The Innovation Diaries

Your perception of a brand is formulated through all the small interactions you have with it everyday. So how would your opinion of your local shop change if you approached to find it’s delivery van splayed across it’s own disabled parking bays? Each and every small gesture builds our relationship with a given company or product, and it only takes on bad experience to taint our viewpoint on a company forever.

Checking out Kanye West’s blog recently (the fr-fr-freshest RSS feed for the worldwide trendwatching squad) I came across a new touchless remote control from Bang & Olufsen. After being wowed by the video demo, I thought I’d pop in to my local B&O store to have a try for myself. Here’s the exchange;

Me: “Hello, how are you? I saw a cool new remote you guys made on the internet yesterday”
B&O Salesman: [holding up standard small Bang & Olufsen remote] “Oh right you mean this”
Me: “No, it was a strange metallic ring that lights up as you put your hand in it”
B&O Salesman: “No, we don’t make anything like that”
Me: “Yes you do, I saw it on the net”
B&O: [getting slightly irate] “No we definitely do not”
Me: “OK, sure. Goodbye!”

In that short exchange, my entire perception of the brand had changed. A salesman for a technology company that not only didn’t know the innovative gadgets that were being created by his company, but he didn’t even care? Why not ask me “Ah, where did you see it? Perhaps I could check it out and ask someone for you?” - but instead, the cold shoulder. Bang & Olufsen are the very definition of an aspirational brand - as a youngster, I would salivate looking at the Beosound 9000 in our local department store, and grew up thinking that eventually I would deck my house out with their beautiful technology. And now, after a wholly negative, shrift, sub-30 second experience, that intrinsic yearning is lost forever.

Disclosure: We’re friends of Bang & Olufsen (they’re a favourite stop on the TopDog tour), it’s just a shame to see the passion they put into their innovation process and design ethic not filtering through to their retail experience.

We’re sure there’s a commercial use in this somewhere. Time Tube tracks your favourite YouTube memes chronologically - we’ve been tracking cats, but you might want to track something more ‘useful’.

It’s a little inspiring how something like YouTube, which often feels unusable due to information overload, can become instantly fruitful just by presenting the information from a different viewpoint. Maybe something to think about in light of the current climate of “too much media”.

Courtesy of our favourite new designer Anthony Burrill. Join us in the reprint waiting line here.

Friends and family are very important to us at ?What If! so every year we invite them to come hang out with us for an evening and get a better idea what the hell we really do! Last night we had 30 of our favourite people come explore our offices, learn about how we work and check out some of our latest innovation projects we have been working on, ranging from our social innovation work with the UN through to our work on the just-on-the-shelves Foster’s Scuba (more to come on this next week). Of course, we fed and watered them with some delights rustled up by our Food is Love team. A lovely time was had by all!

To sell its classic Oreo cookies in China, Kraft foods realised that a ‘one size fits all’ approach wasn’t going to work.

The company reformulated the brand for Chinese tastes and also capitalised on the country’s growing appetite for milk by pushing the behaviour of having cookies with milk. Not too proud to compromise the product, Kraft remade the Oreo itself, introducing for the first time an Oreo that looked almost nothing like the original. The new Chinese Oreo consisted of four layers of crispy wafer filled with vanilla and chocolate cream, coated in chocolate. Kraft even developed a proprietary handling process to ensure that the chocolate product could be shipped across the country, withstanding the cold climate in the north and the hot, humid weather in the south, yet still be ready to melt in the mouth.

Unusually for a multinational, Kraft also bet on the instincts of its local managers and allowed them significant input into the marketing. Kraft began a grassroots campaign to educate Chinese consumers about the American tradition of pairing milk with cookies. The company created an Oreo apprentice program at 30 Chinese universities that drew 6,000 student applications.

Three hundred of the applicants were trained to become Oreo brand ambassadors. Some of the students rode around Beijing on bicycles outfitted with wheel covers resembling Oreos and handed out cookies to more than 300,000 consumers. Others held Oreo-themed basketball games to reinforce the idea of dunking cookies in milk. Television commercials showed kids twisting apart Oreo cookies, licking the cream center and dipping the chocolate cookie halves into glasses of milk.

Kraft CEO Irene Rosenfeld calls the bicycle campaign “a stroke of genius that only could have come from local managers. The more opportunity our local managers have to deal with local conditions will be a source of competitive advantage for us.”

Kraft’s Oreo efforts have paid off. In 2006, Oreo wafer sticks became the best-selling biscuit in China, outpacing HaoChiDian, a biscuit brand made by the Chinese company Dali. The new Oreos are also outselling traditional round Oreos in China, and Kraft has begun selling the wafers elsewhere in Asia, as well as in Australia and Canada. Kraft has also introduced wafer rolls, a tube-shaped wafer lined with cream, in China. The hollow cookie can be used as a straw through which to drink milk.

Over the past two years, Kraft has doubled its Oreo revenue in China, and with the help of those sales, that revenue topped $1 billion world-wide for the first time last year.

Photo from Bollig’s Flickr stream

One of the most exciting areas in innovation, especially for a techno-geek like myself, is the concept of disruptive innovation; ideas that are revolutionary, not evolutionary; ideas that change the basis of competition; ideas that force followers to react. Think of digital photography, the Nintendo Wii, downloadable media, hybrid cars. But disruptive innovation can only come within the right environment, where people feel comforable challenging ideas and to fail, fail again, fail better. A great example of this culture can be found at Pixar, which is why this interview with Oscar winning director Brad Bird on fostering innovation is so engrossing. Amongst the many great points made (which are available in a digested and no-need-to-register format over at GigaOM) is his approach to bringing together the so-called “black sheep”:

“So I said, “Give us the black sheep. I want artists who are frustrated. I want the ones who have another way of doing things that nobody’s listening to. Give us all the guys who are probably headed out the door.” A lot of them were malcontents because they saw different ways of doing things, but there was little opportunity to try them, since the established way was working very, very well. We gave the black sheep a chance to prove their theories, and we changed the way a number of things are done here. For less money per minute than was spent on the previous film, Finding Nemo, we did a movie that had three times the number of sets and had everything that was hard to do. All this because the heads of Pixar gave us leave to try crazy ideas.”

I had a few jobs before starting at ?What If!, and in the past have felt like the black sheep on many an occasion - shouted down in a meeting for offering an alternative point of view, or chastised for spending time trying to find a more efficient way to do rote tasks. However, on starting work here, finding many more “black sheep” willing to rock the boat, frees your creativity, with ability to formulate great ideas is catalysed by the energy of those around you. One of the first things I was told was to “ask for forgiveness, not for permission” and this approach leads us down all sorts of avenues, such as the blog you’re reading right now.

Remember, some of the greatest ideas have come from questions that start “I know this sounds stupid, but …”

How Google fuels its Idea Factory
“You can do whatever you want as long as you track it. We have very sophisticated measurement systems at every stage of launch. We have what is called trusted testers. Then beta test, which is forever. We do these 1% launches where we float something out and measure that. We can dice and slice in any way you can possibly fathom. What’s more important than the absolute number is the relative growth rate. High growth solves virtually all problems. If the growth rate is low, or negative, you’ve got a serious problem.”

Applying Design Principles To Meetings
“A bulletin board in the kitchen was turned into a sort of ongoing conversation about issues and ideas to be discussed. And to introduce some fun, at each meeting a randomly selected employee gets a custom bag, designed to reflect his or her personal interests or hobbies. “This ritual reinforces that we make stuff, that we’re a creative company, that we care about individuals,” says Klebahn. “It also gets lots of laughs.”

Mars teams up with Warren Buffet to buy Wrigley
“Mars has joined forces with billionaire investor Warren Buffet to buy chewing gum giant Wrigley Jr for US$23 million, in a move that will create the world’s largest confectionary player. The merger will enable Mars to expand into areas where Wrigley is strong, such as Eastern Europe, while also allowing the latter company to grow beyond its core chewing gum business.”

List of the week: Google is world’s most valuable brand, according to Millward Brown.
“Google was named number one in Millward Brown’s annual top 100 global brand power list for the second year in a row with a 30 per cent year-on-year increase in its value. Last week, Google posted a 31 per cent surge in quarterly net income and said it is well positioned for growth even if the economy weakens further.”

Holy cow fact of the week: Sixty-nine percent of young mothers ages 18 to 34 in the US have incurred medical debt.
“That compares to 30 percent for all U.S. women, according to the “What do Women Want?” survey of 3,000 women conducted by by Meredith Corp. and NBC Universal. The survey also says two-thirds of women cite financial strain as a major threat to the American family — and a much bigger threat than divorce, loss of faith/spirituality, liberal views on sex and sexuality, both parents working, unwed mothers and couples living together. Forty-six percent of women are extremely concerned about rising healthcare costs and 18 percent reported they do not have health insurance coverage — 24 percent among single mothers with minor children.”

There is something intensely gratifying in discovering how much what you know and what you say is really worth. From the appreciation of colleagues and clients to the respect of friends and family, our self-worth is the venture capital of our personality. But how does that work for companies? Many brands claim coast comfortably along on the notion that they have something valuable to sell us, but what about the value of what have to tell us?

Fortunately, there is value and there are useful clues in what all of us have to say. And in the case of the Amsterdam free newspaper Amsterdam Weekly, they have taken that to heart, literally. With an unwavering belief in the fact that their content is worth a decent amount to their loyal readers, they turned fundraising into hostage taking: future pages are divided into blocks that readers can buy and only the blocks sold will be printed.

Did it work? Absolutely and beautifully. But there is more than funds to raise here: an innovative way to drive consumer goodwill. Buying blocks was not only wholly rewarding in that it released the paper’s content from this unique hostage situation but it was also hugely gratifying as it promised goodies aimed at the interests, likes and loves of their readers.

The notion that in the Culture of Free you can build exceptional reciprocal relationships deserves the unconditional attention of those in the commercial circus: there is no shame in selling what you have to say (even if you are free) as long as you don’t forget to express your heartfelt gratitude to those who provide you with the ever-essential flow of cash.

Over at Signal Vs. Noise they’ve got an interesting little thing on airlines making small tweaks for huge impact, which reminded me of a story we heard from Southwest Airlines …

Collecting empty cups after a landing, flight attendant Rhonda Holley noticed Southwest’s logo printed on the plastic trash bag. Two things struck her - first, customers knew which airline they were on, and second, the trash bags were thrown away immediately. She wrote to Colleen Barrett, President of Southwest, to ask how much it cost to print logos on the trash bags. Her response? “Thanks - you’ve just saved us $300,000 a year. We’re not going to be printing logos on the trash bags anymore.”

Southwest often preach how it’s people are one of it’s greatest assets, and this comes from enabling their creativity ability through innovative practices. One such instance is the “Walk A Mile” program, where any employee can do someone else’s job for the day. Obviously in some instances this isn’t possible (can you imagine taking a flight with a “pilot for the day” introducing himself over the loudspeaker?) but for raising levels of co-operation, understanding and collaboration it’s proved invaluable, with 75% of Southwest’s 20,000 employees having taken part.

Cutting costs through top-down management strategies is all well and good, but when you empower your employees so they personally care about saving the company money, who knows where your next great idea will come from?

We have started a sharing group; it’s made up of people who work within the culture and people teams of some great companies. We meet once a month to share and steal ideas from each other on various topics. Last month we all met for the first time and talked around culture, its no secret we think it is important. We talked about all things from environment to parties to values (much more to come on these!) …

We meet to gather ideas from each other and also to find out how other companies, who are like us do cool things to make our culture thrive and develop. We are going to meet once a month to talk about things like, benefits, office space, recruitment, work-life balance, company brand and parties (again - yes, they’re pretty important for us all!)

Members of the culture club are include Prêt a Manger, Red Bull, ?What If! (of course), Innocent Drinks, Integrity, Diesel and MTV.

Will keep you posted!