Exploiting Chaos: What’s more important, culture or strategy?

According to Jeremy Gutsche, culture eats strategy for breakfast. Gutsche, MBA, CFA, is founder of TrendHunter.com, the world’s largest network for trend spotting and innovation. He is also the author of, “Exploiting CHAOS: 150 Ways to Spark Innovation During Times of Change.”

Did you know that Hewlett-Packard, Disney, Hyatt, MTV, CNN, Microsoft, Burger King, and GE all started during periods of economic recession? Periods of uncertainty fuel tremendous opportunity, but the deck gets reshuffled and the rules of the game get changed.Gutsche offers some pretty compelling insights for capitalizing on the chaos. Here are a few choice quotes from today’s event (and some secret goodies at the bottom):

• • Can you focus what you’re trying to do in seven words or less?
  • There is no point in innovating if you think you already know the answer.
  • Find a way to be irresistible to a specific group.
  • Successful businesses innovate and create opportunities to fail.
  • Win like you’re used to it. Lose like you enjoy it.

More good stuff in the live-blogging stream here. And click here for Jeremy’s secret goodies just for SXSW insiders.

Say No to Bud InBev Deal

I’m not sure if you’ve been following the news lately regarding Anheuser-Busch, but they could be taken over by InBev. Here’s the story…

Why discuss this in my media, marketing, advertising, online marketing, homebrewing blog?

Anheuser-Busch has been a pioneer within the digital media space. Despite the fact that Bud.tv failed, both AB and the online marketing community learned quite a bit from its branded online video effort. You can’t have continued success without a few failures, and AB took the failure in stride and appears to have grown to be better online marketers because of it.

From all accounts I’ve heard, InBev is good at making these types of companies work more efficiently. Most analysts are pretty sure that InBeb will implement its cost-cutting measures at AB if it purchases it. Most of the time, cost-cutting measures start with marketing budgets. You can be sure that if this is the case, you won’t see nearly as much experimentation coming from AB in terms of online marketing (and certainly not to the level of investment as Bud.tv). While it’s obvious that larger companies have still not completely jumped into online marketing, it will be disappointing if experiments like Bud.tv no longer allowed to take place.