John C. Jay, president of global retailing for Fast Retailing, sees the world today as a theater of contraction where creativity is at a zenith and taste is paramount, yet sameness abounds.
“We are probably living in the most creative era in history. Anything and everything is at hyper speed, whether its Uber, Netflix, Tesla, Airbnb, Alibaba — we see the status quo crumbling beneath the speed and the quality of innovation,” Jay said during his presentation.
“Technology is speeding everything up in the most creative era ever. Never before has creativity and innovation been so impactful in our lives, given us the opportunity to connect globally, instantaneously, and to make things that are absolutely unimaginable.”
Related Articles
But he posed the question: “Why is it that we are still awash in the sea of sameness?” And he suggested that industries, such as retail, marketing and fashion, can be “incestuous,” filled with “the same people, the same experience, and the same references, offering the same ideas to the new consumer.”
You May Also Like
In a presentation stacked with cultural references, clips of award-winning ads, shots of creative projects in Uwajimaya, Japan, and elsewhere, and staggering statistics depicting a world moving faster and faster, Jay said:
- The number of Internet users doubles from 3 billion to 6 billion in the next 10 years
- Marketing has changed in the past two years more than in the past 50
- During the steam train era, knowledge doubled every 150 years; today knowledge doubles every two years, and by 2020, it’s doubling every 72 hours
He cited IBM research asking 1,500 chief executive officers what knowledge and experience is most necessary for future ceos, and overwhelmingly the answer was creativity. “There is no doubt that creativity is important. Maybe it is the most important human resource of all. Without creativity there would be no progress. We would be forever repeating the same patterns….Cultural knowledge is critical for building…brands yet it is sorely lacking in most managers. Having been at many agencies, I can tell you who is a good client and who is a bad client, and it’s about the amount of cultural IQ the ceo has.”
On the matter of taste, Jay showed a compelling video of the late Steve Jobs railing against Microsoft in a manner that spoke volumes about Jobs. “The only problem with Microsoft is that they absolutely have no taste,” Jobs said. “I don’t mean that in a small way. I mean that in a big way. In the sense that they don’t think of original ideas and they don’t bring much culture into their product.”
Jay said he has organized “cultural salons,” a concept he first witnessed at Diane von Furstenberg’s apartment. His first, conducted while working for Wieden+Kennedy, was for a client, Nike, in Shanghai in 2005, where he surrounded the ceo Mark Parker with journalists, fashion designers, illustrators, break dancers, Deejays, “everyone that I could find in Shanghai that I thought he would be interested, and he just sat in the middle and they presented and did what they were proud of.”
“Collaboration is key to this new creativity. The old days of the auteur, miserable all by himself, are gone,” Jay said. “You cannot exist without a great collaborative partner. A great hero to me is Olafur Eliasson — look at his team, 75 craftsman, programmers, architects, musicians and product engineers….The new ceo has to be thinking broadly about different experiences and having more experiences.”
However, despite the changes in marketing and communications, the fundamentals always remain important — skill and talent. “All the data in the world is not going to give you that….Being original is pretty complex today, in a digital world that’s filled with inspiration everywhere.”
At Bloomingdale’s, where Jay was marketing director, “one of the first things I learned was to defy conventional wisdom. That was probably what we did best there. One evidence of that [was] the Bloomingdale’s shopping bags that never had the name on them. But the important thing is that we were always focused on the zeitgeist, what was culture saying to us, what was the world saying to us. Yet every time the bag hit the street, everyone knew that was the Bloomingdale’s bag.”
“We are ultimately, if we do our jobs right, conduits of culture.”
Uniqlo, he suggested, is raising the bar on creativity. “We did a fantastic promotion of bringing the culture of kabuki to Paris, New York and other stores….What’s interesting about our latest store in Paris is that no longer will we be doing cookie-cutter flagships that are off the same footprint. We will find those unique places around the world.”
Asked what’s working and what isn’t working at Uniqlo, Jay replied, “The U.S. clearly has its hurdles. That is one of the reasons I joined, is to help tackle that hurdle. We have 30-plus stores in America. The brand is barely just out of its crib here in America. So we have a long way to go. Uniqlo is going through fast-track changing. Five years from now you won’t recognize the company. It’s extraordinary the kind of things that we are involved in now. [Research and development] centers that I am building for creativity in London, New York, Tokyo — around the world. There are a lot of things that are good and there are a lot of challenges in that the business is changing so quickly. Our foundation wasn’t right, perhaps, in America. We have learned a lot. The great thing about our fearless leader is that we never look back. That’s it. We are going forward.”