One of the best exhibitions I have seen in a while was ‘L’Art De L’Automobile’ - a selection of stunning vehicles from the Ralph Lauren car collection in Paris. You will see the cars of your dreams - and I mean that literally. These are not the original cars as they rolled off their production lines. You may see a historic sports car, but from its unique colour, upgraded upholstery, and bespoke ornamentation - means that it was much built by Bugatti as finished by Ralph Lauren. The purists are enraged at the motoring sacrilege, but I was rather delighted. It reminded me of the wonderful ways that we imbue technology with design and materials that are emblematic of its underlying attributes. A car should look fast even when its standing still, it should look expensive even when we don’t know the price tag, and a sports car should look like a race car even when its built for fat, rich old men. And what is true for cars, is especially true for gadgets. 

Technological objects are by nature fetishistic. iPad, Blackberries, Android tablets - our devices in the modern age are our drowsing sticks, totems, and ritual wands. They make us feel more powerful, because they look powerful. I asked someone once in Turkey why people who couldn’t afford expensive smart phones spent months of salary on the latest branded device. In Ottoman times, my friend replied, when men met each other they would show each other the size of their knife or gun. And, he said with a wry smile - what else is a phone today but your weapon?

If I have learnt one thing from studying innovation in emerging markets it is that constraint is the mother of invention. When you are short of energy, money or resources - you are often forced to find solutions that are smarter, cheaper and more flexible. But there is another, darker example of constraint led innovation - tobacco marketing. As you can see from this photo I shot at the airport duty free the other day, Davidoff were more than a little inspired by Moleskine in their latest packaging design. Time for more regulation - the non-smokers and air puritans among you cry! But is there any point? The real issue in controlling Big Tobacco in the future will be not stamping out innovation but dealing with what consumers are already doing on their behalf. Social media is a minefield for tobacco regulators.

So far, the big brands have exercised caution about lighting up on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. But in a sense, they haven’t needed to do anything. Search YouTube for references to Marlboro and you will find thousands of videos - none of them created by the brand themselves. Clips from movies, old Marlboro Man TV ads, and bizarrely enough - smoker fan videos. Equally disconcerting - growing membership numbers on consumer generated fan pages and forums. All of this demonstrates one simple fact - in a network connected world - marketing is less about what brands say to consumers, and more about what consumers say about brands to each other. In the future, banning cigarette marketing will prove increasingly futile. Already in many countries, packet warnings seem tepid, and at times, even counterproductive. In Istanbul I saw one packet with a picture of a beautiful woman and an empty baby stroller. The label helpfully proclaimed that smoking makes it harder to get your girlfriend pregnant. The ambiguity of that statement is fairly self evident!

So here’s the issue - you can try and stop Big Tobacco advertising, regulate their packaging and even force them to display their brands as generic texts - but the damage is done. The iconic metaphors of smoking - The Marlboro Man, Joe Camel and the millions of scenes in movies old and new - have taken on a life of their own. Like the artist Richard Prince’s re-photographs of smoking cowboy advertisements - our commercial unconscious is already full of the ghosts of prohibited brand icons roaming free in the landscapes of our mind. And can you really hope to ban consumers talking about the brands they love?

One of the biggest challenges for luxury brands is how they preserve their aura of exclusivity in the digital domain. If you walk around a high end shopping district, you will see the investment luxury brands make in their retail experience. The luxury boutique is not where you go to buy, it is where reverent consumers pay homage to the brands they idolise. But how do you replicate that quasi religious experience when that same customer goes online and Google serves up pages of fake products, poorly merchandised wholesalers, and amateur review forums?

Two things have happened in the last few years that indicate a shift in the way that luxury brands view the Web. The first is that many major brands have taken back control over the distribution and presentation of their products online. They have restricted online wholesaling and treated their own websites as a kind of master boutique designed to educate and extend the in-store experience. Secondly, some of the major luxury groups have started to purchase or establish their own retail platforms. Case in point is Richemont’s acquisition last year of fashion innovator Net-A-Porter.

Watch carefully what happens next with luxury online. For many brands, and especially those in the prestige space - content and storytelling is a crucial component of the way that the luxury brand mythology is created and sustained. Transmedia is an ideal vehicle for this - and also for careful brand cross fertilisation. For example, if you venture onto the newly designed IWC website, you will note a new collaboration with the men’s department of Net-A-Porter, Mr Porter. Entitled the ‘Portofino Watch Lover’s Look’ - the section is a clever integration between style advice, product merchandising and brand storytelling. And naturally - both companies are owned by Richemont. They say you can tell a man by his shoes - so what should a man’s watch say about his clothes?

I had fun this week playing with the GQ’s UK edition iPad app. With its slick interface, rich additional materials and engaging content - it was not only superior to its US counterpart, but also one of the better iPad magazines I’ve seen. That said, something was still missing. And, as is often the case - it was missing from my mind. One of the most interesting theories on mental states is ‘flow’ - proposed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. The theory is deceptively simple - during certain activities it is possible to be so happily immersed in your task that you reach a point when action and awareness seem to merge. Musicians, racing car drivers and Buddhist monks have all experienced it. And normally, while reading the print edition of GQ in a cool cafe with a strong expresso - I can also get pretty close. But alas, not so much on my iPad. Somewhere in all that exploring, poking, rotating, and sliding of screen elements - while admirably interactive - the experience of media flow is disrupted.

Please don’t take this as a simple preference of analogue versus digital mediums. I can lose myself in a Kindle book, or while typing in a flow orientated interface like the IA Writer. The problem is more subtle. Years ago, when the first CD-ROMs made multimedia sexy, we envisioned a day when all of our entertainment content would become non-linear, multi-path adventures. It didn’t take long to discover that there is a reason that the likes of Stephen Spielberg and Ridley Scott are famous directors - they do a better job of selecting scenes and narrative options than the average Joe. Interactivity, quite simply, can get in the way of a good story. Or, it would seem, also a little glossy magazine gratification.

It seems fashionable lately for hard boiled tech types to talk about consumers with a wide eyed fervor bordering on the frightening. And even worse, they have even come up with a new word to assault the language - Consumerization. Hype aside, what the trend really means is this: enterprise technology is being increasingly driven by the platform and device choices of everyday consumers. Rest assured, this is more than just your employees spending time accessing Facebook when they should be working. The changing role of IT is part of a much bigger shift in the nature of the Web. Applications are being replaced by platforms, and software by the Cloud - and that ultimately means a change in the way we work and, as organisations, create value for our customers.


If you are in a business that regularly deals with consumers, you might find it strange that it is only recently that IT departments have discovered their importance. But in a way, it is not their fault. First you have to understand the way that enterprise systems are bought and sold. The main difference between enterprise and consumer facing technology has to do with accountability. Enterprise software has traditionally been sold to a handful of decision makers in an organisation who commit to platform on behalf of thousands of users. Consumer platforms live or die by whether or not their actual customers - end users - love them or hate them. That is why Apple's best marketing is not its advertisements, but its products.

Try this experiment. Get someone to print out some web pages of a few large software vendors and black out references to their company name. Now I challenge you to discern from the print outs either the name of the company, or even the product category they are in. Welcome to solution selling! Enterprise software is about pitching your platform as an comprehensive integrated solution to a company’s every need. In reality, what you are actually get once you sign off on the purchase order is a proprietary set of tools that will trigger off years of complicated and expensive integration work with existing legacy systems.

The good news is that the model is changing. The bad news is the forces of change are largely out of the control of IT managers. End users are increasingly bringing their own gadgets to work, and demanding that enterprise systems can interface with it. According to a recent study by IDC for Unisys, 95% of information workers use technology for work that they purchased themselves. It started with mobile phones, then it become smart devices like iPads, and then video conferences tools like Skype, networking tools like Linkedin, filesharing services like Box.net and Dropbox - and now even Facebook (for legitimate marketing purposes, naturally).

These changing patterns of consumer behaviour will have a disruptive impact on the enterprise software space. Eric Schmidt at the D9 conference observed that the world was coming down to a war between four major platforms - Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple. Five years ago, it would hard to conceive of any of those companies playing a major role in corporate technology - and now, whether it be Amazon's cloud hosting services, Google enterprise apps, Facebook's brand platforms or Apple's smart devices - it is hard to imagine working without them. But there are other key players to watch too. IBM, having just celebrated its 100th birthday, has proved that you can thrive as an smart integrator of technologies without necessarily controlling your own platform. And Microsoft, with its new shift to Cloud based software services - will be an important player to watch as the mainstream technology space embraces consumerization trends.

However in the short term, the biggest beneficiaries are likely to be small to medium businesses. I recently wrote a blog post on the Cloud Nine - simple web based software tools that allow smaller organisations to deploy the kind of technology traditionally only available to companies with million dollar IT budgets. Nimble web centric companies and freelancers have already discovered what large organisations are struggling to learn - the power of Cloud based tools to connect with your customers and staff, and to soft scale your technology needs as required rather than investing in your own expensive hardware and software implementations.

So what is the future role of your CIO in the Consumerization Nation? Yesterday's CIO was defender of the realm - hired to repel security threats to the enterprise, stand fast against unnecessary capital expenditures, and hand out shiny gadgets to authorized corner office executives. Tomorrow's technology leaders will need very difficult skills. They will have the critical role of navigating a new IT ecosystem where it will be less important to buy and build your own technology - and more essential to know how to nurture a valuable ecosystem of developers and service providers and unlock the real value of consumer data within the enterprise.