innovation playground Idris Mootee

Is It A Design Problem Or Designer's Problem? Is It Narcissistic Organogram Condition Or Atypical CSR Fetish?

I love working with designers and I’ve worked with some of the best designers and design thinkers. Not every designer can become design thinkers. I am guessing 80% of all designers are design craftsman. The craft is an important anchor, and you need it as a foundation. One thing that I think is very interesting is to consider teach designers about economics. Designers have been designing things for the 15% or 20% of the world’s population that can afford those things. But imagine design ideas that benefit the other 80% of the population but can still make a decent economic return?

If we are smart we need think how to reverse that ratio. An example would be the biggest need for the third world is finding a way to make more some money. Martin Fisher, an engineer who founded KickStart, an organization that has helped 230,000 people escape poverty. It sells human-powered pumps costing $35 to $95.  We call this kind of business “Social Ventures.” It is so coolest thing for MBA these days. Imagine a different class of designers that called themselves “Social Designers”? I think hat’s even cooler.

Many designers are simply not ready to tackle the world’s biggest and most wicked problems. Doing a quick health check for designers, you can discover the following problems:

Narcissistic Organogram Condition: A delusion caused by an obsessive desire to dream big simply for the reason of dreaming big.  Totally ignore the realities and without paying attention to the fact that the mission is a commercial undertaking. Suddenly the designer’s role is to change the world. And he/she becomes the chosen one. Watching Matrix too many times.

Atypical CSR Fetish: Not to confuse I am all for CSR, here I am referring to small group of sufferers that see all design activities as having an social responsibility dimension often characterized by inappropriate vocalization of irrelevant issues using CSR words in meetings just to gain attention. But has no clue to make CSR real

Award-Seeking Addiction: Awards are not bad things when many design deserve recognition. But when one is becoming too desperate to the extent that it becomes the sole mission. A total inability not to waste time and effort chasing any types of award, plaque or badge that has no relevance to the real impact of the design idea.

Human Factor Memory Loss: A fugue like state, this involves forgetting all aspects of human factor and assuming that user will perform any kind of tricks to get something done. Designers often understand many of these design principles but cannot apply them when designing products or experiences and violate every human factor rules.

Any CMO Health Check Can Uncover The Following: Chronic Social Media Phobia And Brand Equity Ulcer.

The challenges faced by the CMO and senior marketing execs today speak to many of the fundamental strategic as well as structural problems underlying marketing organizations and the external environment. The proliferation and fragmentation of media as well as the as the over-branding of everything is causing the jobs of many CMOs.

The core definition of the role is not clear in many instances. Sometimes the real job is Chief Sales Officer and sometimes it is the job of a Chief Communications Officer and sometimes the job is the Chief Strategic Alliances Officer. Rarely the job is just Chief Marketing Officer. CEOs are having too much trouble defining the CMO role and making heads or tails of what, exactly, the value was. And for the future, the role will be called  “Chief Social Marketing and Communities Officer”:

CMOs health check will often uncover the following:

Chronic Social Media Phobia: A fear what to do with social media and knowing it is important but can’t figure how to orchestrate these efforts or link them to ROI. How much does a Twitter message worth? How does these behavior will evolve? How do we monitor or measure them? Suddenly our brands are becoming vulnerable.

Marketing Science Delusion: The unsubstantiated belief that marketing is all about science is causing this delusion. There is science in marketing but it will always be just 50%. The other 50% is social science. While great strides have been made in describing human behavior in the marketplace, the ‘general laws’ of human behavior are not really laws. Human behavior is not universal, and observation and experimentation in the marketing sphere rarely yield strictly reproducible results. So it is not that kind of science.

Brand Equity Ulcer: A stress condition caused many to think brand equity is a goal and refuse to acknowledge that brand equity is only an intermediary step towards the larger goal of creating a more successful business (cash flow). Patients find it hard to resist the temptation to narrow the focus to brand valuation when the focus should be on the overall value dynamics of the business.

Undifferentiated Technology Obsession: An obsession disorder suffers by many by repeatedly throwing money at marketing undifferentiated product or service offerings and hoping to magically create differentiation.

For CMOs to succeed they must sit at the top of an “agile and socially-driven” marketing organization, and new capabilities need to be built from the ground up. The science of marketing is advancing forward and measurement systems are years behind. Advertising agencies are more behind the curve than clients and clients are demanding more.

CMOs also need to equip themselves with financial skills and to better understand KPIs that link to NPV. John Quelch (HBS) in an Advertising Age column suggested that “Improved accountability requires CMOs to be financially literate, to understand the balance sheet as well as the income-statement effects of marketing initiatives.”

CMOs also need to take on the role of a change agent. As marketing becomes “social”, CMOs who once bought the voice of the customer into organizations (customer-centricity) now once gain have a mission to bring all ideas that are “social” into the organizations. Effectively the change agent for the transformation of the socially empowered enterprises. There is no room for complacency or incremental efforts.  Marketing is a dynamic practice that keeps an organization in check with the dynamic needs of its customer communities and of the marketplace.

What Is Social Branding? What Makes A Brand Social? What Do You Need To Do To Become A Truly Social Brand Beyond Just Getting Into Facebook And Twitter?

I remembered talking to a group of senior marketing executives two years ago, the topic was “Branding 2.0 Is to get social” and many were scratching their heads and weren't sure what I was referring to. To answer the question "what's social branding?” we need to understand what branding is?  People involved with a collectivity of brands so as to benefit from the meanings they add to their lives. People will look for signs to represent meanings even if we take brands away. If a brand does not have vital consumer meaning, may be it is not worthwhile investing in its leadership both financially and organizationally. So where do they get these meanings?

Where do these meaning comes from? Brands and consumers are interdependence, an attribute that is enhanced to the extent that brands are animated, connected, distributed, networked, humanized, individualized and socialized. (You can read more from my Advanced Brand Strategy Masterclass 2007 by clicking on the tag cloud, these pages are from my latest limited edition coffee table version of my 60-minute brand strategy book which has been updated and in its 4th edition. It will be published in multiple languages, you can read the whole book on my slideshare, but sorry download is not available) Consumers demand more from brands and people online are seeking new ways to connect and be social. Social networks and media give testimony to human most basic desire to belong and to be part of a group(s), as we congregate around the things we are passionate about or want to associate with. Thanks to Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social media, we have the opportunity to re-establishing ourselves as the ultimate communicators, spreading the word across the geographical, cultural and political at unprecedented speed.  This is the globalization of meanings. It takes your brand with you.

Brand is not just visual images and tag lines, it is the collective emotional response to images and experiences. In other words, a brand is not defined by the product or service, but rather the person who uses it, talks about and engages other with it defines it.  Mark Jacob does not define me, rather they are defined by me, they form part of my personal brand and mingle and mix with other brands (Hermes, Apple and Blackberry). Brands are not composed of the people who purchase their brands; rather people and communities are composed of the brands they use.

All broadcast businesses are in big trouble, and user-generated videos are just the beginning. There are more to come. The social casting of YouTube will evolve and, and in the process, so too will consumer behavior. Instead of passivity, the experience flow of tomorrow will be characterized by immediacy, flexibility, portability, permeability, fluidity, interactivity, mashability and ownerability (these are Morgan’s words). With the emergence and convergence of the mobile phone, the Internet and location-based-systems, consumers also have immediate access to co-workers, friends and family members, involvement and consumer connections.

The Future Of Enterprises Will Be "Social". What Exactly Does That Mean?

It started as new media, then interactive media, then consumer generated media, then web 2.0 and now social media…. How different are these definitions? Is social media the new new media? At the end of the day, it is about connectivity that facilitates dialogue and encourages co-creation and conversation. The signal-to-noise ration is high, no question. What about the potential for mining knowledge from heaps of noise and clutter?

Can social media transform the enterprises? Or goverment? Social media can bypass hierarchical structures (generally) established to manage and protect now-antiquated and quaint information flows. The hierarchy is flattened for internal communication, but more often, social media permits external access (inbound, outbound and crossbound) of information and experts whose credibility is established by the social media and, perhaps more importantly, would have been an unknown without social media.

Smart companies can imagine the benefits if they can successfully utilize social technology and media to engage their customers, customer advocates, partners, employees and suppliers in an open and transparent dialog.  Every organization whether banks or governments need to rebuild trust with their public. Many of the trust and credibility that organization used to enjoy were wiped out completely. Can you still trust your bank? Social media not only impacts external customers, it also drives internal change too. By adopting a freeform social media model based on entirely on grassroots populism is anarchy and anarchy is not the same as flexibility and agility. Social media can disrupt hierarchies and very often those hierarchies that are disrupted by inputs brought in from the outside should be broken, but goals, accountability, and processes are required to maintain forward momentum in any organization. In short, social media can transform organizations and accelerate change.

Social media will be used as a platform to reinforce an organization’s purpose and mission, whether it is a business unit or enterprise. It will used to energize and engage employees. All enterprises need to be social, people are social, customers are social, and businesses are social. It is not about point solutions to improve current information systems and processes, but new ways of connecting, competing and creative collaborating. In a wold without trust, social enterprise is the answer. It is Twitter vs SAP.

Charles Handy wrote “technology without trust is just traffic“. I believe technology without trust is just noise.  Handy may not have used twitter or blog or other social media, but he gets it. It is all about trust, a social enterprise is best poised to do that.

Have a great weekend.

What Are The Top Jobs That Will Be In High Demand? Teaching, Health Care, Finance And Innovation. When Is "Innovation" A Career Or Profession?

Watching KC and The Sunshine Band performing on American Idol on TV tonight and I realized I know that tune is telling me how time flies. I was in my early 20s when this song was on the top of pop chart. I remember how limited then in terms of career choices. They were medicine, law and accounting. Oh yes and rock stars. I hated all those three. Thinking the last 30 years we have progressed a lot, think about the fact that computer technologies and many other social technologies having been moving so fast that we sometimes have to invent "artful analogies" just to "comprehend the ... speed" of change. Unfortunately education has not advanced as far and as fast as the computer. Same thing can be said about corporate social responsibility, imagine what our societies would be like if it has advanced 20X.

This front page newspaper headline caught my attention. "Teaching, health care, finance and innovation sectors facing demand that can only grow...." First time I've seen "Innovation" being used as a career description. Interesting but a good sign. But I sill don't know what jobs it was referring to.

It is a terrible time for those who will be graduating from school this year and looking for jobs. The short-term pain aside, people need to rethink their career plan as we are anticipating another structural shift in our economy. Many of today’s jobs will not return and many will be shipped offshore.  Many of the jobs that were in high demand will begin to diminish and new job categories will emerge. For young people, choosing a satisfying as well as high demand career is important. Here are some tips of what to pick:

Technology job growth will start winding down and will still have high demand on certain pockets. Software engineering and system support will not be enjoying the demand it did for the last 10 years. The most widely cited estimate by Forrester predicts 3.3M service jobs will be outsourced offshore by 2015. Roughly 400,000 of these will be IT jobs.  Many engineers will move to renewable energy and this has a good chance to drive a big tech wave.

Data entry, tech support and customer service jobs will start disappearing soon (even Indian will be expensive by then). Advanced technology security (not just online) will be an exception and this one will continue to grow as new threats emerge everyday. Media is another big one that goes down fast. New job categories around “everyday life automation and simplification”, that includes design and life-support services. There will also be new jobs that are responsible for lessening the impact on the environment and sustainability.

The next phase of automation will not happened in the factories (there will be no factories left), but in our homes and in our lives. We are not talking about dishwashers and VCRs, but serious automation including robotic machines (hopefully not operating on Windows) and smart homes. 

What does this mean for someone just now planning their careers or deciding what schools to go to. Proximity, personal services and creativity are the key. The creative industries will flourish, as there will be more opportunities to make money from ideas and intellectual capital. Career that requires proximity such as business development will always be safe, it is all about people and connections. The service industry will take over hard goods from a GDP perspective and jobs will range from care giving to life coach etc. The trend towards a growing aging population that is living longer is already creating high demand in products and services tailored to this demographic. AARP may become a $20+ Billion organization and employing tens of thousands of people providing services to support their members.

What about marketing? It depends. If you are one of those old school marketers you have something to worry about. If you understand many of the structural changes happening and re-equip yourself with a “social” mindset to marketing (and business strategy), you future is bright. Those mediocre marketing and advertising professional that exist today will not survive this shift. The Social Marketing Officer (SMO not CMO) is one of those roles where the mediocre and slow-to-adapt don't survive. For marketers, it means that you must keep on learning new things and acquiring new skills just to keep pace with the changing demands of a "social" economy.

Can Twitter Save The World? Or Can Twitter Save Your Brand? What's Your Twitter Strategy?

Twitter is as hot as Facebook these days, we hear about these new (or not so new) things and wonder how they've taken off and how they will evolve and become part of our everyday life. I don’t think anybody has it all figured out yet. That’s part of the fun.

It is reasonable to expect that in the 18 months new tools will replace some of the first movers. Twitter’s problems as we all know, they are not the only social tool to have it only half-right.  Will Twitter be the Friendster of microblogging?  As the power of the network becomes the utility of the network and each one is working to find its place in the social media ecosystem, LinkedIn for jobs and resume, MySpace for music and pop culture, Facebook for friends and Twitter for life-streaming.

But what does it mean for organizations? Take a look at Dell’s $1 Million Twitter Strategy. Dell reported that their Twitter account has generated over $1 million in revenue over the past year and a half through sale alerts. All of this, without paying a dime for their accounts.  Do we call it Social Spamming? Dell actually has 19 English speaking Twitter accounts, each targeting a different community ranging from support to community to deals. At most these accounts have drawn over 7,000 followers, lots of overlap I suspect.

CEOs and CMOs are getting into the bandwagon. Notable tweeting CMOs include Jeffrey Hayzlett of Kodak (@jeffreyhayzlett) and Barry Judge of Best Buy (@BestBuyCMO), each of whom ties his account closely to their brands. And each interprets the boundaries between the personal voice and the voice of the brand a bit differently. Of course, each brand has different social-media agendas that these executives are trying to push forward with variables ranging from the brands themselves and the strategic objectives to the target audiences they serve and the styles of these individuals. Both are using Twitter for strategic reasons.

Dell also drives conversations with their power user customers through an integrated blogging and advertising campaign called Digital Nomads. So segmentation is still valid. Messaging is still important. And you still need an offer (customer proposition). For Twitter, the question is still where is the money? A report from Credit Suisse speculated that Google’s YouTube video sharing site could be on track to lose approximately $470 mm in 2009. Google paid $1.76billion for something that continue to lose almost $470mm a year. Market share is 41% of US online video watching, does it mean something? Not only Twitter needs a strategy, even YouTube needs one. You cannot charge people for user-generated content which makes up the lion’s share of the video library.  The other option is to charge content providers that are not consumers.

Twitter is still twittering away with more and more people using it creatively. Take Malaria No More as an example, Ashton Kutcher turned a friendly media rivalry into a greater good when he offered to donate 10,000 mosquito nets to Malaria No More if he won the challenge of gaining more twitter followers than CNN by Thurs April 16 midnight. Yes Twitter can be used to save the world.  CNN was quick to respond and matched Ashton’s offer as he achieved the million follower mark first. The power of Twitter. It is by far the most important social networking trend for 2009, and has the potential to be larger than Facebook in terms of numbers of users multiplied by numbers of messages read or sent.  Whatever you thought you knew about Twitter 6 weeks ago may already be out of date. Watch this space.

Applying Design Thinking In Spirituality. Let's Call It "Faith-Based Innovation"? From Kosher Design To Halah Music.

My first thought these two things don’t quite go together and that not necessarily have tot be the case. Religions have always used symbols and colors as part of the design. Take Buddhism as an example, the color red symbolizes lifeforce, preservation, fire, and sacred things or places. Also riddled with duality, fire can represent warmth and comfort, but can also be a destructive force.

Red is associated with the Buddha Amitabha. Throughout Tibetan culture, red is a marker of sacred areas, and a true mark of a Buddhist scared area are the simplistic, tall gates at the entrances. That’s the color that the monks are wearing. It is believed to be a protective color, like that of shamanistic wards. Green denotes youth, vigor, action (Karma), and harmony. Because it is the color at the middle of the spectrum, it is also represents balance and is associated visually with the lush trees. 

And the most important color for them is yellow. Yellow is the color that possesses the highest symbolic quality because of the saffron color of the monks' robes. It was chosen as a symbol of humility and separation from materialistic society. It symbolizes renunciation and desirelessness. That’s a lot of design thinking here.

Imagine a suite of “service design” offerings designed around electronic gadgets, let’s call it  "faith-on-demand", we are talking abut creative religious practice tailored to the lifestyles and needs of individuals who prefer modern than traditional taste. There are lots of innovation opportunities if we start interweaving traditional faith practices more tightly into the texture of daily life. What is the iTunes of faith looks like?

There have always a large number of not-so-well designed religious products out there designed explicitly for Christians, Buddhists, Jews and Muslims, and despite a thriving literature within visual culture studies that examines how religion happens materially. Design critics do not often write about the ways in which religion informs the design and use of products, and how the design and use of products in turn shapes religious  practice.

In 2006 I.D. magazine ran a special issue titled  "Design and Religion:  New Forms for Faith” featured Jewish products and on houses of worship, an "Islamic cell phone” and a prayer rug whose pattern illuminated when oriented to Mecca. We have not seen any serious commercialization of these products. It is interesting if we start thinking about religion and interface.

Apply design thinking in religions can result in a lot of new faith-based innovation. I define this as products/experiences that engage faith in a modern, social and practical manner by facilitating religious practices.  If we apply a little imagination and human factors thinking in traditional religious objects such as rosaries and crucifixes, prayer rugs, menorahs, and censers we can come up with lot of innovation ideas. Technology + Faith = Tons of untapped opportunities and customer unmet needs.

What Does Innovation Mean Or Does It Mean Much These Days? Why Is Innovation So Hard? What's An Idea Worth?

 The word “innovation” has never meant much or less when it is so overused. I was looking at some 25 annual reports on my desk and 19 of the 25 use the word “innovation” extensively throughout. To create innovative offerings and new differentiation requires the strategic alignment of an organization’s goals, people, resources, and culture and at the same time the purposeful misalignment of thinking and working styles in order to generate innovative ideas.

There’s an very interesting article in New York Time on innovation. Here's a small excerpt:

A recent recruit to the endangered list is “innovation.” Once hailed as a panacea, it has been so diminished by hyperbole that it risks seeming irrelevant. (“Transformation” is the fashionable favorite to replace it.) Yet just like “design” and “contemporary,” “innovation” is losing credibility as a word at the very time when it is needed most urgently.

As the economic and environmental crises deepen, there is a growing recognition that many aspects of our lives need to be reinvented. Politicians routinely call for the “redesign” of society, and urge businesses to “innovate” their way out of recession. This readiness to embrace change — even radical change — coupled with advances in science and technology, is unleashing a stream of innovations.

Innovation is hard. At least that what's my clients are telling me. Why is it so hard? Imagine an organization that operates as 8 business units, with a staff of 50,000, and where the corporate strategy is incomprehensible, the marketing effort is massive but not customer-centric, where there is an over-abundance of information, most of it of very low quality, and where the marketing environment is often out of sync with the purposes of interactions and innovation. Such an environment is common in large complex organizations.

Executives understand that innovation is necessary in order to stay ahead or just to survive, yet only a handful have the conviction, discipline and energy to act on that understanding. Very few have the will to change and even fewer have led their organizations through disruptive change and discontinuities. In fact, many have made those disruptions part of the strategy. Over decades, business schools have developed a language for talking about business, from marketing to finance. We hear this corporate jargon all the time in the boardroom and see it in annual reports and press releases.  It helps us to understand and communicate. But because we don’t have a language or framework for innovation, the word was used loosely and even improperly, confusing many people. Part of the innovation process is about providing a language and visual metaphor to facilitate an innovation dialogue.

Another big obstacle to developing a language of innovation is a company's own internal structure or processes. I will write more about the processes and organizational practices next time. Let me end this post by listing different schools of innovation.

Old-school High-tech Innovation. These are technological experimentation that led to early commercialization. These technologies take decade before they hit the mass market.

New-school Open-source Innovation. These are innovation that is the results of open-source movement. The open community shapes Lot of grass root improvisation and the direction.

Social Innovation. These innovations are often the response of large scale human challenge and a new breed of social entrepreneur responded with their own solutions. 

Design Innovation. An example would be a socially responsible product-design firm run by engineering students, which provides high-quality services for nonprofit organizations at affordable prices

Service Innovation. This is a hot one today as the economy in the west is rapidly migrating to service. Service design or innovation is a relatively new discipline. The challenge with service innovation is it’s intangibility and perishability. Most required end user to participate.

System Innovation. This is what refers to innovation that requires mobilization of all different players in the system whether it is government policy or society at large. This often refers to public policy offering sustainability benefits giving the constraints and barriers for this type of large scale change: the costs of changeover, uncertainty and the need to break old ties and do away with old practices

And Business Model Innovation, which I will write about separately next week.

The Rise And Fall And The Coming Transformation Of Madison Avenue. What About The Future Of Advertising?

WPP finally decided to fold (or merge) the agency Enfatico created only to serve Dell after 16 months of operations. I never quire understand the rationale and the logic of doing that. Now it will become part of Y&R This may have something to do with the current climate but it is destined to fail. I've never seen something like this can work and you might as well bring it in-house which we understand the pro and cons of doing that. From an agency perspectives, sure they will tell the client they can outsource the creative and production but with control over the agency's operations and may be some cost savings. Not sure how the cost savings can be real. It is always important for an agency to be independent of the client from both ownership and management. Large agencies are getting desperate to cut deals like this I supposed.

Madison Avenue has come a long way. Since the emergence of modern advertising in the 1920s, defined by the shift from text-based to visual advertising and the use of psychologically sophisticated messages, ads began to resonate powerfully with consumers.  Madison Avenue represented the new and the modern (until the emergence of social networks and media, they took away their cultural authority), and ads helped consumers figure out what they needed to live a certain lifestyle. Consumers were eager to embrace the cultural authority of Madison Avenue.

But by the late 1950s, things were changed. Along with affluence and increased security came an increased awareness and criticism corporate conformity in the workplace. The contradictions of 1950s culture were beginning to emerge, and one of them was the inordinate influence advertising and sales appeared to have in our culture. The big shift is they are far less influence in our culture today and technologies have taken over the role. The emerging social networks are still in its early days shaping how we connect, communicate and create social identities. This is the biggest threat of the advertising industry. I think they are underestimating the disruption.

A little history of advertising here. The collective work of the Frankfort School, mainly represented by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (and their classic 1944 piece “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception”) provided the intellectual foundation. The imperatives of the production side were central, and in both consumption and production, consumers were relatively powerless, even “manipulated” and victimized by advertisers.  In these accounts, the powerful and active agents were the big corporations, not individuals. Today, we can see that this is changing, with an over abundance of almost everything and the growing influences of social networks. Finally, power is switching over to the consumer. Is it  a bad thing?

Even though we are all trained from the earliest ages to be consumers, and though our identities are deeply bound up with consumption choices, social networks are gradually becoming the medium that define our identities. This is the world we live in.

A TV campaign can only go so far in building a brand. In fact, it doesn't build brands, it merely builds awareness. Social media enable advertisers to cultivate brand engagement where interactions take place. Power is shifting from mass communication to social interactions. In just a few years, you can expect the whole advertising industry to be in full crisis mode, driven by continuous innovation. Forward-thinking marketers are embracing new models, which are being shaped by digital media.

In this world, consumers will listen to marketing messages when and if they’re relevant to them. As TV audiences’ fragment and move to more portable media, TV will no longer be the prime brand-building tool. Marketers that excel will be those that recognize that they’re now in a service business. Many marketers also have competencies rooted in interruptive communications, which is declining in efficiency and more importantly, effectiveness.

Twenty-first century marketing will instead be only about customer engagement and adaptively integrated marekting (not a new word but hardly delivered by agencies).  The Enfatico story did represent an effort to tackle a longstanding industry problem. Big big marketers such as Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson and Unilever are expressing frustration with the way ad and marketing firms are structured. Many marketers say it is tough getting different agencies to understand the new world order, let alone to make working together -- even ones owned by the same holding companies.

Easter Day Random Thoughts On Emotional Design And Sustainability.

Easter as an important holiday for many is the result of many different cultures and religions. The history of the Easter basket has a similar lineage. Some of the origins are from ancient pagan customs, some stem from a Judeo Christian background. For many kids, it is about Easter eggs.

Vernal or spring equinox was special time to ancient cultures. It is a time when day and night are equal time. This was a signal that the long winter was finally over and that spring a time of renewal and rebirth. Cultures from the Middle East such as the Hebrews, Arabs, Babylonians, and Assyrians had special traditions such as bringing the first seedling of the new crop to the temples to be blessed. This was in the hope that God would be happy and bless their crops that year. For Christians, you must give up something and fast until after Easter.

Consumers are not cutting back to save money on their chocolate Easter eggs. Many candy stores report business is booming this Easter season. Many consumers admitted with the tough economy everyone is cutting back on spending, but not on chocolate or candy. This is a good example of how "affordable luxury" is  a bright spot and smart marketers understand how to leverage this opportunity to get close to consumers. To sustain themselves, luxury goods will be hard pressed to come up with innovative ideas to maintain their presence by providing little treats that people can afford to buy until the economy turns itself around. The key is to maintain emotional connections and not become relevant. It is easy to be irrelevant for many high priced brands. Consumer feel abandoned by luxury brands when they feel they cannot afford them anymore. This is tricky for marketers as they try to uphold their brand image and at the same time cannot afford to disassociate themselves with their customers.

The art of creating or maintaining emotional relationships with brands/objects is not something you can do effectively with advertising if you can do that at all, doesn’t matter how many millions you spend and what you throw into the media mix. Now this guy gets it. William Warren, who runs a furniture and product design consultancy in the UK and also a Senior Lecturer at London Met University. He initiated a project to further explore ideas of built-in sentimentality within our possessions. The aim is to make stronger emotional relationships with our belongings and encourage life-long use.

I really like the idea of life-long use as opposed to our use-and-discard economy which creates a lot of sustainability challenge. He designed some shelves that are available in oak veneered plywood built-to-order to whatever customer’s measurements. They are intended to be used throughout life as storage for personal belongings. The best part is, upon death, the shelves can be easily dismantled and rebuilt as a coffin. A clever idea indeed.

A Great Sauce Can't Save A Lousy Pasta Just As Great Advertising Cannot Save A Lousy Product Or Brand. Microsoft Is Spending $100mm To Market Its Search. It Better Be A Good Product.

A great sauce can't save a lousy pasta just as great advertising cannot save a lousy product or brand. We should all start with a good product/experience.

Microsoft has just hired JWT for the launch of a new search product. Annualized account billings are estimated at US$100 million and initial media spending will be around $40 million. Microsoft plans to launch the ad effort this summer. OK wait a second, is this a branding problem? I can imagine how the market research is telling them that people don’t think Microsoft as a search company, fair enough. But that doesn’t mean you should just go out and spend a 100 million bucks and that problem will go away. Microsoft is not a search company. Period. Who are you kidding? It is not that the Microsoft brand is bad, it is a powerful brand in many ways, but it needs to rethink its search strategy.

Google has become synonymous with search and that has made it virtually impossible for anyone trying to take on the space. And clearly Microsoft hasn't helped its case by pitching its search and online properties under a host of different brand names. Google owns ‘search’ as much as Microsoft owns ‘office’, I don’t see Goggle spending millions marketing their ‘office’ suite brand. Microsoft does have a branding problem, but it is not search, it needs brand architecture.

But Microsoft has been throwing money at the search game for years now and not yielding any results. I was working very closely with a ‘search’ client of mine for a while and since then there’s only evolutionary change. No one comes close to challenge Google. Now Yahoo is almost out of the picture. I have not seen any leapfrog thinking, things like Live Search Cashback and others didn’t really work. They need a breakthrough idea, before they think branding. Twitter?

Twitter is rolling out its integrated search and trends into the web platform (not sure if this is dressing up for sale thing). They had been testing it for quite a while. Twitter purchased Summize last summer, it has been keeping search and trends separate from the messaging platform until now.  Sure the long term view is to integrate the two. Twitter needs to go mainstream and create new features, search is one of them.

For Microsoft, not only they need to have differentiated features for the search product, they also need a brand. I don’t mean a logo or tagline or an ad. I mean a good user experience. The UX is the brand. Not the advertising. The way users feel about their experience is inseparable from the way they feel about your brand. Let's hope that the Microsof search product is so good that it justify the advertising investments. Well, with $100mm, you have a pretty good chance to develop a great search product just in case this one fails.

Have a great long weekend.

Strategy Vs. Strategic Innovation? Strategy Is A Company's Game Plan For Winning, Either By Competing On Scale, Speed or Special Relationships. Strategic Innovation Is A Company’s Game Plan To Win By Changing The Game.

What’s strategic innovation? Is strategy the same as innovation or innovation should be part of strategy? People ask this questions all the time. Strategy is a company's game plan for winning, either by competing on scale, speed or special relationships. Strategic innovation is a company’s game plan to win by changing the game and to become the winner of future’s opportunity space. Sometimes it is a simply necessity for reason of survival when discontinuities accelerate.

Is strategic innovation the same as business model innovation’? Many are confused about these questions. Strategy needs innovation to power it up but often it doesn’t include innovation. When an innovation is strategic, it means a new product/service/process that create new customer value and change the economics or the market power of the business.

The pressure for strategic innovation has never been greater. Today there are few clear boundaries separating industries from each other or one region from another, so new competitors emerge from unexpected places. Sony finds itself competing with Apple one day, Amazon the next, HP the third.

The challenge for businesses is to constantly re-define itself, its industries, its products, its services and its customers so that when competitors rush into its space, the business has moved on to the next emerging opportunity space. The constant shift is causing many businesses to quickly becoming irrelevant. They often miss great opportunities either due to failure to recognize early patterns or in the lag time between identifying the opportunity and taking action. Large organizations are slow to bring innovation idea to markets are often due to organizational barriers.

Strategic innovation is a practice applied empathy and imagination to create future business opportunities. It is about futurizing your business. "Future" is a conceptual tool, "future" is what we create! There are four components of strategy innovation,

Develop Industry (and Technology) Foresight: Which changes happen in the Industry, are the value chains being reorganized (vertical or horizontal), should we redefine our business concept.

Develop Deep Customer Insight: Which values, feelings and attitudes amongst our end users are important? Which unmet/unarticulated needs can we identify? - Remember, in most industries you can't just ask the end user - it requires psychological understanding and ability to interpret... - Here, user-centered methods are needed.

Develop New Value Propositions: This is the most important question and if you are not clear about this. We have a very serious problem. I cannot stress enough how importance of a Unique Value Proposition (UVP), which is one of the most essential elements of a business strategy. A UVP is a succinct statement of the uniqueness of a business that sets it apart from all competitors. Without a UVP, a company risks becoming lost in a sea of similar businesses. The UVP will then be translating into a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) which drives marketing activities.

Develop New Capabilities: These are the new skills and knowledge enables a company to deliver unique value to customers. It embodies an organization's collective strengths, particularly of how to coordinate activities and integrate multiple technologies.

Refine or Develop New Business Model:  This is the economic engine of your organization and it consists of a set of complex system relationships between different players along the value chain. Creative combination of your participation in different part of the value chain determines your market power, competitive advantages and profitability.

The Secret To Successful Innovaiton For CPG Companies Is Knowing How To Fail Early, Fail Cheaply. P&G Knows It Is Important To Master The Art Of Failing.

Here’s another innovation from a Japan’s sake (Japanese wine) company. Japan’s younger generations tends to look at nihonshu (what they think of as Japanese sake) as “oyaji-kusai,” which translates in the nicest way possible as “reminiscent of a middle aged man.” 75% of young women aged 20-30 hardly ever drink them and the Sake Brewer’s Association is trying to to fix this. This is not just an image problem, it is also the product.

One sake manufacturer, Nihon Sakari, has created two new “entry-level” innovative products intended to win over new drinkers. The first is “Japan Taste Sweet and Sour Sake” and aims to attract women with a “refreshing” sweet flavor. The second, called “Japan Taste Samurai Rock,” promises a nihonshu that doesn’t taste very much like nihonshu at all (don’t know what it means). Instead, an addition of lime juice gives the beverage more of a cocktail feel, masking that distinct sake taste. I am curious what it tastes like and will check it when I am in Tokyo this July.

P&G is still actively investing in game-changing innovations even amid the recession. Consumer goods companies in general have been doing a pretty good job at innovation and less impacted by economic cycles. Over the last 20 years there were the steady flow of profitable new products—ranging from electric toothbrush to frozen dinners—that changed the daily lives of consumers. Recently, these companies have become more and more reliant to innovate as the competition for shelf and mind space intensify and too many new products are being launched everyday. Product extensions are causally classified as innovation. Real innovation is becoming rare.

According to P&G's CEO Lafley, “In our industry only 15% to 20% of new products succeed. P&G's success rate is a little over 50%. But we were at that industry average in the '90s. We improved our batting average by clarifying and simplifying the innovation process. We set checkpoints with clear measures for each phase of the process from ideation through development and commercialization. If a project looks like it will not make it, we drop it. You learn more from failure than you do from success but the key is to fail early, fail cheaply, and don't make the same mistake twice.”

Innovation is always a challenge from both processes to categorizations. The creative brain-storming that used to produce new ideas don’t work anymore and same as their tried-and-true processes for picking ideas, and making investment decisions have become less productive. Many existing methodologies have turned into orthodoxies: established ways of doing business that reinforce the status quo and hinder the adoption of novel, tailored, and flexible approaches to innovation.

The most common problem is the question “What business are we in?” Often this helps to clarify one business focus but at the same time create corporate blind spots. The artificial boundaries of any industry reflect the orthodoxies also dictate what a company should not do but also direct resources to competencies that company should be focusing on.

CPG companies typically look to innovation to open new revenue streams, creating newness and exciting for consumers and try to justify price increases. Often the end result is market confusion and investments return suffers. Here’s a better way to do this. CPG must take more of a platform approach to innovation. The return is bigger and the risk is lower by exploring with variations within a platform concept. One doesn’t have to start from scratch each time, but can tee up big-hit innovation that offers "repeatability" across product lines.

Platforming is common in software technology and automobile, but not so in CPG. And platform takes on a very different meaning in the CPG business. One good example is Crayola; the company is “obsessed with consumer needs” and makes decisions based on insights about the consumer. The company’s innovative strategy is to “experiment, experiment, experiment” Jeff Rogers, director of portfolio marketing for Crayola explains, “Our biggest focus is on the consumer, who is front of mind in everything we do — in marketing, in product development, and as a corporation. We try and turn consumer insights into needs. We start with the consumer and keep them involved throughout our entire product development process.”

Here’s a important element for their success, 5 years ago the company reorganized itself into “Platform” teams, including marketing, for different product areas. The biggest change in innovation then was that we had often started our development with a technology, rather than starting with the consumer need and then identifying or developing a solution through technology, as we do now. They combine chemistry, design, mechanical and electronic capabilities, and these drive our unique and proprietary innovation.”

Many of Crayola’s innovations constitute first-ever technologies or markets for the company. Crayola launched a new range of products including Fusion Beginnings activity products for toddlers — the first time the company has targeted the under age 3 category. Ergonomically designed chunky crayons and spill proof, capless paints and markers are activated by a valve that regenerates itself when the child pushes down on the gumball tip.

Developing innovation platforms allows companies to select ideas from their portfolios that have the best chance of success. They need to break down the organization silos and forming teams based around platform. Closing the gap between consumer insights to develop platforms, I see many organizations having the challenges of:

1. over reliance on traditional market research and not getting useful insights that are actionable
2. inability to translate insight into application and ideas that are adjacent to their cores
3. struggle to think “platform” and limiting ideas to packaging and extensions.

CPG companies need to accelerate their learning curve on “Platform Thinking”. Ops. Final call for my flight.

5 Things Companies Must Do Now To Making This Dowbturn Into An Upturn.

Can we see the future of capitalism?  Does it have one?  We have pushed capitalism to the extreme and exposed the worst side of it. Yes, capitalism has two sides. The good side is the part that appeals to our self-interest. It gives entrepreneurs a free hand to pursue their ideas in the marketplace, and create wealth,jobs and economic progress in the process. The bad side of capitalism is that it's not good for sustainability. The very idea of a company totally beholden to its shareholders, and management rip off its workers and the environment as much as it can need to come to an end. The rising public demand for accountability (including social)  from corporate and government leaders is pushing for new behaviors and changing the future of management.

At the G20 meeting in London, leaders of the world's largest economies are acting fast and have reached an agreement to tackle the global financial crisis with measures worth $1.1 trillion. This will be used to help countries with troubled economies, the resources available to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) will be tripled to $750bn. The G20 meeting is really G2, there are only 2 key players, China and US. Though the summit is bringing together leaders from all five continents, the focus seem to be dwindling down onto the Big Two i.e. US and China given the size of their economies and how the two are intertwine, there are wide spread speculations that the talks will focus on bilateral concerns between the two. Funny the two economies are so tightly linked with China becoming US government's largest creditor and second largest trading partner after Canada.

As a business leader, what should you do? You cannot be distracted with all those macro stuff and sit in front of CNBC and get depressed as you have a business to run. Here are 5 things business leaders need to do This is the time for true test of leadership.

Understanding The Full Extend Of The Impact. Companies must first understand the strategic impact of a recession. It is often time for musical chairs as market leaders lose their dominance and aggressive strategic innovators move to the forefront. Many companies start to either panic and lose their focus or go straight into hibernation mode, but these are defensive strategies. Take a quick scan of what’s going on in your industry including government, demand and degree of concentration. Develop scenarios to evaluate different macroeconomic outcomes and strategic implications. Determine the weakness in your key competitors in order to take advantage of them.

Reprioritize and Recalibrate. Reprioritize your current projects and make sure they are fully aligned to your chosen scenario. De-leveraging your balance sheet and recalibrate baseline profitability as well as shareholder returns. You almost have to reset all your business planning.

Accelerating Change Even before the current financial crisis, the rules of the game were changing faster than ever before. Business environments are changing at an exponential rate so it is no surprise that many market assumptions are rapidly becoming irrelevant. If you business involve technology as a core, you need to rethink your direction and finder a shorter path to postitive cash flow.

Follow The Shifting Of Consumer Behavior. Economic downturns always change consumer behavior in differing ways. This downturn is different as it has huge implications on every aspect of business. Consumers will be poorer or feel poorer. They will be more frugal and cautious in their expenditures. Reassuring the consumer and holding their hand in a "we're going to get through this together" manner is a vital ingredient of successful marketing during a recession. Companies and brands targeting the middle segment of the market will face the most difficulty. Throw away your market research, send your team out to each spend a few days with your customers. If they are busy, hire our anthropologists to do the job for you. You will be amazed how much insight you can get in a few days.

Rethinking Your Business Models. Normally companies don’t need to think about their business models unless you are a start-up. But this crisis force everyone to rethink this. This is my favorite part as I think many companies have taken their business model for granted and didn’t realize that there are other strategic options. Companies engaging with the capital markets will encounter funders who have no tolerance of risk and reduced ability to hedge it. Hardest hit will be business models premised on high leverage or high levels of capex. Businesses with long production cycles or very long-term investment requirements will find it hard to sustain. Need to think how to make your business model asset-light. Business Model Transformation is hard, I've worked with tens of large companies helping them to make the change. It is a tough task. Just about everyone has lived through a failed effort to transform, this climate forces many to do it. A business model transformation can set an organization up for decades of success, this is a critical junction. Are you ready?

Star Wars' Scientists Are Creating Laser Gun To Kill Mosquitoes. Nintendo Is Working With DOD To Train WARS (Wii Attack Robot Squad) To Be Ready To Deploy To Iraq.

Anouk Lorie reported for CNN that scientists in the US are close to finishing developing a laser gun that could kill millions of mosquitoes in minutes. Mosquitoes are putting many at risks because of malaria. It is estimated that there are 300 million acute cases of malaria each year globally, resulting in more than one million deaths, according to the WHO.

The laser, which has been dubbed a "weapon of mosquito destruction" fires at mosquitoes once it detects the audio frequency created by the beating of its wings. The laser beam then destroys the mosquito, burning it on the spot.

Developed by some of the astrophysicists involved in what was known as the "Star Wars" anti-missile programs during the Cold War, the project is meant to prevent the spread of malaria since it can kills millions in just a few minutes. These lasers could be mounted on lamp post-type poles and put around the circumference of villages, to create a kind of "fence" against mosquitoes.

I think this is a great idea since I don’t like mosquitoes. The scientists are working on how to enable the laser to distinguish between good and bad mosquitoes, not sure there are good mosquitoes in this world.

Technology continues to change our everyday life, this is only one small example. Imagine what’s next is Taser equipped security camera that scan for faces that have a match in the criminal database and automatically activate those Taser guns targeted at those “identified” criminals while triggering a dispatch of armed police to the location. I hate to think what happen if you happen to be misidentified.

A Wii Military Camp has started operations training the next generation of soldiers using Wii remote in the battlefield.  The secret camp is funded by Pentagon with Nintendo technologies and they have spent the last 12 months performing advanced modified systems design and human factor studies to allow the remote to control battlefield-ready laser equipped military robots.

The robot is the advanced version of the current PackBot – a tactical robot first used by the US military 6years ago in Afghanistan which still remain in operation in Afghanistan and Iraq. The advanced robot will be equipped with advanced weaponry. This machine-gun equipped robotic sentry carries two cameras, one for day-time and one for infrared night vision, zooming capabilities, sophisticated pattern recognition to detect the difference between humans and trees or different types of uniforms, and a 5.5mm rapid firing machine-gun. The robot operates in two modes, one is autopilot so it can be used to secure an area or manual mode which the human operate remotely within a distance of 300meters. This way, the robots will act as front line infantry.  Here's picture of an early prototype. Top secrets.