With such an interesting or terrible name, I felt it was finally time to explain the thinking behind the name SuperMarket.
I'm a well trained marketing communications professional, have done a year of the McGill MBA Japan program while living and working in Asia, and have been trained by some great advertising agencies in their strategic planning processes, be they traditional Account Planning, or other. And I continue to be a Chief Strategy Officer, translation - I'm a perpetual student of business, new business models, start-ups, and new models and frameworks.
But while working in Tokyo, Japan, at McCann Erickson's 600 person agency, I realized that technology was not being truly understood by the agency world. They thought this was a communications channel only, and not the business, game-changing technology, that we know it has become.
The name SuperMarket was intended to address this paradigm that there is nothing off the menu of tools that smart, advertising agencies, and creative thinkers can use to help their clients.
There were three macro fundamentals that led to SuperMarket and our passion for helping businesses and brands transform:
Not only are categories in a constant state of evolution, but every other dynamic that a business operates within or is effected by, is also changing: Culture, CX, technology, and of course your own organization.
Like us all, our Clients can sometimes tend to be tunnel visioned by their own view - the data that is shared with them. We thought we need to challenge this, completely normal organization and human behaviour by getting them to re-see their business dynamics. The coiner of the term lateral thinking, DeBono, said the purpose of thinking is to eliminate thinking. An example is, once you learn how to use a toaster or a dishwasher, you don't really have to think about it ever again. So our job is to get clients to go through that almost design thinking, customer journey again, to see things like the first day they joined the company.
Thirdly, and lastly, our view has been to not shoot for the safe, incrementalism, but to ask our clients, if we started your business today, what would amazing look like? Not uncommon for smart agencies, but a tough question for some clients.
Anyway, that is the thinking that underpins SuperMarket: constant evolution of the dynamics affecting a business, mental excursions to refresh a view of the familiar, and harness the power of exploratory, conceptual creative to really connect with those, sometimes lost passions and drive for innovation and change.
All of this to help our client pass through this wonderfully disruptive, yet opportunistic time. Like our zebra, passing through the Zebra Crossing, to get to the other side.
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