Posted by Anne on July 7, 2010
Your desk would have piles of invitations, people would come poke you unexpectedly and you would get banana trees and cows out of the blue.
Life itself would start losing fans. And get dislikes.
Would you like to:
a) confirm
b) deny
c) ignore
These statements.
Posted by Anne on June 23, 2010
Recently I found a very interesting and not at all boring consumer research on Trendwatching. The guys made 6 simple, easy and catchy survey-footages among usual common people.
They went out on the streets and asked people from London, Tokyo, Singapore and such other cities what mobile phones they carry. You would be surprised to hear most of the answers. And in case you want to develop a brand, of any kind, the next footage might reveal you some precious facts about branding & positioning versus sameness.
To which category of the two above would you subscribe your brand?
Enjoy and click here for all 6:
Posted by Anne on June 16, 2010
Those of you who have a Star Wars t-shirt, please raise your hand.
Darth Vader and the other space people are so popular and cool that everybody wants to wear them.
But what if Darth Vader becomes “cool”. Will he still be that cool? You know what I mean?
more on trendhunter
Star Wars fashion got a whole new meaning now.
Posted by Anne on June 10, 2010
Our dear Sturmdrang Institute deals, among other nice stuff, with research. Here’s what they lately discovered, on one of the daily breakfast sessions.
Exactly. A golden spoon.
And look what we found at Danone France:
So, we’re really curious now. What do you think the silver/golden spoon stand for in dairy targeting?
And which one’s more flattering to you?:-)
Posted by Anne on May 11, 2010
David Griner with his article on The Social Path and Google with its recently new keyboard toy started some thinking and debates around the office related to the future usage of classical keyboards versus touchscreens. Do you think that the next generation will ever use a keyboard again?
source: Gizmodo
We’re already resignated to the thought that our children and grandchildren will never use the Chinese Fountain Pens we had and will never get stained with blue ink while practicing neat writing. The future sounds like this: you touch the screen with your finger and the word is there.
The present already offers us plenty of this innovative writing: smart phones and smart displays, controllers for video games and all sorts of smart tricks used by platforms like Google, which are able to predict the words you want to type, so that you can quit writing the full sentence and resume to pressing “enter”. There is also Swype, the finger-tracing text programm and the list is open to daily releases.
That should make it easier for us to accept that this is the future; maybe also the present, as 2 year olds are able to use an iPhone before being able to read or to write.
We’ve got our own classical pro&con list, which we leave open for your opinions.
For the pro we can track down the following: touchscreens are smaller and slimmer, so you save up space. They can easily be improved, with a software update. They offer the option to switch the language automatically and they can perform translations on the content. And then there are the smarter touchscreens, like the iPhone, which can predict the letters you want to type and make it easier and faster to select those ones.
For the con we would start with the lack of a touch feedback: when pressing a button, you have the physical evidence of your action and you wait for an answer, whereas when dealing with a touchscreen, you can have a delay in answer and may find yourself in the situation of not knowing what to do – wait or type the same leter 10 times until you get a confusing display? Another con point would be that you cannot use a touchscreen without looking. You may be able to type on a physical keyboard just by feeling the letters and watch the screen or something else at the same time; but touchscreens require your full attention.
Some experts give an insight on the world of touchscreens here.
And while they do this, we can think of what to do with all the free space we save by using touchscreens: maybe store some books and oldfashioned diaries? Nostalgia has to be fed somehow.
Posted by Anne on April 29, 2010
Trends don’t necessarily have much to do with novelty. It’s rarely that a generation brings up a totally original attitude or fashion. Most of them are past-trends that go through a painted revival process. Just take a look at skinny jeans, high heels, skirts that go up the waist and so on. Not to mention that every generation stands up against something – wars, animal extinction, discrimination or global warming – the hippies of nowadays.
However, this is about geeks and geeky fashion and all the other subcultures that are really worth to be analyzed for more precise, thus better targeting.
Posted by Anne on April 15, 2010
We all consume one thing or another. That’s why we’re writing about it, it’s in ourselves and everywhere around us.
One of the first people that categorized consumers was Everett M. Rogers, after some studies made by Ryan and Gross. He defined four types of consumers in connection to their perspectives towards innovation: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority and laggards.
However, we’re facing a paradigm upgrade which might configure the present categories in a different manner. One of the criteria used for the Rogers model was gender and sexual orientation. Nevertheless, the new worldwide attitude towards gay couples is changing and they start being perceived as not-to-be-neglected-anymore entities by the legal and social rules. Therefore, they become consumers by this new input, which brings us to personalized targeting, which brings us to this Levi’s ad:
Posted by Anne on March 30, 2010
Stirring veggies and spices to get a salad is one thing, but combining music and new media to get art is…well, it’s like the footage below 
:
Posted by Anne on March 25, 2010
Here’s one thing that never goes out of fashion: GENEROSITY. It’s always welcome, painless, free and it implies a minimum of emotional effort.
Some big names noticed this and embedded it in their activity, with multiple great results. Apart from the predictable ones that related to fame, money, satisfaction and so on, I will state the two ones that I find most resuming:
1. People that weren’t consumers of their brand, became consumers over night with no kind of effort whatsoever.
2. Some of these people were really happy about all of this. Simple words, great results.
More on generosity as a trend you can find here or here. Or everywhere around you, let’s hope:).
Posted by Anne on March 22, 2010
Make your customer part of your product => you bond more => he likes the interaction => he comes back to you.
That’s about the main idea below. Cinemas need people to quit illegal downloading of movies. So after 3D and Imax, here’s the ultimate cinema temptation: interactive cinema, where the audience controls the characters. The first movie to let us choose how the plot goes:
I say it’ll be some catch, what do you think?
