This last year has seen logarithmic changes in marketing, fueled by different concepts like Utilities, AR, The Collective Exchange of Ideas, Transmedia, Digital becoming ubiquitous, Mobility and more.

I have tried to be a part of some of these discussions online, and have as a result of other peoples shared and collective wisdom published a range of posts, presentations and tweets on the subject.

What I wanted to do before leaving on a short summer vacation was recombine all the best ideas, into ONE Post Digital Marketing 2009 presentation. Summarizing all the major thoughts finding its way to my “ideas”-folder this last year.

View presentation below or here.

Hopefully it will both be interesting and inspiring to some, and the format introduce what Erin McKean defines as Serendipity:

“Finding something you weren’t looking for because finding what you are looking for is so damn difficult.”
- link

Please enjoy, and have a nice summer (winter).

Best Regards
Helge

Friday I was (most proudly) quoted by PSFK which referenced a part of my summary of the Mobile panel at Good Idea Salon London. The main point being, made by both Jonathan MacDonald and Matt Jones, that it is not about what technology can do, it’s about what people do.

Or as Matt Jones more eloquently said; it’s about place, and place is where culture meets location.

So, to prove the point :o) I’ve chosen some excellent videos on what people do, more inspiring than any article on RFID, SPIME or App.

IKEA Skanking (via Ruby on Twitter).

Ai No Corrida (via Boing Boing)

Fifty People One Question. (via swissmiss)

Fifty People, One Question: Brooklyn from Fifty People, One Question on Vimeo.

Nintendo Wii for Christmas (via Seth Godin)

And saving the best for last (Thx to Freddy)

珍走三重奏

We are as marketers and digital strategists to focused on the tools and arenas we want to be “on” rater than our job; to connect consumers and participants to the brand.

Marketing and brand building is not about being “on” anything. It’s about uniquely communicating our ideas to the customer in a situation where your brand is given the opportunity to mean something with the result of establishing a relationship with the participant.

We need to approach digital marketing value first. Not selecting platforms first, and then try to uncover value through a clever choice of strategy.

In order for us to understand the New Brand Landscape we HAVE TO deconstruct our linear models for distributing content, take one step back, and start understanding how and WHERE people connect to our brand, and then start putting the pieces together in the right order – if there is any order at all?

I attended a brilliant talk Thursday by Jess Greenwood, Deputy Editor at Contagious Magazine. The talk ran through a range of ideas and exemplified them with campaigns, many represented in Most Contagious 2008, and all exploring the new digital landscape. But after seeing all this, we are stuck with wondering how and why do I get there? How do I come up with these great ideas, and not limit myself to the regular receipt:

Old model: Campaign site + banners + Facebook + mobile + large amounts of expensive media = Great Success

as compared to the

New model: value + situation + incentive + existing landscape = arena
(although it’s not linear like this)

Understanding the New Mindset:

1. Brand building is about communicating a unique value with the goal of connecting to people, resulting in extended loyalty and preference.

Communicating value is THE purpose of a value driven company, not banners, display ads, Facebook or blogging. The tools are not the goal, the purpose is. And the purpose is: Value, communication, loyalty and preference.

2. People only care about brands in situations where they are relevant. If I’m baking a cake, I don’t care about Nike, but if I’m exercising, Nike is everything.

This gives that brands need to focus on identifying the situation in which they mean something – the situations are the only events where customers would give a damn, and they are the arenas where the competition between brands occur.

3. Identify your value in the situation where you are important, it’s still not about your product, it’s about identity. Whirpool figured out that no one would hang around talking about dishwashers for weeks on end, and created The American Family Podcast, where Whirpool talks about the Family – for the 264 episodes. Beat that!

4. Figure out how to become accessible. How do participants and customers get a hold of you when they care.

This is where many brands fail, choosing only to be accessible online, via the laptop’s browser, when the customer is at home, after putting his children to sleep. Brands need to shed the notion of having an appearance, and start thinking about accessibility.

5. Landscape. What your competitors are doing are just as important to you as your own activities.

First of all “you can’t out-amazon amazon”; unimaginatively trying to challenge a market leader at their own game has failed many. Secondly, as Dove has demonstrated when developing their Real Beauty campaign, a result of admitting that their old adverts where so similar to their competition that changing the product shot inside an ad with a competitors product, made the ad seem for them, rather than Dove. And thirdly, if everyone else is doing it already, it’s probably easier to win by creating a new idea. In the food world everyone wants to become an online distributor of receipts, but there seems to be little understanding that many food brands are not about food, (like Whirpool being about the family, not cleanliness or appliances)?

So the golden rule of the new marketing landscape would be, given that the uniqueness of communicating your values will be as important as the values themselves: Build your own game.

6. Small successes, it’s all about moving your competitor through the snakes and ladders game board, every step is a success. Make sure you build and measure for all the small steps, with your eye on the final price.

According to the panelists Matt Jones of Dopplr and Jonathan MacDonald of Ogilvy at PSFK’s Good Idea Salon London, mobile is all about a patchwork of situated software solving people’s personal and local desires.

Matt Jones spread the concept of Mobile being all about Place, and place is where culture meets location. The future mobile landscape will be a range of small ideas, small applications all working together to create a global mesh - as in contrast to many of today’s developments, where the focus is on solving massive global solutions.

Jonathan MacDonald added that we need to de-silo mobile and start talking of what it does, not what it is. We need to think about what people do in their lives, it’s about every single one of us.

I couldn’t agree more, and found Matt’s additions to the panel remarkably refreshing, putting a lot of stuff into context. Trying to build it into a more commercial articulation I would say that:

1. Mobile is about people, and they stuff they do, where, and how they do it. It’s not about technology, handsets or applications. As I have personally experienced, it is through being inspired by the customers and participants that the really groundbreaking revelations happen. Not through workshopping with clients or reading quantitative analysis.

2. People care about what’s closest to them, this also goes for the situations products and companies want to be a part of. Massive solutions, solving problems on a global scale, will not be as relevant or as interesting as tailored and local stuff.

The patchwork part is also very interesting but probably not from a conscious consumer point of view. The Patchwork implies that it is the combination of intelligence in and sensing by these local applications that the “grand machinery” will be produced. Not by a dumber, global, giant solution.

As a result one can say that Mobile will be about combining people and their ideas (culture) with their location. This doesn’t mean serving me coupons when walking past a Starbucks or sending me an SMS telling me to watch a TV program in the evening because some products will be featured. It’s about understanding my life, the activities I perform, which ones are relevant for your company. And discovering how you can ad value to this based on presence (being accessible when the situation occurs, not on the laptop four hours later), people (person + herd = culture) and place (location + time).

I’ve included this interview with Jonathan MacDonald, by Intruders.TV, for your viewing pleasure. :o)

How important is ethnography to advertising? Ethnography for marketers, A guide to consumer immersion Gives a few answers.

The first 30 pages are just crammed with excellence, and it all starts of with this outtake from the introduction:

The greatest challenge for market research nowadays is to deliver value by linking findings to the strategic business decisions that confront corporate decision makers. Ethnography responds to this challenge by observing consumers on their ”natural” environments and then turning these consumer encounters into ideas that transform brands and product categories.

Ethnography takes research out of the laboratory and into homes, offices, stores, and streets where people live, eat, shop, work, and play. It permits a more holistic and better nuanced view of consumer satisfactions, frustrations, and limitations than any other research approach.

Ethnography can offer insights into consumer language, myths, and aspirations, insights that will meet the toughest challenges brought up by strategic thinkers and brand planners.
- Ethnography for marketers, A guide to consumer immersion, by Hy Mariampolski

It also says this while discussing language:

“Humans practice a highly selective and critical attention – they compartmentalize words and experience – and commonly see the world in ways consistent with their own anticipation, biases and presuppositions. As Edward Hall (1977) has argued, ‘language, the system most used to describe culture, is by nature poorly adapted to this difficult task. It is too linear, not comprehensive enough, too slow, too limited, too constrained, too unnatural, too much a product of it’s evolution, and to artificial.’”, page 21

This last quote fits nicely with Gladwell stating that forcing someone to describe and preference something they are not articulated to evaluate leaves them with favoring the most conservative and least sophisticated option, a choice Gladwell, Norman and Gilbert claim is one they will not even themselves favor in retrospect.

Jan Chipcase, renowed Nokia etnographer publishes two of his latest slideshows on his site. Two excellent presentation showing the results of mobile etnography:

- Carrying & Interactions Behaviour
- Contextual Understanding

The first is a presentation of Interaction and carrying Behaviors, demonstrating where men and women store and how they use their phone.

| View | Upload your own

The second presentation, Anatomy of Mobile TV Use Cases, presents three scenarios in which it elaborates on the context of mobile use. This one is a special favorite of mine as it goes to some depth, and at the same time widens the perspective one something Anne Kirah, former chief deisgn anthropologist at Microsoft – Now at 180 Academy, told a crowd in Norway once – that Norwegians are especially unable to sit still without doing nothing, we pick up and “play” with our mobiles instantly. Now Norwegians weren’t the only ones doing this, but we were the most “impatient” :o)

As I took the tube from London to Heathrow the other day I experienced the same “impatience” with the brits. But here it wasn’t the mobile coming out of the pockets and purses but the reading of free newspapers spread around the couches. They got picked up instantly and read. Even a girl as young as eight(ish) sat there reading her free newspaper, funny brits :o)

| View | Upload your own

Dr. Tina Basi sums up three different kinds of research categories quite simply and nicely over at the Experentia blog.

From her presentation:

Popular methodologies:
Quantitative data, and surveys are useful for learning about numbers, stats, trends, and retrospective information.

Focus groups are good for learning about attitudes, perceptions, discourse, and social climates. Ethnography about building up a rapport, seeing things that people cannot articulate.

Ethnography examines everyday practices, real life contexts, and living situations that you can not explore or understand with other methods.

One of the six ideas behind the emergence of Content Marketing (Slideshare Presentation) is Empathetic Research. But the other way around, according to Sunderland and Denny.

I have just started reading the book “Doing anthropology in consumer research” (2007). And found early on (page 26) a very strong reference to emotional research / experience marketing:

“Theorists and practitioners alike have located much of the business interest in ethnographic methods to a shift in marketing’s focus – from the production of things to a production of experiences in the marketing of brands.”

- Doing anthropology in consumer research, Patricia L. Sunderland and Rita M. Denny.

Excellent plot-thickening :o)

I am spending the day at the Europen Business Conference in Oslo, where the talk is about inclusive design and the advantages it brings to innovation.

The day has been about average, with the most content rich talk given by Jeremy Myerson, Director, Royal College of Art putting on a rather wide perspective regarding inclusive design and the process of innovation.

Although I have some reservations regarding the lack of nuance and generalist portrail of the products of inclusive design; as “universal tools for all good”. The innovation/design process itself is very positive.

A process that is all about researching the needs of the people who are going to use, involve and interact with the end-product. Where the design team through observation, ethnography and/or workshops ++ , gain insight and understanding which is put to use in the creation/design-process. The immense focus on design through true insight into activities, needs, ambitions and aspiration really is a good methodology to achieve innovative design.

Go view the videos of the presentations…

As it has been pointed out many times, linearity is a construct, an imagined process that has been created in order for strategists and theorists to create easily understandable and logical models.

But it has little root in reality. First of all because reality seldom is absolutely linear, and secondly, the linearity isolates external inference with the process and makes it seem as it happens in a vacuum, when in truth multiple processes happens at the same time intertwined and affecting each other in every direction.

Jonathan Harris’ The whalehunt exemplifies the intertwining stories and timelines more beautifully than any theory ever could.

Press “Autoplay” in the lower right corner as you enter the presentation and then “Change constraints” top middle. Absolutly excellent.