David Armano

In the early days of my career, the business world had just begun to embrace the notion of “Customer Experience” along with the initial iterations of e-commerce and e-everything. Consumer expectations were changing with technological advances, and new(ish) field emerged: “CX,” shorthand for Customer Experience. Countless books document the topic, and scores of companies have worked tirelessly to put the customer at the center of everything they do. For a company today, to be described as a “c...

Disruption is often most noticeable in obvious spaces and industries such as travel, entertainment, transportation, retail, etc. Uber and Airbnb excel at meeting the most significant market need with the most efficiency while expanding their models to expand and flex into related spaces (Uber Eats). From apps to Amazon warehouse work as depicted in the Oscar-winning film, Nomadland, The last decade introduced us to the emergence of the gig economy, fractional employment, and rapidly evolving ...

…read the first tweet. The second and third didn’t matter. We’re a culture that reads headlines and skips over the rest. If there was a creative brief behind the choice for Burger King to attempt breaking through into culture by using a “clever,” made you look tactic—it probably included a cultural truth that you have a brief moment to capture people’s attention, but it disregarded how, once you have it—if you aren’t clear, there’s a good chance your actual message will be lost. And that’s wh...

Craig Fisher was let go along with 300 staffers from one of the U.S.’ largest staffing firms in late May. Faced with answering an increasingly common scenario—Craig sprung quickly into action, pivoting to his “side hustle” (TalentNet Media). His transition period included taking on HR tech consulting projects and hosting recruiting conferences, and redirecting to video events due to shifting to remote work. More recently, he accepted an offer to be CEO of a much smaller HR tech startup. Fishe...

Traditional Conferences Hold The Blueprint
Follow The Money.
That’s one thing I’ve learned from over a decade of studying social media professionally and participating in it personally. Clubhouse is fast emerging as social media’s newest darling, accelerating awareness and participation from a recent rush of high profile participants across the spectrum of culture, from Elon Musk, to Katie Couric, to Drake and Oprah. And while Clubhouse has the advantage of high profile VC support from Andree...

A new consumer study from FIS Global, a banking technology company has conducted a survey of over two thousand consumers to better understand how their behavior is changing as consumers navigate their way through the new normal. Not surprisingly, the results paint a clear picture—that business models who have invested heavily in digital transformation efforts and/or were built from the ground up as a digital enabled business will be ones who hold the advantage as consumer behaviors continue t...

As the world begins to uneasily re-open, all signs point toward a future that looks different from our past—and while the talk track is focused on a “new normal”, life in the Covid-19 context looks to be anything but. According to the American Psychological Association, psychologists define resilience as “the process of adapting well in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or significant sources of stress”. Brand builders and guardians know all too well that while a brand isn’t a h...

A deep dive into how digital transformation is re-shaping the marketing landscape and disrupting how brands are built.

Covid-19 is bringing into stark relief the differences between companies that have evolved their purpose from an outdated definition of corporate social responsibility and philanthropy to a broader point of view encompassing all stakeholders and grounded in the reason why a business exists. During this pandemic, altering your brand’s logo to help spread awareness will bring attention, but your business realities and your brand’s purpose will be measured across the totality of your communicati...

I was invited to attend the *Adobe Summit as an “influencer and on the ground correspondent” as part of their Adobe Insiders initiative—a sort of Avengers for the B2B world who both understand the space and have access to relevant audiences. This was my first year attending the event, but while the event itself was new to me, many of the re-occurring themes are not. This year's Adobe Summit comes at a time where the worlds of the CMO and CIO are crashing closer together than ever before, wher...

Many marketers are justifiably over the word “purpose.” There have been few overused words in recent history and “purpose” can tend to mean everything and nothing at once, becoming the latest casualty of scratching the surface on a deeper cultural shift. In the past, "purpose" has been used to describe the good things a brand does to give back to society. It’s been used in describing “CSR” short for “Corporate Social Responsibility.” In the hands of clever marketers, “purpose” has been hijack...

Nike’s decision to feature Colin Kaepernick front and center for their 30th anniversary of their famous “Just Do It” campaign is igniting conversations and debates among marketers and consumers alike. For the past few years, brands have witnessed a steady shift in culture where consumers are increasingly expressing their preference for brands to stand for something bigger than the products they sell.
Yet brands are on the fence when it comes to “taking a side” with controversial or politicall...

In my past two contributions, I first explored the value of putting people first when taking meaningful steps to navigate your organization's Digital Transformation Journey. I then made the case for approaching process by design and embracing process not just as an operational function but also as both a strategic and execution-oriented activity that can help provide data and input. Today, I want to discuss what's often the elephant in the boardroom—technology.

Avoiding The Tech Trap

Modern e...

With SXSW about to kick off, it’s a good time to be thinking about the technologies poised to transform how we live and work. Voice platforms brought to us by Amazon’s Alexa, Google Home, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana and Samsung’s Bixby are all vying to change how we interact with technology, and the “voice wars” are in full swing. Farhad Manjoo recently speculated in his New York Times piece that Alexa has a viable chance of becoming the third most popular OS, next to iOS and Android—an...

Many view process as an operational function, but that’s only half the story. The other half is strategic design, meaning it comes from an intentional act of planning and forethought. One key issue in today’s dynamic business environment is that process and plans need to be designed in such a way that brings order to chaos, is flexible, nimble, agile, and pliable—able to flex and scale as conditions change. As companies navigate their own digital transformation journeys, the design often boils down to managing change across people, process and technology platforms, and for process...