It occurred to me the other day that “doing the right thing” has really basically two meanings: doing what is dictated by convention, and doing what is dictated by your conviction.

I think that everyone gets these two meanings mixed up and mixed together a lot. In spite of this, it generally seems that most people tend to favor convention, and a much smaller group of people tend to favor conviction. Like Tevye, I think they’re both right. Or at least, both are necessary.

Sadly, I think people in both camps tend to demonize much more than they accept or appreciate the other camp. Those who care for convention say of those with conviction that they are (to borrow a meme from fark.com - see this thread for examples) “trying to be special”. Those with conviction call those who care for convention “sheeple” (for examples, see the Wikipedia entry for "Goth Subculture").

I can understand why the conflict is present and I even suspect there are ways in which it should be seen as healthy. What’s more, I think “doing the right thing” is more than a question of “what”; it’s at least also a question of “when”. So there’s more to the story to be investigated, but it seems incredibly useful to remember that what may appear to be “doing the wrong thing” may very well be someone’s very genuine attempt to “do the right thing”.

Well that's what I heard.

I guess I just can't shake the impression that this guy likes to piss on beauty. Oh sure, he talks about multi-disciplinary teams and whatnot, but I think he derives perverse satisfaction from the effect his rhetorical position has on its detractors. He seems rather smug. But hey, I’ve been called a turgid prick and I while I suppose I might be, I don’t believe I am. So perhaps the whole thing is more complicated. Perhaps Jacob is a wonderful fellow.

My guess is that it has to do with the whole “Two Cultures” thing. Any web designer who has worked with a UX or usability expert knows what I’m talking about. The same holds true in reverse. I imagine the same pattern plays in all kinds of contexts; screenwriters and audience testers, architects and engineers, CEOs and CFOs. There is a tension that always exists between what is proven and what is possible.

There’s still compelling evidence to suggest Jacob is a punk. I mean, check out his site. The home page is pretty offputting as user experience goes what with all those links. He’s got this page called, “Why This Site Has Almost No Graphics”. In it he says that,

I am not a visual designer, so my graphics would look crummy anyway. Since this website is created by myself (and not by a multidisciplinary team as I always recommend for large sites) I didn't want to spend money to hire an artist.

Then again, I’m drunkblogging so I realize perhaps I’m just being an asshole. Sorry Jake. I’m just fuggin’ with ya. I love nerds.

It's been some time since the last update on my little Terra Chips interaction. I can't say that there's anything really new to report. I couldn't seem to justify to myself the time and effort to record a phone call to their customer service team given the other important things to which I've had to attend. (Links to the previous posts, in case they’re needed: I, II, III, IV, V, VI - Fail.) And in case I you're still wondering, the Terra Chips folks have still not responded to me, nor do I expect they will.

That said, I wanted to post to say thank you to the folks who offered comments and posts on their blogs. As I said repeatedly, this isn't some kind of watershed experiment. I had no pretentions about breaking through some profound barrier. I simply wanted to point out how pervasively diseased marketing has become. Terra Chips is a great brand. They make a great product. They are simply one of many—in fact, one of the overwhelming majority—of consumer-facing businesses that fail utterly at creating a genuine relationship with their customers. The reason for this state of affairs is simply that mass marketing as we’ve known it since Oyster Bay—indeed since Gutenberg—has reached the end of its utility. I’ve been wanting to post about exactly this, and I have in the past. I’ve got more to say about it, but that will have to wait for another post which I intend to give a snappy title something along the lines of, “Marketing Can Kiss My Ass.”

Continue reading "Grounded Chips, VII" »

One trip to the grocery and one blown PSU later and I can finally offer a final post in the wait for some response from the Terra Chips people. I've got a brand new bag of Lay's Kettle Cooked Original Potato Chips. They're good, although honestly, they're not as good as the Terra. At least I could easily open the bag. (Again, if you haven't read the other posts in this series, here are some links: I, II, III, IV, V. In a nutshell, their bag is hard to open.)

What's the upshot of all of this? Not much. I do know this much: Google is crazy ubiquitous. Google will index this post. It will parse the following sentences. Terra Chips Consumer Relations failed to relate to this consumer. Terra Chips failed to respond to a legitimate complaint. Terra Chips ignored a consumer that was an admitted fan of their product who happened to have a small criticism. Terra Chips failed to prove their claim that they care about their customers' questions and comments.

I'm interested to call Terra Chips Consumer Relation and see if they every actually received my emails. They're located in Colorado and I'm in Missouri. Based upon the information I've read, there are no state laws that would require more than one party to a phone conversation to give consent in order to record that conversation. If I can find the time and setup the equipment, I'll call them and publish the recording here.

To all the folks that manage the Terra Chips brand and their Consumer Relations group, I'm sorry this went down this way. I was really pulling for you guys to get in the conversation. I was prepared to give the Terra Chips brand full marks for their gumption. I don't want to just trash the brand because they've got a few things right--like they make a great chip. But they definitely missed an opportunity here. And they've demonstrated the self-serving nature of their "contact us" page. And they've made liars of themselves inasmuch as they suggested that they care about my questions and comments and then never actually addressed them.

So there are just crumbs in the bag of chips. It's late Sunday night here. I'd like to give the Terra Chips folks one more business day to respond. (If you don't know the story, you can view the posts leading to this one: I, II, III, IV.)

Continue reading "Grounded Chips, V" »

Matt offers an excellent suggestion about how to draw a line in the ground potato chip crumbs as it were. As he suggests, there's no particular science to deciding how long one should wait for a response from a company before you determine that they're not being entirely honest when they say they care about your questions and comments. My writing would also seem to demonstrate that I have a hard time determining when to end a sentence, but that is another matter entirely.

Taking Matt's suggestion, I shall arbitrarily decide that the Terra Chips Consumer Relations team isn't particularly interested in my comments and questions as of the day we finish the remaining chips in the bag and go buy more (perhaps other) chips. Given that half the bag of chips is now inside my vacuum, it shouldn’t be long. Given that I’m having a mild attack of diverticulitis (don’t ask), I’ll leave it up to my wife and kids to consume said chips.

What’s more, Matt has been kind enough to offer support of my chip foibles over at the Integrity Corporation blog. Given Google’s willingness to index anything and its love of all things blog, I’m not surprised to find my post comes up at the top of this search and it is the second result for this search.

Continue reading "Grounded Chips, IV" »

Another day goes by with no response from Terra Chips Consumer Relations. (If you haven’t read the first post on the subject, you can go here and do so. ) I'd like to think the lack of response is not because their conception of consumer relations includes ignoring the consumer for two days. I'd like to think it is because they're really busy and just haven't gotten around to responding. That’s my hope, because I still like the product. It really does taste great. Get a bag for yourself and note first how difficult it is to open but then how good the chips are.

I really don't expect anything from them. I don't need free chips or anything like that. Mostly, I'd just like to know that they heard me. I don't expect them to change for me, but I would hope they could at least do me the courtesy of offering some explanation for my experience. Maybe it’s the intended behavior of the package. Maybe they’re trying to say, “hey it’s hard work to get the bag open which is done out of respect for how great the chips are—y’know, like ya gotta work for it.” Whatever the reason for the packaging and for the nature of the contact form, I can’t see how it would be particularly onerous for them to explain it to me. I did give them my address after all.

Continue reading "Grounded Chips, III" »

As per Skye's suggestion, I'm creating a new post for each update to the Terra Chip saga. So far nothing after an entire work day. I'm starting to wonder if my questions and comments are so very important to them after all. If I get something else, I'll pass it along.

So bigwidesky is in a holding pattern. Things have changed and will change again. Such is the way of things. As an incredibly brilliant person just suggested to me today, "I know I will not get out of this life alive..." That obviously means what it means, but perhaps less obviously it suggests that the only constant is the lack of constancy. How's that for a self-referential paragraph, eh?

But I'm not interesting in digging into all of that right now. I'll be saying more about bigwidesky shortly. Right now I'm employing my potato chip greased fingers to clack out this little experiment. It's an experiment that has been tried many times before. I'm not going to dig up specific links at the moment, but you can go to the consumerist and elsewhere and find other things like what I'm about to blog. But hey, I'm in a potato chip induced altered state of consciousness.

To be brief, I had a hard time opening a bag of Terra Chips. In particular, Terra Kettles. This isn't the first time. So I should have known better, but I'm in my office and I don't have scissors, so I applied the requisite pressure to actually the open the bag; which is to say the same amount of force necessary to move the Earth to a new orbit. Needless to say, my hapless self got chips all over the place. I decided I should let the people who make these chips know that while the chips are good, they are packaged in an armored truck.

Continue reading "Grounded Chips" »

The concept is dead on; execution notwithstanding. We've been talking about this for awhile now.

I have to say I’ve been disappointed with the way the Republican presidential candidates have been handling the YouTube/CNN debate. When I first heard that only Ron Paul and John McCain were committed to appearing and how Romney wasn’t gonna answer no questions from no damn snowman, I immediately thought of Henry Jenkins.

Continue reading "An Humanizing Technology" »

So I was waiting for this massive file copy to complete (I'm actually still waiting) and for the hell of it, I google "marketing blog". Which, well, I just laughed in spite of myself (I'm actually still laughing). (I've now stoped laughing.) The first result is this: Shotgun Marketing BLOG.

Now let me just say that there are other bloggers I enjoy whom hail from generally the same geography as the author of Shotgun Marketing, Chris Houchens and so I was curious. Standard blogger template blog. Smattering of comments here and there.

But pow, the second post from the top struck me as perfect. Granted, this is no representative sample he's talking about (18 people) but there is definitely a rat race of memetic novelty that happens among the wired crowd.

I doesn't surprise me in the least that it takes a Kentucky blog to point that out. Good on you, Chris. I'm starting to think there needs to be a media vehicle dedicated to marketing from the midwestern/southen perspective. Just to hijack the point of his post and expand it, I think it's interesting that those who presume to speak for what the futures should look like are largely from the coasts, and those for whom such futures are intended are everywhere. Hell, I'm even being (consiously) US-centric in this post.

Seth has a post up on his blog called Benefit of the Doubt. In it, he basically suggests that when doubt is swinging your way in the minds of your consumers, they won't be so ready to tear you a new one when you (inevitably) screw up. On its face, it’s difficult to argue with this insight. You know, self-deprecation and all that. It’s amazing to me that it’s much of an epiphany for anyone, but I’m sure it is.

Whatever. I wonder about something a little more diabolically subtle about the benefit of the doubt. I wonder whether those who attempt to ingratiate themselves to doubt’s benevolence realize what a cruel bitch it can be when you’re on the business end of it. I wonder this because, in spite of Seth’s five pithy “brainstorms to get you started” in extracting doubt’s benefits, he doesn’t offer the insight that seems to me of singular importance to the topic: Don’t be a damn liar. To demonstrate what I mean, here’s one of Seth’s “brainstorms”:

Build up expectations of difficulty. Magicians are really good at this. If people think what you're doing is really difficult, they root for you.

For my part, I think benefit of the doubt is conferred upon those in whom we have some trust. We either trust them because we know them or we trust them by proxy: reputation, demeanor, they wear the same brand of socks that you do, etc. So my rejoinder to Seth’s advice is to have real relationships with your customers, use those relationships to honestly exhibit your philosophy and practice, and only rely on the benefit of the doubt when it is offered.

John Hagel is giving rhetorical form to what I think are the most important issues at the confluence of business, economics, marketing and even epistemology. His “Unanswered Questions at Supernova 2007” post from a month ago is still consuming my thoughts even when I’m trying to do other things, like eat and sleep.

Continue reading "Perceiving The Whole From The Parts" »

The great minds in advertising have long championed the emotional sell. As in, a Mercedes SL is sold on its sex appeal, and not, say, the work of the metallurgists on the new alloy used in its body. As I’ve said myself elsewhere, 90%+ of consumers don’t give a damn about your flux capacitor.

I’ve noticed an interesting parallel in sales in general. It seems that with exceptions, even if your product or service is mediocre, as long as you have developed a compelling relationship with your client or prospect, you make the sale. In fact, the relationship clearly does far more than any attempt to extol the virtues of your offering. This isn’t really a revelation. Salespeople everywhere know it.

Perhaps this is why advertising has gotten away with shamelessly lying all these years. Perhaps this is why customer service almost universally sucks (I think, in part, because it is viewed as product support and not part of the relationship.) Perhaps this is why the U.S. Congress is more predisposed to pork than sound policy.

Here's a recent McKinsey report on Web 2.0 in business. The highlight for me was that 42% of respondents said that they, "Invested at the right time but should have more in our companies internal capabilites," and 24% said that they, "Should have invested sooner in technology that in the meantime had a significant impact on our industry."

I don't know why I haven't posted something about this before. I find myself talking about this all the time. Here's the gist:

Marketing is dead. You can be humans again.

No, really. Not the practice of taking things to market; I mean “marketing, the paradigm”. Marketing, of necessity, has been about dealing with customers at arm's length. This is a byproduct of the industrial revolution. In order to pass the value of economies of scale to customers, companies had to be big. They had to talk to a lot of people. Since Gutenberg, the only tools available for—indeed the only ways to even think about—talking to a lot of people have been unidirectional. These univalent tools are the currency of marketing. They offer really no meaningful dialogue.

Continue reading "It's the Humanity, Stupid!" »

Innovation demigods, IDEO, have available for purchase these jaunty “method cards”. We bought some from the fine folks here at William Stout Architectural Books. We shipped ground—because our CFO is just like that—and we waited.

When they arrived, I took a third of the deck and divided the remaining between Steve and Ben. We thumbed through the cards, nodding and occasionally shifting our weight from one foot to the other. Perhaps it was the 11am sun reflecting off the mirrors that cover every surface in Ben’s cube, or even all the Sangria from breakfast; but whatever the reason, we were rather shocked to discover these.

Ben soberly suggested they were simply misprints. Obviously, this was met with derision. Steve and I had quickly recognized them for what they are; origami unicorns—clues alluding to the presence of a higher concept. What is IDEO trying to tell us here? We know they’ve worked with some of the biggest companies around, and even the government. Have we been chosen for enlightenment? Is there a handshake we need to learn? Please help us make sense of these cards. Maybe an IDEO adept (preferably like a 33-degree-er with access to this kind of knowledge) can give us some more information. I, for one, feel like I’m finally seeing the fnords.

The Consumerist has a post about some excellent customer service from SmartBargains.com.

Every ad agency should be making every attempt to sell some kind of customer service initiative with every campaign. An authentic interaction. If the marketing is going to tell a compelling story, it had better be congruent with the customer's experience when something inevitably goes wrong.

...wherein I discuss the finer points of business theory with Odin, from his Madison Avenue penthouse, "Little Valhalla."

me: Great place you've got here.

Odin: ...

me: Right, so for whatever it's worth, I've drawn a good deal of inspiration from your business.

Odin: Oh yeah? What do you do?

me: We architect novelty. In all kinds of situations. In all kinds of organizations.

Odin: Well now you just need the big client.

me: We're working on it. We're talking to Macy's about a big idea. We've been working with Monsanto on some novel communication approaches. But yes, we are always looking for big opportunities to help craft innovations.

Odin: ...

me: ...

Odin: Now you just need to get cool.

me: ...

Valkyrie: Hey, Odin, I've got some people here that want to be near your hair.

ODIN EXITS WITH VALKYRIE.

me: ...

I just spoke with Al Wiman about the Science Cafe offering they run over at the St. Louis Science Center. Tonight, the topic is, "Are We Committing Biocide? The Human Impact on Biodiversity" and includes Peter H. Raven, President, Missouri Botanical Garden. I've been wanting to go to one of these because of the access it offers; they bring each guest around to each audience table for one-on-one discussion. Alas, not tonight for me because it is my wife's night out and I've got the boys. Despite my absence, I thought I'd tell y'all about it. The folks over at the science center are doing yeoman's work and deserve all the support we can give 'em.

We're back on Broad Street. Morning engagements kept me from the first two presenters, and I've come into the middle of a presentation on "Entertainment." The session is "curated" by Lee Maicon; Bald Guy, and Head of Planning at StrawberryFrog. The program doesn't contain the names of the three panelists. One of the panelists is a particularly smart cat who is speaking about narrative and meaning. He (the smart dude) just walked us through some movie clips - one from Kurosawa's "Ran", and one from the Matrix. I haven't been able to determine what exactly they're trying to tell us, but I've only been here for a few minutes.

Continue reading "futuremarketing redux - electric boogaloo" »

I'm sitting here in the "Downtown Ballroom," 41 Broad Street, NY, NY for the futuremarketingsummit. As of fifteen minutes ago, Scott Goodson was to begin his keynote. It has yet to begin. Okay, well he's just starting now. Technical difficulties with projectors and computers were repeatedly met with Scott's opening line, "Welcome to the Future."

Continue reading "futuremarketingsummit liveblog" »

So everything is changing. You may have heard. Technology, of course, is always changing. The communication culture is changing. Business is changing. Politics is changing. Change is changing.

Continue reading "Object Permanence and the Chrysalis" »

The clever Tino Buntic has created a link explosion called 2000 Bloggers. You can easily waste an entire day purusing the links. Who knew this blogging thing was so popular?

Really big montage of blog author photos after the jump.

Continue reading "2000 Bloggers" »

The Pocket Wookie. Because, well, just because.

This is silly. Red Sox management is pissed about a TV ad airing in Japan and featuring their new star, Daisuke Matsuzaka, drinking a beer. From the article:

"The ad is consistent with what's acceptable in the Japanese marketplace," a spokesperson from MLB International said in the report. "We did approve it with him drinking the beer outside of his uniform. It's a type of commercial that is really commonplace in Japan. It is not really that farfetched."

Though the ad may adhere to the law, the Red Sox are concerned with how it will look to have shots of their hot acquisition drinking beer juxtaposed with images of him in uniform.

"It is a perception," Blake said in the report, "and we certainly want our players to be perceived in the right light."

As may be obvious, I take no issue with Daisuke's ad, or the uptick in beer sales at Fenway. I only wish we collectively had the stomach to tell the handwringing, Calvinistic, moral scolds where to stick it.

Every Woz needs a Jobs. And every Jobs needs a Woz. I’m talking, of course, about Apple Computer co-founders, Steve Wozniak, and Steve Jobs.

Continue reading "JobsWoz" »

Brand Noise has a post about a "hot new idea shop" called Fahrenheit 212. The post links to a BusinessWeek article about the firm. From that article:

Clients think of the firm as a way to make long-shot bets without having to use their own research and development resources. "Samsung is a lean organization. We can't afford to have people coming up with ideas that don't work," says Chief Marketing Officer Gregory Lee. "The people at Fahrenheit are very helpful because they are working on ideas that can fail--it allows you to experiment a bit." What's more, Fahrenheit ties much of its compensation to the success of the product, making it an even safer bet.