snowflake

The seemingly impossible variety of snowflakes and the fact that the formation of some of their complicated patterns is still a scientific mystery only adds to the majesty of a white festive season. The snow may have melted away in our hometown of Omaha, but these awe inspiring images of snowflakes will keep that festive spirit alive. Click here to see these natural works of art captured by Kenneth Libbrecht, shown by the New Scientist, and have a jolly New Year.

Many of you have probably heard of the gestalt theory. Gestalt, by definition, is an organized whole that is perceived as more than the sum of its parts. There are two ways our mind uses this theory: when we read text, and when we see visual elements. Read the rest of this entry »

Radial Lines

I am pretty sure that some designers among us create art just to screw with our minds. Art has long explored ideas of perspective, imagery and reality, but there is some art that relies entirely on our imaginative brains for its impact, which includes pulsing, rotating and shimmering where none actually exists.

Scientific American has provided an online history of the study of optical illusions (click here to see it), including stunning works by Op Artists like Bridget Riley. It is fascinating study. Anyway, I have to go now as I am feeling a little queasy.

After recently re-reading Aldous Huxley’s classic novel, Brave New World, it was timely to read the Questions for Jonah Lehrer interview in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, as he has just written How We Decide, a book on how we make decisions. I got to thinking about our understanding of the human brain and the use of that knowledge in marketing. In another post, I’ll chat about behavioral economics, but in this post, as it is the end of the year and there is the surfeit of “Books of 2008″ lists, allow me to note just a few books related to this topic that I think would be inspiring and to ask you to provide your own suggestions. Read the rest of this entry »

Competition–any healthy competition–is good, right? It keeps us on our toes. It pushes us to our limits. It makes us faster thinkers, smarter, and a lot of times even makes us richer. Who doesn’t want all of those things? Read the rest of this entry »

Great article in the New York Times today (Do you want to “Friend” a Detergent?). It speaks to the difficulty for brand managers of using social media to promote their brands … or their incompetence in doing so and, in fact, of trying to do so.

Ted McConnell, the manager of interactive marketing and innovation at P&G, is quoted as saying “I don’t want to be best friends with a brand. Its just stuff.” McConnell’s suggestion is, by and large, that brands frequently assume that the large number of people on Facebook and other like social media applications can be segmented into their customer base or target audience and approached via that medium. However, they seem to ignore the reason why their consumer or target audience is on Facebook in the first place, which is to maintain a conversation with their real friends. It is not to be talked at by brands.

Of course, some brands align neatly with social media as a mechanism for brand expression and conversation. But many don’t. Its just another bad attempt at brand extension, trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

At last Friday’s Midlands Business Journal’s 40 Under 40 2008 Awards breakfast ceremony, Drew Embury, the Young Business Person of the Year, spoke about his success and the excellent growth of his business, P&L Technology.

In explaining his success, he talked about their exhaustive attention to fulfilling the company’s brand promise. Consistently aligning P&L Technology’s business practices with their brand promise resulted in satisfied clients and satisfied employees.

At dd|a, we preach the value and ROI of aligning business thinking with the organization’s brand, especially the “operationalizing” of that brand within the business (see the fabulous book, “Building the Brand Driven Business” by Scott Davis and Michael Dunn).

We are thrilled to see that concept exemplified so successfully. Bravo Drew.

[In the interests of ego, I would declare that I was honored with one of the 40 Under 40 awards this year, hence my attendance at the breakfast. So, err, well done me and all of my fellow honorees!]

That, in a nutshell, is the creative direction of a lot of current advertising. Make a conscious effort over the next few weeks to watch the TV, listen to the radio or review online or print ads through this analytical lens and see how often marketers have used base stereotypes of gender differences in their advertising.  As household and discretionary expenditure has become increasingly controlled by women, marketers have pandered to this primary source of purchasing power. Men are being presented on the one hand as lovable and cuddly, but also prone to acting like a cute dog that doesn’t know better. On the other hand, men are being presented as misogynists. Read the rest of this entry »

I am a sucker for kung fu flicks. Anything high kickin’, screamin’ and fist pumpin’ gets me reaching for my yellow onesie. So when I saw this Bruce Lee Nokia N96 TV Ad I watched it over and over and over.

Of course, Bruce Lee is dead (right?), so this nunchuck wielding martial artist must be a double. But what I still don’t understand is just what a dead celebrity has to do with Nokia’s N96 telephone. Maybe it has something to do with the brand archetype that the marketers have established for the phone, but because I cannot read Cantonese/Mandarin, I don’t know what their Web site says. And I would still be surprised to see a recognizable association between Bruce Lee, the global martial art hero, and a cell phone.

The use of celebrity endorsements is a trite marketing tactic, but still potentially effective. The use of dead celebrities is more interesting, but no less trite.

Anyway, I’m off to watch that clip again.

Invention has many mothers. Aside from necessity, which we get from the old saying, there is also thrift, boredom, sloth and efficiency.

I wrote my first CMS (content management system) tool in 2002 using Visual Basic 6.0. I wanted to maintain a blog, but did not want to use one of the popular blog hosting sites that used banner adds. I also wanted control over how I skinned the site, and archived the stories. I wanted to host it on my ISP’s free static hosting, and wanted control over this data should I move it to another hosting solution.

My solution was to build a series of templates that would represent portions of the blog page. This would include the header, footer, navigation, and repeating items such as the stories, and links in the navigation. The repeating items had field variables that would be populated from an Access database. No need for speed. The final HTML would be spit out into static pages, and FTPed up to the site for viewing friends and relatives. Read the rest of this entry »