Archive for May, 2009
With worldwide personal computer shipments down by 6.5 percent in the first quarter, PC makers scramble to attract every possible demographic. And it was probably in this spirit that the Dell marketing staff figured they’d hit upon a great idea. Market computers to women with a web site called, Della. And before you could even hit shift-tab, the cage fighting had already begun and Dell was back pedaling on the idea.
Reviewers morphed into comedians with suggestions that the company could launch Dello for men. Hewlett-Packarda and Packardo. Silly commentary for what they believed to be a silly idea. If men and women are equal why create such a site? Adding insult to injury, the Della site featured such cutting-edge computer uses as searching for recipes online, tracking exercise routines and counting calories. The implication that women weren’t tech savvy was at the very least, insulting.
In the commentary that followed, it was noted that Dell has lots of company among businesses that attempt to market to women. Some doing a better job of using neutral language than others. Among them, HP with its designer clutch, a computer that can fit in a purse. No word on required size of purse, but it does mean that women no longer have to sacrifice glamour for digital.
With sharp fingers flying across keyboards, someone launched an unscientific research project. A group of 22 women and 15 men were assembled and asked to comment on web sites including Della. It turns out no one found Della to be offensive. After being prompted, 21 women accepted a certain reality that women are different from men and sometimes color, for example will resonate more with women than men.
Della was either scrapped or vigorously modified. Searchers aren’t sure. But now the marketing world is left to wonder what women really want from them. Pink materials for women and blue for men? Purple for everyone equally? Or just basic black? And beyond gender there’s race and culture and so much more to think about. And then there are the Martians.
Using the words from Apple’s advertising campaign, “Here’s to the crazy ones,” along with several Apple Computer fonts, designer Dylan Roscover created a portrait of Steve Jobs. Using Adobe’s popular software, Rosco used an existing photo of Steve Jobs, bumped up the contrast and began creating the subject’s beard with lower case Garamond “L”. After three sleepless days and nights, Rosco can rest assured that the finished image is being much circulated.
Rosco, a self-described “design geek,” describes his typical day as one filled with typography flying through his head. It begins at breakfast with him analyzing the colors on the cereal box. True obsession there. Now the question is – Science or Art? Yes, other people think in terms of graphic design v. art, but we’re so beyond that. Now it’s time to think of the art v. science angle.
As it turns out, when people go looking for the best scientists, they also find artists. Nobel Prize winners, for example are rarely the best academic students with high grades and higher IQs. They often have a broader range of talents and are usually involved in artistic pursuits, from music to painting to crafting things with their hands. Using hands and intellect – well, it goes hand in hand.
Examples of this are all over the annals of science history. Galileo was an artist, craftsman, musician and writer. Kepler was a musician as well. Sir Humphrey Davy, of the miner’s lamp and so much more, was a poet. Any number of Nobel laureates go on to discuss how music, poetry or woodworking helped them to become better scientists. Instead of being the one with the nose in a book, a great scientist looks out into the world once in a while, or more and finds the beauty that surrounds us – and he says to himself – what a wonderful world?
When you were a kid, you built with Lego bricks. Now as a grown up you can use those lessons to remodel your office space. Here are photos of modular wall systems that don’t require much more than the courage to jump in and remodel. Designers include Razortooth and Mio. Add a wall, move a wall - walk around with a wall, it’s all just a matter of taste.
Do your clients read your e-mails or send them straight to the recycle bin? Do they complain of e-mail overload? Workload? Business travel? Kids baseball? Dance recitals? Do you send too many e-mails – just saying Hi? What would you do to encourage e-mail reading? What if someone merged video games with corporate e-mails?
One experiment took this giant leap of merging video game strategies with e-mails. They attached tokens to key messages to get recipients to read corporate e-mails that would otherwise go straight to the recycle bin. Tested on a group at IBM, messages with 20 tokens attached were 52 percent more likely to be quickly opened than normal. No more e-mail overload complaints. The tokens weren’t real. They were virtual – like the game The World of Warcraft.
As the reasoning goes. People like the excitement and challenge of video games. Some have been known to spend hours completing boring tasks in a video game just to win. So it makes sense to harness the principles of gaming with its virtual rewards to promote e-mail reading. Giving e-mail senders measured amounts of tokens would also encourage them to send e-mails only when necessary. Some creative thinking there.
Assuming that everyone is motivated by virtual video game tokens, this is a great idea. Of course, as with anything else, companies have to beware of the monster they’re creating. Eventually the mice figure out the mouse trap. At least the clever and unethical mice do. Then they’ll focus on the tokens and forget about the e-mail. And how do you ever get them to pay attention to anything you have to say again? Then again, someone’s always out there moving the cheese around.
Perks or productivity tools?
Should they be doing that in this economy? And the “that” in this case could be anything from corporate meetings in pricey vacation spots, to ostentatious shareholder meetings, to riding around in the corporate jet. It was the jet trip scolding heard around the world that sticks in any given person’s head. Why did the automakers go to Washington in three corporate jets while seeking a bailout? Why was a bank with bailout money, in the market for a jet? With these images in mind, came round after round of corporate austerity plans, leaving other businesses scratching their heads.
With the knee bone connected to the thigh bone, and the thigh bone connected to the hip bone .. well you get the picture – all that austerity hurts business. Once the swag bags were emptied, the meetings in Vegas disassembled, and the corporate jets grounded, the business impact snowballed. Everyone from bartenders and waiters to pilots and groundskeepers were suddenly losing their jobs for lack of business. Then they were losing their homes for lack of paychecks.
Nowadays open your business magazine and it’s not only the articles but the advertisements that tell the story. Golf courses want you to know that they aren’t just leisure zones, business is done there. General George Marshall came up with his famous plan at the Pinehurst Golf resort. Texas means business and Wisconsin is the state of innovation. The hard hit, private aircraft industry wants it known that far from being the villain, it is the conduit to business. Just one private jet company in New Jersey has a $50 million payroll.
It isn’t known where this is headed. Will Main Street allow corporate executives back on their private jets without an uprising? Can swag makers, golf courses, posh conference facilities and all their suppliers count on business coming back soon? Can Paris Hilton get business back to Hilton hotels? For now, we’re with Mandy Dalton who performed at a mall that went bankrupt without paying her. She’s a clown. She falls on her butt to make kids laugh. She should get paid for that. In times like these we need the clowns.
In the season of graduation, someone contemplating commencement speakers thought the formula could be wrong. Seekers of speakers go for the most successful people they can find. From the President of the country to corporate executives and celebrities – the high achievers get the opportunity to inspire the up and comers. But what if everyone agreed that there isn’t any great predictor of success and instead focused on the study of failure. Is there more to be learned from those who have failed or from those who have succeeded?
As the argument goes, no one is certain about the formula for success. Ask a successful person and they may mention any number of things including passion, perseverance and vision, but ultimately they can’t truly pinpoint it. Does Warren Buffet truly know why he succeeded? Can he put it in a formula that can be duplicated in a scientific manner? Is success a science?
Based on the numerous memoirs detailing the wrong path chosen at their lives’ crossroads, it would seem that failure is the true teacher. Or at the very least, a formula for a book deal. William Saroyan once said, “Good people are good because they’ve come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know.”
By this reasoning, instead of studying Apple we should study Circuit City and where they went wrong. Instead of looking at IKEA we should look at the numerous home accessories stores that went out of business and learn from their mistakes. Why did Lehman Brothers fail? Why did the popular restaurant go under? Actually, restaurants go under all the time.
Can we really learn from them? Or is success and failure just a … dice game? Ultimately, it’s worth considering that failure is more easily duplicated than success. So in the end we may not be able to pinpoint the exact steps of success but we can easily put ourselves on a path to failure. In fact, you don’t have to do anything to fail - right? And who in their right minds want to do that?
What do they do in Ouagadougou? They do what you do? Or at the very least, they want to. While folks in Ouagadougou may love you on YouTube and want to upload their faces to Facebook, they can’t afford to pay for the stuff that’s advertised there. And that’s a problem for Online businesses that are hoping to profit from the popularity of their content. While Facebook struggles to generate revenue in well-off places, Ouagadougou is just one example of the struggle in not very well-off places.
In areas of high unemployment and low incomes, where people have lots of idle time and little money, there is much demand for entertaining, free content. Free YouTube videos are watched and watched, as one provider described it. Such massive watching eats up bandwidth which is rumored to be very costly in far flung places with dial-up services. As someone put it, a megabit of bandwidth in the U.S. costs a bit more than a case of Coke, but in “emerging markets” it costs the equivalent of a few big, pint-sized cases of beer.
That’s a lot of beer for a site like Facebook where 850 million photos and eight million videos are uploaded each month. But the cyber café crowd in Ouagadougou and any number of poorer cities isn’t likely to yield any significant ROI for Internet businesses. So Facebook is experimenting with lower quality offerings such as fewer features for their 200 million overseas members. Others are blocking their services altogether. What’s the point of spending money to deliver content where it won’t payoff?
Blocking content to those who are unlikely to generate revenue presents an ethical dilemma for business owners. Some are even criticized for admitting their feelings of guilt over pulling the plug on the poor. While they may want to contribute to some greater good – if social networking and videos are actually socially good – they also want to do well. And it’s not easy to focus on doing good if you’re not also doing well. Did someone say it’s the thought that counts?