food for fork

It was Tash’s birthday a couple of weeks ago. She was dead excited to receive a beautiful glass cake stand from her best friend, Claire. And Claire’s sister Gina got her a beautiful cake slice from Bombay Duck to go with it, too. She loved it because it went really well with the vintage teaspoons that she already had from Bombay Duck. The only thing that was missing were some nice pastry forks. So naturally once she’d made her favourite Victoria sponge, she blogged about it. And she happened to mention that she didn’t have a nice set of pastry forks. That was that. Then someone from Bombay Duck left a comment on her post. They didn’t sell pastry forks, they explained, but they’ve passed the idea on to the design team. So you never know. Simple and pure. And nice. Lots of people are talking about how the product or service should be its own marketing, so I know this is an obvious thing to say. But maybe at some point in the future all customer service teams are going to be completely proactive, rather than existing to simply react to your issue or complaint. They’ll be able to design their own service model. And maybe they will have their own creative types embedded into the team. So that they can make stuff. Just simple, nice, little things that give you a very personal value exchange. Or maybe the customer service value will be embedded directly into the development of products. Maybe if Bombay Duck choose to make those pastry forks, they'll be kind enough to send the first two sets to Tash and Gina. I’d like that.

messaging

I brazenly tweeted something about messaging a couple of weeks ago. And, probably rightly, Ian and Will called me out on it. Twitter's not necessarily the best discussion medium and I know this is one of those me-versus-the-world things, so I'll do my best to stumble through an explanation why in this post. Be warned, it probably gets a bit worthy. I sort of have a problem with the word "messaging". There's something about it that makes me want to brush my teeth after I've said it. But I feel perfectly fine about "message" or something much more prosaic and amateurish like "copy" or "the words". I'm not saying those are necessarily viable alternatives or anything. They just sit easier with me. There's a couple of (related?) levels to this I think. The first is purely semantic. Messaging sounds like it was grown in a petri dish somewhere, contrived and grafted onto a piece of visual communication. It's one of those marketing neologisms that just feels too abstracted for my liking. It's not like you'd find one human being passing on "a messaging" to another. It's not The Messaging by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. That would be weird. Whereas message seems a bit more genuine, in a weird kind of way. And the others have a touch of naivety about them. They just feel more human. Of course, whether you call it messaging or a message, it's the same thing. I'm not kidding myself. It's still from a brand to a person, in order to stimulate a purchase or use, or to attempt to ensure loyalty. The only difference is charm, I suppose. Like when planners talk like people and not like a cliche of themselves. Which is the neatest way I can find to bring me on to the other level. Messaging feels a bit like it belongs in the more we speak/you listen, disruptive world of advertising. Not to say the whole disruption thing doesn't still exist. Of course it does, it always will to some greater or lesser extent - it's just that we're better off aiming to engage as well as disrupt. Because there's lots of ways of having a dialogue or other interaction with brands. You don't need me to tell you what they are. But I've still sat at a table in meetings where people say things like, "Then users do a behaviour." Which, while it doesn't entirely preclude conversation, doesn't really feel in the spirit of a value exchange. If you're a brand seeking to join in a conversation I think it benefits you to think as human as possible. You just understand the interestingness or usefulness you bring to people better that way. It doesn't mean your brand is human...but it does mean it's something like aspiring to the quality of a fictional character. For me, if your brand is trying to be as human as possible, the language you use in the planning and making of your product/service/comms really matters, because it reveals how you see your relationship with your consumers. And a trace of that, no matter how small, will be visible in all your public touchpoints. So to think one way and try to talk another doesn't really work. Well, that's how I feel anyway. Down with messaging. Long live the message. Because if The Specials had recorded a song called A Messaging To You Rudy, it would have been rubbish. *shuffles off sheepishly*

distributed personality

So I finally got round to watching that programme, Why Reading Matters. And what a joy it was. It told how neuroscience has shown the living brain in action, its modular nature, the connections it makes and needs to maintain. Fascinating stuff. Lots of little anthropological insights, like how reading skills developed from the observational powers tuned up from more primitive times. It also demonstrated how reading a novel opens up imaginative and empathetic abilities, which can be built up like any other muscle. I'll be slipping lots of these facts knowingly into conversations wherever I can from now on. It was also open-ended about how the internet and various technologies are changing the nature of reading. So then I couldn't help thinking about how my reading habits have changed in the last few years. At home I'm reading Watchmen and How to Win Friends and Influence People. On the train I'm reading Novel on Yellow Paper and various Twitter feeds. At lunchtime and just before I go to bed I read blog posts. If I went a couple of days without making a dent in some, if not all of these, I think I'd feel freaked out. All of which is interesting when you think about how our expressive abilities and desires may have changed. We are distributed personalities. I have my blog, my Facebook profile and my Twitter. I've not long been using Delicious, but I'm having fun with it. And there's my randombitsandpieces too. These things are micro self-commentaries, little fragments of personality gone webby. It's not easy to assemble that into a whole. That's why it's so hard to measure the way we engage with communications. But that's the whole thing, isn't it? When we're trying to think about engagement and intimacy, how do you understand what are they worth, truly? I'm not saying we couldn't or shouldn't try do this, of course not. But really, how intimate are we with the stuff we consume, even that we profess to love? And how intimate do we want to be? So, um, yeah. That's it really. (Pic courtesy of this person.)

a little more about active remembering

(Apology and advance warning: approach this post, written whilst feeling tired and worthy, with caution.) Had an argument about the T-Mobile ad with someone in the week. Well, not really an argument, more of a disagreement in conversation. This argument's been going back and forth for a couple of weeks. Some people love it, others don't. It's done its job, of course, because everyone's talking about it. And I can see why people love it. There's a big part of me that wants to as well. I love the spontaneous dancing you get in musicals, for example. But it just feels a bit contrived and, ironically, disconnected for me. So I was going to post something about it, to try to explain why it left me feeling so cold. But then I read two lovely things about connectedness by Asi and Ted. And they made me remember something about active remembering which I'd started to develop. The thing they have in common with each other and the T-Mobile ad is how technologies are enabling people to express themselves in new relations to each other and to brands (and the best brands to people, obviously). We're springing up all sorts of content around our friendships, loves, families and even the vaguest of acquaintances. Pushing what feel like more meaningful emotional buttons. So I found myself thinking how social media and the technologies that support them are a kind of active remembering tool. You might be posting to your Facebook, Twitter, blog or something else to actively remember yourself to a friend. A kind of "remember what we have" message. Or to actively remember an experience you shared, putting your memories in a communal place. And I know that's all kind of obvious. But anyway. It made me feel quite wow. Active remembering is a way of expressing your identity in different contexts and spaces again and again. Some of them may be individual, and some of them may be social. And it made me think, what a powerful thing for brands to harness. And then again, if you're trying to shout about it before you've really, meaningfully, invested in enabling it, you're probably doing it the wrong way around. (Pic courtesy of this person.)

keep pushing emotional buttons

Scamp published something interesting earlier this week. It's about how emotional advertising tends to be more effective than rational messaging. There are plenty of interesting presentations, blog posts and other opinion to be found on this idea. Like this, for example:

The Rise of the Happiness Brands

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: 2008 summit)

It's a preoccupation shared by Faris and by Asi too. I particularly love this:

Happiness as Your Business Model

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: magnolia worpress)

If you extrapolate from (or is that delve into?) happiness, and (fairly logically) end up thinking about interest and relevance, you get into Mark's territory too. All of these things make excellent reading, I think.