Filed under: Attitude & Aptitude, Brand, Brand Suicide, Complicity, Context, Corporate Evil, Creativity, Culture, Innovation, Management, Marketing, Marketing Fail, Teamwork, Technology
I always laughed when people blamed Microsoft Powerpoint for bad presentations.
The idea that this program was purely responsible for you choosing to write 15,000 pointless words on a page in small font.
Sure, it had limitations … sure, it could encourage a certain ‘look’ for what you wanted to present … but fundamentally, that was on you, not it.
Don’t get me wrong, for a tech company … I’m shocked at how bad their user experience is.
If you think their classic platforms are bad, you should see the utter shit show that is a parents account on X-Box.
Or Microsoft Teams.
Oh my god, how can a company that can so carefully and considerately design an X-Box controller for those with disability make such a shit show of everything else.
I literally don’t understand it. Honestly.
Teams is the most user un-intutitive experience I’ve ever had.
Things don’t make sense. Things are unnecessarily complex. Things are hidden.
And yet, instead of fixing this – it seems their focus is to land-grab the video collaboration market, regardless if people like working with it or not.
You can’t go a week without being told Teams now offers a new feature.
Some – as you can see from the photo above – are relatively big things.
Most, aren’t.
A range of tools/functions that seem to only cater to the most niche or nerdy of Teams users.
It all feels like Samsung phones.
When you start one up, you see a bunch of apps that seem to serve no purpose whatsoever other than to be able to say you can do something with it that no one will ever want to do something with.
Ego rather than value.
And here lies the problem with Microsoft …
They claim all they do is about aiding collaboration, but in practice, it appears they have no understanding of how teams – or humans for that matter – actually work together.
For all the efficiency they claim they want us to be able to operate at, they are – arguably – making us more inefficient, either by making things more difficult than it should – or needs – to be, or trying to push us to answers without any capacity for giving the situation some thought to make things better.
And maybe that’s the next gen of their business model.
A desire to make efficiency about quantity than quality … a way to help their corporate clients keep their staff costs lower by not allowing any one individual to rise while also giving them more opportunities to sell tools, like their new AI model which will be incorporated in many of their products.
Yeah … I know, I sound like a conspiracy nutcase and I don’t really believe this is the reason, which means it’s something far worse.
They make for what they wish we did rather than who we actually are.
Or said another way, innovators of control, rather than efficiency.
Filed under: Advertising, Agency Culture, Attitude & Aptitude, Business, Innovation, Insight, Management, Marketing, Marketing Fail, New Product Mentalness, Planners, Planning, Relevance, Resonance, Respect
I recently read the credentials of a design/branding company who said their processes ‘guarantees’ to be effective.
GUARANTEES!!!
How the fuck do they do that then?
Unless they’re literally buying-up whatever it is their clients are selling, there is no way they can guarantee that … even if they have more data and knowledge than God.
Which means they’re talking utter shite.
Or – at best – aiming so low with their goals, that it means whatever they do is pointless.
But what is scary is clients buy this rubbish …
They buy into a proprietary systems – that often are only proprietary because of the name they have been given – and believe it somehow has the power to dictate how people think, feel and behave.
I am not saying we can’t have a good understanding of what is likely to happen.
I mean, that’s literally my job.
But increasing the odds of success and guaranteeing them are very, very different things.
This obsession with the process rather than the output of the process is one of the major issues companies are creating. Wanting to control every detail to such an extent that what comes out the other end is far more a reflection of their ego than the opportunity they can embrace.
Martin and I talked about this at our Chaos talk at Cannes for WARC back in 2019 … but it seems to be getting even worse.
Which leads me to this image I saw recently …
Of course it shouldn’t need saying that it’s correct …
But I have to because there’s companies out there ‘guaranteeing’ success.
Process is important … it serves an important role.
But as I said, too many people look at process development in isolation to what it is there to enable … and that’s when it all goes to shit. At best you end up doing similar things to your competitors. At worse, you end up with stuff that serves no value to your customers.
Now I get the allure of best practice.
Of following what others have found to be effective.
But the thing many forget is best practice is past practice … or said another way, it’s adopting a process that is looking backwards rather than ahead.
And while adding new elements adds a dimension of the unknown to what comes out the other side, the irony is its those who are willing to fail who are the ones who will end up creating the standards everyone else will end up following and chasing.
Filed under: A Bit Of Inspiration, Attitude & Aptitude, Authenticity, Comment, Communication Strategy, Food, Innovation
Years ago I wrote about how standards are driven – and protected – by stubbornness.
Well recently I heard a great story about the man who started the sauce company, Si Racha, who embraces this value.
David Tran arrived in America in 1979 after fleeing Vietnam after the communist takeover.
He found himself living in LA with nothing but his passion for spicy food.
The Vietnamese are one of the most magical and industrial cultures on the planet so David decided to turn his love into an outlet and started making hot sauce in a bucket and selling it from his van.
The name Si Racha came from a Thai surf town where he liked the sauce.
[You thought that was the name of the sauce rather than the brand didn’t you?]
Anyway, David didn’t care about branding or advertising … he just focused on making the best sauce possible. And it worked, because word of it spread like wildfire and suddenly people were buying it in their droves and putting it on everything they ate.
Over time, David started partnering with local Asian restaurants & grocery stores … and more and more people got to experience it.
One day someone said his product was “too spicy” and suggested he adds a tomato base to sweeten it. His friends agreed, saying it would pair better with chicken. But this is where David’s stubbornness started to come through.
“Hot sauce must be hot… We don’t make mayonnaise here.”
Over time Si Racha has become a cult phenomenon.
Famous chefs talked about their love of it.
Obama talked about his love of it.
And in many ways, the sauce became a symbol of both the diversity in America and the opportunity of America … because here was an immigrant who pursued his dream despite all odds and succeeded.
Today, Sriracha sells over 20 million bottles per year, generates over $150 million in annual revenue and has made Tran a very rich man.
But rather than just produce more and more of the sauce to make more and more money, it’s production is strictly managed.
David is adamant on quality, so because Jalapenos have a short window for being at their optimum ripeness, he has created a production cycle where a year’s supply is executed in just 10 weeks.
Tran owns 100% of his company – which he named after the ship that brought him to the US.
He still works at his factory in Irwindale, California and he still wears the same blue shirt and hat every day.
But what I love most is his attitude towards why he so conscientiously and strictly makes his product …
“I don’t make hot sauce for money. I make money for hot sauce.”
We could all do with more David Tran’s.
Filed under: Attitude & Aptitude, Comment, Innovation, Insight, Marketing, Marketing Fail, Technology
A few weeks ago, a client of mine at Google posted this on Linkedin …
Fortunately, due to its lack of swearing and use of bullshit terms like Gen-Z – not to mention the fact it was more professional than I’ve ever been in my whole life – it was pretty obvious no one was going to mistake this for me.
Which means my job – whatever it is I do – is safe.
For now.
And I say now because it’s only going to get better.
That should be obvious, but the amount of people who judge new ideas by the standards of established ideas is insane.
Of course that doesn’t mean every new idea is going to be successful, but it does mean every new idea has more places to grow and go than established ideas and for that alone, we should keep an open mind rather than – as this industry loves to do – make grand declarations about the impending doom of anything we don’t understand, don’t like and/or don’t want it to destroy what you’ve spent years trying to build for yourself.