Spark is your update on culture, innovation and trends - a spark of innovative inspiration. Be careful...you might start something.





Find out why culture matters. "Culture" generally explains most failed products. Download our white paper defining culture as we see it.

What are the new rules of engagement?

1) Get Serious

Most legacy CPG brands came of age in an era in which quality was defined as consistency, uniformity, reliability, predictability and hygiene. Today's consumer assumes those characteristics as a given and reaches to understand "quality" in terms of authenticity or design.

Our contemporary flexible production system can now provide the highest quality products and services almost as affordably and efficiently as it can the most mundane commodities. Your brand must deliver a truly high-quality product experience to survive.

Never make the critical mistake of evaluating your product experience by industry standards.

2) Be Real

Your brand should speak for itself through the quality, design and experience of your product or service.

When you converse with your consumer do so...

• In their language
• Simple conversational vernacular always works best
• Honestly
• Your consumer is far, far too savvy to ever be mislead
• With humility
• Boasting does little good in a niche marketplace flooded with high quality, "specialty" products and services

3) Let Go

Remember that your brand is about the sum total of product experiences as understood by your consumer.

Don't be afraid should your consumer transform your product or service in ways you might never have imagined. Encourage customer-led innovation strategies. Keep an open mind when consumers begin playing with or transforming your brand.

"We'll never have complete control over the brand..."
- James McDowell, managing director at Mini USA

"As consumers wrest control away from brand management control freaks...get over it. Turning your brand over to the consumer is taking control - and in fact, if you do, they'll return it to you in better shape."
- Russ Klein, President for global marketing, innovation and strategy, Burger King

"Today the customer is in charge, and whoever is best at putting the customer in charge makes all the money."
- Stephen F. Quinn, Senior vice president for marketing, Wal-Mart

4) Open Up

In order for your consumer to fully realize your brand experience, it is critical that everything about your brand - from your organization to your narratives to your product and everything in between - be as transparent as possible.

• Re-align your organization into horizontal, flexibly aligned business units
• Look for innovative ways to encourage your consumer to come into your brand family
• Discourage policies favoring "secrecy" or "confidentiality"
• A good rule of thumb is "if we commit words to paper or e-mail, we should be comfortable with them being published on the Internet"

5) Move Ahead

Because experiences are coming to overshadow products and services, we believe that it is absolutely critical for CPG brand success to attempt to gain some leverage over retail.

• Enter the retail business, M&A, etc.
• Consider innovative partnerships

Those who control retail environment hold great sway over shaping the product experience.

6) Get Along

We believe the most successful and competitive firms of tomorrow will be those able to harness the power of cooperation in all aspects of business practice.

Our research indicates that the single biggest driver of sustainability halos among consumers appears to be their general impression of the parent company's "goodwill" and behavior in the marketplace.

"REI, Patagonia, Whole Food, Amy's, Annie's, and all of those...those are the sustainable brands for me...because when it comes right down to it I just know they are good guys...They do things the right way"

7) Have Fun

Increasing evidence suggests that the most useful innovations arise within cultures that understand the sophistication of play. Playful attitudes open the mind to cross-pollinating influences from any direction; it is the secret of the best cooks and inventors.

• Don't create as if anything is immediately at stake; employ the mindset of the young child or Winnie the Pooh before submitting ideas to 'business plan' analysis
• Embrace 'bad ideas' as a necessary part of the creative process
• Failure is one of the most critical components of innovation

And finally...

Just to put our money where our mouth is (so to speak) and demonstrate that at Tinderbox we, too, know how to have fun, we have decided to release some findings from our most recent round of trends research fielded in September of 2006. We polled our nationally representative sample on a variety of attitudes, beliefs, behaviors and practices.

And while much of the data gathered will form the basis of an upcoming report, we also took the time to explore some more lighthearted issues. But just to be clear, the following responses are indeed real data gathered from a representative survey (n=1006) of U.S. consumers

35% Percentage of consumers who believe that the news on John Stewart's The Daily Show is often more accurate than the nightly network news

26% Percentage of consumers who secretly wish Starbucks could improve the rest of their life as well as they have improved their coffee experience.

24% Percentage of consumers who claim they sometimes find themselves offering opinions or commentary about subjects which they know nothing about.

15% Percentage of consumers who claim they enjoy watching their child play soccer, for so long as s/he is not the goalie, they know there is little chance their son/daughter will make a mistake that causes their team to lose the game..

8% Percentage of consumers who claim that when life gets stressful, they sometimes fantasize of joining a cult and letting their leader make all of their decisions for them.

Yes, these really are real data.

Tinderbox is a part of The Hartman Group, Inc. Copyright 2008. All rights reserved.