General Mills launches new business Gluten Freely

General Mills launched a new business & brand called Gluten Freely on March 2, 2011.  This is a new offering for consumer dealing with Celiac disease either personally or with in their family.   The offering provides a wide variety of services including education, recipes, medical information, and integration to your social network.   It provides a one stop shop for both information and products to assist one in sustaining a Gluten Free lifestyle.   The online store offers food and products not only from General Mills, but a wealth of providers and online coupons for some of the most competitive pricing around.

The new business platform is all cloud based.  It integrates together core business capabilities of eCommerce, CRM, order management and B2B integration for fulfillment.   Extensive XRM/CRM management capabilities allow for increased 1:1 marketing potential.  It is capable of delivering content to a multi-channel consumer bases through web, phone, slate formats and is extensible to emerging channels platforms for TV and gaming console applications.   This new platform gives General Mills the ability to rapidly innovate, test, and scale new business like never before.

Check out www.glutenfreely.com and stay tuned for new innovations from General Mills.

www.tomorrowfromtoday.com

 

Microsoft Windows Phone 7 Launch

Microsoft Launches new mobile OS called Windows Phone 7.  Although previewed much earlier the phone has been released in Europe & Asia prior to the North American launch.  Carriers at launch are AT&T and T-Mobile.   A variety of multi-touch devices are available from Dell, HTC, LG, and Samsung.   The user experience is a new design metaphor call “Metro.”   It is based around a hub and tile language of organizing the navigation and data.   Real time notifications keep the user up to date on incoming communications and appointments.   Of particular interest is the new panorama view.  Several screens width wide, it allows a collection of related data to be intuitively navigated and will open many creative possibilities to app designers.

Have test driven the devices.  They are very performant to the touch when scrolling through the screens and large amounts of data.   The interface can be reorganized to the users preference.  Battery life seems long, display is very clear, and data transfer speeds are high.

A Focus on Innovation Trends

Time to reset goals for the next six months of blogging.  I’ll be focusing on to major areas including Design and Innovation.   I’m developing a significant amount of slide and video assets on the respective topics and will be sharing direct insight from the cutting edge consumer innovation projects I’m currently involved with.

Design:

In the design area I’m going to be looking at major trends in design user experience in the multi-channel and multi-touch areas of consumer solutions.   These represent a new bar in terms of user experience and combined represent a significant challenge to corporations, development partners, and creative agencies to rapidly adapt to consumer expectations.   There is also significant architecture implications for new solutions and refactoring today’s online offerings.

In a second design theme,  I’ll also be starting a design thread around basic design aspects and language.  This is design school 101 material, but I will introduce those concepts, then apply them to digital design in today’s solutions.

Innovation:

In the innovation area I will break down trends and emerging technologies into categories of organizational implications and technology capabilities that enterprises need to develop in order to capitalize on the changing business models occurring today.

Both areas are certainly ambitious and my blogging will be trailing the development of the slide, video assets plus the actual innovation projects we are bringing to marketing that must remain NDA until their release.

I’m also working with a number of creative agency and vertical focus groups over the coming year.   Those groups are great collaboration environments and sounding boards.

www.tomorrowfromtoday.com

Innovative Marketing

I’ve started a new video series to discuss innovative marketing practices.   In the first of the series we discuss some of the key aspects to the i-Lohas bottled water marketing campaign that Coke ran in Asia.

Some of the key aspects in the campaign and messaging include:

1. Environment:  Product design choices to utilize more green materials than their competition.
2. Ethics: Resonating corporate value messaging around corporate social responsibility.
3. Economics:  Entering an established market, but gaining the market segment lead in six months.

The video also highlights aspect of the viral campaign that comes from peer influence generated by the physical design of the bottle to compact crush and promote the recycling process.

You can find the video at:   www.youtube.com/tomorrowfromtoday

Previes blog post highlighting the story at:

– https://tomorrowfromtoday.wordpress.com/2010/03/30/coca-cola-i-lohas-marketing-campaign-wins-awards-in-asia/

– https://tomorrowfromtoday.wordpress.com/2009/09/20/economics-environment-ethics-define-new-marketing-messaging/

http://www.tomorrowfromtoday.com

Coca-Cola I-LOHAS marketing campaign wins awards in Asia

Hakuhodo Creative Vox won the Platinum award at the Asian Marketing Effectiveness event.

Coca-Cola launched a new brand of mineral water called I-LOHAS. The brand introduced an ultra-light ‘crushable’ plastic bottle. The bottle can be twisted to crush it which became a powerful marketing and communications symbol.

.

Key high lights:

– Paul Heath, CEO of Ogilvy & Mather Asia-Pacific and judge: “Packaging is beginning to play a much more important role in the marketing campaign, in this example, packaging is where it all started. This campaign stood out as a very clear winner and something that was completely integrated.”

– As a result, Coke sold 200 million bottles of I-LOHAS in six months, becoming the market leader.

– David Elsworth, vice president of creative excellence in Japan for the Coca-Cola Export Corporation, added that the brand has now sold 300 million bottles.

– The plastic bottle uses 40 per cent less resources in the manufacturing process.

Read the full article at: http://bit.ly/CokeColaAsianAward

In a previous post: Economics, Environment @ Ethics define new marketing message: http://bit.ly/EconomyEnvironmentEthics discussed the trends for corporations to align their messaging to and explored each scenario in the subsequent posts.  In this success story we see the environmental impact and symbolism created by the actual packaging of the product being introduced.  This created a strong visual statement that is re-enforced to each user of the product and those watching that consumer actively participate in a “green choice” around a products manufacturing implications and recycling emphasis.

Today’s world of 1:1 marketing attempts to grow ever more personalized.   It is moving past the concept of only specifying what product or services attributes interest you, but the vary design, packaging, and behaviors of the product can communicate a personal value statement to your immediate community.  It is the new form of personalized lobbying, the new millennium of politics where product purchase can move past endorsement to actual advocacy of a cause.   We’ve seen this in many examples in the USA already.  A very popular example is around the “Live Strong” brand and products and cause they promote.  This brand alone covers apparel, sporting equipment, digital consumer devices, etc.

For corporations the question becomes – can our products reflect a personal value statement in terms of relevant social and economical issues of today.  The question for consumers is, not what you value, but what message and behavior are you willing to model by product purchase, endorsement, and advocacy.

www.tomorrowfromtoday.com

Future of Multi-touch in gaming

Multi-touch user experiences are entering the main stream through a world of devices including the iPhone and Windows 7 computers.   Designs are given a whole new frontier to create new metaphors and interactive experience.  One of the great challenges is to create interfaces that will be intuitive and efficient enough for high productivity uses.   Gaming is an idea proving grounds to see how multi-touch can work in the high twitch environments of gaming combat.

Check out this video to see how this “feels” as a user.

http://bit.ly/TomorrowFromToday

Design of Avatar Future Tech

Avatar was a fantastic display of technology.  First and foremost was the latest generation of 3D enabled CGI effects that created the characters and landscapes.  While those aspects set a new bar for movie creation, it was the “in world” technology that both caught my eye and yet seemed dated at the same time.   It featured both large screen imagery on transparent screens and holographically created images that could be rapidly transversed in their use of mapping applications.  Both of these representations seemed quite here and now as it where.  Though I didn’t like the large transparent displays, the seemed very plain in terms of their information and data visualization.   The transparent screens would have offered an interesting capability in terms of the pilots of the machines if they were actually looking through the transparencies at reality and having it a

ugmented by the transparent displays.   This combination of reality augmentation would be at more of the forefront of technologies that are emerging today and offer a real value proposition in terms of the human/machine & reality/virtual aspects of daily life.

Already in today’s world we see large screen displays, interactive media, multi-touch, voice recognition, and facial recognition.   We have mapping software that can render the earth and allow 3D exploration.   I wish we could have scene the same level of creativity explored in Avatar as we saw put into the world of Pandora.

Perhaps project Natal http://bit.ly/PRJNatal will offer the creative spark to designers to start thinking past the flat screen and into the next level of human interactions with machines.

TomorrowFromToday

http://bit.ly/7YYj3c