Picasso (1907) Source: Wikipedia

Richard Ogle described how Picasso came to paint ‘the first real masterpiece of the 20th Centrury’, the Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. In his book ‘Smart World‘ Ogle argues that there is no such thing than the lonesome Genius who came up with the idea overnight.

Regardless of profession or calling, Ogle argues, that humankind has a collective consciousness in which trailblazers like Picasso delve to retrieve their ground breaking ideas. Picasso is quoted in referring to African art for the inspiration of this painting.

By thinking outside the brain and tapping into the extended History and wealth of experience of the extended Mind (Ogle 2007, 10) we see how all great inventions actually came to be. Think of the internet itself- Wikipedia is just one example of such an extended external brain in action.

It is interesting to look at intangible assets in firms that way. Perhaps intangible assets (Intellectual Property, Trademarks and Patents) and their nature of ’suddenly leaping onto stage’, thus ‘disrupting the status quo’ are just an expression of where we are going as a human society. Look closely and we can see how the collective conscious is opening up individual creativity, for example with the ‘Open Source’ concept.

Not one company can claim to ‘own the ideas’ since everything is connected through history, material, memory. This is a scary thought for economists and accountants alike. Yet, this disruptive idea space (Ogle) was first named by Schumpeter as prerequisite to entrepreneurship.

The intangible is quickly becoming a new stage of consciousness, a way forward to the next new thing. It is true that our current Western business models  can’t put a price tag on it- which I assume means ‘making the intangible tangible’ in current economic thinking. If the summary of collective social networks are actually creating the new value in our economies than it is time to investigate the consistency of this mix instead of denying its contribution to firm assets as not quantifiable.

The most prevalent areas in which the small businesses have problems
are Sales/Marketing (40.2 per cent),
Human Resource Management (15.3 per
cent), and General Management (14.3 per
cent). Specifically, Promotion, Market Research, and Training are the most frequently encountered problems, all of which are knowledge or skill related, reflecting the general shortage of expertise in small business sector.

It is not that these smaller businesses are not doing any marketing – they would not be in business if they were not – but that the effort in marketing lacks professional input and expertise. And, when businesses turn to the published literature for help, they find that writing on marketing focuses on larger organisations. Managing marketing activity is a different beast within a department of 10 people compared to the owner/manager developing their own marketing.

Regardless of the view among smaller businesses that marketing is a weakness many smaller businesses are very good at marketing. SMEs may even be more responsive to the market and far more flexible than their larger competitors. But these businesses still look enviously at the big consumer brands and wonder how they too can achieve such awareness and provenance. Marketing in smaller businesses tends to concentrate on sales and promotional tactics rather than on the big strategic issues.

And herein lies the problem. Despite the perception, that such wide awareness requires lots of Marketing expenditure, it is actually the lack of strategic competence and knowledge amongst SME owners/managers that prohibits effective Marketing and market awareness of the SME offering. Sales and Marketing are often either lumped together wit Sales taking a precedent over Marketing. As Paul Fifield writes:

Remember:
Sales is about ensuring the customer buys what the company makes. Marketing is about ensuring that the company makes what the customer wants to buy.

Both areas require a different professional skill set and mindset. Companies, regardless of size, should not be lead by either mindset or preference. They should be market-led, not inside-driven. But that is another aspect of the problem altogether.

There are however, fundamentals that can make all the difference. These are Consensio’s SME brand observations based on market experience and marketing literature:

• cultivate brand emotions
• build corporate and product/service brands and understand how to use them
• integrate marketing and brand development
• develop matching brand affiliations
• create a consistent brand logic
• link the brand to the people and personalise it
• Document your logic and keep experimenting with the right media mix

Ten Years later, and without quantifying the number of businesses in WA, I am assuming the same Marketing issues still apply to our SME’s.

QUESTION ONE

What are the pre-requisites (skills/attributes) needed to obtain a career in your specified field (eg. illustrator, brand/identity designer, photographer, etc.) within the Creative Industries? (4 pre-requisites needed + one line explanation OR reason why)

Consensio Brand Developer

1. Attention to detail (quality design requires flawless execution and cooperation with all parties involved)
2. Big Picture awareness (“how does what I do fit in with client business objectives?”)
3. Service Delivery (quality control and communication skills to sell ideas)
4. Research skills (includes keeping up academic and research about industry and competitor trends)

QUESTION TWO

What are some of the typical activities you perform within you current role/position? (4 examples needed)

1. Presentation of ideas to clients and stakeholders
2. Project management
3. Execution of design ideas
4. Quality control of project execution

QUESTION THREE

What project/accomplishment are you most proud of within your career?

When our client says: “I love it, I get it, I want it, it’s better than what I could have imagined, and my customers want it too!”

QUESTION FOUR

What personal advice/tips would you give to someone wanting to enter into your career path?

What I do now I did not imagine 20 years ago. I only got there because I was open to learn more about myself, the industry and where the gaps are. Don’t be defensive about feedback, no matter how it comes across. Maybe you should not follow a defined path. Make your own rules and step out of the picture now and then and evaluate on an ongoing basis your weakness and strength. After all, we are getting paid for thinking and working creatively in return for authentic business results. The only personal brand you should cultivate is your distinctive sense of humour.

Consensio: We both agree that creativity does not need innovation but innovation does not happen without creativity. You are challenging people in organisations to think outside the box, (thus to become more creative). How do you teach them to go beyond creativity?

Kevin Carroll: I define innovation as something that is new and different AND THAT ADDS VALUE. If it doesn’t add value, then I classify it as simply creativity. If the idea can increase someone’s pleasure (make you more productive, gain you more respect, create more revenue, build your awareness in the marketplace) or decrease their pain (lower your stress, help you lose weight, save you time) then it’s adding value which means it’s innovation.

Consensio: What made you realise this is an organisation issue and what are you doing as a consultant to address that?

Kevin Carroll: Everybody is constantly talking innovation, innovation, innovation..or they use the cliché: “Think Outside the Box.” But I realized that no one teaches people how to do it. It’s nice talking about it, but you have to know how to execute the process.  Also, Breakthrough Thinking needs to be fostered throughout the organization and rewarded…I show them how to do that, too.

Consensio: Are you confronted by some organisational members (eg accountants and CFO’s) who don’t think workshops and courses are money effectively spent? How do you counterbalance these barriers?

Kevin Carroll: I show them my case studies to prove the ROI.

Consensio: Do you use your own problem solving techniques? when do you catch yourself not using them effectively?

Kevin Carroll: Yes, I use my own problem solving techniques and I use some that have been around for centuries. The key is that we all need to build the habit so that we use them automatically. I catch myself getting stuck frequently and I have to consciously apply the techniques.

Consensio: If you could wave a wand and creativity would become the natural tool for organisational problem solving, would we automatically build better products and services?

Kevin Carroll: Yes we would, because we would have a clearer understanding of what the underlying problem really is and we’d be able to fix it. The biggest challenge with being more innovative is that people do not define the problem clearly!!! They state it in vague terms and they then they go about trying to solve it. You’ll get nowhere doing it this way.

Consensio: Would more or just different types of consumers and clients buy them?

Kevin Carroll: Both.

At its heart, creativity is simply the production of novel, appropriate ideas in any realm of human activity, from science, to the arts, to education, to business, to everyday life. The ideas must be novel–different from what’s been done before-but they can’t be simply bizarre; they must be appropriate to the problem or opportunity presented. Creativity is the first step in innovation, which is the successful implementation of those novel, appropriate ideas.

In this paradigm that means, that one can be creative and leave it at that- creativity is only the beginning of what is maybe an implementation of a new idea.  Therefore the often unspoken expectation in organisations to introduce more ‘freedom and courses to express creativity’ may lead to disenchantment down the track when the playful creativity has not lead automatically to ground breaking new processes and practices. Perhaps we have to acknowledge that innovation needs creativity, but that in return creativity does not need innovation.

He observed, that firms were not static output-restrained entities, but that their interactions with the market were of interest and impact to the whole economic system. He noted the cost of resource investment as barrier to firm imitators.
Yet he also reflected, that copycats would always exist in markets. New ways of doing business could produce above normal returns on investments. And Schumpeter concluded that exogenous disruptions are vital to “creative destruction”. In his observation, at the core of the firm was the entrepreneurial vision. Creating or adopting innovations would give firms the necessary competitive advantage.

His work is giving intangible asset creation, firm theory and the processes necessary for creation new integrative meaning. To put it simple; questioning the status quo may give an advantage to innovation in firms, however healthy earnings could also result from less ‘disruptive’ innovations.

…In dealing with capitalism we are dealing with an evolutionary process… (1942).

However, sometimes this book wanders the gaps between ‘how to’ and ‘theory’ too close to the edge. As a theorist, I don’t believe in SWAT analysis and certainly don’t need a template of it in the back of the book. As a practitioner, I am looking at the Boston Matrix and shrug my shoulders. But this is far as my critique goes on the detail of providing the reader with enough background. In detail, the book is thoughtfully written.

In service marketing, the actual experience is created by customer/client word-of-mouth (WOM). According to Young, the client is ‘able to feel a sense of relief’ (pg.26) through the service experience that fixed his/her needs and wants. Young argues that the professional firms are increasingly in need of in-house marketing staff, however, the classically trained ‘goods marketers’ skills belong to a different set of marketers. In short the author identifies that service firm marketers should have the stamina to cut through office politics by

• in-depth knowledge of service marketing
• partner level support from stakeholders in the firm to achieve process integration

Young goes on to identify strategies based on the size of the firm from sole traders to boutique and large organisations.
The chapter on segmentation focuses on what the differences really are between service and product marketing. It really means- honing in on the customer as individual. No more old school ‘industry’ and the ‘age, sex’ segmentation categories. It seems to me, the arrival of Generation ‘C’ is written all over professional service marketing.

Much has been written about the influence of national culture and cross-cultural influence on globalized companies (see for example key culture writers like Hofstede, Tropenaars and Friedman). The link of one’s heritage and underlying assumptions to organsiational performance per se has held bread and butter money for generations of business consultants, HR professionals and psychologists.

It strikes me as interesting, that a quantitative measurement is often engaged to ‘measure’ the organisational culture, e.g. “…33% of our people are effective in their performance; 43% engage in after-hours social activities…”, as if behavioural observation was all that culture is; e.g. we hear culture defined as ‘the way we do things around here‘.

This may be a catchy way of remembering this ‘culture thing’, but it is not an organisational culture definition. Culture is deeper ingrained in people than behaviour that we observe everyday. We behave based on our beliefs and values which are fundamentally based on our deeper assumptions.

That’s why culture can be shared, even when the key people, who left the place, are not there anymore to demonstrate the behaviour. I call this the living heritage of organisations. To measure this, we need different instruments, don’t you think?

Intangible assets remain definition bound and thus subjective. In brand and design practice, most professionals don’t acknowledge that what they are delivering as business service is considered a difficult return on investment for their clients.

There is a lack of consistent terminology in the literature relating to intangible assets and intellectual capital.Management scholars tend to employ either “capital” or “asset” terminology to refer to investments with no physical existence.

Lawyers refer to intellectual property, which has property rights in law. Accountants do not generally use the term “intellectual capital”.

Accountants refer to identifiable intangible assets, goodwill and intellectual property (with legal rights) under the umbrella of “intangible assets”.

Economists refer to intangible assets in terms of their source, as investments, and role in production, as capital. (Hunter, Webster, Wyatt, 2005)

As business-to-business services that deliver design, brand and marketing related services, practitioners should take note of the difficulty that clients have with working out expenditure justification. I think it is therefore important to assist the client in going through a transparent process of achieving mutual goals such as I described in my earlier post about the Consensio intangible asset chain.

“We have presented evidence that suggests the corporate identity construct
is not benign and that there are potential ethical dangers. We are not suggesting that corporate leaders never set out with the best of intentions; the problem is that very quickly such intentions become so entwined with competing interests that they become lost to the point where an identity constructed along lines of social responsibility can be misleading and disingenuous.

Finally, the debate in this article has implications for researchers and academic commentators in this area. We would reassert the value of seeing corporate identity as an anthropomorphism that is convenient, but represents an analogy, projection or metaphor only (Ashman & Winstanley 2007, 95).”

Is it immoral to communicate using Ci’s? Trademarks are commonly used as stand-in for Brand presence. The swoosh or the coke bottle stand visually for the entity.
Ideally, the designer spent enough time in the organsation and got a proper brief to create the Ci which is reflecting the values of the organsation.

And with this I don’t mean the unfortunately common approach of writing a one page brief that outlines what colours the CEO likes or market intelligence that counts the number of plumbers in the area. The best Ci’s represent the essence of collective values of the people who work in the place with a collective name. If the people’s values are corrupt, so is the Ci. However, Ci’s are not moral. They don’t represent boundaries, they are amoral. In my professional understanding they represent shared values.