Category Archives: Uncategorized

The Future of Strategy & The End of the World by Justin Small from The Future Strategy Club on Vimeo.

Get it here https://futurestrategyclub.com/

If the end of the world came, how would agencies react? Here’s a clue!

Martin Sorrel DID NOT make the statement below…but I wish he (or someone as influential as him) would.  We need the power and the talents of every agency in the land to help stop our destruction of the earth. And the talent in the wider Creative Industries is immense – it just needs to be aimed away from aiding and abetting behaviours that our destructive to our world and towards helping us all change our habits to begin redressing the balance.

Issue 0 of the the FSC Mag is nearly here! It’s the self-conscious, nerdy anti-establishment love child of Harvard Business Review and Private Eye – and aims to become the alternative voice of the creative industries.  Available very soon…..

My initiative to try change our behaviours around packaging and save the world from a plastic death

Unpackit – be a lunchtime hero from The Future Strategy Club on Vimeo.

My article in the March issue of the Chief Learning Officer magazine on EX.

https://magazine.clomedia.com/issue/march-2018/the-employee-experience-imperative/

The UK alone produces more than 170m tonnes of waste every year, much of it food packaging. Some of it is poisonous, and some of it never degrades. It can take 450 years for some types of plastic bottle to break down and lot of it isn’t biodegradable at all. Less than a third of plastic packaging is recycled and lots of it finds its way back to our food. It ends up in our salt, our water, and our beer (our beer!).

Unpackit is an initiative to cut down the use of food packaging by bringing our own container when getting a lunchtime takeaway. As simple as that.

It’s time to do something!

My article in Retail Focus on the amalgamation of digital and physical and Integrated Placemaking.

Read it 

My introduction to systems thinking at the FSC event.

“Strategy is Thinking” by Justin Small from The Future Strategy Club on Vimeo.

Interview on The Future Strategy Club and the future of strategy.

https://econsultancy.com/blog/68928-what-the-heck-is-strategy-in-the-digital-age/

Download my latest Whitepaper below:

http://www.thebioagency.com/news-and-views/white-papers/digital-transformation-rebirth-of-the-organisation/

Download my new white paper below.

http://www.thebioagency.com/news-and-views/white-papers/the-service-revolution-how-service-design-is-helping-brands-take-over-the-world/

My keynote on CX and Service Flow from the #BIOTrends Service Revolution event.

My keynote presentation at the launch of the Connected Products Whitepaper.

From Connected Products to Smart Lives: Keynote presentation by Justin Small from Justin Small on Vimeo.

My keynote presentation at the launch of the Future of the High Street whitepaper.

The Future of High Street: keynote presentation by Justin Small from Justin Small on Vimeo.

I authored these 3 whitepapers. Download them here.

The Future of the High Street

Click to access BIO_WP_CONNECTED_RETAIL_012_3.pdf

Connected Products Smart  Lives

http://www.thebioagency.com/documents/BIO_WP_CONNECTED_RETAIL_001_1.pdf

The Future of the Retail Bank

Click to access BIO_WHITEPAPER_Banking_2015-spreads.pdf

Customers want an estate agent brand they can believe in and who’s service is comparable to the services they love and use daily – Uber, Netflix, Airbnb, TfL, Amazon etc. But who will take challenge to transform into the estate agent of the future now?

With the population in the UK increasing year on year, and house building not even getting close to keeping up, the shortage of properties is becoming acute. This shortage will push up prices and create a clear challenge for all estate agents. The competition for stock will intensify, and the best placed estate agents in this fiercely competitive landscape of the future will be those that can offer the best service across the entire customer journey for the best price – for the selling, buying and rental of property across all the key customer segments.

The property market has changed. Property Search portals have taken control of property search. The 4 main portals – Rightmove, Zoopla, Primelocation and On The Market – list around 1.1 mil properties with 16,000 estate agents currently using them, and have disintermediated estate agents from the top of the sales funnel.

Online estate agents are beginning to enter the market with new business models based around flat fees. Currently, online estate agents sit across a spectrum of Hybrids to Pure Plays. The Pure Plays offer a more basic online service (such as Tepilo) which is cheaper but more work for the seller. Hybrids like Purplebricks offer full packages which aim to compete with the traditional estate agents. None of the online estate agents have a high street presence currently, but this could change very quickly when and if they build up enough resources to do this. If their cost models allow it, they will do it.

The differences between Traditional and Online estate agents are clear – but may become more blurred as time goes on – with all estate agents becoming hrybrids. The Traditionals have the advantage currently – with their high street presence and local knowledge, their vast experience in getting sales over the line, and in their pricing structure which incentivises them to drive hard for the completion.

But there are large sways of the customer’s journey through the house selling and buying process where Traditionals have no real brand presence. These customer decision journey dead zones are ripe for brand ownership through the creation of brand interaction points to drive sellers and buyers towards down the funnel towards a particular estate agent. For example, who of all the Traditional estate agents will be the first to fix the hole in the bottom of the sales funnel by building advocacy programs that lock in current customer’s loyalty for their next sale or purchase? Will the Onlines with their more nimble business models crack this first? Or will the necessary investment to do this properly be a barrier to them allowing the Traditionals to get there first? Will the Traditionals use technology such a VR in their high street shops to deliver a better customer experience and leverage their high street presence as a competitive advantage much like holiday companies are doing?

What is clear is that the rethinking of the estate agent service and integrating digital as a service across the entire customer journey is an open goal opportunity for whoever wants to take a shot at it. Whoever takes the challenge to own and join up the customer’s experience using digital and physical service elements will be able to extend their service footprint further across the customer decision journey and win a place in the hearts of UK’s buyers and sellers through an always-on more outcome led personalised service offering that delivers not just an increase in sales, but an increase in brand loyalty.

See the amazing work I led at Greyhound from strategy, ux to design and build through to content and service design. The whole kit and kaboodle.

Such a great brand, and such a great company that is on its way back.

http://www.realise.com/greyhound

The Brand Challenge

The next ten years will see the continuing ferocious acceleration of change in how companies attract and build loyal customers.

One of the key drivers of this change is the disruption caused by the digitalisation of our world through technology, and the accompanying changes in customer behaviour and needs.

Digital channels and platforms will soon be the main and only brand touch-points and therefore will become the critical space for brands to engage customers.

Interactive brand experiences will become the new competitive advantage, and the depth of digital engagement delivered by the experiences will become one of the key measures of brand value.

These changes promise to disrupt markets, bankrupt the status quo and reward brand innovation and dynamism.

The Brand Opportunity

Digital has created amazing opportunities for brands to reach customers on a 1 to 1 basis, creating interactive personalised experiences that have the potential to build loyal and valuable long-term relationships with customers.

The humanisation of brands through digital means that all brands must understand how to act and react in interactive spaces. Trust has become the new brand currency – and has led to the opportunity for real, digital, value-led brands that represent their products & services authentically at ground level, to disrupt markets.

The opportunity for brands to stay ahead and innovate using digital platforms to quickly create, test and learn new product & service ideas and enhancements has never been greater and easier.

Digital now affords organisations with the will the potential to quickly and easily build a rapid fire innovation mentality within previously staid and static brands and create innovative digital experiences that deliver deeper and more long-lasting customer engagement.

 The Digital future is brand led  – and companies that can deliver consistent brand experiences across all channels will earn the continued loyalty of their customers over generations to come.

See the great work I led at PlayStation in Detica case study below. Doesn’t really do it justice – but was one of the best projects I have had the pleasure to work on. I did the full global experience strategy and ran the ux, design and build of the global sites.

http://www.baesystems.com/en/cybersecurity/download-csai/resource/uploadFile/1434557451924

So, you’ve got some decent players, you have a team name and colours and a nice crest. Everyone knows what they have to do – go forward and score.
But hang on..how do they go about scoring? What are the tactics? And what are the opposition going to do?

What formation will you play? What players in what positions? Which channels will they play through?

In football, just being on the pitch guarantees nothing. Just being able to kick the ball forward towards the goal does not mean you will score. You need a strategy. Much like Digital.

Like an England team 1-0 up in the World Cup Quarter Finals with 30 minutes to go, many companies have a ‘kick it away and hang on’ attitude to digital strategy too. A kind of ‘siege mentality ’ approach. These companies generally get buffeted by the winds of innovation worst than most and not surprisingly suddenly find themselves at the bottom of their group about to be dumped out of the tournament. Kodak, Blockbuster, HMV have already been through that – and there will be many more to come.

Digital is building up a hurricane of change for a lot of industries. Many mistook the initial calm they experienced as they watched other industries being decimated as meaning the storm had passed them by – but they have since discovered the calm was actually the eye of the storm. Now, as they look around at the carnage, it is too late. They must rebuild from scratch.

The trinity of the digital revolution is – 1. business model innovation, 2. technology upgrade & integration, and 3. customer behaviour change. And like a 3 legged robotic monster, this triad of change is roaming the business world causing havoc and reducing once successful businesses one after another to dust with no respect for reputation or history.

As Bill Shankly might have said had he become a Strategist and not gone in to football,

‘Digital Strategy? It’s not life and death, it is much more important than that!’

April 2015

Social Advertising – a sketch:  inverting the funnel by activating advocacy 

The grey haired Don Drapers watch the multi-coloured future beautiful end of interruption advertising.

‘What can you see John?’

‘I can…I can…I can see the death of … of interruption advertising…’
‘And what does it look like John? John? …What does it look like ?’
‘It…it is…it’s….. beauti………………’
‘John? John? Joooohnnnnn!!!’

It’s Business Time for Advertising!

Digital is Transforming Advertising into a Numbers Game.

Advertising still needs to deliver the emotional jolt to the soul and change behaviours – but it now has to be interactive, personalised, contextual and multi platform. In fact, what we call Digital Marketing will be called Advertising in 5 years time.

There is no escaping the fact that it is Business Time for hit and hope advertising.

Our clients now have real deep data – and want their advertising to deliver real measurable change.
No more short quick blow outs with unprovable claims of ecstasy through coolness. No more throw backs to advertising like its 1999.

The clients are shouting.

And they are shouting –

‘It’s Business Time baby. We want Greatness from our advertising, but we want it multi platform, we want it measurable, we want it 1 to 1 and we want it always on!’

Yeah baby.

Because of digital, everything is now human.

Products that existed only on supermarket shelves and in kitchen cupboards are now living and breathing via digital.

Products are now members of our social network.

They have been humanized through digital interfaces.

The brand is now in one to one relationships with thousands of fans.

Brands are alive – and need to be human through interactive interfaces. And to be human, interfaces must be intuitive.

Customers now see every intuitive interaction with a brand through a digital interface as an authentic human interaction.

The most intuitive interface is the most authentic, and the most instinctively human.

Only one interface is born instinctively intuitive: the nipple.

Everything else needs to be uxed to feel instinctively intuitive.

Instinctive intuitive design is hard won through interation and testing.

Innovative and intuitive are sometimes not good bedfellows  – the best way to achieve a task may not be the most innovative.

But great innovation should never make us think.

Because in the end, we don’t want to think.

We just want to experience.

We want to flow through tasks and achieve our goals without having to relearn, rethink, or redo.

We want return to our mother’s nipple – the first most intuitive and beautiful experience.

UX is the design of interactions that feel instinctive and pre-learned and which allow experience to flow.

If you don’t know where you are going – how can you get there?

There is a storm upon us  – the Digital Storm. The third industrial revolution.

After steam and electricity comes digital.

Vision is needed to lead us through the storm.

Without vision we have no strategy, and without strategy, there is no measurement.

And without measurement we are just hit and hope meandering wonderers.

Vision is a company’s narrative.

It is its story.

A story in which it is the hero who beats evil and wins the day.

Without narrative there is nothing.

It is imperative we tell stories.

Humans are programmed to see structure in everything – we connect up the dots where there are no dots, we see faces in the clouds, Jesus in burnt toast, the future in tealeaves.

Stories are what we are and what we are remembered as.

Strategy is a story clients can believe in – a narrative that is backed up by research, analysis and emotion.

We are hard wired by evolution to see structure in everything. We look for understanding and empathy everywhere: we see faces in clouds, in burnt toast, in rice pudding, we look for the friendly face in the crowd and we gravitate to empathic people. And thus when we are online we prefer companies whose websites show humanity, forgive our errors and have personality over the more generic ones. In short, we want our digital brand’s interfaces to mimic human to human interactions. Therefore it is key that your customers can see the face of your brand in your website interfaces and can hear its voice in the copy, and that that face and voice is on-brand (i.e. coherent with your offline brand if you have one) and one of meaning and purpose.

From recent work with our clients we know how crucial it is to understand what your current brand experience is (across all touch points) and why it is so important to build a cohesive strategy in order to compete in the digital economy.

Below I detail how and why you need to create a Digital Brand Experience Strategy.

First of all, what is the Digital Brand Experience?

The Digital Brand Experience is the feelings and thoughts generated by an interaction with a brand’s digital interfaces across multiple digital marketing channels and touch-points with the purpose of creating a lasting relationship between the company and the customer across the entire Customer Decision Journey.

Digital interfaces must be on-brand in order for a customer to have the correct experience (feelings and thoughts when interacting with the brand across digital touch-points) and then execute the correct actions. This experience must be unique to the brand and coherent across all channels and platforms.

Before a coherent digital brand experience can be achieved the ‘experience’ must be defined, and once defined then implemented through the design of the interactions which make up the interfaces.

Continue reading →

A while back I  chaired AdTech London and I got very excited about the great case studies that were presented over the 2 days. We had some very clever people and some very successful brands from the UK and abroad come and share their ideas about the future of digital and show some good old digital best practice. And it was great to see digital in practice. By necessity due to the amazing pace of change there is a lot of theory in Digital I find. What we need more of is practice in my opinion because without it we are fumbling about in a digital darkness. Less concept, more proof of concept, so to speak.

Continue reading →

Talk talk talk…about Social Business

Top of the pops!

I work in Digital. Nothing spectacular in that. In fact, nearly everyone you meet these days works in Digital (I am guessing it was the same in the 19^th century with the invention of the internal combustion engine where every second person you met was a mechanic of some sort!).  A side-effect of working in Digital is the number of conferences one has to (or should) attend in order to supposedly ‘keep up’ with what is happening. After all, if Digital does nothing else it does change rather quickly. And a side side-effect of going to all these conferences is conference burn-out – a term used to describe the ashen-faced ones like me who sit in the back and smart-phone their way through the presentations/panels and once in a while tweet a snidey remark about the panel/presenter (I take this opportunity to say sorry to them all – I was just bored!).

But then something happened in the middle of one of these conferences while I was buying a 10mm Red Power Ranger for my son on my Amazon app – a question suddenly popped into my head:

Were conferences always like this – so static, passive and lethargic? Is there not another way?

Continue reading →

I am chairing Ad Tech London this Wednesday and Thursday (19,20 Sept)….mmmm….where’s that Best Man Joke book again?

I am part of the team bringing Rewire London to Google Campus. It is an unconference so bring the most collaborative, talkative and confident you you can.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/justin-small/a-brave-new-social-world_b_1201946.html

Here’s the link as you won’t find it if you look for it…hidden somewhere at the bottom of Tech Page..hohum!…I think it is a genre issue…branding and business and digital – where does it go on Huff? I probably need my own section..I will suggest it to them!..

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/justin-small/the-story-of-digital-comm_b_1420961.html

Brand Juxtaposition – a new tool to give tired old brands a new lease of
life.

Head Kandi looking a bit tired and very last decade? Brand Juxtapose it! Place it next to an ad about Holocaust survivors and voila! you have yourself some new energy and dynamism!

No, not the Ac Dc school uniform wearing guitarist. But the MD of the Aberdeen-Angus Cattle Society. He’s the guy that allowed Burger King to use the word ‘Angus’ on their burgers. I is guessing that in as little as 3 years the word ‘ Angus’ will no longer mean anything to anybody.

Amazing short-term gain for long-term future! That’s what I’m talking about!

Tasty burger though.

When I look at this design for the two flush option I am unsure of which to push.

Is the large ‘button’ larger because it is the most used flush type or because it indicates the large quantity of water to be used? That is, is the small button for big jobs and the large button for small jobs? Intuitively I would think the opposite but UX design wise I would wonder if ease of use trumps symbolism?

It’s a mystery, it’s all a mystery!

I saw this and instantly thought ‘ I don’t want to sell my home for free, I want to sell it for money!’ Typical estate agents, always trying to rip me off!

Me at Social Media Leadership Forum talking about social media in corporations.

Lining up at the supermarket checkout waiting to buy the shopping, I look in my trolley and see around 50 items. I wonder who put them there and how he chose them. I know I physically took the items off the shelves and put them in the trolley, but I have no idea of why these particular items?What ignorance, needs or wants of mine made my brand choices? What unconscious forces were at work and how and who brought these into play on a simple trip to the supermarket? And most importantly, when presented with many different versions of the same product, why did I choose one brand over another?

In this article I attempt to define what branding is in the context of our consumer experienced lives, and how we come to make our on-the-spot choices when under pressure. I posit that buying choices are generally made by a combination of emotional responses to the product or service masked as rational thinking, and our ignorance, needs and wants. Furthermore, that branding agencies know how and do manipulate these in order to ‘nudge’ us towards their products, which is ultimately, if we are honest, what we want and need them to do in order to help us live our lives. Continue reading →

It is easy to dismiss the things we don’t understand

It is easy to dismiss the things we don’t understand as irrelevant and of no use to us. Take Twiiter – it’s just a load of pointless chatter about nothing. Or Facebook – just a load of needy people collecting online friends because they have none offline. Or YouTube – a load of silly banal videos. Or blogging – wannabe journalists and writers writing their diaries online for all to see in a pathetic attempt to get someone interested in their little lives. Continue reading →

Design as Art is Munari’s 1966 book of essays bringing together his thoughts and musings on design and art. Is there a difference between an artist and a designer today he asks? Munari thought the designer was the artist of his day.

‘The designer of today re-establishes the long lost contact between art and the public, between living people and art as a living thing….There should be no such thing as art divorced from life, with beautiful things to look at and hideous things to use. If what we use every day is made with art, and not thrown together by chance or caprice, then we shall have nothing to hide.’ Continue reading →

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/justin-small/why-you-cannot-afford-to-_b_935999.html

They changed the title! humpf! Obviously don’t like the double negative thingy…which I like!

The App store – over a billion downloads, more than 200,000 apps and lots of PR and profit for Apple. But is there any profit in it for anyone else?

Certainly there are some high profile cases of apps that have and are making their developers a load of money. But how about the standard developer or company that spends £20k on an app? Are they able to get a slice of the pie? Can they make any money? Or is it just luck and the whim of Apple and their ‘What’s Hot’ choices that do it? I guess the question we are asking is:

Is it possible for a good quality cheap app to make a profit? Continue reading →

The first thing that strikes me about this book is its design. It is a hard back with a faded red mock hessian feel to it, purposely creating an illusion of age and importance. Immediately this provides a feeling of congratulatory ownership. I feel good about owning this book because it feels worthy of me. I immediately recall a memory of browsing through a second hand bookshop in Charing Cross and finding a wonderful second hand penguin edition of The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse. Aged perfectly in all the right places, it elicits that warm feeling of a humanity and knowledge read and passed on down through many lives and many hands. And so it seems that before even reading a word I have already been pulled in to The Language of Things by the thing itself; the book as an object.

Continue reading →

In this manic early-decade confusion I propose that a new type of Agency is emerging – the Creative Tech Agency – which is digitally creative, innovative, agile and hungry. I also propose that the traditional Advertising Agency is soon to become a symbol of what we will very quickly look back on as the bloated past of pre-digital communication channels. The future is small, specialized and digital. Continue reading →

My article entitled Design and Psychoanalysis: Siblings in Empathy is in this month’s Design Thinkers at http://www.design-thinkers.co.uk.

http://www.design-thinkers.co.uk/design-and-psychoanalysis/

This article is about the heroes of low income design, Netto, LIDL, Waitrose as a surrogate mother, evolution of the urban species, emotional branding,  Argos, communist East Germany and Krispy Kreme.

When one walks the streets of London looking for the unsung heroes of low income design one sees some unexpected things. Who would think you could find  a great example of logo design on Rye Lane, Peckham?

Continue reading →

This article is about pebble dash, the Barbican, the Queen, ugly projections and working class graphic design.

Bad design – it’s everywhere it seems. The ugliness of our world stalks us like a malevolent clown, laughing at our grey displeasure as we rush from here to there, stressed by how effectively we manage to project the lack of beauty in our selfs into our urban surroundings.

But, does bad design actually exist or is it just an internal experience? After all, one man’s beauty is another man’s ugly. And what does the term ‘bad design’ actually mean? Ugly? Not fit for function? In fact, is ‘bad design’ the actual opposite of ‘good design’? If beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then so is ugly is it not? Continue reading →

This article is about morality, guns, nuclear bombs, sharks and post-modernism down the pub.

What can survive the present? How can one thing, one object, one design, manage to infiltrate our minds like dirt in an oyster and grow over time to become something timeless, a ‘classic’, an object left alone by the winds of style, not eroded by the rains of progress, not left to rust in a corner by the whims of modernity? That is, what is Good design? And what gives it longevity? Continue reading →

This is a particularly bad blunder because the lack of continuity of brand experience between offline and online sets up a customer for a big disappointment – with the accompanying loss of brand credibility. It could be because of laziness that this happens, or  the lack of communication between the offline and online parts of a company. Or it could be due to a lack of understanding of how customers build up an impression of brand from multiple touch points – billboards, tv ads, web banners, magazines, high street shops, website etc. If they experience brand inconsistency across these different touch points they will feel confused and will be unable to identify with the brand in a cohesive manner. This will mean the brand message will dissipate and be lost.
Continue reading →

There are some websites out there which, even though they do the job well enough, and haven’t knocked down pedestrians when drunk driving a car, are just so damn ugly they might as well have. More than this, the companies below are top 100 brands in the world. You would think they could buy some one in with a bit of taste, with some knowledge of space, of typography, some one with a bit of feeling for this kind of thing. It’s funny, because companies at this level spend massive amounts of money on making sure their products elicit the correct feeling in their consumers, but when it comes to their website that aim disappears. It seems the main aim of some of these websites is to get as much info in as small a space as possible. They seem to lack direction and a target. The website becomes a box to throw things in with no thought for the person who needs to find something in the box.

Continue reading →

There’s a special type of web design which really gets to me. Especially when it wins awards or the companies concerned are making thousands of £s in the process. It is what I would call ‘cookie cutter’ web design.

Instead of fitting a design to a customer, and the customer’s market and products, these agencies use the ‘cookie cutter’ approach – they fit the customer to a design. This type of approach results in the customer experiencing the website as atonal, off-centre, and in some way disconcerting. There is a mismatch between the product/service and the design i.e. the relationship does not work, has not gelled and results in a feeling of incompatibility which in the end effects conversions, sales and brand value. It is a basic rule of design – design follows function, or in this context, design follows products and services. This can be taken one level deeper – design follows brand, and also design follows brand experience. Therefore any web design must be an increment to a product. For example, a doctor’s website is part of the doctor’s surgery and must function as such ( as a holding, containing, secure environment building trust and calm). This kind of design is derived from a much longer discovery and exploration phases  than a lot of the ‘web design’ agencies are willing to do. The conceptualisation of the website design, in relation  to the end user, must be re-engaged with. Less bish, bash, bosh please. Continue reading →