"MAKIES is an action doll creator: a player/customer can design their own action doll – features, hair, clothes and everything – & we then 3D print it uniquely to them, build & dress it, and send on to them within 3 weeks of ordering."
Via Makie.
And, please, do not even think about everybody having their own 3D printer at home! This will become your worst nightmare - just after the web ...
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Our @wiwo-column just went online:
"Ein Marketing mit erdrückendem Korsett aus starren Strukturen, Prozessen und Ritualen passt nicht mehr in die heutige Zeit.
Das Marketing benötigt das 'Start-up-Gen', um zu neuem Leben zu erwachen."
Please read the full post at Wirtschaftswoche.
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"Those who work in advertising often wonder if they live in a sort of bubble. You wonder, are civilians as active on social media and as inclined to pay attention to what brands are doing on Twitter, and is the rest of the world as preoccupied with that award-winning ad campaign that industry types can’t stop talking about?
The unsurprising answer is no, according to a study commissioned by San Francisco-based advertising agency Heat ..."
Via.
Here are the results in a neat infographic. Have a look at the numbers BEFORE you plan your next 'big thing'.
And please have a look at the bottom comparison, too: Office Holiday Parties. Enjoy!
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"It will cost an eye-watering $25,000 - and this video goes some way to explaining that price." - Via gizmodo.
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Via jay mug.
Great brands and Logos stay ahead of their time by intuitively concentrating on their inner core.
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I just wrote in our weekly column at German business magazine Wirtschaftswoche that Pinterest - or facebook, twitter, television - is not the solution, but just a medium, and marketeers should not fall for their agencies like in 'the emperor's new clothes'.
Here are a few questions you should ask yourself, in case you think about engaging in Pinterest - by Becky Lang from Zeus Jones.
"The point is, sometimes forcing your brand onto Pinterest can backfire. Pinterest is a place for creativity and idealism, not necessarily for all products everywhere. Here are a couple questions to ask yourself before going there with your marketing.
1. Does your product fit with the mood of Pinterest?
...2. Do you respect Pinterest and its users?
...3. Do you create media that might otherwise end up on Pinterest?
...4. Is this just another house for your TV campaign?
..."
Please read her full post.
And have a look at my Visit Pinterest after reading this Post, to understand what Pinterest is desperately missing.
Addendum
Via thisisnthappyness.
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More leadmarke posts about tumblr please find after the click.
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(L/M NET: the blogged experience & expertise of some of the best minds in Innovation, Brand Engagement, Communication Agility:
Tom - Tim - Konstantin - Helge - Drew - Charles - Anthony - Adrian)
There are obstacle to innovation everywhere. Risk aversion, lack of resources, lack of enthusiasm, not enough time, not enough ideas, too many ideas – the list is potentially endless.
You can help your organisation be more innovative right now (today!) by answering these four questions:
Then do the same thing tomorrow.
By getting into the habit of executing ideas you can get over one of the biggest innovation obstacles. Not all of them work, but the net value of a great idea is zero. It’s only be testing them out that you find the value in your ideas.
Identifying these obstacles might give you some really good ideas for your answer to question number 1 too.
Probably not.
And yet, most big newspapers have systems that do exactly that.
The problem is, their new competitors don’t have these. The new news organisations and those of the future won’t have to deal with this obstacle.
Answering this question will help you identify the structural and processual obstacles that your firm faces. And it will give you some ideas about potential business model innovations.
Think of someone, and connect up. Send them an email, or a tweet. Invite them for a coffee.
One way or another, make a new connection.
Innovation requires the execution of ideas. By answering these questions, you generate new ideas. By acting on these new ideas, you can get into the habit of innovating.
It may be that none of these questions trigger huge game-changing innovations.
But then, you won’t know that until you test them out, will you?
(ralf says: Good questions! To illustrate the first one a little bit more, I linked a post I wrote in Jan, 2011: Doing Things Right for the First Time.)
Tim is a lecturer at The University of Queensland Business School. He researches, writes, teaches and consults on topics relating to effective innovation management, with an emphasis on studying innovation networks. He blogs at The Innovation Leadership Network. Twitter: @timkastelle
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The Complexity of Simplicity:
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Alle reden über Social Media, die wenigsten denken es konsequent zu Ende. Zwei unterschiedliche - sich nicht widersprechende, sondern ergänzende - Perspektiven:
01 - Unsere @wiwo-Kolumne:
Von Social Media zum Social Business
Social Business ist das sozial handelnde - im Sinne Ökosysteme kreierende - Business. Ich erläutere dies am Beispiel des Siegeszuges der Eisenbahn.
02 - Meine @thethirdclub-Kolumne:
Wer hat Angst vorm Sozialen Unternehmen?
Fast schon muss man sagen, man kann nicht nicht sozial sein. Warum wehren sich trotzdem so viele dagegen?
Viel Vergnügen!
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I had to quote Michael's entire post for you:
"You either build something that makes the world a better place or you don’t. There are complete industries built on creating arbitrary value for the world (investment banking). And there are complete industries built around innovation and creating value for the world (technology).
If you’re an entrepreneur where your success is built around the value you create for the world (e.g. Apple) , you have an opportunity to disrupt entire industries. The world doesn’t need another “Groupon for X”; we need more companies disrupting archaic institutions like healthcare, education, insurance, government, and banking. We need more companies like Uber that receive cease & desist letters from their city to shut down. And more companies like ProFounder, Votizen, BankSimple, Art.sy and Massive Health that utilize the power of the web to democratize entire industries.
So, the next time you think about starting or joining a company, think about your individual impact on the world. You have a real opportunity to make it better." - Michael Karnjanaprakorn
You may prolong Michael's list of industries by energy, automobile, telecoms, publishing houses, ... almost every industry coming to your mind.
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"Design is shrinking the gap between what a product does and why it exists.
Designing is not just about picking the right font or gradient. Stop thinking about design in terms of wire frames or visual style; it is about the product as a whole.
Designing is figuring out the purpose of your product and how you orient everything else around it. And that means that everyone within a company plays a role in the design process.
And that means that everyone in a company needs to learn design literacy. It’s a hard task. Everyone tells their MBA-wielding friends that they should learn to code: “Anyone can do it,” or “It’s going to be the new literacy.” People think code is the basis of a working product. But what about design? How often are people told that they should “learn to design”?
While everyone involved should know how design works, they should also understand that it can be practiced on anything you make.
The design instinct, above all, is about viewing the world around you as a place filled with opportunities to add more thoughtfulness and care.
Thus, your organization deserves to be just as well-designed as your homepage, and your company’s tweets as crafted as your account confirmation emails.
Which is to say that design should be considered a facet of everything you do, as well as a means of improving your business. Imagine if your site were to slow down. What would you do? You’d try to make it faster, or find an engineer that could. You’d make a conscious design decision to make your site quicker to use, because you understand that doing so will make your offerings more accessible and user-friendly.
Apply that principle of improvement to everything else." - Sahil Lavingnia
Via collaborativefund.
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After reading this you will have understood why Pinterest will be a great success for all those boring superficial brands out there, trying to be cool.
Authentically, true cool brands are on tumblr!
"...well, girls like Pinterest.
Their homepage, which features the most popular posts, is the quickest way to communicate what the average North American seems to think “femininity” is. Remember how girls in high school would paper their lockers with pictures of heartthrobs, puppies in baskets, minidresses they wanted, red, fruity cocktails they’d like to get hammered on? Imagine looking in that locker, then being shoved in it and having the door slammed closed on you. That’s a visit to Pinterest.
And that’s why I find it so bleak. Here is a world devoid of science, of politics, of dark humour, of a social conscience. It’s a world where orgasms don’t exist but babies are everywhere. Where “you go, girl!” affirmations rub shoulders with Mountain Dew cupcakes. This domain is sort of like a girls-only clubhouse, but it’s not about expressing innermost desires, just surface desires—for hair, shoes, nail art, a boyfriend that exists in soft-focus black-and-white.
It’s not a subculture, either. It’s the same idea of femininity that the two biggest female entrepreneurs of the past decade—maybe ever—Martha and Oprah, made their fortune selling. And it infuriates me because it’s so damned archaic - Pinterest circa 1912 would be fundamentally the same." ...
Please read the full post: Pinterest is all pink, puppies and pretty ponies - Here is a world devoid of science, of politics, of dark humour, of a social conscience. Via underpaidgenius.
S/he who likes it (pinterest) a little bit more intellectual, may follow me at pinterest.
Or of course directly at tumblr, the real thing: brandpoems and 'this message is too wide to fit your screen'.
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"... Trying to implement more innovation is noble, but requires a lot of work, work that will distract the business from its normally efficient, effective processes.
Middle managers who’ve spent years developing robust processes to achieve short term financial success are loathe to see their work go to waste and don’t want to distract their people and processes from what they do best.
Thus, the importance of “focus”. If CEOs really want innovation, they must focus, focus, focus on innovation. A one time off-handed request for more innovation simply won’t create much change..."
Via innovationexcellence.
Please read Misserfolgsstrategien alter Männer, and Mark Zuckerbergs Erfolgsregeln, too.
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Ich habe in unserer Wiwo-Kolumne mal etwas zu Mark Zuckerberg, dem Netz und der Dringlichkeit des Wandels für alle anderen geschrieben: Mark Zuckerbergs Erfolgsregeln.
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(L/M NET: the blogged experience & expertise of some of the best minds in Innovation, Brand Engagement, Communication Agility:
Tom - Tim - Konstantin - Helge - Drew - Charles - Anthony - Adrian)
Intro / gap
- According to Microsoft people have moved on, they have explored and adopted online communication / connected technologies to such a degree that they’re online habits are almost unrecognizable compared to only five years ago.
- Think about that, five years ago most people didn’t know what either Facebook or smartphones were.
- We have to understand that people have an adoption mindset and culture – our history is a history of embracing technology, and then having the technology adapt to us. People have always been on the move, and will continue to do so.
- Contrast this to companies who calculate and protect. Businesses aren’t people, but they have to operate within the same world, they have to understand individuals and apply to their way of thinking and doing. This is where the gap begins, and especially these last five to ten years.
Continue reading "[L/M NET] Helge Tenno > "The next 80% (manuscript to slideshare presentation)" " »
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(L/M NET: the blogged experience & expertise of some of the best minds in Innovation, Brand Engagement, Communication Agility:
Tom - Tim - Konstantin - Helge - Drew - Charles - Anthony - Adrian)
Some brands are line extension machines. To jockey for shelf space, they launch waves of new SKUs each year, often without meaningful differentiation from what is already there.
I’m sure there are category management justifications for every niche item, but most supermarket shelves are cluttered and hard to shop. Does Crest really need 40 varieties of toothpaste? Clutter causes confusion and confusion causes paralysis.
I love the refreshing simplicity of Help Remedies. I first spotted the healthcare brand at Duane Reade a couple years ago. Against the clutter of a typical drugstore aisle, they stand out.
Help’s rally cry campaign is “Take Less”: “Everybody in the drug aisle likes to talk about more, bigger, extra, super, and maximum. But we’re not going to talk about that … Help is a new type of drug company—a drug company that promises you less.”
I’d love to see the “Take Less” philosophy in more categories. Category management should include more clarity management.
As HBS professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter observed, “When everyone else suffers from over-complexity, there is a market for products and services that simplify life.”
(Marketoonist Monday: I’m giving away a signed print of this week’s cartoon. Just share an insightful comment to this week’s post. I’ll pick one comment by 5:00 PST on Tuesday. Thanks!)
After drawing this, I remembered I drew a similar cartoon back in 2003, Flanker Madness. Here’s one from the archives.
(ralf says:
Tom mentioning Crest reminds me of my own tooth paste & brush history at GlaxoSmithKline (I was responsible for media strategy not product strategy).
Flanker sometimes make sense, but to do it right is the most difficult to do. If you do not know the benefits of a brush, or your consumers, and their problems, you will fail.
Exaggerations do not make sense at all - which eventually led to my comparison of the brushes' history with that of sneakers: they grew from the most basic tools to some fashionista's gadgets. But the best were still the plain ones (which in the sneakers case we love as 'retro' or 'originals' today.), I guess. Best in the sense of effectiveness, not sales. The best in the sense of product life cycle and profit contribution. Some of them exist even 15 or 20 years later.
"Take less" is my favorite philosophy.
Tom is cartoonist and founder of Marketoonist, helping organizations communicate with cartoons. He draws from 16yrs of marketing, most recently as Marketing VP at method. He speaks about innovation, creativity, and marketing, using cartoons to visualize. @tomfishburne
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(Note: This is a post for The Third Club)
In 'Edge'*, meiner Lieblings-Publikation, las ich gerade folgendes Zitat. Ich möchte es hier als Gedankenanstoß wiedergeben, als Aufforderung, es kritisch zu hinterfragen, nicht zuletzt weil sich die Reflexionen des The Third Club auch um die Beobachtung immer seltener werdender Innovation drehen:
"A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we've seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely.
What's happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we're being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet.
We're being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by.
And so, in the cold calculus of evolution by natural selection, at no greater time in history than ever before, copiers are probably doing better than innovators. Because innovation is extraordinarily hard.
My worry is that we could be moving in that direction, towards becoming more and more sort of docile copiers." - Mark Pagel, Edge
> Dass Facebook und Google dumm machen sollen, hat man ja schon öfter gehört. Verallgemeinerungen, die einem wenig helfen. Was aber ist mit dem Netz als Ganzem? Erzieht es zur Kopie? Verleitet es zur Kopie?
... bitte bei The Third Club weiterlesen ...
* Edge: "To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves." Eigendefinition Edge
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(L/M NET: the blogged experience & expertise of some of the best minds in Innovation, Brand Engagement, Communication Agility:
Tom - Tim - Konstantin - Helge - Drew - Charles - Anthony - Adrian)
The reason large parts of the corporate Internet is boring, difficult and of little direct use / effect is because we are unnecessarily complicating it. The Internet should be one thing: simple.
.
Let me demonstrate with a couple of examples how even minute tasks get unnecessarily complicated online.
Example A:
Comoyo is an Internet based content service. The first thing that happens as I fill in the form is that it refuses the password that I use on 95% of all my Internet accounts. Why would you do that? Why would you start of by inviting people to a service they don’t know what is, offer them a log in and the first thing you do is just crash the whole process? If the system is to complex then redesign the system. We are putting to much of the responsibility on to people, instead of IT.
Example B:
This is the beta version of my Internet bank, the picture is from a sneak preview they offered their customers. Now, I have a bank because I need help doing bank-things. Most often (95% of the time) this means checking my account or paying some bills. The best thing the bank can do is offer me a service that makes banking better. But they don’t. Approximately 15% of the interface is spent on banking, the rest of it is navigation, CRM or a media platform that wants to sell me stuff I don’t need. They give me everything except the actual banking service that I should be demanding (people are just to polite and don’t know that their experiences are being robbed online. In the words of Richard Saul Wurman, the creator of TED: “I would have designed a much better Google interface, it’s not difficult.”).
Now, the reason the Internet isn’t simple, is because of technology. We are treating online as something complicated, something that doesn’t work, something we don’t understand. – And my question is: how much do we really need to understand?
Take a look at other pieces of technology: bread, asphalt, language, bicycle, chairs, door knobs. Now do you think about these things as technology? They work and they are, no questions asked. But this is not the case with the Internet, why?
Understanding the nuts and bolts of the Internet is as important to a business as understanding the complexities of the mechanics that goes on inside the door when we twist the door nob.
Unfortunately the fog of technology diffuses the process of building something meaningful by trivializing the discussions and spending to much time focusing on irrelevant details. When we think of the Internet we are not thinking business models, identity and brand value. We are thinking users (what is a user?), HTML5, responsive design (why would you offer the same service in every situation?), apps or clicks.
The Internet is fascinatingly simple, if we just stop referencing it as technology and start thinking of it as a loaf of bread – because our customers already are.
(ralf says:
All those gurus out there are very deep into the technologies and secrets of the internet. But they cannot transcend the easiest mechanics of it.
To the opposite of my father I never wanted to understand a radio, a television set or loudspeakers. And he was limited by that understanding. He always told me that small speakers cannot - due to the laws of physics - create deep sounds. But they can these days. I showed him. He said: No they can't. They just sound like they can.
We are in the very early stages of the web. We have to get it out of our way. We have to understand that it is not important to understand it. We do not have to understand oxygen to understand that we have to breath. We even do not have to understand that we have to breath. We just do.
We just have to take care of the web's independence, its neutrality, and ubiquity. We must take care that politicians do not sell it to corporations like they did with our water systems and resources ... as simple as that.
The more simple a medium (in McLuhan's sense) is the more precious it will be for us and our future.)
Helge works as a Planner for SDG, helping brands and organizations discover WHY they are valuable in consumers lives, and HOW they can create deliberate value on the arenas and inside the interfaces where they connect with them. Twitter: @congbo
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