I got this thing in the mail from a company called Veer. The cover slip said: “A giant hand. Angsty Cats. Rioting Models.”

How could I not open it?

It turned out to be a huge advertisement poster. It was so big that once I’d unfolded it, I had to lay it on a chair.

It looked like such a pain in the ass to fold it up again that I left it lying there and went and made coffee.

I was standing in the living room again a few minutes later deciding what to do with my Saturday morning, and I started absentmindedly reading some of the copy on the poster.

It was like I’d created a Veer billboard in my living room.

There was a picture of a sweatshirt I thought was kind of cool. Turns out it’s for sale at Veer’s website. (Veer’s primary business is selling stock photography, fonts, and other graphic design resources.) Then, a description of an animated short that sounded interesting, free to view on the site.

Next thing I know, I’m on my way to Veer’s website, looking for the sweatshirt and the film. Wow. They really got me, didn’t they!

In consideration of the web’s enormous power and ubiquitous presence as a commercial tool, I think this is a testimony to the continuing importance of things you can touch, that interpose themselves in our three-dimensional spaces.

But the story’s not over…

Veer’s website is down.

At this point, I’ve been so adroitly manipulated from being a complete bystander to actively seeking out this company that I’m sure this shutdown itself is also part of the strategy: a way to get me to come back on Monday and talk to someone at Veer, hooked in just a little deeper by thinking I’ve serendipitously ended up with this 10% discount opportunity.

Now I’m caught up in this interesting meta-story–curious about Veer’s tactical moves, wondering if they are being as deeply strategic as I’m imagining?

This whole interaction is an object lesson in the complexity of moving a potential customer back and forth between realspace and webspace, and how many interesting ways there are to go about pursuing this objective.

We’ll see if I use the 10% discount to buy a sweatshirt.

In 2006 Half.com (remember them? I barely do) decided to delete my inventory for sale as a response to level of activity not meeting their standards.

Today I got this email

I haven’t been selling my stuff there for two years, since, well, they got rid of my inventory listings. And now I won’t be buying stuff since they aren’t going to maintain my wishlist? I am amused at the patronizing and punitive tone they’ve taken in writing this email. One wonders what the cost is for them to maintain this data, and what they gain by purging their database of crappy customers like myself.

Of course, there are so many more positive ways they could come up with to encourage my action. What sort of non-monetary incentives could they provide for getting me to add something to my wishlist in the next 24 hours? They’ve got this amazing opportunity to interact with me and make it positive, instead they ridiculously negative about it. Wouldn’t you expect better from eBay?

My second interactions column, Everbody’s Talkin’ At Me, has just been published. I offer some thoughts on the crucial but undervalued activity of listening within the context of storytelling.

Get a PDF of the article here. As the interactions website only has a teaser, we’d like to offer a copy of the article. Send an email to steve AT portigal DOT com and (if you haven’t given us this info before) tell us your name, organization, and title. We’ll send you a PDF.
Other articles

• Persona Non Grata
• The Journey Is The Reward
• Hold Your Horses
• Living In The Overlap
• Some Different Approaches to Making Stuff
• Poets, Priests, and Politicians
• Interacting With Advertising
• Ships in the Night (Part I): Design Without Research?
• Ships in the Night (Part II): Research Without Design?
• We Are Living in a Sci-Fi World
• On Authenticity
• The Hard Work Lies Ahead (If You Want It)
• What to Expect When You’re Not Expecting It
• Elevator Pitch
• Kilroy Was Here
• Never Eat Anything Raw
• Content, the Once and Future King

Just over a year ago I blogged about the push approach that Wal-Mart was taking to drive adoption of energy-efficient fluorescent lighting, spending money on persuasive marketing rather than addressing the known barriers to adoption. A year later, it seems to be okay to acknowledge the problems with the bulbs. The New York Times recently looked at the problems that people have with the quality of light created by those bulbs (nothing new, of course, but the fact that the angle of the story has changed is thought-provoking). Most recently, they offered up this this interview with a Sylvania technologist who speaks to the ongoing work to improve the quality of the light that people experience.

Of course the efforts to improve the bulbs were always ongoing. I’m intrigued by the cultural story that was created by marketing and the media, spending money to force a behavior under the guise of “educating” people.

Make a better light bulb, already. One that is energy efficient and doesn’t make us feel (and look) like crap in our own homes. We’ll beat a path to your door.

On a recent trip to Maui, I came across car after car, abandoned and disintegrating, on the sides of the roads.

At what point will these dumped cars become interesting historical artifacts?

How long ago were petroglyphs simply graffiti?

So much about value is a matter of framing. Has there ever been a marketing tactic more transformative than the simple passage of time?

My dad received the following offer in the mail: a chance to win a free cremation. If he enters, he’ll have a chance to win each month!

They don’t specify, but I guess that must be each month until you die?

What’s especially fascinating is their connection between cremation and mobility:

“With everyone moving around these days,
placing a loved one in a ‘local’ cemetery
may not be as functional as it used to be.”

Portigal Consulting has been doing some projects recently on mobile devices, but I never thought to include cremation urns in that category.

The best part of the letter is the disclaimer at the end of the second page:

“Please accept our apologies if this letter
has reached you at a time of serious illness
or death in your family.”

How compassionate.

Boiled down from a bullet-pointy Fast Company piece that is heavy on highlight but makes me hunger for details.

Get more people to tune in to Court TV

The key has been to think like a consumer-products marketer…create a clear identity for each network.

Research revealed that the viewers of Court TV’s prime-time shows include two main groups: mystery solvers, typically women ages 25 to 54 who enjoy piecing together a story to solve a problem, and “real engagers,” young men who like true stories that take them places they wouldn’t otherwise go.

[So,] change the name. Court TV evokes images of criminals. The channel will relaunch as truTV.

Before truTV debuts, Koonin will send researchers into the homes of target viewers to gather information, much as Intuit famously does with its software.

Today’s NYT magazine included a letter written in response to How Do you Say ‘Got Milk’ en Espa?±ol? (about Hispanic advertising).

Giving catchy names to particular demographic segments is one of advertising’s oldest tricks to make the craft seem “scientific”. But why spend time defining the characteristics of each segment if it turns out everybody is a mix of all of them -“a Straddler . . . with certain Learner/Navigator undercurrents”?

Agreed. As I’ve written before, personas are user-centered bullshit.

This story (link may expire) about an evolution in Japanese shampoo marketing points to a loosening of traditional advertising personas (and an associated shift in beliefs about who their customer really is).

Kaori Sasaki, who heads a communication consulting company, said Japanese businesses long viewed female consumers in three oversimplified categories – the housewife, office worker and schoolgirl.

But that formula is rapidly growing obsolete as more women pursue ambitious careers and more mothers join the work force, she said.

“Marketing is changing to reflect a changing lifestyle,” Sasaki said. She noted a recent TV commercial for detergent that depicts a man doing the wash – something once virtually unthinkable in male-dominated Japan.

I just started reading Guerrilla Marketing and was bemused by the list of associated books.

It’s way too small to read here, but click the picture to see it larger.

The New York Times looks at Ludlum and other dead authors who continue to (sorta) release books. This isn’t new; in recent years we’ve seen post-Frank Herbert Dune and other Asimov/Robots books. John Gardner and others have been writing James Bond books for a while now. But as media continues to talk about “brands” and (ugh) “franchises” then I guess this is what we’re in for. It’s easier to sell (and buy) something that is already known that break through with something new. Movies into games. Games into movies. Sequels. Prequels. Remakes. The book people may just be getting started.

Whether it is fair to readers to publish the Ludlum books posthumously – in the form of spruced-up old manuscripts or new novels written by others – is not a serious concern to the estate or to Grand Central Publishing, the former Warner Books, where the rights to all new novels moved from St. Martin’s Press.

“I don’t think anyone objects as long as you maintain the quality of the book,” Mr. Morrison said. “The Sherlock Holmes novels have been a business since ‘The Seven-Percent Solution,’ and some have been better than others. It’s the characters that interest people.”

(click to enlarge, if you really want to)

Ask dropped Jeeves a long time ago. Over the past few weeks I’ve seen this really bizarre campaign (with odd billboards) and the thrust of it seems to be restating the fact that Jeeves is gone. Oh, and somehow talking about the algorithm ties to that. Algorithm? If you don’t have a background in computer science or as a programmer, is that a word you are comfortable with? At least the NYT put quotes around the word for their piece about Google’s secret sauce.

Today the press is carrying the same story but it all seems weird. The timing is out of sync and just seems way too late and the ads themselves are so absolutely unclear. Are we supposed to be curious and therefore more engaged with the brand? If I were marketing a search engine, I might want to associate the brand with clear communication and easy-to-understand information, rather than dense and obscure and smug.

But that’s just me, I guess.

There’s tons of good stuff on business/manufacturing/processes/marketing/company culture/innovation in the fantastic article about Toyota from the Sunday NYT magazine. I’ve picked just a bit to share here.

Toyota’s chief engineers consider it their responsibility to begin a design (or a redesign) by going out and seeing for themselves – the term within Toyota is genchi genbutsu – what customers want in a car or a truck and how any current versions come up short. This quest can sometimes seem Arthurian, with chief engineers leading lonely and gallant expeditions in an attempt to figure out how to beat the competition. Most extreme, perhaps, was the task Yuji Yokoya set for himself when he was asked to redesign the Sienna minivan. He decided he would drive the Sienna (and other minivans) in every American state, every Canadian province and most of Mexico. Yokoya at one point decided to visit a tiny and remote Canadian town, Rankin Inlet, in Nunavut, near the Arctic Circle. He flew there in a small plane, borrowed a minivan from a Rankin Inlet taxi driver and drove around for a few minutes (there were very few roads). The point of all this to and fro, Jeff Liker says, was to test different vans – on ice, in wind, on highways and city streets – and make Toyota’s superior. Curiously, even when his three-year, 53,000-mile journey was finished, Yokoya could not stop. One person at Toyota told me he bumped into him at a hotel in the middle of Death Valley, Calif., after the new Sienna came out in 2004. Apparently, Yokoya wanted to see how his redesigned van was handling in the desert.

and

The way a farmer uses a truck is different from the way a construction worker does; preferences in Texas (for two-wheel drive) differ from those in Montana (for four-wheel drive). Truck drivers have diverse needs in terms of horsepower and torque, since they carry different payloads on different terrain. They also have variable needs when it comes to cab size (seating between two and five people) and fuel economy (depending on the length of a commute). In August 2002, Obu and his team began visiting different regions of the U.S.; they went to logging camps, horse farms, factories and construction sites to meet with truck owners. By asking them face to face about their needs, Obu and Schrage sought to understand preferences for towing capacity and power; by silently observing them at work, they learned things about the ideal placement of the gear shifter, for instance, or that the door handle and radio knobs should be extra large, because pickup owners often wear work gloves all day. When the team discerned that the pickup has now evolved into a kind of mobile office for many contractors, the engineers sought to create a space for a laptop and hanging files next to the driver. Finally, they made archaeological visits to truck graveyards in Michigan, where they poked around the rusting hulks of pickups and saw what parts had lasted. With so many retired trucks in one place, they also gained a better sense of how trucks had evolved over the past 30 years – becoming larger, more varied, more luxurious – and where they might go next.

Obu’s team, which drew on hundreds of engineers, ultimately produced a pickup model with 31 variations that include engines, wheelbases and cabs of different sizes. Design engineers, however, cannot simply create the best truck they can; they need to create the best truck that can be built in a big factory. In other words, Tundra’s design engineers had to confer with Tundra’s manufacturing engineers at every step of the way to create a truck – or 31 trucks, really – that could be assembled efficiently and systematically.

John Winsor describes a Starbucks promotion

… when he saw a guy starting to drive off with a Starbucks’ coffee cup on top of his car. [He] whistled at the guy who promptly thanked him and got out of the car to hand him a coupon to Starbucks.

No doubt this is effective; it made an impression on the warn-er, it made an impression on John, and the story is being spread.

But it’s deceptive. John suggests (if I read him properly) that this promotion and indeed Starbucks are great. I don’t know how I would react, but hearing the story makes me angry and resentful. The work of fending off scams – any situation where someone wants something from you that will have to give up if you aren’t careful – is mighty. I can’t trust the person who chats me up in a bar (not that this happens to me personally, of course) in case they are promoting booze or mobile phones. I can’t trust the phone calls or emails I get. And now I can’t trust the person who needs a little Good Samaritan assistance. If I help someone get their bag under their seat on the plane ride home tonight, will they offer me a flyer about Samsonite? Gah, I hope note.

Our culture mostly expects a clear delineation between content and promotion (with many many many exceptions); the people I’m talking to this week about how they learn what foods go with what wines are a great example: if Trader Joe’s puts up an end-cap with a chalkboard that describes the wine on display, that’s okay. Sure, Trader Joe’s was paid by the wine maker to do this, but it’s preferable than having this information on the bottle. There’s a comfort and credibility in context; even if we understand what’s going on behind the scenes. Breaking through that, as Starbucks is trying to do is notable, but personally uncomfortable.

Update: this has been going on for at least a year

MarCamp – Marketing, Advertising, Recommendations is an unconference sponsored by France Telecom – Orange.

How will marketing and advertising evolve in the next 5 years? How best to leverage the power of the community and 2.0 technologies to the benefit of marketing and advertising? How to improve the relationship with your customers? How important will interactivity with your customer be in your product design strategies?

Having been at one “camp”, I’d like to try and lead a discussion at MarCamp; but I’m not clear yet what the topic should be…