When we started exploring innovation from a marketing perspective a few months ago, Andy Armstrong left a copy of Baked In: Creating Products and Businesses that Market Themselves by Alex Bogusky and John Winsor on my desk—a fantastic read on market-driven innovation. I was only a few dozen pages into the book when I hit a particularly insightful piece of guidance:
“Make a list of the cultural trends that influence your consumers’ behavior. Take your time; all of the items on this list will not be immediately apparent. Stay with it, and you will gradually observe more and more. Be a good observer. Remove yourself from your own cultural perspective. Look for the absurdities, the incongruities, the things that don’t necessarily make sense. You will begin to laugh as you start to see the culture from the outside. (Laughing is a good sign).”
Bogusky’s hypothesis underpinning this advice is simple: consumers are participants in a culture first and an economy second—they’re much more likely to spend their hard-earned dollars on culturally relevant products than culturally ambivalent products. If a brand wins the cultural relevance game, they’ll likely see the economic benefits as well.
The passage also was timely as I’d just returned from Iconosphere 2010, the signature event for Iconoculture clients. The two-day session was essentially a lightning round of the cultural immersion and consumer behavior mapping Bogusky recommends in Baked In. The marketers who joined us were treated to in-depth analysis of the trends and values that are shaping consumer behavior today, accompanied by a healthy dose of practical advice for brands looking to stay relevant.
While the “you had to be there” cliché rang true for the Iconosphere event, the insights and ideas we talked about were very portable. One sample topic: a deep dive into the changing values shaping Generation X behavior as that demographic approaches midlife. We’ve captured a summary of this session’s key takeaways along with the presentation deck and an audio file for Council members here.
Stay tuned for more on the Iconoculture methodology and more insights from their team of cultural, demographic, and category experts.
Related posts:
on 10 June 10
Respond
Who to contact to get a fuller view of the decks/insights/trends shared at the Iconosphere event? Thx. Jim