livingbrands

Permanency and experience

Leland has a great post on the value of permanency and experience in our digital world. As he says...

"Digitisation has always promised to put mass amounts of information in our hands, at the click of a button and whenever. It’s a pretty straightforward promise and a compelling one at a time when most of our lives have been lived to the contrary. But as our world is increasingly becoming digital, we as humans are not gaining. We are losing. We are losing a sense of permanency and a sense of experience."

Really worth looking at in full. And reminded me as I was reading of my recent post on the importance of being present, rooted in a real, tangible way in time and space. Timeliness is something John Grant has also posted on. And in a similar territory, Influx has talked about the rise of a Luddite revolution.

Sounds like a bit of a trend gathering pace.

Then I get to the end of Leland's post, and he references something else I had written to help support his case. Spooky!

The value of grand parents

eRead about the Myspace generation and you could be forgiven for thinking they spend their whole lives in virtual relationships, never engaging with anyone over the age of 25.

For a bit of counter-balancing you may wish to check out the Family section of Saturday's Guardian: it has a good piece on the important role Grand Parents play for this generation, meeting needs that their time pressured, often separated parents can't fulfil.

As the article says...

"Teenagers, it seems, both recognise and value the role of grandparents in their lives. A survey from the Heritage Lottery Fund, published today, challenges society's assumption that the iPod generation is obsessed with technological pleasures: one in five of the 800 adolescents questioned said they'd put seeing their grandparents above anything else in their lives. Overall, a visit from grandma and grandpa ranked second only to going on the internet as a favourite way to spend time, ahead of listening to music, watching telly and going to the park. And there was evidence, too, of how big a physical presence grandparents continue to be in grandchildren's lives, despite the increasing geographical distances between family members: a quarter of the respondents said they saw at least one grandparent at least twice a week, and two in five saw one at least once a week. And when asked what they talked to grandparents about, along with family anecdotes, current family issues were cited by half of the respondents as a main topic of discussion".

Which just goes to show that no matter how many virtual 'friends' you might have, you still need people in the 'real world' you can really trust to stand by you and give genuinely useful advice.

According to one psychologist quoted in the article...

"Grandparents can be the anchor of family life. Parents with teenagers are typically at their busiest phase of life: they're working extremely hard, and they have lots to worry about, especially their jobs and finances. They feel under siege, and kids pick up on that. Grandparents, by contrast, are more phlegmatic, more stable, more constant. They've come through their difficult times, they've survived, and that makes them more optimistic about life than overworked parents tend to be. This is what grandchildren appreciate".

And for me, what's most interesting about this is that, in our hi-tech, youth-centric world, it just maybe that we are seeing the first glimmer of a return to something we have lost in the west - respect and admiration for older generations, and a recognition of the important role 'elders' play in helping young people thru their 'rites of passage' into adulthood (something we've also lost, as kids are forced to become little adults before their time, and teens remain as juveniles into their twenties).

Or maybe the importance of grand parents never really went away: has it just been disguised by a media and marketing community fixated with youth?

Time to think older then. And not just for the oft mentioned business reasons (an ageing, more affluent population), but because a healthy society needs the wisdom and insight of years.

Emotions beat facts

My old friend Robert Heath, he of low involvement processing and now at the University of Bath's School of Management, has a new paper out. In it, he argues that advertising which stimulates our emotions is more potent. This is something that many others have said before, and it is now a generally accepted truth of neuroscience, but Robert benefits from building his argument around research data.

As the press release says...

"Advertisements with high levels of emotional content enhanced how people felt about brands, even when there was no real message. However, advertisements which were low on emotional content had no effect on how favourable the public were towards brands, even if the ad was high in news and information".

You can read the full press release here. If you want to hear more from the horses mouth, contact Robert via his website.

Ooops your briefs are showing

Latest from Brand Camp.

And the moral? We shouldn't impose all our internal marketing and branding nonsense on other people. Nor should we get hung up when they don't play back the carefully crafted words on our creative briefs.

As long as people broadly see our brands as we do, engage with them, and buy them, it's job done. Right language? Do we really care?

Yorkshire does Mentos

Apparently it's staged, and you can see the hose if you look carefully enough (which is probably true, but I can't it has to be said). But funny nonetheless, even if a little after the fact. And a good follow up to the previous post.

So here's (allegedly) what happens when you add Mentos to Tetley's Yorkshire Bitter...

Thanks to the Creative Review blog.

Selling out to the corporate dollar

The mentos/diet coke experiments conducted by EepyBird were arguably one of the highlights of 2006, at least as far as Youtube and all things viral are concerned. Which is why the latest instalment is worth a look.

Another great visual extravaganza. But if you check out the film back at the EepyBird site, you find the following. Firstly, it's 'sponsored' by Coke, who had been so disinterested, even outraged by the original films. Secondly, we are (ever so politely) asked not to post the new film on Youtube (it is there any way, obviously).

Now it may be that the first film had a similar veto on file-sharing. But regardless, you would have thought that two fingers to all those who helped make them famous in the first place, whilst similarly embracing the corporate dollar, might be deemed something of a sell out.

Alternatively, they are not really serious about the veto, and are just having a bit of an ironic laugh at their new pay master's expense.

The profits of small

James Surowiecki (he of The Wisdom of Crowds) writes an interesting piece in the New Yorker looking at the good fortunes of Nintendo, even before the launch of Wii. He contrasts the robust profits of the market's no.3, with those of Sony and Microsoft. Where the big 2 are losing money hand over fist as they battle for share, Nintendo seems content with its position and is making it work for them.

Surowiecki draws some interesting conclusions from this. Once business theory said you had to be no.1 or possibly no.2 to succeed (as Alec Baldwin said in Glengarry Glen Ross: "first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired"). Now everything has changed.

The growth of macro-markets, together with the simultaneous fragmentation of those markets into ever bigger niches, alongside the rise of e-commerce, has made 'small' (relatively speaking) an increasingly lucrative thing to be. Whilst maintaining reasonable volumes, you can now be more distinctive and more customer-focused, boosting loyalty and margins.

At the same time, the old school big boys remain (more often than not) fixated on size, slugging it out for share with increasingly unsustainable marketing investments and discounting, and increasingly indistinguishable products; products which, though theoretically great, aren't necessarily what people are looking. And that's because they (can) fall into the trap of just watching, and mirroring, each other rather than really giving people what they want. The result: profits head south.

So the moral is, don't fear small. Case in point: we're in discussions with a small but successful (on their terms) brand in a market with a dominant no.1. They lack the budgets to attract new people into the category. But that's not an issue as, to reach their targets, they need to capture less the 5% of the market leaders sales. Which definitely frees up your thinking to try something interesting and different, rather than play by the rules.

Everyone is happy, including the consumer, and we all have much more fun!

10 commandments of Paris Hilton

Just discovered last month's Q hanging around as well. So here's the gospel according to Paris...

1. Ambition is everything.
2. If you don't ask you don't get.
3. Education is overrated.
4. Music is nothing new.
5. See the real me.
6. Roll with the punches.
7. Diamonds are forever.
8. Be charitable.
9. If you're having sex, turn the camera off.
10. There's more to life than men.

10 commandments of Boy George

Q have been running a new section for a few months, were music stars give their 10 commandments. Thought the headlines were worth repeating. May inspire something. Anyway, here's what the boy named George has to say...

1. Make a splash.
2. Don't sleep with the staff.
3. Say what you think.
4. Never apologise.
5. Embrace the feminine.
6. Take your punishment like a man.
7. Never do it for the money.
8. An eye for an eye.
9. Multitask.
10. Be nice.

Being present in time and space

A couple of people have written recently about timeliness: that in our digital, PVR-ed world, where we can access content whenever we like, and where brands are increasingly moving into asynchronous 'internet time', there is something to be said for events that are more temporally fixed. What you may lose in control and convenience, you gain in a sense of importance; of emotional value; of common experience - other people doing and feeling the same as you NOW.

This doesn't mean things have to be literally 'live'. But experiencing something for the first time, and in real time, does have that added frisson of excitement born of uncertainty: who knows what might happen (hey, maybe that's a whole other blogging topic: the benefits to brands of having a degree of unpredictability, rather than coming with everything clear cut and buttoned down).

And that's the real power of 'now' I guess: maybe a stupid thing to point out, but it's the only time when things REALLY do happen. You can watch the reruns, or the recorded footage. But it's never the same. It's 'live' experiences, rich with emotional oomph, and the (unconscious) neurological impulses that truck along with them, that form the potent memories which lodge in our brain. Not mpegs on a PC.

Which is just one of the reasons why I completely fail to comprehend the value of camcorders: Why spend the whole of your holiday, kids nativity play or whatever, looking thru a view finder. It just won't be the same when when you watch it back: it will be simulacrum of the 'real', lacking that buzz of 'now' - you already know what happened (or maybe not if you were concentrating too much on your camera).

And here's something else to chew on: in thinking about the 'now' of our most memorable experiences, a phrase came to mind. 'You had to be there'. Which suggests something else that may become an increasingly important commodity in our digitised lives: it's not just about the 'now' but the 'here' as well. Because online, we don't just play games with time, but space as well.

One of the joys of the internet is that I can be (virtually speaking) anywhere in this world...or any other 'world' for that matter....'seeing' things I would never otherwise see, and 'meeting' people I could never otherwise meet. But for all the benefits of this, let's not forget that I'm not really seeing anything or meeting anyone (recognising that many would seriously disagree with this point of view). They are just cyphers and proxies.

Much as there is real value in 'now', when it comes to deep, visceral, emotionally rich experience, the same is true for being 'here' as well. In fact, the two are pretty much inextricably linked. Let's call this the power of being present, rooted in a real, tangible way in time and space.

It's interesting, for instance, that evidence points to the strongest 'friend' relationships on sites like Myspace being with people you have off-line contact with. And as we immerse ourselves ever more in digital space (hey I write a blog - I'm not suggesting a return to the stone age!) being present could become an increasingly potent proposition. Going back to videoing the holiday or nativity play, not only do you lose the immediacy of the 'now' but the tangibility and physicality of the 'here' as well.

It could well be that businesses and brands which exploit this, making 'here' and 'now' part of their offer, will become increasingly valuable to people. Something like Innocent and Fruitstock springs to mind: beyond potential reach in absolute numbers, how can you compare the value and impact of a free music event, and all the multi-sensory experiences and memories this creates, with some 'free' digital content (no matter how unique).

So, in the irreversible rush to populate the digital world(s), we shouldn't lose sight of how (maybe increasingly) important and differentiating it will be for brands and businesses to also live in the 'here' and 'now'; to be present, and to help others feel the power of that rootedness as well.

And just to finish, a maybe slightly random example (at the end of a rather rambling post!) of our craving to be present. Back in 1999, Channel 4 did a survey to find TV's Greatest Moments. One of the most intriguing for me was this, in at no.10...

Why so interesting? For a number of reasons.

1. Important as he was in the early 60s, JFK's death wouldn't have been AS culturally significant at that time to us Brits as in the US;
2. The assassination happened in the early hours, of the morning, UK time - very few, if any, would have experienced it 'live';
3. The film itself was not even made (widely) available until the early 70s, and it's still not something many would have actually seen in the UK;
4. The target age for Channel 4, and the age group to which the survey would have been biased, is 18 to 35 year olds. JFK was assassinated in 1963. Do the maths!

On the one hand this maybe runs counter to what I've said about the importance of being present. Clearly people weren't. Alternatively, it demonstrates that we so desire to be present, particularly at key moments in time - to be 'there'...'then' - that we reinvent history to make it true (how many people is it who claim to have seen the Sex Pistols at the 100 Club?). And this was at a time (even if only 7 years ago) that our digital dislocation and detemporisation (just made that word up by the way) where far less than today.

So if people crave the present, both in time and space, why not find ways to give them it?