Brand Together
The preface from my new book (written with Clare Fuller and Charles Trevail) due to be published Spring 2012

Most leaders would like their organisations to be more innovative: to create new products and services; to develop inventive business processes; to change the rules and boundaries of a market; indeed to follow in the footsteps of pioneers, such as Apple, Google and Virgin Media Their motivations, apart from a desire to emulate these business successes, is that consumers and other stakeholders are demanding the relevantly new. Truly understanding and meeting people’s needs and wants drives successful innovation: think Apple iPad, Google Earth and Virgin Media’s Digital Home Support. For these businesses, innovation is a top strategic priority that delivers value for customers and generates above average returns. As James Andrew of Boston Consulting Group notes of the 50 most innovative companies in the world, ’they outperform their regional peers in stock markets, somewhere north of 200 basis points, year after year.’ So we might ask, why don’t more organizations invest in innovation? Yet throwing money at it doesn’t seem to be the answer. There is no statistically significant relationship between the spend on innovation and financial performance - Steve Jobs also made the point in an interview with Fortune (1998), when he said, ‘innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have.’

Success in innovation is really rooted in two key areas. First, is the insight into people’s whole lives – not just their consuming lives. This means digging deep below the way people explain the surface of things through language to the more difficult to express, limbic emotions, feelings and memory that determine behaviour. For example, if we took that oft quoted phrase of Henry Ford’s, ’if I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse’, we can make the point, as Ford is doing, that you don’t get innovation as a result of talking to people. Yet, what he really illustrates is that if you ask such a question you will get a rational answer. To get deeper you have to ask why and then people might respond with thoughts about convenience, connecting with others, staying in touch with friends and making best use of one’s time. Go deeper again and you might get some further associations and memories of speed and childhood and community – a Proustian meandering into the past and a sense of what people would like in the future. The importance of customer insight is illustrated by the research into successful innovators. In an annual study of 1000 companies, Barry Jaruzelski and Kevin Dehoff write that the best organizations depend on a common set of critical innovation capabilities: the ability to gain insights into customer needs, an understanding of the potential relevance of emerging technologies at the ideation phase, active engagement with customers to prove the validity of concepts during product development and working with pilot users to roll out products carefully during commercialization.

The challenge here for organisations has been in achieving the insight that drives innovation. Cocooned inside the walls of the business and limited by cultural blinkers, managers can easily lose the ability to understand customer motivations. This lack of connection is usually compensated for by market research, but quantitative and qualitative research is often ignored or misused. It also has some limitations in getting to the emotions, feelings and future intentions that drive innovation, because research is an approximation of a current situation based on the past and creates abstract information which is mistaken for the real. In Brand Together we advocate that organisations should try to get closer to customers and other stakeholders; to reduce the distance by encouraging participation and co-creation. In this line of thought we go beyond the traditional idea of asking people to argue rationally what they might do and instead ask them to just do it. This is about events and communities where people can explore together questions and answers and where managers can take part in a dialogue of ideation and development; where as Mark Watts-Jones of Orange suggests, you can be surprised by the difference between how as managers you imagine people live, use services and connect with their friends, and the reality.

The second element that is vital to innovation is the capacity of the organisation to focus on what it is good at and to make those difficult choices about what and what not to do: ‘most successful companies, we found, are those that focus on a particular, narrow set of common and distinctive capabilities that enable them to better execute their chosen strategy.’ The implication here is that the organisation needs to look inwards and to understand itself, which brings us to a word that is rarely used in the books and articles on innovation: branding. It is as though the word is taboo for innovators. Maybe it is because brands and branding are still dominantly associated with logos, packaging and advertising and brands are often seen as ephemeral and possibly manipulative. In the innovation arena the people who matter are social anthropologists, engineers, product designers and scientists – not branders. Yet if we understand ’brand’ as a set of ideas that define why an organisation (or product or service) exists, how it does things and what it produces, we might be able to overcome the myopia around brands and realise the brand creates a focus and framework for innovation. For example, the core brand idea of Virgin as the ’people’s champion’, and a set of values that includes the word ’fun’ defines a certain lens for viewing innovation that would preclude an innovation that aligned with the status quo and was unfun. New products and services from Virgin are meant to challenge the way things are.

So, this book is a journey into the world of innovation from the perspective of the brand. In other words, we will explore how a brand idea (the implicit or explicit definition of the brand) creates a certain set of possibilities to be realized by a certain set of actions that are distinctive to the organisation. Equally this book is a journey into the human mind and body and is based on the belief that innovation must be human centric – enabling the realization of people’s dreams and aspirations by involving them in the creation and development of the very things that affect their lives. This is not to deny the power of the creative genius who invents a new technology or product, but more to argue that we cannot always rely on the intuition of the inventor, who may be good at producing something technically more efficient but not always so good at creating something people want to buy. For that we need to use the intelligence and creativity of the individuals who buy and use brands, for it is when we bring diverse minds together that we discover the new. As Steve Johnson argues about large groups in Where Good Ideas Come From, it is not the crowd itself that becomes wise, but rather that connected individuals become smarter.

During this odyssey, we will look at what co-creation is, where it has come from and why it is becoming a more widely used means of idea generation and implementation – something noted in IBM’s 2010 study of more than 1500 CEOs, where it is observed that, ‘the most successful organizations co-create products and services with customers, and integrate customers into core processes.’ We will also discuss how to use the framework of the brand and the tools of co-creation in practice and the structural and cultural implications. We will look at the limits of participative innovation and the difficulties of involving large numbers of people in a brand dialogue and also the benefits of co-creation in terms of the quality of ideas and the speed of adoption and traction they gain inside organizations. Throughout the book we will illustrate our ideas with case studies and examples and feature some of the practical steps you can take to experiment successfully with your brand.