I call it Cellular Pausely: That thing where you are having a lovely conversation and then everyone takes out their phones and stops talking to each other.
How often has this happened to you? How often have you done it? Do the alerts, flashing lights and vibrations of our phones create irresistible an Pavlovian response to get connected with our virtual lives, even while we are standing or sitting next to perfectly available humans?
If you’ve tried to follow all the hype about Google+, you were probably hard-pressed to try and read all the blog posts and articles. There are just too many. But what was striking about the articles was their sameness. 90% of them seem to be about the future not about the now. Little was imparted about what to do with G+, most of them where rants about what G+ isn’t or about what it should be, or about what it could be, and of course about who will win in the SN wars. The one exception I came across was an article by Thomas Hawk about how to make G+ work for you as a photographer. Other than that, I witnessed the usual hype wave, where usual suspects of social ninjas can’t help themselves and make prognostications to leave a mark, opinion-wise, so they get a share of the voice.
The problem with that isn’t the voices or prognostications, it’s that we so easily get swept away by it that we create a reality about something in our heads that we haven’t actually experienced yet ourselves. We take the time to read all this stuff, but have little time to go and innovate and experiment.
It’s been a few weeks of excitement and tizzy and dilly-dallying. Fine. Let’s move on now and speak about experience insights, experimentation and collaborative best thinking on a new platform, not the next social media weather report. There is nothing more annoying in a playground than the annoying descriptiveness of some authority figure telling us how things are, should be, could be. It stifles application and experimentation.
Alan Wolk, borrowing metaphorically from his grandmothers cookbook, makes a great point in his blog Toad Stool
What’s needed now is a lot less prognostication and a lot more observation. Let people figure out their own best way to use the platform. Before anyone starts telling them they’re doing it the wrong way.
You couldn’t be more right, and thanks for the reminder what this is supposed to be about!
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.
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.
I reported on our tool development for our HumanKind Approach once in a while here and also about the development of a lexicon of human behavior that we call Behavioral Archtypes. I am glad to report the US press has picked up on it and given Carol Foley a nice write up for it.
As Leo Burnett moved from considering itself a “brand-centric” agency to one focused on “HumanKind,” it decided that it should spend some time researching just what humans do. Carol Foley, exec VP-director of research services, and her team set out on a quest to define types of human behavior. After months of digging through academic literature, they realized there really wasn’t a good model. One problem was that a lot of psychological research is focused on abnormal behaviors. That’s not what drives purchasing decisions. “Most of what we’re dealing with is just pretty normal behavior,” she said. So they created their own framework.
An interesting idea came to me via Grant Zemont. Puma started a website called Life Scoreboard which allows people to essentially create simple polls about things they are currently engrossed in or pondering or wanting to find out about. At first, you might wonder, what does this have to do with Puma? Where is the product reference, etc?
I think what is interesting about this idea is that it has given the brand a way to enable people to start exhibiting a new digital behavior with the potential to become quite viral. Instead of exchanging links and status updates, people exchanges scores. So, instead of just trying to make the brand part of existing platforms the target audience is using and emulating or fitting into that behavior, this idea tries to create a new one.
Check out Jeanne Bliss’s article “Shedding legacy practices is key to building great customer experiences” over on RetailCustomerExperience.com. It’s a great read, and highlights a key strategy that smart marketers embrace: You can’t do things the same way you always have and expect innovation to “just happen.” You have to be willing to walk away from how things have historically been done, and express your organization’s purpose in the most real way you can, no matter how differently that action requires you to behave.
She outlines a great example of how banking is an industry ripe for opportunity for smart organizations to reinvent customer experiences, and really impress customers. Banks that don’t challenge or change business-as-usual practices can’t differentiate themselves in the marketplace. It’s not hard to come up with a few other industries that could use a rethinking of the customer experience - just think back to the last time a friend asked to ‘vent’ about their experience at an airport, hotel, restaurant, - you name it.
I especially like that she demonstrated that one of the biggest factors in crappy customer experience is a lack of ‘clarity of purpose’ - which is a completely HumanKind view about addressing customer needs. She advises that clarity of purpose “can unleash the organization’s ability across silos — to make decisions guided by its purpose, its promise.” This point makes strong intuitive sense, especially when you think about how viscerally the entire enterprise has to embrace a vision for it to be executed consistently across the company. That’s what we mean when we talk about a brand’s purpose being single-minded - it has to be basic, clear and powerful enough that everyone can embrace it, no matter which department they’re in.
And lest we not be willing to eat our own dog food, Michael Gass over on Fuel Lines writes about how the world continues to rapidly evolve for agencies - and it’s a rare agency working today that doesn’t realize the critical need for shaking things up to stay relevant. That said, there is not always a clear purpose that the organization can rally behind.
Check out her article, and here’s the interview with CEO Ray Davis where he explains his decision to change Umpqua’s purpose:
So the questions are: What sacred cows do you need to slay in your business, and how can you be disruptive about ‘how things have always been done’?
Scanning the headlines of any marketing industry publication and you’re guaranteed to see at least 5 articles with the title following this format:
5 tips to get more site traffic!
10 mess-ups that make people unsubscribe!
6 things top Brands do to get better creative!
OK - You get the pattern… And it’s worse on Twitter. 10 tips for this. 20 must-see those. Waaaay too many simplifications of search engine optimization, design, social media, organizational design and - worst of all - leadership (”4 habits that make for bad leaders” - ugh).
It seems like a lot of coverage for marketing wants to prove that key marketing disciplines are super easy, and can be boiled down into easy to digest soundbites and lists you could just tack on the wall and call yourself an expert (and full disclosure - we’ve even done posts with lists in them on Cultural Fuel before, but we did include a caveat).
What is dangerous about the Cult Of The Short & Snappy List is the idea that you can take something complex, like say ‘What Moms Do Online’, and reduce it to a bulleted list, ready to be included on a Powerpoint slide, when the reality is much richer, and therefore the opportunity for real engagement is much richer as well. People in our industry are often pushed to simplify to the point of abstraction, creating short-cuts by the use of simple language and a big graphic in the middle of the slide. But I tend to side more with Edward Tufte - who famously said “to clarify, add detail” (although he was talking about the design of the iPhone at the time). Our clients and creative professionals are just that - professionals. And if data is required to get at the insight - then you should show the data. If a short-cut will lose the richness of the interaction - then avoid the short-cut. Don’t be afraid to have your audience think. And don’t avoid the work of thinking deeply yourself.
Daniel Sharkov wrote a good piece on his blog about why he prefers and recommends an infrequent posting schedule and in my opinion it comes down to deep thinking. Rather than finding 10 examples of a trend, a marketer should examine why there is a trend. I like the fact that when Gini Dietrich put together a set of articles about Social Media Trends that she spent at least some time talking about why she believes they are important and what drives them. But no one would ever assert or imagine that trend reporting is comprehensive. Its very nature is synthesis of observation - not inclusive of all aspects of culture by design.
What’s critical to our industry is continuing our focus on the underlying reasons for why people behave as they do - and it’s rarely a simple endeavor. To have a list of what those behaviors can be grouped into is still just a list, but digging underneath the surface is required to get at real insight.
Ultimately, lists are not insight because they focus solely on simplicity. Insights are true whether they are complex or not.
For us, it’s all about behavior. Many tools exist to research behavior, but a new service by SeeVolution really caught my eye on Mashable today because of its ease of use and accessibility.
SeeVolution is a real-time analytics, heatmap and alert system that overlays all the data on the user’s website and you can do it with an easy include on your website.
I just read an interesting article from Augustine Fou over at ClickZ about Digital being at the root of modern advertising, and it seemed to resonate with some discussions we had been having in the Frankfurt office over the last few years.
The point is not that everything begins and ends with a website/banner/facebook page, but rather the cultural impact made by the rise of all our digital options for living. And it’s not that people live their lives online, but rather that people use digital ‘properties’ to do so much STUFF in their lives, even when they don’t think they’re ‘online’. You use digital technology when you pay for gas with a card. You use digital when you check the movie times on your phone. You use digital when you Google the actors in a TV program you’re watching. You use digital when you watch a screen in a store while you wait to check out. Your TV is as digital as most computers are. It’s kind of everywhere, and you relate to it and use it, even if you’re not actively searching for information about a product or service. Ultimately, there is more and more human behavior that is linked, or tracked, or enabled by digital properties. And due to the Request/Receive nature of digital properties, this behavior can be leveraged to understand needs and desires.
The value of this information about behavior (digital breadcrumbs left in our modern world) can’t be overemphasized. Integrating digital at the core of marketing activities allows for unprecedented analysis of data related to how people interact with digital properties, making the case for more efficient and effective work, especially when it is designed from the beginning to take advantage of human insights and behavior.
I’m not sure I buy that Digital is the center, but I prefer to think of it as a key element of the modern human landscape, rather than a channel, for sure.
For us, it’s all about behavior. Many tools exist to research behavior, but a new service by 