Innovation: Your Only Path to Survival/Success People now care about how your brand is innovating. Discover how Phenomblue encourages innovation through three internal initiatives, and how they work together to make us better business partners.
+ + + + Innovation: Your Only Path to Survival/Success Executive Summary Customer perceptions of your brand are now shaped by functional and emotional experiences with interfaces and software, not just with your goods or services. Today, people care about utility and relevance. Your business gains relevance by presenting tools and products that help people complete a desired action. The products and experiences you offer can be software for use on phones, in a kiosk or anywhere that provides customers with a useful experience. In other words, people care about how your brand innovates. In this guide, our brand experience experts will explain: How and why your brand now lives and dies based on software. The three initiatives that are at the heart of Phenomblue s innovation focus. The reasons why our innovation initiatives make us better business partners. 2
Introduction Companies are undergoing a radical transition with branding. Advertising and digital marketing are no longer just about display ads or TV commercials or connecting via social media. They re about creating meaningful tools and relevant user experiences. Customer perceptions perceptions of your brand are now shaped by functional and emotional experiences with interfaces and software, not just with your goods or services. You will either create the software or you will be the software. Douglas Rushkoff Brand Software Think about it this way, a brand is essentially a sum of consumer perceptions. These perceptions are based on the experiences consumers have with a brand s products. These product experiences have become multidimensional no longer solely based on the action of purchasing a good or service. Experiences are now defined as any interaction one has with a product, service or company. Interactions tend to occur on digital platforms (cell phones, tablets, laptops, touch screens and so on), because so many consumers today move seamlessly between technologies in their everyday life. These digital interactions are primarily through interfaces or screens, which run and function through software. In a sense, your brand is software. Brand Consumer Perception Consumer Perception Customer Experience Interactions Digital Platforms Interfaces Brand Customer Experience Interactions Digital Platforms Software Software Interfaces Relevance Through Innovation You should now understand how your business and brand rest in the hands of software, and as a result, the focus of your marketing initiatives should now be on creating useful brand experiences, not just ads. No one cares about great messaging when it s presented with a disconnected experience. People care about utility, something that offers relevance to their lives. Your business gains this relevance by presenting tools and products that people can use. The products and experiences you offer can be software for use on phones, in a kiosk or anywhere that provides customers with a useful experience. In other words, people now care more than ever about how your brand innovates. Innovation now needs be at the heart of your organization s strategy. This is not a trend. It s the new reality and it s only going to get faster and more direct. More screens, more interfaces, more software. This is not a marketing thing. It s a survival thing. Innovation is the bridge to relevance and relevance is the only path to survival. Non-relevance means non-existence in a crowded space where everyone and everything is fighting for the same thing: attention. Innovation is the only way to survive in a crowded marketplace of shiny objects. How We Innovate We help brands provide real utility to consumers. We provide our clients with relevance. We do this through interfaces and software. Phenomblue has invested a tremendous amount of our resources and process to cultivate a staff and culture where innovation reflects top-of-mind focus. At the heart of our innovation focus are three initiatives that represent an extreme version of the product cycle: 1. Bonus Day Bonus Day allows the agency to experiment with roles, responsibilities, new ideas and methods. It s a product cycle sprint where small groups must make decisions quickly. Think of it as our quarterly flash-exercise in creativity. We go dark for 24 hours, and everyone works on whatever they want. The only requirement is they present their achievement to the agency the next day. 3
This is not a marketing thing. It s a survival thing. Innovation is the bridge to relevance and relevance is the only path to survival.
Many Bonus Day projects become candidates for our Skunkworks program, and all of them inspire us and make us better partners for our clients. 2. Skunkworks Our Skunkworks program facilitates research and development of viable commercial opportunities. The opportunities that warrant more commercial exploration are brought before agency leadership, vetted, and if chosen, produced during client gap time. The process is iterative. We do a little, think about it, add a feature test and do it again. This represents the closest thing to a traditional product cycle. Once ready for commercial exposure, the opportunities are taken to market through a proprietary platform. Skunkworks not only gives the selected IP a shot at the big time, but it creates a conduit between our agency and the market without taking our eye off the ball. 3. Signature Reserve Signature Reserve is a twice-yearly event where we embark on an internal passion project. A peer-elected committee solicits ideas, chooses a challenge and drives the execution through 200 hours of billable time. As ambassadors of the agency, the committee engages various internal groups to deliver the final work. We can take our time, but also keep moving forward to see the process through. Examples of work completed during Signature Reserve are Daydreamer and Movie Lotto. Innovation Makes Us Better Business Partners We connect consumers with brands through technology. That s what we do. Innovation is not a choice it s who we are, embedded in our DNA. While often fun, these initiatives are not meant to be a company gimmick or novelty. These are not meant to merely differentiate us from other agencies these initiatives are survival training, keeping us thinking and acting like product managers and a software company. It allows our team to understand the process and cycles of product ideation, development and launch. When we act like product managers, we re thinking about overall value instead of bill-by-the-hour advertising consultants. Innovation ensures that client solutions are focused on utility and relevance, in addition to messaging and design. Our innovation initiatives make us better business partners for three reasons: Better Client Solutions: Investing in innovation we generate our own experience and dramatically expand the opportunities for creative client solutions. With help from these projects, Phenomblue has the background to execute on just about any digital experience imaginable. Plus, our team is ahead of the curve and able to integrate technology into our lives just like the audience we reach. Product Cycle Expertise: We instituted Bonus Day, Skunkworks and Signature Reserve to create an innovation program that consistently pushes us through short, medium and extended time frames to mimic product development cycles. This creates an environment where everyone has an understanding and expertise in researching, designing, developing, deploying and marketing new products and services.. New Insights/Technologies: Innovation leads to new products and services and the occasional DIY keggerator. When our insights identify the need for a tool that does not exist, we often build it. In many cases, we re able to then offer these tools to our clients. Some of our product examples are our totally free QR code generator HelloQR, Wordpress plugins, iphone apps and productivity tools. Conclusion We survive on our ability to innovate. We believe the more relevant products our people produce, the more successful our clients will be. Providing innovation has led to big successes for our clients. We d be happy to tell you more and help you implement these types of initiatives in your own organization. About Us We are a brand experience agency of dreamers, innovators and creators working to connect people and brands. The agency provides full-service marketing and technology services, partnering with clients to deliver thought leadership, contagious ideas and solutions that work hard. Founded in 2004, with offices in Omaha, Neb., and Los Angeles, Phenomblue is a leading member of the Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA). Work by Phenomblue has been. featured in USA Today, Ad Age, Fast Company, The Wall Street Journal, Inspired Magazine and has received recognition from the Webby Awards, the CLIO Awards, SXSW Interactive Awards and the Favourite Website Awards. To speak with a member of our Engagement group about working with us, or to hear more about our approach to innovation and utility, please drop us a line at heyyohey@phenomblue.com. 5
We are a brand experience agency of dreamers, innovators and creators working to connect people and brands. phenomblue.com
For more information on innovation at Phenomblue, visit: phenomblue.com/innovation