Peter Fisk

In the early 1700’s William Fortnum was employed as a footman in the household of Queen Anne. In 1707 he and his then landlord Mr. Mason, established their grocery supply business. In 1761, William Fortnum’s grandson Charles, went into the service of Queen Charlotte and the Royal Court education and subsequent affiliation, led to an increase in business. Over the centuries anecdotes abound about Fortnum & Mason’s role in supplying the very best of produce to royalty, Britain’s armies overseas (and also sending fortifying beef tea to Florence Nightingale in the Crimea).  The 1922 Everest expedition, for example, simply couldn’t start without 60 tins of quail in foie gras and four dozen bottles of champagne (the appropriately-named Montebello 1915).

Fortnum & Mason is 310 years old. A heritage of this kind is a wonderful thing: proof that a brand can survive the constant buffeting winds of change to remain relevant for generation after generation. But longevity can also be dangerous. Customers may grow complacent, and presume that you’ll always be there even if they themselves don’t actually buy anything from you. It can also lead to a certain fustiness, with the brand appearing old-fashioned in comparison to the new, trendy operations on the block. Throw in the royal patronage that Fortnum’s has, and the way in which it has become a focus for anti-austerity and other protesters, and the latter problem increases in spades.

It is these challenges that Fortnum’s has been directly addressing in the last few years, since Ewan Venters joined the company as CEO and brought in Zia Zareem-Slade as Customer Experience Director. From the outset, the duo wanted to tackle certain perceptions that had settled on the brand and stuck.

In an interview with Creative Review she says “Fortnum’s is a prestigious, well-established brand but when you started talking to customers, they were like ‘love Fortnum’s, come there once a year for shortbread for my granny’,” says Zareem-Slade. “People assume we’re just for Christmas. So that’s a real challenge, to grow a business and change that perception. Then there were other people that were like ‘love Fortnum’s but it’s not really for me, it’s for the tourists’. There was a big perception that it was full of tourists and it was this stalwart of Britishness.

“I had probably similar ideas when I first started peeking my head around the door,” she admits. “But when you unpick it a little bit, you realise that at the heart of Fortnum’s is innovation and creativity, and a huge amount of energy.”

Zareem-Slade’s background is in digital, particularly retail and ecommerce, and during her career she has worked for brands including Tesco, Virgin Atlantic and John Lewis. She and Venters met when both were working at Selfridges and he approached her to join Fortnum’s when he moved there in 2012. “In his words, he says I ‘bang on a lot about joining the dots up for customers’. So he said, ‘come on then, show us what you’re made of and bring that point of view to Fortnum’s, a brand that is steeped in history’. He saw the opportunity to think differently about marketing communications, design and tech.”

Innovation isn’t something that automatically comes to mind with Fortnum’s but Zareem-Slade points out that its history is full of it. “It was one of the world’s first multi-channel retailers,” she says. “As soon as the telephone was invented, Fortnum’s was there…. Hamper up Everest? No problem. So if you think of innovation about responsiveness to market changes, it’s unlike any other business.”

She also highlights how Fortnum’s was an early adopter of ecommerce though admits that after its website was launched, it “got neglected from there on in”. Sorting this out, making the brand more outward-facing, and bringing more Londoners back into the Piccadilly store were therefore the most pressing quests for the team from the outset.

In the past four years, all these intentions have all been achieved, alongside significant other developments. To do it, Venters and Zareem-Slade have made very clever use of design and creative thinking but also bold decision-making.

Some of the changes from the outside look small. Zareem-Slade cites significant achievements with simply changing the packaging on products such as Fortnum & Mason’s confectionery to make them dynamic and unexpected, for example. But this was not as straightforward as it might appear. The new designs – created by Design Bridge and featuring illustrations by Timorous Beasties – ultimately “transformed the sales line” (with the product inside remaining exactly the same) though Zareem-Slade describes a long internal process to get them right for the brand.

“My own personal taste is probably more contemporary than people would assume the creative drivers of the business would be, and I worked very closely  with the chairman [Kate Hobhouse] on that particular project. It was tough. It was tough to get to a place where we were ‘that’s it’. We both have very different aesthetics but there was a point in time in the presentation room where we pulled out these ideas and we both went ‘that’s it’. We knew we’d nailed it – because the decorative detailing and sparkle that she loves was met with the bold, slightly more contemporary [look that I love]…. It is all that attention to detail and that care that has netted a result that’s been fantastic for the business and something that we’re incredibly proud of.”

The brand has introduced other playful, fun designs and product innovations across lines including biscuits, tea and champagne, which come together to give Fortnum’s a far more contemporary atmosphere than it had previously.

Zareem-Slade has also taken the store out into the wider world. The brand has a franchised shop in Dubai and small outposts at King’s Cross Station in London and Heathrow Terminal 5, but has also hosted pop up events at venues including Somerset House and the Port Eliot festival in Cornwall. Some of the pop-up mentality has also come back to Piccadilly, with Fortnum’s hosting events and cookery classes, and even a major British art exhibition last autumn. The latter featured works from the collection of Frank Cohen and saw £20 million of British art – from Lynn Chadwick to the Chapman Bros – displayed in store.

While the emphasis of these projects has been on surprise and delight, there have also been elements of serious rebranding at Fortnum’s too. The Fountain, a restaurant attached to the Piccadilly store, has been converted into a standalone offering. Designed by Martin Brudnizki Design Studio – who has also designed restaurants across the Ivy Group – and communications and design studio Otherway, it has been transformed and renamed as 45 Jermyn St.“The brief for everyone was old school  glamour meets contemporary London and that is what it does,” says Zareem-Slade of the restaurant. “It feels like it’s always been there but you get young men and women in there for a cocktail, you get our regular customers who used to come into the Fountain and have their Welsh rarebit and cup of tea and it works really well.”

If you’re a fan of Fortnum’s as it is though, fear not, for not everything will change. “There are things that we’d be silly to try and mess with,” says Zareem-Slade. “One of the big conversations is always carpet. Food and carpet naturally don’t feel like they’re bedfellows. But actually the carpet is there to slow you down, it’s that thing that subliminally makes people [relax] and changes the pace and actually does a huge job for us. Because it makes you calm down, slow down and it feels different…. Now, obviously I’d love to re-lay the carpet and sort the colour out a bit and make sure the density on it is different, but it’s a big beast.”

Otherway is a regular collaborator with Fortnum’s, working with them across a wide range of projects, from window displays to packaging, and founding partner Ben Lewin cites Zareem-Slade’s mix of boldness plus attention to detail as being crucial to the success of Fortnum’s recent changes. “We always say we want to work with smart and fearless clients, and she’s that all over,” he says. “Somebody who’s got the balls to drive things through but also constantly checks why you’d want to do something, so it doesn’t come out as fake.”

Zareem-Slade’s remit is wide, meaning that all creative decisions are channelled through her. From the outside, it seems a daunting challenge for one person to pull off, though her creative direction has certainly allowed a more singular voice for Fortnum’s, in its many forms, to come through.

“It’s a big remit,” Zareem-Slade admits. “However, it’s a big brand but it’s a small business. It’s double the size it was when I started, but it’s a small business. So I can affect change.”

Zareem-Slade’s confidence and savvy with digital also allowed the redesign of the website to take place in a way that sounds positively maverick for a major retail brand. “We approached that in a really innovative way,” she says. “You can call in all the normal tech companies and I went through that process. [But] Fortnum’s is about innovation so we’ve got to do it differently. So I scrapped that whole process and then found a small, boutique software development house – Red Badger – and in a weekend they did a hackathon with open source technology, scraped our entire site and gave us a working prototype. And then once we had the confidence that it could stand up and do what it needed to do, we developed the entire site from start to finish in eight months, which is unheard of in the industry.”

The site now represents over 30% of the sales business, and the new, more playful side of Fortnum’s also comes through there, via products such as The Tea Post, a tea subscription service developed with Otherway. The product was inspired by looking at how US brands are using subscription services, b and subscribers receive different loose tea varieties each month, in a box specially designed to fit through letterboxes. “People view the product in a different light even though essentially it’s still Fortnum’s amazing tea,” says Otherway’s Ben Lewin. “There’s a whole new appreciation for it.”

Design thinking is at the heart of all of Fortnum’s new approaches, though this, like innovation, has in fact long been an element of the business. The Fortnum’s archive is vast and rich, containing artworks and designs from well-known names such as Edward Bawden, Rex Whistler and Oliver Messel, alongside many others.

The archive is seen as both an inspiration and a challenge by the internal team and the design studios it collaborates with. “You go through the archives and they were either so smart that they got to such an amazing point of view, or they just didn’t care!” says Lewin. “They were really pushing what was relevant for that day – the illustrators they worked with, the writers that they brought in were pretty innovative. I think what Ewan and Zia want to do is bring that innovation back to Fortnum’s.”

Fortnum’s has drawn on the archive at times – particularly in its recent cook book by Tom Parker Bowles – but Zareem-Slade is extremely protective over its use, and is keen to focus on the brand’s design future rather than its past.

“We look at the archive a lot but what I find with a lot of people is they want to rip it off or they do a bad imitation, and that’s why I’m very protective of it,” she says.

“With any design partner that we work with, the challenge to them is to get good enough to put it into the archive…. I want someone in this seat in 60, 70, 100 years’ time going ‘well, that was super clever’. It’s too easy to rip it all off. It would be the lazy route through.”

Brands and business need to be bold and brave to win in today’s world. They need to stand up for what they believe in the world, to talk about more than their products, to care about their societies and futures.

Of course ‘purpose’, ‘meaning’, ‘relevance’ are all keywords during any strategy workshop which I facilitate, but in recent times they have started to really matter. To have substance beyond slogans, and to shape the way organisations think and behave. To be real and human, authentic and trustworthy. The best brands are embracing this in quite dramatic and daring ways.

There was a time when all that companies seemed to care about was themselves – their heritage and quality, to be the best in their industry, to maximise returns to their shareholders. Then they slowly shifted attention to customers, leading to rather meaningless statements about putting customers first, service matters and lifetime relationships. Whilst the shift to become customer-centric can be significant and profound, it still sounded hollow – textbook words that lacked passion and difference.

But then the world started to be shaken up like it hadn’t in many decades. Instead of relative peace, stability and certainty, a tidal wave of economic instability rolled at lightening speed across the digitally-connected world. The frustration and aspiration which followed led to revolutions and radicalisation. The Arab Spring toppled dictators and unleashed new religious extremism, war and terror, and floods of refugees across geographical borders that had been eroding for years. At the same time, Russia grabbed a piece of Ukraine, claiming ethnicity means sovereignty, and tried to recreate polarities between east and west.

A new wave a fearful, nationalistic and divisive politicians jumped on the bandwagon, sweeping people up without logic or humanity, from Brexit to Trump, as symbols of change. They challenged the established order. A new world order started to emerge, but not led by Britain or America. China’s rise has been profound, although its debt mountain is fragile, whilst other emerging markets have emerged to drive the world’s faltering economy. And at the same time, Polemon Go came and went, Snapchat captured a new generation, cyberhacking became the new form of attack, and presidents told blatant lies like fake news was simply a different channel.

VUCA was no longer just a military term – volatile, uncertain, complex, ambitious – it applied to every aspect of work and life.

Polarisation, localisation, extremism and  have been the consequences of progress, connectedness and democracy. People who used to yearn for change – to love social and tech progress, to travel the world, to embrace the future – and the sure way in which any new politician could galvanise followers – now seem to reject change. Whilst it felt like people were more engaged, they didn’t seem to care – climate change declared a hoax by the US president, people banned from travel simply because of religion, a hatred of diversity, and walls emerging between the closest neighbours. This isn’t the 21st century we signed up to.

What does all this mean for business and brands?

Companies are a highly visual and practical part of this polarising world.

Leading brands have started to assert their voice, and take sides. They need to, in order to stay relevant but also to make real choices about how they work, treat people, and do business. Brands are the icons of today’s world – they can often have more influence than governments, relevance and maybe trust, working across traditional borders and social divides.

But taking sides also has consequences – it means not everybody will like you. Instead some will love you, others might hate you. Actually it was Nike and Starbuck’s marketer Scott Bedbury said that this is the perfect role of a brand – to polarise people.

 

Whilst politicians have lost their heads, and electorates are left spinning by what is real and fake – and others more extremely seek to whip up a frenzy of thoughtless action – then it is left to brands to fight for a better world, to stick up for fairness and equality, and to re-embrace a positive future.

Challenger brands have long embraced polarisation, knowing that the potential upside of being loved by one tribe and loathed by another is better than people feeling indifferent. These polarised times however, mean people are expecting brands of all shapes and sizes to choose which side of the fence they sit. The results of which have allowed for some glorious rubbernecking as brands discover the quickfire consequences of taking sides.

With a flurry of new #Boycott <Brand> trending every day. It doesn’t matter what you sell, no brand is safe from a consumer who believes you have backed the wrong side. In the current climate, it’s impossible to please everybody, and as such, no particular position is safe.

Take Starbucks’ response to Trump’s potential so-called travel ban. The brand pledged to hire 10,000 refugees over the next five years. Howard Shultz launch a direct assault on his president, reminding people that we are all human and equal, and that Starbuck’s would not stand by watching unfairness. Whilst many people met this gesture with cheers, #BoycottStarbucks began trending on Twitter.

Similarly, Budweiser’s Super Bowl ad which was deemed as pro-immigration led to angry threats to ditch the (previously considered ‘all-American’) beer whilst others pledged to buy it in bulk. This highlighted that responding to our split political climate can lead to both good and bad-will in equal measure. Many other Super Bowl ads took a similar stance. Movie and sports stars have been similar in their vocalness.

At a grassroots level, people are combining their efforts across multiple targets with both #TheResistance and #GrabYourWallet movements. As punishment for toeing the new White House’s party line, these aim to hit brands where it hurts most – in the pocket.

Under Armour fell foul to a backlash after their CEO Kevin Plank expressed his excitement at having such a ‘pro-business president’. Sponsored athletes vocally condemned this point of view and #BoycottUnderArmour gained momentum. In response, Plank took out a full page ad in The Baltimore Sun where he used a letter to personally clarify that he did not agree with Trump’s approach to social justice.

Similarly, sparks flew when fashion retailer Nordstrom pulled Ivanka Trump’s brand from their range after sales began to plummet. Unsurprisingly, Nordstrom received a huffy tweet from President Trump himself and once again, the twitterati responses involved adulation and disgust in seemingly equal measure.

Where brands claim they haven’t taken a side, assumptions are quickly made on where they may stand. Take Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘Building Global Community’ manifesto questioning whether collectively ‘we are building the world we all want’. Although avoiding specifics, Zuckerberg’s choice of language around ‘divisiveness’ and ‘isolation’ led to swift interpretations of an anti-Trump message.

For years brands were dying to ‘join the conversation’ and now they’re involved, people are demanding more from them. And since this boycott train doesn’t feel like it is slowing down, brands need to be confident and consistent in delivering on what they believe. It needs to pervade their business, in passion and action, not just intent and words. For a brand with a clear, longstanding purpose, taking a side is made much easier.

Take Airbnb, who have been galvanised by the passion of CMO Jonathan Mildenhall and his team. From capturing their brand around the bigger idea of ‘belong everywhere’ to their ‘community commitment’ request where they ask travellers to accept their terms and conditions of use, their ‘we accept’ Super Bowl ad, to their support for minority groups in society, they have a purpose that goes far beyond image, slogan or campaign.

Take a little inspiration from this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c23OBLQFcCw

Now is the time for brand’s to show who they are, to have a personality and attitude, a purpose and conscience, and follow though in practical and meaningful ways – to stand up and have an opinion, express a point of view, create debate and inspire a better future – to be positive, bold and inspiring.

Innovation comes in many shapes and sizes, typically an organisation has a whole portfolio of innovations at play, from incremental improvements to game-changing breakthroughs. Of the portfolio is often not well structured or balanced, and the approaches to innovation are rarely thought out, relevant to the dimensions of the project.

A new book Mapping Innovation: A Playbook for Navigating a Disruptive Age by Greg Satell might help.

Greg starts his story like this: “As a boy, Albert Einstein liked to imagine what it would be like to ride on a bolt of lightning. In many ways, it was a typical childhood fantasy. If he were born in another time, you could imagine him learning to speak Klingon or becoming immersed in the lore of the Jedi. Yet Einstein took the idea so seriously that it became the first of his famous thought experiments.

As he grew older and began to study physics, he learned that according to Maxwell’s equations the speed of light was supposed to be constant, but according to Newton’s lawsif a boy riding at the speed of light shined a light forward, then the beam would travel at twice the speed of light.”

Clearly, both couldn’t be true. Either the speed of light was relative to absolute time and space or the other way around. As we now know, Einstein proved that the speed of light was absolute and that time and space were relative quantities. In other words, an inch is an inch and a minute is a minute only in relation to a specific context.

This seems incredible because it’s so alien to our everyday experience, but today it’s easily proven. Simply get in your car, turn on the navigation system and follow its directions. GPS satellites are calibrated according to Einstein’s equations, so if you get to where you want to go you have, in a certain sense, proved the theory of relativity.

What’s also interesting about Einstein’s theory is that he didn’t discover it in the same sense that Columbus discovered America. He didn’t uncover a single fact that wasn’t known to every working physicist at the time. His genius was to see a problem where nobody else realized that one existed.

Every age comes with its own unique problems. For the past 20 or 30 years, we’ve mostly been occupied with finding new applications for technologies built in the 50s and 60s, like microchips, relational databases and the Internet. That effort spawned entirely new industries, such as personal computers, enterprise software and e-commerce.

Yet today, many of those old paradigms are running out of steam. Moore’s Law is slowing down and will soon grind to a halt. Open software has created the need for updated database structures and the Internet has proven to be dangerously insecure. Solving each of these problems will create fantastic new opportunities.

Consider the case of quantum computing, which has the potential to be millions of times more powerful than current technology. A full-scale commercial version is probably still five to ten years away, but is already being tested in areas as diverse as medicine, financial services and artificial intelligence.

It will also create enormous problems to be solved. For example, it will render current encryption technologies obsolete, so business will have to invest in quantum safe encryption. Because quantum computers work fundamentally differently than classical ones, new computer languages and software protocols will need to be devised.

And that’s just one example. Take a look at the Gartner Hype Cycle and you will find dozens of emerging technologies that will have an impact over the next decade. Each one comes with its own problems to solve and each of those problems represent new business opportunities. In some cases, entirely new industries will be created.

Anyone who takes even a casual look at the future can’t help but be bewildered. These days, even teenagers can build websites and smartphone apps, but highly trained specialists struggle to understand the implications emerging technologies like genomics, nanotechnology and robotics. That presents a dilemma for business leaders: How can you plan for a future you can’t predict?

The simple answer is you can’t and you shouldn’t even try. Technology today moves so fast — and in so many directions — that anyone who thinks that they can truly see the future is just fooling themselves. But what you can do is uncover problems related to your business, your customers and in new emerging markets.

That’s one thing that truly great innovators do differently. They constantly seek out new problems. IBM routinely sets up grand challenges, like beating humans at Jeopardy. Experian set up its Datalabs unit to identify problems its customers are having that they can turn into new businesses. Google’s 20% time acts as a human powered search engine for valuable problems.

The truth is that it’s more important to explore than predict. To create anything that is truly pathbreaking, you need to look for it in new places.

Management in the 20th century was, in large part, the art of strategic planning. You gathered information about markets, competitors and other trends and then planned accordingly. Strategy was like a game of chess. You planned each move in response to a changing board and in anticipation of competitors moves.

Yet today, technology cycles move faster than planning cycles ever could, so we need to take a more Bayesian approach to strategy. Instead of trying to get every move right — which is impossible in today’s environment — we need to try to become less wrong over time. Essentially, we need to treat strategy like a role playing game, taking quests that earn us experience and artifacts along the way.

That means that we will need to plan differently. In addition to strategic planning, or planning based on things we know or think we know, we need to start innovation planning, or planning based on things we need to learn to solve new and important problems. That’s how you quest. You don’t plan the journey as much as you prepare for it.

And that’s what makes ideas like those of Birdseye, Schwab and Jobs so great. They solved important problems that people cared about. So if you want to innovate, don’t look for a great idea, look for a good problem.

Greg’s main tool is The Innovation Matrix to map out the different types of innovation and how to approach them:

Start with a problem, not an idea.

There are many misconceptions about innovation, Greg believes the most important one is that it’s all about ideas. Yes, every innovation starts out as an idea but more importantly the idea should be preceded by a very interesting problem.

Why?

There are many ideas out there looking for a problem to solve, it’s a lot of throwing ideas at the wall to see what works. This results in a lot of wasted time, resources and failure.

Another way to look at this is questions become more important than answers as you move away from the core of what you do; so better questions will help you figure out the right problem to solve.

The point is don’t look for a great idea, look for a good problem; which makes it easier to figure out a path forward. Because if you start with the wrong problem, it’s unlikely you’ll ever arrive at an effective solution.

There is no one true path to innovation, you have to create your own playbook

Not all innovation is disruptive, mostly its sustaining; the type that keeps strengthening and extending the core. With this perspective in mind, it’s easy to see why there are so many me-too businesses as they all try to one up each other following the same playbook.

The difference between innovators and non-innovators is a portfolio approach to innovation, where they approach the different types of innovation in their own particular way. Greg maps out how this looks like in various examples on how companies like Google, IBM and others innovate; neither follow the same approach and thus their respective “maps” look different.

As Greg says in the video below, all great innovators do things differently:

Download and read the first chapter

Of course there are many other approaches, models and books on innovation. Here are some of the most useful:

Who are the greatest innovators in the world? Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford. The usual suspects.

There is a myth that innovation comes only from people who are genetically endowed with the ability to innovate. It’s always the lone innovator, sitting in a white lab coat who suddenly gets struck with one great idea.

This myth has been dispelled by the likes of Steven Johnson in Where Good Ideas Come From (see video clip below!) and Kevin Kelly in What Technology Wants, yet most still believe the engine of the economy is fueled by innovators working in the formal world and on the pages of the Harvard Business Review.

I just finished reading “The Misfit Economy” which argues that lessons in creativity, innovation, salesmanship, and entrepreneurship can come from surprising places: pirates, bootleggers, counterfeiters, hustlers, and others living and working on the margins of business and society.

It’s about people you’ve never heard of. It’s about people who are just as innovative, entrepreneurial, and visionary as the Jobses, Edisons, and Fords of the world, except they’re not in Silicon Valley. They’re in the crowded streets of Shenzhen, the prisons of Somalia, the flooded coastal towns of Thailand. They are pirates, computer hackers, pranksters, and former gang leaders.

Across the globe, diverse innovators operating in the black, grey, and informal economies are developing solutions to a myriad of challenges. Far from being “deviant entrepreneurs” that pose threats to our social and economic stability, these innovators display remarkable ingenuity, pioneering original methods and practices that we can learn from and apply to move formal markets.

National Geographic created a series of short films, called Underworld Inc., which was inspired by The Misfit Economy. Watch all episodes online here.

The Misfit Economy’s authors Alexa Clay and and Kyra Maya Phillips, have pulled together a series of archetypes that illustrate the diversity of those who make up the Misfit Economy:

1: The Gangster

Motivated, loyal, seeks a sense of belonging and shows a willingness to take risks. Most often found in the black market. Has a tendency towards territorial behavior and likes to protect “turf.” Operates within hierarchical structures.

2: The Hacker

Anti-establishment, educated, skilled, and experimental. Pursues reputation through risk-taking. Most often found online. Holds values of openness and anarchy.

3: The Unseen

Resourceful, motivated by frugality and a concern for livelihood. Often found within gray markets and the informal economy; dependent on social capital and community for survival.

4: The Copycat

Fiercely independent and competitive. Feels a sense of entitlement to imitate and appropriate. Operates within shadow or “copycat” markets.

5: The Agitator

Inquisitive, mission-driven, primarily motivated by the need to influence and alter. Displays tremendous ability to mobilize populations. Likely found in antagonism with an existing political structure.

6: The Zealot

Charismatic, visionary, pursues truth and stability. Feels most comfortable when in control. Operates largely in hierarchical structures. Perceives only one reality, and has a tendency toward closed-mindedness and orthodoxy.

7: The Provocateur

True individuals motivated by the need for attention; operate in peer-based networks and found mostly in niches bordering on artistic or urban culture. Have a tremendous capacity to shock and provoke.

 

“I have the best job in the world because I get to work in the future,” says Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. It’s actually 25 years since the former Wall Street banker studied the wildfire growth of internet start-ups, went home to convince his wife, and next day packed up his car and headed west for Silicon Valley. Since then he has relentlessly created the future – from online bookstore to store of everything, Prime and Alexa, Fresh and Air – time and time again.

Fast Company magazine this week published its 10th annual ranking of the World’s Most Innovative Companies. Whilst it inevitably features the cool innovators like Airbnb, Snap and Uber, plus a host of the latest exciting start-ups … Top of the list is a 25 year old company that is no longer seen as new, but is relentlessly innovative. A rapid expansion of Prime plus bold bets in the physical world are allowing Bezos and his Amazon team of innovators to offer even more, even faster and even smarter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LI1QuIyC7wY

Picture your ideal neighborhood. What does it look like? Is it manicured, with buildings set in a pattern so that everything flows together, designed for perfection? Or is it gritty and spontaneous, the kind of place where a restaurant might move into the space that used to house a dry cleaner? Boxes bearing the Amazon logo can arrive at doorsteps in either of these environments, of course, but Amazon’s founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, prefers the second type.

“I think neighborhoods, cities, and towns that have evolved are more interesting and delightful than ones that have been carefully top-down planned,” he tells me when I meet him at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters in November. “There’s just something very human” about them, he says.

Our customers are loyal to us right up until the second somebody offers them a better service,” CEO Bezos says. “And I love that. it’s super-motivating for us.

It’s a surprising answer from a man known for his disciplined adherence to Six Sigma–style processes and data-driven decision making. But it’s also revealing. Over its nearly 22 years, Amazon has moved into one sector after another and gentrified it, even if that meant tearing down its own existing structures. Amazon’s Echo smart speaker rose on the lot where its Fire Phone flamed out. The latest version of Amazon’s streaming music service, Amazon Music Unlimited, was constructed on top of its initial music store, Amazon MP3, which opened nine years ago. Amazon Studios’ Emmy Award–winning original TV shows are built upon a crowdsourcing platform that the company first introduced in 2010 for aspiring scriptwriters. Even the company’s fashion business—Amazon is now the second-largest seller of apparel in the U.S., according to Morgan Stanley—evolved from brand experiments in outdoor furniture (2004), home goods (2008), electronic accessories (2009), diapers (2014), and now perishables such as organic, fair-trade-certified coffee.

Unlike Apple, Google, and Microsoft, Amazon is not fixated on a tightly designed ecosystem of interlocking apps and services. Bezos instead emphasizes platforms that each serves its own customers in the best and fastest possible way. “Our customers are loyal to us right up until the second somebody offers them a better service,” he says. “And I love that. It’s super-motivating for us.” That impulse has spawned an awesome stream of creative firsts. Just this past year, Prime Video became available in more than 200 countries and territories, following the November debut of The Grand Tour, Amazon’s most-watched premiere ever. Twitch, the streaming video-game network that Amazon acquired in 2014, unveiled its first three original titles from its recently formed studios. Amazon invested millions in startups that will build voice-control apps for the intelligent assistant Alexa and give her thousands of new skills. The company opened two dozen new fulfillment centers, became the largest online store in India, and made its first delivery by autonomous drone in the United Kingdom.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCjvV3iFsuw

Bezos’s strategy of continuous evolution has allowed the company to experiment in adjacent areas—and then build them into franchises. The website that once sold only books now lets anyone set up a storefront and sell just about anything. The warehouse and logistics capabilities that Amazon built to sort, pack, and ship those books are available, for a price, to any seller. Amazon Web Services, which grew out of the company’s own e-commerce infrastructure needs, has become a $13 billion business that not only powers the likes of Airbnb and Netflix, but stores your Kindle e-book library and makes it possible for Alexa to tell you whether or not you’ll need an umbrella today.

Amazon is a singular enterprise, one that rises to the top of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies list because it has continued to be nimble even as it has achieved enviable scale. To truly understand how Bezos is meshing size and agility in 2017, though, you need to look beyond sales figures ($100 billion in 2015) and the stock price (up more than 300% in the past five years) and consider three initiatives that drive Amazon today: Prime, the company’s rapidly proliferating $99-per-year membership program; an incursion into the physical world with brick-and-mortar stores, something the company has long resisted; and a restless rethinking of logistics, epitomized by a new fulfillment center an hour outside Seattle that features high-tech robots working alongside human workers like a factory of the future.

Our mobile-first, on-demand world finds its roots in Amazon’s founding idea: that digital commerce will radically reshape our marketplace. The company’s impact has already been staggering. In January, the nonprofit Institute for Local Self-Reliance conducted a survey of nearly 3,000 independent businesses, half of them retailers, asking them to cite the biggest threats they faced. Competition from chains and big-box stores, health care, finding employees, and rising rents all ranked near the bottom as modest concerns. “Way above everything was competition from Amazon,” says ILSR codirector Stacy Mitchell. (The study also found that Amazon’s expansion in 2015 led to a net loss across all businesses of 149,000 jobs.)

Despite all the twists and surprises in recent decades—all the newcomers with youth, funding, and can-do enthusiasm—Amazon remains the undisputed leader, a startup at heart still striving to remake our expectations. And to repeatedly remake itself.

Nearly all of Amazon’s most recent innovations share a connection to Prime, which by some estimates accounts for 60% of the total dollar value of all merchandise sold on the site. Between 40 million and 50 million people in the United States use Prime, and, according to Morgan Stanley, those customers spend around $2,500 on Amazon annually, more than four times what nonmembers spend. (Amazon refuses to offer any hard numbers related to Prime membership—that would be competitor focused rather than customer obsessed, as the executives there say—but it will confirm that Prime members spend more and shop across a greater number of categories than other users.)

If you somehow manage to take advantage of every Prime membership feature, it’s undeniably a good bargain. Along with free two-day shipping for millions of products, and tens of thousands of items available at your door in an hour or less through Prime Now, there is one-hour restaurant delivery, a free e-book a month (including the entire Harry Potter series), and ad-free viewing of a streaming video-game channel on Twitch—all included in the annual fee. You can get early access to Amazon’s best deals, 20% off diapers, and unlimited photo storage. For a few more dollars, Prime can be upgraded to include unlimited audiobooks, grocery delivery, and a subscription to HBO that can be watched on Amazon’s Fire TV streaming media player. More than 50 “benefits” were added for members around the globe in the second half of 2016 alone, says Greg Greeley, Amazon’s global VP in charge of Prime. “I would like to say that the team thinks, ‘Oh, boy, we’ll take a deep breath here,’ ” he says. “But the way this company [is], it wouldn’t surprise me if we continue to keep accelerating.”

What Amazon Prime is selling most of all is time. Every executive I spoke to, when asked about how it all fits together, cites this desire to get you whatever you want in the shortest window possible. Stephenie Landry, the Amazon vice president who launched Prime Now in 2014 and has overseen its expansion into 49 cities in seven countries, explains that her business merely has to answer two questions: “Do you have what I want, and can you get it to me when I need it?” The rest of the customer experience is built around answering both questions in the affirmative.

The more products and services Amazon is able to cram into Prime, the more likely users are to renew their membership and buy more stuff, which gives Amazon more data about their tastes and what they are likely to buy next. That information is used to spin out new products and services, such as the Dash button, which replenishes popular items with a tap, and Alexa, which is built, in part, for shopping. “You can just say, ‘Alexa, reorder toothpaste,’ ” says Bezos. “And it knows which kind of toothpaste.” That’s why he has repeatedly called Prime the company’s “flywheel”: a device used in engines that provides constant energy. It is both an accelerant to Amazon’s forward motion and a beneficiary.

Bezos says that people have been asking him for 20 years whether he would ever open physical stores. The answer, consistently, has been no. “I’ve answered pretty much the same way the whole time, which is that we will if we have a differentiated idea,” Bezos tells me. Yet today, suddenly, Amazon has four concepts in the works.

Why the shift? In part it links back to Prime; retail stores offer a tangible lure for the uninitiated. But, as Bezos explains, Amazon’s technological sophistication also now makes it possible for in-store shoppers to interact with its digital platforms in all-new manners. Monitoring the interplay is a classic Amazon way to spot new opportunities.

The first wave of Amazon stores is somewhat traditional: More than 30 pop-up shops showcasing Amazon’s electronic gadgets—Kindle, Echo, Fire TV, Fire tablets, and Dash buttons—dotted the country by late last year. The next phase: expanding the highly curated Amazon Books stores—which showcase titles with a higher-than-four-stars customer rating alongside excerpts of reviews from the website—from three locations to eight. But it is the third leg of the company’s retail experiment that begins to rattle expectations. Amazon Go is a convenience-store concept the company announced in December (it will launch publicly in Seattle in early 2017). After a shopper swipes a code on her mobile phone at the entryway turnstile, she can grab whatever items she likes; they are magically added to her digital cart and automatically paid for when she leaves, through her existing account. This ability to skip both the line and any cash register on the way out is made possible by Amazon’s cloud computing, machine learning, voice control, and logistics know-how. It’s also another example of Amazon creating a technology platform that could be sold to other businesses.

Finally, and more quietly, another grocery-store concept is also being prepped. Although no one inside Amazon is willing to talk about it, documents filed with local buildings departments in Seattle and the San Francisco suburbs of Sunnyvale and San Carlos show that the company is erecting stores in all three locales. (Construction at the Seattle location—where a Chinese restaurant once stood, on a busy commercial thoroughfare in the fast-growing Ballard neighborhood—appears to be nearly complete.) The documents describe a system that would seem to extend the AmazonFresh grocery service: Customers load their digital carts remotely and pay online, then schedule a physical pickup within a two-hour window. “When picking up purchased items, customers either can drive into a designated parking area with eight parking stalls where the purchased items will be delivered to their cars, or they can walk into the retail area to pick up their items,” the filings say.

These stores are not likely to change the way most Americans get their cornflakes overnight. Still, Amazon has always been good at being patient—and incrementally improving its offerings. Since AmazonFresh launched in 2007, the service has slowly expanded to dozens of cities. The Amazon neighborhood continues to change.

Planted on the edge of a military base, Amazon’s recently opened fulfillment center, in DuPont, Washington, looks from the outside like a generic warehouse, with a line of idling trucks snaking around the building waiting to load and unload product. But what’s inside represents a huge advance in the way Amazon sorts, packs, and ships orders.

It starts with a “vision tunnel,” a conveyor belt tented by a dome full of cameras and scanners. As each box comes off the truck, it is photographed and scanned on all sides. Image-recognition algorithms then sort each parcel based on variables such as the type of product or size and weight. What takes humans with bar-code scanners an hour to accomplish at older fulfillment centers can now be done in half that time.

Boxes are towed from the docks into the million-square-foot warehouse, sometimes by driverless vehicles. This facility handles the largest items that Amazon ships, which is why there’s also a huge, 6-ton yellow robot on the main floor. It has a six-axis arm that could pick up a car with ease, but today it’s mostly lifting pallets loaded 4 feet high with diapers and Keurig cups to the second floor of the warehouse where they will await shipping. The arm performs a constant, mostly silent waltz with an ensemble of rolling Amazon robots, which represent the next-generation offspring of the company’s $775 million acquisition of Kiva Systems in 2012, and were only fully integrated into the fulfillment center workflow last year.

Once a package leaves the warehouse, it may end up on a Boeing 767 with the Prime Air logo emblazoned on its side. Bezos rolled out the first in a fleet of 40 wide-bodies last summer, which will be operated in partnership with two aircraft-leasing companies. In January, Amazon announced that the fleet would be supported by a new air hub in Kentucky that will employ 2,000 workers—a $1.49 billion investment, according to a spokeswoman with the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport. The planes, like the thousands of cargo trailers that already sport the Prime logo, make Amazon less dependent on its partnerships with FedEx, DHL, and the United States Postal Service. And, pending FAA approval, those fully operational Amazon delivery drones might one day cut delivery time down to 30 minutes or less.

Amazon stresses that its new automated fulfillment centers actually require more human workers than the old ones did, because the warehouse can store a significantly larger number of products—which all still need people for boxing and general oversight (plus, someone’s got to service those robots when they need repairs). The plant in DuPont, active almost 24/7, employs more than a thousand people full time. At stow station 1405, for instance, I watch a young guy with tattoos, a man bun, and large-gauge flesh-tunnel earrings grab item after item from orange robots, scan each one, and, after the computer gives the green light, send it to be boxed. Over the holiday season, Amazon hired an extra 120,000 workers at centers nationwide to help meet demand. This is what the future of American factory work might look like.

Amazon’s business is not without its challenges. The company’s imperative to deliver more stuff faster has racheted up its annual shipping costs north of $11 billion, reinforcing the pressure to wring efficiencies out of the company’s processes and its people. In the run-up to last year’s holiday shopping season, pilots who work for Amazon’s Prime Air shipping contractors went on strike, demanding hiring increases to reduce their workload. It’s no wonder that the blistering 2015 New York Times article about bruising work environments at Amazon remains in the popular consciousness.

Amazon is working to counteract this legacy. The company pledged in January to create more than 100,000 full-time positions over the next 18 months, and it’s building a new headquarters complex in the heart of downtown Seattle. Five buildings and a 2,000-seat auditorium will surround a trio of glass-enclosed spheres that, when completed in 2018, will contain more than 3,000 species of plants and trees from around the world. There will be flexible, couch-filled work spaces and an “Expressions Lab,” where employees can learn to knit or attend a “Bob Ross Paint Night.” One floor will include a small outdoor dog park, and there will be several markets and cafeterias. Amazon is also funding an additional streetcar for the city, as well as bicycle paths leading to the three-block complex, which includes 1.7 acres of public space. “The biggest thing is probably just that we’re not in a suburban campus,” says Bezos, “which I think would change the vibrancy and energy of Amazon.”

In November, Amazon released a video ad portraying a pair of aging friends—a priest and an imam—laughing, hugging, and then ordering the same knee braces for each other. It is a sensitive and moving vignette, portraying Amazon as a connector of cultures, the kind of compassionate business it has not always been given credit for being. The ad arrived just two weeks after Donald Trump was elected president, so I ask Bezos what the company’s role might be in bridging the divides that exist in the U.S. After all, he bankrolls the Washington Post, which went after Trump aggressively during the presidential campaign (and was an early and influential opponent of Trump’s immigration ban). His answer is almost laughably narrow. “Well, I’ll tell you one way that I don’t think anybody is divided,” Bezos replies. “Everybody wants fast delivery. Low prices. I’m serious about this. Our job is to provide a great customer experience, and that is something that is universally desired all over the world.”

Amazon’s building blocks to the future:

• Kindle. Popular for a decade and currently in its eighth generation, the e-reader continues to have few rivals (mainly Barnes & Noble’s Nook and Kobo).
• Fire OS devices. The company’s Fire TV set-top boxes and Fire sticks (cheaper, pared-down versions of the boxes) made up 22% of the streaming-media device market in 2015, beating out Apple TV. The $50 Fire tablet has become a popular competitor to the much pricier iPad.
• Dash button. These small, internet-connected tabs that users can push to instantly reorder products are finally catching on: Amazon now carries Dash buttons for more than 200 brands.
• Echo. The Alexa-embedded smart speaker, which can respond to certain voice commands and integrate with other devices, has given Amazon a healthy head start in the connected-home category (to Google’s chagrin) with an estimated 5 million–plus units sold since late 2014.
• AmazonBasics comprises more than 800 products, ranging from USB cables to bath towels; under various other brand names, the company also sells baby wipes (Amazon Elements), laundry detergent (Presto!), and organic, fair-trade coffee and nuts (Happy Belly).
• Apparel. Amazon rolled out eight proprietary clothing lines in 2016, including Buttoned Down, a menswear brand available only to Prime members. The company is reportedly preparing to launch its own line of women’s lingerie as well, with bras priced as low as $10 apiece.
• Aircraft. The company has leased 40 planes for its exclusive use and reportedly plans to have them all in operation by the end of 2018. Last August, it unveiled a Boeing 767-300 bearing the Amazon Prime logo.
• Trucks. Amazon-branded semis have been cruising highways since late 2015, when the company purchased a fleet to transport inventory. (The company is also looking seaward: Its China subsidiary received a license to ship ocean freight last year.)
• Drones. A bag of popcorn and a Fire TV became Amazon’s first official drone deliveries, to a farmhouse in En­gland in December. The company plans to test its Prime Air service further and, eventually, deliver packages to customers anywhere in less than 30 minutes.
• Robots. Thanks to its acquisition of Kiva Systems in 2012, Amazon controls some 30,000 robots around the globe, which it fully incorporated last year to maximize warehouse and retail efficiency.
• Bookstores. Five new brick-and-mortar Amazon bookstores are set to open in the U.S. this year, bringing the total to eight.
• Grocery stores. “No lines, no checkout” is how the company describes the forthcoming Amazon Go, a smartphone-integrated retail experiment, currently open to beta users in Seattle (and to the public in early 2017). The company looks to be building larger grocery concepts as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opTMbIKpCCY

More about Amazon:

• Creating the future one click at a time … why Amazon is the world’s most innovative company
• Case study … Amazon’s mission to become the world’s most customer-centric business

Amazon Lab126 is Amazon’s self-contained innovation studio, based in Sunnyvale in the heart of Silicon Valley, where its research and development team designs and engineers new consumer electronic devices and services-  Fire tablets, Kindle e-readers, Amazon Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and more.

In 2004, the Amazon team had a vision: To improve upon the physical book, making it easier than ever for customers to discover and enjoy books. Gregg Zehr, vice president of hardware engineering at Palm Computing at the time, was part of the group that accepted the challenge. In October 2004, Gregg formed a small team, moved into a shared space in a Palo Alto law library, and got to work. Amazon Lab126 was born.

The Lab126 name originated from the arrow in the Amazon logo, which draws a line from A to Z in “Amazon.” In Lab126, the 1 stands for “A” and the “26” stands for “Z.” The subsidiary is an Amazon lab of innovation, research, and development.

After years of research and development, the first Kindle e-reader launched with 90,000 e-books on November 19, 2007. The Lab126 team watched a live broadcast of the New York announcement event, holding their breaths as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos introduced Kindle. 5.5 hours later, Kindle was sold out.

The team has expanded rapidly since then, producing a variety of new, innovative products from Amazon Fire TV to Amazon Echo. The team engineers devices with the same spirit that fuelled the first inventors. They’ve come along way, yet as Jeff Bezos likes to remind everyone, it’s always day one.

 

You probably heard … the 51st Super Bowl, the world´s biggest annual sporting event, exploded with more hype and marketing dollars than ever in Houston last night, as the New England Patriots finally overcame the Atlanta Falcons in extra time.

The Super Bowl, with an estimated $350m net economic impact has become one of the big moments, not just in the sporting calendar, but in the marketing world too.

Whilst we turn up or tune in for the NFL’s annual finale, it is the half time show, and the regular ad breaks that gain just as much attention. Whatever you think of her, Lady Gaga’s Pepsi-fuelled half-time show, illuminated by Intel’s 500 synchronised drones, was undoubtedly this year’s highlight:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOU2qNCBAo0&t=13s

Besides the match score, the biggest question for fans –  and the world’s media – is which brand will take home the trophy for best Super Bowl commercial. For hundreds of millions of viewers it´s a must-watch experience to decide on their favourite advertising moment through the game.

Of course advertising alone doesn’t build a brand today – in fact the role of ads has profoundly changed – rather than simply build awareness, or drive an impulsive purchase – ads are more to reframe an idea in people’s minds by building new associations and possibilities, to provoke a debate on social media  and assert peer to peer influence, to drive people to a mobile app or website where they can immerse themselves more in the brand, its content and experience.

Brands had paid around $5 million per 30 seconds for a moment of Super Bowl airtime. If you also consider costs for creative development, production, PR, social media, then some brands easily spend $10-12 million and more for a 60 or 90 second spot. It’s a big bet in order to grab their target viewer’s attention – particularly in a world which no longer favours mass marketing, generic messages to everyone. But it’s huge appeal also demonstrates the important role of advertising within the media mix – to catalyse, to build or simply to reconfirm a consumer’s engagement.

In 2017, the inauguration of a massively controversial new president loomed over Houston – his outrageous actions against refugees, prejudice against diversity, his threat to build a wall, and much more, provided an abundance of politically-motivated themes to build on. A brand’s ability to connect with the zeitgeist has become all important, driving relevance and realness, to engage with social debate and have an opinion. In many cases, to fight for a cause, to have a higher purpose, to make life better. People in brands that are more than products, that reflect who they are, or want to be.

Airbnb’s simple but incredibly effective exploration of “acceptance” was my favourite moment, which CMO Jonathan Mildenhall conjured up in-house in just a few weeks. Budweiser told the story of its immigrant founders battle against adversity, whilst 84 Lumbar echoed the much talked about wall. Intel spectacularly illuminated the stadium with 300 drones, outshining Pepsi’s contribution to the half-time show, whilst IBM Watson is just beyond this world in its analytical potential.

Below I’ve captured my “super 7” most interesting, distinctive or entertaining moments of this year’s Super Bowl brand fest:

Airbnb’s “We Accept”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qUTYHnLz2g

Audi’s “Drive Progress”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6u10YPk_34

Budweiser “Born the Hard Way”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZmlRtpzwos

IBM Watson with H&R Block “Future”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UujLUcssIZU

Intel’s drone lightshow

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyPCNvx9hVQ

Netflix “Stranger Things”

84 Lumbar “The Full Journey”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4p5n2kc-xDI

So which is your favourite? Of course the measures of success are not as simple as evaluating the creative execution – its the impact it ultimately has in driving brand preference, purchase and performance that really matters.

But do any one of these ads have the potential to become a legendary commercial like Apple’s “1984,” Volkswagen’s “Kid Vader” or McDonald’s “Jordan vs. Bird”?

Instagram likes … Chinese consumers … immersive experiences … service-based start-ups … digital boutiques … magic mirrors … social influence … celebrity endorsement … instant customisation …. from runway to my door …

Luxury goods markets are being shaken up like never before … the rise of new consumers, from millennials to new Asia, comes together with the late but rapid adaption of digital media and technologies… means that luxury brands face more challenge, and opportunity than at any point in their history.

To win in the new luxury landscape, where Apple is as much a force as Cartier or Chanel, established luxury brands need to think like disrupters – with the mindset of a new consumer, and the actions of a entrepreneurial start-up. Whilst some argue that this is to risk the long-standing, carefully-crafted heritage of their brands, the bigger risk is to do nothing.

The best starting point is the consumer, not the technology.

It is the changing attitudes and behaviours, expectations and aspirations, of existing and new consumers   that are the best starting point when thinking about the future – the best guide to innovation and new opportunities for growth. Change offers a roadmap for survival for established luxury companies. Luxury brands need to look at how the next generation of their customers behave and zoom in on the points of friction in their brand experience. Then, they need to become a solution to this friction.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2r4XgN5peFs

In every industry, consumers are embracing new brands and business models – think Airbnb to Netflix, Surfair to Uber – typically enabled by the digitalisation of their markets – connecting buyers and sellers, enabling communication and trust between consumers, and reaching anyone anytime. Similarly, online luxury fashion marketplace Farfetch removed friction from discovery of the next authentic designer. Personalised sampling service Birchbox removed friction from exploration of the new beauty products, is another example.

Here are some useful starting points for innovation and growth:

1. Create a seamless path from inspiration to purchase: Smart luxury retailers like Net-a-Porter merge content and commerce, as well as digital and physical touchpoints, to create an innovative purchase path that firmly integrates points-of-sale with marketing. Net-a-Porter understands that the contemporary consumer demands a strong omnichannel approach where service, experience and products interact.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3XKPW6BCPk

2. Make your brand narrative intuitive and immersive: Modern luxury is about conveying a lifestyle; it is about creating an overall experience that products are a part of. A strong brand narrative combined with technology, which has become signature of the Burberry brand, gives consumers attainable, “no purchase necessary” entry points into brand experience at every touchpoint and price point.

3. Enable consumers to feel privileged and participants: New luxury consumers gravitate toward brands that have a strong point of view, convincing beliefs and compelling values that they express with passion. Communities gather around an idea or cause — be it culture, arts, nature or a social good. Louis Vuitton puts artists at the forefront of the brand. So do Celine and Saint Laurent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdvIKtcBmdc

4. Know consumers deeply, to serve and reward them: A wealth of consumer data allows smart luxury brands to surprise and delight their customers via personalized offers based on their individual browsing and buying history. Increasingly sophisticated consumers demand excellence in all parts of their non-linear purchase funnel through increased seamlessness and convenience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNtZ3pPun3Y

What is the future of your luxury? New consumers from millennials to Chinese, digital disruption of channels and business models, and changing attitudes to the very notion of luxury, are rapidly transforming the world of luxury brands. Every luxury brands needs to innovate, to seize the opportunities to reinvent and drive future growth. Or die. Explore more in Gamechangers