A Better Course

• Is the Tipping Point Toast? — Duncan Watts — Trendsetting
  “A rare bunch of cool people just don’t have that power. And when you test the way marketers say the world works, it falls apart. There’s no _there_ there.”
  (tags: fastcompany article marketing tippingpoint duncanwatts research culture network)
• Slashdot Founder Questions Crowds Wisdom – Bits – Technology – New York Times Blog
  “The Digg method and Digg community are a wider audience than Slashdot,” he said. “But with sites like Digg, it’s the wisdom of the crowds or the tyranny of the mob. You never know what you’re going to get.”
  (tags: social online nytimes slashdot digg)
• Neuromarketing » Why Good Ad Copy Works
  the key lesson is to keep the reward in mind. The target customer is always seeking rewards […] To the extent that the copy can help the reader visualize that reward, it will be effective.
  (tags: neuromarketing copywriting marketing advertising)
• Vuitton Is Embracing Medium of the Masses – New York Times
  Mr. Beccari said the ad would be particularly useful in reaching new audiences in fast-growing markets like China, where the image of Louis Vuitton may be less established than in Western countries.
  (tags: advertising strategy china asia emergingmarkets louisvuitton nytimes lvmh luxury)
• swissmiss: tpod
  first you take the tea bag out of the box. than unfold it…it becomes a little boat. than put it into the cup with hot water and let it swim around until the tea is ready.
  (tags: swissmiss tea elaborate gimmick entertaining)

• Pownce Errors : iain tait | crackunit.com
  if you’ve got a web business these days you need to have a great error page. I bet most brand consultancies haven’t cottoned on to this yet. Next time I see a branding presentation I’m going to raise it.
  (tags: iaintait branding online crackunit pownce funny)
• Internet ’96
  Few websites from these early years have been archived, and many of the best preserved ones were created by fast food and soft drink corporations because they were some of the earliest adapters of the internet. In 2010 this will be about Facebook apps.
  (tags: online internet lego mcdonalds pepsi history)
• Understanding productivity in the Information Age – MIT Sloan Newsroom
  Workers who received more novel information (as measured by an unusual word appearing in the company’s e-mail traffic and then diffusing through part of the firm’s e-mail network) had measurably higher productivity than others.
  (tags: mitsloan research multitasking language information networking)
• what vs. how (tecznotes)
  Divergence means sketching, exploring, playing, choosing the right metaphors. Convergence means you have a goal in sight, and you’re problem-solving to attain it within known constraints. We shift from one mode to another [during] a client engagement
  (tags: tecznotes design play dialogue)
• eHarmony – Psychology – Online Dating – Compatibility Testing – New York Times
  But now some social scientists have rediscovered the appeal of adult supervision— provided the adults have doctorates and vast caches of psychometric data. Online matchmaking has become a boom industry as scientists test their algorithms for finding lov
  (tags: online dating nytimes science sociology)
• Neuromarketing » Why Choose This Book?
  Montague concluded that, for some reason, Coke had established its brand in the reward and valuation circuitry of some brains, while Pepsi had not. He didn’t have a good explanation for that, and notes that caffeine can interfere with dopamine processin
  (tags: neuromarketing bookreview cocacola pepsi)

Some fascinating research from MIT Sloan today; Understanding productivity in the Information Age. The project consisted of analysing data from emails on a single company’s network:

As part of a study of an executive recruiting firm conducted over a five-year period, the researchers were able to analyze ten months of the firm’s e-mail traffic. While the content of the recruiting firms’ e-mails was encrypted […] the research team could track the flow of particular encrypted words through the firm’s e-mail network. The researchers then correlated those findings with data […] about factors such as individual workers’ project workload, project completion time and compensation

All the results in the press release are interesting, but the one that I found most fascinating was:

Workers who received more novel information (as measured by an unusual word appearing in the company’s e-mail traffic and then diffusing through part of the firm’s e-mail network) had measurably higher productivity than others. In this study, encountering just 10 novel words more than the average worker was associated with $700 more in revenue generated per employee.

The whole study has an interesting view on mundanity; I don’t think I’ve read an article in the last year that speaks about email as much other than an irritant, and it’s fairly well ingrained as part of our everyday. The idea that these daily transactions of information contain abstract, important – and, better – identifiable data about how an individual and a company functions is actually quite exciting.

Possibly more importantly, though, is the concept of novel information as something that can be followed through conversations, and through the regular flow of information. From the data given, it looks like this information is as likely to be a new idea as a new project or project update. It would be even better to know how many of the novel ideas here ended up being successful, or if (as I’d expect) the act of having and communicating an idea in itself increased productivity.

There’s been a lot written and said recently about brand engagement – essentially, the idea that if someone uses something related to your brand, they will be more likely to trust (and by extension buy) your product further down the line. Even more problematically, this has frequently been with reference to brand’s Facebook applications. I’ve remained cynical about this in general, because it seems to say that your “brand” and your “product” are two different things that can be separated and put back together more or less at the whim of marketers.

In a recent discussion on two brands every marketer loves (that’s Innocent and Apple, in case you hadn’t guessed) I started thinking about the idea of self evidence in opposition to the idea of engagement. Innocent constantly demand engagement – their packaging shows in incredible attention to detail. This can be ignored, to an extent, but it would take superhuman levels of distraction to fail to notice that your juice bottle is wearing a little hat.

None of this speaks about the (quite nice) smoothie itself, however – there’s an extent to which you have to buy into buying a drink that’s wearing a small wooly hat.

Apple’s packaging, by contrast, demands almost no attention. The proof of the quality (the evidence) comes when you use their products; you know it’s good because you know how it feels to use a good product. Apple’s packaging is not without its obsessives, but engagement follows evidence, and not vice versa.

In both of these examples, by the time you’ve got to the packaging you’re quite close to the product itself; the disconnect between the thing that demands engagement and the thing that provides evidence is not great. The idea of engagement is even more problematic when it moves online. Viral campaigns such as those for The Dark Knight and Nine Inch Nails’ Year Zero have justifiably attracted attention; but these are media which were always going to attract an engaged fanbase.

To use a perhaps more typical, and certainly more personally embarassing example, I spent time over the weekend solving the puzzle on Panic At The Disco‘s website. It was well put together, made sense within their brand (keyword: snide), and I was certainly engaged with it. But I’m far from sure it’s made me less likely to describe them as ‘crappy’, ’emo’ or ‘third tier’ because no amount of engagement on my part will make them into anything other than a crappy third tier emo band (and guilty pleasure).

Ultimately, no amount of ‘engagement’, whatever that means to any individual consumer, is going to turn a bad product into a good one. And if your product is a good one, they’ll engage with it on their own terms, to much greater effect.

• What You Really Want to Buy | Business Week
  Researchers predict that neuromarketing will produce plenty of hype in the coming year or two. Unlike information culled from traditional focus groups, the signals issuing from the brain can point to what the subjects are really thinking and feeling.
  (tags: neuromarketing businessweek research)
• Is It a Recession? Marketers Seem to Think So – New York Times
  Those with long memories may recall other times that ads were devoted to encouraging consumer frugality rather than celebrating unchecked spending. This time the shift in tone is taking place earlier in the economic cycle.
  (tags: nytimes marketing recession advertising)

Matterbox is one of the more fun marketing ideas I’ve seen recently:

Matter is a collection of a dozen or so enticing or intriguing physical things, each one from a different company, occasionally delivered to your house in a distinctive box on a Saturday morning.

I was going to describe it as one of the better ideas, but I’d like to see how well executed the first box is before I go that far. Still, it has all the hallmarks of a superb idea. It’s on your (the consumers’) terms – you ask for it, and if you don’t like anything in the box you get to ignore, recycle or give away whatever’s in it. But if you do like something in it; well, you just found something you like and someone else had a good campaign; I look forward to seeing more from Matter, online as well as in the post.

• adaptive path » blog » Andrew Crow » Bring Bad Design to Justice…maybe
  “I’m not saying aesthetics aren’t important. I’m saying that the attitude exhibited by this set of stickers is indicative of a mindless condescension that has lead to the marginalization of the practice of visual design.”
  (tags: design adaptivepath andrewcrow community)
• I Believe in Advertising | Advertising Blog & Community » Havaianas: Welcome Mat
  When leaving for the day, people simply slid their feet in and stepped out of the mat. When returning home, the flip-flops were popped back in. Because Havaianas are impervious to bad weather, the mat can be kept either inside or outside.
  (tags: design advertising ambient ibelieveinadvertising)

• adliterate: Boring people know the most interesting things
  What clients really want is an effect – a real sense that the marketing activity they undertake is selling goods and services. Not shifting a few here and there but manifestly affecting the momentum of their business.
  (tags: adliterate research marketing advertising online statistics)
• Hershey product looks like drug – police – Jan. 24, 2008
  The Hershey Co. is halting production of Ice Breakers Pacs in response to criticism that the mints look too much like illegal street drugs, the company’s president and chief executive officer said Thursday.
  (tags: cnn packaging hershey)

• Streaming Ads Driving Users Away From Content – New York Times
  Younger viewers: more tolerant, less recall: If you are going to aim a streaming ad at someone, viewers 18-24 are somewhat more tolerant of the practice. 57.6 percent will watch an an online video ad and not become too annoyed to finish viewing.
  (tags: nytimes advertising attention distraction video online)
• Will Marketing Change After Star’s Death? – WSJ.com
  “The best thing that could happen is that all this marketing stuff just goes on and the movie and the campaign don’t turn into some kind of weird grave marker,” he said.
  (tags: marketing wsj viralmarketing thedarkknight)
• When a New Job Leads to Resentment | Business Week
  If people don’t talk about their unease or resentment, don’t dignify it with your own questions or soothing comments. Be open to input, but don’t feel you have to console people or interpret and react to sidelong glances, long sighs, and other signals.
  (tags: management leadership businessweek)
• Nintendo Earnings Nearly Double on Wii – New York Times
  Group net profit at Nintendo Co., which also makes Super Mario and Pokemon games, totaled 258.93 billion yen ($2.43 billion) for the nine months ended Dec. 31, up 96.3 percent from 131.92 billion yen for the same period in fiscal 2006.
  (tags: nytimes computergames nintendo)
• The Death of Mass Luxury | Business Week
  The middle-income shopper is under pressure. Gas isn’t cheap, credit is hard to come by, and many of the same people who rode the housing bubble now see their monthly mortgage payments jumping while home values plunge. It makes for a nervous consumer.
  (tags: businessweek luxury markets)
• CBS to Make Internet Music Unit More Like Radio – New York Times
  Under the new arrangement, users who visit last.fm can search for and select any of 3.5 million songs to listen to on their computers through technology called streaming. There are limitations: any given song can only be played three times.
  (tags: nytimes last.fm music advertising)

• EA Leaps into Free Video Games | Business Week
  The idea is to build local social networking communities around games. “If only the guys who pay the most win, the game is dead, so it has to be tuned very carefully so that the really good players are the ones who actually win”
  (tags: computergames ea socialnetworking online advertising businessweek)
• brand new: It’s not about the 10%
  it’s less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public’s mood. Sure, there’ll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is… an “accidental Influential”
  (tags: brandnew garethkay duncanwatts viralmarketing marketing testing)