Digital media, combined with mobility on a variety of networked platforms, is a way of life in which everything becomes media for the individual empowerment to create, manage and distribute content. How can brands and their organizations cope with this challenge? By re-examining their understanding of human needs and reframing them as what they truly are: desire, wants, and visions of a better self.

The challenge for brand marketing communications is simply this: digital media is not a channel. Mediums are not channels; they are modes of individual action. In this keynote address, provocative author, speaker and leading practitioner in the field of strategic foresight, Alexander Manu surveys the changing context for brand marketing and communication, and explores a few questions that will help organizations identify ideas, transforming them into platforms for engagement or what he calls “a new behavior space.”

Alexander Manu Senior Partner and Chief Imaginator, InnoSpa International Manu is a Senior Partner and Chief Imaginator at InnoSpa International Partners, teaches “Innovation, Foresight and Business Design” at the Rotman School of Management, is a Professor at the OCAD University in Toronto and a visiting lecturer at the Wallace McCain Institute for Entrepreneurship. He has written several books, including Disruptive Business: Desire, Innovation and the Re-Design of Business, published in 2010. Manu works with executive teams in Fortune 500 companies in industries as diverse as consumer packaged goods, media, advertising, mobile communications and manufacturing, and lectures around the world on innovation, imagination, change agents and strategic foresight.