I have two decades of experience creating and crafting brand positionings and strategies that have benefited numerous companies, both small and large, from established multinationals to startups. I use a straightforward approach (see my section on brand strategies) that starts with an understanding of the market, the company and the consumers and ends with a brand positioning and strategies that are relevant and motivating. Now I have a created a condensed version of the process in the form of a one-day workshop. Through a series of structured sessions during the course of the day together we will:

• Define your target audience.
• Create a positioning, a vision and a mission for your brand.
• Develop a series of actionable creative strategies to communicate your brand to the world.

In addition I will help you find ways to unleash the full potential of your brand. Using creativity tools developed for my book ‘The Business Playground’ we will identify:

• New markets and market segments to stretch your brand.
• New usage occasions for customers to use your brand.
• New venues for your brand.

Every workshop is a high-energy experience uniquely designed around your specific branding needs and can either be held at your offices or hosted offsite.  If you’re interested in hearing more, I’d love to talk about how a workshop might work for you so please email me at markjcsimmons@gmail.com.

Thanks!

Mark

Walmart is using Big Data gleaned from social media to target consumers with highly relevant suggestions for products. Last year it bought a startup focused on social media, Kosmix, and formed WalmartLabs. It uses Kosmix’s vast knowledge base, called ‘Social Genome’  to capture information and relationships about entities such as people, events, topics, products, locations and organizations. In Information Week, Anand Rajaraman, SVP of Walmart Global eCommerce and Head of WalmartLabs, is quoted as saying: “There is an unprecedented amount of data about people, places, products, companies, brands, and pretty much anything we can think of. Companies that can mine this treasure trove of data and glean insights to gain a huge competitive advantage.” Walmart can track social media mentions on locations, people or products and use this intelligence to better tailor its product offerings. “The deeper the understanding we have about our customers and our products, the better we can connect with them. Our technology platform, which we call the Social Genome, tracks connections between people, products, brands and other relevant entities. We can use the Social Genome to make product recommendations to customers, whether they are in the store or shopping online,” explains Rajaraman.

Pop star Cee Lo Green will make about $20 million this year. His hit single “Forget You” (actually it’s not “Forget”, but another shorter word beginning with the same letter) became the 12th most downloaded track of all time. But his music sales represent only a small proportion of his earnings. The New York Times calculates “F*** You” earned him about $700,000. The other $19 million or so come from a variety of projects and deals.  Cee Lo’s management company, Primary Wave Music, has come up with some very creative ways to make money for Cee Lo without relying on music sales. Not so long ago sales of recorded music were the mainstay of any musician’s earnings as a hit single would lead to big album sales and plenty of cash, but now with the demise of the album artists like Cee Lo have had to look elsewhere. Primary Wave’s CEO Larry Mestel says album sales represent the smallest slice of the revenue pie. A stream of TV appearances, endorsement deals, TV commercials have traded on and built Cee Lo’s brand. He’s been a judge on TV talent show “The Voice”, has his own shown on cable network Fuse, appeared on Saturday Night Live and been in TV commercials for 7-Up, Absolut Vodka and M&M’s. Next year he will have his own show, “Loberace”, in Las Vegas and will star in a Mark Burnett produced TV show in the UK called “Cee Lo Takes the UK.” What Primary Wave is doing for Cee Lo is the model for the future of the music industry, and is a good lesson in creativity and innovation for many other industries that are seeing their worlds changing through technology. Necessity breeds invention, and without invention we might find ourselves being forgotten.

Philippe Starck is a French product designer who has designed everything from toothbrushes to hotel interiors and is now creative director of interior design company Yoo. His simple, iconic and often startling designs entered the mass market when in 2002 he created a number of beautifully designed, but inexpensive, products for Target stores. Starck writes in a blog post for Wired about what creativity means to him: “Creativity is almost a mortal sickness. It’s not easy to be happy and creative: With creativity comes great anxiety, great effort, great desire for love. To be creative, you have to be curious, generous, to want to try to understand.” For Starck, to be creative, “it helps to live a sort of modern monk’s life. I go early to bed and wake up a little earlier than others because the peak — the hormonal peak of creativity — is around seven o’clock in the morning. To be creative, you can’t be intoxicated by drugs or alcohol. You cannot be intoxicated by poison coming from industrial food. You have to go to the gym and have a lot of sex (although not necessarily in that order!). You also need to live consciously avoid mainstream thinking. If you go out every night for dinner or to a cocktail party, where you speak with everybody, you cannot create because you just end up just repeating what people tell you. You get very comfortable and very unoriginal. The only way to create is to be alone, in front of a white, blank sheet of paper or your computer in the middle of nowhere. It’s the best way to find only your ideas, your intuition.” For most, the idea of living a monk’s life to unleash their creativity isn’t an option, and luckily it isn’t necessary, but it does require some concentrated effort. Creativity is not a a gift that only a select few are given – we all have it, and if we treat it like a muscle that needs to be exercised regularly it will only grow stronger!

You know Big Data is a Big Deal when NPR runs a story, or in this case a mini-series, on it. Big Data refers to the huge amount of data collected through numerous sources that can be captured, processed and analyzed to guide science and marketing, and everything in between, and the rate of growth of the data collected is staggering (90% of all data was collected in just the last 2 years). We consumers leave data trails wherever we go – from using our cellphones, our purchases using credit cards, from our interactions online and from myriad other sources – and marketers are starting to wake up to the huge potential big data that offers to mine information about consumer behavior and target them with exactly the right message, at exactly the right time, in exactly the right place. The results of a marketing campaign in the digital space can be measured almost immediately, and so its effectiveness in driving awareness, sales, engagement (or whatever else the metrics of succes are) can be judged and the campaign course corrected in real time. Big Data is only going to get bigger and marketers have to come to grips with how to harness its power and not be overwhelmed by the bigness of it. More to come in future posts.

Read more at the San Francisco Examiner: http://www.sfexaminer.com/blogs/backstage-pass/2011/11/dave-stewart-mark-simmons-release-ipad-app-called-creativity#ixzz1e6qbGRjT

Our iPad app ‘CREATIVITY’ has just been released so please download it and review it.http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pounce/id477075451?mt=8

You can find it by searching ‘Creativity.’ Here are some things to look out for on the app so you can quickly get a sense of what it includes:

• It includes a full-color book with loads of graphics ad pictures.
• There’s an audio version of the book that can be switched on and off at any time.
• There are 13 original interactive games designed to help unleash your creative powers.
• Every piece of text in the book can be highlighted to reveal a load more information about whatever the subject is. It uses a technology called F* to do this and it’s the first time it’s ever been used in an app.
• You can open up the app’s blog directly from the app to get frequently updated ideas and info on creativity.

It will cost a whopping $9.99 to download, but seeing as most audiobooks on their own cost over $16.00, this is a bargain!

Thanks for your help.

Business Playground is now out as a digital audiobook on Audible. It’s narrated by British actress Linda Gallagher and sounds great. Take a listen when you get a chance.

As written about in the Financial Times, fake shop fronts are starting to appear in the South East of England, where the recession has taken its toll and many shops have closed, and are now making their way over to the US. As well as improving the appearance of the shopping street, they would also seem to have the benefit of inspiring would-be tenants what the store could look like when occupied. One company that is creating these fake fronts is Shopjacket and prices start from just a few thousand dollars.

No, we’re not talking industrial espionage or insider trading. We are referring to creativity.  Here are 6 tips for how to make your business more creative. (there are many more in our book!)

1. Celebrate mistakes. It’s okay to fail. In fact it’s a valuable part of the creative process and those who have many successes tend to have had more failures along the way. The point is to reduce the downside of failing so it won’t kill you. Find ways to reward small risks, perhaps with a prize for the bravest ideas.

2. Slip into something less comfortable. We all have things we feel comfortable doing and tend to avoid the other stuff. But it’s the other stuff that often allows us to think in new ways, so break your routine, talk to people you don’t normally talk to, and make it a goal to try something that scares you at least once every few days.

3. Learn how to play. It’s usually business or pleasure, but to be creative you need to have both because the more you can let go, the more fun you’ll have and the more likely you’ll come up with unexpected ideas.  Use music, humour and games to shake things up and help you and others think in new ways.

4. Try some Idea Spaghetti. Quantity of ideas is the single biggest predictor of creativity, so don’t wait for the Big One: keep generating as many ideas as you can, by questioning what you see around you and thinking of ways to improve them. Set yourself a daily goals for the number of ideas you want to come up and write them up in a notebook

5. Flood your brain. Creativity is about making connections, often between two completely unrelated things. So it stands to reason that if you can feed your brain with a lot of different stimuli you’ll have a greater chance of making connections. Make sure you read, watch, listen and do to a wide variety of things as often as you can.

6. Collaborate. “Plays well with others” applies now even more it did on the school report. It’s almost impossible to bring good ideas to life without partnering with outsiders, so we should be less paranoid about signing NDAs and more willing to collaborate with people who share a common vision and can add expertise we don’t have.

Creativity is not something that can be managed in the traditional sense, and that can make many business people, used to having control, feel a little uncomfortable. The best we can hope for is to manage for it. Robert Sutton, professor of science and engineering at Stanford University, says: “Managing for creativity, I’ve discovered, means taking most of what we know about management and standing it on its head. It means placing bets on ideas without much heed to the projected ROI. It means ignoring what has worked before. It means taking perfectly happy people and goading them into fights among themselves. Good creativity management means hiring the candidate you have a gut feeling against. And as for those people who stick their fingers in their ears and chant, ‘I’m not listening, I’m not listening,’ when customers are making suggestions? It means praising and promoting them.”

While it’s not always easy being making creativity a part of everyday business, in a world in which it is difficult to maintain differentiation without innovation it’s a necessary part of business life. As Richard Branson, who wrote the foreword to the book, says it’s about having a spirit of adventure. “Catch the cow, Ricky,” his mum used to tell him, “If you want some milk you can’t just sit in the middle of a field waiting for a cow to come to you, you’ve got to go and catch it and milk it yourself.”