Following a talk attended last night by our creative friends over in sunny SA, here are a few inspirational extracts on the topic:
'Inspiration is the New Investment; If businesses want to engage the new consumer, they need to reconsider innovation'.
'The information revolution has produced a market in which consumers are ten times more informed, a hundred times more exposed and a thousand times more jaded. Never before has competitive edge been so important to the survival of businesses. But the days in which a deodorant brand, for example, could slap a cool new metallic paint and nozzle on their can, call it innovation and market it to death in the hope of gaining a competitive edge, are long gone. Generation Y has seen it all. They’re bored, disinterested and disengaged, which has caused no small amount of panic among those marketers who only know how to reach an audience in the traditional way. After all, how is one to gain a competitive edge if the consumer chooses to ignore you?
The secret lies in the ability to inspire. If brands want to be attractive to the new breed of consumer, they’re going to have to forget all about push marketing and start looking at ways to pique their interest and turn their heads. Bombarded by marketing that for years has been sadly lacking in essential integrity, most consumers are cynics by the age of 8. They’ve seen, been sold and bought it all. They’re not interested in hearing brands bang on about how cool they think they are. The softer, ‘intangibles’ are what dominate this market and influence their decision to sell. So ask yourself not what the consumer needs, but what he desires. And know at the outset that what he’s waiting for is to be inspired.
It is here that brands are really missing a trick. To inspire, you need to innovate. But what most businesses call innovation is the mere shifting of existing metrics in order to deliver a slightly enhanced version of something that already exists. For years businesses have been geared towards the manufacture of products that they can push onto the market so they naturally look at what they already have and can make, and ask how they can do it better. Invariably they find their answer in technology and so technological advancements become the only exponent of innovation. What these companies forget to ask is the most simple of questions: will the products we are producing meet not the needs, but the desires of the market? And so finally at the end of the long production process, they give a product that nobody desires to a marketing, packaging and branding team and ask them to dress it up in such a way that will make it attractive. But Consumer Y, who’s seen it all before, stifles a yawn and walks off in the opposite direction.
The brands that understand true innovation are the ones that genuinely identify with the new consumer, make a real attempt to understand their desires, and then take as their end goal the delivery of a product that touches, inspires and moves that consumer. This perhaps is the single biggest reason for Google’s meteoric rise to success. They pioneered a way to give the world what it wanted with an open-source philosophy applied to the internet and information.
The lesson? Raw creativity and skilful design application are revolutionising views on innovation across industry sectors. Innovation with an absolute focus on the end consumer has the ability to create a competitive advantage greater than technological advancement alone. For too long, a premium on tangible metrics has meant that the potential of the ‘softer’ more emotional and human instincts have remained grossly underutilised; this needs to change if brands want to touch new consumers. When companies start inventing ways to fundamentally engage the drivers of these ‘softer issues’ in consumers, it will bring about meaningful paradigm shifts in industries that will unlock a value far superior to the metric equations we have been optimising. As the examples illustrated here clearly show, design innovation that appeals to the human instinct can yield rewards not only in terms of revenue but also in terms of brand value.
Unsurprisingly some of the best examples of successful consumer brand engagement use the universally inspirational properties of music, art, design, creativity and science to touch consumers. And instead of just a product, they use these elements to deliver an integrated experience that bundles the full marketing mix to surprise, delight and engage consumers, and in so doing, change their current habits and perceptions. This is the realm of designers and creative thinkers, and it is essential that these right-brain thinkers join their left-brain counterparts in a company’s strategic brand and product innovation discussions much earlier in the process. Design has almost unlimited potential to deliver that longed-for competitive edge to a brand and designers have a great deal to add to the understanding of what will inspire a consumer.
If we’ve learnt nothing else, it’s that inspiration needs to be the starting point. So begin with this end in mind. “If you want me to listen to you, don’t tell me – touch me,” consumer Y challenges. Which means forget about putting your money where your mouth is and start putting your money where their hearts are.'
A big thanks to Mike Lewis and Origin Interactive for sharing this inspiring content with us.
If you liked this topic then you'll love these reads:
Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things by Donald A Norman
The Design of Everyday Things (Paperback) by Donald A Norman
