Are you ready for the experience war? (It’s been building for ages)

Reading Time: 5 minutes At the AG Ideas Business Breakfast held in Melbourne way back in 2012, Mauro Porcini, Chief Design Officer, 3M pitched an emerging social scenario that would in time lead to the experience war we have today; one where consumers are not just savvy, expert and demanding, but also are difficult to categorise and understand.

Brand and the ability to devastatingly disrupt

Reading Time: 2 minutes Thomson Dawson wrote a provocative and challenging article about “devastating innovation”. Brands that weren’t prepared to innovate far beyond their comfort zone, he suggested, would be devastated in the blink of an eye. What’s more, the fallout from such innovation would reach far beyond immediate competitors to wither those who never would have imagined they […]

Presentation: Many roads, one goal

Reading Time: 2 minutes Many Roads, One Goal is based on my most popular blog post ever. It’s about why it takes more than one strategy to find the best strategy and how you can develop a portfolio of strategies to overcome challenging times, implement and test them in batches, and then manage the portfolio down from many to […]

How to fail successfully and recover completely

Reading Time: 6 minutes The concept of failing fast is one we associate readily with start-ups. But if successful brands need to constantly evolve to stay successful, and presumably not every evolutionary move will be a success, how should top companies plan for when things don’t go to plan?

Why some innovative ideas work, and most don’t

Reading Time: 10 minutes We hear a lot about how fast and how much the world is moving. But when companies pursue innovative ideas to cater to what they think is consumers’ fascination with the new and shiny, reactions can be mixed. The trap for marketers in this is that there are different types of “newness”: from the ‘new’ […]

How to unthink the loops and deliver astonishing creativity

Reading Time: 9 minutes Loops are the things that companies do over and over again. Business as usual. Business as boring. Every business has loops. Some are driven by fear, some by tradition, some by distraction, some by lack of awareness or industry convention. Loops affect how we think, how we work, how far we venture and how we […]