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Why my future business card is as it is. On Design thinking.

My future business card - definitive version

I recently got selected for the IBBT iBootcamp dating event. It’s a thing about innovative start-ups.
Some of the teams are still looking for people in marketing to empower their business idea. So I presented myself.
One week later. E-mail: “you’re selected”. Hooray! Wait a minute, maybe I need a personal business card for that? So I started thinking.

Design thinking is to come up with different scenarios and consequently select the best design

Design thinking is huge these days. Is it a buzz? I believe it’s more. It’s an essential way of getting the best result. Design Thinking isn’t just for car designers, interior designers or architects. No, even writing is design thinking.
You come up with a bunch of angles to frame your point in. You select the best angle, the one that appeals most to people. Design works in the same way: you choose that design which you expect will appeal most to people.

Maybe I do have design skills?

As I just figured out I was always using Design Thinking as a means to create an article, it came to me that maybe I could have got those design skills I’ve always dreamed of. Why not do the same but now with graphics?
Below are some steps of the process. No need for words.

Oh, maybe just one more question: would it make sense to create this business card in A4 format?
Who wouldn’t remember such a big business card?

Business card - design phase 1

Business card - design phase 2

Business card - design phase 3

Business card - design phase 4

Making it look beautiful

I’m currently trying to turn this into something sexy. I guess you’ll see the result when we meet, offline.

The rise of Happiness Engineer & The Corporate pursuit of Happiness.

corporate pursuit of happiness

After several months of bloglessness I finally got myself up-and-running again. Full of inspiration? Yes. And I still remember my password too. Great! But that’s only half-way there.

Earlier this week, I couldn’t access my blog Administration. WordPress kindly informed me about the issues. The message was something similar to “Whoops! There’s something wrong. Please check the knowledge base for any known issues and if none of this helps, drop us a note”.

So I did all of that but ended up dropping them that note. The issue got solved extremely quickly by Andrew. But I don’t want to talk about WordPress’s great support service today.

Today I want to talk about Andrew. Andrew is a Happiness Engineer at WordPress. Happiness Engineer? What on earth? Well, WordPress probably met Marketing professor Jennifer Aaker and her research on “Happiness”.

Jennifer Aaker’s study on the corporate pursuit of happiness

Jennifer Aaker is a well-known professor marketing. She studies psychology alongside marketing and spent the last several years studying the subject of “happiness”. How do people find happiness? How do they keep it? How do they manipulate it? How do they use it as a resource?

Jennifer L. Aaker, General Atlantic Professor of Marketing, Graduate School of Business Stanford University

The main finding of the study is that in fact a “meaningful experience” (e.g.: new skill) often makes people happier than moments of pure pleasure. This is what she and others call the “Paradox of Happiness”.

Next to that, she discovered happiness is age-dependent. Young people relate happiness to excitement whereas elderly link it with peacefulness. But what’s more important to me is that Aaker soon discovered that the above little nuances were key for marketing and business.
After all, she realized, brands are increasingly trying to appeal to consumer’s emotions to keep their sales going in these rough economic times.

So she set up her theory and easily convinced the academic world that she was on to something – resulting in a graduate-level class “Designing Happiness” in one of USA’s leading business schools. But in today’s post-recession economy, where morale is low, brand owners and marketers tend to see the appeal of promising happiness along with their products as well. They realized that they could deploy happiness as any other commodity to sell something.

Of course, the question is: how does one implement the ideas of Happiness into marketing and business? Let’s have a look at corporations that tried to integrate this entire “happiness idea”.

Aaker’s Happiness and some Big Guns

• Adobe:
  got lectured by Aaker on the liaison between happiness and meaningful moments. The ideas were implemented through the “Adobe Youth Voices” project. The project allows children and teenagers from poor environments to use the Adobe software freely in order to create their story.
• Coke:
  experimented with the link between happiness and the brand. Just think about Coke’s “happiness machine” or the entire “open happiness” campaign.
• AOL:
  sources claim they have received lectures from Prof. Aaker but I don’t have an idea whether they implemented it in one way or another.

Benefits of “happiness-driven” marketing campaigns?

In fact nobody really knows for sure, as is often the case in social sciences. Aaker’s hypotheses is the following:

Marketing Happiness is one of the few ways businesses can still appeal to people in a manner that feels authentic. That’s important, because people have an aversion to anything that feels overly manufactured.

The concept of Marketing Happiness thus expands the idea of what it means to buy something. If you follow this theory, you believe that brands can provide greater meaning to the world for the consumer. One of those greater meanings could be things that enable happiness. Consequently the consumers want to share that happy moment and feeling as if the product is part of their lives and community (read: facebook likes, twitter mentions).
Happy Talk = Word-of-Mouth!

Case WordPress: bringing Happiness through a job title isn’t enough

E-mail from the Happiness Engineer at WordPress

Best regards — Andrew — Happiness Engineer — WordPress.com

As I mentioned earlier in this article, I dropped WordPress a note to register my issue. Most compelling about the whole support was the job name of the guy helping me out. Andrew is a Happiness Engineer. Guess his job is to engineer people into a happy state of mind, right? Now how can he make people happy?

First, and this is what most people believe is sufficient, he can solve our technical problems as soon as possible.

Second, he can inform us what the error is about and educate us about the skill required to fix it. Maybe next time I can do it myself. This is what’s going to make me really happy, according to Aaker’s findings. And it will probably make Andrew happy too. His work-load will decrease. Andrew choose the first option by the way. He solved it himself. Not teaching me anything. Maybe Andrew already figured I couldn’t fix it anyway.

Aaker discovered that a meaningful experience (e.g.: new skill, volunteering, spending time with family) often makes people happier than moment of pure pleasure.

Andrew, are you authentic? Do you really exist?

Aaker believes marketing happiness could be one of the few ways business can still appeal to people in an authentic way.

I doubt the authenticity of Andrew. Would an authentic human being out of flesh and blood e-mail you six times? Would he send recurring e-mails that bring you exactly the same message? I wouldn’t for sure. It felt like spam. And I’m quite convinced that you’d experience too much e-mails as “manufactured” as well. Didn’t Aaker learned us that we actually don’t like that?

Aaker says that people have an aversion to anything that feels overly manufactured.

Andrew, WordPress's Hapiness Engineer send me 6 e-mails.

WordPress and Aaker did they ever had a date?

So, in the end I find myself asking: did WordPress ever had a lecture from Aaker? Or did WordPress just hear about the “Happiness Buzz” and came up with a title to put on automated e-mails? One would think so. After all they didn’t integrate two key findings of the study:

1. that happiness after a struggle is the most rewarding
2. that bringing happiness requires authenticity

As they did:

1. just solve my problem. OK, it was solved fast, so I’m quite happy with that.
2. not show any authenticity to me. Yes, too much e-mails feel robotized and spammy.

Yours Truly — @vermeiretim — Awesomeness Developer — tmbot.wordpress.com

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Notes:

1. I’m still in love with WordPress. This is just storytelling.
2. You can always frame a story like you want to. I could have written it completely different. Just consider me framing it from the perspective of me being happy because of writing this article as a result of my initial Back-office issue. If you look at it like that, Andrew truly engineered me to be happy. After all, the true struggle was writing this blog post. Now that’s finished, I’m happy.
   Or suppose I wrote this story with a focus on the opposite approach “fear appeals”?
3. There used to be a theory/research about persuasive communication that stated that “fear” (as being the opposite of “happy”) was a very effective way to get attention and communicate a message: “fear appeals”. Here are some references from that “wave”:
   • Spence, H.E.; Moinpour, R. (1972). “Fear Appeals in Marketing. A Social Perspective”. Journal of Marketing 36 (3): 39.
   • Leventhal, H (1971). “Fear appeals and persuasion: the differentiation of a motivational construct”. American Journal of Public Health 61 (6): 1208.
   • Dillard, J.P., & Anderson, J.W. (2004). The role of fear in persuasion. Psychology & Marketing, 21, 909-926.
   • Witte, K. (1992). Putting the fear back into fear appeals: The extended parallel process model. Communication Monographs, 59, 329-349.
   • I’ve also encountered this philosophy in political sciences. Let’s think e.g. on Adorno’s theory of the “authoritarian personality” (1950).
   • Taken the above into account and from what I know from the “fear appeals” theory, one can hardly imagine that this could ever be an ethical way to promote your business value a.k.a. to organize your marketing around a.k.a. to use in your communications.

Who’s ever going to tag this QR code anyway? On AXA Bank’s outdoor ad.

Axa puts a qr code on large format print ad on a busy road

During one of my many escapades on the road, I came across the advert above. The ad is to promote a beneficial “renovation loan” and the offer is only valid until the end of 2011. So you’d better renovate your home this year to get the deal, right?

Don’t bother answering the above question. I have different issues with the ad. I believe the ad demonstrates that many marketers still don’t understand technology from a consumer mindset. I also believe that the usage of the QR code in the ad was solely driven on the fact that earlier that year a competitor launched a campaign in which the QR code was given a rather central position. So the ad clearly demonstrates “old-school competitor based marketing”. But let’s start by briefly describing the ad.

Description of the ad

The large format printed advert is clearly divided into two separate yet linked parts.

• Right frame: the right frame contains the advertising copy and the logo of the company. The copy states “Axa proclaims 2011 as year of renovation”. People should link renovation with renovating a house and a special renovation loaning. So far so good, I managed to get that.
• Left frame: the left frame is an image. It seems as it depicts the act of tearing down your house’s wallpaper and running into a hidden QR code behind it. I didn’t see wallpaper in the left frame while driving by. But I did notice a big QR code – hence the picture.

Who’s ever going to tag this QR code anyway?

First of all: do most consumers already know about QR codes? Shall they realize it? Or do you only want to address the “geeks” to renovate their house in 2011? I can tell you one thing: geeks are often not that into “DIY stuff”. Maybe you’re addressing the wrong target group with your renovation loan promotions?

Second, assume consumers are completely into QR codes already, how on earth can you tag this code while driving by at 90 km / hour? It’s already hard to take a picture of it. Let alone tag it with your mobile phone.

bnp paribas fortis qr code in advert for mobile banking

To end I would dare to say that the QR code is there just because they can put it there. Or is it all about parroting the competitor?

Why a QR code? Because BNP Paribas Fortis had one?

I believe AXA bank used QR because their competitor BNP Paribas Fortis did earlier that year. However, how BNP Paribas Fortis deployed it was completely different. BNP used it to launch their mobile banking application and services. And because I believed it was quite impressive, I even reported on their break-through mobile banking app on this blog but I didn’t relate to the way it was promoted. Today I will though.

Promoting online banking with a QR code

Why would it make sense to put a QR code on an advertisement for mobile banking and not on an advertisement for renovation loans?

• Because a QR code is scanned with a mobile phone.
  People scan the code and they are automatically taken to the mobile banking app. That’s just great, that’s convenience. If you force people to scan a code that has in fact nothing to do with mobile, why would you do the effort? Why would you spend the money?
• Next to that, BNP’s QR codes were easily scannable.
  You could easily scan them because they were in newspapers, magazines and on in-bank posters. Not on large format. Not next to a speedway.
• Finally, the target group.
  Yes, early adaptors of mobile banking will probably know a thing or two about QR codes. And no, people who renovate their houses are not particularly interested in geeky stuff.

What CMOs and agencies need to learn from this

• Don’t just use technology because you can. Make sure it matches your target group.
• Don’t just do something because your competitor did. The trick is to stand out. Will never happen if you parrot!

Say hello to the Hybrid Marketer.

I think this relates to an interesting debate that was held at SXSW, Austin, Texas, USA. Unfortunately I couldn’t make it to the event and this debate. So if anyone can send me a summary, I’d be very thankful. Anyways, here’s how they framed the whole issue:

How much do marketers (& their agencies) need to know about technology? Advertisers and brand marketers are entering a brave new world — one where code is on par with content. “Consumers” are now “users.” So should “marketers” be “developers”? Enter the hybrid marketer. More and more agencies are finding they need to educate and cultivate a new breed of people who understand tech from a marketing and brand perspective, and who have a consumer mindset. At the same time, agencies are adopting practices–agile development, continuous deployment–learned from the tech world. But should they really try this stuff at home? Should “marketers” be worrying about, say, the video capability of the latest iPhone, or pushing the envelope with HTML5? Or should they just stick to their core competencies and work with established software companies / dev shops to realize their ideas? How else is technology affecting the agency model and the creative process?