Especially in hard financial times it is important to remind ourselves that marketing is NOT about selling stuff, it’s about giving the participant a reason to buy stuff:

Two things:

1. It’s not about selling, it’s about buying.
2. There has to be a reason to buy something, an incentive. The incentive is the brief.

So start using your most important tool: Ask why? According to Charles Tilly, in his book “why?” Toyota has it in it’s strategies to ask why? Five times to get to the core of things.

Just wanted to link to the presentation on Nike+ by Michael Tchao, General Manager of Nike Techlab, from Picinic 08′.

For anyone certain that the Nike+ case isn’t relevant to smaller, non-global brands. These 23 minutes will hopefully change your mind, as Michael discloses a lot of the thoughts and ideas that in the end led to the Nike+ phenomenon.

Michael Tchao at PICNIC08: Commercial Collaborations: Tools, Things and Toys from PICNICCrossmediaweek on Vimeo.

Understanding collaboration through the lens of Itay Talgam and a collection of the worlds foremost conductors.

The best event I attended last year was the Picnic Conference 08′ in Amsterdam. Filled with interesting people and invaluable insights. Now they finally put the presentations from the main hall up on Vimeo, and I recommend most of them :o) – Thanks to Putting People First for “finding them”.

I’ve picked out Itay Talgam’s presentation on Conducting Creativity as my favorite, not necessarily because it contains a lot of relevant technical stuff or hands out project experiences. It doesn’t, Itay’s focuses on putting great conductors into context under the goal of teaching his listeners about creative collaboration.

This ads to the content on this blog, because.. carrying on the theme from some of the previous posts; in order to see solutions we need to understand humans, and the interaction between them.

This would have to go without saying when we’re trying to figure out the drivers and incentives for collaboration, community and participation. And is essential in order to understand what this would mean to your company and the amount of control one protects or releases to the public.

The talk creates a beautiful and valuable perspective, touching on a range of different features related to collaboration and creativity. And… it was the only presentation I can remember that got an almost never ending standing ovation!

Here is a selection of three quotes by Itam, or him quoting others, all found in the presentation:

“It’s not only about personal style, this is a part of it, and I think an interesting part. but it’s about creating a certain set of culture that enables certain modes of collaboration between people”

“Without order nothing can exist, without chaos nothing can grow”

“The worst damage I can do to my organization is to give them a very clear indication. Why? Because that creates a one on one relations between me and the players. Which makes the ignore the ensemble and work directly with me”

Have a look at Picinic’s Vimeopage for more videos from Picnic 08′.

Itay Talgam at PICNIC08: Conducting Creativity from PICNICCrossmediaweek on Vimeo.

What’s the difference between selling based on product features or selling based on ideas? It is leaving the customer on their own to create the story themselves, or creating it together with them.

This is my theory (borrowed to a great extent from Dan Gilbert):

When evaluating the purchase of a product we try to imagine our future with the product, and we note the emotional reaction to this experience. This synthesizing is a result of the mind picking up fragments of previous experienced stories and events and putting them together in your own private screening of the possible future.

Now in this process the mind is open to influence, and a strong, well directed and relevant story might help the customer focus on what’s important (to the brand), and color the perception the brain makes when synthesizing.

Now, if left alone to focus on features, you let the customer identify their own random favorite feature and synthesize their future based on that. If you on the other hand create an idea / a story, you can help the customer envision him- or herself with your product and see the story from your best angle.

You’re not creating a new story for them, you re merely suggesting what’s important and coloring their own synthesizing process.

“When setting a mousetrap, always leave room for the mouse”, as the quote goes…

Some more thoughts on how the brain works.

Scott Shamberg from Experience Matter did a wonderful post on the “theater” aspect of digital marketing the other week, and posted the Mad Men: The Carousel video from youtube which excellently demonstrates the point.

Having a dark age discussion with a client a couple of weeks ago considering removing visuals from a website because it was perceived to “heavy” for non-broadband visitors. Set of some thoughts regarding how important and limiting “narrowband” (0-128Kb) is as a “feature/attribute” when designing target groups.

Disclaimer:Norway is in the top 5 when it comes to broadband penetration in the world. Research from Internet World Statistics found broadband had a 88% penetration rate in 2007.

So, the question arose: “are non-broadband users even in the target group?”

Now it seems we often are asked to define target groups based on demographics like age, gender, income rate, children, age of children etc. And even if these say something, they have three important weaknesses that I find outplays the positive:

1. Demographics on it’s own depends on each person in the project to create their own personal interpretation of the target based on their own experience, attitudes and stereotypes.

2. Even though we can draw a generic understanding of these target groups, they overlap and infiltrate each other. Demographics are diffuse. And I would say they create a sloppy and ineffective understanding of who we are going to talk to – and leading from that also what we should say in order to get them to do something (incentive-action).

3. Using demographics is very easy because it allows us to end up with an understanding that is close to what you already believe, and possibly also can relate to. This is counter productive in or search for new creative solutions, and might be horribly wrong.

So what about “broadband” as an attribute? Is broadband only about speed and effectiveness, playing into participants decreasing amount of attention and tolerance? Or can we say that the technology being used to access the content actually tells us more about the customer than a lot of traditional demographics can?

Jeffrey Cole, head of USC Annenberg School Center for the Digital Future, stated at a presentation back in 2006 that moving from Narrowband to Broadband carries greater changes then moving from nothing to Narrowband.

The reason being that participants with broadband are always on, and have no restrictions concerning price (because it’s set).

Cole presented the analogy that narrowband user go on the Internet two or three times a day, and solve tasks written down on the back of an envelope for forty minutes before coming back to reality. Now a broadband user is online 40 times a day for two or three minutes – the Internet is totally integrated into their everyday lives.

We also know that broadband users not only read and solve tasks on the web they want to shape it:

Broadband and wireless users don’t just surf through the online world, they shape it. They are more intense than other users about their online communications and media use: uploading, downloading, sharing, and trading.
- Pew Internet & American Life

A website for broadband users is all about experience, next generation content and visual storytelling. It’s a richer universe communicating with the participant in a way that establishes, and builds story and brand.

Narrowband users are task solvers, with a predetermined schedule. They are at the end of any purchasing cycle and just wants to get over and done with it – they want to get back to their lives.

Broadband users don’t differentiate between real life and digital reality, it’s all a part of their everyday environments and habits.

Is it possible to build a solution for both that isn’t a committee decision meeting everybody half-way?

(It’s a bit un-nuanced and polarized, but an interesting thought, I hope :o)

Understanding how the human brain works and reacts, at it’s most basic level, makes it possible to understand other “unexplainable” phenomena’s in the world around us.

As examples take the terms “Creativity” or “Emotion”. Today they are extremely recognized terms in our industry, but we have no understanding of what they are, and usually explain them with black magic stuff like “subconsciousness”.

What is this “Magic” that Michael Bierut writes about in his popular article This is my process on the Designobserver web site.

Now Israel Rosenfield and Edward Ziff have written a most excellent article on The New York Review of Books going through a range of books in order to understand how the brain works. It is a most recommended read, excellent:

Read How The Mind Works: Revelations.

This post is an unflattering summary mixed with thoughs from other sources like Helen Fischer, Clotaire Rapaille and Dan Gilbert. It gives a superficial explanation on how the brain works (with some leaps of faith :o)

How the brain operates:
1. The brain is bundle of trillions of neurons.
2. A neuron is a string/cell with one receiving end and one transmitting end.
3. Neurons are not connected to each other. There is a gap (the synaptic cleft) between each one.
4. When two neurons communicate the cleft is bridged by the transmitting end of one neuron sending chemicals (neurotransmitters) into the cleft. These chemicals charge the receiving end of the other neuron (with electrical ions) and communication has occurred.
5. A neurotransmitter can be a range of different chemicals – having different effects.

How we learn:
1. The brain tries out a lot of communication combinations between neurons, some of these combinations cause a “reward” reaction. (when applied some of the chemicals give a sensation of reward)
2. Rewards cause repetition and repetition strengthens connections between neurons and makes the specific communication more effective and more common.
3. It’s a Darwinian system – ruled by elimination of things that create no reward.

Now it gets interesting:
1. Some neurotransmitters (the stuff being sent into the cleft) are effective in strengthening the connections without repetition.
2. One of these is Dopamine.

Notice that name, dopamine, it’s a chemical that the brain releases in a lot of instances. Some of them in cases connected with “emotions”. Watch Helen Fischer talk on Love at TED.

Clotaire Rapaille says that in order to learn we have to combine information and emotion – happening at the same time (that is the dopamine (or other accelerative chemicals) creating strengthened connections between neurons without repetition).

Which would explain why bad advertising would need several repetitions in order to work while excellent advertising needs few.

So how do we recollect stuff:
1. The brain doesn’t store events (a memory) as a whole, it stores fragments of it and we synthesize / create the memories in between when asked to remember it. (A bit like a master animator drawing only the key frames and junior animators drawing all the frames in between)
2. A fragment is stored in a collection of neurons which have no adjacency – they are not physically connected.
2. When remembering something we collect all these neuronic impressions into fragments and then create the event by synthesizing the blanks.

How creativity (could) work(s)
1. So if an event is stored in fragments , each fragment would again be a collection of neurons. (that’s a whole lot of neurons being stored for any memory :o)
2. When being exposed to information we relate it to something we already know in order to understand it and create knowledge.
3.When being exposed to an event in the creative phase it might relate to and trigger any of the previously mentioned neurons being a part of a fragment of a memory of an event – setting of a conscious recollection of the (now) related memory.

Is that what we call subconscious creativity, what Michal Bierut calls magic? Is this why suddenly, whilst thinking of A, B and C suddenly enters conscious thought?

I would insist that this does not take the randomness / originality out of creativity because all your memories from your 20, 30, 40 50 or 60 year long life, stored in the front, back and sides of the brain create so much of an incomprehensible and randomly felt set of memories that a good idea can be and would be perceived s original, unpredictable or magic :o)

Just because the process is set doesn’t mean your memories are.. It’s just a combination of neurons, fragments and events nobody has had the pleasure of combining previously…

[OK, this is all loose ideas created by combining a range of sources, but I still hope the theory has created some interesting and random sparks in readers heads event though the theory itself is a bit unscientific :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.

Mark Earls and Alex Bentley claim that emulation (our ability to do what others do) is the only trait that differentiates us from other primates. How does this link to other marketing related research concerning the human brain? And can it be related to “Social Emotions” as defined by David Bonney?

I found Earls and Bentleys Emulation Theory a bit hard to swallow since after reading Dan Gilberts’ book Stumbling upon Happiness (TED Presentation) I have grown to love the theory that ”the only thing that differentiates us from other primates is our ability to synthesize future (construct a vision of the future inside our heads in order to be better prepared to make decisions). The reason we have this ability is because of our Prefrontal Cortex – which is the latest addition to our brain and the part that we haven’t found in other animals.

Accepting Earls and Bentleys claim would mean that emulation is something that happens in the pre-frontal cortex. It wouldn’t make it the only thing that differentiates us from other primates, but it would be one of them :o)

1. If we identify the difference between imitation and emulation as the former being copying a physical event and the latter being performing a set of actions based upon only seeing the end result – and understanding how to reach this end state through synthesizing. As described in this article in the Telegraph “Chimpanzees need role models”. (via Environmental Grafitti). Earls and Bentley would have a right to their claim. But I’m not sure this is what they mean: Random copying and culture.

But there is a different understanding of WHY we emulate, which I find extremely useful in connecting the dots in this setting: Social Emotion.

2. David Bonney writes in the June 2008 edition of Admap (page 44) about the difference between animalistic emotions (the emotions appearing in the part of the brain also found in animals) and the Social Emotions appearing in the prefrontal Cortex (aha!). The research Bonney references shows that social emotions such as “guilt, embarrassment and jealousy” “light up a significant part of the right prefrontal cortex. (fascinatingly he writes is the same part that sees heightened activation when we are exposed to brands).

Accepting that emulation is something we do subconsciously in order to fit in (based on emotional influence) which is based on reactions in our prefrontal cortex would prove Earls and Bentleys claim and make the necessary connections to already accepted (personally) claims by other marketing related research.