Digital Thoughts

Lots of people have been talking recently about the idea that the real world and digital world are starting to become more blurred - I called it the 'environet' which is obviously a similar blurred line between the words environment and internet which as the spell checker on my computer has kindly elected to draw attention to by putting a red line below it, it could be an idea.  

My last two posts were about thought particles - the construction process of the mind and therefore everything in human culture. This one however is about Digital thinking. Not thinking about digital stuff - that thinking is itself digital. This is perhaps the biggest idea in the book 'thought particles' which inspired the last two posts.  This is the idea that experience is felt, touched, seen and in any way sensed in a digital way. This means that the way we internalize anything in the world is by translating it into binary code so that it can then be integrated into conscious understanding and ultimatley reformulated into new ideas. For example when we look at an object we are absorbing information such as form, size, colour, sound, space, smell etc. not as it really is, but as we perceive it. In order to do this every one of these variables is reduced into binary code. Though this is only a theory it kind of makes sense intuitively. You don’t see the colour blue as it really is you only see a reading of it which is a construct based on your experience of blue in the past, the processes in your eye, the things around the object etc... etc... All of this varied information needs to be combined in our heads. How could this be possible if they were not reduced down to something as simple as a series of yes' and no’s, A’s and B’s or 1’s and 0’s? 

So if our perception is itself digital then the invention of digital technology looks different - it looks a lot more like us. 

If this... 1101010111010101010101010000111101010101 was your perception of a piece of information, and this... 10101010111110001101101101110101010 was what sat behind the computer screen where you absorbed it, then surely you could cut and paste the two like this... 110101011101010101010101000011110101010110101010111110001101101101110101010, pretty easily in principle. One day we might not need to split them via two different interfaces. 

Matrix stuff!

Thought Chemisty in action

When I was young one of my parents favourite shows was LA law. The theme tune was pretty memorable and was composed by a bloke who is apparently the maestro of TV and film scores. According to the book from the last post he had a methodical approach to how they are constructed. In the case of LA LAW the alto saxophone represented that the show was meant to be racy. The french horn was meant to be related to the formality of the legal profession and the heavy backbeat was meant to evoke the intensity and imposing backdrop of LA. In other words it was a formula constructed to carry meaning between the writer and the audience. When we assess any kind of creative output i suppose its this that we are trying to decode i.e. what did the artist want to say with this painting or alternatively what evidence has he unwittingly poured into the picture about his state of mind that we can interpret now that the moment has been fixed in time. Maybe these two scenarios represent the difference between strategy and creativity. One seeks to construct things based on an understanding of the formula and the other gets to the answer more subconsciously or intuitively without every trying to deconstruct the process. Both approaches whether formulaic or organic represent two potential routes to the same end point. In other words could it be that the difference between strategy and creativity is not the output or the function its just the mindset used to find the answer. I never much understood the splitting of the two functions in many types of company - maybe this is why.  

Thought Chemistry

This book confirms something that i have been thinking about for a while.  That thoughts and ideas must be made of someting that can be deconstructed in no less than a scientific way.  What science teaches you is that nothing comes from nothing.  Energy is never lost, equations always balance, atoms move into different states but don't actually go anywhere.  If you apply this to ideas then you start to see them in a different way.  What if in order to generate an idea you need to absorb thought particles through your everyday experiences and reshape them into something new based on the ones that you already have.  We all know that the best ideas people fill thier lives with stimulus.  

If any of this is right then what it means is that there must be a general theory of relativity for cultural production that explains how any kind of human development is possible.

Thats one for a rainly day.

Incomplete things

I've been trying to think of an idea or theme that hangs off the principle that there is an inbuilt incompleteness or randomness to lots of different processes, if only to prove the thinking behind the last post.  

So here goes...

If you think about it deliberate mistakes are what allows life to develop.  If everything was created perfectly then a new or different kind of perfect would be impossible.  Mutations are a good thing to help adaptaton.  

Or think back to chemistry lessons and you will remember that its the atoms that have an extra electron or one missing that are most happy to react and be transformed into something new.

Its not unreasonalbe to expect that culture might work in the same way.  A perfectly rounded story like a fairy tale is far less likely to create a new thought than something more unresolved like a mysterious painting.   

Someone on TV the other day said 'the media abhors a vacuum,' to justify the idea that if there is no useful leads on a big story then the press will naturally end up filling the void with conjecture and hearsay.  I expect that our minds work like this as well.  If something comes with room for interpretation or completion or a bit missing then the natural reation must surely be to close the loop and fuse this open ended structure with the Lego of other thoughts and ideas already there.  This also seems to ring true with modern teaching methods that do not teach facts and absolutes but processes and themes that have more of an evolutionary capability.

In other words development comes more easily when things are not fully ressolved which is why if you were designing a system you would leave a few pieces missing before passing it on to the next person.   

More blurred line thinking...

Integration is something that planner types love to talk about and I’m probably one of the worst. Having said that its one of those ideas that can seem to rule the world when applied in big blurred lines to more interesting things than communications.

For example researchers of the brain and how it produces conscious experience have started to think of it as a process that comes about from the integration of all of the major areas and the connection between them. I think of it like one of those transparent jelly fish where there is a constant flow of circulating pulsating lights – as long as the flow keeps going between all parts of the structure then consciousness keeps getting produced.

If integration processes are fundamental to our orientation to time and space then it is probably a good way to understand lots of things.

Sunday I was running but trying harder than this to keep up with the In Our time podcast hosted by Melvin Bragg. It was about how mathematics had had to step back from its quest to know everything in absolute terms via a movement to create a set of immovable laws. The realization was that even in pretty simple sets of numbers there were paradoxes that could not be resolved.

If I am honest I don’t really know that much about what they were on about but I do know that the implication was that Maths had to make do with an incomplete understandings of things.

Later I went to see the new Cohen Brothers film. Like most of their films I came out not knowing that well how much I liked it as so many of the traditional rules and reference points about stories were missing. I had to make do with an incomplete understanding. But then in this case I think it was the point. The film portrayed people from different strands of society seemingly bouncing off each other in incoherent and chaotic ways as if there couldn’t really be design for the way that any of it worked out.

In between these two chaotic sources of words and pictures that were swirling around together in my head I listened to Evan Davies' podcast which was about the psychology of the money market as part of the diagnosis of its current dysfunctional behavior. My understanding was again incomplete and I stopped listening in places but I think I get the main argument that the random factors inherent in the market system allow us to know little more than it will go one way or the other – in the long term the rest is chance.

So today the world seemed to be telling me in different ways that there is in everything an un-accountable element that can’t be weaned out of even simple numbers.  Three incomplete experiences that each in their own way conveyed the fundamental incomplete nature of things. They had each been separate and out there until now when they were all fed in to one integrating process in my head. I am pretty sure that no-one else had all of these in all of the same contexts and even if they did they would definitely have been different to the sum total of every other experience that had gone in before.

Therein is the potential for a new original thought to be re-circulated back into the process. The integration and blurring of experiences is the construction process of new ideas.

Not that I have any yet but I’m working on it : )

Arguments against the Long tail

The long tail observation is based on the idea that well organised distribution of content is no-longer necessary… that content is king and that the consumer is king of content. Following this logic any content can and will be made available for any consumer at any time; the smallest niche of demand will be personally served and everyone will put together their own channels and playlists that are as unique to them as their fingerprint.

This feels very much like the future and pretty liberating as well; endless choice of endless content. Having said this it is easy to forget or ignore the downside of this. The best example I can think of is the BBC in the UK which is TV equally funded by a licence fee for everyone who owns one. Australian friends of mine find this hilariously antiquated – like a TV was a dangerous weapon such as a handgun that needs to be controlled. What this means is that the BBC does not have the remit to make a much money as possible and instead has the one to serve the public interest.

Stephen Fry makes this argument 1000 times better than I every could but it boils down to the idea that a diverse society needs collective broadcasting entities to integrate us, care about our cultural experience and germinate and grow us into content that we would not alternatively have found our way to.

The alternative is a world where people exist only within their small niche which the content market will serve as cheaply as it possibly can.

I am sold that the market will not always nourish the right content for the greater interest of everybody and would not change the BBC. I wonder how many other markets would work better with this or some other model.

Idea generation technique 1

In a recent workshop that i was in about running workshops we discussed three universal types of sources for generating ideas.  The trouble is I can't remember the other two.  And the one I can remember is the least practical for anything that has a strong structure to it.  

Idea generation technique... Random.  The principle of which is to force an idea out of any set of random things until something sticks.

Why does it work?  I'm no expert but I expect if you follow a normal path you would end up with 100 ideas that all sit within a very similar part of the spectrum.  With the scatter gun approach you could end up with a 100 that forcibly fit within every different shade of the rainbow.  Some will be blindingly ugly but at least you will have created range.

Limitations - Works better with less structured projects.  Requires faith and attracts ridicule.

Example - To find an idea for a blog post follow this link and scroll down until you find a photo that makes you want to write a one (this is what i did for the previous post.) 

P.S. this was the first image that caught my eye on the above link even though its a bit random : )

Designed to sell

Something that tries to do one thing but that actually causes the opposite effect should not really happen that often you think about it.  Its ironic... literally.  It s a bit of a balls up to have to explain to someone that the measures that you introduced didn't have the desired effect.  Nor did they have any other kind of positive effect.  In fact the only effect they had was the exact and total mirror image of what you set out to achieve.  Its does not make for a good story.

In simple terms why does this happen?  You could put it down to trying to hard.  If you really want something to happen then chasing that alone would actually preoccupy you from spending time and effort on the things that were most likely to be productive towards that goal.  

A good example would be that it takes men at least until they are 25 and possibly later to realise that getting really drunk is not necessary the best way to attract women.

You can draw the same parallel in art.  The harder you try to create a commercial success the less chance you have of creating a master piece.  Most of the worlds greatest and most valuable art first changed hands for a pittance.  

To some extent the same is true of marketing and business.  The more directly that you try and  chase sales the more this goal becomes difficult to attain.  The most successful companies are often the ones that are led by a bigger strategic or personal vision rather than by following the market blindly in the pursuit of immediate sales success.  But this is a difficult position to uphold in a meeting where you have to convince people that you need to take on a big new cost or turn down a big new contract not because you know that this will work best in the long run, but that you think it just might.  If you own the company you can do it; or if you are given the same kind of freedom.  However most kinds of corporate entities don't work like that.

The only answer that i can put forward to encourage the kind of bravery and counter intuitive thinking is a strategy that is so well ingrained and articulated that it would be unthinkable to shift off course just by a little.  Every company needs to know its purpose or reason for being with as much conviction as any personal vision that an individual might have.  Once you have this you would need to stick to it even until the point that it seems to be leading you in the wrong direction.  If the company purpose or reason for being is a good enough one then this logic says it should come good in the end.

 

Status Anxiety

I have read/heard a lot recently about status anxiety without actually getting around to the book of the same name.  To my understanding this can be summarised as the innate unhappiness and insecurity that goes with the pursuit of modern notions of success symbolised in things like a big car, or a big impressive sounding job title.  Maybe its a coincidence or I'm noticing it more but one article or book on the subject seems to lead to the next.  This ranges from recent best sellers like 'Affluenza,' back into the history the human mind like Fromm and Jung.  

I think it was on Faris' blog that it was discussed that the point of communication is to make people a little happier than they were before.  This is also not so far from the ideas in 'The Experience Economy' that say that we have now gone beyond commodities, goods and services to a point where smart companies create differentiation by creating scintillating theatrical experiences out of the shops, staff and other components that make up their business.  But as symptoms such as status anxiety would suggest happiness is not as boundless as capitalism. If you buy into the research presented in 'Affluenza' you see that the more westernised and the more commercialised the country the more likely it is that the people who live there will live a life disconnected from a real authentic joy of life.  Markets like China are emotionally on the crest of a wave on a promise of the riches of capitalism but are just a few points on the curve away from the US or the UK towards this trend.  In other words its not working.  The saying goes that if it ain't broke then don't fix it and anyone with a different POV about the best way to organise a way of life would struggle (even harder) to get any traction whatsoever for a different approach if this was not true.  

So while we are suffering a slow decline in our mental health and well being, and the financial markets that underpin it are suffering a more chaotic form of madness perhaps it is time for some calm reflection.  One approach to treating physiological problems is to treat the illness as a malfunction or an alien intrusion that needs to be forcefully removed in order to restore health.  Perhaps a more enlightened way to look at it is to see the behaviour as a useful alarm bell that reveal clues about how to redress the more fundamental problem that lies underneath.  

There is currently a growing commitment from many different types of business to change the way they do things in order to make them more sustainable in the future.  But i can't help but think that the starting point should not be exactly the same product aimed at the same person for the same reason, but now made with magical new techniques that mean that the process is not harmful.  If you were starting from scratch you would not end up there. Instead you would start with some more basic question like... what can we make/do/produce that will make people the most happy which, if all this thinking is right, would lead to entirely different outcomes.  Cracking what these are would be the next industrial revolution (by a different name.)

involvement everything

Participation marketing for me is not a tactic that you can employ well... tactically, it can be used to answer any brief.  If it was only half the answer or less then a bigger model of understanding would be needed to explain where why and how it fits into a larger thought system (or so says blurred lines thinking.)  So if this is the case the only way to test it is to demonstrate its value in the places where it does not naturally seem to fit...

These would include;
-Basic utilities 'I don't want to participate with toilet paper I just want to you know what'
-fashion marketing 'don't complicate it just get a strong image out there.'
-Functional communications ' I don't need to engage will a sale sign I just need to see its there.'
-Awareness is my issue 'I need big bold brand ads not small niche experiences'
-Sales is my issue 'I don't need participation I need sales driving media'

I will try and answer these one by one.  If I fail to find good examples or arguments to prove the point then I will be forced to admit that participation is just one slice and should think about a model to explain the whole pie.  

For me the first one is easy.  The prospect of trying to force someone to liston to you interrupt their lives with messages about something that is not given even the smallest plot of brain real estate such as the basic products that you buy everyday is weak and dwindling.  For me involvement is your only defence.  In the same way that they say that everyone has a book in them I would also say that somewhere inside they would believe themselves able to find the perfect Walkers flavour.  Its not crisp advertising its, co-creation, debate, competition, the home culinary revolution, and a community all rolled into one.

Work of art, art of work

If one day I found myself retired and sat on a pile of money generated from one fruitful venture or another I have already decided that I would invest in commercial art projects.  Following on from the blurred lines theme it seems to me that one additional step past coupling a wine bar / organic cafe with an art gallery is for a business venture and an art project to be more intrinsically wedded.  Of course there are already plenty of businesses set up based on creative foundations, creative products and of course advertising but the companies themselves are not in themselves and art form.  What would be the credentials of a business that was set up as a work of art; over to wikipedia.

Work of art...  

A creation... that has been made in order to be a thing of beauty in itself.'

Wouldn't that be a reason to get up when the alarm goes off first time around, to stay calm and friendly in the office, to play nice?

Sustainability thinking says that environmental impact should become a further bottom line by which a company judges everything they do.  Somewhere in the multi verse there must be dimension in which 'being a thing of beauty,' sits on the bottom line as well.  The first management meeting to try and work out the best way to deliver on this new objective would be a funny place to be.  

I know its a bit out there but Steve Jobs puts a lot of the success of  apple down to his appreciation of the art of calligraphy!

Anyway my idea would be to offer money to art projects that are conceived with the notion of aiming to break even.  If a brand can be seen as a utility or a service then why not a work of art as well.  If you really want to engage the viewer then give them something they can inhabit or use.  the Haywood gallery which is currently full of building shaped installations i.e. where art and architecture meet, must cross this trajectory of thinking somewhere down the line.  And on the other hand you could have prototyped a new business model or brand that strategic thought would have been too logical to find.  I'm no artist myself but look out for some example posts on 'artco' (I cant stop making up words at the moment) projects.

More Blurred lines thinking... The ENVIRONET

Maybe its my age but I can still see the internet in a non-abstract way i.e. a very big network of computers. It is the world through the screen, distinct from everyday life in three dimensions. Blurred line thinking would try to find better insights by looking at a subject (no matter how vast it is in itself i.e the internet) and taking a step back to see its natural or potential evolution into a bigger system - to imagine what would happen if where you now see two worlds you instead saw one.

Of course this is happening already and there are lots of examples where you can note the blurring of the line between the internet and every day life.
San Francisco going all WIFI
Alternative reality gaming
GPS enabled training products
RFID technology
Smart codes

... are just the ones that spring to my mind easily and so this is not about identifying a trend. I’ll have a stab at giving it a name though... the ENVIRONET could be a good way to describe the ubiquitous internet; the ambient, everywhere inter and outer-net blended into one.

Blurred line thinking is about the ability to use the insights you get when looking from a different vantage point; or at the very least to help you to throw some interesting problems into the mix if you are not feeling up to solving them all there and then.

-In the world of the environet you would not need an online and an offline agency, nor would you draw a line between digital departments and any other department.

- The concept of brand destinations versus communications no-longer makes sense, everything is both.

-The only currency of communications will be interactive experiences

-Everything we do in the real world like going to bars or bargin shopping or barbques will need a google or a facebook or a something else to make it digitally enabled.

Blurred Lines Examples

Enterprise thinking.
Sustainable business development necessarily takes the view that all of the broader systems in which they operate must be brought within the management construct. The basic rationale is that it makes no odds if your business is sustainable if it exists within a system that is not. You would still be on course for an iceberg which is perhaps the wrong metaphor. But conversely this new holistic approach allows bigger and better perspectives. Customers and clients become partners and stakeholders that can lead to more productive relationships e.g collaborative projects where products can be developed and brought to market in new ways. Blurred lines between the company, the consumer, the client, the supplier and the environment multiplies the benefits for all stakeholders.

Blurred lines thinking...

...was set up as an organizing thought for this blog but I can’t remember ever explaining it. Blurred lines thinking is the idea that the best way to try and understand the way that something works or why it is this or that, is by applying the principle that it is in some way part of a bigger picture or framework that ties it to the rest of everything. In other words like an artist who is trying to resolve one small area of a painting, clarity can come by stepping backwards and then backwards again.   Each time bigger and more general systems can be viewed in an increasingly coherent image. In blurred lines thinking the individual brush strokes can always blur into a bigger image no matter what sphere of life, science or culture you are studying.

The father of blurred lines thinking has to be Einstein. The foresight that allows you to link things as remote as (E)nery and (M)ass as part of one silky fabric seems easier to imagine if you start from the point of view that everything on some level is part of the same stuff. Then the possibility of space and time being connected might lead more easily to an understanding of ‘spacetime.’

Zoom in a few thousand levels closer to the surface of things and its also the reason why marketing services jobs can benefit from an interest in all things that relate to the human condition. Plus its also a thousand times more interesting that way. So have a problem about brand relationships then read about relativity; on one level they have to be well... related.

Examples to follow...

'The easy way to stop being an ego driven, all consuming sap on the environment'

Selfridges has lots of good ideas, even to the point that they can turn the big brash sale signs that they use into an art-form. Fashion loves irony because it creates exclusivity i.e. are you in on it or are you one of the uncool people who don’t get it. In this case its the quasi-religious nature of shopping in modern life that is being sent up.

To the the greater extent its just smart humour but it must say something about the condition itself that it does not stop people in their tracks. I was there over the weekend and like everyone else I was not questioning why I was there or what I really needed. And like everyone else I was a little caught up in how much money was there to be ‘saved.’

The double irony is that looking around the signs are pretty close to the truth. To be held in the grasp of wanting more stuff is the natural disposition that keeps the economy burning. And its hard to image what will replace it in the future though replaced, modified and reshaped it surely will need to be. I am starting to see it like smoking.

-Short term chemical compulsions i.e. adrenalin, the buzz, the instant gratification,
This acts like a nicotine deficiency and regularly wants to be topped up.

-Coupled and blurred with an array of longer term mental addictions which keep ticking over in the background i.e. I will look better and be more successful if i buy this.
This is not unlike the smokers phycology that tells them they need to smoke to have a good time or to enjoy a meal.

I gave up smoking using Alan Carrs book ‘The Easy way to Give up Smoking,’ that takes the opposite approach of most methods. It does this by ignoring the reasons why you should not smoke which everybody knows anyway, and isolating, explaining and ultimately revoking the reasons why you do. I am probably in the top quarter of people who actively learn about and try to change their behavior in order to live more sustainably yet frequently succumb to fast fashion. In other words I fully understand why sustainable lifestyles are necessary but this does not always translate into actions. Perhaps the other side of the coin i.e. isolating the reasons why you feel compelled to spend a Sunday in Selfridges would be more powerful. After all smokers know they are killing themselves quite imminently and directly but it fails to stop them. When I have worked it out ‘the easy way to stop being an ego driven, all consuming sap on the environment,’ is the book I would want to write to explain the process.

Counter intuitive thinking and a $1000 incentive to quit the company

It is not very often that you hear the company where a person works described in a really enthusiastic and positive light. This could be part of the national cynicism of the British but I’m sure its pretty universal. Its one of the few bastions of a sense of community feeling to be able to share in the berating of the place where you work on a par with things like reality TV contestants.

So what if your company started to offer you incentives to leave. If you really meant all of the moans you'd take them up in a shot. Otherwise you would have to start to admit that actually you have got it pretty good and on balance its where you want to be.

Zappos, which for people outside the US is the Amazon of shoes, offers all new recruits $1000 to leave after they have completed their initial training (from an interview on the HBR ideaCast.) And as the company has been growing so has the amount offered to quit. The result being that the people who stay do so after interrogating and renewing their conviction, and the one’s that don’t have the desire or the energy leave the company with its full blessing and something to tide them over while they think about their next move. It makes perfect sense knowing that one of the big problems with big companies is the lower concentrations of motivated and passionate people than in small companies.  However I had to hear the explanation before I fully agreed and understood. Therein is the problem because anything that needs explanation to sound sensible is always going to struggle in the modern company where ideas have to survive based on only the partial attention of all the people necessary to carry and execute them.

It’s a far harder sell to get people to implement the opposite of what seems to make sense rather than the obvious. Even less so in consumer facing decisions such as brand communications which often come from outside partners who have even more incentives to put simplicity first. There must be plenty of instances where the opposite of what seems to make sense is a much better option…

i.e.

-Grown-ups telling young people not to do things like smoke and drink usually has the opposite effect. Wouldn’t it be better to do something like brand them as brilliant fun for the ‘sad’ and middle aged.

-The hard sell also puts up barriers rather than takes them down… why not communicate how hard your product is to find or make your audience go to special lengths to get hold of it.

-By selling sex to men to promote a product like deodorant (aka LYNX,) you are essentially part of the problem that stops young men getting what they really want i.e. attracting and affirming the behaviours of the kind of men who put pictures of topless women on their wall. Wouldn’t it be better to be the kind of brand that helps men appreciate that if they really really like women that much then would it not be much better to avoid doing things that repel them like giant images of Carman Electra in their uni flat. This may not seem counter intuitive to most women but to the 18 year old male and the marketing director it might well be.

I' m back...

Sure I'm back down to ZERO on the number of people who find their way here... work won the battle for my time but hopefully the balance has now resumed.

The glory of the irrational

It’s a bit of a contradiction that the things that I find most captivating in culture are the ones that should never have happened.

As someone who works in strategy it is quite often easy to see the insights and read the motives behind the things that you see around you from ad campaigns to party political manoeuvres to public art. Generally the logical path that strategic thinking guides you down will land you in a territory that you can read retrospectively and learn to expect the outcomes prospectively. Ironic then that the most interesting things, to me at least, are those where it appears like there was some kind of strategic malfunction or mutation so that what you are seeing logically should never have come about because it just shouldn’t work. It’s even better when the outcome clearly does work. Does this mean that a strategy free project has a better chance of producing something special? Maybe in the chaos there will be lots of costly misses but the hits will be more original and culture changing.

My view would be that this is not the case. Instead I would look at it the other way round and say that if something does work in its execution then there is always a reason. The people who created it may not have fully appreciated this for themselves, more likely they were just living it out. As an example an artist such as Picasso or more likely still a band such as the Beetles could probably not have explained at the time why their contribution was so important as we can now. But these reasons why, are real and can be decoded. This may be done very badly or the theory develop over time, but still there is somewhere a truth about why something had the effect that it did.

If this truth is out there when we look back in hindsight then it must also be possible to seek it out in advance and act according to what you think it must be. That’s what any strategy should be looking for. The fact that so often the strategy gets it wrong or worse still seems to net out in the same ‘seemingly’ logical place as every other attempt is not a problem with the ambition and is instead just human error. Being ridiculous for the sake of it, or different from anything else, or exactly the opposite of the likely strategic response, could all be good recommendations. If they could be justified against all the insight and information available they could justify a freakish offspring that confuses or amazes or stands out from the general order of life. In an environment where it is getting harder and harder to be heard and people more and more adept at demoting things of low importance from conscious view, its not a bad line to take. So here’s to the sublime in the ridiculous.

Above is my first example. In a world that acts upon the intellegence of the lowest common demoninator and that shys away from every possible issue or threat that someone raises in a meeting, the chance of getting a piece of public art signed off that is based on a chaotic confustion of traffic signals in the middle of a round-about should never have made it to fruition. But happily it did.

“Moving from a brand image brand to a consumer experience brand”

Just found this little discussion piece. Think there is some interesting points about a new starting point for brand communications...
Brand image as a business driver is an outdated model for understanding how consumers relate to companies and brands.

It relies on an old assumption that was probably wrong when it was designed (primarily in agencies) and certainly is getting less and less right. This assumption is that brands can deliver a brand message in mass media and that this will in itself create brand love.

It was probably always wrong because it does not get a couple of fundamentals about the way that people understand, absorb information and gain ‘experience’ of the world around them.
Actually we react not to what people say but by what they do. Actions speak louder than words. The medium is the message is the way to explain this in a cultural or brand context.

It is certainly getting less and less right because a couple of the key pillars that drive it are breaking down. People do not have to listen to brand messages and do not consume the channels that deliver them in the same way. The only stuff that gets through are the things that people choose, things of value to the individual. Ads can be dialed down or ignored more and more easily because generally they do not offer anything of value.

On the other hand what is valued is the consumer experience that is delivered. Whether this be in a direct product related way such as help about how to use a product, or in a more extended general way such as an interesting project that involves them or captures their interest at least.

For this reason it does not make sense to think first about brand narratives or personality – the big brand message that could work as a piece of advertising… Instead the starting point should be to think about the consumer experiences that the brand delivers within and between every communications touch-point.

What kind of experience would this be?

Experience is how we learn stuff so what do you want to teach?
Experience is something we participate in by choice.
Experiences are live, lived and real things in our lives rather than brand image which is the big unknown incalculable
Experiences happen in destinations – retail and digital spaces
Experiences tie products and brands together
The experience of using a product should be married to the entire experience a brand gives... i.e. if your product offers creative thinking tools then so should the brand through every thing it does.

“So decide what you want the consumer experience to be and then work up and outwards from that”

The New Substance Economy

I have been off with the flu for the more than a week which gives you plenty of time to think off the beaten track. The notion that has been occuping most of my thoughts about the future of branded companies is the revolutionary affect that climate change will have on business. To try to think ahead about what the innovations are that will offer the win wins that are needed i.e. a way to do business in a sustainable way which in turn will offer a commercial advantage that will cause that company to make money and grow its goodness.

This is a big ask when so many of the ambitions of business seem to be set in opposition sustainability. The most obvious of these is the desire for producers to sell more and more of their produce with the ambition to dominate the market that they are in and with a view to opening up new markets in which to dominate in the future. There are obvious ways to make the making of things far more sustainable – it must be possible if a raw material intensive company like Innocent or M&S can make claims to be carbon neutral. If these kinds of companies do well then the model that says make more and more stuff is fine if that new product is taking share away from other products that do not work in a sustainable way. But generally this core need to shift ever greater volume is in some industries going to be challenged.  If people start to question simply consuming and disposing of things quickly and cheaply (as we must expect they will,) and also the regulations and trading efficiencies of being a company that relies on this business model become harder (as we expect they must,) then you have two very clear limitations on this way of doing business which could sweep in like wild fire in the next ten years or so. The internet was a revolution but initially it was seen simply as way to sell more and more products with greater efficiency – an extension of the normal day to day practices into a new channel. It was nothing when compared to this notion that even the basic way that most companies make money is being brought into question... that goes right to the core. So what can be done?

In the last few decades big consumer branded companies have shifted the focus away from the manufacturing side of their business which they now buy in from outside suppliers ‘just in time,’ and by the cheapest and easiest means possible, while they focus attention on marketing. This means understanding markets and consumer desires as well as trying to physically manufacture these things to create markets for those outsourced products. So if you go one step further and actually remove the product itself from the equation can it still be made to balance? Common sense would say not but if you think about it the idea of a company that focuses on services and consumer experiences rather than selling physical products is very normal.   It is also very much easier to make it work against the context of higher cost and more restricted production environments and lower consumer demand for carbon intensive products.

The idea of the experience economy is not new and there have been some things written already about the potential value of using this approach as a response to climate change, but it has not been fully adapted and expanded into this area. Nor has a framework been created to show companies how to seek out and monetise these new forms of value. There is strong research that shows that the purchase cycle of shiny new products makes people far less happy (even unhappy,) when held up against experience driven purchases. Branded companies who unlock this new type of value will by this account succeed in making their consumers more happy than those that rely on physical material based models which is in itself a compelling consumer based reason why these transitions should be successful now even before the strongest effect of a quickening climate change economy take hold.

Scoping this opportunity could be an important step to create a path to smooth this transition from the old carbon intensive physical kind of value creation to these new kinds of economic substance. I am going to have a think about what this framework would look like but at the moment it is fair to say that there are a couple of basic principles that I think will apply.

-The brand marketing function will need to take a lead in their development and execution
-They will be people centric and based on all the different types of cultural value that people can experience

But I’m sure there are more… Anyhow the ‘NEW SUBSTANCE ECONOMY’ seemed like a good name for this new kind of value.