Social Hallucinations

Come Together

We may never diminish the powerful role of emulation for our behavior. This funny video shows how powerful emulation is in connecting people in spontaneous ways. Music and a guy who felt like dancing - it is a must see for all people working with communication. It's not about reaching people, it is about giving them something to copy.

Found at Asi's blog

What should we do next? - Design Strategy

"The key to winning is achieving the resonance between what's meaningful for people and what's profitable for company"

People should be at the heart of everything you do.
Interesting and inspiring video on Continuum's approach to and beliefs about design strategy.

Resonance from Continuum on Vimeo.

Via Paul Isakson

The Marketing Capability: The Future is Digital

"In order for our brand to be relevant in the future, we gotta live digitally... with our communication and the products we sell. And the brands that figure this out are the brands that will succeed in the future."

From the past to the future Best Buy CMO Barry Judge tells the story of how Best Buy's Marketing Capability talks (and listens) to its customers.

Is Talk Cheap?

Image via Wikipedia

According to a recent research of Shyam Gopinath, Jacquelyn Thomas and Lakshman Krishnamurthi, there is a measurable connection between what is being said about a product in online posts and real-time customer behavior. Research showed that if you ask people what’s most important to them in evaluating a product, they say, ‘What other people like me say about it.’ Meaning that that a relatively small group of people in online communities can have a substantial influence on purchase decisions. What is crucial for brands is to track the conversations happening online, as understanding people's attitudes towards your products give you the chance to react accordingly and implement necessary changes. It makes online conversations to be your focus group on steroids, wisdom of the crowds delivering you valuable inisghts that can fuel your product strategies.

“An Internet-armed consumer can become your greatest asset or your worst nightmare.”

Read more here on Kellogg Insight website

What Motivates, Communicates

Image by şυωαίđίά ♥ ولعتني via Flickr

Change is hot topic.
Everyone talks about the change. We want the change, as change usually brings something new. The change is desired state of affairs and mind nowadays and in this ever-changing world, one thing remains constant – human motivations.
Humans are motivated to do things, which satisfy their emotional needs.
Motivation is the key. It sets the chain of events into the motion. Motivations are the main drivers of human behavior. There are to powers that influence our choices – how we do relate to others and to ourselves.
You can imagine yourself human behavior as a horse carriage with 4 horses: emotional needs, personality, self-image and relations with other people. Those 4 horses create the social context where we take decisions and act.
Think about yourself – advertising or media agency employee. Your behavior is driven by one the basic motivations – control. You do everything to avoid chaos that could be lethal for you. You never leave your eyes off mailbox, you check mails either on your PC or iPhone or Blackberry. You want to prove you are in charge, you are always on, you know always what’s going on. You want to prove you have control over what you do. What about the other motivation - the recognition? You want to stand out, be better and be different (thanks to Apple it is easier to fix the latter one). You want to impress your clients with your knowledge and qualifications. Think about the jargon you use to describe the simple things. Think about the titles you aim for to put on your business card and your resume. You do it because it works. It satisfies your self-image and helps you with the professional relations, as it stages the context for your interactions.

Behavior isn’t quite rational
Humans take decisions having one goal – to be rewarded. The bigger emotional reward brand can deliver, the stronger position it can build. Therefore, it is not only the product features should be at the center of communication, as marketing is about fulfilling consumers emotional needs, satisfying their motivations. Vanish – stain remover product isn’t about removing stains. Vanish is about being a good mother and take care for children to have a decent and clean clothes. 
Human behavior isn’t rational as it is driven by emotional needs and as long as you can deliver means to satisfy those, you open the chance for your brand to enter people’s life for longer than a moment of weakness while standing in the shop.

Marketing is a service
It shifts the understanding of marketing function from selling to giving people reasons to buy, to being a service. It requires deeper look into what’s behind human behavior, identification of motivations and creating tailor made products, services and solutions that satisfy those. It is important to align brand with one primary motivation, which will become the compass that will guide you through marketing and communication decisions and take you further on to creating strong brand experiences by linking you brand with secondary and/or tertiary motivations and placing it all within the relevant social context.

I Belong therefore I Am

Image by michael.heiss via Flickr

The need for belonging is one the most powerful needs we share. Being with others people, being social is what our nature demands to function. Some wise-men even claimed that the secret of a good life lies in the harmony between social and personal feelings.
We are herd species and we want to belong something bigger than us. Danes proved it when Anders Colding-Jørgensen Internet psychologist from the University of Copenhagen made an experiment on Facebook. He created a group called 'No to demolition of Stork Fountain' (Storkespringvandet - fountain in Copenhagen). There was nothing strange in it, except the fact that no one wanted to demolish the fountain.
He sent invitation to the group to all his approx. 120 Facebook friends with a message that there was an experiment and asked them to join in. First, the group began to grow quietly. On the second day was reached small 300 members. Then went the stronger and after a little week, reached the 10,000 members. The group has around 25,000 members and is growing fairly stable with approximately 2 members in a minute!

Despite the fake cause, there were 25.000 people who joined and were against something what wasn't suppose to happen. The conclusion - the people didn't join the group to protest against the demolition of the fountain, they joined to be a part of something bigger than them, something that connected them with other people and gave them feeling of joint cause and belonging. This the same as with the groups that protest against new FB layouts. It is not about layout, it is about being part of something bigger than ourselves.

Belonging, being part of something bigger is the one of the most powerful needs you need to consider while working on your digital strategy.

PS. FB group changed its name to "I love Stork fountain" after experiment was done. And it has now over 27.000 users.

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.

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.

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.}

$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.

Human interactions are initialized by things

Image via WikipediaWe are no longer focusing on the socializing with others. Our human relations get objectified and objects are necessary for social interactions. They facilitate them and enhance them. People are not unique, the objects they own, are.
Increasingly, human interactions are initialized by things – they intermediate our contacts with others and definte the nature of our interactions.
Things become essential in the human connections. Nintendo Wii becomes the essential object for kids, it becomes the "be or not to be" of their social life. Should we study Nintendo Wii manual to get more profound understanding of youngers social life? It may be not so silly idea after all seeing so many extreme reactions to receiving Wii.

50 kids happy to get a Nintendo Wii for Christmas - watch more gamer videos

Hat tip to Seth Godin

This is Enough

Muji is a Japanese retail company which sells a wide variety of household and consumer goods that are charactirized by minimalism, recycling and no-brand policy.

The name Muji is derived from the first part of Mujirushi Ryōhin, translated as No Brand Quality Goods on Muji's European website.

Muji's vision is "This is enough"

 

Timeles idea focusing on sustainable design build around simplicity and purity. No flashy advertising, just Muji's message. The new way of earning money where profits doesn't seem to be the only focus. The state of humanity is included and cosidered. An effort to fight pointless consumption and turning less into more.