Weblog Entries for January 2006
January 31, 2006
links for 2006-01-31
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A smallish step towards a different model for movie production, spotted by Alan Moore.
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Adpulp reports on how Amsterdam is signing up bloggers as part of its marketing drive
Knock off
Separated at birth?
Dave at Zopa points to what looks a blatant copycat of their website.So the old saying goes that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery…so I guess we should be flattered?Dave's being quite polite about it I think! In the old days this might have given rise to all sorts of IP or trademark actions, and maybe it still will. I just hope a bit of old fashioned naming-and-shaming does the trick.Take a look and see what you think.
....Do your own design work next time guys!
January 30, 2006
links for 2006-01-30
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Chewbacca blogs, and it's some of the most incisive commentary I've read on current events. (Via Steve Rubel)
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Sue Pelletier reviews research on how actors remember their lines - which has interesting implications for anyone interested in how things are learnt
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Jeff Jarvis rips into the waste of money and talent baked into converntional conference formats.
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Fellow Corante-hubbist Shel Holtz picks up two examples of the power of apologising.
What is training for?
The focus of your core training should be on creating the space and capability for great thinking and relationships.That's Lisa Haneberg on how to ensure training is not a waste of time. I so agree.
January 29, 2006
links for 2006-01-29
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A shot of pure Cluetrain from Doc Searls, in response to Richard Edelman's posting on the rise of individual influence
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Good post by Hans Henrik H. Heming at CPH127, including a good summary of DART model for innovation with customers.
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Open Sourcing Boat Production... watch your boat being build online
Witless contributors...
Neil McIntosh of Guardian Unlimited does a terrific fisking of the National Union of Journalists' code of conduct for using "witness contributors". That, by the way, is their euphemism for "citizen journalists", which somehow makes them sound like dubious accessories to some kind of crime. The real crime here is the NUJ's against common sense, as Neil's commentary highlights.
Neil asks at the end: "So did they deliberately set out to kill user generated content with this code, or was it just an inability to grasp the issues involved that led them down this path?" Personally, I tend to see more cockups than conspiracies so I'll vote for the second option.
Hat tip: Anthony Mayfield.
January 27, 2006
links for 2006-01-27
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Interesting post suggesting that the future lies in individual tools like blogs, that allow groups to form around them in a more flexible way. I'm inclined to agree.
January 25, 2006
Stormhoek: The Podcast
Earlier this week, James Cherkoff and I had lunch with Jason Korman of Stormhoek, the wine brand that has been enjoying considerable success using blogging. Jason talks about the practical applications of the ideas we talk about on our Open Sauce workshops - creating conversations with customers, bypassing conventional market research and design processes, and allowing customers to be really engaged in where the brand is going.
So here is some our conversation in the form of a podcast, with some shownotes below giving the gist of the conversation. I think it's worth a listen, though I say so myself.
Download the Podcast - 21m 17s - MP3 (12.1MB)
Podcast RSS feed for iPodder etc.
Show notes
0.00 Johnnie's introduction
0.23 James asks if it's true that Stormhoek's blog doubled sales
0.33 Jason answers that... yes, it's broadly true... sales have doubled since we started blogging.
0.52 Blogging is fascinating, it's like an ongoing focus group... we're a young company and we are happy to expose things warts and all... we want to hear what people have to say...
1.46 James: so you like criticism? Jason: Yes. We want to know what we can improve
2.10 Johnnie asks how blogging has changed Stormhoek.
2.27 Jason: you're sort of on the small end of a funnel.. you're getting all this information and it's up to the business to figure out what you're going to do with it. One of the great values of blogging is you can ask the market questions and get an immediate response. When you see the total of market opinions you get a real feel of where you're going...
3.42 Johnnie: You're a small player in the wine market and you've courted controversy. How is that working?
3.52 Jason: The challenge with wine is to break through the clutter in an industry with lots of products from all over the world. To have an impact we have to have A) great product and B) something interesting to say. Blogging helps to do that... an enormous opportunity.. and it's very cost-efficient. It's hard to think of a way of marketing that would be less expensive.
4.56 James asks about the impact on the wine trade
5.10 Jason: We've had a lot of trade press recently. It tends to focus on the free samples to bloggers but they misunderstand what we're trying to do. It's like going into a bar and buying someone a drink. You do it not to give them a free drink, but to start a conversation. All we've done is use our product as a way to start conversations with people. That's what marketing today is about: conversations with people. We're lucky to have a product that is a social lubricant.
6.25 Johnnie: the blog is not for connoisseurs... how he likes the way the blog explains the mysteries of the wine trade to the layman. For example, have championed the use of screw tops over corks... So this has an impact not on experts but on me, Joe Blow
7.09 Jason explains the story about screwtops being better than corks - and how Stormhoek chose to play this.
7.36 Jason talks about the problem of the wine industry: it's done a great job of alienating consumers by making the whole product pretentious and elitist. We want to democratise wine. One of the ideas of the blog is to have everyday people, who don't know a lot about wine, talk about how they engage with the product.
8.53 Johnnie: theme of talking to customers as if they're intelligent. The wine industry in some ways treats them like idiots... Previous attempts to popularise wine have resulted in Black Tower and Blue Nun, dumbed down products.
9.58 Jason: The wine industry has done a great job of putting people off. And the wine trade has continued that with, for instance, far too many varieties on display that confuse the consumer.
10.44 Jason talks about the notion of "terroire" - the traditional emphasis on the location the wine comes from, it's very place-centric and the trouble is, everyone is using the same terroire argument. And it becomes a meaningless argument. We want to use messages other than about where the wine comes from.
11.44 James asks for examples of how Stormhoek listens to the market. Jason talks about how their best wine is their Sauvingnon Blanc... and we found some people like it - and some don't. You forget that what we like as producers isn't necessarily what the consumer likes. We've been astounded by the popularity of our Rose even though we expected other things to do better.
12.53 Jason talks about Stormhoek's competition seeking new design ideas for the packaging. We offered £1000 - and about 150 different people submitted ideas. For us, it wasn't about the individual idea, it was about engagement. People cared enough about we are doing to take the time to do this. We gleaned something from those people that sent us off in a direction we would never otherwise have gone in, and will give us a wine which will look like nothing else on the shelf. A contrast between insular inward-looking design and open source with your customers. You're not designing for yourself but to meet the needs of the market.
16.00 The customers who are involved in Stormhoek are in the thousands, not hundreds of thousands - but those people have had an impact on our business, on our product.
16.29 Where we're moving our blog to is to create a window onto the business of making and selling wine. We're talking about the ups, the downs, the frustrations.
16.44 James asks about how the big supermarkets are reacting to what Stormhoek are doing. Jason: For many of them, this whole thing comes out of left field and it's not what they're used to. They are sceptical. We're developing a promotion for one of them which partners with a tech company... and that idea of a tech company promoting with a wine business creates a richness which wasn't there before.. and I think the grocers will begin to see what we're doing.
18.55 Jason refers to Hugh Macleod's idea of brands as idea amplifiers and this is what guides Stormhoek. Wine doesn't have to be about pretence it can be about software, about uploading photos to flickr, about engagement in lots of different ways over a bottle of wine. More interesting than what temperature it was fermented at. There is enormous interest that a little winery such as ours is taking such a different approach.
19.35 Jason: Wine marketing has to change, and if we don't do it, somebody else will.
19.43 James asks whether they'll let customers influence the product itself, not just the packaging and promotion. Jason: absolutely, that's fundamental. We will encouage people to voice their opinions in a way that will influence our style of wines and how we make them, it's just a matter of time.
20 31 Johnnie asks Jason to summarise the impact of blogging on Stormhoek. Jason: it makes us completely outward-looking.. it gives a richness to what we do everyday that fundamentally changes how we do our business and how we view the market. It's something I hope lots of wineries do and I think it could change the industry.
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January 24, 2006
Making conversation
James and I are fond of the label "Open Source Marketing", without (I hope) getting too attached to it or pedantic about it. We use it to cover a range of ways in which organisations can create more real engagement with customers.
A lot of the time, we talk about companies using blogs to create new relationships with customers. But let's avoid two misconceptions.
OS marketing doesn't have to be all techie. When Red Bull set up The Art of The Can they went for high touch not high tech.
And it won't always mean the only way to succeed is with the kind of porosity that blogging might entail. Sometimes, the best way to get talked about is to have something really provocative, witty or smart to say, even if you remain in some ways rather secretive and exclusive. That's where Apple seems to hit the sweet spot. Grant McCracken (my fellow Corante Hub member) gives a good example of this today.
More bloggers
Two interesting new bloggers have arrived. David Maister, professional services guru, has been added to my aggregator. (Spotted by Mark Lloyd.)
Meanwhile McDonalds is having another crack at blogging after getting their fingers burnt doing their Lincoln Fry thing a few months back. This time it's their head of CSR, Bob Langert, who's having a go. Shel Israel is currently underwhelmed by the single post. I'd add that I think it's offputting of Mickey D to put TERMS AND CONDITIONS highlighted in block capitals leading to a less-than-warmhearted legal boilerplate. But let's keep our fingers crossed. There's a learning curve for corporates trying this stuff.
I'm sure a lot of them would benefit from Jeff Jarvis' observations on the ethic of interactivity. What I like about Jeff's approach is that it's pragmatic rather than moralistic. For instance, here's his take on moderation:
Q: Should you moderate interactivity?Yes. As I've said before, I try not to write too many rules on how to do blogging... there are always exceptions. For instance, I think comments are great but Seth Godin doesn't host them and his blog is still a good read. I think figuring out your own style in a practical way is better than relying on a rulebook.A: If you want to. But don’t think that you can tidy up comments any better than you can tidy up the world. People are messy and so’s life. Get used to it.
Papal bull
The Times reports
The Vatican has been accused of trying to cash in on the Pope's words after it decided to impose strict copyright on all papal pronouncements.This sounds bonkers to me, especially if this rumour turns out to be true (I find it hard to believe):For the first time all papal documents, including encyclicals, will be governed by copyright invested in the official Vatican publishing house, the Libreria Editrice Vaticana.
A Milanese publishing house that had issued an anthology containing 30 lines from Pope Benedict's speech to the conclave that elected him and an extract from his enthronement speech is reported to have been sent a bill for 15,000 Euros (£10,000). This was made up of 15 per cent of the cover price of each copy sold plus legal expenses of 3,500 Euros.Still, an alliance between the Vatican and the RIAA could make for some fun historical miniseries in the 22nd Century.
Hat tip: The Brand Builder Blog
UPDATE: But in case we underestimate the institution's real catholicism, I'm pleased to see from AdPulp that "Monsignor Isidore Rozycki, the head Catholic priest for the Greater Waco area, plans to bless the (Hooters) chain's newest location at New Road and Interstate 35."
January 23, 2006
links for 2006-01-23
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Antony Mayfield wonders if PR should change its name to "brand communications"
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Jeff faces the prospect of becoming a kidney donor and his family history of kidney disease. He plans on blogging it all... "it's my way of dealing with the situation." Good luck, Jeff.
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James Governor proposes an iTunes boycott. If I ever used iTunes, I'd join him.
January 22, 2006
Links and tags
You may have noticed that I'm experimenting with posting links here via the Delicious automatic thingy, as per Steve Rubel's tip. I quite like this for providing quick pointers where I don't have a huge amount of commentary to add. And it's a fun gizmo, once you get it sussed out: I can collate links at the press of a button. I'm also keen to support the whole practice of tagging.
For the moment, I'm using Technorati tags for my other posts... Maybe I should root around for a Movable Type plugin that does both?
In place of 42
After he left a comment here, I discovered and enjoyed Nick Smith's blog. Nick is engaged in...
an exploration of an idea that does not leave me alone - that in spite of appearances, we are powerful beyond belief - and that realising this need be neither complex nor difficult.I really admire the boldness of that aim, and the risk Nick takes of being mocked. But then Nick believes
...sometimes, in order to make real progress in this life, we need to step out beyond the horizon of our present understanding and stake our claim in the unknown, not knowing exactly what this entails or how we'll get there.Yes!
I enjoyed his post How to do what you love, which is his response to Paul Graham's essay. Here's some of what Nick has to say
Alas, although the piece is well thought out and researched, the advice is complex and discouraging. The final paragraph starts-There's something about this that really rings bells for me, although I tend to use slightly different language. I don't intend to start a game of "definition deckchairs" by doing this, I'm just attempting to get clear what I think, and I'm revisiting my stomping ground of distinguishing between the complex and the complicated."Whichever route you take, expect a struggle. Finding work you love is very difficult. Most people fail. Even if you succeed, it's rare to be free to work on what you want till your thirties or forties."
Whenever something seems complex I always think it's a sure sign we don't fully understand the problem yet. Truth is always simple. When we can get to see the bigger picture, the larger context, clarity and simplicity follow, but to do this means first being able to raise our level of consciousness.
Life is a complex business because, well, it's somewhat affected by the uncontrollable actions of 6 billion other human beings, to say nothing of the effects of the tides, solar flares et al. If we accept its complexity, we accept that we can never fully understand it. So we can give up the painstaking search for the answer (or settle for 42, as per Douglas Adams). The search for the right answer, out there, treats life as if it is complicated. And of course, if we treat it as complicated, it will be. Paul Nick has a nice take on the ptifalls of looking for an answer out there:
Maybe I'd be better off helping them to take a lot of what they've learnt in school with a big pinch of salt - let them see that the laws, the rules and 'the way things are' are pretty much other peoples' fearful thinking taken form - but they can choose to not go down that road.Leaving aside my nitpicking on language, I'd like to share in
In my own work, I'm pleasantly surprised how sometimes what seem like intractable problems for people unravel in response to a simple intervention. Sometimes, it's me that makes the intervention, sometimes it's someone else. Often what charaterises the shift is a move away from making complicated meanings out of things. (See the gestalt joke, below)
A gestalt joke
I've been telling this joke a lot recently, so I thought I'd share it here.
George the farmer has got to that time of year when his fields need ploughing. It's the ideal time, and he knows the weather forecasts indicate that he'd be smart not to leave it another week.
Trouble is, George's tractor is up the spout and won't be back from repairs until the end of the month. George decides to try and borrow the tractor of his neighbour across the fields. After all, the neighbour has just done all his ploughing and probably won't be using it.
So George sets off across the fields to talk to his neigbour. He starts out thinking, "I'm sure it will be fine, he'll be happy to lend it to me"
After a few strides, it occurs to him "Of course, I'll offer to pay for the fuel..."
A few strides more and he thinks, "I'm sure it will be ok.. though some poeple can be a bit funny about lending things"
A few strides more..."Hmmm, I haven't talked to him much lately... I hope he's not upset with me..."
Later... "Well, he did give me that funny look in the village store last month... I don't know what that was about"
Later... "Oh, I hope he's not going to give me a hard time about this... I'm only asking, after all"
You get the picture, as he strides along, he runs over all the pitfalls that could await him.
Anyway, eventually George reaches his neighbour's farmhouse and taps a little awkwardly at the door.
As soon as his neighbour opens the door, Georges says to him, "You can keep your blasted tractor you miserable git. I never wanted it in the first place!!"
I was orignially told this joke by a gestalt psychotherapist to highlight the value of separating our fantasies about the future from the observable facts of our experience. I rather think there's a moral in it for most of us.
Another addict...
My friend Jack Yan always insisted that mobile phones and blogging were two 21st Century phenomena he could do without. He still holds out on moblile phones but has allowed himself to be completely corrupted on blogging.
Like so many of us, his addiction started out with a little discreet reading, followed by the odd comment. Then he started to pitch in occasionally to brighten up the Beyond Branding Blog. I'd tease him about this, and he would reply much in the style of a character in British anti-drugs advertising, "sure I blog occasionally, but I can handle it...".
Well it now seems the addiction has taken full hold and he's now started blogging unashamedly under his own name. Jack's got a really interesting perspective on branding and wider issues. He's a Chinese-born New Zealander with fingers in various international pies, including his own fashion website and printed magazine.
January 21, 2006
links for 2006-01-21
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Another trend is spotted: the New Puritans who eschew binge drinking, long-haul tourism etc. Found via Tim Kitchin who dubs them the "neocroms"
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Katherine Stone with an entry to the department of "whatever next"
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David Burn finds some more examples of clumsy attempts by agencies to influence the blogosphere
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Jack Yan gives an update on the expansion of New Voyages, the Start Trek sequel created by the fans... which has got original stars Walter Koenig and George Takei taking part
January 20, 2006
Bypassing the middleman in market research
I'm reading John Seddon's book on quality management, I want you to cheat!. It challenges conventional ideas of managing quality through service guarantees and measurements.
He contrasts two approaches to using customer feedback. One bank employed a firm of consultants to do "mystery shopping" in its branches, leading to staff discontent at notions of spying by "experts".
A Canadian bank took a different approach: they invited a large number of their customers to take part in a program. They would write a letter to their local branch manager after each visit, reporting their experience. They discovered that different branches had different types of customer, so they were able to respond flexibly to the feedback.
I am sure the second approach was cheaper as well as more useful.
January 19, 2006
links for 2006-01-19
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An extreme anecdote on what it means to really listen
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Depressing take on what it takes to improve service on failing airlines
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This is an astonishing account of using facilitation to create a 3000 strong people's assembly, a radically inclusive approach to feeding democracy at the grassroots.
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Mark Brady has some fun with the notion that Genghis Khan was a great manager.
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Jack Yan always has an interesting take on how his adopted home should present itself to the world
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A great example of open source marketing from the PSFK blog. Give cameras to the concert audience, edit the results and release at Sundance. Cool.
January 18, 2006
Learning - two way street
A few weeks ago, I linked to Kathy Sierra's excellent crash course in learning theory. This drew an interesting comment from Brian Alger, who has now extended his response to Kathy's post here: Theory: Learning Theory on a Crash Course. Brian raises some useful caveats and elaborations - for example about the limits of a cognitive model of learning and the pitfalls of seeing learning as a deliverable.
The part of this that most interests me is that it's useful to decide whether you want to treat learning as a one-way street, where the teacher delivers content to the learner. For some things in my life, that's pretty much what I need. I don't want to co-create ways to reformat tables of contents in Word, I want Microsoft to show me how.
Or do you want it to be a two-way street, where it's possible for both parties to be learning? And there are plenty of areas where this is a more useful model. It's also the area that most excites me, and it's why I tend to position myself as a facilitator rather than a trainer. For much of the work I do, I don't have an easy answer; the job is to join the client in reflecting on what they're doing and together coming up with something new that works.
I suppose it's no surprise that a lot of talk on the web uses the analogy of "installing new software in the mind" for training people. I've come to be rather suspicious of this way of seeing things, as it perpetuates the notion of the learning experience as something done by one person to another. I tend to see my role as more like improving the bandwidth between people. OK, itself a dodgy metaphor but my starting assumption is that human beings are already rather brilliant creatures, and the more they are able to share with each other the more exciting and useful are the ideas they can generate together.
In my original post I enthused about applying a learning model to branding. And here again, take your choice of whether you want to see branding as something essentially done to people or done with them. James posted a great story yesterday (Why Hells Angels Know Best) about what happened when Harley Davidson stopped trying to dictate what its brand was and let itself be changed by its hard core customers.
(I also appreciated Brian's argument for not treating the brain as a completely distinct entity. Instead, he favours the notion of bodymind. One of the reasons I often use Improv activities when working with teams is that they can help us get away from a purely intellectual way of learning or sharing in favour of something involving the whole body.)
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January 17, 2006
Buzz agencies
Ben McConnell speculates on the future of all the buzz marketing agencies and reckons the losers will be those who try to mechanize evangelism or develop incentive programs to build word of mouth. The winners will help companies listen better and build loyalty through customer communities.
Here's my rambling way of saying I agree with him.
For the mechanisers, I always remember Woody Allen's satirical ambition to "forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. And then see if I can get them mass-produced in plastic." Of course, everyone wants to use the power of technology to leverage yadda yadda... but when we try to aggregate the myriad voices out there into just a set of metrics we risk to deluding ourselves about what's happening and risk cutting ourselves off from the messy reality.
Brand pulse charts are fine as far as they go... but without the verbatim comments they are arid and dull. They may have some intellectual curiosity but they don't have the impact that the real bits of customer conversations do. And I think most of us have a pretty good ear for sensing the difference between a real conversation and a fake one...
And if that fails, we have an ever-smarter network for spreading the word when conversations are faked. Just ask Cillit Bang. Well actually, just ask Tom Coates about them (he's currently the fifth item when you google that brand.)
As for incentives: in the workshops I do with James, there's sometimes a lightbulb moment for clients when they realise that engaging customers needn't cost money. In fact, if you do it right you tap into people's natural desire to belong, to participate, to learn. A quick read of Punished by Rewards will also demonstrate how financial incentives often diminish engagement.
James made the point the other day that part of the new paradigm for marketing is to really allow the possibility that your customers are intelligent. It's worth listening to them because they actually know more about their needs* than you do. You know your product... they know about their lives. If you want to spend a fortune trying to be more clever than your customers, well good luck. On the whole it might be cheaper and easier to assume they have some idea about what they need and want. And then ask yourself if you'd like to hear their feedback straight, or muddled up with the hired voices of a few carnival barkers your agency has recruited?
(Oh, while I'm on this point, would you like to hear it for free online in unmediated conversations, or would you prefer to pay for it to filtered via an "expert" focus group moderator.)
I do think there is a role for agencies in all this. I don't think they are inherently evil. Conversations can be facilitated even though they can't be controlled. Put it this way: if I go to a party it's nice if someone has arranged some food and a band to play. I don't care whether the party host did it themselves or hired someone to do it for them. But if they hire courtesans to get me to buy champagne, I'm outta there.
*BTW this knowledge may not be explicit so it won't come out in focus groups.
January 16, 2006
A terrific post by Grant
A terrific post by Grant McCracken - Who's Coke Is It, Anyway? - which observes the latest trend among Coke fans in the US: buying the Mexican version of the brand at a premium. Apparently instead of embracing this, Coca-Cola is trying to stop it. Grant says
TCCC is acting like administrators of the Roman empire who have discovered that they must now contend with a small group of enthusiasts in Gaul who worship Rome and Romanness with new intensity. The Roman decision: put them down! Because the passion of the zealot is dangerous even if it happens, for the moment, to run in your direction. It's the principle of the thing. "We don't want your zeal," says the administrator, "we just want your obedience."The opposite of Open Source Marketing.
Distributed intelligence
There's an interesting post by Shawn Callahan on how Google is applying the Wisdom of Crowds by creating an internal market in decision-making.
Mirror, mirror....
A big hat-tip to Stefan Liute for his post The biological hardware for culture. He points to this article from the NY Times: Cells that read minds. Here are a few morsels of the Times piece:
"We are exquisitely social creatures," Dr. Rizzolatti said. "Our survival depends on understanding the actions, intentions and emotions of others."NB that notion of understanding by feeling, not thinking.He continued, "Mirror neurons allow us to grasp the minds of others not through conceptual reasoning but through direct simulation. By feeling, not by thinking." ...
Until now, scholars have treated culture as fundamentally separate from biology, she [another scientist] said. "But now we see that mirror neurons absorb culture directly, with each generation teaching the next by social sharing, imitation and observation."...
When you see someone touched in a painful way, your own pain areas are activated, he [another researcher] said. When you see a spider crawl up someone's leg, you feel a creepy sensation because your mirror neurons are firing.
And here's a snippet that I particularly liked:
Mirror neurons work best in real life, when people are face to face. Virtual reality and videos are shadowy substitutes.There's no substitute for a real meeting. And all this reinforces my experience that a huge amount more happens between us when we meet than the mere exchange of words. When I'm working with groups, I try not to overemphasise laborious flipcharting of "what we're learning" as I think it tends to devalue a lot of what we're learning unconsciously.
Note to self: more grist to the mill of challenging "the tyranny of the explicit".
Christina at Ricksticks notes
Christina at Ricksticks notes the arrival of a rebranding for Kodak with limited enthusiasm , coming as it does on the back of efforts like AT&T.
She observes
Well, it seems the rampant rebranding of the giants is continuing into '06...Designers grab onto these rebrandings with such gusto. Within hours, the blog postings and comments are burning with scandalous rebukes (like this one with over 200 comments) and, less often, praise.
I sometimes wonder whether this blogging energy (and I am as guilty as any) is a bit wasted.
Then again...
Nice observation by Nick Wreden:
H Gordon Selfridge, the founder of Selfridges, one of the best-known department stores in UK, first penned the well-known slogan, "the customer is always right."However, Selfridge died both insane and penniless.
Ghost blogs
Renee Hopkins Callahan does a nice round up of bloggers' views on ghostwritten executive blogs.
My two cents: I try to avoid inventing too many rules for blogging - I encourage companies to try stuff and see what happens. You can usually reverse your mistakes. And a lot depends on the quality of your ghost.
Reinvention
Hugh continues his theme that blogs are (as I summarise it) about being changed, more than changing others. blogging is all about "career re-invention". anything else is a bonus.
Forget your competitors...
... says Howard Mann in his riff on Guy Kawasaki's post on The Art of Branding.
Smart thinking
Earl Mardle gives a nice example of how an insurance company is using IT to create a smarter market in crash repairs.
I take the car to their "Care and Repair Centre", identify myself and confirm that I'd like a body shop near home. Then I wait 20 minutes while the team checks out the damage. Then the guy walks me through the damage they find and what needs doing and tells me that the photos and the job spec have been put on their secure website where their registered body shops can log in and bid for the work.They'll call me back in a couple of days to tell me where the job will be done and when to deliver it. No mess, no fuss.
The great return
I'm thoroughly enjoying Rob Paterson's bold series of posts on the theme The Great Return.
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6
Well illustrated, forthright, thought-provoking and wise.
I was struck by this observation in Part 2
The book over experience is a particularly dangerous idea. Julian Jaynes has made the case that when we learned to write we also lost our connection to the intuitive. Over time reason triumphed over innate understanding. In short, as we became enthralled with our intellect, we became clever but lost our wisdom. So today mothers worry about child rearing, read many books, but are closed to their innate wisdom.Rob's not repudiating reason and rationality, but he's putting it in its place. This really resonates with me, and it's why one of my favourites phrases is "the tyranny of the explicit". In fact, I'm tempted to write a book with that title (which would be nicely ironic).
If you've got time, check out what Rob's written. I think it's awesome.
January 14, 2006
Commitment
Jake McKee knows a thing or two about creating customer communities, and his post on seeing it through is a good example of his news from the trenches.
It reminds me of one of my favourite improv activities. If you've got a few spare minutes, try this with a friend or colleague.
Decide who is going to be the finder and who's the cheerer. Ok, finders, this is what you do. Get into a comfortable position, kneeling, sitting or standing and imagine you're going to pull a series of objects out of a sack or bin. I suggest you do it with lots of enthusiasm and get your hands and arms moving.
As you reach into your imagnary sack, pull the object out (and I mean move your hands and arms as if it is real) and name it out loud. Don't "try" to think of the object, see if you can just name whatever object it is that presents itself to your consciousness. If you stop "trying" to think of things, and resist the urge to censor, objects will just appear for you.
Meanwhile, you cheerers, your job is just to make encouraging noises to keep your partner going. Try doing this for two or three minutes and then change over.
What a lot of people find is that it's difficult to keep up a flow of objects. Often this is because they unconcsiously create extra rules for this activity... rules like "I can't repeat an object I (or anyone else) mentioned before"... or "if I pull out a vegetable, I can't just name another vegetable"... or "My objects have to be original".
Well, you can play by these rules if you like, but my suggestion is they actually block creativity. See what happens if you think less and just say the thing that comes to mind. If you have 16 carrots in a row, or find yourself in a long taxonomy of furniture, don't worry - just keep going. What I think you'll find is that if you keep the momentum up, the carrots will eventually run out and something new, and unexpected, will crop up. The creativity begins when the effort to be creative stops!
There's a few different meanings you can make out of this experience. But one is this: there's a lot be said for just committing to an action and keeping going, even if you're not thrilled with the results immediately... I'm not saying you need to persist with stuff that ain't working - just be careful to not think your way out of being genuinely creative.
January 13, 2006
Gee shucks
Declan Elliott has some very kind words about me. The feelings are entirely mutual. Check out his thoughts on Perpetual Betas.
New York
James and I are nearing the end of our visit to New York, exhausted but enthused. We've had some great meetings which have really fired our enthusiasm for our Open Sauce approach. I'll probably blog these once I get back to the UK and decompress.
We had dinner last night with Steve Harrington, Tom Guarriello and Howard Mann. Great company, even though I was turning into a zombie due to previous days of intense activity.
We're having a drink with Piers Fawkes this evening at 6, in the bar of the W on Union Square. Any other passing bloggers are welcome to join us.
Radical disintermediation..
..is the theme of Rob Paterson's post Indulgences - The Reformation - Our Time. Serious thought provocation.
January 8, 2006
Crichton on Complexity
Shawn Callahan at Anecdote links to a video presentation on complexity by Michael Crichton. Sean highlights these quotes:
To learn how to manage complex systems takes humility.Fascinating stuff.To manage complex systems takes the ability to admit we are wrong and to change course.
If you manage a complex system you are frequently if not always wrong.
January 7, 2006
Imperfection
Renee Hopkins Callahan has a nice editorial post at Corante pulling together some ideas kicked off by Elizabeth Albrecht, who suggested that marketers could place less emphasis on flawless promo materials:
Now, with the advent of cheaper and more accessible production methods maybe, therefore, our collateral doesn't have to be perfect any more. Maybe we can take more risks. Maybe throw out more ideas, enable others to comment and contribute.Mary Schmidt comments
In talking about our strategies, joint marketing, targets, etc. we came to the realization that one of our biggest issues is ahem our own perfectionism....Yet, in today's Web 2.0 world it's okay (even cool) to throw things out to the market that are a little rough around the edges. One of the terrific benefits of doing business on the Web is the interaction and community.I'll say a big Yes to that.
In fact, perfectionism could be seen as killing engagement, attempting to deny the reader the opportunity to share in the meaning-making. Perhaps it goes with an Intelligent Design model of how the world works: the genius creator is totally responsible for the result, instead of seeing (the Evolutionist viewpoint) that all progress is the result of mutations, the hit and miss of trying stuff out and sometimes making mistakes.
UPDATE: Antony Mayfield uses a nice analogy in his riff on this post, as well as the appealing title of unpasteurised marketing.
Dealing, then, with a greater volume of communications content, produced more quickly than it has been before, with necessarily "rougher edges" will have the added benefit being less pasteurised. To get a bit geeky for a moment, it means that marketing content will need to be in a perpetual beta mode.
Challenging the "trickle-down" theory of creation... and what it means for branding
This whole intelligent design vs evolution debate has been on my mind lately. There's a fascinating post by Steve Anderson at HuffPo, relating an interview between Der Spiegel and philosopher Daniel Dennett.
Dennett explains why the notion of intelligent design has such appeal to many people, and emphasises how radically the theory of evolution challenges man's sense of self. Here's the nub of it
Dennett: It's the idea that it takes a big fancy smart thing to make a lesser thing. I call that the trickle-down theory of creation. You'll never see a spear making a spear maker. You'll never see a horse shoe making a blacksmith. You'll never see a pot making a potter. It is always the other way around and this is so obvious that it just seems to stand to reason.Now let's add to this insight my favourite psychological notion, the fundamental attribution error (which explains how humans have a perceptual bias that leads us to overemphasise the genius of individuals, and to underemphasise the complex influece of context)... and you begin to question a great deal of popular narratives about how things happen in the world: that give too much emphasis to the heroes (political and organisational leaders, football managers etc), and end up - like the music industry - clinging to notions of owning intellectual property that in the end become absurd.Interesting, never quite thought about it that way. So since we're smart, smarter I assume than our environment, like, you know, rocks and trees, then something larger and grander than us made us.
SPIEGEL: You think this idea was already present in apes?
Dennett: Maybe in Homo Habilus, the handyman, who began making stone tools some 2 million years ago. They had a sense of being more wonderful that their artifacts. So the idea of a creator that is more wonderful than the things he creates is, I think, a very deeply intuitive idea. It is exactly this idea that promoters of Intelligent Design speak to when they ask, 'did you ever see a building that didn't have a maker, did you ever see a painting that didn't have a painter.' That perfectly captures this deeply intuitive idea that you never get design for free.
SPIEGEL: An ancient theological argument...
Dennett: ... which Darwin completely impugns with his theory of natural selection. And he shows, hell no, not only can you get design from un-designed things, you can even get the evolution of designers from that un-design. You end up with authors and poets and artists and engineers and other designers of things, other creators -- very recent fruits of the tree of life. And it challenges people's sense that life has meaning.
I feel I should apologise for a segway from these grand ideas to the sordid world of branding, but James and I have been going over our OpenSauce workshop content lately - and this stuff seems very pertinent to it. One of the themes we constantly return to is the need in marketing to loosen attachment to command-and-control and have more faith in the widom of crowds and the ability of the masses - not elites - to create value in the brand; to decide what the brand is. If the theory of evolution challenges man's sense of self and his notion of God, there's a parallel case for shaking the assumptions that branding is really the work of the expert brand managers and design consultants who currently ply their trade.
Shoot me down in flames.
January 5, 2006
Kathy Sierra continues to share
Kathy Sierra continues to share her first rate insights with her crash course in learning theory. Most of the principles she applies to learning...
Learners are not "empty vessels" waiting to be filled with content pushed into it by an expert, blogger, author, etc. Learning is something that happens between the learner's ears--it's a form of co-creation between the learner and the learning experience. You can't create new pathways in someone's head... your job is to create an environment where the chances of the learner "getting it" in the way that you intend are as high as possible....could be taken and applied to how companies think about branding: in short it should not be about telling people the truth*, but engaging them in creating something new with you... perhaps within certain parameters you may set (and sometimes not).
*Afterthought. Reading this two days later, I realise this is badly expressed. What I'd prefer to say is should not be about telling people your own particular notion of "the truth" of your brand. I didn't intend to advocate (more) dishonesty in marketing!
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Lagged
I got back from New Zealand yesterday morning and am struggling to get to grips with jet lag, and with very short, cold days as well as a pile of mail, both snail and e varieities. And I'm off again on Monday for a trip to New York with James Cherkoff. Seems my New Year is all go.
January 3, 2006
Bonkers
That's how I'd describe the policy of Coldplay's label, which is blocking use of their latest CD, according BoingBoing:
Here are some gems: "This CD can't be burnt onto a CD or hard disc, nor can it be converted to an MP3" and "This CD may not play in DVD players, car stereos, portable players, game players, all PCs and Macintosh PCs." Best of all, the insert explains that this is all "in order for you to enjoy a high quality music experience." Now, that's quality.
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January 1, 2006
Not trusting experts
Thomas de Zengotita recommends this book: Expert Political Judgment : How Good is It? How Can We Know? Zengotita writes
The answer is shocking at first, but makes perfect sense on further reflection. It seems that experts (not only in politics but other areas as well) are worse judges of what is likely to happen than a reasonably well-informed ordinary citizen.Makes sense to me...How could this be? Well, the real fun is in the details of the research, but the common-sense foundation for the result is simply stated. First, experts are likely to have some framework of interpretation to defend, so they force facts into that framework. Second, experts have a gazillion factors to consider when they make predictions, so they get lost in a gazillion plus scenarios and lose track of the obvious.
As a result of these all-too-human inclinations, experts actually come out worse as predictors than what you would get if you just chose outcomes at random.
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