Business Week's inaugural issue of “Inside Innovation,” a quarterly magazine within the magazine, just launched on June 19th. The new magazine’s lead story heralds “Innovation Champions”...

...citing “the new breed of managers and their radical cultures of creativity." This all brings one of my favorite topics to the fore -- how innovation + experiential marketing + design are all connected. According to Inside Innovation editor Bruce Nussbaum’s ‘inmanifesto': “Our goal is to make a meaningful difference in the difficult journey toward building innovative business cultures. . . In future issues, we will. . . instill design thinking to satisfy unmet consumer needs.”

The headline that caught my eye in the inaugural issue: “Trend: Consumer Experience Sells.” This ‘inshort’ paragraph states succinctly that companies which focus on their customer’s needs and wants seem to drive ‘top-line growth and above-average profits.’ Graphs from a consultancy called Peer Insight, then cite P&G, Starbucks, Starwood and Target as prime examples, sharing their 2005 revenues and 5 year compound annual growth rates versus their competitors’. . .to substantiate their point.

No doubt about it—experiential marketing continues to be a hot topic. From my perspective, our design consultancy has matured as we’ve worked with our corporate clients whose branding initiatives seek to create meaningful customer experiences. Experiential marketing holds that the customer’s experiences with a corporate brand go well beyond the products or services the company offers. It goes to the heart of the customer’s perceptions, positive thoughts, emotions and attitudes based on his interaction—and deepening relationship--with the corporate brand.

These intangibles transcend the actual products or services a company offers in the marketplace, all of which can be easily purchased from a number of competitors. With the unification of the customer’s brand experience across multiple channels, an actual brand image can be created that is utterly unique to that company. The brand experience then becomes a total one, by design, encompassing each and every customer touch point.

Creating meaningful brand experiences for the customer begins with the actual design of its product or service, but then extends to its communication hierarchy in the packaging of those products/services, the business’s web site, its letters and special offers to customers, its call center interactions with customers, its advertising and promotions, and more. All of this, in concert, creates a total customer experience. A positive experience in one channel does not create total experiential branding: the sum of all of the customer touch points, if properly managed and aligned, do.

We can’t forget that making human connections is what our work as marketers all boils down to. It’s really as simple as that. All of the marketing jargon in the world, every marketing theory and concept really comes down to our ability—or inability--to connect on a meaningful, human level.

We can all join the IN online Innovation & Design community at www.businessweek.com/innovate. Exchanging information, sharing learning experiences, case studies and solutions to problems as we do on this blog, is invaluable. These environments, too, can and should help us to make meaningful human connections.

What’s exciting about Inside Innovation, for me personally: not only is innovation emphasized, as relates to product development, marketing positioning and development and the restructuring of corporate cultures; but creativity and design are given equal time as relates to product development, marketing positioning and development, etc. You get my drift. All of these concepts shouldn’t be separate and isolated ones; they are all connected.

My sincere hope is that this IN site and quarterly magazine will delve into these areas much more deeply than business publications have in the past and that they make us all unafraid to push the envelope. Today’s global business environment demands bold, innovative solutions. Hence, the need to develop new “radical cultures of creativity”. Let’s just not forget to strive to make meaningful human connections at every level our core focus.