I would like to design sustainable growth through digital, social, sustainable innovation as an :
INNOVATION MANAGER in a DESIGN agency or INNOVATION LAB
DEVELOPMENT MANAGER in a CONSULTING firm
CHIEF EXPERIENCE OFFICER within the brand communication / marketing team
I leverage game changing consumer insights into :
- useful, desirable, sustainable brands
- valuable products and services
- breakthrough digital acquisition strategies
- engaging prospect and client communications
- relevant research and data analysis enabling decision
The best mechanism to drive growth is a strategically planned ecosystem. To establish a successful ecosystem, I thread the needle between employee experience, customer experience, brand purpose, creative, and technology, imbuing all these crucial areas with customer obsession.
I recently completed a master in INNOVATION & TRANSFORMATION focused on individual and collective engagement to :
- plan projects exploring new business models while reconciling financial, human, techs constraints
- pose complex problems with method, structure and rigor to convince decision makers
- design relevant and creative responses through design thinking to remain connected to consumer reality
- communicate the value proposition and the results effectively to concerned audiences, including Comex
I have clarified my approach in a series of methodological articles:
1- To (re) engage employees digital transformation must rise up to social challenges #socialinnovation #purpose
2 - Experience design to create value and collectively visualize the customer experience to deliver #experiencedesign
3- Brand entertainment the new way to communicate with the -35 years on line and on TV # brandcontent
4- The animation of the collective to envision and deliver an exceptional customer experience #collectiveintelligence
5 - The account planner and the designer, actors of corporate innovation and transformation #goodplanners
My resume + portfolio in French as well as my articles are here : www.pourquoitucours.fr
At Snook, we have been thinking about how service design can help shape a more sustainable society. So far our thinking has been outwards focussed; about climate change as something created ‘out there’, by other people. I’d like to now turn our attention inwards, to service design practice and the sustainability of our solutions.
We always put users and their needs at the heart of product or service development. But what if the needs we are designing for today, compromise the needs of future generations? Basic but vital requirements, like access to clean air, food and water. Speed and convenience are common user needs, yet often lead to unsustainable solutions that damage the environment and our health. Think disposable coffee cups, driving short distances, short-haul flights and next day delivery — creating toxic landfill sites, air pollution and carbon emissions.
Are the solutions we design around current user needs worth the environmental impact they cause?
As people become increasingly aware of climate change and pollution, the demand for sustainable services is likely to increase. There is a clear business case to be made for organisations anticipating these changes in user expectations and getting ahead of competitors by starting to implement changes that may take years to complete. Few people cared about disposable plastic packaging 5 years ago and now suppliers are playing catch-up to gain a competitive advantage.
The good news is that we know design has the potential to create more sustainable services and solutions. At Snook, we are experimenting with three ways to design for future user needs:
1. Design for the long term
In today’s society, we tend to focus on short-term benefits. We have a lot to learn from ancient civilisations who made decisions with future generations in mind. The Seventh Generation Principle was and still is, used by indigenous communities to weigh up the effect of decisions on people in the next seven generations. From personal decisions to governmental or corporate ones too. We are currently some way off this, with the example from Carolyn Raffensperger’s assessment of toxic waste from landfill sites predicting a negative impact for 10,000 generations to come.
Another great example comes from the Welsh Government, which introduced the Well-Being of Future Generations (Wales) Act in 2015. This provides a legal requirement for all public bodies in Wales to make sure decisions have positive, long term impacts. There is even a framework to help apply the Act to public services and a commissioner to hold the government to account for its decisions.
I have also been experimenting with the Three Horizons tool for long term thinking, created by H3Uni. It is a great method for bringing groups of people together to discuss challenges with ‘business as usual’, define a desirable future and generate ideas that will act as stepping stones between the two. I used the tool as part of my dissertation to generate ambitious ideas for Dundee City Council’s Food Growing Strategy. It certainly broadened people’s thinking from short term challenges to longer-term aspirations, and helped prioritise actions we can take now to increase the chance of that future happening.
Image credit: H3Uni.org
2. Understand the impact of our solutions
To design for future user needs, we need to understand the environmental impacts of the services we design and try to minimise them. We need data on the impact of our designs, which is not common practice at the moment. In fact, I’ve struggled to find examples of any services that do.
A leading example comes from the Scottish Government’s Digital First Service Standard and the Green ICT criteria. This requires all digital services developed by the Scottish Government to understand the environmental impact of the service over its whole lifecycle, and plan to reduce this over time.
Environmental impact assessment tools are commonly used in other industries. Such as the Triple Bottom Line which is used to balance the economic, environmental and social costs. I’ve yet to see this used in a service design project (but would love to be proven wrong!). Instead, I’ve participated in many concept prioritisation workshops that only consider the benefits of business costs and short-term value to the customer. If you’ve used an environmental impact assessment tool as a part of a service design project, I’d love to hear about it.
3. Expand human-centred design
Human-centred design has delivered great change in designing things around the people that use them not just the organisational needs. However, human-centred mindsets are an underlying cause of climate change. Our failure to appreciate how dependent humans are on ecosystems for basic services has lead to us destroying ecosystems we need to survive. Plus, animals are amazing and life would be very boring with just us humans.
‘All-living-things-centred design’ isn’t catchy but that’s what we should be aiming towards. We must consider the needs of all living things as stakeholders in our designs, both present and future. I recently spotted ‘the environment’ and ‘future generations’ on a stakeholder map at Snook.
As service designers, we are used to working in iterations and making improvements. The next iteration of service design must be to take responsibility for the impact of the things we design, for current users and future users in generations to come.
Are you experimenting with tools for sustainable service design or thinking about future user needs? I’d love to hear from you! I am keen to start a conversation about what more sustainable service design looks like and build a community to experiment with. If you are interested, join us.
Update: we started the community, join us at www.designandclimate.org
The idea of “crisis management” requires no explanation right now. Something unexpected and significant happens, and our first instincts are to defend against — and later to understand and manage — the disturbance to the status quo. The crisis is an unpredictable enemy to be tamed for the purpose of restoring normality.
But we may not be able to return to our familiar pre-crisis reality. Pandemics, wars, and other social crises often create new attitudes, needs, and behaviors, which need to be managed. We believe imagination — the capacity to create, evolve, and exploit mental models of things or situations that don’t yet exist — is the crucial factor in seizing and creating new opportunities, and finding new paths to growth.
Imagination is also one of the hardest things to keep alive under pressure. Companies that are able to do so can reap significant value. In recessions and downturns, 14% of companies outperform both historically and competitively, because they invest in new growth areas. For example, Apple released its first iPod in 2001 — the same year the U.S. economy experienced a recession that contributed to a 33% drop in the company’s total revenue. Still, Apple saw the iPod’s ability to transform its product portfolio: It increased R&D spending by double digits. The launch of the iTunes Store (2003) and new iPod models (2004) sparked an era of high growth.
With imagination, we can do better than merely adapting to a new environment — we can thrive by shaping it. To do this, we need to strategize across multiple timescales, each requiring a different style of thinking. In the current Covid-19 crisis, for example:
The initial emphasis is on rapid reaction and defense.
Then the focus shifts to constructing and implementing plans to endure the likely economic recession to follow.
As the recession abates, the focus shifts to rebound — making adjustments to portfolios and channels as we seek to exploit recovering demand.
Over time the situation becomes more malleable, and imaginative companies shift their focus to reinventing — seeking opportunity in adversity by applying more creative approaches to strategy.
In other words, renewal and adaptive strategies give way to classical planning-based strategies and then to visionary and shaping strategies, which require imagination.
We recently surveyed more than 250 multinational companies to understand the measures they were taking to manage the Covid-19 epidemic. While most companies are enacting a rich portfolio of reactive measures, only a minority are yet at the stage where they’re identifying and shaping strategic opportunities.
We have written elsewhere about what the post-Covid reality is likely to look like and how to discriminate between temporary and enduring shifts in demand. But how can companies avoid having imagination become the first casualty of the crisis?
How to Develop Your Organization’s Capacity for Imagination
Crises place heavy demands on leaders and managers, and it is easy to lose the already slim time we might have for reflection. But we won’t see the big picture, let alone a shapeable picture of the future, unless we stand back and reflect.
Most of the time in business we operate with our instinctual “fight-or-flight” nervous system that evolved to help us in high-pressure situations, like running from a predator. This system narrows our focus. But less emphasized is the parasympathetic, or “rest-and-digest” system, which evolved to manage mental and bodily operations when we are relaxed. We can imagine in hunter-gatherer days, the mental intensity of the hunt, followed by time back at home, reflecting on the day’s stories, perhaps imagining how to hunt better.
We need to create the equivalent rhythm of action and reflection in business as we navigate this crisis. Ways to switch off the fight-or-flight mode and support reflection include:
Taking time over a meal to rest, digest, and reflect
Listening to or playing music
Going for a walk without your phone
2. Ask active, open questions.
In a crisis, we likely won’t have immediate answers, and we therefore need to employ good questions. The most natural questions in a crisis tend to be passive, for example, “What will happen to us?” However, the possibility of shaping events to our advantage only arises if we ask active questions, such as “How can we create new options?”
Creativity involves reaching beyond precedents and known alternatives to ask questions that prompt the exploration of fresh ideas and approaches. Some good questions to ask in the Covid-19 crisis might include, for example:
Which needs or products are taking center stage?
What customer needs exist for which there is no current solution?
What are we not doing for our customers?
If we were starting over now, what company and offering would we build?
Why are today’s loyal customers still doing business with us?
3. Allow yourself to be playful.
Crises require a goal-driven and serious response. However, in times of stress, we tend to overlook the important human capacity of play to temporarily forget about goals and improvise. Biologically, play can be characterized as de-risked, accelerated learning. For example, juvenile animals’ mock fighting is highly effective preparation for real combat.
In unprecedented, rapidly changing situations, play is a critical capability. As well as providing some much-needed stress relief — how many of us are currently working from dawn to dusk? — play can end up being, counterintuitively, very productive. We can make interesting, new connections between ideas when we allow ourselves to loosen up from our regular, goal-driven, laser-focused, instrumental approach.
“Creativity is the rearrangement of existing knowledge into new, useful combinations,” Jorgen Vig Knudstorp, chairman of the LEGO Brand Group, told us. “Just like playing with LEGO Bricks, this can lead you to valuable innovations — like the Google search engine or the Airbnb business model.”
Sometimes nothing immediately useful will come of play, but playing at least allows us to practice imagining, improvising, and being open to inspiration — all important skills when navigating the unknown.
4. Set up a system for sharing ideas.
Someone, somewhere in your organization is likely being forced by circumstances to experiment with new ways of doing things. The imaginative corporation picks up, codifies, and scales these innovations.
Imagination doesn’t just happen on an individual level. Ideas evolve and spread by being able to skip between minds. Companies need to facilitate collective imagination. The key to this is allowing new ideas to be shared while they are still in development: creating forums for people to communicate in a casual way, without hierarchy, reports, permissions, or financial justifications.
Conversely, the way to kill imagination and the spread of ideas is to construct non-communicating functional silos and to induce fear of not meeting the bar for “sensible” suggestions. In the name of “practicality” or “common sense” many ideas are rejected without being explored. But it is hard to distinguish ideas with no eventual merit from those which are merely unfamiliar, undeveloped, counterintuitive, or countercultural. In a situation where there are no easy solutions, we need to open up rather than constrict the funnel for new ideas.
Every corporation had entrepreneurial beginnings. But successful corporations that have honed a stable, profitable, business recipe forget the messy, imaginative origins of the ideas upon which they were founded. Now is not the time for only executing a practiced recipe. We are facing a historic discontinuity, requiring entrepreneurialism and creativity.
5. Seek out the anomalous and unexpected.
Imagination is triggered by surprising inputs. Our pattern-seeking minds adapt our mental models when we see something that does not fit. And when we adapt our mental models, we entertain different strategies and courses of action.
To solve tough new problems, look externally. Examine accidents, anomalies, and particulars, and ask: “What doesn’t fit here?” Digging into what we find will prompt reframing, rethinking, and the discovery of new possibilities.
In the current situation, we might ask, for example, why have some countries like Japan, China, and South Korea been able to break away from an exponential infection pattern? Or why are some cities suffering more than others? Or why apparently similar strategies gave different results in different places? Or what stopped us from being prepared for this crisis in spite of MERS, SARS, Ebola, and other ominous precedents?
6. Encourage experimentation.
Although a crisis stretches our resources, it is important to encourage experiments — even if only on a shoestring budget. Natural systems are most resilient when they are diverse, and that diversity comes from trying new ways of doing new things. Our ideas only become useful if they are tested in the real world, often generating unexpected outcomes and stimulating further thinking and new ideas.
For example, Ole Kirk Christiansen, the founder of the LEGO Brand, originally made homes and household products, such as wooden ladders and ironing boards, until the Great Depression of the 1930s forced him to experiment, and he tried building toys. This turned out to be a successful move at a time when consumers were holding back from building homes. After examining the international toy market, which was dominated by products made from wood, Christiansen was driven to experiment again by introducing toys made of a new disruptive material — plastics. Despite the scarcity of the immediate post-WWII years, he re-invested a full year’s profits into new machinery and tools, at first making traditional toys, then creating building blocks. By 1958, these evolved into today’s well known “binding” LEGO Bricks. Soon after, the company abandoned all wooden and other toys to double down on the LEGO Brick Toy Building System (“LEGO System in Play”).
7. Stay hopeful.
Imagination feeds off the aspirations and aggravations that propel us to seek a better reality. When we lose hope and adopt a passive mindset, we cease to believe that we can meet our ideals or fix our problems. In statistics, Bayesian learning involves taking a belief about a statistical distribution (a “prior”) and updating it in the light of each new piece of information obtained. The outcome of the entire process can be determined by the initial belief. Pessimism can become a self-fulfilling prophesy.
As a leader, ask yourself whether you are giving people grounds for hope, imagination, and innovation, or whether you are using pessimistic or fatalistic language, which could create a downward spiral in organizational creativity. Dealing with real risks involves taking imaginative risks, which requires hope.
“Never in our lifetimes has the power of imagination been more important in defining our immediate future,” Jim Loree, CEO of Stanley Black & Decker, told us. “Leaders need to seize the opportunity to inspire and harness the imagination of their organizations during this challenging time.”
All crises contain the seeds of opportunity. Many businesses, struggling now, will likely find a second life during and after the crisis, if they can keep alive and harness their imaginations. Imagination may seem like a frivolous luxury in a crisis, but it is actually a necessity for building future success.
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A special double lecture at MIT on the theme of sustainability, on June 3rd 1994, features two prominent speakers: Karl-Henrik Robèrt and Paul Hawken. Robèrt is a Swedish oncologist and significant figure in the global sustainability movement, known in particular for the “Natural Step” framework he devised that lays out the system conditions for sustainability. It was launched in Sweden in 1989. Five years later his call was taken up by Paul Hawken in the U.S. Hawken is a renowned environmentalist, entrepreneur, journalist, and author who focuses on sustainability and changing the relationship between business and the environment. The speakers are introduced by Bill Isaacs.
I was working at Mullen Lowe in 2004. It all started with a Wisk ad campagn from the US then launched in Europe before becoming Persil UK ad campaign and now Skip Ad Campaign. https://vimeo.com/107732866
We then launched it in Europe under the Sunil Brand.
"Great brands are no different. They create connection and meaning that allows them to transcend their often menial use and go beyond what they do to relate to who we are. They create a narrative that weaves into our greater lives and forges a deeper attachment for the user.
But none of this is by accident. It is the skill of the great marketer to devise these brand stories by means of his or her own ability. Think Nike, generating a near-myth about people's ability to accomplish regardless of gender, race or athletic prowess - the "Just do it" story. From sneakers to desirable must-haves, consistently over three decades, due to the power of the story.
Other great brands have done the same. Apple took the hitherto banal world of what was known as "information technology" and, by means of an altogether more compelling story, created an ever-expanding category that has meaning in all of our lives, from iPods and iPhones to iPads and beyond.
What produces this meaning is the story - one largely told and embodied by the late Steve Jobs himself. It brings new meaning to what computing really can be. A story in which Apple becomes the champion of a world of freedom-enhancing technology, as opposed to the promise of tedium and enslavement that computers stood for prior to the great Apple story of the 20th century. This idea became filmic reality in the "1984 won't be like 1984" ad - the ultimate expression of computers' ability to smash the very totalitarianism for which they had, until that point, stood, adopting George Orwell's tale as the medium for new storytelling within the category.
Weaving a significant narrative
Persil/Omo's "Dirt is good", arguably one of the more notable modern-day brand stories, does the same. It weaves a new narrative of real significance into a category that traditionally would boast about the size of its molecules or the severity of stains it could remove. Now, the narrative is that dirt equates to creativity; and parents aspire to have creative, free-thinking and playing kids, as opposed to those locked into pristine-clean conformity. By establishing this story - one of true human significance that is applicable the world over - it propagates meaning, connection and, ultimately, commercial success. It is among Unilever's biggest brands, exceeding $3bn globally.
Having been at the heart of this piece of brand thinking, it is worth reflecting on the role of storytelling in the conception of the "Dirt is good" idea. A story that would genuinely shift not just the way consumers across every continent related to their laundry, but, just as importantly, the way the brand team internally saw the challenge.
To come up with a story that can permeate the ranks and regions of an organisation as much as it can connect with consumers the world over, we first need to find a way of relating it to ourselves. Before we can create a brand that has a true story to tell consumers, it must hold meaning for the team who will steward and build it.
Only connect
So how do great brand stories emerge?
The "Dirt is good" story started with a degree of soul-searching within the team, to understand the ideology of the Persil/Omo brand across its history and how this related to the team's own beliefs. We found that the brand, in its many guises across the world, was obscuring what had been a very strong agenda of humanity and connection. This was a brand that, across the eras, had connected with the human side of consumers and their relationship with laundry. It may not have been elevated to any great discourse on the notions of freedom or accomplishment, but it was notable nonetheless. This formed a connection within the team, who, in turn, expressed an ambition to be more connecting and meaningful in the world in which their brand existed. This founding ideology - being humanist and connected - formed the backbone of the "Dirt is good" story.
The critical next step was the link to the broader lives of consumers globally. By moving beyond the confines of the washbowl we started to glimpse a world in which our team ideology would relate in ever-more pertinent ways to the consumers our brand sought to serve.
Investigating importance
We spoke one-on-one with consumers the world over, using stimulus that would begin to make connections from their world of banality to greater heights of meaning. By imposing the discipline of asking "Why is that important?" we could touch the very nerves of true emotion, and tap into the way that this bigger emotion could link back to the laundry category. We began to find that there was indeed a deep connection available, via the deep insight that "If you are not free to get dirty, you cannot experience life and grow".
Having located the area within which our story would unfold - where a parent's desire for a creatively unconstrained child relates to everyday dirtiness or cleanliness - we went on to specify the point of resolution the brand would bring. Great brands and brand stories play to a deep desire or resolve a deep tension.
Now, the narrative is that dirt equates to creativity; and parents aspire to have creative, free-thinking and playing kids, as opposed to those locked into pristine-clean conformity.
We located this tension as the counterpointing of disciplinarian parenting versus the universal aspiration for a more libertarian parenting style in the spirit of transgenerational progress. Everyone seeks to feel they are somehow more progressive than the preceding generation. We had found our great point of resolution. The story would start to unfold.
We now sought arenas in which our brand could allow its idea to be experienced by means of brand ritual. We needed to allow consumers to be able to participate in the story, as opposed to merely having it read out to them by means of didactic, one-way TV communication. We identified painting as the first experience platform for the "Dirt is good" ritual and instigated painting competitions from Pakistan to Brazil. Consumers came in droves to experience the idea and prove their own relationship to it founded on such insight into real lives. Later, our story moved to new areas of brand ritual - most notably sport. The indelible connection between playing sport and getting dirty was formed.
Turning to innovation
We then looked to use the "Dirt is good" story to conceive of innovation the brand could bring to the category. This continued to stoke the essential fire within the story, but in a way that was part of the "Dirt is good" brand.
This approach identified new chapters in the Persil/Omo brand story - subplots that would weave the narrative ever-more tightly through the organisation and the consumer world. "Pockets full of promise" proved to be the way to speak about what, hitherto, would have been yet another banal enzyme in search of some monster stain.
Instead, we spoke of children's pockets as the theatre of their experience and repository of all their finds. As such, pockets would get dirty in the service of this freedom and creativity.
Within a relatively short time we had begun to develop a story we would tell, and which would be told time and time again. Wherever we were to travel, the essential narrative of "Dirt is good" would connect. The plot and characters would elaborate and grow, but the essential story would remain the same.
A story that would shift the banal to the truly meaningful, which lives forever.
David Arkwright is a founding partner of global brand-development agency MEAT and the former global brand director for Unilever's laundry business. He is the author of The Making of Dirt is Good.
HOW TO CREATE A MEANINGFUL BRAND THROUGH STORYTELLING
Locate the point of ideological connection between the team and the brand's past.
Define how the brand can connect with the consumer's life at a deeper level of purpose and emotion - the "why" beyond the "what".
Find the brand's point of resolution. What is the deep desire the brand realises, or the deep problem it resolves?
Define where and how the idea can be experienced by ritual, so that the story is told in experience as much as in words.
Create new brand chapters via innovation, which is conceived through the brand's story and central idea.
"The Great Turning is a name for the essential adventure of our time: the shift from the industrial growth society to a life-sustaining civilization. Future generations, if there is a livable world for them, will look back at the epochal transition we are making to a life-sustaining society. And they may well call this the time of the Great Turning. It is happening now." ~Joanna Macy
According to Macy, to accomplish this turning, work needs to be done in three distinct areas. They are as follows:
1) Holding Actions- this is essentially what we normally call activism or direct action. It's getting out there in the streets and saying a "Holy No" to the destructive and unjust practices that are taking place on the planet right now. It's putting bodies in the way of an out of control global system as it marches its sick juggernaut towards some form of deterioration or collapse.
2) Structural Change- this is where we actively work to build new societal forms, new economies, new ways of being together and organizing etc. This is the realm of the famous Buckminster Fuller quote, "To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete".
3) Shift in Consciousness- this is where we do the work of inner spiritual and psychological transformation, what Joseph Campbell called the inward journey. Here we intentionally try and develop beyond our "skin encapsulated egos" and open into wider spheres of identity with the earth, cosmos, and the whole of humanity. This can happen through new forms of thought, understanding the Great Story of which we're a-part, and in particular, through the many spiritual traditions that have developed the methods for such transformation over the centuries.
For Macy this is important because, "These structural alternatives cannot take root and survive without deeply ingrained values to sustain them. They must mirror what we want and how we relate to Earth and each other. They require, in other words, a profound shift in our perception of reality--and that shift is happening now, both as cognitive revolution and spiritual awakening"
A year ago we wrote “Sex & Startups.” The premise was this: The current technology and venture capital structure is broken. It rewards quantity over quality, consumption over creation, quick exits over sustainable growth, and shareholder profit over shared prosperity. It chases after “unicorn” companies bent on “disruption” rather than supporting businesses that repair, cultivate, and connect. After publishing the essay, we heard from hundreds of founders, investors, and advocates who agreed: “We cannot win at this game.”
This is an urgent problem. For in this game, far more than money is at stake. When VC firms prize time on site over truth, a lucky few may profit, but civil society suffers. When shareholder return trumps collective well-being, democracy itself is threatened. The reality is that business models breed behavior, and at scale, that behavior can lead to far-reaching, sometimes destructive outcomes.
Many well-reasoned think pieces* have been written about the gaping chasm between the world we need and the world that exists. Today, we want to provide the seeds of a solution — and to encourage founders, investors, foundations, corporations, and their allies to organize around it.
A company’s business model is the first domino in a long chain of consequences. In short: “The business model is the message.” From that business model flows company culture and beliefs, strategies for success, end-user experiences, and, ultimately, the very shape of society.
We believe that developing alternative business models to the startup status quo has become a central moral challenge of our time. These alternative models will balance profit and purpose, champion democracy, and put a premium on sharing power and resources. Companies that create a more just and responsible society will hear, help, and heal the customers and communities they serve.
Think of our most valuable institutions — journalism, education, healthcare, government, the “third sector” of nonprofits and social enterprises — as houses upon which democracy rests. Unicorn companies are rewarded for disrupting these, for razing them to the ground.
Instead, we ought to support companies that provide extreme home makeovers. We can’t assume these companies will be created by accident. We must intentionally build the infrastructure to nurture them.
ENTER THE ZEBRA
This new movement demands a new symbol, so we’re claiming an animal of our own: the zebra.
Why zebras?
To state the obvious: unlike unicorns, zebras are real.
Zebra companies are both black and white: they are profitable and improve society. They won’t sacrifice one for the other.
Zebras are also mutualistic: by banding together in groups, they protect and preserve one another. Their individual input results in stronger collective output.
Zebra companies are built with peerless stamina and capital efficiency, as long as conditions allow them to survive.
The capital system is failing society in part because it is failing zebra companies: profitable businesses that solve real, meaningful problems and in the process repair existing social systems.
Drawing from the work of many thinkers,** we’ve developed a portrait of what a zebra company is, does, and stands for. This chart outlines how a zebra company compares with its mythical cousin, the unicorn.
For a downloadable, printable version, click here.
WHY IS IT SO HARD TO BUILD ZEBRA COMPANIES?
In the last year we’ve spoken to countless founders, investors, foundations, and thought leaders who believe zebra companies are crucial to our society’s success. Yet zebras struggle for survival because they lack the environment to encourage their birth, let alone to support them through maturity. “I wonder how many change-makers are stuck under the demands of unicorn investors,” said TJ Abood of Access Ventures, who added that he worried about “the opportunity cost to society” under this model.
From our conversations with stakeholders, we distilled the most common challenges facing zebra companies:
1. The problem isn’t product, it’s process. Tech isn’t a silver bullet. Building more won’t solve the biggest challenges we face today. An app won’t address the homelessness crisis in San Francisco or unite bitterly divided partisan politicians. The obstacle is that we are not investing in the process and time it takes to help institutions adopt, deploy, and measure the success of innovation, apps or otherwise.
2. Zebra companies are often started by women and other underrepresented founders. Three percent of venture funding goes to women and less than one percent to people of color. Although women start 30 percent of businesses, they receive only 5 percent of small-business loans and 3 percent of venture capital. Yet when surveyed, women — who perform better overall than founding teams composed exclusively of men — say they are in it for the long haul: to build profitable, sustainable companies.
3. You can’t be it if you can’t see it. Look hard outside of Silicon Valley and you’ll find promising zebra companies. But existing and aspiring business owners haven’t seen enough proof that they’ll have a higher chance of becoming financially successful and socially celebrated if they follow sustainable business practices. They lack heroes to emulate, so they default to the “growth at all costs” model. Imagine if every fund allocated a small percentage for zebra experiments. The investing firm Indie.vc has bravely stepped into this space, but it shouldn’t stand alone.
4. Zebras are stuck between two outdated paradigms, nonprofit and for-profit. For young companies pursuing both profit and purpose, the existing imperfect structures (hybrid for-profit/nonprofit, Public Benefit Corps, B-Corps, L3Cs) can be prohibitively expensive. The expense comes not only in legal fees, but in the consumption of a founder’s most precious commodity: time. Months are lost searching for aligned, strategic investors who are both familiar and comfortable with alternative models. This presents a chicken-and-egg problem for foundations, philanthropists, and investors alike. They are spooked by unproven alternative models, but companies can’t prove their models work without experiments to fund them in the first place. Moreover, the current tax system doesn’t reward — or even acknowledge — anything other than for-profit (tax) or nonprofit (deduction) strategies. From the IRS’s perspective, there is nothing akin to a “50 percent financial return, 50 percent social impact” investment. This leaves many potential investors in a straitjacket.
5. Impact investing’s thesis is detrimentally narrow and risk-averse. Much of the $36 billion in impact investment funding is restricted to verticals like clean technology, microfinance, or global health. This immature market limits innovation in other sectors — like journalism and education — that could desperately use it.
“So how will investors turn a profit and mitigate risks?” you may be asking. Dividends? Equity crowdfunding? We don’t have all the answers. But we’ve seen how a company’s business model and values can negatively affect the bottom line (#deleteuber). So what if the opposite is also true? What if more-enlightened dollars invested in more-enlightened companies led to stronger returns? What if companies that stood for something were in fact more profitable? Patagonia, Warby Parker, Zingerman’s, Etsy, Mailchimp, Basecamp, and Kickstarter are a start — but the world needs so much more.
MAKE ZEBRAS: JOIN US
If you believe technology and capital must do better, if you are building a zebra company or want to help carve out a space for them to thrive: join us
Our goal is to gather zebra founders, philanthropists, investors, thinkers, and advocates to meet in person this year for DazzleCon (November 15–17 in Portland, Oregon)— a group of zebras is called a dazzle! — to learn from one another and pool resources, ideas, and best practices, to collectively advance this set of ambitions. From this gathering, we will capture and share the unique patterns that zebra founders and funders are finding, and we’ll turn a loose network into a powerful, cohesive movement.
DazzleCon is proudly supported by Knight Foundation, Artha Investing for Impact, Social Capital Markets, Portland Incubator Experiment, and Catalyst Law. Interested in sponsoring? Get in touch.
Thanks to Jenn Armbrust, Adam Brault, David Chen, Molly deAguiar, John Dimatos, Lennon Day-Reynolds, Corey Ford, Christie George, Seth Godin, Andrew Haeg, Jason Kunesh, Rachel Hankerson, Jonathan Harris, Jennifer Jordan, Luke Kanies, Duncan Malashock, Kanyi Maqubela, Ellen Mayer, Julie Menter, Douglas Rushkoff, Jake Shapiro, Michael Slaby, Rick Turoczy, Stephanie Pereira, April Rinne, Tom Watson. And to Jen McDonald for editing; and to Arthur Jones for the illustrations.
My experience in strategic planning and project management leads me to manage innovation projets in design consultancies or open innovation hubs. I am also interested to manage brand communications for a company embracing digital, social and environmental changes.
My strengths : 🙋 — Market, consumer, usage & habits research ⚡️ — Experience design applied to brands, products, spaces, campaigns... 🚀 — Innovation & transformation project management 😀 — C suite advisory and satisfaction 👪 — Collective intelligence and Open Innovation (parners / consumers)
🔍 — My articles : 1- To (re) engage employees digital transformation must make sense #socialinnovation #purpose 2 - Social innovation to meet client expectations with a positive impact on society and environment #innovationsociale 3 - Experience design to create value and collectively visualize the customer experience to be delivered #experiencedesign 4 - Brand entertainment the new way to communicate to millennials # brandcontent 5 - The account planner and the designer, actors of corporate innovation and transformation #planner
My book and articles are here : www.pourquoitucours.fr
Over the past years one word kept popping up whenever people talked about advertising and marketing: ‘Storytelling’. And for anyone hoping this trend would one day fade away, we have some bad news. It’s not going anywhere.
We live in an age where traditional advertising is losing its power, where the younger generation is obsessed with sharing personal stories through social media, and all of us are addicted at some level to what the streaming giants have to offer. Obviously brands and companies want in on the action. Brand stories, brand narratives, purpose films, manifests, branded content, branded entertainment, viral marketing. All branches of the same tree, which trunk stems from the fundamental art of storytelling.
Why do we even tell stories?
Most scientists will agree that life is essentially just a sequence of random moments. You are born, random stuff happens and then you die. But ever since the dawn of human intelligence we have tried to make sense of the meaninglessness of our lives. We’ve trained our brains to form patterns that connect random moments and inject meaning into them. That’s what storytelling is. It’s a way for us to get a grip on the endless chaos that would otherwise consume us. If you understand this, then you might also realize why storytelling is so much more than just entertainment. It’s an essential part of our survival, because without the ability to tell stories we would all be lost.
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
— Joan Didion
So how does this translate to selling a yoghurt drink?
When Yakult asked us to help share their story to a larger audience they had no idea what that story really was. Neither did we. Because a story is not just a string of facts. We all learn at some point that “And then, and then” stories are boring and tedious. No matter how interesting the origin of your brand might be, that’s not a story in itself. The best way to find where the real gold is would be by reverse-engineering the storytelling mechanism. “Connecting dots gives meaning to life”. Find that “Meaning” and you’ll know where to look for the those dots.
Wait, purpose?
It’s not easy to formulate your company’s or brand’s purpose, because let’s be honest nine out of ten times companies started because someone saw an opportunity to make a buck. Nothing wrong with that of course, but it’s not the stuff of stories. Purpose is often obscured and you’ll need to scrape away the bullshit to get to it.
Almost a hundred years ago a Japanese microbiologist (Minoru Shirota) created a beverage that offered “daily health for an affordable price”. That’s good business, but also purposeful. Because not only did he create the product, he also thought about a way to get it to people who need it the most. Enter the Yakult Ladies. A group of hardworking dedicated women who ride their bikes (nowadays scooters) to clients, offering their daily portion of health in a bottle.
Great story! All we needed to do was to show how the work of Yakult and their ladies helped Japanese people reach old age in health. Wrong. If only it was so simple. In Europe Yakult is not considered a medical product and therefor not allowed to make or even imply any health claims associated with their product. So now what?
We needed a different story
Going back to the Yakult Ladies, we found something even more powerful than the product they offer and that’s the dedication to their clients. Because as much as you want to debate the effectiveness of Yakult, you cannot deny that millions of people swear by it and cannot imagine starting their day without the tiny bottle. You could dismiss this as placebo, but perhaps there’s something more meaningful underneath? A daily ritual, a conscious moment of caring for your digestive system and if that bottle is a part of it, who’s to argue that it doesn’t work? The truth is that Japanese people reach higher ages than any other nationality.
Sadly, old age comes with a down side. A lot of those elderly Japanese people live in solitude and are often lonely. So, you can imagine how this reoccurring visit of the Yakult Lady is of tremendous value to them, because next to suppling their weekly ration of the yoghurt drink, they offer something more valuable: attention. This is meaningful. Going back to connect the dots and this four minute film is the result of our collective search for purpose. It’s the story of Yukie, a Yakult lady who forms a special bond with one of her oldest clients and in the process discovers herself.
What could initially be considered repetitive and insignificant work, now reveals its deeper meaning and purpose. That’s why we love to tell stories: not to make stuff up, but to help people see what was always there.
When brand executives come to us with what they think is a positioning problem these days, we typically have an entirely different diagnosis. Usually, it's a purpose problem.
Positioning around a functional or emotional benefit isn't enough anymore, with purpose instead emerging as the heartbeat of modern brands and as a key ingredient in what makes a brand become — and stay — relevant. Brands with purpose stand for something beyond their product or service, and consumers know it. These are brands that can always answer two questions: What do we believe? And why do we exist
Purpose has become one of the best ways to inspire people, both internally and externally. And it's essential to creating shared value. Brands with purpose don't just transact with people; they deliver something more, an intangible element that becomes part of an ongoing relationship.
By the numbers
Industry research backs this assertion up, including a recent study that found that brands with a strong sense of purpose grow at rate 2x that of those that don't. Our own Prophet Brand Relevance Index shows time and time again that components connected to how consumers interpret brand purpose propel "meaningful" brands to the top, led by the likes of Amazon, Netflix and Apple. Brands like Pinterest are beloved, while others lacking a strategic purpose may be used but lack relevance. Facebook, for instance, doesn't even crack the top 100 in our latest ranking.
Consumers can name many coffee brands, but they know Starbucks. When they lace up their sneakers or use Nike+ to track their morning run, they believe Nike is hoping to inspire the athlete inside them.
This sense of purpose isn't just about winning with customers. It's the No. 1 reason millennials choose to work for a given employer, studies have found — sometimes even trumping salary. It is then through a clear purpose that companies can attract and retain exceptional talent. It's also essential to appeal to potential partners and is the foundation for creating a meaningful experience.
Of course, this is not to say that purpose is the only thing that builds relevance, or that it immediately translates to higher sales. Brands must do many things right to succeed. But it's increasingly clear that the brands that fare the best and are the most differentiated from their competition are those with a crystallized strategic purpose.
How to find true purpose
It's important to point out that brand purpose can, and often should, be different than a corporate mission. Unilever, for example, has staked its claim in sustainability and supported that through its portfolio of brands. But Axe's purpose is to help guys look, feel and smell their best, while Dove strives to turn beauty into a source of confidence, not anxiety.
Some brands are lucky enough to have been based on purpose from the very beginning. Parents can buy many types of toys, but their favorites are likely Fisher-Price, because they share the belief that play is learning, or LEGO, which sees all children as the builders of tomorrow. Others, such as Ford, GE and Bank of America, have reshaped their purpose to hold more meaning for today's audiences.
Centering your brand on a strategic purpose isn't easy, but the intersection of a few lenses can put you well on your way to achieving this goal:
Societal impact — where does the world need help and you can make a difference?
Major capabilities — what are you good at beyond the products and services provided?
Passion point — what is your organization most passionate about?
The first step when examining these issues is to ask the question that goes to the heart of a brand's sense of itself: What do we believe? It's the value closest to the center of an enterprise, one so fiercely held that it sets it apart from peers. Many companies believe in being good corporate citizens. Only State Farm believes in being a good neighbor.
Put in simpler terms, how does your brand see the world? What makes that viewpoint different?
Examining tough questions
The second question marketers need to answer is harder: Why does our brand exist?
This comes bundled with a few other points, such as what tensions do we want to do address? What experiences do our customers love or couldn't live without? What do our employees think we do best? A purpose is only valid if it's known, shared and prized by everyone within and around the enterprise — from potential employees to core customers to investors.
Answering this second question is a logical leap from the first. Bank of America, for example, believes in the power of meaningful connections. Its reason for existing is connecting individuals, families and businesses to make their financial lives better. GE's core belief is that with imagination, anything is possible. It exists to use that imagination to invent the next industrial era, one that will build, move, power and cure.
Answering this second question also delves into the ways your organization delivers on promises. A commitment to purpose, once crystallized and communicated to all parts of the organization, is what inspires a steadily evolving array of services and products.
Following through
Once the answers to those two questions have been synthesized and articulated into a clear and succinct brand purpose, that purpose needs to be infused in several ways throughout the organization. The smallest details matter, but so do high-level strategies. In 2014, CVS stunned many observers with its decision to stop selling tobacco products. It told customers it needed to do this to better deliver on its purpose of striving "to improve the quality of human life."
In hindsight, the retailer had to make that call in order for employees, customers and business partners to take its commitment seriously.
Finally, it's essential to continually validate your brand's purpose. While purpose reflects deep and enduring values that shouldn't change much over time, it's still essential to track the purpose of competitors. Without finding new ways to engage customers through living brand experiences, competitors can hijack your purpose and take customers with them. Is the purpose still clear and evident in every way? Are there new ways it can be conveyed more meaningfully?
Preserving relevance
By the same token, brands need to continually take the pulse of core consumers and stakeholders, monitoring shifts in the way they interpret purpose. Many concerns about sustainability, for example, have evolved to be as much about people as the planet, expanding the purpose to address issues of fair trade and human rights.
Great care must be paid to delivering on brand purpose. Ingredient scandals are destructive for all food brands, for example, but they're crippling for those positioned as especially healthy. And while Volkswagen has bounced back from #dieselgate, the damage was precisely because the fraud involved faked emissions results, negating its purpose of environmentally-sound engines. Consumers virtually always dislike bad corporate behavior, but they're especially fierce in punishing what they perceive as brand hypocrisy.
Is a strong purpose enough to make a brand soar? No. But combined with a commitment to creating living, evolving brand experiences and the recognition that brands must be powered from the inside out through culture, capabilities and engagement, it's an essential ingredient of relevance. And in today's fast-moving world, that's the currency that matters most.
In the Age of Experience, customer expectation has been transformed. It’s not just a good idea for a company or a brand to deliver an experience with their product: it is imperative when you want to have a real impact on the market. This is changing the scope of what it means to Design.
Design has evolved beyond modeling products. Products used to be the direct expression of the design intent, defined under the physical constraints of available technologies, materials, ergonomics and well defined tasks and functions. But in the Age of Experience, products are dematerialized, reduced to “black boxes”, while integrating the realm of our augmented life.
The scope and value of Design is now at a critical place.
Design’s perspective is moving from designing products to designing experiences, engaging final users in a totally new way. It goes beyond aesthetics to genuine social means, investing in a larger scope of actions across a large spectrum of new disciplines. This “transdisciplinarity” of Design impacts business models, creates new offerings and new social engagement, and convokes new uses of science for designing meaningful and sustainable experiences.
We traditionally consider “Design Thinking” as placing the “human” at the center of the project or value proposition and deciphering what people really want, but fail to express. Design Thinking was the first visible step of Design transformation, moving from the individual designer’s subjective concept towards an empathic model of engagement, leveraging a social participative approach and multiple viewpoints.
Businesses use Design Thinking to identify market opportunity and build a solution that delivers customer value. It’s an improvement for designing a better product with clear identity, efficiency, and well-defined utilities. But the world and Design have quickly moved on to broader and more holistic issues, tackling complex systems and considering the full technological and service ecosystem by co-defining with users what makes up a unique and continuous experience.
This broader realm of “Experience Thinking” encompasses a new scope for designers, going beyond functions and harnessing the emotive power of customer experience. They script future scenarios and craft real-time 3D prototypes, use immersive technologies and virtual universes, and develop 3D digital masters with integrated information. Designers are acquiring abilities to access new information, including knowledge gathered from studies, but also a large variety of Data captured from sensors. These combined social and science-based data provide new material for designer creativity.
Digital content is the new nexus for thoughts, interpretation and decision making. The right tools and platform for ideation, virtualization, manufacturability and sustainability enable designers and businesses to view and validate experiential designs at any stage of the development process. Designers can craft the links between products and their interactions, making visible the emotional connections and their use. Data and senses combine for new balanced proposals.
Where we go from here depends on how we use Design to transform companies’ business ecosystems to create designs that captivate users, accelerate technology adoption and deliver ethical and sustainable experiences. Users will “co-design”, modifying deeply our life experiences and changing forever the way people live, travel and interact with technology in the future.
Design professionals across industries (such as architects, industrial designers and transportation specialists) can today transform their processes, methodologies and applications for experience thinking to imagine, design and fabricate innovative proposals.
Collaborating within this new innovation environment, experience thinking can help a business build its brand’s promise and the accompanying emotions it evokes. Then, each customer experience stands on its own as a singular achievement, but also provides a perfect center of gravity that builds brand loyalty and customer satisfaction.
Discover more about Design in the Age of Experience at our event website.
Find out about Dassault Systèmes’ Design Studiohere.
