Strategy Partner Group

Now/Next/Why The Strategy Partner Group visits Contagious magazine’s innovation conference.

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Strategy Partner Group

Now/Next/Why

On Wednesday May 1, the Strategy Partner Group attended Contagious magazine’s Now/Next/Why conference in New York City.

The goal of the day was to address one pressing question: How can big brands best address current and future technological trends?

In this document, we’ve summarized the event’s presentations and shared some key insights. Topics include:

• Digital Immediacy: How do brands market themselves and compete in a world of 'Buy It Now'?

• Adaptive Innovation: Prioritizing experimental practices to fuel innovation and growth is no longer a luxury, but a necessity for modern marketers.

• Beyond Screens: As technology breaks out from behind the glass, what will the post-mobile era mean for brands?

• New Currencies: Digital has reconfigured how we think about value - both in terms of what we expect to receive and how we expect to pay for it. How do brands go about navigating this new value exchange?

Check out photos and videos from the event: http://eventifier.co/event/contagiousnnwny/

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Strategy Partner Group

Digital Immediacy: Every Second Counts

Time is precious: consumers are obsessed with immediacy and instant gratification. Time is also relative: sometimes it flies, and other times it drags on. - Katrina Dodd, Contagious Magazine

Today, an increasing number of brands are working more conspicuously with time: – to earn our time, to keep it, and to make the most of every millisecond.

The more that brands can understand and work with our sense of time and experience, the better they are able to create lasting relationships with consumers.

Brands can use time as a tool to establish connections with consumers and add value by:

• Expediting: offering the most elegant means to an end.

• Engaging: enhancing and deepening the consumer experience.

Katrina Dodd, Contagious Magazine

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People confuse the desire for privacy with desire for control and transparency.” - Mark Guldimann, Enliken

The public’s placement of trust has shifted from authority to peer:

• Only 35% of people trust government officials, while 61% say they trust people like themselves.

• 21% of Americans and 15% of Britons would be comfortable with abandoning traditional sovereign currencies for currencies not tied to a major banking institution

The decentralization of trust has bred the decentralization of currency, and alternative forms have arisen: cyber currency (such as Bitcoin), mobile airtime, loyalty, reputation, sharing, and even personal data.

To evolve with the shift, brands need to reconsider their value exchange with their consumers.

• Brand currency = the totality of a brand’s assets

• How can this be monetized and invested?

• Trust and transparency are key

New Currencies

Mark Guldimann, Enliken

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Coding Generation

Communication is only possible among equals. Not everyone needs to be a specialist in the field, but a basic grasp of coding language is useful to enable shared meaning and productivity.

- Leng Lee, Codecademy

Increased access to education + democratized technology = burgeoning coding generation

On the frontlines of this movement is Codecademy, one in a series of recent ventures designed to make learning to code easy and accessible for the masses via an online platform. Leng Lee, head of Business Development at Codecademy, believes coding is becoming an essential skill that should be part of school curriculum:

• There will be 1.4 million (est.) U.S. job openings in computer science by 2020., but less than half as many people qualified to fill them.

• Digital consumption is now standard (the internet, ieverything), but digital production is not. Producers are a powerful group with increasingly universal demand.

Leng Lee, Codecademy

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Creating a Global Brand Franchise: Top 10 Takeaways

Coca-Cola’s Wendy Clark shared what she learned during the process of turning Fanta’s one-way dialogue into a completely immersive “global brand franchise”:

1. Be a better you (not a worse them). “We had to let Fanta be Fanta” and find an “ownable space” for them to play.

2. Know thy consumers. You need to know what the core target wants and give over to them.

3. Data is not a proxy for decision making. Welcome data, use it, act on it - but remember that data doesn't make decisions, you do.

4. Dream beyond reason. If we don't dream big for our clients/brands/companies, who will?

5. Do not accept the status quo. Be restless. Reimagine the “no’s” as a “yes” waiting to happen

6. Get into the conversation. Wendy and her team are building a “hub” to enable real-time social listening and consumer engagement.

7. The days of control are over. 80% of the content put out on your brand is not created by you - it's created by consumers.

8. Great work based on great ideas based on great strategy can get collective agreement very quickly.

9. Draw a line in the sand on culture. Own it and create the one you want, even if you have to start small.

10. Talk is cheap. Show evidence that you're investing behind and actioning great work.

See more: www.playfanta.com

Wendy Clark, The Coca-Cola Company

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Adaptive Innovation

We all have this manic obsession with innovation - with being first. But perhaps what’s really important is being second - but getting it right for real people. - Will Sansom, Contagious Magazine

True innovation is disruptive, chaotic, and often impractical. Big brands can’t handle this kind of disruptive change. For them, innovation is more about refining than disrupting.

In the quest to be more adaptive, some big global brands are looking beyond their walls:

• Accelerator programs that engage the startup community

• Ex: Nike+ accelerator “seeks small companies that share Nike's commitment to helping people live more active lives.”

• Open source R&D

• Ex: AT&T’s Foundry program looks externally for “the next big development – or 100 small developments” and takes a Venture Capital perspective, relying on a few big successes to make up for the many failures.

Will Sansom, Contagious Magazine

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Constraint & Innovation

Creativity is internal – it’s personal. But the measure of innovation is adoption. You can be as creative as hell, but if the outside world doesn't rate your contribution and accept it as an innovation, your creativity is meaningless. - Howard Pyle, IBM Design Lab

Constraints provide a helpful, often necessary framework during the creative process – and become even more essential when making the leap from creativity to innovation.

Pragmatism is key: If you're not thinking about how what you're doing addresses an unmet human need, and how it fits everyday lives of real people, it won't go anywhere.

Key considerations:

• Who are our partners?

• What kind of time and money do we have?

• Who is the audience?

Howard Pyle, IBM Design Lab

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Beyond Screens

We're beginning tire of having interactions interrupted by screens. 41% of Americans use their tablet or phone when talking to others.

- Nick Parish, Contagious Magazine

Wearable computing like Google Glass allows people to be back in the moment, rather than buried in the technology.

• More human and natural

• More emotionally resonant

• Encouraging people to interact

These technologies require a design that's more empathetic, pointing towards a coming revolution in how we approach messaging and communications.

Nick Parish, Contagious Magazine

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With the introduction of the iPhone, touch screens became a tipping point technology that radically altered the way people interact with their devices and generated an avalanche of innovation.

- Ivan Poupyrev, Disney Research, USA

The next generation of interactive innovations will take the human experience beyond the screen and into the real world, eventually “making the whole world interactive.”

• inanimate objects, such as plants, that respond to human touch

• virtual textures that can be felt over a regular screen (think: feeling sandpaper or a hardwood floor on the screen of your iPad)

It’s all about constructing the ultimate experience. Ex: paper tickets at Disney World will soon be replaced with RFID bracelets, the data from which will be used to optimize each visitor’s experience and “bring the fantasy to life.”

The World That Feels and Responds

Ivan Poupyrev, Disney Research, USA

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Strategy Partner Group

To Continue the Conversation…

Julie Belgraier

Associate Strategy Partner Group julie.belgraier@ipsos.com +1 (212) 293-6507 twitter: @IpsosSPG