innovation playground Idris Mootee

The Big Question: Should Digital Agencies Be Stand-alone or Brought Together With The Traditional Core?

For agencies, should digital be stand-alone or brought into the core? There was an interesting article on WSJ today by Suzanne Vranica. It reported that earlier this month Jean-Marie Dru, the chairman of TBWA Worldwide (Ominicom), flew from his office in New York to Halifax, Nova Scotia, for lunch. His mission was to seal a top-secret deal to lure Colleen DeCourcy, the top digital executive at WPP Group's JWT, to take the reins as the chief digital officer for TBWA. Colleen and I worked together at Organic way back and she only only gets it but also intelligently creative. I've always wondered what the heck was she doing at JWT? It must be like teaching an elephant to dance or teaching a lion to swim. Colleen has now decided to join TBWA. The story gives you a sense how desperate the big agencies are since they are so behind. I spoke with some of my friends who just left Ogilvy a couple of weeks ago and they were saddened that even agencies like Ogilvy couldn't pull it off. Lot of buzz words flying around but no one has any idea of how to make things happen. Well other than another tag line. Who wants tag lines today anyway.

It was the final touch on a wooing process that began on the deck of the Majestic Hotel during the advertising festival in Cannes in June. Ms. DeCourcy's appointment was announced last Friday and Mr. Dru's willingness to travel to Halifax, where Ms. DeCourcy was on vacation, demonstrates the lengths to which advertising agencies go nowadays to beef up their digital operations. So far, traditional agencies are far lagging behind independent digital firms in the competition for digital business -- one of the fastest-growing sectors of the ad market. One major factor is the shortage of digital talent at the older agencies and the overall pool is small.

Big clients like Visa were not impressed with TBWA's digital capabilities and so will continue to use AKQA versus TBWA's digital arm. Agencies have two (actually more) issues. The first issue is calling it "Digital arm" which signifies a big problem. I think we are less than 30 months away when over 60% of all ads will be purely digital. The second issue is hiring a world-class creative person who does not solve the problems. It's not just a cool idea for a digital billboard or a viral video. It takes strategy. It's whole new way to think about building brands beyond "communications". It is about "customer engagement". See my previous post on the ad agencies' new game.

Are You A Content Provider or Intermediary? Not Exactly A New Question.

There's never a better time for media executives in terms of fun. This whole consumer-generated content thing is turning the media world upside down.  There's always that question of who is the content provider and who is the distributor?  Who is the intermediary? The lines between them are blurred. Consumers are both distributors and/or producers.

According to a new Jupiter Research Report "Networked Media: Thriving In An Intermediated World", in the long run, content producers must acknowledge the importance of blogs, portals, and aggregators in connecting with their audiences. The report points out that 57% of 18-to-24-year-olds internet users get their news from portals versus 21% from cable news sites--and online users now trust portals nearly as much as traditional news media. That makes sense.

"To thrive on the Web, news sites must become more network-focused and aggregate content from other sources while distributing their own content through intermediaries," according to David Schatsky, president of Jupiter Research. "By paying closer attention to the tendencies of the end user, these sites will be able to evolve and meet the needs of a wider online audience." Sounds simple enough. The big question is not the "what", but the "how".

So how should content producers embrace intermediaries and what is it that is needed to be done to exploit opportunities to become intermediaries for their core audiences. It seems the dynamic cycle of "dis-intermediation" and "re-intermediation" continues with no end in sight.

As marketers are quick to jump on these CGC, picking an choosing what to leverage and adding "filters".  And presuming that consumers will continue to be willing to play along and create free content that marketers can in turn attach some marketing messages. This assumption is definitely worth challenging but also gives us some ideas for the next bug thing.

Yahoo Back In the Social Networking Game

Social Networks are still hot and all the people I've talked to were telling me about how their organizations were looking for new ways to get into the game. Yahoo is taking a shot at it with their new college job-seeking social network, Kickstart. Kickstart is doing some filed research to find out how many students like to be connected with recruiters or alumini of the company. They are still at the conceptualization stage and I suspect a they're still a few months away from any beta if they do go ahead at all. This is a great example of bringing web 2.0 ideas into an old game. The site also provides some useful information about the company including industry, size, location, contact, and description. Anyone who is connected in some ways with that company is also displayed. This is great for those companies with a great culture, but this is surely not a good idea for companies who never treated their employees well. Particualrly for industries where demand far exeeds supply. There is also a similiar Facebook look-alike component which is the university page that features basic information about the schools and their events etc.

I think 2.0 will force many of the first generation of highly successful internet businesses to rethink their strategies. Whether it is dating, commerce, jobs or help wanted, we can expect innovative reincarnations of these business models. That's why my partners and I decided to start this new firm Idea Couture Inc. It is a pure Web 2.0 firm.

This is far more exciting than in 1999 without all the crazy money. This is more real.

Now This Is What I called Experiential Marketing!

Not all advertising can build brands. I'm not sure about this one, it may depend on what your brand really stands for. Now you can customize your marketing messages on a toilet roll. This company is called justtoiletpaper.com who can do just that for you. Now all you need is some imagination on what message to put on your toilet paper. The call-to-action message should be printed on the last sheet I suppose. The best selling one is "The Candidate Roll", as it says "Who's best suited to clean up the mess?". Great copy-writing. The concept is totally on brand in this case. Both are best sellers and were sold out last time I checked. Check back next week if you can wait.

Open Source Advanced Brand Strategy Masterclass - Starting Next Week

I had a great conversation yesterday with the chief executive of Interbrand, a leading global brand consultancy, we came to the same conclusion that brand strategy consulting is at an exciting cross-road. We agreed that the basic concept of brand strategy itself is only 15 years old at most and that it’s still evolving. It was great talking to someone that not only has the passion but can deeply understand what it means.  We fully agreed that the competitive front today is all about “customer engagement management”.

In the world of hyper-competition and proliferation of everything, organizations need to build strong brands more than ever. But it is getting more and more difficult as brand loyalty is declining and at the same time it costs a lot more to launch a new brand. It’s hard to imagine the ROI.

Finally, we’re going to begin our Masterclass next week. I received many emails from people who wanted to confirm the start date as well as the program details. This virtual course assumes that participants have a good understanding of marketing, the internet, as well as some knowledge of brand management. The whole idea is to democratize professional knowledge, making the best resources available to more people who need it for their job. With new free tools online, like blogs, Wikipedia , Facebook, del.icio.us, and YouTube, we are about to join in something new. It is an absolute first.

Open Source Advanced Brand Strategy Masterclass - STARTING NEXT WEEK - REGISTRATION OPEN - SEE BELOW

The course will not provide basic branding concepts or background of brand management such as the Proctor & Gamble model that was developed in the late 1930s (Branding 1.0). Instead we will focus on clarifying the myths of branding and looking at them through the lens of web 2.0 as control over brand messages or even meaning is gradually moving away from brand stewards and edging closer toward consumers. Imagine Disney blogging about its characters, Apple about its next products, or Sony about product recall. It could very well help them get closer to consumers by reaching out to the core fan communities. Exploiting this avenue requires smart thinking and a firm commitment.

The course will span eight weeks and I will divide the three day workshop material into eight presentations. I will post questions around these topics will find a volunteer moderator every week. Participants will post comments and their most important point of views. They should challenge others and be prepared to be challenged. I will look for volunteers every week to consolidate the ideas that were discussed and put it into a presentation format which I will post on this blog. I’ll leave it open the participants, if they want to continue the current discussion here and bring that to another place to further extend the topic with others. I think we should use our debates to update Wikipedia and use Facebook to create our own special interest community. I will need some help here, since as you know I’m in the middle of starting up an web 2.0 strategic innovation and incubation consultancy, so a lot of the content or activities will be participant-generated. In true Web 2.0 fashion.

Finally, to the most interesting part, will have the final session which will spark a dialogue on how a company can respond to the challenges posed by web 2.0 and the whole extreme consumerin-control movement. I hope all of us can collectively create a deliverable in the form of a deck and maybe create a short video clip on YouTube. Or we can create multiple versions of the deck depending on the appetite of the participants. That will conclude the program.

Here are the program details:

Week One - What is a Brand? Introducing brand taxonomies.

Week Two – Managing brand meanings

Week Three- Developing luxury brands

Week Four- Developing brand architecture

Week Five- Developing brand strategy (part 1)

Week Six – Developing brand strategy (part 2)

Week Seven – Managing global brands

Week Eight - Branding for the future –Responding to the challenges

Week Nine to Ten- participants develop joint deliverable(s)

For those who have not registered, registration is simple, Just click on registraton below and leave a message there.

BTW if you have missed the piece on branding by our contributing blooger Mark Ury a few weeks back, you should check that out. It is a really good piece.

Registration

Countdown for Apple Sept 5th Special Event

Last week I wrote about Apple's next moves.  Invitations (above) were sent out this week for an event in San Francisco, where Jobs will presumably introduce the new iPod/iPods. It's the right time, I need a new iPod.

If you haven't bought your iPhone yet, wait a couple of months and you might have another choice-a  gPhone. It is rumored that Google has been working hard to create its own Linux mobile phone OS. I am not sure if Google will be working with Apple on this one and I think they will bring a suite of cool mobile apps to this phone. I will write about some potential new apps that they would want to incorporate into the OS. Wondering who would be making the hardware? Nokia. Motorola, Erisson or LG?  I think we can expect a mobile OS platform battle in two years...or less. 

Separately, WSJ is reporting that Apple appears to be exploring new opportunities to more deeply integrate its products with the entertainment systems inside vehicles. Steve Jobs met recently with Volkswagen AG CEO Martin Winterkorn, according to Hans-Gerd Bode, a spokesman for the German auto maker. German financial magazine Capital reported the two executives discussed a possible "iCar" project that would feature products by Apple, whose iPod music player already has some integration with car stereo systems

Tagging Moves From the Vitural To the Real World

Wonder who actually invented tagging? Many are quick to say social tagging started with del.icio.us and social voting started with digg.  Back in 1991, Xerox PARC was working on such ideas in a system called Tapestry which was described in a 1992 Communications of the ACM article. You can read the article here. Here's what I've taken from that article:

“The Tapestry system was designed and built to support collaborative filtering. Collaborative filtering simply means that people collaborate to help one another perform filtering by recording their reactions to documents they read. Such reactions may be that a document was particularly interesting (or particularly uninteresting). These reactions, more generally called annotations, can be accessed by others’ filters.” (Emphasis theirs.)

If you read this carefully, this paper was the first to use the term ‘collaborative filtering". It assumed that “some annotations are themselves complex objects, and those annotations are more simply stored as separate records with pointers back to the document they annotate.” This design would sound familiar to anyone who had implemented a “modern” social tagging and voting system. Xerox Parck had came uo with so many great innovations and unfortunately they were less successful in bringing them to the market. It’s always interesting to read an old paper nd get some historical perspective in the age of 2.0.

Here's a funny piece of how "tagging" moves to the real world. In cities like Berlin and Seoul guerrilla "taggers" have been tagging outdoor ads with personal evaluations delivering messages such as "this ad makes me sick", "I like this ad", "I find this campaign boring" etc. It's a guerrilla action with the objective of raising the level of consumers' awareness about the quality of advertising. I am not sure the ad agencies like this idea.

Here's big idea. Let us develop a TV commercial tagging system via a remote control that allows us to assign "relevance" or "entertainment value" to TV ads. Those who are tagged most as more entertainment will be played more or paying less for their airtime than those tagged with "boring". This way we can bring 2.0 old ideas to television advertising. What do you thing?

Human Centered Design (HCD) Is Innovation's New Secret Weapon

While every organization talks about how they use new tools to uncover new innovation opportunities, there's simply not enough practice of HCD in companies' planning process.  User data is no doubt an important source of new product ideas (of what should be designed), which has the potential to redirect a company's effort towards a new direction (particularly in fast moving consumer electronic and personal communication industries). Having recognized the importance of understanding how people interact with design, many research methods are actually borrowed from the social sciences both to 1) understand, and credibly explain and predict human behavior in the pre-design process and 2) to measure how people perceive, understand, remember, and learn in the design evaluation process.

While understanding human behaviors is a goal of social science research, design requires the application of such understanding, turning it into innovation. Thus, designers 80% of the time struggle with the methodological implications of conducting user research to support design.  Business strategists question the rigor of those methodologies.  The strategic output should support the following decisions:  minor redesign, complete redesign (but based on the same user paradigm), radical redefinition of basic concepts, and fundamental innovation that ignores all past assumptions.

Design projects usually begin with business objectives which fall into one of the four innovative strategies, and based on market situation, a company's willingness to spend and capability to innovate. Recently, advanced thinkers are combining design thinking and business thinking and exploring deriving their innovation opportunities from human-centered user research, which helps uncover unarticulated or emerging user needs. Below is a summary from a recent talk at the User Experince Week by Jan Chipchase who is a principal researcher at Nokia Design and is very well respected in the HCD circles.

Jan's job is to conduct exploratory human behavioral field research at Nokia Research Center while splitting his time between running user studies and developing new applications, services and products.  His responsibilities include taking teams of concept/industrial designers, psychologists, usability experts, sociologists, and ethnographers into the field and to get usable data to inform, inspire product design and development. I envy what he does for a living. He is based in the land of sushi and electronics--Tokyo.

“That as human centered design practitioners we talk about, well, putting humans at the center of the design process. Which is all fine and dandy except that in the context of designing our ubiquitiously connected and oh-so-smart future this roughly equates to understanding the sum of all human experiences, which is clearly impossible. The joy of aiming high and failing. Or not?

That the path to a good project can start with the simplest of questions. Who are you? How can you prove it? What do you carry? Why did you do that thing you did?

That the deep pockets of a corporate research lab/design studio and buy-in from upper management make for a well resourced project, but that ultimately all it takes to get started is an inquisitive mind and a bit of positive attitude. Point in case? - the years of illiteracy research which I’ve written previously and which is ongoing in lab started out as a three week scoping project with no travel budget, relied on the voluntary assistance of a friendly India based subcontractor who gave up her weekend to collect data on our behalf. The resulting report showed sufficient promise to warrant further (better resourced) investigation. And the subcontractor? Ah, she earned her place on the team in studies from Cairo to Tehran, most recently in Dharavi, Mumbai. Looking for experience? Willing to work for peanuts? Of course you are.

And that you’d be surprised at the internal credibility that comes from external reporting of the design research. By this I don’t mean peer reviewed navel gazing or at the other extreme, lite fluff pieces. But simply that when your research is what they see when they open their favourite press, in their mind’s eye you’ve arrived. For now at least a virtuous circle.”

An Advertising Campaign That Throws Away Money (Literally)

Here's a cute marketing campaign by Saatchi and Saatchi London for Carlsberg. A total of £5000 in £10 and £20 notes were individually dropped around the streets of London with a green removable sticker that read, Carlsberg don't do litter. It is also a public service campaign but I am not sure how that  can be associated with the Carlsberg brand. Anyone please tell me the CPM for his campaign?

If You Ever Need Your Trash Back?

This is my second post today. I honestly don't know if this is a great idea or just a silly one. Cagnina Design developed an external hard drive for Intech called Tempo. As you delete your files and drag them into the recycling bin, they are automatically copied to the mini-trash box which is a 250GB can-shaped external device, just in case you will ever need it back they are there. I am not crazy about the idea, but I don't know why can't we just drag and drop these things into a folder where it will be automatically placed in another device. So I can drop my songs into my iPod or any photos into a printer etc. That's more useful than backing up a trash bin.  There's a reason why we put things in the trash in the first place, it's because we don't need it. I don't know anybody who saves their garbage and buys a nice container for them to store it in for months before they dispose it.  Would you?  Enjoy the rest of your weekend.

Why Most People Are Wrong About What's Strategy?

Here's an interesting except from an recent McKinsey interview with Prof Richard Rumelt of UCLA's Anderson. I've met with him once many years back in a strategy roundtable. We share very similar views on strategy. He is very well respected in our field and early in 1972 he became the first person to uncover a statistical link between corporate strategy and profitability. Here are some interesting insights:

- Most corporate strategic plans have little to do with strategy. They are simply three-year or five-year rolling resource budgets and some sort of market share projection. Calling this strategic planning creates false expectations that the exercise will somehow produce a coherent strategy.

- Plans are essential management tools..... plan coordinates the deployment of resources—but it’s not strategy. These resource budgets simply cannot deliver what senior managers want: a pathway to substantially higher performance.

- There are only two ways to get that. One, you can invent your way to success. Unfortunately, you can’t count on that. The second path is to exploit some change in your environment—in technology, consumer tastes, laws, resource prices, or competitive behavior—and ride that change with quickness and skill. This second path is how most successful companies make it. Changes, however, don’t come along in nice annual packages, so the need for strategy work is episodic, not necessarily annual.

- Many people think the solution to the strategic-planning problem is to inject more strategy into the annual process. But I disagree. I think the annual rolling resource budget should be separate from strategy work. So my basic recommendation is to do two things: avoid the label “strategic plan”—call those budgets “long-term resource plans”—and start a separate, non-annual, opportunity-driven process for strategy work.

- (any strategy starts with identifying change) Here's an example. Right now, the advent of 3G cellular technology makes it possible to deliver streaming video over mobile phones. Cell phone makers, cellular carriers, and media companies all need to develop strategies for exploiting this change. Even though these changes have long-term consequences, companies need to take a position now. By “take a position” I mean invest in resources that will be made more valuable by the changes that are happening.

- Strategic thinking helps us take positions in a world that is confusing and uncertain. You can’t get rid of ambiguity and uncertainty—they are the flip side of opportunity. If you want certainty and clarity, wait for others to take a position and see how they do. Then you’ll know what works, but it will be too late to profit from the knowledge.

- (So how does a company take a good position?) One big factor is a predatory posture focused on going after changes. I saw an interesting pattern. Most executives easily explained how companies became market leaders: some sort of window of opportunity opened, and the leader was the company that was the first to successfully jump through that window. Not exactly the first mover but the first to get it right. But when I asked these same executives about their own strategies, I heard a lot about doorknob polishing. They were doing 360-degree feedback, forming alliances, outsourcing, cutting costs, and so on. None of them even mentioned taking a good position quickly when the industry changes.

- Then in 1998 I had the chance to talk with Steve Jobs after he’d come back and turned Apple around. “Steve,” I said, “this turnaround at Apple has been impressive. But everything we know about the personal-computer business says that Apple will always have a small niche position. The network externalities are just too strong to upset the de facto “Wintel” standard. So what are you trying to do? What’s the longer-term strategy?" He didn’t agree or disagree with my assessment of the market. He just smiled and said, “I am going to wait for the next big thing."

Jobs didn’t give me a doorknob-polishing answer. He didn’t say, “We’re cutting costs and we’re making alliances.” He was waiting until the right moment for that predatory leap, which for him was Pixar and then, in an even bigger way, the iPod. That very predatory approach of leaping through the window of opportunity and staying focused on those big wins—not on maintenance activities—is what distinguishes a real entrepreneurial strategy.

Key takeaway, strategy is about the big opportunity and how well you are prepared for it. In fact, the last two week my business partners/fellow strategists were just finishing up on our unique methodology and framework to help companies to take advantage of industry change.  This is not about strategy or planning, it is about opportunities scanning and conceptualization -- we call it noodleplay. It is a collaborative innovation program designed to help companies to identify new revenue opportunities and  stage a predatory posture. It is about ringing design thinking into business strategy. I can't tell you how excited we are about this.

Finally, a great quote from Prof Rumelt:

"The primary problem in corporate strategy is very bad practice. Despite research and teaching and the best advice of the best consulting firms, large companies tend to seek size and diversity rather than innovation and value creation."

Multitouch Display Product Roadmap - Apple Best Known Secrets

Will we soon be reaching a tipping point where we will demand technology to be simple and easy to use? When I say technology here, I’m referring to all gadgets, cell phones, and digital cameras and like some of you, I’m still struggling everyday with my Blackberry (don’t get me wrong, I love my Pearl), my Lunmix camera, and my newly installed Office 2007.

Apple’s relentless pursuit of simplicity and elegance has set the new standard for user experience. It fully masters the intangible concept of design--the underlying software engine that connects music lovers to an iTunes music library or short videos from YouTube. They take the pain away from purchasing and adding the pleasure to enjoying music, and are now doing the same thing with iPhone. iPhone is the beginning of something big, not only for Apple but for several industries. I am very convinced that the iPhone and its multitouch-display technology is another strategic turning point platform for Apple. Jobs’ touch is always magical. Let me make a few predictions for the next 24 months:

-    I expect an iPhone type multi-touch iPod to be launched within the next 3-6 months. It will be larger in size than the current video iPod and will be sold at $350-$400 and the first one will come in black instead of white.

-    I expect a first full multi-touch screen iMac in 12-16 months. Probably with a 10-12 inches screen and you can use most of the functions without even needing a keyboard. A keyboard is entirely optional and most likely not included. It will cost some $1,600-$1,800 when first launched.

-    I expect a gaming device of some sort...iGame? Although this will be a little further down the road...maybe 24-28 months away. Most likely a joint venture with a key industry player. It will be a fully networked device and all the control mechanisms will be a combination of touch screen and audio command. The Nintendo Dual Screen won’t be competing with Sony PSP, but it will be competing with Apple’s iGame.

Many of the design innovations happening the next three years will focus on mobile devices and applications because cell phone use is so integral to our lives. The convergence of digital cameras, social-networking devices, music players, portable video players, and GPS devices will seed new user behavior. The next three years will also be the turning point for interface design since the days of the desktop, keyboard and mouse. Multi-touch display also serves a valuable function in personal computing. The so-called gestural interfaces will become more prevalent in home-networked devices. This is a whole new growth cycle and will have cross-industries impact. This is the most fun one can have as an interface designer. Design is king.

The shift toward making design a top priority is partly driven by the fact that microprocessors and sensors are turning up in an increasingly large array of everyday devices and every device or appliance can potentially become a node to multiple networks. As devices and networks converge it is opening up a flood of new experiences that will further inspire more new services. The problem is when all these devices or appliances become more computer-like instead of mere gadgets, we will be also adding layers of complexities as we allow configurations and there will naturally be lots of integration issues. We, as consumers, all hate to deal with the complexity of networking these devices--we just want them to work. Is that too much to ask for? This will become a huge challenge for designers. Consumer will be happy to pay for ease-of-use and elegant styling. This is a huge market opportunity. So far, only Apple is well positioned for this game. Companies like Philips, LG, Samsung, Motorola and Sony will not be bystanders either.

I am happy to see that design has gone beyond just to make a product looks cooler or something that we add at the end to make up for bad engineering. It will be weaved early and fully into any product development process. It is getting more complicated as there are more interaction designs and integration issues. The need for a new breed of designers and business thinkers to deal with these problems prompts Northwestern University to start a (beginning this fall) an MBA manufacturing program that includes a Master's degree in Design. MBA meets MFA. Companies today are eager to hire talent with such diverse skills and in fact this is the core philosophy on which the new firm that I am starting is anchored upon. It is Design + Business = Innovation.

How Much Time Is Needed To Make Hard Decisions?

I've worked with a lot of smart executives in my long consulting career (and a lot of not-so-smart ones [I won't give any names here], and a very few really stupid ones). When it comes to making hard decisions, many make the mistake of taking careful deliberation and spending as much time as possible sleeping on them and making sure every piece of data is being included and considered. The problem is our conscious mind has limited processing capability (unless you have a quad-core hardwired in your brain). So no matter how long and careful you think the result will still be crude and ineffective. Many of us do not realize this.  How many of us can calculate different competitive moves by a competitor or different responses from consumer for a particular design?  How many can calculate all the risks involved in a new venture to launch a revolutionary interface for a traditional product? That is beyond our human hardware capability and the more we do it, the more diminishing return our thinking effort will be, in the end we make slow and ineffective decisions.

So what is a better way to do it? Don't kill yourself when making these decisions. Use your unconscious mind rather than your conscious mind as it has far more processing power. Use your conscious mind to collect all data and analyze them, but don't go over and do it. Instead go to perform some other activity (jogging, playing piano, meditate or simply go and sit in a Starbucks for 2 hours watching people) while your unconscious mind absorb the data in a fuzzy manner. A day or two later, the conclusion will be the best choice.

Quite a bit of scientific study out there revealed that the longer people spend thinking about a decision, the more likely they will include irrelevant information and then the quality of their decisions actually drops.  Although sometimes you cannot verbalize the logic of the decision process, the gut feel or intuition has proven to help people making higher quality decisions. If you've ever worked with people like Steve Jobs you will understand why he relies so much on his intuition. Many who work with him couldn't understand why sometimes he can make quick decisions without pouring through a sea of both useful and useless data.

Many people think strategists like us only base our recommendations purely on data. While it is true that we are often fact-based when we look at a problem, but when it come to solving them, the best recommendations come from our intuition and our creative mind. Maybe I shouldn't have told you this. It was supposed to be a trade secret.

Experience Design Is The Next Disruption for Chains

Marriott announed that they will bring designers’ touch to their chains. With big names designers like Starck and Graves who lift Target to the contemporary design class, I think it is really a matter of time that they bring their ideas to hotels, restaurants or even gas stations. Hip hotelier Ian Schrager, the founder of the concept of boutique hotels, is partnering up with Marriott. The idea is to have Schrager to design about 100 boutique hotels for the as-yet-unnamed brand in major cities across the US, South America, Europe and Asia, and Marriott International will operate them. Mariott plans to leverage Mr. Schrager’s aesthetic ingenuity and cachet with its own marketing and organizational muscle to enter into the boutique segment, still the fastest-growing in the hotel industry with healthy margins. It is estimated that the global market for the boutique segment is $6 to $7 billion a year and half is in the US. I believe in the next three months they will be busy doing these roadshows to sell the idea to investors.

According to Mr. Mariott, “Schrager is going to be developing a new experience for people looking for more than just a bed, and breakfast.”. For those who is old enough to remember that Mr. Schrager was co-founder of the Studio 54 and Palladium nightclubs in New York City in the late 70s. His other project included Royalton and Paramount hotels in Manhattan to the Delano in South Beach and the Mondrian in West Hollywood and that’s how we earned the rock-star status of hip hotelier . I love the Delano. By tapping into his circle of renowned architects and designers, Schrager can definitely transform these properties.

While there's no announcement on  who those "renowned architects and designers" will be, Schrager says,  "...believe me, I'm not going to have a book of standards. It will be..." He paused for effect. "The anti-chain." That’s the strategy and probably a smart one. Coincidently, my business partner Scott and I were talking about the idea of bringing contemporary designs to many less obvious industries. I think there’s a lot can be done with this “anti-chain” idea. The three biggest opportunities would be the transformation of "de-chain" of 1/ fast food chain 2/ car dealership and 3/ chain restaurants. May be I need to be pitching these ideas soon. Scott, start your idea engine!

Social Networks, Purposes and Sustainability

These three things don't usually go together, particularly in business. But there is no reason why they can't be part of a company's core business strategy. Currently, many non-profit businesses are launching profiles on those popular social-networking sites trying to connect with younger targets. This is a good opportunity for them to embrace social networks. Social-networks are also getting creative to come up with new tools to help connect the nonprofit organizations and contributors. A social-action start-up called Project Agape recently launched a new program on Facebook called "Causes," in which users can create online communities to advocate for various issues, charities and political candidates. They attracted more than 2.5 million Facebook users, raising some $300,000 for nonprofits and politicians. Not bad. The future of charities is here. I can see more than 50% donations to non-profits will come from social networks in a good few years.

Charity is all about viral fund raising and spreading the message.  Another success story is Network for Good, launched on SixDegrees.org. They created a "charity badge" listing their favorite causes and sending it out to their acquaintances. The badge keeps a running tally of how much has been raised and how many donors have contributed. What a great idea. I believe some 5,500 charity badges were issued and more than $740,000 was raised. Good job.

Some pure-play web-based nonprofits such as DonorsChoose and Kiva are attractive because contributors say they allow them to connect directly with their recipients. This is the killer apps for donations. No more abstract recipient and check-in-an-envelope, but real people and real gratifications.

An innovative Portland based start-up outdoor apparel company NAU also playing with this idea as a part of their core strategy. Nau is not just another outdoor clothing company. Their mission is to combine the generosity of the human spirit and the power of technology with business innovation. Along the way, they are going to sell some nicely designed outdoor clothing. Check out the NAU official blog, dubbed “The Thought Kitchen". Nau gives away 5% (gross) to the charitable organizations that address either humanitarian or environmental issues and they were pre-selected from a list of more than 200 organizations. Their philosophy is based on what they call a fusion of beauty, performance, and sustainability. I love this. According to my friend Ian Yolles, who is the VP of marketing at NAU “The dominant paradigm suggests you can’t do all three--we’re doing it all, but none of it matters—sustainability, charity, green ethos—without a killer product.” The cultural conversation around sustainability, social change, and human rights now has a strong platform (social networks) to tell their stories and businesses will ride this wave and build a few cool brands along the way. NAU will be one of them.