While great ideas can happen anywhere at any time – in the shower, while observing the consumer, while on a vacation - bringing a little science to the art of imagination can help ensure success in any planned ideation gathering.  Over the years, we at (r)evolution have learned how to tap into such creativity – from clients, partners, consumers, and ourselves.

These 6 best practices can help you get the most out of your ideation event and unlock your next great idea, with just a little bit of magic.

1) Clearly articulating the destination: In order to set out on the right path, people first need to know where they are going.  There are three critical questions that need to be answered and clearly articulated to participants at the start of any ideation process:

- What are we brainstorming or solving for?

- What are the ultimate objectives and goals?

- What are realistic expectations for the outcomes?

2) Identifying the Right Participants: It’s not uncommon for organizers of ideation events to experience pressure to be inclusive of all internal stakeholders. Succumbing to this pressure can lead to too many thinkers, or the ‘wrong’ kind of thinkers.  A best practice is to find the right people who can contribute the best ideas and thinking for the desired outcomes, versus trying to make an ideation event a “cure all” for creating excitement and buy-in across all stakeholders relevant to the opportunity.

When choosing participants, think about who best understands the challenge, and whether you’d benefit from any outside perspectives, such as a neutral third party to eliminate biases or a subject matter expert to jumpstart the thinking.

3) Strategically Designing an Ideation Agenda: When an agenda is required to keep an ideation on point and on time, the design and architecture of the session is important to maintain energy and momentum, and get the most out of participants. To do this, you should also strike a balance between the time spent sharing information, and the time spent brainstorming. Also, making sure your activities clearly align with your objectives, and with the strengths of your participants, will keep your agenda disciplined and focused.

Any thing you can do to keep energy up, engage people’s senses, and appeal to different types of thinkers (introverts and extroverts) will help you produce the best ideas. And it will also make it fun for everyone involved.

4) Capturing ideas: Of course, producing the ideas means nothing if you do not capture them. Although this can be challenging with larger groups, here are a few simple tips:

- Use tools to ensure all ideas have been written down

- Keep track of which exercise, part of the day, or team the idea came from (e.g., color-coded cards or initials on cards)

- Organize and categorize ideas as they come in by theme

- Record ideas in a simple format to allow for easy evaluation (e.g., sorting by theme or activity)

5) Choosing the Venue: In any ideation session, where you are matters just as much as what you’re doing. Making sure the venue feels special and unique, and is dramatically different from the everyday office are two important ways you can ensure a productive session. Of course, it should align with the objectives of the day and be easy for the participants to find. Finally, choosing a location with a layout that supports all of your exercises will make things run a little more smoothly throughout the day.

6) Finding your thinking caps: If your participants are in the right mindset, then the ideation will be much more productive. One way to do this is to break down people’s barriers and create a more egalitarian atmosphere where all ideas are equally weighted. After all, when people are comfortable, they’re more likely to share their ideas with the whole group. At (r)evolution, we use goofy hats to do this, but you can feel free to find your own “thinking caps” to get the ideas flowing.

So whether your organization engages in formal or informal brainstorming sessions, these principles can serve you well. We all have good ideas in our heads, but a little science mixed with a little magic can make these ideas come alive. We’d love to hear what has worked well (or not so well!) in your past ideation efforts.

I was recently reminded of a powerful tool for positioning: the “unlike” statement. A TV spot for Pradaxa, an anticoagulant drug, deliberately highlights that it reduces stroke risk and unlike Warfarin, “there’s no need for those regular blood tests.” This a niche example of direct competitive differentiation, but others, like Southwest Airlines’ crusade against bag fees, have been much more visible examples of the “unlike” positioning.

As marketers, we are the beneficiaries of the fundamental tools of our field that were pioneered years ago by the titans of modern marketing. These include professors like Kotler and organizations such as P&G and The Coca-Cola Company. The classic positioning statement handed to us from these pioneers includes very specific identification of the target, competitive frame, benefits and evidence.  It is this concise yet deliberate statement that guides and coordinates internal decisions and external execution, from brand strategy to pricing to advertising, packaging and service delivery. The gold standard of positioning is to articulate the value of the brand or offering in a way that is feasible for the business to deliver, valuable for the target, and at the same time clearly differentiated in the market. It is on this last point that our classic statement sometimes fails.

A good positioning statement includes a clear distinction of both points of parity and points of difference among the benefits. But in today’s hypercompetitive and cluttered markets, this distinction is sometimes not enough to clearly differentiate and effectively guide decisions. In a world where we have increasingly less time to choose from among 8 whitening toothpastes, 10 anti-dandruff shampoos and 125 drink choices from a single machine, how can people truly understand nuanced or, worse, undifferentiated benefits without comparisons?

Moreover, how will our organizations be able to provide these comparisons unless we’ve clearly identified how our brand or business is different? In Organizing Genus, Warren Bennis highlights that “virtually every great group defines itself in terms of an enemy.”  He goes on to describe how at Apple, “IBM functioned as the Great Satan… big inelegant symbols of a reactionary corporate culture that Apple despised” and that Steve Jobs led “pirates” and “resistance fighters” against the “Orwellian zombies” at IBM. Even Roberto Goizueta, the legendary CEO of The Coca-Cola Company, said that “organizations who don’t have an enemy need to create one.”

This is the power of the “unlike” statement. For your target who lives in a cluttered, fast-paced world, the “unlike” statement can clearly define how a brand or product or business is different. And it can more clearly define an “enemy” for internal stakeholders who need to make decisions everyday about what is and what is not consistent with the positioning. So, unlike the classic positioning statement, let’s make sure to define our enemy in our positioning from now (see what I did there?).

We’re proud to announce that one of (r)evolution’s Managing Principals, Brad White, was nominated for the 2012 ARF Great Mind Awards. The ARF Great Mind Awards recognize and celebrate individuals who contribute to the excellence and advancement of advertising research across several categories. Winners will be announced on March 28th in NYC.

You can find out more by visiting: http://www.thearf.org/great-mind-12.php

Frank Deford, a syndicated sports writer, recently wrote a column about Jeremy Lin: Looking For Lin In All The Wrong Places. I know what you’re thinking. What can we in business learn from a sports writer? A lot, it turns out. Deford highlighted an issue that is just a pervasive in sports as it is in business: assets hidden in plain sight. Lin is not just good; he is a phenomenon who had his own Top 10 list on ESPN last night. But for Lin to be discovered “a half-dozen weird happenstances happened to occur — the owners’ lockout, salary-cap manipulations, trades that fell through, injuries and, at last, a coach’s sheer desperation.” Lin’s discovery should never have been the product of weird happenstances.

He led his high school basketball team to a state championship and played on a Division 1 college team for four years.  He was the first player in the history of his conference to record at least 1,450 points, 450 rebounds, 400 assists and 200 steals. In short, he was in plain sight all along. But he was not a product of the conventional channels to the NBA: Lin played at Harvard (who has only had four players ever in the NBA and, before Lin, no one since 1953). Deford laments that “nobody in basketball had the perception or the guts to say: You know, I don’t care what anybody else thinks, this kid Jeremy Lin has it… but none of the geniuses — not one scout, one coach, one general manager — could see what everyone sees now when it’s fashionable. None of the people paid to envision, could envision.”

Hidden assets in businesses require the same two things to be discovered: the imagination to look beyond conventional wisdom and the courage to be an advocate for challenging conventional wisdom in your organization.

Source: http://www.npr.org/2012/02/15/146856935/looking-for-lin-in-all-the-wrong-places

By Jessica Wilkerson

People Are No Longer Buying Products or Services……they choose a company. With a plethora of product choices, it has become far too difficult and time-consuming to attempt to evaluate each offering. It is much easier now to determine if the company you’re buying from shares your values and is likely to provide a good experience. We’ve known for a long time that a brand is a heuristic for consumers – a short cut to limit the amount of thinking that is required to evaluate and compare products. But the American consumer has matured beyond using only brands as heuristics to using the company behind each brand as the heuristic.  Or perhaps the company brand is just taking a more prominent role, which would lead to the conclusion that the “brand” is not necessarily the brand, but an amalgam of what the brand stands for and what the company stands for.

This perspective on American consumption is evidenced in Millward Browns’ studies showing that brands with the greatest growth are those that are built on purpose and values, not product attributes.

Commonalities across purpose-driven organizations:

1.Have a charismatic leader who lives the purpose through symbolic action and positive reinforcement

2.Are surrounded by people who embody the purpose in their personal and professional lives

3.Have strong stakeholder advocacy by being a servant, protector, and inspiration

4.Use purpose as the prism for growth and decision-making

5.Earn profits in a way that is consistent with the purpose

At (r)evolution, we believe purpose is more fundamental than brand positioning. It is commonly seen and heard in communications, it guides decisions across the entire organization from operations to M&A to customer service to HR to communications. It is NOT the existing corporate strategy, vision or mission. It is NOT something new or the communications strategy du jour. It is an excavation and discovery of something that already exists. It has immediate credibility and power because it is an articulation of something everyone knows implicitly.

Importantly, the brand’s purpose is always a human truth – something that every person knows and understands. It articulates something unique and distinct about a company and brand’s role in the world and its reason for being. It is most evident in times when the organization must take a stand, like J&J did during the Tylenol crisis. Once the purpose is understood, it can be linked to the existing positioning to develop a comprehensive communications strategy/platform both internally and externally. Eventually, it can and should be used to guide the decisions of the entire organization. Understanding what your company’s purpose starts with a fundamental question, “If your company were gone tomorrow, what would the world lose?”

By Michael Hartley

Marketers have longed championed the cause of branding, especially in the B2C space, citing such benefits as product memorability, familiarity, brand loyalty, and lower product marketing costs. But beyond these quantifiable costs, brands are also a reflection of the company’s spirit, goals, and position in the marketplace. One useful tool in understanding a brand is to think of it in the context of a superhero.

The Importance of Origin

Origin stories explain three important elements of a superhero: mission, identity and powers. Consider the origin story of Batman. Eight-year-old Bruce Wayne, walking with his parents in an alley, runs away as muggers approach and subsequently witnesses the murder of his parents. His traumatic story serves as the backdrop for the creation of Batman. Bruce’s mission quickly becomes clear: to avenge his parents’ death. His identity—millionaire and owner of Wayne Enterprises—explains his ability keep his Batman alter-ego secret. And while Batman has no supernatural power, his Batsuit, Batmobile, and Batcave enable his fight against Gotham’s most evil villains.

In a brand, origin stories are just as important as they are for superheroes. They help the consumer understand how the brand came to be (its identity), what it stands for (its mission), and how it will change the world (its powers). Consider Facebook—a brand with an origin story so powerful it became a book and then a movie. Controversies and drama aside, most people know that college student Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook so that Harvard students could share photos. The Facebook identity was, and still is, one of fun, ease, and empowerment. While its mission has grown in scale, in principle it remains the same: to connect people and enable them to share personal information. Finally, Facebook’s power is that empowers users with the ability to expand their network. Users choose to join the network, choose what content they upload, and choose how they share that information. Facebook’s humble origin and simple mission resonate with consumers and have enabled its tremendous growth over the past 5 years.

Understanding your power and its emotional benefits

Superheroes rely on special powers or abilities to carry out their missions. For companies, identifying your power—at the highest level—can help pinpoint the emotional benefits you provide a customer that truly drive brand loyalty. Coca-Cola is one company that has embraced emotional branding and used it to drive preference. Advertisers love to tell the story of how Coca-Cola’s marketing department defined Santa Claus as we know him today: plump, jolly, and wearing a red suit. Thanks to magazine advertising beginning in 1931, Santa Claus became a de facto symbol of Coca-Cola. While not a superhero in the traditional sense, Santa Claus does have a power—a power that lies in his gift giving (a functional benefit) and the happiness that comes with it (emotional benefits). Coca-Cola has long known that their power isn’t making soda or acquiring sub-brands. Rather, Coca-Cola’s most recent marketing campaign has one simple message: open happiness. After 80 years of branding and marketing, the world’s number one came back to the power of its icon, Santa Claus, to drive differentiation.

How to differentiate your brand

Finally, thinking of your brand as a superhero can help you differentiate your company and understand it’s position in the marketplace. Is your company front-and-center, like Superman? Or does it remain behind the scenes until the customer puts up a Bat Symbol? Or maybe your company empowers the customer, like the ring gives power to the Green Lantern.  Understanding the personality of your brand can help you position your company in the marketplace to be differentiated from other brands.

By Danny Chapman

Coca-Cola, the world’s largest beverage company, began changing its Coca-Cola product cans and bottle tops from iconic red to snow white as they raise awareness for the habitats of the polar bears they’ve so long featured in their holiday advertising. The design will make its way on to over 1.4 billion cans and will allow consumers to donate $1 by texting the package code to357357. Coca-Cola plans to donate around $4 million dollars towards the WWF’s efforts to maintain a tundra habitat twice the size of Texas between Greenland and Canada.(1)

This isn’t the Coca-Cola Company’s first major can design change this year—the company gave its Diet Coke product a much needed makeover for the fall season. The new can, which features the Diet Coke logo scaled up is both interesting and different.

For a brand that, according to Interbrand’s Guide to the Most Valuable Brands(2), is the most well recognized brand globally, it can be a risky to change the identity of your product. Packaging is the final frontier before purchase for customers. However these two can changes reflect the power that great branding can have. In terms of the first-ever white can, Coca-Cola is able to not only draw attention to their product but also demonstrate corporate citizenship through support of the environment and its beloved polar bear mascots. Not all CSR programs work for companies, but in this case, Coca-Cola has found a perfect balance between strategy and charity.

Sources:

(1)http://www.forbes.com/sites/eco-nomics/2011/10/27/in-first-coca-cola-cans-go-white-for-polar-bears/
(2)http://issuu.com/interbrand/docs/bgb_report_us_version

Managing Principal Brad White is serving as a Conference Chair for the 2011 PDMA Annual Product Innovation Management Conference <http://conference.pdma.org/> . This year’s conference is being held in Phoenix, AZ from October 29-November 2. Clients and friends of (r)evolution can use the registration code “CM11GC” for a 20% discount to the registration fee. We hope to see you in Phoenix.

Only 20% of Americans can say they strongly enjoy their jobs. This creates nearly 40 hours or more per week of dislike, boredom, or just plain hate for a large majority of Americans. .

Career well-being is an essential part of a healthy and enjoyable life. People with high career well-being wake up with something to look forward to that day at work. These people are involved in something that fits their strengths, gives them a feeling of purpose, and allows them to attain their goals.

At (r)evolution, we believe an essential element to career well-being is developing trusted relationships. We believe that our business is founded on relationships, our relationships are founded on trust, and trust is founded on integrity. We strive to maintain open and honest relationships with each other and we seek the same with our clients. Developing these relationships entails committing to a common purpose, so that we can lead with flexibility and agility to uncover solutions. Below are some tips* on how focusing on relationship management can lead to better career well-being for employees and, in turn, better client results.

o Show signs of truly caring about your employees: Many managers care about their employees’ progression within the company, but it is also important to care about them as a whole person. This means not just seeing the employee as a means to an end, but as an end in itself. Employee respect can be gained beyond merely creating results and working hard; it can be created on personal connections that extend outside of the office.

o Be open about the challenges you face outside the work place: It is a common belief that personal issues and dilemmas should be kept outside the workplace. However, if you have heart and passion for what you do and it shows, then others will follow your lead. Being open and showing your emotions can lead to deeper understanding from all parties and can create a positive, low-stress environment, allowing employees to take full advantage of their intellectual capabilities.

o Require continual follow-up to help employees manage their well-being: This doesn’t mean project feedback, but general Q&A sessions based on how they’re doing physically and emotionally at work. This is a great way to gain an emotional, financial, and competitive advantage for your organization. Be open with your employees and they will be open with you.

At (r)evolution we love what we do. We pride ourselves on our people and our relationships with each other and our clients, which creates strong career well-being for all individuals involved. We believe strong well-being allows us to think differently and deliver unquestionable value.

When you have employees with high career well-being, they’ll do great work, support each other, and go to great lengths and new heights to create unquestionable value. Essentially, a comfortable and thought-provoking atmosphere in which employees feel they are emotionally secure can lead to focused creativity and innovative thinking

Employees who agree with the statement “my manager cares about me as a person” are more likely to*:

- Are more likely to be top performers

- Produce higher quality work

- Are less likely to be sick

- Are less likely to change job

- Are less likely to get injured on the job

*Source: Tom Rath & Jim Harter, Well Being: The Five Essential Elements, Copyright 2010 Gallup, Inc.