“If you’re looking for the next big thing, and you’re looking where everyone else is, you’re looking in the wrong place.” – Mark Cuban
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innovation
I do a lot of interviewing. Not only have I been building out a team of my own, but I am also a “bar raiser” at Amazon which means that I participate in many interviews in an effort to maintain a high hiring bar for roles all over the company. I have interviewed candidates senior and junior roles ranging from software developers to economists from marketers to security guards. I get to ask candidates about the decisions that they have made and the outcomes of those decisions. This has sharpened my focus on decision making as a leadership skill.
Early in your career, when you are new to a role, or in some process-oriented positions, your job is to execute on decisions made by others. You run the plays, follow instructions, and earn the trust of the organization, your colleagues, and your manager.
As you develop your scope and influence, you are called to make decisions. Others seek you out for answers and advice. You look at the data and determine the ruling. You umpire. You judge. Your opinion becomes the recommendation. If you make good decisions, you get to make more decisions, faster and with greater complexity and risk. More people are impacted. More dollars are at stake. More is riding on you getting it right.
That broadening scope of decision impact is fairly well understood. When interviewing, I try to assess the kind of autonomy and responsibility a person had in their previous roles by learning about the decisions that they made (or didn’t). Decision making authority can be codified in things like spending authority. At leading companies, cultural fit is determined by how the candidate made decisions, who they involved (or not), and how they learned from mistakes (or didn’t). Making decisions is a litmus test of organizational seniority.
However, scope and impact of decisions aren’t the only measures of leadership. The most impactful leaders don’t just make decisions, they create the moment of decision. They don’t just answer questions brought to them, they ask new questions. If you consider the business leaders who have lasting impact outside of their individual teams, business, or industry they have in common that they created disruption. That disruption is caused not by answering the questions in front of them, but by anticipating tomorrow’s questions or forcing the answers to questions that no one else is considering. If you wait until there is an obvious fork in the road, it may not matter which path you take. Truth is you are too late and you have lost the race. Why? Because someone else created the fork in the road. They were the first to divert from the path to create something new. Truth is, if you are at a fork where the options are clear, you are a follower.
Most forks in the road don’t start as high-stakes decisions, thankfully. When done best, they are small experiments, pilots, or proofs of concepts. Small ventures, building upon each other in layers of learning, until a road is paved. By the time others come to fork in the road, the stakes are higher. This is what defensible differentiation is all about. Making the fork in the road more costly for the next traveler. Followers are faced with high-stakes decisions. “Should we abandon their existing legacy business to pursue something that would maintain their competitiveness in the future because we can’t afford to do both?” they must ask. Often they are forced to partner with frenemies to lower the stakes, which can be a sound approach when it is clear that there is a front-runner and it isn’t you. But how much better would it be to have created the fork in the road? To disrupt yourself. The annuls of business history are littered with companies with dominant positions in their space, the bigger market share, the most loyal customers, and with the best minds in the business…who got left at a turn.
This is true of the movement of whole organizations and down at the team level as well. Managers make decisions within the boxes on the organization chart or within the confines of the business charter. Leaders work in the blanks between the boxes and can see possibilities. The leadership pioneer Peter Drucker once said that “the most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The truly dangerous thing is asking the wrong question.” Or perhaps not asking questions at all or after the answer is obvious.
As you think about your work, your short-term goals, and long-term ambitions consider your decision. : the decisions you are asked to make and what decisions you can truly make proactively. May you have the boldness to make your own forks in the road.
Here are a few technology trends I am following. By no means an exhaustive list, so I would love to hear more about what you are hearing about, especially coming out of CES, ISE, SXSW, and other recent events.
Ultra-Fast Charge, High Capacity Batteries: This is the key to the end of the combustion engine. A world where torque reigns and the electric vehicle is in every garage (or at the end of every Lyft call). At the end of last year, Toshiba announced a 200 mile battery that charges in 6 minutes, and although this one doesn’t appear to be out of the lab yet, every multi-industrial and every car company seems to be investing here. The implications of this shift not only change industries, but our environment and travel practices as well. But perhaps we won’t be ACTUALLY going anywhere if the next trend catches on.
Augmented Reality/Mixed Reality: Before we go virtually landing aircraft in our living room or visiting the Louve from Los Angeles, I have seen some great practical applications for the technology in technical field repair work and training. I also love the application of virtual reality for architecture, as despite our technology advances, humans as a species have a very difficult time visualizing. We simply can’t imagine what a carpet tile will look like replicated across our entire office space or how a vaulted ceiling will “feel” once it is installed. We had great success with this kind of visualization tools (here is an example) at my previous company, who wanted you to know what your space (or one like it) would look like with a big video wall installed. So, before we replace our physical world with some dystopian future where people in grim warehouses think they live in luxury due to their headsets, I think we can build and maintain a more beautiful and functional world using these new tools.
Light Field Technology: Related to the category above, light field technology has a promise to change the way virtual images show up in the real world. MagicLeap gave the world a holiday present with it’s long leaked and teased light field technology, but as someone who came from the display world, the core science here is very interesting and will spark a whole lot of innovation before we are done. Check out what Leia (named less for the princess than after her “Obi Won Kenobi, you are our only hope” hologram in the Star Wars movie) is working on or geek out on some of the technical papers of the Society for Information Display.
Motion Capture: I loved the pioneering work that OptiTrack does here (full disclosurer: I was with Planar and Leyard when we acquired the company in 2017). I also love how the optical science was originally inspired as a method for mouse replacement for a disabled family member of the then teen-aged founder/inventor, who earlier had won a science competition at 12 years old for building a hoverboard, but I digress. Now, technology of this type is used for motion science research, as well as Hollywood productions and gaming that is changing the realism of what we see. And all because we found a way to sensor up real motion so that we could build better models.
Internet of Things: I would be remiss to list out a technologies to watch list without listing this ubiquitous term that is underlying the growth of companies from start-ups in garages to industrial giants like GE and Honeywell. That said, I think that IoT should probably stand for the “instrumentation of everything.” Why would you use a camera technology (however sophisticated it might be) to identify intruders, when you could use the door, window, or floor covering itself? Why would you need a refrigerator to tell you whether your fruit has spoiled when your robot chef has already taken inventory and is whipping up a batch of banana bread? Why not prevent tripping or falls (which account for more injuries and deaths each year as the population in developed countries ages) with lights triggered by personal beacons and air bags on stairways? With modern day processing and sensors literally in everything, it will be awesome to see what simple solutions arise to real problems.
Artificial Intelligence: This buzz word is SO buzzy that it has spun-out a few additional buzz words to clutter the landscape: deep learning, machine learning, and data science. It is the underlying technology behind self-driving cars and trucks and will be very disruptive to the logistics industry overall. It is an arm’s race not just between companies and research universities, but between countries. Even content, like news articles or promotional videos, will be created auto-magically using these new tools (and their new friends in natural-language generation, video, image manipulation, and 3D modeling).
Fake News: Okay this is a trick one. It really isn’t a technology, but one enabled by a collection of inter-related technologies. We hate fake news. As a marketer, I particularly dislike “smoke and mirrors” pre-releases that feature only Photoshop wizardry, photorealistic 3D renderings, and the promise of things not yet possible. Add to that VoCo which allows you to “Photoshop” your voice to sound like anything or anyone. It is amazing how the technology is advancing. We can’t tell the filtered from the real anymore and with folks like Adobe leading the charge, this will only get harder. This is one to watch as it will change (and has changed) the need for media literacy and the nearly impossible ability we will have to discern it. But maybe with our sensored world, we will just trust the data and skim the news.
“Is it a verb, a noun, or a value?” -Mohan Nair
I remember talking to my grandpa about the amount of change he had seen in his life, which spanned the center of the 1900’s. He would tell me about the novelty of plastic bags (where you could see what was inside without opening the bag – crazy!) and freeways (they overlapped each other just like a Buck Rogers’ cartoon). Fast forward to 2017 and the pace of change is just that: fast forwarding. Futurist Maurice Conti predicts that in the next 20 years, there will be more change to our work than in the last 2,000 years.
“A fatherless girl thinks nothing is impossible and nothing is safe.”
– May Sarton as quoted by Gloria Vanderbilt on the documentary she did together with her son Anderson Cooper
If this is true (and thankfully, I don’t have personal experience), what will this mean to our world as so many girls are growing up without fathers in their lives. More invention. More innovation. More paranoia. More pessimism or more optimism?
On a Tuesday in 1954, H.W. Sweatt, the president of Minneapolis-Honeywell (a leading control systems company that would go on to be called Honeywell) had an important message to deliver. According to Jeffrey Rodengen, in his The Legend of Honeywell, H.W. assembled some division executives and sales people and shared some thoughts about innovation.
“To me,” he began, “one of our greatest weaknesses and one that I think is growing in this company is a failure to keep ‘a spirit of restlessness’ fully alive in our organization.” He went on to describe that he observed people in the sixty-nine year old company had gotten too comfortable with that status quo or how things exist today and lacked the time or the mental energy to do the “thinking, planning, and imaging that must be done to protect the future of the company – not next year, but in the decades that lie ahead.” In a successful business it is easy to overlook the constant change that is “inherent in every business picture,” and efficiency can not take precedence over changing and leading. To continuing to pioneer new frontiers with an entrepreneurial spirit.
“As for me, while I always want to strive for perfection and never want to be satisfied with less, if I had to choose, I would prefer to settle for a little less perfection today and a little more imagining for tomorrow.” He recognize that risk-taking would lead to mistakes, errors, and sacrifice immediate profits, but the threat of withering and dying was too real. Sweatt, who is now the namesake of Honeywell’s highest award for engineers/scientists considered this spirit of restlessness “One of our most priceless and fundamental possessions.”
In Creativity, Inc. Ed Catmull, President of Pixar Animation and Disney Animation recounted a time when a proud tradition and commitment to excellence conflicted with a spirit of innovation. The team at Disney Animation was making the movie Bolt and ran into a technical challenge that was set to delay the film unacceptably by over 6 months. After a pep talk from leadership and some creative problem solving by a few team members, the problem was resolved in a few days. So, why did the larger team think it would take six months to do something that ended up taking only a few days? Why the conservatism? “The answer, I think,” Ed surmised, “lay in the fact that for too long, the leaders of Disney Animation placed a higher value on error prevention than anything else.”
No one had to remind them about the legacy of the studio, the innovations and advancements that had been made under Walt Disney’s leadership, and the pressure that they faced to get things right. “Their employees knew there would be repercussions if mistakes were made, so the primary goal was never to make any.” But estimating that a problem would be solved with no errors, was absolutely the wrong choice in this situation. “Seeking to eliminate failure was in this instance – and I would argue, most instances – precisely the wrong thing to do,” he continued. It was important in the end to turn the focus “away from the notion of the ‘right’ way to fix the problem to actually fixing the problem – a subtle, but important distinction.”
In the final tally, perfection and innovation have to be held in balance. If things are too perfect, efficiency might be high, but innovation suffers. If things are too innovative, there may be wasteful rework and abandoned short-term profits. The higher order problem to be solved might not be as obvious as the problems of yesterday that prompted the processes, procedures, and thinking prevelant today. There isn’t a warning label that exists in the world because someone wasn’t first harmed or injured. So, these “perfect” processes, documentation, and support rise up to solve yesterday’s problems. Maybe not the problems of the future.
The spirit of restlessness, that H.W. Sweatt encouraged and was demonstrated by the small team at Disney Animation, is the attitude that keeps clever people pushing forward, with dissatisfaction to today’s constraints, imagining the future, and possibly most importantly, trading in short-term perfection along the way for the discovery of solutions to larger, more impactful, problems. It’s restlessness, in fact, that uncomfortable feeling that we have outgrown the status quo or might be missing something bigger, that puts us on the path of innovation.
This article originally posted on LInkedIn Pulse.
I learned recently that the research firm SRI employed researchers that developed the hyperlink and many of the conventions that we use today on websites and other digital interfaces. And the same team pioneered some machine intelligence, AI, and voice recognition developments that were behind Apple’s Siri application. It struck me as ironic that over the decades, this group sought to undo its own work. You don’t have to click on anything, if you can just speak to your devices.
Planar, now a Leyard company, has a history of this kind of cannibalization. We make our own products obsolete regularly. The Planar® LookThru™ OLED transparent display addressed many limitations of previous offerings and has essentially replaced the Planar® LookThru™ LCD offering. We have single displays that are larger than 2x2 array of tiled video wall products, making this style of display easier to specify and install than previous generations. We add features into products that used to require separate purchases or third-party equipment. You have to look no further than the latest version of the Planar® UltraRes™ display to see how much image processing, scaling, and control we have built into the product, especially once you consider the free iOS or Android UltraRes App. As the bezels have been shrinking on LCD tiled video wall displays, like the award-winning Clarity® Matrix™, we have also introduced cutting-edge, fine-pitch LED technology that is truly seamless (see Planar® DirectLight™ or the Leyard® TVH or TW series).
Innovation companies that last are ones that aren’t afraid to kill their best product lines with a new idea. To stay relevant, I heard someone say recently, you need to be prepared to run a different company every few years. In the fast-moving space of display technologies, flexibility is a requirement. Planar has been innovating for over 30 years and Leyard for over 20. It’s a testament to our shared commitment to the long play.
“Grandma, you have to see this new show that we found on Netflix. I think you’d really like it!” my son told my Mom. “Really? What is it?” replied my Mom, intrigued. “It’s a show about a Dad and his son and his crazy co-workers in this small town. It’s really funny and doesn’t have bad language,” he continues. “You’ve probably never heard of it,” he adds. “It’s called the Andy Griffith Show.”
This conversation really occurred in my house last year, when my kids thought they had discovered this show which ran 8 seasons in the 1960s. They were shocked to learn that their grandma already knew about the show. In fact, she had watched it every week when it was broadcast, first in black and white and then in color. My kids “discovered” Andy Griffith like Columbus “discovered” the new world or the world “discovered” TED talks over the past few years. Things around for decades, centuries, or even millennia get rediscovered when new technology makes it possible.
My kids would have never watched Andy Griffith without NetFlix serving up suggestions. Columbus would have never discovered America without the help of ships and navigation technologies (however flawed they were). TED would have never extended beyond an event for 1,200 people in Canada each year, if it weren’t for the ability to stream video online, which extended the platform of the events and the “ideas worth sharing” to multiple continents and cultures.
What old things are worth discovering again? What technology innovation will be required to make that discovery possible?
We just got a new thermostat in the house from EcoBee. Their claim to fame is that instead of one sensor (at the thermostat), you can put temperature measurement devices around the room or space to generate a better picture of the living environment, be more comfortable, and save energy. Pretty cool, new solution to an old problem: how do we allocate expensive and scarce resources (in this case, heat), more effectively?
I wonder what business problems could be solved by moving from a single point of measurement to multiple measurement points. The sensors have to be cheap (either embedded into a process already done or solved with cheap technology). Instrumenting various other parts of the organization might lead to allocating expensive and finite/scare resources more effectively?
In today’s ultra-competitive business landscape, a strong brand is essential—and digital signage can be a powerful ally in that effort. Not only does digital signage attract customer attention, but it can also build business and customer loyalty. Indeed, one survey found that four out of five product brands that use digital signage increase sales by up to 33 percent. Another found that moving from static posters to digital signage when advertising outdoors can boost monthly revenue by as much as 800 percent. And we have seen similar results in indoor implementations as well.
The reasons for this are simple. Digital signage creates eye-catching and often interactive experiences that engage consumers and help them remember your brand, your product, how it made them feel, and what compelled them to share their experience. And most people enjoy digital signage, viewing it as “a cool way to advertise” and a “good way to learn about sales and events.” As Nancy Fletcher, president and CEO of the Outdoor Advertising Association of America, puts it: “Consumers are paying attention to the information presented to them and acting on it, whether they are drawn to a location featured on an ad, discussing the ad with friends and family, or attending an advertised event.”
The good news is that digital signage keeps getting better. Thanks to the latest innovative technology, digital signage is becoming ever more impactful, immersive, and versatile. Consider the following three trends that can be applied to the next generation of digital signage:
Video installations are getting bigger. Whereas just a few years ago, businesses used 55- to 65-inch displays as the basis for digital signage, today organizations are creating digital signage from displays as large as 98 inches. In addition, an increasing number of companies are taking advantage of seamless video wall technology and affordable prices to combine multiple displays into large video walls that make a huge impact — especially in public venues and places where crowds gather. The result is that what was once a medium for individuals has evolved into an ever-more powerful tool that can attract entire groups at the same time.
Digital signage is becoming interactive. From vibrant touch screen solutions to real-time body and face tracking, digital signage has becoming increasingly interactive, allowing companies to create highly immersive and customizable experiences that build brand loyalty. For example, retailers are installing interactive kiosks that offer coupons and rewards to repeat customers. Airports are implementing interactive way-finding stations that help travelers quickly find the services they need. Public venue installations can enable crowd-sourced, curated content submissions and social engagement. And advertisers are building digital signage that can sense who’s viewing it, offering up customized ads based on factors such as the viewer’s age and gender. Ultimately, interactive digital signage can give consumers the information they need, right when they need it—improving brand loyalty.
The opportunity for creative applications is growing. While many organizations are installing video walls, in today’s world, there’s no reason to limit oneself to the four walls of a building. From ceiling and floor installations to counter tops, digital signage can enhance almost any surface. Companies can design see-through installations on glass surfaces, overlaying text, images, and video onto physical objects that sit behind the glass. They can build captivating 3D installations that people can view in virtual reality using lightweight glasses. And they can tile displays into non-traditional shapes to create a mood or atmosphere that complements their brand. Taking this a step further, NBC Olympics, a division of NBC Sports Group, built a series of huge video walls featuring finish carpentry, which masked the walls into organic shapes, in their coverage of the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Similar approaches were also used at the Woody Gutherie museum. Likewise By tapping into these technologies and creative installation design, businesses can generate highly memorable experiences that elevate their brands above the competition.
These are just a few of the ways organizations can use digital signage to attract customers and build brand loyalty. And with today’s advanced technology, the sky’s the limit for creating unique, highly inspiring installations. To learn more about how digital signage can strengthen your brand, please attend my keynote, “What leading brands are teaching us about interactive digital signage,” at Digital Signage Expo 2017. I hope to see you there!
Jennifer Davis will present Seminar 13 entitled, “What Leading Brands are Teaching us About Digital Signage,” on Wednesday, March 29 at 4pm at DSE 2017 to be held at the Las Vegas Convention Center. For more information on this or any educational program offered at DSE 2017 or to learn more about digital signage go to www.dse2017.com
This article was originally published on AVNetwork.
You can imagine the excitement of the first tribe to learn to control fire. Maybe the remnant of a lightning storm or perhaps the spark from a flint tool, it was probably lauded as the greatest invention of the age. “Better than sliced bread,” the patriarch announced. “What is bread?” replied his confused, but adoring family. Anthropologists claim that the discovery was a turning point in the cultural aspect of human development and it is no wonder. Fire has a lot to teach us about innovation.
It’s intuitive.
Professor Chris Dede from Harvard commented in a seminar recently that fire is a wonderful technology, because you can get warm just by standing beside it. It’s purposes are obvious.
Intuitive interfaces and natural technologies are very important to modern technology advancements as well. The best products tell you how to use them using only the basic human senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, or touch. Buttons are meant to be pushed. Tones to be answered. Doors handles opened. At my company we make electronic displays and video walls, and some of the best innovations we have invented are things that can be appreciated simply by passive observation. The displays simply look better.
It is multi-functional.
Fire can be used as a source of heat on a cold day, a source of light on a dark night, and as a way to cook food. It is also a useful weapon unto itself and can be used to forge weaponry. It was and still used in ceremonies, religious and secular. After all, what is a prayer service or a birthday cake without candles? Even the sight or sound of it can be a source of comfort (as evidence by the cable channels that present a virtual, crackling fireplace). The product manager for fire, didn’t have to spend time doing in-depth research or SIC code analysis to determine the target market or problem it solved. In the ancient world, fire solved them all.
Most technology advancements since fire have had to pick a problem (or few) to solve. The need for relevant information drove the printing press, newspapers and Twitter. The need for better return on marketing investment has driven innovations as far flung as the questionnaire to Google Analytics. The needs solved by our modern inventions, like the smart phone or cloud storage, solve multiple problems. But at the core, the best technologies offer their users multiple ways to use the technology.
It scales.
Fire is infinitely personalizable. You can collaborate at a bonfire or you can use a personal lighter on your cigar. You can ignite a gas burner on a stove to make yourself a pot of tea or you can use a grill to cook food for a crowd. The same fire that creates the fearsome scene of a forest fire blazing out of control is the same in the fireplace where you sit and rock your sleeping infant.
As we think about technologies that have impacted our world, they also can scale up and down. They can improve individual lives and the experiences of groups. This is a holiday week in the US and I am reminded that airplanes, such an amazing invention, started in the early 1900’s by moving a person or two (either the Wright brothers or the New Zealand farmer, Richard Pearse, or the Brazilian, Alberto Santos-Dumont, living in Paris, depending on which account you read) and now allow families to be reunited across the continents. And yet, this same technology is used by aviation enthusiasts individually and many of the aerodynamic concepts forms the basis of today’s drone technology and helps fuel innovation in our space exploration and automotive industries as well.
It changes lives.
Being able to control fire allowed the expansion of human activity to the darker and colder hours of the night. It wasn’t a technology just for those who learned to use it. It was a technology the changed lifestyles, which changed lives, which changed the course of history.
The technologies that I think the most fondly of are ones that changed my life. My RIM Blackberry (and the Palm Pilot before that) changed the way that I waited and communicated. Uber has changed the way I move about a city and think about material assets. And business to business innovation changes lives as well, enabling new business models, customer connections, and efficiencies never before possible. I am sure you have similar examples of how technologies, both consumer and commercial, have changed your life.
The smart phone alone has changed so many things about our lives. Your elementary school math teacher would tell you that you need to learn long division because “you won’t always have a calculator with you.” Boy, we proved her wrong!
It can be used for both evil and good.
Fire can be used to warm and comfort or burn. Seven people die each day in home fires (National Fire Protection Association Report 2013). According to the US. Fire Administration (did you know there was such an agency?), the risk of dying in a fire was 10.7 per million in 2014. Strangely, the highest risk states of fire death is Mississippi, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and the highly urban Washington DC. It seems no one is safe. There is even a special name for intentional fire starting (arson) and experts attest that most fires are caused by children just playing around. Even in a world where we control fire, it can sometimes get out of control, if we mean harm or aren’t careful.
The guiding principle of physicians – primum non nocere or “first do no harm” – illustrates that innovation or knowledge in itself is no enough. It must be accompanied by ethics. Whatever the intervention, medicine, or procedure, the person who knows more has an obligation to use the technology for the benefit of the patient or mankind. “Don’t be evil” was famously the corporate motto of Google. It is said to have been suggested in an employee meeting on corporate values. According to the founder’s letter in their pre-IPO filing in 2004, the motto prohibited conflicts of interest and required objectivity, and perhaps the elevation of long-term good, over short-term gain.
I think the recent US election coverage illustrated how technology can be used for good and evil. How many of breathed in the noxious fumes of fear, misinformation, or tragedy in our social media feeds? Often without taking the time to put out the fire or at least check to see who started it (and why). And messages can resembled a fire in so many ways. Both the good (as information illuminated or revealed) and evil (as lies spread like wildfire or good ideas or even relationship were burned, or at least singed).
It is taken for granted.
Earlier this year, LiveScience published a list of the top inventions of all time. The top of the list was the wheel. Strangely missing was fire. Although both the nail and the internal combustion engine (both made possible by fire) made the list. The light bulb was included (which for many applications, including street lighting and the Easy Bake Oven, replaced fire). It does make me wonder what other technologies or innovations we are inventing today that will be so ubiquitous, so understood, and so taken for granted that they won’t make tomorrow’s list?
This article was originally posted on LinkedIn Pulse.
Paying attention is the key to ongoing relevance and evolution in our businesses and in our careers.
Some of you will excel at the ideation that comes from seeing what others are doing in different markets or segments. Others will excel at refining and improving the concepts once they are proposed. Others will focus on implementation. Some will enable ideas to reach their potential with proper funding and leadership. And others will make their mark in measurement and analysis. All of those super powers are required.
But no matter if you have super strength, super flexibility, or super speed. We can all improve our power of observation with practice. And we can all enjoy the payoff of paying attention.
Read more about companies can take inspiration from other industries to grow their businesses. Download the free eBook “The Payoff of Paying Attention”.
“Technology harnesses and amplifies ideas.” - Thaniya Keereepart, mobile strategist for TED
“I’m exhausted. But the success is glorious.” – Albert Einstein, after presenting his decade-long quest on the theory of relativity, November 1915
Jennifer Davis was quoted in an article by Inverse in the article, The Future of Transparent Screens Isn't Iron Man's Smartphone- It's Bigger and Better.
I wrote recently about Google’s efforts to provide the whole product in my article Y is for You: Google's Alphebet and Personal Branding. I learned recently that one of the founding father’s pioneered some of these strategies himself: Ben Franklin
Ben wanted to be a printer. His biographer (Isaacson) talks about the lengths to which he went to procure a printing press from Europe. He wanted to own a communication machine.
He started printing things for his friends and customers.
So, to use the machine, he started a newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette. If one flyer was good, then having a weekly or daily publication was even better. Those who wouldn’t afford to print a flyer, could afford an advertisement in a larger publication.
He printed books. The most popular book was the Bible. But most people only bought one of those in their lifetime, so how could he get people to want to buy a book every year. He started the Poor Richard’s Almanac which would have repeat customers every year.
Then he began to think bigger. He wanted people to read his books and magazines, but many people were far sighted and had trouble reading. So he invented bifocals.
He noticed that in the cold New England winters, people weren’t reading as much, so he invented the Franklin Stove.
He wanted to broaden his distribution channel to allow people outside of Philadelphia or the region to read his books and publications. So, he championed the US Postal System.
And realizing that it was inefficient to print things in Philly and move them around the country, he franchised and shipped the plates to a friend in the Carolinas so she (yes, she) could build a business serving that community.
A man with Ben’s broad curiosities and diverse background pursued these and many other ideas in service of his main themes and principles. What are your main themes and principles that are worthy of the height of your creativity, enthusiasm and focus?
Jennifer was quoted in a press release announcing Planar's new PlanarView™ Visualization App.
A lot has been written about consumer-centric marketing in recent years. The desire to provide relevant content and position the brand in the context of that value. Seth Godin’s permission marketing principles. The move to personalization. The emotional attachment that brands should create for their customers. Across all communication channels and at every customer touch point.
Today’s empowered consumer doesn’t just want to be educated. They don’t just want to be engaged. Frankly, they want to be super heroes. They want to be the heroes of their own story and the brands they choose reinforce this perspective. They want to call a car whenever they need it, like the Batmobile, and the adoption of Uber and Lyft is evidence that the on-demand concept is appealing. They want to have their whims indulged. They want their news personalized and curated. They want to keep up with friends of their choosing.
As marketers we have a responsibility to build the customer experience into the core of our company’s DNAs and into every medium or channel through which we communicate. So, how can customers be granted super powers in our marketing?
First and foremost, today’s buyers must remain in control. Our terms of service, privacy policies, product quality, production practices, and priorities must align with what customers want. We start with our integrity when building trust. I know that many customers might relinquish control without a second thought, but it’s our job not to let them do themselves harm.
Secondly, we create opportunities for customers to have power on a scale that they couldn’t have without us. Today’s savvy consumers are impressed with nothing less than super human strength and the ability to fly. They want to see their name on a can of Coca-Cola. We help them place a message on a personalized M&M. We can put their picture on a billboard in Times Square. We can put a mark on the world. One that is unique to them.
This can be part of the product or service we are selling or it can it be something we do in our marketing. The distinction between the two is blurring and so is the customer’s experience of the brand across all the touchpoints, so marketing has a leadership responsibility. For instance, the new iPhone camera takes beautiful, high resolution photos and video. Why not build on the out-of-home ad campaign we have seen where photographs from iPhone users are printed on subway signs and billboards with the caption “taken with an iPhone” by creating a YouTube/Vimeo/Flickr style platform for sharing videos and photos taken with iPhones and have those images featured on the Apple site, social media, and digital billboards and in homes as an Apple TV screen saver?
Next, we can connect customers visibly within the community. We can give them something to brag about and some connection to their idols and friends. It starts with sharing features, but goes beyond that. We as market leading brands need to make our consumer constituents heros among their peers. We can provide customers street credibility or expand their influence. It’s the Apple sticker in the Macintosh boxes on Volkswagens across the country or the look of a teenager wearing Beats headphones by Dr. Dre around his neck. I see this as a gap in store and airline loyalty programs. Members with elite status aren’t given rewards that are visible to the community of other shoppers or guests that undoubtedly share other circles of influence.
It is also a limitation with the nearly ubiquitous category of hybrid cars. Imagine hybrid cars connected with a gamification system that allows one driver to compete with others for fuel efficiency. Similar to how FitBit users can track steps on a leader board. Imagine how many more fuel efficient cars would be sold with this kind of gamification?
Consumer fashion brands do this well by offering sponsorships or free product to highly influential individuals, but could that scale to something that other brands could do even if they don’t have a celebrity endorsement program or a full-scale newsroom? I imagine so, if we were creative in our marketing.
Lastly, we can give customers a mission. As marketers, we give our customers an opportunity to be involved in greater causes and the power to benefit others with their super powers. This is what Whole Foods has done with the wooden nickels for “bring your own bag” rewards or Starbucks involvement in (Red). You could allow customers to donate a perks to non-profits of their choice. Loyal customers could be allowed to pick charitable giving campaigns from their favorite brands. Customers could donate their photos from their Hawaii vacation to be featured in the advertising or on the website of the visitor’s bureau for the State. At Planar Systems we recently offered our customers and employees an opportunity to participate in a fun run in Portland, to benefit a local alternative high school. This example of the “do well, by doing good” approach which is growing in importance and influence among our customers.
With a purposeful emphasis on integrity, giving users power, community connections, and missional marketing, we can transform our customers into the super heroes that will not only show us loyalty, but will attract others to us.
This article was published on Frost & Sullivan's Digital Marketing e-Bulletin.