Being a 90:10 Business

As you may or may not have heard we recently left Brando Social to setup The 90:10 Group.  It’s been a great 13 months that saw us grow from a team of 2 to 15, build a network of leading thinkers from around the globe and achieve some pretty significant client wins along the way. I’m incredibly proud of the Brando Social team, what we achieved and my time there. Thanks to the trust of both The Band & Brown Group and their clients we got to deliver some exciting projects that pushed the boundaries and gave us great learnings along the way.

So why 90:10? At Brando Social we relished the challenge of helping evolve a PR group and their respective client base to be a better fit with the changing media landscape. Without doubt they as a discipline can truly bring about the effective use of new and important environments. However the deeper we got the stronger our beliefs became in that the value of social technology is much more than its use as a media. Social technology has the power to change the world we live in. It has already changed politics forever. It is changing business whether business likes it or not. It is not a fad. People are never going to give up this new found power. They will generally use it for good to fashion their world into a better place.

It became our belief that if business can effectively embrace the power of the network it will help make better products that people want, with cheaper routes to market, therefore leading to less waste. The impact will be felt by everyone not just the business as we will all benefit from cheaper, better and more useful products / services to help us in our particular lives. The trade off for businesses, in order to earn permission from the crowd to join their community and tap into their energy, must be a better business. They must be consistent, honest, clear in purpose and its articulation through actions not just your words. If they can rise to this challenge, as some have already started to do, the gains will be huge.

So our focus became to bring about change across the whole business making greater efficiencies, better products and the like. Previously this kind of conversation was outside of our clients remit. Even in a marketing and PR context they needed permissions from the board to change how they measure success before they could really start to use communities as anything more than a channel. So it became clear our client needed to be the decision makers at CEO / CFO / MD level. At a time when money is tight the opportunity we present is a timely and attractive one. As many sectors such as publishing and music are finding out to a greater or lesser extent a disruption is coming your way. So change can be brought about either from the top or via an external force. Our role is to help facilitate this change as a consultancy or bring it to life in solutions for whole industries.

The reason why we choose to use the ratio 90:10 to represent this mission statement is as follows:

For the last 500 years as David C tells it we have all been passive consumers on the end of a linear production line. Broadcast media reflected that.

It was a supplier heavy scenario with at least 90% of the energy to go from an idea to a sale coming from the producer. Idea generation, design, R&D, productization, through to the marketing and the distribution of it, came from inside the organisation. The consumer arrived for the last 10% – where they simply bought the product – 10% consumer, 90% the business.

With the arrival of the Internet and then simple social technologies from email to Facebook the world has been turned on its head. The consumer is no longer passive. They are participatory. They have opinion and more importantly they trust these opinions. They are the media and they are now ‘visually’ in control. I say visually because the notion of control was always an illusion as most conversations were hidden.

I can’t think of one sector unaffected by this major disruption. Whilst this may sound like a very threatening statement its only so to those that choose not to take the opportunity to evolve and adapt what are generally out-dated and fairly ineffective business models. To the others this is an opportunity. An opportunity to make direct, real-time connections with consumers on a global scale. The opportunity is to be a 90:10 business where 90% of the energy is coming from the consumer.

As demonstrated by the diagram below previously organisations were ‘mediator’ reliant whether that be an agency or media owner. Now success is only really engagement dependent.

We have already begun putting 90:10 thinking into practice across a number of clients and sectors. The successes of which we will share with you over the coming months. It is an exciting time as we bring in yet more great minds into the process with offices now opening in France, Italy, Spain and Germany.