luxury brands : new mentors for us?

Blog Nicolas BORDAS

Nicolas Bordas

Vice President at TBWA/EUROPE & President of BEING Worldwide

What if we learned from luxury brands?

February 28, 2013

The Tuileries garden is one of the most beautiful spaces in Paris. Filled with families, flaneurs, and tourists, twice a year the garden changes radically: welcoming white tents and swarms of paparazzi, models and voyeurs. Its Fashion Week, folks! And for a small but growing population in the city, Fashion Week is more than glitz and glamour—it’s a big business.

As late as 15 years ago, Fashion Week was a small event virtually unknown to the general public and reserved to buyers and editors. Since then, Fashion Week has had starring roles in documentaries, Hollywood movies, and tell-all novels. Luxury and fashion brands have now begun profiting from this increased exposure, releasing viral videos to promote their new collections, putting bloggers in the front row, and even streaming their shows to the general public via sites like LiveRunway.

Just as Fashion Week has transformed from a niche event to a mass phenomenon, so have luxury labels gone from small privately held and family run businesses to large, publicly traded corporations. The markets for luxury are huge and in spite of our global financial crisis,they are growing.

Luxury brands must now grow and seduce new fans whilst not alienating the principles of exclusivity and quality that have defined them. In my opinion, luxury brands are more than up to this challenge. Indeed, the 21 century has taught us that if anything, consumer brands have a lot to learn from luxury, because these brands innately understand their tangible and intangible value better than many other brands. Just in time for Fashion Week, here are three lessons that every brand can learn from luxury brands.

Lesson N°1: Know your signature codes and play with them

 

I teach a class on branding at the French university Sciences-Po. Alongside my co-teacher David Jobin, we stress “the art of playing with one’s codes” as necessary for brand communication. Luxury brands have always had strong codes: be they special insignia, the materials used, or even the location of their workshops and stores. These houses are extremely apt at readapting their reference points, be it Louis Vuitton’s construction trunks, Cartier’s sublime “Odyssey” viral video, or Prada’s West Texas highway boutique. Brands that construct strong identities and communication codes distinguish themselves from competitors. Having a strong visual identity and attitude can only help a brand tell better stories.

LESSON N°2: Offer Tailor-Made Shopping Experiences

Luxury brands were among the first to understand the importance of a “shopping experience”—placing their stores in beautiful buildings and having impeccable customer service—this philosophy of premium retailing has been adopted by many brands, in particular Apple, whose Apple Stores have sandstone floor tiles that come from a particular quarry in Italy. In a day an age when brick and mortar shopping is being challenged by e-commerce, brands need to deliver one-of-a-kind experience for those who choose to go into a retail space. Luxury brands have been perfecting the art of customized shopping for centuries.

Lesson N°3: Tell stories through premium content

 

When a brand has strong codes, it can tell stories. This is what Chanel has been doing marvelously well these past few years. I was most taken with their film “Chanel and the Diamond” which tells the story of Chanel haute jewelry through the life and times of Coco Chanel. Part art film, ad, documentary, and homage, this video marks the final chapter in a 3-part series dubbed “Inside Chanel” which uses video to tell the story of the house through 3 themes: Chanel N°5 Perfume, Marilyn Monroe & Chanel, and Chanel Jewelry. I would urge anyone who is interested in a lesson in brand content to head to the Chanel YouTube page to see the richness of the content that they are producing. For a generation of young fashionistas who get their news not from WWD but from the BOF, these viral videos are a way to preserve the value while sharing the values of the Chanel brand. Even though “Chanel” and “YouTube” might seem diametrically opposed, the brand has managed to appropriate the media in a way that is in harmony with its identity.

It is because of the growing power of luxury brands that in 2011, TBWA\Paris launched the Luxury Arts network. Headed up by Natacha Dzikowski, Luxury Arts exists as a horizontal network in major luxury markets worldwide (Paris, London, Moscow, Los Angeles, Shanghai, Tokyo, and Rio de Janeiro). This micro-network utilizes our top talents in luxury communications to reach consumers in culturally relevant ways. As Natacha says “Luxury brands have strong stories and they never needed more meaning than today, luxury needs smart storytelling fed by disruptive culture and arts.” Luxury Arts is particularly proud of their 2011 spot for Dior’s “J’adore” fragrance. The spot goes beyond a simple perfume ad by combining the history of the Dior house with pop music; a charismatic spokeswoman; Dior handbags and accessories; ready-to-wear archives; and famous faces from the houses’ past—in short it tells the story of Dior. This ad was able to be a major hit while expressing the codes of a highly valuable luxury brand.

As Jean-Marie Dru, Chairman of TBWA\ and creator of Disruption stated in his most recent book Jet Lag “There is probably more to be learned today from Hermès than from General Motors, from Dior than from Unilever.” I couldn’t agree more.

cover photo credit: guestofaguest.com

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3 Paths Toward A More Creative Life

WRITTEN BY: Bruce Nussbaum

WANT TO BE MORE CREATIVE? SOMETIMES IT’S JUST A MATTER OF GIVING YOURSELF THE SPACE TO THINK, WRITES BRUCE NUSSBAUM.

Everyone can learn to be more creative, but to become very creative, I’ve come to believe you need to lead a creative life. In watching my best students, in examining the lives of successful entrepreneurs, and in seeing the process of the great Native American artists who I know, it is clear that how they live their daily lives is crucial to their success. I realize that it sounds very “zen-y” (which is OK by me), yet I come to this realization not through a search for spirituality or clarity but from simple observation.

Creativity is in such demand today that when we apply for jobs, when we join organizations, or when we just meet other people, we are asked to present our creative selves. But we can’t do that unless we understand the nature of our own creativity, locate the sources of our originality, and have a language that explains our work. If you are one of the growing number of “creatives,” or want to become one, you need to lead a creative life. This is what I talk about with my students. Through outside speakers, deep readings of key classics, and intense classwork, we explore the nature of leading a creative life and develop a series of concepts and a literacy that allows us to understand ourselves and communicate and convince others of the validity of our work and the resonance it has in society and the marketplace.

It’s a work in progress, of course, but here are three specific ways that can help you lead a creative life.

1. BE MINDFUL–DISCONNECT

As important as it is for you to lead a hyper-connected and super-stimulating life as a creative person circa 2013, it is just as crucial for you to be self-reflective and mindful. The last time I had dinner with Bill Moggridge, the father of interaction design, the cofounder of Ideo, and then head of the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, I asked him where he went in New York to spark his creativity. He quickly said the High Line. Walking the High Line was where he would go to think and ponder. Steve Jobs was a walker. Mark Zuckerberg is a walker.

WALKING ALONE IS AN EXCELLENT STRATEGY FOR FREEING YOUR MIND UP TO BRING TOGETHER DIFFERENT AREAS OF KNOWLEDGE. 

For good reason. We are all so connected these days and distracted by constant interactions. Our time is spent responding, reacting to others or absorbing, taking in new information. But we often lack the space, the time, the moment to integrate that knowledge, connect those dots, generate that creativity. Slowing down and disconnecting provides that space. That’s why showers or lingering over that cup of coffee before starting off to work are good places to start your creative life. Taking a walk is particularly good. Walking alone is an excellent strategy for freeing your mind up so that you’re able to bring together different areas of knowledge.Finding that neighborhood coffee shop to hang (not the one where you meet your friends) and just think can be important. You don’t need hours and hours of disconnection but just a few to be mindful of your challenges and how you might meet them. You need to allow your creativity to flow without interruption and to let your mind to fill up.

 

2. TO CREATE MEANINGFUL THINGS, DELVE INTO THE PAST

 

Bill Buxton, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research and a polymath’s polymath (he was building a Cree birch canoe using traditional tools and techniques the last time I saw him in Toronto), says people spend more time learning about the music they love than the fields they work in–especially in high tech. Prospecting and mining the past to gain a deep understanding of where things come from and why they exist is hugely important to creating meaningful new things. Buxton points to the example of the 1993 IBM/Bell South touchscreen smartphone called the Simon that was a likely inspiration to Jony Ive for the wildly successful iPhone. Bob Dylan “mined” Woody Guthrie. Van Gogh found inspiration in Jean-Francois Millet. Being mindful of the roots of your knowledge domain, your industry, your creative space can bring greater understanding–and more success–to your own creative efforts.

 

MINE THE PAST TO GAIN A DEEP UNDERSTANDING OF WHERE THINGS COME FROM AND WHY THEY EXIST.

 

Being mindful also means understanding the intellectual context and history of key ideas. The UX (user experience) is perhaps the single-most important concept in business today, but our understanding of that experience is shallow. We know enough to be “user” focused but not enough to really know what that means. Read Walter Benjamin’s work on aura and fashion, and you realize that our most powerful attraction to things come from a dynamic engagement, not a passive experience. In Praise of Shadows, Junichiro Tanizaki describes a Japanese entrancing relationship to the smell and look and feel of cooking rice. Digging deep into meaning and understanding, you discover that some wonderful things “beckon” us, we interact with them emotionally, we want to stay engaged. In an era of social media where we all want to participate in the making of our lives, user engagement (UE) is more important than UX.

Being meaningful is important for leading a creative life because it allows you to understand the deeper meaning of relationships, outside and inside the marketplace. That includes our relationships to things and our relationship to one another. For example, we just celebrated Valentine’s Day. But do you really know what a gift is? We are mired in swag, “free” gifts we give away at nearly every event. But do you know the intense underlying psychology, social, political, and economic dynamic that goes with giving and receiving a gift? Knowing the anthropological and sociological literature on the gift–it is extensive because the gift is perhaps the most celebrated and common of all human rituals–provides meaning to your creativity. Kickstarter is all about the gift as a mechanism of patronage, art production, and, I would argue (and cofounder Charles Adler would disagree), shaping a new kind of capitalism.

 

3. BE MASTERFUL

 

We now know that we can all learn to be more creative. It’s not a rare “aha” moment that comes to a lucky few. To be very creative, however, requires a deep mastering of both knowledge and skills. Creativity is mostly about two things–connecting different bodies of knowledge in new ways and seeing patterns where none existed before. Connecting dots of disparate information (shoes and the Internet, anyone?) usually involves “fresh eyes.” It plays to the strengths of the younger. Seeing things differently, often taking existing things and connecting them to new technologies, can be serendipitous. But we can train ourselves to look for serendipity constantly and everywhere. We can learn to play at connecting this and that to see what it creates. We can make serendipity work for us day to day.

 

PATTERN SIGHT IS THE ABILITY NOT ONLY TO SEE THE RARE “ODD DUCK” BUT TO ROUTINELY LOOK FOR THAT DUCK AND SEE IT. 

 

Learning pattern recognition takes longer. Pattern sight requires you to master the skill of looking for what should and shouldn’t be there. It’s the ability not only to see the rare “odd duck” but to routinely look for that duck and see it. That’s what good birders do. That’s what hunters, hikers, skiers, and all outdoors people do. It takes time to learn patterns of information, which is why you need to spend a lot of time “in the field.” We call that “experience,” and you’ve seen that whenever you’re in a situation with someone who just “knows” what’s coming next without being able to explain it. That person is reading the patterns. This mastery is not about fresh eyes but wise eyes.

Leading a creative life is increasingly the path people are choosing, for good reason. In an era of volatility, uncertainty, chaos, and ambiguity, being creative is perhaps the best way to navigate your career and succeed. It gives you the right skill set and mindset. But a creative life can offer more than business success. Keith Richards perhaps says it best in his biography Life: “There’s a certain moment when you realize that you’ve actually just left the planet for a bit and that nobody can touch you. . .When it works, baby, you’ve got wings.” Richards is a textbook example of leading a creative life, which is why his biography has become required reading in my classes. But you don’t have to be a rock star to tap into creative flow–just start by taking a walk.

week-end

On topf of what you have to do …

FORBES

extracts

Here are 14 things successful people do (or should be doing) on weekends:

1. Make time for family and friends. This is especially important for those who don’t spend much time with their loved ones during the week.

2. Exercise. Everyone needs to do it, and if you can’t work out 4 to 5 days during the workweek, you need to be active on weekends to make up for some of that time, Vanderkam says. It’s the perfect opportunity to clear you mind and create fresh ideas.

“I know an owner of a PR firm who takes walks in the park with his dog to spark ideas about how to pitch a new client, or what angle to take with the press for a story,” Kurow says.

Cohen suggests spin classes and outdoor cycling in the warmer months. “Both are energizing and can be organized among people with shared interests. For example, it is not uncommon for hedge fund folks and Wall Street professionals to ride together on weekends. It is a great way to establish and cultivate relationships based on membership in this elite professional community.”

14 Things You Should Do at the End of Every Work DayJacquelyn SmithForbes Staff

Successful Leaders Do 15 Things Automatically, Every DayGlenn LlopisContributor

How Goofing Off Can Make You More ProductiveSusan AdamsForbes Staff

15 imagesPhotos: 14 Things You Should Do at the Start of Every Work Day

3. Pursue a passion. “There’s a creative director of a greeting card company who went back to school to pursue an MFA because of her love of art,” Kurow says. “Pursuing this passion turned into a love of poetry that she now writes on weekends.”

“Successful people make time for what is important or fun,” Egan adds. “They make space for activities that add to their life balance.”

4. Vacation. Getting away for the weekend provides a great respite from the grind of an intense week at work, Cohen says.

5.  Disconnect. The most successful people avoid e-mail for a period of time, Vanderkam says. “I’m not saying the whole weekend, but even just a walk without the phone can feel liberating. I advocate taking a ‘tech Sabbath.’ If you don’t have a specific religious obligation of no-work time, taking Saturday night to mid-day Sunday off is a nice, ecumenical time that works for many people.”

6. Volunteer. “I know a commercial real estate broker who volunteers to help with cook-off events whose proceeds are donated to the Food Bank,” Kurow says. “The volunteer work provides a balance to the heavy analytical work she does all week and fulfills her need to be creative — she designs the promotional material for the non-profit.”

Cohen says a lot of successful people participate in fundraising events. “This is a great way to network and to meet others with similar interests,” he says. “The visibility also helps in branding a successful person as philanthropic.”

7. Avoid chores. Every weekend has a few have-to-dos, but you want these to take the minimum amount of time possible, Vanderkam explains. Create a small window for chores and errands, and then banish them from your mind the rest of the time.

8. Plan. “Planning makes people more effective, and doing it before the week starts means you can hit Monday ready to go, and means you’ll give clear directions to the people who work for you, so they will be ready to go, too,” Vanderkam says.

Trunk agrees. She says successful people plan their month and year because “if you get stuck on short-term lists you don’t get anything big accomplished.”

9. Socialize. “Humans are social creatures, and studies of people’s experienced happiness through the day finds that socializing ranks right up there, not too far down below sex,” Vanderkam says.

Go out with friends and family, or get involved in the local community.

“It has been demonstrated that successful people find great satisfaction in giving back,” Cohen says. “Board membership, for example, also offers access to other successful folks.”

10. Gardening/crafts/games/sports/cooking/cultural activities.This is especially important for those cooped up in an office all week.

“For the pure joy, some folks find great satisfaction in creating beautiful gardens,” Cohen says.

Kurow knows an attorney who uses her weekends to garden and do mosaics and tile work to satisfy her creative side. “Filling her life this way enables her to be refreshed on Monday and ready to tackle the litigation and trial prep work. Artwork for her is fulfilling in a way that feeds her soul and her need to connect with her spiritual side.”

Bridge lessons and groups can also sharpen the mind and often create relationships among highly competitive smart professionals, Cohen says. “I once saw a printout of a bridge club’s membership list; its members were a who’s who of Wall Street.”

Theatre, opera and sporting events can also enrich one’s spirit, he adds.

11. Network. “Networking isn’t an event for a successful person, it’s a lifestyle,” Trunk says. Wherever they go and whatever they do, they manage to connect with new people.

12. Reflect. Egan says truly successful people make time on weekends to appreciate what they have and reflect on their happiness and accomplishments. As Rascoff said, “weekends are a great chance to reflect and be more introspective about bigger issues.”

13. Meditate. Classes and private instruction offer a bespoke approach to insight and peace of mind, Cohen says. “How better to equip yourself for success in this very tough world?”

14. Recharge. We live in a competitive world, Vanderkam says. “Peak performance requires managing downtime, too–with the goal of really recharging your batteries.” That’s how the most successful people get so much done.

Successful people know that time is too precious to be totally leisurely about leisure, Vanderkam concludes. “You’re not going to waste that time by failing to think about what you’d like to do with it, and thus losing the weekend to TV, puttering, inefficient e-mail checking, and chores. If you don’t have a busy workweek, your weekend doesn’t matter so much. But if you’re going from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day, it certainly does.”

First job – tips

FAST COMPANY

 

Invaluable–And Simple–Advice For Succeeding At Your First Job
BY DRAKE BAER | FEBRUARY 27, 2013
Starting off on the right foot means learning to love the gruntwork, building peer relationships, and managing your manager, among other things.

“Your first job is not only about showing that you can get the job done,” Thorin Klosowski writes at Lifehacker. After the thrill of the hire and the trial of negotiation, the maiden voyage begins–one in which you’ll need all the connections and tricks of the trade that you can develop from the beginning.

Relish the gruntwork
“Chances are you’ll need to clean the proverbial toilet for a while before you’re given any real responsibility,” Klosowski says. “This means you need to show off your work ethic even if you’re stuck doing tasks you don’t like.”

He makes a canny point: When you’re starting out at a new gig, you’re naturally going to be doing low-level work for your employers–meaning that your dazzling gifts are going to be muted for a minute. The best way you can differentiate yourself from the rest of the entry-level gaggle is by hustling harder than anybody else–and rejoicing in it. As Paul Graham says, you’re going to have to learn to love to schlep.

Be on point at all points
It’s all about those little trust-building details that will be foundational to your working relationships and your personal brand: You need to always be on time (or early) and make all your deadlines, enabled by the subtle arts of organization. Keeping your desk clean–literally and metaphorically–will signal that you’re dependable.

“You can worry about standing out later,” Klosowski says. “At first you just need to get your work done as efficiently as possible.”

Get to know the people
Meet everyone. Have lunch. Make friends. Form bonds. Gain trust.

Ask questions
The best thing you can do for yourself is to get the job done right the first time–and you can do that by asking process questions as set out on the task. If it’s a longer project, Klosowski recommends checking in via progress reports with your boss.

At the same time, don’t overburden your higher-up with tons of questions. This is all a part of managing your manager–an essential skill for successful office navigation. Like Klosowski says, wanting to learn is a great trait, “but so is initiative.”

Those relationships you form and skills you gain are what you’ll take to your next gig, maximizing your options as you make each step–and finding work that leaves you satisfied.

The fruits are in the roots

PSFK.com

Extraits

Reena Jana – Phil Duncan P&G

———————————-

Here’s our lightly edited and condensed chat about what Duncan calls ‘the next chapter in design strategy,’ now that many major corporations have design in the C-suite. Not surprisingly, it centers around tapping into consumer emotions.

Why is it so important for a brand to spur an intense reaction, such as tears?

When you have a deep insight of consumers and are truly empathetic to them, it’s important to hold true to that understanding with every aspect of strategy. For instance, our approach during the Olympics was to show that we are in service to moms and families. We didn’t get distracted with “broad consumer activations.” The idea of communicating how P&G supports families above all else paid off from a company and business standpoint. And from a personal standpoint, too. Honestly, it was a transformative experience internally. I felt that I moved from being a design officer to being in service to moms and the home across the world.

That said, what are some specific and practical tips that you have for drawing people in emotionally, both internally and externally?

I use the saying, “the fruits are in the roots.” What I mean by that is that it can be very helpful to take inspiration from a deep understanding of a brand’s heritage, where it comes from. Then, tap into a new mindset, and new insight, and add an element of creativity to keep that insight fresh. I tell my colleagues that it is the responsibility of brand teams to write the next chapter for the P&G book, not to write a new book. The goal is always to keep the story interesting and moving forward. Keep the characters going. And never stop writing. Otherwise, there is always the temptation of changing everything to follow some sort of trend. Then you risk being disingenuous. At P&G, we always keep in mind the brands people know and love, and then figure out how to make them contemporary by figuring out their relevance in people’s real lives, and then tie that sense back to the company’s heritage.

If you can do so, then you’ll tap the source of truth and inspiration of the brand. But of course it’s really important to then place it into the context of contemporary competition in the marketplace.

One good example: the use of the colorful, simple, and easily identifiable London Tube map reference as design language in the overall P&G Olympics campaign. How and why was that so effective?

For the London Olympics, we focused on creating successful programs from identity or experience standpoints. We followed this strategy: 1. Be true to the P&G brand, and bring our brand equity to life. 2. Reflect on what I’d call “modern design elements of today.” 3.  Honor the local market we’re entering.

The Tube map is ubiquitous in London. We realized that it is an interesting metaphor for the entire city. So we ran with it. We let it influence and bring to life our program.

What we didn’t lose sight of: we made sure everything we worked on with the map concept still felt like P&G and was always clean and modern. The challenge was to find a design element that could work with so many different types of consumers. Looking back now, I see the Tube reference as a great beacon. It worked in stores, online, and in ads. What we needed was a design piece to connect the whole P&G program. We hoped that it would help consumers recall that lovely ad on TV, then build resonance when they saw P&G displays in stores, online, and during [sponsored] raising Olympian stories on TV.  We created a very intentionally woven piece of cloth.

You’ve spoken about how corporate innovation and design strategy, as they relate to each other, is now in “Wave Two” – that in the early to mid 2000s, design was fighting to get a seat at the boardroom table. Now, with executives such as you at the table, how has the relationship between innovation and design evolved at P&G?

At P&G, the integration of design was always part of the innovation process, bar none. Ten to fifteen years ago, however, the company was most interested in the performance of our products alone, not the holistic experience consumers have with the brand. Phase 1 brought design to the table with R&D, marketing, and other functions.  And then we publicized it over the last 5 years. But design also began to play a role in new areas, helping to innovate by helping to come up with service-oriented brands based on existing ones, like a Mr. Clean Car Wash or Tide-branded dry cleaners. One dilemma with those efforts is that we found we were not innovating for our core consumers, and not focusing on where those loyal customers could find us. P&G asked, what’s the next thing, in terms of reaching our core audiences?

Now, what’s happening at P&G is that we have doubled down on our innovation efforts with an extreme focus on retail customers, and of course ultimately the loyal P&G consumer. Design is at the heart of that effort. I can say that design is the MVP of our innovation sessions. Via design, we’re matching incredible technologists with people who bring their work to life via data visualizations, rapid prototyping, display thinking. These have been a huge strength and we are making connections internally that frankly were not deeply ingrained even during the first wave of innovation-meets-design at P&G.

We’ve been public about P&G’s need to be innovating for our primary channels. So we’re continuing to innovate at our core. In packaging, that means designing packages so that they are relevant to how consumers shop today. That’s a great challenge: to not say “we’re done with package design, we know how to do this.” It’s easy to have a more trendy approach and move to only a “strategy of design thinking” point of view and ignore packaging and product development as part of the core of our work. I think this can apply outside of P&G. It’s important for all designers to aim to reinvigorate their core.

Speaking of how people shop today, so many of us buy our groceries and home products online and even on our mobile phones. How are you addressing the design challenges that come with this new style of shopping?

Yes, the move to shopping online or on phones affects the shopping experience dramatically. But the principles remain the same. We need to understand consumers and then engage them before we can expect them to purchase our products. What P&G has always been good at is mass communications. So, for the Olympics we focused on driving people to see our Olympic campaign.  In the end we had 76 billion media impressions – that’s a staggering amount.

A big part of this success was creating the assets that people like to talk about. For instance, we ask, “How can we encourage people to share stories about our brands from mobile device to mobile device?”  We create moments that can be posted on Twitter or Facebook.

In short, we’re full-on embracing the mobile shopper, the online shopper. From a company standpoint, it’s still about communicating and connecting with people – only in dramatically new ways.

To not take advantage of the technological capability in front of you is a big miss. Why would you under-leverage a brand experience you can create with your consumers via online social media? When you get it right, the delight factor is huge. If it is flat, without interaction or sharing…it just doesn’t work. We’re getting better as a company at enabling mass sharing. When you receive a personal Facebook message that says “I really like this because…” — that’s a huge amplifier. Social media, I believe, has taken on the role of the modern day soap opera. That is in terms of promoting brand awareness, instead of advertising. The real key is figuring out how to promote share-ability. That’s where design is helpful; designers have always known how to do that, how to make brands and products so desirable you want to share your experience with them.

Still, I should emphasize that our physical retailers will always be critical to us. But social media offers an important place to learn.

You’ve said that P&G is at heart “a tech company.” How so?

Well, we have 9,000 employees in R&D. Absolutely, it’s a technology company. For a company to grow,  it needs to understand from whence it’s growing. You can never give up on creating superior products for consumers. And that we believe that takes an enormous commitment and investment in R & D.

More fully embracing that dimension can take us far. But putting design into that equation…can push R&D to the next level; as Dieter Rams said, “design unleashes the potential in a product.” So we’re getting much more savvy about how to invest in product superiority, as well as how to add what will delight and enhance the experience of those products. I feel great about our ideation [idea creation?] ability and our new product pipeline. It will take a few years before I can share the results because much is still up stream. We don’t get it right all the time. But we’re figuring it out on a much better and more consistent basis.

Switch on your creative inner side!

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4 Ways To Amplify Your Creativity

INNOVATION ENGINE

WRITTEN BY: Bruce Nussbaum

CREATIVITY IS KEY TO INNOVATION. SO HOW DO YOU EXPAND YOUR OWN CREATIVE CAPACITY AND THAT OF YOUR BUSINESS? THROUGH SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT, ARGUES BRUCE NUSSBAUM.

The holidays are over, the weather is lousy, and we’re sober again. We made all kinds of New Year’s promises, but the big one that will change our careers, if not our lives, is the promise to ourselves to become more creative. In my new book, Creative Intelligence, I show that creativity is learned behavior that gets better with training–like sports. You can make creativity routine and a regular part of your life. That’s true for big companies as well as small startups, corporate managers as well as entrepreneurs. Creativity is scalable.

The huge national policy storm brewing over “dwindling innovation” and an “innovation shortfall” also gives creativity an even greater agency. Creativity is the key to generating economic value and getting the U.S. economy to grow fast again.

So here are four specific ways to lead a more creative life and boost your creative capacities. Creativity is not about blue rooms and brain waves but about social engagement and mining the existential. Here’s what you can do.

MANAGERS NEED TO IDENTIFY THE CREATIVE CIRCLES WITHIN THEIR ORGANIZATIONS.

1. ASSEMBLE A CREATIVITY CIRCLE.

Nearly every creative entrepreneur, artist, musician, engineer, sports players, designer, and scientist works with one, two, or a handful of trusted people, often in a small space. Sometimes they work on just one project but often a series of projects over time. They energize, complement, and spark each other and together and create something of value that didn’t exist before. From the Rolling Stones to Thomas Edison, this is how creativity works. This is how Apple works.

So you need to engage with creative people. Ask yourself, among your friends and colleagues, who is the most creative? Who brings out the most creativity in you? How does it happen? Reflect on that. Take time to think about it. And add to your creativity circle if you need to.

Managers need to identify and promote the creative circles within their organizations. The pyramid is the accepted geometric organizational structure of most businesses and organizations. We’ve spent decades “flattening” the hierarchy of the pyramid to boost efficiency. But to raise an organization’s creative capacity, we need to replace pyramids with circles. Identifying, promoting, and managing those creative circles is a key skill they should teach in B-Schools.

2. BELONG TO A PIVOT CIRCLE.

Successful creativity requires scaling your new concept into an actual product. You have to pivot from creativity to creation. To do that, you need to find the resources to transform your concept into reality. We call them general managers, patrons of the arts, professors, lab chiefs, sports coaches, and, these days, crowdfunders. I like to call them “wanderers,” people (or smart crowds) experienced enough to screen new ideas, pick those likely to succeed, and provide the resources to try them out. People need to belong to pivot circles at work and in their regular lives to make their creations real. What pivot circles do you belong to? Who are the wanderers in your life? Family, friends, Kickstarter–who can identify your best creative ideas and help scale them into reality?

Managers need to identify and empower the wanderers inside their organizations. Who is designated to search out the creative possibilities being offered up in your businesses? How do they make their decisions? What resources are they providing? Who do they report to? The Six Sigma black belt is the hero of efficiency in most corporations. To increase creativity, a new corporate hero must be born.

3. CONDUCT A CREATIVITY AUDIT.

Creativity is relational. Its practice is mostly about casting widely and connecting disparate dots of existing knowledge in new, meaningful ways. To be creative, you’ve got to mine your knowledge. You have to know your dots.

We are used to thinking about the dots of knowledge that come from spending 10,000 hours on practice or study. Learned knowledge from immersion is extremely important to knowing. But look around at the world of startups and you see that the knowledge we embody as members of groups–demographic, cultural, national, linguistic–is often more important than what we’ve studied and learned. Embodied knowledge, especially for young people, can provide critical dots that we can connect to new technologies and new situations to provide meaningful solutions to the problems in our lives.

So take a moment to take a creativity audit. What do you really know that might be of value? What does your generation, your group, your family, your hobbies, your obsessions give you that might connect to new technologies or other bits of knowledge that might lead to something new? Ask your trusted friends to hold up a mirror to your possible creativity.

Managers should do creativity audits within their own organizations. What is inside that might lead to something new and valuable. What are your generational and global assets–what do they know that might be of value if mixed, shaken, and stirred, especially with social media technology? The easy part is auditing the formal spaces for innovation–labs, new product groups, R&D. Harder but possibly more productive are the informal groups working under the radar on weekends and at night. Or just the rare birds with unique backgrounds and knowledge, learned and embodied. Do you know them?

4. MAP YOUR CREATIVITY.

Being creative means leading a creative life. We need to reflect on what we do, with whom we engage, how we act in order to increase our creative capacities. One easy way is to keep a creativity journal and map our creativity. Take a few days, a week, or a month and write down what you do, where you go, and with whom you spend your time. Map out where and with whom you get your “best” ideas? Which coffeehouse do you go to in order to be alone to think? Where do you get coffee to meet people? Where do you go for inspiration and provocation? A creativity map can reveal your process of creativity. Or it can show the banality of your life and why you should change it.

CREATIVITY MAPPING GIVES PURPOSE TO PEOPLE’S LINKAGES.

Managers can do creativity maps of their organizations, both formal and informal. Network mapping, increasingly popular in big corporations, is a first step. Creativity mapping takes the effort further by giving purpose to people’s linkages. Most networking is about making mobility alliances–job-hopping to other places or promotions. Creativity mapping is about finding people to join your circles of creativity and pivoting. It’s about creating new economic value.

Creativity is deeply undervalued in America today outside a tiny few university and business enclaves. Only 9% of all public and private do any sort of innovation. Our best schools teach the tools of efficiency and analysis. Yet we know that creativity increasingly is the greatest value-generator. It separates those who can deal with change and chaos and those who can’t. So we all need to build up our creative capacity. Building these four competencies can help get you there.

Like a virgin! Please make each time, the first time.

TRENDWATCHING.COM

http://www.trendwatching.com/trends/virginconsumers/

extracts :

The key to adopting a VIRGIN mindset:

#1
Keep it simple:

Cast off industry convention and (if you’re an established brand) previous product iterations, andreimagine your product from the ground up, so that it makes sense for the way consumers live now, and is intuitive to use right out of the box. See how VIRGIN BRANDS Lytro made photography effortlessly simple for VIRGINS by releasing a camera that could focus after taking the shots. Or learn fromNest, who made thermostats intuitive, sexy andsustainable. 2012 saw big brands thinking like VIRGINS, too: witness the Nike+ Fuelband, an end-to-end service – including wearable device and online platform – that finally made tracking activity through the day easy. While for Microsoft, ripping up two decades of user experience and pivoting to a touch-led tile interface in Windows 8, meant creating an interface that caters to VIRGIN CONSUMERS.

#2
Explain your brand:

Think campaigns that answer foundational questions: who are you? What makes you different? What does your brand say about those consumers who choose it? This is a must for VIRGIN BRANDS, who are new to all consumers: see how new Welsh jeans brand Hiut Denim, launched in March 2012, used the ‘Story’ section of its website – and its ‘Our town is making jeans again’ message – to link itself to the history and heritage of jeans making in Cardigan, Wales. Brand explaining is of course crucial for established brands looking to EMERGING VIRGINS, too: see how Volkswagen connected with VIRGINS in China with no prior experience of the VW brand, with a website for its Phaeton luxury vehicle that explained VW’s manufacturing heritage and its ties to the Saxony region of Germany.

#3
Don’t ask for commitment:

Where once VIRGINS may have wanted a long-term relationship, now many would prefer a one-night stand 😉 Indulge the joy VIRGINS take in playing the field by streaming and renting them products instead of selling. Learn from examples such as designer fashion rental platform thesixosix, or established brands like BMW’s DriveNow short-term car rental initiative, and think in terms of how to give VIRGINSaccess to your product, rather than just selling it to them.

 

In short, whether you’re a startup or a heritage brand, remember: as NEWISM pushes consumerism to light speed, you simply have to start mirroring the VIRGIN mindset in your own thinking if you want to stand a chance with many consumers.

But however you cater to VIRGIN CONSUMERS, remember: make it special. It’s their first time 😉

Some simple & easy tips to make life better

businessinsider.com

10 Incredibly Easy Ways To Improve Your Life

Eric Barker, Barking Up The Wrong Tree | Jan. 16, 2013, 7:28 PM | 69,187 | 1

1) Get out in nature:You probably seriously underestimate how important this is. (Actually, there’s research that says you do.) Being in nature reduces stress, makes you more creative, improves your memory and may even make you a better person.

2) Exercise:

We all know how important this is, but few people do it consistently. Other than health benefits too numerous to mention, exercise makes you smarter, happier, improves sleep, increases libido and makes you feel better about your body. A Harvard study that has tracked a group of men for more than 70 years identified it as one of the secrets to a good life.

3) Spend time with friends and family:

Harvard happiness expert Daniel Gilbert identified this as one of the biggest sources of happiness in our lives. Relationships are worth more than you think (approximately an extra $131,232 a year.) Not feeling socially connected can make you stupider and kill you. Loneliness can lead to heart attack, stroke and diabetes. The longest lived people on the planet all place a strong emphasis on social engagement and good relationships are more important to a long life than even exercise. Friends are key toimproving your life. Share good news and enthusiatically respond when others share good news with you to improve your relationships. Want to instantly be happier? Dosomething kind for them.

4) Express gratitude:

It will make you happier.

It will improve your relationships.

It can make you a better person.

It can make life better for everyone around you.

5) Meditate:

Meditation can increase happiness, meaning in life, social support and attention span while reducing anger, anxiety, depression and fatigue. Along similar lines, prayer can make you feel better — even if you’re not religious.

6) Get enough sleep:

You can’t cheat yourself on sleep and not have it affect you. Being tired actually makes it harder to be happy. Lack of sleep = more likely to get sick. “Sleeping on it” does improve decision making. Lack of sleep can make you more likely to behave unethically. There is such a thing as beauty sleep.

Naps are great too. Naps increase alertness and performance on the job, enhance learning ability and purge negative emotions while enhancing positive ones. Here’s how to improve your naps.

7) Challenge yourself:

Learning another language can keep your mind sharp. Music lessons increase intelligence. Challenging your beliefs strengthens your mind. Increasing willpower just takes a little effort each day and it’s more responsible for your success than IQ. Not getting an education or taking advantage of opportunities are two of the things people look back on their lives and regret the most.

8) Laugh:

People who use humor to cope with stress have better immune systems, reduced risk of heart attack and stroke, experience less pain during dental work and live longer. Laughter should be like a daily vitamin. Just reminiscing about funny moments can improve your relationship. Humor has many benefits.

9) Touch someone:

Touching can reduce stress, improve team performance, and help you be persuasive. Hugs make you happier. Sex may help prevent heart attacks and cancer, improve your immune system and extend your life.

10) Be optimistic:

Optimism can make you healthier, happier and extend your life. The Army teaches it in order to increase mental toughness in soldiers. Being overconfident improves performance.

Read more: http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2012/05/what-10-things-should-you-do-every-day-to-imp/#ixzz2JsvVfbCJ

Moms everyday life cycle

FAST COMPANY

How Ikea Creates Massive Demand For The Ektorp Sofa: It Thinks About Moms

BY GREGORY P. SHEA AND CASSIE A. SOLOMON

JANUARY 30, 2013

IKEA has made very clear choices about who they will be and to whom they will matter, and why. Can you say the same for your brand?

Göran Carstedt, president of IKEA North America, summoned his top executives to a large meeting room to share his strategic plan. They arrived prepared for a flashy PowerPoint presentation complete with charts and graphs. Instead, Carstedt told them a story about a mother. He depicted a detailed scene of her and her husband getting two kids off to school in the morning. She gets up, makes coffee, wakes up the children, makes breakfast, and so on. Then he paused and moved to the heart of the matter: “Our strategic plan is to make that family’s life easier by providing them with convenient and affordable household items in an accessible location. Period.”

Carstedt, in short, wanted IKEA to enter the scene, to populate it with IKEA-supplied usefulness that customers would appreciate having in their homes as they conducted their daily lives. He wanted his executives, in effect, to write IKEA into their customers’ story in a way that improved the story for the characters that populated it. Brilliant! As Carmen Nobel, senior editor at Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, notes, “IKEA has made very clear choices about who they will be and to whom they will matter, and why.”

Clarity of purpose in any endeavor–from invading Afghanistan to marketing an MP3 player to orienting a global home-furnishing empire–avoids wasting resources such as time, money, effort, and communication. No surprise there. The same holds true for organizational change. If the desired change were to take hold, what would you see as you walked through a work area? What would you hear as the proverbial fly on the wall? Hover for a moment over the flow of information or product or service. How is the decision making on given matters unfolding? How does information move, and from where to where?

A change leader who hasn’t thought through these questions hasn’t prepared adequately to move to implementation–no matter how grand the change scheme, no matter how beautiful the flow charts or how heartfelt the calls for “enhanced communication,” “a culture of safety,” or “dedication to innovation.” Absent a clear set of end behaviors on the horizon, a crew that starts rowing, perhaps even with vigor, but with little idea where they should head, will likely end up exhausted and disillusioned.

Change leaders need to focus on behavior, desired behaviors in particular. Easy to say. Intuitively obvious, perhaps. Yet doing so takes time and effort. Doing so also facilitates clearer focus and crisper implementation. The odds of success drop if you don’t know what success looks like.

There’s no best way to imagine the future. However you travel, bear two principles in mind. First, move far enough into the future to uncouple yourself from the major constraints of the moment. For executives, this usually means moving at least five years and perhaps 10 years out. For managers, two to four years might prove sufficient. Starting at a specific moment and working back to the present produces more creative thinking. Second, assume the world you desire has come to pass. This helps make the unreal more concrete and enables greater, easier specification of that world. With these principles taken as given, the process that follows should help you find the desired future and delineate the end behaviors needed to get there.

Start Big

Just because change is difficult doesn’t mean it has to be timid. In fact, bold change initiatives can prove easier to pull off than incremental ones, because they force–or should force–change leaders to think systemwide, not just about processes but about the people who implement them. Successfully implementing widespread change requires successfully altering widespread patterns of behavior across large numbers of people reacting to a multitude of cues from the work world around them. Begin there.

Focus on Intent

What specifically are you trying to get your business to do? More local problem solving? A broader, deeper commitment to quality or safety? Ongoing refinement of production or delivery processes? Enhanced attention to product innovation? A dedication to customer service and intimacy? Regardless of whether the underlying push or pull comes from outside the organization or from within it, what’s the end purpose? If you can’t state it in one simple sentence, you’re not ready to imagine what it will look like if and when it’s achieved.

Identify Critical Roles

Which organization members will most contribute to realizing your intent? And don’t stop with the executive suites. The goal here is to think ground level, those proverbial trenches. Titles and job descriptions do not matter; function and behavior do. Salespeople switching their focus from volume to customer satisfaction may provide the most powerful insight into the required work system changes. Or perhaps envisioning housekeepers moving from pure maintenance activity to customer representatives will enable the most acute (and painful) analysis of the current work environment. Or receptionists migrating from check-in portals to point-of-contact client problem solvers.

It’s the future. Anything can come true.

Coffee shops are great places to work and be creative, indeed!!!!

FAST COMPANY

Why You Should Work From A Coffee Shop, Even When You Have An Office

BY WESLEY VERHOEVE

|

JANUARY 25, 2013

While team Family Records was in between offices in early 2012, we had 6 weeks to bridge until our new space was ready. During that time we were fortunate enough to be taken in as guests by awesome companies for stretches of time, and for the remainder we took over corners of coffee shops all over Brooklyn and Manhattan. The experience of working out of coffee shops was so positive that even after we moved into our new home, I made sure to get in a few “coffee shop days” each month. For carpal tunnel related reasons alone, I would not recommend working out of coffee shops every day, but here are some reasons why it might be great to try it for one or two days every month.

A change of environment stimulates creativity. Even in the most awesome of offices we can fall into a routine, and a routine is the enemy of creativity. Changing your environment, even just for a day, brings new types of input and stimulation, which in turn stimulates creativity and inspiration.

Fewer distractions. It sounds counter-intuitive, but working from a bustling coffee shop can be less distracting than working from a quiet office. Being surrounded by awesome team and officemates means being interrupted for water cooler chats and work questions. Being interrupted kills productivity. The coffee shop environment combines the benefit of anonymity with the dull buzz of exciting activity. Unlike working at home, with the ever-present black hole of solitude and procrastination, a coffee shop provides the opportunity of human interaction, on your terms.

Community and meeting new people. Meeting new people always provides me with new ideas, a different perspective at existing problems, or an interesting connection to a new person doing something awesome that inspires me. Today alone I met a top Skillshare teacher whose class I will now take, a sleep consultant, a publicist who offered to help with a project, and a wine consultant who recommended some bars.

To make the best out of your coffee shop days, keep a few things in mind:

Rotate coffee shops. Rather than going to the same coffee shop every time, switch it up, and avoid the stifling feeling of routine you were trying to avoid in the first place.

Buy something. Don’t be a cheapskate nursing that one coffee throughout the day. Buy some stuff throughout the day, and tip well. Coffee shop workers are awesome, and they’ll be awesome to you if you are a good customer. That hidden power plug will be revealed, an extra free refill will be given, an introduction will be made.

Placement. Don’t sit near the door or the register, if you can avoid it. Temperature differences and high traffic don’t help you to focus.

Power up. Come with a full charge. I like to not bring a power cord, unlike most folks, because I get 6 hours out of my laptop battery, and it forces me to take a break and work with focus because I will run out eventually.

There you have it, a few reasons why I recommend taking a break from the office at least once a month, and some tips on how to get the most out of it. For those of you located in, or traveling to, the New York City area, I have put together a special Foursquare list with 15 of my favorite local coffee shops to work from. Let us know how it goes!