partum intelligendo

Brussels this Friday 29th April 2011

I'm in Brussels this coming Friday to run a workshop for the European Commission in the afternoon. (I'm missing the Royal Wedding - you can probably tell how much that matters to me...)

I've got some time between arriving in the morning and the actual workshop at 1pm in the afternoon - anyone for coffee and conversation?

Stories on offer for artists - take these stories and make art from them

Read on - the offer in the title is real.

Just before Easter, I was in New York for an excellent project exploration meeting with Starlight Runner and others. (An opportunity to let out my inner sci-fi geek and talk all sorts of speculative fiction, from Jasper Fforde to Stephen Donaldson. And indulge a little comics talk too...)

One part of the discussion - making stories available for artists to use to produce new art - prompted me of two things.

When we were collecting stories in Pakistan as part of the pilot of Children of the World, the intention was that those same stories would become part of cross-cultural discussion - pupils and students engaged in international debating, but gathering source material from each others' narrative cultures. It's still in the plan for when we get the next tranche of Children of the World off the ground.

And, more recently, at Mat Locke's excellent The Story conference, (reviews here, here and here here here and check out Mary Hamilton's wonderful talk on Zombie gaming here) I talked briefly with Adam Curtis. His talk is neatly summed up here

Adam covered much ground in his talk, but among the elements that resonated with me were his comments about how we experience the world in fragments that only make narrative sense later, how the stories we hear daily are edited versions of the raw stories of people on the ground, how making those raw stories is better. I was keen to talk further, but timed it badly as Adam was headed off to meet someone.

Our brief interchange at the back of the hall, however, made me think. One of Adam's criticisms was that what we had done in various countries - gathering local people's stories, with their explicit meaning attached to each one - was "just information". He was more interested in what is done with those stories to create something new.

Which naturally, led me back to our intention from the Children of the World pilot.

So. As part of the Children of the World pilot, we collected some 1500 fragments of stories from people in Pakistan. These were collected Open Source, so are something I am willing to share - in order to create new art.

If you would like to get in touch to talk about using them, please do. Most are in English and are short snippets of experience in response to ambiguous pictures. They're available as a text file, but get in touch and there may be some interesting things to play with beyond the pure text.

Branding - in the customer's mind, not yours

Yesterday's post on understanding how customers see you - and what they value about you - embellishes a conversation I've been having recently with branding experts and internal communicators.

Now, the definition of a brand varies according to the discipline and thinking of the person on the other side of the table - all the following are versions that I've heard:

• A shortcut to a decision
• A trigger for patterns in long-term memory
• A promise or commitment
• A story

All of which work in their contexts. And all agree that the important element is that all these happen within the customer's mind.

Where it comes unstuck is that the focus is still on the customer when it comes to branding. There's a bigger article that Ton and I have talked about - complexity and branding - but for now it's enough to note that while yesterday's example was around sales and customer processes, it should be the first stop of all branding.

First, understand what customers see your brand as. And that may well change from person to person, from application to application and from place to place. (E.g. my iPod Touch is a business tool when I'm in meetings - a calendar, email, reference document storage; when I'm travelling, it's an entertainment device with opportunities to read heavy articles if I'm feeling virtuous; when I'm keeping my children occupied, it's a games machine. The iPod Touch brand then varies according to my role and context. Ask me to define it and I can't do it out of that context without losing half of that valuable data.)

Secondly, take the material - the micro-narratives - that come back as part of that research to the brand/advertising/marketing teams. And let them build the new material and messages from authentic, real examples. (In the UK, one bank used advertisements featuring customers talking - complete with authentic-sounding um's and er's)

From the patterns that come through, it's also easy to see which elements of customers' beliefs are particularly fixed, which are likely to change suddenly and which are open to opportunity - great places to start the next evolution of the brand...

Knowing what your customer values about you

Most companies think they know what their customer thinks of them - some through customer surveys, others through feedback. But most have it wrong - because their starting point for looking at what customers say is their own marketing and branding. So the values or marketing proposition they've defined themselves are the values they test customers against.

Yet they may have it completely wrong.

Some of the work we've been doing recently revolves around helping companies see themselves as their customers see them. Collecting stories about how they use services, about times when they interact with the call centre or the sales rep. Analysing those stories to see what differentiates negative experiences from bad ones, what sorts of interactions generate trust or erode it. And, instead of looking for "how many stories are about service/benefit A/problem X", looking to see what patterns emerge.

One client recently expected to see "speed of service" coming out as a crucial element (they were about to launch a programme to improve exactly that). Absent from the data. Not a sausage. Instead, their customers wanted to be sure about the quality of the service - to some surprise, big customers were relying heavily on it. (Company execs were assuming that it was a useful, but not critical, part of customers' business.)

Standard surveys would have asked about "speed of service" specifically and, because no-one will ever say "I want slow service", they would have got a positive response to wanting faster service - a reinforcement of their own beliefs.

Instead, they could divert the intended resources to quality - safe in the knowledge that that investment would pay real dividends with their customers.

To them it was a breakthrough - particularly given that these customers were large multi-nationals with high value contracts. A false step can cost tens of thousands - better to know for real, than to be reassured of a false result...