working with uncertainty

Working with Uncertainty branding, creativity, strategy and stuff

Every discovery by definition is unpredictable. If it were predictable it wouldn't be a discovery. Creativity exposes

unpredictable things to be discovered. Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

People can also have negative associations with novelty;

an attribute at the heart of what makes ideas creative in

the first place. Mueller, Melwani, Goncalo

Cornell University

The Illusion of Knowing

Every product and every single brand wants to 'engage' users in a massive participatory experience. Even Especially if they're utterly dull…but by now you've discovered there's very little to say if you're a brand people don't care much about. Tim Malbon, Made by Many

Market Research Spending skyrockets +23% 5 years

What drove Sony’s shift from a disruptive to a sustaining innovation strategy? Prior to 1980, all new product launch decisions were

made by cofounder Akio Morita and a trusted team of associates. They never did market research, believing that if markets did not exist they could not be analyzed. Their process for assessing new

opportunities relied on personal intuition. Clay Christensen,

Technology Review

Seinfeld, Mary Tyler Moore, Hill Street Blues, Friends – all pre-testing failures.

The payoffs to innovation are greatest where the uncertainty is highest.

Charles Leadbeater

Motorola, Hewlett-Packard, Xerox, Ryder, Unisys, Texas Instruments, Revlon, Converse, La-Z-boy, Interstate Bakeries

All formed in the aftermath of the Great Depression

Reinvention is happening in every market at an accelerating pace. Just in the last two years we’ve seen fundamental shifts in music,

gaming, banking, education, government, automobiles, energy, coupons, payments, retail, rental cars, manufacturing, publishing,

journalism, just to name a few…

I’m a believer that in the next 5 years we’re going to see every major industry reinvented in ways we didn’t see coming.

Bryce T. Roberts, AlphaTech Ventures

We need to make uncertainty work for us.

Purpose

Creative Capitalism

Cultural Innovation

Find focus in purpose, not consistency.

360° The answer for a growing number of marketers is to take a 360° approach, zeroing in on a target group

likely to be receptive to a message – and surrounding it from every angle.

You’re a rational, self-interested, entrepreneurial individual who is trying to satisfy unlimited wants, whatever they may be.

The more information you have, the better decisions you’ll make. Relationships are impersonal, anonymous and transactional.

The Monoculture

Finding purpose. I think many people assume, wrongly, that a

company exists simply to make money. While this is an important result of a company's existence, we

have to go deeper and find the real reasons for our being.

David Packard

Ask yourself this:

What cause are you a credible voice for?

What a brand feels is important

How a brand talks

How a brand acts

What a brand rallies the community around

Why a brand does it

To contribute to the real change in Braddock, the Levi’s brand is

committed to funding the refurbishment of Braddock’s

community center, a focal point of the town and their youth-based

programming. Additionally, Levi’s is supporting Braddock’s urban farm

which supplies produce to local area residents at reduced costs.

What the people of Braddock are

proving is that decay and destruction don’t always mean the end, a point of no return. They can also be a frontier,

a place to start anew.

Embrace creative capitalism.

[A process that] incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly

destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the

essential fact about capitalism. Creative Destruction

Five of today’s hundred largest public companies were among the top hundred in 1917.

Half of the top hundred of 1970 had been replaced in the rankings by 2000.

The most resilient companies are actively contributing to their destruction and reinvention.

Once upon a time an ad was about a company's unique selling position. But people can now

accept more complex brands, and I thought we might be able to build a deeper relationship if we

built on multiple fronts. Mike Hughes, Martin Agency

Red Bull Massive Niche

exploration

Red Bull Crashed Ice

Good Magazine A platform for experimentation

Create cultural innovations.

Invention Conceiving a new idea Innovation Arranging the economic requirements Diffusion Adoption of the idea

Joseph Schumpter

Most often, when people are asked to describe the current media landscape, they respond by making an inventory of tools and technologies.

Our focus should be not on emerging technologies but on emerging cultural practices.

Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture

The Difficulty of Doing

The Difficulty of Doing

If agencies want to think more like tech startups, they might focus less on clever storytelling and

more on utility. Adam Glickman, Founder, the IdeaLists

The Framing Layer

That's what we need to add to so many things, to give them that extra necessary magic. A pretending layer. So it's not just a useful or beautiful or functional object - it's got some little nod to who we're pretending to be when

we're using it. Russell Davies

3X as many smartphones are being activated every minute

around the world than there are babies being born

Cultural Innovations have never been so attainable.

Technology advances à Cultural advances From R & D to Cultural studios

From USPs to coherency through purpose Build Infrastructure for experimentation

Develop new working relationships Follow the DIS principle

You learn to like the excitement of mild, ongoing risk taking…Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't,

but it's the creation of possibility. Brad Blanton, Founder of Radical Honesty

Thanks. You can find me on the internet. Paul McEnany Director of Strategy at Twist Image heehawmarketing.com // @paulmcenany Credit to: David Coacci, Corey Litvak Flickr: Beth19, mateugrin, cdm, harleyhaskett, karl_hab, michaelsissions, uzbecca, thorne_ryne, vamitos, whsimages, nitsrejk