pecha kucha pecha kucha pecha kucha Madrid

De vuelta del Pecha Kucha Madrid vol.6. Ha habido un buen mix de presentaciones. Personalmente me han gustado más las de la primera mitad (varías de arquitectura y la de poesía). Imagenes, palabras y pensamientos provocadores, bocanadas de aire fresco sobre todo para los que pertenecen (pertenecemos) a otras disciplinas.

Con qué distintos ojos somos capaces de enfrentar una misma realidad según seamos arquitectos, marketineros, publicitarios o lo que sea. Qué limitado por un lado y qué reduccionista pero qué enriquecedor cuando somos capaces de escuchar otros lenguajes.

Para mí la mejor ha sido la visión que sobre los bolardos tienen los chicos de untercio.com. No voy a revelar nada más de momento. Estoy pendiente de retomar mi conversación con ellos para mostraros su presentación pronto en este, mi blog y, por supuesto, suyo de ustedes también.

Left AND right brain

In one of my previous posts I addressed the lack of dialogue between Business and Design. I have just bumped into this article, EQ meeting IQ, by Carina Oskarsson. She also points at the difficulties of communication when one side is wired around text and the other around visuals, the traditional left brain versus right brain argument. Her solution is for one side to adopt the perspective of the other:

"A key to effectiveness is to seek to have the same mental ground as those I cooperate with. We cannot communicate through visuals, so we have to use words in order to gain a common understanding. Once we have a dialog, we develop trust. Trust is more than a brand; that is what design is about".

Definitely, traslation or "learning the other side´s language" does the trick. Nevertheless how enriching it is to be "bilingual". Tools like prezi (to create presentations), or the business model canvas (to describe and analyze business models) come to my mind. I think is about time for Business to learn the language of Design. That fresh air is much needed.

More targeted marketing on Pandora

Listening to Eric Clapton on Pandora, Best Buy offers me a Fender guitar. The model, of course, is Eric Clapton's legendary Stratocaster.



This is what you get when you click on the link. Not quite flashy as the add, but they offer free shipping...

A variation on Amazon's recommendations

A couple of days ago I was browsing through Amazon, getting to know more about how their gift certificates work. Today I got this in my inbox:


"Thanks for visiting Amazon Gift Cards"... wow! they know...

Mixing the right amount of images and words, this short, catchy email is a masterpiece of simplicity and effectiveness:

• Clear value proposition: spread the smiles
• How it works: email, print it, mail it...
• Actionable: buy a Gift Card button, Quick Gift Idea, Pay with Points
• even Cross-selling!: Amazon Gift Cards are redeemable at endless.com

I do not know the cost of the technology that tracks the pages I have visited and determine that I didn't buy a gift card. The rest is simple, dirt cheap, good marketing

Solar branding

I saw this last week walking up Bancroft Avenue in Berkeley. The fact that the signal was powered by solar energy and labeled accordingly with the name of SolarTech drew my attention:




The product is manufactured by Solar Technology, Inc., but if you google Solar Tech you will also come up with an industry consortium promoted by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group (a group of companies involved in public policy issues in the Silicon Valley). There is also another company called Solar Technologies...

Despite the confusion, this "solar tech label" made me think how it could be used to create awareness on how solar energy can power our everyday life. I would argue that solar energy must be made tangible in the same fashion that Intel made us see that they were powering PCs - Intel also captured most of the value in the PC industry along the way-

from intel inside...

...to solar inside,
well, maybe with a cute little sunny icon...

Is there a "solar energy label" or industry certification? I am thinking of something potentially pervasive like that "recyclable" green icon...

Negativity and stickiness

One of the main messages of Strengths Finder 2.0, a book by Gallup's Tom Rath, is that most of the times we focus too hard in solving our shortcomings instead of in boosting our strengths.

First thought:
We focus on the negative -improving defects-, instead of going with the flow -prop up our strengths- which definitely sounds a little bit less strenuous. This reminds me to that martial arts' principle that advises to leverage the force of the opponent instead of wasting our energy opposing him directly.

Second thought:
Tom Rath estates that our culture has created icons out of people who have succeeded thanks to this "you can do anything" approach: underdog, no talent, works hard, faces the challenge and prevails. From Chip and Dan Heath's Made to Stick perspective, this is a perfect example of the "David vs. Goliath" plot. This would be one factor that explains why these icons - or stories at the end of the day- "stick" in our minds. (see other factors, in my previous post mice and books)

Maestro Market, a marketplace for speaking engagements

Are you looking for a public speaker that can deliver an unforgettable mark on your audience? Are you a professional looking for speaking engagements?

If that's the case I would like to talk to you. This summer I will be working with Maestro Market, a marketplace connecting people of talent with customers who can benefit from the talent for events, appearances, and other engagements.


Although being an early stage start up we are all helping out with pretty much anything, I am primarily in charge of Marketing and Product development.

There are two things that get me excited about this project:

• One is the team. We are five people, coming from very different backgrounds yet passionate about entrepreneurship, high-performance and making better matches between talent providers and talent seekers.

• The second one is the possibility to put in practice all that I have learned about user-centric design and customer development. In fact right now I am leading our efforts to map our customers needs.

I enjoy the level of excitement and energy we all share. We are definitely off to a great adventure.

Bart is on twitter

Not Bart simpson but BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) is on twitter. It says a lot about how fast this site is spreading around.

For the moment they are twitting on services updates (such as 10-min. delay between Concord & Pleasant Hill in Pittsburg & SFO directions due to equipment problem. Get all advisories at bart.gov/alerts.), other BART news, give-aways and promotions, pics and videos related to BART or trains...You can check it out here.

The gift of fermentation

Almost one month ago my classmate and friend Sergio introduced me to Adam, the founder of Linden Street Brewery. Adam's beer factory is located in a 1890's red brick building in the port of Oakland. Most of the space as you can imagine is reserved to tanks, pipes, fermenting tanks and other elements for the beer making. Close to that space there's another big room decorated with objects from all over the world, school desks and theater chairs, brewer's magazines and lots of books, especially travel guides.


Sergio and I met Adam again last night over tapas, beers from around the world and fascinating conversation. He is one of these unique individuals who is able to transmit the passion about what he does. He believes in cherishing the product: he brews using methods that originated in the Bay Area during the Gold Rush days. He told us "We play music to the yeast. If you love your yeast, the yeast is gonna give that love back to you". Revolutionary.

His dream was born in the community, for the community. Last week they became the first microbrewery to brew beer in Oakland after 50 years. Without planning it, and starting with a small get together, they have been sharing "the gift of fermentation" with whoever showed up at their parking lot on Fridays. Read the Yelp reviews to have an idea of the magnitude of this true grassroots movement.


From a business perspective Adam is into something big. He knows beer. He has practically had a job in every step involved in the making of beer. He knows the industry, from the hops to the beer tap, from world trends to the numbers of his business. Man, he knows his numbers. His passion and personality are a magnet for positive events to happen around him. Events are stories and stories are differentiation. No MBA-planned marketing campaign will ever match that.

When I talked to Adam I saw something that reminds me of an artist in the moment of creation. Some people call that "the flow"(*). People like Adam inspire you to find what you have been "programmed for" and realize your dreams.

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(*) check out the following TED video by Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi.

Worn out. Play on

ReUSE A SHOE is Nike's initiative to recycle used shoes into surfaces to play. Old shoes are turned into grind that can be used in running tracks, playgrounds, soccer fields and basketball courts.

your old shoes...

...reincarnate as a basketball court

According to the site it takes 50,000-75,000 pairs to resurface a full field or soccer pitch but only 2,500 pairs for an outdoor basketball court.

A meaningful dialogue between Business and Design

In the last months I have had many informational interviews with people in the Design Thinking* space, mostly designers. When I asked them about the value of a Business School graduate in their companies one single comment came up over and over, surprisingly with almost the same words every time: Business and Design do not "talk" to each other. I do not like that. At all. Today more than ever we need the integration of Business and Design in order to solve this mess of interconnected pressing challenges our world is facing.

That's the reason why I have launched The DesignBusiness SandBox.

For the Design and the Business community, the DesignBusiness SandBox is a meeting point that brings the Design perspective into Business and viceversa.


Using Design thinking as the underlying methodology, the goal of this tool is to create a meaningful dialogue between the Design and the Business world.

Although it has been originated as a student-driven Independent Study Project, and right now it lives within UC Berkeley, I eventually would like to open the site to the Design and the Business community. The site is in an very early and shameless prototyping stage. As the first topic for discussion I am focusing on storytelling.

If any of the previous paragraphs appeals to you, [contact me] and become a collaborator. You will make this man happy.

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* Here it is IDEO's Tim Brown's definition of Design Thinking. Here, the wikipedia article, not as catchy as it should be for such an important concept. I should address What is Design Thinking in another post but this might work as a beginning for those of you unfamiliar with the term.

Google Book Search offline campaign on Campus?

Found this week at Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley. The poster has good printing quality and the paper is thicker than normal.

offline marketing...

Is Google Book Search launching a student-driven, ambassador-like promotion campaign at universities? Anyone knows? I will try to find out more about it... By the way, this is what you find when "googling" (or "googleing"?) the term "Search Books"

...complementing AdWords and organic search positioning
Click to enlarge or just google "book search"

Google Book Search owns the main sponsored link and ranks first, third and fifth in the organic search results.

Storytelling and technology

My favorite feature of many many web 2.0 sites is the status update feature. Such a tiny thing is a crazy mix of personal news update, ego-exhibitionism, gossip and who knows what else (probably this is the reason why it appeals to so many people). Such a simple feature can serve many different purposes as casual or as transcendent as you can imagine. Actually there is a debate going on regarding uses of microblogging, Twitter in this case, beyond its traditional purpose.

twitter tweets...

I want to bring here the case of Twitter as an example of how users can find innovative use cases for existing technologies. Recently, going through Frog Design's blog I found this interesting post on how Twitter has been used for a real-time reenactment of the 23 feb 1981 coup d’etat in Spain. In a country that was struggling to consolidate a budding democracy those were uncertain days. I was too young to recall anything but my parents have told me how we were driving home, close to a military cantonment, not knowing if tanks would be out blocking the roads. The whole country held on to their radios and TV sets listening to the pieces of news that kept on dripping every other minute.

...also en español

Twenty eight years later, Twitter users have revisited, minute by minute, this historical event for my country. Isn't it a wonderful way of telling a story with today’s latest technical tools and language?. I am shocked with what people can come up with when given the adequate resources...

Walkin' and a-Talkin'. ATT&T true colors?

This is what I received together with my AT&T monthly bill. A total of 8 pieces of paper of different shapes and colors. In one of them, the green one, I was encouraged to save resources and "go paperless"

Honda case: more fun than a barrel of monkeys

The story of Honda's entry in the US motorcycle market in the 60s is one of the most popular case studies at business schools. Case studies, apart from a cookie-cut narrative structure, tend to include a fair amount of exhibits with graphs and tables. Very rarely they indulge in including light notes or fun facts. The Honda case is extremely appealing by itself but the following document adds some extra color to it:

The Beach Boys composed the song "Little Honda". Since they already had two hits aligned for radio release they put together the Hondels to launch the song. I guess that the song was commissioned as part of the communications campaign of the Honda Super Cub but I have not found any information about it.

Here you have the Beach Boys' tribute to the "groovy little motorbike" that is "more fun that a barrel of monkeys". No product placement in this clip though.

Hang on tight while you listen and enjoy!

Share of stomach / tank

A couple of days ago driving along highway 80 I noticed something, I guess, quite familiar all over the US. Chevron's and McDonald's logos shared a sign at a rest area. I couldn't take a picture of the actual site but it was something quite like this.

.................

What grabbed my attention was that both brands were sharing the same status up above in that sign. Equivalence of stomachs and gas tanks!. For me, gas is a completely undifferentiated product which unique function is to "feed" the car. In a sense, it looked like McDonald's hamburgers were performing for human-beings the same function that gas provides for a car.

The golden arches' brand doesn't come out nicely from the matching. Both brands belong to very different experiences. As a consumer I felt a subconscious disconnect. Well, some may say that at the end of the day it is all about chemistry - organic and inorganic-, isn't it?

Lululemon and customer nakedness

Last week I was shocked to see real customers' pictures in the shop windows of the Lululemon shop close to where I live. When I say real customers I mean people that I know. Apart from a fair and bare amount of their skin, they revealed their dreams too. Over the black and white pictures of their semi-naked bodies all those people had written a concrete personal goal: "I want to become a lawyer by 2016". "I want to be more compasionate"...

Lululemon is a retailer of yoga-inspired athletic apparel. I had the chance to study their business model as part of one of my classes project. They have a powerful mission statement: "Creating components for people to live a longer, healthier, more fun life". Something that sets them apart from other retailers is their strong focus on grass-roots relationships. Their shops try to become rooted in the community they cater to by holding community events and offering free yoga demonstrations and classes. They appoint ambassadors and offer product discounts to athletic instructors.

There is a couple of things that struck me from the "customer nakedness" campaign in the shop windows:

• Lululemon's brand power and connection with their customers. It takes a whole deal of familiarity and credibility as a brand to convince your customers not only to take off their clothes but also to expose, yes, to publicize, their most personal challenges. This would not happen without an authentic personal, one-on-one relationship between the brand representatives (shop owner, sales associates) and the customers. What a credible and consistent-with-brand-values testimonial campaign.

• The participants behavior is the reflection of an interesting sociological trend. Obviously there can be a myriad of personal motivations when volunteering for the pictures. My personal take on it: we need to have our own voice and we need everybody to know. We need to feel beautiful and worthy of praise, admiration - or desire -. Part of the popularity of blogging may have to do with this too. Not many brands are able to provide this unique benefit, and this is an open question for my readers: what brands do you think are giving their customers the possibility of feeling different, unique...you name it?

A note on "branded" email

In Spring 2008 my classmates Alexandra Levich, Jenny Xu and Thang Troung Minh and I carried out an independent study on social networks. The study was supervised by Professor Rashi Glazer, our marketing professor at the Haas School of Business.

The goal of our study was to identify and validate the value proposition of online social networking. Our overarching question was What is the social networks' value proposition and how is it perceived by consumers?. Apart from the explicit, several focus groups unveiled interesting implicit behaviors of online social network users.

the explicit and the implicit

One of these behaviors consisted in that a given user employed facebook.com's messaging system to communicate with the same recipient he has just emailed one minute ago. This modality of "branded" email struck us. Beyond pure use, and despite a clunkier usability than regular email, there seemed to be a lot of hidden meaning.

From an elements-of-communication perspective, it seems that context plays an important role. Facebook, as the context in which this communication happens, has managed to create a new interaction space with its own rules.

In its form of "branded" messaging, the content of a facebook message can potentially be the same as in a traditional email. The channel itself, although clunkier, is technically similar to that of email. Nevertheless a facebook message serves different purposes, and can have different recipients than those of conventional email. Your friends tell you certain things over facebook and other things over email. People who would not email you, contact you via facebook messages. Maybe it is perceived as less intrusive?. Regarding time, my view is that facebook messaging is also perceived as more asynchronous, i.e. less aggressive, than email.

From a marketing point of view this case constitutes a great example of differentiation. Differentiation enabled by the facebook brand and the context it creates, but driven by user behavior. Fascinating.

Communications in the Time of Crisis

As part of their communication strategy in the auto bail out controversy, General Motors has a website - GM Facts and Fiction - addressing facts and myths about the company.


The home page starts laying out plain facts: "General Motors is the best-selling automaker in the U.S., "M’s brands [...] are ranked above industry average as measured by 2008 J.D. Power Initial Quality", etc.

Then, another section of the site follows the scheme myth - fact. Myths about GM are grouped into 5 categories and for each of them there is a response, backed up with data ("GM doesn’t make cars that people want to buy", "General Motors has far too many people working for it","GM designs are uninspiring", etc.). The site even allows visitors to submit myths they might have heard.

It is not available anymore but some weeks ago there were messages addressed to different audiences. I might not remember it perfectly but I think there were specific sections with answers for auto workers, consumers and suppliers. I am a big fan of profiling users in order to increase relevance in the message, so i do not understand why this technique disappeared from the site.

To complete the picture, there are FAQs, latest news and general information on the auto industry.

There are twenty seven (27!) myths. Obviously they are all highly detrimental. Given that the firm refutes them, it would be interesting to know what triggers such amount of bad perception amongst the general public. My point is, what is the role that this fact - widespread negative consumer perception- plays in GM having to recur to a bail out. Twenty seven (at least) false and extremely harmful beliefs have been lurking who knows for how long before the firm started giving facts to counter attack them...

Mice and books

One good example of a message that sticks, found at the Environmental Design Library at UC Berkeley:

It really stands out. The message is more likely to engage people and be remembered as compared to the traditionally "authoritarian" NO FOOD, NO DRINKS IN THE LIBRARY. It happens to follow pretty nicely the Made to Stick (*) "SUCCES" checklist:
- Simple: food attracts mice. Mice destroy books. Crystal clear.
- Unexpected: at the entrance of a library you expect a big poster with a red forbidden symbol crossing a cup and a sandwich icon, or just a NO FOOD, NO DRINKS printout, but NOT an alert to avoid feeding mice.
- Concrete: the message is quite specific...no mistakes here
- Credible: well it's posted by the library guys, they know about this stuff, right? Besides they give us a very compelling reason why we should not bring food into the library instead of the usual Don't do it. Period.
- Emotional: unless you are a ruthless human being, thinking of ruined books hurts.
- Story: again there is a strong visual component here. We picture the mice, or the varmints, or the critters, destroying the books...that visualization is like a little movie playing in our head, easy to remember and engaging.
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(*) Made to Stick is a book by Chip and Dan Heath on "Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die". I highly recommend it. Their blog is pretty cool too.