My favourite of japanese car manufacturers, Subaru, is currently running a wonderful viral campaign where they present the fictive “Mediocrity 2011″. Subaru intends to market itself as the Japanese car manufacturer with integrity, that sticks out. You may argue on the exterior expression of Subaru’s, but as a whole they are quite different with rumbling [...]

Many times have I been defending the practice of marketing among people who think of it as tricking people into buying what they don’t need and want. Today’s form of marketing, that I represent, is rather about matching needs, demands and offerings, while taking attitudes and awareness into account. You can make people aware of [...]

I am now officially open for business. My objective is to make companies and their offerings more competitive through innovation based on inspiring customer/consumer/user insights. Primary tools will be persona- and scenario methods, sensemaking and creative prototyping together with classic and new strategy development methods.
The picture shows a traditional Swedish kiosk (newsstand/sweetstall) which has transformed [...]

There have been many attempts to explain what value is, and the difference between the seller’s and the buyers’ product. Here’s another one!

For the seller the deal is about costs and revenue, for the buyer it’s about the perceived value. Only what is perceived has a value for the buyer, the customer. Again, the total [...]

A few days ago I attended a seminar at Transformator, a Swedish service design agency. They showed a very inspiring presentation with concrete and tangible examples – very refreshing in a design area that is still under development and where still most of its stakeholders seem to have a different view of what service design [...]

The video has now been published on YouTube.
To see my talk at TEDxNorrmalm, 17th of april 2010, click the image or this link.
Welcome!

Along with Michael Porters’ generic strategies cost leadership and differentiation, there is also the focus strategy which can actually be applied to the other two.
By focusing you can be more efficient and clear on your market, but you have to take elements like relevance and risk into account. This guy seems to have a strict [...]

Some time ago I came across the manual for the original Macintosh. It’s quite fascinating.
When you open it, it feels almost a bit surreal. A bit like watching Teletubbies, the TV-show made for 2-3 year olds. Why? Because it explains things we all know by heart since a long time ago, as something completely new. [...]

The concept of USP, “Unique Selling Point” or sometimes “Unique Selling Proposition”, has been widely questioned. It has been claimed that you cannot be unique these days; you have to add something else, sometimes called ESP – “Emotional Selling Point”.

Well, even if the idea is correct in some sense, I would argue that the discussion [...]

Yesterday I went to TEDxHumlegården, one of the TEDx events in Stockholm this week. It was very inspiring, and how could it be otherwise including such titans as the always so engaging Klas Hallberg. marketing guru Stefan Engeseth (who dared to question Apple!) and Sigge Birkenfalk, who once taught me everything about strategic communication at [...]

I took this picture in Brooklyn, New York, in 1989. I have used it many times as an illustration of the frustrating inconsistency between what companies supply and what customers actually want and/or buy. The need might be there, but no supplier is available. Companies trying to sell things that people don’t really want. People [...]

One of the stories in my TEDx talk was from a vacation in Croatia. I had some “house red wine” with my dinner one night and it was so good that I asked what kind of wine it was.
“- It’s house red wine.”
“- Yes, but I mean, what kind is it?”
“- No, we make it [...]

My talk was basically about my experiences from several creative areas, and the pattern I have seen when putting these on top of each other. Instead of a PowerPoint I used the blue and red glove so that the audience could follow the idea and make up their own minds on the pattern I am [...]

Twenty years ago there was a tea and coffee store in the block where I was living, and what always struck me when visiting it was that there was no particular smell of coffee in the shop. Today this would of course be impossible; a well dosed smell of coffee is expected [...]

In the old industrial world you would look for the linear connections. If I do this, I will have that result. You would set a goal and then set up a linear process and work with determination towards that goal.
Same thing in communication. You would define what you do and then formulate how you do [...]

By now I think that the idea of how the western world has moved from an industrial state into a post-industrial state, is rather accepted. There are plenty of interesting readings to be found on and off line. I will only refer to this briefly.
What actually interests me is how this model, this shift from [...]

Holistic, integrated product development – what does that mean? Well, if you want to be successful today and tomorrow, if you want to be innovative and competitive, then it will be too slow, inefficient and irrelevant to first develop a physical functionality and then try to powder on some experience values. You will need to [...]

I am trying to find the connection between all these aspects. Which are the drivers in this transition that so many products and services go through? I can see so clearly the “before and after”, in so many areas. But how can I explain it?
I think a part of it is about choice. Let’s take [...]

I have always thought there is something strange about the concept of “adding value”. Which is frustrating as that is basically what I try to do in my work. I think the problem is that “adding value” has a linear touch to it, like if some part of somethings value was already there by itself. [...]

Can something just be “beautiful” in itself? Looking for examples I find my turntable below. But then I realise that the consequences of this product design were more interesting than that. The beauty is not only in its minimalistic brushed metal shapes, but also in its statement towards the ordinary.
Basically, the traditional modernistic approach to [...]

Here is a first rough illustration of the shift in various areas. Of course this model is very simplified and I want to point out the aspects which are increasingly in focus, not an absolute truth!

Obviously the later aspects don’t replace the earlier. But for me the change of focus is quite evident. You may [...]

Service design is a rapidly growing area that today gets a lot of the attention concerning value creation and cross collaboration. And design. Which is good. In area after area, the potential in developing things and expressions that people actually want, as well as the need of collaboration between competencies in order to create that [...]

Today is the second day of “The redesigning business summit” in London, with many fresh thoughts in the field between design and business.
The major theme is how design and business development will act after this recession. People will not consume as they did before. They will be more conscious about their spending but they will [...]

Market strategy generally deals with so called differentiation. That is changing your product from being a commodity, like sugar, wheat or crude oil, to becoming a distinguished product with certain properties so that customers will prefer your product from others and thereby also pay more.

The first thing you do is to, for example, to refine [...]

Let’s start with four examples, from left to right:

The last edition of the Olympus XA camera (XA4). At its launch in 1979 the XA was the first quality camera made of plastic, which was a sensation. Shape, choice of plastics and surface treatments, and graphics made this a not at all “cheap” product with technical [...]