Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Agency Culture, Attitude & Aptitude, Comment, Communication Strategy, Creativity, Culture, Emotion, Empathy, Experience, Imagination, Innovation, Insight, Loyalty, Marketing, Marketing Fail, Point Of View, Relevance, Resonance, Technology
As funny as the photo above is, the reality is it’s still a better brand experience than much of what passes for good brand experience these days.
Hell, if I was shopping there and saw that sign, it would make me smile, which is more than a lot of brands and their experience strategies achieve.
I’ve said it before but too many companies mistake basic interaction as brand experience. Or worse, think that by simply removing friction from the purchase process, they’re building a good brand experience.
Seriously, how boring and self-centred must their lives be to think that?
If done well, brand experience can be a huge thing.
And by well, I don’t mean making bad, average – or creating a consistent base-line standard across the company – I mean making the things that actually matter to audiences, personal and valuable … or focusing on the key things audiences think you actually do well and pushing that so the experience can become something that is almost seminal so people want to share, repeat and shout about.
I wrote about this a while ago [here and here, for example] … but it still blows my mind how many companies and agencies approach experience in terms of not getting left behind when they should be seeing it as an opportunity to move ahead … a chance to leave their competition looking slow, rather than themselves.
And before people say this approach would cost more money, it doesn’t. Or it doesn’t have to. It’s all about defining the experience you want to create.
Given a badly placed store sign next to some condoms gave me a better brand experience than so many of the systems, processes and strategies brand experience promotes, it’s safe to say the discipline may need to start understanding what people give a shit about rather than what they wish they did.
Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Attitude & Aptitude, Brand Suicide, Creativity, Culture, Management, Marketing, Marketing Fail
Brands.
Bragging about their importance.
Their unquestionable dominance.
Their ability to solve everything you’ve ever wanted.
Their purpose to help humanity stop making fuck-ups.
Shame they miss the point when it comes to their day-to-day behaviour.
Like this lot … starting with the unsliding doors, Sliding Doors company.
Oh, it’s not just one store. It’s here too.
And here’s another.
Not quite the same as mopping is different to vacuuming, but close.
I know … I know … it’s a small thing.
But when brands act like they are the most important thing in people’s lives, then it becomes a big thing.
A big thing that makes people laugh at them rather than with them.
Don’t get me wrong, brands have importance.
What they do has – despite what some say – significance in people’s live.
But until they accept the role they really have in people’s lives and that they aren’t the be-all and end-all for human happiness/status/success/value/perfection … then they’ll keep being called out for their hypocrisy and stupidity.
No one expects perfection.
No one minds mistakes.
But they do like honesty … and until brands are as good with that as they are with amplifying their ego, they will never reach the adoration – or respect – that they aspire to have.
Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Attitude & Aptitude, Environment, Health, Home, New Zealand
There are many good things about moving countries so much … one of them is the ability to continually keep your house clear of shit.
And given how much shit I have, that means it’s the difference between living in a house you can move around in, or being officially given a ‘harder’ label.
So every time we are moving, we sell/give/dispose of a whole heap of things … stuff that either doesn’t work for us anymore or won’t work with where we’re going. It’s quite cathartic once my wife and I have got past the arguments of what we individually are claiming is ‘not rubbish’.
Anyway, the reason I say this is as we are setting up home in NZ, we needed a table – but, as usual – we decided we wanted something quirky beautiful, so off we went traipsing around and then we discovered this.
Now, I accept being excited about a table is possibly the saddest thing I could ever admit to, but look at it …
A Czechoslovakian, Industrial Laboratory Table from 1976.
NINETEEN SEVENTY SIX!!!
The stories it could tell.
The experiments it’s been involved in.
The people who worked on it.
Though I’m choosing to ignore the dangerous chemicals it has probably had poured on it or churned out. Not to mention the ones still be hidden somewhere in its taps and pipes.
If it was a book, it would be a mystery story where the last pages of each chapter have been ripped out, leaving you to imagine where things go.
And while paying a fuckload of cash for a piece of 45 year old ‘office furniture’ may seem like the most stupid idea ever, when you remember how many robot dog, rabbits and – worse of all – balls I’ve blown perfectly good money on throughout my life, this could be one of the smartest investments I would ever make.
Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Attitude & Aptitude, China, Chinese Culture, Comment, Context, Creativity, Culture, Dad, Health, Management, Pollution, Relevance, Resonance
Once upon a time, a creative friend of mine rang me up.
He had been offered a job in China and wanted to hear my perspective on being there.
During the conversation, he asked if the pollution was bad.
When I asked why he was asking, he said he was pretty susceptible to asthma and while on his visit to the agency there, he had felt a bit ill, despite the weather being good.
He had asked some of his prospective workmates if they felt the weather was ever bad for breathing and they all said no and he wanted to know my take on it.
I laughed.
Not just because it’s pretty well documented the air there is not great, especially for an asthmatic – despite the government being the biggest investor in green technology in the World – but because it reminded me of something my Dad had told me while watching the Tom Cruise movie, A Few Good Men.
I know this is going off on a tangent, but hang in there.
You see, at the scene where Jack Nicholson spouts his immortal “You Can’t Handle The Truth” line, my Dad burst out laughing.
When I asked why, he said this:
“There are occasions where people will openly deny truth. Not because they hold a different opinion, but because to accept it means they would have to accept their complicity in a situation truth has revealed. Sometimes, the simple act of acknowledgement means people are forced to face and question the motives and values they conveniently chose to hide away”
His point was literally what my friend had experienced.
The prospective colleagues he asked about weather conditions knew full-well there is pollution in the air. However, their mind had almost forced them to forget it. Not because they were liars or bad people, but because if they admitted the truth, then they would be forced to ask themselves why they were there when they knew it was likely to be doing them harm.
We experience this every day.
Deliberate ignorance.
From people hired to purchases made.
Not because people are bad, but because we don’t want face the questionable decisions we’ve chosen to make to benefit our personal circumstances over health, values or friendship.
Which is why my mate decided not to go to China.
The moral of the story.
Remember people sometimes don’t tell you what they think, they tell you what protects them from you knowing what they think.
Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Agency Culture, Attitude & Aptitude, Chaos, Comment, Consultants, Creative Development, Creativity, Culture, Design, Effectiveness, Environment, Innovation, Marketing, Perspective, Resonance
Creativity is getting a bit of a kicking these days.
Oh, people talk about it.
They wax on about how valuable it is.
But then they dictate a ‘formula’ … something they say ‘optimises’ effectiveness and efficiency … conveniently ignoring they are actually promoting the total opposite of what creativity is and how it works.
Complicity.
Somewhere along the line, we’ve decided the value of creativity is not related to output at all … just input.
Now there is truth to that, creativity definitely starts with the mind, however that never includes an endless list of superfluous and superficial mandatories followed by dictatorial demands regarding terminology, talent and ‘category codes’.
You don’t liberate the power of creativity by weighing it down with factors that – at best – can come much later in the process.
And yet it is happening more and more.
Where success is people knowing your name and your corporate colours.
It doesn’t matter if they like you or feel something about you, it’s all function attribution.
And that blows my mind because creativity is capable of incredible things.
Making people care.
Creating value and intrigue.
Driving change and differentiation.
Literally open up possibilities that make people want you rather than you having to chase them down or brainwash them into submission with millions of dollars of spend.
That all these possible outputs are being dismissed in favour of following a pre-determined process and output blows my mind.
Of course one of the big reasons for this is control.
Creativity asks people to let go of comfort zones.
Asks them to be open to new ways to solve old problems.
Demands them to trust someone who isn’t at all like them.
I get it, that’s scary and hard … and there’s definitely a lot of people and organisations who have been burnt by other people and organisations who claimed to offer ‘creativity’ but weren’t really that creative.
[Though it you’re going to value creativity by price point or complicity rather than the impact it has on your business … what do you expect?]
However while everyone has some form of creativity, there are some who know how to harness its power in ways that can change how millions think or feel or want to live.
Sure that may include your brand becoming synonymous with a colour.
Or a set of words.
But it will be more than that, because they will find a way where people value you for what you have added to their world.
Not simply functionally … but how they see and feel what’s around and possible.
And while there is always a risk it might not end up quite as successful as you hope, it is still better to end up with something that means everything to someone rather than nothing to everyone.
That said, when you see the possibilities of creativity – like this magical mural by Brazilian artist Fabio Gomes – then you may accept people who see the World differently to you can create ideas that are far bigger and more powerful than your World could ever imagine.