When Genevieve Bell was studying the car industry, one of the things she reportedly discovered what that the technology in the car wasn't as important as the technology that people brought into the car.
Our music, podcasts, address books and recent destinations are with us everywhere, so why try to duplicate that in the car? Just create the ability to hook up the phone.
Which makes sense. Our cars are full of personal items we brought in.
It's a very smart piece of ethno research. And it might be the philosophy that helps retail, too.
What if instead of a retailer investing huge amounts of money into physical things, location by location, they focus their attention on reacting to a phone once it arrives? I think this goes beyond apps and beacons. Target and Starbucks and more could tie together on one platform, not separate ones that they each have to build, market and grow an audience for. Like our playlists of hundreds of bands that share a channel.
The reason design projects that neglect research fail isn’t because of a lack of knowledge. It’s because of a lack of shared knowledge. Creating something of any complexity generally requires several different people with different backgrounds and different priorities to collaborate on a goal. If you don’t go through an initial research process with your team, if you just get down to designing without examining your assumptions, you may think your individual views line up much more than they do. Poorly distributed knowledge is barely more useful than no knowledge at all.
I think in the corporate world we freely use ‘positive words’ like ‘transformation’ and ‘innovation’ in order to indicate our progressive, modern leadership style. But we shy away from a proper engagement with ‘negative words’ like ‘risk’ and ‘mistakes’. We don’t like the suggestion that commercial success is a calculated risk, because we don’t like to accommodate the prospect of failure. It offends our faith in optimism and positive thinking. In this respect we do ourselves a disservice. It’s like talking about rights without recognizing responsibilities.
And we are particularly cautious around the word ‘creativity’. Creativity belongs in Pandora’s box, along with art and Bohemia and adolescent paintings of Coke cans; along with hirsute cyclists of dubious politics and personal hygiene; along with an excess of emotion and a scarcity of common sense. Creativity is all about soft sell and soft options, not hard data and hard facts.
I wonder if we in the creative businesses have chosen the wrong word. Would we fare better if we were called ‘change managers’ or ‘commercial disruptors’? Would our expertise be more highly regarded if we were ‘innovation scientists’? Would we sit at the mythical ‘high table’ if our chair said ‘transformation consultants’?
Here's an artificially intelligent billboard with an algorithm attached. The board evolves over time to show the most effective ads that it can based on people's reactions. Copy, layout, font and image can all be mixed and matched, automatically, in real time. The point is that it gets smarter, choosing less and less solutions until it finds the best mix...
There's an important nuance to monitor with this particular approach for creativity. It's one thing to have various executions and then optimize to the highest performing one; that's wonderful. And there's a beauty in taking design elements that prove to work in one area and trying to spread them across others.
But this AI creative design approach starts to get close to literal group design without guidance. Incorporating everyone together and then spitting out one idea is a risk. Like what GM did with their initiative to "give the people what they want" and use extensive focus groups to arrive at the design of the quickly-pulled Aztek.
Said one company exec back then: "By the time it was done, it came out as this horrible, least-common-denominator vehicle where everyone said, 'How could you put that on the road?'"
Understand that our present time is the furthest thing from banality. Reality as we know it is exploding with novelty every day. Not all of it’s good. It’s a strange and not entirely comfortable time to be alive. But I want you to feel the future as present in the room. I want you to understand, before you start the day here, that the invisible thing in the room is the felt presence of living in future time, not in the years behind us.
To be a futurist, in pursuit of improving reality, is not to have your face continually turned upstream, waiting for the future to come. To improve reality is to clearly see where you are, and then wonder how to make that better.
Act like you live in the Science Fiction Condition. Act like you can do magic and hold séances for the future and build a brightness control for the sky.
Act like you live in a place where you could walk into space if you wanted. Think big. And then make it better.
Overall things don’t replace things. We’re a culture of more
and we see evidence of that everywhere, from Costco to our personal technology.
According to eMarketer, a third of us now report that the tablet is one of our
three favorite devices. One of our three
favorites. What is our attitude toward more technology, when do we let go
and at what point does new innovation, such as Google Glass, become accepted?
Let's start with the traditional book. There is nothing
wrong with it. In fact, there’s a connection with printed pages, a warmth and an
intimacy, that simply doesn’t exist with digital. (Early Kindles do get close.) But today digital pages are just more convenient. And yet the book will
not go away because it retains certain experiential advantages. They’re small
advantages, but enough not to wipe out the market.
When we look around there’s a sense of wonderfulness to many
lo-fi items—from the crackle of a record player to the quirkiness of a
Polaroid. It’s not mass-market wonderfulness but such charm too often disappears
with superior technology. So we don’t let go, we just limit our use and add new
things.
Technology only vanishes when the original invention retains
no emotional charm. Like the VCR. Once the DVD arrived there was nothing
wonderful that remained with video tape. Cisco was onto this when they
discontinued the Flip. Surprising at the time, they knew smartphones would do
everything the Flip did and that nothing charming would remain, so why wait?
But we rarely commit to fully letting go. We’re a culture of
cupboards, basements and storage units. It takes little effort to hold on to the
things we still kind of like and might even use on occasion.
So now we have Google Glass...
Some think it will eventually
replace the cellphone but I see it as more of an add on.
When Altimeter Group evaluated the top technologies at SXSW
they awarded Google Glass with a “watch” designation. They cited two questions to support this: how will it work and what will the etiquette
be? The latter, I believe, is of equal importance to the former.
In Seattle, the 5 Point Cafe just banned the use of Google
Glass. They simply don’t want their clientele on film without their
knowledge. So there’s the privacy etiquette to consider.
Perhaps a good analogy is the baseball cap. It started to be
seen in the late 1940s, which isn’t all that long ago. Today they are
common and we don’t think twice about somebody “wearing a cap.” Unless they’re
wearing one at a wedding, or in church, or in a formal office setting. Indeed,
some people don’t care and wear hats everywhere, but the majority of us choose
when it’s appropriate.
Google Glass will probably go the way of the baseball cap in
two notable ways.
First, there will be times when it won’t be acceptable to
wear them. This will happen where any amount of privacy is cherished: at
the 5 Points Café, in a business meeting, celebrating Christmas eve dinner or
enjoying coffee with a friend.
Secondly, we’ll get used to them. Douglas Adams said this best
and it’s what always happens with generations and age and their relationship
with new technology and innovation:
"1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is
just normal;
2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty
is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out
of it;
3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the
natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know
it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be
alright really."
This is a breakdown of US household consumption from Bain (click to enlarge). It's part of their Great Eight Trillion Dollar Growth Trends for 2020 and the chart is probably helpful to review and file for presentations and such. Within the Great Eight trends, there is one that ties directly to marketing, #7: "Everything the Same But Nicer." The chart is from that section. And since it's the sole trillion dollar trend focused on marketing, it's worth a study...
The red boxes signify the "hard innovations" or, basically, tech stuff driven by science and R&D departments (e.g. tablets, Twitter). While these will be important, Bain really focuses on the other grey boxes citing them as the second largest driver of global GDP over the next 8 years behind the growth of the Asian economy. Which is incredible. The grey boxes are where "soft innovation" opportunities exist; the things that are marketing or process driven and promote additional consumption. They require a focused effort on insight finding and creative development.
Within organizations it's worth creating an internal team tasked with just that: finding the right insight to increase product or service quality and drive increased consumption. It's possible with anything, regardless of the industry. Take the coffee category for instance where over the last ten years soft innovations (such as premium retailers, Via single serves and Keurig K-Cups) raised global economic value 80% versus only 21% growth in "quantity" consumed.
Recently I attended a fascinating presentation by Tim Leake who uttered the phrase "useful is the new cool." Which I quickly wrote down. "Useful is the new cool." This is about 'making the active choice' and designing systems to become more helpful to customer's lives.
I think this is just as important as introducing stellar "soft innovations." I can't apply a trillion dollar figure to it like the folks at Bain, but it feels that important. There should be a team dedicated to this too.
I suppose it could be tempting to assign both under one team. But finding these answers require very different brainstorming, testing, team skill and creativity. Establishing two teams within an organization, one focused on each, would probably be the best way to structure things.
Often in advertising and marketing there is debate as to whether the industries are more art or science. I happen to think that good science and good art don't have many differences from each other and that it's actually the combination of what might typically be referred to as "artistic" approaches and "scientific" approaches working together that breed the best insights.
But there are two different processes we can go through to get to those insights... And that's where an interesting difference lies and where the science of idea finding comes in.
Facts --> Idea
The first is Facts to Idea, or the brick-by-brick approach. Based on a logical progression of information this is the more traditional process where A leads to B then to C and so on... It begins with an observation which is followed by the accumulation of data and then the analysis of that data. Once everything is analyzed there is more observation to verify the facts and then the process is done. This is the most common approach in business as it's relatively safe with many opting out points. Facts to Idea is widely taught in business schools. The approach has brought us frozen food at the supermarket and the proof of gravity's existence.
Idea --> Support
The second is Idea to Support. In this approach one doesn't start with an observation but rather with an idea brought forth from background knowledge. Once the idea is thought of the rest of the process goes about disproving why the idea won't work via experiments and prototyping. A diagram from Stephen King's excellent 1981 presentation of Advertising: Art and Science highlights this wonderfully:
Idea to Support is what Galileo and Einstein practiced. We see it today in the likes of Bezos and Jobs. They start by disproving accepted ideas through volunteering something entirely new.
These are two very different approaches. So which one is right?
I've studied and experimented a lot with both and I must say that neither side has convinced me they are exclusively optimal. I think more to the point is how well you do each of them. And when you do each of them; "change the category" and "change the world" ideas usually come from Idea to Support because it's starting from a place of dissatisfaction with the status quo.
It's important to be cognizant that there are two types of idea creation and that everyone probably has a preferred method. Which means if you're choosing a method that goes against-type for someone it's helpful to discuss the differences at the beginning.
It's important not to casually and slowly meander away from the great stuff that affects you. Which is easy to do, of course, with all the good stuff that also finds you. There's lots of good stuff, which gets mixed in with the great stuff. Kind of like how Tom Junod reminds us that we live in the age of the good song.
So here are five great things particularly worth spending time with.
It turns out that the buildings we work in can contribute to a marked difference in how we work and how we perform at our jobs. According to a series of studies by the WSJ, low ceilings and loud air-conditioners created more stressed people both inside and outside the office than recently renovated spaces. That blue tones generate great creativity while red tones lead to accuracy and attention to detail. And that working in high-ceiling rooms are 25% more conducive to seeing connections between unrelated objects than 8-foot ceilings are.
We probably all assumed things like this, but it's nice to have some research to back it up. And while we may not all be able to work in offices like these, or affect the hiring of our company's next architect we can use these insights as a guide to choosing and building war rooms or deciding on the location of the next off-site brainstorm session, I suppose.