How brands should act in a digital context. You don’t understand a problem until you’ve tried to solve it

We talk a lot about prototyping as a fundamental part of the way we work with our clients and the confidential nature of what we do means it’s hard to give examples.

Nevertheless we thought we’d explain more of what we mean.

Prototyping plays a key role in the cycle of innovation as it connects insight, strategy, and ideas by demonstrating possibility.

Prototyping stimulates innovation and helps reveal the extent of generated economic value.

It’s a truism to say that you don’t have an effective strategy if it can't be executed.

This is especially true in a data driven context.  The truth is that it’s very hard to make sense of the data unless you have an idea.

To us at BBL/P the old advertising age looks like the traditional model of scientific enquiry where observations are collected to build general theories which are then applied widely; often without checking back to the original data.  

These theories become law and often go unchallenged. Paul Feldwick noted that everyone involved in Marketing has within them a theory about how advertising works (they also have one about how big logos need to be, and what sort of people shop in Waitrose). The point being that the theories are rarely if ever made apparent, let alone discussed or subjected to scrutiny.

Brands in a digital context gain advantage by using trial solutions very early in the process.

Here we’re not laying down “knowledge” and “learning” as an immutable volume gathered over time, rather we are innovating.

It’s not very “us” to quote Einstein but he put it like this “Theory cannot be fabricated out of the result of observation. It can only be invented”.

The very patterns in the data are the start of a creative process – both in what they suggest, how they might inform and influence our strategy and what the possible exploration of these insights looks like. The prototype itself will provide a fresh lens to look at the patterns in the data again.

The blue-print informs the lathe and the lathe informs the blueprint.

How might the positive experience one group of customers have enjoyed be replicated in different settings, contexts or countries? Why did that work well there but less so there and what might change the outcome?  That platform has a new functionality, how do we align our brand and experiment with it? Consumer confidence is returning at different rates in different countries, how should the brand respond?

We do all of this - using Data, Strategy and Prototype Designing to help brands innovate and modernise how they think and act in a more complex, changing landscape.