The Future Foundation recently expanded to the USA – and meeting many US brands has given us an insight into a marketing trend that is shaking the foundations of the industry stateside and globally. One of the strongest sentiments is an emphasis on the need for immediate results, despite the recognised need for innovation. These two seem to be mutually incompatible. Surely innovation can only come from a proper and extensive investment in generating insights, with a properly constructed programme of ideation, with product or service prototyping to establish which ideas will actually work?

At a conference I chaired recently in Boston, I heard how Eli Lilly work on multibillion dollar new drug investment programmes over at least seven years; and that Campbells’ spent years researching how the brand could transform itself to appeal to a new younger audience. How does this sit with the intense pressures of greater short-termism borne of five years of continuing economic uncertainty?

This is something that most western markets have been facing, however many predicted upturns and positive indicators are unearthed by the soothsayers of economic forecasting – we have lost our faith and are now even more wedded to the treadmill of quarterly results, if not weekly trading figures, as so many retailers are. We need to maximise the value of our investment in innovation just as consumers need to maximise the return on the cash in their purses. So, how can firms innovate whilst keeping their eye on the short term? Surely that is a recipe for disaster?

As in so many things right now, it is the digital space that is proving to be the answer, particularly the smart mobile devices that are spreading like wildfire through the populations of the East and West and almost everywhere in between. And anyone can get into the App game – big players, small players, established brands or new. Arguably it has been easiest for the young businesses and fleet-of-foot to capitalise immediately on the new technology, but now big brands are beginning to realise that this is a playground for them too and a plethora of new services, extensions and engagement devices are multiplying.

Some recent examples include:

• Fujitsu launching Hada Memori, a smartphone app designed to help women monitor the condition of their skin. To use the app, individuals simply hold a card featuring a 15 millimetre hole to their face and then take a photo. Subsequently, the app records and analyses data about the user’s skin – allowing them to track areas such as skin tone, blemishes and pore size

• In the US, Triad Energy introduced its Triad Wall – a wall display which shows the real-time energy usage not only of the owner’s household but also that of others in the local vicinity to promote social norms constraining excessive use.

• Branches of US department store Nordstrom have been equipped with iPod Touches in an effort to reduce check-out waiting times.

• Marriott International is using Twitter as an online concierge-style service, responding in real-time to complaints or queries posted by guests. By offering responses in real-time, it hopes to offer instant assistance to those who have been frustrated by their experience of the company as well as demonstrate the premium it places on customer service.

And this expanding territory doesn’t have to be insight free, inhabited purely by the geeks and hipsters who were leading the wave. We are finding that the ‘fast’ trends which Future Foundation works to identify at the rate of two per month, combined with the latest global examples of where these have been recognised and put to work as a the basis for a new commercial offer, can be a powerful basis for sparking ideas and generating immediately testable prototypes in workshops with clients. Also we noticed that many software vendors are selling community management systems designed to create and manage innovation panels and agencies have theirs lined up for instant use – the smartly-named Collaboratory by Sterlying Brands, for example, providing qualified and usable feedback on ideas from anywhere in the world.

Fast innovation is going global and requires a more immediate and rapid response set of tools. We don’t think it is going to replace the longer established approaches and programmes that exist or the need for deep insights on which to build category-busting ideas and market creating products, but it is a necessary approach in choppy waters.

Ogilvy & Mather India scooped the Future Foundation sponsored Special Prize for Best Use of Insight at the prestigious IPA Effectiveness Awards last night.  This special prize champions the use of insight within planning and demonstrates how effective use can provide a tangible difference to communication results – the O&M campaign stood out as an example of robust insight and its positioning at the very heart of a brand campaign. It was selected by the panel of industry judges as a demonstration of the way that a true understanding of cultural signifiers and social context can affect the nature and meaning of consumption in particular countries.

The campaign used in-depth research and insight to reposition Cadbury Dairy Milk in India, creating an association in the minds of Indian consumers of chocolate as part of the shared experience of meetha – a shared happiness ritual – rather than as a self-indulgent treat.

As judges of the award, we were delighted to see such beacon of excellence for how insight should be applied at the heart of brand direction; of a genuine ‘aha’ moment which became the inspiration of an exciting and emotionally powerful campaign. For us, the campaign demonstrates perfectly the necessity of fine tuning global brand positioning to specific market conditions, in order to create genuinely effective advertising – knowing how to balance the dynamism of wider trends and local market insights is critical for today’s global brands.

For more on the win, check out our website http://www.futurefoundation.net/press_releases/show/61.  For more on the IPA awards, http://www.ipa.co.uk/.

If you’d like to discuss ways to make insight work more effectively for your organisation, please call Karen Canty or Josie Watson on 020 3008 4889.

The Future Foundation has been monitoring an aspirational trend we call Authentiseeking for more than five years now. Born of a confluence of three other long term trends in our stable – Ethical Consumerism, Local Preference, and the Simplification of Complexity – this is about a powerful urge that many people feel to get in touch with what they believe is a more ‘real’ world. The idea of what constitutes an authentic, unmediated way of living is of course, a fascinating construct to explore and one that has multiple components. It is also driving a demand for new services amongst marketers and innovators from firms in our line of work thus creating a strong business-to-business angle to consider. More and more, it seems there is a desire amongst business people to get out of the office, away from the computer screen and to be exposed to raw and unpredictable environments and experiences – including debates, lectures and tours. The IPA recently took groups of agency heads to China and Silicon Valley as the most effective way of learning what is really happening.  The idea of consumer safaris which provide direct access to curated experiences in the same physical space as craftspeople and niche services targeted at specific consumer groups is gaining momentum – such as The Liminal Space run by artists and designers. And every night of the week, the business community in London can choose from myriad events, debates and tours ranging from art tours with House 7 (organised by the Soho House group) or high level debates with Intelligence Squared that provide privileged access to the intellectual and cultural coal face for those needing ideas, inspiration and insights.

For many consumers Authentiseeking is about a return to a more natural mode of existence –in harmony with nature and our ‘true selves’ – as an antidote to the consequences of mass production and the consumer society that shapes so much of our existence and reference points these days in what is also an increasingly urbanised world. Rural sociologists from Newcastle University working with us on a Defra-funded scenario project on the future of the countryside, described it as ‘symbolic rurality’, by which they meant the idealised image of the countryside that we all carry around in our heads, and want to be there for us, even if we find it almost impossible to leave the city these days. More than 50% agree that they feel a need to be closer to the country, rising to two thirds amongst the baby boomer age group.  This certainly contributes to desire for second homes – in an attempt to inhabit that rose- covered cottage in the country although fewer than 10% actually own one. And it doubtless drove the much-heralded ‘downshifting’ trend that was widely discussed by journalists in the quality press in the late 1990s – although by our calculations only 7% of people could ever have afforded to seriously consider this option.

There is also a more challenging explanation of the Authentiseeking trend. This proposes, following in the footsteps of the recently-deceased French social theorist Jean Baudrillard, that our daily lives in the modern world are becoming a negation of reality as we once understood it. With proliferating communications channels, now filled by signs and symbols constructed to communicate and promote the products and services of the consumer society, he argued that we effectively live in a simulacrum which simulates physical and emotional reality, but are ersatz representations and thus less able to satisfy our real needs. And the growing amount of screen time that each of us is now giving to the range of digital devices we own could be accentuating the scope and depth of the simulation possible.  We spend more than ten hours a week on average on line and nearly half of the UK population is extending that through ownership of a smart phone.  It is no surprise that many express the need to get away from it all – from the 60% who agree that they sometimes want to just switch off their phones and computers, to the 40% who now define luxury in terms of relaxation and escape rather than material goods – suggesting a wish to get behind the façade and reconnect with our true self(another potent construct in our post-Freudian age).

Clearly this creates a big challenge for marketers and advertisers – how to communicate that a brand is authentic through using the very complex language of signs in a more digitally facilitated world that is creating the simulacrum itself? No wonder semioticians are becoming more widely consulted – they are becoming part of the deciphering equipment that brand managers can deploy, along with a wider tool kit of good insight and probing analysis.  Jack Daniels’ current advertising is a good example of how the emphasis on the real, the slow and heritage can work for a smaller niche brand. Divine chocolate puts the accent on their co-owing grower community – ethics and authenticity are mutually reinforcing.  And some big names are beginning to figure out what it requires them to do and it can tick another box by demonstrating transparency too. Oxfam offer visits to overseas projects as a prize for supporters in a regular draw and Asda now provide live feeds from webcams in farms and factories round the world. Authentiseeking may be well established, but it is gathering momentum in response to the spread of digital interaction and our long term responses to the reality of living in the urbanised consumer world.

To give our clients a taste of the real thing, Future Foundation will be hosting our very first consumer safari on 28th June, a curated adventure into luxury, sustainability, connoisseurship plus a futuristic food tasting.  We still have a few spaces left so if you’re interested in attending, please contact Josie Watson on 0203 008 4889.

The future of effective communication has to be about ideas, as it has always been. The best advertising is clever, interesting and creates a new perspective on the human condition relevant to a brand or proposition in some way. In the good old days there were clever creative-types who by dint of sheer genius seemed to do it naturally. Later, planning teams created disciplined approaches to generating effective ideas and processes that mere mortals could use to generate really good ideas. As time went on, and the world got more complex and interconnected, this involved greater degrees of collaboration across disciplines and more focus on really understanding the proposition as well as the way that media were evolving and would affect communication. So far, so adaptive – advertising is chock-full of intelligent, adaptable, problem solving types after all.

Equally, innovation has never been more important to the success of advertising and marketing communications. We live in a modern world where the proliferation of content, channels and media means that most messages will drown in the cacophony of noise and competition that is the saturated, always-on media environment of today. Whilst innovation has been big news for some time in the business world and the wider economy, the human tendency, as always, to define, categorise and control means that for most people the term innovation is about devising new products and services.  But in the growing space that is created by the expanding bubble of personalised digital communication, innovation must be as much about generating a rich seam of new, interesting and different ways to engage with the consumer. This engagement is key to creating the powerful social and cultural construct that is a brand and to effectively changing behaviour - whether for social, philanthropic or commercial purposes.

But now, the field of play, with networked communications and ubiquitous digital channels that reach in into every nook and cranny of the consumer psyche has got so vast and amorphous that agencies are faced with an ever-more intense challenge, perhaps, than ever before. How can they generate powerful, motivating and stand-out ideas that are so good that they can have a life of their own, provide space for consumers to play and pass on and become integrated into the cultural landscape of the day-to-day?  Because in a world where brands become verbs, such as Google, Twitter and Facebook, the prize of effectiveness has to be integration into the consumers rich palette of daily repertoires and activities.  It is worth noting that many social nouns are also becoming verbs - family and community are all about what we do, rather than what we are, which gives a further clue as to the paramount importance of the active consumer in creating social and consumer reality these days.

Ideas are born from many different sources - in fact what seems to distinguish the best and most original ideas nowadays is the ability to combine insights from a range of disciplines and perspectives into a single over-arching and powerful thought or proposition that will corral consumer attention.

From research we have undertaken published in  The Future of Insight and from the workshops we have been running with our Insight Community over the past year,  we have found that the nature and role of insight is rapidly transforming from being a research-process to an idea-formulation to transform the ordinary to the special. Great emphasis is now placed on the experience of getting an insight - the “Aha!” moment as many people call it.

More and more of our clients (both agency and client-side) recognise that such breakthroughs can only come from a genuinely broad-based, open and collaborative process. This requires the right mix of skills - increasingly bringing in people from different disciplines - as well as the willingness to constantly experiment and innovate with approaches, to turning research into inspirational material and working methods to maximise the quality and range of ideas. The most important facet is then being able to capture and communicate the insight in a way that transforms the mind-set of everyone involved and this remains one of the biggest challenges facing our clients. It is almost as if insight professionals have to become marketers of their own ideas to maximise their impact.

This year the Future Foundation is sponsoring the IPA Effectiveness Awards and as part of this year’s judging panel we look forward to witnessing many examples of clever insights, ideas and impressive displays of innovation, which in order to clinch one of these coveted awards will also have had to have been clearly identified, communicated and measured in terms of their effectiveness. In particular we are delighted to be sponsoring a Special Prize at the Awards which will reward the paper where insight was at the heart of thinking and significantly influenced the return on marketing investment. Entering these Awards are no mean feat and require enormous dedication, but for companies keen to prove the power of their marketing communications, winning an IPA Effectiveness Award is the industry equivalent of an Olympic Gold.”

For more information on the IPA Effectiveness Awards or to enter, please visit www.ipaeffectivenessawards.co.uk

f you would like a copy of ‘The Future of Insight’, please email Josiew@futurefoundation.net