Leaders: Latest

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Grooming together: health and beauty in Brazil

The Brazilian beauty industry is booming, with consumers placing a huge amount of importance on their personal appearance and wellbeing. So what can brands do to tap into this potentially lucrative area?

Leaders

Mass Customisation, two decades on

Joe Pine talks about how since the publication of Mass Customization almost 20 years ago, brands have seen the importance of creating products which cater to consumers' identities - but there are several industries which have yet to catch up.

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What kids really want

What do brands have to do today in order to be part of young people’s lives tomorrow? After speaking to a global network of young people, the surprising, quite simple answer that emerged was to ‘be useful… every day’.

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Systems thinking goes mainstream

While systems thinking has been present in academic and design circles for decades, the rise of data tracking is now giving individuals an ability to understand their place in global systems better than ever.

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Mobile use in Japan

Many people in the West often struggle to understand Japanese consumers' relationships with technology. We look at mobile industry trends and consumer attitudes in the country that is sometimes called ‘the cradle of mobile civilisation’.

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Myths of the near future

Laurent Haug discusses our sometimes troubled relationship with technology, talks about the hot topics at the 2011 Lift Conference, and explains why we already use the technologies of the future every day but barely notice them.

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Riots and group behaviour

The riots that swept across England earlier this month were manifestations of a collective behaviour that has served as a valuable means of letting off steam for thousands of years, and still has great relevance to our society today.

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Public and private screens

Dale Herigstad discusses his work and research in the area of our evolving relationship with the screen, and examines how a future of interactive screens and augmented reality will challenge our definitions of public and private space.

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Emerging market brands

Amitava Chattopadhyay has conducted extensive research into brands that originate in emerging markets and experience success in the developed world. Here he talks about what can be learnt from the strategies that these companies use.

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Weak negatives and blank spaces

Research has suggested that imperfection and negativity in communication and design can have beneficial results. Dr Baba Shiv talks about the positive effects that associating a brand with a small amount of negative information can have.

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Beyond billboards: Part 2

In part two of her report on OOH advertising, Daniela Krautsack wonders how the future aesthetics of our cities will be defined. Who is responsible for establishing a city's identity? And how do citizens relate to the urban space around them?

Leaders

Beyond billboards: Part 1

Following extensive research and expert interviews, Daniela Krautsack evaluates how the city and urban spaces might evolve in the coming years, and suggests an antidote to complaints about visual pollution with a bold pre-emptive strategy.

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Beauty and the beast

Changing consumer attitudes on gender and identity are presenting a big challenge to the traditional campaigns that brands have been churning out for the last few decades. According to today’s mentality, they are outdated and out of touch.

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Proximity is a virtue

As our locations are tracked and recorded with greater frequency than ever before, we leave behind a trail of digital 'fumes' which can be put to a variety of surprising uses. While where you are is interesting, what you are near is crucial.

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Pattern recognition

The digitisation of products and services produces a bewildering explosion of data for brands. Making that data useful is increasingly about compressing the informational load, picking out what is most relevant and deriving meaning from patterns.

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Retail in South Africa

With an increasingly diverse and affluent middle-class population and recent admission to the BRICS group of countries, South Africa is emerging as an exciting retail centre with its own distinctive consumer culture.

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Expanding the Filter Bubble

Eli Pariser, author of The Filter Bubble, talks about what the web is hiding from us every day without our even realising it, and discusses how algorithms based on individual preferences are coming between users and serendipitous information.

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Being and Britishness

When you talk to young people about their sense of national identity, you soon realise there is a tendency to falsely label a vast group of teens. How can brands build on perceptions of 'Britishness' to appeal to young people?

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Nature's laboratory

A growing interest among consumers regarding sustainability, urban agriculture and ethical living should encourage brands to prick up their ears on the topic of biomimicry, which takes inspiration from nature rather than just exploiting resources.

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Ringing the changes: the Royal Wedding and Britishness

How has the sound of Royal Wedding bells affected perceptions of Britishness? Alex Gordon deconstructs the signifiers behind Wills and Kate's special day – and what they might mean for brands.