If you are a Stanford graduate student and want to get some sticky experience in designing stuff to be viral, please sign up for Creating Infectious Engagement.  This course is the third iteration of a vein of intellectual inquiry which began with Creating Infectious Action (CIA) two years ago, and became Creating Infectious Action, Kindling Gregarious Behavior (CIA-KGB) last year.  Is there a government agency named CIE anywhere on the planet?  Let me know about that one.

As usual, the d.school experience is all about team teaching, because it increases variance.  I have the pleasure of joining an illustrious, experienced, and fun teaching team for the class:  Debra Dunn, Perry Klebahn, Kerry O’Connor, and Bob Sutton.  We’ll be doing projects for Facebook and the Climate Savers  Computing Project.

You can find out more about the class at Bob’s blog.  The class is for registered Stanford graduate students and will likely be the most work of any class you’ve ever taken at Stanford.  If you are interested in
applying to the class, please send a resume and statement to CIEapplication@lists.stanford.edu
(no more than 500 words) about why you are interested
in taking the class and will be a constructive part of it.  Additionally,
please list your experiences, if any, with d.school classes.  Applications
are due March 15 and admissions to the class will be announced on March 19.
   Also, if you have any questions, please write Debra, Kerry,
or Bob.

Here’s some brain fodder to play with the next time you’re stuck in traffic: Evolution of Car Logos

Just look at the evolution of the SAAB badge.  Amazing how much churn there is on the automotive branch of the tree for a brand which only emerged after WWII:

Myself, I like the 1949 badge the best.  Don’t like the screaming chicken so much.  How does one say "Burt Reynolds" in Swedish?

As I look through this site, I have to admit that many of the older badge renditions are at least as compelling as their replacements, and often more so.  Having been a brand manager at one point in my peripatetic career, I sense that the rationale for many brand revisions or logo redesigns are rooted more in internal politics and the need to do something tangible for one’s yearly performance review than in market needs.  In other words, most customers probably don’t care if your new logo is slightly better than your old one, especially if they just finally got used to the old one, because it has only been the old for the three years that have passed since the last redesign.  As with management, sometimes the best marketing may be no marketing at all…

Anyway, it’s fun stuff.  Thanks to Tim for pointing me to this link!

This week’s unveiling of the Tata Nano is yet another piece of evidence that "nano" is the new "turbo".

In our world of bloated, inane Flabbigators and ANC SL2455’s and RSQ77 urban land yachts, the Nano is a refreshing point of view.  Instead of car design being done from an elitist point of view whose aim is to find ever new and novel ways to heat, cool, and pamper our fat asses, the engineers at Tata have said "here’s all you need" and nothing more.  It’s a populist design approach visited before by such iconic designs as the Model T, the Beetle, the Mini, the Cinquecento, and — my favorite — the 2CV.  Unlike those designs, however, I don’t believe the Nano is the rational enough.  That swoopy windshield is a hollow attempt at style over substance: who needs an expensive, complex, Le Mans-quality aerodynamic solution when one’s top speed (let alone average speed) is so low?  Something more planar would be simpler, cheaper, and easier to fix and replace over the life of the car.  Of course, reflective design is the lord of the manor when it comes to automotive sales, and what people really want is swoopy, I suppose.

And, doffing my hypocrite’s cap, I can’t help but think that the last thing the world needs is another car, let alone a popular, high-volume one.  However, if we’re going to have more, they might as well be nano-ish in mass and form.  Where’s the true cradle-to-cradle personal transportation solution we all need?  Perhaps I should get on that…

A few weeks ago I asked for some help in whipping up a definition of marketing.  What ensued was a good online brainstorm.  That discussion helped me formulate this working definition of marketing, which I used for my MSI talk (a copy of which will be posted here soon):

identifying desirable experiences, then delivering them

It’s not a bad definition, but not as good as the one I found recently at the HBS Marketing Unit department page:

Marketers concern themselves with acquiring and retaining customers,
who are the lifeblood of an organization. They attract customers by
learning about potential needs, helping to develop products that
customers want, creating awareness, and communicating benefits; they
retain them by ensuring that they get good value, appropriate service,
and a stream of future products. The marketing function not only
communicates to the customer, but also communicates the needs of the
customer to the company. In addition, it arranges and monitors the
distribution of products and/or services from company to customer.

I think that’s it.  Should have started there.

What appears to be footage from the taxi ride in from Logan is actually racing action from a recent round of The 24 Hours of LeMons.

Seriously folks, the racing featured in this not-so-serious contest for under-$500 racing "machines" beats the pants off of anything I’ve seen in my last two decades of 4am Formula 1 gazing.  The 24 Hours of LeMons works because it is designed to be fun for drivers, teams, and spectators.  Simple.  I imagine the design principles behind the series look something like this:

1. Make it fun for drivers
2. Make it wild and outrageous for spectators
3. Keep the cars simple and brutally cheap so that teams can have a good time at the race, too

What an indictment of the state of modern motorsports that, when it comes to creating an arena where the simple joys of competition can flourish, a hipster-doofus series administered by ace scribe Jay Lamm puts almost any professionally-managed racing series to shame.  Modern race series are deep-yawn, drool-running-down-your chin boring.  Boring boring boring.  I don’t know about you, but the only in-car footage that compares to the stuff above would be something out of a WRC car.  Modern racing series can learn a lot from Lemons.

As a case in point, look what happens to cheaters at The 24 Hours of Lemons:

There are three main points to take away from this video:

1. That backhoe operator is an artist
2. The structural integrity of a BMW is not to be underestimated (how about those door hinges?!!!)
3. Any experience, be it a call to an airline reservation center or an ER admitting line or a trip to the DMV, can be and should be designed to be meaningful.  Look at the creativity that went in to making the act of disqualifying an entrant something worth talking about.  If you wanted a customer to feel good about interacting with your brand, you could do worse than to digest what Jay Lamm has done with Lemons and then reassess every point of interaction in the customer journey through your organization’s presence in the world.

For example, consider the hum-drum treatment of cheaters in modern sports.  When McLaren was caught cheating in Formula 1 earlier this year, they were forced to pay a $100,000,000 fine.  Yes, 100 million dollars.  That’s a steep fine, but the boys at McLaren were allowed to keep racing for the entire season.  It was all about the lawyers, not the fans.  If we learning from LeMons, a much more appropriate penalty would have been a hydraulic-clawed machine of some sort munching dainty MP4-22 carbon monocoques by the harbor at Monaco.  And then no more racing.  That would be a truly priceless penalty, and a crowd-pleaser at that.

The next running of The 24 Hours of LeMons will be next week on the 28th and 29th of December. 
 

"It was design by
dictatorship.  All else, this marketing, these focus groups, what
have you, is bullshit."

– Mini Clubman chief designer, Gerd Hildebrand.

(I love this quote because it acknowledges the unique role which talents plays in the realm of visceral design.  If you have talented, highly-trained and educated designers, why would you second-guess their aesthetic judgment based on the input of folks off the street?  Yes, test the hell out of the behavioral elements of your offerings — fit, function, ergonomics — but leave the visceral, and to some extent the reflective meaning, up to the people who get it)

You may not like this ad, but I do.  Not just because I’m a fan (and owner) of Toyota cars, but because it’s a great example of designing a message to spread. 

In this case, it is about tapping in to the seven million plus folks who play the online game World of Warcraft.  That’s a lot of potential truck buyers.  If you don’t play World of Warcraft, the ad is entertaining, but if you do play, the ad is just amazing.  And, it seems perfectly designed to spread around the place where World of Warcraft players hang out the most, that thing called the internet.  This is about designing for YouTube.

My only question is, I’m level 66, so can I get a Tundra instead?

Thanks to Carlos for showing me the video.

Help me out here.  Last night I was putting together my argument for an upcoming speech about marketing when I realized that I don’t know what marketing is about.  Or, to be precise, I do know what marketing is about (I have a very strong point of view on it, actually), but I don’t have a good definition.

What is marketing?

Can you help me?  If you have a definition you’d like to share, please shoot me an email.  Or, better yet, please leave a comment below.  That way we can all riff off each other. 

Thanks in advance.