Category Archives: marketing

Complexity, Simplicity, & Storytelling

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VW’s DSG gearbox is a marvel.  It combines twin clutches to provide the direct,  mechanical power flow of a traditional manual gearbox, but with shifting as smooth and seamless as that found in any automatic, fluid-coupled transmission.  If you’re in to driving, it also lends itself to paddle shifting that makes you feel like Fernando Alonso as you flick down through the gears, and you can shift those gears in the middle of a corner without upsetting the balance of the car.  It’s a fantastic piece of engineering. In 2-3 years, every serious performance car will come with a DSG-style gearbox as an option, or even as standard equipment.

But, as you can tell from my sentence above, it’s a hard thing to explain.  Also, very few people care how it works, but they want to know how it feels in use.  It’s the experience that matters.  That’s why the commercial above works so well; it shows rather than tells.

Thanks to Stacey for pointing me to the video.

Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness

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Here’s a nice medley of Ferrari Formula 1 Cars through the decades, thanks to the marketing communications folks at Shell.  Lots of nice touches, from including a front-engine Ferrari race car (that’s the first one), to the use of period-correct large-window full-face helmets for the racer from the 70’s, to the exquisite V12 & V8 soundtracks, well done.  Bravo.

It does feel like a bit of an homage to the Honda Impossible Dreams commercial, which benefits from tighter editing, a humorous plot line, and a wonderful soundtrack.  Not trying to be overly critical here, just calling it like I see it. While the Honda commercial evokes a strong emotional reaction, the Shell ad leaves one feeling a bit flat in comparison.  Nothing wrong with it, but if brands are all about how they make you feel, then a commercial which is all about building meaning should fire on all emotional cylinders, as it were. A reminder of how great reflective design is so hard to do.

Okay, excuse me while I go listen to those V12’s on overrun once again…  Forza Ferrari!

Many thanks to Doug from out in metacoolland for pointing this video out to me.

26march update: here’s a link to a Quicktime version of the Ferrari-Shell ad, much higher quality

Introducing Creating Infectious Action, Kindling Gregarious Behavior (CIA-KGB), to be taught starting in April at the Stanford Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford

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Wow, what a lot of fun that namestorm was!  The "KGB"  names are still rolling in, and I have to say there was some very creative thinking going on (see Reilly’s comments on the previous post below).  The winner is Kindling Gregarious Behavior, because it sounds good, actually describes the content and aim of the course (not a bad thing at all when you think about it) and — best of all for me — it echoes the observation that Wikia CEO Gil Penchina made on a panel I hosted at last year’s AlwaysOn conference.  Gil made the point that, instead of spending all your time, energy, money and luck building a big bonfire on your own and then hoping that a bunch of other people will choose to come and sit around it, why not identify all the myriad little campfires burning around you and pour a little gas on each one?  That’s the way infectious action and gregarious behavior get fed.  It’s not about some big top-down mission, though centralized thinking matters.  It’s about embracing the power of the community.  It’s about kindling.

Anyway, I’m really excited to be teaching CIA-KGB along with a truly fabulous — FABULOUS! — teaching team.  We learned a lot teaching CIA last year (and got lots of great coverage in BusinessWeek and other august journals), so this year we’ve made some tweaks to the class to try and make it an even better experience.  This year’s class will again involve a creating infectious action project for the good folks at Mozilla, and will then focus on a project for Global Giving.  I’m very excited to be working with Global Giving, and it already feels good to be brainstorming project ideas with my Mozilla friends.

This will not be your usual classroom experience.  Everything is real, everything is open-ended, and the sky is the limit.  It’ll be scary.  It’ll be fun.  It’ll be something, hopefully, which knocks your hat in the creek.  As if all that weren’t enough, it looks like Global Giving will be supporting some summer internship positions for CIA-KGB students who A), kick butt in the class, and B) want to keep working on Global Giving-related issues.  How cool is that?

Are you a Stanford student with Master’s standing?  Please consider applying for the course.  You can find an application here.  It’s due March 9, and we’ll be selecting 24 people to part of the CIA-KGB classroom community.  The journey is the reason we do all of this, and the fruit of the voyage will be more experience with the design thinking process as well as further developing methodologies for creating infectious action and kindling gregarious behavior.

Making reflective meaning

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I’m not sure I get it, but what I do know is that it would be pretty cool to have a sailing ship about as long as the Empire State Building.  Very nice.

My view on products and advertising is that any market offering sits somewhere on a continuum bounded by interplanetary satellites (which require no reflective design, AKA "marketing communications), and pet rocks, which are all about the message.  Deodorant is a few notches above a pet rock.  It’s all about the story.  And in this case, I really appreciate the lack of boasting about 10-hours-of-superlative dryness! here, and my-isn’t-this-a-cool-shade-of-time-release-blue-gel there.  You know what I mean.  It’s not about performance-driven features, it’s about how it might make you feel, and from that point of view Old Spice now enters the elite company of experience-centric products such as the Palm V, the iPod Shuffle, the Porsche 911, and any Dyson vacuum cleaner.

And of course, that magnificent sailing ship.

Thanks to Coop for alerting me to Mr. Campbell’s manifesto.

Designing for Contagion

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I was fortunate to be interviewed by Chris Shipley as part of the Guidewire Group’s Leadership Forum.  The topic was "Finding customer zero – identifying the root of contagious behavior in emerging markets".  I really enjoyed the session, because the conference itself was small enough where we could all fit in a room and see and hear each other, so very naturally our onstage interview quickly became an audience-wide discussion.  Based on work that’s been happening at IDEO and at the Stanford d.school, I suggested a simple (but not simplistic, hopefully) model for designing for contagion:

  1. Begin with Desire:  create an offering that will bring value to people’s lives by starting your process with a focus on their needs.  Not on your killer technology.  Not on your brilliant business model.
  2. Weave Sticky Stories: design all of your messages to be stories that are genetically engineered, if you will, to be as sticky and contagious as possible.  (more on this in a second)
  3. Design a System to Spread: it’s not enough to have a great offering with an amazing story.  You’ve got to consciously design a system which is uniquely optimized to spread the story about your specific offering.

As you might expect from a crowd heavy with Web 2.0 thinkers, we quickly got into issues of co-creation and open innovation.  I only wish we could have spent another hour or two on the topic.

I had an easier time than usual talking through Point Two above because I had an easy out: the next speaker in the lineup was Professor Chip Heath from Stanford’s Graduate School of business.  Chip and his brother Dan are about to launch a book called Made to Stick.  It’s all about Point Two, so all I had to say was "wait until tomorrow, and listen to Chip".  Made to Stick is a perfect companion to two other books which are about designing systems to spread:  Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and Seth Godin’s Unleashing the Ideavirus.  And like those two books, I think Made to Stick is going to be a Big Deal.  You can read an excerpt from Dan and Chip’s book here.

What makes Points 1-3 work is a human-centered design process.  Genuine, authentic stories about offerings that help people get real jobs done in their daily lives are what work.  You get there via design thinking, by putting people at the center of everything you do.  To that end, Chip recently joined my company as an IDEO Fellow.  He joins our existing Fellows Barry Katz and Bob Sutton.  They all lend their specific areas of deep expertise to our design process, and I’m very excited to see what happens with Chip in the mix.

By the way, Dan and Chip will be on the NBC Today Show tomorrow, January 3.  They’re scheduled to go on during the 7:30 – 8 AM time slot.  A great chance to hear about making stories sticky.  They’ve got a good blog going, too.

Update:  here’s the Today Show video with Chip & Dan

Memorable Ads, Impossible Dreams, and Being Innovative

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My colleague Paul Bennett of IDEO has written an insightful and delightful essay for BusinessWeek: Most Memorable Ads of 2006

Here’s an excerpt from Paul:

We’re clearly at an inflection point. I’m not even a traditional ad-guy
and I’ve been asked to write this, so what does that say? We’re all
firmly in this together—marketers, designers, clients, agencies,
researchers, ethnographers, art directors and writers, all being sniped
at, out-thought, and remixed by consumers younger than our own kids.
Hard as it is to say, in most cases, they’re as good, if not better, at
this stuff than we are. Now, together, we must figure out where to go
from here. But before we get in to a whole spiral of circle drumming,
chest-beating and problem-solving, let’s take a quick tour of some of
the highlights of the last year.

But first a warm-up of sorts: Honda’s Impossible Dream spot—which aired in December, 2005, and therefore doesn’t make the official 2006 list—deserves a mention for Not Being Afraid of the Joy of Great Storytelling,
for expansive locations, great nostalgic music, excellent casting, and
a fantastically simple premise. In it, a guy emerges from his trailer,
mounts a scooter, and then seamlessly moves from product to product,
stirring emotions, sweeping us along in his wake, and bringing a tear
to many an eye.

I’ve written before about Honda’s Impossible Dream ad in the context of what I like to call tangible brand mantras (you can see the ad by following that hyperlink).  It’s an ad I can watch over and over (and I have – maybe 50 times; not as many viewings for me as the original Star Wars, but getting there).  And it’s one which is authentic and true even though it’s so outrageous and funny.  Honda is a company where the CEO knows whereof he speaks.  It’s a company as capable of pulling off revolutionary innovation outcomes as it is innovating on a routine basis.  It’s a group of people not afraid of thinking weird but right.  And, above all, it’s a company which solves for happiness because, when one gets down to the bottom of it all, that’s what drives innovation.

metacool Thought of the Day

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"Our chefs and managers cook and run restaurants as if the word of mouth spread by each and every guest today will determine how full — or empty — our restaurants will be tomorrow.  We work hard to hire people whose emotional skills — even more than how they can cook or serve wine — make them predisposed to deriving pleasure from the act of delivering pleasure.  Long after our guests have forgotten how much they did or didn’t like the turbot or the lamb shank, they’ll remember how we made them feel."
– Danny Meyer, WSJ, 3Oct3006

Yes, we need some stinkin’ badges

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I recently bought a pair of Jack Purcell shoes from Converse.  A classic design, wouldn’t you agree?:

Shoecloseup

They’re good shoes.  But what I really dug was the clever detailing on the box they came in:

Boxcloseup

My first reaction was something along the lines of "how clever!".  What a nice way to echo the gestalt of the shoe in the shoe box.  And then I thought, "how did the marketing manager for this line of shoes win the argument in favor of adding little metals shoe grommets to each and every box?"  While grommets are cheap, they’re not free — a few cents here and there and it all adds up. 

On the other hand, who says a brand logo needs can’t be a three-dimensional object, even on a lowly shoe box?  Why not treat a logo more like a badge, as many automakers do?  These Converse grommets are badges, and not so different than the nine (9!) brand badges which adorn my car (ten if you count the one on my key fob).  Why print a swoosh or a set of mouse ears when you can a have a tangible brand expression?

Bravo, Jack Purcell!