Ariadna Navarro

VSA Chief Growth Officer Ariadna Navarro recently appeared on an episode of “CMO Convo,” hosted by Will Whitham, to discuss how chief marketing officers (CMOs) can overcome today’s biggest challenges—including how to get buy-in from their fellow executives on the importance of brand as a business asset.

With the increased ability to measure and trace results, CMOs today are often held to hard metrics and KPIs that need to be realized immediately. But, paradoxically, brands can sometimes take years to build, and short-term tactics may compromise long-term success.

If a CMO doesn’t already have a mutual understanding with other business leaders about the critical role brand plays, they are going to have an uphill battle. Still, they can aid their cause by showing how brand can be used as the filter through which all decisions are made, as well as demonstrating how brand can help other executives meet their own KPIs.

Check out the full podcast to hear more about how CMOs can navigate the new marketing and business landscape, including how to build strategic partnerships among other executives and teams for shared success, why emotion is so critical in marketing and how to measure it, and Ari’s three golden rules for CMO success.

Chief Growth Officer Ariadna Navarro recently shared her thoughts on building breakthrough brands in a piece published on MarTech Series. Ari explores the importance of truly differentiated brand experiences, the cyclical nature of brand-consumer relationships and how even product-driven, tech companies need strong branding to truly stand out.

Check out an excerpt below, or read the full article.

No matter how innovative your product or service is, or how niche of an industry your business operates in, it’s excruciating to find differentiation these days … and it’s a never-ending chase. The acceleration of a perpetually changing future has made it all that much more critical to sharpen the most important tool you have for standing out from your competitors: your brand.

Before digging deeper into how a brand is built, it’s crucial to first understand what we mean when we say “brand.” While many people (even some in our industry) conflate brand with advertising or the products they sell, those are only pieces of what you do that make up the larger idea of who you are. Put simply, a brand is the most compelling articulation of your business strategy—a clarification of what you stand for, and the basis of your relationship with customers. Note the word “compelling.” It has to be true, relevant and differentiated.

From bland to brand

Using the Silicon Valley startup landscape as an example, you can see the effects of using product as a brand (PaaB). Technology is not a differentiator anymore; it’s an equalizer. Although tech-driven, business-model innovation is great, it has to come with the development of brand. Think about how many times you’ve heard a business described as “the Uber of X” or “the Warby Parker of Y.” Just as quickly as those household names upended industries, they were engulfed in a sea of copycats all sporting minimal, templatized UX; clean, muted design; and a familiarly witty, human tone. When ideas are only new for a moment and products are easily imitated, “disruption” becomes more of a category than a way of standing out.

What do you stand for?

To avoid fights on features and performance comparisons, it’s up to brands to create a more authentic connection with customers, building relationships and loyalty over time. That’s what I call a “better human experience.”  It’s a pursuit to create value for all stakeholders—employees, customers, investors, clients. But how do you commit to standing for something in an ever-changing landscape? It starts with conviction—fighting the urge to follow every trend or to say something broad enough to appeal to everyone, and instead find what’s true to you and relevant to your audiences. Identifying that sweet spot is what makes the connection between a brand and a customer resemble any other human relationship. For the same reasons love isn’t eroded by a single argument, customers stick by brands that stay true to the values that attracted them in the first place.

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Chief Growth Officer Ariadna Navarro was recently featured on MarketScale, discussing her views on how businesses can move forward with integrating AI into their operations in an ethical and sustainable way.

Ari outlines her approach with four pillars: transparency, boundaries, accountability and education.

• Transparency: Clients need to know how it’s being used. However you’re using AI, and whatever business you’re in, ensure your partners are informed.
• Boundaries: Outline what AI can and cannot do or be used for. Despite the hype, it’s not the be-all and end-all solution to absolutely everything.
• Accountability: What governance is in place for your use of AI? What are the checks and balances on the output before it becomes external facing?
• Education: Empower employees to learn how to use the different platforms, as well as to understand some of the consequences of poorly managed AI.

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‍Watch the interview.

AdForum interviewed VSA Chief Growth Officer Ariadna Navarro to get her thoughts on the future of AI and creativity, and how companies can set ethical, responsible guardrails around the technology. Check out an excerpt below.

Does your agency encourage or deter the use of AI in your work? If applicable, how does your team integrate these tools into the creative process?

It’s a little of both right now. We encourage everyone to use it, but with guardrails and guidelines to keep the work honest, human, and original. At the moment, AI is best suited to things like exploration, evaluation, and experimentation. It can reliably accelerate existing processes—from research and analysis to idea generation and content creation—but it’s equally susceptible to misinformation, redundancies, and both legal and ethical issues that we’re only beginning to understand.

In other words, AI is an exciting, new option in our toolkit, but it’s nowhere near a replacement for any of the ways we work yet.

How does the accessibility of these tools affect the way it is used?

The accessibility factor is core to AI’s success. It’s incredibly rare for a tool to possess both the low barriers to entry and the near-infinite possibilities that AI represents. The open format and widespread availability of this generation’s AI tools have given them access to an unheard-of volume of perspectives, permutations, and information that’s driving its rapid evolution, but that also comes with increasing risk.

While the exponential growth and innovation of these nascent phases is exciting, it’s also why we can’t afford to lose any more ground in understanding and safeguarding against the dangers and threats it could pose.

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