Nonlinear Thinking

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12 Consumer Values

The 12 Consumer Values to Drive Technology-related Product and Service Innovations was created by the Washington, DC-based research and consulting firm Social Technologies.  It forms a nice pillar and touchstone for anyone launching a marketing, interactive or social media initiative i.e. is my project/deliverable going to align with some/enough of the "12"?

Here is a brief explanation of the values.

User creativity
Consumers increasingly want to create, augment, or influence design and content, and share these creations with their peers. Supporting user creativity will be increasingly important to consumer technology, and will become more mainstream in coming decades.

Personalization
Consumers will increasingly look for products and services that align with their specific personal needs and preferences—whether in the aesthetics of a product or in its functional design. More goods will be created to match individuals’ unique specifications.

Simplicity
Simplicity will have growing value for consumers confronted with information overload, time stress, and technological complexity. Simplicity’s influence is already evident in new, stripped-down devices that offer just a few functions, as well as in minimalist interfaces that conceal breathtaking complexity. The common denominator of all these efforts is that they are human-centered—and thus easy to learn and integrate into busy lives.

Assistance
As consumers are bombarded with more tasks, choices, and information, and as demographic changes such as aging reshape consumer markets, they are looking to assistive technologies for help. Consumers will seek to bolster and extend their natural abilities—with technologies ranging from pharmaceuticals that enhance mental performance to robot aides for the elderly.

Appropriateness
Products and services will need to embrace the principle of appropriateness to ensure that they are suitably designed for users with varying physical needs, resources, cultural characteristics, literacy levels, etc. Appropriateness will aid in the spread of technology products and services to new markets and to diverse user segments.

Convenience
Already well-established in mature markets, demand for convenience will rise as a technology value for consumers all over the world. Consumers will look for technological products and services that give them what they want and need on demand and that reduce effort and relieve time pressure.

Connectedness
Connectedness gives consumers what they want, when they want it, and will grow exponentially with the expanding global information infrastructure. Consumers will look for products and services that seamlessly integrate with this global network.

Efficiency
Efficiency is the ratio of output to input—or, put simply, the ability to do more with less. It will become more important to technology as consumers search for products and services that let them manage emerging resource uncertainties, rising costs, and other pressures.

Intelligence
Intelligence will be enabled by innovations that increasingly shift information and decision-making burdens from the user to the device or service. The demand for greater intelligence will come in response to factors including complexity, aging, and the desire for personalized experiences.

Protection
Protection will be sought by consumers in a world that feels increasingly insecure. Consumers will look for technology-enabled products and services that strengthen their sense of personal security and protect their families, homes, wealth, and privacy.

Health
Consumers will look to technological products and services to maintain and, increasingly, improve their health and wellness. The search for health-enabling solutions will extend beyond traditional health and medical products and services to include more of the things consumers use in their everyday lives, whether at home, work, or play.

Sustainability
Consumers will increasingly look for products and services that embrace sustainability—reducing the “human footprint” on the environment while maintaining quality of life. A variety of technologies offer ways to minimize resource use, waste, and pollution while improving human welfare.

David Armano on the Micro-Sociology of Networks

Just more good content from one of the very best at articulating the emerging social business design environment.  David Armano seems to have a real knack for sifting and synthesizing the many strands of content and context with regard to the broadening social media/network/business universe.  And, as always, he is visually very entertaining.

The Micro-Sociology of Networks

Building A Smarter Power Grid

A very nice video from GE on smart meters as part of the movement towards realizing the smart grid. 

The Evolving Lexicon of the Millenium

Cramer-Krasselt, a Chicago-based, full-service advertising agency has just released their second annual compendium of new nomenclature for the new millenium.  The 2009 version of their Cultural Dictionary is organized by topic -- politics, ethics, the economy, the environment, technology -- and is offered with tongue firmly in cheek but also with a mission to take our cultural pulse.  While the dictionary is enormous fun, it offers some tremendous insight into shifts, both seismic and subtle, that are taking root in our national mood.

You can access your copy of the Cultural Dictionary here

C-K is one of the more creative agencies around, with clients including Corona Beer, Levitra, Porsche and Air Tran.  Here is nice example of their work.

A Night At the Opera

Not the Marx Brothers movie nor the classic album by Queen, I am referring to one of the coolest technology platforms and business models I have come across in a while.  Norway's Opera has just released their 10 Beta browser which advances further their agenda of defining and delivering on a ubiquitous platform for personal and professional computing.  Nothing is more exciting than seeing a company build a business model based on stretching the boundaries of what has come before.

Opera's vision is to deliver the best Internet experience on any device.  Opera's key business objective is to earn global leadership in the market for PC/desktops and embedded products.  Opera's main business strategy is to provide a browser that operates across devices, platforms and operating systems, and can deliver a faster, more stable and flexible Internet experience than its competitors.

To explore the full spectrum of what Opera has created, you can visit them at http://www.opera.com/

or check out this visual evocation of their One Web platform.

Things I Wanna Know

As we make a mad dash thru 2009, trying to survive, maybe thrive, while wondering if the world we grew up in will return in any semblance of it’s prior self, I gotta lot of things on my mind, such as:

• At what point will McDonald’s and Starbuck’s become competitively undifferentiated and, essentially, interchangeable? 

• Do any of the traditional advertising agencies have a chance for survival in the world of Web 3.0/4.0? 

• Is the great suburban experiment really over? 

• Are the strategic concepts of “white space” and “blue oceans” interchangeable? 

• When will Wagamama come to my town? 

• Do we have the capacity, both socially and economically, to take care of the many disenfranchised individuals that now face a challenge they never expected? 

• Is “capital is scarce” ever a good reason to put innovation on the back burner? (I believe the correct answer is “no”) 

• Who will be the last print daily newspaper standing? 

• Where do I go to cure my addiction to Alltop? (If you haven’t visited it, I’m warning you!) 

• What is the revenue model that will make Twitter more than a passing fancy?  And how can it not include advertising? 

• What will the drought in Napa/Sonoma do to cabernet/pinot noir/chardonnay affordability? 

• Has adding to your LinkedIn network now devolved into a digital age parlor game?  

• No offense, but, why do we need this?
  

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Venture Funding Dries Up in Q1

The venture capital industry took another big hit in the first quarter of the year, according to new data from Dow Jones VentureSource. VCs pumped 50% less money into startups than they did one year ago. At $3.9 billion, it was the lowest total the industry has seen since 1998. That means it was worse than anything seen in the years after the seminal dot-com bust. Information technology fell to its lowest levels since 1997, with just $1.68 billion in deals, and clean tech fell by 73% to just $117 million.

More on the New Marketing and Media Model

The traditional marketer/client – agency – media company structure is evolving into a significantly different ecosystem that is more complex and, no surprise, increasingly digital.  As the overall media environment changes, the current marketing agenda and delivery capabilities must be re-imagined, driving unprecedented rate of change in marketing organizations, agencies and media companies.  That is the finding of Booz Allen’s “Marketing Media Ecosystem 2010 (MME 2010),” a cross-industry study that details how marketers and their agencies must change as the convergence of media and technology, combined with the fragmentation and personalization of media, changes the connection between marketers and end users.

What is clear from the study is that marketing fundamentals have not changed, but the strategies, investments and capabilities required to succeed in marketing have shifted. In the new world of marketing, the agile and flexible are more likely to become and remain successful than those enterprises tied to the old ways of connecting with the marketplace.

Mapping the Future

Mapping the Future was developed in 2007 by the Global Strategy Institute at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).  The CSIS Global Strategy Institute is dedicated to promoting long-range thinking about the big global issues that loom before us.  To that end, they have produced this really cool graphic.  Be sure to click on it to get the "big picture".  If you go to the here and click on the nodes, you can get a description of each data point.

Today's leaders function in an environment marked by rapid change, ever higher levels of complexity, and ever shorter decision timeframes. This map is the CSIS Global Strategy Institute's modest attempt to help us all elevate our thinking beyond today's headlines and to anticipate the competing obstacles and opportunities we can expect to navigate in the future.