When Graham Brown witnessed trends around how teenage girls in Japan were using pocket-bell pagers to message each other in the mid-1990s, he knew a significant shift was happening, and saw the potential for SMS messages before mobile providers had introduced the feature on early mobile phones. But when Brown excitedly approached mobile phone companies with his observations, he was told, “We don’t market to kids.” Ironically, it would be teenagers who would teach mobile companies how to make money from data packages much later on.
In this episode of the podcast, we explore how, throughout the history of technology, young people have often been the ones to drop clues about future trends through their digital social interactions – often going so far as to corrupt technologies to make them better.
We also talk about how story listening can help brands defeat innovation bias, and stay open to the way technology needs to evolve.
Guest Details:
Name: Graham Brown
Title: Founder
Company: Pikkal & Co.
LinkedIn | Website | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram
Graham Brown is the founder of Pikkal & Co, an award-winning, AI Powered, data-driven, B2B podcast agency in Singapore. He is a published author on the subject of The Digital Transformation of Communication, and his works include “The Human Communication Playbook”, “The Mobile Youth: Voices of the Connected Generation” – which documents the rise of mobile culture in the early 2000s in Japan, China, Africa, and India – and “Brand Love – How to Build a Brand Worth Talking About”.
