 November 21, 2008
As a futurist envisioning digital things to come based on analogous developments in other mediums, and—just to come clean—as a cinéaste (by training and in temperament) interloping in the digital space, I’m patiently awaiting the aural web. I’m waiting for Garbo to talk, and I don’t mean in a podcast. I mean in a moment that signifies a sea-change. I’m waiting for the web’s Jazz Singer hour (the 1929 version obviously), when we create a wholly different human experience with digital sound, music and voice—for the mainstream customer, not just the gamer, not just the MySpace indie band fan. Sound online is overdue, delayed perhaps by early experimentation that left the cube farm-dwelling populace apologizing to workmates for sudden unsolicited rock concerts on their pc’s. By now, there’s sensitivity to the context of the listener, and a new playfulness, even artfulness to sounds that are, strictly speaking, functionally unnecessary. What would our experience of the iPhone’s accelerometer be without that great clickety, clickety? You can set your alarm but you can’t come up with straight jackpot cherries, figuratively speaking, without it. There’s a new, already wildly popular Mac app called the Poladroid that is a visual tool for retrofitting your digital images with Day-Glo surreality and the occasional midday poltergeist (and can make you channel Woodstock, if you look at an image long enough). You can even add the clean white border of a Polaroid to your digital pix, always so unceremoniously unframed. Some of the nostalgic irresistibility apparent in the Poladroid demo for me derives from the exact duplication of the film paper’s distinctive auditory dispatch from the camera. (There are other reasons the demo is so delightful; for instance, it makes you wait just as long as you have to with a real Polaroid for life forms to emerge from the brown murk. And the picture is shaken, as if by an impatient hand trying to accelerate the development.) But ocular time travelling aside, Poladroid had me at the clackety-click…whoosh. Google results are paltry for the “aural web” but buried among them is a prescient post on oreilly.com from 2006 that describes our prolonged ‘silent era’. O’Reilly pops up again with his Where 2.0 2007 conference, where we can find not only a strong argument for “soundscapes” for digital maps (putting the there in the where, as the copy says) but an intersection of two of my favorite trends, aural branding and cartocracy. Here is the question few brands are prepared to ask, let alone answer: what do you sound like? What is your aural identity? Many brick and mortar retailers have brand–reinforcing soundtracks for their shoppers but by and large leave them listening to sounds of silence online. There are notable exceptions, and many are found in the luxury category. (I believe that the luxury value proposition online is, frankly, untenable without sound/music/voice in the right places at the right times.) Nordstrom’s Designer Collections online plays the song “Madrid” by the French band Holden. (I had to check them out on last.fm.) The repetitive nature of the music, plus its worldly cred, is the right note to strike on the charmingly illustrated home page. Cartier has a MySpace Love collection profile with commissioned music by the likes of Lou Reed and Marion Cottilard. Talk about atmospherics; the brand’s signature scarlet background and the songs swallow you and your better judgment whole. RalphLauren.com features glamazons descending a chateau staircase to the strains of the Pierces’ “Bored”; colossally snooty fun. And LouisVuitton.com brings us downloadable MP3 soundwalks of Hong Kong, Beijing, and Shanghai—essentially travelogues by three famous Chinese actresses serving as seductive narrators that further reinforce the love affair Asians (and the burgeoning Chinese middle class) have with this innovative luxury brand. Accessibility experts have studied sound as a form of non-visual navigation, and there’s something in this idea for everyone. Sounds can reward our decisions to move through a web site, unearthing auditory surprises as we go. Music can be a powerful brand differentiator, but so as to accommodate a brand’s every consumer segment, music should be made available as a highly curated selection. Sound not only has to be used creatively to reinforce the brand, it has to be used judiciously, and always with the on/off option and a fade in or fade out (lifted right from stage directions) once the choice to listen or not is made. Brand differentiation we know is essential to business survival, particularly because brand loyalty is, among certain demographics, on the wane. Sound and music are memory narcotics and to help a customer remember your brand in a certain way is the first step to putting your products invariably in the “consideration set.” Some day, we’ll have thousands of brands with Intel jingles and—to modify the title of Alex Cox’s Pulitzer Prize Finalist book on 20th century music—the rest will be noise. November 6, 2008
Remember the third place? Digital Millennials are the first real post-PC generation; their smart phones are not only their primary digital device but some would say their primary means of discovering what it means to be a social being. For brands, millennials’ perpetual connectedness via mobile phones and social networking profiles has been their most salient trait for about five years. Facilitating and being part of this perpetual connectedness was a brand’s route to relevance. But another millennial trait is about to usurp simple connectedness: their collective location awareness—and the importance they ascribe to place as a marker of self (yes, just as brands endeavor to be). Mobile phones once again are the technological driver of this generational trait, but only those that are location-aware (thanks to cell tower triangulation and GPS). These phones and their geo-applications, along with cyber cartography—the constitution of information-rich up-to-the-minute digital maps of astounding physical accuracy, mean that brands have to put themselves on the map, literally. Why? Because the more accurate and personally useful digital maps become—with the help of anyone willing to geotag their photo or geoannotate a place—the more people expect them to constitute a complete “mirror world,” as the gamers call it. Brands must recognize that there are consequences to being left out of this mirror world. As web surfing gives way to world surfing, brands have to be at the right places at the right time. Most important, they have to be part of the Fourth Place. After home (first), work (second), coffee shop/athletic club/church (third), the Fourth Place is a fusion of virtual and real, a spontaneous hot spot created by people oscillating between digital co-existence in a geo-annotated space and the heightened possibility of suddenly meeting up—at a store, nightclub, park—in the real world.
October 29, 2008
 Life is back from the dead. And Marilyn is forever.Tagged as: O.P.E.N., digital millennials, engaging, networked, social webPosted by: Nita Rollins Life Magazine is a brand colossus, in many ways the quintessential Boomer brand. Defining photojournalism in the 20th century while also defining the 20th century, its portraits framed the ahistorical absolutes of courage, despair, charisma and power as much as the persons of a certain historical gravitas. The viewer’s pursuit of accidental revelations of character kept all those modernist literature-stoked latent/manifest dichotomies in productive tension. I know because I used to sit spellbound before the stacks of Life my cousin had collected in his post-Harvard hovel. With my two-page spread-sized memories intact, and an avowed deference for the tradition of the defining public image—in stark contrast to the people’s indefatigable showcasing of social networking candids—I am the perfect witness to a Boomer brand entering the ecosystem of the open web. It’s not Life’s digitization per se that makes this an interesting transition for a brand twice defibrillated in its 64-year history—we barely raise an eyebrow over Google’s all-in-a-day’s-work project to digitize the world’s books, for heaven’s sake. It’s the letting loose of Life’s curatorial authority, its single-photo storytelling precision, into the jungle of laissez-faire cut-and-paste social web content that begs for commentary. The ‘coming soon’ web site promises over 10 million photos will be made available for viewing, or, as parent company Time put it: "…the most important collection of imagery covering the events and people of the 20th century…[will be] available for free for personal use”—at least, for viewing and sharing. More than 97% of the collection has never been seen by the public. Such an inconceivable darkroom trove of “outtakes” (albeit by the likes of Alfred Eisenstaedt, Margaret Bourke-White and Gordon Parks)! What could be more appropriate for our era of flourishing amateur photography and citizen journalism than converting Life’s vault into an editorial roundtable, a photographic piñata? Unsettling, perhaps, for its Boomer devotees who remember when larger-than-Life was hard to come by? (Winston Churchill as a screensaver—really?) But probably, ultimately, exhilarating for all comers. That is, if Life truly adapts to the digital channel. And from what I’ve gathered, the revenue model is strictly 20th century—mainly advertising-based. (As Time also owns Getty, site visitors coming to look and learn will be exposed to the latter collection and might buy.) Based on the advance press, there is but one concession to the social web’s intensely OPEN relationship with images—you can create Flickr-style personal collections. There are ways to counter the constant battering of our journalistic institutions (hint: they’re digital), and, in this instance, to drive cross-generational traffic to Life.com. (Yes, this begs for a post on washingtonpost.com.) For Life, in my opinion, the most important of these is a social platform for storytelling, the kind that would enable community voting on the best photo/journalistic albums—those with stirring commentary that keeps history alive. Kodak has an employee blog that has done wonders for their place in the imaging community, as they like to call it. Limited edition downloads of Life covers for poster-size printing wouldn’t be a bad idea either, even if I did steal it from the current collaboration of Absolut and fashion designer Helmut Lang. For all those copyright-minded among you, there are always the Creative Commons alternatives. Quite simply, more exposure, more usage=more life for Life.com. To make sure I’m not blindly enthusiastic about this digital brand makeover of Life, particularly as an Engaging and Networked brand, I conducted some quick research of a certain person who has graced Life’s covers several times, and who is the very definition of iconic inexhaustibility (if you don’t believe me, read American Monroe: The Making of a Body Politic). Has the social web tired of Marilyn Monroe? Can icitizens find enough to do, interactively speaking, with the silver screen goddess? Does she make sense any longer to digital millennials, for whom continuous virtual self-presentation precedes self-knowledge? Are you kidding? 16,738 thought to upload some version of Marilyn Monroe on Flickr. Metacafe has 144 largely homemade Marilyn Monroe videos. iStockPhoto has several Marilyn impersonators doing their best to keep the subway breeze blowing up her white pleated dress, figuratively speaking. And Google says Marilyn Monroe matters to someone 13,400,000 ways. I found a particularly appropriate cultural artifact trolling around someone’s personal Picasa photo album: Marilyn Monroe coaxed once again into life through a collage of Life’s covers.
I also found a Marilyn Monroe image rarely seen (perhaps never before published?) on Flickr and will leave you to contemplate both its hold on the viewer and the icitizen comments that follow.
October 3, 2008
Anthropologie's Pioneering Web Site for its Pre-Commercial WomenTagged as: O.P.E.N., creative, engaging, new consumer journey, retailPosted by: Nita Rollins Few apparel and accessory brands have created worlds so thoroughly inhabitable, so completely unto themselves, as Anthropologie. The world of Anthropologie is where women play dress up their whole lives and dream of men but don't really care if they ever show up. An asexual innocence pervades the rooms and visages of Anthrowomen, which is endowed with a nesting instinct that makes sartorial style an extension of one’s domicile. References are not to the catwalk but the artist's canvas, the cupboard's shelf liner, the arts and crafts potholder, the apron of your cookie-baking memories. The stores combine clothes and chest knobs with studied flea market intrigue—although I always thought they could take this premise further and thoroughly break up the categories. And navigating through the web site's current "Black and White" in "Points of View" shows you just how clothes make the room—as well as the woman. Laying on the bed, hanging on the curtain rod, slung over the shabby chic straight back chair are black and white garments sometimes absurdly hard to decipher (is that wool or silk? Is that a top?), but there is much pleasure in swirling around a room where backdrop enhances foreground and vice versa. Generally, the print and the products on the site are too small to see, particularly those on the dress forms, and too swallowed up by the white background (which blends with many of the garments' pre-washed quality) to actually make an informed buying decision about them. The zoom utility, you quickly realize, isn't a luxury. But you excuse a lot of dead ends and inscrutable nomenclature (Where, do you suppose, "Adorned" will take me?) because everything seems designed to be a little Lost & Found in Anthropologie's world. In particular, navigation of Anthropologie.com is increasingly off the beaten nav bar/drop-down menu path; it has a whimsicality that is near genius, except for a few oversights that cause excessive reliance on the back button. Throughout the entire "Adorned" section you find navigation redefined in Anthropological terms. In "Look Closer," pretty objects are made preternaturally detailed under the movable microscopic pane, and take on an archeological intensity. The "Masterpieces" section features pre-Raphaelite beauties painted with artful smudges of blush or eye shadow. They also blink, which is to say the models are live, more or less, as they are posing as mannequins—or impersonating portrait sitters. This section fascinates—and reminded me of the likewise blinking digital portraits adorning the walls of Ian Shrager's Clift Hotel Redwood Room. The "Spectra" section was a combination of Barneys' floating products and the scattering effect of Visual Thesaurus. "Wonderland" lays the product over fairytale (magical mushroom) graphics, and, indeed, the entire site reworks the pristine white space of ecommerce with a collage aesthetic, with remnants, notions, paper scraps, lyrical word lists of studied desultoriness, like the following: Zephyr mist vast leaden loam moss Molten moonless salted frigid earthen light Gloaming volatile magnificence cold calm Iceland. I'm a deep admirer of the Anthropologie brand, and think the navigation and collage aspects of the web site are important digital shopping innovations disguised as whimsy. But by way of postscript, and as a true confession, I have to say I'm not much of a consumer of the brand. Those Anthro models find themselves in places that generally don't show up on my fantasy map. (I'm more Manhattan rooftop restaurant than roadhouse. ) But I'm deeply intrigued by the pre-commercial Eden (all hand-me-downs and heirlooms) beckoning its targeted consumers. And given the prominent role the catalog plays in the found-object world of the web site, if I could ever find those Anthrowomen on the grid, I'd be tempted to send them their first Sears & Roebuck catalog. Before helping them log on to Anthropologie.com, of course. September 22, 2008
“You are here.” How many of us have scrutinized this inadvertently philosophical assertion when wayfinding in the subway or at the zoo, mall or amusement park? The X designating one’s location vis-à-vis other highlights on the map is practically the universal symbol for being slightly lost. In my experience, it always seems to have little to do with where I feel I am, or where I wish I were, or where I thought I had finally arrived. All manner of perspectival negotiation of the 2-D maze of lines and dots before me ensues: moving in closer, tilting my head to align the landmarks with my sightline, squinting so as to project myself onto the smaller plane of impervious reality before me. A cartoon check on Google reassured me I’m in good company finding humor in the incongruity between my existential self and this confident cartographic depiction of it. But a really funny thing has happened recently while navigating our way to the forum—or big box or nightclub. Something dislodged this incongruity, this mismatch between our selves and our public maps. Location awareness has become the new “there there” of our digital devices, and not just of the mere 17% of phones that are GPS-enabled (as of late 2007, pre- 3G iPhone). Low- and mid-tier mobile phones and PNDs (personal navigation devices) have been serving up location awareness to millions.
Location awareness, in case its killer app-ness is initially lost on you, means the navigator is embedded in the map. That inscrutable X that once stood for you is now the real-time longitudinal and latitudinal (and sometimes altitudinal) equivalent of you. And if that isn’t enough of a kick for the navigation-challenged, or the socially mobile (as it were), the map in which you are embedded can be populated exclusively by the geo-information in which you’ve indicated interest. So the world arrays itself around you and your immediate needs and desires as if you were Zeus on a daytrip. The digitally prescient have been talking about this paradigm shifter for some time—how web surfing is giving way—or at least sharing the stage with—world surfing. We in the RI:Lab have been studying the macrotrend of Cartocracy for months. But brands might be wondering what the heck these apps and maps offer that their store locators don’t. We’ll need a few WeThink posts to answer that one but, for now, here’s a handy list of five reasons a new kind of X marks the spot, and how mega value creation is sure to follow.
More mapping mania to come! August 21, 2008
Chris Anderson is an expert meme splicer. The Long Tail, as a marketing strategy recently flattened into financial negligibility by Anita Elberse in the July-August 2008 HBR article, "Should You Invest in the Long Tail?," is now part of Anderson’s broader economic argument for the value (variously defined as revenue, reputation, consumer attention) of making much of your service or product offer free. Anderson’s splicing occurs by attaching both the long tail and the marketplace-of-free memes to our economy of abundance. Many would argue that by the time the Free meme winds its way through Wired magazine article to blog and “open source ideation” to best-selling business book (following the winning and not entirely free formula of The Long Tail), many of us will have finally read or reread Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture or Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, both of which Amazon reviewers by and large think cover the same conceptual terrain. But such is the nature of free information exchange. There is much that is derivative, but more people are exposed to—and contribute to the ideas in the long run, er, tail, er, run. And if you want to preempt the long tail of derivation, you can always, well, pay for premium content, that is, buy the book. Yes, indeed, we’re having some sporting fun with what admittedly are essential, galvanizing ideas, which marketers should decide are worthy of implementation or not. To be clear, Elberse’s HBR article doesn’t dismiss the long tail altogether; it is best, for instance, to offer a wide assortment of products—including niche ones—to your high-value customers because they’re “disproportionately active in the long tail.” (Her most shocking finding to me: those connoisseurs who favor long tail choices don’t rate them higher than the more popular, less esoteric products. So much for our extreme private delight in that rare find—the book, the song, the band, the blog—and its transcription into larger cultural currency. To social network theorists like Duncan Watts, it’s been proven again and again that the popularity of a cultural product and the pleasure taken in it or the affinity one feels for it are inextricably linked.) The debates around Anderson’s free stuff argument are in full swing. And to contribute to them, we need go no further than the recent auctioning off of that part of the spectrum freed up by the imminent national move to all-digital TV. You might have read some of the bloglines about these so-called white spaces of the spectrum. Invisible, intangible assets. Free like wi-fi sometimes is? Well… In order for Verizon Wireless to attract more customers for high-speed mobile internet access, they shelled out $9.4 billion on airwaves. Anderson argues that phones are often free so carriers can charge for services. But Verizon’s acquisition of the coveted C-block spectrum must follow "open access" rules, meaning the network must be accessible by any compatible gadget and any software application. Not all of which will be “owned” by Verizon, obviously. This is where “free” gets very complicated and comes off as the frontman for an extravagantly expensive business model. But then the recent spectrum auction aligns once again with Anderson’s free argument when you consider Google’s stake in it. They didn’t take home any spectrum licenses (they were outbid) but the open access rules (which, I hasten to point out, AT&T’s spectrum doesn’t require) suit them just fine. They’re happy to “provide technical support, including intellectual property, design, databases, etc.” And why not? More free internet access with all the bells and whistles=more ad revenue for Google! Stay tuned for Part Two of my free meme free associating, where I take on the three forces Anderson says are driving this new economy—“fremium”, third-party (advertising) support and the gift culture—and hazard some advice about where marketers should be headed. August 11, 2008
On occasion we find ourselves in client meetings with a very senior team shouldering a very inconvenient burden: convincing their CEO that the digital medium is not inert and uninvolving—that its ads are more than insinuating party crashers, that its Flash-fangled web sites don’t pale in comparison to 3-D store shopping, TV ads, magalogs, or even digital OOH advertising. “The web can’t make shoppers fall truly, madly, deeply in love with us. Period.” Thus speaks the CEO who knows from retailing—the merchant prince with skeptical eyebrow arched over all things dreadfully, dully digital. Yes, digital diehards, pioneers and recent converts, doubts persist about the web’s potential to involve us emotionally in a brand. If the argument were entirely without merit, rebuttals would hardly be necessary. But most of us don’t say “deeply moving,” “wildly inspiring” or “irresistible” quite as often as we’d like about our digital brand experiences. Most of us aren’t able to say, “That brand feels like me” often enough online. Hence the rise, one could argue, of consumer-generated content that makes the brand over in our own image. Brands that do make the emotional connection often employ humor, and among digital millennials, humor is king online, particularly sarcastic, knowing, parodistic, low-brow humor—emblematic of both the generation’s marketing savvy (they’re in on it) and the emotional peculiarities of a life lived virtually (and a private life lived publicly). Sarcasm and parody, after all, put some distance between “us” and “them,” don’t they. Music will dramatically change the emotional timbre, if you will, of the web. So will the continued rise of brands demonstrating corporate social responsibility—particularly those using the power of video to spur activism. But let’s give the devil’s advocate his due. A very thoughtful post by Sean X Cummings about the deeper emotional impact of the TV spot vs. the online banner ad, Is Digital a Hopeless Medium?, draws a series of sharp contrasts between the individual viewer/user’s respective psychological stances while online or watching TV. Online engages the cognitive cortex, TV the limbic system—allegedly the older, less understood part of the brain involving emotion, memory, learning/motivation. Though I’m unaware of any scientific proof of this argument, it seems at least superficially accurate. My rational drawbridge is down, in the way one says “my defenses were down,” when I’m watching a movie (or Mad Men) on TV, which makes it easier for emotions to cross the moat. Cummings also argues that digital is a “learn forward” medium, chiefly informational and individualistic whereas TV is a “lean back”, communal entertainment medium. Again, these assertions seem generally true, leaving the very communal and limbic MMORPGs aside. Leaving aside digital millennials’ constant connectivity and the digerati’s microblogging and lifecasting, which also seem inarguably if strangely communal to me. Leaving aside networked brands that are either transforming “traditional” online advertising into social media marketing or dramatically decreasing spend on straightforward interruptive ads because they recognize the web’s colossal community impulse. Leaving aside as well the imminent full-video web, which will make distinctions between so-called entertainment media like TV and informational media like the web (and first, second and third screens) superannuated. OK. Leaving aside quite a bit. Still, Cummings’s argument seems to contain a kernel of truth. An intuition, perhaps, about how difficult it is to describe, assess, appreciate the virtual community when members haven’t (yet) fleshmet. (I’m reviving this term because it’s deliciously, well, corporeal, and contrasts nicely with the hyperreal online.) It does seem a propitious moment to introduce a digital experience far, far from the banner ad that Cummings spends considerable energies critiquing. A digital experience emphatically limbic and communal, that springs from the living web—and all that it implies.
If you haven’t experienced this site, “harvesting human emotions” since August 2005, you have to steal a moment and do so. Through its global reach, wefeelfine.org proves the universality of human emotions, and through its “particle theory” of sorts, we witness the personal versions and vicissitudes of the vast emotional spectrum. Inert and uninvolving? Not for me, baby. July 22, 2008
Sent to NYC to experience the future firsthand at MOMA’s Design and the Elastic Mind, let me begin by saying that reportage is rarely more exhilarating. An exploration of (as the show’s superb catalog would have it) “…one of design’s most fundamental roles: the translation of scientific and technological revolutions into approachable objects that change people’s lives and, as a consequence, the world,” the show was both provocative and practical, optimistic and urgent, sci-fi clunky and simply ravishing, nano and macro—this latter spectrum in particular requiring a certain mental elasticity to span. As digital marketers, we also know that one of design’s most fundamental roles is the translation of basic human requirements into viable commercial experiences. Usability and digital ethnography help us build a matrix of intelligibility and desirability behind every web site, mobisode and digital POS system. Until now, the human body has had paltry interaction with brands’ digital interfaces and environments. So addictive and liberating is the iPhone “pinch” (an example of gestural computing), it’s tempting to think of it as having given rise to a new species of computer-literature humans: those with opposable thumbs! (Lest we forget, this is the distinguishing feature of primates and that which permits the use of tools.) Typing with thumbs on PDAs doesn’t count: here the thumb acts as just another index finger—on its own, doing the same basic act of button-pressing. One installation at Design and the Elastic Mind, entitled “Shadow Monsters” and part of “Not Your Usual Interfaces”, invited greater bodily involvement with the digital universe. A magic lantern show-meets-performance art installation, its responsive design embellished certain physical movements of the participants with sinister appendages (accompanied by monster growls and such), making Monsters one of the indisputable hits of the show. See me on the left, my muscle-flex gesture suddenly met with snapping tentacles (while trying to capture the shot, of course.) Saw-toothed hands kept many people performing way past the point of there being any point. Except, of course, complete captivation by the phantasmagorical world of inner demons unleashed. (Talk about Engaging.) Responsive design is a trend we’ll be monitoring because it pushes basic usability insights to ever more intuitive and imaginative heights. Moreover, the retail possibilities are myriad. What if… (cue my favorite part of futuring) changing rooms offered fantasy backgrounds and accouterments? Trying on lingerie would trigger the projection of a five-star hotel suite; prom dresses would prompt tiaras, red carpets, popping paparazzi light bulbs, James Bond escorts. When it comes to digital brand experiences, it’s about time the (rest of the) body showed up, don’t you think? July 17, 2008
With all due mayhem to the Sex Pistols, the mashup is to the digerati what the safety pin was to the punk movement: an emblem of the power of combinative improvisation. Though the safety pin’s utilitarian value was ultimately superceded by its aesthetic one, and the mashup’s utilitarian value is often only realized through its sufficiently pleasing or simple aesthetic (think Google Maps, not the first mapping mashup by any means but arguably one of the simplest), the two cultural acts both champion the use of what’s already available—whether through thrift stores or open source—to create new value. July 10, 2008
Resource uncovered four motivations of the icitizenry not generally tied to consumer types or groups. On the surface, this motivational quartet—digital competence, collectivism, cultural change and celebrity—seems, at best, tangentially relevant to typical purchaser profiles. But that is the nature of motivations; some are worn on sleeves, others (in fact, most) are buried deep in our unconscious. It is the work of a digital marketer not only to unpeel the onion (if you’ll pardon the expression) but to make a brand beckon the deeper layers of consumers’ unconscious. Marketers have been in the onion unpeeling business for years, have they not? Marketing’s social science ambitions are the stuff of cocktail party conversations. How many people pored over Underhill’s Why We Buy as if it were the great American novel? So what has changed? Quite simply, what is latent has become manifest online. Consider what is now readily observable about consumers in the social web’s gigabytes of consumer-generated content and in search engines as “databases of intentions.” Given such radical consumer transparency, it might be time to revisit that “price-conscious and seasonal” segment that has served you well for years. Just how much more incremental value could it represent if your web site supported these bargain hunters’ motivation to socialize, which is deeply satisfied (indeed, in some cases, unleashed) elsewhere on the web but not the least bit on your web site? A recent study by IBM and the Economist Intelligence Unit indicates we’re making progress in consumer segmentation. The Boston Globe reports that business leaders of 1,130 companies and organizations from 40 countries identified two new consumer types— information omnivores “who demand a say in everything from product design to aftermarket support,” and the socially-minded consumer “who will buy ethically and environmentally responsible products and may be ready to pay more for them.” These types” bear more than a passing resemblance to Resource’s competence-motivated and cultural change-motivated icitizens. And though the Globe article’s title is, “The Rise of the Unpredictable Consumer,” it is precisely the opposite that we are witnessing. Less latency online means more predictability. It means more dimensionality for your consumer types, hence more opportunity to market to the whole of them—including their eco-consciousness and co-creating ambitions—and not just their penchant (perish the thought!) for markdowns. |
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Google’s 
If the icitizenry has taught us anything, it’s that traditional customer segmentation must evolve. The point is not that every customer segment should become a full-blown persona (though that certainly is the ideal) but that every segment should factor in behaviors and motivations made newly manifest by the social web. 
© 2008 Resource Interactive LLC