"shared manifold of subjectivity"

I've been watching and listening to a few TED talks recently. And not that I want to turn this blog into a series of TED embeds or anything, but this one by a cognitive researcher called Nancy Etcoff just seems to speak to me on lots of different levels. Not sure why I keep coming back to happiness as a theme. But I do. And yes, it's because it's useful to think about brands in those terms. But it's also more because it's more interesting and more exciting to think about it from the human being out into that and lots of other directions too, rather than from the brand back. There is something really interesting about the idea, as presented here, that happiness and sadness aren't two points on the same continuum. They live in parallel. And that there are so many layers to happiness. And just why doing social things and approaching things collaboratively are so rewarding.

controls

I was watching an interesting documentary about happiness and learning last night. It was called Who Do You Want Your Child To Be? and you can find it on iPlayer at the moment. There was a bit about how unstructured play helps you because it enables you to think more flexibly than if you are instructed. They showed children starting to solve basic problems having been given room to work things out for themselves. That was quite inspiring. Human beings are a million times more interesting than brands. But it did make me think about brands and how they are perceived to work. Sometimes, the people set up to make decisions about the brand aim to tightly control things from a central place. They make decisions about relatively few things, like key messages and graphic design and advertising, according to a pretty rigid set of rules. Sometimes, they don't have any concern for the experiential stuff; the lived bits where human beings touch the brand and reach a real decision about what it is and where it fits in their lives. That's a bit weird. I think that's how you as a consumer get to feel a fundamental disconnect between the comms and the product and/or service. Seems to me that the human stuff is where it's at for brands. That's the way to connect with people. Adding something useful to their lives, or giving them space to say something about themselves. And creating a feeling of community identity. So there's plenty of new frontiers for intelligent brand thinking...like customer service, product innovation, design and packaging, and other things which, um, I can't quite think of right now. Lots don't invest the same kind of time, budgets and talent into the human interaction side of their business as they do their advertising. Or if they do, the two aren't hooked up very well together. But if more forward-thinking brands aren't thinking about interaction design (in its broadest sense) in the next couple years, I'll be eating my hat. Or theirs. Or something. (Lovely 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.

"we're all in the happiness business now"

I'm almost finished reading Herd and I've really enjoyed it, so I got very excited when Talent imitates, genius steals posted this. From it I found an earlier post on a similar theme. More advertising and brand communication in general should be measured by how it makes consumers feel, and subsequently how they behave, rather than attempting to measure some elusive switch in their "rational" thinking. People don't receive signals in a way that puts "messages" first...so why do we believe we are/should be transmitting them like this? (Pic courtesy of this person.)