Here It Is!

Well here it is people - the new blog for a new start. The principles are the same to continue to give my take on the world of communication, design, marketing, branding and all the things which make our fantastic world better. I see readers are still coming through and I hope you sift through the articles here before heading over to the COG BLOG.

 See you on the blog!

COG BLOG

Thank you

The BCOM blog has been winding down as the business side of things has evolved. I am in the process of setting up a new communication structure which will have a blog attached to it and will be bigger and better than before. I would like to thank the loyal readers and participants who have made this blog a pleasure to maintain. I will post a link to the new blog and site soon. 

Kind regards

Tim 

The Third Man

The thing the Americans are discovering apparently is something which has fascinated the French since elections were invented - the third man. As Bayrou simmers down after stomping his way up to a healthy 20% and the election race appears to be more safely swung back to two party race, I for one wouldn't count him out. Otherwise a good read from Shankar Vendantam at the Washington Post and fits in with my "marketing is seeping into every aspect of my life phase.

If Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama ever took a break from fundraising to bone up on psychology, they might realize the need to talk up . . . John Edwards.

The same goes for front-runners John McCain and Rudy Giuliani in the race for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. They ought to be drawing attention to Mitt Romney, or to "Law and Order" star Fred Thompson, who could be running third in the race if he declared.

Front-runners are usually focused on racing each other. They often do not    realize that when people cannot decide between two leading candidates -- and it doesn't matter whether we are talking about politicians or consumer appliances -- our decision can be subtly swayed by whoever is in third place.

Psychologists call this the decoy effect: In a perfectly rational world, third candidates should only siphon votes away from one or both of the leading contenders. Under no circumstances should they cause the vote share of either front-runner to increase. In the actual world, however, third candidates regularly have the unintended effect of making one of the front-runners look better than before in the minds of undecided voters.

Joel Huber, a Duke University marketing professor, showed how the decoy effect works with restaurants. Huber asked people whether they would prefer to eat at a five-star restaurant that was far away or at a three-star restaurant nearby. As with many choices in life, each restaurant had different advantages. If the better restaurant was also nearby, there would be no dilemma. But the question forced people to compare apples and oranges -- trade off quality against convenience -- which ensured no automatic answer.

The human brain, however, always seeks simple answers. Enter the third candidate. Huber told some people there was also a choice of a four-star restaurant that was farther away than the five-star option. People now gravitated toward the five-star choice, since it was better and closer than the third candidate. (The three-star restaurant was closer, but not as good as the new candidate.)

Another group was given a different third candidate, a two-star restaurant halfway between the first two. Many people now chose the three-star restaurant, because it beat the new option on convenience and quality. (The five-star restaurant outdid this third candidate on only one measure, quality.)

What the decoy effect basically shows is that when people cannot decide between two front-runners, they use the third candidate as a sort of measuring stick. If one front-runner looks much better than the third candidate, people gravitate toward that front-runner. Third candidates, in other words, can make a complicated decision feel simple.

How would this work in the context of the current political race?

Let's say you are a centrist Democratic voter who cannot decide between Clinton and Obama because you want a candidate who is strong on national security but also someone fresh. You like Clinton on one measure and Obama on the other. Enter Edwards, whom you see as more dovish than Obama but part of the same establishment as Clinton. Obama looks better than Edwards on both counts, whereas Clinton beats Edwards on only the national security issue.

On the other hand, let's say you care about experience but are wary of policies such as universal health care. You like Clinton's experience but are worried about her track record on health care. Enter Edwards, whom you perceive to be as untested as Obama but even more likely to pursue a traditionally liberal agenda. Clinton now looks better than Edwards on both counts.

What this means is that Obama and Clinton stand to gain by drawing attention to those qualities of Edwards's that make each front-runner look much better than the other. Clever front-runners, in other words, can turn third candidates into their wingmen.

"Many people lavished hate on Ralph Nader for presumably taking votes away from the Democratic front-runner in the 2000 presidential election," said Scott Highhouse, who has studied the decoy effect at Bowling Green State University. "Research on the decoy effect suggests that Nader's presence, rather than taking votes away, probably increased the share of votes for the candidate he most resembled."

Suzanne Fogel, head of the marketing department at DePaul University, conducted a study of the 1992 presidential election, where Ross Perot provided the psychologist with a third candidate and a national laboratory. She and colleagues Yigang Pan and Robert Pitts found that, contrary to the conventional wisdom about which candidate Perot would hurt, undecided voters who focused on different qualities of Perot tended to gravitate toward George H.W. Bush or Bill Clinton.

"People are not very thorough information processors," she said. "People try to distill the essence from things, and if someone calls attention to one attribute or another, you make your choice based on that attribute because it is in the foreground of your attention."

I asked her whether the 2008 front-runners could take advantage of the phenomenon.

"You can manipulate that by what you draw attention to," she said. "You would find someone who is sort of close to you but that you are better than, and talk about how you are different from that person."

And what should people do to avoid being manipulated by marketers and pols? Don't let salespeople tell you what issues to care about, and don't let candidates define one another. More simply, think for yourself and be wary if a difficult choice suddenly feels simple.

Art and Life

This is an interseting tilt from the forward thinkers in San Antonio on art education in schools. As I have said before, not only does art education and the apprenticeship of creativity prepare you for art but also for life. The capacity to think creatively and to improvise efficiently is an important part of any business person's tool box. Thanks to Dan Pink for the heads up. Enjoy

AUSTIN — Ben Chacon-Torres, a junior at San Antonio's Brackenridge High School, has no idea where his life would be headed if Texas schools didn't teach music, dance and theater.

For him, the fine arts make his life go around, giving him a good idea where he might land some day.

"I'm going to be famous," Chacon-Torres said last week while waiting to perform in the Capitol rotunda with his school's Razzle Dazzle Concert Choir and Show Choir.

Hundreds of students from around Texas performed in the rotunda and on the Capitol steps Thursday to draw attention to Arts Education Day.

A new study by the Texas Coalition for Quality Arts Education shows both students and schools with robust fine arts programs do better academically. Schools rated "exemplary" had 61 percent of their students enrolled in fine arts courses, compared with 54 percent for "recognized," 51 percent for "acceptable" and 44 percent at "low-performing" schools.

"We're not claiming that those statistics by themselves prove that having fine arts makes students smarter or are more likely to make them stay in school," said Robert Floyd, executive director of the Texas Music Educators Association.

Video

The Brackenridge High School choir speak out for continued funding of arts electives.

"But these statistics show that a high level of student participation in fine arts is one of the characteristics of outstanding high schools and middle schools in our state."

For Chacon-Torres, who said he ranks in the top 5 percent of his class academically, dance and song "help me express myself."

"It helps me get out of that zone to spring out," he said, adding he plans to pursue the arts in college but has not decided where.

Though the arts face no immediate funding crisis in Texas schools, supporters worry that increasing demands for more academic courses will put elective classes at risk. Last year, legislators increased the number of math and science classes that high school students must take.

"When you add a number of subjects to a student's already crowded load, in essence, it is ruling out fine arts. They don't do it on purpose. It's just one of those aftermaths," said Joyce Brannon, director of the Razzle Dazzle choir.

About 1.2 million of the 4.5 million children in Texas public schools participate in fine arts.

 

"It adds enrichment to a child's life," Brannon said. "It gives them ready-made friends. It gives them a reason to come to school. It gives them creative thinking ability and (teaches students) how to analyze."

The state of Texas requires high school students to take at least one fine arts credit to graduate under the recommended and distinguished achievement graduation plans. The fine arts include music, art, theater and dance.

Arts advocates have at least one influential ally in Rep. Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands, chairman of the House Public Education Committee.

A fine arts education is imperative "for our culture to survive," Eissler said, adding Texas schools develop "amazing talent."

"Left brain is logic, right brain is creativity," he said. "We don't want our kids to compete internationally with half of their brain tied behind their backs."

Democracy

The gloves are off here... 

The Americans and the French have diametrically opposite views on the relationship between quality and quantity. To a Frenchman, anything that is worth savouring must, of necessity, be available only in limited quantities. To an American, anything that's any good must be made available to everyone. Ford, Coke and McDonalds are archetypal American brands just as Chanel, Louis Vuitton and Chateau Petrus are archetypal French ones.

The French would never try to bring democracy to anyone else, as obviously these foreigners would be incapable of appreciating it.

Me, I prefer the American approach. Indeed I am much taken with an Andy Warhol quotation along the lines of "what I like about Coke is that the President of the United States can't get a better Coke than the bum on the street." Really great brands should be universal. (When you think about it, the huge explosion in the value of luxury goods brands is evidence of a social malaise).
Though France is sporadically wonderful, it suffers from a terrible lack of scalability. A good cuisine remains trapped within its region. A great cafe or restaurant remains a great cafe or restaurant - with a single outlet. Part of the reason for this is that the French see the principal purpose of a job as supplying status, not money. So your typical Frog restaurateur would rather operate a single restaurant in Paris patronised by a few cabinet ministers than operate a vast chain of eateries serving the general public. This explains why the great majority of French Schoolchildren aspire to be civil servants when they grow up. And why it is no co-incidence that succès d’estime is a French phrase.

I once asked a Frenchman why, given that they had "the best food in the world" they had not attempted to compete with McDonalds. "Why not," I wondered "a nationwide chain of restaurants selling cider and galettes?". "But that is a Breton cuisine," he replied.

It is fashionable to despise popularist brands in Britain, too. And so a particular brand of British middle class twat regards Brie as healthy and burgers as dodgy. And I am so glad they do.

You see, one of the great things about McDonalds is this: that the people who "don't go to McDonalds" don't go there. If you live in the South East of England this is wonderful - it means you can go there with your kids and be guaranteed that you won't be exposed to any of the hand-wringing tossers who say things like "Jolyon's allergic to chips, actually".

I like brands like easyJet, IKEA, etc which are actually anti-snobbish and act as snob-repellents. When not American, these brands are often Scandinavian, Australian or Dutch. They are gloriously non pretentious, and attract a similar clientele.

And of course this works the other way round. There are plenty of brands which, while appealing in themselves, attract a peculiarly revolting class of user. BMW above all (I was once upgraded at Avis to a BMW 5-series and refused it) or the Apple laptop. My aversion to British Airways is similar - anything the airline does is counterbalanced by the need to share a plane with a lot of lower-middle class ugly people with an unusual penchant for doilies.

The Art of Getting Recognized

 

Straight out of eBay. This is a marketing gem, I even want to bid just to be part of the story. Crap car with no options and the guy is making himself a star. Enjoy... 

Is this the World's Worst Car?

Of course, I'm kidding. After all, this isn't a Lada, a Trabi (Trabant), or even a Holden Camira.

It's my trusty 1989 (AE92) Toyota Corolla. And it's got nearly 300,000km on the clock.

Although it looks tired (OK, very tired), and everybody enjoys making fun of how shitty it looks, it does have some benefits.

Seriously! There are some reasons why you might want to buy this car. Don't believe me?

Well for a start, it's been driven for the last three years by a guaranteed future A-list celebrity: Steven Pam, host of Hound TV.

Would Anna Nicole Smith, Prince, or Seth Godin drive a car like this? I don't know.

But I did, and you might.... here's why:

• It never breaks. Seriously! In the ten years that this car has been in our family, the only things we've ever had to fix have been normal consumable/wear and tear/maintenance items, like tyres, clutch, battery. And even those don't need replacing very often. Yep, these babies are bulletproof - ask any mechanic.
• Unlikely to get stolen or broken into. I mean, if you were a crook, would you be looking for valuables in a car that looks like this?
  
• No car park paranoia. Some grotty nine year-old slams the door of his Mum's SUV into your car? No problem. You can even park 'by ear' yourself, if that's your style.
  

OK, so what do you get for your money?

• Engine. Toyota's stonkin' 1.6 litre, twin cam, carburetted beauty, straight from the factory. Less than 300,000km covered
• Body. Keeps the rain out. Well mostly. It does tend to pool around the driver's footwell area. But you'll be garaging it, right? I mean, it's worth it.
• Seats. Surprisingly comfortable. And very worn - especially the driver's seat
• Stereo. Well, it outputs a stereo signal, but three of the four speakers are pretty much stuffed. So I guess it's more of a 'mono' than a stereo. But anyway, it picks up both AM and FM radio, and even plays tapes (compact cassettes). Oh, and mp3s and podcasts! (You just need an iPod and one of those tape adapter thingies. Works a treat.)
  

• Air conditioning. Actually, it doesn't have air conditioning. I lied. Sorry. Try winding the window down... it's better for our planet anyway.

• Cup holders. OK, it doesn't have cup holders either. But who needs them? You shouldn't be drinking and driving anyway, you slob. I mean, look at you!

• Steering wheel. For going around corners (left or right)

• Brakes. Man, this thing can stop on a dime! Especially if you position the dime a couple of hundred meters down the road. No, seriously, the brakes work fine. Discs at the front, drums at the rear. One (or both?) of the rear drums feels a bit 'grabby' when the car hasn't been driven for a few days. New shoes would probably do the trick.
• Racing tyres. Yeah, they're like, slicks. Bald, in other words. I suggest you get new ones if you're planning on driving this thing. If you just want it for parts, or you're planning on mounting it at the top of a pole outside your business (or house!), then the current tyres should be just fine. I mean, they hold air and everything.
• Sporty 6-speed manual transmission. Well, it actually only has five forward gears, but reverse works, too, so that's six, isn't it?
  
• Lucky numbers. I will paint your lucky number (stencil or freehand) on the doors in your choice of colour, for free. Vinyl cut lettering available at extra cost.
• Celebrity photo & autograph. When you collect the car, get a photo with me handing the keys over. I'll also autograph the car's manual - or any other part you nominate.
  It's not just any autograph... I'm a genuine A-list celebrity! "How so", I hear you ask, "when I have never frickin' heard of you"?
  Look, I host Hound TV, the world's first video podcast for dogs and their owners. Podcasting is hot now, you know that. It's only a matter of time before I make my way from Z-list, to Y, and so on, until I'm a household name. Just imagine how impressed your friends will be when you tell them that your car was once owned by THE Steven Pam. It'll be just like the Seinfeld episode where George buys a car once owned by Jon Voight. Only better, because it will be YOU, not George Costanza.
• Roadworthy Certificate. Just kidding, you don't really get one. The car is sold strictly 'as is' - what you see is what you get. So if you want to register the car, you'll need to organise a RWC yourself. Of course if you just want the bits off it, want to use it as a paddock bomb, or mount it at the top of a pole... no problem!

The Future

Get a load of this. Remember Tom Cruise's nifty computer where his hands were flying over the screen. Everyone knew Minority Report was set in the future but now it doesn't seem that far away. Presenting suddenly seems like a whole new ball game.

 

SwapYourStuff

A new way of saving the planet and a cool business idea - SwapYourStuff. I have a whole garage full of stuff.

Ouch

The gloves are off. Check this out. 

The Karma Café

Oh, I love this... 

You can pay anything you like at the Terra Bite Lounge in Kirkland, Washington, reports Amy Roe in The Seattle Times (2/6/07). No prices are listed on the menu — it’s up to the cafe’s customers to decide how much to pay, or whether to pay at all. “Does it really matter to any of our patrons … whether they pay a dollar or three dollars or five dollars?” says Ervin Peretz, a Google programmer who scraped together the dough to start a cafe that he says sells “good karma” as much as coffee and snacks. His bet is that “he can finesse the largesse of well-off latte lovers to cover the tabs of the less fortunate.”

Ervin says he got the idea while drinking at a bar in Saigon, and named the place as “a play on the tech term ‘terabyte,’ a trillion bytes, as well as a reference to earth and food.” As he explains: “People want something different. They want simplicity … They want to be taken to a new place, and they want to contribute something.” One patron, Tonja Maciolek, says she likes the idea “because she’s sensitive to price and would prefer to name her own, even it ended up being the same.” She contributed $4 for a bagel with cream cheese and coffee.

Kate Lewis, a high school student, says she’d pay extra for the privilege of setting her own price. "It’s kind of like a social experiment," she says. Which makes Chris Allar, slightly crazy. "It’s always hard to see if you paid too much or too little," he says, admitting to a certain anxiety over that. But Ervin thinks he’s onto something — since opening late last year he’s served an average of 80 customers a day, each of whom has paid an average of $3. He says he needs about 100 a day to break even. If that doesn’t happen, he says his alternative is pretty obvious: "If it turned out that 20 percent of the population were dishonest, we could just put in a cash register," he says. ~ Tim Manners, editor

 

Ignore Everybody

When I first started blogging I stumbled across Hugh as did about a jillion other people. His views are not the cheesy easy to digest view of the world of a regular cartoonist looking at the world through the eyes of a cynical cat or doofus office worker but rather they are little finger pokes in the chest given by your right brain. Sometimes I don't get it and sometimes I get it so accutely it feels like a life-changer.  

The more original your idea is, the less good advice other people will be able to give you. When I first started with the cartoon-on-back-of-bizcard format, people thought I was nuts. Why wasn't I trying to do something more easy for markets to digest i.e. cutey-pie greeting cards or whatever?You don't know if your idea is any good the moment it's created. Neither does anyone else. The most you can hope for is a strong gut feeling that it is. And trusting your feelings is not as easy as the optimists say it is. There's a reason why feelings scare us.

And asking close friends never works quite as well as you hope, either. It's not that they deliberately want to be unhelpful. It's just they don't know your world one millionth as well as you know your world, no matter how hard they try, no matter how hard you try to explain.

Plus a big idea will change you. Your friends may love you, but they don't want you to change. If you change, then their dynamic with you also changes. They like things the way they are, that's how they love you- the way you are, not the way you may become.

Ergo, they have no incentive to see you change. And they will be resistant to anything that catalyzes it. That's human nature. And you would do the same, if the shoe was on the other foot.

With business colleagues it's even worse. They're used to dealing with you in a certain way. They're used to having a certain level of control over the relationship. And they want whatever makes them more prosperous. Sure, they might prefer it if you prosper as well, but that's not their top priority.

If your idea is so good that it changes your dynamic enough to where you need them less, or God forbid, THE MARKET needs them less, then they're going to resist your idea every chance they can.

Again, that's human nature.

GOOD IDEAS ALTER THE POWER BALANCE IN RELATIONSHIPS, THAT IS WHY GOOD IDEAS ARE ALWAYS INITIALLY RESISTED.

Good ideas come with a heavy burden. Which is why so few people have them. So few people can handle it.

Powerpoint (again)

Seth Godin is at it again and as easy as it is to rip this off and beat my chest about how I've been hammering this into companies for years, if this post serves as a lead into the gems distributed by Seth then I with feel less guilty about the cut and paste. Happy reading... 

 

Really Bad Powerpoint

It doesn’t matter whether you’re trying to champion at a church or a school or a Fortune 100 company, you’re probably going to use PowerPoint.

Powerpoint was developed by engineers as a tool to help them communicate with the marketing department—and vice versa. It’s a remarkable tool because it allows very dense verbal communication. Yes, you could send a memo, but no one reads anymore. As our companies are getting faster and faster, we need a way to communicate ideas from one group to another. Enter Powerpoint.

Powerpoint could be the most powerful tool on your computer. But it’s not. Countless innovations fail because their champions use PowerPoint the way Microsoft wants them to, instead of the right way.

Communication is the transfer of emotion.

Communication is about getting others to adopt your point of view, to help them understand why you’re excited (or sad, or optimistic or whatever else you are.)If all you want to do is create a file of facts and figures, then cancel the meeting and send in a report.

Our brains have two sides. The right side is emotional, musical and moody. The left side is focused on dexterity, facts and hard data. When you show up to give a presentation, people want to use both parts of their brain. So they use the right side to judge the way you talk, the way you dress and your body language. Often, people come to a conclusion about your presentation by the time you’re on the second slide. After that, it’s often too late for your bullet points to do you much good.

You can wreck a communication process with lousy logic or unsupported facts, but you can’t complete it without emotion. Logic is not enough.

Champions must sell—to internal audiences and to the outside world.

If everyone in the room agreed with you, you wouldn’t need to do a presentation, would you? You could save a lot of time by printing out a one-page project report and delivering it to each person. No, the reason we do presentations is to make a point, to sell one or more ideas.

If you believe in your idea, sell it. Make your point as hard as you can and get what you came for. Your audience will thank you for it, because deep down, we all want to be sold.

Four Components To A Great Presentation
First, make yourself cue cards. Don’t put them on the screen. Put them in your hand. Now, you can use the cue cards you made to make sure you’re saying what you came to say.

Second, make slides that reinforce your words, not repeat them. Create slides that demonstrate, with emotional proof, that what you’re saying is true not just accurate.

Talking about pollution in Houston? Instead of giving me four bullet points of EPA data, why not read me the stats but show me a photo of a bunch of dead birds, some smog and even a diseased lung? This is cheating! It’s unfair! It works.

Third, create a written document. A leave-behind. Put in as many footnotes or details as you like. Then, when you start your presentation, tell the audience that you’re going to give them all the details of your presentation after it’s over, and they don’t have to write down everything you say. Remember, the presentation is to make an emotional sale. The document is the proof that helps the intellectuals in your audience accept the idea that you’ve sold them on emotionally.

IMPORTANT: Don’t hand out the written stuff at the beginning! If you do, people will read the memo while you’re talking and ignore you. Instead, your goal is to get them to sit back, trust you and take in the emotional and intellectual points of your presentation.

Fourth, create a feedback cycle. If your presentation is for a project approval, hand people a project approval form and get them to approve it, so there’s no ambiguity at all about what you’ve all agreed to.

The reason you give a presentation is to make a sale. So make it. Don’t leave without a “yes,” or at the very least, a commitment to a date or to future deliverables.

Bullets Are For the NRA
Here are the five rules you need to remember to create amazing Powerpoint presentations:

1. No more than six words on a slide. EVER. There is no presentation so complex that this rule needs to be broken.
2. No cheesy images. Use professional stock photo images.
3. No dissolves, spins or other transitions.
4. Sound effects can be used a few times per presentation, but never use the sound effects that are built in to the program. Instead, rip sounds and music from CDs and leverage the Proustian effect this can have. If people start bouncing up and down to the Grateful Dead, you’ve kept them from falling asleep, and you’ve reminded them that this isn’t a typical meeting you’re running.
5. Don’t hand out print-outs of your slides. They don’t work without you there.

The home run is easy to describe: You put up a slide. It triggers an emotional reaction in the audience. They sit up and want to know what you’re going to say that fits in with that image. Then, if you do it right, every time they think of what you said, they’ll see the image (and vice versa).1

Sure, this is different from the way everyone else does it. But everyone else is busy defending the status quo (which is easy) and you’re busy championing brave new innovations, which is difficult.