by Jacqueline Koch | Sep 24, 2015 |
It’s that time of year! UNGA, and it’s the launch of the Sustainable Development Goals.
Time to think about a few other items: Giving back. Paying it forward. Or stepping up as a good corporate citizen. However you want to frame it, each member of Boost! Collective holds a deep commitment to advancing positive change. As luck would have it, our hometown offers us fertile ground and much inspiration. Seattle is a recognized epicenter of global health, cutting-edge research and an extraordinary assortment of development organizations—from cancer and infectious diseases to land rights, disaster relief and new technologies to address the root causes of poverty.
We recognize that to tackle any tough problem, cross sector collaboration is an invaluable tool and we draw strength from diversity. We founded our collective of professionals—each with varied skills and interests—on this principal. Every day, for each client, it reaffirms the maxim: The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
With this in mind, we found it fitting to be joining forces with Global Washington. An organization supporting the global development community in Washington state, Global Washington connects, strengthens and promotes the work of 170 members engaged in creating a more equitable world including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, PATH, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Mountain Safety Research We are honored to contribute to the growing momentum of their work and supporting the production of the 2014 Global Washington annual report is just one way we can do this.
At Boost! we’re optimists. We are doers. We’re passionate and we’re motivated. Like Global Washington, we’re firm believers in the power of collective impact.
by Jacqueline Koch | Sep 21, 2015 |
By Gretchen McLaurin
As magazine publishers face increasing pressure to reinvent themselves for the digital age, they are challenged to secure the skill sets they need to compete against digital natives that aren’t held back by old school thinking. Corporate culture can be a powerful tool for attracting and delivering more agile and motivated employees, especially Millennials. A corporate culture has to work for the company as well as its customers. With a strong culture, you can hire for fit, train for skills, and let culture fill in the gaps when the unexpected occurs.
As magazine publishers face increasing pressure to reinvent themselves for the digital age, they are challenged to secure the skill sets they need to compete against digital natives that aren’t held back by old school thinking. Corporate culture can be a powerful tool for attracting and delivering more agile and motivated employees, especially Millennials. A corporate culture has to work for the company as well as its customers. With a strong culture, you can hire for fit, train for skills, and let culture fill in the gaps when the unexpected occurs.
The need for a codified corporate culture becomes clear when you consider how the internet and, more importantly, social media amplify employee and brand mistakes. Misunderstanding a hashtag reference or picking a questionable image might not be eliminated, but culture can inform employee choices and set expectations for promoting the brand and serving customers.
This is nothing new
In 1951 post-World War II Japan, Dr. W. Edwards Deming was honoured with the Deming prize, aptly named for him as the first recipient. Working on reconstruction with the US Army, Deming was instrumental in helping the Japanese rebuild their economy. His 14-point philosophy on continuous process improvement starts with ‘creating constancy of purpose’, and ‘adopting the philosophy’. He urged management to ‘take on leadership for change’. These principles, in conjunction with his expertise in statistics, helped companies like Toyota and Sony achieve international success in product development.
by Jacqueline Koch | Jul 14, 2015 |
By Janinne Brunyee
Fast Company recently named The Washington Post as 2015’s most innovative media company. A few years ago, this accolade would have been unimaginable. But, under the steerage of new owner, Jeff Bezos, today The Post is flourishing with 50.5m unique visitors to its website in April 2015 – a 64 per cent increase year over year and 33.7m unique mobile visitors – up 89 per cent year-on-year. This is no small achievement in an industry which is under pressure to reinvent itself to stay relevant, let alone grow.
Fast Company recognizes there has been a much greater focus on The Post’s digital presence in the Bezos era. In fact, the company is now living up to its goal of ”thinking like a digital product company”. This is critical because The Post, along with other traditional print publications faces declining print advertising and a readership that increasingly gets its news from online and mobile devices. According to Pew Research Center, weekly circulation for the daily newspaper sector has fallen 17 per cent over the past decade with a 50 per cent decline in ad revenue.
by Jacqueline Koch | Jul 7, 2015 |
By Gretchen McLaurin
When GoPro had its public debut at US$24 a share one year ago, the message was “we don’t want to be known as just a camera company, we want people to know us as a lifestyle media company.” In the past six months, their social media channels have been growing aggressively – Facebook fans are up 10 per cent, Twitter followers up 20 per cent, YouTube subscribers up 35 per cent and Instagram followers are up a whopping 40 per cent.
GoPro has unquestionably succeeded in winning hearts and minds with their many diverse channels and followers, from performance athletes to furry friends. But can they capitalize on that momentum and convert this adoration to the bottom line?
Read more on www.fipp.com
by Jacqueline Koch | May 14, 2015 |
We recently sat down with David to talk about climbing mountains… at work and on weekends.
Janinne: Where did you fall in love with the magic of marketing?
David: For me, it started in that most magical of places – Pittsburgh (laughing). But seriously, it began back there in an early job on the agency side as I helped clients tell the stories of their brands, and then the real catharsis came in my next role with a Boston management consultancy.
I was having such a blast learning how to drive growth for small- and mid-sized businesses that it gave me the bug for entrepreneurial marketing, which led me to pursue that focus in my MBA at Babson. I then joined what some at the time were calling a “ten-billion-dollar start-up,” Amazon! At the time it was the right choice for me. My wife and I were starting our family, so it was a great time to balance the fast-paced dynamism of a sky’s-the-limit business environment with the stable security of a large corporation. I loved that mix, and got to help launch a number of Amazon’s marketplace stores, then moved over to manage their Music and Movies third-party businesses.
Janinne: Can you tell us about the biggest marketing challenge you faced so far in your career?
David: That came next, while working at Microsoft. My role was to bring products to market globally for the Display Advertising group, working closely to set up field sales for success while bringing the clear voice of customers to the engineers building what’s next. The scale, international/organizational complexities and pace of change were both exhilarating and challenging. For example, we launched the industry’s first true multi-screen targeting, allowing an advertiser to tell a sequential story to a desired audience across their daily use of MSN, Skype, Xbox, Outlook and Windows. One challenge we faced was moving our salespeople from telling ‘silo’ stories (say, the MSN pitch or the Xbox value proposition) to a narrative that conveyed the power of the unified Microsoft media ecosystem across 35 different countries. Long story short: the global sales trainings, demo videos and pitch collateral we built helped Sales make that leap with clients, and the launch had the positive splash we sought. Being able to work on projects like this made my seven years there pass by in a flash.
Janinne: Even with those challenging work pursuits, you must have time for other interests?
David: I love spending time in the mountains and oceans, and some of my favorite memories are of climbing Alaska’s Denali, mountain biking from Telluride to Moab and paddling a wooden kayak I built around Orcas Island. Kids naturally usher in a different stage, and my greatest recent joys have been coaching their soccer teams and teaching them to ski and sail.
Janinne: What brings you to Boost!?
David: I love the variety of client engagements Boost! offers. We deliver projects for high-scale, matrixed organizations, while simultaneously engaging with budding ventures who have complex, early-stage needs of a very different type. That diversity energizes me. Frankly, I also prize the flexibility my current role offers me. It’s a cliche, but halfway through life, I’ve come to greatly appreciate the ability to work hard, play hard… and attend my daughter’s dance recital.
by Jacqueline Koch | Apr 29, 2015 |
Part two of our article on lessons learned about innovation from a mathematical genius. Read part one here.
Cedric Villani, the 2010 winner of the Fields Medal for mathematics (the Nobel Prize for Math), is in the innovation business. His goal is to solve ‘unsolvable” mathematical problems and thereby more the collective knowledge of mathematics forward.
In his latest book, Birth of a Theorem, Villani explores the conditions or ingredients that need to be in place to support individuals and groups as they try to advance the current best thinking to solve specific problems.
Whether you are dreaming up a new-to-the-world product or service or trying to find new and compelling ways to connect to your customers, draw some inspiration from someone who spent almost three years on a journey of discovery to provide answers to centuries-old problems and connect important strands of physics, math and economics in the process.
The dynamics of innovation are collective
Existing knowledge – Scientific innovation usually starts with the work of others. The goal is to build on and progress what we already know. Let’s make sure that we know what the best thinking is in our field – let’s educate ourselves on what is currently possible and then find ways to move that forward.
Motivation – This is the most important but most elusive ingredient according to Villani. Some people believe that motivation is born in us as children. One of the greatest innovators of our time, Alan Turing, for example, discovered the concept of scientific explanation when he read Natural Wonders Every Child Should Know as a child. While motivation cannot be manufactured, it is critical to attract some fellow travelers along on your journey who will help keep you motivated during the times when you lose your way.
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Environment – Discovery is more likely to happen in an environment that is favorable to innovation. This environment can be influenced by government policies, economics, availability of funding etc. Clearly Seattle, Austin, New York City and Silicon Valley are great examples of environments that foster technology and biotech innovation. Is it possible to create an environment for innovation on a more micro scale? In your own organization, for example.
Collaboration – Very few scientific discoveries are made by individuals in isolation. Instead, scientists tend to leverage collective dynamics within an atmosphere of sharing. They recognize that this collective approach accelerates the innovation process and can produce far superior outcomes. This is a principle that we have embraced at Boost! where our ‘product’ is the collective dynamic that exists between our team of marketers. We recognize that the fruits of our collective labors are much more valuable for our clients than the efforts of a lone wolf.
Constraints – Villani points out that while constraints and creativity sound like an oxymoron, it is constraints that drive you to a solution. The interrelationship between constraint and innovation is also present in arts like poetry where the writer is required to create within a tight structure – rhyming couplets, number of lines etc. Constraints can serve the purpose of removing many of the choices we face and force us to focus.
Hard work combined with intuition – It is often the case that the solution comes after many hours of hard work – just when we turn our attention to something else. Our intuition tells us what the solution is and we must lay the groundwork for it to do its job. But then we also need to know when it’s time to get out of our own way and let the solution come naturally. It’s not a coincidence that many people have their best ideas is the shower!
Luck combined with tenacity – The journey to discovery includes many bumps in the road. But according to Villani, the more we persist, the more opportunities there are for luck. What it luck? It’s the chance meeting with the person who can move your idea forward. It’s the off-hand remark offered by a collaborator that helps you identify flaws in your logic. Luck is everywhere and available to everyone who is willing to see and receive it.
Marketing strategy as a journey of discovery
The opportunity in the idea that developing marketing strategies is a journey of discovery, is to think bigger than simply re-using existing ideas and frameworks to solve problems. Instead, we ask how we can create the conditions to be truly innovative and move current thinking and best practices forward to create competitive advantage.
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