Toboggan Innovation

Talk about an innovation that could transform the winter experience that’s about to blizzard into our lives – saw these SnowShorts at the Orvis store in Boston the other day. Now that’s meeting an unmet and unarticulated consumer need!

 

The Power of 80’s Mythology

As part of her first week in Grade 7, my daughter (and her entire class) was assigned to conduct a peer-to-peer interview with a classmate as an exercise to socialize the kids and transform them from a disparate group of previous-school attendees to a current-school community. The value of quickly constructing a community among Grade 7 students who will only spend two years together is very high at this particular school; in October they will spend three days at a camp where they will engage in the kind of team building activities that the corporate world pays big money for on occasion to connect the human dots between its employees and that we, at Idea Couture, typically weave into our Noodleplay process. But enough of Business Development; back to the peer-to-peer interview.

One of my daughter’s questions to her interview subject was, Who is your hero? His response was surprising to me and, as 12 year old girls are prone to saying these days, so random to her…but only after I explained who the hero was: Chuck Norris.

Chuck Norris!?!? What 12 year old boy names Chuck Norris as his current hero unless he belongs to the right-side of the Larry King watching Republican? My suspicion is fairly obvious: a kid whose dad was into Chuck Norris 10 years before the birth of his son. That Chuck got the nod from a kid whose potential list of pop culture heroes could include Alexander Ovechkin, Georges St. Pierre, Tony Hawk or – if he’s prone to building his game with the girls – Rob Pattinson or Taylor Lautner – is about as left field as it gets. But not when you consider how pop culture heroes are an enduring part of our cultural mythology.

Film and TV, alongside music, are the most powerful receivers and transmitters of our mythologies. The Internet is certainly catching up, but it has yet to produce the sort of mainstream, focused narratives (as opposed to activities) that we like to latch on to as a way to formulate our thoughts, values, languages, attitudes, opinions and practices. To quote from the school of consumer insights, it has yet to truly fulfill our “unmet and/or unarticulated needs” for plot, storyline, character, drama, passion, intrigue, romance and so on.

Granted, there is some content of mythical proportions being generated online and, if your TV is on the semi-fritz like mine or you don’t like to schedule your life around your favourite shows like me, the Internet the most effective way to transmit the myth-rich content of HBO, Showcase and the wonderful world of DivX streaming video.

So where did this kid discover and latch on to the POW-rescuing Texas Lone Star sherriff? Maybe through YouTube: score one point for the Internet and its wealth of throwback content. Possibly at the local video store: score one point for Blockbuster for still eeking out some profit in the face of BitTorrent and DivX streaming. Or maybe in a home with some dusty VHS tapes and a dad who, like this one making his daughter watch Harry Hamlin in Clash of the Titans or listen to Monty Python records, wanted to keep a mythology particularly close to his heart stay alive through his son: score one point for the power of transmitting narratives and their heroes through the ancient media of family time.

Thoughts like this percolate during personal time. Maybe I’ll bring it up during my meeting with those insurance execs this week in the States when I tell them that their brand could use a little Chuck Norris action. You think they’ll get it?

 

Innovation and Early Adopters: Beyond The Bell Curve

When it comes to product, service or marketing design, following the bell curve can sometimes lead you astray. This is certainly the case for businesses and brands courting the highly coveted, often elusive consumer category known as early adopters.

Early adopters are typically described as curious, adventurous consumers who buy first, talk fast and spread the word to others about the pros and/or cons of what they have purchased. According to Everett M. Rogers in Diffusion of Innovations, the landmark 1962 textbook that popularized the study of how new ideas and technologies spread through societies, early adopters make up 13.5% of the consumers who will adopt an innovation.

If you’re facing the bell curve, they occupy the initial climb upwards, right after the 2.5% of those people who create an innovation. Following them is the early majority (34%), consumers who make their moves through the market more carefully, but tend to adopt a new product more quickly than most. At the hump of the bell curve is the late majority (34%), consumers who adopt a new product only after the majority has weighed in on its value. Finally, sloping downwards are laggards (16%), the critics, curmudgeons and haters who do their best to resist making the purchase but will eventually do so.

The problem with this bell curve is that it is a mathematical model, one that was never designed to represent the social context of innovation, the diffusion of innovation or early adopters. In looking to crack the code and harness the coveted word-of-mouth that can be generated by the approval of early adopters, designers, brand managers and researchers need to look beyond the numbers. Without a deep understanding of and appreciation for early adopters, they risk operating in a cultural void where assumptions can lead to product ideas that have no relationship to reality.

Those assumptions can be traps, particularly if chasing numbers on a bell curve leads to designing products that target only early adopters and, in the process, destabilizes brand identity or alienates core consumers. I’ve identified potential traps that brands and businesses often make when pursuing early adopters. To learn about them visit Noodleplay.

 

Makes You Scratch Your Head…

Check this highly cerebral performance from the Scratch Bastards.

 

The Quest For Brand Fire

Check my most recent post on Noodleplay about recent problems in my love affair with Pepsi.

 

The future is too bright & shiny

Even though their vision of the future is only 11 years away, it saddens me to see that the entire human population has been reduced to 15 personas.

According to Ericcson – the company behind the Sony Ericcson phone that just scored a $5 billion network outsourcing deal from Sprint and a $1.7 billion link with China Mobile and China Unicom – those are the personality types that will live and breathe our world in the years ahead.

It’s all part of their 2020 website, a slick, predictive look into possible technologies in the years ahead. A collaboration between McKinsey, the Institute for the Future in California and the Copenhagen Institute For Future Studies, 2020 is, in its defence, a designer-centric glimpse ahead – and we all know that lots of designers (and others) love the simplicity and focus of the persona.

I’ve raised the rally cry against the persona before. Some joined me, others sat by to watch me savaged by the orthodoxy of product & service research. Now, I fight mujahideen style – biding my time, patiently waiting to pick off those trucks that lag behind the military re-up convoy. Until then, I watch the 37-year old space engineer from New Zealand, the 17-year old student from Uganda, the 86-year old Japanese retiree, the 25-year old waitress from Ukraine.

These and 11 other personas make up the population of Ericcson’s 2020 Planet Earth. It is one of the most impressive persona-based projects ever – a hint at how lives, professions, experiences and geographies might intersect with a series of digital and other technologies to make life better, easier and more simplified.

Perhaps it’s the simplification of 2020 and personas that gets my back up against the cave as I watch those trucks roll by, driven as they are by Japanese retirees and Ukranian waitresses.

The research I don’t really question although, to my knowledge, there is no transparency to how these data and foresight giants collected – or what they collected – information on social trends, economic trends, tech sustainability and other metrics. It’s the simplicity or, better yet, the sterility of these personas and their futures that I dread. Having just finished reading Frank Herbert’s Dune for the third time as well as enough Silverberg, Heinlein, Simak, Ballard, Pohl, Asimov and others over the years to fill Carl Sagan’s universe of billions and billions, I know that the future is messy, longer than a paragraph and populated by characters whose lives are more complex than the direct line from customer behavior to customer need.

It’s also populated by so many more personas. Given that this is a project sponsored and led by a major corporation, it’s no surprise that some of today’s social marginals have fallen off the future-population radar to keep things bright and shiny. Skip the hacker persona, please. It doesn’t distract from the fact that, at Ericcson, the world is populated by people who seem more like their from the Veer universe than the future.

Where are the whores? The drug dealers? The people with disabilities? The porn stars? The guerillas? The mystics? The cross-dressers? And, most glaringly omitted of all, the artists of music, dance, theatre, film, paint and pen? If Silverberg, Simak, Heinlein, Ballard, Pohl, Asimov and Herbert are to be believed, these are where the next ideas, the next movements and the next cultures will gestate from.

I appreciate the old Brazilian farmer and others like him. They do speak to struggle of the economically marginalized and, as such, I will let them pass by my cave unharmed. But unless, like technology eleven years from now, these personas evolve to better reflect real people rather than customer scenarios, I’m locked & loaded.

 

Elementary of What’s Hot

According to popular consensus in my daughter’s graduating Grade 6 class:

For the boys: Skinny Jeans, Fedoras, Flat Braid Hats, Vans, Colourful Nikes, Hoodies, Pink Stuff, Plaid Shorts, Hollister, Abercrombie, American Eagle, Converse.

For the girls: Colourful Sunglasses, Leggins, TNA Sweaters, Skinny Jeans, Graphic Tees, Flat Braid Hats, Scarves, Tank Tops, Sparkles, Neon Colours, Fedoras, Converse.

Talk about a polysemic and enduring brand: I rocked my first pair of Chuck Taylor All-Stars in grade 9 when those of us who were into skating and/or punk rock style clashed with colours. Mine were green (first pair), purple (second pair) and white (third pair). Chris G. and Robinson K. were similarly engaged in the footwear battle. From the piece of crap ball shoe that ruled the hardwood before Nike got in the game (sorry Chuck, your support was and still is nil) to the choice of the boys in the hood on the Left Coast to grade 6 girls rocking them with their grad dresses a la Kristen Stewart, you gotta give it up for a brand that’s managed to stay in the game with its original DNA still intact.

 

From Chuck to me to Patty

Another great Rodigan video tipped off by Chuck Bam that I’m dedicating to the biggest Billy Joel fan of all time, Patty G.

 

36 Pounds of Muscle on Noodleplay

Bursts of research trips, talking to clients and jetting around the continent for meetings means that the number of blog posts dwindle. Launching a new company portal where the boss wants regular content means that the dwindling dwindles on. Check my latest post on Idea Couture’s Noodleplay site to get some “actionable” (heh heh) tips on how understanding and appreciating the new cultural mythologies embedded in Twilight and True Blood can help your brand add 36 pounds of muscle.

 

Junglist Insights

That the academic world can be slow when it comes to catching on to new ideas and innovations in the underground is old news. That the underground can be slow when it comes to catching on to new ideas and innovations in the academic world is probably newer news. Some recent news hints at the space between these two worlds, Check this blog posting on an article that I co-authored with linguistic anthropologist Jack Sidnell a few years ago.