For those expecting mindless audience applause

It is true that developing a brand personality that walks hand-in-hand with the attitudes and lifestyles of the people you're interacting with is an important part of branding and market success. Critical, for sure, but not the whole of what connects people to brands. After all, you can only project that image to a limited number of people that listen. And the "audiences" that mediocre marketers assume are out there, applauding given appropriate cue? They hardly exist.

There's something else to there, and I can think of a personal example. I'm something of a Google fanboy. Not quite there yet but easily a few notches away - I always have that skewed positive outlook whenever Google introduces a new project, but things like Google's hotly debated/questionable entry into the world of knowledge archives (read: Knol) keep me a bit on the safe side of the fanatic line.

I'm reminded of what I like most about the Google suite of products when I occasionally glance through some of their various product blogs. What Google does in these blogs is give you more than just an updates, they give some insight on how they've come to see such updates and features as important. More often than not, the reason is something like "we've heard a lot of you say ___ about this feature" or "after getting a lot of feedback, we decided to add ___."

The long and short of it is simple. I walk away knowing why the products I use fit the things I try to accomplish online so well:  Google goes well out of their way to build products modeled heavily on user input. It's smart design. And it's not just because Google hires smart people that makes Google smart, rather that Google designs from an active understanding of how people really interact with things online.

I can think of another similar example. Having just moved into Atlanta, we were quick to discover a chain of inconvenient realities:

1. We're going to have to do without cable for a short time while settling in
2. There is a surprising absence of any DVD rental locations anywhere even near Midtown Atlanta (even by GA Tech!?)
   
3. Comcast has a long wait for setting up new service -  we're going to have to do without cable for a long time while settling in

So I started to think about why Netflix must be so popular, and the cognitive wheels started turning towards purchasing a subscription. Coincidentally, I noticed soon after that Blockbuster happened to be in a network of retailers provided by the agency where I work, for which I am eligible to receive discounts. Somewhat to my dismay, I could become a Blockbuster online subscriber at less cost.

To my dismay? Every single thing I hear about Netflix is raving good news. In fact I just checked Brand Tags, a favorite tool of mine - more people have "awesome" top-of-mind when presented with Netflix than "movies," "convenient," or even "DVDs." DVD's is at least a close contender, but nothing else even comes close.

When I think of Netflix, I think of gold star, unprecedented, over-the-top customer service. I've never known anyone who uses Netflix, and outside of this excellent story today of selfless service on Netflix's part I found today while thinking of it, I really haven't had any interaction with Netflix. Really for the most part I just have this hazy, sort of unsubstantiated idea of Netflix as a brand that's mostly just out there in the ether (I vaguely remember seeing some occasional Digg buzz). But I'm pretty sure I'm going to forgo my (probably small anyways) discount and jump on in with Netflix.

Now that's some powerful branding through customer service.

(It doesn't help that Blockbuster is completely shady about their pricing plans. I ended up having to run into a CNET review blog post just to find out what it'd actually cost without signing up for a "free trial." I'll definitely talk more about business transparency soon.)

Netflix and Google are brands with loyal followings because thier supporters know what it's like to be respected as people who use services because the service have some kind of personalized value. Too few organizations take this approach to understanding what it really means to build relationships with users, opting for the "market products to audiences" strategy instead.

Good experience games.

Here's something extremely interesting I've found to follow. Mark Hurst has written the book Bit Literacy, addressing the frequently discussed information overload trend/phenomenon. As a UX guy he writes on his blog Good Experience about what it means to improve user experience, customer experience, and human experience - for me, this stuff really hits the spot.

On top of that, he keeps an excellent list of Good Experience Games - flash and online games that aren't there just to waste time but are genuinely entertaining and extremely well put together. We ran into the list looking for a quick way forget the fact that we've run out of Law & Order: Criminal Intent DVD episodes to watch; some 4AM later we realized we ended up finding something much more entertaining than we expected.

I got to thinking how interesting it would be to explore what the games on this list all share - what is the common user-experience thread here? I've been kind of poking around some sources, tossing some ideas around in my head, and might have some good thinking on the matter soon.

How seldom we know what we're really looking for.

Not too long ago, we were shopping online for flowers. It didn't take too much searching to figure out that the standard online flower shop - alongside many another online retail service - is missing that certain something. In fact, there is plenty of discussion about the fact that online retail lacks something in the way of experience, you can find an interesting exploration here.

On your typical online flower space, you find the categorized navigation that became the user-experience standard through the mid-2000's and is still widespread today:

Typical online flower retail

Same concept, found throughout most online retail

My usual approach to finding more modern and innovative search results is a simple del.icio.us search, which lead us to this site where you drag-and-drop your own bouquet:

click-and-drag a custom bouquet

We at first overlooked that the site is intended to send an online bouquet only by email. But it wasn't long after searching the other sites before it became clear that this pick-and-choose-features kind of approach would be much appreciated. Particularly for the girlfriend searching for the flowers, since she wanted to make a very personal and thoughtful selection - the flowers were for a funeral.

In fact to me, it stuck me as odd that many to most stores made some kind of disclaimer about the lack of certainty, in terms of size of color and even type of flowers that would actually be delivered after ordering. When it came to bouquet size, many retailers had a general Large/Medium/Small selection, often without measurements. We really got the impression that when buying flowers online, most people just don't put in that kind of personal effort that involves wanting a certain color palate, certain kind of vase or basket, certain kinds of flowers.

Maybe it is simply that our view of what flower-buying should look like is just very different from how most people conceptualize this particular process - this is interesting enough. But we got into a discussion of how other retail categories, ones that we can be sure people put a lot of personal effort into, still use that old-fashioned categorized approach. There is an obvious one here -  men's and women's clothing, dresses especially.

Here is a category where the typical website architecture makes an assumption that is clearly a bit suspect: that people shop for clothing already knowing what they want, and can thus find what they need simply by clicking an appropriate category. Men can click things like "Polo's" and "Jeans"; for women it's hardly more than "Blouses," maybe getting a couple subcategories like "sleeveless" or "halter."

I think here we find where some of that lacking online experience is most apparent: retail sites are organized in a way that simply does not match the way we actually shop for clothing. When we go into an actual store, sure we often have an idea of what we're looking for. But that idea isn't made up of basic clothing categories, its made of things like patterns, cuts, designs, and colors.

This is why we were drawn to the drag-and-drop bouquet, and why people are drawn to sites like Studio 28 and StyleShake, where you select design elements of your future garment in a logical step-by-step process:

It's certainly no hot-off-the-press trend - we've called this customization, and it's been a clear web 2.0 staple. But I think the insightful thing to take away is to remember that customization works on a simpler principle than is immedately apparent - the fundamental principle that we hardly ever immediately know what we really want. Certainly we like to have personalized, customized, semi-one-of-a-kind stuff. But in an important way, these sites let us tease out what we're really looking for, one element at a time.

A few thoughts on leadership.

While spending time in the military, I had a lot of time to think about what leadership really is, since I always had a problem with the Army's own ages-old conception. Real leadership is in fact about making meaningful connections with people. There is a school of thought people have subscribed to, that leadership is somewhere in the field of controlling loyalty.

Anyone who has a foot in reality knows that such a notion is naive: at some point, reality makes it clear that you can't pretend to have that control.

What I got to thinking today is about what you can have: a true connection with some motivator that drives loyalty. What is that motivator, and what does that connection look like?

That motivator is vested interest. On an important level, leadership is about something very simple: captains make decisions because they are the only ones going down with the ship. True leadership starts with that commitment, because then loyalty is no longer about being controlled, it's about having control. The control is over a decision: either I stay on this ship and support its success, or I get off now before I sink with it. When people realize that someone has more vested interest in a task than they do, that there is someone besides themselves who is responsible when the ship goes down, they realize why they aren't the leader in the first place. The ones who understand and want that responsibility become leaders themselves.

Thats a model much more aligned with true motivations than any system of ranks and medals. What a shame that too many people out there never get past that first conception of being able to control people in the first place.

And now let's give ourselves a round of applause.

Advertising agencies and professionals often lay claim to their award-winning work, and sometimes it's important to think through what we're really getting across. Because great communication is driven by true, meaningful insights about the people you're communicating with. A lot of mediocre thinkers look at insightful ads and communications, and tend to think of insights as something that come out of a 50 minute brainstorming session. That or they think they're "creative" enough to think them up on their own in even less time (thats what creativity is, after all...right?).

You're doing yourself a huge disservice if you think you can connect with an audience or consumer that way. Unfortunately, the idea is far too common. And it's reinforced with these "awards," doled out by people who have made a career thinking the exact same way.

It's like, hey - if those professionals think it's good, it must be...right?

Shouldn't we be thinking differently about what makes an ad or other communication good? I mean, we're supposedly communicating with someone...why aren't they judging?

And the truth is that they absolutely are. And now more than ever, with all the communication tools social networks offer. Blog posts referencing YouTube videos. Links being shared. Lines being referenced in primetime comedy.

I think what I'm getting at is that it's extremely easy to come up with what we think will connect with people. And not too much harder to convince similar thinkers that we're producing great work. But we should be talking about our accomplishments in terms of insights, not awards. Because thats exactly what the people we're talking to are doing with their friends.