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.
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:
Make it fun for drivers
Make it wild and outrageous for spectators
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:
That backhoe operator is an artist
The structural integrity of a BMW is not to be underestimated (how about those door hinges?!!!)
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.
My favorite talk from TED2007. As one might expect, this is a meta level talk, a Director’s Commentary about being a director dreaming big things. A meditation on designing life.
Here’s a transcript of Starck’s talk. Let’s just say that this is a very provocative and intriguing twenty minutes.
Moonwalking designers in a Halloween parade featured prominently in my earlier post about the weird and wonderful culture of my own innovative workplace. I recently learned about a similar Halloween parade at Zappos, a significant sponging agent for my disposable income, and a remarkably innovative retailer in its own right.
Might there be a causal link between putting on killer Halloween parties and forging corporate cultures capable of innovation on a routine basis? Or does the causality flow in the other direction? Or both ways? Or is this merely correlation, and not causation?
No matter. I really dig the Poltergeist reference at the end of the Zappos video. Very nice.
Professor Jim Heskett will be moderating our panel. He’s written a provocative post on the HBS Working Knowledge website about tomorrow’s discussion. There’s on open invitation there to leave your comments, ideas, and thoughts on the subject. Please do so, as we’ll be tackling at least some of them in the time we have tomorrow together, and the discussion will continue online through December 18.
The agenda of speakers at the conference is simply mind-blowing. I expect to walk away with more than a few new ideas and insights, all of which will no doubt make their way in to metacool. The entire conference is being held in honor of Professor Thomas K. McCraw, author of my favorite book of the year, Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction.
My time at Harvard Business School changed my view of the world in many ways, and as a result fundamentally changed my life. It is very meaningful to me to be back on campus exploring design, innovation, technology, business, and life.
I wrote the other week about Alex Zanardi’s amazing achievement at the New York Marathon.
I’m not a good enough writer to capture the charm of a live interview with Zanardi. So to show yet again why he’s my hero, here’s a five minute segment from WindTunnel. Enjoy.
Beautiful can be so… boring. The great thing about race cars is that, since style is not a primary design objective, they tend to fall at either end of an aesthetic bell curve: either they’re so gorgeous that no styled object can match their state of perfection (think Ferrari GTO or SR-71), or their ugliness is so extreme that from it rises another kind of beauty, one characterized by exceptions to all norms of classical beautiful (think Panoz Esperante or the first-gen BMW M Coupe). In other words, they are jolie-laide, ugly-beautiful.
There’s so much going on with this Kellison. It’s the Gerard Depardieu of automobiles. For example, check out the squashed roof and the bulbous behind below it. Driving this car would be like living in a flat with low ceilings and one too many overstuffed leather couches from American Furniture Warehouse. Or like walking around the set of Being John Malkovich:
Looking inside, the lack of workmanship is compelling. Lexus? Flawless fit and finish? What is that? Forget about tight panel fits or unbroken surfaces, this thing is all about undulations and unresolved lines and sharp corners that might make you go "ouch":
And that aircleaner, standing proud of the hood like the conning tower on a WWII sub floating somewhere in the Pacific. It’s just there. Standing free and proud, utterly oblivious to all the streamlining floating around it:
Why be beautiful when you could be interesting?
For the adventurous (and masochistic) among you, this particular J-4R is for sale at Fantasy Junction (where these photos were sourced). Props to the upstanding lads at Bring a Trailer for pointing it out.
