Category Archives: Marketing

Trend singularity: why are businesses going after the same opportunities?

Posted on by
Reply

Opportunity CenterTechnological Singularity, according to some futurists, is an event horizon after which the accelerated progress of technology and in particular artificial intelligence becomes too rapid and too extreme to predict. There are various arguments with regards to the exact timing of that event.

I wonder if the structure of the singularity argument could be extended to other areas. For example, I think it’s safe to say we’ve pretty much hit the content singularity. Social media percolation is increasingly so efficient, that stories that once took days and weeks to move from the margins into mainstream media can now take minutes to do so. Once something is deemed interesting or important it gets liked/re-tweeted/etc and at a certain point bound to be broadcasted by one of the big connectors, mavens or salesmen and just take off. It’s on the next news bulletin and in tomorrow’s newspaper.

Unlike with technology, a state of absolute efficiency is not very far from where we are right now. Continue reading →

About Uri Baruchin

Uri is an international marketing strategist based in London, working as Strategy Director for The Partners, a leading UK brand strategy, design and innovation agency. He is an associate lecturer at the London College of Communications' MA in Graphic Branding and Identity and active in the Hebrew digital scene.

Marketing Plots: the search for meaning trap (and New Year’s resolutions)

Posted on by
2
Twisted Worlds by Jeff Kubina

Twisted Worlds by Jeff Kubina

February is here, and we can hear the gentle pop of New Year’s resolutions expiring all around us. Like soap bubbles that once were full of hope, reflecting a better future, many of our resolutions are now reduced to a moist residue on the harsh pavement of reality.

It’s no surprise that coming up with resolutions is much easier than keeping them. A 2007 study by Richard Wisemen from the University of Bristol showed that 88% of those who set New Year resolutions fail, even though over 50% felt confident they will succeed at the point of making their resolution.

New Year’s resolutions are commonly articulated as objectives, and just like business objectives, common reasons for failure can include lack of strategy, inconsistent implementation, lack of stakeholder engagement and cultural fixations. But there’s one pattern of failure I’d like to point out: the search for meaning trap.

When we set ambitious change-orientated goals, we are engaging with our definition of purpose. We are articulating various “happy ending” objectives and laying out early chapters for new, life-changing, narratives. In essence, defining resolutions is one of the ways we explore the meaning of our lives.

Similarly, defining business objectives is an activity intertwined with the organisational search for meaning. When we define business objectives we are exploring the purpose of our organisation and redefining a vision of our company’s future. The more critical the objectives are, the deeper we will have to engage with the fundamental questions about our brand. We will discover that in order to make significant changes to the composite and priorities of objectives, we have to engage with the question of who we really are as a company. That’s why in strategic processes you will find that terms like mission, vision, purpose, values, brand story, personality and other terms suggesting deep meaning tend to connect, raising further complexities and challenges.

This is the point where the search for meaning trap kicks in.

Continue reading →

About Uri Baruchin

Uri is an international marketing strategist based in London, working as Strategy Director for The Partners, a leading UK brand strategy, design and innovation agency. He is an associate lecturer at the London College of Communications' MA in Graphic Branding and Identity and active in the Hebrew digital scene.

UKGC – custom gaming PC building service review

Posted on by
Reply

So, I don’t think I’ve ever written a review on this blog, but I think this time it is well deserved and also a nice example of the difference good customer experience makes…

UKGC's Cerebus

My pet monster

So here goes:

About 18 months ago, I decided to indulge myself and get back into gaming. I started the process by making the terrible (and apparently common among adult gamers getting back into the habit) mistake of buying a gaming laptop (and nothing less than a souped up Alienware 11mx !). About a year later, I still had the best laptop I’ve ever had, but being unable to upgrade the graphics card (or pretty much anything) meant performance with new titles began to suffer.

So, swallowing my pride, I started looking around at getting a proper gaming PC. Among many questionable gaming PC workshops on the net, ukgamingcomputers.co.uk stood out.

UKGC are all about your customer experience.
We don’t all have time to sweat and curse through the process of building a custom-made PC and they make it all a pleasant experience at a reasonable mark-up.
The site doesn’t bombard you with a million alternatives, just with premium, award winning, components. For those, you will find detailed information that will help you understand what you wish to keep and what you wish to change, even if you’ve been out of the hardware loop for a while.

About Uri Baruchin

Uri is an international marketing strategist based in London, working as Strategy Director for The Partners, a leading UK brand strategy, design and innovation agency. He is an associate lecturer at the London College of Communications' MA in Graphic Branding and Identity and active in the Hebrew digital scene.

Breakthrough thinking traps and two types of brand projects

Posted on by
Reply
A prospecting shaft. Mch. 26. Claim 44 below Discovery, Hunker Creek

A prospecting shaft. Mch. 26. Claim 44 below Discovery, Hunker Creek (1901) by Joseph Burr Tyrrell, 1858-1957, CC: Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto

Strategic brand ideas are rarely linear textbook answers; they often call for an original reframing of the problem or reinvention of the rules. Strategy is sometimes called “The creative before the creative”, but fundamentally both share a similar ambition – the quest for breakthrough ideas.
Breakthrough thinking is just as mysterious as breakthrough creativity – the two are intertwined. And while there have been attempts at exploring it, you won’t be surprised to know that there are no recipes. However, occasionally there are some useful tools and models.

One of my favourite descriptions of the quest for breakthrough ideas, highly applicable to design thinking, is found in David Perkins’ book “The Eureka Effect: The Art And Logic Of Breakthrough Thinking”.
Perkins constructs a model of breakthrough thinking based on the analogy of digging for gold in the Klondike. During the gold rush, everybody is looking for gold, and there are various methods of digging for it. When you find gold, if you have even little experience, you’ll know you’ve hit gold. But the big question is “how do you know where to dig?”

In that tricky terrain, the breakthrough answers and brilliant ideas are out there somewhere, but to get to them, the creative thinker must confront four types of thinking traps: Continue reading →

About Uri Baruchin

Uri is an international marketing strategist based in London, working as Strategy Director for The Partners, a leading UK brand strategy, design and innovation agency. He is an associate lecturer at the London College of Communications' MA in Graphic Branding and Identity and active in the Hebrew digital scene.

Valve software: why idea development is like Jenga

Posted on by
Reply

To the non-gamers among you, Valve software is the gaming’s industry most original player. They combine game design innovation, with marketing and business model innovation, they are the avant-garde. you could say they are the Pixar of game development, only they’re much more.

Here is a quote from a recent blog post that I think applies to concept development in general and creative/strategy collaboration in particular:

“Coming up with a Meet the Team short [* animation shorts promoting one of their games. UB] is a lot like a game of Jenga. 99% of it involves making room for an idea and seeing what happens.

Most of the time what happens is the whole structure collapses. Then you have to figure out why it collapsed and rebuild it, this time making sure to add in some structural support for your idea so it doesn’t bring the whole short down.”

(the rest of their post relates more to the specific animated short they’ve been developing)

About Uri Baruchin

Uri is an international marketing strategist based in London, working as Strategy Director for The Partners, a leading UK brand strategy, design and innovation agency. He is an associate lecturer at the London College of Communications' MA in Graphic Branding and Identity and active in the Hebrew digital scene.