This post from Own Your Brand! reminded me of my Spin/brand riff earlier today.

Knowing all this, I’m still puzzling on the pieces of a pattern I experienced last night at a local Taco Johns.

As I entered the establishment (“restaurant” seems a bit overstated for a fast-food place), a young man appeared to be walking out. Then I realized he was in a Taco Johns uniform and he wasn’t walking out, he was opening the door for me. I was actually being greeted and welcomed into a fast-food joint. That has got to be a first!

I felt my “fast-food pattern” breaking and a new one taking its place. Cool.

Since it was “Taco Tuesday” I was ordering for my whole family at home. It’s a large tribe made up for four generations, but I digress. They love their taco sauce, so I was instructed to ask for extra hot and mild sauce which I did. I always ask for extra hot and mild sauce – that’s my pattern.

Now, the last piece of my puzzling pattern encounter – after the “warm and fuzzy” door opening, warm greeting, hospitality experience, when I’d returned home, I discovered they forgot the to include any hot and mild sauce. They always do, unless I remind one more time when I pick up my order. So much for the new pattern – back to old reliable.

I’ve received my second issue of Spin magazine since a recent relaunch. It’s gone from being a youth-oriented slightly alternative music magazine that featured (one of my writing heroes) Chuck Klosterman (in an ever-declining role) to a youth-oriented slightly alternative People magazine.

I wasn’t exactly in love with the old Spin, given my rural lifestyle (i.e., Portigal Consulting world headquarters is just blocks away from an alpaca ranch), but I admit I found it strangely comforting to read about Coachella and Death Cab for Cutie even though there’s little chance I will go to the first or listen to the second. I want to say “I’m too old” but it’s really not a matter of age, I have always liked reading about this stuff, but I never felt part of it. Reading Spin a couple of years ago was an attempt to shake off the depressing feeling that Classic Rock Radio (and Rock Marketing) has been giving me for many years.

But I can’t stand this new magazine, it’s replaced attitude with vapiditude. Spin will certainly lose me as a reader. I’m not sure that’s a problem for them. I’m probably not a customer for their advertisers and therefore not a valued reader.

It does raise some interesting questions about how to “re-launch” or otherwise evolve a brand. I know this is not the first time Spin did this (at one point they were vaguely hard-hitting, big format, run by Bob Guccione, Jr., the Penthouse scion). But there’s no transpanecy in this process. Where is Klosterman? Why all the pictures of hotties? Parties? Hot parties? I’m asked to consider it as the same Spin, even though it’s not, and it doesn’t feel like it.

In this case, the entire experience has changed, it’s not a new ad campaign or new bumper graphics, old stuff is gone, new stuff is here, the editorial voice has been revamped.

Contrast with newspapers that change features all the time (newly designed stock tables, new font, new page format, you name it) and typically will explain the heck out of it, what was done, how it was done, and why it’s better. They know that when you have a comfortable relationship with a paper, you’ll be shattered if changes slightly without you knowing a little bit in advance.

A recent study we did around some commercial software that was used aggressively every day all day found that the management of inevitable changes is crucial, the software is “their” software, just like Spin is “my” magazine. The consumer/producer split has an emotional component that producers don’t always get. As one of the software users told us (paraphrase) “I don’t come to your office and change how your system works!”

That’s sort of how I feel. Spin didn’t ask me if I was going to be okay with this, and I’m not. I hate this magazine and I want my old one back. And Spin is probably all right with that reaction, but it’s easy to identify other cases where it’s not so cool to piss people off so much that they leave.

No pat solutions here, although maybe others have examples of good or bad to contribute here.

Accidental entrepreneur David Weekly sets a new record for startup failure – Valleywag

Well, I learned a little bit about viral marketing. I also learned that big companies sometimes don’t like small companies innovating using them as a platform.

As part of some programming contest, some smart dude launches a site that monitors MySpace accounts and sees when someone’s relationship status changes to or from single. There are other sites that do something similar. Site is launched, reviewed, and then MySpace lawyers send a letter.

I just thought the quote was interesting, as it’s fascinating to watch the ecosystem (ahem) of products and services emerge around big successes. eBay takes off, and suddenly you’ve got sites to handle posting photos, other sites to handle creating an eBay store, and then even meatspace facilities that will take your item, hold it, post about it, sell it, and ship it off. The iPod has launched more white plastic crap than we can truly conceive of. And here’s an example where it didn’t work, or at least this guy’s example didn’t work. It raises the question, though, where are the MySpace accessories?

The Ethnography of Marketing is another BusinessWeek piece about, well, ethnography. (It should be entitled The Marketing of Ethnography, perhaps).

The Institute of Design…[has] developed the User Insight Tool, an ethnographic methodology designed specifically for business. It relies on disposable cameras, field notebooks, and special software that teases out new understandings from consumer observations.

How does the User Insight Tool work? Researchers decide what human behaviors they want to observe. They give observers disposable cameras to take photos of those activities. With pictures in hand, researchers talk to the people using a standard framework outlined in their field notebooks. The goal is to understand each person’s activities over a number of dimensions such as comfort level and product use. The notes are analyzed and entered into the software along with general insights and the original field notes.

The software lets the researchers look for similarities among all the insights gleaned from the different subjects. It organizes them graphically on the computer screen so large patterns of similarities appear as dense patches or clusters. The value of clustering is that it can reveal hidden patterns of behavior.

Interesting. The Institute of Design has been talking about this tool for a while now, and this is as close to an actual description as we’re probably going to ever get. It’s still remarkably opaque. Is this some advanced Artificial Intelligence system that does Natural Language Processing? That would be surprising to see emerge from the ID, wouldn’t it? If not, then perhaps the article is suggesting that the “observations” that are entered into the system must be put into a set of categories (pre-defined?) and then it does some rudimentary sorting on them? For it’s the creation of that categories that seems enormously challenging.

In science, you can determine your parameters ahead of time; you can even set up all your stats before you do your data collection. But in fieldwork, you don’t really know what the categories are, you can hypothesize, but the pattern recognition has to let you go broader than you imagined (that’s why you are doing this in the first place!).

I’m always a little nervous when I see a piece of technology emerge as the panacea to complex human problem (and we see this all the time, either it’s software, or hypnotism, or MRIs or something else presumably objective). In this case, we’ve got messy people (those who we study) and a slippery skill set (doing ethnography). And it seems that the story here is throwing some gizmo at the problem to eliminate that. Are the people doing the “observations” considered ethnographers or are they simply data collectors working to a script?

There’s always a market for short-cuts, easy answers, quick-and-dirty solutions. Although their case studies sound intriguing from the little bit of detail we’ve been given, I would want to know much much more about what they’re actually doing to get to these results.

When the Institute of Design compared the ethnographic data of both the P&G and Lenovo studies, it found that while the kitchen is the center of family activity in the U.S., the parents’ bed is the family social center in India. This is vital information for any company making global consumer entertainment products.

Is “the parents’ bed is the family social center in India” an ethnographic insight or something that any Indian would be able to tell you? On that note, Dina Mehta has documented a whole series of Indian cultural norms around business, consumption and beyond. It’s a brilliant reference piece. Check ’em out: part 1, part 2, part 3.

Rock is dead they say

If you want rock and roll all night, KISS Coffeehouse will be the place to be. On Tuesday, June 27th, legendary KISS band members Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons will be on hand at Myrtle Beach South Carolina’s Broadway at the Beach to cut the ribbon on the most outrageous coffee and dessert shop ever constructed.

One of the sublime pleasures in being a longtime fan of the Simpsons is that once in a while things happen that seem as if they are torn from the script pages of a recent episode. I suppose the corpse of rock-n-roll has already been flogged, flayed, broasted, turned into a B-way musical, re-released, remastered, repackaged, revised, endorsed, divorced, sold-out, infotained, bleeped and crammed into its Kiss Koffin where it revolves at a dramatic thirty-three-and-a-third revolutions per minute, but damn, this is sweet and bitter (like the coffee and desserts, no doubt).

Check out their menu:
Rockiato (size: Gold, Platinum)
Rockuccino
Cinnamon Rollover
White Choc. Symphony
British Toffee Invasion
Rocket Ride Espresso (sizes: Single, Deuce, Destroyer)
Firehouse S’Mores
Kiss Kooler
also, Cotton Candy, Strawberry Shortcake, and Assorted Cakes, Pies & Sweets (as priced).

Is this what former Flintstones writers are doing nowadays? Frozen Rockuccino! Yikes.

[And is that even the correct KISS lyric they are referencing in their press release? Didn’t they want to rock and roll all nite?]

Backup-Pal seems like a reasonably good idea, but points to a larger problem. Here’s a device that connects to your cell phone and lets you backup your phone book, etc. If the phone dies you’ve still got your data. That’s a problem, and this device solves it. But why aren’t these things interoperable? If I’m already pulling SD cards out of my camera to put in my laptop, why can’t I do that with my cellphone?

Is the future converged formats where we can back everything up easily, or is it a series of special function devices to keep track of that backup everything else? A special third-party TiVo backup, a backup for my microwave, my car, my GPS unit, my XM radio?

I’ve got nothing against this solution, but it speaks to a larger problem that could continue to get worse.

I’ve already blogged about last week’s BW story on ethnography, but I had to add another post once I saw the accompanying picture. Whoah.

Scary looking people in lab coats peering into a dollhouse (with a real tiny family living separately)? Could we evoke anything more horrific and antithetical to the whole point of doing ethnography?

And I still never heard back from the author of the article who invited feedback. Ah, well. Even if I don’t agree with everything BW does, it’s nice that some folks there are extremely interactive with their colleagues, readers, public, etc.

PSFK Agency “Tour”

We’ve started a series of agency visits in New York. If you’d like us to come in and say present at, say, a team meeting we’d be happy to. Our 30 minute conversation includes a break down of PSFK, a look at three critical global trends and a Q&A.

*Flash* Portigal Consulting to launch 4-Star Eatery Tour. We’ve started a series of high-profile power lunches at exquisite restaurants. If’d you’d like us to join you, say, for a meal, such as lunch, or perhaps brunch, we’d be glad to do that. We’d order a selection of appetizers, and regale you with funny (and relevant!) stories from episodes of the Simpsons and Kids in the Hall while we share some dessert after the entree plates are cleared.

If you are an influential player with an expense account, get in touch at steve AT portigal DOT com and we’ll set up our nosh-fest.

steve portigal at design 2.0, originally uploaded by selfconstruct.

This is pretty cool. I like big words. More on this to come, soon.

The Chron gets on board with the whole viral-meme-user-generated-content thing. At least in their articles.

The SoaP meme began, as most great things do these days, with an individual blog entry. Screenwriter Josh Friedman recounted his adventures with doctoring a script for a movie about — why not? — snakes. Snakes on a plane. Snakes on a plane with Samuel Jackson. Could it get better? It could not, reasoned SoaP fanatic Brian Finklestein, a law student at Georgetown University who started SnakesonaBlog.com last year as part of his quest to be invited to the movie’s world premiere. His blog has since morphed into SoaP central, gathering news, rumors and the latest spasms of SoaP-inspired creativity.

While appreciating his efforts, New Line has kept its corporate hands to itself. ‘They’re excited about what’s going on online, but they realize if they get involved directly, the organic, spontaneous feel will be gone,’ Finklestein says. ‘A lot of what’s fun about this is that people are doing everything on their own. If the studio became involved, it would lose whatever charm and cache it has. I’ve gotten phone calls from marketers asking what they can do to make this work for them. The answer is that there’s not much you can do — except not sue your audience. The music industry can learn from this.’

Very well put. For a more in-depth exploration of this type of approach, check out Rob Walker’s classic article about Alex Wipperfurth and the letting-things-be-what-they-are marketing for Pabst Blue Ribbon. Walker, by the way, who writes the Consumed column for the NYT magazine, now has a blog.

By the way, User-Generated Content is now referred to as UGC (or so I read in Media magazine), and Snakes on a Plane is now referred to as SoaP. How cool(?) is that!