A Better Course

• The flat pack hammer (Monoscope)
  A CNC cut flat packed hammer, ideal for woodworking, cooking, furniture assembly or as a child’s toy.
  (tags: design hammer monoscope)
• adaptive path » blog » Peter Merholz » Don’t design for “mobile” – design for mobility
  we had been designing not just for the “PC,” but for a sedentary experience. We shared unstated assumptions that people would remain in one place for long periods of time, with little change in their environment.
  (tags: design mobile online adaptivepath)
• apophenia: what are marketing and advertising’s social responsibilities wrt youth?
  One of the reasons that companies have tapped into children is because they are the only true “new” market. More problematically, healthy economies are based on growth and growth doesn’t happen when people just consume what they need.
  (tags: advertising marketing teenagers children ethics zephoria danahboyd economics)
• I Believe in Advertising | Advertising Blog & Community » Financial Times: Cityscape
  “World business. In one place. We live in Financial Times.” One of my favourite ads of last year – original, clever advertising for a serious brand.
  (tags: ibelieveinadvertising financialtimes advertising poster)
• Infovore » Skate: Gaming for Generation C
  I find Skate exciting because it’s a prime example of a game that understands Generation C; it allows players to share game-information outside the game [..] just as they share movies, photos, and blogposts.
  (tags: infovore marketing computergames skate online web2.0)
• Wondermark by David Malki ! – 368: Facebook, Distilled.
  Wondermark sums up the Facebook experience.
  (tags: advertising comic facebook funny marketing socialnetworking online wondermark)

I honestly don’t know how I would have reacted if I’d been part of Orangina’s marketing team and the agency had presented this concept:

It looks like it came from a brief that asked for a change (probably for the ‘sexier’) to the previous staples of Orangina’s advertising (happy oranges, attractive people in rural France). The agency could have chosen a more widely loved internet subculture to reference, however – and even discounting that, it looks quite creepy. Sometimes, it’s okay to say no to a concept even if it does meet the brief.

• Mob Rule Brings Higher Quality at Gawker – Bits – Technology – New York Times Blog
  Mr. Denton says he’s noticed that the posts that generate the most interest are those that actually have something new to say. And these, sometimes take a little more time to report and write.
  (tags: media nytimes publishing blogging gawkermedia)
• On the campaign trail | Primary colour | Economist.com
  “I pulled the ad. I do not want it to be run at all.” Mike Huckabee, deciding not to run a negative ad against Mitt Romney. He then showed it to the media, and it has since appeared on news reports and the internet.
  (tags: media online theeconomist america election mikehuckabee mittromney)
• Advertising | How not to annoy your customers | Economist.com
  The greatest hope for in-store TV may be in emerging markets, where shoppers are hungrier for branded consumer goods than they are in the rich world.
  (tags: emergingmarkets theeconomist advertising retail)

When I read The Long Tail last year, I was disappointed at what I percieved to be a lack of working through the implications of living in a ‘both/and’, rather than an ‘either/or’ business climate. However, reading the Mr Splashy Pants analysis (briefly; Greenpeace’s campaign was a lot more successful than expected and they didn’t quite have the capacity to deal with it) makes Chris Anderson’s book seem incredibly relevant.

Most online campaigns aren’t going to get this level of attention – over double that predicted – but it’s far more likely in this than in any other kind of marketing you’re going to do. One of the main implications of the new climate is that more marketing departments will have to to plan for the best case scenario in the same way they’d plan for the worst case scenario.

• Travel Book Publishers Try to Reclaim the Web – New York Times
  The acquisition by BBC Worldwide of a majority stake in Lonely Planet prompted travel publishers to search for new sources of revenue online.“We want to be in a position where if the business collapses in 5 years we have a plan —unlike the music indus
  (tags: lonelyplanet bbc publishing travelguide nytimes online web2.0)
• How Marketers Will Collaborate in 2008: As “Frenemies” | Marketing Profs Daily Fix Blog
  ‘My vote for a business word we’ll hear a lot in 2008? “Frenemies.”’. It is my sincere wish that this is not the case in 2008 or ever.
  (tags: marketing marketingprofs neologism collaboration)
• What to Do With Taboo News When Teenagers Are Your Readers – New York Times
  Starlets usually get banned from the pages of teenage magazines after they get into trouble, but Jamie Lynn may prove to be an exception. Her fans have been so caught up in the news that some magazines have decided to address her pregnancy.
  (tags: publishing publicrelations jamielynnspears nytimes teenagers)
• Web Playgrounds of the Very Young – New York Times
  Second Life and other virtual worlds for grown-ups have enjoyed intense media attention in the last year but fallen short of breathless expectations. Children’s versions are much more popular, to the dismay of some parents and child advocacy groups.
  (tags: nytimes socialnetworking children web2.0 advertising)
• Macs, PCs and Music Downloads – New York Times
  “In the third quarter of 2007, exactly half of Mac owners paid to download music at least once, while only 16% of PC owners did.” Not sure about the analysis; I’d be interested to know about take-up of the iTunes store amongst PC as opposed to Mac users
  (tags: nytimes pc apple technology music)
• That Computer Is So You | Business Week
  Until recently, PCs were viewed by many in the industry as low-margin commodities. What changed? Apple proved with its flashy iPods, iPhones, and MacBook laptops that design really matters to consumers.
  (tags: businessweek apple design branding brand selfimage)
• The Long Nose of Innovation | Business Week
  the bulk of innovation behind the latest “wow” moment (multi-touch on the iPhone, for example) is also low-amplitude and takes place over a long period—but well before the “new” idea has become generally known, much less reached the tipping point.
  (tags: businessweek innovation)

Over the Christmas holidays I went home for a week. As is often the case at the end of the year, my family discussed what we’d enjoyed over the last year, which in turn became myself and my father trying to ‘sell’ each other our favourite things from 2007 – in my case, Last.fm and in his case the Slim Devices Squeezebox. I was interested that we both made the same claim about our favourite products; “it’s changed the way I listen to music“.

Both of these brands are incredibly fortunate to have this said about them; not only because “it changed the way I do something fairly fundamental” is a powerful piece of word of mouth marketing, but because it’s going to keep happening. It’s easy to remember and talk about the things that changed our lives, and they’re interesting to hear about because very few people’s lives or habits change often.

To go back to my post about narrative, these are the kinds of stories we incorporate into narrative about ourselves. However small the area of our life they affect, they still become part of us and part of what we talk about. To look at this from more of a product than a marketing point of view this time – do you want your product to change people’s lives? Do you know what that change would look like?

Originally, I started a generic post on the business or marketing books I’ve read this year. But there’s only really one book I want to write about, because I think the ideas in it are incredibly important to anyone in marketing or product design. These ideas are also the ones that seem to be the most ignored.

The most useful book I’ve read this year has been Joe Moran‘s Reading The Everyday. It is entirely about the mundane things in our lives; commuting, parking, working, service stations, renting or owning property. First, some extracts (emphasis mine) –

From Workspace:
the behaviour required of call-centre workers is similar to that required at McDonald’s – ‘a very stripped-down kind of interactive style, with some pseudo-Gemeinschaft thrown in’ …[like] a comment made, without apparent irony, by a member of the training staff at McDonald’s Hamburger University: ‘we want to treat each customer as an individual, in sixty seconds, or less’.

From Urban Space:
‘20 Sites‘… reveals the hidden temporality of the everyday by registering infinitesimal changes. A milkman delivers bottles in 1981, soon to become a historical curiosity; Giles Gilbert Scott’s red telephone box morphs into the more functional glass kiosk of the 1980s; satellite dishes sprout from roofs, then shrink or disappear as newer technologies make them redundant; the Peckham Odeon is knocked down, under pressure from the multiplexes. Some of these changes show the intrusion of market values into everyday spaces, but many of them are not so easily attributable.

From Non-Places:
‘Mondeo Man’ has… been caricatured… as someone who simply wants to retreat from the public sphere into the apolitical sphere of everyday life… an aspirational but insecure figure. He feels he has worked hard for his mid-range car, semi-detached suburban home and foreign holidays, and is keen to hold on to them by opposing excessive tax burdens and other forms of government interference… [This] argument obscures a complex relationship between the monitoring and anticipation of public opinion. ‘Mondeo Man’ may reflect a demographic reality, but he is also an invented (and gendered) construction, which may help to dissuade governments from taking difficult political decisions.

From Living Spaces:
The makeovers in Changing Rooms and similar programmes are not generally motivated with how rooms will be lived in after the dramatic ‘reveal’. To employ Judy Attfield’s useful distinction, such shows elevate a notion of design, which she defines as ‘things with attitude’, over the banal reality of material culture, which she calls ‘design in the lower case’. This concept of design specifically excludes ‘the disordered everyday clutter of the mundane’, the vast majority of objects and materials that do not form part of the conspicuous display of taste and style.

All of the above feel like a challenge to design and market better for the lives that people actually live – to make something that fits around our everyday lives and makes them better. To go back to the quotation about different kinds of design, the iPod would be an example, however obvious, of something that cuts across both kinds of ‘design’ as mentioned in the last quotation. It’s an elegant piece of design, and quite obviously a thing with attitude – but one of the things it does best is to make people less bored on a commute.

The book’s relentless focus on mundanity is an important reminder that the mundane something in which everyone partakes. Unless your product is aimed exclusively at members of royal families and Jay-Z, your target market is going to call call centres, find parking spaces, deal with clutter. I always feel deeply uncomfortable when I hear a marketer use the phrase ‘average person’ or ‘ordinary person’ – this is a thoroughly considered reminder that we are all ordinary people when we deal with the ordinary.

• Where’s the sausage?: Pedigree show the power of BEING the consumer
  One benefit of consumer empathy is of course better marketing, and ideas that truly connect. But another big benefit is internal engagement.
  (tags: marketing participation empathy consumer wheresthesausage pedigreechum)
• Mr Splashy Pants Update
  One of the problems with campaigning organisations is that we nearly always have over 100% of our time allocated at all points during the year. So when something like MSP happens, there isn’t any spare capacity to throw at the project
  (tags: marketing media wordofmouth notforprofit greenpeace behindthebuzz)

• Personal attention drives Apple Store success – (37signals)
  Apple’s stock is up nearly 135 percent for the year. 20 percent of its revenue comes from its physical stores and that number is growing: The stores accounted for $1.25 billion of Apple’s $6.2 billion in revenues in 2007’s fourth quarter, a 42 perce
  (tags: business customer apple customerservice retail 37signals marketing)

• …but a Monocle’s supposed to treat myopia >> Adam Greenfield’s Speedbird
  Tyler Brûlé has succeeded in one of the most daunting tasks faced by contemporary enterprise; establishing a resonant brand ex nihilo. The trouble is that the brand he brought into being says all the wrong things about me and what I value.
  (tags: monocle review adamgreenfield speedbird tylerbrule publishing)