Great Monday //

Recently, my colleague Robert Richman and I were asked to speak at the DMI Annual Conference in New York. Here we explain how culture is the key to building a design-driven company.

From the inside: Steelcase

From its 1937 creation of a Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired desk to its 1996 investment in product design juggernaut IDEO, Furniture-company-turned-workspace-consultant Steelcase has a long history of not only investing in new ideas but successfully bringing them to market.

The latest in this long tradition is a newly formed group called Growth Initiatives, anascent project that focuses on creating, testing, and bringing new innovations to market. The group’s objective is to capture and systematically fund potential revenue streams as they look 5 and 10 years into the future. To accomplish this Growth Initiatives uses a rigorous venture capital-style investing process that grants progressively larger amounts of resources as an idea proves its value. This method mitigates Steelcase’s investment risk and ensures that only the most viable ideas move forward.

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Untangling brand and customer experience, in 10 minutes or less from Brandon Schauer on Vimeo.

Does the brand define the customer experience, or is the customer experience the brand? Your work may involve both, but you probably attack problems with a bias for one or the other.

Earlier this year I asked Josh Levine of Great Monday to simply describe the relationship between brand and experience, and I like what he said.

I went back and dug deeper with Josh to clear up the differences between how he described it and and the way I often see the relationships between brand and experience being practiced. What emerged was this illustrated question and answer, attempting to untangle brand and customer experience in just 9 minutes.

As humans, the drive to connect with others who share common values is an inevitable force. This behavior is so fundamental, so critical to functioning societies, academics have dedicated their careers to understanding the complex dynamic and ritual of tribal cultures.

Of all the years of academic research spent understanding tribal affiliation, inclusion, identity and shared cohesion, it’s only recently that business has taken notice. That’s not to say commerce based tribes haven’t been around forever—they have—but until now they’ve formed organically, without the considered attempts of brand managers to leverage this platform.
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I just found this article on HBR by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, and I couldn’t agree more.

Challenging times divide winners from losers. Winners survive because they never forget the important enduring truth: High quality products and services are created by engaged employees who know and care about customers.

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Does Snickers understand marketing on the social web? Does its parent company, Mars? Read the whole article here.

1) “It’s the same old story – brand shirk the love of consumers in favor of control”

2) “Let’s face it – Mars, the parent company of Snickers, has been struggling to understand the web” Read the rest of this entry »

Culture (from the Latin cultura stemming from colere, meaning “to cultivate”)^[1] is difficult to define. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of “culture” in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions.^[2] However, the word “culture” is most commonly used in three basic senses:

• excellence of taste in the fine arts and humanities
• an integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for symbolic thought and social learning
• the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group.