Debra Kaye's Blog

A growing body of research documents the powerful impact meditation has on the brain: it literally changes our minds—for the better.



Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School have found that people who meditate for about 30 minutes a day for eight weeks have measurable changes in gray-matter density in parts of the brain associated with memory, sense of self, empathy, and stress. MRI brain scans taken before and after participation in the study show increased gray matter in the hippocampus, an area that is important for learning and memory. The images also showed a reduction of gray matter in the amygdala, a region that is connected to anxiety and stress.

Yale University researcher Judson Brewer and his colleagues have found that experienced meditators have “improved attentional focus” and “improved cognitive flexibility” due to the changes mindfulness brings to the area of the brain known as the posterior cingulate cortex. While this heady research has many practical applications for health and wellness, it also suggests that meditation feeds the wellspring of creativity that resides within us.

Based on brain-science studies, corporations are using meditation to help employees bring new concepts and ideas to the table.

Innovation begins with meditation.

Innovation, says Shell chemical engineer Mandar Apte, is “all about thinking of new things.”

Apte, whose “Empower” curriculum incorporates meditation techniques to teach Shell employees how to innovate, continues, in a Knowledge@Wharton interview: “one has to learn how to drop the old habits, the old ideas, the old concepts and it’s like taking a pause from the business of today, a gap in your mind from the train of thoughts. That’s what meditation allows you. It gives you tools and techniques to pause. And silence is the mother of creativity.”

It does not take years to realize the benefits of these tools, either. The research of Richard J. Davidson at the University of Wisconsin explains that meditation triggers high-frequency brain waves associated with attention and perception to a far greater degree in experienced practitioners of meditation than in novices. Davidson says you can observe changes after as little as two weeks of consistent meditative practice.

Meditation strengthens cognitive control.

Judson Brewer’s brain research shows that the ability to concentrate is enhanced when meditation quiets other brain functions.

Brewer explains, in a buddistgeek podcast, an experiment in which he had people meditate with their eyes open and graphed their brain activity in the posterior cingulate. He found that “when it was active, subjects were doing something self-referential or mind wandering.”

“When the posterior cingulate area of the brain was de-active,” Brewer said, “they were concentrated or some even described it being in the flow state.” Steven Kotler, author of “The Rise of Superman”, explains “flow state” as “a strange state of consciousness. In flow, concentration becomes so laser-focused that everything else falls away.” The spark of creativity, it seems, is ignited when we are able to get out of our own way by letting go of preconceived notions, inward distractions of day-to-day worries, habitual associations. Creativity, in other words, stems from the state of mind induced by meditation.

Meditate? Who, me?

There are many business-friendly programs that offer this valuable braining training.

You need not go to work for Shell to participate in a program like Empower to bring the benefits of mediation into your workplace. There are programs designed specifically to bridge the gap between the esoteric realm of brain science and the practical realities of the office. The Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, for example, offers the evolve program, designed to “explore the power and potential of mindfulness practices” at work. Around since 1995, the Center is one of the old

est programs around—and its affiliation with a highly respected medical school gives it added gravitas.

MedWorks, located in Brookline, Massachusetts, offers on-site training programs, and on-line programs via Skype. Their impressive client list includes New Balance, Dunkin’ Brands, and Genzyme Corporation. But if the idea of a formal program sounds too time-consuming or too expensive, you might want to make your initial foray into meditation and mindfulness by using the free app—which works with Apple and Android platforms—Insight Connect. Insight Connect provides users with guided meditation sessions that last as long as you choose.

The “hows” of meditation have been around for millennia. Scientific confirmation of the beneficial neurological changes that take place during periods of mindfulness ought to make us all stop and think.

Last summer, when Jane Janovsky of South Hadley, Massachusetts and a friend found themselves with buckets of blueberries, they made blueberry lemonade. When that didn’t empty the buckets, the pair took to their kettles and began turning out blueberry preserves that literally became the talk of the town when a local diner added the sweet treat to its menu. Jane saw the potential for a new business and she ran with it. Today Just Jane’s Artisan Preserves turns out some seventeen varieties of preserves, jams and spread.

Jane’s entrepreneurial vision encompasses three key principals for a successful new-product introduction. Information Resources, Inc. (IRI) recently analyzed 190,000 CPGs introduced in 2013 to identify the clear winners, and found that each had its origins in innovation inspired by “understanding the deep context of consumer attitudes, usage and shopping habits.”

Across the broad spectrum of CPG categories—food and beverage, household health and beauty, and convenience items—three factors emerged as key. In order to inspire early adopters to become repeat customers and spread the word to family and friends, new products must meet critical expectations that using them gives consumers results that are fun, fast, and functional.

Fun Factor

Jane’s preserves have immediate appeal by attracting consumers with their whimsical music-themed names—Rockin’ Raspberry, Bubbly Be-Bop Strawberry, and Harvest Harmony, for example.

The fun factor also applies to mass-marketed comestibles such as yogurt. Says Dr. Mehmood Khan, who oversees PepsiCo’s global research and development, in the New York Times, yogurt is an “’I gotta have it because it’s good for me’ kind of a product. The ‘wanna have it’ was missing.”

Müller Yogurt (Pepsico/Quaker Oats), introduced to the US market in 2012-2013, made its mark—nearly $100 million in first-year sales—by combining the traditional “function” of yogurt as a healthful “fast” food with a concept of “fun.” Its quirky European spelling is the first element of fun, and Müller’s innovative compartmentalized packaging gives consumers of choice of whimsical mix-ins such as “crispy crunch” and “choco balls.”

Just Jane’s and Müller Yogurt succeed by adding excitement and fun to everyday nutrition, an addition product innovators would do well to keep in mind.

Speed It Up Faster

According to IRI, consumers embrace household products that save time and money with innovative packaging: “a strong majority of 2013 home care innovation winners, 82%, make it easier to get household chores done. Fifty-five percent of winners make home care more convenient.”

Far and away the most successful trend in this category has been the introduction of pre-measured cleansing agents for the laundry and the kitchen. Tide, ARM & HAMMER, and Purex all offered a version of a toss-in dose of detergent that eliminates the need for measuring and the mess of dripping laundry liquid. The same pod technology has taken the dishwasher detergent market by storm.

Just like with Müller yogurt’s mix-in packing, encapsulating detergents into a toss-able ball adds an element of fun even as it saves the consumer a little bit of precious time. This new technology also racked up some $325 million in sales for Proctor & Gamble’s Tide Pods.

New products that reduce the time and effort consumers devote to household chores can mean big revenue.

Functionality

Last year’s successful products kept on their promises to consumers. In the huge (14%) market segment of health and beauty products, consumers look for items that deliver excellent results. One such family of products, Proctor & Gamble’s Pantene Age Defy hair treatments, had Good Housekeeping testers singing its praises: “We were certainly impressed – Age Defy shampoo/conditioner or shampoo/deep conditioner gave some of the best results we’ve ever seen.”

Consumers agree. Reports Proctor & Gamble: “Pantene Expert Collection Age Defy Advanced Thickening Treatment launched in North America in January 2013 at a premium price and is already the #1 treatment in the Salon Inspired segment of the Hair Care category.”

Salon-quality results from at-home beauty products is a high bar, but one that new products in this market must meet in order to have breakout sales.

Frugal Is In—Cheap Is Out

IRI concludes that “in 2014 and beyond, consumers will take a very deliberate approach to grocery shopping.” Innovators—and entrepreneurs—will “have significant opportunity in helping consumers live well for less.”

Careful consumers want to know that their dollars are well spent. At $4 to $5 for a four-ounce jar, Just Jane’s preserves are not cheap, but represent good value for those who want the great taste of hand-crafted, locally sourced and all-natural products. For aspiring entrepreneurs, they exemplify the value of the four F’s of product development: fun, fast, functional, and frugal.

Incorporate the F-words in your product planning—you’ll swear you be glad you did.

How can you come up with innovative ideas that customers will love, even when what they say they want isn’t what they want at all?

Here are three tips:

1. Don’t Fight Herculean Battles

If you want to change your customers’ habits, you’re in for a long, uphill battle that you’re gonna lose.

It is probably the single biggest place where innovators go down. When you invent something new and you are the innovator, you think, ‘Oh, this is the greatest product idea in the world. The world is going to flock to it and change its habits.’ And that’s a big mistake. Don’t expect people to change their habits. You do not have enough marketing dollars to change people’s habits.

So what should you do instead?

Adapt to their habits.

Fit into existing consumer behaviors. If you want to go out and invent new products, then watch behaviors, watch what people do, figure out what you can invent that can fit into those things. Live with customers…don’t have them in a focus group room. Watch people go shop. Then talk to them.

For instance, when a washing machine manufacturer was getting tons complaints from their Chinese customers, they went into the field to find out why. They found out that people were using the washing machines to wash their vegetables, and the vegetables were clogging the machines and the machines were breaking down.

Of course, misusing the machine voided the warranty. But instead of scolding their consumers, they were very smart and said, “Consumers are doing this, we need to be number one in this marketplace, let’s adapt our washing machines so they also wash vegetables.” They added a special basket and labeled their machines as vegetable-friendly. Now 40% of the company’s revenue comes from rural China.

2. Think Like a Stoner

Steve Jobs said that he learned to how to make his products so uncomplicated that even a stoned freshman could figure them out.

People don’t want a lot of bells and whistles. But the problem is that people think that they do. If you sit people in a focus group and give them all the special features, they say, “I love these features. I want every single one of them.” However, creating these features costs a lot of money, raises the price, and then people will never buy those products because they become too complicated.

So how can you create something that people will actually buy?

Keep it stupid simple.

In everything you do, simplify. The simpler the better.

Simplify what your product does, like Steve Jobs did with the iPod. Make your product represent one thing, and make it do it really well. Simplify your message, too. Particularly in the technology field, the more that you can use icons to represent what you have to say, the more international your products will be, and the easier they’ll be to understand. I try and convince all my clients to use as few words as possible. No one has the time to read stuff at the shelf.

3. Jump Off the Cliff

If you’re trying to get your idea just right, give up. Don’t even try.

You waste too much time trying to get to 100%. You lose too much time in the marketplace. Someone will get there first.

That’s because making mistakes is part of the game. Your idea is based on the ideas of others, and how you’re tying that all together. You’re bound to get it wrong right out of the box; no one thinks of absolutely everything. It’s just built into the process.

So how do you figure out when to launch?

Make some mistakes ASAP.

Launch when it’s basically ready, not when it’s perfect. If you’ve got what you want 80% there, get it out there.

That’s because you want to make mistakes. Mistakes are great because you really learn so much from them. Innovation is based on the scientific method. It’s trial and error. Get some feedback. Make some mistakes. Learn. You cannot live in a vacuum, and the more you can learn, the faster you can learn, the better.

This post was co-written with Mixergy.com, based on an interview with Debra Kaye.

There are different meanings for the concept of sustainable growth. In one sense, it is synonymous with sustainable development; in other words, it is a pattern of economic growth in which resources are not depleted and the environment is preserved to meet the needs of not only the present, but the future as well. Sustainable growth also has a financial meaning for business. In simple terms, it is the realistically attainable growth that a company can maintain without running into problems. Unfortunately, as we have seen recently in many economies, conflicts may arise if an organization’s growth objectives are not consistent with the value of its sustainable growth.

Whole Foods and Patagonia are great examples; they have been focusing on sustainable growth for years and are among today’s strongest brands. For example, Patagonia believes in doing no environmental harm(or as little as possible), so it has created the Footprint Chronicles website, making its production process public so that people can choose those products that have less environmental impact and make suggestions. Smarter consumers look for smarter and more like-minded producers.

In the broadest sense, I think sustainability is more than just non-depletion of resources. For me, sustainability is about creating profitable businesses that not only have positive outcomes for their employees, investors, and nearby communities, but also are able to reach out and help others become more self-sustaining. I believe strongly that if all new businesses build the broader good into their DNA, especially in a way that enhances their longevity and future profits, we will go a long way toward harnessing capitalism and the market’s full power. In 2005, Walmart was roundly criticized for focusing solely on lower costs without considering the environmental or human cost. It changed its vision to become environmentally sustainable and began forcing its suppliers to do so as well. For example, it mandated that it would sell only concentrated laundry detergent, causing P&G to completely change its manufacturing procedures. It also switched from selling incandescent bulbs in favor of compact fluorescent bulbs, which are said to save energy and last longer than conventional bulbs. In 2008, it was one of only two stocks on the New York Stock Exchange to rise.

Understanding your customer is critical to your business. But what may surprise you is that there is a lot you can do on your own without the need for expensive research. You and all members of your team can develop skills to find out how consumers truly engage with your business and why they go back to it. Understanding your consumers’ context can go a long way to perceiving what they will want to buy next – even before they realize it. Here are ways to find your consumer’s future:

• Spend time “living” with your customers. Shop, work, play, and relax with them. Go where they are and observe them in their various roles, notice their habits and the underlying reasons for those customs. On a walk through the rain forest in Tanzania, an adventurous young Englishwoman came across a large male chimpanzee hunched over a termite nest. Binoculars at the ready, she watched as he took a piece of twig from a nearby bush, stripped the leaves off and bent it. The chimp then stuck the “spoon” into the nest and used it to both dig the termites out and put them into his mouth. In that one chance encounter, Jane Goodall had made one of the most important scientific observations of modern times – she had witnessed a creature other than a human make and use a tool.

• Find out what bugs them. Solving problems that irritate or slow people down often turn into the most profitable innovations. Notice what people do to work around the limitations of existing solutions of your products and build on that. An example of this comes from Haier, a leading Chinese manufacturer of home appliances. Haier is well known for its inventiveness and its quick turnaround time (it prides itself on “satisfying the personalized needs of users in a short time”). After it began selling appliances to people in rural China, it received numerous complaints about its washing machines and their propensity to clog. So the company sent its engineers out to pinpoint the cause of the problem. It turned out that the rural Chinese were using Haier washing machines to wash not only clothes, but also vegetables from their gardens. Instead of telling customers that they were using the machines incorrectly and refusing to honor the warranties (look at any warranty from most manufacturers and you will find that it is null and void if you do not use the product the way the manufacturer wants you to use it), the company saw an opportunity. The Haier development team came up with a new wash cycle that was designed specifically for vegetables, and fitted the new machines with larger drainpipes that could handle bigger pieces of dirt. Haier even put new labels on washing machines sold in Sichuan that read: “Mainly for washing clothes, sweet potatoes and peanuts.”

• Develop your “empathy gene.” Empathy is the human search engine that makes connections between related phenomena visible to our inner eye. When we relate to people, understand what motivates them, or “what makes them tick” we put ourselves in their place – and that’s when you begin to have insight into what that person might need next. Discover your innate empathy skills to find out how your customers truly engage with products and why they go back to them. You may not even be aware of the relevant social values and rich symbolic meanings that customers have embedded in products until you see things from their point of view. What is the real purpose behind an appreciation of one product over another? How can you have more of a conversation about that to reap greater benefits? Respect consumers’ intelligence and ingenuity: how do they use products in ways that are different from the way you intended them to use those products and what can you do to capitalize on that information? The symbolic value, which is often unspoken, can be where the “money” is in terms of innovation. Also, watch how consumer with limited resources come up with low-tech solutions and innovative applications as another valuable tool for making connections between behavior and need. Does this represent an opportunity to reduce a step and make something more convenient?

Humans are wired for stories – we tell them, love to hear and read them, and look for them in the chaos of the world to feel a sense of order. We communicate these stories by drawing pictures with language and most directly, with images themselves – from cave paintings to family photos, scribbles, scrapbooks, videos, to Pinterest boards – communicating through pictograms is a cultural habit that is near universal.

Images are symbolic of our lives and our culture. Anytime we as marketers can use them we convey so much more than we could have had we depended solely on words. Pictures also help businesses engage customers because an image is an oasis, a moment of relief from the bombardment of all the “noise” in the marketplace. Using icons in your product packaging and sales materials is a secret weapon.

Visual communication has become a habitual way people share information. No surprise that Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat have gained fast adapters – they are so easy and simple to use, and help users communicate so much emotion and meaning – and stories – without words.

Icons have always been powerful signifiers because they are immediately recognizable and understood, while also expressing complex cultural codes in compact form. Think about the smiley face or the heart symbol: these icons now sometimes considered corny and hackneyed, but only because they are so easily understood that they became overused and eventually, cliché. That doesn’t stop adolescents and adults alike from adorning handwritten messages with circles adorned with two dots and a smile.

We still use the heart symbol instead of the word “love” to indicate our passion for an object, person, or event. It started in the 1970s, when New York City’s fiscal health was in deep decline and crime, including murder rates, was higher than ever, people were afraid to come to the city. Milton Glaser was hired to come up with a campaign to encourage tourism. He dug down away from language, harkening back to our most innocent emotion and to the already familiar heart icon:. The campaign was such a huge hit because it was absorbed emotionally rather than literally; it’s meaning was instantaneous.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of businesses are not using pictures or iconography in their communication, whether on Twitter or Facebook or websites, mailings and packaging. Why not? It is easier to communicate more ideas through an image on Twitter than it is using its 140-word format. Plus, with a picture you are more likely to create an emotional connection with the viewer. They are more prone to stop and look at an arresting or interesting image than they are to slow down and read more text.

The more immediately someone understands a product or a message, the more chance you have of selling him or her on it. Everyone recognizes the white ear buds without a word ever being said. Visual perception occupies by far the largest area of the human brain, at 80% followed by hearing at 10%, making sight the most influential of the senses. Add this to the fact that people spend as little as three seconds at the retail shelf; they do not even see text much less read or understand it. The time spent attending to a digital ad is even less. So why not use more visual imagery for modernity, fun, and memorable communication?

If you think of your business in terms of pictures at the outset it may well be a way to find points-of-difference that will carry through in everything you do. We should be on a mission to convert as many words to icons and images on our products, packaging, and all marketing efforts. You might even think about more dynamic employee communiqués. Every company or brand should have its own unique and immediately identifiable universal symbolic language. Remember too, that visual language gives you more opportunities to sell across cultures – for there are fewer language barriers to break. Proof of this is in the international symbols for men’s and women’s restrooms (simple silhouettes in either pants or a dress), restaurants (knife and fork), and the baggage claim (suitcase) in airports. Simple yes – and very powerful.

No new invention is completely original and everything stands on the shoulders of what has come before. Why try to come up with an original idea when someone else has already done the hard work for you? Is there a product or process from another industry that you can make disruptive in your market?

Francois Hennebique needed a stronger building material than concrete. While attending the Paris Exhibition of 1867, he found an exhibit for concrete flowerpots that contained a metal mesh. The need for reinforced concrete in the building industry, which made skyscrapers possible, had already been invented in the gardening context by Joseph Monier.

Carbozyme Inc. needed to create an efficient way to remove carbon dioxide from the air so they could make filters for smokestacks. The key solution had been around for millions for years and was used every time anyone took a breath. The human lung efficiently removes carbon dioxide from the bloodstream and Carbozyme adapted this design into an effective smokestack filter.

As high as 90% of the problems we solve today have already been solved in a different context, according to estimates by problem-solving experts. All great innovators cast a wide net to incite creative thought by looking beyond their category and into analogous businesses around the world. The problem: time, effort and often happenstance needed to seek out all those corresponding ideas and technologies.

New software just released finds these solutions from different contexts—also called analogous solutions. Just type in two words (e.g., reinforce concrete or remove carbon) into Analogy Finder and it easily and inexpensively finds solutions to accomplish what you need. Further, it takes into account the many ways that people might express the goal. For example, there are many synonyms of reinforce (strengthen, bolster, enhance, fortify, intensify, etc.) and perhaps a few for concrete (cement, mortar, grout, etc.). Analogy Finder lets you edit the lists that it finds, and then combines all the verbs and nouns into a large set of search phrases. In essence, you type in one goal and Analogy Finder performs many searches, perhaps hundreds, and organizes the results.

Currently, Analogy Finder searches the U.S. Patent database but will continually be expanded to search other patent databases, scientific journals, and other promising online resources. Some companies even want us to search their own corporate data because they cannot find the relevant ideas from their own company’s history of projects.

Analogous solutions are great for businesses because they get stalled projects moving again and decrease time to market. Before analogy-finding software existed, cross-context discoveries happened accidentally. You either had to stumble upon it yourself or know someone who happened to know something about the other crucial context. Too much chance was involved. Analogy Finder makes the accidental discovery a more regular and predictable occurrence. Analogy Finder drastically increases your odds of finding the key idea for your problem. You can now systematically search through the vast number of contexts in the U.S. Patent database and soon you will be able to search through many more contexts in scientific journals and other resources.

So, the next time you have a problem to solve, don’t try to reinvent the wheel and don’t wait for an accidental discovery. Use Analogy Finder to quickly find the thing you need from a distant context. You will smoothly be moving ahead instead of stalling out and wasting time.

For more information and Analogy Finder success stories, contact Tony at tony@innovationaccelerator.com

This post is written by Tony McCaffrey, PhD and Debra Kaye.

If companies want to innovate the way successful bold newcomers have, they have to unplug

from the constraints of “That’s the way we’ve always done it” and recharge, starting with the

mantra, “Let’s just not do that anymore.” They need to be willing to take market risks that more

traditional companies are often unwilling or unable to take.

It’s surprising that we repeat things in business even when we don’t get the results we want,

but we’re creatures of habit and old habits are hard to break. Changing a routine takes time and

thought out of our busy work lives and there is a risk in trying something new. Even something

that is simple and accessible and that has an obvious benefit doesn’t always go over right away.

It took almost 200 years for the British Navy to give all its sailors citrus to prevent scurvy even

though it had been demonstrated several times during those years that it was an effective cure.

In this volatile world the old model of process innovation needs a new framework. It isn’t in sync

with the way our minds work, which brain research tells us is more serendipitous than linear.

Innovation just doesn’t lend itself to being predictable and risk free. Innovation demands looking

at the world differently, and finding connections between seemingly disconnected things.

Corporate protocol, management hierarchies, and rigid assumptions about customer needs

often create anxiety and stifle freedom of thought and exploration.

Loosen the reigns. Allow your best talent to challenge assumptions and unearth information

in ways that may be outside the scope of the corporate culture without engendering fear of

getting it wrong and getting fired. I call it anarcho-innovation because it entails tolerating some

chaos. In politics, anarchy is considered the ideal; it’s the absence of government and the

absolute freedom of the individual, free of fear or reprisal. In business it means allowing people

to formulate ideas, use trial and error to gain knowledge, and turn data on its head to create

new experiments. And it’s not just in your R&D department, but throughout the company.

Innovation arises from serendipity, discovery, and mistakes. It’s organic and messy, which is

where anarchy comes into play.

Endorse unexpected questions. Challenge existing assumptions. It’s better in the long run to have

a hunch that something might work and try it out than it is to declare “I know this will work”

and invest in proving it. Make sure people are out in the field with customers seeing how they use

things, seeing what fails, getting their hands dirty. The process is non-linear and, yes, chaotic.

Here is your opportunity to completely recharge innovative thinking within your company, while

at the same time halting the vicious cycle of failure. These are 7 surprisingly simple things

you can do right now to ignite your thinking, invigorate existing ideas, and boost productivity.

Download this manifesto and unshackle what constricts so instead of getting what you always get, discover what’s possible.

On the average a consumer spends 5,840 hours per year using a mobile phone while time spent watching television is only 1,865 hours per year. With people engrossed in this miniature small screen world, it’s surprising so little attention is paid to the human meanings of the tech devices themselves and the profound meanings of their daily use. Constant flows of information automate and streamline lives via our mobile universe.

Chief anthropologist and partner at Lucule, Tom Maschio, provides extraordinary insights into the meanings people attribute to the technologies they use. As Tom sees it, “Texting, photo sharing, streaming video and other content are leading to new ways of being in the world, new ways of finding meaning, value and pleasure in life.” When people use mobile devices, they draw upon what anthropologists call cultural scripts, or frames. The scripts most often used are those for toys and play. The use of a mobile device is characterized by the sense that one is playing with a toy because the small size image invites passage to the imaginative realm of play.

Like “toys”, mobile objects lend themselves to fantasy and play; yet at the same time they are powerful tools for adults. We ascribe certain aspects of ourselves – desires and personality – on to the inner space of the phone, and build a metaphor of self, a sense of the self as accumulating or building over time. For example, a social network becomes meaningful when an Instagram picture of a special moment is sent to the family’s digital network. The members of that network comment on and feel the emotion of the scene. People are creating and outlining social boundaries and social communities of taste and shared interests as they incorporate their own lives into the digital space of the smartphone.

Brands must learn how to occupy this space in digital culture if they wish to have influence in the mobile world. Just as people increasingly define themselves in relationship to others so too must a company. You need to encourage consumers to become a creative part of your brand; to help “create” around your brand because “creation” is the modern take on self-invention in social and digital culture, which we all participate in to one extent or another. We are all influencing and drawing influence from others in social media spaces.

To communicate in this new environment, marketers need to stop wasting social media dollars on smartphone ads, online magazines and social networks that use the same approach as a 30-second TV spot. When brands first immersed themselves in the search for influential people in social networks they found that the process was much like looking for a needle in a haystack. Even if they found someone who might be considered an influencer, they still didn’t know if that person was able to effect behavioral change or how many people might be influenced.

The old model of influence itself is no longer useful when it comes to social media. The old model looks at most people as passive recipients of information – but this is not what is happening in the culture of social media. We are learning that people today are agents themselves who take information, rework it, rebroadcast it, and change it. This means even the traditional top-down model of celebrity influence is changing.

We are all influencing and drawing influence from others in the social media space. Everyone can be an influencer and can potentially broadcast a brand message if that message is couched in the right idiom. So it isn’t about a high Klout score any more; it’s about how to best create this connectedness – that people create places. The places represent connection to people, to events, to memories.

Five Factors Shape Brand Influence

Lucule, an innovation consultancy in which I am a partner, has developed a proprietary social media-planning framework called Pénte. Pénte identifies five factors that shape audience receptivity to marketing communications and can therefore impact the desired behavioral response to these activities.

Depending on the specific cultural context of the marketing objectives, these factors play shifting roles in driving the desired response: message type, form of message, device, time, and level of audience engagement. Not surprisingly, people respond to messages on their mobile phones differently than they do to those received in other ways.

Mobile devices open people up to the unexpected, felicitous event or experience at any moment in time. That is the message essentially of social media and why the old, standard top-down models of influence are outdated. It is crucial to understand this distinction if marketing is ever to get ahead of the curve.

This post was co-authored with Jure Klepic, partner at Lucule.

As Strunk and White’s Elements of Style classic manual conveys the principles of English style with wit and charm so that we all become better writers, so too Keith Sawyer’s new book, Zig Zag: The Surprising Path to Greater Creativity, gives practical techniques to help everyone be more creative. With simplicity and warmth, Sawyer guides the reader through every possible way to expand thinking, completely reducing the apprehension someone might feel because he doesn’t even recognize what the problem is. To be referenced regularly, Zig Zag will have you brimming with a vast array of creative solutions to approach many different life situations.

Sawyer tapped into the back-stories of world-changing innovations and analyzed laboratory experiments and delved deeply into everyday creativity. As other experts, he realized creativity comes in tiny steps, bits of insight and incremental changes. Sawyer identified eight steps that anyone can follow to become more creative: ask; learn; look; play; think; fuse; choose; and make.

The first practice of asking: find the question. How you frame a question is often the biggest path to new ideas. Jay Walker, the creator of Priceline.com, could have created another aggregator traveler site that offers the best prices and schedules. Instead he turned the tables. He asked hotels and airlines what they might accept. Consumers now set prices and as a result a whole new business model was created. Instead of asking “How do I build a better mousetrap?” ask “How do I keep mice out of the house?” and you have a whole new way of tackling the problem, which leads to different types of solutions. When people are forced to change context from what they were originally thinking, they wind up being much more creative because they are forced out of first assumptions and have no choice but to look for surprising new connections and perspectives.

Look. Rodolfo Llinas, a neuroscientist at NYU School of Medicine, says that what we see is in large part, a projection created by the brain. He estimates that only 20% of our perceptions are based on information coming from the outside world; the other 80%, our mind fills in. While this is not fully understood, it is our brain, not the images received through our eyes that is constructing our image of the world. Without thinking, we put new perceptions into old categories – forcing the new information to fit our expectations rather than creating something new. Sawyer reveals how to smash that tunnel vision. As he says, “For greater creativity, you have to stop living on autopilot and start paying attention.”

Now we come to one of my favorite parts and something that will sound familiar to my readers. Sawyer says creative life is filled with lots of small ideas. The small ideas weave together as you travel along the zigzag path, and they can lead you to greatness. Time and again researchers have found that lifetime quantity of ideas turns out to be a pretty good predictor of creative quality; meaning the surest way to greater creativity is to come up with the most ideas possible.

Keep coming up with those ideas – make long lists and the longer, the better. It reminds me of an expression that I often employ – there’s always a Plan B. Sawyer shows all the techniques to keep going, and it’s fun too. He reveals how to take unrelated things and fuse them together, as well as how to look at the underlying structure of things rather than just the superficial to be more creative. An example is a saw. Instead of “sharp” and “made of metal”, “cuts by moving back and forth” is a structural characteristic, which requires “pressure downward to cut” and this makes you think of a whole different set of ideas.