An art compilation that includes Alex Katz, Robert Motherwell, Tom Christopher, Sailor Jerry and Big Daddy Roth.
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Lift Trucks Project
Category: New Ideas Blog Comments Off | January 26, 2011
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Chinese Flying Livestock
According to reports, the Chinese will be transporting livestock three flights a day from St. Louis, Missouri to China. Presumably, this is all part of China’s recent buy-up of natural resources including oil reserves, precious metals, timber, and other materiel around the world. As China’s population grows and aspires to greater consumerism (they are already the largest automobile market in the world), they will naturally require more food, more energy, more everything. Which brings up interesting questions, more or less.
Category: New Ideas Blog Comments Off | January 23, 2011
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Bookstores Face Off Against Nook and Kindle
CUBE Architects designed bookshelves for a Paagman’s book store in the Hague, Netherlands
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Stop, Look and Listen
As Robert Fulghum once declared, some of our best life lessons we learned in kindergarten. The same can apply to marketing.
Stop. Look. Listen. A simple triplet we all became acquainted with as we learned the simple, yet potentially deadly act of crossing the street. This simple method can also help keep us out of danger in the shopping aisles.
Stop. So difficult to do when you feel your hair is on fire. And so necessary. Real-time focus on putting out the fire du jour can become self-propelled failure. Chasing the seasons rather than chasing “wish we’d done that!” brilliance (plus a heaping helping dose of complacency) is what allowed Netflix to blindside Blockbuster, Toyota to best General Motors, and Walmart to beat Sears.
In the flurry of facing the every-day, stop and remember who is your customer. Sometimes your target consumer can be an amalgam of different—even opposite—social and psychological types.
Stop and remember what you’re selling. Much product innovation can be found already sitting in-house. Fresh insights are smoldering in the stacks of data on someone’s credenza or something else happening real-time in the marketplace. When LEGO finally responded to the thousands of enthusiasts who engineered their own creations from LEGO bricks (often requiring hundreds of thousands of bricks—rather than the boxed LEGO castles), they created LEGO Factory. A consumer-inspired idea that let fans create their own LEGO sets. (Nearly bankrupt a score of years ago, LEGO business now surpasses most toy makers and even Internet games.)
Stop and think about service. While reaching out via hi-tech social media, never forget the everlasting importance of high touch. (A little packing supplies company called Uline is a great example of how to combine both.)
Stop and think about the future. Write the headline you’d want to write for your company or brand ten years from now. Then plan backwards.
Look. Most of us live in a bubble that travels to the office each day, works at the office, and then travels back home again. Too often, we are forced to think our way toward conceptual solutions, rather than hitting the streets and taking a look at our consumer. Some of us deliberately break out and carry our laptops to the malls of America to remind us of the consumers we’re trying to sell to. When a friend visits a foreign country, they go to the grocery store and see what things people there buy every day. Be curious. Explore food, fashion, fads, (new and old) media. Go to the movies, the museum, buy a magazine you typically wouldn’t read. Velcro® was inspired by a walk through an open field.
Target sends trendspotters into markets like New York’s Soho, downtown L.A., Barcelona, Milan, Sao Paulo and elsewhere to see what’s new and different and smart. That’s why they’re Target.
If you’re beached at the office, look into network theory, punctuated equilibrium, or RFID. Look at monocle.com, TED conference videos, good.com, bigthink.com, check out AllSaints SpitalFields and worldwidefred.com. Apps like Flipboard for iPad can even help do the sifting for you. Problem-solving is hard work but it can also be personally good, illuminating and even transformational. It’s a big world. Look around.
Listen. We were made with two ears and one mouth and should use them in proportion. As Pete Blackshaw says, every organization should have listening pipes: feeds from the outside world that are pointed at us to enlighten, nourish and inspire. We live in the greatest dispersion of ideas since the Gutenberg Bible. Our consumer can talk with us, about us, and against us in a dozen formats. But all that chatter and all those ideas need a funnel. And that funnel must be pointed at you.
Many of us can get so wrapped around buzzblogs and scan data that we have forgotten the art of listening. In the swirl of constant change (to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln) we must listen, think, and act anew. A friend traveled to their company’s sales offices around the globe, listening to what people in other geographies had to say. While people back at HQ bitched about his expense reports, he encountered out-of-the-ordinary market challenges, smart solutions and new innovations. He came back filled with fresh thinking, brilliant tactics and ideas he never could have imagined, sitting back at HQ reading field reports. Complacency is evil.
Listen to what people want. Remember that the BlackBerry was conceived as a paging device. The iPod was created from off-the-shelf components. The world keeps moving, with or without you. Keep your ears—and your mind—open.
Great ideas, like great leaders, aren’t born, they’re made. They’re molded from wet clay and require a lot of pounding. (Remember that old 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration line from Thomas Edison? He underestimated the perspiration part.) Great notions stem from diagnosing the right problem, using the right tools, and the blessing of time and energy and passion.
Stop. Look. Listen. This simple drill can pay off in big ways even when responding to the fire drill of the moment or the quarterly earnings pressures set from on high.
It’s a new year. Let’s give it a try.
Category: New Ideas Blog Comments Off | January 6, 2011
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We spend too much time on execution, not enough time identifying the problem or opportunity.
In Moscow, a group of Europeans and Americans are sitting in a small, chilly room with headphones on. An interpreter drones through the headsets, relating what young people are telling a research moderator on the other side of the glass. What the respondents are saying is insightful, stunning, and bad news. As participants in the new Russian free market economy, these young Moscovite men and women declare, they do not want to be office drones. They want to be jet-setting billionaires, with limousines and jewels and romp all night with attractive models.
All of which makes the advertising our client has been airing—the punchline being two office schlumps giving each other high-fives over their office cube wall—terribly wrong.
Of course, the fact that we’ve discovered this within the first hour of talking to consumers makes the disconnect more egregious.
And that double clicks on the real problem.
We spend so much time and money and meetings micromanaging execution, but inversely not nearly enough time focusing on what we will call Problem ID—identifying the true problem or opportunity.
Examples abound. Gap’s recent new logo debacle was hardly solving for their real problem of being relevant in a world of similar choices. (The logo refresh may have been the introduction of a Brand New Gap with better organization, design and merchandising, but now we’ll never know.)
Harley Davidson zealously markets its choppers, when the sad fact is that its baby boomer bikes just don’t appeal to younger generations born to be wild on Japanese rockets.
Then there’s the story of the beer company that tried to get into the Chicago market. They launched their big ad campaign and had major first trial, but zero repeat business. Turns out the refrigerator cars on the Chicago-bound train went out and skunked the beer. Skunk happens.
There are (at least) two reasons for this. The first is that product and marketing managers rotate between brand groups at an alarming rate. Hitting the ground running, new managers are often unable to put in the upfront time and resources to identify the right problem to execute against. Instead, they get a new agency. They get a new campaign. They invest in social media. They Tweet.
The second is that everyone everywhere is overtasked. We have at least three meetings we could be at during any day part. And forget about lunch.
Where to focus?
The answer is in problem ID. Drill down to identify the real problem or opportunity you are solving for.
Part of the answer may be in those stacks of consumer studies your predecessor left behind. The answer may be out in the streets. But if you’re new to the post and have a fire to put out in Bentonville, and Target is considering thinning your SKUs, it’s easy to get distracted.
Problem ID may be a simple reframing. Turn the problem on its head. As Sir Kenneth Robinson says, “Imagine if the paperclip is made of foam rubber!” Or, to borrow from design thinking, How many marketers does it take to screw in a light bulb? Why a light bulb?
Your problem may be service, pricing, distribution, the sales team, or even the product itself. (Recall Toyota.)
Another answer in problem ID might be soul. Discovering the deep-skin emotional attachments people have (or don’t have) toward your product or service is not just insightful, it’s inspirational, even revelatory. “We never knew that!” are four words always thrilling to hear, because now we’re not just problem-solving, we are leapfrogging to brand reawakening and fresh opportunities. There’s a new there out there.
When problem ID solves right, sales follow. Once Domino’s identified their real problem: their pizzas sucked—and (bold move) they admitted it—they gave themselves a fresh perspective and renewed vision. Today they have some very saucy sales figures.
Zappos takes the tactile indecision out of Internet shopping and famously gives female shoe shoppers the ability to try on different styles, just like real-world 5th Avenue. (The inside secret? Order five pairs and return the ones you don’t like. Free shipping is awesome!)
AT&T identified that their service sucked—so they countered that with a buzzworthy exclusivity pact with Apple iPhone. (AT&T may have to problem ID again very soon when we can all get both an iPhone and opt for Verizon’s state-of-the-art service.)
Digging in and uncovering the real problem takes mammoth concentration and often new discovery tools. But finding the right solution propels the entire sales force forward—and not just the brand team, but also regional salespeople, people sourcing product, upper management, your consumers, and everyone in between. And sometimes, like in the Domino’s case, it takes some hard and honest evaluation. But it’s worth it. And definitely better than spending millions, only to find you’ve been running down a rabbit hole.
Identify the problem first—then deploy your resources to help solve it. Now, that’s a solid reason to high-five your co-workers over the office cube wall.
Category: New Ideas Blog Comments Off |
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Remembering Corso Como 10
Corso Como 10 uses outstanding graphics as part of its design appeal
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