If you want to get to the heart of a customer’s relationship with a brand experience, asking them to write a personal letter can often reveal deep insights about what they value and expect from even the most everyday objects and interactions. Read more »

“Although there is no substitute for merit in writing, clarity comes closest to being one.” – Strunk & White

Long blog articles are going out of style, as we all learn to write short concise messages (for many in less than 140 characters). The danger of this change is that subtle meanings can be lost and messages impoverished by a focus on literal meanings and core content without the context. In Microstyle, Christopher Johnson provides some useful tips on how to think big and write small to make short but important messages stand out from the crowd and stick in the mind. Read more »

Chance favours the prepared mind

The approaches that businesses use for brainstorming are widespread (almost universal) and date back to the work of Alex Osborn in the late 1940s. In his new book Imagine, Jonah Lehrer argues that some of the assumptions for these tools are wrong, and that we need to rethink, at least in part, how we understand and practise the creative process, basing his arguments on scientific studies and latest brain science. Read more »

The trouble with the future

Many organisations do some form of long term planning, and typically such plans are based on forecasts which extrapolate the present into the future (e.g., by talking a spreadsheet and adding a set percentage to key numbers!). Even when such plans include future ‘scenarios’ these typically reflect the best and worst cases which can be thought of at the time (i.e., the biggest and smallest percentages which can be imagined). Read more »

“Five senses, an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them – never become conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?” – C.S. Lewis

Marketing to the senses

Our experience of the world, and the brands in it, is always mediated by our senses and our mind. Every communication, interaction, touchpoint and connection must first come to us through one or more sensory channels, and then is subject to interpretation by our brains, mostly based on past experiences and anticipated outcomes. In previous articles, I have written about the five main senses, and their importance in architecture, design and marketing. Read more »

How smart are our eyes?

In his Theory of Colours, published just over 200 years ago, Goethe describes colour as having ‘a strange duplicity’ and wrote about colour as something other than constant and fixed. Although his theory has been superseded, his ideas on colour perception as a product of the interplay of light and dark are still relevant today. Goethe is also partly responsible for the colour circle that is standard now and the idea of complementary colours. Read more »

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.”  - F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.”  - Albert Einstein

Connecting the dots

Are you drowning in the sea of data yet? As the world becomes more and more complex, with more and more information to understand and less and less time to do this, the importance of integrative thinking becomes more and more important. In The Opposable Mind, Roger Martin presents a number of convincing business case studies, including A.G. Lafley at P&G, Jack Welch at GE, Michael Lee-Chin at AIC and Martha Graham (who revolutionised modern dance), all of whom were able to see problems from a range of perspectives, think in terms of total systems and not component parts, and simplify complex ideas into straight forward (and often disruptive) solutions to problems. Read more »

“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 »

Dan Pink’s post on solving problems by sharing them intrigued and inspired me.  He reports recent research which shows that we are quicker and better at solving problems when we are solving them for other people than when we solve them for ourselves, and we get better and better the ‘further’ away we are from the person.  Put another way, the more we are able to distance ourselves from a problem, the more abstract and creative our problem solving is. It can really help your perspective to trade places with someone else (as Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy discovered). Read more »

The importance of ‘why?’

Jean Piaget described children as “little scientists”, seeing them as active thinkers developing knowledge through constant theorising and experimentation in the world.  In her book The Philosophical Baby, Alison Gopnik expands this idea based on latest research arguing powerfully that one of the reasons for human success is the extended period of immaturity that has been allowed through the development of social groups, which allows us to be ‘smarter’ when we finally grow up by also extending our time for learning (and theorising). The book reminded me very much of my earliest encounters with psychology applying the theories of George Kelly (who described man as a scientist too). Read more »