Never get out of the boat

Friday, October 26, 2012

strategy jukebox friday

If a customer's bond with a brand/product/service is strong enough, then they will continually repurchase without jumping through any of the previous decision journey hoops that they initially made to get there.

This is different from any status quo bias because it is about bond not inertia.
The cult of Apple being case in point. We'll put up with foibles and mistakes from Apple because we feel something for them. The relationship is not simply transactional.

Up to a point, obviously.

A big part of strategy has got be about this, a solid bond.

Though how this can be expressed in a spreadsheet, or brand onion I've yet to find out.

'Feel.. is a word I can't explain,
At least not in words that are plain,
Makin' it easy to express, But I'll try to do my best, to hit you where it counts,
I just want to build up...a solid bond in your heart'

Friday, October 19, 2012

free your ass, your mind will follow

On the day it was announced that the mighty George Clinton and the Parliament/Funkadelic mothership are to headline Victoria's Golden Plains Festival early next year, it seemed like an appropriate juncture to finally call out the legendary P-Funk architect on one small issue.

Changing people’s behaviour first is, in fact, the best way to open their minds.

Action come first, attitude comes second.

For instance, it has been scientifically proven that the simple act, the behaviour, of donning the labcoat of Dr Funkenstein would enable one to believe oneself the actual intergalactic master of outer space Funk.

So we should be better advised to Free Our Ass, then our Mind will Follow.

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

come on feel the noize

Our thanks go to Tomas Czeszynski, over in Sweden - and a constant source of interesting behavioural nuggets - who pointed to an old post on the Branding Strategy Insider blog yesterday.

Controversial author Martin Lindstrom - remember? Love your iPhone, Literally - published a splendid article on Sensory branding, and the criminal lack of attention paid to the power of sound in advertising.

Lindstrom, this time talking sense, points out:

'There can be no doubt – sound is immensely powerful. And yet 83 per cent of all the advertising we’re exposed to on a daily basis (bearing in mind that the average person will see two million TV commercials in a single lifetime) focuses, almost exclusively, on the sense of sight. That leaves just 17 per cent for the remaining four senses.

Consider to what extent we rely on sound. It confirms almost all our digital and electronic connections. We rely on it to dial or text on our cell phones. Interestingly, the revenue from the slot machines in Las Vegas fell by 24 per cent when the whirring and tinkling sounds was removed. Furthermore, experiments conducted in restaurants show that when music slower than the rhythm of a heartbeat is played, we eat slower and we eat more!'

At the end of the post he also references some research his company conducted that produced three top ten lists of the most 'addictive' non-branded and branded sounds.

Unsurprisingly - from an evolutionary standpoint - baby noises top the chart, and from a cultural point of view, cash register sounds also figured highly in the overall combined chart.

How many times during creative development in advertising have you witnessed the scenario whereby the soundtrack or audio components are the last things selected?

Perhaps even some stock audio has been crow-barred in as a semi-afterthought?

Even if it's just a few it's too many.

Legend has it that Quentin Tarantino takes the audio route first and actually selects and plots the soundtracks for his movies before commencing the writing of the script.

The power of music and sound to evoke memories, feelings and emotional responses is undeniable, that's why it was one of our earliest pre-language forms of communication and continues to have the power to shape culture.

Indeed, everyone has a soundtrack to their lives.

Here's my soundtrack to the spring of 1973, a lanky brat running round smashing windows in Aberdeen with short trousers.

find products for your customers

I remember this story from last year about the kid who invented a doorbell which calls the householder's mobile phone if nobody answers the door.

Laurence Rook, the 13 year old boy from Croydon, said he got the idea after noticing his mother had missed several deliveries by not being in the house.

Laurence licensed his invention off to the tune of circa 250k.

At the time it struck me that the combined innovation departments of BT, Orange, T-mobile, Vodafone and goodness knows who else from the telco sector had failed to notice this simple customer insight/problem, yet a 13 year-old kid, paying attention, had come up with fantastic piece of utility using a sim card and some bits and pieces lying about the house.

Another one that the telco's have missed cropped up on FIR: the Hobson and Holtz Report podcast that I listened to this morning in the car.

This was the first time I'd heard of Connectify, a software based router for Windows computer that shares wi-fi connections your other devices.

One of the principal benefits for the business, or otherwise, traveller being that in many hotels the wi-fi access is limited to one device at a time - Connectify solves that conundrum.

Again, one has to wonder why this had to be invented by a small start-up (the software's development was funded via crowd-funding platform Kickstarter, by the way) when there was a simple customer insight to be leveraged and yet none of the telco's saw the opportunity.

I'm reminded of this simple maxim that Seth Godin is often quoted on, in regard to where businesses should look for innovation opportunities and to temper the impulses that lead them to be hellbent on acquisition of new customers.

'Don't just look to finding customers for your products, find products for your customers.'

Friday, October 12, 2012

the paperless office self-nudge

I wonder if this one will work? I took a tip from Pete at work and in an attempt to cut down the amount of paper (ie printed material) in my office at home I've simply made the desk space so small as to be nigh on impossible to stack up documents, therefore discouraging me from printing in the first place.

Friday, October 05, 2012

chair man of the bored

Just a couple of points on the Facebook 90 second film released online yesterday. The ad has been broadly panned by the social media commentators for a variety of banal reasons I wont go into, however I liked the spot before I knew this and the criticism has only served to make me like it more.

It's worth stepping back for a second and remember what this advertising is for.

It's not about acquiring new customers or promoting trial.
It's not about brand awareness.
It's not even any sort of post-purchase rationalisation.

It's no accident that Facebook picked Wieden and Kennedy be agency of record, the next evolution of Facebook, the brand, will have to involve moving it out of the technology and social network categories - how they do that and where it goes will be interesting to watch - but from a comms point of view that's just the kind of emotional storytelling shift that is bread and butter for W&K.

See Nike, Levi's, P&G to name just a couple.

This spot didn't have to be made for any commercial reasons, but works as a kind of celebration of what's been achieved and a look-how-far-we've-come.

Facebook is one of those American dream success stories so perhaps a little hedonic boost is permissible and from a strategic point of view, starting to position Facebook in that same iconic Americana-brand-for-the-world, space like Nike and Levi's is the correct move.

One small note to the writers - it's aeroplane not airplane.

Tuesday, October 02, 2012

to be perfectly frank

I don't know if Frank Sinatra ever wrote a song in his puff.

But it's hard to argue that as an artist his blues-inflected saloon balladeer ouvre (particularly his mid-50's period circa 'Only The Lonely') pretty much wrote the book of sharp American masculine cool, and with significant sex, style, subversion and skill to boot.

Sinatra's ability to interpret a song, and take it somewhere else was his art.

It was not necessary to have been the originator of the material.

As a young guitar slinger in the early 80's I was the principle tunesmith in several bands.

(None of these particularly 'made it' but that's not what the story is about.)

I was a fan of the hits of Burt Bacharach and Hal David for a time, but the prolific nature of that partnership meant there were literally hundreds of their songs that I was not familiar with.

So to write tunes for my band I would often pull out the Bacharach-David songbook, pick a tune a didn't know and use the chords to make up my own tune.

I couldn't read music so all I had to go on were the chord shapes.

So nine times out of ten I'd end up with something new based on 'copying' Burt and Hal.

In advertising we idealise and revere the novelty or originality of ideas and insights.

In fact, we relentlessly pursue the 'new', almost at all costs.

We hold aloft the stuff that proclaims 'this has never been done before'.

Really this is the true advertising conceit.
If we are honest, advertising has routinely hi-jacked, jumped upon or otherwise adopted and commercialized existing cultural ideas since day one.
That’s what it does, and that’s why it works.

But is new always better?

I've no qualms at all about adopting an insight from somewhere else and applying it to the particular problem I'm looking at.

I've equally no qualms about adopting the basis of an idea that may have been used somewhere else and improving it.

Because, and I’ll quote enfant terrible of le Nouvelle Vague, Jean Luc Godard here, it's not where something comes from that's important, it's where it goes to.

Novelty is over-rated, to be perfectly frank.

We don't always need new, just better.

Friday, September 28, 2012

new york city

We are currently loving this stop motion video from director Greg Jardin for the late great Joey Ramone’s 'New York City.' - a splendid, and joyous love song to his home town.

The tune is taken from the posthumous album, '…ya know?' - a collection of previously unavailable sketches and demos retrieved from Joey's post-Ramones sessions and archives.

Among the the 'cast' in the clip are Ramones long time producers Ed Stasium and Tommy Ramone (also of course the original drummer), Andrew WK (whatever happened to him, btw?) plus assorted members of equally legendary punkers The Dictators, and a selection of interesting looking regular New Yorkers who happened to be passing by.

Don't know how my NYC friends and readers feel, but if the New York City tourism office are thinking of launching a new ad campaign any time soon, then I would humbly suggest that they look no further than this piece.

Thursday, September 27, 2012

one of the problems with Australian advertising

At Sputnik Planning Labs we love our cognitive biases; and a particular favourite is the one sometimes called 'the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon' or more commonly the 'frequency illusion'.

This particular foible being the illusion in which a word, name, phrase or other thing that has recently come to one's attention suddenly appears 'everywhere' with ridiculous frequency.

So, if you've never heard of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, never fear, you'll absolutely be hearing about it again soon.

In this case it's the phrase 'world class', and the context principally Australian advertising.

This or that campaign or spot is 'world class'. This CD/Planner/other is 'world class', this or that agency are 'world-class'.

To boot, I was chatting with an acquaintance who is a very senior Professor in Melbourne the other week who informed me that this 'rating' is similarly applied to the scoring of academic papers in his University.

A top mark qualifies a study as 'world class'.

World class then, being clearly up a notch from simply Australian class.

Herein lies the problem.

It's a classic example of another of our favourite cognitive traps coming in to play; the worse-than-average effect in which people will routinely seriously underestimate their own ability to do stuff in comparison to their perceived ability of others.

When does one ever hear of 'world class' work coming from London or New York for example?

Hardly ever.

Because agencies these markets don't feel the need to benchmark* themselves against any other territory.

(*In fact 'benchmarking' itself is another hideous trap, but we'll cover that one another time.)

The work is what it is.

It's either great or not great.

C'mon Australia. It ain't where you're from, it's where you're at.

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

vip mail

If you've upgraded your iPhone to iOS6 then you may have noticed the VIP mail setting in the email fuction.

For users it’s a way to flag certain contacts as VIPs and have their emails appear in the special VIP section in your mail.

Simply put, this means you potentially never miss messages from people that you want/need to hear from.

Priority mail has been around in Gmail for a while, of course, but VIP seems extra handy as it's device based and it's super-easy to aggregate contacts from different accounts for the non-geeky.

This is not to say 'email-is-dead' but is further testament to the idea that effectiveness of communication correlates directly to the existing level of permission.

Another nail in the coffin of unsolicited spam, and a pointer to perhaps a renaissance for email as a viable channel.

Friday, September 21, 2012

whoops now

Over the last goodness knows how many years I have either worked on or pitched on a dozen or so campaigns and projects for Breast Cancer Charity organisations.

And since 1993, when Janet Jackson's 'Janet' album was released featuring the now iconic sepia toned shot of Ms Jackson being supported, I must have presented an adaptation of that shot several times.

Much to my relief the idea has finally been used as part of a promotion by UK Breast Cancer charity Coppafeel featuring ex-Spice Girl Mel B as 'Janet'.

So thanks to Coppafeel and their agency (if there was one), the idea may or may not be great but it's a terrific relief to know it will never have to be wheeled out again.

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

fear

Fear is a pretty powerful emotion and when confronted with fear humans seem to be wired to recoil first and ask questions second.

As a result, fear can be pretty easily sparked in such a way that is instinctive and not subject to rationality.

In fact, many phobias are firmly rooted in irrational fear - monsters and clowns for example - while other fears are rooted in more automatic areas of associated memory - fear is a pretty efficient survival tool, learning to look both ways before crossing the road it's a pretty vital early skill to learn.

Emotional manifestations of fear include things like apprehension, terror, dread and panic.

In advertising a 'fear appeal' is a type of psychoactive trigger that is often used to evoke an emotional response in the participant regarding the effect of other automatic behaviours.

This spot from Finland clearly plays to that, showing how children are affected by parents drinking habits.

A few people have pinged me this with a footnote around 'there you go, using emotions in shaping behaviour'.

But exactly how much fear induces behaviour change or a simply a looking-the-other-way is another question. I don't know.

Compare the Finnish spot to this one about teen smoking in Texas, which uses the social norms nudge '8 out of 10 Texas teens don't smoke' and a large dose of teen humour to tackle the problem.

The problems are somewhat different but I have still a wee hunch that addressing what is a social norm (parents bad drinking habits in the presence of children) with a 'fear appeal', while ultimately more effective than an information or gawd-help-us 'educational' appeal, would be more effective still, in the long game, by promoting a new social norm.

'Most parents with under-5's say one is enough', for example.

That said, it's a pretty powerful spot.

helpless

We do a lot of work in the NFP-charity sector and, regardless of media, storytelling is the probably single most powerful tactic we have to try and move behaviour.

Often this takes the form of dramatising the experience of the beneficiary.

And while direct mail is the default first tool in the box for many NFPs, I'm always mindful that film is pretty much the unbeatable storytelling medium.

I'd normally be on the side of happy endings being more effective, there's fairly robust science to back that up, but occasionally something comes along in this category with a surprising twist and proves the exception to the rule.

For me, this film made for The St John's Ambulance service is another example of this almost situationist trend for communications that incriminate the audience.

The story reflects new research from St John Ambulance which shows that over four times as many people believe that more people die from cancer than a lack of first aid - an availability cascade - when there is compelling evidence and statistics to indicate that the danger of choking, for example, is at least as frequent.

(On a minor tactical note, and bearing in mind that 'virality' is going to be an important mechanic for this spot, the 'surprise' element of how the piece ends up is somewhat spoiled by the labeling of the film on You Tube)

Friday, September 14, 2012

first look at the iPhone 5?

Thanks to Mike in the Sputnik Creative Lab who pointed me to this skit from the ABC show Jimmy Kimmel Live.

JKs people went out onto the streets to ask the public to evaluate the new iPhone 5.

In a splendid demonstration of visual and verbal priming many of the participants reported the new device to be lighter or heavier, faster, bigger or benefiting from improved design.

Of course there was no iPhone 5, all the participants were looking at a regular iPhone 4S.

Thus proving that special ability humans have to post-rationalise percieved product features and benefits with System 2 following our automatic story building System 1 response based on whatever available information we have.

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

larry, woody and me

Some comedians and comedy writers would make excellent planners.

Larry David would have been a classic, for instance.

'Anyone can be confident with a full head of hair. But a confident bald man - there's your diamond in the rough.'

Also

'If you tell the truth about how you're feeling, it becomes funny.'

Insight, is the comedy writers stock in trade.

In fact a cheat I often use when looking for nuggets around any given topic is to search for jokes about it.

We're working with a mental health not-for-profit, so of course I went straight to Woody Allen to see what I could find.

'More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.'

'Most of the time I don’t have much fun. The rest of the time I don’t have any fun at all.'

and

'My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.'

Unfortunately the reverse is not true. I've not met that many planners who were great comedians.

Not intentionally anyway.

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

momentum and strategy

I've always thought that the single most valuable skill of a strategist or planner, if you prefer, is the ability to be constantly on the alert, noticing things and then interpreting them.

This is called having insight.

It doesn't have to be an earth shattering revelation, just 'apprehending the true nature of things'.

Our thanks then go to our Tahlia, in the Sputnik Insight and Planning Lab, who noticed this yesterday and pointed the rest of us to it.

An excellent short sequence of heavily loaded tweets - posted below - from the Obama 2012 campaign that clearly demonstrates that - despite Cass R. Sunstein's recent departure from the Obama camp - applied behavioural economics are still very much part of the Obama strategy.

Before Charlie gets at me, a quick note that this post is merely an observation on a piece of the Obama communications strategy, I'm not close enough to the policies debate or other political issues in the US to be voicing any informed opinion.

(My own representativeness heuristic does, however, lead me towards feeling that Baz is the the choice most capable for the next term, so there you go.)

A quick look at a couple of the key tweets.

'317,954 who gave were giving for the first time'
In psychology this is called the Bandwagon effect or Herding – this influences our tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same.

Also known as social proof.

This is all about momentum-as-strategy.
Despite Obama being the current Prez and therefore extremely popular with a section of the electorate there are still more (a lot more) NEW people joining the cause.

This acts as a sort-of counter availability heuristic to the neck-and-neck nature of the race as described by the opinion polls (always the scourge of momentum and often the hardest battle).

If I'm unsure about which side to back then this statement is indicating clearly that there's a groundswell for Baz's camp, something is going on.

'$5 or $10 helped, most donations were under $250 but the average was $58'
This is a clever tweet that combines a framing effect plus anchoring and a bit of herding.

Once the anchor is set, there is a bias toward adjusting or interpreting other information to reflect the "anchored" information.

This tweet anchors us on the high figure of 250 (probably too much to contemplate as a donation) however $58 seems reasonable

And that's the average i.e. That's what most people are giving. Those who gave $5-$10 are thanked but clearly are being encouraged to rethink their donation based on the social norm - $58.

The final tweet of the sequence - endings are very important in the efficacy of communications of course - adds the sense of urgency with a clear direct instruction to act. 'RT this link, right now".

The link goes to the donation page, and, wahey!, the page title is 'Build the Momentum: Donate today'.

In his paper 'Understanding how behaviour shapes strategy' Mark Earls concluded with the following paragraph, one which I seem to have commited to memory and find myself oft to recount when talking with clients about strategy.

'...wouldn’t it be useful to think about strategy in terms of momentum?
Strategy as being primarily how to create a sense of momentum in our favour?
About creating the sense that we, staff, customers, citizens or investors are moving more andmore towards something? Or that more of us are doing so?
Or that our velocity in any given direction is getting faster?
And if this is right, shouldn’t we start to judge all strategy by the sense that it is creating or sustaining momentum?'

Anyway, let's notice how the rest of the campaign unfolds.

Thursday, September 06, 2012

the planners dream goes wrong

In an experiment two participants were given boxes of lego bricks and instructions on how to build a simple robot from the bricks.

The participants earned two dollars for the first robot they built, then a subsequent fee for each additional robot on a decreasing scale of 11 cents per robot.
So robot 2 earned them 1 dollar 89, third robot 1 dollar 78 etc etc.
The participants could continue building robots for as long as they felt motivated. Both participants were told that their robots would be dismantled and the bricks re-used for the next participant.

Condition 1.
The first robot builder managed 10 builds before packing in and received $15.05 in payment.

The researcher took each of his ten constructed robots, placed them carefully in a box, in clear view, beside his table upon completion.

Condition 2
The second participant only built four robots and received payment of $7.34. Each of his four constructed robots was dismantled immediately upon completion by the researcher.

Throughout the day condition 1 robot builders averaged 10.6 robots.
Condition 2 robot builders average 7.2 robots.
The economic reward for the activity was the same for both conditions, yet the participants in the 'meaningful' condition – the ones who could witness the progress of their work – were motivated to keep building robots.

The condition 2 participants – for whom the task had no meaning – were much less motivated to continue.

This is a short version of a longer story that features in Dan Ariely's 'The Upside of Irrationality'.

I wonder if any of the planner fraternity can relate?

;)

up the bracket

The popular image of Karl Marx is the old fella with a big beard.

I get a better feeling for the man - pretty much the founder of modern sociology - with this picture of the young Karl looking like an imaginary second guitar in the Libertines.

"It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness."

Tuesday, September 04, 2012

beer chase

I would be slightly disingenuous if I did not state that the following sticks in my craw somewhat, but Clems' new Carlton Draught spot, 'Beer Chase', is great.

However, if I was going to be picky (yes, I am) - and this was something I used to repeat during my time at the agency over and over - then I would pick on the following.

If one is making a movie, and therefore giving life to a story, then there's a lot of other stuff that needs to be considered.

Until there's a better word to describe this process then we are stuck with the term 'transmedia storytelling'.

If people connect with the content - and they are, at the time of writing the clip has racked up 1.8million views on You Tube - then it's a massive missed opportunity to not create a bigger story world.

For instance.

Who are these characters?

How did they end up in America?

What happened to the money?

What are the other concurrent narratives?

The spot ends with a point to the Carlton Draught website, perhaps this will be where more of the narrative is revealed? Nope.

For the previous Carlton Draught film 'Slo-Mo', I fought to have #carltondraught hashtag on the end, this was a new idea back in 2010 which has become the norm.

A #beerchase tag to prod for conversation would have been more appropriate than pointing to a static website where there is no extension.

While I was at Clems, Draught's long standing agency, we often mused that Carlton Draught had the potential to truly transcend the beer category and could be viewed more as an entertainment brand, one for which the beer was really a marketing mechanism for the overall cultural brand.

Like a Converse perhaps?

It's a cool bit of film, funny and bang on for the brand and no doubt an award certainty in the film bucket but I still believe there's a big opportunity for Carlton Draught to be a bigger iconic Australian brand if only they could be broken out of the category mindset.

Sunday, September 02, 2012

always be closing the nylon curtain

I've no truck with so-called guilty pleasures.

I honestly don't have time to pretend to like stuff that I don't care about for the sake of some irony or fear of seriousness.

I'm deadly serious about music.

Like Keith Richards said, it's about discernement.

Knowing what the shit is, and what isn't the shit.

I love the first four or five Billy Joel albums. Maybe even six.

They are most definitely the shit. He never became big in the UK really until 'Uptown Girl', but his best stuff predates that.

Check out this interview Billy did with Alec Baldwin for WNYC's 'Here's The Thing'. The two of them riffing off of each other like a Long Island version of Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon.

Even if you're not a fan I guarantee you'll hear him differently afterwards.

Alec Baldwin is the shit too. If only because he's responsible for one of the finest 8 minutes or so of cinema history in GlenGarry Glen Ross, as the salesman with balls of steel.

Always. Be. Closing.

Billy also knows a thing or two about what's important to the artist, or communicator who wants to connect an audience.