Jag lyssnade nyligen (som vanligt) till filosofiska rummet och avsnittet om Aristoteles ”Fysik”. Inte bara är verket i sig uppenbarligen en obduktion av fysiken och naturen och hur den (verkar) funka, utan även avsnittet är ett metaforiskt intelligent böljande samtalshav, mellan tydliga exempel och analys av mekaniken och förhållandena bakom den. Ett bra case.
Detta är något jag saknar så otroligt mycket i många föreläsningssituationer. Case efterfrågas, gärna best practice, men de får gärna avverkas tillsynes utan djupare reflektion. Av många. Inte alla, så klart. Workshops är annorlunda. De kretsar inte kring case utan lek och utforskning av just mekaniken. Om den designats väl vill säga.
Min uppmaningar är att lyssna efter vad som ligger bakom exemplet. Välj aktivt att inte bemöta eller fråga om exemplet i fråga, utan principerna. Förstå mekaniken. Dyker då inte frågorna upp, ja då har du alltid en väldigt enkel. Att du hör vad personen säger och beskriver, men att du bättre vill förstå grundprinciperna. Kan personen i fråga inte obducera detta case på ett sätt som är upplysande bakom det uppenbara, då ska du istället befinna dig i en workshop.
Examples like these might seem tiny, insignificant and maybe even fruitless. But I disagree. To every product there is a backside to the production, usage and remains. To all of this there is a business oportunity somewhere. And as businesses are pressed to rethink the entirety of their operations I think we’ll see more examples of significant size where reframing markets as an end-to-end eco system makes perfect sense. And if Unilever can view its Sustainable Living Plan as the business strategy there’s hope.
I came across “Who you are and what you do is your brand“, over at Seth Hosko’s blog, about how Gap does things the wrong way, and that they should learn from H&M and Uniqlo. He’s not alone. If the crowd sourced logo re-design was a hurried and panicked decision or a plan, I don’t know, but what they’re doing doesn’t strike me as strategically sound (and it’s a badly executed one too, but that’s more subjective). The statement is definitely right in the H&M case; that who you are and what you do is your brand, as they’re about affordable fashion for everybody and they really connect with everybody. Affordable fashion yes, but still they have a key to the finer fashion world through collaborations with well known fashion designers. They’re quite remarkable in vision, strategic decisions and in how that is carried out.
Here’s a project we did for our client H&M (full disclosure; I work for Gyro and H&M is a client), and pretty much all about connecting people to brands. The Lanvin for H&M launch, for the first time via digital/social media only and not as they usually do; with big outdoor campaigns, TV and that package.
So really simplified; how do we launch the designer collaboration through social media only, and sustain interest, and engagement, over a significant period of time?
H&M launched lots of cryptic films, if you will, about design and what it is, where it comes from and its importance to many. Framed in a way that it generated heaps of commenting and guesses.
Films kept coming, and so did comments and guesses.
Fast forward. The designer is out; it’s Alber Elbaz of Lanvin. Fashion world exclaim woohoooo!! Trending topics on twitter and all that. The films have talked about his view on design, influences and inspiration and consequently his way of transferring this to fashion. Successful fashion to boot. Fashion that is loved.
At the same time, 4m+ H&M fans on facebook, many of which are fashion interested bloggers, are spending time and energy on expressing what they like and perhaps even live for. It’s about their inspiration, their taste and their influences. They too transfer this into something appreciated by others and hopefully even commercially successful.
We facilitated a collaboration with these people, in order to spread the word about Lanvin even further, while giving them something back; traffic and attention. Hard currency in a blogger’s world. A widget helped gauge the love for their blog, and give them a chance to win the exclusive trailer to the big Lanvin for H&M show. Only to feature on the winning blog, with H&M directing traffic their way. So people joined, got the widget and gauged their blog love.
This little widget had value for fashion bloggers, and relevance in where and who it came from. The strategy was to connect. And the small execution was the connection, reaching millions of people, engaging tens of thousands and finally promoting only one. It generated heaps of traffic and attention to the winning blog (strangely enough, the clip wasn’t ripped as we had thought, given we didn’t have an embed code. After all, views should happen on the winning blog). One lucky winner enjoyed a wave of interested fashion peeps. Here’s the case film.
Everest Poker was a bit late into the Swedish market, considering the boom in 2005 and 2006. But then again the category as such seem to never get tired of playing and definitely not growing tired of sign-up bonuses. Talking to, and practically living with, poker fanatics from all buy-in levels of the game tells you many things and one of them is the fact that it’s a high interest category but with very low interest in the product brands in every aspect other than the functional benefits which is about functionality on the site (smart settings, auto fold, proximity of buttons and the order thereof etc), number of active players (need to be lots of tables across all buy-in levels), whether or not you can be lucky enough to play with real pros and of course the sign-up bonus (which you don’t want to make your only reason for acquisition as repeat playing gets tricky), most of which are experienced by trial.
Obviously brand communications play a role, first of all by getting people there (and then conversion is up to the site) and also by reminding players that it’s time to try something new (considering the fact that they are often registered on 5-8 sites and often active on 3+ at the time). How you do this, however, doesn’t necessarily have to be so functionally focused and not even bonus focused given the category norm which says; poker players try everything.
We devised a creative strategy playing on high quality feature film style, while communicating the most core brand value of Everest Poker; not making it about bling bling, not about taking the last dime off your opponents – but for the love of the game. A place less macho, and a tad bit more friendly without coming across as completely alien for that matter. That, we figured, is to be shown before experienced, but probably not told. For the player tuned to details, you’d see that the 4 films in total were actually connected in 2 stories. After all, it was all built on evoking curiosity as opposed to being stupidly redundant.
