By Daniel Metz, Specialist, Marketing
Professional Convention Management Association

How do you keep your brand relevant in times where the media landscape seems to change every day and getting an audience to focus for 60 seconds is a near impossibility? Marketing mogul Steve Stoute helped answer these questions as PCMA’s Education Conference Master Series speaker.

Stoute has been a giant in the advertising and marketing industry over the last decade after spending the majority of his career in the music business as a producer and record executive. Since making the switch to advertising and marketing he has worked on some of the world’s most well-known campaigns from McDonalds’ “I’m Lovin’ It” to State Farm’s “Like a Good Neighbor.”

How to be successful

Stoute attributes his successes to having an interest in the unknown, viewing business problems from a different vantage point and focusing on the future. He believes that without curiosity there is no innovation and without innovation your business model is broken. If your brand, business, meeting or event is getting stuck in a routine way of doing things then something has gone wrong and you risk the chance of becoming irrelevant in the eyes of consumers.

Be a Part of Pop Culture

In today’s market everyone is competing for the consumer’s attention. To stay top-of-mind, Stoute urges you to find a way to be a part of the social dialogue. Try to weave your brand into culture and don’t be afraid to change with the times. Stoute references Kodak’s one time monopoly on the camera industry but their complacency toward market and advertising changes was disastrous. It is important to embrace the digital age and study how audiences are communicating with each other so you know how to best reach them.

Today’s Market

Stoute wrote a book entitled The Tanning of America: How Hip-Hop Created a Culture That Rewrote the Rules of a New Economy where he claims that you should not be marketing cross-culturally and segmenting your audience in different silos. Taking a multicultural approach is the way of the future as audiences are paying less attention to race and gender and simply care about good ideas.

Key Takeaways

• If someone has a problem with your idea then that may be the sign you are doing something right. Good ideas force change.
• Make sure your brand is elastic – always able to change as our culture changes
• Stay innovative and focus on what the next big thing is
• You have to force the industry to evolve; it won’t do it on its own.

Be Sociable, Share!

•