iMedia Connection Blog

There’s no better illustration of what Ford Motor Company futurist Sheryl Connelly calls the “balance between provocative and plausible” than the fact that her team talked about $100 barrels of crude oil nearly a decade ago, but also had a discussion about what would happen if aliens landed on Earth.
Of course, to our knowledge, only one of those scenarios came true. Whatever. Such is your life when your role is to create a Center of Excellence for global consumer trend insights and a forward-looking mindset that can support and inform design, product development, strategy, business and marketing functions throughout Ford.
Speaking to a packed audience (granted seemingly every venue was overflowing), Connelly offered Lessons From A Futurist during South by Southwest Interactive.
Many of her assertions were on the surprising side. Among them:
She once thought that the future is a mystery and best unexplored.
Connelly cautioned against the use of SWOT analysis that attempts to look at a company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. She said that such endeavors limit thinking and fail to take change into account.
“It’s foolish for an organization to think it owns its strengths,” she said. “Those are defined by the marketplace.”
Connelly describes her job as a mission to... Read more

New objects shown at South By Southwest Interactive will be shiny whether or not the sun comes out in Austin, Texas.
My message to marketers: beware.
I’m not anti-innovation. Quite the contrary, in fact. I’m in tech as much for the unknown as the known. But let’s concentrate on the known for a minute. The estimated 30,000 going to Austin are not the norm (in more ways than one). We seemingly all carry iPhones and Macs, and many of us check in on Foursquare.
The norm is likely your brand’s target — about half of U.S. mobile subscribers don’t yet carry a smartphone, much less line up to buy a Mac. Their idea of a check-in involves questions of smoking versus non-smoking, a room away from the elevator, and the time the buffet opens in the morning.
What we saw at the Austin Convention Center and environs last year were early-adopter models, ones that caused a ripple on Twitter but not so much on Main Street.
The geo-location startups came into a marketplace that today shows only 30 million global users of leader Foursquare (for perspective, there are well over 300 million mobile subscribers in the United States alone and more than 6 billion worldwide).
So... Read more