Boyd Drew - Adding Prestige to Your Portfolio

Drew Boyd gives product innovators a new, powerful method to strengthen the creation of customer value propositions. Success is built upon a strong, unique value proposition, and Drew has pushed us to stretch our thinking while developing new products and services.

Mark Atkins, Board Vice Chair of the Product Development and Management Association and Founder and President of Smart Hammer Innovation

Weve always known that creativity templates have many applications. But the next step is to tailor it to specific fields. Creativity is a general topic that can be used in many fields, but a specific connection between creativity and the selected field has to be investigated, defined, and tested. Drew Boyds latest book, Adding Prestige to Your Portfolio, is the first successful attempt. It takes this idea further by mashing up creativity templates with luxury templates. I have no doubt this will pave the way for other mergers and open up completely new avenues. But most importantly, anyone who wants to innovate inside the luxury or prestige goal can find useful techniques and many examples of how it can be done.

Jacob Goldenberg, PhD, Professor of Marketing at Arison School of Business at IDC Herzliya and Visiting Professor at Columbia Business School

Every marketing leader now has a comprehensive playbook to attract and retain elite customers. Adding Prestige to Your Portfolio describes in detail a completely new processthe Creative Luxury Processthat companies can use to make themselves more competitive. Let Drew Boyd be your creative concierge for luxury market success!

Lisa Nirell, Founder of EnergizeGrowthLLC, author, and Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches member

Drew Boyd outdid us all with his incredibly insightful book Inside the Box and now he takes his always innovative perspective to a new focus: prestige and luxury. Having watched Drew work his creative magic in front of groups many times, its not at all surprising that he brings a unique and insightful process to the concept of luxury. This book isnt about luxury as we typically think about it. Rather, it is about how to grow your company by transforming part of your portfolio in a new and innovative way. Design thinking meets inside the boxthe result is an entirely new innovative process for growing your company. A must-read.

William Putsis, PhD, author of The Carrot and the Stick: Leveraging Strategic Control for Growth, Professor of Marketing at Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and CEO of Chestnut Hill Associates

To Wilma

A lifelong advocate for the advancement of women,
way ahead of her time,
inspiring thousands to reach their dreams,
herself a woman full of style, charm, and dignity,
a sparkling jewel in all respects

Drew Boyd is a global leader in creativity and innovation, an international public speaker, an award-winning author, an innovation podcaster and blogger, and a university professor.

Together with Jacob Goldenberg, Drew wrote Inside the Box: A Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results (2014), published in 17 languages. He is author of So You Want to Be a Professor: How to Land Your Dream Job in Academia (2019). He is also an author for LinkedIn Learning, where he has produced over 22 different courses since 2013 on creativity, marketing, branding, decision making, and sales management. His work has been featured in business publications such as The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Industry Week, Psychology Today, and Strategy+Business.

Drew is an associate professor of marketing and innovation at the University of Cincinnati. He spent 17 years at Johnson & Johnson in marketing, mergers and acquisitions, and international development, where he also earned his first of seven patents for medical devices.

Drew is an accomplished acoustic guitar maker (a luthier) and creator of The Guitar Innovation Experience, a unique blend of training and invention. During one-on-one sessions, his clients learn systematic creativity and use it to invent something new for a guitar. Drew then builds a custom handmade guitar with their invention inside, names that invention after them, and grants them the intellectual property rights to it.

Drew is a graduate of the US Air Force Academy. He served in the military as a nuclear missile launch officer and war planning officer. He earned his MBA at the University of Chicago.

Patterns fascinate me. Its not because they surround usboth in nature and in human behavior. Its not because theyre interesting to look at. Nor is it because they help us be more efficient in our everyday lives.

The real reason is this: One would think that restricting ourselves to follow rigid patterns of thought or action would limit our creative potential, but in fact the opposite is true. Patterns boost our creative output; they make us more, not less, original. How can that be?

Consider snowflakes. All snowflakes in nature form in the exact same structure: a sixfold, hexagonal symmetrical shape. Yet no two snowflakes are exactly alike. The same pattern is used but with a completely original outcome.

Look at Picasso. Study his works of art, and what do you see? The same pattern is used but with a completely original outcome.

Look at artists, musicians, poets, scientists, and even the everyday innovators who, for thousands of years, have used patterns in their creations, usually without even realizing it. Those same patterns are used over and over but with completely original outcomes.

Do you see the ramifications? For me, the fact that patterns are used over and over again with different outcomes is astounding. I can be creative anytime I want to be just by restricting myself to patterns. I let the patterns do the work for me.

Thats the key theme of this bookhow to apply patterns in a systematic way to generate ideas you probably would not have thought of otherwise. Specifically, I show how to apply patterns to another domain well known for applying patterns: the world of luxury.

This book brings together patterns from two different worlds to form a set of tools you can use to make yourself more successful. Ive combined the structure of creativity methods with the structure of luxury methods to give you a way to upgrade what you doto add prestige to virtually anything, be it your products and services, your processes, your business as a whole, or even your reputation.

Creativity is something I know a lot about and with which I have a lot of practical experience. The world of luxury? Well, I have no experience in it. Im not a luxury industry insider. But for this book project, being an outsider had its advantages. I saw things with a fresh, naive perspective. So please take note. If youre expecting from me some deep insights, powerful knowledge, or secret formulas from the great luxury brands, youre reading the wrong book.

That said, I have managed to bring in the relevant knowledge and frameworks of those who are truly the worlds experts in luxurypeople such as Daniel Langer, Oliver Heil, Jean-Nol Kapferer, Vincent Bastien, Wided Batat, Linda Lisa Maria Turunen, and many others. Through writing this book, Ive been pleasantly surprised to learn about the vast and brilliant community of academic researchers, professors, and practitioners who have made luxury such a vibrant and fascinating field. Luxury management is taught at prestigious universities around the globe. It is practiced, managerially, to state-of-the-art levels. There are consultants who specialize in luxury. In other words, collectively, we know an awful lot about luxury, which I guess shouldnt be that much of a surprise, given that the concept of luxury is as old as humankind.