As the world moves toward a one-device ecosys­tem and tech­nol­o­gy and plat­forms dis­rupt estab­lished mod­els, brands and mar­keters must adapt as well if they don’t want to die out like the prover­bial dinosaurs in the hotel and cam­era indus­tries. Mar­ket­ing experts say brands and mar­keters must think like entre­pre­neurs and star­tups. They must be proac­tive to avoid dis­rup­tion.

Brands must be more will­ing to take risks and they must be nim­ble and go where con­sumers are, which some­times means into unchart­ed ter­ri­to­ry that doesn’t offer met­rics. And while that can be scary for more tra­di­tion­al and estab­lished brands, their busi­ness and mar­ket­ing mod­els will even­tu­al­ly lose effec­tive­ness, so it’s an imper­a­tive.

Airbnb is one exam­ple of an indus­try dis­rup­tor that caught many brands off guard.

Brands have long stood for con­sis­ten­cy and reli­a­bil­i­ty and tra­di­tion­al busi­ness mod­els have been about effi­cien­cy in rep­e­ti­tion, said Jonathan Hall, pres­i­dent of con­sult­ing at brand devel­op­ment and mar­ket­ing ser­vices firm Added Val­ue.

“But in a world in which Airbnb can dis­rupt an entire indus­try, it’s not what it used to be,” he said at Social Media Week New York.

And, dri­ven by vast tech­no­log­i­cal changes, the future is not what it used to be either, he said.

Adapt Or Die

Inno­va­tions like robot­ics and 3D print­ing will have pro­found effects on indus­tries like health care, edu­ca­tion, and man­u­fac­tur­ing, “fun­da­men­tal­ly [chang­ing] the dynam­ics of industry…and [destroy­ing] exist­ing giants,” Hall said. “It’s an excit­ing and scary time to be in busi­ness.”

This is trick­ling down to mar­ket­ing depart­ments as well.

While mar­ket­ing used to be a lot eas­i­er, the upside is that there are now more oppor­tu­ni­ties than ever to con­nect with con­sumers, said Bonin Bough, vice pres­i­dent of glob­al media and con­sumer engage­ment at food and bev­er­age con­glom­er­ate Mon­delez Inter­na­tion­al.

“Look at the scale and growth of the tech sec­tor and how fast con­sumers [adopt] plat­forms,” Bough said. “Mar­keters are able to take tech­nol­o­gy and fuse it with more tra­di­tion­al core busi­ness val­ues to dri­ve unbound­ed growth.”

And that, he said, is where the mar­ket will see the kind of growth expect­ed of Mon­delez-sized brands.

Oreo’s Twist, Lick and Dunk game, for exam­ple, has 7 mil­lion down­loads to date and it’s essen­tial­ly “play­ing an ad that has ads inside of it,” which, Bough said, “is a whole new mod­el.”

What’s more, said Matt Bruhn, senior vice pres­i­dent of glob­al mar­ket­ing at vod­ka brand Smirnoff, “What we’re real­iz­ing is the speed of change is faster than we’d like it to be.”

Tra­di­tion­al busi­ness mod­els in which com­pa­nies make more of the same more cheap­ly will no longer work, Bruhn added. The com­pa­nies that win and sur­vive will be the ones that make dis­rup­tive prod­ucts.

The World Is Changing

Smirnoff sells in more than 120 coun­tries, which means Bruhn works in both emerg­ing and emerged economies with com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent skill sets. Access to tech­nol­o­gy is grow­ing in some coun­tries – includ­ing a large pop­u­la­tion of mobile-first/on­ly con­sumers – and per­cep­tions are chang­ing in oth­ers as the shar­ing econ­o­my takes hold and, for exam­ple, con­sumers embrace the idea of shar­ing their homes with strangers, which was unfath­omable a decade ago.

“Mas­sive shifts are com­ing in mar­ket­ing depart­ments and big cor­po­ra­tions must real­ly respond to them or they’ll fail,” Bruhn said. “What our mar­ket­ing depart­ment looks like today, it will not look like in six months, 12 months, or two years.”

So, too, is there huge dis­rup­tion in the TV indus­try as Matt Brit­ton, CEO of cre­ative and tech­nol­o­gy agency MRY, said the mar­ket moves toward a one-device ecosys­tem in which all con­tent will even­tu­al­ly be streamed from that sin­gle device, includ­ing every­thing from TV to bill­boards.

And that means brands must move/change/adapt to this sin­gle-device, shar­ing-econ­o­my ecosys­tem, or they’ll die.

“Go back to Kodak,” Bruhn said. “A moment of dis­rup­tion has under­mined its entire busi­ness mod­el. It’s a dan­ger­ous place for com­pa­nies that refuse to move.”

Adopt An Entrepreneurial Mindset

An entre­pre­neur­ial mind­set is one tech­nique brands must adopt to sur­vive, Hall said.

In oth­er words, the hub and poke mod­el – in which brands have lim­it­ed skill sets in the cen­ter and farm out mar­ket­ing work to mul­ti­ple agen­cies – will no longer work, Bruhn said.

“The lev­el of com­plex­i­ty is giv­ing rise to the inabil­i­ty to be dis­rup­tive and these par­a­lyzed enti­ties can be inter­rupt­ed [by play­ers like] Airbnb,” Bruhn said. “They’re so busy try­ing to man­age them­selves, they fail to rec­og­nize exter­nal stim­uli.”

But this alter­na­tive requires more of an appetite for risk. And it means there won’t always be met­rics upon which to base a campaign’s rel­a­tive suc­cess or fail­ure.

Go Where Consumers Are

That’s par­tic­u­lar­ly true when exper­i­ment­ing on new chan­nels.

“Keep in mind that a lot of emerg­ing plat­forms have no way to track per­for­mance,” said Pauline Mal­colm, vice pres­i­dent of agency strat­e­gy and devel­op­ment at short form video firm Mak­er Stu­dios. “Brands have to be com­fort­able that it may be ephemer­al and dis­ap­pear or there are no KPIs to track.”

In par­tic­u­lar, Mal­colm said younger mar­keters are implor­ing their peers to embrace this move­ment or die, say­ing, “‘This is what Mil­len­ni­als are doing. This is how they’re con­sum­ing con­tent. You can no longer reach Mil­len­ni­als on TV. You have to go to emerg­ing plat­forms.’”

Though YouTube isn’t an emerg­ing plat­form any­more. “YouTube has emerged,” Mal­colm said. “It’s here. But it’s being super­seded by Face­books, Twit­ters and Snapchats that have come out with their own video plat­forms. If you’re not there as a brand and increas­ing your mar­ket share over­all in this frag­ment­ed land­scape, which con­tin­ues with the emer­gence of new vehicles…for mar­keters, hav­ing that mind­set of want­i­ng to be where the con­sumer is is the way you have to go to sur­vive.”

It also means cre­at­ing on-the-fly con­tent with­out sto­ry­boards and with no guar­an­tees about what the final prod­uct will look like.

‘Flatness Is Failure’

Bruhn acknowl­edges a will­ing­ness to go into pro­duc­tion with­out sto­ry­boards is tough for tra­di­tion­al mar­ket­ing teams, but it’s some­thing he argues is nec­es­sary.

“Organ­ic con­tent devel­op­ment is the future of mar­ket­ing, but it requires a new breed of mar­keters to come through that under­stand the process more intrin­si­cal­ly,” he said, not­ing Smirnoff just shot video in Argenti­na for six days with a handy­cam, four paid actors and no script or sto­ry­boards.

“We let the cam­era run for 60 hours and filmed sequences of events to deliv­er the brand sto­ry,” he said. “It’s tra­di­tion­al 60s and 30s, but shot organ­i­cal­ly. We want to be authen­tic and real in terms of the con­sumer expe­ri­ence.”

But, he notes, sim­ply let­ting a cam­era run to acquire organ­ic con­tent is dif­fi­cult to get signed off at a major cor­po­ra­tion.

“You’re putting down mon­ey for either bril­liance or fail­ure,” he said. “It will either be amaz­ing and cap­ture the authen­tic­i­ty of the expe­ri­ence and engage the audi­ence or it will fail.”

But the alter­na­tive is bland, vanil­la con­tent, which is far worse, he said.

“Flat­ness is fail­ure,” Bruhn said. “If you’re deliv­er­ing vanil­la con­tent, you’re wast­ing every dol­lar.” In fact, Bruhn calls for a rev­o­lu­tion of sorts and for mar­keters to cre­ate a move­ment with­in their orga­ni­za­tions.

“If you’re try­ing to con­vince the CEO, you need to have sheer weight of num­bers on your side in peo­ple who are mobi­lized through­out the entire orga­ni­za­tion and with well-artic­u­lat­ed argu­ments: ‘Do you want to be Mar­riott Hotels, inter­rupt­ed by Airbnb?’” Bruhn asks. “You have to cre­ate a lev­el of fear and para­noia, so they don’t accept con­ti­nu­ity.”

Take Risks

Bruhn’s advice to mar­keters is to “make a big risk feel like it’s not a risk and to make the alter­na­tive feel worse.”

And, he adds, “You have to have real con­vic­tion, but know you’re putting your rep­u­ta­tion on the line. When we sell mak­ing real con­tent, we sell it like, ‘If we don’t do it this way, it will be a dis­as­ter. This is the only way to make the change we need. The alter­na­tives are not worth con­sid­er­ing.’”

And brands that don’t move/change will have to respond in cri­sis mode.

“Look at the case study of Mar­riott Hotels,” Bruhn said. “They’ve changed the way they do [food and bev­er­age] because the entire indus­try is in food trucks and stalls. They’ve changed com­plete­ly because they’re in cri­sis mode, so they’re redo­ing things…if you as an inter­nal per­son can make them believe that if they don’t change, they will die, you can inspire senior mem­bers of staff.”

Bough agrees mar­keters don’t have to move the entire orga­ni­za­tion, but rather the peo­ple will­ing to move with them – a so-called “coali­tion of the will­ing.”

Think Like Entrepreneurs & Startups

He also notes there are mul­ti­ple ways to change the mind­set of mar­keters with­in a giv­en orga­ni­za­tion, but Mon­delez chose the start­up route in its Mobile Futures pro­gram in which sev­er­al of its brands lit­er­al­ly part­nered with star­tups to devel­op and incu­bate new mobile ven­tures in 90 days.

The result has had a pro­found impact on par­tic­i­pants, as well as on Mon­delez brands and mar­ket­ing efforts since.

Kathryn Sheaf­fer, senior asso­ciate brand man­ag­er of Ritz at Mon­delez, said the expe­ri­ence has made her think dif­fer­ent­ly about how she approach­es prob­lems, includ­ing a pro­gram with a retail­er in which Ritz ulti­mate­ly brought in anoth­er start­up “and gath­ered peo­ple and for a scrap­py bud­get and did a real­ly cool thing” the brand will talk about pub­licly in a few months.

In oth­er words, after par­tic­i­pat­ing in Mobile Futures, Sheaf­fer said she has “the abil­i­ty to think about things in dif­fer­ent ways and pull peo­ple in and not wor­ry so much about results, but [rather] to think about how to part­ner with the right peo­ple.”

Sim­i­lar­ly, Lau­ren Fleis­ch­er, anoth­er senior asso­ciate brand man­ag­er at Mon­delez who works on the Sour Patch Kids brand, said Mobile Futures increased her will­ing­ness to take on risk. That includes more of a will­ing­ness to work with influ­encers like Bethany on YouTube, who, she said, is more of a celebri­ty than a Bey­once to teens.

“So we have this nugget around influ­encers and do some testing…but if I had not been through Mobile Futures, I might not have felt that way,” she adds.