The biggest challenge we face with some of our larger corporate clients is no longer persuading sales or marketing to 'go digital' and use new technologies to improve their competitive advantage - they're all well aware of the need and the benefit - it's negotiating our way through the strict rulings laid down by their IS departments.

Andrew Needham of Face has a really interesting article in October's Admap pointing out how some go-ahead consumer product companies like Unilever are using their customers to help them develop their products. There is a strand of thinking that customers and consumers don't really know what they want and if we always rely on them to tell us, we would never invent anything new. Like Henry Ford said, if he had asked customers what they wanted - they would just have asked for a faster horse. The advocates of this thinking (usually big-brand agencies) regard the only useful customer research is as crash test dummies - ie to test stuff after its been invented.

But it depends how you use the input from your customers and consumers and the way you deal with it. The Economist Intelligence Unit published a paper called The Digital Company 2013. They believe that customer-driven innovation will become mainstream by 2013.

If all this is true for product innovation then how much more real and important will customer co-creation be for service innovation? Services more than products are a series of interactions between the individual and the offering. It is continuous interface between the users of the service and the people providing it. So who is going to be better at deciding whether the experience was a good one or a bad one - the agency or the user? As the Design Council's RED Paper 02 says "A top down innovation strategy is no longer appropriate for solving today's complex problems". And this is even more so when you are solving today's complex service problems.

How you involve the user to co design the services they will use, and how you can get them to truly co innovate rather than just ask for a faster horse, is more to do with the techniques you use and the way you ask the questions. But the successful service companies will work out how to involve their customers and users and they will be the most innovative companies of the future.

Had the privilege recently to spend 3 days with some of Europe & North America's more progressive agency minds doing what we all like to do - pontificating about the future - and it was enlightening and scary at the same time. The theme was reacting to and driving change. The focus: our clients' customers. The challenge: helping them to recognize and react to what is round the corner.

The fear? That everyone would become shocked into over-reacting to the credit crunch and the general slowdown in the economy, rather than taking a step to the side and looking beyond and to start planning for the rebound.

We've seen significant changes in buyer behaviour even before the current crisis and this crisis is only likely to amplify those changes. This creates opportunity for those willing to look. Opportunity to not only be one of the first to react to or even anticipate the rebound, but to have developed new strategies for the new world order, whilst others follow using the same old marketing techniques.

The saying "fortune favours the brave" could not be more appropriate.

One of the first lessons in Marketing School (a bit like Hogwarts, only based in Hammersmith) is how to name new products. The advice goes roughly like this

Make the name:

• Usable
• Meaningful
• Distinctive

It's all quite simple and it all came back to me when I saw a poster for a car called a cee'd. That's right, a cee'd. No, not a ceed, or indeed a Ceed. A cee'd.

How? Why? Who sat round a boardroom table and dreamt this one up? Those responsible should be named. And since the readers of this blog are regularly involved in naming new products and services, I thought it was worth analysing this carcrash of a naming exercise and asking how the name 'cee'd' measures up against those three objectives.

Have you noticed how really good service makes you happy? Whether it's dealing with a restaurant booking or using a mobile phone, your experience really makes a difference to whether you go back there or renew your contract.

So why don't companies and organisations take more care in how they put together that customer experience? If you were buying a razor, you'd understand that a lot of research has gone into how to design it. Making it fit your hand. Making it look good. Making it do its job properly. But when it comes to services, people just put them together. There is a tendency to offer the service without really thinking about who is going to use it and what their experience would be.

Give in to your Friday fidgets with something useful, entirely relevant to your work, and fun. The Brand Tags project is it - and now there's a version just for UK brands. People, what more do you want?

Okay, here's a bit more: a short while back, our Creative Director, Dave Thomas, found the  newish Brand Tags site just as we were starting work on a Very Big Campaign. Typing in the name of the Very Big Client returned a tag cloud of one-word associations that loads of people have when they see the brand name/logo. How useful is that? Well, it made for a nice little piece of backup to our proposal, anyway.

So that's how it works - either you type in a name, or you let the site flash up a random logo, and you type in the first word that pops into your head. Then you can see all the word associations other people have input to the site, too. Neat, eh?

The US version has the most major brand names indexed at the moment, so if you don't find one you're looking for on the UK site, go on over to the Dark Side.

Didn't I tell you to go play?

PS: Big Client is PayPal. It's no secret, really.