Dazzle Ships

The book that isn't (yet)

 

Stokes has written a fair amount here about Chris Andersen's much touted new book 'Free', so you should all  be familiar with the basic premise.

The latest salvo by Anderson came in the form of an article in the WSJ last week.

The gist of the argument is basically the same as reported by Stokes, but there's some really interesting examples of companies actually doing this stuff.  Let's hope they, and the idea, survive the recession.

Read it here, and start thinking about this stuff now.

(Don't forget the comments, there's some good stuff in the comments)

--  Toby

The Curse of Knowledge

Thanks to my old gaffer, Mark Palmer, who encouraged me to get off my arse and get cracking with Made To Stick, which has been sitting in my 'to read' pile for about a year now.

I'm only a couple of chapters in and am loving it.  I'll hope to do a full review when I've finished, rather than a load of little updates, but one thing I've already read really struck home and picks up on some of the stuff we've written about before.

The authors talk about the 'Curse of Knowledge', what they mean by this is, essentially, that once you know something it's very difficult to imagine what it's like not knowing it.  They illustrate with a great story, which you may be seeing coming to an Ignition session near you soon.

In 1990, Elizabeth Newton got a PhD in psychology from Stanford for the following very simple experiment.  She asked people to pick from a list of twenty five famous songs and tap them out on a table top.  Thse people were the 'tappers'.  There were also 'listeners' who, obviously, had to guess what the song was.

This is the interesting bit.  The 'tappers' were asked what proportion of the songs the 'listeners' would guess correctly.  They reckoned 1 in 2.  The actual result.  1 in 40.  That's quite a miscalculation.  The reason for this is simple, when the tapper tapped out a song they were singing it in their heads.  The taps were just a bit of added percussion to their own personal soundtrack.  They couldn't hear what the listeners heard, which was, pretty much, just a series of random taps.

Try it.  But be warned, being a 'tapper' is absolutely infuriating.  You simply can't believe that the listener can't understand what you can so obvioulsy hear.  This is the curse of knowledge.

Now think about the process we go through with our clients.  We work for months on new launches.  We know exactly what the product spec is, and how it stacks up against the competition.  We know what the communication strategy is (we probably even came up with it ourselves). We understand the media plan in its entirety, knowing exactly which channels start when and how the story unfolds between them.  We've seen the ads dozens of times, in all their iterations.

And then we're completely infuriated when consumers don't get it. 

So get fresh eyes on everything you do.  And if they really don't get it, don't argue with them, try to persuade them you're right or dismiss their stupidity.  Take on board what they say and refine your ideas till they stick.

-- Toby

Recomended reading

  

Ok.

Apologies for not being around for a while.  The new business machine has been working overtime, so I've been a bit distracted.

Fortunately I came across this over the weekend.

It's a list, links included, of the best 250 blog posts ever written about marketing, advertising, media and communications.

So, whilst there's nothing from me to read, there's plenty here for you to be getting on with.  (And there really is some terrific stuff here).

Back soon.

-- Toby

Madonna's Kryptonite

I'm currently reading The Pirate's Dilemma by Matt Mason.  It's early days yet and I'm getting a little dismayed by the high-tech utopianism.  But I'll give you an update when I'm done.  In the meantime, though, there's some great stories in there, from which we could learn alot.

The first I wanted to share is about Madonna.  In the run up to the release of American Life in 2003, the music majors were getting tough on piracy.  They'd seen off Napster (officially declared bankrupt in 2002), and were feeling pretty confident.

Now, we know from Kryptonite the dangers of ignoring what's going on online.  After ignoring the online videos showing their very expensive bike locks being opened with a biro, they ended up looking pretty foolish (and pretty broke), when the mainstream media picked up on the story.  10 days later they'd promised a full product exchange.  Estimated cost $10m.  Estimated cost to their reputation?  Who knows.

So, Madonna wasn't going to ignore these people.  No, she was going to go one better.  She was going to wind them up.

In what probably sounded like a great idea in a brainstorm, Madonna and Warners decided to post some of the tracks from the forthcoming album on KaZaA.com, a peer-to-peer network.  But when all those Madonna fans downloaded these free files, instead of the songs they got something very different.  They got Madonna screaming 'What the fuck do you think you're doing?' at them over and over again.  Way to go, Madge.  That'll tell them. 

What do you think happened next?

Somewhat predictably, the message was sampled and remixed, becoming its own 'single' (called WTF).  Some of these remixes can still be found here, along with the original source files.

Though slightly embrarassing for her, not the end of the world.  But this was just the start.  The coup de grace was delivered on 19th April, a couple of days before the album's official launch.  Madonna's website (www.madonna.com) was hacked, and the entire album was placed free for download on her homepage, accompanied by this message:

 

Nice work.

So, stop and think.  You might not like what your customers (or in this case, fans) are doing.  But you certainly shouldn't ignore them.  And you certainly, certainly shouldn't go out of your way to piss them off.  Because now they can fight back.  Be constructive, talk to them, find common ground.

-- Toby

Free love

Why are we so irrational when it comes to our love of Free?

I'm currently reading Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely the behavioural economist. It's very good by the way. It's basically a summary of lots of social experiments that he and some of his colleagues have undertaken to demonstrate how expectations, emotions, social norms and other invisible, seemingly illogical forces skew our reasoning abilities and show how irrational rather than rational consumer behaviour can be. One chapter focuses on our love of Free. His view is that "free us gives us such an emotional charge that we perceive what is being offered as immensely more valuable than it really is". Here are two examples he gives.

The first was an experiment that was conducted in a large public building offering Lindt chocolate truffles for sale at 15 cents or Hershey's Kisses for sale at 1 cent (both being at a much lower price than their normal retail price, the Lindt truffle being a better quality than the more everyday Hersey's Kiss) - with a limit of one chocolate per person. The result: 73% chose the Lindt truffle and 27% chose the Kiss. Next they moved the experiment on by dropping the price of each by 1 cent, the Lindt becoming 14 cents and the Hershey's Kiss became free. What happened? 69% of customers chose the free Kiss, opting to pass on buying a Lindt truffle at a very good price.  Basically when Free was on the agenda the customers behaved in a much more irrational way. To ensure that the results weren't influenced by not having to get out your wallet, the experiment was repeated next to a till where people were buying something in any case producing similar results.

The second example was analysing Amazon's free postage offer. Now I'm hooked on this to the extent that I nearly always buy extra books to make sure I qualify for their free postage and it seems like I'm far from the only one. It turns out that Amazon were running this offer in every country they operate in with the exception of France where they were running a similar incentive scheme but in this instance the shipping cost was the equivalent of about 10p rather than Free. Now 10p is a pretty good offer, but one that was virtually ignored by the French. However this all changed when the offer was aligned with the rest of the world and turned to Free - a drop in 10pence, but a significant uptake in the offer.

What does this mean for brands? Well the model works for mobile phone operators and retailers and appears to still work with laptops for The Carphone Warehouse. Some people may also have heard about this free gun offer when you buy a car which has gone down a storm for one car dealership in the US. More on it in the video below:

It looks like brands should at least consider reframing their retail offers to incorporate Free, could start to incorporate more imaginative Free incentives or at least could test where free fits in in their market. The alternative might be to be drawn into discounting mainly on price which of course could create an ugly race to the bottom which no one is likely to win in the long-term.

Stephen

PS: To get a feel for the rest of the book you can that this How irrational or rational are you? test.

Now you're talking my language

I'm reading a book at the moment called 'The Advertised Mind' by Erik du Plessis. He works at Millward Brown in South Africa and has a long history in the field of advertising research. It's a great book, delving into the world of the mental processes to try to uncover how to make advertising as effective as possible.

One anecdote from the book struck a particular chord with me. Du Plessis tells a story that he states to be the most valuable lesson in communication he's ever had. So, it must be good. It goes something like this.

Doing research into the opinions of black miners in South Africa, he found that they preferred to be given instructions by their (white) managers in English, rather than in Afrikaans. This seemed odd as most black miners were more proficient in Afrikaans than English (they were their 3rd and 4th languages, respectively). Why did they want to receive instructions in a language they were less proficient in?

The answer was to do with the person giving the instructions. When managers gave instructions in Afrikaans (their first language) they gave them quickly and assumed they had been understood. If things went wrong, the managers would then be angry. When they gave them in English (their second language) they had to spend more time and care getting their message across and checking it had all been understood. This meant it was less likely that things would be missed and the workers would get something wrong.

The difference is that in Afrikaans, the managers believed they had done a good job in communication. In English, they had actually done a good job in communication.

Du Plessis cites this to support his argument for creative testing. Advertising professionals need to ensure that their advertising communication (their first language) is understood by the audience (who are not as well versed in the language of advertising), rather than assuming it will be.

I think this is also very applicable for media. Media has its own weird language more than just about any other discipline and we often formulate our plans with this language dictating things - frequency, impact, cut-through, flighting, etc. We need to ensure we are planning with the audience's language in mind.

This is where planning to ideas rather than channels (and associated terminology) comes to the fore. Our ideas must have a clarity of purpose. What are we trying to achieve through communication, in terms of what consumers think and do? What do we need consumers to get out of it? What influences will aid them get to where they want to go? We need to consider what they want, and in what what way they want it. This is the language our planning should express itself in.

If we plan in the language of the consumer, it's far more likely that they will understand what we're trying to say and respond in the way we want.

-- Alex

Big Up Yourselves

Thanks to all who made it to Book Club yesterday.  A lively yet sensible discussion, and good to hear about how you're all intending to use what you've learnt for our clients.

If you could send Jess & I your comments soon, that'd be great.  We'll consolidate them and circulate the output.

For the hugely keen amongst you, John writes a number of blogs, all of which are really useful.  Go here, and explore from there.

I'd also recommend Seth Godin's post How to read a business book.

-- Toby