Impact branding for the urbanising century

Sérgio Brodsky is an internationally experienced brand marketing professional and scholar of The Marketing Academy. Having worked for the world’s leading strategic communications agencies, he is a proven thought-leader, regularly being published and featured on high-profile conferences and festivals worldwide. He is passionate about cities and culture and the role of brands and technology in society. Sérgio is multilingual, holds a BA in IP law and an MBA in global brand strategy and innovation. Follow him on Twitter: @brandKzar

In behavioural economics ‘functional fixedness’ is a cognitive bias that limits a person from considering something beyond the way it’s been traditionally used, causing a ‘mental block’ against thinking differently when solving problems. For example, the people on the Titanic overlooked the possibility that doors, tabletops, tyre inserts and even maybe the iceberg (yes, ice floats on water!) could have been their lifeboats. Fixated on the fact that only actual lifeboats could be their transport to safety, people overlooked the size and shape of different objects that could play the same role but in different ways.

When it comes to innovation, businesses are constantly hampered by functional fixedness and other cognitive biases that cause people to overlook elegant