i [love] marketing.

just watch the sky

This is beautiful. Besides being fun&awesome in itself, i think it's a great example of "web storytelling", based on conveying ideas through technology. Or through design, if you will. Meaning that the story and technology are inseparable. This would be awfully close to McLuhan's famous idea, if I were talking about the medium and the message. But I am not. I am talking about turning an idea into something tangible [think any great design, e.g. furniture or fashion]. Here, there's also a song to go with each page. Song & text & font & color & navigation are all aligned to tell a story. By way of comparison, see this as an example of "traditional" storytelling & "the medium is the message" & "let's overuse Flash" [i've already written about the latter here and here]. It is worth noting that Anomaly has recently done something similar for Converse, but this one maybe has a slightly better vibe. (I didn't like Converse linear navigation, it somehow didn't totally work for their story. Non-linear and/or community-based navigation, like Digg's, might have been better ... but i heart Anomaly so will keep my comment lite)

a bit of thinking about customer research & banking

A friend of mine told me a story about a company who was pitching for some big bank, and lost it. Apparently, they got the customer research part wrong. That is, they overdid it. They also seemingly asked the wrong questions. I am all for the planner's classic role as a voice of the consumer. But can we have too much of that voice? In this particular case, a company pushed consumer perspective more than brand or business category perspective. In fact, they totally ignored business goals & category insights. How did they managed to do that? Well, it seems that a thorough user research revealed that people don't know and don't care about the difference between Roth IRA and traditional IRA (fictional example -- i just made this up), so account planners in question just went straight ahead and told that to the bank. Made their recommendations, too. Aside of the fact that this can make the pitch team look arrogant, or ignorant [or both] in front of the client (who still knows a thing or two about their own business), it also revealed something else. That something is the manner in which some acct planners do customer research. It is fairly expected that people won't know and won't care about the above mentioned difference if they are asked in that way. But if they are asked, do you plan retirement now, or later, or never, the answers would be different. If they are asked if they plan to move to Florida, or go to Europe, or cruise around the world when they retire, the answers would be even more specific. If they are asked how they think about money in terms of risk and how they calculate the future, the insights can really help both those people and the client. But this requires a way broader research approach (and also, dare I add, some knowledge/interest in sociology, ethnography, and design research). In this broader approach, customers needed to be treated holistically, as people, not as bank users. Then, it is the context of someone's particular life that matters. (Or, as Dan Saffer puts it, "by fixating on tasks, [one] won't look for solutions to the problem as a whole"). Third, in life, everything is connected to everything else. So even if you asked about their daughter's wedding, you may end up getting a good insight about what level of risk that person is willing to take in life, and this may offer a good idea for designing a suitable retirement plan. Just don't ask specific banking questions. Why? If you do, you will never be able to make something better than what already exists -- and more importantly, you won't be able to seamlessly fit into people's life & transform their [future planning + risk calculating = banking] experience. Which is what great branding does. And what designers  have been doing forever. Like IDEO, for example: "when IDEO tackles an assignment, they properly believe it’s lazy to ask people what they think about a product or idea. Instead, they choose to observe people using the product (or engaging in an activity) ... [then they ask] how can we change this interaction so that the user gets more our of it?" (via blog of a very smart guy Leland Maschmeyer). And yes, as steve Steve Jobs says "a lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them". Or, in this case, they won't be able to tell the difference between Evergreen Mountainview Health and the trip to the Carribean.

brands & personalities & brand personalities

When you hear repeated mentions of brands as people, and of people as brands, you start thinking about the concept of brand personality created by Stephen King of J Walter Thompson in the 70's (yea, that's long time ago and JWT still had its original name). Sure thing, I know the why & who & how of this concept, but I still have to ask: why so complicated? To clarify ... People interact with offline products/systems directly. They also interact directly with online brands (which are famous for their lack of personality). But for some reason, marketing people still use the concept of brand personality to explain this interaction. B/c it's thought not to be social, so we need to socialize it. And we do the socializing through this really complicated set of steps (there's a brand, it's characterized by a set of attributes, these attributes are communicated through messages and/or different touchpoints) to finally get to the beginning, which is people's direct interaction with a product/service. So I guess these products/services are terribly socially incompetent to form any kind of bond through our interaction w them. They just sit there until brand comes and breathes in life in them through its personality. I am well aware that there are ton of products that are so generic that are indistinguishable. But thinking that a strong brand personality has to be the only way to contextualize the relation between us & a generic object is wrong. Ties between people and products can be contextualized in many different ways (build a system, create a content, design, innovate). But this kind of thinking  requires a serious shift in brand communication though. Communication does not happen solely between humans. It also happens between humans and objects (as Dan Saffer nicely demonstrates). Maybe it's time to think about designing for this interaction instead of anthropomorphizing it. The latter just creates an image that separates us from the world around us. An update: A month after I wrote this post, i accidentally discovered another similar opinion on personal branding [via tiny gigantic].

What is (the) definition of digital marketing? part 1

I strongly suspect that if people in the industry knew HOW to define digital marketing a lot of their lives would be easier. That is, it would be awesome if some affirmative claim existed instead of statements what what it is not, and inventing "wizard of oz"-type of concepts like "engagement" and "authenticity" that regularly conceal more than they reveal. The trouble really started a few years back, when marketers started taking web as a serious advertising & branding vehicle. Trouble is, it turned out that is not enough for digital agencies to define their area of expertise as "digital marketing" as opposed to "traditional marketing", which relies mostly on media buys in television, print, radio, and outdoors. In reality, "digital marketing" usually means just a little bit more than adapting the attention-based, get-the-most-eyeballs framework of traditional marketing to the digital medium, and developing content formats suitable for it. So as people's social behavior has changed, digital agencies unsurprisingly found themselves in the same crisis as their traditional counterparts. As a consequence, they are increasingly forced to come up with a new set of concepts and methods that define what "digital marketing" is. Also to invent the new language to talk about the evolving digital reality. But as of now, the situation seems to me to be something like this: 
"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?" asked Alice.
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
"I don't much care where--" said Alice.
"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.
"--so long as I get SOMEWHERE," Alice added as an explanation.
"Oh, you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."
"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."

more on running & branding. maybe also on social marketing 101

So there was this conversation with the Nike rep there at Brian Morrissey's blog which I already mentioned, and it unfortunately turned into "us" vs "them" kind of thing. Which is kinda not new when convos with brands are involved, but it can become a little bit tiring. That is, if you really engage in those discussions. So people were complaining on Brian's blog about how the run was badly organized, and then they were complaining that some gadgets don't work well, and also that the Nik e+ site crashed, and then too that they can't find shoes they were looking for. And basically, that all of this makes them to finally give up. When you think about it, people are loyal/not loyal to a brand because in particular situations that brand failed them or not. The above are the situations where runners have been failed by Nike. But the n this Nike rep gets his opportunity to enter the conversation and to provide useful & enjoyable convo experience. He claims that Nike "supports runners on more levels and more places" than other brands. Ok. So, isn't one of those places right there & right now in our conversation? He had opportunity to change any possible misconceptions about the brand in a non-patronizing manner - through offering information, advice, by listening, and taking notes [so the brand can gear its next marketing/branding program towards those people who are passionate about running but are not passionate about running in Nike shoes]. All in all, it could have been a fun experience talking to this guy [and this, by association, would make it a fun experience with Nike brand]. There was a lot of free information there, so the only thing Nike had to do is to turn them into actionable insights. But it seemed that the only goal that the brand had [through the human voice of PLe1] had was to prove all of us wrong. Oh well. You win. I am sticking to my asics. 

brand strength

I was in IKEA in Brooklyn yesterday for a record minimal amount of time since I knew exactly what I needed (and refused to be drawn in IKEA-experience). Truth to be told, at one point I did get trapped and had to cry "how the hell do I get out of here??". But this was the consequence of me refusing to follow the arrows (which is exactly what happens to those disobedient shoppers who just have to be too difficult to go with the happy flow). In any event, I wanted my purchase delivered, and there is where the mess started. In a hyper-disorganized line for delivery (actually, there was 2 lines), customer service first packed my stuff forever (oh, let me go get that duck tape - will be back later) and then, I had to wait in another line to set a delivery time and to confirm my address (um , why the fist guy could not have taken care of that?). All the while, I WAS NOT blaming IKEA (why?? how?? i love to hate brands!!), but the actual people working at the customer service in that particular Brooklyn store. That is, I strongly believed that IKEA customer service is perfect (present evidence to the contrary), and that the poor customer service that I was currently experiencing must be an exception. It defies common sense to think that everywhere else it works great, but that in this store and in this situation it is not. But, that's the story. Or, as a friend of mine said, you can't use American Express in so many places, so why do you still have it? The real issue here then is not why a person stays brand-loyal when everything is peachy, but rather why does one stay loyal when this is not the case? These bad experiences are conflict situations in which we experience cognitive dissonance, and, thanks to my buddy Todd Thiessen, I recently started thinking about how some brands can get away with it, and some can't. I tend to think that the question goes beyond brand perception and has to do with the people's actual experience (i.e. how are those "conflict" moments incorporated in the whole system of relations that a brand develops -- if this system is strong enough, it won't go down; if it's not, it will). In any event, it's good to start thinking about brand loyalty not only in terms of repeated positive brand experiences (b/c in those situations, it's easy to be loyal), but also in the context of real-life, actual "conflict situations" when we actually have to choose what to think.

where is the runner?

I had an interesting exchange just now with John at Hella Sound over at Brian Morrissey's blog (yes, the conversation about the Nike Human Race Fiasco is still going on - and aside of being an awesome case study in a brand PR, it is also contains some great marketing insights). In any event, John assessed that "[you] make some valid points about consumerism, but I think what you're saying is passing through an idyllic fantasy vision of what a "real" runner is." I would be totally ready to agree with him (truth being that i do tend to have idyllic view of the world), if my comments weren't based on some actual experiences (my own, and other people's). And ignoring those experiences reveals a too-well-known marketing perspective that is focused way too much on the brand and its products, and not enough on people's experience with the actual activity [in this case, running]. The brand cares less about *people-as-runners* and people's *running experience*, and more about *people-as-consumers* and *running-as-a brand-experience*. The point being, our running experience equals what we are wearing. Experience is more than sum of its parts. And, obviously, the missing link in brand's marketing thinking. As the Nike Human Race had shown.

"shut up, we are blogging" by W+K New York

After I accidentally came across W+K New York blog, I started thinking if agencies' blogs say something about their culture. This one seems to me as one step away from "shut up, we are making ads", which is awfully close to the (perceived) attitude of the W+K's NY office. Other famed places, like W+K Amsterdam & London, have their blog titles at "Think Global, Act Stupid" (Amsterdam), which may read as 'we are having fun and not taking ourselves seriously', and "Welcome to Optimism" (London) - not sure about that one, but it's safe to assume that it's pretty self-explanatory :) The best is their Portland blog, which has no title whatsoever, just pretty fun & useful stuff. This make me think about the age where marketing agencies had their own slogans (remember the Truth Well Told?), and it turned out that that age is still now. Some of the more enthusiastic ones are "I Feel Creative" (DDB) (um, ok), "Time is the New Currency" (JWT), "Nothing is impossible" (Saatchi&Saatchi) (ya, we know, and sky is the limit, too), and my personal favorite "To be most valued by those who most value brands" (Ogilvy Group UK) (and clearly, ogilvy values simplicity). More about agency's slogans here. But it is easy to make fun of traditional agencies (and almost unfair). Surprisingly enough, there are some digital ones that like logo-ing too, like "Inventing Digital Future" (Avenue A/Razorfish), and "The Agency for The Digital Age" (R/GA). As far as others go, they don't talk, they just do (AKQA, HUGE or Anomaly come to mind). so it is them who prefer to keep it shut. 

my dissertation proposal ...

... in a few words.

are we storytellers? or ... are we a technology company?

One of the chapters of my dissertation deals with digital agencies' "identity crisis". The title sentence comes from an email exchange among the executives of a large digital marketing firm i worked for. I think it accurately describes what a lot of digital agencies are going through [i already wrote on R/GA here]. After all, they are the ones who need to somehow marry traditional marketing practices with properties of digital technologies. Making this combo happen is challenging enough for Sillicon Valley and Madison Avenue (a recent AdWeek article  talks about it), and considerably more so when it's happening under the same roof. In a nutshell, I think that the core of this divide is the way of thinking that separates "storytelling" from "technology". That is, here is a story, and then, here is a technology that is going to be used to communicate it. The problem is that the technology IS the story. To make this statement less obscure, just think that digital media are all about interactivity - and as a result, communication there depends less on messaging and more on creation of tangible stuff, like applications and websites and minisites and widgets which attract people to interact with them. So really there is no story before this interaction. And there's no story that is told just in a message - a person really needs to participate. So the story is kinda in-between the two.  How one designs interactions then pretty much shapes the story. Think branding, for example. Traditionally, brand is regarded as an abstract communication entity that manages brand image, logo, and personality. It does so through the representation of perception of products (operative word being "representation"). But the actual brand strength resides in our real-life attachments to products and services. Who cares what we are going to say when we may not behave in that way? Decline in brand loyalty & in brand power makes this say/do thing pretty apparent. There is a yawning gap between the world of communication and the world of, well, reality. What are agencies about to do then? Focus on how people behave, and don't really bother much with what they say. Forget about communication. Don't do research for messages that will resonate with the target audience. Do research about the target's life and then design something that will become natural and invisible part of it. Something that really seamlessly fits in their life. Now, what does all of this have to do with the agencies? First, their work process is still pretty linear and segmented: it revolves around the "idea" part and then the "execution" part. And the two are connected in a linear manner. Good luck with that. Truth is, those two things are inseparable - the same way the story and the technology are (so yes, I would have credited Big Spaceship in Cannes back in June). Second, where are the account planners? And why is design at the end of the whole process? And why does each team work separately? And, finally, why are we all still in the business of creating messages?? In order to marry technology and marketing, first there needs to happen a shift in thinking about the relationship between the two. Or, as Guy Kawasaki put it, a "jump to the next curve". Then the agencies can start to do business differently. This might seem a bit of a "chicken and egg" situation since agencies are the ones to make the change ... the good news is, if they don't, consumers will. It's all about the interaction, after all ... 

where is the runner?, part 2

I love pushing for the idea that social relations happen not only between people but also between people and products, technologies, and information. This kinda changes everything. Communication is not anymore something that happens exclusively between humans. And it's not reduced to images & sounds that grab our attention. It becomes interaction with things. And with this, the need for the concepts of brand image and brand personality starts to approximate zero. Why need an image or a set of imagined (personal) attributes to mediate your relationship the world around you? Properties of things may just be fine enough to speak for themselves, and interaction with them can be designed for, and made useful and delightful. When I go running, I have particular sneakers on, along with the rest of the gear. Those sneakers define how fast and how far I can run, as much as my own body. If I buy another pair of sneakers, I may run even further. They shape me as a runner equally as my training routine. So who does the running then? Me, or my gear, or me-and-my-gear system? I really think that neither we nor the products we use can be separated from the activity that connects us in and creates this system. The role of brands is then to serve this activity and to make it better (or more fun, or different, or whatever). And brand personality is pretty useless there.

is she laughing? (she might be screaming, too)

... some of the delightful ambiguity of the 50's ads. [found while I was looking for the pic for my "authentic what?" post]

tap is the new click, by dan saffer

Last night there was a really awesome preso at R/GA by Dan Saffer (a version of that preso is here). R/GA still managed to mess it up with overbooking the facilities, despite the RSVPs (I felt like I was in the line for a Delta flight, minus the extra miles for those who didn't make the cut). Anyway, Dan's story revolves around the new modes of interactivity between humans and their environment that is more natural than typing & clicking & pressing the red button. Touch screens are the current example, but as time progresses, more and more of interaction (between people and objects) is going to move towards natural movement. This also implies seamless transition between digital and analog world: if our natural gestures suffice for interaction, then there is really no divide -- no special learning and skills are required, as if with writing for example. There's is also no separate medium, like with the non-interactive TV/computer screen. That is, media naturally dissolve into our behavior. Awesome. Dan Saffer is my new hero. (altho those little interactive screens in cabs usually make me nauseous if I stare too much).

interesting ny ... and innovation

This was one of my few fav presos at the Interesting NY this past Saturday. The other two were "The Bodega Food Pyramid: Food choices and the nutritional habits of the underserved" by Dallas Penn (awesome both in content and in its delivery), and "The Consume®econnection Project a one-year experiment to meet the people who make everything I consume" by Scott Ballum (which I find meaningful & super-interesting & makes me happy to know that people like him exist. Scott's interview with PSFK from a couple of days ago can be found here). Although there were other cool topics (like "How to wander around the city" by Morgan Friedman of Overheard in New York, and "Cheese, wine, and software? How software is crossing the artisanal divide" by Hillel Cooperman), only with the above three I had a feeling I would not  be able to easily hear them anywhere else. Which was a highly refreshing thing among the topics that only its author is interested in & presos that managed to take an interesting topic and deliver it in a really boring way (yeah, there were a few of those, too). Also liked Faris' talk on recombinant culture: it would be even more awesome if he actually added his own punchline. But I am sure he will next time. How I think about this is: ok, we do know that there's nothing new under the sun, and that ideas are always combinations of other ideas, but a great thing to add would be that the whole field of innovations and entrepreneurship is actually based on the idea of "re-combination". BUT, and this is the keyword, innovations are UNEXPECTED combinations, meaning that it is not enough just to "remix" something, but to remix things that no one else thought of, like "karl lagerfeld" and "robot". Or touchscreen and a phone. or a iPod and a running shoe. Or high fashion and the internet. That is, the ability to detect similarity of a seemingly very disparate elements. To re-cognize patterns in a very different situations. To apply one solution in a very different context. To re-conceptualize a situation. And stuff like that. If a combination fails to do any of these things, then it's just useless/boring/no fun. Or, a fake.

EVE [a.k.a the MAC]

EVE is a character (actually, a female lead) in Pixar's latest heart-melting movie, WALL-E. It terribly reminded me of something ... something that I've seen before  ...  somewhere... if only i could remember. Fair enough, EVE was created by Jonathan Ive, the  design brain behind all recent Apple products. MAC included. EVE  would make a beautiful computer.

On running & branding

There's an interesting conversation going on right now on Brian Morrissey's blog, around his "the nike human race fiasco" story. A guy from Nike is part of the convo, too, and on my part, I wrote a comment, excerpts of which are repeated here. At the end of his post, Nike guy lamented how it is "amazing how quickly a brand can build a negative perception, and how difficult it is to build perception after the fall." Okaaay. The thing was, that people who complained on the blog were not talking about their negative perceptions, but about their negative experiences with the various components of the Nike system (shoes, site, sportsband, etc). That is, they were talking about actual, real-life, first-hand experiences with the brand. They were not talking about Nike ads, or its slogan, or Nike+ website, or anything else that a brand uses to project a certain perception. They were talking about running. So from this follows that if Nike wants to change its "perception", it actually needs to invest in making the experience better and more relevant for different types of runners and for different types of runs. As is now, the current Nike+ system supports only a specific type of running experience – and a person’s got to have that specific running experience in order to be able to use the system. So, if I don't have *that* experience, the system is useless to me. And this is generally the problem with all closed systems (Nike+ being one of them) -- they break down all too easily & they are good for a limited number of uses only [see adam greenfield's awesome post "on the ground running" for more about "closed-ness" of the Nike+ system]. I suspect that all of this would be totally fine if Nike+ did not claim that they provide super-customization [this being their marketing angle] for all runners. Um, no. If this were true, why are all those long-distance runners complaining? Because they feel = experience (not perceive) that Nike+ is not for them. It is for casual runners (no matter what the claims are). Because casual runners do like to have brand new, fancy shoes, and $15 dollar socks. Serious runners usually have beaten-up gear and are usually emotionally attached to their sneakers they remind them of a specific great achievement (marathon, super-difficult run, etc). Like, just look at the photo above (do those people look like they are wearing anything new&fancy? do they look like they care what they are wearing?). Serious runners replace sneakers mostly when they have to. Casual runners have multiple pairs of sneakers (for different running “events” – with my date, with my friends, for my 10K race). Serious runners usually run alone and pray to god that no one they know sees them. And they don’t listen to music because they run for intrinsic rather than material reasons. E.g. they don’t have a fitness goal, or stress-reduction goal, or any other material goal. Their goals are immaterial – they run for running sake (paul isakson also talked about this in his usual super-smart way, in new balance vs nike ads post). Anyway, all these facets of the experience are relevant to distinguish serious runners from casual ones who are externally motivated. It is surely possible to turn casual runners into serious runners and then into long-distance runners (as Nike claims its goal is) but then they would not use the Nike+ site anymore. B/c their motivation for running will become qualitatively different. They will be running for entirely different reasons than those they started running for. In any event, while its marketing people still think like this: “the more people run, the more miles they put down, then the more stuff they NEED TO BUY” (whoa, the old salesman is back and it creeps me out), it’s going to be more about the brand and less about people who it is supposed to serve. The actual continuation of the sentence should have been “the more people run … the more HELP they need”. That help being shoes, gadgets, and yes, some smooth 10K runs. That’s the reality of branding today: if a brand doesn't help me [to do something better], it doesn't exist for me. As simple as that (and that's why i wear asics when i run).

service = system

In my previous posts (here and here) I was talking about how a brand should disappear behind its applications / stuff that it does for people. Sure thing, this is not new, and was already very neatly summarized in the concept of branded utility by Johnny Vulkan and Benjamin Palmer a while ago. I have hard time explaining people that's not really what i am talking about, but words tend to fail me. Until i figured that i am talking not about brands-as-services but brands-as-systems. What's the difference? I guess that a service addresses only a certain [single] type of action and builds a certain relationship around it. Service then operates only on the dimension "bad" - "good" - "great". A system is many relationships collected together (so some of its parts can be good/bad). Actions/relations - shopping, chatting, searching, banking, reading news - never exist in isolation but are always part of a wider systems of action [call it people's life]. There, everything is connected with everything else. So back to branded utility: what it provides is mostly PART of the bigger system. I guess it was just easier for us to regard the general statement "doing something useful" for people than thinking about specific actions that do so [i would love to put here "moments of truth" but will stay clear of the temptation]. That's why i don't think Nike+ is ONLY a service (it surely is that, but it's not only that), it is a system that addressed every action of what the practice of running is [maps, speed, goals, motivation, music, inspiration, community, races, etc]. Sure thing, it is a closed system [designed for a specific type of runners and for a specific types of runs] and that's why it breaks down so often (see Brian Morrissay's article for example) and is not very appealing to long-distance runners.  Another example is Google -- sure it does provide a great [search] service -- but today Google is way more than search. It is a whole system [search, calendars, email, im, photos, maps, images, and now a browser, too].  All these elements are [almost] neatly connected so there is no friction in going from one point (service) to the next. And that's exactly what Google was thinking about: how to address the people's experience not by thinking about particular activities but the way they are all connected (online and offline). An update: a week after I wrote this post, I came across this sentence in Dan Saffer's book: "service design, like systems design, focuses on context - on the entire system of use ... service design, really, is designing this whole system of use. The system is the service."

Awesome.

I can't even start to explain how much better & cooler & more awesome this is than what Modernista! has done. [this is a website for Bond Art and Science, a very cool company which excels in interaction design]. As seen above, Bond re-purposed a form of online social interaction (IM application in this case) to make their point [that point being "we understand the web"], instead of just stapling their logo on the top of whatever social networking site Modernista! got its hands onto. See the difference? The first is an original [and more importantly, authentic] appropriation, and second is taking a piece of web "life" and calling it its own. M! thinks it disappeared behind the social web but it didn't. It did everything but disappear. You don't become part of a dialogue by taking over the conversation. You have to be PARTICIPATE in it (see above for the reminder).

where is the brand image?

I just can't let it go today. Obsessed. With. Digital. Branding. Continuing on the "act of [brand] disappearance" behind its digital offerings [applications, content/advice, community - for examples think Tylenol "Feel Better", Nike + (yes, i know), Home Depot's "How to", Disney's Family.com, or just about any native digital brand]. Here what you see is what you get, i.e. perception = experience. Brand image is dead. When brand perception is based on actual experience, there's no need for a brand image, right?? Direct interactions with the brand online shape the brand experience AND, in this case, perception is not something that is seen/heard, it is something that is done. Digital branding is then about creating things that people would be attracted to interact with. In order for this to happen, brand's digital offerings have to have some tangible impact on people's life (again, think examples above). They have to respond to a need, give a solution or advice, transform a practice, offer entertainment, and/or impact behavior through creating some (any!) improved way of doing things. Digital branding is about actively transforming people's behavior, instead of trying to influence it through projecting a desired brand image (yay yay coke happiness factory!!) So I guess this shift in thinking makes us consider websites as a stand-alone digital products. A digital product communicates only if it does something [for me]. Promotion = function. Yep, websites can be created for promotion but even then they have to have a function in themselves. This function is the basis of creating a relationship with users: websites need to do something for them. As such, they develop value for people that is INDEPENDENT even from the products/services they promote.If this thinking is right, the actual products/services are then mostly "by-products" of this relationship.

Google's Chrome & immersive-ness of the web, part 2

While I am still at it ... a few more thougths to share. I kinda like this cartoon b/c of the [browser] frame. It is super-illustrative for the space of web, namely the one that is porous and fluid (think Hulu experience, or Facebook, or NYT (yes, still), or maybe just any blog around). We don't really pay attention to the frame, but go straight to what we want to do there. So I find interesting talking about brand "image" online. Like, what image [when there's no frame]? (Forget about moving images, too - they still need a frame). It's about something else here, not about [brand] representation or a narrative (what kind of brand image does Hulu have? More importantly, does it even care to have one?). How awesome would it be if a brand dissappeared behind the applications [i.e. why more brands don't take cue from Chrome??] Everything that brands ever did was to impose their image in between our perception of a brand and our actual experience with the products/services of that brand (the two often being a very different things). That is, brand image literally and figuratively blocked our view. But as cartoon correctly says, if you ignore the image, you can go straight to what you want to do. Oh panic [for brands] because for once they have to develop something that DOES something (and not only SAYS something).  The better thing they develop online, the more likely we  will go there  (and come back).  So brands online develop digital products (websites, applications). Even if they have a crappy physical product, they can create an awesome digital product. The relationship starts right there.

Google's Chrome & immersive-ness of the web

I get to hear a lot about "social and "immersive nature" of web. While I think that claiming that web is social is stating the obvious, I was intrigued by its "immersiveness". Not because I am suspicious (I am not), but because I tend to think that talking about immersion somehow went in the wrong direction. Namely, flash took over and all of the sudden to be immersive was to be IN some created environment, mesmerized by its awesomness (think Coke Happiness Factory and, sadly, AA/RF new website - forget not to turn the volume on). While this most certainly works for video games, I am not super-convinced that this is what being immersed online means. E.g. how many hours a day we spend chatting, shopping, reading news, searching, shopping, twittering, and /or hanging out on facebook? Those surely are activities that we immerse ourselves into, and we do so because of all the awesome applications that make the experience so enjoyable. So, when we are immersed online, we jump from one activity to another without ever breaking their stream. We are not immersed in BEING somewhere, we are immersed in DOING something. Being somewhere = Euclidean space; doing something = fluid space. Rich, interactive applications ask "what can i do for you" [to help you] search better, read news better, connect with others better, shop better, chat better? If they can do something awesome, here we come. Online ads, take notice.

3 signs of [great] (tele)marketing

Recently i've been frequently called up by telemarketers. On 3 rare occasions when i actually did pick up due to some confusion, i've: 1) been offered car insurance (i don't own & operate a motor vehicle); 2) i've been told "please hold, all representatives are busy assisting other customers" (but you've called me!!!); and 3) i have been addressed in Spanish (i am not Spanish and/or Latin American). Awesome targeting. It's good that no time & money is wasted.