Braden Kelley
The Importance of Community in Marketing
An Interview with Mark Schaefer Conventional marketing wisdom says that communities are a great way to connect with your target audience in an engaging and meaningful way. Typical justifications for building communities include: Creating an opportunity for your brand to stand out from the competition…
ChatGPT is a Powerful New Tool for Entrepreneurs
In today’s digital, always connected world, Google too often stands as a gatekeeper between entrepreneurs and small businesses and financial success. Ranking well in the search engines requires time and expertise that many entrepreneurs and small business owners don’t have, because their focus must...
Have the Rules of Marketing & PR Changed?
The ways we communicate continue to evolve. Keeping pace with the latest trends in social media and online video, while preventing your product or service from getting lost in the digital clutter, is a daunting task. David Meerman Scott is a master at helping...
Introduction to Loyalty Archaeology™
Tools for Excavating Sources of Next Generation Loyalty Marketers have an overly optimistic perspective on customer loyalty and their implementations of customer loyalty programs. The reality is that very few customers are loyal and much of what we speak of as customer loyalty is no…
Creating Cumulative Advantage
Exclusive Interview for CustomerThink with Mark Schaefer Cumulative Advantage as a concept builds unstoppable momentum for your ideas and your business -- even when the odds seem stacked against you. The book shows how initial advantages, seams of opportunity, sonic booms, and the lift from...
After Hours with PepsiCo’s First Chief Design Officer – Mauro Porcini
Recently I had the opportunity to sit down with Mauro Porcini, SVP & Chief Design Officer at PepsiCo, a multi-billion-dollar American corporation with more than 250,000 employees. It is the second largest food and beverage company in the world, and the largest in North...
Starbucks Improving the Last Minute of the Mobile Ordering Journey
Starbucks is definitely viewed as an innovator in the loyalty and mobile commerce spaces. Starbucks was one of the first retailers (2008) to successfully launch a card-based loyalty program with broad adoption - the Starbucks card - which not only had loyalty benefits for customers...
When You Should Hire an Evangelist
What is an evangelist? When many people hear this term, their minds used to picture Billy Graham or Pat Robertson, but this is changing. Why? Our perceptions of evangelists are transforming as the pace of change accelerates to construct a new reality faster than most…
Align Your Markets, Organization, and Strategy Around Customer Needs
An Exclusive Interview with Jim Kalbach The Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) approach offers a unique lens for viewing the people you serve. Instead of looking at the demographic and psychographic factors of consumption, JTBD focuses on what people seek to achieve in a given circumstance. People don't...
Leading a Successful Reorganization
An Exclusive Interview with Stephen Heidari-Robinson and Suzanne Heywood I had the opportunity recently to interview fellow authors Stephen Heidari-Robinson and Suzanne Heywood, co-founders of Quartz Associates and former leaders in McKinsey’s Organization Practice, about ReOrg: How to Get It Right, a practical guide for successfully planning...
Designing a Digital Business for the Digital Age
In our digital age, all companies must change how they think, how they interact with customers, partners, and suppliers, and how their business works on the inside. Customer, partner, and supplier expectations have changed, and a gap is opening between what they expect from...
8 Design Thinking Flaws and How to Fix Them
by Braden Kelley and Adam Radziszewski Design Thinking attempts to extract the mindset of a designer, an artist, a creator, or even a child into a series of steps that can be applied to any discipline (even business or politics) to solve human-centered problems. Its...
Building an Insights and Innovation Group from Scratch
Many of you reading this have created or operated innovation or insights programs for organizations of a variety of sizes, or are curious about how to go about it. Operating an innovation program or leading an insights group is definitely much different than creating one....
Eight I’s of Infinite Innovation – Revisited
Some authors talk about successful innovation being the sum of idea plus execution, others talk about the importance of insight and its role in driving the creation of ideas that will be meaningful to customers, and even fewer about the role of inspiration in...
Visualizing a Change Standard
In The Five Keys to Successful Change I highlight five key areas for organizations to focus on if they are serious about building a strong, sustainable capability in organizational change, including: Change Planning Change Leadership Change Management Change Maintenance Change Portfolio Management As you can…
Measuring Change Readiness
Are you and your organization ready for change? Too often organizations define the change effort they want to pursue without first identifying whether there are people, resources, legislation, etc. present that must be in place before the change effort can begin. We will explore the...
Building a Global Sensing Network – The Reboot
When I first wrote about Building a Global Sensing Network I wrote in the specific context of the war for innovation and the need to make sure you’re fighting it outside your organization -- not inside. We looked at how most organizations hire the most...
Designing the Organization for Change
In my last article and the first free download from the Change Planning Toolkit™ on The Five Keys to Successful Change™ we looked at the five different disciplines that must come together to make any organizational change effort (or even a project) successful. They...
Kill the Word Doc – Build a Visual Project Charter™ Instead
The first three of ten free downloads from the Change Planning Toolkit™ were focused on change and innovation: Five Keys to Successful Change Architecting the Organization for Change Building a Global Sensing Network The goal of these three frameworks was to get people visualizing more…
Peeking Behind the Veil of Design
The KitchenAid Craft Coffee Story A company in Dubai is asking me to teach a design thinking and innovation course in May of next year, and this was good synchronicity because I came across the video below recently. https://youtu.be/vKzCE0kaCNc The design process is often very…