Deuxième draft. La régénération fonctionne en synergie avec la circularité. Les 4 services éco systémiques sont basés sur les besoins humains (faute de mieux). 3 grands principes permettent de s'éloigner du profit comme finalité.
Au sein de l'association, nous explorons des approches et outils pour enclencher la transition écologique dans les entreprises en réponse au dépassement des limites planétaires et la disparition du vivant.
"Pour être populaire l'écologie doit faire sa révolution culturelle en retrouvant ses fondamentaux. Le vivant est sur toutes les lèvres". Le manifeste #noussommesvivants est la
Notre approche pour porter la transition écologique dans les entreprises, c'est la régénération.
Note de cadrage sur la régénération ICI dont projets a mener ICI
Seuls les systèmes vivants se régénèrent. Leur résilience demande des capacités spécifiques pour entretenir leur potentiel de vitalité, de vie. Ainsi, l'approche régénérative a pour but de développer les capacités uniques du vivant (humain -social et/ou environnement - nature) à poursuivre son évolution. Sa finalité c'est de permettre à un collectif de contribuer à un service écosystémique.
Nous avons élaboré cet outil : Un Regenerative Business Model Canvas - (REGEN)BMC - simple et structuré qui permet d’identifier les potentiels de régénération de votre business en croisant vos projets/initiatives à portée positive déjà lancés, vos enjeux matériels et votre chaîne de valeur opérationnelle. Une sélection des initiatives à plus fort potentiel de régénération est ensuite faite.
Pour réaliser ce projet, nous avons besoin
De réaliser un POC de cette méthodologie en trouvant un terrain d’expérimentation en entreprise
De créer un écosystème d’experts pouvant nous aider à concevoir et mettre en place des projets régénérateurs (agriculteurs/permaculteurs, biomimétisme, designers, écologues, sociologues, comptabilité…)
De créer une communauté d’ambassadeurs convaincus qui diffuse le principe du business régénératif. En France et à l'étranger
The idea of “crisis management” requires no explanation right now. Something unexpected and significant happens, and our first instincts are to defend against — and later to understand and manage — the disturbance to the status quo. The crisis is an unpredictable enemy to be tamed for the purpose of restoring normality.
But we may not be able to return to our familiar pre-crisis reality. Pandemics, wars, and other social crises often create new attitudes, needs, and behaviors, which need to be managed. We believe imagination — the capacity to create, evolve, and exploit mental models of things or situations that don’t yet exist — is the crucial factor in seizing and creating new opportunities, and finding new paths to growth.
Imagination is also one of the hardest things to keep alive under pressure. Companies that are able to do so can reap significant value. In recessions and downturns, 14% of companies outperform both historically and competitively, because they invest in new growth areas. For example, Apple released its first iPod in 2001 — the same year the U.S. economy experienced a recession that contributed to a 33% drop in the company’s total revenue. Still, Apple saw the iPod’s ability to transform its product portfolio: It increased R&D spending by double digits. The launch of the iTunes Store (2003) and new iPod models (2004) sparked an era of high growth.
With imagination, we can do better than merely adapting to a new environment — we can thrive by shaping it. To do this, we need to strategize across multiple timescales, each requiring a different style of thinking. In the current Covid-19 crisis, for example:
The initial emphasis is on rapid reaction and defense.
Then the focus shifts to constructing and implementing plans to endure the likely economic recession to follow.
As the recession abates, the focus shifts to rebound — making adjustments to portfolios and channels as we seek to exploit recovering demand.
Over time the situation becomes more malleable, and imaginative companies shift their focus to reinventing — seeking opportunity in adversity by applying more creative approaches to strategy.
In other words, renewal and adaptive strategies give way to classical planning-based strategies and then to visionary and shaping strategies, which require imagination.
We recently surveyed more than 250 multinational companies to understand the measures they were taking to manage the Covid-19 epidemic. While most companies are enacting a rich portfolio of reactive measures, only a minority are yet at the stage where they’re identifying and shaping strategic opportunities.
We have written elsewhere about what the post-Covid reality is likely to look like and how to discriminate between temporary and enduring shifts in demand. But how can companies avoid having imagination become the first casualty of the crisis?
How to Develop Your Organization’s Capacity for Imagination
Crises place heavy demands on leaders and managers, and it is easy to lose the already slim time we might have for reflection. But we won’t see the big picture, let alone a shapeable picture of the future, unless we stand back and reflect.
Most of the time in business we operate with our instinctual “fight-or-flight” nervous system that evolved to help us in high-pressure situations, like running from a predator. This system narrows our focus. But less emphasized is the parasympathetic, or “rest-and-digest” system, which evolved to manage mental and bodily operations when we are relaxed. We can imagine in hunter-gatherer days, the mental intensity of the hunt, followed by time back at home, reflecting on the day’s stories, perhaps imagining how to hunt better.
We need to create the equivalent rhythm of action and reflection in business as we navigate this crisis. Ways to switch off the fight-or-flight mode and support reflection include:
Taking time over a meal to rest, digest, and reflect
Listening to or playing music
Going for a walk without your phone
2. Ask active, open questions.
In a crisis, we likely won’t have immediate answers, and we therefore need to employ good questions. The most natural questions in a crisis tend to be passive, for example, “What will happen to us?” However, the possibility of shaping events to our advantage only arises if we ask active questions, such as “How can we create new options?”
Creativity involves reaching beyond precedents and known alternatives to ask questions that prompt the exploration of fresh ideas and approaches. Some good questions to ask in the Covid-19 crisis might include, for example:
Which needs or products are taking center stage?
What customer needs exist for which there is no current solution?
What are we not doing for our customers?
If we were starting over now, what company and offering would we build?
Why are today’s loyal customers still doing business with us?
3. Allow yourself to be playful.
Crises require a goal-driven and serious response. However, in times of stress, we tend to overlook the important human capacity of play to temporarily forget about goals and improvise. Biologically, play can be characterized as de-risked, accelerated learning. For example, juvenile animals’ mock fighting is highly effective preparation for real combat.
In unprecedented, rapidly changing situations, play is a critical capability. As well as providing some much-needed stress relief — how many of us are currently working from dawn to dusk? — play can end up being, counterintuitively, very productive. We can make interesting, new connections between ideas when we allow ourselves to loosen up from our regular, goal-driven, laser-focused, instrumental approach.
“Creativity is the rearrangement of existing knowledge into new, useful combinations,” Jorgen Vig Knudstorp, chairman of the LEGO Brand Group, told us. “Just like playing with LEGO Bricks, this can lead you to valuable innovations — like the Google search engine or the Airbnb business model.”
Sometimes nothing immediately useful will come of play, but playing at least allows us to practice imagining, improvising, and being open to inspiration — all important skills when navigating the unknown.
4. Set up a system for sharing ideas.
Someone, somewhere in your organization is likely being forced by circumstances to experiment with new ways of doing things. The imaginative corporation picks up, codifies, and scales these innovations.
Imagination doesn’t just happen on an individual level. Ideas evolve and spread by being able to skip between minds. Companies need to facilitate collective imagination. The key to this is allowing new ideas to be shared while they are still in development: creating forums for people to communicate in a casual way, without hierarchy, reports, permissions, or financial justifications.
Conversely, the way to kill imagination and the spread of ideas is to construct non-communicating functional silos and to induce fear of not meeting the bar for “sensible” suggestions. In the name of “practicality” or “common sense” many ideas are rejected without being explored. But it is hard to distinguish ideas with no eventual merit from those which are merely unfamiliar, undeveloped, counterintuitive, or countercultural. In a situation where there are no easy solutions, we need to open up rather than constrict the funnel for new ideas.
Every corporation had entrepreneurial beginnings. But successful corporations that have honed a stable, profitable, business recipe forget the messy, imaginative origins of the ideas upon which they were founded. Now is not the time for only executing a practiced recipe. We are facing a historic discontinuity, requiring entrepreneurialism and creativity.
5. Seek out the anomalous and unexpected.
Imagination is triggered by surprising inputs. Our pattern-seeking minds adapt our mental models when we see something that does not fit. And when we adapt our mental models, we entertain different strategies and courses of action.
To solve tough new problems, look externally. Examine accidents, anomalies, and particulars, and ask: “What doesn’t fit here?” Digging into what we find will prompt reframing, rethinking, and the discovery of new possibilities.
In the current situation, we might ask, for example, why have some countries like Japan, China, and South Korea been able to break away from an exponential infection pattern? Or why are some cities suffering more than others? Or why apparently similar strategies gave different results in different places? Or what stopped us from being prepared for this crisis in spite of MERS, SARS, Ebola, and other ominous precedents?
6. Encourage experimentation.
Although a crisis stretches our resources, it is important to encourage experiments — even if only on a shoestring budget. Natural systems are most resilient when they are diverse, and that diversity comes from trying new ways of doing new things. Our ideas only become useful if they are tested in the real world, often generating unexpected outcomes and stimulating further thinking and new ideas.
For example, Ole Kirk Christiansen, the founder of the LEGO Brand, originally made homes and household products, such as wooden ladders and ironing boards, until the Great Depression of the 1930s forced him to experiment, and he tried building toys. This turned out to be a successful move at a time when consumers were holding back from building homes. After examining the international toy market, which was dominated by products made from wood, Christiansen was driven to experiment again by introducing toys made of a new disruptive material — plastics. Despite the scarcity of the immediate post-WWII years, he re-invested a full year’s profits into new machinery and tools, at first making traditional toys, then creating building blocks. By 1958, these evolved into today’s well known “binding” LEGO Bricks. Soon after, the company abandoned all wooden and other toys to double down on the LEGO Brick Toy Building System (“LEGO System in Play”).
7. Stay hopeful.
Imagination feeds off the aspirations and aggravations that propel us to seek a better reality. When we lose hope and adopt a passive mindset, we cease to believe that we can meet our ideals or fix our problems. In statistics, Bayesian learning involves taking a belief about a statistical distribution (a “prior”) and updating it in the light of each new piece of information obtained. The outcome of the entire process can be determined by the initial belief. Pessimism can become a self-fulfilling prophesy.
As a leader, ask yourself whether you are giving people grounds for hope, imagination, and innovation, or whether you are using pessimistic or fatalistic language, which could create a downward spiral in organizational creativity. Dealing with real risks involves taking imaginative risks, which requires hope.
“Never in our lifetimes has the power of imagination been more important in defining our immediate future,” Jim Loree, CEO of Stanley Black & Decker, told us. “Leaders need to seize the opportunity to inspire and harness the imagination of their organizations during this challenging time.”
All crises contain the seeds of opportunity. Many businesses, struggling now, will likely find a second life during and after the crisis, if they can keep alive and harness their imaginations. Imagination may seem like a frivolous luxury in a crisis, but it is actually a necessity for building future success.
If our content helps you to contend with coronavirus and other challenges, please consider subscribing to HBR. A subscription purchase is the best way to support the creation of these resources.
I was working at Mullen Lowe in 2004. It all started with a Wisk ad campagn from the US then launched in Europe before becoming Persil UK ad campaign and now Skip Ad Campaign. https://vimeo.com/107732866
We then launched it in Europe under the Sunil Brand.
"Great brands are no different. They create connection and meaning that allows them to transcend their often menial use and go beyond what they do to relate to who we are. They create a narrative that weaves into our greater lives and forges a deeper attachment for the user.
But none of this is by accident. It is the skill of the great marketer to devise these brand stories by means of his or her own ability. Think Nike, generating a near-myth about people's ability to accomplish regardless of gender, race or athletic prowess - the "Just do it" story. From sneakers to desirable must-haves, consistently over three decades, due to the power of the story.
Other great brands have done the same. Apple took the hitherto banal world of what was known as "information technology" and, by means of an altogether more compelling story, created an ever-expanding category that has meaning in all of our lives, from iPods and iPhones to iPads and beyond.
What produces this meaning is the story - one largely told and embodied by the late Steve Jobs himself. It brings new meaning to what computing really can be. A story in which Apple becomes the champion of a world of freedom-enhancing technology, as opposed to the promise of tedium and enslavement that computers stood for prior to the great Apple story of the 20th century. This idea became filmic reality in the "1984 won't be like 1984" ad - the ultimate expression of computers' ability to smash the very totalitarianism for which they had, until that point, stood, adopting George Orwell's tale as the medium for new storytelling within the category.
Weaving a significant narrative
Persil/Omo's "Dirt is good", arguably one of the more notable modern-day brand stories, does the same. It weaves a new narrative of real significance into a category that traditionally would boast about the size of its molecules or the severity of stains it could remove. Now, the narrative is that dirt equates to creativity; and parents aspire to have creative, free-thinking and playing kids, as opposed to those locked into pristine-clean conformity. By establishing this story - one of true human significance that is applicable the world over - it propagates meaning, connection and, ultimately, commercial success. It is among Unilever's biggest brands, exceeding $3bn globally.
Having been at the heart of this piece of brand thinking, it is worth reflecting on the role of storytelling in the conception of the "Dirt is good" idea. A story that would genuinely shift not just the way consumers across every continent related to their laundry, but, just as importantly, the way the brand team internally saw the challenge.
To come up with a story that can permeate the ranks and regions of an organisation as much as it can connect with consumers the world over, we first need to find a way of relating it to ourselves. Before we can create a brand that has a true story to tell consumers, it must hold meaning for the team who will steward and build it.
Only connect
So how do great brand stories emerge?
The "Dirt is good" story started with a degree of soul-searching within the team, to understand the ideology of the Persil/Omo brand across its history and how this related to the team's own beliefs. We found that the brand, in its many guises across the world, was obscuring what had been a very strong agenda of humanity and connection. This was a brand that, across the eras, had connected with the human side of consumers and their relationship with laundry. It may not have been elevated to any great discourse on the notions of freedom or accomplishment, but it was notable nonetheless. This formed a connection within the team, who, in turn, expressed an ambition to be more connecting and meaningful in the world in which their brand existed. This founding ideology - being humanist and connected - formed the backbone of the "Dirt is good" story.
The critical next step was the link to the broader lives of consumers globally. By moving beyond the confines of the washbowl we started to glimpse a world in which our team ideology would relate in ever-more pertinent ways to the consumers our brand sought to serve.
Investigating importance
We spoke one-on-one with consumers the world over, using stimulus that would begin to make connections from their world of banality to greater heights of meaning. By imposing the discipline of asking "Why is that important?" we could touch the very nerves of true emotion, and tap into the way that this bigger emotion could link back to the laundry category. We began to find that there was indeed a deep connection available, via the deep insight that "If you are not free to get dirty, you cannot experience life and grow".
Having located the area within which our story would unfold - where a parent's desire for a creatively unconstrained child relates to everyday dirtiness or cleanliness - we went on to specify the point of resolution the brand would bring. Great brands and brand stories play to a deep desire or resolve a deep tension.
Now, the narrative is that dirt equates to creativity; and parents aspire to have creative, free-thinking and playing kids, as opposed to those locked into pristine-clean conformity.
We located this tension as the counterpointing of disciplinarian parenting versus the universal aspiration for a more libertarian parenting style in the spirit of transgenerational progress. Everyone seeks to feel they are somehow more progressive than the preceding generation. We had found our great point of resolution. The story would start to unfold.
We now sought arenas in which our brand could allow its idea to be experienced by means of brand ritual. We needed to allow consumers to be able to participate in the story, as opposed to merely having it read out to them by means of didactic, one-way TV communication. We identified painting as the first experience platform for the "Dirt is good" ritual and instigated painting competitions from Pakistan to Brazil. Consumers came in droves to experience the idea and prove their own relationship to it founded on such insight into real lives. Later, our story moved to new areas of brand ritual - most notably sport. The indelible connection between playing sport and getting dirty was formed.
Turning to innovation
We then looked to use the "Dirt is good" story to conceive of innovation the brand could bring to the category. This continued to stoke the essential fire within the story, but in a way that was part of the "Dirt is good" brand.
This approach identified new chapters in the Persil/Omo brand story - subplots that would weave the narrative ever-more tightly through the organisation and the consumer world. "Pockets full of promise" proved to be the way to speak about what, hitherto, would have been yet another banal enzyme in search of some monster stain.
Instead, we spoke of children's pockets as the theatre of their experience and repository of all their finds. As such, pockets would get dirty in the service of this freedom and creativity.
Within a relatively short time we had begun to develop a story we would tell, and which would be told time and time again. Wherever we were to travel, the essential narrative of "Dirt is good" would connect. The plot and characters would elaborate and grow, but the essential story would remain the same.
A story that would shift the banal to the truly meaningful, which lives forever.
David Arkwright is a founding partner of global brand-development agency MEAT and the former global brand director for Unilever's laundry business. He is the author of The Making of Dirt is Good.
HOW TO CREATE A MEANINGFUL BRAND THROUGH STORYTELLING
Locate the point of ideological connection between the team and the brand's past.
Define how the brand can connect with the consumer's life at a deeper level of purpose and emotion - the "why" beyond the "what".
Find the brand's point of resolution. What is the deep desire the brand realises, or the deep problem it resolves?
Define where and how the idea can be experienced by ritual, so that the story is told in experience as much as in words.
Create new brand chapters via innovation, which is conceived through the brand's story and central idea.
"The Great Turning is a name for the essential adventure of our time: the shift from the industrial growth society to a life-sustaining civilization. Future generations, if there is a livable world for them, will look back at the epochal transition we are making to a life-sustaining society. And they may well call this the time of the Great Turning. It is happening now." ~Joanna Macy
According to Macy, to accomplish this turning, work needs to be done in three distinct areas. They are as follows:
1) Holding Actions- this is essentially what we normally call activism or direct action. It's getting out there in the streets and saying a "Holy No" to the destructive and unjust practices that are taking place on the planet right now. It's putting bodies in the way of an out of control global system as it marches its sick juggernaut towards some form of deterioration or collapse.
2) Structural Change- this is where we actively work to build new societal forms, new economies, new ways of being together and organizing etc. This is the realm of the famous Buckminster Fuller quote, "To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete".
3) Shift in Consciousness- this is where we do the work of inner spiritual and psychological transformation, what Joseph Campbell called the inward journey. Here we intentionally try and develop beyond our "skin encapsulated egos" and open into wider spheres of identity with the earth, cosmos, and the whole of humanity. This can happen through new forms of thought, understanding the Great Story of which we're a-part, and in particular, through the many spiritual traditions that have developed the methods for such transformation over the centuries.
For Macy this is important because, "These structural alternatives cannot take root and survive without deeply ingrained values to sustain them. They must mirror what we want and how we relate to Earth and each other. They require, in other words, a profound shift in our perception of reality--and that shift is happening now, both as cognitive revolution and spiritual awakening"
My experience in strategic planning and project management leads me to manage innovation projets in design consultancies or open innovation hubs. I am also interested to manage brand communications for a company embracing digital, social and environmental changes.
My strengths : 🙋 — Market, consumer, usage & habits research ⚡️ — Experience design applied to brands, products, spaces, campaigns... 🚀 — Innovation & transformation project management 😀 — C suite advisory and satisfaction 👪 — Collective intelligence and Open Innovation (parners / consumers)
🔍 — My articles : 1- To (re) engage employees digital transformation must make sense #socialinnovation #purpose 2 - Social innovation to meet client expectations with a positive impact on society and environment #innovationsociale 3 - Experience design to create value and collectively visualize the customer experience to be delivered #experiencedesign 4 - Brand entertainment the new way to communicate to millennials # brandcontent 5 - The account planner and the designer, actors of corporate innovation and transformation #planner
My book and articles are here : www.pourquoitucours.fr
When brand executives come to us with what they think is a positioning problem these days, we typically have an entirely different diagnosis. Usually, it's a purpose problem.
Positioning around a functional or emotional benefit isn't enough anymore, with purpose instead emerging as the heartbeat of modern brands and as a key ingredient in what makes a brand become — and stay — relevant. Brands with purpose stand for something beyond their product or service, and consumers know it. These are brands that can always answer two questions: What do we believe? And why do we exist
Purpose has become one of the best ways to inspire people, both internally and externally. And it's essential to creating shared value. Brands with purpose don't just transact with people; they deliver something more, an intangible element that becomes part of an ongoing relationship.
By the numbers
Industry research backs this assertion up, including a recent study that found that brands with a strong sense of purpose grow at rate 2x that of those that don't. Our own Prophet Brand Relevance Index shows time and time again that components connected to how consumers interpret brand purpose propel "meaningful" brands to the top, led by the likes of Amazon, Netflix and Apple. Brands like Pinterest are beloved, while others lacking a strategic purpose may be used but lack relevance. Facebook, for instance, doesn't even crack the top 100 in our latest ranking.
Consumers can name many coffee brands, but they know Starbucks. When they lace up their sneakers or use Nike+ to track their morning run, they believe Nike is hoping to inspire the athlete inside them.
This sense of purpose isn't just about winning with customers. It's the No. 1 reason millennials choose to work for a given employer, studies have found — sometimes even trumping salary. It is then through a clear purpose that companies can attract and retain exceptional talent. It's also essential to appeal to potential partners and is the foundation for creating a meaningful experience.
Of course, this is not to say that purpose is the only thing that builds relevance, or that it immediately translates to higher sales. Brands must do many things right to succeed. But it's increasingly clear that the brands that fare the best and are the most differentiated from their competition are those with a crystallized strategic purpose.
How to find true purpose
It's important to point out that brand purpose can, and often should, be different than a corporate mission. Unilever, for example, has staked its claim in sustainability and supported that through its portfolio of brands. But Axe's purpose is to help guys look, feel and smell their best, while Dove strives to turn beauty into a source of confidence, not anxiety.
Some brands are lucky enough to have been based on purpose from the very beginning. Parents can buy many types of toys, but their favorites are likely Fisher-Price, because they share the belief that play is learning, or LEGO, which sees all children as the builders of tomorrow. Others, such as Ford, GE and Bank of America, have reshaped their purpose to hold more meaning for today's audiences.
Centering your brand on a strategic purpose isn't easy, but the intersection of a few lenses can put you well on your way to achieving this goal:
Societal impact — where does the world need help and you can make a difference?
Major capabilities — what are you good at beyond the products and services provided?
Passion point — what is your organization most passionate about?
The first step when examining these issues is to ask the question that goes to the heart of a brand's sense of itself: What do we believe? It's the value closest to the center of an enterprise, one so fiercely held that it sets it apart from peers. Many companies believe in being good corporate citizens. Only State Farm believes in being a good neighbor.
Put in simpler terms, how does your brand see the world? What makes that viewpoint different?
Examining tough questions
The second question marketers need to answer is harder: Why does our brand exist?
This comes bundled with a few other points, such as what tensions do we want to do address? What experiences do our customers love or couldn't live without? What do our employees think we do best? A purpose is only valid if it's known, shared and prized by everyone within and around the enterprise — from potential employees to core customers to investors.
Answering this second question is a logical leap from the first. Bank of America, for example, believes in the power of meaningful connections. Its reason for existing is connecting individuals, families and businesses to make their financial lives better. GE's core belief is that with imagination, anything is possible. It exists to use that imagination to invent the next industrial era, one that will build, move, power and cure.
Answering this second question also delves into the ways your organization delivers on promises. A commitment to purpose, once crystallized and communicated to all parts of the organization, is what inspires a steadily evolving array of services and products.
Following through
Once the answers to those two questions have been synthesized and articulated into a clear and succinct brand purpose, that purpose needs to be infused in several ways throughout the organization. The smallest details matter, but so do high-level strategies. In 2014, CVS stunned many observers with its decision to stop selling tobacco products. It told customers it needed to do this to better deliver on its purpose of striving "to improve the quality of human life."
In hindsight, the retailer had to make that call in order for employees, customers and business partners to take its commitment seriously.
Finally, it's essential to continually validate your brand's purpose. While purpose reflects deep and enduring values that shouldn't change much over time, it's still essential to track the purpose of competitors. Without finding new ways to engage customers through living brand experiences, competitors can hijack your purpose and take customers with them. Is the purpose still clear and evident in every way? Are there new ways it can be conveyed more meaningfully?
Preserving relevance
By the same token, brands need to continually take the pulse of core consumers and stakeholders, monitoring shifts in the way they interpret purpose. Many concerns about sustainability, for example, have evolved to be as much about people as the planet, expanding the purpose to address issues of fair trade and human rights.
Great care must be paid to delivering on brand purpose. Ingredient scandals are destructive for all food brands, for example, but they're crippling for those positioned as especially healthy. And while Volkswagen has bounced back from #dieselgate, the damage was precisely because the fraud involved faked emissions results, negating its purpose of environmentally-sound engines. Consumers virtually always dislike bad corporate behavior, but they're especially fierce in punishing what they perceive as brand hypocrisy.
Is a strong purpose enough to make a brand soar? No. But combined with a commitment to creating living, evolving brand experiences and the recognition that brands must be powered from the inside out through culture, capabilities and engagement, it's an essential ingredient of relevance. And in today's fast-moving world, that's the currency that matters most.
In the Age of Experience, customer expectation has been transformed. It’s not just a good idea for a company or a brand to deliver an experience with their product: it is imperative when you want to have a real impact on the market. This is changing the scope of what it means to Design.
Design has evolved beyond modeling products. Products used to be the direct expression of the design intent, defined under the physical constraints of available technologies, materials, ergonomics and well defined tasks and functions. But in the Age of Experience, products are dematerialized, reduced to “black boxes”, while integrating the realm of our augmented life.
The scope and value of Design is now at a critical place.
Design’s perspective is moving from designing products to designing experiences, engaging final users in a totally new way. It goes beyond aesthetics to genuine social means, investing in a larger scope of actions across a large spectrum of new disciplines. This “transdisciplinarity” of Design impacts business models, creates new offerings and new social engagement, and convokes new uses of science for designing meaningful and sustainable experiences.
We traditionally consider “Design Thinking” as placing the “human” at the center of the project or value proposition and deciphering what people really want, but fail to express. Design Thinking was the first visible step of Design transformation, moving from the individual designer’s subjective concept towards an empathic model of engagement, leveraging a social participative approach and multiple viewpoints.
Businesses use Design Thinking to identify market opportunity and build a solution that delivers customer value. It’s an improvement for designing a better product with clear identity, efficiency, and well-defined utilities. But the world and Design have quickly moved on to broader and more holistic issues, tackling complex systems and considering the full technological and service ecosystem by co-defining with users what makes up a unique and continuous experience.
This broader realm of “Experience Thinking” encompasses a new scope for designers, going beyond functions and harnessing the emotive power of customer experience. They script future scenarios and craft real-time 3D prototypes, use immersive technologies and virtual universes, and develop 3D digital masters with integrated information. Designers are acquiring abilities to access new information, including knowledge gathered from studies, but also a large variety of Data captured from sensors. These combined social and science-based data provide new material for designer creativity.
Digital content is the new nexus for thoughts, interpretation and decision making. The right tools and platform for ideation, virtualization, manufacturability and sustainability enable designers and businesses to view and validate experiential designs at any stage of the development process. Designers can craft the links between products and their interactions, making visible the emotional connections and their use. Data and senses combine for new balanced proposals.
Where we go from here depends on how we use Design to transform companies’ business ecosystems to create designs that captivate users, accelerate technology adoption and deliver ethical and sustainable experiences. Users will “co-design”, modifying deeply our life experiences and changing forever the way people live, travel and interact with technology in the future.
Design professionals across industries (such as architects, industrial designers and transportation specialists) can today transform their processes, methodologies and applications for experience thinking to imagine, design and fabricate innovative proposals.
Collaborating within this new innovation environment, experience thinking can help a business build its brand’s promise and the accompanying emotions it evokes. Then, each customer experience stands on its own as a singular achievement, but also provides a perfect center of gravity that builds brand loyalty and customer satisfaction.
Discover more about Design in the Age of Experience at our event website.
Find out about Dassault Systèmes’ Design Studiohere.
UK rapper Professor Green's recent documentary on the scourge of male suicide made the headlines for lots of reasons. First and foremost, it shone a light on the shocking statistics: in the UK, suicide is the biggest killer of men under 45. And it got people thinking, let’s hope in a long-term way, about stereotypical forms of masculinity – stiff upper lips and the demands of "laddishness" – and the potential harm they can do.
In fact, Pro Green himself came under the spotlight for crying on a Newsnight appearance to promote the show. He used the opportunity to tell people, including men of course, not to be ashamed of showing emotion like this.
It’s not too much to say that the cultural expectations that our society places on men, and that are strongly self-policed, are literally killing them. Men are far less likely than women to admit to or seek help for depression. And even when they do, they risk not being taken seriously, told to get over it, to ‘man up’.
The hope is that seeing mainstream role models like Professor Green speaking out will gradually start to chip away at these stereotypical expectations. Because what’s going on in culture isn’t just an interesting tangent to this debate – it’s a key driver of the appalling facts. In-culture prevention is therefore just as critical as targeted intervention, especially as cuts to mental heath services start to bite.
All of us have a responsibility to reconsider our view of what it means to be a ‘real man’. And this includes brands, which, as we know, can be very powerful forces for shifting the cultural discourse. We’ve seen lots of female-focused brands, from Always to Sport England, taking on stereotypes of femininity. What about products and services targeted at men?
Dove Men Care has taken the lead with its #realstrength campaign, which launched at this year’s Super Bowl. Even the famously laddy Lynx is partnering with CALM, a charity dedicated to preventing male suicide, encouraging men to talk about the #biggerissues. Let’s hope this is just the start of a new wave of stereotype bashing.
After leaving Adaptive Path in 2012, Todd Wilkens has been focused on one of the biggest issues in Service Design: building a Service Design practice on a massive scale. In the past four years, Todd has been a pivotal part of design initiatives at Mayo Clinic, the enormous design transformation initiative at IBM, Atlassian the enterprise software developer, and is now starting a new position as the head of WooCommerce. Todd is speaking at Adaptive Path’s upcoming Service Experience Conference in San Francisco, and is bringing his hard-won expertise to explain why we need to sacrifice Service Design as a unique discipline in order to build great services.
Scott Sullivan (SS): So looking over your recent work history, it seems like it’s focused on building a design practice within massive, massive places.
Todd Wilkens (TW): In the last few years, that’s for sure. I’ve been going to places, trying to help build design practice in big organizations.
SS: The scale of what you were doing at IBM is just — is insane, right? I mean, everybody was just like, “I can’t believe they’re actually attempting to do that there,” but it seems to be working out really well.
TW: Yeah, that was why I originally went to go take that job was because it just, it was crazy. It was crazy what Phil Gilbert and the team he was putting together were trying to do, and it just seemed like, you can’t just not — if you have a chance to try that, you gotta give it a shot, right?
SS: Absolutely! And IBM is doing great now. They’re getting stuff done, consistently publishing really great insights and tools, really useful stuff. Would you consider that, from your current perspective, mission accomplished? Or well on the way?
TW: Yeah, you know, it’s funny. Something that I learned from working at Adaptive Path in the past was, people used to come to Adaptive Path for help transforming their organizations a lot of times. They’re trying to understand how to do design or Service Design or planned thinking or whatever phrase they use — trying to bring that in, make it strategically impactful. How do we do it?
We’ve talked to lots of large organizations about that, and the one thing you always realize is that this is a task that is never completed. You start working on that, but it’s never like “it’s done, okay, we can hang up our hats and it’s going to be fine for the next 10 years.” Transformation almost never just “happens” — it’s always moving in the right direction.
IBM is one of the places where the basic idea for my talk was cemented, which is that you have to stop focusing on being a designer and owning design. You have to recognize that, in order to make great products and services around the world, designers don’t do that by themselves, right? It’s these whole multidisciplinary teams that actually get things out into the world to have impact. That was one of the first places where I realized I had to kind of give up the ownership of design. It couldn’t be this precious thing and this precious identity to myself and the people on our team. We had to prioritize getting good things shipped out the door over ourselves as design people. The output, the impact in the world and the impact on the world was much more important than us continuing to own or even get credit for everything.
SS: So would designers be seen as more of a gatekeeper? When you’re working with multiple lines of businesses on multiple touchpoints, what’s the service designer’s responsibility?
TW: It’s interesting that you say, “the gatekeeper,” that’s a conversation that we had at Atlassian, sometimes people use the word gatekeeper, sometimes they say “Is this some kind of stage-gate that everybody has to get approval before we build a thing?” Sometimes the word ownership gets used in those kinds of conversations as well, asking “Who is the owner that has to make the decisions and has to be consulted before a decision is made.” And, what’s interesting is that, this happened at IBM, and this is one of the lessons I’ve learned at Atlassian, the sort of trite thing to say is that software products and services are never done, right? They’re just in their current state, and you’re trying to make each state of their release better than the last, but they’re never done, and they’re also never perfect. And even if you got something that was “perfect”, the world would change enough that it would stop being perfect as a match for that world within three to six months.
So we’re always evolving everything that we release, whether software or service. I say that because it’s actually an interesting thing when it comes to design, in my experience, and the role of design. If you ask most designers “should we be iterating on things?” they will say, “Of course you’re iterating on things! It’s never perfect, you’re always iterating, always improving, you’re always duh-duh-duh-duh-duh.” But most designers talk about that within the studio, “as long as I’m ‘in the prototyping phase’ — yes, of course, it’s iterating. But then there’s a point where I have to feel like it’s done and I’m releasing something to the world. They tend to choose their criteria for success when something is released out into the world. It needs to be better, more perfect. And then there’s this kind of real hesitance, I’ve found, around how you handle iteration once something is out in the world. Designers are really comfortable with that iteration idea, but I find that they get more uncomfortable once it’s released into the world.
I want to change the conversation and start saying, “Well, yes, there are some things we can learn and improve on when it’s kind of in our control in the studio,” and I use the word studio in a sort of generic sense, not out in the world. But there’s this sense that we aren’t really learning if it’s working until we’ve made it and gotten it out in the hands of people that use it. Yes, we can do generative research. Yes, we can do evaluative research before it’s out. But oftentimes, especially with services, which tend to have complex touchpoints — you know, it’s one of those things that we can’t actually completely understand all the implications before it’s out and being used. The sooner you get it out into the world, and the better you are at quickly iterating it once it’s out in the world, it’s actually a better way of reducing risk and getting to success than spending time up front. One of the things I’ve learned is that, in some cases, that skill set is actually more important than all the design thinking that goes on.
So what that means is, designers need to stop seeing themselves as a gatekeeper and more as a conductor. You could say it like a train conductor, or like a music conductor. Both cases are actually accurate in some sense as a metaphor. It’s like being a conductor or a jazz musician with improvisational jazz. You don’t know what the next thing that is going to happen is, and you need to empower your people to respond to things, even when you’re not there telling them what to do.
Join Todd to learn more about Service Design as a unique discipline within organizations at the Service Experience Conference on November 3 & 4 in San Francisco. Todd will be joined by a line-up of premier leaders in Service Design and workshop teachers with practical take-home tools and know-how.
Amanda Rendle leads a global marketing team covering 55 countries and territories HSBC operates in, with more than 13 million customers in the UK alone.
In an insightful interview, Amanda explains her vision for a customer-centric organisation and the concerns she has that marketing is getting lost in an increasingly technological world.
“I’m really worried about marketing at the moment.” says Amanda.
“Marketing is at a really difficult time as it risks being narrowed to just the ‘colouring in department’ of brand marketing, unless it steps up to the challenges that technology brings.
“I know it can’t be left to function as it is, or it’ll become smaller and diminished. If we’re not careful marketing itself could become disintermediated.”
‘Digital’ is banned
Amanda has gone as far as to ban the word ‘digital’ to encourage her team to think beyond organisational silos.
“We need to go back to what marketing is, and the product is marketing. More people need to remember that, get off the drug of digital being something separate and get back to what we do best.
“Look at an organisation like Apple. They don’t do masses of marketing; it’s a great product and a clean brand. I think that their marketing department is tiny, but then it is a marketing-led organisation.”
As more and more of HSBC’s interactions take place through digital interfaces, Amanda believes that marketing plays an important role in shaping the design of the online value proposition.
“In many organisations where they are behind on digital what happens is they hire in someone to be a head of digital or ecommerce as separate functions.”
“All of a sudden, that person hires a load of marketer/customer experience champions, so you end up with two marketing departments. For any organisation it’s huge waste of resource to have two teams doing the same thing. That’s the real danger. Brand is not only about what you say, it’s also about what you do”
“In the past we thought about international and local marketing being quite separate and woke up one day to realise it’s the same thing. I think it’s the same thing with digital. Everybody talks about it, setting up innovation teams, but if marketers don’t own that space, marketing becomes very skinny and just about creative, and the digital function expands.”
Marketers need to stand up and own the full customer experience
Amanda believes that marketing should be the ‘soul and conscience’ of the customer.
“If you put the customer at the heart of what you do, then you should be thinking about the full customer journey, and how marketing can improve that – which is different to being the people who just do the ads.”
“Marketers have got to remember what they are there to do – that they are the voice of the customer – but they need to become more technology savvy.”
“The problem I’m observing is that a lot of marketers are reverting to focusing on the creative solution alone– a great advert – and don’t understand that a creative should be technology-driven as well. By not striking the balance between the two, marketers risk ending up with no substance behind the creative.”
Connecting creativity with technology
Amanda gives the example of HSBC’s critically acclaimed TV ad as an example of what could have been achieved with a different approach.
“I believe that marketing teams can be transformative if they learn how to take a great creative idea and take it all the way through into all parts of the customer journey. We are working on this now. We have a great creative idea and our challenge is how you amplify through content/sales experience.
“I am convinced that getting the right balance of talent can turn a fantastic creative idea into the cornerstone of everything we would do for the next six months. This needs technology-savvy as well as a creative team to come up with a different solution.”
Technology changes impact the entire organisation, not soley the marketing department.
“One of our main learnings has been the extent to which we require the business to get involved with the implementation of new marketing technologies. If the data inputted isn’t right then the whole system fails.
Customer technology DNA
The technology that HSBC currently uses to power its online customer interfaces includes:
Bespoke CMS and Email “We have built a number of solutions in house, including our ‘Atlas’ content management system and the ‘Radar’ email system we built ourselves.”
Advertising retargeting through Google Remarketing and Facebook Atlas
Source: Datanyze
The marketing talent gap
Finding talent to shape the future of marketing is proving increasingly hard to find.
“We have to learn new technical skills and hire a different mix of people.
“There are two different areas of expertise developing in marketing. There is the ‘left brain’ of data, insights, marketing operations and automation, and I need to hire really good analysts to interrogate our data and make sense to produce valuable insights.
“Then there is the ‘right brain’ of content and creative.
“But what we are missing are the leaders of the future who are capable to straddling both to see the overall strategy, how we use digital and social channels. We need to train our talent to fuse the two.”
Amanda is open about not having all the answers as her department evolves to new ways of working.
“Like everyone, I am learning to catchup. I’m not a technologist, but I did grow up as direct marketer which helps. A lot of CMOs developed through a more creative route which makes it harder to adapt to a data-driven environment.
“I’m not sure where the talent is going to come from to help me do all these things. Possibly from people sitting in Google and other technology companies.”
Agencies need to change
It is not only marketing departments which need to embrace change – the traditional agency model also has to adapt to the changes that technology brings.
“In my experience, most agencies are unable to fuse technology and creative. They still treat social as a campaign tool rather than customer opportunity. It’s because they don’t understand the full customer journey and I think it’s becoming real problem.”
“If agencies don’t come to us with wider solutions to encompass the whole customer journey, you will see advertising agencies scope become narrower.”
“There are some interesting agencies who are responding to clients’ briefs in a different way – who are putting a brief out to 150 technolgy-savvy individuals around the world to come back with a solution. But for the most part I just don’t think a lot of them have got it YET, and even those who are embracing it have yet to master it, transformation takes time.”
Amanda’s team regularly speak directly to technology companies about how to get the most from their platforms.
“Why wouldn’t I? I pilot products for LinkedIn, they come to me and we try new ideas. “As a media agency’s revenue model is under threat as they aren’t going to get a load of revenue from Google PPC ads. The way we start to pay our agencies will need to evolve.
“Agencies have an important role to play in understanding your brief and coming back with the optimum solution using all channels. But they can’t be just media planners anymore – they need to become media strategists.
“They need to understand the technology, programmatic advertising etc, and become segmentation analysts, different groups respond in different ways.”
Mapping the full customer journey
An organisation like HSBC has many touch-points with a customer, including in branch, online and customer service, email, social media, in person meetings and live events.
“My biggest frustration is how we are measuring effectiveness at all parts of the funnel and working to improve performance. I am sure it is for many Marketing Heads. Marketing has a huge role to play in the full customer experience, from awareness all the way through to conversion.”
Amanda is working on creating a team whose sole job is to improve brand experience for customers, across all the touch points that they have.
“This team might pick five issues a month and try to hot-house ideas to solve those issues, bringing in various insight sources together, including external data, to build a complete picture of our customers and to continually test and improve it.”
Looking at the complete customer journey involves teams which aren’t part of marketing, of course. Collaboration is key to working across all the functions:
“We work closely with these teams, but ultimately journey mapping needs to be by people who understand the full customer experience. Having a clear customer propositions is key. ”
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We are strategists who study how brands connect with people.
Our team uses all the usual methods for accomplishing this task (e.g., ethnography, in-depth interviews, online panels, seances, tarot cards, focus groups, etc.).
The conclusions drawn from our studies allow our clients to create more effective strategies for product development, sales, distribution, and advertising.
We conduct our work like a think tank, with our clients—be they brands or agencies—as partners in the process.
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Our research is informed by our fascination with ideas, beliefs, and behavior. We devote a lot of time to learning from minds better than our own. Sometimes this carries us into the realm of behavioral models, service design and systems thinking, each a tool that helps us understand the dependencies we observe in our studies.
Plannerzone works with advertising agencies such as R/GA, Digitas, J. Walter Thompson, Saatchi & Saatchi, BBDO, Mother, Wieden + Kennedy, and Ogilvy & Mather. Direct corporate clients have included Apple, Proctor & Gamble, Ameriprise Financial Services, Nestle, and 3M.
Philosophy
People are people. They aren’t customers, consumers, target audiences, segments, or low-hanging fruit. They are people with the kinds of joys, concerns, fears, and worries that real people have for their families, their livelihood, and their well-being. When we talk to a person as a part of a project, whether interview, group discussion, or a visit to a private home, that person—the person we are talking to—is the most important person in the world.
The reason is simple: Real people are interesting, and they hold the key to solving many of your business problems.
Qualitative vs. Quantitative
Qualitative research is not quant, and quant is not qual. There isn’t really such a thing as qual/quant. They are, in fact, two different types of research with distinctly different goals. Qualitative research tools are put to best use when digging into emotional territory to gain insight into human behavior.
This special territory is where we tap into a shared experiential space that’s difficult to measure with scientific objectivity; it is both art and science, drawing upon empathy and critical thinking to qualify the applicability of another person’s beliefs and feelings.
Quantitative research, by contrast, is all about measurement. It tells us in broad strokes how individuals, when consolidated into larger segments of the population, have behaved, or will behave. Quantitative research can effectively describe behavior, but it does little to explain why the behavior occurs. In the best of all possible worlds we use qualitative research to develop a hypothesis to test in a quantitative setting. Qualitative explores possible answers. Quantitative identifies the best answer.
We spend our time thinking about the right questions to ask, because if we ask the right questions sooner or later the right answers are sure to follow.
