Leo Burnett - Cultural Fuel

A friend from Chicago sent me this article from McKinsey Quarterly.
On my first read, what came to my mind was that they actually did not come up with new facts. In fact, the authors themselves state that the obvious goal of marketing is to influence a potential buyer to decide on/buy your product, and use every means of persuasive communications at your disposal to influence that purchasing decision. It was something that leading marketers like P&G used to do well (think of their “soap operas”) and modern marketers like Amazon built their business on. But today it seems like we’ve lost that art of thinking through the most influential touch points and engaging with people there.

But at a second glance, you see that McKinsey at least affirmed what a lot of us have been saying to our clients for a while now, with extensive research in 5 industries and 3 continents, including big cities in emerging markets such as India and China. They redrew the traditional funnel into a loop-like model, which again, is not revolutionary because the purchase funnel has always been considered a loop, but it does paint a new picture. It impresses upon us two important things:
1) Consumers have changed the way they make decisions, but we haven’t changed the way we engage them. Or not enough.
2) Consumer decision process in nonlinear and dynamic.

So what McKinsey has done with this study is bring data about category, brand and consumer/touch points all in one place and brought the consumer decision path back to the center of integrated communications, where it belongs. And since the decision-making process has become more complex, dynamic and its phases interdependent, marketers need to know what kind of touch points are relevant to influence people in which phase of the process and how these efforts play together in an optimal way. It forces marketers to think through their communication plans with more rigor, and re-think (and maybe add or remove) touch points/tactics to better influence consumer decisions and move people towards the end purchase in a systematic way.

But ever the healthy skeptic about research, I would give anything to know more about the research design and questionnaires and how they recorded behavioral information in the various markets.  Anyway, at least the focus on studying shopping behaviours across all channels and how they come into play differently for different categories is great!

The ultimate for twitter geeks: a house that tweets. Currently, I feel it’s not past the geek experimentation phase, and I wonder if “getting a sense of the heartbeat of the house” is really an emotional benefit at this point. But then again, these thing are known to change. Technology changes human behavior more than anything.

What a great idea for a global viral campaign to honor Michael Jackson ! Everyone can add their own moonwalk as Leo Burnett Mexico did.

Many thanks to Marilyn and Marie for sharing the eternal moonwalk with us.

Visit  http://www.eternalmoonwalk.com/

The Cultural Fuel Newsletter June 2009 for free

Nobody expected that a Finnish company would come up with the idea of selling mobile phones.

Nobody expected that a Dutch company would dare to develop navigation systems.

Nobody expected that a Korean company would become the world leader in flatscreen technology.

And probably nobody expects that a Swiss company will build a car.

This is what it says on the website of Mindset, a new swiss company with a new car concept. In a time of a car industry in crisis, you could say: bad timing for a start-up, or: extreme opportunity to come up with a vision for what mobility means in the future, which in swiss unadornedness is:

We are not offering some future vision but a sustainable, contemporary automobile for everyday use. We at mindset know about cars and we want to attract people who like cars and enjoy driving.

Submitted by Florian Geiger

Florian Geiger found a great article by Robert Fabricant on the future rules of engagment in terms of design. For years, UCD (User-centered design) has been the staple of every experience planner, information architect and interaction designer. In the light of the current crisis, Robert asks some tough questions, pushing to innovate in the experience planning and design areas and challenges the very basics of contemporary design practice.

We have been operating under the assumption that the primary challenge is to convince businesses to focus on fulfilling user needs with higher quality products, with more meaningful experiences? But what if the ‘users’ themselves are the problem?

In his article, Robert discusses new dimensions of social value that currently are not considered in the design process. After web2.0 it would be easy to agree that this is more than necessary. I agree with him that the holy grail of experience design cannot just be a quotient of user tasks completed and pain points eliminated on the single user journey to a successful transaction. Moving from the individual to the collective brings with it a focus on joy points derived from social value. Hence, as Robert call out, we have to plan and design for scial systems from the get-go. But how?

But engaging with communities is fundamentally different. We are not merely substituting one center (the user) for another (the group). With communities, the means of engagement and influence exist across the participants not within a single person. Value is created and shared dynamically through cooperative activities that are not often apparent from the outside. They emerge from within.

Yes, and it isn’t new. Old-school discplines such as PR have understood that engaging communities is driven by an inside force. While a rational decision making process of an individual (or a single user) is usually based on only one’s own black or white processing of the experience, dealing with a community means being part of a phenomen where everyone has a different experience, even if they are at the same time and place. Hence local relevance and offering a communual benefit, even if is not black and white is always part of a social force. Grassroot movements are good example of this. He continues…

As much as we can look at the external symbols of communities (such as status and reputation) we cannot appreciate the nuance of social behavior without participating. Certainly not to the degree that is needed to support effective design solutions.

To learn more about his techniques on how to design from “the inside out”, check the rest of the article here.

This should be interesting not just to experience planners.

These 3 videos are a example of what’s coming up with Project Natal from Microsoft that claims:

“NO CONTROLLER REQUIRED. YOU ARE THE CONTROLLER”

E3 2009: Project Natal Xbox 360 Announcement

E3 2009: Project Natal Milo demo

Project Natal - Live Demonstration - E3 2009 Microsoft conference Xbox 360

Find out more here!

Funny adage from Wired: Check out what happens when you make your 13 year old replace his iPod with a Sony Walkman.

I wish they had continued the “study”. I am sure that in parts of Berlin this could have spawned a retro-trend.

Check out operation beautiful where Caitlin talks about encouraging positive body image in women through ending what she calls Fat Talk.

Inspiring, and it gives me a lot of ideas for how marketers could be helping women spread the positive word.

This monday, June 22., I attended the GAMESplaces International 2009 Conference in Frankfurt am Main. Here are the bits I found interesting:

Nintendos ways of marketing the Wii and the DS to women.

Silja Gülicher (Senior Assistant Manager PR Nintendo Europe, GER) presented two cases in which Nintendo targeted women in a different way.

1. Based on the insight that 60% of the book sales in book store today are to women, Nintendo approached several book stores to sell Nintendo DS games (the software) in their stores. After adding the DS hardware to the offering, the sales of the software and hardware went up considerably. Some book stores even have “Nintendo corners” now.

2. Nintendo talked to Tupperware to include the Wii and Wii Fit in their “Home Parties”. Nintendo would take the Wii where the women are and Tupperware would have a product to attract a younger audience. Tupperware agreed and Nintendo sold hundreds of Wii units this way.

The Keynote presentation style

Jason Della Rocca presented his keynote “The evolving games industry ecosystem” in a very interesting form. He drew most of his presentation slides with an stylus and a tablet live on stage. This had a very honest and being part of the process feeling to it.

He sees the games industrie adopting the “google model” of launching products/games in beta and evolve them over time to reduce the risks of game development.

What was missing

Besides talking about the latest technical advances in CPUs, GPUs the conference lacked any news or visions of future interface for playing games. Everybody seemed fixed on the status quo using games-controllers, keyboards and mice. Location aware and augmented reality games, with posible new interfaces on mobiles have not been mentioned at all.

Most of the talks should posted as podcast in the coming days or weeks as it has been in the previous years.