This is an amazing piece from Dow Corning on the future of glass in our lives. It really sets the tone on how they will through their products make our lives better. It makes me wonder why more startups and large brands are not creating films about the future, and how they will shape it in a positive sense.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Cf7IL_eZ38]
Prufrock coffee who created the worlds first disloyalty card.
The card to encourages their clients to sample the wares of quality coffee shops around their local region in London. Which is completely counter intuitive to sound business practice.
How does it work?
If a disloyalty member tries all 8 coffees on the above card , it will earn you a free coffee at your next visit to Prufrock Coffee. The interesting part is that it was conceived to keep ‘coffee customers’ out of the four walls of the ever encroaching Starbucks behemoth. The disloyalty card created a community of coffee lovers that could compete the ‘way of an artisan’. Something Starbucks could never do. It might just help keep them out. In this instance the community matters more than the trader. This is the new collaborative world we are in transition towards. A community who vest their interests in each other.
What can your startup do to flip the rules and do what a bigger competitor never could?
This is the best advertising I’ve seen so far this year. Really love the concept and the execution. Made me hungry.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9EL_naUHtY]
If you’re going to advertise your startup then I reckon we can learn something form the radvertising above. And the lesson is this:
Don’t get lost in the middle. Go as close the edge as possible. Make outrageous tongue in check claims and be hilarious, or be 100% authentic and truthful. Everything in the middle of either of these two extreme edges is simply, wallpaper.
Making really good stuff is not enough. We’ve got to be good as well. Good people. We’ve got to have a DNA encoded into our business which shows we stand for something that is wider than what we sell. I’m not talking about any of that Corporate Social Responsibility crap, or even triple bottom line reporting. I’m talking about caring enough to leave good things behind us in our trail. For the things we touch to be the same or better after we’ve been there. And most of all, we need to make sure our trail is going to be good, before we carve the path that takes us forward.
Brands will start shipping product components and raw materials to stores for to be assembled on site… as part of the retail experience.
The customers will become the theatre at transaction.
The desire to create and customize will conspire to create highly interactive and profitable retail concoction. What we’ve already seen in digital…’A mash up of co-creation and mass customization’… we will inevitably see in retail…. The retailers that survive anyway.
You may have heard of the Winklevoss Brothers. They’re two of the luckiest people on the planet. They received a reported $65 million in a settlement from Facebook for essentially having an ‘idea stolen’. Latest reports are that they unhappy with the settlement terms because Facebook has recently been valued as high as $50 billion.I’m calling it Winklevoss Syndrome.
Winklevoss Syndrome = the false belief that an idea is ownable and that the real value of a business is strongly linked to the idea. People who suffer from this syndrome believe that they have some kind of ownership rights to something because they thought of it.
Although Mark Zuckerberg may have taken their idea, but he’s the one who built, it, funded it, promoted it, resourced it and expanded it. I’ll go as far as saying that the Winklevoss brothers are delusional if they believe they had anything to do with the success of Facebook. The idea of a social network has nothing to do with the act of building and populating a social network. Ideas in isolation have no value, ideas once executed ‘may’ have value. It’s also worth remembering that every idea that any number of people could or did have, would always be executed very differently. I think the Winklevoss brothers are the luckiest entrepreneurs on the face of the planet. They received a $65 million dollar gift for an idea and some unfinished pieces of code. They got very lucky they ever met Zuckerberg.
Every fresh idea usually has thousands of entrepreneurs around the world toying with it or building it. Simply because they have foundations in common trends, insight and technology evolution. So next time you see your ‘idea’, being brought to life, remind yourself that you didn’t ‘do’ anything about it. And then resist the temptation to suffer from Winklevoss Syndrome. Instead we should go and build something and see how limited the value of the original idea is.
Today I tweeted a little thought that we are all becoming entrepreneurs:
and then Jason asked me this:
… and here is what I think.
I think it’s great that we are entering an age where everyone can play. The richness of human life comes from the social fabric and the variety in personality and experience. When people enter a commercial world it’s impossible for their experiences, views and values not to emanate into their business. So the net result is a wider array of rich ideas and systems which can benefit real people rather than demographic aggregates. Smaller cohorts can be nimble and focus on pleasing the few. Some may even end up pleasing the many. The net result of the new low barrier world is a richer place to live in, both socially and economically.