Taking a break from the local creative trail for a week (I’m back on the road next week). Three bite-sized mini-posts instead:
1. Most of the “new-marketing” firms I’ve talked to the past couple of months aspire to be some kind of variation of IDEO, the Bay Area–headquartered firm that conjoins strong design, creative thinking, business practices, and marketing consulting in a richly unsiloed way. (IDEO’s Web site is an intellectual and visual Thanksgiving feast.)
The local firms I’ve posted about also aspire to be more than old-school creatives. They seek to be design and business thinkers. And they’re all pursuing that business model in distinctive ways:
• Zeus Jones, for instance, has a strong emphasis on design and retail environments.
• Interval works with health-care providers to improve how they deliver services, seeing those improvements (rightly) as fundamental to their marketing efforts.
• Catalyst Studios unites animation and interactive design with insights into how a client company can tighten up its internal processes.
Firms like these—they’re not “agencies”—are offering practical visions of the ways successful businesses of the future will operate.
2. Someday, someone will write a good business history of Polaroid, one of the great American industrial innovators of the postwar era. It was a great design firm as well as an inventive manufacturer. Such a book would have a lot to teach about entrepreneurial creativity arises, and how it fails. It could even be a great snapshot history (wordplay intended) of American business during a golden age. Polaroid’s still around, but it’s been exiled far from its glorious throne.
Until that book is published, here’s something to help tide us over: a fine little slideshow (with entertaining embedded videos) that shows what happened to Polaroid, and why its downfall was so fast. Many of the insights are surprising, even counterintuitive. (Polaroid actually was an early adopter of digital photography. But...)
3. The blog links on the right-hand side of this page have been updated. Most are local—all are worth mental exploration. Discover.
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