At this year's Unbound Festival of innovation, one theme that stood out was the methods that businesses are using to keep up with the ever-changing demands on their products and brands. Here's what we learnt:

1. GET STRATEGY
SMART AT UNBOUND
Keeping up with the
customers

2. GET STRATEGY SMART AT UNBOUND
Keeping up with the customers
Unbound Festival is an annual celebration of innovation; the conference brings together
speakers from a host of industries, with established businesses, disruptors and start-ups
coming together to discuss the future, and how we might get there from where we are today.
Throughout this year’s keynotes and panels, one theme that stood out was the methods that
businesses are using to keep up with the ever-changing demands on their products and brands,
including tracking consumer behaviour, crowdsourcing information and having conversations
with customers.
TRACKING BEHAVIOUR
Arguably the simplest way to understand customers is to track their online behaviour. Media
brands were particularly vocal throughout Unbound about the importance of tracking to help
understand how to best fit products into users’ lives. Hayley Cochrane, Head of Digital at Mail
Metro Media, believes that this understanding helped the Mail Online to achieve the status of
the biggest English-speaking news brand in the world, by becoming a place people visit every
day:
“We’ve managed to weave our way into people’s daily routines,
their rituals…”
She described the clear pattern of visits the Mail Online website receives - with a regular 8am
spike on mobile, lunchtime visits on desktops, 3pm during the coffee break, 6pm for the
commute home, 10pm pre-bed; and then mothers, using the site throughout the night as they
feed their children. Kate Ward, SVP at Refinery29, a digital media company aimed at women,
described how they used a similar insight to develop content. Tracking helped them uncover
that horoscopes did incredibly well on Sunday evenings, as people prepared for the week
ahead, while a series called ‘Five things at 5pm’ on Instagram served to enrich users’ daily
commute.
Tracking customers’ behaviour can be a highly informative exercise – it allows us to see their
true actions, that people themselves might not always be aware of, and uncover insights that
would remain hidden otherwise. Having these precious insights means brands can understand
their customers better and, hence, can better optimize their media activity.
CROWDSOURCING INFORMATION
Brands are no longer just using social media for customer service, but are designing its rich,
complex, real-time data into business operations and messaging. Finlay Clark, UK Country

3. GET STRATEGY SMART AT UNBOUND
Keeping up with the customers
Manager of navigation software Waze highlighted how attitudes towards this kind of
crowdsourced data have changed incredibly quickly:
‘Two years ago, people would say that it [crowdsourced
information] was not that reliable’ – Finlay Clark, Waze
There are two main reasons crowdsourcing has been so rapidly adopted – firstly, it offers real-
time information, which is precious in the current fast paced ever-changing context. Fergus
Weldon, Director of Data Science at the Trainline, pointed out that “the quickest source of
information is Twitter”; the company then supplements this real-time data with machine
learning to optimise journeys.
Secondly, crowdsourcing offers an ever-more important indication of the things people care
most about. Hege Sæbjørnsen, Country Sustainability Manager, Ikea described how
crowdsourced information drove the retailer to act on single-use plastics – while IKEA had
previously considered cutting down plastics use, the final decision to focus on the issue was
influenced by the fact that the concern seemed pertinent to the whole of the UK. The final
execution was driven by a grassroots movement. Sæbjørnsen concluded, “I don't think it would
have been articulated that way had it not been for that movement.”
Twitter itself is having to evolve to keep up with its customers’ voices and the evolving
importance of its content. The platform has a “complex role in the world,” according to Martha
Lane Fox, who sits on its board. Twitter has a huge online reach with 350m users, but it is the
amplification in the offline world that makes it extraordinary – tweets regularly get picked up
by the media and “it becomes the story”. It is used heavily by politicians and journalists, making
it a very important platform that can keep users updated in real time. This is not the use-case
Twitter was built for, but it is updating its business based on the way people are using the
product at any one time.
Crowdsourced information is proving increasingly important to businesses; its potential as a
free and up-to-date source of insight should not be overlooked, as it can fuel brand relevance
and high levels of responsiveness to the external context.
HAVING A CONVERSATION
While watching behaviour and listening to customers’ opinions is important, the true potential
of the internet, arguably, is in the ability to have conversations with the customers. This is
exactly what the new challenger bank Monzo prides itself on, having earnt 800,000 customers
in the two years since it launched with no traditional marketing; instead Monzo focuses on its

4. GET STRATEGY SMART AT UNBOUND
Keeping up with the customers
community, which allows it to grow purely through word of mouth and referrals, according to
Monzo’s Head of Marketing and Community, Tristan Thomas.
This model of growth forced Monzo to get people bought in enough to tell their friends about
the bank; one way to achieve this was to ask for their opinion. Thomas explained that Monzo
sought to build something that appealed to 95% of the market. To do this, the bank asks its
customers what they want through its community forum, then builds the products and services
people asked for, and keeps the community updated on the bank’s progress so people feel
involved.
While these kind of opt-in, online conversations may not be achievable for all brands, giving
customers a forum for feedback and clearly addressing it is likely to lead to deeper
engagement as customers feel involved in the brands’ decisions.
IMPLICATIONS FOR BRAND AND BUSINESS STRATEGY
The democratization of voices and the constant ability to listen mean that businesses today are
embarking on near-constant cycles of evolution. Alex Marquez, founder at growth consultancy
Propellerfish, focused on the impact this was having on product development. He reminded us
of the traditional rule: that you spent 20% of your time developing a product and 80% of your
time marketing said product. Marquez suggested that as businesses listened more to their
customers they were reorienting towards better products with “marketing built into the
product… the narrative has to be built in.”
The highly responsive data-driven approach to business has many advantages when it comes
to better meeting customer needs; however, it also poses strategic risks. Constantly tracking
and reacting to information is resource-intensive and means that businesses are at risk of
having less capacity to be proactive, to think long-term. The need to constantly adapt means a
heightened need for a strong strategic vision, a set of values and a purpose to ensure that a
brand remains recognizable and stays true to itself as it evolves.
Charbel Aoun, AI City Managing Director EMEA, of NVidia warned that the challenge is only
going to intensify: “wait till you see what happens in one minute of IoT [internet of things]”. As
the world becomes more connected and even more data becomes available, businesses will
have to learn to balance the constant deluge of data with long-term thinking if they want to
survive.

5. GET STRATEGY SMART AT UNBOUND
Keeping up with the customers
If you are interested in learning more about the subject of this article, please contact Sarah
Emmerson, Insights Planner, emmersons@bbdoknows.com
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