A Brainzooming Exclusive: Post Thanksgiving Surf's Up!

Back when I used to live at the library reference section, the high school kids working the magazine counter told me the Friday after Thanksgiving was their busiest day each year. It seemed the people not seeking gifts were out seeking knowledge.

In the same spirit, here are five links, with no particular theme, to check out if you get a chance!

“Summertime” by Gina Sicilia – An informal performance from a soulful singer at Caffe Vivaldi. And since I’m not a big fan of cold, a little more summer is always welcome! Plus you can play this while you visit the remaining four links.

Recession In’s and Out’s – Where to invest or place your attention during periods of economic challenge.

“Election Day Could be Become ‘Nightmare’” – An article from several weeks ago with doomsday election scenarios that never materialized. A good reminder that, unfortunately, a lot of media is intended to needlessly incite fears and trepidations about relatively remote possibilities.

Business Model Design & Innovation from Alex Osterwalder – Interesting work, albeit a little self-absorbed.

Muckety.com – Portraying the connections between news figures, celebrities, events, and the organizations behind them.

Why Don't I Cheer at Restaurants Anymore?

Creative Quickie – Elliptical Trainer

If you’re stuck with an uncreative attitude, exercise can be the perfect restart. Recently, I’d spent the entire day in our home office working on the computer - a sure thing to put me in a grumpy mood.

Before I’d started exercising, it would take quite some time to work through that mood.

Now, spending 30 or 40 minutes on the elliptical trainer triggers all those body chemicals that make me (or you) feel good.

Try it yourself to recharge your mental perspective and work off Thanksgiving dinner!

Economic Crisis Have You in a Fog? Be a Lighthouse

Someone forwarded a statement made by GE CEO Jeff Immelt at the Business for Social Responsibility Conference in early November 2008:

“The economic crisis that we’re going in right now doesn’t represent the cycle. It represents a reset. And I think people that understand that will prosper in the future, and people that don’t understand that will (I think) get left behind. The era of transparency, accountability for corporations, responsibility is profoundly different today versus where it was even six months ago . . . I think when we come out of this fog this notion that companies need to stand for something and need to be accountable for more than just the money that they earn is going to be profound.”

He went on to talk about people being afraid and the importance of leaders to help shape fear into self-confidence.

Very true words.

So what do you do to get through the reset as strongly and innovatively as possible? Three suggestions:

1. Although some things have diverted from the expected path, determine what important fundamentals are still in place from which to move forward.
   
2. Imagine the range of relevant possibilities that may yet unfold. Amid what may be presented as tremendous uncertainty, look for common elements among the possibilities. Figure out actions you can take that make sense irrespective of which scenario plays out.
   
3. Identify what everyone else is doing in reaction to short-term swings and irrelevant possibilities. Then dig deep (maybe pray hard) for the fortitude, wherewithal, and mental composure to move forward relative to the long-line with your sights focused beyond the “fog.”

That’s my strategy.

Saturday Special - 7 Marketing Tune-Ups for Tough Times

Amid a challenging business environment, look for opportunities to tune-up your marketing approach. Here’s a starter checklist that could be valuable for you:

Maximize What You’ve Got – Inventory creative that’s already developed and make sure it’s being used in all ways possible, i.e. Can customers get collateral as web downloads? Can you get your new TV commercial to customers in more ways? And when developing new creative, think through all potential uses before beginning. Get the extra paragraph, photograph, take, or edit that will extend its uses or effective life.

Align Messages – Pushing all-out for increased sales can create a proliferation of messages as you try to ensure every possible product and feature gets visibility. One downside can be confusion and lack of clarity among both customers and the internal sales organization. It’s a good time to revisit a solid strategic messaging platform, working hard to tie messages back to it to improve clarity.

Develop New Capabilities – Are there processes or skills that you’ve been putting off developing within your marketing team? Now might be the time to create a skunk works effort and get a new approach to an old challenge underway. To also develop your team, involve staff members not typically on your usual list of participants. That will pay dividends later as well.

Monitor Competitors’ Efforts and Share of Voice (SOV) – Most – but not all - companies cut back on marketing investments during challenging economic times. Gauge what’s happening among your competitors. Has everybody in your market pulled back, signaling an opportunity to maintain investment (or reduce it at a lower rate) and increase your share of voice? Or are certain competitors using a longer-term approach, investing for the eventual business recovery? Knowing your industry’s situation helps shape decisions on your brand’s best approach.

Spread Out or Heavy Up - Based on SOV insights, determine how to spread your marketing investment across channels. If share of voice is down overall, consider extending your investment into new areas while still maintaining enough frequency and relative presence. If you’re being outspent overall, it might be right to mass your investment in fewer places and “own” what you can, using other means to point customers and prospects to the areas where you’ve heavied up.

Consolidate Marketing Partners - When every dollar of marketing investment is precious, you need maximum efficiencies. One approach is to look at your external marketing partners and determine if there are process and cost advantages in working with fewer partners. Making this type of reduction allows you to manage fewer relationships (time efficiency), grow deeper relationships (message alignment advantages), and negotiate for lower per unit costs (investment efficiencies).

Generate a Guerrilla Tools List - Revisit and expand your list of available marketing tools, particularly low-cost and “free” ones that may be underutilized. A great starting point is the website for Jay Conrad Levinson, the father of guerrilla marketing with its list of 100 guerrilla marketing tools. Additionally, you can customize and expand the list of tools for your business. Be sure to consider blogs, podcasts, and social networking sites that allow you to inexpensively reach new parts of your audience.

Those are seven places to start fine tuning and maximizing your marketing efforts. Please comment on approaches you’re using successfully.

Quotes & Notes

To wrap the week, here are some quotes and notes from the marcus evans Customer Segmentation conference last week:

• "If you could say it in words, there'd be no reason to paint." – American artist Edward Hopper from an airport billboard at arrival
  
• “If I’d asked people what they wanted, they’d have said ‘faster horses.’” - Henry Ford from Sheryl Connelly’s consumer trend presentation

Several quotes from “Connecting What You Value to What You Do” presented by Kevin Clark, Brand & Value Experience at IBM:

• “FUMIFU - First Use Must Inspire Future Use TM” Polyvision Products, a Steelecase Company
  
• “You can tell you have good scenarios when they are both plausible and surprising; when they have the power to break old stereotypes; and when the makers assume ownership of them and put them to work. Scenario making is intensely participatory, or it fails.” – from Peter Schwartz’s book, “The Art of the Long View” , which both Kevin and Sheryl recommended
  
• “People forget what you say, forget what you did, but never forget how you made them feel.” - Maya Angelou

That’s a wrap for the conference recap. It was great to meet everyone there and thanks to Ana Bardelas for producing a great event and making everybody attending feel very welcome!

It's All About You

Several marcus evans Customer Segmentation Conference sessions addressed customizing experiences. Some highlights follow from two of them.

Edward Gala, VP of Corporate Marketing Services at Xerox, began his presentation covering a range of customization applications: personalized M&M’s, Heinz ketchup labels, and the recent “Obama losing by one vote” video. This emailed video effectively combines customization and viral elements to challenge the recipient to vote and avoid the result depicted: a news story reporting a one-vote Barack Obama loss traced to the video recipient’s failure to get to the polls.

Within the video, there are several appearances of the recipient’s name in newspapers, TV headlines, and even in a goat herder’s frightened reaction to a McCain win. It makes effective use of an experience memorability model that seeks to maximize personal interest (it’s forwarded by a friend, personal challenge to vote), experience intensity (surprising personalization, humor, anticipation), and a brand’s connection as the experience enabler (frequent references to Barack Obama).

This novel customization approach can trigger all kinds of ideas for applying it in other ways.

On the opening day, John Carroll, VP - Bottler Planning & Operations at Coca-Cola shared work they’re doing customizing and adapting retail store experiences:

• Coca-Cola segments to the store level, identifying each store’s “unique DNA.” To coordinate strategies with retailers, Coca-Cola maps its store segments to a retailer’s store segments.


• It’s also using shopping cart RFID to locate hot spots within a store based on movement patterns to isolate specific merchandising opportunities.


• Similar to a case study from Simon Property Group at the CMO Summit earlier this year, retailers are increasingly being considered as media outlets based on their audience delivery opportunities.

John also offered three great overall take aways relative to segmentation:

1. Don’t lose sight of your core business, even if you have to segment differently.
2. Use as many insights as possible in developing and refining your segmentation.
3. Make sure segmentation is simple, direct, and understandable.

This was a very content-rich event and tomorrow, we’ll wrap with some memorable quotes.

Trends at the marcus evans Customer Segmentation Conference

Today’s post from last week's marcus evans Customer Segmentation Conference highlights fundamental market trends, described by Sheryl Connelly from Ford as “manifestations of shifts in consumer values, attitudes, or behaviors.”

Michael Marx, VP of Research Services from Visa, began the conference covering how lifestyle insights create greater business initiative success. Among the intriguing macro trends he shared:

• Baby Boomers generally see themselves as 12 years younger than they are as people in their early 60’s view themselves as being in their late 40’s. Their consumption patterns thus resemble those of younger people as they display a willingness to change brand preferences in ways that previous generations wouldn’t have.


• The “Monopoly Board” generational pattern has been altered dramatically. No longer do specific life events happen in similar sequences and within fairly narrow age ranges for most people. Ethnic, lifestyle, and life stage diversification has caused people to not only do things non-sequentially (i.e., having children before marriage), but at different stages (i.e., the prevalence of second families starting at much older ages).

Sheryl Connelly, Global Trends and Futuring Manager at Ford Motor Company served as the conference chair and related her perspectives in trying to help Ford make a comeback, in part, by adopting an outside-in strategic approach. Some of the trends Sheryl highlighted were:

• The aging population – recognizing this trend is playing out differently in different country markets
• Changing physiology worldwide - with larger people (weight and height) in much of the world
• Demands for customization and the means to deliver it - a recurring topic at the conference
• Increased desire for safety and security - people seeking greater reassurance amid a sense of greater uncertainty in society
• Ethical consumption – increasing concerns over purchases and the impact of consumption. Sheryl sees this as the most important trend she’s tracking.

A key take away is that demographic-based trends can be foreseen and planned for more readily than other types of trends.

Additionally, Sheryl offered a key question that’s an interesting one in strategic efforts: “What are things we can’t control that can affect our brand?” It’s a challenging question but one that’s worthwhile for all of us to address in our business situations.

Tomorrow, we’ll recap customization-oriented presentations from the conference.

Customer Segmentation and Its Branding Impacts

With many great strategy and innovation insights at the marcus evans Customer Segmentation Conference last week, we’ll take several days to recap them. Branding building lessons abound, even if you’re not in a brand’s traditional target market. Two great examples were featured at the conference: Food Network and Bliss Spas.

Michael Smith, Senior VP – Marketing, Creative & Brand Strategy from Food Network covered its dramatic 10-year growth (from 42nd ranked to 19th ranked network) driven by segmenting a niche market and programming to reach non-traditional viewers. Its initial target was gourmands. While an attractive audience, it didn’t offer particularly attractive growth.

Following several segmentation efforts, the network saw opportunities to broaden its audience through other segments:

• “Pressed for Timers” wanted quick recipes and meal prep solutions
• “Adventurers” combined food and lifestyle interests seeking entertainment, escape, and discovery

This segmentation helped create day part-based sub-brands addressing these needs. “In the Kitchen” became the daytime sub-brand, with learning-oriented programs delivering meal solutions. “Nighttime” programming links food to travel, history, and reality TV styled competitions. Hosts cross both sub-brands to link the network’s programming.

The Bliss Spa case study was presented by Kerry O’Day, its Marketing & Publissity Director. The Bliss Spa story is a great example of tying all customer experience points to the brand’s foundation. With a vision of making people’s lives more relaxed, fun, and less stressful, the brand’s personality embodies being:

• “Tongue in chic” (to make people smile)
• A spa-thority (using its credibility as a spa service provider to extend into products)
• A place for “You Time” (playing on the emotional benefits of its services and products for target consumers)

The Bliss brand, with limited dollars, was originally built on public relations and unconventional marketing. Even with more dollars now, its unconventional approach is an integral part of Bliss. One example? The spas serve small brownie bites - an indulgence that doesn’t feel that way since they’re so tiny! Bliss turned the challenge of finding local bakers into a contest, creating customer participation in brownie selection and driving website activity.

Three take-aways:

1. Michael Smith said successfully identifying and implementing segmentation is as much art as science. While Food Network did a lot of segmentation work, creating the specific sub-brands and programs came down to making solid, insight-filled business decisions and accepting risk.


2. I love brands where everything comes from a strategic foundation (Southwest Airlines is a favorite example). Given it’s still growing, Bliss accomplishes this through continuity in people around at its start, hiring people fitting its brand personality, and doing creative in-house. It will be fun to watch how its brand continuity plays out amid future growth.


3. There's always value in guerrilla marketing (or as Bliss would probably call it, "Girlrilla" Marketing). Check out this link for questions to help enhance your list of guerrilla marketing tools.

Tomorrow’s conference topic will be on marketplace trends.

Creative Quickie - A Squirrelly Story

Of our three pumpkins this year, we only carved one. Another was already rotten, and while the third, which our neighbor gave us, looked great, we decided to simply put it uncarved on the porch.

Squirrels began eating the two pumpkins immediately, starting with the one I carved. The design was ruined within one night. After Halloween, they started in earnest on the uncarved pumpkin.

On the way to church Sunday morning, I joked with my wife that we should take a funny picture of the pumpkin since, based on the design, we obviously had the stupidest, most uncreative squirrels in the world.

Yesterday afternoon, taking pictures from different angles, it was apparent that maybe I hadn’t given our squirrels enough credit. Looking at the pumpkin from a different vantage point, it seemed our squirrels might be more creative than originally suspected.


Turning the pumpkin on its side, it was clear that our very smart, very innovative squirrels had made a creative decision to carve the pumpkin from an alternative angle, using the stem as the pumpkin’s nose.

All of a sudden, I felt intense pride in our Prairie Village squirrels!

This squirrelly story’s moral? How often do all of us make quick judgments and suspect something’s bad simply because we don’t share someone else’s creative sensibilities? Probably way too many times.

Next time you think there’s nothing creative in what’s been presented to you, hold your opinion, listen to your creative team member, see the creation from their view, and find out if maybe, just maybe, your first impression was wrong!

Saturday Special - Anniversary Week - Blogging Tips and Lessons Learned

After blogging a year, here's what I'd pass along to anyone seriously considering starting a blog. There’s no shortage of web articles on the topic, but these lessons have been learned directly from writing one:

Know why you’re going to blog – Before starting, determine your reasons for blogging. Knowing it is for the discipline of writing a book sustains me while building an audience.

Establish rules for yourself – Guiding principles simplify decisions and your effort. I knew early I’d cover general work-related topics without mentioning my employer specifically. Additional guides include the number of words (generally under 300), how often to publish (daily except holidays), and topic categories (limiting content to 20 topic areas).

Write for a month before publishing – After deciding how often to publish, write a month’s worth of posts before putting something online. This provides three advantages:

1. You’ll discover how much effort blogging will take and can adjust your frequency to ensure you’ll sustain it.
2. It will help refine your writing skills.
3. You’ll have a backlog of material for when your creative juices run dry.

Create an editorial calendar – Get a big desk calendar, some small post-it notes, and plan out a few months worth of topics. Knowing where you’re headed is helpful and the flexibility of modifying where you’re headed (by moving the post-its around) is essential. Another hint – after 6 months, throw out any still-unwritten topics to freshen future content.

Capture ideas all the time – Always have something to write down blogging ideas. Never lose a potentially viable idea. Ask yourself daily what happened that might have blog potential. It’s a great relief later to thumb through a notebook of starter idea fragments.

Keep a hidden blog – After setting up your main blog, establish a hidden one where you can experiment with graphics, pre-publish posts to see how they’ll look, and work out bugs as you experiment with blogging.

Anniversary Week Live from the marcus evans Customer Segmentation Conference

This year was an unusual one to begin blogging. Amid challenging business and economic conditions (which provide a lot of potential material), my typical creative times (on planes) and stimuli (travel and exposure to new, external ideas) have been in short supply while creating five posts weekly on strategy and innovation.

That’s why I’ve relished opportunities to interact and learn from other marketers and business people at the various events I’ve been fortunate enough to speak at this year. They’ve provided a wonderful source of material, and the current conference is no exception.

Yesterday included two sessions at the marcus evans Customer Segmentation conference in Miami – one on Brainzooming and the other an interactive exchange where the group shared segmentation best practices in an exercise called, “90 Second Solutions.” There were a number of interesting presentations from a variety of companies that I’ll recap next week.

As we wrap up Anniversary Week, thanks for reading the blog and remember – let me know what you’re thinking and what you’d like to see here in the coming year!

Anniversary Week - Bueller? Bueller?

Today’s blogging learnings relate to interaction. The lessons are best characterized as being similar to a magnet – there’s an attractive force, with both positive and negative elements.

Attractive Force

Blogging has revealed personal interests that have attracted learning opportunities, even from people who already knew me pretty well. Through people sharing information prompted by blogging, I’ve learned about:

• Playing with Legos - both serious and silly
• The HTML code to open a hyperlink in a new window (target=”new”)
• Threadless T-Shirts – an intriguing business model and the funniest t-shirt I’ve ever seen
• The ins and outs of doing an hour radio show
• Gas, KANsas – I kid you not!
• Keri Smith and her book meant to be wrecked
• The Benrik approach to “Changing Your Life”
• What brands we’d miss

And that’s simply a sample of the varied and very cool stuff others have shared because of blogging.

Positive

I’ve received much positive feedback about blogging via email, comments here, and personal conversation. Through Google Analytics, I can see hits worldwide – audiences I’d never reach. One regular reader commented recently that there are “some very good posts” here; I asked him to let me know which ones since it’s tough for me to pick them out! The most intriguing comment was from a Chicago reader reminding me the blog earns me one minute of his time every day and that "counts for a lot." It certainly does, and I sincerely appreciate it!

Negative

The negative is we still haven’t uncovered how to get more of you participating in dialogue and sharing the blog with others, especially via posts or other web references. As a group, you seem fairly quiet online, at least around here.

Blogging how-to’s suggest regular, strong, original content as a growth key. We have regularity, but if you see modifications to content or style that would compel more of your own participation, getting your thoughts would be great. In one comment, Chris Reaburn pointed out similarities between indie bands and bloggers in this regard. You are the "small initial audience" and through the level of interaction you create, you can directly impact the work.

Feel free to exercise your influence by sharing thoughts on three questions to help shape the blog in the next year:

• What topics have been most beneficial to you either professionally or personally?
• What do you think about featuring shorter posts – do they still offer enough worthwhile information? (Results to the recent poll suggest that brevity is still preferred; Creative Quickies were at the top of the preference list.)
• What are your suggestions for continuing to grow readership?

Thanks in advance for any comments you provide. And here’s to another year’s worth of sharing strategy and innovation ideas!

Anniversary Week - Let Me Draw You a Picture

• Presentation Zen
• istockphoto.com - when I bought Presentation Zen, there's a code in the back for an initial discount on your first istockphoto credit purchase.
• Leslie Adams - her blog and cool pictures!
• Flickr.com - photo sharing and more (I think...remember, I still need to learn more about it!)
• Creativecommons.org - helping creative people protect and share their work.
• Veer.com - a fun creative and photo / image site. Its design approach really drove the early design work on "Creative Instigation." (And as I write this, it strikes me there's no reason the style I used there couldn't surface here to provide some more creative variety!)

Anniversary Week - Writing Lessons from the First Year of Blogging

I’m a heavy-handed editor – ask anyone who works with me. At least I go through many rounds of editing my own stuff also (Exhibit A is at the right). Writing so much for the blog, however, has forced a more structured approach with specific editing rounds. Here are steps I’ve learned that may help you be a faster writer:

• Keep something around to capture ideas – don’t let even remotely good possibilities evaporate.


• Mine, combine, dissect, twist, and edit ideas into a first draft. Get a complete version down irrespective of whether the sentences are complete.


• People want shorter material so start with a word limit. Five hundred words used to be my maximum. Based on reader preferences, I cut it to 300, with many under 200.


• Edit to tighten the prose on the next pass. Also consider rearranging elements to make it work better. Surprising how often an article’s conclusion becomes its new intro following this editing round.


• Run a spelling / grammar check to check the word count and help catch typos. Print it, read it aloud, read it backwards – anything to see it with fresher eyes since you’ve been through it several times.


• Shorten it even more – reduce the word count by 10 to 20% on the final edit. It may seem challenging, but the result is invariably stronger.

Now you’re set to start your own blog and crank out 60,000 words by next year!

Happy Anniversary Week!

Today’s the first anniversary of my initial blogging foray. Thanks for being a loyal audience and offering suggestions throughout for improving it!

The blog started after a presentation on corporate blogging by Jessica Myers of Garmin Industries. She said that anybody could start a free blog in 10 minutes. Several weekends later, I started with the expectation of writing twice weekly. It was intended to create something instructional beyond presentations, provide more permanent life to strategy and innovation ideas, and maybe form the basis for a book.

After posting the first article, I emailed my creative instigation partner Jan Harness, suggesting she start a creativity blog. She responded that current commitments made that unrealistic; that was Saturday.

Next thing I knew, I received an email about Jan’s first Creative Instigation blog post. By Tuesday, she’d written two articles. By Wednesday, it was clear she’d be posting daily. It took me several weeks, but out of competitiveness, I started writing daily too. It was a great example of the creative instigation approach we practice.

Looking at the initial objectives, the blog has:

• Solidified material that’s later found its way into my strategic thinking presentation
• Caused me to be a more succinct writer
• Provided material for Jan and me in putting together our “Creative Instigation” book

The only challenge has really been creating dialogue with all of you. You tend to be a “quiet” group. In the coming year, I’d love to get more interaction going and continue building this community.

This week we’ll cover lessons from the blog that can benefit you – even if you’re not blogging. And there will be a favor or two asked of you along the way! Check back tomorrow for more on writing lessons learned.

Rope-a-Dope

Muhammad Ali was famous for the “rope-a-dope,” a technique he used to beat defeat George Foreman and regain the heavyweight boxing title. What Ali did was stand on the ropes and let Foreman pound away for more than seven rounds. Foreman eventually wore down, and Ali went on the attack, knocking Foreman out in the eighth round. The strategy was effective because of his patience and ability to absorb as many punches as it required for Foreman to tire.

A business-version of this strategy can also be very effective.

Everyone works with people who like to talk first, talk second, and then talk some more. Maybe then they’re willing to let somebody else talk. While it’s tempting to dive in early on to interrupt and get your points across, doing so often makes them even more resolute about talking.

If you have the patience and the mental fortitude, consider letting them talk themselves out. The strategy provides an opportunity to more fully understand what’s on their mind, look for gaps and contradictions, even ask questions, and then go for the last word. It’s not applicable all the time, but it often can work to your advantage.

So go ahead and comment; it’s your turn. I promise I’m listening!

What You Saying?

There are at least two distinct ways to start a communications assignment. You can begin by asking, “What do I want to say?” or “What is the audience looking for and ready to hear?”

During a recent joint writing project, there were groups wanting to start with each question. It quickly became clear that the end result differed based on which question was the beginning point.

So which is the right way? It’s to answer both questions before you start writing.

It’s important to first know the communication objective (ask, “What are we trying to accomplish?”) and then swing around and sit in the audience’s seats. Process what you want to say with their eyes, ears, and minds as best you can to determine how what you want to communicate needs to be shared so they receive the intended message.

Post Election Advice

I’ve written before about “Real Simple” as a great magazine to use for ideation. There’s a column called “The Motivator” by Gail Blanke that unfortunately ended in the September 2008 issue.

From the ones I’ve seen, she does a great job of highlighting approaches to deal with a whole variety of personal and business challenges. Her final column addresses both how to give and how to take criticism – equally challenging issues for many people. Check it out along with another pertinent strategy and innovation topic – how to think on your feet.

And if you know any winning political candidates from yesterday, forward this post to them. They’d certainly benefit from reading up on these two topics as well!

Who Should Think Strategically?

People ask me frequently about who should be thinking strategically in business. My perspective is that the best businesses cultivate some strategic thinking skills in all employees. While that idea’s frequently received skeptically, it comes from the view that strategic thinking is about “addressing things that matter with insight and innovation.”

The definition suggests that strategic thinking is about applying knowledge, good judgment, and a creative perspective within one’s job functions and scope. It clearly doesn’t mean that strategic thinking is only limited to senior managers setting a company’s overall direction.

So while not everyone’s involved in corporate strategy, a broad group of employees should be tapped into strategic thinking. In that way, they can evaluate their activities against “what matters” when the rules aren’t working.

That requires information sharing with employees and education on what’s important to the business, how they contribute to that, and the parameters for them to exercise judgment in assessing what matters. It’s certainly not easy, but it should contribute to better performance and customer experiences.

Creative Quickie – Reading, Writing, and Creating

The November 2008 Inc. Magazine has a feature on hotelier Chip Conley. The article mentions in passing an intriguing creative inspiration combination he uses when designing hotels: he selects one magazine and five words that embody the overall hotel concept.

Give that approach a try next time you're stuck for a creative start:

• Get a magazine that’s brand new to you
• Identify five words describing your intended creative destination
• Put them all together in one room for the night and hang out the DO NOT DISTURB sign
• See what new possibilities emerge the next morning!

More on the Dyson Airblade

A comment from Chuck on the Brainzooming blog sent me in search of some more background on the Dyson Airblade.

Here's an article and video on its introduction. I'm interested in trying it again to see if it really dries hands in 12 seconds as is claimed.



Additionally, click here for an article on the innovation process at Dyson.