NITA AT LARGE

Sent to NYC to experience the future firsthand at MOMA’s Design and the Elastic Mind, let me begin by saying that reportage is rarely more exhilarating.  An exploration of (as the show’s superb catalog would have it) “…one of design’s most fundamental roles: the translation of scientific and technological revolutions into approachable objects that change people’s lives and, as a consequence, the world,” the show was both provocative and practical, optimistic and urgent, sci-fi clunky and simply ravishing, nano and macro—this latter spectrum in particular requiring a certain mental elasticity to span. 

As digital marketers, we also know that one of design’s most fundamental roles is the translation of basic human requirements into viable commercial experiences. Usability and digital ethnography help us build a matrix of intelligibility and desirability behind every web site, mobisode and digital POS system. 

Until now, the human body has had paltry interaction with brands’ digital interfaces and environments. So addictive and liberating is the iPhone “pinch” (an example of gestural computing), it’s tempting to think of it as having given rise to a new species of computer-literature humans: those with opposable thumbs! (Lest we forget, this is the distinguishing feature of primates and that which permits the use of tools.) Typing with thumbs on PDAs doesn’t count: here the thumb acts as just another index finger—on its own, doing the same basic act of button-pressing.

One installation at Design and the Elastic Mind, entitled “Shadow Monsters” and part of “Not Your Usual Interfaces”, invited greater bodily involvement with the digital universe. A magic lantern show-meets-performance art installation, its responsive design embellished certain physical movements of the participants with sinister appendages (accompanied by monster growls and such), making Monsters one of the indisputable hits of the show. See me on the left, my muscle-flex gesture suddenly met with snapping tentacles (while trying to capture the shot, of course.) Saw-toothed hands kept many people performing way past the point of there being any point. Except, of course, complete captivation by the phantasmagorical world of inner demons unleashed. (Talk about Engaging.)

Responsive design is a trend we’ll be monitoring because it pushes basic usability insights to ever more intuitive and imaginative heights. Moreover, the retail possibilities are myriad. What if… (cue my favorite part of futuring) changing rooms offered fantasy backgrounds and accouterments? Trying on lingerie would trigger the projection of a five-star hotel suite; prom dresses would prompt tiaras, red carpets, popping paparazzi light bulbs, James Bond escorts.

When it comes to digital brand experiences, it’s about time the (rest of the) body showed up, don’t you think?

I’m hard at work here on another post on escapism. Relish the irony.

Earlier this year, I attended Leveraging Online Media and Online Marketing, hosted by the Marketing Science Institute, the Jaffe Center for Persuasive Communication, and the eLab Sloan Center for Internet Retailing. We gathered at the UC Riverside Palm Desert Graduate Center—a vaguely Frank Gehry-like structure griddling in the sun, surrounded by the Santa Rosa mountains. And it certainly proved to be no country for old people. The sociological and econometric working papers presented are gold mines, but only for those marketers willing to prospect in the craggy cliffs separating academia from the business world. (As most of you know, I was born with a rock pick.)

Ann E. Schlosser’s paper, Will the Real Me Please Stand Up? An Exploration into Virtual vs. Physical Identity and Its Effect on Consumer Behavior investigated among other things the influence of virtual world avatars on real-world shopping. Subjects who had virtual product experience had higher intentions to purchase the product (online and/or offline) than those who simply read and viewed pictures of the product or those who watched a video of the product being used.

Avatars, whether physically congruent with the real person or not (the research into avatar physical traits and corresponding interpersonal dynamics is just plain fascinating), have this effect on purchase intent because they provide escape from objective self-awareness. They reduce awareness of self-discrepancies (a marvelous notion). Avatars, in other words, deemphasize the real self in favor of the aspirational self marketers are always referencing.

There are two lessons here. First, it seems to me that shopping online itself favors subjective self-awareness, or a self less split between the idealized and the actual. Shoppers can maintain trance-like states unfettered by sales associates, traffic jams or money itself (particularly true when credit cards are registered, thereby eliminating the reality check that should come with reaching for one’s plastic or cash.) The self we think (or our friends and significant others think) we ought to be, at least as it relates to our material possessions as a form of self-expression, has extraordinary license to thrive online. And I don’t believe marketers think about this enough. We should always be asking, “What are the proper fantasy supports for our fashionistas or homemakers or outdoor enthusiasts?” And at the motivational level, what are the best supports for our consumers’ celebrity aspirations, for their co-creation ambitions, etc.? (Do these ring an OPEN bell?)

Second, marketers should be less literal-minded when it comes to avatars. Not all require a full-blown virtual world to inhabit (though this is the definition Gartner uses when predicting that by the end of 2011, 80% of active internet users will have an avatar.) Avatars on Yahoo Messenger show up simply when you’re IM’ing a friend, and change expressions as you change your emoticons. Personalizing consumers’ experiences of ecommerce and branding sites is, essentially, accommodating more fully their virtual selves, their thinner, richer, more book-reading and world-changing alter egos. My “avatar” when shopping for shoes online is a gal whose feet never touch the ground.

More from the Archives 2008

Escapism has become one of the highest forms of national achievement (if you’ll pardon the paradox). Americans start early, studying Dr. Seuss’s twin avatars of escapism, those double trouble mini-me’s that made the Cat in the Hat look like a buttoned-up babysitter after all. Thing 1 and Thing 2 consecrate rainy-day imaginativeness for us in our impressionable years, and our devotion to diversions does anything but ebb in adulthood. We are likely affected by an inverse ratio of escapism to vacationing, with the former flourishing as the latter shrinks. Expedia’s brilliantly incriminating Vacation Deprivation Study shows the French weighing in with 37 beach and café days per year and Americans with a paltry 14—minus the three many of us never get around to taking. No wonder Americans need mentally to take leave (without leaving) on a regular basis.

Defined as “the desire to retreat into imaginative entertainment rather than deal with the stress, tedium, and daily problems of the mundane world,” escapism manifests itself in increasingly diverse and technologically sophisticated ways. Your tennis Wii is your Thing 1 and your new Flip video camera Thing 2. Your political tell-alls on Kindle are Thing 1 and your bachelorette mobile blogging on Kyte Thing 2.

One could argue that escapism is in many respects the turbine engine of the social web. Amateur digital creativity put in the service of fun abounds, so OPEN brands focused on improving the Engaging consumer experience confront a staggeringly high escapist entertainment threshold. Consumers are geared up for web sites and social media campaigns that are aesthetically, functionally, narratively, socially and sensorially rich enough to make them feel teleported. Deliriously lost in the moment’s challenge. A part of the (thickening) plot. As if they were getting away–with it!  

What would the Things do? Probably borrow from the unrepentantly escapist fare of video games or ARGs, whose protocols and pleasures are moving into the mainstream while undergoing quite a reappraisal (read: redemption) these days. Recall Steven Berlin Johnson’s argument for video games’ cognitive benefits in Everything Bad is Good for You. And tune in to the High Priestess of Alternate Reality Games Jane McGonigal, who convinced the SXSW crowd in March that ARGs meet all four criteria of happiness: they give you satisfying work to do; are designed for you to be successful; enable you, in multiplayer games, to spend time with people you like; and give you a chance to be a part of something bigger than yourself.

 Now that’s escapism of a higher order. Engaging brands: man your joysticks.

With all due mayhem to the Sex Pistols, the mashup is to the digerati what the safety pin was to the punk movement: an emblem of the power of combinative improvisation. Though the safety pin’s utilitarian value was ultimately superceded by its aesthetic one, and the mashup’s utilitarian value is often only realized through its sufficiently pleasing or simple aesthetic (think Google Maps, not the first mapping mashup by any means but arguably one of the simplest), the two cultural acts both champion the use of what’s already available—whether through thrift stores or open source—to create new value.

From the Archives 2008

If the icitizenry has taught us anything, it’s that traditional customer segmentation must evolve. The point is not that every customer segment should become a full-blown persona (though that certainly is the ideal) but that every segment should factor in behaviors and motivations made newly manifest by the social web.

Resource uncovered four motivations of the icitizenry not generally tied to consumer types or groups. On the surface, this motivational quartet—digital competence, collectivism, cultural change and celebrity—seems, at best, tangentially relevant to typical purchaser profiles. But that is the nature of motivations; some are worn on sleeves, others (in fact, most) are buried deep in our unconscious. It is the work of a digital marketer not only to unpeel the onion (if you’ll pardon the expression) but to make a brand beckon the deeper layers of consumers’ unconscious.

Marketers have been in the onion unpeeling business for years, have they not? Marketing’s social science ambitions are the stuff of cocktail party conversations. How many people pored over Underhill’s Why We Buy as if it were the great American novel? So what has changed? Quite simply, what is latent has become manifest online. Consider what is now readily observable about consumers in the social web’s gigabytes of consumer-generated content and in search engines as “databases of intentions.”

Given such radical consumer transparency, it might be time to revisit that “price-conscious and seasonal” segment that has served you well for years. Just how much more incremental value could it represent if your web site supported these bargain hunters’ motivation to socialize, which is deeply satisfied (indeed, in some cases, unleashed) elsewhere on the web but not the least bit on your web site?

A recent study by IBM and the Economist Intelligence Unit indicates we’re making progress in consumer segmentation. The Boston Globe reports that business leaders of 1,130 companies and organizations from 40 countries identified two new consumer types— information omnivores “who demand a say in everything from product design to aftermarket support,” and the socially-minded consumer “who will buy ethically and environmentally responsible products and may be ready to pay more for them.” These types” bear more than a passing resemblance to Resource’s competence-motivated and cultural change-motivated icitizens. And though the Globe article’s title is, “The Rise of the Unpredictable Consumer,” it is precisely the opposite that we are witnessing. Less latency online means more predictability. It means more dimensionality for your consumer types, hence more opportunity to market to the whole of them—including their eco-consciousness and co-creating ambitions—and not just their penchant (perish the thought!) for markdowns.

Sawdust-stuffed woodland creatures arrayed next to the Lucite jewelry wunderkind's works. As animal lover and slave to fashion, I had a very split personality moment here. The Bergdorf Goodman holiday 2011 animal kingdom windows prompted the same schizoid reaction in me. 

(download)

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A few months ago, AT&T came knocking. A door-to-door salesman--I think you’ll agree a rather quaint vehicle for pitching innovation—tried to convince me to switch from my current telecom/cable provider to AT&T because their new service enabled viewing of DVR’d shows on any TV in the house, not just the TV on which the show was recorded. This meant I could watch Trueblood while on my treadmill or cooking dinner, or in bed, and inevitably, I seem to record it on the wrong TV. The Stackhouse siblings and their vampire neighbors are on the kitchen tube but I need them on the treadmill tube. AT&T had made other upgrades to the TV time-shifting experience, including more possible simultaneous recordings, but this one was the crown jewel. I like to imagine it was based on a keen consumer insight—culled from extensive research—that we can indeed time shift but we can’t place shift (unless you happen to be one of Trueblood’s shapeshifters…but I digress.)

I resisted what would clearly have been a lifestyle upgrade for a comparable price, based on a telecom switching weariness that has accrued over the years. But, more fundamentally, I imagined the colossal inconvenience of the new gear installation. New black boxes, new wires, new remote controls. And I balked.

In reality, the new installation would take a technician about two hours, while I wrote in my study. And my new tech adoption, the dreaded learning curve, would take about ten minutes, with a few setbacks spread out over subsequent months perhaps.

In June 2009 at the Marketing Science Institute’s conference on “Customer Insights for Innovation,” I learned the reason for my resistance, for most consumers’ resistance to innovations that offer objective improvements to their existing product experiences. Harvard Business School Professor of Marketing John Gourville explained that the more behavioral change required—real or imagined, the tougher sell the innovation will be. The deeper the “attachment” to existing product features, called the “endowment effect,” the tougher sell the innovation will be. No matter how miraculous the innovation, these are the psychological impasses it must overcome. Gourville’s paper, “The Curse of Innovation: Why Innovative New Products Fail in the Marketplace,” is not yet available for download at the MSI site, but here is the 2x2 you’ll need to adapt it to your innovation processes, particularly when weighing which feature to emphasize, which to cut, which will need marketing to generate interest, and which is likely to be adopted without much marketing at all:

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I wrote this one at the height (or depth) of the Great Recession.

On the consumer front, there is a whole lot a quakin’ going on. Consumer confidence is at an historic low after years of hyperbolic lifestyles based on easy borrowed money and home values gone parabolic. Our impressive GDP, it turns out, has been propped up by $880 billion of consumer debt, which passed for patriotic duty not so very many administrations ago. Still, having said all of that, Obamanation seems ready to respond to the clarion call for restoration of fiscal sanity, however long it takes. A new energy economy brings the promise of new industries, new jobs, though they might be a few years in the making.  The tax-cut portion of the proposed $825 billion economic-recovery package is on its way (though that cash infusion might head right to debt service for many Americans). And despite the new frugality and reappraisal of that old national pastime—conspicuous consumption, consumers’ relationships to their favorite brands aren’t likely to evaporate overnight.

Let’s pause on that last point because now, more than ever, it’s important to be clear-eyed about the global economics of brands, which stretch from various collapsing financial markets all the way to the new wealth creation and burgeoning middle classes of the Asian Tiger and BRIC nations. Brands alone account for one-third of the value of the Fortune 500, according to the BRANDZ 2008 ranking by Millward Brown Optimor. And to illustrate their resiliency in even the toughest of times, consider this example of what economists would call a “flight to quality”: On September 15, 2008, the day Lehman Brothers filed for the biggest bankruptcy in U.S. history and Bank of America ate Merrill Lynch, every company in the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost value except one: Coca-Cola, the #1 brand eight years in a row in Interbrand’s Top Global Brand ranking.

In what might be the worst bear market on record, while you batten down the hatches, be bullish about top-ranked brands.

Remember the third place?

Digital Millennials are the first real post-PC generation; their smart phones are not only their primary digital device but some would say their primary means of discovering what it means to be a social being. For brands, millennials’ perpetual connectedness via mobile phones and social networking profiles has been their most salient trait for about five years. Facilitating and being part of this perpetual connectedness was a brand’s route to relevance. But another millennial trait has usurped simple connectedness: their collective location awareness—and the importance they ascribe to place as a marker of self (yes, just as brands endeavor to be). Mobile phones once again are the technological driver of this generational trait, but only those that are location-aware (thanks to cell tower triangulation and GPS). These phones and their geo-applications, along with cyber cartography—the constitution of information-rich up-to-the-minute digital maps of astounding physical accuracy—mean that brands have to put themselves on the map, literally. Why? Because the more accurate and personally useful digital maps become—with the help of anyone willing to geotag their photo or geoannotate a place—the more people expect them to constitute a complete “mirror world,” as the gamers call it.

Brands must recognize that there are consequences to being left out of this mirror world. As web surfing gives way to world surfing, brands have to be at the right places at the right time. Most important, they have to be part of the Fourth Place. After home (first), work (second), coffee shop/athletic club/church (third), the Fourth Place is a fusion of virtual and real, a spontaneous hot spot created by people oscillating between digital co-existence in a geo-annotated space and the heightened possibility of suddenly meeting up—at a store, nightclub, park—in the real world.