Author Archives: Diego Rodriguez

My new car is a…

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… bike.  In fact it’s this tasty number made by Breezer:

Uptownd_2

I’ve had the bike for about three months now, and have grown to love it on several levels:

  • It’s an integrated experience:  I could have spent a bit less money by cobbling together an equivalent bike from bits and pieces, but the Breezer works really well as a unified whole.  Its designer, Joe Breeze, has a strong point of view on what makes a good bike, and I can feel that as I ride it.
  • It’s fun:  I spent a significant percentage of my childhood free time messing around with bikes.  I lived for my BMX bike.  I was either jumping it off of tall things, riding it through deep pits of mud, fixing it and cleaning it due to the previous two activites, or finding a way to get moneoy tobuy upgrade parts.  Over the course of about six years I took it from being a $80 Huffy to being a mean, lean, nickle-plated jumping machine.  A Mongoose that flew through the air and even landed safely more often than not. By the time I was done modifying it, the only original parts left were the wheels (the original ones ran strong and true), and the chain.  I’m looking forward to hacking on this bike (because as Facebook has taught us, it’s all about user-hackable platforms), and I just love the feel of the wind through what is left of my hair.  Fun fun fun.
  • It looks killer:  Amsterdam is the New LA.  Or Paris.  In other words, the cool look these days is fenders plus bells plus black paint.  Forget spandex and your aero tuck on that carbon fiber frame; sitting upright and maximizing your coefficient of drag is the way to go.  Admittedly, I’ve been unduly influenced by the editors of Monocle on this dimension, but I see the general rise in popularity of the Dutch bike aesthetic as a search for consumptive sobriety for sombre times; the Prius is statement about remorse for over exuberant car-ness, and I think black bikes with fenders are like wearing Timberland boots in a world of Blahniks — the durable, practical,sensible choice.  That happens to also look killer in its own way.

Is the commuter bike the new Prius?

Yes.

What’s old is new again

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I spied this vintage Honda Cub on the street today in Palo Alto.  And yes, that is a tasty Cayman S just behind it, looking quite gnarly crouched down on a lowered suspension and some expensive three-piece wheels.  But I digress.  Let’s focus on the Cub for now.

As our societal context changes, value propositions that were of no value can suddenly gain back their value, and vice versa.  In a world of cheap gas, a Honda Cub is an inferior mode of transportation in many ways to a Flabigator XL SUV.  But expensive gas is enough to bring one out of mothballs and use it to carry quite a bit of stuff, as witnessed by the large trunk strapped to the back of this one.

Innovation is about finding ways to grow that are right for you.  Do the ideas need to be new to the world?  Not likely, especially since there are few new things under the sun.  It may be as simple as looking back to times past in search of analogous situations.  People are still people.  What worked then that could work now?

Brands are what we say they are: Brand Tags

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Brand Tags is a website about something very near the absolute truth when it comes to the essence of brands.  It is truthful because it is not about positioning statements or a theories of meaning emanating from self-proclaimed branding gurus sitting deep inside corporate campuses.  Instead, it uses crowdsourcing to let all of us know what all of us really think brands stand for.

It is instructive and illuminating to peruse the catalog of brands.  For instance, this site helped me understand the gap I feel between my fondness for cars made by BMW and some aspects of the brand that surrounds them.  Here’s what the crowd thinks of BMW:

Metacool_no_bmw_rule

I admire this site because it flips the fundamental equation of formal market research on its head.  Instead of a few asking the many to provide isolated points of data which are aggregated in private for the exclusive use of the few, this is about the many publicly commenting on the work of a few.  It’s brand equity made transparent.  The internet changes the equation of one-to-many communications such as market research so radically that we have to question many of the market research methodologies that worked well for the past fifty years.

Enough sermonizing.  The battle mode is a fun time sink — watch out!

Metacool_brand_tags

There’s something about GINA.

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I’ve received a large number of emails from folks asking my opinion of the BMW GINA concept car.

Here’s what I think:

  • GINA is about being remarkable.  And being remarkable, whether it be in the domains of design, engineering or marketing, takes guts.  BMW excels across all three of these domains, and does so in no small part due to having the courage of its convictions.  Sometimes these convictions are too strongly held, witness iDrive in all of its befuddling infamy.  But from iDrives to flame surfaces to Bangle Butts, BMW seems to be a place where errors of commission are forgiven.  It’s about guts, in other words, and GINA is an tangible expression of those held by the brave folks from Munich.
  • GINA is about a return to a paradigm of flexible, articulating structures.  GINA’s anthropomorhpic nature is quite sticky from an emotional point of view, but I find it most interesting in terms of a return to a structural paradigm used by early aviation pioneer such as Louis Bleriot.  Being covered with a fabric is not a new idea — many cars used to have
    leather bodywork (and we still have lingering fabric convertible tops
    out there) — but combining that fabric with an articulating structure
    is new for automobiles.  The wing of a Bleriot monoplane flexed in response to pilot control inputs.  To see that wing in motion is to see organic motion very different to the mechanistic slides and pivots that characterize modern airplanes.  When the light hits it just right, there are few mechanical structures more beautiful than a semi-translucent Bleriot wing.
  • GINA is a platform for a new age of open innovation and co-creation.  As Chris Bangle states in the video, attaching the fabric covering to the space frame does not require a great deal of time.  Imagine the cool stuff that could happen if BMW enabled "civilians" to riff on their own fabric covering patterns.  Or perhaps non-structural elements of the space frame could be easily modified within specified parameters to allow for surface improvisations.  And even the parameters controlling the wink of GINA’s eyes could be made available for public hacking, so that you could upload new software routines and choose to have a sleepy car or a caffeinated autobahn stormer.  Most BMW’s, I’d wager, would be the latter.

I’ll take mine in a matte finish.

Everything matters: great marketing from Virgin America

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I received this email last month the night before taking a Virgin America flight:

Dear Diego Rodriguez
            
            
Due to delays
in the modification of our new planes, the inflight entertainment and
select other in-seat services will not be available on your upcoming
Virgin America flight. This includes the Red Inflight Entertainment
system, which normally features satellite TV, movies, games, Google
Maps and a food ordering system. In addition, the plugs at every seat
for electronic gear will not be operational for the flight. Why are we
sending you this message? We want you to be prepared to have your
laptop or iPod fully charged, and ensure you have the latest magazines
or newspapers to read while onboard your flight. We’ll do our best to
provide some reading material onboard in case you forget.

We
make millions of dollars in high-tech modifications to each one of
Virgin America’s brand new planes and we appreciate your patience with
us as we finalize this modification process across our brand new fleet.
Thank you again for your patience and we look forward to welcoming you
on Virgin America.
         

The Guest Services Team

As it turned out, when I boarded the inflight entertainment system was working (they had fixed it, I suppose) so my low expectations were greatly exceeded.  I was a happy guy: happy to be on a clean airplane with an enthusiastic crew, happy to get something I didn’t think was going to happen, and happy that Virgin knew how to reach me with the right message at the right time. 

This message feels like it was written by someone who had flown on a plane at some point in their life, and understood the importance of having something to do during the flight.  Like having reading material.  It is a far cry from the disjointed jingle-driven marketing drivel spewed by most other airlines.  No tag-lines or positioning statements here; this is marketing at its best: all about making my experience the best it can be, and showing a concern for all the small elements of the flying experience which signal that the big stuff are being taken care of, too.  Great marketing is an exercise in fractal experience design.

My favorite new blogs: technohumanism & Our RISD

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I really like technohumanism and Our RISD, John Maeda’s latest new blogs.  For such as busy guy, Professor Maeda sure has a lot of blogs — I count four on the metacool roster of cool destinations.  And maybe that’s the point: if you’re using a blog as a place to fool around with ideas, it helps open your eyes to the world, which then makes it easier to see the world, which then makes it easy to have things you’d like to blog about, and so forth.  Of course, it helps a lot if you start out with John Maeda’s curiosity and energy!

If you have access to Monocle magazine, check out their recent profile of Professor Maeda’s new role as the President of RISD.  Here’s a quote where he is talking about where students of the future may come from:

"I want all these under-served areas that are massively creative and
unique. How do you get to where the missing talent is? How
do you find raw talent? Maybe it’s ageless, maybe it’s people who are
60-plus. I think all these stigmas can maybe go away."

If you’re a reader of metacool, you know that greatly admire John’s philosophy of doing both.  If I were 17 again and looking at places to pursue an undergraduate education, I would look quite seriously at RISD, for it is a place  all about exploration across boundaries.  When I was 19, after a harrowing freshman and sophomore years that felt like I was leaving my soul at the entrance to campus, I figured out a way to do both, and ever sense I’ve been happiest in life when I’m trying to do both.  Now, it’s tough to do both at times (and I’ve been caught doing too much of both in the last six months), but life gets better and richer this way.  Why choose?  Do both.  One blog?  Why not two blogs?  One job?  Why not two?  How about three?  The only sell out is selling yourself short with false tradeoffs. 

Q: what does our brand stand for?

A: what does our space feel like?

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The office of Lamborghini’s marketing chief, Manfred Fitzgerald, is covered in a nice profile in Fortune magazine.  You can see a glimpse of it here, but unfortunately the best photographs of his office are only in the print magazine. 

Configured in raw aluminum, polished steel, black stone tile, and white leather, Fitzgerald’s office does in fact look and feel like the embodiment of the current Lambo brand – which is something about German technical know-how and integrity draped in Italian mojo.  Audi-owned Lamborghini is the type of Italian car company whose marketing chief would most appropriately be named Manfred, in other words.  As is argued in the article, the aesthetic of the space informs the thinking done there which informs the greater brand of the company as embodied by its products.  Aside from the use of Eames chairs, the product of folks whose design sensibility sits in a place a world away from that of Lamborghini, it works for me. 

It also leads me to believe that imagining what one’s brand-delivery knowledge working space should look like could be a great exercise for getting to the essence of a brand.  And perhaps a more effective exercise than coming up with keywords or images borrowed from stock imagery or from other brands.  For example, the workspace of the pre-Audi Lamborghini — a chaotic, passion-filled brand — would have been an old Emilian barn with a gas-welding setup in the middle of the room, spanners on a table, sheets of aluminum in a messy pile, and a pyramid of empty lambrusco bottles over in the corner.  And some loud opera playing off of vinyl.

Let’s try some more to see if this works.  Close your eyes and imagine Apple’s place.  You can see it, right?  It’s not so different from Lamborghini’s palace, except that people are wearing jeans instead of multi-thousand Euro suits, the floors are white instead of black, and there’s a CNC machine in there carving something interesting out of a block of stainless steel.  Puma.  What would Puma be like?  I see it as an outdoor cafe in a hipster place like Miami, with multiple open-participation shoe creation stations where civilians (filtered by a hipster bouncer, natch) could help design future shoes.  Subaru’s brand development place would be a heli-vac capable modular building transported around the world on a seasonal basis, always positioned out in the boonies where there’s a good supply of muck, gravel, snow, and sheep filth.  Petter Solberg would have a permanent bunk bed there, always ready to roll, so long as he slept in his nomex coveralls.

These are the types of spaces where brand-creating folks should be sitting, not in some corporate cubicle-ville where the closest cultural wellsprings are a TGI-McFunster’s, a parking lot, and the nearest highway.  Living in the brand in order to create the brand.  Virtually or literally, it makes sense.