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 »
Language and thinking
I have always been fascinated by colour (and spent much of my time as a PhD student using colour to prove the validity of some of the methods I was using). The language of colour is particularly fascinating. Like smell, our human ability to detect different colours is vastly in excess of our ability to describe what we can perceive. According to Berlin and Kay, there are no more than eleven terms which are commonly used to describe the abstract properties (hues) of colours, as Inspector Insight wrote in a previous article. Read more »
Making more sense of brand experiences
A recent post on Making Sense of Brand Design (link here) shares some great examples of creating sensory signatures to create short term impact and long term brand identity, and recent reading (see references) has revealed more ways in which the senses can be leveraged to create great brand experiences.
The most interesting overall finding revealed in Helmut Leder’s Scientific American article is that in the short term how a product or experience looks is very important to its appeal, but after a month of use how it feels comes to be much more important than how it looks. It’s great to wear a really fancy pair of shoes for the first time, but we won’t wear them very often unless they are really comfortable on our feet. Read more »
The brain science of marketing
In his recent book Brainfluence, Roger Dooley shares 100 tricks for persuading and convincing consumers based on a wide range of evidence from neuromarketing and many other fields such as psychology and behavioural economics. The examples are well documented and overall this is a much more practical, structured and sound guide to brain science of marketing than many other books (including notably Buyology which is less structured and poorly documented). Read more »
Storytelling helps designers and marketers create imagery, emotional resonance and a more complete understanding of events or systems through a natural interaction between themselves and an audience. Storytelling is an important skill in learning and sharing information and biologically hard wired into all of us as a uniquely human trait. Storytelling is the original method through which we have always passed information to one another and is a rich and satisfying way to share knowledge. Read more »
Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain
Mnemonic devices help us remember information by reorganising it to be simpler and more meaningful (often creating iconic representations through letters and images). Mnemonic devices use images and words in very specific ways to create a mental shortcut from less familiar information to more familiar memories which are already embedded in the brain. As with icons, such devices are most powerful when the images are vivid, peculiar or exaggerated in some way or the words and letters are very familiar and closely related to any images. They are particularly useful for remembering names of new things, large amounts of information (through chunking), and sequences of events (ie procedures). Examples of mnemonic devices are: Read more »
The Incredulity of Saint Thomas by Caravaggio
“The hands want to see, the eyes want to caress.” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“The task of architecture is to make visible how the world touches us” - Juhani Pallasmaa paraphrasing Merleau-Ponty
Are we seeing too much?
In The Eyes of the Skin, Juhani Pallasmaa argues for the importance of our sense of touch and the dangerous dominance of vision in our thinking, design and buildings. Vision was the last of the senses to develop in evolutionary terms, but has become our dominant sense accounting for around two-thirds or more of sensory processing (you can read more on vision here and more on touch here). Like all the other senses, our sight is embedded in our skin and is an adaptation of it. Vision originated as light sensitive skin cells, and our eyes still have a covering of skin. Our skin is still sensitive to light and experiments have shown that some people are even able to detect colour from their skin’s sensitivity alone (that is, they can see with their skin!). Read more »
Colourful designs
Colour is used by designers and marketers to attract attention, group elements, provide meaning and enhance aesthetics, making designs more visually interesting and appealing and reinforcing the organisation and meaning of elements and features in the design. When badly used, colour can impair the form and function of a design, but there are well used guidelines for how to use colours properly in any design work, and the main themes are summarised below. Read more »
Should communication be adapted for local markets or be consistent and global? Accommodation theory was developed in the 70s by Howard Giles and others, and describes the process where we adapt communication styles (word choice, accent, dialect and other aspects) to minimise the social distance between ourselves and others (or in some contexts we may do the opposite and emphasise or maximise the social distance). The theory argues that such behaviour is noticed and appreciated by others, as we all find those similar to us more attractive and persuasive (as Robert Cialdini explains). Read more »
