It’s not all that often that you can point to published predictions you made as they are fulfilled, but it’s a warm feeling. In August 2008 we put together a mobility POV in which we predicted that bandwidth would become scarce. Although the iPhone was launched in July 2007, this was still before everyone you know owned an iPhone.
This month, as everybody winds down for the holiday period, we’ve put together a shortlist of best books to help you refresh your mind – or give you ideas for last-minute presents! Read more…
Most of my career has been spent on the front lines of commercial design where the rules and standards are quite clear. Design needs to be clearly understood by the masses. I am in Miami attending two events this week; Art Basel and Design Miami where the rules are very different.
Art Basel is the largest contemporary art fair in the Americas where the fewer people understand and appreciate the art, the better. While you can find works by Picasso, Chagall, Duchamp, Dali, etc., this is really a place for recent works by artists that few have heard of except in the rarified circles of the global art elite. It is place where technique and craft might not matter at all, and where concept might either be everything or nothing (the lack of concept might be the concept…). Novelty, cleverness and uniqueness are what are important. As a designer and artist, I can appreciate much of what I am seeing here (many thousands of works from several hundred dealers), but I must admit, it is a cerebral response. I get it, but most of it leaves me cold. Call me old fashioned, but I like to be moved and inspired by art.
Design Miami plays on a different edge of art….
Positioning can be a real headache. That’s fine. No pain, no gain. But for many brands, positioning on purely functional benefits can cause heartache too. This was the case for Advil, the number two brand in the highly competitive and commoditised US analgesics category.
Why is it so hard to execute a solid brand strategy? Why does your agency just not seem to get the brief? Why do different agencies come back with such dramatically different interpretations of the same brief? And why does every new brand manager seem to have a different understanding of the same brand strategy?
Most of us spend our lives avoiding conflict. But there’s nothing quite like a good argument to clear the air. A moment to state your case and hear the response of your opponent.
If you are reading this then you are interested in the future. And you have probably spotted that too much trend work actually just records the past. It paints a familiar trajectory picture, based on data points you already know. Which isn’t much use when you are trying to develop marketing activity that is fresh and distinctive. Take Health & Wellness; it has been around for years and, no surprises, there is an awful lot of generic health-oriented marketing.
We hear every day how digital technology is changing business, but what’s the impact for marketing, and specifically for insight and innovation? A big subject, but we thought we’d gather some brain-food on how organisations are reaching out to harness the opinions and imagination of consumers and creative thinkers in digitally empowered ways:
Wouldn’t it be great if we could just tap into the body’s physical responses to design by leveraging the best technology, software and science? We could remove all the messy, subjective and mysterious parts of understanding how people are influenced by aesthetics. It has long been a promise of science fiction that computers will be able to read our minds. It is also an implied promise from a range of physiological measurement techniques currently being applied to marketing problems. Let’s look specifically at eye tracking and assess its utility in measuring packaging effectiveness.
As anyone who has set foot in the world’s largest potential market knows – it’s a land of great contrasts. And many contradictions. The complexity of just about everything can be overwhelming. Especially when it comes to making the difficult decisions that are so important to creating and implementing great strategy. Choosing your big bets and deciding where to focus your investments can be daunting.
