Aradhna Krishna’s new book on sensory marketing “Customer Sense” is a welcome addition to a very select list of reading on the topic. Aradhna has already edited “Sensory Marketing”, which contains chapters by experts in each of the five senses, many full of interesting insights and examples of how the senses work and how brands can create more engaging product and service experiences.
Is Pantone’s choice of Emerald (Pantone reference 17-5641) an inspired read of cultural shifts and green shoots of recovery or a slightly naive hope for the coming year? [Read about the different meanings of green here.] Read more »
Interference effects are the name given to the slowing of mental processing (with diminished accuracy) when there are competing mental processes. They occur when two or more perceptual or cognitive processes are in conflict, reflecting the multiple systems used by the brain to process information independently of one another. The outputs of these systems are communicated to working memory for interpretation when there are relevant goals. When they are congruent. interpretation is quick and performance is optimal, but when they are incongruent interference occurs and additional processing and time is needed to resolve the conflict, leading to a negative impact on performance. Read more »
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 »
[This is an edited version of a talk for IAA Singapore and 4As on 26th September 2012]
Advertising can learn much from the latest understanding of the brain just as market research can (read more here). Although there is much to learn, here are three important lessons:
The Cathedral effect describes the influence of the perceived height of a ceiling and human thinking, and is (at least in part) a priming effect. High ceilings are known to encourage abstract thinking (creativity) and low ceilings encourage concrete thinking (focus on detail). Most people prefer high ceilings to low ceilings, and the Cathedral effect demonstrates that the environment can impact our approach to problem solving (either enhancing or undermining ability, depending on the nature of the problem to be solved)
“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 »
Easy user experiences
Mapping is the term used to describe the relationship between controls and their movements or effects, and good mapping is an important part of making the user experience easy and enjoyable. For example, the Segway human transporter goes forward when the user leans forward and back when the user leans back. A great use of mapping. Read more »
Designing for fictional characters
Personas is a design for helping guide decision making regarding features, interactions and aesthetics by focusing on the needs of specific (but often fictitious) profiles of people. Read more »
