What do consumers really want?
February 24, 2009 by Phil · Leave a Comment
Customers want to feel what they buy is authentic, but “Mass Customization” author Joseph Pine says selling authenticity is tough because, well, there’s no such thing.
He talks about a few experiences that may be artificial but make millions anyway.
The Long Wow
July 10, 2008 by Phil · Leave a Comment
Adaptive Path’s Brandon Schauer and David Verba, recently gave a presentation on Subject To Change. It’s a good overview of the main points of their new book. “The way most organizations think and work on products and services isn’t suited to the unpredictable world we live in. Instead, companies need new ways of thinking and working to adapt into innovative, agile, and commercially successful organizations who creates great products and services”.
As David Armano pointed out: “The biggest challenge that today’s marketers face is understanding how to overcome the obstacles that get in the way from creating user/customer/consumer experiences that people want to make part of their everyday lives.”
I also wanted to share this slidecast, The long wow. This presentation lays out an experience-centric approach to fostering and creating loyalty by systematically impressing your customers again and again. The Long Wow challenges creators of customer experiences to plan across channels, time, and disciplines to identify a progression of seduceable moments.
For more on that topic, you can check Adaptive Path’s blog.
Virtual export
May 13, 2008 by Phil · Leave a Comment
Gold Farmers are young people who earn their living by playing MMORPG games. They acquire (”farm”) items of value within a game, usually by carrying out in-game actions repeatedly to maximize gains, sometimes by using a program such as a bot or automatic clicker.
They sell the artificial gold coins and other virtual goods they’ve harvested to players and/or farming organizations and get “real” money in return. Players from around the world will then use the golden coins to buy better armor, magic spells and other equipments to climb to higher levels or create more powerful characters.
Interesting article about a documentary by Ge Jin about people in developing countries virtually exporting goods to earn some money.
The cognitive surplus
May 3, 2008 by Phil · Leave a Comment
Now here’s a thought. Clay Shirkey argues that sitcoms could be seen as the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels of society would come off. He points out that since WWII society has been faced with a new phenomenon; through social and economic development, society forced a large amount of people to deal with something they never had before - free time. And as society was simply not able to deal with this new phenomenon, we really needed a drug to numb our brains, make that new life a little more bearable - welcome sitcom.
It’s only now we’re starting to wake up from that collective bender and starting to see the cognitive surplus created by having free time as an asset rather than as a crisis. We’re seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody’s basement.
Brands who are able to carve out and leverage on the cognitive surplus of their target audience will be the brands best placed to succeed in our rapidly changing media landscape. It is about involving your target audience through a media strategy that includes consumption (no, it wont go away), production and sharing to unleash the cognitive surplus that exist in our collective brain. Now that’s a thought.
(via PFSK)