Unsure about how to plan to succeed in the 2020-2030 decade? Checkout our 10, 20-30 programme here.
10, 20-30 is a framework for delivering a future-proofed mindset to your team, business and lifecycle.
Why?
Every day, there’s a new disruptive business story, a new tech start-up raising millions to change something, someday.
On the flip side, and at the same time, there is regular reporting of start-ups and established firms going under. Uber loses a founder, WeWork takes a tumble and other unicorns report a year of negative returns and lose their shine. Sometimes, some things are too good to be true.
The reasons for missed ROI targets and, even closures, are many and various and all start with an assumption: you’re alright, because somebody will always need your paper, water, chocolate, steel work, cosmetics, legal services, financial advice, cars, office space…or will they?
But…
With a properly critical look at your future, at your consumer behaviours and your market, it’s possible to see what’s coming down the line to compete with you. And there will be something on your horizon that will cause some of your older revenue streams to dry up.
There it is. An uncomfortable truth maybe but one to watch none-the-less. With insight comes the opportunity to future-proof yourself.
So what?
Working with teams to create roadmaps to a profitable future, we can find that everything looks different.
You will define what your business is going to be. You’ll plot your path of baby steps so everyone knows what they must do from the minute they hear the plan.
We always make it clear that the output we create together isn’t a plan for someday: the output we generate by working with you is a plan you can use now.
Forecasts are guesses
As a process, ours is an easy one to understand. Pick a point in the future, use radical insight to inform what’s needed for that strategic end point to be viable and plot the product developments that will get you there. As far as ROI is concerned, you’ll have a general impression of size and shape.
However strong your forecasting function is, and we’ll probably disagree on that, they are guessing just as much as you are. Of course they have models and spreadsheets to justify their view of the world, but you have one thing they don’t – and that’s insight driven intuition.
This is the magic sauce that could bring your CSuite to the party.
Maybe you’ve heard of the ‘fuzzy front end’ or ‘future forecasting’. What they point to is a future sales figure that amounts to the same thing really: guesswork.
Intuition
Your senior management has been around long enough to get into the CSuite. They’ve worked through cycles of business to achieve the sort of insight that can only come with time served and they know, more often than not, what good looks like.
So, if you can’t get them involved in the actual process of innovation, it’s worth bouncing the odd ball down the board table to see where their interest lies, what sparks their excitement, and where their intuition makes them look.
Awareness vs trust
In the digital marketing rule book, we are told there are three phases to online marketing: awareness, trust and conversion. It’s the same across your business structure and vertically from bottom to top.
Being noticed isn’t the same as being trusted, but getting an innovation concept through the stage gates means tapping into what becomes a reason to believe.
This may sound a bit too much like pragmatism to be true innovation, but innovation ultimately is a matter of commercial survival.
Today, you need a plan. If you don’t know where to start, or how to sell it in to your CSuite, get in touch. We do.
In the meantime, you can download our free guide to ‘Selling innovation into your own company’ here and get detail of our 10, 20-30 programme here.
Future thinking. Future-proofing. It’s what we do.
Newsfeeds and social media are signalling disruption in every corner of our lives in this decade. Learn how to avoid being reactive to every shift in customer behaviour, and how to anticipate what to do next.
1. Start with what you know.
Every person in your business has had a different experience of your customers than you have. Think how many of your colleagues have come from a company where things are done differently, and customers are treated differently.
Ask them to tell you about it.
Your staff represents an invaluable source of insight. They all buy products in consumer markets every day. They know which websites work the best, and they know what their markets are doing. Your colleagues are expert in one thing above all else – themselves – so ask them about their experiences. If there’s a subject we all like to talk about, it’s ourselves.
Take time to talk to your employees and you’ll be surprised at what you will learn about their view of your market: who is launching a new variant; who is leaving a competitor; who is having trouble with their supply chain; who is likely to merge with somebody else…
Do it regularly, and one-to-one. You don’t have to set up a meeting, but you should commit time to this every week. Doing it less often releases you from the obligation of learning what you need to know. Make it a priority in your schedule.
If you need help to moderate conversations like this, book a call here.
2. Innovations don’t appear from nowhere. You can already see them happening.
Insight nugget: the things that will disrupt you in five years’ time have started to emerge already – and you can see them, if you look.
There isn’t a company in existence who can suddenly produce a ground-breaking product. It doesn’t happen.
When the iPhone was launched in 2008, it didn’t immediately have the consumer-shifting effect we attribute to it. It took three years for the App Store to appear, and developers saw that as an opportunity.
Over time, Android apps appeared and now we have cross-platform apps for Android and Apple iOS. Suppliers like Adobe and Microsoft sell you software on cloud-based platforms so the apps are managed differently through subscription.
This is an example of how a market has evolved quite slowly, offering signals all along its development path. The same is true for your market. If you make components for petrol-engines, get ready for a change: EVs don’t need them. If you think you’re safe because your parts are used in boats, planes or tractors – think again.
So…be pro-active in how you review the macro influences that are forcing change in your market. A little bit of looking over your shoulder to remember how you got where you are is time well spent. Then go and talk to your colleagues – it’s surprising what they know too.
If you need help to formulate a plan or to gather this kind of insight, get in touch.
3. If you need help, get it.
Inviting an external service into your business has the potential to be disruptive and expensive. It can be…but it doesn’t have to be.
Enduring relationships with long-standing clients are great for both parties, because we learn each other’s needs. The beauty of this approach is that efficiency gets built into the process.
What we always do at room44 is to stay naïve about your market. A specialist in your market won’t offer you a different view. What we do is to see your business through a new lens and open up vistas of opportunity.
Get in touch and test us. If we can’t show you an opportunity that hasn’t occurred to you before, we’ll stay friends and walk away. If we can, at zero cost for the first conversation, there’s an opportunity to build a relationship.
As the saying goes, the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The next best time is now.
This is how to start or book a call here. We look forward to your challenge.
The way ideation works depends on how it is directed.
Creativity is best achieved with nurture and new insight.
During a room44 ideation session there is a moment when somebody in the room will realise that the ideas on the wall can be started immediately. The “…and we can do that now” moment is how we judge the success of the process.
Seeing where ideas overlap, developing embryonic ideas and providing the right stimulus for ideas to emerge is our skill.
Future-thinking. Future-proofing. It’s what we do.
If you’re planning a strategy project, get in touch.
During project research, we stumble across thousands of facts that can’t be used for that project but are still interesting – maybe we’ll be able to use them one day. Below are just ten examples. Some are fun, some are serious. All of them useful in the right context.
If you know all of these already (and somebody will), please make a comment. You’ll be instantly invited to join our pub quiz team.
1. Australia is on the move
Since the last GPS calibration in 1994, Australia has moved around 7cm closer to Singapore every year: that’s 1.75 metres so far.
The next calibration is happening in 2020, so it’ll all be OK again soon, but this helps understand why Lidar scanners and other mobility sensors have found a market in some unexpected places.
In Australia, there’s a harbour called Port Hedland. The ships that collect hundreds of thousands of tonnes of iron ore are vast. At certain times, the draft clearance between the ship and the seabed is no more than 25cm, making navigation accuracy critical. In this context, 7cm is a lot and 1.75 metres is huge.
2. Your great, great, great, great-grandchild is in the next booth
Without getting hung up on the future of the ‘booth’ in the workplace, is this really possible? Well, there are now five generations in the workplace for the first time in history. Today, Alpha Gens (people born since 2012) are about 7 years old. In another 10 – 15 years they’ll be entering work. So yes, feasibly, with life-expectancy rising, it is possible to imagine a time when six generations will be working side by side.
To qualify this, it’s also thought the person who will live to 150 years has already been born. Great news for Aubrey De Grey and the SENS Foundation.
3. The Wild West wasn’t so wild after all
Life in a new continent may have been wild and scary, and we know that lawlessness was a big challenge for early settlers in the USA. But movie studios have a habit of not letting the truth get in the way of a good story. In my early film-watching years, I was regularly shown gangs robbing banks. In fact, if you believed the TV, this was going on every week.
In fact, between 1850 and 1900 there were eight recorded bank robberies in the US.
Compare this to published FBI data showing that there were 2,451 US bank raids in 2016 alone. It’s getting wilder out there.
4. Where has all the sand gone?
Right now, the world is running out of sand suitable for construction. Massive home and urban building programmes across the world have decimated supplies of this humble raw material with serious environmental effect. The manufacture of cement and concrete is a huge user of water and the material isn’t easily re-usable. As a result, we’re seeing development of wood-based alternatives: engineered wood, recycled wood, wooden load-bearing structural elements. All these are recyclable and all of them can be regrown after harvesting.
It’s calculated that Canada can regrow the wood used to build a ten-storey building in just ten minutes.
5. The apostrophe dies
The Apostrophe Protection Society has hung up its quill. For eighteen years, the APS has been trying to maintain standards by campaigning for the correct use of the apostrophe. Famous supporters, including Lynne Truss and Simon Griffin have championed the cause in print.
This is a sad indictment of the low standards we set ourselves when we write. Websites are harbours for poor SPaG and the APS founder says “…fewer organisations and individuals are now caring about the correct use of the apostrophe in the English Language. We, and our many supporters worldwide, have done our best but the ignorance and laziness present in modern times have won!”
That said, apostrophes don’t make it easy on themselves. The word ‘influenza’ was originally abbreviated to ‘flu. No-one knows why the ‘in’ is more important than the ‘enza’.
6. Tumbleweed migration
Another feature of my movie-watching career has been desolate landscapes punctuated and accented by strategic tumbleweed moments. I don’t mean the embarrassing silence during a project pitch, but actual tumbleweed in movies.
This may have been the original Fake News. It seems tumbleweed is indigenous to Ukraine and was an early accidental import to US [agri]culture. Tumbleweed is actually the dried carcass of Russian Thistles and crossed the ‘pond’ with flax imports in the 1870s.
7. Water Stress
When we run projects and workshops that help teams create future-proofing strategies, there is a temptation to introduce concepts that are almost too huge to comprehend, and convert them into useable ideas. We have to be sensitive to the audience and strike a balance between what is really going on in the macro-environment and what is needed by a business to stay relevant to its customers.
Water is one of these subjects. In the world today, water migration is a real phenomenon. People are displacing themselves because they cannot survive on available drinking water. Similarly, whole cities (e.g. Cape Town) have faced complete drought and more are forecast.
In our part of the world we are lucky enough to have potable supplies, but even these are threatened. In some US states, suspicion about polluted water supplies from leaking chemical plants has caused local government to close public drinking fountains. The Guardian ‘Today in focus’ podcast explores this man-made exacerbation of a general threat to the supply of our most basic resource.
We may not worry about water while we have it, but things do change. A signal of water stress is how you consume. If you buy water in a single-use plastic bottle, there’s a chance you trust that supplier over what comes out of your tap. Something to think about.
8. Cars will kill the Mars Bar
Research an issue from the right angle and adjacent opportunities become apparent.
Cars are gradually being electrified. There are @8,500 filling stations in the UK and @123,000 across the US. Just two market examples.
All of these outlets sell confectionery that you buy on impulse when you fill up the car/truck/van… Take away the footfall from gas stations and the ‘impulse’ to buy chocolate goes away as well.
We haven’t been asked to come up with a strategy to overcome this yet and suspect the issue sits beyond the strategic view of brands like Mars. There’s probably a board game idea in this too.
9. When was DNA discovered?
The so called ‘molecule of life’ is thought to have been discovered in the 1950s when, in fact, this discovery was built on work from the 1800s. If you watch CSI, you’ll know just how important DNA is and how we are all unique.
We’ve been tracking the development of DNA exploitation for a decade and believe that its application to diet, nutrition and medical predisposition has just seen a seminal moment. It’s too long a story for a paragraph here, but watch this space…
10. Crocodiles do smile
And finally, if you’re short of somewhere to spend the holidays, consider a trip to Africa.
Issue #14 of The Happy Reader tells us that there’s a town in northern Ghana called Bolgatanga that boasts the ‘friendliest crocodiles in Ghana and perhaps the world’. We want to believe this, even if we don’t know how you test for a friendly crocodile and feel the old Peter Pan song may contain a more sensible sentiment:
“Never smile at a crocodile
No, you can’t get friendly with a crocodile
Don’t be taken in by his welcome grin
He’s imagining how well you’d fit within his
skin…”
Thank you for reading this and see you next year.
Every day, there’s a new disruptive business story, a new tech start-up raising millions to change something, someday.
On the flip side, and at the same time, there is regular reporting of start-ups and established firms going under. Uber loses a founder, WeWork takes a tumble and other unicorns report a year of negative returns and lose their shine. Sometimes, some things are too good to be true.
The reasons for missed ROI targets and, even closures, are many and various and all start with an assumption: you’re alright, because somebody will always need your paper, water, chocolate, steel work, cosmetics, legal services, financial advice, cars, office space…or will they?
But…
With a properly critical look at your future, at your consumer behaviours and your market, it’s possible to see what’s coming down the line to compete with you. And there will be something on your horizon that will cause some of your older revenue streams to dry up.
There it is. An uncomfortable truth maybe but one to watch none-the-less. With insight comes the opportunity to future-proof yourself.
So what?
Working with teams to create roadmaps to a profitable future, we can find that everything looks different.
You will define what your business is going to be. You’ll plot your path of baby steps so everyone knows what they must do from the minute they hear the plan.
We always make it clear that the output we create together isn’t a plan for someday: the output we generate by working with you is a plan you can use now.
Forecasts are guesses
As a process, ours is an easy one to understand. Pick a point in the future, use radical insight to inform what’s needed for that strategic end point to be viable and plot the product developments that will get you there. As far as ROI is concerned, you’ll have a general impression of size and shape.
However strong your forecasting function is, and we’ll probably disagree on that, they are guessing just as much as you are. Of course they have models and spreadsheets to justify their view of the world, but you have one thing they don’t – and that’s insight driven intuition.
This is the magic sauce that could bring your CSuite to the party.
Maybe you’ve heard of the ‘fuzzy front end’ or ‘future forecasting’. What they point to is a future sales figure that amounts to the same thing really: guesswork.
Intuition
Your senior management has been around long enough to get into the CSuite. They’ve worked through cycles of business to achieve the sort of insight that can only come with time served and they know, more often than not, what good looks like.
So, if you can’t get them involved in the actual process of innovation, it’s worth bouncing the odd ball down the board table to see where their interest lies, what sparks their excitement, and where their intuition makes them look.
Awareness vs trust
In the digital marketing rule book, we are told there are three phases to online marketing: awareness, trust and conversion. It’s the same across your business structure and vertically from bottom to top.
Being noticed isn’t the same as being trusted, but getting an innovation concept through the stage gates means tapping into what becomes a reason to believe.
This may sound a bit too much like pragmatism to be true innovation, but innovation ultimately is a matter of commercial survival.
Today, you need a plan. If you don’t know where to start, or how to sell it in to your CSuite, get in touch. We do.
In the meantime, you can download our free guide to ‘Selling innovation into your own company’ here and checkout our 10, 20-30 programme here.
10, 20-30 is a framework for delivering a future-proofed mindset to your team, business and lifecycle.
Future thinking. Future-proofing. It’s what we do.
As you sit down to write your 2020 budget plan, ask yourself this question: how different will this plan make us look by this time next year?
It’s likely, in many cases, that the answer is, ‘it won’t.’
This is something we can help to change. Here’s why and here’s how.
Why?
Today’s marketplace is dominated by brands looking for a cause to align themselves with: a purpose to adopt and work into their brand messaging to show they are sufficiently aware of environmental, societal and technological forces to know where their own values intersect. In most cases, this is nothing more than marketing.
marketing (noun)
- the action or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising.
The most trusted brands today are those focused on their central beliefs and who present their message most efficiently. This is not something an established brand is going to do successfully in a single budget cycle, but if your brand is to have any chance of growing, it is something to consider.
Don’t confuse growth with doing business as usual.
Planning a 2020 budget without making any changes to what you do only maintains the status quo and, while it may work for a year or two, it won’t work for ever. A well-deigned marketing plan will make it possible to sell more than last year, until the marketing stops working. As we all know, marketing always stops working, and a new plan is always needed.
For evidence of this, look at the size of your marketing budget versus your ‘innovation’ budget. See what I mean?
How?
Having a core purpose to your business is more than, for example, changing from virgin plastic to post-consumer waste in your supply chain, or removing some packaging from a product, or working up a VR social media advert.
Having a core purpose is what new positionings are based on. Without a purpose, you will not be seen as actively engaged in the issues that matter to newly influential consumers: Gens Y, Z and Alpha. Without an embedded and ingrained purpose, you are actually sliding out of relevance, whether you know it yet or not.
You?
Taking a stance inside a business, that doesn’t speak to the norm of what it does today, is hard for anyone. The route of least resistance is to keep your head down and get on with what you are paid to do. If you are doing work that no-one is noticing, you’re running with the crowd and there used to be nothing wrong with that. But we believe that, today, it’s not a sustainable position for anyone to adopt. Workforces need to be mobilised as innovators.
To be the agent of change in your company, you must be the nucleator; the grit in the shell; the person that stands out for suggesting ideas that immediately attract resistance.
You don’t have to be difficult or contrary or deliberately confrontational. But you do need to push against something to know that your idea has made a bump in the road and that, now it’s out there, it has a chance of forcing a change from within.
We’re not suggesting revolution
…only that you take it upon yourself to create an atmosphere within which change can occur.
Being controversial is hard. Happily, today may be the absolute best time to be controversial, because this is where disruption starts. And if you’ve read anything about business in the last five years, disruption is the word of the day, every day.
Some examples
George Soros is controversial. His money supports activities that some people would prefer not to happen. He isn’t always popular but, anyone that has ever read reports about his ventures, knows what he stands for (George Soros interview at The Guardian).
Ben and Jerry’s is an ice cream brand with purpose beyond their product. As long ago as 2009 their Marriage Equality policy was written into their core values and reflects in product marketing.
Patagonia has only ever said what it says. Its uncompromising stance on environmental impact has never changed. This is a core value instilled by Yvon Chouinard when the business was founded and remains firm.
When you realise that these core purposes are so long held and so deeply embedded, it’s easier to understand why they attract such a lot of support from their social media communities. People who know that some brands represent more than making money, making ice cream or making T-shirts reward them with consumer trust.
When you sit down to write your 2020 budget, please have a think on what the right thing to do next year is:
purpose (noun)
noun: purpose; plural noun: purposes
- the reason for which something is done or created or for which something exists.
- a person’s sense of resolve or determination.
Our answer to starting this process is called 10, 20-30 and you can download the outline here.
Retail space is display space. Not selling space.
It’s three years since British Home Stores went into administration. Three years, and so many signals that UK retail is not in a happy place, yet successive retail failures quickly followed. The demise of Toys ‘R’ Us and Maplins added to the signs that all was not well, but the reassuring voices of other major high-street names told us not to worry – they were on the case.
Long-standing brands are continuing to fall away, more quietly perhaps, but the rate of attrition is now established. This week, we learnt that Mothercare’s stores will follow Thomas Cook’s by soon vacating all their premises.
At the current rate, the UK is losing 110 retail stores per week from the ‘most popular town centres’, according to PwC. Sixteen a day. If you haven’t noticed yet, you’re either in a big city, or maybe you never had them in the first place.
Retail space is display space. Not selling space.
Shoppers are spoilt for choice when it comes to getting what they want at the cheapest-on-display price. Mothercare may have done a great job at displaying brands for parents -to-be to try, but why would they buy there?
The press accused Mothercare of being ‘expensive and grotty’ this week: neither of these things happens overnight. ‘Grotty’ happens when there isn’t enough money to refurbish, and ‘expensive’ happens when the competition has undercut you for so long that you need to sweat the maximum cash out of every sale.
Thomas Cook, apparently, hadn’t noticed that people don’t buy holidays from a brochure anymore. Maybe they’d never heard of Ceefax, let alone the internet. Mothercare didn’t understand its customers’ digital tendencies – or it chose to ignore them.
So, in the company of Jack Wills, Staples and Bonmarché, we’re likely to see another gap in the UK retail landscape this year.
Who loses?
You and me. I needed to buy a printer last week and I tried to do it by going to a store. It didn’t happen.
John Lewis was, frankly, atrocious. If customer service and a two-year guarantee are now their only USPs, I don’t see them surviving. Curry’s/PCWorld couldn’t sell me what I wanted and there just weren’t any alternatives. My town (@miltonkeynes) sits at the heart of the UK’s technology ‘Growth Arc’ and it seems more than a little ironic that basic products and services for the growing ‘technology’ population aren’t on sale.
As much as I hated to do it, necessity and convenience drove me to Amazon and my new printer arrived inside 48 hours.
Will this continue?
Should we expect more of the same? Should we get used to hearing ‘not another one’ when a high-street brand vanishes? Hell, yeah.
In the last month, we’ve met around eight SME businesses that won’t be in business in three years’ time. The signals of change are loud and clear, but the need to stay loyal to a founder’s vision has over-taken the acknowledgement of the blindingly obvious.
There’s even a networking business that has suspended one of its groups through a lack of interest. If ever there was a sign that grass-roots start-ups are pulling in their horns, this is it.
What are we doing about it?
It’s all very well sitting here and bleating about how bad things are, and how Amazon is taking over the world, but what is room44 doing about it?
Two things
Firstly, we’re diversifying and investing in a new activity stream. We’ve been writing about environmental matters for a long time and we’ve decided that we should do a bit more than talk the talk. We’re about to walk the walk as well (more about this later).
Secondly, we’ve built a product that will help companies, like yours, plan to outlast your competition and thrive in a tough market. It’s called 10, 20-30. Together we will build product launches to take you through the next decade and provide you with the tools to launch at least one per year, so you stay relevant in a changing market.
Because we take seriously our capacity to deliver quality, it’s only available to a limited number of clients. Take a look at the 10, 20-30 proposition here and get in touch if you’d like to know more.
Thanks for reading and, if we don’t speak, good luck.
Future thinking. Future-proofing. It’s what we do.
Like a great song, a product can have a development trajectory. Here’s how a product can be nurtured over the 2020 – 2030 decade.
1984
When Leonard Cohen released Hallelujah, probably his most recognisable song, in 1984, he did so after a struggle.
If you’re familiar with Cohen, you’ll know that he isn’t the jolliest of singers, even if his poetry is worth a read. 1984 was all about the end of disco, and the start of the New Wave and electronica. It wasn’t about angst-ridden self-reflection. So Leonard had an uphill battle; his record label didn’t want to release Hallelujah at first, apparently telling him: ‘We know you’re great. We just don’t know if you’re any good.’
Cream rises to the top
With enough heat though, cream rises to the top, and Leonard got Hallelujah out – although it didn’t do particularly well. But, like all ideas that start as a minimal viable product, the development of Hallelujah was built by various artists over the following years. It was sung faster – let’s face it, it couldn’t get slower; it was shortened from the original seventeen verses; it was treated to as many styles as there were covers – and then came Jeff Buckley.
1994 – 2007
Buckley got hold of Hallelujah in 1994 and made it his own. Again, it wasn’t an immediate success – in fact, it didn’t meet its moment until almost a decade after Buckley’s death. The version of the song that finally became a hit was true to the original, but with a new vibe that resonated with a contemporary audience in the early noughties.
And what happened as a result? Leonard Cohen himself came to the party with a couple of extra beats per minute, and sped up his own song when in his seventies.
Hallelujah!
The point is that Cohen conceived a ‘product’ that was almost good when it launched. Over time, the idea got better – until someone came along and packaged it in a different wrapper and it met its moment. It took over twenty years and speaks to the long-term value of ‘evergreen’ content.
The lifecycle of a product is never easy to predict but, if the product is any good, it will find its market position eventually.
I’m not claiming that Hallelujah was an innovation. That would be like saying Cohen invented music. But I am saying that products that don’t make it at first can, with tenacity, belief and maybe even some pivoting, win out.
10, 20-30
To read about our new long-range innovation tool please click here and we’ll send you a synopsis. It’s called 10, 20-30 and it is designed to maximise your opportunities though-out the next decade.
Future thinking. Future-proofing. It’s what we do.
Innovation, ‘new’ product development and creative strategy all have one thing in common; they are forward thinking concepts. Ideas that you have today will launch in the future, into a future market landscape and meet a need for a future consumer.
Nothing about the future has happened yet
Yes, straight line extrapolations of data will predict what might happen based on what went before but data isn’t able to anticipate anything new.
Example
I was brought up watching movies that my dad liked to watch and he loved Westerns. Stories of outlaws and Marshalls. Almost every story involved a bank robbery so my impression of America was that banks got robbed a lot.
The assumed accuracy of this information conflicts with the reality. When Westerns were set, in roughly the second half of the 19th century, banks rarely got robbed. It’s reported that between 1850 and 1900 there were less than 10 bank robberies across all fifteen states of the US.
Following that logic I may have straight line projected and come up with a number for the 2000’s but probably would have missed what has happened and what will happen. According to FBI published data there were 2,451 bank robberies in the US in 2016.
But, this figure is now thought to be reducing
A significant reduction in cash being held by clerks in banks means that holding one up is less lucrative than it once was. It’s also easier to illegally extract money from many, many individuals directly through their bank accounts, online, with the right skill-set.
Don’t just trust the data
To innovate successfully it is essential to apply creativity, intuition and to start believing the signals you see by reading market landscapes. As you make product design decisions it’s really important to see the world through the eyes of your consumers. Through a different lens, if you like.
Sometimes you need help.
Future thinking. Future proofing. It’s what we do.
If this kind of thinking can be helpful to you, let’s talk.
Here’s my diary. Book some time.
And by the way, Tumbleweed isn’t something an American cowboy or bank robber would have seen too often either. It came from the Ukraine. Go figure.
People often refer to innovation as what happens in the future. But, for us, the future means what happens in this budget year.
In 2019, Millennials still hold the top spot in the most important consumer rankings (depending on what you sell). They are, of course, important in today’s market and will be for years to come. If you service Millennials and do it well, keep on doing it for as long as you can.
But bear in mind, things do change.
Things change
According to Courier Media, Generation Z (people born since 1995) will represent 40% of the market by 2020 and will have a spending power that is double that of any previous generation – including Millennials.
Gen. Z is different. These younger, discerning consumers are not impressed by aspirational fluff and bluster made of packaging and clever positioning. They want inspirational values. They don’t want you to align yourself with a worthy cause. They want you to behave in a way that makes them want to align with you. Be found guilty of exploitation, or of not thinking too hard about your materials, and they’ll drop you like a hot stone.
Get to know Gen. Z
Gen. Zs always turn to the internet for peer referral. They’re used to seeking out opinion online, and they take recommendations. These young people have only ever known a world where smartphones and social media are available. Ask a Gen. Z what they think about anything (everything) and they’ll search it up.
Getting to know Gen. Z is something that luxury brands and new brands are tuning into. If you sell consumer products, you need to get with this programme, and fast.
Innovate now
People often refer to innovation as what happens in the future. But, for us, the future means what happens in this budget year.
If you’re not thinking about next year in this way, room44’s Programme for Changemakers is the programme you’ve been looking for.
Future thinking. Future proofing. It’s what we do. Book time to talk here.
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