Jeff Yang writes:

There’s been a lot of clamor around how the Internet has impacted language — primarily focused on the heady mix of slang (spam, troll, noob), neologisms (blog, app, tweet) and acronyms (WTF? OMG!) that pepper digital discourse. But these vernacular mutations are actually the least significant of the consequences of our wholesale move from paper to pixels. There are more profound changes afoot, reflecting fundamental shifts in how consumers interact with the written word:

Text is no longer seen as self-evident: Readers now expect digital text to be linked directly to underlying sources, additional references and alternative points of view. At best, this turns every piece of text into a springboard for research, adding context, depth and balance. At worst, hyperlinks can be interruptive, leading readers away, along a chain of distractions that within a handful of clicks, inevitably arrives at porn. And — neither good nor bad, but different — hyperlinks are often used to add a layer of metacommentary to text that, depending on the nature of the linked item, can be witty, scathing or prankish (ask anyone who’s experienced the cringe of Rickrolling).

Text is no longer seen as permanent: Readers increasingly expect digital text to iterate over time, with updates and embellishments that add new information, correct prior mistakes, evolve arguments and respond to critiques. Text that doesn’t change now feels dead, or at the very least archival; it may even raise suspicions among readers that undisclosed changes have been made — a cardinal sin in the world of digital reporting and comment. One response has been tireless watchdogging from the blogosphere and “editorial transparency” services like NewsDiffs; another has been the unofficial establishment of a set of stylistic conventions for iterative publishing — like striking through errors yet leaving them in place; adding timestamped updates at the end or beginning of pieces; and “promoting” noteworthy or critical comments from attached threads to the body of the text as part of a response to the reading community.

But where does this leave marketers? Well, everything that’s true about news, entertainment and opinion content should also be true for marketing communications. Readers expect ad copy to be hyperlinked, and promotional posts to evolve over time. Why shouldn’t they? The fact that they don’t is what calls them out as ‘other’ in the digital world’s economy of ideas.

Most marketers remain still stuck in a world of 20th century corporate communications, where showing signs of internal disagreement or making amendments in response to feedback is regarded as off-brand or off-message. But there shouldn’t be anything to fear: The open texts of the digital world are in essence no different from medieval manuscripts. Their construction, with their crossings out and marginalia, reflected the fact that Dark Ages, if you were literate, you were also a scribe, both consuming and contributing to the world of words; in the Digital Age, we’ve simply come full circle.

So here’s a thought: Marketers should embrace the read-write nature of communications in the Internet era. A good piece of digital marketing is one that other people choose to draw attention to — by blogging it, posting it on Reddit, adding it on Tumblr, by Facebooking or retweeting it. The best way of maximizing your engagement footprint is to roll with the new expectations of digital readers. Weave your messages into the web; make sure they stay alive and organic; allow others to talk back, both on and off your platforms. Don’t think of your communications as static content, but as the start of a conversation.

Even if that makes for some sticky moments in the C-suite.

The image at the top of this post is of pages from the Breviario di Girolamo Savonarola, from the Florin medievel manuscript portal, and is used with thanks.

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Silvia Rigoni writes:

The rise of disciplines like design thinking, user-centred design and service design have helped us apply design beyond the world of graphic and products. As the economy shifts from to services, design lets us analyze the new market, putting the user at the centre of the research and understanding peripheral elements which may influence the final experience. This method sees people as part of a moving system where things influence one another within a whole and no object is isolated.

So while the rise of service economies has exposed the importance of an holistic approach, in practice many organizations are encountering significant barriers to practicing it internally.

One way to integrate design thinking within businesses is through the idea of the “ambidextrous organization” proposed by Michael Tushman. He argues that a successful organisation should exploit its existing operations while conducting parallel entrepreneurial activities to explore new directions. Design thinking can help to push the boundaries of a given context and create new opportunities.

For Tushman the exploration and exploitation activities should coexist on the management agenda, but should have separate teams nurturing the two different cultures, with shades of Scott Fitzgerald’s famous line that “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

But organizations are often not capable of supporting both behaviours internally. Rather than try to do it all themselves and risk compromise or clashes between the two processes, they should focus on what they are good at (exploitation) and collaborate externally engage to explore.

Although Tushman’s focus was on big organizations, the same dynamics can apply to start-ups. For example, take ColaLife, a non-profit organization that has succeeded at creating a social impact, and which won the award for Best Product at the Design Museum’s recent ‘Designs of the Year’ awards. > . It started when the founder Simon Berry, working in Zambia for the British aid programme, noticed that you could buy a Coca-Cola even in the most remote parts of the world, yet in the same areas, kids died from simple, preventable diseases caused by a lack of medicines. He put those two thoughts together: “Let’s just send medicines using Coke’s supply chain”. That’s how ColaLife started.

Berry recognised an opportunity, sized the existing market capabilities and decided to outsource help to reach his target. ColaLife’s business strategy took off thanks to the resonance of social media prototypes of a pod full of medicines soon started piggy-backing Coca-Cola crates. This strategy has allowed ColaLife to sell medicines in remote villages at very reasonable costs. Coca Cola is not an active partner in this project, but it gave ColaLife the permission to use its distribution channels on a trial project. What Simon Berry achieved is a good example of how thinking creatively – ambidextrously – can ultimately drive growth.

The image of Cola Life comes from D and AD’s interview with Simon Berry, and is used with thanks.

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Andrew Curry writes:

In our recent Future Perspective Succeeding in Low Growth Markets we looked at the headwinds that could keep economic growth in the richer economies low for the foreseeable future. At the time it was a slightly controversial view – ever since Robert Gordon and Tyler Cowen started this argument in the US others have been queuing up to knock it down.

Now HSBC’s chief economist, Stephen King (yes, the other Stephen King) has stepped into the argument. In an article in today’s Guardian he says:

The new reality is, I’m afraid, a world of significantly lower growth, where the gap between our expectations and actual income is getting bigger day by day. Neither Keynesians nor austerians have an answer to this sober outlook because both sides claim their own policies will ultimately take us back to a world of rapidly advancing living standards.

Our view is that ‘the low growth economy’ is, at the least, a plausible scenario, and that, like all plausible scenarios, businesses that prepare for it will do better than those that don’t. Even if it doesn’t happen, exploring the world of low-growth will throw out new insights about consumers and markets. If it does happen, businesses that have prepared for it will gain a competitive edge.

And it turns out that looking at economies through the lens of the headwinds we explore in the report throws up some stretching questions about how we do business – and new innovation ideas – as indicated by the summary graphic of the story.

The fuller story is in Succeeding in Low Growth Markets, which you can download here.

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Andrew Curry writes:

We’ve just launched our latest Consumer Outlook survey, of the UK and Ireland – the seventh since the financial crisis struck in 2008. There are a couple of striking findings in the latest crop of data.

The first is that the experience of debt has a hugely significant effect on attitudes to consumption. Looking at our two debt-affected segments, 71% of All Hands on Deck and 63% of Choppy Waters (see here for an explanation of the segments) agree that “Since the recession I have learned how many things I can do without and still be happy” – whereas only 35% of the largely unaffected Plain Sailing segment agrees. Other questions produce similarly polarised responses.

The second is that social connections have a profound effect on outlook – we’ve known this for a while from the happiness research, but the data aren’t usually this clear. In short, people who said they’d made new friends since the recession, that they were now closer to friends and family, and talk to their neighbours more than they did, are twice as likely as the UK average to be feeling “more optimistic about my life and the future”. People matter.

These are dangerous waters for brands. It’s easy to get the mood wrong. People don’t want them to try to sell them things they don’t think they need any more, and it’s difficult for brands to insert themselves into social connections without seeming like they’re intruding. The brands that have done well since the recession (think Sainsbury’s but not Tesco) have been careful to get their tone right.

You can find out more here about UK MONITOR, which includes both the UK research conducted for our Global MONITOR survey and the Consumer Outlook data. This syndicated insights service, which normally costs £12,500 + VAT, is on offer if ordered before the end of April. Contact Karen Kidson for more details.

The image at the top of the post is from Sainsbury’s summer campaign in 2012, celebrating friendship, and came via Campaign Live. It is used with thanks.

The post The changing consumer mood appeared first on futures blog.

Pen Stuart writes:

The Futures Company’s recently published thought leadership report The Future Shopper helps map out the rapidly evolving retail space from the perspective of the shopper, and understand how to take advantage of the opportunities it opens up. These changes go a long way beyond digital and social technologies – they are part of a change in shopper mindsets as well.

The report was co-written with Kantar Retail. One of the themes we explore is what shoppers are looking for in the changing retail environment, and how they have been re-shaped since the financial crisis:

Value

The recession gave people in developed markets permission to focus on value. For many this has embedded habits of using price comparison tools that are  unlikely to disappear even when economies improve. In emerging markets, most shoppers expect to have to be resourceful. But even as growth in their markets pushes them into the new middle class, their shopping behaviours persist.

Assurance

Shortcuts and sharp practice by suppliers in both the developed world and emerging markets mean that it’s harder for shoppers to know they’re getting what’s promised on the tin. A range of scandals, from food contamination fears in China to the horsemeat issues in Europe, make them increasingly sceptical of brands and retailers. Offering guarantees, and finding ways to rebuild relationships of trust with shoppers becomes vital.

Mental space

Convenience used to be about saving time. Now it is about trying to reduce the clutter of information and opportunities to focus on what really matters. This includes looking for simpler shopping experiences. Retailers and brands need to revisit categories to see how to reduce the time and effort shoppers spend engaging with the category, without weakening their affiliation with the brands.

Quality

A focus on value has shifted the way shoppers think about quality. Now they are looking to trade off higher quality in areas they care about (witness the rapid growth of organic baby food) with lower quality in areas they are less engaged with. This is polarising many categories, often to the benefit of private label, forcing many brands and retailers to reconsider how they segment value in their markets.

The report explores how brands and retailers can respond to these challenges. If you want to read more, it can be downloaded here. Alternatively, if you prefer to listen to a presentation, there are recorded webinars from both the UK and the US.

The post The needs of shoppers appeared first on futures blog.

Christina Hughes writes:

One of the perks of working in London Bridge is the proximity to the Design Museum, one of the world’s leading museums of contemporary design. Since we’ve worked on a number of recent projects related to the future of transport, we thought the opportunity to hear Paul Priestman speak about his experience of innovative design for trains, planes and hotels was too good to pass up.

Priestman compared the current transport network in the UK to the communications network before the internet – disconnected, slow and frustrating for consumers.  Governments have typically responded to congestion in urban areas with short-term solutions such as adding extra lanes to highways and motorways.  But is this really the answer?

What if there was a way to link up the disparate transport network, to connect Beijing to Europe by train, and to change consumer behaviours towards transport? What if people could park at the local supermarket and catch a train all the way to Germany, rather than driving to the airport? Priestman’s design company Priestmangoode  is in the business of stretching our thinking about these questions. For example, Moving Platforms shows a video concept  of inner city trains transporting people from the city centre to the periphery, pulling up alongside high-speed trains and linking doors together so passengers can pass from one train to the other.  The high-speed train then disconnects and speeds on, allowing passengers to move across train lines seamlessly. Yes, safety issues would be a challenge, but it is certainly different.

Other ideas Priestman shared included ‘textured motorways’, whereby the outside lane surface was more uneven that the inside and middle lanes. Drivers in outside lanes will experience a much noisier journey, prompting them to think about moving inwards and freeing up the outer lane for others to overtake, reducing congestion. There was also an award-nominated design for wheelchair access on planes, changing our perception about disability and travel with a seat that detaches itself and can be wheeled around the plane and into departure lounges. Disabled travellers are therefore able to move around once on the plane and get to toilets, as well as switching to the airplane wheelchair in the airport, reducing undignified manhandling into a cramped airline seat.

One of my favourite ideas was that of the “Walklines” – purpose-built covered walking routes throughout the city, with the essential cafés and toilet stops en route. If you knew that you could walk from home to work in 40 minutes, without delays or weather worries, wouldn’t you be tempted? With innovative developments such as The Highline in New York City taking centre stage, I hope that this idea comes to London.

Of course, the future of public transport innovation lies in the hands of governments and transport organisations. Fortunately there are signs that attitudes of governments are shifting away from car dependency and in public transport’s favour. To quote Enrique Penalosa, the former Mayor of Bogota whose term of office was marked by radical transport innovation: “a developed country is not a place where the poor have cars. It’s where the rich use public transportation.” Perhaps a seamless future could be on cards after all.

The image at the top of this post is taken from the Moving Platforms video by the designers Priestmangoode, and is used with thanks.

The post A future of seamless transport? appeared first on futures blog.

Fast Company has an article this week on how brands anticipate the future, and our chairman, J. Walker Smith, was one of three industry experts the magazine spoke to. In short, the theme of the article was that you can’t predict the future, but you can anticipate it. The writer, Mark McNeilly, quotes some work from The Futures Company’s history as an instance of this: MasterCard’s ‘Priceless’ campaign, built on an insight that consumers were redefining success to be about the intangible (experiences) rather than material (stuff).

And although McNeilly suggests that it wasn’t possible to ‘predict’ the financial crisis, we described to clients in 2005 the key ingredients that were already shaping to create such a crisis – heavy consumer debt, negative savings rates, and increasingly high oil prices – even if the timing was harder to get right.

McNeilly suggests that companies that want to improve their future should understand how business models are changing, both inside and outside of their category and sector, and should use trends and futures insight to shape new products and services. (As in the famous Wayne Gretzky line, “Skate where the puck is going, not where it’s been.”)

And he has some rules of thumb for picking an a future insights agency, which I’ve summarised here:

The article is here. 

Edited with BlogPad Pro

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Radha Patel writes: We’ve just finished a new report for the IHG Group (Intercontinental Hotels, Holiday Inn, Crowne Plaza) on the future of travel, which was launched today by IHG’s chief executive, Richard Solomons, at an event in London. The new kinship economy: from travel experiences to travel relationships develops a theme of The Futures Company – and then uses it as a lens to explore the future of the travel sector.

The big trends that will shape the travel sector are, in a sense contradictory. On the one hand we see the rise of the new Asian travellers, who have the budget for the first time to see the world’s sights; on the other, travellers from richer markets are looking to explore ‘unknown cities’. As in other categories, demand is being shaped by some of the big social shifts, in particular the ageing population; the over-50s – the ‘expansive mid-lifers’ are growing fastest in numbers and have more money to sprend. At the other end, the changing attitudes of millennials is creating a new generation of business trveller that values informality and exchange with other travellers.

And, of course, digital and social media are now deeply embedded in the travel experience. For the hospitality sector, this is producing its own paradoxes. The new ‘invisible traveller’ – who has researched and booked online – may be happy to have no contact with hotel staff, even having their room activated by, say, a mobile download. ‘Predictive service’ though, describes a world of deeply customised and personalised service – in which the traveller’s digital footprint makes it easier for the hotel to respond to their visitors’ preferences.

The news release is here: the report can be read online here, and be (pdf) downloaded here.

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Haywood Watkins III writes:

The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. 

We cannot walk alone. 

And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead.

“I Have a Dream” by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963

Dear Black History Month marketers,

I grew up with subdued resentment and an unspoken vendetta fostered by media and marketing that was brought to center stage one month of each year, Black History Month. Each February I was met with images of Emmett Till, Rosa Parks, and Dr. King and the consistent thread  amongst all stories, whether overt or covert, was the transgression of white people. The month of February signaled 28 days of separate but equal to somehow pay homage to those who fought ferociously against that very ideology.

Carter G. Woodson, the creator of the first Black History Week (later extended to Black History Month), never intended for the week or month to always remain. He hoped that the need for distinction would be eliminated when black history became a fundamental piece of America’s history. I do not think we have arrived at a place socially where Black History Month has outlived its purpose, but I strongly believe the current execution of the Month is doing more harm than good. There is richness to the history that is being overlooked that deserves to be told holistically and unabridged.

Black History Month is not a month for African Americans. It is a month for all. It is a time to reflect not on travesty, but achievement. Advances created not in spite of race, but accomplished by people able to look beyond it. February should be more than a reflection of subbed-in black faces. It should be a depiction of progress made, together. Viola Liuzzo, Vernon Dahmer, and Levi Coffin among many others knew this to be true. I think it is time that, as marketers, we did as well.

To honor their sacrifice Jon Ransom and I created a Black History Month campaign entitled, White Faces of Black History. This campaign brings to light untold stories of Black History focusing on various contributors overlooked perhaps due to the color of their skin. It is our hope that this campaign shows first hand that people can identify beyond their assigned identity and that common ground lies wherever individuals decide to place it.

So if we believe the content of one’s character trumps the importance of his or her skin then our Black History Month marketing must change. In other words, Black History Month can no longer be a one-sided depiction of society past, present, or future. And for King’s dream to continue to become a reality neither can the other eleven months of the year.

Still dreaming,

Haywood R. Watkins III

The above picture is one of several postings in Brooklyn, NY of the White Faces of Black History Campaign. This particular posting is a showcase of Viola Liuzzo, who was shot twice in the head by a FBI agent for supporting local civil rights marchers by driving them home. 

The post An open letter about Black History Month appeared first on futures blog.

Elisa Birtwistle writes:

Marissa Mayer’s instruction to Yahoo staff that will no longer be able to work from home has caused something of a media firestorm – even if Yahoo later tried to clarify it. The central question is whether Mayer’s edict runs counter to the idea of the progressive workplace, and the role of flexible working in that. It depends how you look at it.

Critics observe that the notion of ‘presentism’ – that you can only be working if your managers can see you – is certainly a 19th century throwback to the days of Taylorism and time and motion studies. It might be right for an industrial manufacturer but it doesn’t hold for companies who make money from knowledge.  Stronger critics would argue that it also suggests a lack of trust in employees.

What’s been lost in the noise, however, is clarity about the nature of knowledge work (we explored on this several years ago in a set of workplace scenarios for Orange). My suspicion is that Mayer looked around at her competitors – she came from Google – and asked herself ‘What does my biggest competitor have, that I don’t?’. The likely answer: ‘Culture’. The creation of high value complex knowledge – essentially the business that Yahoo is in – does work better through facetime, downtime, and corridor conversations. And the leaked memo says, “communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side”. Personal contact is better for creativity.

But although the modern open office is good for this, it’s not such a good environment for execution, for getting things done that need concentration – one of the reasons why people say they are more productive when working at home. Technology has given us a set of tools to work from home, but not yet ways to collaborate and interact remotely in the same way we can in person.

At the heart of the controversy, though, is the politics of the workplace. In the modern extended workplace, juggling work and personal commitments is hard (forget work/life balance), and made harder by recession. Yahoo is removing one form of flexibility (home working) without offering an alternative (e.g. at work childcare), although she has, at her own cost, set up an on-site crèche for her own child. It’s possible that the memo is a tactic to persuade staff with family commitments to move on, giving way to a potentially younger workforce who will put work first.

One of the problems is perhaps in the messenger, rather than the message. As we argue in our Women 2020 report, one of the biggest issues that discriminates against women’s economic and social equality, in work and elsewhere, is the issue of childcare – and it’s an issue that’s becoming increasingly politicised in the workplace and outside of it. Mayer’s famous for the 130-hour work weeks she used to pull at Google (you have to “shower strategically”, she one told an interviewer). She took two weeks maternity leave after her son was born, which she spent working from home.And Silicon Valley’s never been famous as a model employer.

The most likely outcome of the office edict is that Yahoo employees with dependents – women and men – will look elsewhere, to companies that support their juggling of home and work. That represents quite a heavy business cost – and may well be greater than the benefits of speed Yahoo might gain from people spending more time in the office.

The image at the top of the post is from Digital Strategy Consulting, and is used with thanks.

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