standalone music store. The App Store only exists because of Apple’s mobile hardware. Building out an consumer ecosystem in a pre-planned way can be the right approach, provided you get the strategy spot on.

Having said that, I remember reading an interview many years ago I think after the iPod took off, in which Steve Jobs said that his main role was insulating his R&D team from being influenced by the commercial influences elsewhere in the business, nurturing a free-thinking environment for a group of super smart product designers and developers. Everyone knows what happened after that. Although I would not call Apple’s astounding run of innovation growth hacking, creating a free thinking context in which experiment can happen and a tight team can work fervently together is I believe also necessary for the growth hacking scenario.

Rapid Prototyping cycles for product-market fit

So when is Growth Hacking relevant and possible for big businesses? At its heart Growth Hacking is an ongoing series of experiments, each one built on the intelligence gained from the those than ran before it. This is essentially iterative prototyping, a concept that is no way a new idea for big companies, but in the case of web startups they are doing it in public, or to anyone who will pay attention, and getting feedback directly to tune the product and the marketing mechanics at the same time. For many reasons not least the desire to keep new developments unseen from competitors, it is harder for big companies to do this process in the open.

The iterative method is founded on data. If there is no way to capture the performance of the product as data and use that data to make informed decisions about how to improve the product and market it better then forget the Growth Hacking idea. It’s something else at that point. This may well limit true growth hacking to web and mobile companies where the products are literally plugged into the market itself, but I am open minded on this point. All kinds of products are getting hooked into the internet-of-things now, and reporting performance data back to engineers and designers. Either way it does not stop other companies from using the ideas and approaches that are bound up with growth hacking.

Implicit in the argument above is the assumption that the marketing model and the product experience can co-evolve together. Often when companies get big and established one ends up downstream of the other. In many growth-hacked web services these days, the user experience itself comprises viral mechanisms that bring other users in, so that the product does its own marketing. Even if the viral effects are not wired into the product in this way, the product and the way it is distributed needs to allow for really short prototyping cycles. This principle is something that big companies could learn from, or at least aspire to this ideal, since often they place marketing downstream of R&D, which can end up in the miserable scenario of trying to sell products that are unsellable.

Connect customers & growth team directly

Spelling this principle out in terms of the people involved, the ideal is to short cut the feedback loop between those designing and creating the product and its ultimate customers as much as possible. The word “growth hacking” feels very cold and technical, not really the ‘human insight based thinking’ that we like to boast about in marketing, nor the ‘customer centric culture’ that corporate CEOs work so hard to advocate in their companies. In a way though the growth hacking approach is the MOST customer centric approach there is, provided that the data being collected and used for optimising with actually does represent the value the customers are bringing to your brand and bottom line, in both the short and long term.

Thus the quintessential growth hacking metrics-based process of experimentation and optimisation is in simple terms a way to short cut the ‘prototype > test > iterate’ loop and make it spin as quickly as possible with the least separation between market and product evolution. This efficiency is what underpins the “fastest route to success” philosophy at the heard of the growth hacking movement.

Anyone who has worked in a science laboratory or R&D lab recognises this process, and so in a sense growth hacking start-ups have effectively put the lab at the centre of the business. In too many big businesses not only can the R&D department become a costly appendage, but the scientific approach often loses out to internal politics or other constraints, or else the R&D amounts to just tinkering with existing formats because the bigger vision has been forgotten or become obsolete.

Defining the necessary conditions

So I believe big companies can benefit from growth hacking style approach to growing a new business model, but they have to set up the context to mirror to some extent that of a startup in the following ways:

• It should be run by a few people who “own it”: passionate about the idea and strongly incentivised to make it work, ideally through equity ownership
• These leaders should be given the responsibility to take decisions without committee agreement, leading to forthright decision making and accountability
• Allow risk taking and accept failure as a natural part of the process. Experimentation is needed to hit on the right formula, and you are unlikely to hit on it first time.
• Start off with as few people as possible. The last thing the leaders need is a big team to manage before they know what it is they need to be doing.
• You need to create an efficient, no-fat-on-the-bone base upon which to build out a profitable model. Too much resource early on, either people or money, will lead to inefficiencies that will at worse kill it prematurely, or else get baked into the business and restrict profitability later on.
• Give the business brand-independence, enough for it to be able to tell its own stories and connect to a distinct audience that becomes its early adopter customer base from which an early majority can be recruited.

The importance of a brand narrative

This last point about the need for brand independence is often forgotten I believe, but companies whose founders understand how to grow a brand often take off faster and win big in the long term. This is because they are making the technology mean something more than what its features would imply on their own. In my experience people often forget that the experience people have is fundamentally different depending on what they are looking to get out of it, and this is dependent on how well it is branded and the communications around it. No first time user touches a feature set without preconceptions, so framing this interaction and the ongoing usage is the role of the brand.

Founders and companies with simple, powerful brand identities and compelling ideas around their technology, such as Phil Libin with Evernote’s “remember everything”, or Mark Beniof’s with Salesforce.com death-to-software narrative, are so good at selling their technology story that we forget just what masters they are at branding. Both men had plenty of business experience before founding the companies that made them famous, and it shows.

I would say that successful startups always have a strong “founders story”, a vision to make the world better, core values, that for better or worse get baked into the brand perception from early on. Even if they are not a consumer-facing brand, this narrative is important for getting others excited about its potential, which is always necessary. These stakeholders are the investors, journalists and early hires in tech startups. But the same thing goes for new business models springing off big business, where the equivalents would be the board members, the individuals transferred in or hired into the business as well as the consumers who would adopt the new product.

So although it is very hard to generalise about how business models should get built out, the brand story and how it enables businesses to captivate each subsequent audience as it builds its following is one, and the other is the way the internal team expands.

Growth teams and growth hackers

It is my belief that team structure is the most important area of growth hacking for big or established companies to take note of, not least in starting off slim, but what type of people are brought into the mix.

If we generalise a growth team into specialists and generalist, a room full of generalists is not ideal, but then nor is a room full of specialists, and yet this is often the make up you see.

You definitely need deep vertical expertise. In a web start up you might have an SEM specialist, a PR specialist, a contents marketing / social media specialist and product developer as the first 4 members of a growth team. The challenge is getting these relatively diverse skill sets to work cohesively together so that much needed synergies emerge. It is even harder in big companies where these verticals might already exist as distinct departments, potentially physically separated.

In order to get them working synergistically you need someone who can speak all all their respective lingoes, and who has a sense for the difference between just showing up in that area, and actually driving competitive advantage. Who is that person? It needs to be someone who has themselves dived into these skill sets at one point, not to the extent that they became an expert in all of them, but typically in one area at least.

These multi-skilled individuals are the sort of people who, being quick learners, dive headlong into a knowledge specialism for a while, get to the point where they understand 90% of it, can perceive the nature of expertise in that last 10%, but do not fancy spending the next 3+ years to perfect those skills themselves. And then they move on to another vertical. They get bored as quickly as they get inspired, but rather than being a weakness, it equips them with a rare combination of literacies.

Not T-shaped, but “rake-shaped” talent is key

In management theory they are similar to the T-shaped people, but actually more like a “rake”, or Japanese “kuma–te” meaning “bear’s claw”. You heard it here first! Ideally you can find one of these talents who also has leadership potential, and build the team around them, since they can be the bridge that gets the teams working together efficiently.

These sorts of people are rare and hence very valuable assets, especially if the areas they can bridge between map to the necessary skill sets of your business, and have the communication skills to forge a team spirit. These sorts have been key drivers in the growth of the US silicon valley tech startups, where they are highly prized but they are even rarer in Japan. These people represent the “growth hacker” archetype, and so perhaps more so than “growth hacking” the approach, it is this archetypal skill set that is most important to highlight beyond web and mobile startups.

In Japan deep vertical expertise is celebrated and rewarded. Finding your craft and plugging away at it for a lifetime earns you respect and career progression. This is no bad thing, and Japan’s ongoing success as an economic force is built on this tradition. Japan does not have a shortage of specialist, I believe.

However, the way companies and careers are structured it makes it hard for multi-disciplinary careers to be nurtured within companies, and hence there are not many growth hacker types around, and I believe this is a limiting factor on Japan’s economic success going forward that needs to be addressed.

The post Growth Hacking for brands and how to grow a hybrid team appeared first on James Hollow's Blog about Hybrid Thinking.