In the sixth episode of AdTech | AlikeAudience, Founder & Chief Collaboration Officer, Collabor8 Group Pty Ltd, Phil James, Co-founder of AlikeAudience, Ronald Kwok, and Director of The Brand Creatives, Jessica Lam, discuss the relevance of diversity in the field of marketing.
Tune in below to listen to their interesting conversation about some of the recent developments and trends in the inclusive marketing, including:
• How diversity can help unlock strategic advantages for clients.
• Building a team with diversified cultures and backgrounds.
• Diverse perspectives that people from different parts of the world might bring to a particular subject matter.
• How diversity, going broad and going wide, unlocks opportunity.
• Discussion on examples of successful and failed case studies.
Meet your host: Jessica Lam Hill Young
Jessica Lam: Welcome to the sixth episode of AlikeAudience’s AdTech podcast, where we discuss the latest ad tech trends and industry insights and a series of interviews with industry leaders. I’m Jessica, the director of the brand creatives, a boutique agency creating thought leadership content for tech companies.
Guests for the Episode: Phil James and Ronald Kwok
Jessica Lam: I’m hosting the podcast today with Phil James, founder of the Collabor8 Group in Sydney, a collaborator with brands like Unilever and Honda, as well as startups that innovate and differentiate in the market. I would also like to introduce Ronald Kwok. He’s the co-founder of AlikeAudience and heads the AlikeAudience team, with a passion for diversity and team-building. Today, we’ll discuss diversity for brands and how marketers can strategically differentiate brands with data-driven insights and creative thinking.
Experience and accomplishments
Jessica Lam: So let’s jump right in. Welcome to the podcast, Phil and Ronald. Let’s start with you, Phil. Tell me more about your career so far and about Collabor8.
Phil James: Sure, thank you for having me on the podcast. In a nutshell, I’m both a social animal and a marketing geek. What does that mean? It means that I spent a lot of time with marketing folks, whether they be creative talent, strategic marketers, or with clients. On the other side of the ledger, I help solve business challenges through the power of diverse creativity. That’s what I do in a nutshell.
My background has spanned a couple of decades, working primarily with fast-moving consumer goods in classic marketing and innovation roles on the client-side for many, many years. I’ve built brands, categories, and businesses for the last seven years. In fact, next year Collabor8 will be eight years old. Collabor8 was founded on the basis of trying to do things differently but distinctively, where diversity of talent and diversity of capability really comes to the fore. And of course, the subject matter today, we’ll talk about diversity. I’d love to explain in due course how diversity really can help unlock strategic advantages for clients.
Jessica Lam: Thank you, I find it really fascinating. So what about you, Ronald? Would you introduce yourself? And what are your day to day responsibilities at AlikeAudience?
Ronald Kwok: Thank you so much, Jessica. I’m Ronald, co-founder of AlikeAudience. AlikeAudience, just like Collabor8, is a seven-year-old company. But we are a data company that helps and empowers marketers to reach target audiences through programmatic media buy. Before jumping deep into what the company does and what data is, I want to focus on my role in which I’ve helped build a team with diversified cultures and backgrounds so that the team can work harmoniously in a smooth working environment. Hopefully, they do enjoy the working environment. It illustrates how diversity helps the company’s growth.
Defining diversity in the context of their roles
Jessica Lam: Thank you, Ronald. Let’s step back a little bit. I’d like to define the term diversity because it can mean different things for different people. In the context of both your roles, how would you define that very loaded term, diversity? Phil, maybe you can start first?
Diversity means going broad and wide to get a collective experience
Phil James: Sure. When we think about diversity, we’re not thinking about it in those classic terms of age, gender and race. We’re really thinking about diversity in terms of perspective.
A diverse perspective is something that a group of folks from different parts of the world might bring to a particular subject matter. I’m sure you’re familiar with the term same same, but different. Same same, but different implies you’ve got a lot of proximity of perspective, a lot of similarity of perspective. And there are nuances of difference.
For us, and for our clients, more importantly, the thought of diversity is to go broad and go wide. And it tends to be around a geographic span first, so go around the world to find different talents. And then different backgrounds in terms of vocation or different experiences. So all these elements of difference can bring diverse or collective intelligence. It can bring collective experiences that can enable new ways of thinking. Diversity is about the breadth and depth of different backgrounds and perspectives.
Jessica Lam: So you would describe it as different perspectives from very diverse people and diverse backgrounds, diverse cultures, etc.
Phil James: Yeah, it’s really about experiences and perspectives. The wider, the broader you can go in terms of engagement of diverse crowds; let’s call it that, diverse groups of people, the more we can unlock different points of view, let’s even say challenging points of view. Okay? If everyone’s the same, if everyone’s similar, if everyone’s same same, but a little bit different, then the universe for growth, universe for opportunity, in our view, in our experience, is heavily limited and heavily constrained. So diversity, going broad, going wide, unlocks opportunity. That’s our mantra. That’s our very strong belief.
Jessica Lam: I think that’s really important as well in today’s world to drive innovation. What about you, Ronald? When you hear the term diversity, what do you think of it, or how would you define it? Do you have a different definition?
Diversity means embracing differences and practicing empathy
Ronald Kwok: Thank you, Jessica. Basically, when I first met the term diversity, I also got the same idea, just like Phil mentioned, like, sex, race, age, these kinds of diversity. However, when I build my team, this works differently now. Everyone’s unique. We came from different backgrounds, no matter our education, no matter our family background, and how we were raised; these are all diversity, I would say. Everybody is raised differently. We all experience it differently throughout our lives. We see that difference in these characters, skills, or expertise actually helps the team grow, just like Phil mentioned. All similarity just heavily limited the growth, the ceiling.
We need to embrace each other’s differences. And this actually strengthens the empathy. We learn from others and basically learn the best out of others. That also helps us grow. This is the key message from the diversity that I see.
Why is diversity important for businesses?
Jessica Lam: It sounds like it’s very similar to what Phil was saying about having different backgrounds and how that improves building teams as well. Both of you are founders of companies, and you’re marketers. So why is this idea of diversity so important to what you do and for business in general?
Diversity opens up more pathways to solve problems
Phil James: If we think about business, ultimately, success in business will come fundamentally from solving problems. You’re solving consumer problems. You’re solving client problems. You’re solving marketing problems. If we take the view that our job fundamentally is to solve problems, the way to solve problems is to have a choice of possibilities. It is to have a selection of possibilities, of possible outcomes to solve problems, right? There’s more than one way to skin a cat, is the old expression. Diversity and building teams with different backgrounds, as I said, open up the opportunity for more pathways to solve problems.
Now, if I use an example, let me just take you on a little bit of an analogy, a bit of a journey. Imagine you’re a chef in a five-star restaurant. And your challenge is to come up with a wonderful, fresh and innovative meal to put on the menu. Okay? So that’s your challenge. The resources that are given to you on this particular occasion are 10 ingredients. Okay, so your 10 ingredients have to make a wonderful meal and something new and exciting to solve this culinary challenge. Okay, so imagine ourselves in this situation. Imagine also that those 10 ingredients are all the same. You’ve been given 10 humble chicken eggs. That’s it. You need to create a wonderful meal out of 10 eggs, nothing else. What do you think the chances are of cracking, no pun intended but cracking a big creative idea for a menu option. I mean, it’s limited, right? It’s arguably negligible.
But if the challenge was posed in a slightly different way, if you as a chef were given the same challenge to come up with a really innovative meal and you were given 10 ingredients, and those 10 Ingredients spread the span of protein and dairy, herbs and spices and vegetables. You had an Open Pantry of 10 ingredients. I’m sure you’d knock that recipe out of the world, out of the park, world-beating recipe.
That’s the same thing when it comes to teams, when it comes to problem-solving for businesses and solving problems creatively. I don’t want 10 eggs. I want a pantry of ingredients. And so we go around the world, we curate talent, different backgrounds, different perspectives, different experiences. And it’s the combination of those ingredients, those creative ingredients, that enable those wonderful recipes to be developed and those meals to be served as solutions to business problems. That’s the fundamental approach that drives what we do.
Jessica Lam: I think that’s a really great visual example of team-building with a chef in the kitchen. So what about you, Ronald? Do you have any thoughts on that?
Diversity creates a win-win situation for all parties involved
Ronald Kwok: I don’t have a story on food to share. I think from two perspectives. The first one is about problem-solving skills, hard skills. When you face diversity, it’s very interesting that people have some built-in thinking and operation modes in their minds that shaped themselves in the past 20 or 30 years. It may create some chaos or disputes when you work with teammates like those in short term. But in long term, you see how others achieve something better than you do, and you can learn from that. That actually brings you to a higher layer of problem-solving. That’s the hard skills part that I see why diversity helps.
On the other side, it’s about soft skills, definitely. So about the soft skills side, it’s about understanding others’ culture, and the rationale behind why others are doing things in that particular behaviour to make that decision. That creates empathy, just like I mentioned earlier. Just like Phil mentioned, business is about keeping on searching for problems and building the corresponding solutions that the market needs. Once you understand your target users well, you will never find it hard to create value for your users. So it’s easier to embrace diversity to create a win-win situation after all.
Jessica Lam: So, from your perspective, understanding the problems that businesses have and learning from other people who have different experiences can also help to solve problems, right?
Ronald Kwok: Yes, that’s the key. This is nothing about diversity. It’s about the business itself. If you don’t understand your user well, basically, you cannot create any corresponding solutions or services for them. This is fundamental.
Case studies proving diversity can lead to success
Jessica Lam: I can definitely see how what you said about diversity would help solve those issues as well. So there are some common threads there. I’m wondering, so we’ve talked about this in very general, abstract terms, but I love to get some specific examples. Phil, I know you’ve been doing this for a long time. Do you have any case studies of how you apply this kind of thinking to help businesses innovate? With your clients?
Success Story: How a Lebanese creator solved a crucial problem for an Australian business
Phil James: Absolutely. There are lots of case studies I can refer to, but one that comes to mind, clearly upfront, is a project we worked on some years ago with Nestle in the Asia Pacific region. The KitKat brand, specifically. For the problem solving, the setup was that the client, the KitKat team, had been working with their advertising agency to try and crack a really clever and impactful execution idea for their KitKat advertising. And while they had a very strong strategic idea, they were really finding it difficult to capture the essence to bring it to life. So after a while, our team was brought in to bring some creative inspiration to help the agency move forward. Our role was about inspiration – creative inspiration.
We went to the marketplace. Through our diverse creative approach, we went to the marketplace and solicited 280 different ideas, diverse ideas from creators across 40 different countries. A really rich, broad and deep set of creative concepts from around the world to answer the problem that was defined in the communications brief. Now, what ultimately happened, if we cut to the chase of it, what ultimately happened is one particular idea resonated so much with the team. And then, in subsequent testing with consumers, it was a must-do idea. It was the must-execute idea that inspired the agency. The agency went on and produced a piece of copy that had great success, great impact, first of all, in the market, and great success for the brand.
The point of this story is the creative idea, or more importantly, the creator behind the idea came from Lebanon. It was a Lebanese creator from Lebanon, not a Lebanese creator living in Australia, solving a problem for KitKat here in Australia, but a creator sitting in the Middle East, trying to solve a problem for KitKat here in Australia, and brought such a powerfully different concept.
Their perspective on solving this particular problem for KitKat was so different, so interesting, and so unexpected. It stood out from the crowd. It stood out from the pack. And it unlocked, as I said, the creative juices of KitKat’s agency that then went on to produce the famous catapult ad piece for KitKat. It ran in Australia, and it also ran in seven countries around the world. It was that powerful and had tremendous results for KitKat in the market in terms of sales growth, in terms of market share growth, and, importantly, in terms of consumer love. All stemming from a pool of unique ideas, a pool of creative, diverse concepts from creators all around the world.
It’s a very specific example and a very successful example. And it’s one of many that I could share. I know we’re limited in time, but I think it’s a very important and strong example of the power of diversity in unlocking competitive advantage and in unlocking opportunity.
Jessica Lam: Yeah, I think it’s very interesting how out-of-the-box thinking happens versus in a roomful of executives and soliciting ideas from different countries. What about you, Ronald? You mentioned you’ve built-in perspectives from other people who’s been in the industry. Would you also like to share some examples or some of your experiences with diversity and differentiation?
Case Study: A tale of two marketing strategies – USA and Japan
Ronald Kwok: Yes, absolutely. So I would love to share two cases. One is a good experience. One is a pretty bad experience, I would say. The good part first. So basically, just like I mentioned, AlikeAudience is a data company that offers data solutions to marketers. When we first launched, we actually launched in the United States, and the people there understood our solution well, they used it frequently, and our company grew. When we expanded to other countries like Japan, we actually offered the same initially. However, we see the result was not that good. So we tried to understand more, just like what I mentioned in our previous conversation that understanding is very important.
We jumped into talking to our partners and our users and tried to understand why the result wasn’t good. The localization or the culture behind Japanese, I don’t want to specify one, but this is one of my experiences that they need things to be very precise. Even with the same data solution for the US, they needed elimination of irrelevant target audiences which was already a very good solution for them. But for the Japanese, they needed to be very precise and concise so that they could accurately target those people. Even though it is the same data solution we are offering, we needed to approach them from a different approach. After we learned this, we saw the business is growing a lot in Japan right now. And even for the same engineering team, we offer the same solution, but from a different angle. We achieved a lot right now. So this is why we need to learn from diversity. And that helps businesses grow.
On the other side, there’s a bad experience of mine. One day, I received a call from the Netherlands. I was shocked. I took the call. It was actually from the CMO of one of the milk powder brands. He heard of AlikeAudience and told me that he would love to implement the same solution in 11 APEC countries that we also offer. Not only in Hong Kong but also in some of the Southeast Asian countries. When I received the call, I was thrilled and shocked. I was happy to walk through his team in Asia to see what I could help. I actually talk to them and the representatives in Southeast Asia, and they show no interest at all. They just think this is a command and an order from high level in the headquarter, so they need to obey. I just strongly recommended our products. I walked them through our solutions and what are their strengths so that we could fulfill their need. However, they showed no interest, and they just fulfilled the needs of their high level for three months. We didn’t continue, and the business didn’t sustain.
This is a lesson from myself that I need actually to learn from what they need. We did a business for the first few months. But this is not sustainable. So this explains why diversity is very important. So I keep embracing and bringing a team with diversity so that we can tackle challenges afterward.
Jessica Lam: I love those examples. I think one of the themes I found in both of you is how important it is to bring in and build a team with different perspectives and different backgrounds so that we can understand other people better and implement solutions that other people actually want and resonate with. So well, we’re wrapping up with a final question. There are a lot of marketers who listen to this podcast. I would love if we could perhaps share some strategic insights for their businesses on how we can use creative thinking and diversity to enrich their business.
“Outsiders” working together with local experts can amplify results
Phil James: Perhaps I can jump in here. I think an important insight that I’ve taken out of engagement with brands over many, many years at both the strategic level but also in the market and execution level is the power of not shifting the pendulum too far left or too far right but trying to find balance in everything we do. Now, the relevance of balance in this discussion is that while I promote and I live every day, diversity, as I’ve explained in terms of creative stimulus, in terms of creative inspiration, and we go around the world to unlock possibilities, nothing really beats at the end of the day, the local experts to execute and to bring to life ideas.
So I think the insight that I want to deliver and make clear to our listeners here is when you think about diversity, and you think about breadth and depth, and maybe even naivety, differences and challenge and mentality, it’s a wonderful, powerful resource to unlock possibilities. And to get inspired and put you in a particular way of thinking. It doesn’t preclude, and it certainly doesn’t exclude the local resources, local teams and local partners that know the nuances of the in-the-market experience.
The combination of outsiders or the combination of some degree of strangers in that world of diversity, coming together with the expertise and the knowledge of the locality. I say outside and inside come together, magnify results, amplify results. So start with diversity, start with the breadth and depth of opportunity. And then now local experts, local resources, now informed with inspiration, can execute with excellence. And it’s that whole integration of capability from outside to inside that, in our experience, unlocks the greatest results.
Jessica Lam: I think that’s a quotable line. Outside and insight magnifies and amplifies results. So what about you, Ronald? Would you like to share strategic insights, having run your company very successfully for these years and working across global teams?
Diversity helps you think from others’ perspectives
Ronald Kwok: Yes, indeed. As a business owner, there are a lot of problems and challenges ahead every day. As for brands, they need to do pricing differentiation, different go-to-market strategies, and new designs, so there are a lot of problems that they have to face already every day. So I would say take diversity as one of the solutions, not the only one, to help you ease these problems.
Just like what we mentioned, when you understand others, you will see the difficulty drops a lot because you actually share the same pain. You have empathy for the same problem that you are helping to solve. This helps in not just solving your clients’ problems. When you have a problem like pricing or like go-to-market strategy, think from others’ perspectives, this is already a very good strategy that helps a lot on execution. So basically, this is about what I see and have as a strategy that I have experienced in the past few years. And this helps a lot.
Differentiation doesn’t equal distinctiveness
Phil James: Another important insight, I think, is in recognizing that marketers around the world have tended to fall into the trap of confusing differentiation with distinctiveness. What research has shown is that consumers see brands as very similar. In fact, you would say there’s more similarity in the consumer’s eye than there is a difference. It’s rather ironic if you think. Marketing is all about differentiation.
My point being here that brands have fallen into this trap of thinking about differentiation, linked to similarity, as opposed to distinction. And so, you think of 50 shades of gray. I don’t mean that the novel or the movie, but the notion of there’s gray, there are 50 shades of gray, and they’re all gray. Okay, brands are very similar in the eye of the consumer. And so the power of diversity, the way that we think and we engage with our clients in the notion of diversity, is to break away from 50 shades of gray and bring in an entire color palette, like an assortment of colors. Blue is distinct from red, and red is distinct from yellow, and so on. Distinction is standing out from the crowd. Uber is distinct from the different taxi services that exist in markets, for example.
I think there’s this really important lesson that marketers have really confused the fundamentals of marketing, which is to be different. I would say be distinct and use diversity as an enabler of distinctiveness or distinction, and really try to forget about just being different. I’m going to come back to that comment I made earlier about same same, but different. That is what consumers see; same same, but different. And if you’re investing in a brand, and you’re investing to grow a brand and build equity in a brand and build a business, why be the same? Why be same same, but different? Be different different, and distinctive.
Jessica Lam: I can’t agree more with that. I think that’s a very inspiring insight. And especially with big companies, which tend to be more conservative, they probably need a lot more persuading to overcome.
Phil James: Yeah, exactly. Both persuasion and boldness. I think that’s the other piece, the willingness to be bold, to step away from the comfort zone of similarity and step away from the comfort of same same, but different. To be bold, not necessarily to be brave, but to be bold to take those steps of distinctiveness. That’s what’s going to unlock opportunity. Again, I use the example of Uber. Uber is significantly distinct from the mediocrity of taxis. And they’ve had a significant impact and success in the market. Not same-same, but different-different and distinctive.
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Jessica Lam: Thank you for these inspiring insights. Let’s conclude here, and thank you for listening in. So if you’re enjoying the podcast, we would love for you to leave us a review and tag us on social. You can also subscribe to get more podcast episodes from AlikeAudience. Visit us at www.alikeaudience.com to get transcripts and find out more about our audience segment offerings.
