Leo Burnett - Cultural Fuel

Yeah, it’s been a slow month on the blog here. I was on paternity leave (yes, we do take them in Europe). So, funnily enough, I just have some parenting trends to report on.

First off, ever since that “Go to F*** to Sleep” book came out, everyone’s in a tizzy. In Germany, STERN magazine caught their cue and made a big deal about how research shows that kids really don’t want perfect parents. Really? Thanks for being Prussian about it, but it’s not like you ever have the option to get perfect parents, so here’s toasting to stating the obvious.

However, being a new parent myself, I can’t say a little pressure release wouldn’t help. Is our society bent on providing perfection to mitigate risk for our kids? Yeah. Apart from the whole notion being an impossible endeavor perpetuating mishigas in the first place - it also isn’t healthy. Learning from mistakes is what makes great individuals stand out. Not that this should give parents a wildcard for abandoning their role decreed by nature - but it calls for another book called “Parents? Just f****** relax”. For, as many things you are trying to do right (as you should), just as many will go “wrong”.

Now, if you have any business with brands in the toddler, kids, adolescent area, this means that you could provide some relief for parents as opposed to creating more tasks and reminders for parents to do their jobs. Yet this is what most brands do, admonishing already stressed out, already caring people to go ‘the extra mile’. Go easy on the “solutions” you might have for parents. Provide peace of mind instead. Rest assured, parents are still gonna worry enough about their offspring no matter what you do to give them 5 minutes off.

All of this is encapsulated amazingly well - and quite subliminally clear - when you listen to Werner Herzog read the oh so famed book.

Thanks to Ninja and Sung for the parental inspiration.

Download the latest Cultural Fuel Trend Report here

With a great example of showing that you care about the passions of your customers - Friskies created three branded HTML 5 / CSS3 games for tablet devices, that generate “cat-gagement” by awakening the natural instincts of cats to react to movement.

It’s not the only example out there, and some may say that the branding is a little off, but my cat had a great time going fishing.

Via Digital Buzz Blog

Download the new culturalfuel report April 2011 from this link.

Bonin Bough, global director of social media and digital at PepsiCo, has a healthy attitude towards the role of social media. An attitude we’d like to see more of. Social Media is no magic bullet.

The fact that digital and social cannot rehabilitate brands or that they cannot be magic bullets seems very obvious.

Yet, these questions get asked, or at least you get the feeling that that is the expectation brands have after they finally nilly-willy accept that they need a digital strategy of some sort. This behavior makes one wonder if digital is now only seen as a lifeline for failing brand marketing. It can’t be. And indeed, if you cannot have real conversations about what your brand is strategically, what purpose it serves in the minds of people, and if you don’t work hard as an organization to remove internal barriers to allow your brand to take a fundamental stance in how it makes a qualitative difference in people’s lives, you will just end up using social media and digital channels in that very tactical way.

Thanks Bonin for saying how it is.

To err is human. But we really hate being wrong, right?

Kathryn Schulz spent five years of her life studying how we react to being wrong. Or better yet, how often we assume we’re right when we have misunderstood the signs around us.

It’s brilliant work, and in the latter part of her talk, she outlines some of the dangerous assumptions we make when we are challenged on what we believe.  When someone doesn’t think we are right, we first assume the opposition is just ignorant, and needs to hear the truth from us. If that doesn’t work, we assume they are morons, and can’t grasp what we have learned. If all else fails, we assume they are evil, since they have heard the truth, and are intelligent enough to understand it but are choosing not to agree. Sound familiar? Rather than reconsidering our position, we are much more likely to decide to attack, which makes being wrong (or, more accurately, believing that we’re right) a source for much cruel treatment in the world.

But there is beautiful symmetry to this behavior as well. While we resist being wrong, we love our books, movies and games to mislead us with plot twists and surprise endings. In the abstract, and in fantasy, and the stories we tell ourselves, we recognize the essential humanness being wrong, and embrace it. It pulls us in, because we all share it and can relate.

In the coming week, I challenge you to do 5 things differently to take advantage of the new perspective being wrong can give you:

1. Strike up a conversation with someone who has a different political affiliation from your own. Examine the assumptions you have made about their views (and their sanity or goodness).

2. Think about the last big argument you had. What ideas were you not willing to reconsider? What about the other person?

3. Take a look at the competitor to your Brand and think as if you were them - what would they say is wrong with your Brand and its view of the world?  Are you a stubborn Brand?

4. Find a piece of your Brand’s story where you can reverse the plot, and make a new discovery because of being wrong.

5. Take a fresh look at your consumers.  What data are you ignoring because it doesn’t fit with what you believe to be true about them?  What if you were wrong?  How could you find out?

Be wrong a little this week. Or at least consider the possibility!

Via TED

Leo Burnett Worldwide CCO Mark Tutssel sent us this inspiring video today. Jay Denhart also blogged about this from a semantic point of view here a few weeks ago, but I felt like talking about its relevance to the study of human behavior and brand management.

In this TED talk, research Deb Roy talks about an amazing project in which he recorded every word and image in his house, as his newborn son grew to learn how to talk and walk. Every bit of human behavior recorded, tracked. He has also found ways of visualizing this data in interesting new ways, unveiling patterns that may not have been apparent before.

Taking this approach the connected mass media world, he has used the tools available to him to show how people, mass media, content and contexts can be interlinked in 3D models, so that we can observe human behavior in the form of new social and interaction structures.

As a creative agency that has declared people and their behavior as the starting point of all our work (and with it behavioral planning), the sheer amount of MIT Media Lab computing power, long-term research vision and prowess to study human behavior makes me drool in envy. But also, as we move away from the brand era of mass media messaging to the people era of connected experiences, the work of Deb Roy reconfirms that continuous and deep study of human behavior - and the endeavor to create tools that help us understand it - is a worthwhile cause. Simply finding out about people’s attitudes and values, and inferring their preferences, just doesn’t cut it anymore. Rather, not only does behavioral planning unveil new patterns and types of insights that we wouldn’t have seen before, it also inspires us in ways to help brands make a qualitative difference in people’s lives that the tools of the TV and Brand era could never have.

While unfathomably complex to unravel and to look at, behavioral insights are much more substantive than traditional “consumer” insights, as they do not express an inferred interpretation about what people think or say about a brand (and how we then may be able to manipulate their perception) but rather, behavioral insights are building blocks to people’s journey through different product categories that paint a much more complete picture of how they actually live, and what they actually do. In other words, finding out what people say or think isn’t nearly as interesting or inspiring as what they do. Not only because those two things are rarely the same, but, more importantly, because today brand management and creating brand engagement isn’t so much about saying something to people but doing something with or for people along their whole customer life cycle. Observing behavior and understanding the drivers of behavior (as beautifully visualized by Deb Roy) therefore leads to not only to a completely different way of creating communications, but also to more purposeful interactions and experiences that allow brands to play a meaningful role in people’s lives.

Download the Cultural Fuel Report March 2011

Living in our always-on connected lives we sometimes forget how powerful it can be to make a connection with our neighbors.  We exist day-to-day making constant virtual connections with people from all around the world.  But some of the most powerful Social Media we can interact with centers around our neighbors and local communities, like when a New Orleans artist named Candy decided to find out what aspirations were hidden in the people on her block.

It was an abandoned house in her neighborhood that inspired Candy Chang to get the community talking. She turned the side of the building into a giant chalkboard where pedestrians can complete the phrase: “Before I Die I Want To…”

On her website, Chang says that the project “transforms neglected spaces into constructive ones where we can learn the hopes and aspirations of the people around us”.

Chang has continued to check back since the launch of the project, and take more pictures of the messages added to the chalkboard over time (check out her website for more stories and pictures).

The statements range from “learn French”, to “beat some sense into you”, to “understand” and “be OK with not understanding”.  Looking at the handwritten answers to her simple question forms a fascinating picture of what is important to the people in her neighborhood.

It’s wonderful to see a project that is both personally- and community-focused, where the idea is all about getting everyone to participate together as a group, but doing so by sharing something as personal as a life objective.

I find that sometimes when marketers ask for participation, the activity ignores the fact that the person is both an individual and a member of a community (or many communities).  If you want to design powerful sharing opportunities that truly move people to action, you have to consider a few questions:

1. Why should I care? Is the activity something that benefits, enlightens or helps the person doing it?  And the purpose has to be clear here, because unless it connects with something pretty important, people won’t feel moved to take action.  Remember, the chalkboards premise is “Before I Die”, not “Before Something Unimportant Happens”.

2. Do you care? Ultimately I want to feel that the idea comes from an honest place, and that I can believe that you really want my participation (not just to sell me something).  The artist showed that she really wanted the feedback by the design, scale and commitment she showed to the project.  Can you do that?

4. Have you done your homework? Have you given me a way to participate and offer me the tools I would need to contribute in the best possible way?  She didn’t assume that every walks around with a marker. Her choice of location, site, and materials all point to a considered effort to gain a community response.

5. Will my participation make my world better? Finding new ways for people to mail in boxtops doesn’t inspire action or esteem, and shows that you’re after the individuals attention, not a member of a community.  Find ways to show your dedication to changing the world by eliminating eyesores in my community, cleaning up garbage, making people treat each other better, or spreading moments of joy.

What would you write on the wall?  What’s important to you?

Via Creative Review

Pretty interesting video on human behavior regarding our tendency to act in conform ways. Human Behavior is so much more interesting than simple attitudes. Always blows my mind.