Image courtesy of Fast Company

Bustani was selected for Mandalah’s history of work connecting international companies with Brazilian culture. Our strategy to position Nike during and after the upcoming 2014 World Cup was highlighted, which featured soccer tournaments and training for low-income families, as well as sponsoring local marathon runners. By creating long-lasting relationships with locals, Mandalah set Nike on a path that will lead to the ultimate goal of creating purpose and profit.

Of course, with offices in New York, Berlin, Tokyo, and Mexico City, Mandalah’s reach goes well beyond Brazil. We’re well-poised to help brands like Nike identify original, local ideas that can be exported to the rest of the world, as well as adapt to developing markets. Lourenço and the entire team here at Mandalah thank Fast Company for the chance to tell others about what we do, and hope we continue to inspire others for many years to come!

With 2,814 pledges and 219 businesses, the week may have been a relatively small event, but its implications are nevertheless important—it is but one of many visible movements towards a more critically minded consumer base, one that likes to know about the “how” and “why” of a product, not just the “what”. These consumers like to see products from local sources, ethical and transparent supply chains, and a larger social focus from businesses.

Larger companies have begun to integrate these ethical credentials into their business models to cultivate ethical clout and attract this new breed of consumer. For instance, Nike, after suffering years of scolding and controversy, has made considerable efforts in improving working conditions and dealing with sourcing issues that still exist. Wal-Mart, McDonald’s have both attempted to reset their sometimes less than stellar track records through high-profile rebranding campaigns.  Unlike co-ops, these companies do not have a social goal woven into their DNA, but are attempting to evolve in a more conscious direction.

Good start, but to be truly successful, it can’t just be one week in the year. To truly change the landscape of how companies operate, consumers must take a hard line stance on supporting the values they believe in. Think critically about your purchases – you’ll be doing society a favor.

Transactional Storytelling is the construction of a story through the trade and repurposing of images and image sequences. The intention behind it is using the retail experience to elicit a consumer dialog that boosts empathy and provides meaningful moments. This involves leveraging theatrical elements like a script, sounds, aromas and objects to recreate a story and deliver a message to the people that visit the space. The final product: memorable and meaningful impressions.

The fashion industry is one of the most daring industries utilizing this trend, as seen through stores like “Story”. The New York store uses a unique proposal that reflects the point of view of a magazine, presents like an art gallery and sells things like a store. Every four to eight weeks, STORY will undergo a transformation to adhere to a new theme, like a magazine releasing a new issue.

With each new “issue” of STORY, there will be exciting new collaborations with popular shopping brands. The concept is similar to reading the monthly issue of your favorite magazine in an interactive way. The store also provides a calendar of events that includes in-store book signings, talk events, classes hosted by Skillshare, film screenings and concerts.

Timberland has also developed a unique interactive experience within the retail market that intrigues and engages the customer throughout the store by inspiring them to discover their great outdoors with Timberland gear, technologies and brand storytelling.

While this is just the beginning of transactional storytelling, we can look forward to seeing more large scale manufacturers tapping into this concept. For example, H&M has recently announced its launch of a new luxury label in 2013 called “& other stories”, tying their own version storytelling into the mix of their retail market.

As digital commerce reaches its peak, brands will need to widen their proposal to be less about consumption and more about intriguing consumers by providing content that is full of meaning. For those brands who want to still remain competent into their retail space, they should try bringing meaning into the consumer’s shopping experience. As Plato used to say: “Those who tell stories rule the world”.

As a continuation of Glad’s “The Wild Life” campaign, the brand has partnered with acclaimed mosaic artist, Jason Mecier to turn celebrity trash into pieces of art. “The Wild Life” campaign was developed to represent that no matter how wild life gets, cleanup is in the bag. And, now Glad is going beyond that to say, cleanup is in art.

Mecier developed 4 unique works of art from celebrity donations and the Great American Cleanup event by Keep America Beautiful (KAB). Amongst those celebrities who graciously offered their scraps were Amy Stewart, Lauren Conrad, Nathan Kress, Emmanuelle Chriqui and Jesse Eisenberg.

Upon completion, each of the art pieces were auctioned on eBay from April 16th to 26th to support KAB’s Great American Cleanup event.

Mecier isn’t’ the only artist who supports the vision of re-using plastics as art in order to avoid them from going to landfills. As a part of an Earth Day tribute, Brookfield Properties commissioned artist, Katherine Harvey to build a chandelier made out of recyclable materials to be placed on top of the marble staircase located in New York City’s World Financial Center Winter Garden. The chandelier will be located there until May 11th.

The 21 foot tall and 15 foot wide chandelier is built out of trash collected from the building’s users including water bottles, take-out boxes, egg cartons and plastic containers, all of which would have otherwise been eventually ended up into landfills. Harvey designed the art to showcase that there is a need for a stronger recycling program in order to ensure that plastic does not end up in the landfills.

Both Harvey and Mecier’s environmentally friendly art masterpieces are meant to showcase the opportunity of upcycling and inspire citizens to take measures in trying to reduce waste, art being just one of many solutions.

St. Louis-area Panera Bread started pay-what-you-want in 2010

The PWYW pricing model gained major prominence and awareness in 2007 when popular British band Radiohead announced its new album In Rainbows would be available online as a digital download for the price of “It’s Up To You.” While many thought such a move couldn’t possibly lead to profits (and in fact, the majority of downloaders chose to pay nothing), the album went on to generate more money before its physical release than total sales of the band’s previous album. Another success story of the PWYW pricing model from the world of video games is the Humble Indie Bundle, a collection of independently developed, DRM-free computer games released together. Since its inception in 2010, over 8 various bundles have been released. Besides allowing its purchasers to designate their own price, Humble Indie Bundle also allows buyers to assign how their money is distributed between the games’ developers, Humble Bundle Inc. (who runs the promotion), and a charity (these have included American Red Cross, Child’s Play, charity:water). This transparency leads to authenticity in the program and an increased, personal connection between the brand and the buyers.

Transparency and Charity are advantages found in Humble Bundle's business model

Both of these examples reveal how the PWYW model can serve as a deterrent to the era of digital piracy, as both games and music have faced industry-changing upheaval. But examples of restaurants and physical retail offering similar models show a larger possible impact, especially in these harsh economic times. The advantages of the pay-what-you-want model are based on more than just a perceived ‘good deal.’ The personal, human, emotional aspect is also quite important, as the study shows, particularly in the case of adding charities to the mix. Pay-what-you-want goes beyond making a consumer feel good for ‘saving money’; they also feel they are making a positive impact because their money is going directly to those who they feel best deserve it, whether that be a charity or the individual workers most directly involved in the creation of the product/service.

Florian Peter’s collaboration Trend-based Innovation – Leveraging Trend Analysis and Foresight for Innovation Development has been featured in this year’s Focus Yearbook.  The FOCUS Jahrbuch is an annually released textbook dealing with media, communication and marketing topics, featuring articles by experts in the aforementioned fields. The topic of the 2012 book is Trend Forecasting and Future Studies, and is available in Germany since mid-April.

Here is a PDF of the article in its original German format.

The article covers the role of trend innovation as a source of information and direction in industry today, and the future it faces as technology and culture become ever more enmeshed. (Spoiler: Things are looking bright!)

How has trend innovation helped pave the way to success for your company?

While it is advisable to display a healthy level of skepticism to such Eureka stories – do new ideas ever arrive, perfectly formed, in a single moment? – it’s worthwhile to consider how the discovery happened.  Archimedes wasn’t sat in his study.  He was doing something.  It was during a (rather mundane) moment of physical activity that the idea appeared.

Doing things.  Having experiences.  This is the basis for creativity.  All types of artists, from painters and novelists to composers and actors, understand this at an intuitive level.  They draw on their life experiences as a continual source of new ideas.  However, the deep link between experience and creativity is often overlooked by organizations trying to improve their innovation capabilities.

One practical improvement that any organization can introduce is Experiential Ideation – a technique that introduces an experiential learning component prior to the company’s ideation sessions.  Experiential Ideation involves two steps: first, an intense, immersive group learning experience related to the subject or innovation area; second, a collective session generating ideas together.

At Mandalah, we like to use this approach.

In 2011, we worked with GM on a global study into the future of urban mobility. We invited a diverse international group, including industry experts, urbanists, architects and designers, for a seven day workshop in São Paulo.  During the active learning days in the city, the participants gained first-hand experience of mobility in a developing megacity – the heat, the noise, the stress, and so on.  By the time we began our ideation sessions, each individual had a powerful experience to draw upon, making our discussions richer and outputs more productive.

Introducing the experiential learning step before ideation brings many practical benefits.  It helps to disrupt entrained forms of thinking.  It builds empathy with the subject area.  It increases the levels of participation and collaboration between individuals.

Developed at Northwestern in a joint effort between the Engineering and Journalism departments, Narrative Science combines editorial expertise with regimented, computer algorithms to create clear, consistent narrative reporting of data, allowing readers and data experts to gain greater insights. Companies like Forbes use Narrative Science to generate online articles reporting on corporate earnings statements. Narrative Science takes the hard data (stocks, IPO, pricing, etc.) and automatically presents it not in a graph or chart we expect from computers, but in a readable, concise narrative story one would expect from a trained journalist. In terms of publishing, Narrative Science currently gets the most use in data-heavy fields, like finance and sports, but the technology could eventually breach into all types of reporting. Already, it has generated news stories from “unstructured data” like Twitter to ‘write’ a story on Newt Gingrich’s Twitter feed.

Granted, none of this reporting is likely to win the Pulitzer Prize (until that, too, is awarded by robots!). But it is looking like this will become more and more common. On the publishers side, it is simply a matter of economics. Keeping a full-staff of writers to scour data, write a story based on it, edit (humans make mistakes, of course), and publish is both expensive and time-consuming, something Narrative Science can do on its own in less time and for less money. This is all especially true for data-heavy reportage like financial information and sports statistics, where ‘analysis’ isn’t as necessary as simply ‘data-presenting.’ However, computers are analyzing machines, and if they are used to do the types of trading Narrative Science reports on, what is to stop these robo-journalists from analyzing their data as well?

Humorbot 5.0, from 'Futurama'

There would seem to be a line that robots cannot cross. “Humorbot 5.0″ is funny, but for all the wrong reasons, so I can’t see robots replacing fiction or more ‘thought-based’ writers. (I sure hope not, seeing as that’s basically what I’m doing here!) Rather, robots are meant to handle increased levels of information and data, as they always have been. The real question, however, is if this proliferation of robotic writing and creation will lead to a general cultural acceptance of robotic-generated material? If society becomes more used to the presence of robots as cultural creators/curators, their expansion into other fields seems natural. Perhaps it won’t be long before we see “Humorbot 5.0″ following Leno on NBC.

This new campaign comes after many years of listening to pizza-eaters for suggestions for the complete re-vamping of Domions pizza . With the implementation of fresh ingredients and better tastes, Dominos now feels confident enough to claim that their artisan pizzas needs no more changes and have therefore forbid people to alter them.

The “No” campaign came as a surprise to many as it goes against recent consumer behaviors and desires. For one, people are more motivated to buy products that are specific to their own individual needs. We, here at Mandalah NY, call this new trend Nouveau Niche, where, “consumers are more individualized than ever and are expecting products, services, and experiences to address their unique selves”. Taking away people’s ability to individualize their own pizza goes directly against this trend and stood out to me as a controversial approach.

But what really caught me really off guard, was that the approach was developed by a company like Dominos. The company’s previous campaigns were very insightful and well thought out in terms of it being just what the people wanted. The company made it a point to hear what consumers had to say, and make them feel a part of the re-design of Dominos Pizza. The Dominos Times Square Tracker campaign and Show Us Your Pizza Campaign were great concepts that played off of key human drivers including the need for authenticity, transparency and the drive to help companies by sharing their own creative suggestions. Many other recently emerged trends of co-operations and crowd-sourced projects have gained much recognition and success based on these similar drivers. Dominos’ “No” campaign, however, resembles an oppositional concept that that may risk the chance of upsetting the current public who are focusing their efforts on being heard and being a part of a change.

People want companies that care about their concerns and give them what they actually want. They don’t want another company who disregards the public opinion and only focuses on their own benefits. The new “No” campaign may project those very characteristics and may not be welcomed as a “people-friendly” company, and therefore risks the chance of being opposed by the mass public.

While I have not yet tried one of Dominos new artisan pizzas and therefore cannot fully predict the success of the campaign (as the artisan pizzas may actually deserve the marketed confidence), I can only imagine that if Dominos continues to emphasize an over-confident and public-restrictive persona, it may not bode well for the company, and will in fact, go against their recently built fan-base who admires the company’s openness to the people and their opinions.

Co-ops make up a large part of the world economy. In Kenya, 63% of the population derives its livelihood from co-op models. 22% of New Zealand’s GDP is produced by co-ops. 42 percent of Norwegians are members of a co-op. They are represented in a huge number of sectors, and range in size from neighborhood convenience stores to multinational production syndicates. Since 2001, co-operatives even have their own domain system- .coop.

A co-op is any organization owned by its members working towards fulfilling the needs and aspirations of its community. Unlike other corporate entities, where social objectives are often tacked on as a marketing strategy, co-operatives have clear social purposes built into their DNA. By being in-tune with their supporting communities, co-operatives are versatile and fast-moving organizations that can adapt to essentially any market fluctuation, making them robust agents of change: The British Co-operative Group began in 1844 as a collection of independent wholesalers- it now operates in a wide array of sectors, from banking to funeral care.

Co-ops are also excellent trendsetters. Seeing a lack of healthy and ‘non-processed’ foods in the food sector in the mid 70s, food co-ops sprung up offering healthy and cheap alternatives to Wonder Bread and Oscar-Meyer wieners. Fast-forwarding 40 years, organic and local are widely recognized as important product traits, and organic, local alternatives are available in most supermarkets. Once again, the direct link between organization and community allows co-ops to create new markets and see instant demand.

However, the values and characteristics of co-ops can also lead to some serious issues. Because organizational services are so closely interwoven with community needs, the fate of many co-ops is tied to the success (or failure) of a given communities. When the readymade market for a co-operative dries up, or people begin to lose interest,  it begins to decay and eventually collapses. On the other hand, highly successful organizations face a whole other set of problems: hyperplurality and an unstreamlined democratic process can lead to a loss of competitive advantage as a co-ops reactivity is mired in politics and bureaucratic rigidity.

In a hyperbolic example, This Park Slope food co-op recently had a referendum on whether or not to have a referendum on the sale of Israeli made products: mirroring the American democratic system, a plethora of interest groups sprung up and external third parties began to get involved. Despite strong lobbying from both sides, the referendum referendum was quashed by a large majority of members.

Nevertheless, if correctly managed and supported by a community, co-operatives are a powerful agent of change. Offering localized insight into a communities health, commercial focus and cultural interest, they are a valuable tool in the trend analyst’s toolbox, and the next step in the development of local enterprise.