Leo Burnett - Cultural Fuel

Beautifully done.  Create and explore a virtual archive of your social life.

A wonderfully crafted, rich experience - but I wish you could have a little more control over the navigation.

Via Adverblog

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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’?

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There’s a great post over on ExactTarget’s website about recent research into why people become fans of Facebook pages for Brands.

Unsurprisingly, there are multiple competing reasons, which run the gamut from “I just like their products/services” to “I WANT FREE STUFF”.  Some marketers may try to turn people into ’segments’, but ultimately each user is a human being, and they will never all want the same thing.

Looking at the nuances behind the behavior we can see the range of relationships (yes, I used the R word) that people have towards Brands.  Some people truly will feel motivated to reach out to make connections with their favorite brands, and they always have some sort of rationale for the level of participation that they’d like to have.  In cases surrounding our brands, we make sure that first we have identified what we can DO with our consumers, before we look to set up platforms to do it on.  From there, it’s a matter of making sure that we can provide the kinds of experiences that they expect from us, and pay off on what the purpose of the brand is.

And we even can surprise them every now and then.  When was the last time you surprised a user? How did you do it?

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A new article from TechCrunch outlines the current fight between Zygna and Facebook on the Credit System that they prefer (require) payments to go through.

The fight is interesting in that Facebook clearly would like to benefit from some of the amazing spend that some loyal users are throwing at the Zygna platforms, but also in regards to Brands who may wish to get in on the action.  When the payment platform that Facebook prefers/requires includes a cut for the ‘house’ then Brands have to think twice about playing.

We’ve spoken about the cost of participation on social platforms before, but this discussion also raises a few new questions about how to measure actions taken on the platform.  We can imagine some of the possible benefits for Brands working with Facebook to utilize, offer and redeem credits - whether or not those credits are bought, or earned through engagement on the platform.  After all, if the value of the experience that we are offering is great enough, why would some virtual currency not change hands? Rewards for positive behaviors may extend to offering these virtual benefits, which will then require more scrutiny as to their ROI than some current offerings/rewards schemes.

Via: TechCrunch

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How many times has this topic been discussed?  Possibly more than any other.  But reading the Seven Principles for Marketing to Women on the Retail Customer Experience.com site, I was struck by how important it is to heed ‘the basics’ in our work with this half of the population.

I think the article is worth a read - and not just for retail insight.  Even in the realms of interaction design and channel strategy, we have to take the time to make sure we are viewing the decisions that women make through a lens of their priorities and values.

Or - do you think this model is outdated?  Are we seeing behaviors that are not always really there, and looking to evolutionary evidence to confirm our preconceptions?  (The author is a cognitive anthropologist but that doesn’t make him infallible!)

via: RetailCustomerExperience.com

Plus -  it looks like there is a page takeover ad running today on the site (and probably for the next few days) of Microsoft’s Embedded Retail Device technology that is super-cool.  Check that out as well!

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Not really news to most of us, but don’t y’all love to say “I told you so”: On his recent Ad Age Post Garrick Schmitt goes into the theory that User Experience Professional (and some other smartypants) have been preaching for the last 15 years or so: experiences, not messages are what brands should focus on.

For example, 65% of U.S. consumers report a digital experience changing their perception about a brand (either positively or negatively) and 97% of that group report that the same experience ultimately influenced whether or not they went on to purchase a product from that brand. In a nutshell, experience matters. A lot.

Schmitt mentions Red Bull, Virgin America, Uniqlo and Guinness as great examples of brands that spend their money in creating a qualitative difference in people’s lives that ultimately make a bigger impact than expensive advertising messages.

I can’t help feel like having to say “Duh,” but then again, anyone who so convincingly preaches to marketers is a brother-in-arms to me.

Ultimately, it comes down to creating acts (not ads) that are based on people and their behavior, defining a human purpose for the brand, allows people to participate, and in so doing, makes the brand popular (at Leo, we love alliterations). Being able to plan and create for experiences (functional and emotional ones alike) is the key business to be in.

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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.

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In his article Tim Richards of Razorfish explains some (not so) new paradigms on how to approach experience planning and design. It’s a pretty good description of how to approach UX in general, and I am glad he took his time to spell it out at bit, especially the seperation of roles of planners and creatives. Also, more interestingly, his approach tries to marry the oh-so-traditional, but important need to be storytelling with the more functional user experience view of just documenting the experience.

Read the whole thing here.

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So simple.  So stupid.  So addictive.

OK - granted it doesn’t connect with anything, so for now it’s just fun (and probably fun that you might only visit once).  That said, why not spend some time thinking about why someone would want to go here and play drums (and some samples) online?  Maybe they could watch a video and add their own beats and then share them with their friends?  Maybe they could play ‘against’ someone else in a virtual competition, or add this functionality to their own blog or social network profile for visitors.

Source: Thrillist

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When I first saw this guest writer article on TechCrunch by yesterday by Eric Clemons, I thought “That content is like, so web1.0, no need to comment on it.” Then, when I looked again today, the article had gotten 200 more comments, and I thought “What the dickens? This type of statement still gets people going? Why?”

Basically Eric Clemons gives a few well-deduced, even if obvious reasons why the Advertising is failing.

1. Consumers do not trust advertising
2. Consumers do not want view advertising
3. Consumers do not need advertising

None of this is really news, is it? Seriously, in the 15 or so years I’ve been in this field I never thought the opposite of the above points. It’s always been about brands providing people with meaningful value exchanges and experiences, not mere messaging blather. Brand messaging, if anything, can just be an add-on to an experience that enables a human behavior. So, as a result, what professionals in this space must do is to use creativity to  do things for or with people (brand experience), not just come up with ways to say things (advertising).

But looking at the comments on this here techcrunch article, it seemed like I had to check my ideology at the door, once again, and be reminded, once again, that even industry professionals still believe that making advertising alone is valid. In fact, some people commented in ways that basically told Mr. Clemons to shove off with his whiny little liberal nerd voice and one even threatened to bash his head in!

This was surprising to me, as TechCrunch isn’t exactly a mainstream advertising gazette with “Ad Men” fossils milling about, talking about “Big Campaigns”, “That blonde in Cannes who really liked my winning 30s spot” or whatever people apocrypally usually do who work for the failing business model called “Mass media advertising agency” and do nothing to change it (btw, I yet have to meet one of those people, they MUST be sowhere).

Why I believe the whole thing got heated unnecessarily, is that Mr. Clemons predicted the death of advertising (like many did before) in a way that was a bit polarizing, in order to make a point.  If the point is that you can’t just message at people and treat them as passive recipients, but instead need to deliver experiences that make a qualitative difference in their lives, I think most people would say: “Yeah, got it, thanks!” But even if you heed this advice and you help brands understand and enable human behavior and create acts instead of just ads: it still doesn’t mean you won’t see any messaging anymore. When you do something for or with people, it is worth talking about, too. The only difference should be: instead of giving your brand a reason to buy, you focus on giving it a reason to exist, i.e. a purpose in the context of people’s lives.

I think if you tried to get the commentators of the article to subscribe to that notion, it wouldn’t become so much about advertising and whether or not messaging will die, but rather what one commentator described as “the natural evolution of advertising”. But then again, it wouldn’t have made for a controversial article with the potential to get Mr. Clemons that much publicity (which btw, in spanish and french is the same word as “advertising”).

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