Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Advertising, Attitude & Aptitude, Brand, Context, Creative Development, Creativity, Culture, Dad, Design, Jill, Marketing, Marketing Fail, Paula, Perspective, Planners, Planners Making A Complete Tit Of Themselves And Bless, Planning, Women
I know it’s Halloween, but how I’m choosing to ignore it because I wrote this post ages ago and I can’t be arsed to write a new one to celebrate the ghosts and ghouls.
Hey, at least I’m being honest.
So anyway, I love design.
In fact, I would go one further …
I think design can see opportunities most strategists could never pull off.
This is not because my wife is one.
And some of my closest friends.
It’s because design can make the impossible, happen.
It can make a teetotaler buy alcohol.
It can make static images move.
It can make you want to pick up a specific product on an aisle of identical products.
It can open possibilities to people who have been denied for years.
And it can make you pay a premium for something that does exactly the same thing as everything else.
This last one is exemplified by something I saw when I was recently in China. Specifically this:
How lovely is that?
Yes, I really am talking about IT and mathematical equipment.
And while I assume the manufacturers are trying to attract a female skewed buyer – given its lipstick pallete inspiration [Don’t shout at me, I said skewed, not exclusively women because I totally appreciate the role cosmetics play across culture] – it’s such a refreshing change from the old, lazy, sexist and conformist ‘just make it pink’ bullshit that so many marketers used to think was the most efficient and effective way to engage the ‘female customer’.
Like this.
Or this.
Or this.
Or this.
Or this.
But it’s not just because it’s an update on the lowest-common-cliche we’ve seen – and still see – from brands. No, what I also love is the craft and consideration that has obviously gone into all of it.
It’s wonderful.
It’s refreshing.
It’s something I bet few planners would ever come up with, because one of the biggest problems we have as a discipline is our desire to reveal our self-appointed ‘intellectual superiority’ and frankly, creating a set of IT equipment that has been inspired by lipstick palettes is probably something the vast majority of us would see as ‘beneath us’.
And that’s problematic for a whole host of reasons.
From the fact we prefer to give answers rather than gain understanding right through to our motivation seems to be more about impressing our peers than doing things that actually change outcomes. Not in reality, but theoretically. Hence we read so many ‘hot takes’ about what’s wrong with work from people who have never made anything of note whatsofuckingever.
It all reminds me of something my Dad used to say, which – because I love the Lucille Ball quote about the same issue – I’ve paraphrased to this:
A person who wants others to know how intelligent they are may be smart, but they’re not very clever.
And that is why I adore what my wonderful and brilliant friend, Paula Bloodworth, recently spoke about at a conference when she said, ‘the smartest thing a planner can be, is stupid’.
Happy ‘trick or treat’.