I moved. Please stay in touch.
March 29, 2011 Leave a comment
Visit blog on its new location: vermeiretim.wordpress.com. Think you’ll feel at ease there as well.
because screaming is from the past
March 29, 2011 Leave a comment
Visit blog on its new location: vermeiretim.wordpress.com. Think you’ll feel at ease there as well.
March 26, 2011 Leave a comment
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?
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.
March 24, 2011 10 Comments
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?
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
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
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?
WordPress and Aaker did they ever had a date?Aaker says that people have an aversion to anything that feels overly manufactured.
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:
As they did:
Yours Truly — @vermeiretim — Awesomeness Developer — tmbot.wordpress.com
Notes:
March 22, 2011 4 Comments
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.
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.
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?
What CMOs and agencies need to learn from this
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?