The first in an occasional series of useful thoughts collected from our Capabilities team.

Working with marketing teams from organisations around the world, we are fortunate to be exposed to many different styles and pick up new ways of thinking about common marketing issues.

New product development is often a tricky area – particularly when you’re suffering from Innovator’s Block! So why not try some of these alternative, tried-and-tested ways of thinking around the problem?

1. Make the challenge MORE difficult

A loose innovation brief can often constrain creativity, so make the task easier by making it more difficult – define the boundaries, tighten the scope and force yourself to find a creative way out of the problem.

2. Meet up with old friends

Go and interview an ex-client/customer and ask him to tell you what you should do better. They will be more honest and open about talking about barriers and issues when out of the formal relationship – you should not be afraid to listen to criticism and act on it!

3. Are we nearly there yet? 

As well as asking questions like a four year old, why not ask a child their opinion? This is a test of how simply and easily you can explain your idea and its benefits. Can you explain your innovation idea to your children so that is clear, easy to understand and they get the benefits? Often an idea that cannot be explained simply, cannot be explained at all…

4. Bedtime writing

Keep a notebook and pen by your bed, you never know when a great idea might strike and it is easy to forget something if it’s either late at night or first thing in the morning!

5. Hire a celebrity innovation board

Put together a dream team of celebrity innovators to help you with your challenge, then imagine how they would approach the problem. How would Madonna or Gordon Ramsay see it differently?

6. Take time to consider

Creativity is not a linear process. Sometimes it’s good to stop, take time out and let your brain think about the problem while you’re doing something quite different … It’s amazing how creative you can be when you’re not even trying. So, if a workshop has reached a point where the creativity has dried up, or the problem seems too difficult to solve, get everyone to go for a walk outside and just chat about it.

For 22 years our identity has been based on the “flask and flowers”, an iconic representation of the combination of science and creativity which we have always brought to all our projects. 

However in recent times we felt that this predominantly black and white identity was becoming a little tired in what is a significantly-changed (and ever-changing) environment. Furthermore the combination of art and science, while still relevant, has increasingly become a consultancy generic, something which all our competitors had started to claim. 

So we wanted a new identity – that was going to be the same but different. It needed to reflect the fact that we are still brand-focused and brand-led, that we’re still solving difficult marketing problems for our clients but now we’re doing it with more depth, experience and variety to our offer. We have over the years expanded our focus from Branding, Strategy and Innovation, to establishing thriving practices in Insight, Closeness and Capabilities. 

We also recognised that we are now competing in a different market – from being amongst the first to create and sell “brand consultancy” it is now more important for us to differentiate ourselves within it. So we did onto ourselves what we so often do with clients – exploring who we are as a brand and what makes us different – and in end it came down to our thinking. 

We believe we deliver cut-through thinking, helping our clients out-think, out-manoeuvre and out-pace their competition. Our thinking (and our body of Engineers) encompasses a spectrum of approaches and methods, from literal to lateral, from intuitive to rigorous, from analytical to analogical, from deviant to random. Ultimately however what our thinking does though, is help create clarity from complexity: it comes together to provide strong actionable recommendations and solutions. Solutions that will help our clients create value through brands and branding.

Other elements of our approach and our personality fed into the brief too. We wanted a design that used modern, fresh, contemporary colours, depicting the rich variety of people and thinking styles, that captured the collaborative nature of our approach to projects – the coming together and working together that characterises our style. We wanted a design with life, vitality and dynamism. We didn’t want much – we wanted it all!

We’re delighted with the results from our in-house design and consultancy team who worked so hard to deliver our new identity and hope you like it too.

Here are some of the designs which didn’t make the final cut…

I’ve always been intrigued by the Japanese concept of the capsule hotel: the idea of squeezing yourself into a slightly over-sized coffin in a city where space is at such a premium as it is in Tokyo makes such great sense at one level, but feels so deeply alien at another. Our over-populated culture has glorified space to such an extent that more space has come to mean more luxury, even if we have no possible use for all that space. I for one, still get a thrill being upgraded to a junior suite in the old European hotels where the term usually means something resembling a football field-sized room. Even if I’m only staying for a few hours sleep between a workshop and a flight home, it still gives that sense of enviable luxury and the illogical belief that I will enjoy this night’s sleep more because I’m in a huge room!

One night last week as I was finishing groups late at the office, then flying out to Amsterdam at un-godly o’clock, I decided to trade a night at home in the luxury of my own bed for an extra hour’s sleep staying near Heathrow Airport. The Hilton was going to cost an arm and a leg for a few hours sleep, so I leapt at the chance to try out the Yotel in T4 instead.

It’s dead easy. You arrive, check in at an ATM-style screen and get a receipt with your ‘cabin’ details on, including a code to access the free in-room wi-fi. The cabin is tiny, but with just about adequate room to change, but the bathroom is en-suite (better than Formule 1 in France, then) and the bed is plenty long enough (although the duvet is a bit light for a freezing January night – take your jim-jams). The cabin is pretty well sound-proofed and there is multi-channel TV and radio.

There was, however, a problem. Reserving a room was easy – a few clicks of the mouse and a credit card and I reached a screen with my reservation code and a message reassuring me that this code would also be sent to my email and my phone as a text. I rashly decided not to make a note of the code, trusting the system to deliver it to my Blackberry. A couple of hours later, as no confirmation email had arrived, I phoned Yotel and asked for it to be sent again (this time taking the precaution of writing it down, just in case). Once again, nothing arrived.

Unlike lots of modern boutique hotels, where style definitely reigns over substance (what is the point of paying through the nose for a designer bath-tub if the room is so badly sound-proofed you can hear every single word of the late night phone conversation of the person in the room next to you?!?) Yotel is a fabulous concept – it delivers against a genuine need, providing a clean, comfortable place to get your head down when you don’t need the facilities of a hotel. If they could get the customer service detail right, it would be a great concept that actually works and have the right elements for a strong brand.