Consumer Centric

How many times have you bought batteries or a new electronic gadget or a DVD and it takes you 10 times as long to get it open as it ever took to find and purchase it? It can’t be just me who has wondered why they package certain items as if they really, really don’t ever want you to open it and use it.

Surprise! Innovation has hit the packaging world.  Maybe this has been around for a long time, but last night was my first pleasant introduction to the simple change that rocked my world… OK, it really did for about 30 seconds. And then it happened twice in the same night with a second purchase.

First, I bought an iPhone car charger (made by Monster) because I needed one, but really because my phone was dead and I had to make a few calls and was a long way from home or the office.  Got out in the car, looked around for something hard and sharp to pry may way into the plastic safe.  But, no… check this out:

How amazing is that?  Someone realized you could perforate the plastic case in the back to make it so a person who most likely wants to get into it after buying it can do so easily.

I was irrationally excited about a simple, consumer-centric innovation.

Then, this morning I went to open the new Logitech wireless mouse that I bought. Again, I prepared to cut through the very strong plastic case to extract the device.  Lo and behold… someone at Logitech had a similar epiphany, but they took it one step further.  They told me how to do it!  On the case!

Way cool.  I’m just excited someone got around to solving for that little problem.  A great example of taking a consumer-centric insight and taking the time to solve for it.

Thank you Logitech and Monster.

So I watched the Kevin Spacey piece on Letterman last night and had a good laugh like thousands of others (maybe millions).  The two of them covering off on an emergent technology like Twitter was hilarious to say the least.

But the moment that caught my intrigue was when Spacey (@KevinSpacey) pulled out his phone and typed a quick message into Twitter real time.

In just a few seconds his action created a moment of personal connection for any of the 829,000+ followers who track him.  Granted — the show isn’t live, so those people caught the update hours before it aired on TV.  But, still, if they watched the episode on TV and they follow Spacey I’m certain they checked his updates. And they felt somehow “in” on the action.

Today, Spacey paid off the obvious large number of replies he received: Glad you enjoyed Dave & my Twitter banter last night. Back shooting in New Orleans today. Hope all are feeling positive & sending good vibes.  Through a celebrity comment on a “live” TV program coupled with his tweet, Spacey created a sort of omni-present moment for his followers.  In a sense, they participated with him on Letterman.

This evening I came across a completely different example involving just two people.  Ivan Campuzano is a blogger focused on personal growth and development.  On Twitter he has a following of over 10,000 people (@IvanCampuzano).  His blog is full of video clips, words, phrases, quotes, and ideas about improving yourself.  His work clearly connects with people and makes a difference for many.

Today he shared an experience in which he was touring a coffee plant in Costa Rica, tweeted about the tour, and before it was over he was given a gift purchased online for him by someone from Alaska.  Turns out, the gift-giver is a Twitter follower who saw the tweet and took the time to find the plant’s online store, make a purchase, and request that it be delivered to Ivan in person before he left.  He tells the story in a recently posted video.

This experience shows how geographic limitations go away as a barrier to creating a moment for connection between two people.  The guy in Alaska wanted to express appreciation to Campuzano and found an immediate opportunity in which he could do just that.  Geography didn’t matter.  He didn’t have to be there physically to “be there” in the moment.

Finally, while writing this post, I saw the Best Buy “twelpforce” advertisement for the first time.  I enjoyed the ad.  But, more importantly… Best Buy’s effort makes it possible for thousands of passionate employees to be “omni-present” for questions of customers looking for solutions.  Location doesn’t matter. Personal connection or familiarity isn’t required.  Used this way, Twitter facilitates authentic moments between people in a way that provides genuine value.  Way to go!

In short, these three examples show how technology is breaking down barriers to real connections between people.  We almost can be omnipresent in certain aspects of the lives of other people without having to be there.  Sometimes that can just be cool (fans of Spacey who are also on Twitter), it can be meaningful and fulfilling (surprising a mentor with a live gift give-away), or it can help you make better purchase decisions (seeking input from thousands of Best Buy customers/prospects).

That is at the heart of consumer centricity.  

What omni-present moments have you had with any social media platform?

A long day in the LA area yielded two bizarre encounters with strange marketing practices. One seems innovative and cool but with a few weird elements, the other was ridiculously frustrating.

First, between meetings this morning, Andy Hunter and I were looking for some food and a solid WiFi connection.  I suppose where we ended up was the last place we’d expected to look:  the ING Direct Cafe at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and I-405.

That’s right, a cafe branded entirely by banking services ING Direct!  You can get food, drinks, and WiFi for incredibly cheap prices for surprisingly good food.

Why would ING Direct do this?  They explain on their site as follows:

We believe saving money should be as simple as having a cup of coffee. So we invite you to come in and experience just how refreshing it is to sip a latte, surf the Internet for free and talk to us about how we can help you Save Your Money.

Given the prices for some really good food, I’d say their claim to save your money is accurate.  And during the time we ate neither of us was pursued by financial services sales people.  

Turns out ING Direct has eight cafes across the country (NYC, Philly, Chicago, Honolulu, Wilmington, St. Cloud).  While it first seemed strange, it’s an innovative concept that delivers on the promise and stretches to a connection to the brand.

The strange part?  Aside from trying to figure out why ING Direct had a Cafe, the glass-enclosed bathrooms took the prize.  Sure, you couldn’t exactly see through the glass, but the idea of catching the shadows of the person in the bathroom was odd.

Then, in the men’s room at least, the ING Direct Cafe designers had some fun with marketing and branding by placing ING spelled out in braille above the urinal.  

I had to snap a picture as I sat there wondering what in the world it said.  I couldn’t figure out what you possibly would want to communicate via braille in that specific location.  Thanks to some Twitter friends I learned it spells out their brand name:  ING.

The net takeaway:  find a relevant value (save money on good food and get free WiFi while you wait) and offer it in a disruptive way that results in a memorable experience (put a cafe into a bank, etc.).  Way to go ING!

You made an impression upon me… and I now think of ING Direct being a partner to help me build strategies to not just make money, but to save money.

Wacky encounter number two…  Headed back to the airport hotel we were on our way to drop of the Hertz Rental Car but realized we needed to get gas.  As I quickly put in my card to prepay (or authorize) for use of the pump, I saw a question pop up on the screen that I’d once again next never thought I’d see.

Apparently, I was being asked by the machine if I wanted a $0.45 fee to use the card, or not.  Naturally, I selected no (why would I want to pay a fee?).  Then, I received a second message explaining that the card I was trying to use was rejected.

After trying to get the card to work I finally had to go into the am/pm convenience store and pay at the cashier.  I was then told in no uncertain terms that the gas station does not accept credit cards, only debit cards.  The clerk tried to convince me that my check card was not a debit card… but I finally gave up and just paid with cash.

Wow, was that frustrating.  It turns out this trend of not allowing credit cards is growing and started the summer of 2008 as gas prices rose as did the fee the station is charged for each time the card is used.  

While I’ve found mixed opinions online about whether we should care about not being able to pay with a credit card, the inconvenience and frustration of not being able to complete a task that I’ve grown accustomed to being quite simple and easy was palpable.  That was a major step back to the 70s or 80s when the only option was cash.  In fact, the only reason I stayed at the station and paid with cash was because I had no choice given time and the need to fill the rental up before dropping it off.

In the real world of normal life, removing basic steps that make the purchase experience easy for the customer is not innovative marketing.  It’s ignoring the user experience to save a buck–in the end, the am/pm convenience store will lose one or two more than they save.

Thank you LA area for two wacky finds in a single day!

RSS feeds, Twitter, email alerts, IM, Skype, Facebook, LinkedIn, Naymz, Plaxo, Mint, apps, phone, satellite radio, podcasts, audiobooks, Google, Google Analytics, WordPress, etc., etc. ….

Too many distractions… or tools to help focus?  Both.

I’m more certain it’s both after taking focused energy to read Sam Anderson’s well thought out piece in the New York Magazine about today’s distraction-filled digital world.  The article came out a few weeks ago, but I just happened upon it today.  

Anderson’s main point seems to be technology today can deliver extremes in both distraction and focus.  Both can be bad.  Both can be good.  But, balanced and channeled, distraction feeds focus, while focus enables distraction.  Together they can lead to a sharp and creative mind.

The truly wise mind will harness, rather than abandon, the power of distraction. 

It’s possible that we’re all evolving toward a new techno-cognitive nomadism, a rapidly shifting environment in which restlessness will be an advantage again. 

My disappearing act from keeping up with the “distractions” of Twitter and the blogosphere over the past few weeks was both due to extreme distractions that are a reality in life (sickness, new biz launch, huge project deliveries, end of school year with four kids and a zillion end of year concert thingys, first season with our pool and joy of busted lines, etc., etc.) combined with periods of paralyzing focus (working through the to-do list to the point that there’s no time to do anything!).  

So what is better?  When life hits and you do your best to push through it all–build better focused attention to get things done OR follow distractions as they come up?

Obviously, both have their benefits and drawbacks.  The solution seems to be building enough mental cues to sharpen focus enough to allow distractions to take your thoughts and abilities to a totally different level, and to capture new meaning.

Again, back to Anderson:

I keep returning to the parable of Einstein and Lennon—the great historical geniuses hypothetically ruined by modern distraction. What made both men’s achievements so groundbreaking, though, was that they did something modern technology is getting increasingly better at allowing us to do: They very powerfully linked and synthesized things that had previously been unlinked—Newtonian gravity and particle physics, rock and blues and folk and doo-wop and bubblegum pop and psychedelia. If Einstein and Lennon were growing up today, their natural genius might be so pumped up on the possibilities of the new technology they’d be doing even more dazzling things. Surely Lennon would find a way to manipulate his BlackBerry to his own ends, just like he did with all the new technology of the sixties—he’d harvest spam and text messages and web snippets and build them into a new kind of absurd poetry.

I love this.  It tells us we need to be comfortable in chaos, thrive in diversity, and work our way through adversity.  It means we have to train our mind to be able to focus, but with the goal of being able to play “choose your own adventure” with the distractions that come along the journey.  

Ben Malbon (@malbonnington) and Heidi Hackemer (@uberblond) share their own dilemma with distraction in reading Anderson’s article in their recent BBH Labs Post entitled Getting comfortable with chaos.  The behavior both expressed, however, resulted in linking together multiple ideas around the topics raised by Anderson–a product of digging down different trains of thought, but always returning to the central idea.

There’s another dimension to this I found interesting from another music example that Malbon found in David Allen’s article on the same topic recently in Wired.  Allen talks of Evan Taubenfield, a guitarist, song-writer and leader of a band.

He was telling me how he’s learned to produce an album most effectively. Some of the best ideas for his songs happen while he and his band are working on another one. Now he has a whiteboard in the studio. They’ll be in the middle of one thing, suddenly get inspired about something else, and stop to capture it. Evan said it’s chaotic, but once the band got used to it and trusted the process, they were way more productive and more creative than ever. Before he realised the power of capturing thoughts as they occur, and building in just the kind of structures that he needed to foster and support the process, he experienced lots of wasted and frustrated energy, with much less output. Trying to exert the “discipline” of staying focused on one song at a time stifled his creativity. The coolest thing about the new process, he said, was that making music was fun again.

Allen argues Taubenfeld’s experience shows the benefit of capturing meaning in the moment of distraction for later connection and use to create something new.

The trick may be to harness what happens when you’re there. One of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned in my quasi-scientific approach to sustained laziness is the value of storing thoughts in appropriate places, as soon as I have them. That means parking them where I will later evaluate their merit (or lack thereof) and dispose of them accordingly. Having a thought once is what the mind is for; having the same thought twice, in the same way, for the same reason, is a waste of time and energy. I also found out that having a place for good ideas produced more of them, and more often.  The new skill the next generation may bring forward is how to deal with meaning, tactically. Not “meaning” in the philosophical or spiritual sense, but rather in the harvesting of it in our ordinary lives, day to day. 

If we focus too much, we can push out the ability to capture meaning from random distractions.  If we allow distractions to meander too far we miss the original destination entirely.

Instead, we need to define priorities for what is most important, build in cues to help us see where we’re headed, and enjoy finding meaning in the moments of distraction that come along the way.

This balance of focused distraction yields productive creativity.  

The next question I have is how do we apply this reality of life to the way we engage with people through brands, products, and marketing?

UPDATE:  A few other interesting commentary and ideas on this topic in NY Times and Louis Gray (back in 8/08 but good ideas) and Dan York’s Disruptive Conversations blog and Patricia-Anne Rutledge’s The Web-Savvy Writer, among others.  Just some good reading and ideas I’ve found recently.