The customer is always right. Especially when it comes to innovation. Whether they know it or not, customers have the answers for where the next big breakthrough will be.

The problem is that customers are notoriously bad at imagining the product that solves their problems and conceptualizing how they would interact with true breakthrough solutions. As Henry Ford reputedly put it, “If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” The trick is figuring out how to unlock the right information that can get you to the winning solution without relying solely on asking people what they want. This critical step is where many innovation efforts fail.

When the failures occur, it’s not for a lack of effort. Companies often invest heavily to understand the so-called voice of the customer. They may gather overwhelming amounts of data around current and potential customer behavior, opinions, and attitudes. Problems arise when these organizations try to figure out what to do with all the information; they lack a structured way of determining what’s important and what’s not. This makes it difficult to figure out the right direction to take.

And that sad picture describes some of the more customer-centric organizations out there. More commonly, we find companies relying heavily on very short customer satisfaction surveys and highly circumscribed concept tests. These instruments have their place, but they offer little or no insight into the fundamental drivers of demand, what might cause customer preferences to shift, or where an industry should head. By looking with myopic intensity at data that is very easy to collect, companies can miss critical elements of the whole picture and cast their efforts in fundamentally wrong directions.

Even when it comes to new products, which seem straightforward to research, companies’ track records are dire:

• More than 50 percent of newly launched products fall short of the company’s projected expectations.
• Only 1 in 100 new products covers its development costs.
• Only 1 in 300 new products has a significant impact on customer purchase behavior, the product category, or the company’s growth trajectory.

Fortunately, the Jobs Roadmap provides a systematic way to beat the odds. Many new product failures can be avoided simply by understanding what jobs customers want to get done. Rather than leaping to foist a solution on the market, companies need to step back, listen to and observe real and potential customers (including how they react to early prototypes), and then hone in on strategic opportunity areas that show promise for growth.

Doing It Right

Making the innovation process work doesn’t require lashes of genius, nor does it depend on glamorous ideas. By looking intently at customers in the strategic context of the company, great ideas can emerge from simple insights that are easy to act upon.

Consider the story of Uber, an on-demand car service that gets you an affordable ride within minutes. The idea isn’t revolutionary. Taxis and car services have been around for a long time. In shaking up the taxi industry, part of what Uber brought to the table was a more cost-effective business model. By being a coordinator for drivers who had their own cars, Uber could substantially reduce its up- front costs by avoiding the need to pay for cars and medallions. But simply starting a price war by introducing a lower-cost model wouldn’t have been enough to steer people away from traditional taxis. Large incumbents—even in relatively low-margin industries—usually have the resources to weather the storm, even if things are a bit uncomfortable for a while.

The key to Uber’s success is that its efforts rely on Jobs-based principles. It’s almost impossible to list all of the pain points associated with traditional taxis: Long waits while trying to find an empty cab, unfriendly drivers using every trick they know to drive up the fare, and “broken” credit card readers that force you to pay with cash are just a few of the difficulties. Uber’s founders saw the problems that customers were facing and set out to offer a better alternative. Starting from the ground up, they produced a solution that would solve the most important jobs and alleviate as many frustrations as possible. The app’s interface allows you to summon a car on demand and know exactly when it will arrive. The interface provides fare quotes in advance, and back-end staffers will refund fare overages when drivers take overly long routes. Every ride is charged to a credit card on file, eliminating the need to deal with cash. Beyond eliminating a number of important pain points, Uber focused on emotional jobs that the taxi industry had ignored, offering a sense of certainty and control that you simply don’t have as you stand out in the cold waving at passing lashes of yellow or sit in the back of a cab endlessly watching the fare tick up on the meter. By focusing on fundamental jobs and taking a customer-centric perspective, Uber has grown to a $50 billion valuation in a little over five years.

5 Things That Leads Companies Astray

If the route to success is straightforward, why is it so uncommon? Here are five reasons why smart companies go astray.

First, doing things right requires a modest up-front investment of time. In typical corporate life, none of that is available. For example, back in 1999 one colleague had the privilege of leading a team responsible for creating one of the first smartphones ever. Until he pushed back hard, he was given a whole two weeks from the project’s inception to develop the specification for what would be in that device. Really.

Second, following the Jobs Roadmap entails following the Jobs Roadmap also entails asking difficult questions, many of which you’ll struggle to answer. his is not the sort of behavior that’s re- warded in most organizations. We are trained to be solution finders, from early schooling through to our annual employment reviews. Asking awkward questions can elicit equally awkward pauses, when people fumble for smart-sounding answers. You will need to get comfortable with the unknown. In tough questions lies great opportunity. Albert Einstein once said, “If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.” Once you frame a problem very well, the answers can be rather obvious.

Third, market researchers and product developers can focus too heavily on the superficial questions—probing into whether customers like this or that better. They worry that if they delve too deeply into behavioral drivers, customers will come up with rationalizations that don’t ultimately reflect their decision-making process when it comes time to make a purchase. A benefit of the Jobs Roadmap is that it allows you to target and understand discrete pieces of why customers act as they do, getting at the real root causes of behavior first and then becoming progressively more specific about the ramifications for the innovation.

Fourth, managers seek data to justify their conclusions, and data is rarely readily available about Jobs to be Done. Data can be produced reasonably quickly and inexpensively through primary re- search and test-and-learn experiments, but most companies still lack this information. This state of events is actually a good thing: It means that securing the data creates a true advantage for the company willing to do the work.

Last, and quite critically, we must discuss Clayton Christensen. Clay was the first person to popularize the notion of Jobs to be Done, although he is most famous for his concept of “disruptive innovation.” Aside from Clay’s remarkable brilliance, there is good reason why this one man has produced these two concepts. The disruptive innovation theory holds, in part, that products starting out in small market niches can grow to upend industry giants. Companies already incumbent in an industry tend to ignore these niches, focusing on their business as they’ve traditionally defined it. For interlopers, though, looking at underlying jobs helps determine whether that niche is a dead end or a route to eventual greatness. By targeting an under-addressed job to be done, a disruptive entrant can attack incumbents in asymmetric fashion, building strength in corners of the market that seem uninteresting to the traditional giants. When the giants awaken, it is often too late to fight of the clever entrant. Disruption succeeds when it targets the right jobs to be done.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Stephen Wunker, excerpted from his new book JOBS TO BE DONE: A Roadmap for Customer-Centered Innovation, with permission from AMACOM publishing.

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Microsoft Surface Studio is a new category of device, designed to put you at the center of the creative process. Turn your desk into a Studio. Just imagine all the wonderful things artists and designers will make for us.

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Ashley Judd speaks boldly about online gender violance — and what we can start doing to end it. She’s onstage at TEDWomen 2016 in San Francisco. Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED

In all of its formats, in all the ways we listen and watch, the media is extremely powerful in how it represents — or underrepresents or misrepresents — women. Unless we’re prepared to change the way women are portrayed in the stories we tell, we’re not prepared for real change.

In Session 4 of TEDWomen 2016 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, seven speakers (and a ballet company!) asked us to rethink how we tell each other stories, to empower us all.

Stacy Smith studies how women are represented in film … starting with a simple headcount. She spoke onstage at TEDWomen 2016: It’s About Time, in San Francisco. Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED

The epidemic of invisibility. Filmmaking has the powerful capacity to transform and transport ideas. It shows us about the world — and ourselves. But the reality is that many of us are grossly underrepresented, if represented at all, in film. Media researcher and activist Stacy Smith studies inequality in film. Each year, Smith and her team study 100 popular Hollywood films, and they’ve found that women are largely invisible — on and off camera — to the point that women represent less than a third of speaking parts. Why is this? Perhaps thanks to this fact: Only 4.1 percent of films are directed by women. The numbers get smaller when factoring in race, age, sexuality and disability. Smith describes this situation as an “epidemic of invisibility.” Even in these grim circumstances, she offers practical solutions, like “just add five”: If, starting today, each filmmaker was to add five female speaking characters to their film, we would fill the gender gap in a mere three years. Ultimately, viewers have the power to address these problems by supporting women filmmakers and insisting that more women voices are heard.

Let girls flex their bravery muscles. Writer Caroline Paul has lived a high-risk life. After a failed world-record attempt in high school (she wanted to beat the Guinness world record for crawling), she became a firefighter, then a paraglider; adventure and danger are part of her DNA. So it came as a surprise to her that people, mostly men, were baffled by her courage. And then she realized: they were operating under the misconception that women weren’t brave. Where does this frame of thinking come from? It begins in infanthood, she says. Parents spend so much time protecting young girls from falling down and making mistakes that they grow up to be women who see and use fear of failure as a barrier instead of a propeller to power our most courageous and ambitious endeavors. The message of this talk is simple: encourage young girls to get outside of their comfort zones, build confidence by trying and failing for themselves and shaping their destinies based on their capabilities and not their limitations.  “I’m not against fear,” Paul jokes. “I’m just pro-bravery.”

Nanfu Wang speaks about her career as a documentary filmmaker at TEDWomen 2016: It’s About Time. Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED

The power of story to control time. “Time for me has always been an adversary,” says documentary filmmaker Nanfu Wang. “In my work and in my life, I’ve seen how moments can squeeze and dilate, and how in a moment the entire course of a life can change.” For Wang, those moments span from the interrogation room faced by three Chinese national security agents during the filming of her documentary, Hooligan Sparrow, to the sudden death of her father at age 33. These experiences shaped her determination to live every minute as if it were two. When she encountered documentary film, she recognized its power as a way to take control of time by allowing her to live multiple lives and experiences, manipulate time in the editing and storytelling process, and share it with an audience so that they could time travel, too. Storytelling, she says, loosens the grip that time holds on us.

Sisonke Msimang weaves a story about stories suring TEDWomen 2016. Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED

Stories are not as magical as they seem. Stories are everywhere. From documentaries to podcasts, media offers us an unprecedented opportunity to hear stories from around the world, stories that make us fall in love and push us to imagine beyond what we already know. Sisonke Msimang explains that it’s not uncommon to hear people say that stories help make the world a better place, but she also cautions that stories can create an illusion of solidarity. An activist and social critic, Msimang explores the ways audiences react and engage with the content of nonfiction stories, arguing that such members must push beyond the simple act of listening into the reality which surrounds those highlighted stories. Storytelling alone cannot effect social justice without the credibility of facts and the intellectual curiosity of listeners who dare to ask questions about their content, she says. Instead, action requires a meaningful commitment to the storytellers, rather than their platforms, understanding that “sometimes it’s the messages that we don’t want to hear … that we need to hear the most.”

Jack Myers speaks up for men at TEDWomen 2016. Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED

The future of men. Author Jack Myers is concerned about young men today. “We need a movement,” he says, “a simple movement with clear purpose, led by both men and women, LGBTQ and straight, that gives young men the confidence to discover their purpose and their place in the future.” He wants us to do away with prescriptive notions of masculinity and embrace non-conventional role models for our men and boys through positive media portrayals, mentorship programs and education. Because none of us should feel limited by the binary expectations of our gender.

When we curb abuse, we’ll expand freedom. “Online misogyny is a global rights tragedy, and it’s imperative that it ends,” says actress Ashley Judd. In an electrifying, spirited talk that shines a light into the darkest corners of social media, Judd shares a glimpse of the vitriolic, hateful and threatening speech she encounters online every day. As a public figure, Judd sees a concentrated form of online abuse, but her experience of online harassment is one that’s shared with many others each day. After a particularly abusive experience following a tweet she sent after a University of Kentucky basketball game, Judd started to write. The resulting op-ed, published against the wishes of her publicist, went viral, encouraging her to start The Women’s Media Center Speech Project with a goal of expanding protections against online abuse. She offers some practical solutions, too: we need digital media literacy; we need to end the sexism in the workplaces of tech companies (tech platforms built from the ground up by diverse teams, instead of a room of dudes, will set better priorities); law enforcement needs to know how online platforms work, and how threats escalate from the internet to the real world. We must have the courage and urgency to disrupt online gender violence as it’s happening.

The importance of female storytellers. “Why do we think that stories by men are deemed to be of universal importance and stories by women are thought to be merely about women?” asks theater director Jude Kelly. We’re taught that divine knowledge and creative genius come through the masculine, but that impacts whether we believe that women’s stories, and consequently women’s rights, matter. “Without that, change can’t really come,” she says. We need to go back through our stories and see that so many are written from a male perspective, and we need to give women the chance to speak on behalf of the world. “All civilizations, all of humanity, have relied upon artists to tell the human story,” Kelly explains, but if that story is told by men, it will be about men.

Our life force, our spirit, is bursting. Darkness opened to bleak light, in this minimalist but powerful performance by Alonzo King LINES Ballet. A woman in a man’s world desperately yearns to break free of her imposed restraints, and eventually achieves a false sense of freedom, only to be ripped back to her harsh reality. Her perpetual fight reveals glimmers of a brighter future beyond the horizon, but ultimately her pained expressions and almost infantile helplessness spirals into unhinged hysterics, as a voice howls hauntingly overhead.

Alonzo King LINES Ballet presented TEDWomen 2016 with a moving, complex story. Photo: Marla Aufmuth / TED

Learn about research that was conducted to better understand how ANA members are using data to manage agency relationships and how learnings can be applied to optimize client/agency performance.

By Gary Larkin, Research Associate, The Conference Board Governance Center The issue of using universal proxy cards in contested elections has been on The Conference Board Governance Center’s radar since the spring and held a roundtable for its members last month on the topic. In fact, a small subgroup of the roundtable met with SEC […]

If you head to Google.com today, you might notice something interesting underneath the search bar: an invitation to watch a series of animations called #WhoWeAre.

A collaboration between StoryCorps and Upworthy, with support from Steven Spielberg’s Righteous Persons Foundation and Delta Airlines, #WhoWeAre is designed to encourage people across the United States to reach out to others who’ve had vastly different experiences. It’s a call for connection in a deeply divided election season. From stories of people who got to know individuals who’d committed crimes against them, to stories of people who went above and beyond to help strangers, to stories of people who faced discrimination for their race, religion or gender and found ways to understand with those who persecuted them — the goal is to share stories that stress empathy and love.

As Dave Isay, the founder of StoryCorps and winner of the 2015 TED Prize, says in a short explainer video about the series, the animations are intended “to speak to our best selves.” He added over email that the idea for #WhoWeAre started shortly after he spoke at the TED2016 conference. “Steven Spielberg asked me to meet, and we came up with idea of trying to blanket the country with simple, animated StoryCorps stories,” he wrote. “We hope they’ll be a little ripple of hope in the midst of the madness.”

Enjoy the playlist above. Isay has one request as you watch and share: that you reach out to someone who thinks differently from you, and ask them meaningful questions about their life. For extra credit, record the conversation using the StoryCorps app — and upload it directly to The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.

Politicians, actors, directors, architects, athletes, everyone is tweeting about the elections in USA. With #TweetsFromTheStars they will tweet for those who can no longer do so.

“O1” (a creative Latin collective based in Venice Beach, California) created the Tweet From The Stars campaign which they’ve dubbed a Hollywood Blvd. Intervention. The crew took to the streets and placed tweets over the actual stars on the Walk of Fame in Hollywood for those who are no longer with us including Robin Williams, Alfred Hitchcock, Frank Sinatra, Michael Jackson and even Godzilla weighed in on the US Elections. In the end the video encourages viewers to vote, and that’s a good thing.

CREATIVE CREDITS:
Advertising Agency: O1 (Venice Beach CA).
Agency website: www.o1-agency.com/
Creative Director: Curro Chozas, Pablo Lopez
Art Director: Antonio Mora
Director: Pascui Rivas
Production: Shad Thompson

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Cue the Guns N’ Roses‘ song “Welcome to the Jungle” add Danny McBride and Michael Phelps and watch them say “screw it, let’s go to space” in this epic trailer for the soon to be released Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare.

World gone mad? Screw it, let’s go to space! Directed by Peter Berg, follow a crew of gamers – including Michael Phelps and Danny McBride – as they escape the frustrations of Earth and launch into intense dogfights, zero-G combat and classic boots-on-the-ground action across the solar system in this epic new installment in the Call of Duty franchise.

CREATIVE CREDITS:
Ad Agency: 72andSunny

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Take a look inside b8ta, a new store for discovering new tech products.  Learn how b8ta closes the gap between maker and buyer with a hands-on helpful retail customer experience that is much needed into today’s high tech, omnichannel world.

other Brand Experience Briefs:

• Target Open House connected home store
• Apple Union Square
• Best Buy

transcript:

Today’s brand experience brief is about an innovative retail store designed for discovering, trying, and buying new technology products.  It’s called b8ta and it can be found in downtown Palo Alto, California.  Let’s take a look inside.

b8ta showcases a collection of new technology products including many Internet of Things products like the Sense by Hello which tracks your sleep behavior, a video home phone device and network called Ily or ily (not quite sure about that), Mocaheart by Mocacare, a heart health tracker that measures heart rate, blood oxygen, and blood velocity, and an e-Bike by Juno Power.

Every product is out on display, with explanatory signage and demo screens and videos, so you are encouraged to try them out.  And each also displays a reminder to ask the friendly b8ta staff for a demo.  One of the store slogans is “No packaging—just products,” and it definitely delivers on the hands-on experience.

Unlike most tech stores that are not very kid-friendly, b8ta hosts a prominent kids section where kids are invited to play with the products and, even in the case of a maker-like product, are given ideas of what to do with it including creating something that can make a loud noise!

b8ta is the perfect environment for companies like SoftBank Media that want to show off products like its emotional robot, Pepper, which is  able to “read” four human emotions — happiness, joy, sadness, and anger — and respond accordingly.

b8ta is targeted both to consumers who are interested in learning about cool, new products — the store markets itself as “retail designed for discovery” — and to makers and sellers of those products who want to get exposure for and feedback on their innovations. In fact, there’s a display in the store promoting The Stable, a retail sales agency for IoT products.

b8ta opened in December 2015 and was founded by four former Nest employees who wanted to “Create a physical space where people can try the best new technology products out of the box.” They wanted to create a store where all the products are displayed for hands-on interaction and to close the time and physical gap between maker and buyer.  They’ve certainly succeeded.

b8ta says two more stores will be opening in December 2016, in Santa Monica and Seattle.  As more and more products start to have some element of technology in them, stores like b8ta are going to be needed so people can learn about and try them before purchase. Also b8ta demonstrates that the role of a store is no longer just about providing access to inventory but it’s also the best possible marketing for a product — it’s an idea that is growing in relevance in today’s omnichannel world.

The post brand experience brief: b8ta appeared first on Denise Lee Yohn.

By Alex Parkinson, Associate Director, Society for New Communications Research of The Conference Board The Society for New Communications Research of The Conference Board (SNCR) today opened its call for entries for the 2017 Excellence in New Communications Awards. Organizations that have made innovative use of digital, social, and mobile technologies can now submit their […]