1) Over the past 10 years, the document discusses lessons learned about understanding and engaging prosumers, who are influential early technology adopters that can help predict future market trends. 2) It emphasizes the importance of constant innovation, collaboration, and pushing brands forward in new ways to engage consumers and retain market share in a changing environment. 3) One lesson is that the best ideas are those that can be widely and rapidly shared, so marketers must be willing to cede some control and collaborate with partners.

1. Lessons Learned from:
TEN YEARS OF BREAKTHROUGH THINKING

2. Find Your Prosumers

3. Find Your Prosumers

4. Prosumers Are Vital to the Development
of Creative Business Ideas
By understanding what matters to
members of this group, the trends
they’re driving, and their changing
attitudes and behaviors, we are
able to forecast how mainstream
consumers will change in coming
months and years.

5. PROSUMERS
ADOPTION
6–18 monthsInstigators
Prosumers
Mainstream
Laggards
10–20%
Prosumers Drive Trends Across Markets

6. Lesson
Learned
All consumers are not created equal. By
developing a way to identify and segment a
category’s or brand’s most influential
customers, strategists can make highly
informed decisions based not on where
markets are now but on where they’re headed.
For our agency network and our clients,
Prosumers are a window to the future.
Find Your Prosumers

7. Get the Buzz Going

8. Get Consumers on Board

9. Give Them Something to Talk About

11. The fact that anyone, anywhere, can
create the next Internet sensation that
goes viral through social channels
creates an environment where brands
have to push further and more
deliberately into the world culture.

12. Lesson
Learned
The power of viral marketing lies not in
building buzz but in making consumers feel
more deeply connected to the brand. The
best campaigns offer a sense of ownership
that ties consumers in emotionally and
makes them feel they have a genuine stake
in the brand’s success.
Get the Buzz Going

13. Cast Your Net Far & Wide

14. Creative Collaboration Is Vital in
the Intangibles Economy
In another era, a nation’s most
valuable assets were its natural
resources—coal, say, or amber waves
of grain. But in the information
economy of the 21st century, the most
priceless resource is often an idea,
along with the right to profit from it.
—International Herald Tribune

15. Open Windows and Doors

16. Build Collaborative Partnerships

17. Lesson
Learned
Today’s demand for constant innovation
requires a mix of collaborative contributors who
can shake things up and deliver together more
than any one of them is capable of delivering
alone. That makes it imperative to cast a wider
net to bring in more thinkers, partners, and
outside influences. That applies to companies
and agencies. And it applies to brands.
Cast Your Net Far and Wide

18. Make It Meaningful

19. The Search for Substance

20. Dulux: “Let’s Color”

21. The new consumers are ready to play the ‘brand
game’ to the full, which means that simple,
unidirectional, repetitive communication is over for
them. Precisely because they are closer to brands
and understand them and their role, they want
brands to do their job: keep in touch, keep alive,
keep being meaningful, keep making a difference,
keep the entertainment up, be a good citizen…This
makes it really interesting, does it not?

22. Lesson
Learned
It is our job as marketers to help clients
understand the triggers that will be most
successful in attracting customers and building
brand loyalty. In this new era, these triggers are
connected not to the outdated archetypes of
hyperconsumption but to the traditional values
people have begun to crave, including community,
simplicity, sustainability, and rootedness.
Make It Meaningful

23. Keep Moving

24. Electric Typewriter, Meet the Mac
Image credits: Chris Campbell@flickr.com; apple.com

25. A new brand is all promise and vision. Then a
market develops and the brand builds trust by
delivering on its promises. But the natural cycle
of brands means that, left alone, it cannot
maintain momentum. In the absence of
innovation and dynamism, it ceases to meet the
needs of its customers. Brands require tending.
A static brand is a dying brand.

26. Goodbye, Nursing Homes; Hello, Nightclubs

27. Lesson
Learned
To retain and gain market share in any
category requires constant innovation and
repositioning (sometimes subtle, sometimes
major), building on people’s trust while also
relentlessly pushing the brand forward in
new and fresh ways. In this new
environment, “business as usual” leads only
one place: a dead end.
Keep Moving

28. Don’t Let Your Brand
Be Boxed In

29. Going, Going…

30. Think Bigger

31. Generally speaking, the
broader the brand values,
the more room there is for
a brand to grow.

32. Evian: “Live Young”
EVIAN’S “WE
WILL ROCK
YOU” SINGLE
SOLD 600,000
COPIES
WORLDWIDE

33. Lesson
Learned
Rather than cling to old business models,
constantly reassess what category and
industry you’re in, whom your target
customers can and should be, and how you
should be conducting business. This will
keep you a step ahead, always moving
forward rather than scrambling to follow the
lead of upstart competitors.
Don’t Let Your Brand Be Boxed In

34. Utilize Your Inner MacGyver
… or where there’s a will, there’s a way

35. The Golden Age of Advertising?
Image credit: Paul-W@flickr.com

36. The technological revolution has fragmented the
audience and made it extremely difficult for
brands to reach their targets. This has forced
brands to interact, to engage further with their
audiences, to deliver experience, to focus on
building loyalty with their current customers—in
other words, to produce a more valuable and
involving content beyond what their products
and messages were traditionally delivering.

37. Mortein: “Modern-Day Ramayana”

38. Lesson
Learned
Never be limited by the tools at hand and what
others already have done. In emerging markets
especially, reaching a target through existing
channels may not be possible. If a
communications channel doesn’t exist, invent it.
If the brand clutter seems impenetrable, find a
way to get consumers to come to you. This is
the golden age of advertising for those with the
creativity and drive to make it so.
Utilize Your Inner MacGyver
… or where there’s a will, there’s a way

39. Don’t Be Afraid to
Cede Control

40. Collaboration Over Control

41. TckTckTck: Campaign for Climate Justice
Image credit: Greenpeace Switzerland@flickr.com

42. To make a difference there had
to be one message, and
everyone had to own it.

43. Lesson
Learned
The impenetrable divisions that used to be rife
within the corporate world are crumbling.
Businesses are learning that collaboration and
sharing can accrue benefits unattainable under
a traditional structure. More and more we’ll see
that the strength of a creative idea lies not in
how well it can be controlled but in how widely
and rapidly it can be shared. Even the very best
ideas can’t get terribly far with clipped wings.
Don’t Be Afraid to Cede Control

44. Be Social

45. Everyone Connected

46. Share This

47. Up until recently, traditional media were the main
vehicle with which to attract potential customers. It
was mainly one-way communication. Now the wired
consumer is keen to engage with the brand and
other consumers, through social media, before he
decides to espouse a brand or a product. He wants
the brand to be a statement about his personality,
his beliefs, and the social group with which he
affiliates himself.

48. Lesson
Learned
For marketers, it’s no longer a question of
whether to use social media, but how and to
what extent. Being part of the social
conversation is essential in every consumer-
facing category. No one can say with certainty
how social media will evolve over the next 10
or 20 years, but we know for sure that it will be
critical to the propulsion and trajectory of our
most brilliant ideas.
Be Social

49. Get There First

50. In the Beginning…
Image credit: BinaryApe@flickr.com

51. Digital changed everything—for our industry and for our
agency. With our ‘Digital at the Core’ Creative Business
Idea, we took the bold step of integrating the world’s
largest digital network, Havas Worldwide Digital (then
known as Euro RSCG 4D), into Havas Worldwide, our
main advertising and communications entity. This
integration was not just in words, but philosophically,
creatively, structurally, and financially. Our digital arm
has been suffused throughout our company’s body. And
that is driving our clients’ businesses and ours. ‘Digital at
the Core’ will be our future…at least until we recognize
that digital has changed everything again.

52. Lesson
Learned
A passion for innovation and how we build
and drive it into organizations has served
us and our clients well. Some of the most
profitable Creative Business Ideas involve
an element of the unknown—a leap of
faith and the courage to do something
that has never been tried before. It’s how
we make good on our promise to get
clients to the Future First.
Get There First

53. Lesson
Learned
www.creativebusinessidea.com