“Design is thinking made visual” - Saul Bass
Customer-centricity
At the Customer-Centric Initiative Symposium in Singapore on 11 July, there were some great presentations in the morning session (let’s forget the afternoon!), including some great examples of local companies delivering better services through greater focus on their customers’ needs. The highlight was a presentation by Tim Brown and Andrea Kershaw from IDEO, who provided a clear, common sense framework for thinking about service design issues (and within which the other speakers examples sat very neatly). Read more »
The truth about brand research
“Always within an arm’s reach of desire.” - Robert Woodruff (former chairman of Coca-Cola)
Being available
Let me give away the punch line of this article in my first line: the secret of great marketing is to make your brand easy to buy. Making brands easy to buy means building mental availability (through building salient mental connections) and physical availability (breadth and depth of distribution). Sadly, many marketers and almost all researchers operate under false assumptions about how marketing and advertising work, and make the following mistakes: Read more »
Recent discoveries in neuroscience, psychology and behavioural economics have straightforward implications for designing retail environments and point of sale materials which can be summarised as SHAPEing behaviour:
- Simplify the environment and minimise choices
- Humanise the experience
- Attract by engaging the senses
- Persuade using brand imagery
- Explain to activate choices Read more »
“They must often change who would be constant.” - Confucius
Constancy is the human tendency to perceive objects as unchanging, despite changes in sensory inputs and real world attributes. Although perspective, lighting, colour and size constantly change as we move in the world, we perceive objects to remain constant and unchanging. For example, when we view a person at a distance, they form a smaller image on the eye’s retina than when they are closer to us. Despite this, we perceive the size of the person to be constant, helping our brains to eliminate the need to continuously reinterpret objects in the world. As with all aspects of perception, what we experience is much more than simply receiving sensory inputs, as our brain has to reconcile such inputs with our previous understanding about the properties of things in the world. This constancy is manifest in a number of ways. Read more »
