Hee-Haw Marketing

All kinds of stuff

Department of good quotes
Every discovery by definition is unpredictable. If it were predictable it wouldn't be a discovery. Creativity exposes unpredictable things to be discovered.
-Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation

Indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is actually the one and only cardinal sin of design.
-Dieter Rams

The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.
-Franklin D. Roosevelt

Surround yourself with talented people and then let them step up. In our real lives we often have the luxury of time and titles to question and prod and redo. Often that makes for really great art, but it's good to be reminded that you can work from a place of fundamental trust as well.
-Association of Independent Radio

Where Music and Foodie Culture Meet
"'Obviously, you've got the total punk aesthetic of the working kitchen, with the cursing, staying up until 4 a.m., the drugs and everything,' said Dawson Ludwig, marketing director for Noise Pop. 'But it's more than that. Good music and good food are total indulgence, both providing fulfilling sensual experiences.'"

Turntable Kitchen: Pairings Box
"Introducing the Turntable Kitchen Pairings Box: a curated food and music discovery experience, delivered to your door, every month."

Teller explains the psychology of illusions

Film Psychology: The Shining, Spatial Awareness

One of the original influencer outreach programs
The Tennessee Squire Association created by Jack Daniels. From wikipedia: "A Tennessee Squire is a member of the Tennessee Squire Association, which was formed in 1956 to honor special friends of the Jack Daniel's distillery. Many prominent business and entertainment professionals are included among the membership, which is obtained only through recommendation of a current member. Squires receive a wallet card and deed certificate proclaiming them as "owner" of an unrecorded plot of land at the distillery and an honorary citizen of Moore County, Tennessee."

Music Bloggers Hack the Record Industry
"It’s not a common way to release a record, but putting out an album through a popular indie music blog is a pretty smart way to hack the traditional record industry business model. Yours Truly is just the latest indie music blog to launch a label, serving up lovingly crafted offerings and using the kind of promotional savvy that traditional record companies can’t seem to muster."

Barbie in Real Life

Big Smarts

From Influential to Small Connected Groups

"I feel that we’re at the beginning of a cycle in business where we move away from this idea of “influentials”, and instead focus marketing activity on small connected groups of close friends. I think this is what marketers are starting to think about, and will be the prominent theme for this decade."

Why Are Spy Researchers Building a Metaphor Program?

"The Metaphor Program may represent a nine-figure investment by the government in understanding how people use language. But that's because metaphor studies aren't light or frilly and IARPA isn't afraid of taking on unusual sounding projects if they think they might help intelligence analysts sort through and decode the tremendous amounts of data pouring into their minds."

Tesco's Home Plus Subway Virtual Store

Where Food is God

"American health food is usually said to have started with a Presbyterian minister: Sylvester Graham, who first lectured on the virtues of vegetarianism during the 1820s. (He is remembered as the namesake of the graham cracker.) It really got going in 1863 when Ellen White, a leader of several hundred Christians who called themselves the Seventh-day Adventists, said that God had revealed to her that "Grains, fruits, nuts, and vegetables constitute the diet chosen for us by our Creator." The Adventists became vegetarians, and by the turn of the century, two members, cereal moguls John Harvey Kellogg and C.W. Post (who once marketed cornflakes as "Elijah's Manna"), had laid the groundwork for the U.S. health-food industry."

How Can You Make Healthy Food More Satisfying?

"Participants' satiety was consistent with what they believed they were consuming rather than the actual nutritional value of what they consumed."

The Package-free Grocery Store

"Focusing on the concept of “pre-cycling,” the store will encourage shoppers to bring their own containers from home, filling them up with and purchasing only the amounts of food that they need."

A Look at How Many Calories $1 Will Buy

"One dollar’s worth of Coke has 447 calories, while $1 of iceberg lettuce has just 16.5. To look at it another way, you would have to spend about $5 to buy 2,000 calories at McDonald’s, $19 to buy 2,000 calories worth of canned tuna and $60 to buy 2,000 calories worth of lettuce."

How Earned Media Boosts the Branding Effect of Paid Ads

Secondary Attention and Little Boxes of Sound

"And this brilliant post from Phil made me realise how much the device oriented bits of sound design and behaviour is also focused on Primary Attention. The Walkman gave us personal soundtracks, I wouldn't be without mine, but they're a powerful drug and there's a difference between listening to sound in your head and listening to sound in the world. Maybe, in fact, there's a more important difference - between listening and hearing."

The Argumentative Theory

We now know that our rationality is inextricably linked to our gut. But now it seems we may have misunderstood why we reason at all. Decades of research has been developed to better understand decision making in regards to the individual when it seems we keep coming back to what makes us fundamentally different, our social evolution. Enter the Argumentative Theory of Reasoning:

"We do all these irrational things, and despite mounting results, people are not really changing their basic assumption. They are not challenging the basic idea that reasoning is for individual purposes. The premise is that reasoning should help us make better decisions, get at better beliefs. And if you start from this premise, then it follows that reasoning should help us deal with logical problems and it should help us understand statistics. But reasoning doesn't do all these things, or it does all these things very, very poorly."

"Reasoning was not designed to pursue the truth. Reasoning was designed by evolution to help us win arguments... Reasoning can lead to poor outcomes, not because humans are bad at it, but because they systematically strive for arguments that justify their beliefs or their actions. This explains the confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and reason-based choice, among other things."

No grand conclusion here, but it does speak to a couple things - first, the people we're trying to influence aren't necessarily looking for the best list of features. Gaining competitive advantage is about understanding belief systems, culture, lifestyles, environments, and the like - not winning on the battlefield of objective rationality. We just have to credibly justify the gut.

But more importantly, it speaks to how important our approach is in creating better ideas. We need to work with, for and among people that perceive the world differently than we do, we need to create environments in which contrarianism is lauded, where openness to new thinking and conversation is expected and where rigidity in the process exists mostly to force experimentation and sharing.

photo via jason rowe 

Some Cool Stuff

No Place Like Marfa Texas

The Photography of Ray Gordon

Levi's Film Workshops

Why did LOL infiltrate?

The word serves a real purpose - it conveys tone in text, something that even the most cynical critics accept.

"I don't 'LOL'. I'm basically someone who kind of hates it," says Rob Manuel of the internet humour site b3ta.

"But the truth is, we do need emotional signifiers in tweets and emails, just as conversation has laughter. 'LOL' might make me look like a twit, but at least you know when I'm being arch."

A few good promises

I promise to stay curious.

I promise to look for the other way.

I promise to experiment.

I promise to remember the lesson and forget the rest.

I promise to carry on the cause.

I promise to inspire when I feel inspired.

I promise to use empathic ears.

I promise to learn something from everyone.

I promise to be different.

I promise to persist, but adapt.

I promise to be focused, but flexible.

I promise to accept responsibility.

I promise to win together.

It's the Links

Behind the Scenes at TED

70 Online Databases that Define Our Planet

"While good data from social sciences experiments has been hard to come by in the past, researchers are currently swamped by it thanks to a new generation of lab experiments, web experiments and the study of massive multi-player on-line games."

Language and Tone of Voice: A look at "Oh Great"

In Pursuit of the Perfect Brainstorm

"In the last decade, a quirky legion of idea peddlers has quietly invented what might be a new discipline and is certainly an expanding niche. How and why this happened is, naturally, a subject that everyone in the field theorizes about. What’s clear is that in recent years, much of corporate America has gone meta — it has started thinking about thinking. And all that thinking has led many executives to the same conclusion: We need help thinking."

Dialects in Tweets

"More interestingly, however, there is a major difference in regional slang. ‘uu’, for instance, is pretty much exclusively on the Eastern seaboard, while ‘you’ is stretched across the nation (with ‘yu’ being only slightly smaller.) ‘suttin’ for something is used only in NY, as is ’deadass’ (meaning very) and, on and even smaller scale, ‘odee’, while ‘af’ is used for very in the Southwest, and ‘hella’ is used in most of the Western states."

Pick the meal for the person behind you

"It’s a creative, if strange little set-up since you still face the problem of choice overload – you have to pick something off the full menu – and the requirement to make a choice for yourself, without the benefit of getting what you ordered."

Mini Planners

MINI PLANNERS from Moleskine ® on Vimeo.

Everything will be reinvented

"I don’t mean to come off as some starry eyed huckster but, from my vantage point, we’re living in a very exciting time. If ever there were an opportunity to think big and attack large markets with incumbent players, its now. I’m a believer that in the next 5 years we’re going to see every major industry reinvented in ways we didn’t see coming."

Things Left Unsaid

When asked his view of the value of University education, Jason Fried of 37 Signals finished with a description of the class he'd like to teach:

"It would be a writing course. Every assignment would be delivered in five versions: A three page version, a one page version, a three paragraph version, a one paragraph version, and a one sentence version.

I don’t care about the topic. I care about the editing. I care about the constant refinement and compression. I care about taking three pages and turning it one page. Then from one page into three paragraphs. Then from three paragraphs into one paragraph. And finally, from one paragraph into one perfectly distilled sentence.

Along the way you’d trade detail for brevity. Hopefully adding clarity at each point. This is important because I believe editing is an essential skill that is often overlooked and under appreciated. The future belongs to the best editors."

Editing is one of the last skills to hone. Hoarding and discovering are just more fun and much less painful. 

But the winnowing process as defined by Jason makes editing seem far less sacrificial. I've heard some of the best radio writers don't actually start with the ad, but write full stories, developing characters and scenes in order to understand motive and intent. So each next step in the process of editing isn't a step away from meaning, but towards clarity. Each unable to stand without the understanding generated by the one before.

Seems obvious maybe, but we probably don't give enough credit to all the things we've left unsaid.

(photo via this isn't happiness)

Understanding Customer Culture

It's shill time, peeps. If you could take a few moments to vote for our SXSW submission, Understanding Customer Culture; Caution: May Require Cajones, it would certainly be much appreciated. The panel is pretty super, I must say, including the Director of Strategy at Twist, Sean Howard, the brilliant Sam Ladner, the author of one of my favorite books of this year, Grant McCracken, and the man that pulled it all together - Huffington Post and Marketing to Culture blogger, Ujwal Arkalgud.

Vote by clicking the thumbs up here

Some other good goods you should vote for:

Community Thunderdone - Brand vs. Unbranded, You decide w/ Bud and Mike

Conquering Creativity: A Creative Method For Every Mind w/ Jason Theodor

Why PR's Future May Not Look Like PR w/ David Armano