Getting back at the Hyping Point 29Jan08

Seth Godin has a thoughtful response to the wonderful Fast Company truth about enzyte story “The Un-Tipping Point” by Clive Thompson.

Unleashing the Ideavirus didn’t spread because ‘important’ people endorsed and promoted it. It spread because passionate people did.
One more reason not to obsess about the A list in any media category. Worry instead about people with passion and people with lots of friends. You need both for ideas to spread. That was Malcolm’s point all along.

There are many ways to interpret the story, which covers Duncan Watts’s research, which discounts the roles of the super-influentials that many marketers try to reach to make their products tip rapidly. My interpretation is that marketers often over-simplify the definition of an influential, not recognizing that different people will be influential for different types of ideas or products. For example, Slashdot is a hugely influential audience for open-source software. It’s almost irrelevant when you have a new digital audio player to sell. This level of nuance has been left out in most efforts to create an influentials strategy, and that’s why the Tipping Point isn’t the panacea marketers hoped it would be. Just my two cents, you should read the story.

Seth’s Blog: The Hyping Point

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Language, Culture and Ordinary Volk 23Jul07

Cultural research lies at the base of design strategy. Unless we understand the needs of ordinary people, it doesn’t matter how elegantly designed our offerings or how cleverly plotted our strategies for their roll-out.

These days, the focus of cultural research is on individual, extreme groups whose needs are aspirational for the rest of us. We might look at people who have already sold their SUVs to begin to understand what the people driving Hummers today will be looking for five years from now — and potentially how to make more efficient vehicles appealing.

Small distinctions in people’s lives have huge implications for product planning and strategy. Studying small groups tells us a lot about the rest of the world, in part because we are mindful of their similarities and differences to the wider population. By seeing finer and finer dilineations between people, we are able to see a clearer image of the whole

But once, the concept of a culture as a shared set of values or customs that crossed class boundaries was radical in itself. For a long time, we viewed nations as entities that existed because of the rule of law and the power of governments. In the late 18th Century, we realized that nations exist because of people. Nations emerge from the connections between people and the way the languages they speak and the ways they live their lives, not top-down impositions of order.

This intellectual shift was led by Johann Herder, an almost absurdly romantic German who would inspire the Brothers Grimm in their collections of folk tales. What matters is the Volksgeist, the spirit of the people that pervades through people in the same culture.

Romantic nationalism is not without its downside. After all, when a philosopher begins promoting patriotism and nationalism as the key values of a culture, a turn inward occurs inevitably. Herder, for example, was extraordinarily pro-German, and this biased his work considerably. In his view, all intellectual roads ran through Germany, whether they actually did or not. Herder made sure to qualify his statements, warning against the excesses of nationalism. But few listened, as is the way of such things. The end point of unchecked nationalism is totalitarianism.

This lesson does have continued implication for design strategy. Great social and cultural research can point the way forward for a company. But unless we pair insights with great designs and strategies, they don’t lead anywhere. Worse, if we grow beholden to a particular group or set of needs, we’ll one day defeat ourselves. Bill Gates once said that we tend to overestimate how much things will change in 10 years and underestimate how much they will change in five.

I think the same is true of people. We tend to overestimate how similar people in a given culture are with regard to their needs — and underestimate how little major differences matter in the face of products and services that really connect with ordinary folks. In other words, Americans (or even Baby Boomers, for that matter) as a category is incredibly broad and hard to develop for — focus on a smaller group. But once your studying is over, look for the needs that go beyond the immediate group. Then go past the obvious solutions to the stuff that really resonates.

If we do that, we can benefit from the Volksgeist. And that’s a great thing.

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The Aesthetics and Psychology of Stuff 18May07

Today, we generally acknowledge that perhaps the most meaningful of all possible experiences come from serendipity — finding greatness in the least likely of places. Discovering the profound in the prosaic, as a friend and colleague puts it, is the rarest of pleasures.

This notion has tremendous implications for the design of everything around us. A beautiful product is not enough. A novel or exciting product is not enough. People want products that both surprise and delight them, whether it’s an MP3 player that organizes music the way we do in real life, a shoe that fights poverty or a robotic vacuum cleaner that acts as a surrogate pet. This is all table stakes in today’s market — I don’t even consider it a particularly interesting discussion.

Here’s what is interesting: Serendipity, the discovery of greatness in the most unexpected place, has only been a real virtue for the last 150 years, and only then thanks to a handful of folks who argued that art needed to be cheap and handmade. Also, one more thing, the best work of a great blacksmith is every bit as valid as the finest portrait by a court painter. The movement is Arts and Crafts, and the prime mover is William Morris, who devoted his life to promoting the resonant power of humble, well-crafted goods and the people who made them.

Before Morris, an Englishman of the mid- to late-19th Century, changed the discourse, Western society understood beauty as something found in nature, the work of the Renaissance masters and in the ostentatious architecture of royalty. After Morris, the traditional rural house, hewn from simple, natural materials, became the ideal of taste and meaning.

He also founded the very first independent design firm, best known as Morris and Company. He designed beautiful tapestries, wallpaper, even hand-painted stained glass. He founded a legendarily luxe printing company, Kelmscott Press, that brought the beauty of illuminated manuscripts to the middle classes. The consciousness was raised, an art and architecture movement was born and Western Society’s conception of aesthetics broadened to include everyday objects.

THIS MEANS SOMETHING, as E-lab used to say in its presentations. Perhaps the most important realization to the development of the modern consumer economy was an essential insight that Morris highlighted, whether he meant to or not: Regardless of objective aesthetic or emotional value, people care more about the little things they use thousands of times a day — their front doors, their kitchens, their pencils, their dens — than they do about the big things that most can only enjoy in a gallery. This makes sense: People are physical, mental and emotional. If you form a physical bond to an object through repeated contact, you will also form an emotional bond. It can either be a positive bond or a negative bond. The stuff that we bond positively to are the hardest to take from us — just ask anyone who has been using a Macintosh since 1984 if they would ever willingly use a Windows machine.

This is an essential insight to consider when making anything — people don’t love good design, they love stuff that loves them back.

The greatest irony of William Morris’s life is that he tapped into the secret of design as an added virtue for the simplest things in life — thereby creating the idea that one object could be superior to another with the identical function because of some vague notion of artistic merit. All of this from a socialist. Life’s like that sometimes, isn’t it?

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