Age of Creativity
on October 10, 2007note: don't be scared, these are just some brain-farts I wanted to throw out :]
Interesting article on readwriteweb: Creative Entrepreneurs: The Next Masters of the Universe. Now ofcourse the notion of creative entrepreneurs is pretty obvious. There are many books including this one that stress the importance of the right brain thinking, the inoutsourcable power of creativity. But I think the importance of creativity is not only limited to this new business-elite.
One of the main powers behind the social web and web 2.0 movements are the people that create content. Websites like Wikipedia show how much an organization is dependent on its users. But for sites like Wikipedia there is just a low percentage of users actually contributing to it, probably because the incentive is relatively low to contribute. You can imagine that an emergent organization with a high percentage of user contribution shifts a lot of power to the people itself.
Creativity will be key to the next stages of not only business, but to mankind itself.
The dying of branding. As businesses get more transparent there is less and less need for branding. A typical example would be the Louis Vuitton wallets I see here every day in Tokyo. Some people are aware of the actual costs of constructing the product, which get lower and lower all the time. Yet people keep on wanting the product, making it more and more expensive. Like diamonds, the key success of Louis Vuitton's business is withholding supply. Pretending that there is a scarcity while there is none. That's why you get bugged on the Champs Elysee by Chinese to buy Louis Vuitton for them. There is a limit of 2 bags per Asian. Now, back to the point. I think slowly, but surely, branding is dying. Because:
A. businesses will get more transparent, providing a moral insight for the customer.
B. the channels that high-invested marketing campaigns require are dying. With these channels I mean the typical non-targeted advertisements like TV, magazines.
C not sure if this will work in favor of branding, but there is and will be a boom of choice. The Long Tail, and at the end of it.... YOU!
...you create your own brand
As Youtube showed, the tools to create are very accessible. Of course most of the video's found on youtube are crap. This is just the beginning, but the foundation is there. Professional tools are getting pushed to lower end consumer markets quicker and quicker. Knowledge and mass collaboration is now possible thanks to the web. The walls between amateurs and professionals are already breaking down.
...you create your own solution
And not only that, you share it. For free as in beer? Well, what if we don't require any physical assets to buy a beer. What if - like in startrek - we have this machine where we push a button and PSSSSHH there's our beer. Doesn't free as in beer get an entire new meaning?
...creative energy will be the new currency
