6 ways your brand can prepare for a digital detox
“Tired of technology that isolates us from one another, people seek out and place greater value on physical, authentic and ‘unperfect’ experiences designed with empathy and delivered by humans.”
Marketing chips have been stacked on a digital-heavy strategy to satisfy the demand of global events. The tsunami of digital disco lights battling a screen war, has resulted in an onslaught of the senses for many. If consumers find themselves needing a digital detox, does your strategy easily shift to plan B to meet your consumer with better engagements when they re-enter the real world?
Watching human movements has taught us valuable lessons in keeping emergency cards in your back pocket. Here are 6 ways your brand can create a reserve runway for product-vulnerable changes:
1. INVENTION BEATS COPY PASTE
If you haven’t already, prioritise finding new ways to engage with your users in the real world. Ask your teams to relook critical questions not yet solved, in spaces and opportunities where your users seem to be finding copy paste experiences. Once the copy-pastes have been identified, find innovators to fast track cracking those codes for your brand.
2. SELECT A COMBAT-READY TEAM
Record sales data for anything Michael Jordan in the last few weeks, confirms the public frenzy over Netflix’s latest docuseries, The Last Dance. The series highlights the Chicago Bull’s key winning formula, which was that the only way to win games, is to have the best players on your team. Bring in the right brains for your mission. High level innovation requires a carefully selected spread of unique thinkers to ensure all ideas are of superior quality, and are generated by experts that have extensive technical understanding as well as design experience. This ensures that you don’t end up with a pipeline of innovations that are not viable, and end up on your back burner.
The brands that are the fastest at solving a problem for users, will enjoy the leading head start when economies open up.
3. SPEED AND IDEATION SUPERIORITY
Fast ideas are something most companies can come up with, but producing innovation that accurately solves important issues for consumers is ultimately governed by the accuracy of the experts and thinkers you have curated. You want to walk away with ideas that have the highest potential in meeting your internal and external stakeholder criteria.
4. FUEL FROM OUTSIDE RESOURCES
If the mindset and culture in your organisation is not geared for agility and speed, make sure you have an agile innovation supply partner that is able to plug in and innovate at the needed pace and quality. Producing new thinking, can only come from fresh eyes that have not been staring at the problem day in and day out. In order to truly disrupt, exploration and experience research should always be extracted from cross industry influences and clues.
5. ADVANCED IDEATION METRICS
A shortage of ideas has never the problem. Cracking a code in a problem space however, requires layers of engineering filtration, to ensure all possible challenges have been considered, resolved and your solution is validated, before a costly development phase is initiated.
6. STAKEHOLDER SWIMMING LANES
Your innovation may be last season if your internal alignment process is not set up in a way that your phases are able to run in parallel. Think swimming lanes. All tasks are time boxed and aligned to the deadline.. All stakeholder activities are time framed and linked to a continuum process that ensures your innovation pipeline has nurturing ecosystem of fuel streams as the ultimate safety net.
“Longevity in this business is being able to reinvent yourself, or invent the future.” Satya Nadella – CEO of Microsoft)
