technogoggles

Batelle on Start the Week

Link: BBC Radio 4 - Start the Week - 21 November.

What does the world want? According to JOHN BATTELLE, the company which knows the answer to that question is Google. Not only is the search engine now the gateway to so much of our knowledge but, in a world where every click can be preserved for ever and tells someone, somewhere, what you want, companies like Google are changing more than technology and the workplace: they're transforming our way of life ...

Start the Week is on a good vein of form lately - and I'm liking Andrew Marr a lot.  This week he had John Battelle discussing search [obviously] libertarianism, the Patriot Act and your rights i.e. links are still not defined as private information so the US government can find out what you have been searching for and Google is not able to tell you that this is being done.  All good stuff but made so much better for having a mix of other non-techy guests there.  In getting bright people thinking about subjects outside of their speciailism you get interesting, new avenues of thought.

This is exactly the kind of programming that would work with Tom's audio annotation-wiki.

The Assault on Pleasure

The Future Foundation are undertaking a new study of The Assault on Pleasure.  They have apparently identified a new social trend away from the excesses in contemporary soociety.  Blurb:

A total of 30% of people in the UK (35% of under-24s) now agree that : Pregnant women found smoking in a public place should be given a caution by a police officer.

Commenting on the results, Paul Flatters, Chief Executive and Editor of the Future Foundation’s Assault on Pleasure study, said :-

“Only a few years ago, these results would have been unimaginable.

But these days, for whatever reasons, we are accumulating so many anxieties about our personal health and our public environment that ever more of us seem ready to accept new ideas about what we and our fellow consumer-citizens should not do - or not be permitted to do.

It’s almost as if there is a new cromwellianism in the land, a new drive to regulate all manner of markets and behaviours. It is striking that support for so many regulatory propositions stretches across both age and income groups. In every sector of our society, there are now substantial pockets of what we have called the “neo-croms”, those who are motivated to extend the definition of anti-social behaviour into new areas and themes.

This is the culture and the future that not just businesses but also political parties must face.

Every activity involving an element of fun or escapism is falling under new scrutiny from health professionals, green lobbies and pressure groups of all kinds. Perhaps it is this which is feeding these new attitudes, attitudes which might well be seen, for good or ill, as a kind of modern puritanism.

We can only imagine that this instinct to regulate-and-restrict will impact on more markets and more activities in the years ahead.

In five years time, will giving a Christmas box of chocolates attract the same odium as giving a pack of 200 cigarettes once did? Will all office parties be shandy-only? Will it be a dinner-party boast that one does not any longer go to the Lake District - for ecological reasons? How many other activities will go the way of smoking in pubs?

If this is a new trend then it's kind of ironic that many people are trying to regulate areas of society in the face of ineffectiveness around traditional forms of regulation in the case of ASBOs and the need for a new "Yob Tsar" and on a wider geographical scale the horror with which law and order broke down in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.  Indeed puritanical tendencies could be seen to be a reaction to this moral panic now engulfing us on aspects of social order.

Communal Living

The Independent yesterday had a good article about Britain's first purpose built 'commune' and the same story has been taken up by You and Yours on Radio 4.  In a time when we are looking more and more at ideas of 'community' to inform design around digital online experiences - social software - innovation around offline community has been less obvious.  Architecture is perhaps the one exception though until now design of communal public spaces rather than co-housing per se has been the main form this has taken. 

Commune's have a got a bit of a bad name in my opinion.  Sleeping together is fair enough but having to eat, cook and live in the same space isn't right for the modern chap.  Communes need to adapt to 'post-traditional' society and our desire for community but also our need for privacy.  Hey presto, Springhill. 'A co-housing initiative' and what could pass as a glorified housing estate where it not for the fact that the 'houses' are all 'designed', they're made out of wood, there's a shared kitchen [should you want to use it] and gardens and it's in Stroud, home to artists, hippies and the like.

I really believe that initiatives like this will become more and more popular and not just amongst the middle classes, especially as we search for communal solutions to everday issues such as childcare, 'playspace', security and company etc.  Another co-housing project in Bristol is already underway. A place where old and young can come together to help each other out sounds idealistic built it makes a lot of [common] sense when notions of trust are increasingly important and increasingly hard to build. 

see also -
Independent article on commune in Buckinghamshire
UK Co-housing network

OfCom: Sponsoring TV Channels

As of today OfCom will now consider the sponsorship of TV channels.  What sort of brand would be willing to sponsor a TV channel?  More to the point what channel would be willing to have their 'brand' usurped by another, especially one that could up and leave after 12 months?  Of the terrstrial channels I would guess only Channel 5 is  really  open to  this kind of sponsorpship but there must be shed loads desperate for cash in the outer reaches of the EPG where actually sponsorship could raise the profile of the channel... 

Tastemakers and Filters as Brands

I've been following with interest the conversation between Chris Anderson and John Hegal around brands and branding, not least because I find myself in the marketing industry now.  In an age when we have more and more brands and yet less and less loyalty to those brands, at least in so far as there is a greater churn rate of brands and a shorter shelf life especially in FMCGs, what is the value of brands and branding?  The question of what economic value brands have got if any is an important one - it threatens my job! So what intrinsic worth do brands possess?

John's initial remarks are that we are moving from product centric brands to consumer centric brands:

In broad strokes, we are moving from product-centric brands to customer-centric brands. Product-centric brands represent promises about products (or retailers) – “buy this product from us because you can trust that it will be a quality product at good value.” Customer-centric brands offer a radically different promise – “buy from us because we know and understand you as an individual customer and we can tailor an appropriate bundle of products and services to meet your individual needs better than anyone else.” In other words, customer-centric brands promise that, if you give them their attention, they will give you a better return on attention than anyone else.

The key thing here is the knowledge required of the consumer and the way in which the 'producer' or brand engages with that consumer.  He goes on to say that the move to customer centric brands "will create more value than customer segment brands because they offer superior return on customer attention." Hmm.  Seems to me that that very much depends on the nature of the relationship.  Why should the producer or the brand 'know' you any better than you know yourself?  I know my friends very well but sometimes I will get them presents they hate [my wife included..!].  Why should producers or brands 'own' this relationship when consumer can manage the information so much better themselves? 

Chris's response is typically incisive:

Yes, the center of gravity of brands is shifting from products to customers, but I think John trips over the fuzzy term "-centric". Instead, I suspect that tomorrow's most powerful brands probably won't be companies at all. They'll be the customers themselves.

This is radical. 

As product brand proliferation leads to brand dilution... brand power will shift downstream from the producers to the consumers. So the fact that Jessica Simpson is wearing something becomes more important that what she's wearing. Likewise for the fact that Instapundit bought that camera. Or that Jon Stewart praised that book (like Oprah did before him)...

So, in a Long Tail market, the brands that matter most are the tastemakers. These are the filters you trust, who point you to the niche (or mainstream) stuff you wouldn't have found on your own. And because you trust them, you're willing to follow their recommendations, voyaging down the tail with confidence. In the Long Tail, great filters become brands.

People become the brands. Kind of.  The information that people provide around 'things' can become the brand. 

That does not mean that brands will not have 'values', attributes and 'personality' but these things will be  mediated by a mass of people that exist between the purchaser/consumer and the brand itself.  The 'lovemarks' that Saatchi & Saatchi have us believe are the sensual, emotive relationships that people have with products are engendered through being open, where the consumer is heavily involved [as two of the most popular 'lovemarks', Apple and Bookcrossing attest too]. The brand will only be as good as those tastemakers or intermediaries that the consumer trusts.  Especially in the long tail.

So if the brands themselves don't hold the economic value what then of marketeers?  Hmm.  Tricky.  Will companies spend money on their brands in the long  tail?  The short answer is yes, but  the more savvy will invest time, money and resources in developing a closer relationship with their customer and improving their product or service. That way the filters and the people that ultimately provide the information of filters will become your marketeers.    This could exacerbate the speeding up of brand life cycles but need not necessarily do so. Cultivating a strong brand by moving with your customers needs, values and expectations will ensure some longevity because they'll be 'living' the brand.   But is the consumer really now in charge?  Has the power shifted to the consumer?  It's shifted to the collective and that poses it's own problems for individuality and identity... seeking out valuable and trusted guides to suit your own 'self-actualisation' will be key.  Simple solutions like trying to 'buy' the tastemakers to  'buzz' around a product do more harm than good.  Honesty and transparency are key and they are words, words which are difficult to an industry used to dealing in myths.

Producing memories and victims

Just come upon an interesting phenomenon - people banding together to say they're not afraid of terrorism.  We are not afraid. With lots of pictures and .mp3s of people saying "we are not afraid".  In the words of virgorama one of the contributors "Terrorism traffics in fear. Defy that fear and terrorists become nothing more than murderers who kill civilians and who accomplish nothing."  I find it interesting because people don't seem to be afraid, they're just pissed off.   Tube / bus commutes in London are bad enough already without the possibility of it being your last.  Laudable as this campaign is I have to  agree with Mick Hulme [from Spiked online and previously Living Marxism and someone who never toes any line other than his own] writing in The Times:

Even before we knew how many had died in the bombings, let alone who they might be, the authorities rushed to dedicate memorial gardens and books of condolence to the victims. Then Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, announced the two-minute silence, a vigil with prayers and poems in Trafalgar Square last night and a memorial pop concert in a park tomorrow. Not to be outdone, the Government pledged to build a permanent memorial, and the churches promised a service of remembrance with the Queen.

This move for political gain and the production of memorials to somehow objectify the memories, the History, serves to 'institutionalise' the grief.  Why do we need this?  Are we competing for who feels worst, Madrid, London, NYC.  You don't see other countries making such a fuss.  I think it says something quite profound about the society we live in that we have to  'mark' events, feelings, anything, publicly.

It is time to end the grisly harping on those terrible events, and all the morbid theatrics of public-mourning rituals. The authorities should stop acting as if we are all vulnerable victims, before they destroy the strength of spirit that was so uplifting last week

Yep.  Perhaps we are not afraid should be renamed 'get on with it' with a call to action saying, er, get on with it. 

Relatedly, glad to see pushbikes are having a resurgence.  Perhaps the rise in the number of people cycling in the capital [and anecdotal evidence of that increasing more since the bombings with bike sales rocketing] will push Transport for London to implement safer cycling measures... They'd have to do some year zero work on the cabbies though, they're the real enemy of us on two wheels.

Bush in death scare..?

Link: Tomski: 100% Geniune TV Grab.
Bush comes back from the dead. 
Is that clever taxidermy?  Has Dubya been stuffed?

 

 

 

 

Thanks Tom.

Also, Michael Moore finds 17 reasons not to slit your wrists.