Erich Joachimsthaler Ph.D.'s Linkedin Analytics

I am the Founder and CEO of Vivaldi, a strategic business reinvention firm that focuses on brand, innovation and growth; and the best-selling author of several books and over 100 articles. I study the impact of technology on customers for brands and businesses from a demand-first perspective. I work closely with senior executives inside companies. My latest book: The Interaction Field: The Revolutionary New Way to Create Shared Value for Companies, Customers and Society, came out in 2020. I wrote two other major books, one on brands and another on customer-centric innovation. Prior to founding Vivaldi, I have been an academic at various business schools in both Europe and the U.S. With my academic colleague, Professor David A. Aaker, I have pioneered work in branding - particularly the dominant brand leadership model, including brand equity, brand strategy, and portfolio and architecture work. In the early 2000s, I co-authored the well-known “Branded House vs. House of Brands” model that helped companies optimize their own brand and product portfolios. Over the last seven years, I have focused my research on the role of network effects and exponential technologies in building platform businesses. I have created the concept of Social Currency to study this impact on customers and consumers of all kinds. Most businesses today focus on competition and disruption instead of collaboration, participation, and engagement. They focus on transactions instead of interactions. They seek to optimize or extract value rather than share it. They build assets and thrive on enormous scale, huge distribution networks, and brand recognition. But then along comes a rival that doesn’t care much about your brand and your other assets, and it either rushes past you or mows you down. The only way to thrive in this environment is through the Interaction Field model. Companies who embrace this model generate, facilitate, and benefit from data exchanges among multiple people and groups—from customers and stakeholders, but also from those you wouldn’t expect to be in the mix, like suppliers, software developers, regulators, and even competitors. And everyone in the field works together to solve big, industry-wide, or complex and unpredictable societal problems. The future is going to be about creating value for everyone. Businesses that solve immediate challenges of people today and also the major social and economic challenges of the future are the ones that will survive and grow.