Social Hallucinations

The Science of Shopping Revealed

"Despite all the new technology (neuromarketing), simply talking to consumers remains one of the most effective ways to improve the “customer experience”."

Wow! What an enlightenment. It is cheaper to be nice to your clients and improve the overall customer experience than hire the team of neuroscientists with expensive machinery to get into customers subconsciousness. Image by turtlemom4bacon via Flickr

Simplicity is often the best solution. However we humans love the glittering lure of fancy technology and people in white smocks that blur the simple ways leading to problem solving.

"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” da Vinci

Read the whole story at The Economist - The Science of Shopping.

Dissolving the Meaning

I've been going through oceans of fluff written by social media experts. 5 tips how to... 10 advice on how not to do...etc.
Many social media experts are on their quest to rule the world the way mass media did and still do. Social media experts claim the right to be legislators and impose us values. Their advice is becoming a contemporary myth, telling us what the best behavior is. Their efforts focus on convincing the world they say the truth. They are not neutral. They don't create the meaning for the social media. They make the meaning disappear, they dissolve the meaning of the communication facilitated by social media.
Communication that is impossible to reject, because it is the context and the background of contemporary times. Communication that teaches us about ourselves and our reality. If social media disappeared suddenly, we would feel like abandoned on the desert island...

Photo by Ahmed

I am your Future...And I am not Interested in Mobile Marketing

We believe we know what young people think and want. Excellent presentation by Graham Brown showing that there can be a gap between what marekters and youth think

mobileYouth.org I am...not interested in mobile marketing

View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: cell student)

Sociology and Marketing

"Sociology and marketing are on a collision course." - says Armano

Sociology and marketing should never be separated. Marketing is about creating the value for people and making it accessibImage by Donna Cymek via Flickrle. It is hard to create and spread it without understanding human relations. This is not about focus groups or media, it is about real life observations and digging into human nature and nature of interactions. Social media and the digital technology are just enhancers of social behavior. We people are just keep talking and express ourselves and our opinions, this time powered by technology that makes it loud wider and allows us to reach more people. The motivations remain the same as BSM (before social media) - belonging and conviviality, to mention two most relevant drivers.

But *beware the common sense thinking* when applying sociology into your marketing efforts.

Doubts Raised over Brain Scan Findings

Image by alles-schlumpf via FlickrUnderstanding the brain has become the holy grail of the marketing - the promised land of getting really close to separate consumers from their money in a scientific way. As exciting neuroscience is, as doubtful its findings can be.

"(...)in most of the studies, which linked brain regions to feelings including social rejection, neuroticism and jealousy, researchers interpreted their data using a method that inflates the strength of the link between a brain region and the emotion or behaviour." writes New Scientist.

Neuromarketing shamans jumps quickly to conlusions that may not be even true. However marketers are ready to spend their money on neuroresearch in hope to get quick fix. But you know what quick fix isn't any strategy. It is like pouring the water into the glass filled with holes, instead of fixing the holes.

Hat Tip via Mark

The Core of Marketing

Image via Wikipedia"Publicity is selling what you have: the film’s stars and sometimes its director. Marketing, very often, is selling what you don’t have; it’s the art of the tease." Tim Palen

It is time to get back to the core of marketing which is not selling but creating the value (in order to sell)

Good Ideas Goes London

On 30th January 2009, PSFK will host a day long Good Ideas Salon in London to discuss ideas in the fields of arts & culture, collaboration, design, digital, makreting, mobile and youth.

There are great speakers ready to share their beautiful mind:

Pat Connor \ Vision Development Executive \\ BBC
Kate Moross \\ Designer
Coralie Bickford-Smith \ Designer \\ Penguin
Matt Brown \ Editor \\ Londonist
Mark Earls \ Author \\ Herd
Jeremy Ettinghausen \ Director of Digital \\ Penguin Piers Fawkes \ Trends Analyst & Founder \\ PSFK
Amanda Gore \ Trends Consultant \\ PSFK
Matt Hardisty \ Founder \\ Analog Folk
Dan Hon \ Founder \\ Six To Start
Sophie Howarth \ Founder \\ School Of Life
Matt Jones \ Founder \\ Dopplr
Cameron Leslie \ Founder \\ fabric\matter
Colin Nagy \ Partner \ Attention
Colin Nightingale \ Creative Director \\ Punchdrunk \ Founder \\ Gideon Reeling
Jenny Owen \ Founder \\ Ruby Pseudo
Christian Nold \\ Artist
Justin Quirk \ Associate Editor \\ FHM
Nicolas Roope \ Founder \\ Hulger\Poke
Taryn Ross \ Founder \\ Urban Junkies
Richard Banks \ Interface Designer \\ Microsoft
Mike Butcher \ Journalist \\ Mbites
Jonathan MacDonald \ Senior Consultant \\ Ogilvy
Paul Graham \ Partner \\ Anomaly UK
Terry Guy \ Founder \\ Monorex\Secret Wars
Kevin Anderson \ Blogs Editor \\ The Guardian
Simon Waldman \ Director of Digital \\ The Guardian
Paul Andrew Williams \ Film Director \\ Steel Mill Pictures

This is definetely one of the events you can't miss. It is a shame I can't particiate myself.

You can book your ticket here and warm up with Good Ideas Salon from NYC. Lots of great thoughts going on and loads of inspiration.

Instruction Manual for Life

We live by book. We follow each step manual outlines and become terrified of any change, of anything that's different. We risk getting stuck...

This video make me think about Georges Perec and his beautiful and unpredictable books.

"What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us. We live, true, we breathe, true; we walk, we go downstairs, we sit at a table in order to eat, we lie down on a bed on order to sleep. How? Where? When? Why?"
— Georges Perec (L'Infra-ordinaire)

Throw away your manual for life in the upcoming week. Do things differently. Suprise yourself.

Insights Uncovered

Image by cdw9 via FlickrI had a few serious discussions through my career about insights and it is ineed incredible how little understanding is on what the real insights is. It is so often mistaken for information, for something you have extract from research. I always believed insights comes from observation of human behavior and social life of any kind. I've tried to find them in very unexpected places: on the bus, in the grocery store, playing with kids, reading books, browsing zombie film fans blogs. However I have always had hard time with explainig what insight is. Richars Huntington (Adliterate) nailed it in his latest post:

"No revelation or astonishing disclosure, no insight"

How to find those revelations?

"From real people, not respondents"

"great insights come from within"

‘Why would I want to go and conduct six one and a half hour groups with the good people of Solihull and Sidcup when I can read the work of someone that has been studying this area for 20 years and written seven books on the subject"

Read the whole post and get inspired here.

Traditional Advertising is The Art of Reduction

Image by basvasilich via Flickr
Traditional advertising is the art of reduction of people and products. It reduces the the complexity of culture and human interaction to one slogan or one word. The potential customers are being reduced to passive recipients of a message and all efforts are focused on depriving them of the desire to analyze the advertisement. The efforts are focused on reducing human beings into subjects of consumption - The more I consume the more I am - turning the product / service into chains of adjectives that don't convey anything meaningful. Products become nothing more than just objects of consumption that bring no value to its consumers life, except the glittering lure of getting happier or prettier - that just never happens, as days move and financial resources shrink, we stay as ugly and as miserable as we were before buying the "saviour" product.
Attracting attention becomes the main goal and all means are allowed to achieve it. Traditional advertising reduces the world to the "paradise of the adjectives" communicated with countable reach points. Communication becomes diminished to sending  fussy messages that are nothing more that  watered-down sentence telling us - buy this potatoes.

Are there any antidote to reduction powers of traditional advertising? Yes, thinking in verbs than adjectives, finding purpose ideas for your business - doing things that enrich people's lives and get them together. This is the story for another post.
_{You can read all about purpose ideas and doing things on Mark Earls' Blog - Herd.}

Words, Words, Words

“When words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain” Shakeapeare

This is beautiful visualisation of my blog.

You can get your own here at Wordle site.

First Virgins, Now Sacrifice

The Whopper Sacrifice is the new campaign from Burger King that challenges to get rid of ten of your Facebook friends and get a free whopper.  Looks like the manifestation of defriending trend - decrease number of your so called friends and you get a meaty reward. Being dumped for burger - ouch, it must be painful. On the other side you can defriend each other and then go together to eat a whopper - online defriending, offline hanging out.

After all Virgin Sacrifice is a necessary fuel for one's own continued existence, like a vampire who needs to feast on virgin blood every once in a while in order to continue living, so Burger King needs to feast on human connections to earn some money. ;-)

via Angus

What is Viral?

"Viral is a thing that happens, not a thing that is. If people pass your communication on, it's viral. If they don't, it's not. Sometimes I get calls saying this viral isn't performing very well - what's the problem? We've seeded it to all the right places, it's on you tube and everything - where's our traffic? The problem is usually that they've made an ad that contains nothing people consider worth showing to their friends." (Faris Yakob)
We share things we like and things that tell something about us. We share to exchange information, to maintain relations, make other people laugh and to empower the community we are belong to. There are no recipe for effective viral campaign. Fortunately not. As Faris said, viral is a thing that happens and it is impossible to predict what we will love. It is about one great idea that can gather people. Like this event for Tic Tac with the talented boy who attracted a small crowd and make them to have fun on one rainy day in Copenhagen.

Is it possible not to love TicTac Micha? ;-)

Visit also Micha site to learn about his history, his intruments and play TicTac hero (guitar hero spoof)

This the result of cooperation between Buzzanova (bunch of engaged and creative guys), Vizeum (me) and the wonderful and daring client in the world Ferrero Scandinavia.

$100k Makes People Collaborate

Great example of social behavior. If you give people something to share / talk about they will get involved and will collaborate even though they are complete strangers. The common purpose forms community.

Found at RedFraggs blog

Rationaliation vs. Sex

Michael: "I don't know anyone who could get through the day without two or three juicy rationalizations.They're more important than sex."

Sam: "Ah, come on. Nothing's more important than sex."

Michael: "Oh yeah? Ever gone a week without a rationalization?"_{(From "The Big Chill" movie)}

We talk about our choices as very rational ones and we can't go a day without rationalizing. It makes us safe, it gives us the illusion that we are not only very clever at what we do but also take very well-thought-out decisions. Ratio means reason in Latin. Rationalization is our defense mechanism, a justification for our decisions and attitudes we use after we acted. The true motives remain hidden, also from ourselves.

We use two techniques of rationalization:

sour grapes - we simply deny our failure by diminishing the importance of the goals we were suppose to achieve. If you can't afford the grapes, you say to yourself "they must taste sour after all"

sweet lemons - we Image via Wikipediaconvince ourselves that the bad situations, wrong decisions are not so bad after all, they are actually quite a blast - we convince ourselves the lemons taste quite sweet. Take for example smoking. If smokers were rational, they wouldn't smoke, but they post rationalize smoking as sweet lemon - it is the source of pleasure to them, it makes them feel good, they like it, etc.

Rationalization sounds serious but it makes us happier. This is an interesting area for companies that provide services and products to look at - how can we make our clients happier but giving them sweet lemons, making them feel good and clever.