2020 Archives - room44

2020 is 10% done. How was it for you? The next obvious question is, what has been different so far this year? It’s not always easy to read but it is true to say that the way you do anything is the way you do everything.

For example, have you tried pulling an article out of Le Figaro or Die Welt and dropping it into Google Translate to see what the EU mainland thinks about Brexit?

Or, how about, reading some CES 2020 reviews?

Or have you looked for clues where you’ve always looked, or where you know your competitors look? With 10% of 2020 behind us, doing more of the same isn’t going to provide you with the business insulation that’s probably needed this year.

Adjacent opportunities can be found and grasped. Longer term scenarios must be mapped and reviewed. Constant and tenacious interrogation of your market dynamics and consumer behaviours is imperative.

The way you do anything is the way you do everything.

If you are taking care of business today with only an occasional look at immediate threats, the way you will react is occasional and immediate.

Regularly working on your future makes your opportunities appear regularly. The way you do anything is the way you do everything.

There is a way to work in your future.

It’s a way to work in the 2020-2030 decade and know what you need to do next, and then next… Download it here. Take a look and start a working differently today.

Future thinking. Future proofing. It’s what we do.

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.

But…

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

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

Awareness vs trust

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.

To look for insight where you’ve always looked, or where you know your competitors look, isn’t going to provide you with business insulation.

The eruption of new business start-ups and the resultant increase in business failures makes the chance of existing business faltering higher than ever before.

Adjacent opportunities must be sought and grasped. Longer term scenarios must be mapped and reviewed. Constant and tenacious interrogation of your market dynamics and consumer behaviours is imperative.

The way you do anything is the way you do everything.

If you are taking care of business today with only an occasional look at immediate threats, the way you will react is occasional and immediate.

Regularly working in your future makes your opportunities appear regularly. The way you do anything is the way you do everything.

There is a way to work in your future.

It’s a way to work in the 2020-2030 decade and know what you need to do next, and then next… Download it here.

Future thinking. Future proofing. It’s what we do.

Our passive drift towards a world where sensors, monitors and machine learning pose a real challenge to innovating companies.

Trust is a testimonial

The signals from our research on future trends tell us that commerce for new brands is going to get tougher. While shopping for consumer products is easier in many ways than it was a few years ago, it’s still a complex operation. We can all research online, visit stores and compare prices across media to get the best deal. You may resist a visit to the shops if you’re buying clothes, but Apple says that 80% of people who buy online have been into store first.

We read seller recommendations and take notice of peer testimonials. This might be the single thing that influences our final buying decision. Without buyer endorsements, we have learnt not to trust brand promises and to be wary of positioning statements that promise too much.

Trust is what everyone else does

So, we don’t trust things until someone else validates our decision. As James Clear says in his book, Atomic Habits, “we’d rather be wrong with others than right by ourselves” and this describes the problem facing innovators today.

Unless shoppers make independent judgements, we will all end up making the same decision and the biggest promoter will win out.

The industry that has evolved around these issues makes our lives harder still. We’ve all received advertising from brands who don’t mind where their address list came from. Scraped data is big business. Similarly, our passive drift towards a world where sensors, monitors, facial recognition, sat nav and machine learning push us into actions, is a real issue for innovating companies.

Trust in technology

Wearable technology is a relatively easy thing to spot. Phones, watches and tablets are part of the fabric of everyday life. As we use them, our behaviours are captured by some of the biggest data harvesters the world has ever seen: Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple to name only the big few. These data-centric platforms have one objective: to advertise to you. Every feed you access is sending you adverts that respond to your search activity. You are being inexorably nudged towards a buying decision. You are sensing little acts of influence every minute of every day that you spend on a device.

Trust is a nudge in the right direction

If you are a brand and aren’t nudging your customer towards you, you are being nudged out of the market. If you’re a new brand, you have choices: stay local and grow organically, trade local and get ‘found’, or secure investment and dilute. It’s a tough one.

But all is not lost. Consumer inbuilt scepticism allows for some push-back. Why is your most frequently seen advert in your feed? Where does that email come from that reminds you it’s your friend’s birthday? Who knows that your car lease is due for renewal?

Our filters for advertising are as highly tuned today as they were when all we had to worry about were leaflets through the door and posters on the bus. But the volume of media we consume (estimated at @300,000 words per day, the same length as an average novel) makes it hard to resist buying something just to satisfy the pressure.

So, how do new brands break into a market?

There are many answers but the truth is, it’s going to take time. Tenacity, energy, creativity and bloody-mindedness will help. There are a lucky few who may gallop through this cycle and X Factor-esque quick wins may happen. Pragmatically, though, the best advice might come from the most unexpected philosopher of our time, Jack Reacher: “Hope for the best, plan for the worst.”

Target trust

Play the long game and build customer trust over awareness. Target trust over availability. In fact, target trust as your marketing collateral. It’s where ‘organic’ growth comes from and it doesn’t rely on digital endorsement, peer approval or huge media spend.

Future thinking. Future-proofing. It’s what we do.

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.