The Importance of Brand in an Era of Digital Darwinism
Excerpts of an unpublished appendix for The End of Business as Usual… by Brian Solis
Markets, consumer behavior and how businesses connect with customers are all directly impacted by technology.
The increasingly important role of technology, combined with global economic unrest, means a company’s brand is more important today than it has ever been. Consumers, in search of certainty, rely heavily on a brand’s symbolism and significance
Digital Darwinism is the evolution of consumer behavior when society and technology evolve faster than some companies’ ability to adapt.
Babson College cited a rather humbling statistic; “Over 40% of the companies that were at the top of the Fortune 500 in 2000 were no longer there in 2010.”
24/7 Wall St. published its annual list of “Ten Brands That Will Disappear in 2012.” The publication predicts the demise of some of the world’s most recognizable brands, including Sony Pictures, American Apparel and Nokia.
“For me, marketing is about values. This is a very noisy world and we’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. So, we have to be very clear what we want them to know about us.” (Steve Jobs)
The company then looked inward in an attempt to answer the questions: Who is Apple; What does it stand for and where does the brand fit in the world.
“What we’re about isn’t making boxes for people to get their jobs done,” said Jobs during the company meeting,” Apple’s core value is that we believe people with passion can change the world…for the better. Those people, crazy enough to think that they can change the world are the ones that actually do.…Here’s to the crazy ones.”
McDonald’s is adapting to a new era, creating an experience marked by muted colors, wooden tables and faux leather chairs. And, that’s just the beginning. McDonald’s is pouring $1 billion into redesigning the consumer experience.
Everything begins with embracing a culture of innovation and adaptation — a culture that recognizes the impact of disruptive technology and how consumer preference and affinity is evolving.
If a organizations cannot recognize opportunities to further compete for attention and relevance, it cannot, by default, create meaningful connections, a desirable brand or drive shareable experiences. The brand, as a result, will lost preference in the face of consumer choice, which may one day lead to its succumbing to digital Darwinism.
Coffee & Power – It’s A Crowdsourcing Workclub Hybrid
Coffee & Power is the current project of Philip Rosedale, the founder and former CEO of Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life. It’s a crowdsourcing startup that Rosedale founded in 2010 with former Linden Lab colleague Ryan Downe and former Accenture consultant Fred Heiberger. And it’s all about making it easier for people to do small chunks of creative work for one another, and get paid for it. The idea has to components, there is a website where people can post small jobs they need done or are willing to do. And two physical Coffee & Power “workclubs,” in San Francisco and Santa Monica, where members can meet to collaborate or deliver services. These are the “key enabling features” that they copied from Secon Life and that help sellers and buyers find one another, decide who’s trustworthy, and pay for work completed. The first element is rich communications, in the form of profiles, reviews, status updates, and a live public chat space (no 3-D avatars this time). The second is radical transparency, meaning the details of every transaction are available for everyone to see. The third is a virtual currency, called C$ in an echo of Second Life’s Linden Dollars or L$.
Investors have been paying a lot of attention lately to bigger crowdsourcing players like oDesk and Elance, as well as upstarts such as TaskRabbit, MobileWorks, and Zaarly. (via xconomy)
Hello Future – The Bionic Exoskeleton
Ekso is the bionic exoskeleton that allows wheelchair users to stand and walk.
How it works
Guided by a clinician, Ekso utilizes four electromechanical motors and
an intelligent algorithm to provide patients with a smooth natural gait.
It will debut in rehabilitation centers in early 2012
and enable users to stand, walk, make turns and sit.
Camera That Can Capture At The Speed Of Light [video]
A team from the MIT media lab has created a camera with a “shutter speed” of one trillion exposures per second — enabling it to record light itself traveling from one point to another. Using a heavily modified Streak Tube (which is normally used to intensify photons into electron streams), the team could snap a single image of a laser as it passed through a soda bottle. In order to create the slow-motion film in the video we’ve got after the break, the team had to replicate the experiment hundreds of times. The stop-motion footage shows how light bounces through the bottle, collecting inside the opaque cap before dispersing. The revolutionary snapper may have a fast shutter but the long time it takes to process the images have earned it the nickname of the “the world’s slowest fastest camera.” (via engadget.com)
Invoked Computing For Ubiquitous AR – Complete Change of Perspective
We currently place a lot of emphasis on the digital gadgets we own.
What if we were looking at the wrong paradigm and it’s not about the form factor or the physical object?
What if instead was all about what we wanted to do and achieve?
Welcome to the world of Invoked Computing from the University of Tokyo.
Think of the consequences…
1. All the stuff we could get rid of.
2. The environmental benefits of doing that
3. The lamented demise of the electronics product designer and product design (via Core 77)
Randomly Juxtaposing – How Software Can Help Overcome Habitual Ways Of Thinking
Randomly juxtaposing diagrams of two everyday objects.
The Creatomatic by Nova Jiang:
“The Creatomatic is a piece of software designed to accelerate the imagination and prompt new inventions. It works by randomly juxtaposing diagrams of two everyday objects from a selection of hundreds. Through free association, the two objects can prompt the invention of an entirely new object, which can be practical or nonsensical. Inspired by the accidental nature of creativity, the Creatomatic uses the technique of surprise to overcome habitual ways of thinking and short circuit rational control.“
(via liftlab_blogs)
Quantum Levitation [Video]
Wow that’s awesome! This video from The University of Tel-Aviv showing a disc of yttrium barium copper oxide floating due to quantum levitation. It’s pretty crazy …
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