kid fresh

One of the biggest challenges adults face in eating healthily is time. Cooking yourself gives you more control over portion control and nutrition, but for many working families using pre-packaged food is almost anecessity. We've already seen what I would call "distributed work" businesses in the cooking space for adults, where the company does some of the work (shop for ingredients and provide a space to cook) and you do to (in this case assemble the meal, then defrost as necessary). Kidfresh takes this a step further.

As we know, childhood obesity is on the rise. What Kidfresh does is provide parents a simpler, assembly line way to make kid's lunches and dinners for the week in one swoop. As time becomes more crunched, dual income couples remain necessary (e.g.because of rising house prices) yet family and balance remain important, look for more of these "distributed work" businesses in new areas.

complexity and chaos

Despite having bought a copy a while ago, I have guiltily only just finished Grant McCracken's last book: Flock and Flow. The book tries to provide marketers a roadmap for how to harness cultural changes for their brand. But my sense is that the theoretical underpinnings of the book are more revealing.

I've talked in previous posts about people's need for novelty - the dopamine addiction that we have in our brain. But Grant frames this in a slightly different way: it's an adaptive imperative. As the cultural changes at a far more rapid pace than ever before, the earlier we receive news the more prepared we are to take advantage or adapt to any change. We are so sensitized to change and so expecting of it, that our behavior has now shifted. This raises a risk for corporations: the risk of not risking change. When a brand comes out with a not-so-radical line extension, is it more than ignored but actually marked down for not doing enough? I have to believe that in a time starved world, the penalty for trying to get my attention and wasting my time with no news is less dollars.

lomo

This is the first part of a great documentary about the Lomographic movement. The Lomo is the Russian made camera that is ultra basic: no shutter speed, no aperture settings etc., that it gives it a particular style. What the camera lends itself to is the informal snapping of lots of pictures, in order to create a photo mosaic.

But what is more interesting about this is the movement that got started behind the Lomo. The documentary tells the story of how a group of Austrian students started and spread the word. The Lomographic manifesto is pretty cool to.

You can find the other parts of the documentary on YouTube as well.

yes, it is

British artist Benedict Radcliffe's wireframe sculpture of a Subaru Impreza. Old world getting one back on the new?

via Make

pay by sms

Belgium is an unusual place in more ways than one. For such a small country, they have been among the first to adopt/experiment with new forms of payment, including the first (swipable) smart card payment system. Now a Belgian company is going to start trials of a new mobile to mobile payment system that uses SMS messaging. All this is made possible thanks to a new "m-banxsafe" security standard on SIM cards.

Influx Insights has a report of a similar system coming into operation in Kenya, and one can certainly see how mobile to mobile systems are very useful in a country where banks may be long distances away. However, the issue in other countries is whether a debit card could not do the same thing? Mastercard and Visa - through bank partnerships - are now issuing debit cards to most US bank customers. Credit Card acceptance is spreading to places like taxi cabs and ticket machines. Given how conservative Americans are about new banking technology (it took ages for ATM's to catch on here), one wonders if a mobile system would be able to differentiate itself here.

mindhunter lockdown

According to the new Mini spoofisode (a cross between Boogie NIghts and Night Rider), this is my action hero name. It's fun, it's good, it's Crispin (even though it's Butler Shine & Stern) and it is getting all to familiar. It's a shame because a lot of the stuff Mini has been doing with it's owners (including the code ads) seem a lot more inventive.

POV

I have just stumbled upon Cognitive Daily which bills itself as having a new cognitive psychology article every day. One of the studies they reported on a few days ago was this article about the difference ways that artists and people look at pictures.

The study used eye tracking software to measure where artists and "others" looked: which do you think is which?


via kottke.com

food development

While trend spotting now seems to be a litte frowned upon, a new Booz Allen study shows how patterns of food consumption and taste preference can be nifty signs of economic development, wherever you are in the world. For example, when a country reaches a certain level of suburbanization, sales of off the shelf flat bread take shoot up (because, it seems, workers are seeking cheap and easy mealsthat they do not have to make themselves). Similarly, the evolution of petrol stations (from humble pump to ful retail store) seems to cross countries. Clearly global brands e.g.Mexico's Gruma are taking advantage of these taste trends of this (Gruma sells flatbreads across the world), but so are companies such as South African Breweries (SAB), who bought up local breweries across Africa and waited to introduce higher margin beers as the economies of those countries developed and tastes changed.

Hilary '84

This mashup of Apple/TBWA's 1984 is causing quite a stir on the blogs over here. The politic afficionados are disquieted by the amount of vitriol that's already developed between Hilary (no-one uses her last name - is that her doing?) and Barack Obama. From more of a marketing perspective, I wonder if anyone has seen the fan of one brand someone advocating against a competitor? The mid 1990's saw the start of sites such as untied.com which ridiculed United Airlines. The best I could find on YouTube was one (hour long) rant about Vista and a lots of Complaint Choirs. The simple answer may be that only something at the level of belief can inspire this kind fo response, and brands seem to be a little short on belief right now.

Next Politics

The Pew Research Center has just published it's latest batch of data on what it calls Generation Next i.e. 18-25 year olds in the states. The findings are significant because their attitudes represent a bit of a change form the previous crop of people that age.

For a start, the 2004 Presidential election saw the first increase in the percentage of 18-24 year olds voting since 1988. At the time, the 18-25 cohort was more likely to vote Republican. Now, however, the Democrats have the majority with only 35% saying that they would vote Republican. This generation is also more likely to trust the government to run things - a real sea change to the early 1990's when neo-libertarianism and fear of the government helped drive Newt Gingrich into power. However, they are not anti-business - they just have a little more believe in the power of a central organization. This is very possibly influenced by the security situation in the country, as well as events such as Hurricane Katrina where a stronger central intervening role would have helped (to put it mildly).

But lest you think we are raising a nation of do -gooders, these folks see thier generations most important goals to be rich and famous (and are much more likely to say so than even my generation). No wonder celebrity culture is boomer in America :)

don't forget

8am at Cafe de la Presse. See you there

class

The class I have been teaching at the Miami Ad School has just ended and it has confirmed my thought that teaching (and verbalizing of any kind) is one of the best ways to sort out your own thinking. Listening to the questions in class and watching people work reminded me that some of the things at the heart of planning are relatively simple: asking questions, looking at data, trying to see things from different angles and telling good stories.

The students did some nice work on the major project of the term - a strategy for Major League Soccer in the US - and some good creative and strategy (much earlier in the term) for the National Resources Defense Council. (click to enlarge.)



copy: How Will You Live? We pose this question to consumers with a reusable bag that will be distributed in high traffic shopping areas. The two sides of the bag are representative of two possible futures, allowing the consumer to make the choice of which side to carry.










Copy: Bribing doesn't fit out beliefs. That's why we lobby to implement environmental change. Our lobbying efforts have provided safe, cost effective environmental solutions. Our achievements ensure that there will be an environment for generations to come.

fear

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself"

Thus spake FDR in his inaugural address of 1933. He would probably be quaking in his boots if he looked at marketing today.

We all seem to spend fretting about the state advertising and it's agencies are in,the consumer generated media and media crowding. However, few of us seem to be either willing or able to do anything about it. I don't believe it's because we do not know what we have to do: most of the people discussing this (especially on the blogosphere) are far smarter than I am and have/are coming up with smart ideas. And maybe that's because we are tackling the wrong issue.

The biggest human condition that (always) stands in the way of change is fear. That's why the warranty or money back guarantee was such a great idea in retailing (and still is). And it's why brands are in so much trouble.

Confidence, in a person or brand, breeds charisma and attraction. In a Wall Street Journal review Boone Picken's (a famous American oil "wildcatter") autobiography, the author talks about how Picken's confidence was a self feeding mechanism for success. The same thing can be applied to brands. If a brand has confidence - the way all the classic case study brands do - they attract people to them because of their projected strength. But for every Dolce and Gabbanna (who had to have 5 countries threaten them with closing their business), there is a GM that reacts to a single pressure group.

So if our enemy isn't ignorance, but fear, what can we do? Classic change management usually states the need for a charismatic leader. Unfortunately, I don't Howard Schulz or Burtch Drake riding up on a white horse. So perhaps instead we on the provider end have to take more risk - do what we tell brands to do and give something away in order to get something back. In an ideal world we would start a little group - call it Gratis - that would work for free in exchange for getting to experiment and prove new models of marketing. It's that, or live in what at the very least could be described as permanent uncertainty.

influence revisited

A very interesting piece in last week's Brand week (via Mark Earls ), challenging the influence of influencers. Instead, Prof. Duncan Watts suggests that it is who gets influenced that matters most - which sounds very logical if you think about things in network terms. I want to touch the biggest network, not the coolest person.

The Geneva car show is going on right now and it provides an interesting contrast in design language and brand assumption. Ever since working on Cadilac - whose art and since design language has helped it get back on the right visual track - I have seen a lot more higher end cars adopt similar hard lines and edges. The Audi A5 (pictured above) is one example. Audi's lines tend to be rounded, and while this is not an angular car it seems to mark a shift.

This Opel OTC (which admittedly is made by GM) is similarly linear as is the M3 below (or at least when compared to previous BMW's).



All these cars are an interesting contrast to the new Toyota hybrid that was unveiled in Geneva.That curvy softness is a continuation of the current Prius language but now it is much more exaggerated. In a way it is disappointing and feels a little cliche. I (subjectively) tend to associate this type of design with a more feminine gentle feel - a nice fit with the a "heart", green image that a hybrid car needs but I am not sure it is going to drive category sales. Instead, it would have been more challenging to balance a "heart" issue with a more masculine or even fun design. That challenge could have made the brand one that continues to push people mentally. Instead, it risks feeling flat.

march 16

The next likemind is later this week.

Let's try a more gentle start: 8:00 AM at Cafe de la Presse?

Hope to see you there.

photos from the brand new/noah brier drinks

So a Gareth has already posted, there was a nice pre-conference shindig in NY the other night.



Gareth in mid-theory




Noah in mid-pint after a hard day's conferencing



Malcolm from Mindshare - seems like a nice, smart bloke, although he is paying far to much atention to the wittering of some planner (likely me)

PSFK Conference

Just landed back from a quick trip to NY for the PSFK conference.

Overall, there was some interesting stuff but not as much new or radical thing as my little heart could have desired. Allen Chochinov from Core 77 had a good perspective on design as idea vs. object and showed some great design/photo sites for new product stuff. MY favorite was probably the notion of cameratossing - photos of what happens whena camera is just thrown a picture is taken.

In cont5rast to lots of "designed" stuff, artist Laurie Rosenwald and tattooist Scott Campbell talked to the need to get away from Illustrator and back into handcrafting things. I was particularly taken with what Laurie was saying because she talked about the need for randomness and chaos to make good art. She gathers lots and lots of stuff and just throws it together without thinking to much about it. Lots of stuff gets tossed, but it is more genuine that way. Similarly, she runs workshops where she gives people 2 minutes to make a piece of art.

Some of the best presentations were in the afternoon, including Kevin Slavin of area/code (inventor of big games) and George Murphy of Fitch (but formerly of Starbucks and Coke). The latter's presentation on brand experience was square on things I believe in and have worked on with Red Sky - the need for brands to be generous with customers, get the operational details right, doing it for love (vs. asking for something) and basing a brand off of continuity not consistency.

I had to leave early so missed a few things, but during the course of the day I was lucky enough to get to chat with Grant McCracken , meet Dino , Simon Sinek and Kelly Schoeffel (who worked with me at KB and is now at Wieden in Portland).

the prestige

The trip to London last week meant I got a chance to catch up on some films - including The Prestige

In the novel and film, the author(s) describe three parts to a magic trick: the pledge, the turn and the prestige. Given that we want to create the occasional piece of magic in this business, I thought it was an interesting analogy for how we tell stories.

The pledge is where the magician shows the audience the object of the trick - showing the audience the simplicity of the object, the fact that there are no hidden doors etc. In a way it's a reminder to us that every good story starts with a simple basis or with a certain innocence (think about the way nursery rhymes start for example). There is almost a need for that simplicity (and to set it up) in order to contrast it with what comes ahead.

The turn is the trick itself, and in the case of this movie it involves the transportation of an object from one state to another. It's not the only way to tell or build a story, but the point of and need for transformation (either of an object or the self) is universal at certain points.

The prestige is where the magician returns the object or himself to it's original state. It's the pinnacle of magic - to show it's not a fluke and it's possibly the most interesting point in terms of brands. Because as brands we might set a stage and we might transform a person or a scene, but we have no prestige. In fact, our whole point is to change behavior or state of being and not let it revert.

I'm not sure what our prestige is. Maybe it's that we let someone go back to their original state - without the brand or product (reminding them of what the original state was once like). Maybe it's that we offer "free" passage between the two states (brand and non-brand). Either way, more magic wouldn't hurt us.

psfk conference

I'll bet at the PSFK conference in NY on Tuesday - hopefully some of those reading this will be there. If you are, come along to the drinks that Gareth and Noah have organized on Monday

unexpectedly london

I've been in London for a family emergency for the last few days so haven;t had much time to blog or do stuff. But I did have one or two unexpectedly good things happen for such a short notice trip.





I happen to be crashing at the Hilton Olympia, right next to which is the (only?) showroom for Bristol Cars. Formerly an airplane manufacturer, then a well known car company in the 60's, they now make 20 cars a year or so of the Fighter (top picture above). Not only are the designs nice (I know, it's not easy to really see in my photo), but that is serious, long tail like, exclusivity.

The other car is an electric model which they first imported in the 1970's at the first oil crisis. It's got that classic, boxy 70' shape but doesn't look to out of place in the world of Smart or the Ka.

Aside from ogling cars and dealing with relatives, I had a chance to have tea with Russell Davies . And of course, it was very interesting and of course he is a very easy going, good guy. I didn't record it - mainly because I hadn't really thought it through before hand. But we did talk a lot about brand retail- how this has the potential to be a brand laboratory to work with consumers but to often ends up trying to be a brand showcase (which is nice, but can under deliver). One interesting point was the importance of retail to brands like Nike and Apple and the focus that they put on it in terms of resources. These brands know how to do good ads: their best people seem to be tackling the sharper end of the stick.