Presentation from Infopresse Creativity and Web Strategy Conference in Montreal. See it live here (Click more for the full link): http://heehawmarketing.typepad.com/hee_haw_marketing/2011/12/working-with-uncertainty.html

1. Working with Uncertainty
branding, creativity, strategy and stuff

2. Every discovery by definition is unpredictable. If it were
predictable it wouldn't be a discovery. Creativity exposes
unpredictable things to be discovered.
Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

3. People can also have negative
associations with novelty;
an attribute at the heart of what
makes ideas creative in
the first place.
Mueller, Melwani, Goncalo
Cornell University

4. The Illusion of Knowing

5. Every product and every
single brand wants to
'engage' users in a massive
participatory experience.
Even Especially if they're
utterly dull…but by now
you've discovered there's
very little to say if you're a
brand people don't care
much about.
Tim Malbon,
Made by Many

6. Market Research
Spending skyrockets
+23% 5 years

7. What drove Sony’s shift from a disruptive to a sustaining innovation
strategy? Prior to 1980, all new product launch decisions were
made by cofounder Akio Morita and a trusted team of associates.
They never did market research, believing that if markets did not
exist they could not be analyzed. Their process for assessing new
opportunities relied on personal intuition.
Clay Christensen,
Technology Review

9. Seinfeld, Mary Tyler Moore, Hill Street Blues, Friends –
all pre-testing failures.

10. The payoffs to innovation are greatest where
the uncertainty is highest.
Charles Leadbeater

11. Motorola, Hewlett-Packard, Xerox, Ryder, Unisys, Texas Instruments,
Revlon, Converse, La-Z-boy, Interstate Bakeries
All formed in the aftermath of the Great Depression

12. Reinvention is happening in every market at an accelerating pace.
Just in the last two years we’ve seen fundamental shifts in music,
gaming, banking, education, government, automobiles, energy,
coupons, payments, retail, rental cars, manufacturing, publishing,
journalism, just to name a few…
I’m a believer that in the next 5 years we’re going to see every
major industry reinvented in ways we didn’t see coming.
Bryce T. Roberts, AlphaTech Ventures

13. We need to make uncertainty work for us.
Creative Capitalism
Purpose
Cultural Innovation

14. Find focus in purpose, not
consistency.

15. 360°
The answer for a growing number of marketers is to
take a 360° approach, zeroing in on a target group
likely to be receptive to a message – and
surrounding it from every angle.

16. You’re a rational, self-interested, entrepreneurial individual who is
trying to satisfy unlimited wants, whatever they may be.
The more information you have, the better decisions you’ll make.
Relationships are impersonal, anonymous and transactional.
The Monoculture

17. Finding purpose.
I think many people assume, wrongly, that a
company exists simply to make money. While this is
an important result of a company's existence, we
have to go deeper and find the real reasons for our
being.
David Packard

18. Ask yourself
this: How a
What cause are you brand acts
a credible voice for?
How a brand talks
What a brand feels is
important
What a brand rallies the
community around
Why a brand does it

21. To contribute to the real change in
Braddock, the Levi’s brand is
committed to funding the
refurbishment of Braddock’s
community center, a focal point of the
town and their youth-based
programming. Additionally, Levi’s is
supporting Braddock’s urban farm
which supplies produce to local area
residents at reduced costs.
What the people of Braddock are
proving is that decay and destruction
don’t always mean the end, a point of
no return. They can also be a frontier,
a place to start anew.

22. Embrace creative capitalism.

23. [A process that] incessantly revolutionizes the
economic structure from within, incessantly
destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new
one. This process of Creative Destruction is the
essential fact about capitalism.
Creative Destruction

24. Five of today’s hundred largest public companies
were among the top hundred in 1917.
Half of the top hundred of 1970 had been replaced
in the rankings by 2000.

25. The most resilient companies are actively
contributing to their destruction and reinvention.

26. Once upon a time an ad was about a company's
unique selling position. But people can now
accept more complex brands, and I thought we
might be able to build a deeper relationship if we
built on multiple fronts.
Mike Hughes, Martin Agency

27. Red Bull
Massive Niche
exploration

28. Red Bull
Crashed Ice

29. Good Magazine
A platform for experimentation

32. Create cultural innovations.

33. Invention
Conceiving a new idea
Innovation
Arranging the economic requirements
Diffusion
Adoption of the idea
Joseph Schumpter

34. Most often, when people are asked to describe
the current media landscape, they respond by
making an inventory of tools and technologies.
Our focus should be not on emerging
technologies but on emerging cultural practices.
Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture

35. The Difficulty of
Doing

36. The Difficulty of
Doing

37. If agencies want to think more like tech startups,
they might focus less on clever storytelling and
more on utility.
Adam Glickman, Founder, the IdeaLists

38. That's what we need to add to so many things, to give
them that extra necessary magic. A pretending layer. So
it's not just a useful or beautiful or functional object - it's
got some little nod to who we're pretending to be when
we're using it.
Russell Davies
The Framing Layer

39. 3X as many smartphones
are being activated every minute
around the world than there are babies
being born

40. Cultural Innovations have never been so
attainable.

41. Technology advances à Cultural advances
From R & D to Cultural studios
From USPs to coherency through purpose
Build Infrastructure for experimentation
Develop new working relationships
Follow the DIS principle

42. You learn to like the excitement of mild, ongoing risk
taking…Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't,
but it's the creation of possibility.
Brad Blanton, Founder of Radical Honesty

43. Thanks. You can find me on the internet.
Paul McEnany
Director of Strategy at Twist Image
heehawmarketing.com // @paulmcenany
Credit to:
David Coacci, Corey Litvak
Flickr: Beth19, mateugrin, cdm, harleyhaskett, karl_hab,
michaelsissions, uzbecca, thorne_ryne, vamitos, whsimages,
nitsrejk