Who is in the dream team?

We want the best team in the world to achieve amazing things. Be it sports or business, its all about putting talented people together and making it collectively. We know '1' is an extremely lonely number and unsustainable in the long run. No successful leader I know or read about can do everything themselves. They usually have a dream team rallying behind them.

A brand dream team is hard to assemble but does not excuse us from having one. Talents are out there, we just need to find them. A dream brand comes from a dream team. The key is first to identify the roles in this dream team. Here is my list in no particular order of importance or ranking. Each role is like a table leg supporting the table (brand). I doubt even the most multi-talented amongst us can encompass all of these skills.

1) Story Teller - People love listening to stories. All great presenters are great story tellers. Any brand has a story to tell its customers that romances and captivate them. This role takes on crafting and communicating a brand story which delivers the impact needed to drive its products and services. The Story Teller is an advocator of customer engagement.

2) Experience Designer - This role handles all communication and customer facing experiences. Working closely with the Story Teller, this person takes care of the details to communicate the brand to customers. They prototype experiences or image how it feels like to be living and breathing the brand. The key is to  deliver that experience to customers from multitude of angles. From the way the packaging feels to how it is disposed or re-cycled. This role creates multi sensory platforms rather than visuals to translate the brand promise to an acutal experience.

3) Design Researcher - Someone who has a passion for life and people. They are not marker researchers who get stuck in an office all day and claim they understood 'what is out there'. This person listens and observe before asking questions. Like a dry sponge with child-like curiosity, consumer behaviours are recorded and analysed by them. They constantly take notes, beam down ideas and cross pollinate them to feed brainstorming sessions. R&D folks love them.

4) Brand Strategist - This role takes on a T-shaped design. Left-right, they deal with the breath of issues that encompass market sentiments, trends and competitors. Top-down, this person handles strategic branding to details like pricing and market channels to penetrate. This role is a fusion of a brand management and marketing with a dose of creative thinking.

5) Brand Orchestrator - The boss (fiend or friend, the team decides!). The visionary or realist who reports to the business stakeholders and to manage the team's performances and results. Primarily, the brand owner who assembles and orchestrates different members and rally them behind the brand's vision. This role pull all available resources to ensure the dream team work in optimization. Being a juggler and hurdler who also surmount difficulties in order to attain what the dream team must accomplish. The dream itself.

I would also like to acknowledge this fantastic book Ten Faces of Innovation for inspiring me to write this post. Read it to know what are the different roles and design thinking to build a truly innovative culture in your organization.

Please leave your comments, if any.

How Asian technology brands stay ahead.

Speed to market. Yes, that is their strategy to roll out products faster than their competitors. Their speed to quickly churn out many products at a rate that is unmatched by other European or American brands. Their strategy involves gaining market share by rapidly flooding products with new models every 6 to 8 months.

How is this speed-to-market affecting market research? Definitely. The traditional design research which involves understanding user needs, creating new concepts and rolling them out has been shortened significantly to meet market needs and capture market share (top priority now). Being the number one market leader by sales figure speaks the loudest.

Many designers are rolling out concepts quickly and hoping that one of the many models will wow the consumers. Not your typical European brand product life cycle. Are consumer needs measured? Probably but I suspect not really in-depth. You would probably agree some smart phones look really alike to each other. Speed to market is killing innovation. Do we really need a crystal keypad from LG? My take is that Asian brands are not aiming for a big leap in innovation but a series of refinement till they get it right. I hope not at the expense of consumer needs and wants.