holistic brand experience innovation by Justin Tsui

50 Steps Holistic Brand Experience Innovation Framework by Justin Tsui May2014

 

50 Skills to Master Holistic Brand Experiences Innovation

 

Innovation is connection of irrelevant ideas

Innovation is the best way to maintain a company’s competitiveness and sustain growth in today’s competitive global economy.

But what is innovation might have different interpretations depending on industry and profession backgrounds.

For me, true innovations are seemingly irrelevant connections and improvements of ideas, that dramatically improve and disrupt existing competition offers.

My passion is always in driving holistic brand experiences in various product and brand development processes, and believe only by mastering the integrated value creation, delivery, and communication, the processes will unleash maximum values for business.

 

Disconnection and inefficiency in Traditional Innovation Process and Teams

Unfortunately, in traditional organization design, the product development, branding, and communication & advertising teams are usually handled by different teams either internally or worst externally; and the project leaders often have very little or no experience in driving innovation across function and disciplines.

If you have deep pockets like Procter & Gamble, you could hire the best in class staffs and agencies to handle each of the innovation, and be hoping their ideas could seamlessly click together at the end.

The sad reality is the output of different teams are often have some degree of disconnections in ideas, as well as compromises between the ideas depending on which sub-team are more influential! And, the team communications is a real pain in the butt and takes a lot of time and efforts to manage.

 

Holistic Brand Experience Innovation = FASTER, BETTER and CHEAPER

After 20+ years experience working with some of the best talents in product and brand creation, it reinforced my belief that we seriously needed a better framework to help an organisation to better create and deliver holistic product and brand experience, faster, better and more cost-effective.

With nearly 2 years’ research and practice, I would like to share my first attempt at a Holistic Brand Experience creation framework. This framework is certainly far from complete, which I hope to serve as an initial medium to invite new thoughts and advice from other innovation experts and industry leaders.

holistic brand experience innovation by Justin Tsui

50 Skills in Holistic Innovation Framework

I’ve suggested 50 Skills or Activities that constructs the Holistic Brand Experience Innovation framework, and many of which are interweaved and running in parallel in the processes.

 

50 Skills to Master Holistic Brand Experience Innovation

  • 5 Processes
  • 8 Tools
  • 4 Capabilities
  • 5 Leadership
  • 2 Learn & Improve
  • 5 Product Core Values
  • 6 Brand Value Amplifications
  • 7 Marketing Value Transfer
  • 3 Strategic Planning
  • 5 Research and Insights

I hope this visual chart could provide a rough overview of my proposed Holistic Brand Experience Innovation framework. I will try to explain each of the 50 Skills with more detail in my upcoming writing, and I know it will be a process of continuous improvement and learning with suggestions and challenges from other experts in the product and brand innovation industries.

 

Holistic Innovation requires Multidisciplinary Talents

This framework encourages cross-platform and multidisciplinary leadership and skill sets across business strategy, research and development, Design & Creative across 3D, 2D, interactive, space, advertising, Digital, as well as web and analytics expertise.

In a traditional setting, this could be easily a team a 10-20 experts each specialized in an area of professions; and it will NOT be an effective and agile working team.

Multidisciplinary SWAT team

The “SWAT” Team

And I would aggressively propose a “SWAT” team of no more than 4 people who have multidisciplinary skill sets with a passion for innovation and drive changes for better. Ideally, each SWAT team member should have hands-on experience in at least 20-30 of these 50 skills, and some overlaps of skill sets are desirable to enable different perspectives on the same topic.

And the special mission of the SWAT team is to drive holistic brand experience innovation with their special multidisciplinary skill sets.

 

Why Multidisciplinary

One common form of innovations is to connect irrelevant ideas to discover hidden insights and ideas, so having a wide scope of multidisciplinary experience will naturally enable and provoke these types of irrelevant connections.

Besides, multidisciplinary professionals are often quicker learners and have a natural drive to learn and try out new challenges. These entrepreneurial and creative mindsets are also critical qualities of a productive SWAT team member.

 

Innovation Leadership

Last but not least is the leadership and empowerment for the Holistic Innovation SWAT team; for the SWAT team to function and work effectively, the business leadership should ideally be a part of it, or authorize the decision to SWAT team leader.

Once the small and effective SWAT team worked out a promising prototype, then the prototype could be pass to the separated specialized teams to execute with excellence, and SWAT team could move on to other innovation projects.

 

Reduce Investment + Increase Success Rate

In conclusion, I believe if an organization could successfully adept a Holistic Brand Experience Innovation culture, it will significantly reduce the investment (both staff and time) and improve the success rate of any new business, new product, and new brand innovation.

Well, I know this vision might sound a bit crazy, but I think it is possible and could be the best answer to the rapidly changing and demanding customers who constantly seeking for better brand value and experience.

If you have different thoughts and suggestion on holistic brand experience innovation, please feel free to drop me an email at justin@justintsui.com. If you are interested to follow my up-coming writing on the framework, please subscribe here.