John Drake

Emotional Speeds

Every day you should have some laughter, you should spend some time in thought and you should have your emotions moved to tears of joy or appreciation. If you do that, Jimmy V said, you will have a wonderful life. Indeed, we are all built with both the ability and the need to move our heart, mind and soul in ways that make life richer.

I believe that more of this should come through in our work.

Many brands pick an emotion and stay there. Jack In The Box brings humor, Uniqlo embraces irreverence, Southwest is always fun. This, of course, is a proven way to go and is often a solution that can pay dividends for years.

Another way to go is to work at varying emotional speeds. It's made possible when a brand stands on very high ground and allows marketing to explore the natural range of human emotion within that ground. VW has been re-focused around "the people's car," which is a nice example of this.

A second example of this is Expedia whose "Find Yours" campaign from 180/LA began with some joy and is now sharing a different side of travel with the powerful message of "strength"...

Varying emotional speed is a beautiful form of marketing. It's harder to find. It's much more difficult to do. Yet it appreciates, perhaps more so than other strategies, that on the other end of the product is a person and that people have days where they laugh, they cry and they have some thought.

Doesn't it seem like brands who operate at different emotional speeds feel as if there's people like us working there as opposed to just advertisers? I think so.

The Beauty Of The Digital Mess

[ Ralph Morse’s photograph of Einstein’s office in Princeton, taken hours after Einstein’s death and captured exactly as the Nobel Prize-winner left it. ]

In a way it would be nice if all of your notes could be in one place on the web. For efficiency and other reasons. I know there are services that claim to be able to do this but there really isn't. Not everything. And once you think about it, how much fun would it be to organize everything so neatly anyway? There's that strange, pre-mixed peanut butter and jelly jar at the grocery store but we like to combine it ourselves most of the time.

My current digital storage mix includes Delicious, this blog, favorited tweets, Skitch/Evernote, Kindle highlights, downloaded PDFs and more. It's different for each of us. Stuff is everywhere. But it's our own unique digital collection. Kind of like that cluttered desk where only you know where everything is and it looks like a mess to everyone else and that makes you like it even more.

Adding to my own digital mess I didn't know what to do with all of the highlighted books I've read over the years. So I added them to Flickr and just made them public in the spirit of another "blog all dog eared pages" sort of way. It's been entertaining to go back through my library and see what I underlined and had forgotten about since it wasn't on the web.

Pulling these up on the phone during meetings has been quite fun. It's nice to see the actual page of the book with the late night underline or highlight.

Adliterate recently posted eight things that planners need. Which is great. That blog is always great. Number six on the list talked about "weird wiring":

Planners are often subject to the same information and stimulus as everyone else but they use it and process it differently. It’s as if there is a crossed wire somewhere in their brains that means they make connections that aren’t obvious. I have always loved the conversations that takes place between planners because they jump around, drawing in references from a huge spectrum of experiences and ideas. An old boss maintained that in interviews she looked for the people that spoke in analogies – they were the ones that made great planners. 

Which led in nicely to number seven, "moderate geek tendencies":

"...A planner recently told me that whenever he flies he goes to the newsagent in the airport and picks up a magazine about a completely random and unfamiliar subject in order to dive into other peoples’ worlds, whether nursing, cross stitch or steam railways. I have always believed that a planner’s reading matter should confuse and slightly repel your account handler, because face facts, you’re a geek.

Embracing a digital mess, actually enjoying the messy process of the creation and curation of it, is part of the interestingness of the web.