By Luke Sklar and Amber Hudson

A colleague of ours came in one morning and told us how she got busted by the cops.  I KNEW it!  No one can be that nice and that smart and not have something insidious lurking below the surface.  Illegal smuggling ring? Money laundering?  Armed robbery?  Nope, she made an illegal left hand turn.  After laughing over the fact that someone actually got CAUGHT doing that she went into detail on how she managed to escape without a huge penalty (did you know you could lose 3 points for that tiny traffic infraction?)  

First the cop gave her a fact-based explanation of her wrong doing.  Rather than snort with derision and get all this-is-another-example-of-the-man-trying-to-bring-me-down our colleague saw an opportunity to get out of this unscathed.  She swallowed a little pride and, in an agreeable tone, said she’s sorry, admitted what she did was wrong and that she won’t do it again.  She did the right thing.  Happy cop.  Happy driver.  No points. 

So what does this have to do with brands?  Think of the cop as the consumer and the driver as the brand.  The consumer is always watching, waiting for a brand to screw up.  When a brand does something wrong and gets busted by the consumer, it’s easy to knee-jerk react.  But there is massive opportunity to set things right.   

Brands that did a great job of setting things right with consumers: Tylenol – the original brand to do it right, Netflix – reversed their price decision, Domino’s pizza – admitted the crust tastes like cardboard. 

Brands in denial that have clearly been told by consumer: Sears, Labatt Blue, Mickey D’s (listened to a “cop” named Morgan Spurlock). 

The lesson to brands:  be friendly, be honest, promptly respond….and don’t do it again.

But Sony reversed the increase on Sunday night saying it was a mistake (I’ll say) and that they hadn’t intended to raise prices.  Rather, they thought Whitney’s albums had been under-priced for a while, her death simply called attention to the mistake, which was promptly fixed. 

But by then Twitter was on fire.  For example: 

 What’s that old saying?  Better to do it now and ask for forgiveness later. 

Sure, everything is marketing, but folks, you can’t hijack death!  In a world of consumer conversation all I can say to Sony is W…T…F…  

The very sad death of a woman with a god-given talent got us thinking about brand lifecycles (crass as it sounds).   Whitney, Elvis, Michael Jackson, Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain:  all extremely talented people, loved by many, but were victims of their own success (excess?).  It’s rare the person who gets through and enjoys a long “brand lifecycle.”  (Speaking of making it through, read Keith Richards’ “Life.”  It’s a fantastic book, a fascinating look into the mind of a guitar player).  

It’s easier to live in the now and not concern yourself with the distant future.  It’s less complicated to just keep on keepin’ on and ignore looming disasters (Blockbuster, Kodak).  What is your brand’s roadmap to ensure it has a long lifecycle and not burn out before its time?

 Click HERE to read the full article from FastCompany.

Pinterest has mastered the art of minimizing cognitive load – in other words, reducing the mental effort required to do what the site wants users to do. Reducing cognitive load is what good design is all about. Making something simple makes it easy to understand, easy to use and ultimately increases the desired behaviors.

Pinterest’s obvious secret is its ability to serve our innate desire to capture and collect, while making consuming, creating and sharing easier than ever before.

Click HERE to read the full article from the Globe and Mail

Click HERE to read the full article from FoodNavigatorUSA.

Click HERE to read the full article from MediaPost.

by Tasman Richardson

In a science lab in Kyoto, Japanese scientists are recording the movie of the mind‘s eye. They’ve developed a way to capture images directly from a subject’s brain using an MRI scanner by placing you in a scanner and then showing you a series of pictures. The pictures come to you through your eyes and are converted by your brain into a variety of electrical impulses. All those complex bits of activity are recorded and then the computer’s difficult task is to interpret them correctly, and offer up its best guess as to what it thinks you’re looking at. So far the results are a bit murky, like looking at the world through someone else’s coke bottle glasses. The distortion is understandable though, after all, you’re used to looking at things with the hardware you were born with, whereas the computer has to do its best with nothing more than brain activity scans. Amazingly, it still manages to produce images that are recognizable, albeit, a bit creepy. It’s the first time that a technology can legitimately claim to be “mind reading” rather than playing match maker by pulling from a preprogrammed collection of image possibilities (accomplished in previous experiments by Jack Gallant and colleagues at University of California Berkeley).

As MRI scans improve and gain more clarity, Yukiyasu Kamitani (ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories) says they’ll be able to add more pixels to the images produced and possibly even colour. As Kamitiani explains “By analysing the brain signals when someone is seeing an image, we can reconstruct that image,” which means that any image in the mind is up for grabs. As you may have guessed, images you might prefer to keep to yourself such as daydreams or even dreams you have in your sleep are potential candidates, giving new meaning to the term “dreamcatcher”. Imagine watching a dvd of your own dreams, some of which you may of forgotten. John-Dylan Haynes (Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany) has praised the breakthrough as “a very significant step forward” but has also raised concerns in the area of marketing, in particular “neural marketing” in which advertising could be tailored to target the thoughts of a target audience. Haynes called for “clear ethical guidelines” but was supportive of the benefits of the research, saying: “A lot of people want their minds to be read – take for example a paralysed person. They want us to read their thoughts,” he says. “But it shouldn’t be possible to do this for commercial purposes.” Naturally, where there are volunteers, commercial research will be possible but it’s still too early to say what could be gleaned from this kind of intimate insight into the consumer mind. Is there a Freud in the house?

To learn more about this technology, check out these video links to see the results in action:

Japanese Dream Recording Machine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MElU0UW0V3Q

(UC Berkley) Brain Scanner Records Dreams on Video
http://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/tech/Brain-Scanner-Records-Dreams-on-Video-130497213.html

By: Jeanie Hendrie

I retired my calculator the day I chose a career in marketing – Texas Instruments, I thought, was a name I’d never hear again…unless I was considering upgrading my cowboy boots. Alas, like many naïve marketers before me, I’ve come to realize there’s something to this art and science thing. Last year, as the launch of our new website drew near, the question of who would report the analytics lingered in the room – and when I say that, I really mean it lingered…loitered and then got stale. New to the company and eager to impress, I decided maybe this could be my je ne sais quoi. A year later, I still only speak basic French…but I’m now fluent in Google Analytics.

With so many companies aboard the blogging bandwagon, it’s become as difficult as it is important to have a unique point of view. Breakthrough in the online community is no easy feat and if your videos don’t go viral, how do you know if you’re making an impact? Measuring page views and time on site? This monkey could do that. But understanding online influence? Well that’s much more complex.

Page views and influence aside, every new Google geek must begin with the end in mind. Here are 3 things I wish I’d done before the train left the station early last year:

• Start with the Key Questions: Speak to the end user of your data. The first time I presented analytics, I talked about how many people were reading our posts but what the team really wanted to know was how those people were interacting with the content. How do we foster engagement? How many people are sharing our posts? Understanding the key questions means you can focus on the numbers that matter – the first step in attempting to measure your online influence.
• Define Success: When it comes to the world of blogging, there are many areas around which you can set goals – frequency of posts, content topics, reader engagement, reader loyalty, social media influence…the list goes on. Defining success early on can provide focus in a confusing sea of numbers. Our team used a Plan on a Page approach, with three pillars for success: generate content, expand deployment and foster engagement. We chose these pillars because they represent important milestones in the growth of our reader base. Broadly speaking, our team set out to produce a stream of thought-provoking content (generate content) that garnered loyalty (expand deployment) and inspired conversation (foster engagement) among our targeted reader base (you, our clients). With these parameters in place, it was clear which metrics we needed to measure and which ones we could leave in cyberspace.
• Learn the Numbers: Get to know the language – bounce rate, unique visits, page views – understand exactly what each of these mean and use your key questions to determine which ones you care about and which ones you don’t. And once you’re comfortable with the terminology, explore your platforms. There may be more than you think. I started with Google Analytics but now also use Facebook, Bit.ly, Digital Hug and Mail Chimp. Many platforms have free, built-in analytics reporting and, while less sophisticated than the paid versions, there are often nuggets worth sharing.

Start with the questions, define success and learn the numbers. Grab your motherboards and megabits readers and stay tuned! In Part II, things get technical as I take you through the 3 most valuable and easy-to-use Google Analytics features.

By Manoj Raheja

I once read that the 3 most important factors in job satisfaction are:

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1. Having clear direction on your role and responsibilities
2. Then having the tools to actually be able to execute against it
3. And…having a best friend at work

A penny for your thoughts dear blog reader?  I’ll bet your mind is already going through a series of flashbacks for how the first two have come into play in your professional career, and perhaps you’re nodding with me… “Yeah…that does drive my satisfaction.”  But the 3^rd one might be new for you.  Intuitively it makes sense.  If you have a best friend at work then you might have more fun.  But what if it’s more than that?  What if there was scientific proof of physiological and psychological benefits?  Check out this excerpt from an article in today’s National Post about the impact on children when they are with their best friends.

In a recent study at Concordia University, and published in the latest issue of the journal Developmental Psychology, Dr. William Bukowski discovered that having a best friend at a young age proved to be both physiologically and psychologically beneficial.

Setting up base at local Montreal schools, Bukowski asked participants in Grades 5 and 6 to keep a journal and answer questions about their feelings multiple times each day, for four consecutive days.  Students then submitted saliva tests in order to monitor their levels of cortisol, a hormone that is produced by the adrenal gland in direct response to stress.  In the end, participants who were with their best friends showed lower levels of cortisol during stressful situations.

To read the rest of the article – click here. 

So if this is true for kids, then why wouldn’t it be true for Adults?  What does a stressful work situation look like when you’re with your peers vs. if one of those peers is someone you consider a really good friend?

So what does this mean for you?  Don’t be afraid to take a time out and search for your work best friend.  It’s not about forcing it…but in an age where we’re running from meeting to meeting – take a time out and get to know a colleague over lunch.  If you happen to click – great – if not – then keep moving.  A best friend at work can help you manage stress, increase work satisfaction, and likely do a whole host of other good things!

If you like this topic you might also be interested in reading these blogs on the topic of happiness.

Are You Happy?

Feeling Happy: The Secret to Britain’s Youth?

By Luke Sklar and Amber Hudson

Have you seen Moneyball yet?  Go see it.  Here’s the 10 second summary from iMDB: 

The (true) story of Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane’s successful attempt to put together a baseball club on a budget by employing computer-generated analysis to draft his players. 

Baseball?  Statistics? I like sports AND I’m a researcher, and even I’m having trouble stifling my yawns.  But really, it’s an excellent movie, deserving of its Oscar nomination.  

Okay, so getting to my point.  In the movie are a bunch of old-fart, crotchety baseball guys.  They’d been in the game for decades, often starting as players and ending up in team management.  When Billy Beane comes to them with the idea of recruiting players based on stats and not hype / surface level appearances they collectively clutch at their chests.  They were all…we’ve been doing this for 25 years! You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about! Impossible, this will not work! They flat out refused to even mull over the slightly screwy idea.  I recently attended a market research conference (another yawn, sorry) where Anne Mulcahy, former CEO of Xerox, spoke about the industry.  When asked if she would ever hire someone who doesn’t believe in research she said yes.   She would hire a skeptic, but not a cynic.  Love.That. Cynics just whine and complain about how bad something is but won’t come up with the solution.  Skeptics will push for change, push for a better solution. As in…

Just like in Moneyball. 

By the way, do you really think it was just Eli, the catch by Mario Manningham or their vaunted defense that lead the Giants to the Super Bowl win on Sunday? Hell no. It was their numbers guy, Neil Hornsby that crunched the scenarios to tear apart the flawed Patriots secondary. 

So, to the lessons:  

• We’ve all heard the saying it’s a mix of art and science:  to be successful you need purpose, passion and judgment. But intuition will only take you so far; you need data to help make informed decisions, to raise your odds of success.   
• Be skeptical and challenge the expected.  Or if that’s not in your DNA, hire the skeptics and give their ideas a chance. 
• Have the courage to fail.  (check out a great blog our colleague Manoj about succeeding through failure) 
• And at the end of the day….No guts. No glory.