giacomo bracci helsen He’s a brain ambidextrous design thinking strategist.
EDUCATION After a degree in Marketing, Trend Research and New Media, he attended a 13 months English spoken MBA in Milan, focused on Strategic Design Management that Domus Academy organises with SDA Bocconi and the Interaction Design Institute of Ivrea. Scholarship awarded, Final Mark: Distinction.
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE He moves to Rome to as Experience Designer for Kanso.it, to develop a Multimedia Museum at the Imperial Forum. In 2006 he joined Park.biz, an Advanced Design Management consultancy with offices in Germany and The Netherlands, in quality of Strategic Designer for clients such as LEVI'S Europe & SIEMATIC Germany. Hired in 2007 by Contagiousmagazine.com, London as Senior Researcher, Editor and Strategic Consultant, he got fascinated by strategy and left to join Ninjamarketing.it, Milan as Strategic Planner, to design a niche DIESEL branded social network for cool hunters. After various freelance projects, he was hired as Senior Strategic Account Manager at Ninjalab.it, being responsible for clients such as: UNILEVER BEN & JERRY'S, TELECOM ITALIA, UBI BANCA. After a short but intense experience at Independents United, London – as creative strategist and digital producer for global clients such as DIAGEO and ASOS and UK-based clients such as BBC, HARRODS, ZEBIT he landed in Montreal, Canada working for Nurun Lab, the design thinking Innovation branch of digital agency Nurun.com, developing apps for BBVA bank and cable provider TVA.
FREELANCE EXPERIENCE He worked as Freelance Trend & Innovation Consultant for psfk.com, New York, as design consultant for eco fashion label AMAZON LIFE, as Senior Account & Project Manager for Veryweb.it, Milan and as Senior Creative Strategist for Slide Agency, Florence being responsible for fashion labels such as LUIS TRENKER, MORINI & VICHEROY, events organisers such as IPM, DISCO VILLAGE, MOXA and acquatic parks such as ACQUA VILLAGE.
ENTREPRENEURIAL CAREER After a challenging experience as partner and Strategic Director of fashion brand Radical Diversity, he became founder, art & marketing director of disco_nnect music festival. He’s actually the CEO of jenuinō, a service design startup that combines PSS (product-service-system) design with CSA (Community Supported Agriculture).
ACADEMIC CAREER He taught non conventional marketing strategies at the Master in Business Design (Domus Academy - Milan), the Master in Marketing Innovation (Accademia di Comunicazione - Milan), the Master in Fashion Management (IED Florence), Service Design Summer School (Central St. Martins - London).
Hi, I am Giacomo, I am a Design Thinking Strategist. In the past I developed ideal brand personas for LEVI’S EUROPE, a B2b communication strategy for high-end kitchen producer SIEMATIC, a brand rejuvenation & repositioning for shoe-maker MORESCHI and new product developments for ELICA and UNILEVER. Lately I’ve been involved in consultancies for BBVA bank, to develop a money management app, and cable provider TVA Canada to develop illico.tv, a new cross platform TV app.
BBVA / The Smarter Wallet With the use of digital money management tools on the rise the Nurun Lab undertook an extensive ethnographic study on the relationship that exists between people and money. Eventually we came up with “The Smarter Wallet� which gives consumers the ability to not only manage their money, but to become aware of and manage their emotions towards money as well. It also brings back the notion that our banking habits are social, allowing the wallet to be shared by family, friends and communities. For more info check here: http://www.digitalforreallife.com/2013/03/the-smarter-wallet/
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TVA / illico.tv We took an extensive study to better understand how consumers watch TV. In this changing TV landscape, with the emergence of connected devices and the explosion of content across platforms, people are watching just as much television as before, just in a more individualistic way. TV viewing now involves the encounter of particular content, on a specific device, in a certain social context. Even though the ability to watch any content on any screen has freed users from the tyranny of a TV schedule, people still crave the social dimension of watching, and talking about watching, TV. For the future, we believe that stakeholders (producers, channels, manufacturers and cable companies) should think of the TV viewing experience as a “responsive ecosystem,� in which each device plays a different role depending on the other devices available at the moment of use. For more info check http://www.digitalforreallife.com/2013/02/the-future-of-tv/
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Levi’s ‘Face of the Brand’ Levi’s Europe invited Park, in occasion of the street fashion fair ‘Bread & Butter’ in Barcelona, to create and develop ‘ideal brand personas’. Persona is a strategic design tool which consists in the creation of fictitious characters, that are used to represent different targeted demographic, desires, bahaviors and emotions based on research of emerging trends, analysis and direct observation of real users’ groups. Along with the creation of personas’ backgrounds and stories we created a bedroom, based on the information we gathered, with the aim to inspire Levi’s designers immersing them into a holistic experience inside the most intimate place of a teenage girl: her bedroom.
S1 Communication Strategy SieMatic is a high profile kitchen producer that works mainly with architects and interior designers. We built a B2b communication strategy for the launch of their new kitchen, the futuristic S1. How could we raise awareness and buzz around the new model? • We created unbranded invitations in form of white cubes (same shape of the kitchen) that emitted smell of spices such as sage, rosemary, to be sent to influential architects. • We collaborated with sound designers to develop an unbranded vernissage which consisted in a glossy white cube positioned in the middle of the gallery together with cooking sound installations and finger food in the shape of white cubes. • We organised temporary events in influential cities. We rented disused warehouses to to host pop-up cooking nights where the kitchen was finally unveiled. We asked some of the architects invited, to cook for the rest of the audience as a way to experience the kitchen in a holistic way.
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Moreschi Brand Rejuvenation The shoe-maker was using different logos while exporting in different countries weakening the whole brand identity. We repositioned the brand, refreshed it, created a more coherent identity and transformed the retail spaces into hubs for experiences, focusing on Made in Italy, the tailor-made approach and a high quality standard of the shoes, combining them with other aspects of excellence typical of the Italian way of living, creating slow, relaxed environments offering regional food, design exhibitions and lectures in influential cities.
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Elica / Product Extension Elica is a super high end cooker hood brand. As experts in the air business, we’ve been asked to imagine potential new Elica branded products. We eventually came up with a heater inspired by biomimicry and a magic mirror that used pure oxygen to wake up consumers in the morning.
Unilever / twinsoul brush For Unilever we had to create new design concepts forecasting the evolution of toothbrushes. Usually the toothbrush is the only object in your beauty case that you want to hide; they are awful and over-designed. Through a product repositioning I wanted to transform the object into something beautiful, long-lasting, that consumers were keen to show-off. Taking inspiration from the evolution of Gillette rasors that, from disposable objects became status symbols in the beauty case of millions of men, I developed two prototypes, one for him, one for her, made of teak wood and titanium with disposable silver heads.
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As the final product was quite expensive, it was unlikely to sell them at the supermarket. We opted for concept stores and high profile beauty stores.
Hi, I am Giacomo, I am an Experience Designer. Designing a Tourist Access gate in Rome was a very challenging project. The experience in the customer journey map doesn’t restrain with the trip itself, but starts much before, at home when people looks for information on the destination and continues afterwards, in the post-trip phase, with the collection of memories and the establishment
 of a dialogue between the tourist and the brand. I believe a travel service design accomplished its goal when the tourist says that the best souvenir he had
 was the experience itself.
Tourist Access Gate For Kanso I collaborated with the Rome Municipality for the creation of a of Multimedia Museum / Tourist Access Gate at the Imperial Forums. The multi-million euros project started with direct observation of tourists, their segmentation and the creation of personas. The second phase focused on creating pre-tour, on-tour and post-tour travel experiences. The last step of the consultancy consisted in the creation of interactive, engaging and cognitive environments to immerse users into the roman life of Augustus.
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Magic Box
Technical scheme
Hi, I am Giacomo, I am a Strategic Planner. I am passionate in developing useful, relevant and entertaining strategies, integrating online & experiential, to engage an audience of increasingly low attention span consumers. No more ‘Bully Marketing’, bombarding with messages. I believe that ‘digital utilities’ are the future, where brands will only earn a place at the center of people’s lives if they provide a useful service or a helpful application, without demanding an immediate return.
Asos / Social Media Sales Challenge / Transform Facebook as the second sale medium Solution / Realising before others the “dead of fixed prices” as we know it, together with my team I came up with the idea of approaching the marketing activity not as a campaign - which is something finite, planned to the end before it starts - but as a projects encouraging a more meaningful dialogue with our audience. A project is something ongoing, amorphous and organic that needs constant nurturing. Low budget, learning by doing, experimentation,
Results / All year 1-2 weekly sale “campaigns” using gamification to offer our FB fans added value, such as earning queue points so they could access the sale before the masses. 90.000 likes in the first day, 200,000 likes in a week and doubled Asos fans in few months.
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Unilever / Ben & Jerry's for Good Ideas Challenge / activate the brand in the italian market generating advocacy Solution / To activate the B&J brand in the italian market, we collaborated with London-based co-creation & netnography planning agency The Face, creating a €50k competition to find the most innovative social innovation initiatives, using crowdsourcing to help select the winners. Entries were submitted to a dedicated splash page on the Ben & Jerry’s Italy website and previosuly screened to assure a match with Ben & Jerry’s brand values before being posted to the site. http://goodideas.benjerry.it/ You can have a brief look at the campaign here: https://vimeo.com/26269213
Results • 205 social innovation start-ups, ONGs and Associations participated to the Good Ideas initiative, • 170 Published Posts • 600 blogs and websites engaged in the conversation • 28.700 fans on the fan page with a 30 days only campaign • 13.600 people used our bespoke Facebook App • 6.300.000 the global reach of the campaign
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Ubi Banca / Ethnomarketing Campaign Challenge / Open a new Market with “New Italians” Solution / We had to reach Sri Lankans, Albanians, Romanians, North Africans, Philippines & Peruvians in a way that was meaningful and non invasive. Through an Ethnographic research such a direct observation, Interviews, Shadowing techniques, we found out that 2nd generation italians (sons and daughters of immigrants) represent the bridge between post-modern society and their family acting as “sense decoders” for their parents helping them making purchasing decisions especially for money. We hired influential, young new italians to be this bridge and put them into aggregation points such as piazzas and markets sponsoring events such as the Sri-Lanka cricket tournament. We created branded content in the form of documentaries to tell their stories and launching the first italian integration observatory of new italians.
Results / Activation of 13,000 new bank accounts in 30 days.
Diesel / The Cool Hunters' Community Ninja Marketing is an unconventional marketing agency based in Milan and Naples. At Ninja I worked as a project leader on a Diesel account where I was responsible for conceptualising a Diesel niche Social Network of trusted cool hunters around the world. A network where users would contribute, through UGC, spotting trends and cool things and receive prizes, money and increased social reputation.
Amazonlife The Project Amazonlife is a Brasilian based environmentally-friendly bag producer. During 2009 a short and long- term communication strategy has been designed to raise awareness around the brand and emphasise its social involvement with the Amazon’s protection foundation. As a first step we created a campaign to promote the photo exhibition “Amazon Life the Project” opened in Florence in concomintance with Florence fashion fair Pitti Immagine Uomo More info click http://issuu.com/giacomobracci/docs/amazonlife_finale_inglese?e=1089378/2941627
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Hello, I’m Giacomo, I’m a Digital Producer. At Independents United I overlooked, managed and organised both projects and human resources, for a series of global clients such as ASOS, scoring ‘Best Use of Social Media’ at NMA Awards 2011 adding 200,000 Likes to the ASOS page in less than a week, DIAGEO, creating iPad apps for Guinness and Jonnie Walker Blue Label , BBC Children in Need + PayPal, the world’s first Facebook-PayPal Integration charity game, ZEBIT and UK based clients such as HARRODS. I even worked on two of the agency ventures, Festival Annual, a crowd sourced photo book of UK music festivals and Weathermob, a social weather iPhone App.
BBC + PayPal / Children In Need Challenge / Raise awareness around Children in Need and get people to donate money Solution / A new Facebook app provides a fun way for people to donate by helping to build the largest ever (digital) cake. The app is the ďŹ rst time a UK charity has raised money directly on Facebook rather than via a third-party donation site. Children in Need’s partnership with PayPal has enabled the app to include the latest payment technology to allow a really integrated user experience which allows you to choose layers or decorations for the cake. When the cake reaches a certain size, new special layers from BBC One shows including The One Show, EastEnders and Strictly Come Dancing will become available. IU worked with the BBC to conceive and design the app, and worked with Gamaroff Digital to build it. Results / Ten of thounsands of pounds donated, high talkability for Children in Need and a fresher, more modern perception of BBC as a innovator in the digital space.
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Guinness iPad App An interactive ipad game for Guinness South Africa.
Harrods / Facebook beauty Harrods Facebook beauty is a nice little FB app that asked girls to match their friend with the 7 different looks available and win the ultimate Harrods beauty experience for them and their 7 friends. The 8 winners had a professional make over experience and won all the products used in each of those fantastic looks.
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Weathermob / iPhone app Weathermob, the other Independents United venture, is a social weather iPhone App, actually a best seller on the App store.
Festival Annual Festival Annual is a Independents United venture, a crowdsourced photo book of UK music festivals
Hi, I am Giacomo, I am an Entrepreneur. I owned a fashion label, I organised a music festival and launched jenuinĹ?, a service design organic food box subscription delivery.
jenuinō is a service design startup that combines PSS (product-service-system) design with CSA (Community Supported Agriculture). It acts as a bridge between the families that produce and the families that consumes reducing the supply chain and ensuring quality in the finished product as well as transparency in the process. We help farmers in need offering families and individuals, hotels and restaurants, the ability to support the farmer through the purchase of “food box subscriptions” and receive at home, office or at a pick up location, high quality products that are: personalised, seasonal, traceable, local and healthy for you and your family. By investing at the source, users ensure the farmer a secure pre-paid market at the beginning of the season; through food box subscriptions subscribers dramatically lower the cost of the food they buy and help create a financial stability in the operations of the farms associated. The main difference between jenuinō and other platforms consist in a proprietary adaptive system, a machine learning algorithm capable of automatically recognise, anticipate and perfect users’ tastes and behaviors offering a personalised, unique experience. Have a look at the video: https://vimeo.com/50013301
disco_nnect, music and digital art festival, in the mesmerizing frame of Forte Bazzera, Venice was made in collaboration with “Biennale dell’Arte” and “Mostra Internazionale di Arte Cinematografica”. ‘disco_nnect to the near-forgotten off-line world and take a deep breathe as you realise your body is made of blood, not bytes. Line-up 2009: Royksopp, LCD Soundsystem, A Certain Ratio, Fujiya & Miyagi, The Glimmers, Ebony Bones!, Little Dragon, Bugo, Principles of Geometry, Panico, Esser and many many more... Sponsors: Nokia, Bacardi, Red Bull, Rizla, Franklin & Marshall, Amazon Life, Municipality of Venice. Media Partners: Rolling Stone, LastFm, SamuraiFM, Nat Geo Music, Zero, Hot, Radio Popolare, Rodeo, etc.. Results: 12.000 participants / 50.000 unique visits on the website / 8.000 fans on Facebook / 30.000 fans on Myspacek / more than 400.000 results on Google / 200 features on blogs, mags, newspapapers. You can have a quick look at the disco_nnect report http://issuu.com/giacomobracci/docs/disco_nnect_festival_presentation_good?e=1089378/2870433
MUSIC FESTI VAL
As high profile conceptual street-wear label, based in London and Florence, Radical Diversity was distributed in the best Italian (Rome, Florence, Milan) and European (Paris, Antwerp, Berlin) boutiques. The last collection AUT/WIN 1929/2010 was a retro-futuristic clothing line made with hi-tech materials such memory shape linen and waterproof silk and was born out of the current financial turbolence and its relation with the previous recession of 1929.
Hi, I am Giacomo, I am a Researcher & Editor. Since I was five I used to travel around the world with my dad to help him taking pictures and write anthropological books and pieces. This amazing experience led me to write the first article for a newspaper when I was 16. Spotting emerging trends is the object of my research and definitely one of my passions.
Contagious Magazine Contagious Communications is an award-winning London-based but globally oriented magazine, DVD, online resource, newsletter, strategic consultancy and events organiser specializing in the most innovative exercises in marketing, design, technology and pop culture.
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Hi, I am Giacomo, I am a Lecturer. I love sharing my research and interests, stimulating a debate and encouraging the cross fertilisation of ideas. I taught at the Master in Business Design, Domus Academy, Milan, the Master in Marketing Innovation, Accademia di Comunicazione, Milan, the Master in Fashion Management, IED, Florence and the Service Design Summer School at Central St Martins Schools of Design, London.
Service Design Summer School The Service Design Summer course is an intense learning experience over the period of 2 weeks (full time). During the first week of the course many service design processes, tools and methods are introduced mixing theory and practice. In the second week the students apply their learning outcomes to a life client brief working in small teams. Workshops, open debates and mentoring sessions with leading international professionals in the area of research, business and service design are provided throughout the duration of the 2 weeks.