Playing in traffic at the intersection of design, innovation, brand and business with Will Novosedlik — The Influential Series Issue #3
For the third installment of The Influential Series I am thrilled to be joined by Will Novosedlik. Will is AVP, Head of Growth Partnerships at Idea Couture. He has successfully created, built, and re-positioned brands in the consumer packaged goods, technology, telecom, retail, sports, and leisure categories for over 30 years. As both a client and consultant — and across the United States, Europe, and Canada — he has brought brands to life through messaging and customer experience.
JP: As Head of Growth Partnerships, you play in traffic at the intersection of design, innovation, brand and business. What are the most common challenges you face and how do you overcome them?
WN: Playing in traffic at the intersection of design, innovation, brand and business is something I came up with to describe myself but it isn’t far off from what we do at Idea Couture. This speaks to my own background in design; I worked and was trained as an artist and designer. I morphed into a brand strategist and became intensely interested in brand experience. In 2003 I was lucky to find a role in the Czech Republic where for two years I was focused on customer experience and learned an awful lot. I then came back to Canada and worked on the Wind Mobile launch; I was head of customer experience and brand experience. So I have been in design, branding, business and innovation. These four words capture everything I’ve done.
JP: How can diverse perspectives enrich work?
WN: One perspective is not enough to achieve innovation. There is this notion of creative collisions, where you choose stimuli from unrelated contexts and put them in the same box to see what happens.
It’s the concept of the dialectic, wherein you are forcing these two things together that don’t really belong together and creating a new narrative by the combined effect.
Diversity is one way to take advantage of this. You take people that come from different backgrounds, different specialties or sectors to look at the same thing and provide a completely new perspective.
It’s interesting to compare Prague to Toronto in this context. My background is Czech and that is one of the reasons I took the opportunity back in 2003. People are not emigrating to Prague. It is a closed culture. The city is beautiful, I am emotionally connected to it and it’s in my blood. But I don’t think I could live there more than a couple of years because of the lack of cultural diversity. We are very lucky in Toronto to be so culturally diverse. I wouldn’t give it up for anything.
JP: How do you create circumstances that cultivate innovative ideas?
WN: Certain skills are required, one being comfort with uncertainty. You start at a very messy place where data is coming in from all sorts of places, you’ve got all kinds of questions and you are unsure that the problem you are trying to solve is the right problem to solve.
It’s critical to have people who can play in a messy place and be excited about it. You need to be able to extract meaning from the mess, take diverse data points, pull them together and see new patterns.
You need to add business rigour, put ideas to the test, then plan for commercial success. You often don’t find one person with all of those skills but you may find people who have many or maybe 1 or 2 of them. It’s about putting the right people in the room. You also need clients that are willing to go along with the ride and many corporations are not built to work this way. Clients may say they want to innovate but they may not be ready for it. Having a willing client, one that accepts risks, is a very important ingredient.
JP: Should we stop referring to people as customers?
WN: I don’t have a problem with the word customer, it’s a role you play as a human being. I am more against the word consumer, which sounds industrial, mechanical and functional. It’s like the consumer is the last stop in the industrial value chain, a cog in the machine. I’ve disliked it since the first time I heard it. Traditional market research is all about creating a fictitious profile of an average customer which doesn’t exist. There is no such thing as an average human. One of my colleagues once said, we are not consumers, we are humans who sometimes consume.
JP: What do brands need in different stages of their development?
WN: A brand needs to stand out and have as unique a value proposition as possible. But branding is often counter-intuitive; most people don’t want to stand out. From a social perspective, most people want to fit in. Organizations are the same.
When you are making a brand, you are asking someone to do something that hurts. You need to ask the really tough questions, are you really doing something unique, are you bringing something new, are you fulfilling a need that doesn’t exist, etc.
You can bring to market another detergent but unless it stands out, then what’s the point? Brands need to be brave, they need to be constantly asking themselves why are they here? Who are they for? What are they doing? I think brands tend to get comfortable with themselves. That is when they start to lose their edge.
JP: What do you know now that you wish you knew earlier in your career?
WN: I believe in adopting a surfing posture. I learned that from Bruce Mau, one of Canada’s most well known designers. I didn’t quite understand what he meant when I first heard it 20 years ago. But as a former windsurfer, I understood what that meant in the context of sailing. You need to assume a humble stance in the face of nature. You need to accept that it’s bigger than you, and you won’t be able to survive it if you try to control it. Once you realize this, you start to experience the power and thrill of the experience. If you’re stiff and resistant, frustrated you can’t go where you want to go, you won’t have fun doing it and you won’t learn from it.
I applied this to my career, almost unknowingly at first. I made career decisions in response to external forces and industry changes in a way that allowed me to pursue what I was really interested in. The surfing metaphor has been a potent way of describing this experience. Not everyone is comfortable doing this but it worked for me and it has been a great ride.
To learn more about Will Novosedlik or to get in touch with him, please visit Idea Couture’s website at www.ideacouture.com/bio/will-novosedlik. Also be sure to check out Will’s recent article, “Brand Canada: The Next 150 years”.
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The Influential Series is an independent publication where I explore the minds of thought leaders in the marketing and technology space.
Other interviews in this series:
My Interview with Hilton Barbour — The Influential Series Issue #1
Meaning is the new strategy” Martina Olbertova — The Influential Series Issue #2
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com on September 7, 2017.
Originally published at artplusmarketing.com on October 30, 2017.
