The Havas Media Lab has conducted a research that shows most people wouldn't care if 70% of brands disappeared. Only 20% of global brands noticeably improve people’s quality of life.
People don't care about brands, people care about their lives and social ties.
It means we have to focus more on how to create a value for people, make their life easier, more meanigful. It means we need to shift away from just only focusing on what we should say as a brand.
People don't care what we have to say. They just want their problems solved.
Brands need to become meaningful and "enhance the well-being of individuals, communities and the environment, making people and society flourish."
Simple. Requires less bullshit and more great shit.
I love this idea of low-tech augmented reality from Philips that came up from a simple consumer insight: Over 73% of Taiwanese men think that grooming is just about cleanness, preferring a clean-shaven look over any type of beard and stubbles.
How do you change the behavior than to create interest in grooming kits. No beard, no grooming.
Philips take on this is awesome; they have created "Low-tech Augmented Reality Mugs" to show any possible look the young guys can have when grooming. Simple.
It proves that the great communication is not about "digital at heart" but about awesome ideas that address people needs and help them to make decision or have great experiences....and sometimes it may be that digital is perfect for this task, sometimes a simple mug is enough.
The second screen experience is increasingly taking over the living rooms with more and more people expanding their passive TV viewing patters with tablets or phones. Microsoft is trying to fill the gap with Xbox SmarGlass. The whole idea is about enhancing the viewing experience, make it more interactive and interesting. Multiscreen experience represents a great opportunity for advertisers and it's going to be exciting to see how brands embrace this new behavior and deliver on it.
Differentiation used to be about standing out, about creating a product that is significantly different and there are no other products like it. Just to be noticed and valued.
But is seems like today, there is more focus on illusory differentiation driven by more choices, brand extensions, improved ingredients, more washing power, higher performance....you name it...supermarkets shelves groan under those "different products" that are all the same and use the same tactics to attract users.
“Today we have more of everything. More brands. More products. More choices. But it all just feels like more of the same. A great big blur of similarity. And most companies are stuck on a competitive treadmill, competing like crazy trying to keep up with each other. But this only makes them just like everyone else.” (Youngme Moon)
What is the solution? Maybe look at the differentiation from different perspective. Start with quitting adjectives. Seeing "differentiation as deviance, permutation, commitment to unprecedented and letting go."
It's getting back to basics, putting the right meaning into the word different and creating great products, no one else does and connecting consumers in the meaningful way instead of creating more clutter. Challenging the ways we see competition. It is good to know what they do but they shouldn't necessary be the point of reference. Look outside, get inspired by different categories and think from time to time that your brand is not saint...
QR codes are the new IT thing to have. Wherever you look there are posters, products, ads with QR code on. Looks nice and so tempting. You wonder what hides behind, you scan....and there is the disappointmend. Because what you discover are bad mobile sites, where apprently on one bother to think about what experience to offer once you bothered to scan. QR codes are cheap way to pretend the business is going digital, mobile, whatever.
But there are more and more exciting campaigns seeing the light showing how the simple technolgy can extend brand experience, enhance the campaign and make people have fun.
There are particularly two I like a lot:
Guiness and their QR cup. QR cup gets visible and readable only when filled with the right beer - Guiness. Once you scan, you can tweet, you get coupons and special promotions and Guiness content. Sounds like fun. After a few hours in the pub, any kind of enterteinment is needed ;)
This QR code campaign comes from South Korea and it is genius. QR codes get activiated by sun, from 12 to 1 p.m. and its goal is to drive sales in a E-mart store while there is normally a significant drop in sales. Scanning QR code within this period of time gives people access to Sunny Promotions and make them shop, smile and delivers results! This case shows that relevant, easy accessible solution that creates value for people always works!
We are going digital. Indeed, digital is a place where many want to go these days. The destination is set but the ways of getting there aren't always clear. Forgetting what's it is all about, we chase the new shiny technologies and miss on connecting with people.
"Sometimes marketers forget that media platforms are enablers to big ideas. They aren’t the big ideas themselves."
Those words brought me a relief. I've lately relized that the more I know the less I can digest and use. The overload and overconsumption of information gives an illusion of knowing more, but in fact the more becomes the stress. The quest for informaiton expands all the time and seems to be infinite. I've found saying "I don't know" to be a soothing exprience. Not knowing may become the new luxury nowadays. Besides some things are just not worth to know.
"We need to remember the value of nothing. It’s like breathing: you can’t inhale all day. We need to learn to make peace with the information we don’t know, to embrace the zeroes, to relearn the pleasures of hunger, need, interruption, restraint. We need to work up our ignorance muscles. We need to organize our internal absences to create meaning. We are responsible, in other words, now and forever, for our own deletionism."
“All the left brain thinking and figuring out, can’t ever replace the shear mystery of being alive”
The history of human thinking from the caveman days forward. In so doing he links more than 4 decades of data driven developmental psychology research (based upon the work of Clare W. Graves) to the dramatic narrative of human evolution.
"I don't use PowerPoint to spew hollow facts and meaningless statistics. I aim to deliver revolutionary corporate poetry into the hearts and minds of marketing vice presidents across this country.
I believe that sometimes a PowerPoint demands five consecutive pages of full bleed abstract images. Just to make people feel. To get mid-level managers to loosen their ties and take off their name card necklaces. Too much logic is the death knell of any PowerPoint pursuit."
"Four hundred years ago, the great French essayist recognized that our inbuilt capacity for sympathy depends on our physical proximity to others. Recent neurological research appears to back him up."
Very interesting that our morality is so tightly bound to the physical distance. It would indicate that despite what 'cyber utopians' believe we will not make the world better place cause we are connected more than ever. Internet doesn't get us any closer. Even though we feel we are so close, we are far away from each other and it influences our ability to feel sympathy and to fire the mirror neurons.
