Increasing demand for innovation

• Increased user sophistication - particularly due to new digital content access forms
• All companies striving to gain a competitive advantage to maximize it’s stock value.
• Looking to differentiate their product from increasingly similar competition
• Not just special effects and, new delivery devices e.g.:
  • Process
  • Presentation,
  • Product / service,
  • Geography,
  • Value chain,
  • Industry structure

• The life-cycle of innovation is accelerating
• 4 levels of competency
  • Unconsciously Incompetent – Don’t know that they don’t know e.g. Homer Simpson – get hit by innovation / lightning but don’t know what happened
  • Consciously Incompetent – Know they don’t know, don’t want to know e.g. Dilbert – actively watch and avoid lightening complicating their lives
  • Unconsciously Competent – Brilliant talents but undisciplined. Successful using instinct but lack process and can’t teach what they do. e.g. Muttley & Dick Darstardly – generate lots of lightening / ideas but often have trouble managing or harnessing it’s potential
  • Consciously Competent – Innovation is a disciplined process of test, learn, measure, go-forward / discard e.g. Einstein or DaVinci – have lightning in their palms – like a sparkler from a birthday cake or putting your hand on a lightning ball.

Challenging dynamics of innovation

• Two types:
  • Tactical / evolutionary / incremental. Problem is that often the idea is easily replicated. One hit wonders: Bling Bling
  • Sustainable - 5 pillars of breakthrough innovation:
    • Can’t imitate,
    • Profitable,
    • Departure from existing standard (in your category),
    • Change perception of industry,
    • Charge premium for your product / service (affect stock price)

• Barriers to successful sustainable innovation
  • There is often a gap between where companies need to be and where they are (called Innovation Gap)
  • There is also a delay in activating innovation that is often proportional to size of a company. This is due to added layers of bureaucracy and resistance to change
  • Process unfortunately can be considered to retard innovation because it gives more opportunities for people to say no and retards agility
• Risk management
  • Understand the difference between real and perceived risk
  • Most of our effort in innovating is managing acceptance of risk
• Dimensionalise and define brand need to risk because of pressures from:
  • Stock market
  • Corporation
  • Category disruption
  • Consumer disruption
  • Personal – career
  • Political
• Risk from different perspectives
  • Client
  • Client marketing
  • Client media
  • Digital
  • Traditional Account director
• Managing risk
  • Understanding risk from several perspectives:
  • Your risk profile
  • Risk profile of your customer
  • Profile of stakeholder in decision process.
• Checkpoints & Accountability
  • Controls, checks and balances
  • Gateways for progressive approval at various stages e.g. tough decision points to decide whether to progress or stop and concentrate on another effort
  • Clear, simple measurement metrics
  • Results – because the approval isn’t important – the final result is

You can innovate through Leadership

• Understand dynamics. I can help you identify / understand the dynamics of a situation, but I can’t give you the solution to every problem. If you understand the pieces to the puzzle, you can put them together in different ways to solve problems yourself.
• Create a vision of what could happen to dynamics for your industry (and similar)
• Increased discipline: FIRE (Focus, Ideation, Rank, Execution)
  • Focus: Ask hard questions, deeper insights for briefs
  • Ideation: Pushing the ideas, metaphors, parallels
  • Rank: Sorting ideas (realistic, ownable, 5 pillars etc)
  • Execution: Checkpoints, measurement metrics
• Strive for Conscious Competence
• Connecting the dots in different ways

Powerpoint available on SLIDESHARE

Whether it is between a customer and a piece of brand communication, between two customers discussing a brand or an interaction with a contextual situation associated with a brand, communication is all about starting a conversation.

The more relevant the content of the conversation, the more immersive the experience and the more willing people are to engage and consistently participate.

The objective of the conversation can have a short-term objective. If you want a short-term reaction, the unstructured ‘bling-bling’ of a pick-up line may get a superficial reaction (good sex). Though, as we all know, relationships mature over time. Participants expect the connection to get stronger to maintain commitment. Hence, ‘bling-bling’ is an exhaustive and unsustainable way to maintain interest in / participation in a conversation.

Relationships that stand the test-of-time normally start with conversations built on mutual respect and admiration.

‘Communication Design’ is exactly that exploratory process. It is the process of carefully constructing an integrated architecture of messages that remain consistent in their personality and tone across many different content forms, contexts and contact environments.

For brands that are serious about their commitment to their relationships, each conversation needs to firstly be inherently linked to a human behavior or insight. To be considered ‘Good design’, each experience, message, content piece and delivery context needs to be intuitively architected and have continuity and consistency.

Lastly, well designed messages don´t have to rely on tedious repetition to force engagement. The immersive connection leverages relevance and aesthetic appeal.

I´m under no illusion that ‘good design’ is easy. Actually, it is actually near impossible in the fragmented, competitive and dysfunctional communications industry. We need to explore the dynamics and disciplines required to stimulate a conversation that can help us make the small steps necessary to bring this to life.

Cheers. BC

Many digital evangelists claim the problem is that everyone else doesn´t get it!! They are partly right, but at the same time they are blind to their own ignorance and weaknesses.

The most successful digital minds are one that can either cross both the traditional and emerging worlds or partner with a mentor that can help them focus and articulate their value.

 90% of what digital evangelists claim that they are inventing – has actually already been done in the traditional world. Like naïve teenagers, they discover something (e.g. a remake of a Rolling Stones song), thinking it new, give it a name of their own and adopt it as their own groundbreaking innovation.

The problem is that digital evangelists not only disrespect historical marketing theory, but they have deliberately kept anyone (e.g. a grey hair mentor) in the dark and at arms-length. In fact, they have been guilty in many respects of ‘Reinventing the wheel’ because of the barriers that they have placed have stopped them learning from the elders of the ‘communications tribe’. In these times, where digital thinking transcends the digital mediums, it may be in the digital evangelists to be a bit more humble and sign a peace treaty.

Sure, the traditional establishment hasn´t made it easy for this seemingly disruptive splinter group. The demons of past battles still haunt the minds of digital journeymen. Likewise, the partying and arrogance prior to the digital bubble bursting and premature claims that ‘everyone associated with traditional communication are irrelevant and dying’, have left deep seated rift between the traditional and emerging communication worlds.

When an industry is growing, it makes sense to separate and concentrate efforts in a silo to achieve a sense of critical mass.  The problem is, as the pie grows, particularly in an extremely dynamic environment where training always plays a back seat to delivery, if you don´t reintegrate, there simply aren´t enough people to do the required work.

It is time that the ‘digital thoroughbreds’ start feeling a little more self-confident and start adopting and recruiting ‘digital immigrants’ people to do the work so that they can move forward and do what they do best – attack the critical problems facing communication: innovate and build conversation infrastructure. There is no doubt that digital thinkers will rule, but in this new world built upon collaboration and co-opetition, let´s hope that we all can find a way to heal the wounds, collectively swallow our pride and act as the mature leaders that our clients and customers need.