Brand management and Innovation are two complementary and interwoven business activities and companies are well-served to manage them with the same team.

For large companies, a brand is a very valuable asset. It helps customers recognise you, easily understand what you stand for, and it simplifies the customer’s purchase decisions. Managing this important asset of the business falls on the marketing team, generally speaking.

A brand however also needs product and service innovation, in order to keep up with changing consumer needs and category dynamics as well as generate growth. This aspect, however, is not always/exclusively managed by the marketing team.

I would strongly argue that the marketing team should have the lead role in both activities (brand and innovation management), as coordination of these functions can make the brand stronger and more effectively and efficiently communicated.

Covering the same needs

Both activities have in common that they address customer needs, though in different and complementary ways. When thinking of customer needs, we often distinguish three layers:

• Emotional needs
• Social/identity needs
• Functional needs

The brand is very important when addressing emotional and social/identity needs, though it will also extend into the coverage of functional needs.

On the other hand, when it comes to product / service innovation, we often focus on the functional needs that the new product / service addresses, but there is a strong argument that we need to understand the emotional needs very well in order to ensure that we connect with potential customers.

The Marketing team should be the voice of the customer within a company and they should have the best understanding of what their functional and non-functional needs are. Hence, they should be best suited to lead both functions, brand management and innovation management.

Mutual impact

Moreover, the functions actually influence one another quite substantially: A brand’s positioning influences in which areas you can innovate, and at the same time innovations have an influence on how a brand is perceived.

According to Al Ries and Laura Ries in The 12 immutable laws of branding, one of the key aspects of a strong brand is its focussed nature. Using the same brand for a wide variety of solutions may weaken your brand. On the flip side, launching a new innovation under the same brand is easier in the short term than launching it under a new brand.

This very delicate relationship is difficult enough to manage within the same team, but even more difficult when spread out throughout the organisation.

So, yes, in conclusion, the marketing team should play a central role in both activities.

Health trackers are very popular gadgets. They come in at different price ranges and have different functionalities, but they clearly serve a purpose: people wish to track aspects of their activity and health, and the knowledge obtained can help stimulate making changes for the better.

Apple is especially active in this area with the Apple Watch. Initially, the positioning of the Apple Watch was all over the place, but very quickly Apple narrowed in on the Health functionalities of the watch. Every year, Apple expands on the information it can gather about our health through different sensors, as well analyse it in new and useful ways:

• Sleep
• Heart health notifications
• Blood oxygen
• Exercise and activity tracking
• Ambient noise levels
• Tracking menstrual cycle
• Fall detection and gate analysis

Changes observed in my running through my watch

Personally, I have been using a smartwatch for many years now and have tracked my activity and other health aspects for that time. Admittedly, I have done so on different platforms (Withings, Google Fit, Samsung Health, Huawei Health, …) and don’t have years of information in one centralised place, but I continue using it actively.

Since last year, I am fully into the Samsung ecosystem and I have a Samsung Galaxy Watch Active 2. Samsung’s health app has very nice stats for running, which I happen to do. In part, in fact, that is the reason I wanted to go with this watch.

I wish to share a very illustrative example of what this type of technology enables and which I think is pretty powerful. When running, it tracks of course your route, heart rate, steps, distance, speed and many more things. However, it also does an analysis of your running “technique”: assymetry, contact time, flight time, regularity, vertical, stiffness.

Now, generally speaking, I score Good on 4 of these aspects and Great on 2 of them. I am far from a great runner, so no surprise here.

Since reading the book Born to Run, I have always had an interest in the idea of letting the foot do the work it was designed to do rather sticking it in a shoe that limits its movement. As a results, in the summer, I like to run in a pair of Luna running sandals. The idea is that your body is much more atuned to the ground and its feedback and that you change - without active effort on your part - your running style: smaller stride, higher cadence, landing more on the midfoot to front foot, … Which is supposed to be beneficial.

In any case, to my surprise when I checked these advanced running metrics after running several times on my sandals this year, I could actually see that it registers a difference, where all of a sudden I pass to Great for contact time (which means it is reduced) as well as stiffness.

There is still so much potential and areas for growth

Of course, this is just anecdotal evidence, but I think this is the transformative power of these tools: allowing you to see the positive impact of changes you make in your life.

Now, tracking consistently and continuously information like sleep, weight, body composition, activity level, heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen level, blood sugar levels, movement data (for fall detection and gate analysis) is a powerful tool for preventative health care, I am sure.

New sensors are being developed, existing ones get better and cheaper and the processing of the raw data is something that is under continuous development for better diagnostics. All of this will make this more and more useful.

Looking at the future and the role this can play, as a user:

• I want one central place where all information is stored, from all of my health devices.
• Ideally speaking, existing devices such as the watch, earbuds, or even glasses, will add new sensors that allow recording more information.
• But more than just information, the health solution should take the next step to giving diagnostics based on Big Data analytics.
• And, crucially, all this information should be safely stored under the sole control of the user, where he/she can share it with their health professional safely as interpreting results and making sense of it often still requires the help of professionals.

So, is this the sort of tech you are enthousiastic about? Have you made any changes in your life based on the information measured? Hit my up on Twitter or Mastodon if you want to chat about this.

Amy Webb is a Quantitative Futurist that started the Future Today Institute. I have listened to her many times on the TWIT network’s podcasts where she discusses future trends and have read her book The Big Nine, which I reviewed here.

Every year she (and her team) come out with a Trends Report that makes for very interesting reading. Make sure to check it out if you want to know what’s up with AI, Blockchain, Biotech, Tech regulation, Data Privacy and so much more. Here is the link to the landing page for The Future Today Institute’s 14th Annual Tech Trends Report.

We’ve known about the Surface Duo for quite some time, but Microsoft has finally made it “official”. However, rather than an actual product launch, it feels much more like a beta programme.

That is necessary to a large extend, as the foldable phone category is very young. We’ve seen many companies try different ways and we clearly haven’t settled yet on THE foldable form factor.

In the case of the Surface Duo, we are looking at two independent screens rather than a foldable screen as we’ve seen in the Galaxy Fold phones. Microsoft has some good ideas, that it has showcased, of how this is better for the user, but we’re clearly not there yet.

I don’t want to take anything away from the product, though, because it looks really well designed and thought through, and I for one am really excited, but clearly this is a .5 version. Rather than just refining it in the labs, Microsoft will allow consumers to play with it and shape the future development, I can only imagine.

Firstly, there is the hardware. It is beautifully designed with what appears to be a great working hinge, which will be important to make this work well. However, it has last year’s processor, doesn’t ship with 5G, it has incredibly large bezels, and it has a small battery. These are big “flaws” for a device that comes in at 1.400 USD and are really a result of having been in development for a long time (apparently, the hardware has been ready for some time).

Then there is the software. Microsoft is launching this with an adapted version of Android. The two-screen UI allows for apps to take up both screens, but divide the app in panes. Microsoft will have its apps ready, but developers will need to time to play with this new paradigm (if they will actually adapt their app to take advantage of the capability). Launching it early and letting people and developers play with it, is of course a great thing for the development of this new product category.

Lastly, it is only launching this phone in the US, which again indicates they want the roll-out to be small for now, so they can gather feedback. It’s not yet about market share or revenue.

As a researcher that helps companies in product development, I can only imagine what a luxurious situation this is for the product team. Microsoft does well financially and can afford to do this. They will learn a lot and it will help them building the next version. I am very excited to see this.

Source (The Verge): [Microsoft’s Surface Duo arrives on September 10th for $1.399] (https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/12/21364633/microsoft-surface-duo-release-date-pricing-features-specs)