Strategic Director
Adrian is a Strategic Director specializing in innovation strategy. He advocates for the application of human-centered design approaches to create new products, services, and experiences. He combines his hands-on professional experience in business, design, and ethnographic research to help clients find new business opportunities that generate profit. Throughout his 10 years of experience, Adrian has specialized in working as a hub between the realms of design, user research, and business strategy. Some of his favorite methods are innovation benchmarking maps, pattern recognition studies, behavioral observations, interviews, and brainstorming sessions with clients. Recently at Cheskin, Adrian has been working closely with Microsoft.
21 May 2007
Not long ago, the Hispanic market was considered marginal by many businesses, being perceived as a largely immigrant group with income, language, and educational limitations. Today, with the commoditization of the concept of acculturation and the emergence of bicultural TV networks, no one argues that Hispanics are an appealing market segment that goes beyond the classic preconceptions to encompass more affluent, hip, bilingual and bicultural consumers. While this shift from low value to high value is important, there is an emerging shift that promises to elevate the role of Hispanics even to a higher level: Hispanics are moving from being a market in itself to being a strategic tool for competitive advantage in the general market. Those who chose to leverage the influencing power of “The Latino” in the crowded general market will profit from the next in strategic marketing.
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Posted in
Hispanic Markets
by Adrian Burstein, 4 comments
30 January 2005
I have seen lately many alarming articles about the falling dollar, its causes, and consequences around the globe. These articles often had a political agenda and focused on macro-economic perspectives, blaming the astronomic national deficit. As important as all this is, I inevitably abstracted myself from the economic speech, and fell in a delicious thinking cycle around the notion of reality dictating our behaviors vs. our behaviors dictating reality. I mean, aren’t we who with our consumption behaviors created that deficit to begin with?
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Posted in
Innovation & Design
by Adrian Burstein, 3 comments
15 August 2004
A few weeks ago Microsoft announced the introduction of its new mouse designed by famous designer Philippe Starck. The newness of such partnership, the design itself, and Starck’s sexy brand drew considerable attention from the media. However, there’s something more important behind this news that goes beyond Starck or Microsoft and that went unnoticed; an experiment about the next grounds for competitive advantage in the personal technology industry: vanity and fashion.
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Posted in
Innovation & Design
| Positioning & Branding
by Adrian Burstein, 0 comments
15 July 2004
I admit it. I’m a philatelist, but please don’t rush to conclusions; philately isn’t a new disease or anything to be afraid of. For many of those who don’t know the meaning of the word, philatelist means a stamp collector in proper English. However, there’s a difference between a philatelist and a stamp collector that goes beyond wording issues. A philatelist is someone who enjoys learning about history, geography, art, and cultural manifestations as they occurred or were perceived at different points in time. Collecting and studying stamps provides us with an opportunity to own a testimony, a glimpse of what happened years or centuries back in time, as well as what happens today- that is-if the postal system allows you.
In the midst of the research project I was working on in Paris, I managed to run to the post office to send a couple of pieces of mail.
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Posted in
Innovation & Design
by Adrian Burstein, 1 comments
