How does digital communication affect business outside marketing?

In this three-part article I will try to explain the changes I’m seeing in the convergence of emerging digital communication, branding and business.

Read part 1 here.
Read part 2 here.

I’ve divided the future of digital, the way I see it, into three concepts. In the process I have purposely left out the natural extension of traditional digital communications as it is already accepted, debated and in excellent shape.

And I’ve focused on “emerging” concepts. I’m guessing most of these are already familiar, but I’m hoping that setting them in relation to each other will give additional inspiration in regards to how they can be utilized.

3. New business models
We need to change our perception of what a service is, from thinking of it as marketing, to becoming an integrated part of our business models:

From part two:
“The main thing though is not … trying to better the experience by adding a service to the product. But the perception of what a service is: From thinking of it mainly as a cost to becoming a direct means for generating income.”

The problem with marketing is that it is perceived as a cost. And as long as digital communication is perceived as a marketing tool it is inevitable that it will be perceived as a cost as well:

“I also suggest that the problem with most [digital] initiatives today is that they are designed as marketing and by that inevitably will be perceived as a cost. If we are to see more money and more innovation being put into the digital and connected activities, we need to start helping companies identify, design and benefit from new business opportunities, not new marketing opportunities.” – http://www.180360720.no/index.php/archive/connect-everything-else/

In short: Digital communications needs to move from selling products to being products.

How can we accomplish this?

The communications industry perspective:
First of all, we need to create a new discussion and movement around digital. That discusses how to generate tangible value FROM brands, not intangible value FOR brands.

I’m not arguing that the latter is less meaningful, but that digital communications should start partaking in processes further down the business value chain.

“We need to get people to pay for products and services, not just talk about them”.

Secondly, we need to change the current impression that developments and investments in marketing technology is concentrated on finding new creative ways to hand out free stuff (http://is.gd/1NVVGc).

It’s as if digital’s own brand has become “FREE [stuff]“.

We need to prove that the platform is mature enough to support a business model, not a coupon model.

And doing this by demonstrating the value from acquiring members, not freeloaders, and understanding what real value these people will be willing to pay good money for.

As Tim Malbon states in this clip interview with Edward Boches:

“When people think about digital in traditional advertising agencies, … basically what they think about is communications first. … What is the coms idea? … We’ll actually they are missing the biggest opportunity, which is often: Can we create a new business here? Can we create entirely new revenue? Can we change the business model of the company that we are helping? Can we help them by bringing people in making their product and services better?”
- Tim Malbon of Made By Many interviewed by Edward Boches

The client perspective:
Going back to the second part of this article, I suggested that there was two ways of looking at the goal of any business:

Traditionalist mindset: Lowering the cost of customer acquisition.
Services mindset: Increasing the value of each customer (member).

From this we can take that the goal of the services mindset is to increase the long term value of a customer, most often by offering them an opportunity to pay by subscription.

The New York Times wrote about this back in 2009:

“EVERYWHERE you look these days, businesses are selling subscriptions. Cable television, Internet and cellphone services are sold that way. So are business software, office printing and car rentals like Zipcars. … Marketers like them for good reason: Convince someone to take a subscription, and the revenue flows in for months to come.” – http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/11/business/11every.html?_r=1

So how does a company used to selling physical objects move on to sell abstract intangible software solutions, or services?

In my mind the solution to this challenge lies in the core of each company. Going back to the origin and idea behind the value of the original offering. Something often forgot by marketing departments, accountants and CEO’s as the company moves from its idealistic first stages and into the conformity of big business.

In the presentation When marketing becomes the product 2, I give this explanation:

A product is worthless. It is not before it is introduced to a situation where it offers something valuable that the object becomes meaningful and valuable to people. This is the origin of most business: Some dedicated individual[s], seeing an opportunity to create and offer something valuable to people. That is how we got the toothbrush, the toilet brush and the air brush – they were all designed by people who identified a need or an improvement. Designed the solution and implemented it into the market.

This is the core of any business – understanding how to ad something valuable to a situation. And this is the core of the services and subscription mindset: Understanding the businesses core value and how to modernize, strengthen, increase or extend on it.

Trying to make this more tangible I offered four/five simple directions (at the very end of the presentation Connect everything else) where companies could start looking for products and services to increase the value of their situations:

1. Fixing broken models
In the first direction companies are urged to look for broken models. These might not be obvious at first, as we are used to working around them or accepting them. But they are often there and finding digital solutions to simplify them or avoid them completely might create an opportunity for the business.

As an example hotel checkouts are often crowded and an unnecessary wait for regular business travelers. Mobile applications allowing for direct checkout via your phone might help customers skip the whole reception area and walk right into the waiting taxi – ordered automatically by the same service.

Imagine car-sharing schemes. Having to go to two physical locations in order to pick up the car, the first one being the physical keys, the second the car itself. Zipcar solved this problem by removing the unnecessary stop at the key depot. Every driver could just download the car key app on their mobile and concentrate on finding the car.

2. Combining digital and real world initiatives
The real world is filled with limitations. What would happen if we employed a non-physical layer with the ability to record and personalize data? The goal would be to enhance the physical experience by the opportunities offered by digital.

This is the kind of thinking that went behind the Nokia Push / Burton project explained in part two. Where adding sensor technology to the snowboarding clothing and equipment boarders will be able to not only make radical jumps, but also collect points for awesomeness and compete against their friends by comparing scores in the evening (or live on their phone).

3. Adding services / Extending the experience surrounding the product
Where the second direction is saying that the real world experience could be changed by combining it with a digital layer. This direction is saying that the real world experience is the same, but we need to ad additional stuff to it – in order to expand it.

An example of this is how the Albion bakery, in London, made sure, through Twitter, that every potential (and subscribing) customer on the closest city blocks got a message when Albion’s products where best served – steaming hot directly from the oven.

A second example is the National Railway in Norway. Who not only put Internet connection and WIFI on their long distance trains, but also wanted to ad digital services to this connection. They ended up building a content portal where travelers could download anything from music, to videos or games. All adding to the already paid for product (and with the opportunity to further monetize.)

4. Thinking in terms of relationships – when people are more important owning and using your product, than thinking about buying it.

Do you treat your customers as members? Ask yourself this: what can I offer my customers every day, or every week, which would increase the value of the situation I’m designing my offer for?

It needs to be understood that inviting your customers to become members is not a one time thing. It demands a program and a system that is able to offer them subscribable value.

Spotify is a good example of this, where they understood that as soon as music became something that got hidden away on your hard-drive – as opposed to decorating your bedroom wall. Music would stop being something worth treasuring. It would turn into a commodity you listen to and then throw away. Spotify understood how digital changed the music experience and started designing a business model for it – a subscription model.

These were all generalizing ideas to kick start an ideation process in order to figure out how to monetize digital opportunities in your company.

If you are still stuck, and if all else fails, then ask yourself these final questions.

- How do we create members – not customers.
- How do we create loyalty to our brand that nobody can take away from us?
- How can we earn money doing things that didn’t exist five years ago?

Now, get to work!

How does digital communication affect business outside marketing?

In this three-part article I will try to explain the changes I’m seeing in the convergence of emerging digital communication, branding and business.

Read part 1 here.

I’ve divided the future of digital, the way I see it, into three concepts. In the process I have purposely left out the natural extension of traditional digital communications as it is already accepted, debated and in excellent shape.

And I’ve focused on “emerging” concepts. I’m guessing most of these are already familiar, but I’m hoping that setting them in relation to each other will give additional inspiration in regards to how they can be utilized.

2. Digital services
I would argue that digital services is the natural extension of customer service emerging as a consequence of new technology, in this case personalization and mobility, enabling customer service to grow into the next generation.

I think it is important to point out this relationship as digital services is not a brand new concept lifted out of thin air with no goal or intention. That there are at least twenty years of good customer service reference, experience and research to dig into when wanting to understand how digital services could offer gains and advantages for a specific business and their customer.

Not to make it sound as if we just added ones and zeroes to something old… There are of course important differences:

“Customer service is a series of activities designed to enhance the level of customer satisfaction – that is, the feeling that a product or service has met the customer expectation.” – Turban et al. (2002)

“A digital service is a tool, application or activity designed to increase the value of an experience. That is, increasing the value offered by a brand in a situation where it is already relevant or extending the existing relevance to new situations.” – 180360720.no (2011)

The important part in regards to the deliverable is that where customer service promise only to “meet the customers expectations” digital services wants to extend the company’s offer and set new expectations.

The Nokia / Push Burton project is a good example of this. Where by implementing connected technology in Burton snowboarding equipment and clothing, software can identify, record and eventually score jumps, slope and style. Tapping into the snowboarding culture and turning a day in the slopes with your friends into a massive online game extending the whole concept of snowboarding.

The main thing though is not the software extension of the existing hardware / trying to better the experience by adding a service to the product. But the perception of what a service is: From thinking of it mainly as a cost to becoming a direct means for generating income (more on this in part 3: New business models).

Now, the world is simple; companies produce and sell physical products (or services) generating a direct value customers understand and find valuable enough to exchange with cash. Why would businesses want to complicate this?

Because; the current mainstream way of employing marketing communications is to acquire customers, not to capitalize on the customer relationship. And as technology becomes more personal and mobile the next generation of Internet tools is more suited for generating value from relationships than direct sales.

We need to accept the fact that there is more to the web than the long tail. A marvelous concept, but still just playing on the first generation abilities of online and more explaining the realities of product availability and search, than offering a fresh look at how companies do business.

One could say that where the traditional business mindset employs conventional means in order to achieve the lowest possible cost for customer acquisition, the digital services mindset says that business value is not generated from new customers, but from increasing the value of each customer.

Traditionalist mindset: The goal is to lower the cost of customer acquisition.
Digital services mindset: The goal is to increase the value of each customer (member).

Now, the digital services mindset demands that we answer two questions:

1. How do you increase the value of a customer?
2. How does this increased value result in cold hard cash?

1. Increasing customer value:

a. Brand lock-in. The branded service would be a means to lock the customer to the brands product line, so that there is a value to be lost if the “next” purchase is a different brand.

The Nokia / Push Burton example above is a great example of this. Where only the friends with the Burton equipment are able to share and compete online and buying a Nitro board or some Salomon snowboarding trousers will exclude you from future group activity.

b. Subscriptions, not products. Digital services would be a means for businesses to change their business model from a purchasing/sales model to a subscription model. (More on this in part 3: New business models)

2. Having a conventional mindset it’s not difficult to see the implications:
As what I am saying is that capitalizing on an existing relationship with a current customer is more valuable than creating a new one. That business and marketing communications should concentrate more on generating money from people who have already purchased the product, rather than get more people to buy it. How does this make any sense?

a. A customer is an exceptionally expensive acquisition for almost any company. We all know that it is not the first, not even the second, but the third, fourth and fifth purchase that makes them valuable.

b. There is an increasing amount of companies trying out or launching subscription models instead of product purchasing models. Two of the reasons being increased accountability of income, and stickiness; customer’s tendency to give subscriptions one, two, three or more chances before canceling them.

c. How do you keep adding value to the experience when the product is exhausted? A physical product has its limitations, at one point it becomes a better idea to offer an extended value through a digital augmentation, rather than rethinking and re-communicating the product time and time again.

d. Traditional marketing means are expensive as they both scale poorly and lack longevity (due to media cost and wear). The job is not to demonstrate increased value from digital services, but to instill confidence in doing something different.

e. People are your ambassadors. They share their experiences with each other and often this includes products and brands. Often what they lack is not the willingness to share but the tools to do so. The goal is to enable people to share the experience through tools supporting the culture your brand is a part of (as the snowboarding example above)

To put digital services in another way – it is more than creating brand preference (which I wrote about in part 1) it is capitalizing on brand loyalty.

How does digital communication affect business outside marketing?

In this two-part article I will try to explain the changes I’m seeing in the convergence of emerging digital communication, branding and business.

We try to place every advancement or innovation within the context of what we already know.

“We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”
- Marshall McLuhan

This rear-view mindset instantly frames discussions and ideas inside boxes belonging to old technology and old solutions. One of the indicators of this is how we give new stuff new numbers (2.0 or 3.0) instead of new names.

A point already wonderfully articulated by Breakfast:

“Some people call what we do “the Internet of things” or “web 3.0.” In our opinion those sound a bit silly. We simply think of ourselves as inventors who are trying to take all the amazingness of what can be done online and bring it into some sort of device or experience in the real world.” – http://breakfastny.com/what-we-do/

(And yes, I am as guilty as anyone else…)

Consequently this is making it hard to understand and see the opportunities offered by digital and how these can have different effects on business. And of course, seeing how digital communications has moved on from being exclusively a marketing tool to a critical part of the business toolbox.

I’ve divided the future of digital, the way I see it, into three concepts. In the process I have purposely left out the natural extension of traditional digital communications as it is already accepted, debated and in excellent shape.

And I’ve focused this article on “emerging” concepts. I’m guessing most of these are already familiar, but I’m hoping that setting them in relation to each other will give additional inspiration in regards to how they can be utilized.

1. Experiential brand design
Ironically “the brand” has run into the same problem it was designed to solve; helping consumers differentiate between companies and offers. Where brands are designed to diversify the offer in the market without changing the actual product, the strategies for shaping and designing brands today are so similar and so universal that we are creating brand categories, not brand identities.

Brand building in a recession: Richard Murray from D&AD on Vimeo.

Brand Building in a recession: Richard Murray

As a perfectly timed response to this digital is maturing into branded experiences in the form of services, applications and tools: A designed experience being a much more powerful branding tool than psychological storytelling.

Unfortunately there is a cleft here, because even if digital is ripe, we are not taking advantage of this maturity.

I’ll support this with a marketing classic: “Nobody sells tires, they sell security”.

Isn’t this true? You don’t buy a set of winter tires (with spikes) because you need new tires. You buy them because sliding around on icy and snowy roads on summer slicks is extremely dangerous.

Now all branches of marketing know this, and every brand comes up with a unique value proposition that is communicated thoughtfully and consistently in every interaction with the customer. With one exception: Online.

Often the most important interaction between the customer and the brand destroys or ignores all the effort and investment put in by the other initiatives.

An example:
People travel between two cities. They can either travel by plane or by train. The train takes double the amount of time and is as expensive as the plane – why would you choose to ride the train? The National Railway of Norway were faced with this dilemma and wisely decided on a brand platform suggesting that when it comes to the train it is the journey itself that is the destination – the train ride in itself is a valuable product – as opposed to the plane which is just herding cattle.

The company invested heavily in this story on a range of surfaces and channels. But what happened when people came online to their website – possibly the most important interface in the interactions between the brand and the customer? Online the story was hidden. What people met where a ticket purchasing application/calculator mistakenly similar to the one offered by any cattle herding airline.

The National Railway were communicating and selling “security” on every channel and surface, except for online – where it was selling “tires”…

This is the challenge and the immaturity of digital. And as we outgrow it we will also see the potential of online as a brand building platform and experiential branding (branded activities and services) as the solution to the “similarization” of psychological brands.

Differentiating the brand from its competitors by designing branded experiences delivering on the brand promise is the first emerging concept.

End of part 1… Part 2 to be published.

Customer retention comes down to one simple thing: Having a good reason to stick around. In this presentation for the banking / finance industry I argue how brand and design strategy is not only underused in the category, but also, if used properly, can represent a cost effective way of creating loyal and motivated customers.

Some core arguments:

- It’s not about creating a psychological value-layer “outside” the product or service. But having the brand strategy define and guide the development and design of the services and/or offerings themselves. The brand is the promise, the service is the proof.

- Online is the most important interface in the relationship between the client and the company (especially in banking and finance). Still many companies waste this opportunity by adhering to sterile, engineered calculators.

- It’s not about tools or applications, but the bigger picture. Helping the customer achieve a goal through tailored, specialized applications delivering on the brand promise – and by that differentiating oneself in the marketplace.

- Emotions and aesthetics are about motivation – inspiring people to learn and use what is offered. Services often disappear because they lack the ability to motivate use.

- Visualizing existing data sets creates meaning where there was none, but also learning and even new services.

- Personal banking should think of itself as a membership platform, committing itself to fill the customer relationship with valuable offerings and services.

What are the myths concerning digital / online strategy, and how are they affecting our ability to innovate?

I picked out seven of them as preparation for a presentation on Thursday. And added them below.

Myth 1: Formats are predetermined
In traditional media communication companies need to re-articulate their value proposition in order to fit into available formats. Online this mindset is obsolete; we tailor formats to best accommodate the company’s value proposition. Tom Himpe writes in his book Advertising Next:

“Advertising’s hunger for impact explains the heavy usage of cliches and jokes throughout its history. The reason is simple: clichés allow immediate recognition and require little exposition; jokes are short and can get a point across very effectively. It is rare for advertisers to construct deeper, more meaningful stories, as time is simply not on their side” – Advertising Next, Tom Himpe

To put it short: Digital offers both the flexibility in format, time and opportunity to build relationships that companies need in order to connect with people through a rich, deep, meaningful value proposition.

Myth 2: The Internet is extremely complex
The Internet is not complex; it’s the same. The same business challenges, the same customers, the same competitors and the same products (to a large extent). The problem arises when companies who should be thinking in terms of business challenges and opportunities start discussing the granularities of the digital platform – at a cost to discussing the strategy. (“we need to be on Facebook” rather than “we need to make sure every subscriber gets daily or weekly value from his subscription, we need to give them a reason never to leave …”).

Myth 3: Brands are evil
People don’t share stuff because they notice it; they share stuff because it’s valuable. Companies are experiencing that the change from buying attention in the traditional media landscape to earning attention through valuable content completely changes their role and motivation in their interaction and participation with customers. Brands now understand that the reward from offering genuine value is a much more valuable long-term strategy than buying short-term customer exposure. In order to achieve this, companies need to offer transparent, real and relevant value.

Myth 4: It’s an information storage unit
Online information can be stored in unlimited amounts. But the Internet in its current format is not a good place to read stuff, it is in fact the worst place to read stuff, both in regards to the illumination and size of the screen, the latter especially on smaller devices and the situations where it is used (increasing amounts of impatiens and immediacy). The Internet is more an actions platform, for doing stuff, for applications and tasks – something becoming clearer and clearer as we are moving into services and tools, away from the “searchable Internet”.

Myth 5: It’s a direct sales platform
Sure it is. It is an online store open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, available from anywhere in the world. But this is not the only important aspect of the Internet. Looking at how technology is being adopted and integrated into peoples’ lives, online is increasingly turning into a relationship platform. Which is a good thing as it supports to a far greater degree the idea that people are much more important owning and using a product than thinking about buying it.

Myth 6: It’s about people
It is, but remember that it’s first and foremost about you (the company) building a strategy to get what and where you want. Fresh research is finding that to many companies are investing in online activities based on peoples’ needs and wants, not their own business models. The result is that the online investment is being viewed as a cost, not a business advantage. And why would a company want to invest more money in something being perceived as a cost? If your digital strategy doesn’t offer new business opportunities it is destined to stagnate.

Myth 7: Measure success with Google Analytics
Google Analytics does a great job at measuring the distribution of people through a network. But the ease of measuring traffic also offers us the possible disservice of designing for the stuff that is easiest to track. In the words of Jon Steel:

“I also think we should be angered by the accountability mindset that means we are making more and more decisions based on what can be measured rather than what’s really important.” – Jon Steel

Google analytics only visualizes one set of values generated by the website – and unless your in the business of direct sales this is not the most important one.

What does it take to employ a winning design strategy online? In the presentation First Impression, Marketing, Brand and Participants 2010 Update I discuss some suggestions.

This is an update to a former presentation with the same name published on slideshare.net in 2007.

As always find the slides available on my flickr account: everythingnewisdangerous

Should clients have 100% veto power over designers and creative’s art direction and design?

Firstly they are paying for it, and secondly their product and brand is at the mercy of it. But the result is all to often that expert craftsmanship and brilliant work is being destroyed and turned into mediocre craft and ineffective communication at the hands of unskilled clients. Affecting all parties negatively.

Is only one party to blame here? Or is the problem more nuanced? With both creatives and companies having to be more aware of their weaknesses and strengths?

In my presentation Designing Identities I mention that:

“We need to include our clients in the articulation of design, if not products will become unsophisticated and conservative (research proves that the will of unarticulated people creates products that people themselves find uninteresting and boring).”

Aaron Winters requested the references to this, and I thought the feedback would be interesting for several readers:

1. The first reference is from the book Emotional Design by Donald Norman, where he mentions an art project where two artists ask people their preferences in regards to visualization and art. Collecting a range of answers these are then used as instructions for a series of paintings, which garnered terrible feedback. Directly externalizing people’s preferences turned ideas of beauty into something expected and boring.

You can find a larger reference to this statement on slide 17 in the slideshow below, or here.

2. The second and third reference are both from Malcolm Gladwell’s, talk at PopTech!

First Gladwell talks about a research project where a group of students were asked to choose their favorite of two posters; one impressionistic and one of a cat. The first group could just take their favorite poster and leave. But the second group had to explain what they liked about the image and then take it. The group that could just take the poster (without explanation) tended to take the impressionistic one, the group that had to explain their preference tended to take the one of the cat. Even more interesting was the fact that when the researchers called these people back after a while to ask them if they still had/liked the posters, the group who chose the impressionistic one tended to still like their posters while the people who picked the cat did not.

3. Secondly Gladwell mentions that some TV stations in the US turned down what would later prove to be some of America’s most popular TV shows after asking everyday people their opinion on the pilots. The interesting thing about this though is that what the focus groups would criticize and dislike was the things that eventually would make these shows a great success – the quirkiness, the odd things out, the exaggerated personality, the unexpected.

Gladwell points to several things:

- Having to explain our preferences changes them, because we start favoring the stuff we can explain.
- Having to explain ourselves changes our preferences to the least sophisticated, traditional and expected.
- Having to explain ourselves changes our preference from something we really would like, to something we don’t.

At the same time as these three references favor the work and craft of the designer or art director there are arguments favoring the clients perspective:

While clients are not skilled in the creative crafts most designers and art directors are not skilled business experts. And almost no one has as good an understanding of the clients business as the business themselves – shooting out brilliant ideas is one thing, solving business challenges and generating value inside a foreign context a completely different one.

Donald Norman in his article “Design thinking: A useful Myth” suggests that designers, in the context of design thinking, do not possess “some mystical, creative thought process that places them above all others in their skills at creative, groundbreaking thought”, but they do offer an outside perspective.

And I would ad; have a greater propensity to push one self out of the excepted and into the unexpected.

People skilled in the creative crafts are indispensible in the role of solving big communication challenges for companies who need disruptive and innovative solutions. But it is not because they, as Norman says, possess some unnatural ability to have all the solutions in the universe – it is because they help clients remove blinders, and push them to explore opportunities in what will initially be perceived as uncomfortable spaces.

And this is the problem; it is not that the creative work is to good or to bad. The root of the challenge is that creative professionals need to understand that their work is as much related to removing blinders and luring clients into the uncomfortable. If they are not able to do that from a business perspective and on a layman’s level in regards to the design craft, then the product or solution they provide will seem natural to them but be without explanation and relevant context to the client.

The way brands and agencies have combined new technology with their sales, marketing and design strategies, give the impression that technology is outgrowing the creative and communications industry almost ten to one.

A descriptive example is the OMO/Unilever campaign being run in Brazil at the moment (read it here: popsop.com / brandchannel.com). Where they are putting a large GPS tracking device into 50 boxes of a new OMO detergent. And then having teams follow customers as they take it out of the store. At home the people are given a small video recorder and asked to video tape personal moments of family happiness.

To me this presents several missed opportunities. First of all having teams following 50 boxes in a large country as Brazil seems like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Secondly the prize seems to small, thirdly asking people to share their private and personal family moments with the world might be difficult (at least when you are only inviting 50 random people to participate). And lastly; this is detergent, people don’t care, and the context surrounding detergent is probably more connected to housework or clean stuff than the universal value of family happiness (I rant, and am not familiar with the target group, but there it is).

What the campaign does unveil though, and is a brilliant example of, is how bad we are in the communications and creative business at using technological innovation to do our own innovation. We seem to spend large amounts of time and resources on picking out a technology, fitting it into a marketing campaign (and avoiding the hurdles it introduces), rather than using it to innovate our own concepts.

What I am saying is that new technology hasn’t brought with it new ideas, we are just using these new opportunities as vehicles for old communication strategies.

Donald Norman suggest that technology always comes first, and then it creates a need. I interpret this as technology in the beginning will always be rudimentary and difficult to use – innovation in application and design follows in the footsteps of the technology (and I might be a bit impatient).

But we need to keep our eyes on the goal, we need to be aware that we are still talking to people in the same old way – even if the format available has changed completely. In a former post I mentioned the mobile industry having been the only industry to see that what they have been doing has been completely wrong – it is time for the other industries to follow suit.

With the energy, innovation and ideas we are seeing from engineers, start-ups and even companies established production and logistical chains, the creative business is presenting itself as conservative and slow to react.

The creative business might be the most boring business.

The way we are making and selling design is becoming generic and confusing. One of the challenges is that design, as creativity, is described as a product, an end goal. When the fact is that neither design nor creativity is a result; it’s a description of how we get there, not what we will end up with.

The presentation discusses some of the challenges and opportunities of design today, as I see them. The content has previously been posted as three articles on popsop.com and linked to from this blog. The presentation tries to put it all together, make it more internet consumption friendly (read: packed with sound bites), and offer it as a pleasant and enjoyable printable document.

As always the individual slides can be found on flickr.com/everythingnewisdangerous

Find the presentation on slideshare.net/helgetenno/designing-identities or below.

Are we challenging the status quo just to settle for an updated version? Is this even a time for status quo?

One of my personal mantras has always been: “Never stop, as soon as you’ve found a solution – start questioning it”. In an ongoing email discussion William Channer, he asked me to elaborate. I thought the answer would be well worth posting on the blog:

WC: Why is this important to you?:
“Never stop, as soon as you’ve found a solution – start questioning it”

Two reasons:

1. This is not the time for status quo’s. Working in an environment where the pattern of platform usage, media consumption and technology awareness in the general public is in constant development means that the currency of our products needs to meet this change. As we have not yet “landed” on the next big thing but finding our way there (we are currently in between generations), settling down can quickly either leave one stranded or result in the loss of a big opportunity.

For our clients this is the time to gain market opportunities through new business models, utilizing technology and behavior in tailored ways (like Amazon has done for the book industry or Google for the media industry the last fifteen years). If we are not helping our clients discover and develop new opportunities, but milk old ones, are we doing our job?

2. Deconstructing concepts, taking them apart and challenging each fragment is a way of exploring and discovering ideas. Amongst others described by Stephen King in the book A Master Class in Brand Planning: Find one idea and then try to destroy it.

The benefit of this process is both a chance to polish the final concept and make sure every detail is perfect, but also to understand how and why the details work, and uncovering new insight in the process. Deconstructing something you’ve already did that worked gives you great ammunition not for copying it, but for finding out why it was a success, and then understanding which specific details in it made it work and why other details did not.

As an example advertisers have always known what types of communication gave an intended effect, but it is only in the last twenty years brain science has been able to tell us exactly why. Which has led to an offspring of brand new ideas based on the specific knowledge of how the brain works as opposed to just copying known “advertising rules”.

To put it briefly: People constantly adopt and implement new ways of communicating and of fitting technology into their everyday life. By deconstructing our big ideas into smaller fragments we have a better tool for knowing what will work when building solutions on new platforms for new behaviors – and by that the “risk” or “guts” people often talk about when explaining creativity becomes rational and logical – even safe.

This does not make marketing and design boring, but it demands more thinking about thinking. – And it demands as much creativity from the strategic department as from the creative department.