rocks in the pond

Emotional Destinations...

2010-06-14T10:24:00.013+01:00

Scroll down to see a couple of great ads. Good to see them back on again...

They illustrate something pretty simple, and something I first remember learning when I was but a junior, barely hatched, egg, at O&M.

That communication is about benefit. Benefit is the thing you think about, the magical thing that creates in you a feeling.

Your search for it is where an experience begins...immersing yourself in its discovery is where the process ends.

I once worked on Shell, at Ogilvy. It was a prestigous account, and I was working for an Account Director who was the best in the agency and destined later to rise to become CEO of a vast group. I was lucky to be on the team. It was just after two famous commercials were produced, in the early 1980s. One featured a family driving home, seeking a petrol station when the fuel level drops. Kids asleep in the back, wife snoozing lazily in the warm fuggy Volvo, Dad sees the welcoming Shell pecten (yes, that's what it's called) in the twilight ahead. The key moment is the 'fuel gauge' shot...the needle lifts, and he sees it. Job done. On they go. Accompanied by The Beatles singing 'Two of Us' ("...back home, we're on our way home...") - the first time a Lennon and McCartney song had ever been used in an ad. Cheesy, perhaps a touch. But simple and brilliant.

The other featured a Wayfarer clad young man pulling into a deserted Shell petrol station high on a deserted moor. He is driving a Porsche. He does the filling up thing. Then the iconic fuel gauge shot. Then the first few bars of Steppenwolf's 'Born to be Wild' (used most famously in Easy Rider), and he pulls out on to the empty, moodily shot winding roads ahead. The kind of ad that made a spotty young local reporter called Jeremy Clarkson the man he is today...

Both of these commercials are about petrol. How do you find the benefit in a smelly, expensive liquid that you never see and you certainly don't want to spill all over your shoes? It was an era when oil companies thought the only way to sell the stuff was by giving you promotional toys, points or making claims about the mileage their fuel would give which were neither true nor ever believed. Shell, and Ogilvy, almost alone, understood that nothing is as powerful as an expression of the emotional destination of the brand.

Petrol isn't about petrol. It's about where it takes you, and how that feels. I think that remains true twenty five years later, (though the insistence of BP on pumping crude oil straight onto the Louisiana coastline at the moment may mean that other truths of the consumer-oil company relationship are perhaps more centre stage just now)

And so to these two from Virgin trains. No one iconic moment in them, though in the familiar archetype of advertising like this, they are symbol heavy (here done with tongue placed deeply in cheek). But light on generic, forgettable product points (other than in passing and where they support the central theme...buffet car, champagne, plug socket etc) they focus on the simple reasons about why we might want to make a journey, and the powerful emotions which await us on arrival...

Connect

2010-05-08T02:36:00.007+01:00

Synectics. The art of connecting the previously unconnected to find the new...

Norwegian band + French motion graphics company + British target audience + Infographics = Brilliance.

A satisfying meal of a video. Layers and layers of it.

Why does it work? Listen to the rhythm...the timbre. The psychoacoustics as they're called. Feel the structure, the pace - reducing the song to its mechanical pulses. Then add to it visuals made of automated schematics. But just as the vocal has a sweetness above the synth line below, so too the graphics have a human charm - in their heroine.

Masterly.

I recall seeing it when it first appeared and I'm glad I've found it once more...

The suffocation of market research

2010-04-24T13:18:00.025+01:00

We live in a New Dark Age.

I speak of Procurement and Rosters.

I've been prompted to write this piece today by something in the IJMR recently.

Before you start checking the acidity of the grapes on my desk, I should say that I have been on rosters aplenty, over the years. As I have always co-run small companies, this has been Quite A Hard Thing to achieve, but we did it. And worked with some big, bruiser brands in the UK and Europe.

And perhaps what I'm about to say has been said before. In which case I make no apologies for saying it again.

There are the apologists for the way things are. Procurement departments have been a fact of life in many other corporate functions for years. Get over yourself. Prove you're better. Then you'll be fine, they say. Meanwhile, the cost-of-everything-value-of-nothing mentality creeps forward, powered by The Recession - its Henry V Moment - and the manner in which research is bought in the UK goes into deeper lock down each month...

But even the most superficial of examinations of this approach leaves it in shreds. It has been killing something vital. And it's getting worse and worse.

Research - of whatever kind - is about people.

Infinitely complicated, infinitely extraordinary people.

People who conduct it, and people who take part in it. Everything that happens in research - everything - is about the quality of those people.

Imagine you were hiring someone to work for you, in your department. You know what the job is, you know the kind of person you want, and you want the best you can find. You write the recruitment brief.

Then someone from Procurement emails you to say that you can only hire this person from the three companies from which the last three successful applicants came.

Of course, such a thing would never happen. But just imagine it did. What might be the motivation behind such an edict? At its heart would be fear, and conservatism. And lack of trust - in you, the manager, hiring. Implicit would be the belief that you would quite likely mess things up if you went off piste. Hire a crazy person perhaps. Offer them a salary of £2 million and as many bananas as they can eat? The last three companies produced perfectly fine candidates thank you, the logic might go. All of them brought with them the technical or craft skills you needed before. None of them wanted a stupid salary. You'll be fine. Just buy a new employee from them, like a box of copier paper.

Insane?

This is exactly what the closed shop of rosters does. And the thinking is essentially the same. At its heart is the belief that what happened in the past will always be good enough for what will happen in the future. At its heart is the obsession with not dropping the ball, and much less interest in taking that ball and scoring with it.

Now there are some good agencies on rosters. No question of that.

But I'd submit that if they were that good, you'd be hiring them anyway - without the need for a roster. They'd prove their worth every time.

And of course, there are some 'not so good' agencies on rosters. I used to work in the world of advertising, as a Planner. Even then, the roster culture was taking hold, especially amongst the big corporates. I can remember many ocassions when my heart - sometimes even my client's heart - would sink because someone somewhere within the company had dictated that a certain project should be handled by a certain research company.

And the project would duly take place, and the results would duly be mundane, or tired, or superficial, or in some other way disappointing. Any chance of fertile, breakthrough thinking had somewhere had a pillow pressed firmly over its face.

The winner? You tell me. Not the client, not the business, not the customer.

And then there's the response 'Yes, but if you were good enough/doing something different enough, you could make a case to be on the roster'.

They always say that don't they? Something 'different'.

This one needs demolishing with both barrels.

Apart from the whole Equity-card style paradox of never getting a chance to prove that you have something to offer until someone actually hires you, there is a basic misunderstanding of the nature of qualitative research here.

Qualitative research can, and often does, make a clear, measurable difference to a client's business. Insight, connections, truths discovered in it unlock problems, open up opportunities, change the landscape, every day of the week.

But the manner and mechanism by which good researchers do this has usually got much less to do with shiny, eye catching new techniques or 'products', which can be branded, publicised, and shown to a Procurement Dept ("Look we definitely haven't got any agency that makes people not brush their teeth for a year and then make a movie about it or interviews people under water wearing aqualungs" etc...) than with the quality of the grey matter inside the researcher's head.

We're talking about the researcher's ability to THINK. Clearly, imaginatively, openly. We're talking about their vision, imagination, and instincts. We're talking about their experience - and by that I do not mean simply years accumulated, but breadth, of markets, brands, life. The 25 year old who has spent a year digging wells in Africa alongside her two years learning the ropes of 'research' has learned something worth hearing about. The 55 year old who has come into research after three other successful careers in catering, publishing and market gardening has too.

Can you write this stuff down on a form?

"We'd like to use these people because they just seem to really get what we're about as a business, because we have chemistry with them, because they seem to exhibit real flair and imagination and we're confident they'll do a great job".

See what happens.

More often that not, such an appeal to a Procurement department won't even get to first base. Where's the shiny new toy? Who's to say that the people already on the roster can do all this just as well...

And that, actually, gets to the nub of it. Who's to say? Well you, actually.

You, the Research Buyer.

You the person actually hired to think about this stuff, to have a view, to make the best decisions.

You the person whose career is going to languish if all the research you commission is kind of, well, er, just ok.

You whose company is going to hit the skids because the competitor down the road is thinking these things through in an open minded, unconstrained way, and has the scope to get the best people in each time...

That's right - your opinion isn't good enough though. They. Don't. Trust. You.

And as for where I'm sitting...well here's another home truth about all this. And it's something that researchers are terrified of saying. Terrified.

We don't really have any shiny new things to show you.

Read that right? We don't. Sure, we have approaches, techniques, all that. But then so have all our competitors. Glittery ones, in some cases.

The real news is about what we have lodged firmly between our ears.The stuff that we bring into play to decide which approaches to use, and having used them, how you can use what they revealed.

I haven't found a way of writing it down on a form yet. Or taking it to a Procurement manager and saying "There! Look! That's the thing!"

But then, I'm not sure than any of the great researchers from whom I learned my trade, learned about what was really important in this business (people like Chrissie Burns, Roddy Glen, the late Prosper Riley-Smith) could do it either.

And nor, I suspect, would they try.

Every so often...

2010-04-13T18:32:00.000+01:00

...you just come across something and smile and think...nice work.

Whilst some fumble about in the foothills of Social Media, tweeting sale items to random collections of spam-burned followers, these guys have done something genuinely fun and new. Stretched the format, you might say...

Watch and learn...I will be :-)

Measuring Social Media. Butterfly Wings and Snake Oil?

2010-04-01T14:48:00.014+01:00

One of the few things that captured the public imagination from Chaos theory (a subject now making its second appearance on this blog (!) after this) was the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazonian Rainforest might ultimately be the trigger for a hurricane which devastates the Eastern seaboard of the US. The principle being that the butterfly's actions have effects, which create other effects, which create others. Starting very small, these effects are magnified throughout the system that is meteoreology, over and over, growing each time.

Ultimately, the tiniest, most incidental of activities can thus be the start of a chain of events which culminates in the biggest.

This phenomenon has been long something with which the market research industry has failed to grapple - principally because it's Too Hard*. Big on deterministic solutions, and attempts to break down markets, consumer behaviours, brand activities into their constituent parts - from which it still (often) makes linear, literalistic assumptions - the concept of 'emergence' has failed to gain any real traction in mainstream research thinking. Emergence is the unfortunate fact that when systems operate as systems, they don't actually behave as you might expect from a simple study of the activities and reponses of their individual parts. A termite colony is an emergent system. The human body is one. The collective response to the death of Princess Diana was one. The world economy is another (and the absurd primitivity of mainstream economics in failing to recognise this - still - has been laid bare these last two years).

Many mainstream research methodologies - I mean quantitative ones chiefly, and so called 'predictive' ones specifically - complete ignore this question. And they have done for decades. And made a lot of money from so doing too.

But here's another thing.

If you are going to try and draw some conclusions of sorts about what's going on, or what something means in a collective sense by exploring the tiny parts of a system and then rolling what you find into some big ole' conclusion, then you'd better make sure you the data you collect is accurate and means what you say it does.

If you don't, then the little errors you make will be compounded over and over and over as you scale your conclusions up. Like building a house with rotten joists, the most dangerous moment comes when you put what you've built under pressure - by constructing, say, several storeys on top of them. The rotten wood itself isn't dangerous per se. What you do with it, and what happens when you sell the house to some unsuspecting buyer, is.

But, hey, who cares? You're outta there. And when the whole thing falls down, who's to say it was the joists that caused it?

Yesterday I spent the day at the snappily titled Social Media Monitoring Bootcamp.

I've been to plenty of conferences in my time. This was, in fact, one of the best I can recall for sometime. But not because the news the speakers had to give us was good.

Social Media - talked about everywhere in marketing, and particularly within, er, Social Media - is trying to come of age. As we speak, companies large and small are queuing up to start Tweeting, or to invite fans to their FB pages. They are starting to sweat a little about the real effect of all those blog posts and forum comments. They are wondering just what the hell FourSquare is. They are worrying that the brand snapping at their heels is doing this stuff and they aren't. And so on.

Ultimately, most don't have a clue why they need to do it, they just somehow feel they do. Some are using the opportunity of this new world as essentially PR for the 21st century - a chance to tell people things they might or might not want to know, and sell them things. A few - a very very few - are understanding that potentially what's going on is a game changer. That they are now on a two way street and that what's on offer is the chance, and the opportunity, to develop an entirely new dialogue with 'real' people - a dialogue which can help them make and sell the right things, at the right price, to people who really want to buy them, who feel loyal to that brand and who actually might give a damn.

Naturally, as the avenues expand, and the technology improves, a 'Measurement' sector has emerged. It's certainly needed. The absence of it has been one of the biggest brakes on the growth of this area, as Boardrooms look puzzled about it all and wonder whether any of their company's time and investment actually achieves anything.

Yesterday revealed for me the fairly ghastly truth on this question - confirming a hunch I'd had since I first starting looking into all this. There are many many companies out there offering funky software you can download, offering to measure the prevailing sentiment (positive, negative, neutral) pertaining to your brand. Giving you data on the number of mentions you have had, and where. Even purporting to tell you how much 'influence' you are having, via the 'influence' of those who are writing about you.

And guess what? Almost all of it is smoke and mirrors. Bullshit, as the excellent talk by Philip Sheldrake put it, in fact.

Why? Because much of the data on which these conclusions are created is flawed. Incomplete. Subjective. Even incoherent.

The query you use to define what you're looking for is usually immensely difficult to form accurately. It takes considerable crafting, and patience.

The spiders which go out looking for reference to what you come up with may or may not cover anything like the 'entire' net (think about it...Google can't even do that, and is a long way off from doing so, when you include the almost infinite amount of data that is stored within elements within pages within trillions of sites).

The algorhythms that are used to define whether the person who is posting or tweeting about you is 'influential'...on this topic, in these circumstances, to this group of others...are nonsense.

The 'automated sentiment analysis' which claims to detect whether you are getting good or bad coverage is rudimentary, still unable to decode real human writing properly, understand context, intent, sarcasm, irony, or vernacular (and any focus on single word or phrase analysis is useless). Nor can it adequately unpick complex remarks, or those which might reference several brands. Nor can it take account of the fact that human beings don't always say what they mean, or do what they say.

And on top of all this, everybody does it in a completely different way, with their own proprietary software, about which they are probably not going to tell you very much (check the answer to question 2 here). As Marshall Sponder pointed out, you need only put the same query into five different platforms, and wait for their sentiment analysis to come back. You'll get five entirely different sets of data. He did it.

And on top of this, it all eventually boils down to the requirement of human beings to sit down and actually read all this stuff and then work out what everyone is really saying. Read the data that, of course, may have already been entirely, subjectively, ruined. And there's not a whole lot of time and money spent on that bit of the equation in the rush for 'intelligent' web crawlers to do it all.

There are no common, industy-wide, protocols for collecting data, nor for defining terms, nor for providing results. What there are, are hundreds of sexy looking dashboards which will produce very plausible looking graphs, pie charts, and ranked tables. All of which you can download easily, and cut and paste for the Marketing Director. And many of which aren't worth the electricity used for the pixels which display them. Nice.

So there we are. Hyperbole? Overclaim? I'd go further. Snakeoil.

Or if you like, the rotten joist, nicely painted, buried in the masonry?

* You know the old joke? This man is walking home from the pub one night and he sees another guy peering at the ground by his car. So he stops and asks him what he's doing, and the other chap says "I'm looking for my keys".

"Right," says our man, "Where did you lose them?"

"Over there in that bush" he says. "But the light's better here".

Social Media: The New Monologue?

2010-03-26T12:43:00.003Z

Following on from the Nestle post below, I came across this

Rentokil - never the world's most glamourous brand - 'getting it wrong' with Twitter. Another example of a company trying to 'answer' back?

Social Media is billed as the birth of proper 'dialogue'. Yet the quest for dominance in the exchange continues. On the one hand, we see the emergence of organisations 'using' Social Media to further their interests - shrewdly, subtly, and with the tacit (or blind) acceptance of those they are 'using' (great example here). This, to me, is simply super smart PR with a bigger reach than ever in which everyone gets to take something home from the party.

On the other we see brands pilloried because they try and 'respond' to accusations, or even simply question the comments of their Twitter followers, or FB fans. Quite often outrage seems to then follow, and lots of media professionals write head-shaking pieces on their websites in 'sadness more than anger' about the 'naivity' of some brands etc etc.

I actually feel quite sorry for Rentokil.

Find me the dialogue in all this, will someone please?

(Cross posted from the 'We are Social' group on Linked In)

Nestle shoots itself in the foot

2010-03-20T12:14:00.009Z

Oh dear Nestle.

Greenpeace outed them for using Palm Oil from felled rainforests in their products. It's an ongoing thing. Then Greenpeace put a video up on You Tube featuring someone idly biting into a Kit Kat, and blood pouring down his face. Except it's not a Kit Kat, it's an Oran Utan's finger - they live in the rain forest you see.

So what happened next?

Nestle's lawyers got You Tube to take the video down. Oh dear, again. And then it really kicked off. Nestle's Facebook page was swamped with negative comments, and demands that they stop using the Palm Oil. Worse, Nestle started deleting some negative comments, especially those who had distorted the Nestle logo as their profile pictures.

And then they started getting involved in the row itself, fuelling it, inflating it, on their FB page. Until it hit the media.

The result...

Yes, the share price fell.

The whole story is here and, frankly, pretty much everywhere else on the net already. It's already doing the rounds as the a case study in disastrous use of Social Media.

Note what Robin Grant from WeareSocial says (my bold)...

“What Nestle did in removing the video was naive. The legal recourse inflames the situation, and brands need to be aware of this. People are acting as a mob today, and the key thing is not to inflame the mob".

Let's take a look at that.

Sure, Nestle shouldn't be using Palm Oil sourced in this way. Sure, Oran Utans should protected. Yes I care. Yes I have stood in a demo (though not about this issue) with a placard myself, and been described as part of a "baying mob" (though we were anything but, frankly). And not virtually either.

But there are aspects of this incident which I find unsettling. Greenpeace - for whom this was priceless publicity - has a view. One for which it is easy to have sympathy. Nestle has a view. One for which it is much harder to feel sympathy, partly because they are a vast, profitable and fairly secretive conglomerate with a very patchy social responsibility record and a reputation as the bete noire of the socially progressive left.

Fact is though, Nestle were lynched, publically, and in the stock market, when they tried to reply, and offered some defence. The person in charge of their FB page has been hung out to dry...the general view is that he, or she, should simply have rolled over and died.

Getting stuck into the fight, when you are fighting a vast and unaccountable population of people of varying levels of knowledge, is probably not a good idea. Far better to have simply listened, and noted.

But I really don't wish to live in a world in which "the key thing is not to inflame the mob".

Mobs act without rationality, without responsibility, with a savagery and an anonymity created by their scale. No-one needs to care very much or know very much to be in a mob, but the collective power of the many can have vast power, as we are seing over and over - now that you can be in one mob, then click through to another page and join a second, from your sofa. This week a nice, right-on issue of animal rights and the environment. Nasty Nestle. Cuddly Greenpeace. Next week, a group forms to smash up the home of a pediatrician in Southern England because no-one can spell paedophile (it happened)?

I have some personal experience of living in fear of the 'mob'. A mob, in my case, created and fuelled by reactionary and conservative society, by the right wing media, and by ignorance. Over an issue about as far removed from the one in which Nestle is involved as it's possible to be, I'd add. And many of those who piled into Nestle on this, I'd add also, might perhaps support me in my cause. I have been on the receiving end of collective hate, randomly and anonymously - words written by people with a casual fleeting prejudice who soon moved on having added their bile to the sum of bile.

The particular issue isn't, as it were, the issue, you see. It's the capacity for this to happen, and for lives to change because of the mob, for better or worse. Just ask the people of Paris in the early 1790s...

Perhaps someone might give that some thought as they see the ramparts of Evil Nestle aflame?

I doubt it though.

Equal Rights, Equal Opportunities: Progress for All

2010-03-08T09:38:00.003Z

Happy International Women's Day - or United Nations Day for Women's Rights & International Peace (with its rather smarter moniker)

Several countries (including Russia and China) observe today as a public holiday, which is nice. IWD was first observed in 1911, a day when men stayed home with the children while their wives went out to meetings. Good to see that women were networking successfully back in 1911 too - as much of the planning for that first IWD (then observed on the 19th March) were made via WOM. Of course, at that time, one of the big issues was achieving the vote for women. (note: NZ women have had the vote since 1893)

There is still a long way to go yet to right global inequalities, but this year's theme of equal rights, equal opportunities and progress for all sounds pretty good for starters.

Onwards and upwards!

BOOKS? I couldn't eat a whole one!

2010-03-04T11:29:00.005Z

Today, March 4th, is World Book Day (note, it's World Book day but this date is only celebrated in Britain and Ireland. The rest of the world apparently celebrates it on another day, understood to be in April - just so we're clear!)

Hurrah. A whole day to acknowledge the power of books and move them forward. And there are some really good things happening about books - especially for kids today...

http://nationalbooktokens.com/index.asp?m=32&c=1188

But you can't help wondering why just ONE day for the lovely world of books? When British pies get a whole week and Fair Trade a fortnight - although hastily adding that we have absolutely no issues with their time in the sun!

A recent news item revealed teachers, when they inform pupils a book must be read as part of their studies, meet responses such as eye rolling and sighing. They get asked questions like how long is it and must they? Is it true that our collective concentration spans are becoming positively gnat-like and we really can't get through a whole one anymore?

So why not indulge in the satisfying reading of a good book today, while munching on a chicken, leek and mushroom pie (pie of the day), washed down by your favourite Fair Trade coffee, while you still can?!

We'll Call You

2010-02-18T15:36:00.001Z

Interesting to see the phone company Talk Talk is offering free weekly chats to its customers. The 5 minute calls are to be made by staff members who have volunteered and conversation topic is to be set by the customer - but the company promises not to try and sell services or give advice or counselling. It's aimed at older people living alone - estimated to be around 6% of Talk Talk's customer base.

While it's agreed that this kind of thing is tremendously helpful to the elderly, lonely and/or bewildered, there have also been concerns raised... Is five minutes long enough, will the volunteers be properly trained, and as customers will need a password for the service (to stop fraudulent callers), might this might get confusing ? etc.

Is it purely cynical? A gimmick? Well, Talk Talk say they're launching the scheme to "give something back" so maybe they should be given the benefit of the doubt at this stage?

We like the idea of giving something back, so good on them.

A Consumer's Report by Peter Porter

2010-02-14T19:38:00.001Z

The name of the product I tested is Life,
I have completed the form you sent me
and understand that my answers are confidential.
I had it as a gift,
I didn’t feel much while using it,
in fact I think I’d have liked to be more excited.
It seemed gentle on the hands
but left an embarrassing deposit behind.
It was not economical
and I have used much more than I thought
(I suppose I have about half left
but it’s difficult to tell) –
although the instructions are fairly large
there are so many of them
I don’t know which to follow, especially
as they seem to contradict each other.
I’m not sure such a thing
should be put in the way of children –
it’s difficult to think of a purpose
for it. One of my friends says
it’s just to keep its maker in a job.
Also the price is much too high.
Things are piling up so fast,
after all, the world got by
for a thousand million years
without this, do we need it now?
(Incidentally, please ask your man
to stop calling me ‘the respondent’,
I don’t like the sound of it.)
There seems to be a lot of different labels,
sizes and colours should be uniform,
the shape is awkward, it’s waterproof
but not heat resistant, it doesn’t keep
yet it’s very difficult to get rid of:
Whenever they make it cheaper they seem
to put less in – if you say you don’t
want it, then it’s delivered anyway.
I’d agree it’s a popular product,
it’s even got into the language; people
even say they’re on the side of it.
Personally I think it’s overdone,
a small thing people are ready
to behave badly about. I think
we should take it for granted. If its
experts are called philosophers or market
researchers or historians, we shouldn’t
care. We are the consumers and the last
law makers. So finally, I’d buy it.
But the question of a ‘best buy’
I’d like to leave until I get
the competitive product you said you’d send.

************************************

Good old fashioned poetry eh?

In a day in which my mind has been full of pack design research, and the battery market and the women's shaving market, and the power and measurability of social marketing (and yes, a pretty average Sunday, but hey)...it made me smile :-)

The Secret Life of Chaos

2010-01-15T17:58:00.007Z

Every so often something appears on the tv at Different River Towers which fires the Corporate Imagination, and is self evidently Something To Think About.

Last night BBC4 offered up 'The Secret Life of Chaos', a chase through the history of chaos and complexity theory hosted by Professor Jim Al-Khalili. It starred luminaries like Alan Turing (who, it seems, as well as inventing the modern computer, and saving Britain from the Nazi hordes with his code breaking prowess - after which he was moreorless murdered by the British establishment for being gay - came up with some stunning mathematical thinking which set the ball rolling on Chaos). Edward Lorenz (he of the Butterfly Effect) and the gorgeously named Benoit Mandlebrot - for whom we have to thank for Fractal geometry - also featured.

Chaos is wonderful. The world is chaotic, governed by physical (and social, and economic) systems which never - ever - ultimately act as the maths says they should. Or as deterministic Newtonian physics - the act of faith (as it turns out to be) - says they should. From the errant weather, which just won't behave, to Stock markets which collapse unexpectedly, to the migrations of birds or the activities of undersea currents, to the shrinking of the ice caps or population growth, all are stubbornly resistant to being fully and accurately modelled, no much how data we endlessly push into the business end of ever bigger computers.

And yet, patterns emerge. Patterns which are derived from feedback loops which are absorbed by these emerging systems (they are in fact called 'emergent' because no-one really knows exactly what they are going to do once they get going). The action of the waves creates feedback on rocks, which influences the creation of shapes - and self repeating pattens. Feedback in markets influences share prices, and regularities appear. Feedback from the environment influences evolution. The arrogance of the human race may be in the belief that we can capture and isolate those myriad factors which create the feedback, and in our blind selectivity in picking out the factors which we believe are critical and ignoring the rest.

It's a fascinating area. About 15 years ago, I tried to get some thinking off the ground which took it somewhere (having read James Gleick's 'Chaos') - in the setting of markets, brands and research. Some stuff was going on in economics at the time - still is I'm sure - which suggested there was a story to tell. Gleick's book spoke of this fabulous inter disciplinary place called The Santa Fe Institute, where Theoretical Physicists were chewing the fat with Population Scientists, Agronomists with Evolutionary Biologists, and so on. And everywhere seeing chaos and complexity...

At the heart of the thinking I was doing at the time was, however, an awful truth. It was one I felt I knew already, one that many Planners in many agencies knew, though we didn't know why we knew. It was that any pretensions to prediction claimed by market research were - had to be - hogwash. And that the seemingless endless quest for the ultimate algorithm, the Perfect Model, was completely misguided.

I recall some correspondence with a researcher in the US at the time. He was working in the multi billion dollar quantititative research industry, so fond of testing to destruction - or at least coming up with an answer, any answer. Clients were, still are - both there and here - paying big money to have someone show up with some PowerPoint slides to tell them that the top box scores indicated future success, or failure.

To his great credit, and not without some professional courage, he had written something around chaos and complexity, and got it published. It was a thorough, well thought through piece, scholarly and well argued. And it moreorless said his entire industry was doomed.

He told me that the response was...well, the term 'cup of cold sick' comes to mind. He wrote back like a man shortly to be tied to a stake and burned in the town square.

Back then, it was hard to avoid a picture of turkeys standing in the polling booths looking at a ballot form with 'Christmas' written on it from coming to mind. I was surrounded by the increasingly trendy econometricians agencies were hiring, and seeing growing numbers of quant researchers - with their black boxes and their normative scores - troop through my clients' offices. I felt discouraged, deferential, and let it drop.

Yet those turkeys might just have another choice open to them. Feedback Loops in complex systems means that there is a role for research. It is how brands and markets - systems both - receive information, and it is the fuel they need with which to mount a response. A response based on something may be better than lying prone as circumstances play merry hell with your brand or your business.

But don't imagine you can actually shape the future. You can do some smart, timely things, perhaps. But don't imagine you are God.

Time to get those old papers out I think...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If you're in the UK, catch the programme here.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00pv1c3/The_Secret_Life_of_Chaos/

(If you're outside the UK, get your laptop to connect to the net via a Proxy server, in the UK (search the web to find one). That gives you a UK IP address. That tells the BBC you are watching it in the UK...and off you go. Though it may not stream that well, so you may need to download...)

Yuletide photography :-)

2009-12-21T12:40:00.001Z

There you go. What other qual research company actually takes its own photos for its Christmas card eh? ;-)

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to everyone!

My kind of client

2009-12-09T23:49:00.005Z

Mick Jagger hires Andy Warhol...

(with thanks to http://gezd.posterous.com/)

G&B's - Progress or Compromise?

2009-12-03T17:16:00.004Z

Talking to a retailer friend in the Vikki Shop about Green & Black's chocolate ...

Now we consume a bit of G&Bs at Different River and we're generally big fans of their quality product.

But since our friends, Cadbury bought in, it seems some things have changed. Just subtle things, but you could describe them as compromises. For example, the Cherry flavour: Did you ever try that when it was positioned as a superior flavour in the family? It was a bigger block and had gold on the packaging and it used to be around £2.89, but it was to die for - the outstanding flavour. It's been reincarnated, but it's now more run of the mill and priced accordingly at around £1.99.

So they are now more reasonably priced. But I'm told that they're no longer vegan, as they contain milk solids. Is that the price you have to pay for the big boys having a hand in it? Is it a good thing to have the range ever extending and all priced sensibly - or is it just taking away some of its quality and class?

The Romance of Letters

2009-12-03T12:39:00.004Z

I continue from Jo's Borders lament...

Having just seen "Bright Star", Jane Campion's touchy feely film about John Keats' and Fanny Brawne, I was struck by the utter romance of letter writing. And, a bit like Borders, it would be sad if the act of letter writing doesn't survive.

The exchange of letters during John and Fanny's troubled relationship held such precious value for them - not just as a communication tool, but very much a part of their love expression. The film shows Fanny kissing her letters to John, and in turn smelling and holding his close to her breast and reading them over and over. The very sensuousness of the article was as key as exchanging their thoughts and feelings for one another.

Surely no electronic communication form could offer the sender or recipient such an experience of pleasure - could it??

Borders goes bust

2009-11-27T13:02:00.016Z

News today that Borders UK has gone into receivership. The website (oh the semiotic irony, do they know they do it?) once replete with book titles and ideas and ordering options, is now a simple black page with some dull Administrator speak on it. Perhaps they could have also sprung for some clipart of a hearse too, just to complete the effect?

The news of a decent, value added business, that provided something that I liked very much, collapsing is very saddening. Personally, the retail park branch near where I live is...was...a destination in its own right. Well stocked, with friendly staff, a thriving local following and events like book readings and book groups. It even had a half decent Starbucks.

Perhaps the most distressing news of all is that the company, which had been struggling for some time, has been the victim of short term management with an absense of any vision. Classic British corporate culture in some ways...Borders has been through several owners in the last few years, the most recent being a management team who bought the company in the summer with the backing of venture capitalists.

Or Vulture Capitalists as I heard them described just now...the deal was only done in July. Now, inside five months, they have pulled the plug.

How can a good business like Borders, (and yes - I mean good in that it met a need, and did it, as far as the view from where I sat looked), fail?

Well, it's a slightly simplistic queston, I know.

In a hundred ways, especially in the toxic economic climate in which we live now.

My guess? Cost. Big expensive stores, crammed with stuff people weren't buying and big expensive wage bills for the people in the stores to look after the diminishing number of customers. Cost that looked more and more unsustainable as first the Net Book Agreement (the restrictive pricing practice that meant all books were sold everywhere at RRP) was demolished by Asda and the other supermarkets, then as the book buying public moved out of bookshops and onto the internet, and then as they started to not buy books at all - downloading and discovering E-readers and the like.

Whilst many businesses put the focus on turnover, they fail to understand the erosive poison of cost. Stocking palette loads of things that people aren't actually buying is a tough business model indeed. And no, I'm not expecting to be getting the Nobel Prize for Economics for coming up with that insight...

The other factor is vision. Absense of it. We face a situation in the UK where the national postal service, The Royal Mail, is on its knees (and will collapse, in my view, in the next five years - at least as a publically owned service, if the balance sheet is the only criterion in play) because no-one in government knew, ten years ago, what an email was. Thus was The Royal Mail prevented from developing and investing in areas which could have saved it. The idea of writing stuff on a bit of paper, putting it in an envelope and then gluing a picture of the monarch on the front which proved you had paid for someone to take it somewhere had, after all, been around since the Roland Hill. And, without the stamp bit, it had been around for centuries before. How could it all be about to change?

But it did, and it does.

Which begs the question, 'Will we even have books at all in 50 years?' It seems almost inconceivable that we won't. But we must conceive of it. Books may well be something found in antique shops, a curious reminder of the past. Loved still by people of a certain generation, as the horse and buggy was, but of no practical use to most. Seems impossible? Tell that to the guy looking for a job lighting the gas lamps in your street...

The age of big shops crammed with writing on paper which was glued or stitched together will be pretty much over, just as age of the wheelwright and the candle maker is behind us. And sadly, not even the chance of a double shot skinny latte in an agreeable cafe - whilst you browse books that you then put back on the shelf and go home and download - is going to make much difference.

Meanwhile, I'm going to go down to my local Borders to tell the staff there how sad I am about what's happened...

Different River Announces Radical New Research Breakthrough...

2009-11-23T15:20:00.003Z

Yep, today we can unveil a new research initiative which we think is going to take the marketing commuity by storm.

It's called RealPerson.

And here's the thing.

It involves tackling research challenges by finding useful people...sitting down with them...and listening to them.

That's right.

Face to face.

In the flesh.

Not in a flashmob, not crowdsourced, retweeted, or IMed. Without looking at anyone's RSS or logging onto Foursquare. Without having to diggit, or check their status updates...

In fact...

...are you ready for this...?

Not on the internet at all!!

Think it'll catch on?

Banking: The Different River View...

2009-11-20T15:50:00.009Z

Check on the pic in Slideshare widget for our brand shiny new presentation about the banks. About where it all went wrong for them and us, and how we can recapture the magic :-)

It's just down there on the right of your screen if you scroll down a bit. Go on, you know you want to ;-)

Nicest way to see it is to click on the 'Full' tab below the slides once you're on our Slideshare page. It takes about 10 mins, and we hope there are things in it that will make you think in a new way about what the banks have been up to, and how we as customers have been behaving...

(It was embedded all funkily here, but weirdly, after changing the text slightly on the original and reuploading it to Slideshare, the embed code still points to the unrevised version, so I took it down. Hmmm...buggy buggy...)

How the world works now...

2009-11-17T10:41:00.002Z

I was told a joke the other day ...

It is the month of August, on the shores of the Black Sea. It is raining, and the little town looks totally deserted. These are tough times, everybody is in debt, and everybody lives on credit.

Suddenly, a rich tourist comes to town. He enters the only hotel, lays a 100 Euro note on the reception counter, and goes to inspect the rooms upstairs in order to choose one.

The hotel proprietor takes the 100 Euro note and runs to pay his debt to the butcher.

The butcher takes the 100 Euro note, and runs to pay his debt to the pig farmer.

The pig farmer takes the 100 Euro note, and runs to pay his debt to the supplier of his feed and fuel.

The supplier of feed and fuel takes the 100 Euro note and runs to pay his debt to the town's prostitute that in these hard times, gave her services on credit.

The hooker runs to the hotel, and pays off her debt with the 100 Euro note to the hotel proprietor to pay for the rooms that she rented when she brought her clients there.

The hotel proprietor then lays the 100 Euro note back on the counter so that the rich tourist will not suspect anything.

At that moment, the tourist comes down after inspecting the rooms, and takes his 100 Euro note, saying that he did not like any of the
rooms, and leaves town.

No one earned anything. However, the whole town is now without debt, and looks to the future with a lot of optimism.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how your Government is doing business today.

Hmmm?

Neave TV

2009-11-16T22:37:00.001Z

I'm just loving this site. I'm loving the whole idea of taking television out of context. And the whole interactive, bizarre, responsiveness of this site tickles me...take a look around, it's fun.

The Restaurant From Hell

2009-10-28T15:42:00.033Z

Just want to take up Vikki's post on Customer Service.

Personally, I have been experiencing some dreadful service these last few days. From a certain phone company. It's an ordering-and-billing saga that, in a kind of Kafka-esque nightmare, seems to be on an endlessly repeating loop. And writing about the specifics here is neither good for my sanity, nor yours, nor particularly the point of what I want to say...

What is the point is to ask you to imagine the following scenario.

You walk into a restaurant. A big one. It used to be the only one in town, but now it isn't.

You have a problem. You are are hungry. It takes a while to find a table, but you do eventually. You sit down. In front of you is a menu.

On that menu are written the words

"Hello and welcome to our restaurant! To help you with your order, you've got 6 choices. To order a starter, wave to the waiter with the red hair. To order a main course, call the waiter with the bushy eyebrows. To order a dessert, attract the attention of the waitress with the long legs. If you want something to drink it's the waitress with the blonde bob. To get cutlery, attract the attention of the old guy in the corner. If you'd like to pay get up and walk over to the corner and stand about. For anything else, including a bread basket, condiments or napkins, ask for the Manager. If you'd like to read these choices again, just go to the top of the page."

You really want a meal. That's a meal. You want many of the elements listed in front of you but ten minutes ago you conceptualised your need as one thing, not six or more, and you quite like that thought. You quite like the idea of a meal being essentially a collective noun for a grouped set of related needs which is easiest to think of in the singular. You do that, because somewhere, you are using a model that uses a single emotional outcome. You want to look back on your dinner, bring the various aspects of it together, and feel better for having walked in...

Turns out this restaurant thinks you're wrong about that.

You try and attract the attention of the guy in the corner. But fourteen other tables are waiting for him too, and it takes a while.

While you are waiting, a man walks into the restaurant and places a small card on your table.

It says

"Your order is important to us. We are experiencing an unusually high demand for the old guy who puts out the cutlery at the moment. You are in a queue. Don't forget that if you prefer, you may wish to go home and get your own cutlery and bring it back with you. Your house is open 24 hours a day, 52 weeks a year. Thank you for your patience. To pass the time you may wish to hum".

You wait. And wait.

Eventually it's your turn. The old guy comes over.

"I've been waiting 15 minutes" you say. "I'd like some cutlery."

"I would like to apologise for the delay, we have been experiencing unusually high cutlery demand at this time," says the Old Guy. "My name is the Old Guy who does the Cutlery and I'm here to help you with your cutlery needs today".

"Well actually I wanted a meal, maybe you could you take my order for me? I have been waiting a long time, and my stomach is starting to hurt it is so empty," you respond.

"I can only do cutlery" he says. "But I can tell you where the waiters who bring food are"

You sigh.

"Well in that case, I'll have a fish knife, and a fork please. I thought I'd have the plaice."

"Ah" says the Old Guy. "I'm afraid I can't help you with a fish knife. You see that's actually part of Fish, not Cutlery. You'll have to speak to Fish. Would you like me to try and find him for you?"

"Why isn't it dealt with by you?" you say.

"Because specialist cutlery is dealt with by a different department."

"Right," you say.

And off he goes.

And you wait, and you wait. And you wait...

And eventually someone else appears in front of you.

"What do you want?" he says.

"I'd like a fish knife" you say.

"No-one told me," he says.

"I see. Right. Let's start again then. I'm very hungry indeed, I've been in here for a long time now, and I wanted to order the fish. So I wanted a fish knife."

"Well, I'll need to get Cutlery over. It's their area. Everyone knows that".

"But they just told me it was your department".

"No. Absolutely not. Our system only involves fish and other water-based food groups. Definitely not cutlery. I can put you in a queue for Cutlery. It looks like we're experiencing unusually high demand in that area today though. Can you hum?"

I could go on...

At the heart of all this is a very very simple issue.

The customer in this scenario is one person. One life, one set of needs, one desire. The customer approaches the restaurant with no interest in the range of systems and disciplines which must be called upon to meet his or her needs. These factors are irrelevant. He or she wishes the problem solved, the brand to take responsibility, to recognise and respect his or her needs. To deal with them.

Many organisations have no real concept of this still. They put the customer on some kind of Model-T style production line and wheel that customer from one discipline to the next (and sometimes back again) not because the customer finds that easiest, wants it, or because it meets that customer's needs. They do it for themselves, to accomodate large volumes of business, not particularly well. At their heart, they exist for themselves, and are broken into internally-manageable operational silos that prevent cross contamination of discipline because they don't trust their staff to go beyond a tight operational remit. What the customer feels, and wants, is at a deeply and systemically level irrelevant - despite the "your-call-is-important-to-us" white noise.

What should they be doing? Well, there's a clue in the phrase 'Customer service'.

In fact there are two. I wonder if that phone company can guess what they are?

Luckily, the restaurant business came up with this whole new approach some years ago...

Opportunities

2009-10-26T11:38:00.005Z

UK is still in recession, but what about the opportunities…

The figures out on Friday informed us we’re still officially recessed /recessive (?!), but it was interesting that everyone seemed to be expecting better news. Is there better news coming, or are we still doomed to stay wading around in our own economic mire a while longer…?

Our feeling is that yes, it will take a while more, but that’s no reason to lose the will to live now, not when we’ve come this far!

As we know (and repeat as our mantra), recession is merely CHANGE. So what do we do when change happens? (and no, we don’t turn to Zurich) We look for the opportunities. And they abound now. Oh yes they do!

One of these opportunities exist within SERVICE, one of my pet bug bears. Customer service, I’ve argued for a long time, is average to poor in this country. Like sport, we are not naturally good at it – it needs work. I blame empire mentality, mostly – we’ve just spent too long being out there, taking over places and being in charge. Hubris not humility. Service doesn’t sit well on our shoulders – sadly, even in the 21st century – we just haven’t turned it into a virtue yet – not as a nation. My mum used to say to be “if you can’t be there with a glad heart, don’t be there at all” and she was right. Whatever you need to do to change your mindset, so that the service you offer is your pride and joy – well, we must do it! And NOW, while the chips are down (or whatever the thinned down, budget chips are currently doing with themselves).

The opportunity exists out there for the companies that do. And there are some pretty sore industries that surely, surely need to embrace all the opportunities they can find right now. The banking industry springs to mind, for one …

The bank that comes up with some clearly differentiated, customer-focused products that actually help a customer take control of his/her finances to not only save more easily and efficiently but also to manage and speculate better will be the bank I choose to spend the rest of my life with. That’s a promise.

And if they can manage to make me feel like a valued customer, regardless of whether I have £50k in the black or £5k in the red, then I will consider spending half of my next life with them too.

Gimps and Ball Bearings and Falling Pianos

2009-10-16T01:25:00.028+01:00

Somewhere buried in the Campaign Live site is a reel of the top ten 'weird' ads.

The film below isn't in it.

But, thereagain, I never actually thought it was weird. The proposition is burned through it. Though legend has it that a dumper truck of fivers was delivered to Tony Kaye to do it and he brooked no intervention from agency or client till the whole feast was in the can, edited and purring through the U-matic player* in some conference room at AMV.

At the agency where I worked, we used to sneak it into meetings to show brand managers whose companies sold cereals or insurance. Right after the Millward Brown meeting and just before the Nielsen presentation. A bit like lacing the biscuits with LSD - copious amounts of which The Velvet Underground were possibly taking when they first recorded the music in 1967... (hey who said the Age of Rebellion is over! ;-) ).

A masterpiece. Still.

* 'U-matic'? Look it up ;-) Listed next to 'Gas Lighting', and '78 rpm Long Players' I expect.

...and the XFM kids

And thus to a radio station on which you're never going to hear The Velvet Underground, or Lou Reed, or anyone like that really...XFM. Looked after, in advertising terms, by Mother, which is co-run by a chap I used to work with.

Mother's reel is pretty good still, and though the film below isn't quite current, it uses the (fairly old but still-a-banker) idea of Kids Trying to Be Grown Ups very nicely. The idea doesn't have to be new to the world, but if you point it at a really clear strategy (new music, and only new music) and craft it well, it can do the business for you.

A paltry number of hits on YouTube really for such a nice piece of work...

(I'd add only one parting thought on it. As 'The UK's New Music Station', I wasn't expecting to find the release of a new Nirvana DVD at the top of the bill on their website this morning. Hmmm. And there's Jarvis Cocker lurking on the home page too. Brand drift?)

Horizontal tornadoes

2009-10-15T21:34:00.000+01:00

Vikki came across this the other day, and I instantly loved it. Be sure to check the videos on the site of people trying this fan out.

Yes, it's a fan.

With no blades.

I loved it because it illustrates one of the most powerful and enduring principles of innovation. At least I think it does. I'm no James Dyson, but my take on this extraordinary item of kit is that it reminds me of a tornado. Tornadoes are rotating columns of air which suck more air in a downforce down a funnel. Make one really small, turn one on its side and point it at someone, and you've got a fan. Better, you've got a fan which you can build in a bunch of colours and retail for £199.

Though whether the market for desktop fans at this price is as robust as it once was is debatable.

Maybe I'm making it up about the tornado. Tornadoes, obviously, have a habit of destroying Kansas towns and sucking up herds of cows, gas stations, police cars, Dorothy's house, all those kinds of things. I guess Dyson has ironed out any tendency of this thing to pull the face off those enjoying its cooling breeze. Indeed the air comes out at them. Like a fan.

But the point is...so much innovation comes from looking at something and thinking "What if you did that with it...".

Connecting the hitherto unconnected.

So I do hope someone somewhere at Dyson is a closet storm chaser...