Talk to Me is a vastly comprehensive digital innovation exhibit at MoMa NYC featuring a range of works interpreting humans’ interactions with technology, from diagrams and apps to products and spaces. Paola Antonelli, curator of the exhibit describes goal to “explore how objects communicate with us… emphasizing how the need to share information and have a dialogue with audiences is overtaking form and function in contemporary design.”
With QR codes tagging every piece and a rare encouragement to break out your iPhone and interact with the work in a major institution, the exhibit is a smart and engaging look into the closing gap between life and our relationship with more intuitive technology. Antonelli explains the dominant trend in emerging technology design in communication “people need to communicate with each other. But they also communicate with objects, with cities, with the Internet, with literally everything.”
About 20 of the projects were sourced by open submission on the online, live, micro-site facet of the exhibit, Beyond the Galleries, documenting the process of the exhibit as well as a broad database of apps, projects, interfaces, readings, discussions and more. Some notable projects include the Rubik’s Cube for the Blind by Konstantin Datz, Wolff Olins’ own Jody Hudson-Powell’s Hungry Hungry Eat Head, Tweenbot by Kacie Kinzer, along with the popular apps Talking Karl, Chris Milk’s Wilderness Downtown for Arcade Fire and AOL Artist Sascha Nordmeyer’s Communication Prothesis.
Definitely worth seeing, the exhibit runs through November 7th.
Ubiquity - Being across the experience chain is clearly owned by Nike - Nike call themselves a services business, not a sneaker business. They create value around the use of sportswear, not focus on shifting units.
In a world where Brands are no longer defined by positioning but their roles in peoples lives, the experience that a Brand creates and curates though it’s products and services is fundamental to the sustainability of the business. Most peer-to-peer recommendation is based on experience - our perception, the emotional take out of interacting with products and services - if the experience fails, then so does the Brand. So how do we design the end-to-end Experience? How do we support the role of the Brand in the world? The following is presented as a set of principles and questions that brands should consider when designing this system.
The modern Brand Experience should be: Ubiquitous, Social, Semantic, Sentient and Human.
We used to live in a time when making a purchase meant having to visit multiple shops and retailers to attain new goods. Today, with the ease of Internet shopping sites and powerhouse sellers such as Amazon, it is possible to choose from a greater variety of items from one location. In a world where you can get anything you want, wherever you are, how can a brick and mortar retailer compete?
Creating a better reality with storytelling is a powerful way for a company to reach its customers on an experiential level. Providing a meaningful experience for consumers while retaining relevance to the product is paramount.
Leveraging creative initiatives, retail shops can build connections with their consumers. Spotisquare is an example of this. Foursquare teamed up with Spotify to connect venue and retail locations with music playlists. Visitors can make collaborative playlists and share the experience of making music in relation to a place.
Stickybits is a social network in which users attach personalized content to a product barcode. When another member of the network scans the barcode, they see the notes, recipes, tips, photos, and reviews of that item. Retailers are engaging consumers on a more personal level creating stories based on their personal experiences.
A more localized approach to creating consumer connectivity comes from Subway in Japan. The restaurant allows you to grow and harvest your own lettuce, which is then immediately placed on your sandwich. It’s about creating an experience even for objects that are ubiquitous; making the customer more excited about interacting with a product or brand through relevance.
It may be more difficult for physical retailers to compete with larger warehouse-style Internet markets. They can build a sustainable, competitive advantage by engaging consumers to interact with them on an experiential level.
Creating a definition of the word brand seems to be both the easiest and perhaps the hardest thing to do. The challenge is not that the existing definitions aren’t correct (or more accurately weren’t correct). The challenge is that the environment in which brands live is inherently Darwinian.
As the environment changes brands must adapt. Once brands have adapted enough then what you get are effectively new species - entities unlike what have gone before and that must now be defined in completely new ways.
This has been a constant process over time, but I think we could now define ourselves as being in the third age of brand.
1. USP
The first age was the product age. The environment was post war baby boom America and the defining factor was the rapid growth of the middle class.
In this age brands were built from functional attributes of the product, which spawned the concept of the Unique Selling Proposition or USP.
The technology that enabled this age of brand was television and the platform was television advertising.
In this age the Creative Director was invented and their role was to find creative ways to communicate this USP to the consuming public at large.
2. ESP
The second age was the marketing age. The environment was one of 1980’s excess and the growing demands of Generation X.
In this age the realization was that functional attributes were not enough. It spawned the concept of the Emotional Selling Proposition or ESP, which was defined through the mechanism of Brand Positioning - the technique of identifying and then owning an emotional territory for the brand.
The technology that enabled this age of brand was the desktop PC and the platform was consumer research.
In this age the Account Planner was invented, and their role was to more deeply understand consumer wants and needs in order to understand which emotions to manipulate for each of the brands audiences.
The second age represented a logical progression from the first. Marketing followed product. The connective tissue was that brand owners retained an information advantage relative to brand consumers. In both these ages an information asymmetry benefited the brand owner at the expense of the brand consumer.
3. XSP
Today we are in the third age, the experience age. The environment is one of unprecedented choice and transparency and the defining factor is a fickle Gen Y audience who demand more from less.
In this age brands must be built around their Experiential Selling Proposition (XSP). Unlike the simplicity of USP’s and ESP’s, the transparency of the third age demands that brands manage complex systems of value - understanding how all of the actions of the brand owner (product/service, societal, environmental, technological, marketing) interrelate to create the experience.
The technology that enables this age is the Internet and the platform is Social Media.
The definitive role that this age will invent is not yet clear, but so far we see Innovation leaders, Engagement leaders, Digital leaders, Social Media leaders and Experience leaders.
The fundamental and exciting shift is that the third age represents a sea change from the other two.
The brand owner no longer benefits from an information asymettry over the consumer. Instead this relationship has been reversed. As such, the old rules and indeed the very definition of how brands must behave in order to succeed has also changed.
The tools of brand positioning and advertising that have held such strength for so many years must now be replaced by both new tools and new rules.
XSP demands integration of product, service, social, environmental and marketing layers. It demands the creation of value across the system of the brand. And fundamentally it is built from a trust that brand owners will have to earn from their consumers on a daily basis.
The implications of this change for many brand advisers are potentially dire. Entire industries optimized for the more effective communication of a brands ESP now find themselves facing a systemic decline in efficacy and indeed value.
This will mean one of two things:
1. Brand advisers will need to focus less effort on how a brand communicates its ESP through marketing communications, instead focusing their efforts on helping brands to innovate across the entire system of the brand in order to generate revenue driving XSP.
2. Brand advisers who choose to remain focused on marketing communications will need to find ways of innovating and re-engineering their business model and offer for a lower value, lower fee world. Seeking structural change to create value both for themselves and the brand owner.
Wolff Olins have chosen to follow the first path: Our focus is increasingly on helping brands create new revenues and new value across the entire system of the experience.
Victors and Spoils on the other hand appears to represents an innovative new model designed to deliver the second.
Whichever model wins, whoever defines the new role(s) that will represent the third age, there is no doubt that this is an incredibly exciting time to play.
We may even get a new definition of what a brand is.
The AV Club has a nice list of documentaries that toe the line between reality and reel. Some common threads linking these films are that many of them never admit their fictional basis and often present the premise of the movies as straight-up fact, with the purpose of their ambiguity unclear.
What’s interesting about these documentary style films is that they reflect a lot of what is going on with brands online. We are starting to see the blurring of reality and fiction of brands and identities.
For instance, Borat and Bruno are clearly fictional characters, but the people that Sasha Cohen interviews and the situations he puts himself in are often very real. This makes for intriguing storytelling about a fictional person and his encounters with very real people. But more importantly, Borat and Bruno are brand extensions of the Ali G show. These characters help extend and reinforce his style of comedy beyond the platform that the show was intended for (cable tv).
Similarly, Mad Men achieved similar success by using Twitter to extend its characters personas. Users impersonated some of the series characters effectively extended the series beyond TV, while respecting the tone of the characters on the show.
Papa John’s also used Twitter to tell the story of its individual franchises. Each PapaJohn’s account promotes local promotions based on the region making the brand much more personal than its competitors Pizza Hut or Dominos.
In both cases the blending of fact and fiction created better realties for customers by helping people experience both brands in more intimate and meaningful ways.
I just read Clay Shirky’s book – Here Comes Everybody. In it he makes a great point that being ‘professional’ brings with it an inherent bias and unwillingness to see change.
He quotes the example of professional journalists missing the racist comments by former leader of the House Trent Lott, which eventually led to his resignation. For these journalists, it didn’t fit within their existing structures and concepts of ‘newsworthiness’.
Instead it was ‘amateur’ bloggers who picked up on the comment and sparked furious debate about what he’d said, and then an investigation into what he’d said in the past.
I couldn’t help but think about this in the context of marketing and brand building. For years marketers and their agencies have defined themselves as ‘communications professionals’ and yet the mechanics of communications, much like the mechanics of journalism, are changing radically and permanently.
If we lock ourselves into the idea of being in a communications profession, I think we risk massively underestimating both the pace and nature of change in the world around us.
In a world where image no longer defines reality, but instead reality is increasingly driving image, anyone thinking of themselves simply as a communications professional risks being left behind.
Instead, I think we need to open our minds and begin thinking of ourselves as brand amateurs, where brand is a system of mechanisms – experience, innovation, culture, communication, conversation, creativity etc.
Rather than being locked into a single mechanical construct, this frees us to focus more on pursuing a business vision – through whichever means is most important, and irrespective of whether it is about communication or not.
So Starbucks have opened a new non-Starbucks themed coffee shop in Seattle. Their claim is that they’ll eventually have only three of them.
It’s pretty interesting that much of the Twitter traffic on this has been of the “Starbucks brand is so tarnished they have to change it” variety, which if you’re not a fan of their coffee is probably pretty tempting.
However, there are two more interesting thoughts. The first, as suggested by Seattlest is that this is going to be a lab where they can test ideas fast and without danger to the core brand. This may well be the case as using market facing labs in locations close to your headquarters is a tried and proven trick. Just ask Bank of America.
However, there may be something else going on here.
When large corporations look at markets they are often looking for the mass proposition. The proposition that will fit the largest number of people, encouraging scale economies and scale growth.
The challenge is that to be “good enough” for a large enough group of people means that you have to compromise on creating a “special enough” experience for a specific group of people. This is possibly why Budweiser has almost no flavor - because it is designed to be “good enough” for as many people as possible, and hence the product cannot be special for any one group.
Starbucks appears to a great example of this in action - as it has grown, it has worn away the edges of specialness in the experience in order to appeal “just enough” to a broad group of people.
Unfortunately for them, this has now brought them dangerously close to the McDonald’s of this world, who’ve begun to eat their lunch.
How to respond?
Well, changing the core Starbucks proposition would be both costly and perhaps a little dangerous (as you’d be messing with the familiar), so adding a new niche proposition or perhaps even propositions may well be a smart move in the search for growth.
This allows them to keep the Starbucks franchise robust and add new experiences to reignite the innovation/growth engine. While it is easy to decry their initial pilot as being derivative, not everywhere has the robust coffee culture of Capitol Hill in Seattle. What may appear old hat there, could well be quite unique elsewhere.
Which, of course, raises interesting questions about the future of innovation for mass brands. As the Internet has very explicitly shown us, mass is really a collection of smaller niches - where the individual consumers within these niches now have tremendous power to self-identify and organize themselves.
As mass players max-out on their potential, they have to look elsewhere for growth. This suggests we may well see more innovation of the kind that Starbucks has done here and not less - where mass brands look for ways to stretch from their core into more specific niches.
The trillian dollar question will be whether mass brands can embrace the specialness which is a defining characteristic of a niche brand, or whether they will need to create whole new brands to do it. So far we’ve seen examples of three different approaches:
In the extend the brand and try to make it feel special camp, we have Pepsi Natural, which appears to be a very contradictory marriage of brand and proposition. Particularly when we consider established niche competitors in this area such as GUS soda.
Starbucks (as shown in the image above) have chosen a different brand, but with the modifier of a more subtle “inspired by Starbucks” endorsement.
Finally, in the create a new brand in order to be special camp we have Sunglass Hut, who chose to completely seperate their Ilori brand in order to create a completely different experience to drive growth.
It’s not clear right now that any one approach will fit everyone, but I’m tempted to think that the more mass - and hence the least special - the experience of the core brand, the more difficult it will be to stretch it into a specific niche.
I just read 