What do consumers really want?
February 24, 2009 by Phil · Leave a Comment
Customers want to feel what they buy is authentic, but “Mass Customization” author Joseph Pine says selling authenticity is tough because, well, there’s no such thing.
He talks about a few experiences that may be artificial but make millions anyway.
Measuring User Experience
February 10, 2009 by Phil · Leave a Comment
In the online space, building accurate ROI model is difficult - especially if there is no e-commerce activities. Adaptive Path in partnership with UC Berkeley have just released this interesting report. It provides frameworks and analysis that will help you to:
- Understand how to choose high-value, high-impact Web development projects
- Evaluate Web investments in the context of the larger corporate budget
- Internally advocate for user experience as a competitive advantage
- Optimize your business processes and organizational structure to better leverage your Web site
“Over the last few years, ROI has been sought as the “holy grail” of getting more headcount and credibility for Web design teams. By unraveling how to measure the value of Web design, ROI analysis contextualizes corporate decision-making and transforms user experience design into a real competitive advantage.”
Ideas, creativity and play
January 7, 2009 by Phil · Leave a Comment
As I don’t blog anymore these days, I’ve decided to post this great content from a firm I admire a lot. First, for those interested, you should that The Guardian in association with IDEO has launched Inspire and Innovate section on the Guardian. They focus on explaining why now is the time for creative thinking and innovation.
Then, at the 2008 Serious Play conference, IDEO’s Tim Brown talks about the powerful relationship between creative thinking and play. He reminds us to “forget the adult behaviours that get in the way of ideas.” A great video to change the way you get to ideas.
- Explorations: Go for quantity
- Building: Think with your hands
- Role Play: Act it out
Management design flaws and radical remedies
October 17, 2008 by Phil · Leave a Comment
MLab was founded by Gary Hamel and is designed to support research and experimentation around the future of management. At the inagural event the MLAb interviewed the attendees to hear about what radical remedies they might have for the future of management.
Each participant was asked to identify a key barrier that prevents organizations from being adaptable, innovative, or an inspiring place to work; and then to propose a potential solution. In the video clips, academics, venture capitalists, and CEOs identified the critical flaws of "management-as-usual" and posit innovative solutions.
Underlying music moment
October 16, 2008 by Phil · Leave a Comment
I’m always amazed how small interactions can create such a level of happiness. That’s what happened to me last night when I discovered the Shazam application for iPhone.
Already an industry standard, Shazam fully integrates with and complements the iPhone’s native environment, allowing you to seamlessly discover, buy and share tunes simply by holding your iPhone to music for just a few seconds.
The Shazam application enables you to tap into a vast database of nearly 5 million tracks giving instant satisfaction for those times when you want to know the tune that is playing, learn more about the artist, buy the song immediately - or simply add it to your playlist.
You can:
- Tag music: identify music anywhere - whether it’s on the radio, TV, in a movie or in a store.
- Build your own soundtrack: see the list grow every time music is tagged.
- Get the music: go straight to iTunes to preview and buy.
- Music Videos: see related videos of the track on YouTube.
- Capture the moment: personalise the tag by taking a photo and adding it to ‘My Tags’.
- Share the moment: send track details to friends via email.
Predicting the next 5,000 days of the web
October 16, 2008 by Phil · Leave a Comment
At the 2007 EG conference, Kevin Kelly shares a fun stat: The World Wide Web, as we know it, is only 5,000 days old. Now, Kelly asks, how can we predict what’s coming in the next 5,000 days?
The Long Wow
July 10, 2008 by Phil · Leave a Comment
Adaptive Path’s Brandon Schauer and David Verba, recently gave a presentation on Subject To Change. It’s a good overview of the main points of their new book. “The way most organizations think and work on products and services isn’t suited to the unpredictable world we live in. Instead, companies need new ways of thinking and working to adapt into innovative, agile, and commercially successful organizations who creates great products and services”.
As David Armano pointed out: “The biggest challenge that today’s marketers face is understanding how to overcome the obstacles that get in the way from creating user/customer/consumer experiences that people want to make part of their everyday lives.”
I also wanted to share this slidecast, The long wow. This presentation lays out an experience-centric approach to fostering and creating loyalty by systematically impressing your customers again and again. The Long Wow challenges creators of customer experiences to plan across channels, time, and disciplines to identify a progression of seduceable moments.
For more on that topic, you can check Adaptive Path’s blog.
Cannes 2008 : Total Collision
July 6, 2008 by Phil · Leave a Comment
Here is the video from the presentation Jeroen Matser did in Cannes a few weeks back. Based on the feedback received afterwards we believe he did a good job again. Please share any thoughts and point of view in comments below if you like, we are interested in opening a bit more of an industry wide debate about how to move things further around this - what we feel is an exciting - topic.
Open Innovation
July 4, 2008 by Phil · Leave a Comment
I’ve always been interested in open innovation. If we are in the early days of collaboration in the agency world, I think that we should try to learn to work with others.
We all speak about UGC, social network, sharing and so forth but what do we do ourselves? We work with the Internet everyday and are immersed in a world of widely distributed knowledge and don’t use much of these advantages.
We don’t spend much time innovating but have a lot of clients. We cannot afford to rely entirely on their own research, but should instead buy or license processes or inventions from other companies [that spend a lot of time experimenting but don’t have enough clients to take these innovations to market].
In Think Like a Venture Capitalist and Change the Marketing Model, Mark Kvamme said: “When it comes to the ways technology is changing the world, marketers would do well to think like venture capitalists: invest upfront in opportunities with potentially huge payouts and help new technology companies define novel ad models.”
I also wanted to share this presentation from Nokia about open innovation. I hope the case studies will get you excited about trying to open the way you work a little bit.
For more reading you can check:
Design thinking
June 6, 2008 by Phil · 1 Comment
I’ve recently come across this thought saying that “as marketers realise the power of digital, our industry is going from telling stories to designing experiences - experiences that deliver information, entertainment, and applications for online, mobile, or physical environments. Applications create utility and engagement that, when relevant, result in deeper brand experiences.”
If agencies are going to design experiences, then it might be the time for us to have a closer look at design thinking.
Tim Brown, CEO and president of IDEO, recently wrote an interesting piece on Harvard business review on how thinking like a designer can transform the way you develop products, services, processes—and even strategy.
Here are key points on how to make design thinking part of the innovation drill.
- Begin at the beginning
- Take a human-centered approach
- Try early and often
- Seek outside help
- Blend big and small projects
- Budget to the pace of innovation
- Find talent any way you can
- Design for the cycle
Then you might be interested in seeing this video conference on the same topic that Tim Brown gave at MIT about innovation through design thinking.