We will be working on a great new little project that will combine taste-bud explosions and improved morale. And we have a plan how to do it. Drop by at this counter once in a while to find out more.
To keep up with the quickly changing consumer habits and needs, interface brands are emerging. These brands manage to offer people something old and slow-moving institutions are lacking: empathic, responsive and practical products and service. Interestingly these brands need the existing systems and technology – only they will add the cherry on the cake.
Two great examples are Simple and Giffgaff. Simple is a US based money management system, that closely works together with a few banks – which customers won’t see or know about. Giffgaff is a community-run mobile phone brand running on the O2 network.
Anyone needing a new interface?
Maybe it’s just because the ‘Gift Giving’ season is upon us, but it feels like Luxury is ‘back from the dead’. On the cover of Forbes Magazine, Bernard Arnault shares his ambition to sell luxury to emerging markets. In the same week, Bain&Co’s luxury industry expert Claudia D’Arpizio traveled to Amsterdam to talk about ‘the state of the industry’. Whoever thought that luxury goods will be gone for a while… think again.
On July 9th we held a workshop on business empathy with 4 major Dutch companies, all leaders in their category: banking, supermarkets, rice and cable companies.
This workshop was part of the Dutch Empathy Monitor 2010, conducted by Ruigrok | Netpanel in cooperation with Fronteer Strategy. One of the interesting outcomes: there is a positive correlation between empathy and attractiveness.
But how can these four large brands be empathic while serving literally all Dutch consumers between the four of them? How can they understand all these 17 million consumers? The truth is, they can’t. But they can at least start trying.
These are some of the brand challenges that came up during the workshop:
- How can a commodity- or technical brand be empathic?
- Is empathy the reason why people still write us real letters?
- Should we deal with all the millions of expanding on-line touchpoints our brand has?
I was quoted the other day in Dutch newspaper ‘De Pers’. I argued that the 1% principle (1% of each community is a ‘creator’) also holds for mass-customisation. Only the real affecionados are interested in tweaking and personalising their favourite products and brands. However, the generated buzz affects all consumers. The other 99%.
Here is what I said:
“Volgens merkenexpert Martijn Pater van Fronteer Strategy is de groep consumenten die ‘customizet’ relatief klein, maar gaat er een gigantisch marketingeffect van uit. ‘Wij hebben onderzoek gedaan naar het effect van personaliseren op het merk. Daaruit blijkt dat het merk er een open en toegankelijk imago van krijgt, als innovatief wordt gezien en daardoor populairder wordt. Het effect slaat dus over op het hele merk.’ Hij wijst op een slimme actie van Nike ID dat vorig jaar voor de wedstrijd Arsenal-Manchester United bezoekers van zijn website de schoenen van spelers als Wayne Rooney en Cesc Fabregas liet ontwerpen.”
Love for Denim. And…Almere ?
One of our current projects combines just about all my professional fields of interest, as well as one of my strongest personal passions. I’m as surprised as anyone to find two of its main components to be ‘the City of Almere’ (a relatively new town to the right of Amsterdam) and ‘sustainability’.
Due to my former role as program director of Amsterdam International Fashion Week, i’m regularly asked to take part in discussions on economic & regional policy, especially relating to the development of creative industries and fashion business. During one of such discussions with the ambitious Economic Affairs team from the City of Almere, we got talking about one of my favourite topics : Jeans. Read the rest of this entry »
Some time ago we took part in a conference called ‘The CoCreation Event’ held at the university of Eindhoven. Keynote speakers included Johan Sanders, innovation chief at Dutch Coffe brand Douwe Egberts and Martijn Staal of TNO, and I took part in a panel discussion about the question ‘Is Cocreation a Hype?’, which was fun.
Together with about 15 other co-creation specialists, we presented ourselves to around 500 attendants during a ‘market’-style mingle session, followed by break-out workshops. Rather than just talk about ourselves, we chose to ‘practice what we preach’ by spending both our time on the ‘market’ and in our break-out session on a cocreation topic.
We chose a topic close to any businessperson on the move: BNR Newsradio, the semi-quirky Dutch business & news radio station owned by the Dutch Financial Times. Read the rest of this entry »
The research recently performed by Fronteer Strategy and market research bureau Ruigrok | Netpanel has been very well received in the media; it was aired on Radio 1 and the number of websites that published the results of the research exceeded expectations. Amongst them Adformatie, Molblog, Distrifood, VEA, Marketing Tribune and Zibb.
The results, that state that the more accessible a brand, the more it is perceived as “attractive” and “innovative”, are also picked up across the border: Frank Pillar links the research to a recently performed MIT research study by open innovation expert Eric von Hippel and Johann Füller.
Fronteer and some of the brands included in the research were present at Ruigrok’s ‘Zomerborrel’, where the results were presented as well. Some brands have already reacted to it and want to have deeper insights into the results. We are proud and happy that the research has brought about so many reactions and are looking forward to the potential continuation it can have.
“The more accessible a brand, the more it is perceived as attractive and innovative.” This is the result of a research amongst 500 Dutch consumers, performed by market research bureau Ruigrok | Netpanel in cooperation with strategic consultancy firm Fronteer Strategy.
The research looked on the impact of openness of a company on brand value in different sectors, among which supermarkets, banks and electronics. Coffee brand Douwe Egberts, supermarket chain Albert Heijn and Rabobank are considered to be the most accessible brands and in line with that also the most attractive and innovative. Beer brands Heineken and Grolsch are performing on similar, but mediocre levels. Nokia is performing best in the electronic sector, leaving Samsung and Apple behind.
At Fronteer Strategy, Innovation and Brand Development are our two favourite topics, so we were very happy to be called this week by one of The Telegraaf’s senior business editors who was writing an article about the need for “A”-brands to innovate, ‘even’ in times of crisis. Here’s a summary of our point in English.
Many brands’ innovation programs are frozen like a deer in car headlights. The knee-jerk reaction of ‘putting your hand on your wallet’ (as we say in The Netherlands) is worsened by recent experience of mediocre-but-expensive innovation projects. Read the rest of this entry »
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