Damien Basile's shared items
|
In a discussion on why Heinz has such high market share for ketchup in the Pittsburgh area, one commenter posts, "It's just better ketchup. Their other products may be closer in quality to the competition, but for Ketchup nobody compares. When you go to a restaurant and they have a different kind, it feels you are eating at some cheap cafeteria."
This is really telling, but probably not the in the way Matt intended.
Heinz doesn't make better ketchup. Heinz makes better Heinz ketchup. There's a huge difference.
If you define ketchup the way most people do, you define it as, "the ketchup I grew up with." Or to be more specific, "the ketchup my mom served me, the one that I was allowed to serve myself when I turned three..."
One thing that marketers do is sell us a feeling, not a set of molecules or bits. When you spend $3 on a bottle of ketchup, that's what you're buying. And Matt and the rest of us are so brainwashed we rationalize it as 'better ketchup.
For some of us, the essential concept of touch screen interfaces comes from the tricorders of the original Star Trek (The Original Series or “TOS”) and the consoles of Star Trek The Next Generation. (TNG). While TOS’s computer interfaces now seem quaint 40+ year later, TNG still sets a high bar standard in many ways despite being the product of 1980s set designers. Our concepts of voice command and touch interfaces are still shaped by what we saw decades ago. But, one thing we didn’t see much of in the previous decades of science fiction on TV was touch interfaces that touched back. We have vibrating tactile feedback today. But, it provides limited information value. What if a display actually changed shape under our fingertips? That’s what NewScientist reports on in this article.
Microsoft develops shape-shifting touchscreen
We are probably years away from actually seeing (or, more accurately, feeling) this technology in consumer devices. But, it does look like something to look forward to in our lifetimes (vs. Star Trek’s 23rd or 24th century time frame).
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
So in the last post I talked about how the notion of simplification as a way of explaining good ideas shifts into the belief that good ideas can always be simplified, and finally into simplicity as a sign of good ideas.
Here’s my thoughts on why this is a problem.
This diagram shows two funnels. The top, red, one is a fairly basic schematic of the process of research, but it might also stand for the process of simplification in general. You start off with a mass of data. You subject it to a process of analysis, which explains the data. You boil that analysis down to an insight (see previous Blackbeard Blog entries!) which maximises its explanatory power, copyability, sexiness, etc. etc.
The insight is then delivered. The blue pyramid represents a downside scenario for what happens next. The insight is preserved intact, but becomes received wisdom - an unquestioned piece of information, something for recipients to expand, extrapolate from, base assumptions on and generally build on. For instance, if you have an idea of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs in your head you might decide to base your next segmentation study on those, and then you find yourself mapping different levels of relationship with a brand onto the levels of the Hierarchy, and so what you’re doing is building your own set of analysis out of the original insight, often by combining it with other insights you’ve picked up along the say (Hey! Maybe self-actualisers are more likely to be Mavens with a higher Dunbar Number!!). But - and remember this is a bad-case scenario - you run the risk of ending up with nonsense.
What’s happened here? The process represented by the red pyramid neccessarily involves simplification - stripping away parts of an idea until you’re left with a kernel of “insight”. The notion is that the insight will lead you back up the chart, encouraging you to dig deeper into the analysis. But what often happens is that the insight stands in for the analysis and the pyramid flips, transporting you into the blue pyramid like a sci-fi wormhole. Here the insight is all that is left of the original analysis. Coming to it second-hand, you assume it is correct and complete, and build on it. This isn’t necessarily harmful, of course: you can imagine a “happy” version of the blue pyramid:
Here the insight is working like insights are meant to work - it’s robust, it’s complete, it leaves nothing important out and it’s hard to misinterpret. So it’s a great foundation for building new ideas on. O happy day when we find and communicate one like that!
Of course, you can’t control ideas once they’re out there - if they’re going to live, they’re going to change. I wonder if the process of simplification accelerates this - by introducing a kind of memetic bottleneck, where the population of ideas has been reduced to a small number and the chances of those ideas mutating (being misinterpreted, extrapolated without reference to data, etc.) rapidly increases.
We live in a period where simplification processes are everywhere - I had the wikipedia page on “genetic bottlenecks” open writing this; I work in an industry forever flagellating itself for not being simple enough; once I hit “Create Post” I will go to Twitter and post a 100-character summary of this whole thing. The rapid scrambling, remixing and mutation of information that results means we live in exciting times. Is there even room (professionally or otherwise) to stand as an advocate of nuance or complexity? I’m not sure. But it would be a good idea for researchers to remember that they’re the guardians of the red half of the chart as well as enablers, for good or ill, of the blue.
|
The Festival of New MR, a virtual research conference organised by Ray Poynter and others, has closed its submissions process - all the presentation synopses are up now. There will be a voting process soon apparently, but meanwhile the list is a fine showcase of where researchers’ heads are at right now.
I have a synopsis in consideration myself, but I thought it would be nice to highlight the summaries I think are most exciting or intriguing from the current list. I’ve left off mine (obviously!) and also anything I’ve already seen at a conference (which includes some great ones). And this is a list which caters to my own peculiar tastes in research work, so if you’re not on it, that certainly doesn’t mean I thought your paper was under-par or boring! (And I’m not on the festival committee so it hardly matters anyhow!)
So - in order of appearance on the synopsis page, my top 13 - it could easily have been 25, but I have a pub to go to:
Embracing The Third Screen (Steve August/Ian Ralph): Online qual on smartphones - as the kind of stuff I work on (communities/social media research) goes more and more mobile this is exactly the sort of thinking I need to catch up on.
How Zynga Conducts Research (Vivek Bhaskaran/Kevin Keeker): There’s a bunch of papers on short-form/modular research - this is a REALLY important area which seems to be creeping up on us a bit. This one has the added carrot of coming from social gaming giant Zynga, so I’m hoping I’ll learn a bit about that too.
Tesco And Stokes Croft (Nigel Legg): Looks like a useful case study of context in social media - I like the framing of the question as one of power, not of “influence” (we should be calling this particular spade a spade more generally too)
How Easily Can I “Game” Your Future Dataset? (Dan Foreman): Very excited someone is finally talking about this - industrial reputation espionage in the social media age, conversation jamming and dataset fixing. Yum yum!
Whose Afraid Of The Big Collaborative Wolf? (Nick Coates): Lots of co-creation summaries here, I picked Nick’s simply because it sounded funniest - and I like the emphasis on non-researchers.
We Came Up With The Term MROC: Now We’re Telling You What It Is (Tamara Barber): Supremely cheeky title, this! ;) It would be professionally remiss of me not to want this one to get through, partly because the promised “lively Q+A” should actually BE lively!
Asia and the Developing World - Smart Enough For Mobile MR (Navin Williams): Not enough BRIC-oriented synopses (in my opinion - and mine wasn’t either!). This one looks meaty and very useful, though.
Red Velvet Ropes (Alison Macleod): Alison raises a really interesting point - if we’re all about giving the participant more autonomy and control in New MR, shouldn’t and couldn’t that extend to sample frames? Who gets to choose a “target market” in a collaborative age - not the dear old brand, surely?
Don’t Forget… The Respondent Experience Trumps All (Leslie Townsend): So fully locked-on to the specs of my own job (using social media to improve the research experience) that I really want to find out what Leslie has to say here.
Navel Gazing with Purpose (Theo Downes-Le Guin): Also cheeky! Social media analysis of the researchosphere, you say? :)
Zero Gravity Questions (John Griffiths): Typically forward-thinking examination of the ecology of the question (I have a sneaky feeling something I mentioned ages ago may have inspired a tiny bit of this, but John is running with it and then some.)
Time: A Goldmine Of Free Data (John Puleston): Almost can’t believe this is the only paradata-based synopsis in here: this stuff is going to be really important, especially when linked to eye-tracking etc. I say this with the confidence of someone who doesn’t actually know much about it, so perhaps I will learn more here!
Hacking The Data Shadow (Rich Shaw): Covers some of the same territory as John Griffiths’ proposal (see above) but I had to include this because of the overall “what can researchers learn from hackers” idea - very enticing. And it made me look up what a “data shadow” was!
There you go - that’s MY dream virtual festival (or one day of it, anyway). What’s yours?
|
The latest idea for Kraft's Macaroni & Cheese was literally cooked up by Crispin Porter + Bogusky. The agency, which won the account in March, came up with a new product—a frozen version of the staple in an aluminum tray that you can throw on the grill. "We wanted dads to use it," says Bill Wright, group creative director at CP+B, "and the only way was to be able to make it so you can throw it on the barbecue grill." Wright says the grill "lends a nice, smoky flavor" to the Mac & Cheese. Kraft is currently testing the product in "very, very small release." CP+B's other work for the brand has been no less quirky. Ads, which sport the tagline, "You know you love it," play up the guilty-pleasure factor. "The most fun you can have with your stove on," reads one outdoor ad. TV spots, meanwhile, show parents screwing their kids out of their Kraft dinners. Wright says the product intro shows how CP+B thinks beyond advertising. "I don't know if you usually get product ideas from your ad agency," he says. This isn't the first time CP+B has gotten into product creation. The agency is credited, for, among other things, dreaming up Chicken Fries, now a Burger King menu staple.
Pixar are renowned for creating award winning feature length animated films but since I can remember the films have always been preceded at cinemas by a short film, often showcasing the latest techniques Pixar can achieve. The recent release of Toy Story 3 is no exception with the fantastic short Day & Night, the first film to be directed by Teddy Newton. (Thanks to Jane for the link.)
Video Link via Gamaniak
www.pixar.com
