Michael Campion: You have a brand protocol that links community and commerce. Every company these days, especially in the tech world and in the fintech world, every company, every brand, wants a community. But what do communities form around and how do they form and how do they impact commerce?

Bob Sheard: So this is very much an evolution of brand design. That is, as a consequence of Web 2.0. So, as brands were able to vacate the physical world of bricks and mortar and populate the digital world of Web 2.0, how do we get people to orient around our brands when there's not a physical space on the high street for them? Well, the way it's done is to generate content that brands realize that they were becoming, effectively, media channels that had content that people would consume and become addicted to, and whilst they were becoming addicted to them, to the content that would be buying the product. So, effectively, you've got this situation where you have content that creates community, that creates commerce. Rapha did this. They built their brand of 80,000 meaningful relationships and got it to about 40 million with 80,000 meaningful relationships, those being people that actually had bought products and what drove them was to create a meaningful relationship. It's a bit like a marriage you don't talk all the time to your wife or husband about everything it just would be a disaster but what you do talk is you talk about the meaningful things at meaningful times. So another brand that is really important was Lululemon. Lululemon were able to create and grow hugely, create this sense of commerce around the religiosity of yoga. This turned that into a north of $1 billion niche brand through the idea of community. Then if we can generate community, we can drive commerce from that community. And more recently we've worked on a brand, a yoga brand, called Oceans Apart, which is very much just pivoted off the influencer yoga community and using the influencer model, has got to in three years an EBITDA of over 20 million. So you can see the power of community. The interesting thing now is how we morph from Web 2.0 to Web 3. 0, is how the dynamics of creating and keeping that community will change as the dynamics of web experience changes.

Michael Campion: And there's a huge element of co-creation of content. Now, isn't there an order to build a community, could you maybe go a little bit deeper on that? Content to community, to commerce and the co-creation of content, and how vital that is?

Bob Sheard: Yeah, Web 2.0, all about more or less one-way traffic creating content and trafficking that in one direction to the community, to create the addiction, to then create sales. The rise of the influencer has meant that it's become very important to start to co- create the brand, co- create content and co-create products so that the feeling of the community is that they belong to something that they're part of creating, that you value them, they make they feel valued and they feel valued as an individual. And so the talent challenge for brands is that, you know, through the history of brands it's always been very strict. Strict guidelines and strict architecture, in which all the rules exist for brand creation and don't step outside of them. Now we're moving from a strict architecture to more of a garden where we're allowing the co creation of brand content with consumers, the co- creation of brand design to enable new holes of creativity, new holes of knowledge and new holes of intelligence to ferment and be created to help generate a brand. That creates all sorts of potential chaos, and the way to solve that for a brand is to drive versioning and selectioning throughout their content portfolio. So if you think about the way retailers are now organizing their product selection, so if you have a retailer that's selling products on the east coast of America, which are very urban based, and then they're also selling products on the west coast of America, which are very outdoor based, then if they've got a store in New York or a store in LA, then they're highly likely to be selling different products. But what the store managers now do is they buy from a online archive of products at the brand holds and therefore the brand creates universal products that the store holders can select from and more and more brands need to learn from that. It's a similar model to the Zara model. More brands need to learn that that's how they work with their influencers. They create a portfolio versions that influencers can select from and make their own, so that you then get the impression of co- creation without the chaos.