A number of unrelated things struck me today, so I thought I’d write about each of them.

First, some brilliant design work by Pepsi. As you know, I’m a big fan of the way Pepsi is innovating packaging for shelf impact, news and excitement. Pepsi has shattered the paradigm this year, electing to think more about the vernacular of their target audience than maintaining a static, slavish perspective on their narrowly defined “equities”. The 35 distinct package designs for Trademark Pepsi add news to the brand and break up the shelf, so rather than being a sea of blue wallpaper, the linear shelf space Pepsi owns is now a dynamic destination in-store. The brand is tying the limited time designs through to cups in foodservice as well, and launching separate microsites for each design. I’m eager to learn about the results.

Now, Pepsico has launched the Green Label Art project for Mountain Dew, marrying the introduction of the first aluminum bottle in the U.S. CSD category with gorgeous, breathtaking, visually arresting designs by an eclectic group of non-traditional designers, including skateboarders, tattoo artists, vinyl toy developers, etc. These designers know their audience and Mountain Dew is leveraging their edgy appeal to create breakthrough, on-brand creative. It’s brilliant and beautiful.

Another tidbit that caught my eye (actually, it was sent to me by the fabulous Amy Brachman, Innovation Manager at Alcoa), is an article in Businessweek talking about the development of an energy-conducting film that could someday be used as wallpaper to power your room. Imagine, the end of wall sockets. The end of wires. It fits my favorite definition of innovation - it’s both surprising and inevitable!

Finally, I was fortunate to attend IIT’s Strategy Conference today and hear one of my strategy and design heroes, Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management speak. He’s fantastic and inspirational. He spoke about the “fundamental tension” between reliability (aka business thinking) and validity (design thinking). If reliability is about making sure you get the same result over and over again without deviation, validity is about getting the right result, even if it introduces excess complexity and variability. Reliability is built on precendent - marrying up with the past. Validity is built on projection - designing for the future. (An example - think about how many times you’ve used metrics that don’t necessarily reflect the reality of your business, but they are things you could measure. It’s a reliable scorecard, but does it mean anything?) His speech was thought provoking and included suggestions for how we can learn to meet in the middle, empathizing with the other point of view and finding the balance point between the two tensions.

These are three unrelated ideas, but really, I think they all point to the same thing. We’ve got to learn to shatter the constraints of tradition, experiment with the needs of the future, and wade into the unknown. That’s where all the fun stuff happens!

This is going to be a fairly long post, so bear with me. As we learn more in 2007 about Web 2.0 (the GeoWeb), our technological bearings are going to evolve to more closely match our mental ones. Geographic proximity will make way for attitudinal proximity, enabling our virtual constructs to better reflect the organizational capacity of our brains. With more sophisticated links and tags, get ready for the fun to really begin. Or as my good friend Kati says, it’s all about the meta.

Starting with the simple: I’m fascinated by brand neighborhoods, the mental space that’s shared by brands in different categories that create a common attitude, persona or cache. Pepsi, for example, shares a brand neighborhood with iPod and MySpace. It’s more at home with the Daily Show than the Tonight Show. It fits with a greener, more idealistic energy. Coke’s brand neighborhood is much more staid and conservative. Coke doesn’t have much technology in its brand neighborhood, but it might go to the movies and eat McDonalds.

But please note, a brand neighborhood isn’t a mere cross-tab of psychographics and needs states; its the posse that hangs with the brand — the group of products that shares the same mindspace, trade dress and soul. Red Bull is a great case study of brand neighborhood - it effectively borrowed its ideal neighborhood as a launch strategy, tying into local extreme games and the bar crowd. Red Bull built its personality via affiliation with the cool kids, the brands that shared the mindspace to which it aspired.

The concept is simple from an intellectual perspective. Ask a consumer to shop for brands that share the same attitude as yours (I call this Brand Neighborhood Ethnography) and they’ll be able to do it and articulate the reasons why - visual and verbal conventions, advertising, user profiles. Our brains are set up to marry distinct concepts across myriad classification schemes. It’s just that our technologies have not been…until now.

Enter the GeoWeb. The technology of the internet now enables users to cross data with visuals, data with ideas, to bring together individualistic classification schemes. By tagging information, you can create an entirely new context. Gawker Stalker, for example (not that I recommend it), let’s “fans” tag locations on a map with real time information about celebrity sightings. “Quick, George Clooney is having breakfast at Balthazar.” Geotagging is a powerful tool that creates new definitions of proximity — attitudinal proximity. Now we can create a map of places George likes to shop or eat or sleep. It’s a map of Georgeness, defined by his tastes, not by location. It might include restaurants in Lake Como, Italy or stores in Telluride, CO. Information is linked by George’s personal preferences. Geographic proximity is meaningless.

Now let’s go back to Brand Neighborhoods. What if we could tag information similiarly? Create pools of Pepsiness? Build a world that shares a dominant personality, one its consumers buy into. To go back to one of my earlier themes, become the editor of attitudinal space. Pepsi could define its crowd, its distribution network, its weekend plans. Pepsi could choreograph the Pepsi fun. Or, if the Pepsi persona were well enough defined, it could open its Pepsiness to be directed by its brand fans.

Which leads directly to the concept of community. Everyone is talking about community these days. It’s a race to build the strongest, most enduring, most involved and engaged community. The internet has enabled next generation communities, built around shared ideals, no longer just shared geographic proximity. Your community is more likely to be your friends scattered around the globe, your attachment parenting group online, your televisionwithoutpity Heroes Forum members than your next door neighbor. Community is more about membership than physical location. Home is the heart is, not where your house is.

As brands have moved from badges to membership markers, from statements about what I own to statements about what I believe, community is shifting to attitudinal ties that bind. Are you Pepsi or Coke? Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts? American Red Cross or Heifer International? And based on who you are, who else is like you?

If the Pepsi archetype were so well-engrained in the minds of its consumers, the community could steer Pepsiness effectively (and without worry from those in Purchase). The Pepsi posse (their community) could link and tag brand Pepsi to the attitudinal brands, events, and ideas that made the brand global and local, geographic and metagraphic, personal and pivotal. If the Pepsi community were engaged across the GeoWeb, where would the brand neighborhood lead? And is Pepsi ready? Is your brand?