Think bigger, spark new possibilities.
Helping businesses uncover value across their ecosystem.
We work with companies of various types and sizes across a wide range of industries. Some clients choose us because we work in areas different than their own, and we’re able to break convention because of it. Others come to us for specialized expertise in their category or with similar brands to better solve for their specific challenge. This makes sense:
Diversity has a distinct value — coming at old problems with a fresh lens can lead to more innovative, unexpected solutions.
Specialization has its unique value — deep experience can focus problem-solving and shorten implementation and time to market.
However, as the world evolves and the challenges businesses face get more complex, choosing one of these approaches over the other can have serious disadvantages. Because here’s the thing: these two outlooks are not mutually exclusive. It’s not only possible to have broad knowledge about a specialized topic. It’s more powerful. To cut through in a specific field, it’s imperative that you are able to approach it, and ideate from different angles. To solve for this, we combined the advantages of both strategies into a new approach: ecosystems thinking.
Ecosystems are networks of industries that revolve around a common arena and go broader and deeper than what’s traditionally considered a vertical market. It brings together learnings from what might at first appear to be opposite or unrelated experiences, such as senior living and off-campus student housing in the Home ecosystem, and leverages what’s common – in this case, underlying feelings people have about home and independence – to create breakthrough ideas.
Simple Truth now has three ecosystems and we use this thinking to spark new possibilities for how to evolve your purpose, deepen audience connection or create disruption within each:
Home — which we look at as the feeling at the heart of how we live, work and grow.
Health — representing the confluence of forces that impact our well-being and our ability to live our fullest lives.
Learning — focusing on experiences that expand how we understand, connect with and thrive in the world around us.
The ecosystem model lets you do three things:
Ecosystems thinking starts with taking a broader look at the arena your business is in. For example, if you define home as a feeling and a relationship at the heart of how we live our lives, then it’s not just a place. It is not just construction, development, management (or buying, selling, renting) of the spaces we call home. It’s also products and services that make life more convenient. It’s the protecting of home. It’s living safely. It’s living seamlessly. It’s making memories.
Zooming out like this, you expand your FOV. You get a sense of how many companies and products revolve around the bigger idea of home, regardless of industry. You look at your own company’s connection to that idea, and the ultimate value you bring to it. Importantly, you also begin to see audiences from new perspectives. This can help your brand see and own a much richer, more valuable point of connection.
The Scion Group is a leader in the off-campus student housing industry. We helped them see their audiences not just as residents looking for amenity-filled apartments, but as young adults in a singular time of their lives. But building Scion’s experiential family of brands wasn’t just informed by insights we gained about college students. It was also informed by our work with millennial-professional renters, first-time homebuyers, and even adult children looking for a senior living community for mom or dad. At all stages of life, home is about so much more than the features or amenities.
Once you have a wider FOV, you can build richer relevance by tapping into broader trends. Companies often spend much of their effort on micro trends happening within a specific industry or niche, or even at the product or service level. Macro trends are forces happening at a cultural, societal level. These can be harder to harness. But by connecting with larger ecosystem or societal shifts, your brand can demonstrate the value you’re able to bring in more relevant ways.
This kind of thinking was critical to elevating InStep Health from a point-of-purchase health marketing company to a media leader, connecting consumers and brands across the entire health experience. We tapped into macro trends around the rise in platform models like Uber and Airbnb, as well as consumerism driving more empowerment and connectivity in virtually all aspects of our lives, including healthcare. This enabled InStep Health to elevate customer conversations from industry-level, tactical engagements to the higher value of delivering better health outcomes.
As you tap into micro and macro trends across your ecosystem, you expose tensions — places where forces that may at first seem at odds can be brought together to achieve a better outcome. For example, take findings from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) that show those with bachelor’s degrees earned a median of $1,305 a week, while high school graduates earned around $780¹. While on the other hand, trends like The Great Resignation and Quiet Quitting seem to show people valuing pursuits that are more life-fulfilling over traditional employment tracks. This tension provides just one reason higher education may benefit from reframing its value more relevantly — as offering both a real marketplace advantage and an opportunity for greater personal growth and independence.
Brands that can spot tensions like these can seize them to build broader relevance. But that’s only the start. It’s also how brands can play a larger role in influencing the future of their ecosystem and build a path to long-term relevancy, sparking new opportunities for growth, both now and in the years ahead.
Simple Truth’s Home, Health and Learning Ecosystems experience are just three areas where we blend diversity and specialization to harness cross-category insights and grow our clients’ businesses. If you’d like to think bigger and spark new opportunities for your business, let’s chat.