livingbrands

FutureScope 64

Just to let you know, the latest edition of my trends newsletter is now out: "emerging trends, new ideas and general thought stimulation"...or so it says on the cover.

Well it seemed like a good idea at the time (no. 437)

So you're out of dishwasher powder. What do you do? It's obvious! Squirt some washing-up liquid over everything: it does the same thing after all.

Well I'm sure you can guess what happened next. We spent the rest of the evening playing out a scene from a bad sitcom, as soap suds escaped from every available part of the machine.

Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Any one else have similar bad good ideas?

10 things we didn't know before the 17th week of 2007

1. Boris Yeltsin lost a thumb and index finger on his left hand while playing with a hand grenade as a child.
2. Runner's World, Wilfred Owen poetry and Uncle Tom's Cabin are restricted in Guantanamo Bay, lawyer Clive Stafford-Smith says.
3. Neighbours is the most watched daytime telly show other than the BBC's One o'clock news.
4. Scouting for Boys by Lord Baden-Powell is the fourth bestselling book of the 20th Century, after the Bible, the Koran and Mao's Little Red Book.
5. We each get a completely new skeleton every 10 years, because of cell renewal.
6. Smoking will be banned in police interview rooms in England when the new law takes effect, although it is not banned in Scotland.
7. Kryptonite exists.
8. Nearly half of all cases handled by top divorce lawyers last year involved a private detective to check on alleged infidelity.
9. £26m of pennies have been lost on UK streets since 1971.
10. North Korea is the least visited country in the world – only 1,800 Westerners make the trip each year.

(Source: BBC)

Hurrah for me

Let's go and show Seth what's what ;-)

The People Project (April 07)

The latest People Project is up online and free to view. So if you want an unrepentantly unrepresentative view of what the world thinks about stuff, here's what we asked this time on the streets around our office...

• What are you wearing?
• What are you watching on TV?
• What music are you listening to?
• What brand or product couldn't you live without?
• What are people talking about?
• What's in the news at the moment?
• What was the last thing you had an argument about?
• What would you do with £500?
• Make a prediction
• What was the last exciting thing you did?
• If you could change one thing, what would it be?
• Tell me about your hero

And we're still looking for partners.

We've just signed up a fashion PR company we work with, who are going to do some on-the-street stills photography stuff.

But the more the merrier.

So if there's anyone out there (different places in the UK, countries, whatever), who wants to join in the fun (hey, open source vox popping!), get in contact. It would simply mean asking the same questions, filming the answers (natch!), sending them over to us, and we'll edit, up-load and credit you. And share our footage in return, if you wanted it.

Dave Gorman (photographer)

Amongst his many other talents, it turns out that (THE) Dave Gorman is also rather good at photography. And he embraces creative commons.

This is a very recent one, making use of the new British Heart Foundation campaign, that made me laugh...

And for you Londoners out there, he does a nice line in London photos, from which this comes...

...which I hope is how you feel after visiting here :-)

Environmental upside

On green issues, I'm very much in the camp that says we need to reduce our impact on the environment...or it's off to hell in a handcart for the lot of us. At the same time though, there IS good news to be found at a micro/local level, particularly when it comes to wildlife conversation.

We live in the Chiltern Hills. Go back a dozen years, and the only time you saw a buzzard just flying around was if you'd got in a car and driven down to Devon. And Red Kites? Never heard of them.

How times change. Now you get to see what are Britain's 2 biggest birds of prey outside the Scottish Highlands with a frequency verging on the blasé.

Out cycling last weekend we saw 3 buzzards, 2 at the same time (rare as they are solitary birds).

And a pic-nic without 20-odd Red Kites circling over head (this time giving the distinct impression they fancied a bite to eat as well) is a disappointment, as they have to be one of the most beautiful birds in the UK. You now even get them in the back garden like some giant, fiercer pigeon!

So that's big birds in Buckinghamshire sorted. Now it's just the rest of the world.

(and thanks to Kevin Du Rose for use of his photos. I hope he doesn't mind)

10 things we didn't know before the 16th week of 2007

1. Mr Man author Roger Hargreaves is Britain's third best-selling author, having sold more than 100 million books.
2. Termites are cockroaches, according to the Royal Society's Biology Letters journal.
3. Denmark is the happiest country in Europe; Italy the unhappiest. (The UK was 9th out of 15.)
4. Kate Middleton's family tree has been traced back 200 years to ancestors who survived coal mining, malnutrition and a cholera epidemic in the North East.
5. Male doctors are twice as likely to drink and drive as anyone outside the health service.
6. Dr Seuss' name is pronounced Dr Zoice.
7. A water-tight denial by a politician – as opposed to one that leaves room for later manoeuvre - is known as a Sherman pledge. The other sort is called a non-denial denial.
8. Chocolate is better than a passionate kiss, causing a more intense and longer-lasting buzz, and doubling the heart rate.
9. The average Briton has sex 4,239 times.
10. Spiralling obesity rates are forcing councils to upgrade their crematoria, to take wider coffins.

(Source: BBC)

Creativity from constraints

Good TED talk by architect Joshua Prince-Ramus, looking at how major practical constraints (whether physical, logistical and monetary) can lead to significant and radical creativity.

So look on the bright side: the more mandatories in a brief, the greater the likelihood we may have of doing something truly different...if only we can see it!

Marketing popularity

I wrote a while ago about the power of coincidences, and the danger of the conclusions we draw from them. Just a bit of fun really. But I was reminded of it when reading this article that Jason turned up, which has far more significant things to say about the way we do things.

It looks at the idea of cumulative advantage: the idea that small and often quite random initial occurrences can, over time, be multiplied and turbo-charged by our tendency to like things that other people like, propelling one product, brand, song or whatever to dominance (all a bit like chaos theory really). And that under only slightly different initial conditions something else might end up in pole position.

It features a a rather neat piece of research to demonstrate this effect, based around music downloads. All of which does start to explain some of the more unexpected, and maybe unwarranted (to our minds) success stories we see around us. And, as the article suggests, to undermine the idea that, if we only mirrored what 'they' did, we could enjoy similar success.

Does make you think about the role of marketing. Maybe it should maybe be less about communicating benefits (given how marginal differences can be) and more about communicating/implying popularity...in good Mark Earls fashion.