ERROL FLANAGAN

Say less to involve more

More from Stefan Sagmeister.

Here he makes a great point on a theory on abstraction while talking about an Yves Klein Blue field painting, all in the context of design that's made him happy.

His observation is that, 'if you abstract an image you merely open as much room for the unrepresentable, and therefore are able to involve the viewer more'. Less information brings more involvement and engagement.

As usual, some great ideas and design insights that can be applied to brands and the persuasion business of marketing.

Genius graphic design

A brilliant collection of playful and inspiring inventiveness - mostly with a client attached. A timeless and enduring truth that comes through for me here is that inspiring people is the main thing to achieve to makes something stand out.

New Did You Know? from Xplane - convergence and how the internet is changing our lives

via PSFK.

Semiotics for brand faith

This is a revisited post from some time back.

I've added to it a bit in this relook at my old blogsite at www.errolflanagan.com

It's a post about the power of semiotics and how they are useful to brands that want to create a resonant and believable position with consumers through a well managed, considered behaviour that has an eye for detail.

Like most markets, in the beer world semiotics are essential. Pour it into a glass and the pale yellow fizzy liquid bubbles and becomes anonymous. In its bottle though it's a work of dedication, the product of an artisan's love made real in form of a robust homespun humility and natural industry to be savoured and considered.

Semiotics is to do with deciphering the symbols for meaning. So all the obvious stuff is there to connote authenticity and people who care. Scrolling text, earthy solid colours and bottle weight and shape - this beer is clearly something you have to properly hold suggesting weight and substance to the product - it's not to be taken lightly. It's all very obvious but it works. All very natural and solid - kegs, sketchily illustration style, big caps for no-nonsense, and scripted name of brand for family owned. 

Does it make a difference? Yes, as obvious as the brand behaviour might be, it works to convey a tone for the brand - implying a character and personality. The bottle makes an impression the product can't. It's not just packaging but the managing of subtle messages choreographed in the design of graphics and form.  The object as media is a big opportunity because everything is media. Often overlooked in communications is the power of semiotics to help people decode culture, and for brands to create culture. Semiotics in the right hands helps us understand what the stuff around us means, or what it is trying to mean, in the way it is, and the way it does what it does.

While getting the semiotics right can help a brand standout, the most important use of it is in making sure the total brand behaviour rings true.

Mies van der Rohe said, 'God is in the details'. Semiotics helps out the fakes and more deeply appreciate the complexities and subtleties of brands that are powerful and real.

Elephant - a new magazine for 'the enthusiastic and curious'

The owner of Magma bookstores, Marc Valli, has created a new magazine called Elephant aimed at people he describes as being 'enthusiastic and curious'. This is a link to an article in Creative Review about it.

He says in the article that he wanted to create, 'the kind of magazine a group of beat friends would have done in the 50s, before the art world became the art world, and the creative industries took over, a time when artists didn’t measure the worth of their work according to auction prices, but by the opinion of their peers.'

The content and design looks interesting. It replaces a previous magazine, Graphic, that was themed based. Colors, made by Benetton and edited in the 90s by Tibor Kalman, used to be a good theme based magazine. It was a good source of interesting facts and figures and great images and was a design studio must-have. 

Elephant looks like another good aggregator of interesting things in culture, like Monocle and Wallpaper, set to do well. Valli says that while books sales are down, magazines seem to be thriving. Elephant will have global distribution in stores and newsagents.

This is an old Colors cover. The magazine is printed in French and English which gives it both a graphically interesting and continental feel at the same time. It was always a fascinating read and a great example of a very subtly branded content.

Kesselskramer exhibition in Sydney

I saw this walking to work this morning in Bondi Junction. 

Kesselskramer are a famous dutch creative agency, often mentioned in the company of other great Amsterdam creative agencies like Strawberry Frog, Wieden + Kennedy, Droog and 180. This should be well worth checking out.

Stand for something against the intolerable status quo - give fans assets - start and feed a movement

In this talk at TED, again from some time ago, Seth Godin adds weight to the argument that push marketing has had its day – he’s promoted the idea of tribes (the title of one of his books) as being the way to go for brands in the connected world we are in.

In the talk he suggests that social networking technology has helped tribes form easily around niche interests and galvanize themselves into creating change - sometimes on a world scale.

He gives examples of how change can happen from Al Gore to Tom Shoes (in the interesting places column on this blog).

Status quo challenging ideas from leadership thinking, that become stories or big ideas that a person or a brand stands for are necessary. Then it's harness tribes to create a movement and create change individuals couldn’t achieve by themselves.

But thanks to these times of internet connectivity, it seems like power to the fans of ideas that create a better way, is gaining on the power of the mass mindset.

Another good case in point showing the influence of the internet and the power of social networks, is in this two minute extract of a talk given by Scott Thomas, which I found on Coolhunting.com.

Scott designed Obama's digital campaign. Instead of just having people ordering campaign merchandise online, people were able to download Obama branded assets so they could create merchandise of their own.

Net result; Obama's vision of getting people more involved in the political process is achieved - and from involvement comes commitment, which leads to loyalty, and then advocacy, towards the nirvana of customers as brand fans - resonators and zealots and the best marketing machine a brand could wish for.

 

 

Here's an image from Seth Godin's TED talk.

Accidental influentials - an interesting theory on how ideas travel in social networks in the Web 2.0 world - the size of a Forest Fire has little to do with the spark that started it, and more to do with the state of the Forest - and other things

This is something I found last year that I think is still relevant when thinking about Web 2.0 successes and strategies.

The idea is that if the network permits the spread of the idea, then virtually anyone can spread it. It's from research by Duncan Watts and colleagues at Columbia University which is an important development on Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point theory of key influential individuals being the ones marketers should seek out and influence to influence others.

Perhaps so called 'influentials' are still ones we should find, understand, enlist in co-creation and help us resonate ideas for brands, because they may be best placed to resonate an idea across networks of their own, but perhaps we would increase our chances of success if we spend more time and effort on making sure the network itself is 'idea-ready'. Like on a tight drum skin, a slight tap can make a great noise, but if the skin is loose, a big sound can still be made, but it takes a lot more effort.

A case in point is Lonelygirl15 from a few years ago, who became a Web 2.0 case study after she achieved webwide coverage for apparently no reason other than she hit a community ready and willing to transport her broadcasts across the globe. Arguably, she wasn't that influential herself, but thanks to the resonance potential of the network, she became famous. Similarly the Free Hugs guy, Juan Mann, may have hit the internet fame magic formula of, good content + tuned network = web 2.0 success.

This is one of the ideas listed on the Harvard Business Review's breakthrough ideas for 2007 in HBR ideacast number 29.

Also on this podcast are sections on:

1. New thoughts on marketing brands from Harry Potter - essentially, brands might be more successful if they grow and mature with their audiences rather than segment audiences by age and attempt to talk to
people only of that age - upside is increased loyalty, less likelihood of switching at key ages and lower costs of acquisition of new consumers.

2. 'Conflicted consumers' - an interesting idea that beneath the loyalty figures in most companies, there is a stealth segment of consumers who have ethical concerns about the company and are poised to bolt if a competitor comes along with a more viable alternative emerges - apparently 1 in 4 consumers bought things from companies whose ethical reputation they deemed to be poor or very poor, but unlike hardcore ethical consumers who go green or go without, they continue to purchase but have a latent potential to be an upsurge of bad word of mouth. Lesson here for me is stay ahead of the ethical trends and take leadership - catch-up or staying with the pace of trend may be going too slow to stay in the game.

3. An observation that people who are political or social conservatives tend to have more children, who in turn have more children, which means consumer culture demographics

4. The folly of accountable-ism is the last idea - the increasing bureaucratisation of morality and how that ends up working against efforts to maintain moral and ethical behaviour in an organisation.

Converse and (PRODUCT) RED doing good brightly

I saw these Converse shoes in a Hype shop window in Bondi Junction, in Sydney the other night. The brand is owned by Nike and it was one of the founder brands of Bono's (PRODUCT) RED initiative launched a few years ago in the US and UK.

The original brands in at the start of (PRODUCT) RED were Gap, American Express, Motorola, Armani and Converse. Gap did some t-shirts - INSPI(RED), was one design I saw pictures of David Beckham and Elle MacPherson wearing in a couple of different issues of mX the free Sydney commuter paper - American Express did a red card for use in UK and USA, Motorola did a red RAZR phone, Armani did some red sunglasses and Converse started their PRODUCT (RED) product line with some mud decorated Chuck Taylors. Apple have joined too offering (PRODUCT) RED bits of the iPod family, but Converse has, it seems, been the only brand to fairly consistently support the effort in Australia with a number of outings to market with new products.

A brand that innovates and gets to market fast and fairly easily might appear to be an ideal partner for a cause brand looking to have a lot of consistent market presence over a long time, with the message being kept relatively fresh. Though Apple may have had their (PRODUCT) RED Nano out for some time, it feels like Converse have been more active in their raising of the charity's profile.

What really caught my attention was the bright and optimistic nature of Converse's brand behaviour in this particular cause minded effort. Given the brand's stereotypical emo associations, the latest red effort could have been a whole lot heavier. It definitely isn't gloomy. It's very positive, rallying almost. It made me think about social efforts that are made, or could be made, by the commercial world again too, so thanks Converse and (PRODUCT) RED for bringing that very worthy but necessary point back into my head.

Apple store in Sydney

I saw this today in Sydney's George Street. I had a fleeting thought that it would be interesting if there was nothing actually behind the big blue poster awning covering the supposed new shop construction, and that one morning it suddenly wasn't there - a sort of pop-up pretend-to-construct-a-store.

It also struck me that such a vast piece of surface could have been put to some more interesting marketing use other than just being a great big coming soon poster.

People could have interacted with it in some way - perhaps a giant scratch card surface like the one in the post below about the Royal Festival Hall's 'Hidden Love Song' programme. Or a projection site of some kind, or a simple spilling on to the pavement or interacting with the buildings around it in some way.

Like the £106 million architectural wonder, the Eden Project cleverly did in Cornwall, UK, people might have been encouraged to come and watch the build progress. Eden Project sold tickets to come and see 'the big build' from a platform high above the disused China Clay pit as the vast biome structures took shape.

Perhaps it's a testament to Apple that something special is expected to be their business as usual. Once an expectation of innovation is set, there's no turning back to doing the normal kind of things other less innovative brands would do unnoticed.

Prada spring/summer 2008 launch

This is a film called 'Trembled Blossoms' made by Prada to launch their Spring/Summer 2008 collection. The illustrator James Jean also worked on designs for the collection and the catwalk shows.

Apparently, the more alien a model looks, the more likely it is they will achieve super-model status. This takes that to the extreme to a parallel universe of some kind of place of perpetual and beautiful cycles of metamorphosis, much like how some would describe Prada is, as a brand.

Typical of the Prada sensibility and brand ethos, the film is not confrontational, but provocative and inviting, and as irrelevant as it might appear to be, I think the film is a good pointer for brands when they try to break out of traditional ways of communicating. Simple, universal, positively inspiring.

Sixty foot scratch card and a hidden love song

This is a link to a piece of work that involves a love song hidden behind a sixty foot scratch card type surface, used as part of an interactive exhibit in London, created by Melissa Mongiat and others. I found it about a year ago via a Wallpaper magazine featuring the designer. A bit of googling, and my curiousity being grabbed by both the exhibit title, and the website being called milkandtales.com, took me to find something quite enchanting, childlike and fantastically wonderful.

The title of the exhibit is called 'Hidden Love Song'. It was done as part of the Royal Festival Hall's 'Keeping In Touch' project. It's a great bit of people engaging with creativity, to create something quite special and unique. It would be great to see more of this kind of thing from brands applying sensitivity and art in their communications.

In a world where mentos mints and diet coke bottles get to be performance art ads by whim of an imaginative mind or two, surely more invention and original thinking is not only called for, but actually very necessary for brands to be more interesting in their conversations with consumers.

I've categorized this under 'not enough time to be bland' because for me it is a big watch out for brands. The opportunity for brands to step up to the plate on having a big idea and being imaginative about how they bring it to life, will always be there - the Royal Festival Hall could have spent the money on a poster campaign, or maybe a tv ad about what was on there, but they did a sixty foot, old tech, interactive, music playing, scratch card instead. This was an ad people had to touch, feel and be moved by, it delivered intrigue and provoked stories and wonder. Importantly, it was a metaphor letting people make their own meaning from it, and not a lesson, and it had an idea to be true to, not a demographic to connect with, in mind.

If it were branded, it would have conferred a great deal of joy and optimism on the brand associated with it. It would probably have made the brand feel like a positive thing to listen to, probably giving the brand thought leadership kudos, challenger brand and innovative thinking points too. I suspect it would have made people a little more interested in finding out what was on at the Royal festival Hall as a result too.

The power of a sticky, innovative and inspiring idea arguably makes the RFH's direct marketing or the Sunday papers' listings ad's job a lot easier, and it probably makes those, and all other channels in play, marketing their offer, more effective too. But of course this chaotic synergy of brand behaviour is not something traditional marketing approaches are used to measuring, so a 'too hard to do' or 'not what we do' attitude often means support for the non-traditional is kicked into touch. Great. That means bravery still wins, and the imaginative few agency/client partnerships are the ones that will be the leaders. But, not so great, in that the bar doesn't get raised higher very quickly, and mush in the middle bland brandedness continues to be what most of us get.

These sorts of magical things get to happen where there is a belief that doing interesting things in culture is innately a good thing to do, and those that excel at it are those who believe that inspiring and innovating is mission critical for their business success.

There's a great quote by organisational ecologist Michael Hannan which says, 'Natural selection only works on available diversity'. Technology is making product functionality advantages pretty small and short lived, and people are putting more value on innovation and inspiration from brands as both badges of belonging, and beacons of clarity in confusion. This means the iconic success stories will be more likely to be found in the brands who are most obsessive about being interesting, genuine, innovative and inspiring in their thinking and doing.

In another post, I've mentioned P&G going for inspiration and emotion, rather than functional and rational messaging and marketing approaches, for sound business reasons and making a success of it. That and this piece of art-meets-communication is the stuff marketers need to be inspired by to rethink and enliven models and processes to produce magic of their own for their consumers. If they are not amongst the leaders in shaping and pioneering marketing behaviour, in the current cultural appetite for genius, brands better be in the early adopters group at least, following inspired bits of public engagement like this. Staying in the mass middle ground of the herd of usual marketing behaviour, or getting too late to the game, will mean having to shout loud and compete on price in the blur of sameness - end result is a low margin, high risk game.

For most it's 'do what we know' high measurability, low risk, high traditionality. For some it's 'heck we'll try stuff, and we must, otherwise we'll be as boring as them'. I suspect both sides will be adamant about their way being the best way, and have numbers to prove it. Perhaps its more about faith.

Melissa Mongiat was one of Wallpaper's breakthrough designers for 2007.

This a screen grab from the website.

'We could do' v. 'We have to': zero sum thinking, second life, media thinking, The Long Tail and media agencies

A click on 'The Long Tail' link in the 'interesting things' list here, showed up an article by Chris Anderson, Wired founder and author of 'The Long Tail', about why he quit second life. I clicked to that and the reason given was nobody was there - so confirming the commonly held view on the pre-Facebook era, internet flavour of some months back.

But Wagner James Au came right back at the article with an argument, using The Long Tail principle of many little positives, over many niches, over time, making up a massive more significant consumer effect than big fame for a short time.

Chris Anderson seemed to concede a little but I got distracted by a link to someone he clearly rated as a writer and thinker on the matter so, I followed that to this link to an article by Rich Karlgaard, in Forbes.com about 'The world's worst disease'. In the article, I was reminded about media and ideas and how getting the two to gel to create big cultural usefulness, is for some getting apparently a harder and more fraught thing to do, while for others, it seems that some kind of 'anything is possible' utopia has arrived. His assertion that a lot of good writing and thinking happens outside the constraints of systems and a culture of zero sum thinking, is intriguing when you think about the dilemna of media agencies at this time.

This is an exerpt from that article in Forbes about limited thinking and to my mind a scarcity, rather than an abundance mentality, to coin an idea from Stephen R. Covey's 'The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People'. Whilst being a bit 'Little House on the Prairie' for some tastes, Covey's Abundance v. Scarcity thinking seems to be very applicable here, and Karlgaard seems to share a liking for the more optimistic outlook too.

The article's a good read and a nice point of view on why positivity existing outside systems, with fairly little control, are the places from which big evolutions can come - a kind of tinkering around the edges by enthusiasts that creates breakthroughs we eventually all benefit from in the hearts of our expert worlds. I imagine a hobbyist, self-funded r+d type of open-source, intellectual property development realm of ideas rubbing off on each other and becoming new ideas that shift culture. Not a million miles away from garage electronics tinkerers being the birthplaces of companies like HP, or Bill Bowerman's famous pouring of rubber onto his wife's waffle iron to make the first revolutionary waffle soled Nike running shoe.

Here's the excerpt:

"Meanwhile, the most energetic, original and positive writing has been migrating to the Web and to blogs. No surprise here. Anybody who creates a blog is: (a) an entrepreneur and thus probably NOT a zero-sum thinker; (b) a producer first and a consumer second. These two attributes alone guarantee that the blogger probably has a more accurate view of the world, and how it really works, than does the zero-sum thinker toiling away at his MSM position.

Economists and professors compete for a limited number of tenured university spots. This warps their view toward zero-sum thinking. It is no surprise that the top business mind of the last 50 years – Peter Drucker – by and large operated outside of the university system. Drucker, who escaped Germany in 1937, was no Pollyanna or stranger to evil. But he saw that evil had its roots in a belief system of limits; in the Nazi’s case, a belief that there was room on the planet for one ideology and race.

As we approach Thanksgiving, let us give thanks to our divinely created bountiful world . . . and to ordinary people, who by their daily optimism and creative actions, add to the world’s abundance."

'We could do' people just seem to do more interesting things than, 'we have to' people.

Thanks to Carolyn Miller for telling me that the Lynx Jet idea came out of a discussion where someone from the media agency said, 'we've got a jet we can do something with'. Recently, I saw a presentation on the fragmentation of media, the proliferation of gadgets and the tivo-ing of the TV world as we know it. All roads pointed to a shift to engagement from interuption, to a marketing imperative to pull from push.

We were shown a 'Minority Report' future of chips and code readers, and embedded info rich things, that was like a Willy Wonka world of possibility for media - anything looked possible in terms of tracking and getting information to people in handy digital formats. It strikes me that this is a great time to be a media agency because of the vast numbers of new toys to play with, and the fact that screen based moving image is becoming less reliant on TV, has to force brands to be better orchestrators of the channels. But to what end?

To take a musical analogy, it feels like good media agencies could be like great arrangers or producers and also great record companies. The way the song gets played or delivered can make all the difference to its success - like Frankie Goes To Hollywood and Trevor Horn, The Beatles and Sir George Martin, or Frank Sinatra and Nelson Riddle, the composer and producer partnership can be legendary if both parties bring expertise and respect to the table. If there is stuckness, closedness, or limited thinking and scarcity mentality going on, things tend to be derivative, safe and ultimately a bit dull and predictable. But when there is openness, trust, a wide vista of imagination and a sense of appetite to do great work, a spirited and positive kind of collaboration between media and creative agencies creates a big blur of possibility between them where magical things can happen.

Then there's the clever distribution bit, the right advertising or brand engagement message product having been made, now gets the smart media/creative company mix playing the great place and promotion game. Rejecting the conventional stuff between the idea and the sale, Radiohead innovated the download experience of their 'In Rainbows' album by cutting out the middle machinery of the music business of A+R, launch schedules, retailer networks, product manufacture, handling and inventory issues like trucking millions of bits of plastic around the globe, by going straight to the consumer via the internet. Not a new innovation really but letting consumers pay what they feel is ok for a download of the album certainly was. Again, 'we could do' out innovates 'we have to'.