Gotta give a shout out to Fast Company for alerting me to US West Coast regional bank, Umpqua, who seem to have built a lot of their business on the strength of very innovative marketing. (I guess amongst a bunch of other good stuff – it can’t all be the environment & the pretty graphics!)
Check out the Umpqua Innovation Lab. It’s like Star Trek!
Umpqua appear to have jumped enthusiastically into the Third Place idea, which also drives businesses like Starbucks and the whole slew of coffeehouses – small and large – that populate the street corners of much of the Western world. It reminds me again how important community is to people, and how ministries like The Freeway and Q Café really get that concept.
We are wired to be together – share life, spend time….and just hang out.
HT to South Waterfront , Portland, Oregon for the pic
4 comments:
Glad you picked up the theme, and ran with the ball a little more, Fernando
http://fernandogros.com/?p=1107
i'm always a little suspicious of the third space idea, it's just another consumer space afterall - but a different one from work and home :)
I think you're right to be cautious, Paul. It would be relatively easy for business to be hawkish about the Third Place thang.
I've generally more interested in those spaces that have grown up almost organically, and also in those places where the initial seed has been planted(2 horticultural analogies in one sentence!! ;-)) from within some kind of Jesus-following communities. (If you can understand the last ramble I've just written, you are a better man than me!! :-))))
Like it Johnny
The UK has a proud history of credit unions which are usually linked to community...which I think link into your overdeveloped farming analogy (",)...probably without the bells and whistles of our American cousins though
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