Jim Carroll- Futurist, Trends & Innovation Keynote Speaker

With all the keynotes I do, I spend a huge amount of time on airplanes — and often end up going through a lot of video. As of late, I’ve seen a number of rock documentaries, and was struck by some of the unique innovation stories in these films. And so I’ve put this list together!

Start with the slide show on the image below: use the right arrow key to advance through the list! (SLIDESHOW)

You can also continue reading the list below.

#10 Woodstock: 3 days of peace, music …and love

They figured out the HP InkJet business model, long before we even had personal computers

Innovation is all about risk, and Woodstock Ventures Inc. was all about risk. Everything went wrong — problems with ticket sales, the decision that the concert would have to be free, last minute problems that forced a change in concert location which drove up costs. They lost a ton of money on the concert — but made it up in spades with the film and album. Which is an innovation model that many would follow years later, with companies giving away printers for free, and making gazillions off the ink they would later sell you!

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Here’s a summary of my observations from a keynote I did in New York City for retailers, agencies, marketing organizations, food and CPG companies, on some of the trends that are sweeping their industries today.

The summary is courtesy of the event sponsor, the Readers Digest Food & Entertainment Group.

1. The New Consumer Is Shifting Their Attention Faster than Ever

Consumers suffer from “continuous partial attention” with more stimuli around them than ever before:

• The number of text messages sent each day exceeds the population of the earth
• There are 62.6 million videogame households (up 11.4%) and the average age of a video game consumer is 41
• consumers spend about 10 hours per day and $1,000 per year with various media – primarily wireless devices, iPods, in store displays, in-auto media content and the Internet
• 93% of American teens are online, proving that the Internet will become ubiquitous

Consumers across demographic segments are immersed in this new interactive world forcing brands to engage them across all mediums to stay connected.

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Here’s an article that I wrote for the spring issue of Marketline, for the BCAMA. Some good food for thought on the future of branding, and how all this social networking might really evolve.

Key point: “The concept of branding is being re-energized. People care again”

Pat Boone Has an App
by Jim Carroll, Marketline, Spring 2010

Does that blow your mind? It should. After all, for some people, Pat Boone could be the most uncool guy around, and yet he has an App with a pretty good rating in the Apple App Store. I think that’s pretty cool.

If it doesn’t blow your mind because you don’t know who he is, then here’s the deal: he’s a singer who sold some 50 million albums during the 50s and 60s. Think Justin Bieber if he was around in 1956.

I learned about Pat Boone’s App when I set out to get my own. Given the nature of my business, I’m a brand, and I’m a big believer that we are rapidly entering the era of the personal brand App. And in fact, the same folks who developed Pat’s App pulled mine together and had it available in the App store within just eight weeks.

What does this have to do with the future of marketing? Probably everything and anything, in that we are in the very early stages of what is likely to be a very significant transformation in the energy that people have towards the concept of a brand.

Bill Gates once observed that “most people overestimate the amount of change that will occur in two years, and underestimate the change that will occur over 10 years”.

Think about that statement in the context of the current impact of social networking on brands and marketing.

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Back in May 2007, I was invited to be the keynote speaker at the 4th World Conference on Quality and Improvement on behalf of the American Society for Quality; I spoke to an audience of about 2,000 individuals involved in “quality” issues — everything from construction to pharmaceuticals, consumer products to automobiles.

The key premise of my message was that in a world of accelerated innovation and fast paced change, organizations would find that new and more challenging quality issues would appear. The result, I suggested, was that organizations need to pay a new and different type of attention to ‘quality’, since quality issues could now spiral out of control faster than ever before.

(I’ve got the entire keynote on tape, with the slide deck, and might put a few clips up).

Fast forward three years, and we’ve got a situation in which the CEO of Toyota, previously one of the world’s most respected organizations when it came to quality, is on the ropes.

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Could you be so out of touch with your customers that you have no clue how they truly perceive you?

More information:

• Blog post Is your brand from the olden days?

How is social networking impacting brands? Take a look!

“Do you we truly appreciate just how quickly things are going to evolve?”

What should brand leaders be thinking about in terms of the velocity of change with customers and branding.

This clip takes a look at the trends impacting brands….

Early in December, I was contacted by an AP reporter who was doing a story on the key trends that would impact the economy into the future.

A brief part of my comments appeared in an article, “Crystal ball for 2010 sees changes in work, home“, that appears to have run in several hundred newspapers and Web sites over the last few weeks.

The key trend they used in this article was this:

Further adding to a nomadic work force: Many companies will look to hire employees on a contract basis, avoiding the risks and costs of full-time staff, said Jim Carroll, futurist, trends and innovations expert and author of “Ready, Set, Done: How to Innovate When Faster is the New Fast “.

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>by Jim Carroll, CAMagazine, August 2009

When you travel like I do, you spend a lot of time reading. One ofthe recent books on my list provides a fascinating look back at the 1950s and ’60s: Mr. Playboy: Hugh Hefner and the American Dream. (No, I didn’t buy it for the pictures, because there are very few.)

I was struck by one paragraph about how Hef worked very hard in the early years to get advertisers on side. He was initially met with resistance, for obvious reasons, but he persisted and eventually succeeded at signing up some of the “leading brands of the time.”

Just what were those brands? Crosswinds House beach towels, Scintella Satin BedSheets, the Lektrostat Record Cleaning Kit, Mansfield Holiday II 8-mm cameras, Leslie Record Racks, Electro-Voice Musicaster loudspeakers, the Ronson Electric Shaver, Max Factor crew-cut hair dressing and the Rogers “Rocket Flame” cigarette lighter. And let’s not forget Merrin Gold Jewelry and the Batch Book, “a new and modern address book that lets you list every pertinent detail — the surest way to avoid social errors.”

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There’s quite a bit of traffic on my clip about the importance of innovation with social networking.

The experience learned here links back to a point I often talk about in my keynotes about the reality of innovation:

• Innovators fail fast.
• Innovators who fail fast learn faster.
• Innovators who learn faster from faster failure master faster markets.
• Innovators master faster markets because they master fast failure

I was on a planning call with the CEO of a large global company that is having me in for a leadership meeting in the fall. We discussed the reality of his industry — very rapid change in terms of branding, infrastructure, competition, business model evolution, customer loyalty and expectations.

You name it — they’re in a whirlwind of change.

And it’s their ability to learn from their faster failures that will help them to master this hurricane of change.

Fail fast!

There are 147 million people interacting on social networks through mobile devices today – expect that to grow to 1 billion within 5 years.

A clip from a recent keynote in which I outline the dramatic impact that social networking — Twitter, Facebook, etc — is having on brand image, relevance of brand, and longevity of brand.

Here’s a video clip from a recent keynote in Las Vegas.

I was on stage in front of an audience of 4,000, speaking for a global organization.

In this clip, I’m speaking about the challenges that organizations face with innovation — and in particular, the fact that every organization has people who wake up each day and ask themselves, “what can I do today to kill innovation?”

Do such people exist? Are there really attitudes like this out there with such high-velocity change in the economy out there? You’ll realize the answer to this question is yes, as soon as you hear the list of the “innovation killers.”

Think about what they say:

• “We’ve always done it this way”
• “It won’t work”
• “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard”
• “That’s not my problem”
• “You can’t do that”
• “I don’t know how”
• “I don’t think I can”
• “I didn’t know that”
• “The boss won’t go for it”
• “Why should I care?”

I challenge the audience with this issue, and get them thinking about the need to innovate — faster — to keep up with rapidly evolving trends.

When you travel a lot like I do, you end up doing a lot of reading. One of the books I’ve been reading provides a fascinating look back at the fifties and sixties: Mr. Playboy: Hugh Hefner and the American Dream. (No, I didn’t buy it for the pictures, because there are very few.)

I was struck by a paragraph that spoke to how the company worked hard to get advertisers on board in the early years. It took some time, but eventually, they began to sign up some of the leading brands of the time.

Home amenities also abounded, with promotions for everything from Crosswinds House beach towels and robes to Scintella Satin BedSheets, Lektrostat Kit record cleanerss to Mansfield Holiday II 8-mm. cameras, Leslie Record Racks to the Electro-Voice Musicaster (an outdoor “high-fidelity speaker system for relaxed enjoyment at the patio or pool”). personal accessory plugs included the Ronson Electric Shaver, Max Factor crew-cut hair dressing, Rogers “Rocket Flame” cigarette lighter, Merrin Gold Jewelry, and English Leather aftershave and toiletries. Ads focusing on romance promoted such items as Coty Perfume (“Nothing makes a woman more feminine to a man) and the Batch Book, “a new and modern address book that lets you list every pertinent detail – the surest way to avoid social errors.”

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I’m quoted in a Reuters article that has run in the Washington Post, Globe and Mail, and the Sydney MX among a few, that comments on the recent woes of Starbuck’s.

Titled “Not everyone’s crying in their lattes for Starbucks; There’s a schadenfreude among some coffee drinkers who think the java giant got too big too fast,” the article looks at how some people seem to be enjoying Starbucks in its Icarus moment.

My comments?

The schadenfreude of coffee drinkers drawing satisfaction from another’s misfortune is part of the popular culture that enjoys the downfall of companies or celebrities, said Jim Carroll, a Mississauga-based trends and innovation expert.

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I’ve had a new article published for Association Executives for the CSAE, about how you can innovate and jazz-up your annual meeting or conference.

Here’s an extract:

Does your conference marketing suck? Maybe it does, and you don’t know it.

People today don’t want to go to an “annual conference” and attend “plenary sessions.” Kids (and today’s 30-40 somethings — the demographic you increasingly want to get to attend!) go to FESTIVALS.

I think they’re expecting the same brand image velocity for the conferences or events that they might attend. Would you rather go to the “121st Annual Tree Farmers Association Annual Meeting and Trade
Show?”

Or would you rather go to “TreeFest 2009 – The Place Where Tree People Rock!”

Me, I’m all for idea of TreeFest!

• Read the article Get Fest-ed!

I just came back from delivering the opening keynote for the annual meeting of the US Association of Actuaries. This crowd is the risk assessment side of the US life insurance industry, and given the rapid pace of change, their job has become much more difficult through the last several years.

They know that. They also know that there are many who don’t understand the critical role that they play, and so they set out to change that last year, by refocusing on a re-branding of the profession.

It turns out that they did a great job, having just picked up the Corporate Branding Campaign of the Year 2008 from PR Week magazine, even beating out “uber-cool” Tesla Motors.

The re-branding campaign fits with the challenges they are faced with: as the economy speeds up, they have to continually migrate their skills, capabilities and knowledge in order to continually assess new and more challenging forms of risk. One of those new skills might involve their transitioning to the role of “location intelligence professionals,” a trend I’ve written about here. This would involve learning how to marry the vast stores of information on current policy holders to the vast sources of “spatial” (think Google Maps) information emerging online, to come up new forms of assessing insurance risk.

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Here’s something to think about: we are going to see $12 to $18 trillion in intergenerational wealth transfer in the next 12 years in North America. (US GDP is $12 trillion). By 2053, $130 trillion will have moved from one generation to the next, in rolling waves of wealth transfer. All this will involve monies moving to new customers who are far more independent, financially savvy, and technically sophisticated.

In other words, tomorrow’s customer is going to be completely unlike the customer of today. That’s why innovating — keeping up with the future – is critical!

Tomorrow I keynote a group of professionals in the life insurance industry. Next Monday, I keynote a national Association of Actuaries; the following week, an international accounting and professional services powerhouse. Last week, a major bank and a number of wealth management firms. The heavy duty theme this month is the world of finance!

Here’s the thing about anyone doing business in financial services: you can drown in all the noise and short term hype and hysteria that involve markets and economies in rapid change.

Or, on the other hand, you can manage through that, and think about the innovations that are set to occur through the next five years. Focus on those, and there’s your future strategy.

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From a variety of keynotes through the last few weeks, here’s what we’ve got to deal with.

The consumer of today is:

• time challenged
• attention starved
• jumpy & fast with product perceptions
• edgy and vocal when operational excellence is not provided or perceived
• influenced differently in terms of brand / product / service choice
• more vocal when they’ve been “wronged”
• faster in adopting new trends and ideas

As a result of this, today’s new product is:

• faster to market
• more collaborative in design
• solutions oriented, responding to the fast consumer
• rapidly redefined by the customer
• having to maintain a brand image that is energized and up-to-date

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I just returned from a keynote for the Direct Seller Association; the industry dedicated to selling products to individuals in their homes. One might think in the Internet era that such an industry is on the skids; yet organizations like Avon, Mary Kay, and new direct selling companies continue on a growth trajectory; through innovation in traditional markets, and through fascinating growth in the Asia Pacific region.

My keynote focused on two primary trends: how the customer of today is changing; and how marketing and advertising are changing. I then spoke about how these organizations need to continue to keep up with the rate of change that is occurring around them.

So what’s with the picture? One of the trends I covered was that today’s consumer is influenced differently when it comes to their purchasing activities. It used to be all word of mouth; it still is, but WOM has changed to a significant degree: it’s widened to include the world of social networking.

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Last week, I gave the opening keynote for a leading global auto collision repair group, Fix Auto, which has locations throughout the US, Canada, the UK and France.

I opened with one of my favorite quotes from Rupert Murdoch: “The world is changing very fast. Big will not beat small anymore. It will be the fast beating the slow.”

What precisely does that imply? In this case, those who can spot the opportunity for rebranding of an industry sector, and who can pull off such a rebranding quickly. If you think about auto collision repair shops, there are a number of areas where we are seeing “high velocity change”: customer expectations in terms of service quality are going up; there is a focus on cost reduction as insurance companies become more sensitive to increasing accident claims; rapid change in the very technology that makes up an “automobile” today. Each one of these areas of change can be spun into an opportunity through some unique business strategies.

My focus for the audience was to realize that we live in a time in which we are seeing the:

• rapid emergence of new markets
• fast opportunities for arrival of new brand images
• new ways of achieving customer awareness around those brands, and
• significant opportunity to transform old, stale market and business structures to vibrant, new brands

Maybe the catch phrase is “branding in the high velocity economy.” Folks who figure out how to do this will cause significant transformation in their industry, and from that, new and growing business opportunity.