Tomorrow’s World
Jump! Innovates’ Dive Without Fear programme links with executives to decode alternative futures. Founder Paul Kelders talks to Nick Mulcahy about capturing ‘emergent value’
Jump! Innovates is the business of helping clients with brands to look to the future. What’s around the corner that brands need to be aware of, and how do they innovate with their products to take advantage? It’s apt therefore that Jump! has undertaken the same process for itself, and is pivoting into 2023 under the banner ‘Dive Without Fear’.
Jump! was born out of ad agencies, and founder Paul Kelders has developed a successful marketing agency that works with clients to invent or reinvent brands. “We are also advocates of companies lifting their heads beyond what’s happening in the next year or two and thinking about what future markets could emerge that we could construct future value from,” he says. “Jump! tends to work at a brand level but now we want to assist the C-suite to see into the future to anticipate and prepare for future markets.”
Enter Dive Without Fear, a separate but associated entity to Jump!, with a team that includes sociologists and computational scientists. The move is partly informed by a dialogue Kelders had with a client.
“We had come up with some fantastic concepts and they just weren’t moving on the ideas,” Kelders recalls. “I said to the client that this looks like a sure thing. He said back to me, ‘Paul, innovation is the riskiest thing that we do’. He was absolutely right, but it also signalled to me that reward systems are linked to shortterm achievements. There is very little attention paid to corporate foresight and where the leaders are going to take the company. For a lot of companies, when they’re innovating they look at trends, and everybody is looking at the same trends.”
Launching from London, Dive Without Fear will aim to partner with executive teams to help them decode alternative futures and capture what Kelders calls ‘emergent value’. The promise is that clients will be better able to anticipate and prepare for opportunities that haven’t been seen by others.
“In essence what we’re doing is defining the key forces shaping tomorrow and examining how they may evolve over time,” Kelders explains. “We use simulations to generate possibilities grounded in empirical realities. We then value these emergent possibilities to direct us to the highest value options. These immersive experiences use virtual, augmented, and physical events, to allow people situate themselves within these emergent futures.”
Kelders’ experience at Diageo set him up to become an entrepreneur. The son of a Dutch father and Offaly mother, his childhood was nomadic as his father, a senior hotel executive, was constantly on the move. After school he did the advertising course in Rathmines and worked with a number of ad agencies before marrying childhood sweetheart Sinead O’Connell and opting out of the rat race for a year for a roundthe-world honeymoon. “I remember being in a call centre in Bangkok and my mum warning us to return home immediately because house prices were going crazy.”
Sinead worked in Guinness UDV, which later became Diageo, and Kelders landed a job there too. The company had set up a consumer planning unit to inform the company’s massive advertising outlay on its drinks brands. Kelders likens the experience to a university, in terms of acquiring branding knowledge. Diageo is also a corporation, and in 2004 it was made clear to Kelders that if he wanted to move up the corporate ladder he would have to relocate to the Netherlands.
With three infant children, and another one on the way, Kelders demurred and incorporated Jump! Marketing Ltd in December 2004, with his wife also leaving Diageo to handle the start-up’s accounts. “After all the change I had gone through in my youth, I didn’t want that for my kids,” says Kelders. “I also had this itch about working for myself and starting a business. We mapped out the idea of combining business strategy with consumer strategy. Then it was just a case of starting off in the attic.”
The business has proved to be rewarding, though the Covid lockdown impact was evidenced in a decline in net current assets to €1m at year-end 2020 from €1.3m the year before. It was back to normal in 2021, with a net profit of €290,000 and current assets rising to €1.7m. There were 14 people including five directors on the payroll of Jump Marketing in 2021 in Dublin, and a related company in London has 12 staff. Besides the two founders, directors Lee Geraghty, Ruan McGloughlin, and Bettina McCarvill also have stakes in the venture.
Jump! has prospered through working with the likes of Diageo, Irish Distillers, Kerry Group, Paddy Power, AIB, Coca-Cola and many others. Its role is to assist clients to define goals and targets that informs the brief to the ad agency for the actual advertising and marketing spend. As more players arrived in the brand strategy space, Jump! leaned into helping clients come up with new products and services, and to reinvent exiting brands.
The next stage is Dive Without Fear, where the aim is to take brand strategy beyond the marketing department. Kelders instances work for Nestlé in the US to invent a new water category, and a project for Heineken in Africa. With the beer brief, Jump! consultants have been immersing themselves in the youth cultures of Ethiopia, South Africa and Nigeria.
“What we found in Lagos and elsewhere is that young people are annoyed hearing all the time about how awful life is in Africa,” says Kelders. “They take great pride in their own resourcefulness and the hustle and the gains that they create every day. In Lagos we engaged with a rap group and a recording studio, immersing ourselves in the culture. Our aim is to learn and create something that reflects and contributes to the culture rather than stealing it and sticking it on a label.”
With Heineken, the purpose is to inform product development in the region, and Kelders says cultural immersion will also be on the Dive Without Fear agenda. “Lots of companies talk about the future, but very few of them introduce chance into those futures and very few of them can use simulation and computational science,” he says.
“We are using immersive techniques to bring these worlds to life for our clients. We bring these new markets to life so the C-suite can go in and see and experience it and we start to make futures more tangible. If they can make that a habit, they can achieve the profitable advantage over their peers.”
‘We are using immersive techniques to bring these worlds to life for our clients’