Selection for the curious: not the headline news in brand

Brand

Vitaminwater emphasize the "energy-boosting" properties of their drink with bus shelter ads in the States.

Kellogg and Augme Technologies have announced that they will be working on optimising interactive packaging technology with the aim of acquiring data about Kellogg’s customer base over the next year.

Sainsbury’s juices get portion control windows to help customers manage dietary intake.

Innovation

This time, innovation in service! Heartbreak Hotel - Dutch hotel's weekend divorce service. via @iconoculture

Where do good ideas come from? Great summary of current opinions by practitioners and insight into how its done by the Made by Many team. @madebymany

Design

Inspiring and cultivating creativity. Hint: 9 of the top 10 motivators are intrinsic, not intrinsic! via @the99percent

Great site around the new John Hegarty book. Home truths, funny truths and the occasional fish slap:

http://www.hegartyonadvertising.com. Includes the great quote:

Creativity isn't an occupation, its a preoccupation.

Genius

Good starter article on the learning secrets of Polyglots, Polymaths and Savants.

Dzongkha anyone?

Getting amongst it. Your brand that is.

How often do you get amongst your customers? Your channel partners?

Could you say what they looked like, what they said to others as they were handling your products?

It's great to be excited about your new ideas, your new packing, TVC and service offering. You need to be excited to be able to get others excited.

But how will you get customers excited with you? First, you need them to notice and listen to you. For that, they need to trust and like you.

Rule no.1 of how to get people to like you from How Win Friends and Influence People: Become genuinely interested in other people.

Rule no.1 of developing trust - it has an inverse relationship to how much you focus on yourself rather than focus on the other person.

So, the number one rule about getting people to talk about your brand...it's not about you.

So, get amongst it and see what your customers are all about. Guaranteed you will learn a new, powerful insight about them each and every time you get amongst it.

Here's five ideas how:

• Have a bi-weekly channel partner safari - be it walking around retailers, popping in to see your partners' office or surfing some new online shopping options.
• Adopt a store - if you have 50 people in your company, with a little coaching, you can have live and direct feeds from 50 of your customers, using just your staff.
• Stroll. Stroll through where your customers live and shop.
• Become your own ethnography team. Arm a bunch of your team with cameras, notebooks, markers and a travel ticket and a juicy list of things to observe. Come back for a private screening where you share stories and artefacts. It may not be robust, but done regularly will begin to paint a real picture of your consumers.
• Be (politely) inquisitive. Next time you're shopping your category and you notice a customer buying, ask them why. It works for Richard Branson! Maybe you could invite them over for tea and biscuits with the team?

You? What ways do you get amongst it with your customers?

ideas = future

Great quote courtesy of @BrandDNA and the immortal John Hegarty.

Selection for the curious: not the headline news in brand

Retail: Zara back in black for the first time since 2007. Zara returns to profit as new shops boost sales via@retailweek

Design: Students from Les Ateliers-Paris Design Institute have created a project called Fabrique Hacktion that aims to improve collective spaces in the city via @LSNglobal

Design: Why two brains think faster than one. Video interview with Antenna Design by @the99percent

Big ideas: No Boinking: Raising awareness of India’s population control problem with a playful ad that works even without understanding Hindi for Idea 3G, by Lowe and partners: When the power goes out, don't boink, play 3G games!

Social / Tech: White House: Twitter helped debt agreement. Virtual pressure pushed the deal, whilst Obama lost 36,000 followers.

You’ve got FAIL: Windows Office365 team Punks Gmail via @ADWEEK

TaskRabbit iPhone App Lets You Post Errands On The Move via @PSFK

Innovation: The British Egg Market—An Incubator of Innovation via @popsop_com

Zip.

So, it's great to be interesting, curious and open to many things.

But if you are about many diverse things, when do people to turn to you? After all, there's wikipedia.

To develop a personal brand, you have to be the go-to person for something.

What's your something?

Every business is social

A business involves people. People buy the business outputs. Ergo, a business is social.

I often get asked by business owners 'what is social media' and 'how do I set up Facebook for my business'? It seems everyone wants to go social.

Sometimes what people miss is that they already are.

My answer is simple, and the acts are simple, but still, simple acts can still generate profound changes in an organisation.

The simple answer - social is an amplification of existing ways of communicating.

Instead of phoning or emailing your customers one by one, you can share information about your business with all those that 'follow' you in various ways. Instead of broadcasting using a megaphone, because someone has chosen to link with you, its like you are having a conversation in the same room. You can point at things using links, Slideshare, Youtube and Skitch. You can show how much you like what they are doing by sharing their information with your 'room'. And this can all be done in a way that is infinitely 'spreadable' in a social chain reaction.

This is true both internally and externally within a business.

So the first part of my advice is simple - map your customer touch points and start with those. Is there a way you can a) help those be better experiences and b) help spread the word about your business?

The obvious place to start is customer service - can you add more ways for people to simply connect with you and resolve a query immediately, rather than over days waiting for email or call backs? Adding Twitter and live chat could help reduce issue resolution time and potentially head count. But then lets move on to your shipments - can you add a customised message for your customer on your delivery docket, with an invitation link to see the latest trends in their industry, a secret customer-only event or a slide-share presentation on best-practice on shaving costs on shipping in their industry?

Social is being yourself (your Brand), but amplified.

My top 3 tips for businesses as they are starting to dip their toe in:

1. Give. Be useful. People share things that are useful and good.
2. Be relevant. People are time poor - give them what they want and need. If you are highly technical company with a highly technical audience, it is unlikely that they want to be friends with you on facebook. But they are likely to want to read new developments that your CTO finds interesting on your blog.
3. Be real. People interact with people, not things. Part of the enjoyment of engaging with a brand or a business is learning the real people involved in it, being one of the community with a real relationship with you, not just someone who has read the brochure.

As with any technology / behavioural adoption, once you've taken the first step, you're already in a new and exciting place.

You? Where do you think a business should start in their social adoption?

Notes: This article was inspired by an article by Jed Hallam, part 2 of a series on the social business. You should read it, it's good :)

Image credit: Faithoncampus

Fashion: nature vs nurture?

A recent article in Grazia caught my eye and made me wonder, how often do customers beat the trend makers?

Kind of like asking the nature versus nurture question, but for fashion.

The article showed examples of girls using Celine zip-up cases for keys and coins or Marc by Marc Jacobs iPad cases as very stylish clutches.

The Tipping Point highlights specific individuals starting trends. Yet on the other hand we have game-changing innovations such as the iPhone, which admittedly build upon existing behavioural changes but itself creates new ones. Walmart started a new trend in retailing not from looking at customers, but initially looking at operations, as this interesting article by Scott Davis of Prophet describes.

Modern marketing, branding and design is all about being customer-led, suggesting that all trends come from customers.

I wonder, is it possible to create a genuinely new trend, that is not at all hinted at by other events? A world-changing new spark, the trend equivalent of 'the big bang'?

You? What do you think?

Meanwhile....sharing some of my favourite trend-spotting gurus: trendwatching; PSFK; LSN; Iconoculture; Scienceofthetime; Trend Hunter.