Many companies focus their strategic thinking around current marketing needs by getting into a conference room and divining the future (or attempting to). It’s a very inside-out or top-down approach. In a reversal of this traditional process, exceptional companies use an outside-in approach, or bottom-up strategy, to focus their thinking on engaging in a dialogue with the other members of their community, allowing them to co-create innovations with their customers.
This holistic, organic strategy allows companies to recontextualize and reframe their brand continually, making necessary adjustments as the community and customers evolve.
In the context of the rapidly changing business environment, it is time to question what we already know and how we attempt to learn what we don’t. Are we using tools that provide us with meaningful and useful insights that can drive corporate strategy from the context of our customers, bottom up through the organization?
Can data be transformed, from the bottom up instead of top down, into relevant innovation in branding and product development? The only solution is to develop new ways of understanding and finding meaning in the dynamic flux.
http://www.dmnews.com/pdffiles/beyondbrand.pdf
