Any fool can sell luxury to the rich, but it takes a genius to sell it to the poor.
From the comments thread: http://bit.ly/PlIKzF
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You can provoke new ideas by considering the opposite of any subject or action. When bioengineers were looking for ways to improve the tomato, they identified the gene in tomatoes that ripens tomatoes. They thought that if the gene hastens ripening maybe they could use the gene to slow down the process by reversing it. They copied the gene, put it in backwards and now the gene slows down ripening, making vine ripened tomatoes possible in winter.
REVERSING ASSUMPTIONS. Suppose you want to start a new restaurant and are having difficulty coming up with ideas. To initiate ideas, try the following reversals:
1. List all your assumptions about your subject.
EXAMPLE: Some common assumptions about restaurants are:
A. Restaurants have menus, either written, verbal or implied.
B. Restaurants charge money for food.
C. Restaurants serve food.
2. Reverse each assumption. What is its opposite?
EXAMPLE: The assumptions reversed would be:
A. Restaurants have no menus of any kind.
B. Restaurants give food away for free.
C. Restaurants do not serve food of any kind.
3. Ask yourself how to accomplish each reversal. How can we start a restaurant that has no menu of any kind and still have a viable business?
EXAMPLES:
A. A restaurant with no menu. IDEA: The chef informs each customer what he bought that day at the meat market, vegetable market and fish market. He asks the customer to select items that appeal to him or her and he will create a dish with those items, specifically for that customer.
B. A restaurant that gives away food. IDEA: An outdoor cafe that charges for time instead of food. Use a time stamp and charge so much for time (minutes) spent. Selected food items and beverages are free or sold at cost.
C. A restaurant that does not serve food. IDEA: Create a restaurant with a unique decor in an exotic environment and rent the location. People bring their own food and beverages (picnic baskets, etc.) and pay a service charge for the location.
4. Select one and build it into a realistic idea. In our example, we decide to work with the “restaurant with no menu” reversal. We’ll call the restaurant “The Creative Chef.” The chef will create the dish out of the selected ingredients and name the dish after the customer. Each customer will receive a computer printout of the recipe the chef named after the customer.
Reversals destabilize your conventional thinking patterns and frees information to come together in provocative new ways. http://bit.ly/Nxv85U
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“It sounds very mechanical, but the effect is the exact opposite. What it does is free you to write. It liberates you to write. You’ve got all the notes there; you come in in the morning and you read through what you’re going to try to write, and there’s not that much to read. You’re not worried about the other ninety-five percent, it’s off in a folder somewhere. It’s you and the keyboard. You get away from the mechanics through this mechanical means. The spontaneity comes in the writing, the phraseology, the telling of the story—after you’ve put all this stuff aside. You can read through those relevant notes in a relatively short period of time, and you know that’s what you want to be covering. But then you spend the rest of your day hoping spontaneous things will occur.
“It may sound like I’ve got some sort of formula by which I write. Hell, no! You’re out there completely on your own—all you’ve got to do is write. OK, it’s nine in the morning. All I’ve got to do is write. But I go hours before I’m able to write a word. I make tea. I mean, I used to make tea all day long. And exercise, I do that every other day. I sharpened pencils in the old days when pencils were sharpened. I just ran pencils down. Ten, eleven, twelve, one, two, three, four—this is every day. This is damn near every day. It’s four-thirty and I’m beginning to panic. It’s like a coiling spring. I’m really unhappy. I mean, you’re going to lose the day if you keep this up long enough. Five: I start to write. Seven: I go home. That happens over and over and over again. So why don’t I work at a bank and then come in at five and start writing? Because I need those seven hours of gonging around. I’m just not that disciplined. I don’t write in the morning—I just try to write.”
John McPhee, The New Yorker
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Jay-Z, like rap itself, started out pyrotechnical. Extremely fast, stacked, dense. But time passed and his flow got slower, opened up. Why? “I didn’t have enough life experience, so what I was doing was more technical. I was trying to impress technically. To do things that other people cannot do. Like, you can’t do this” — insert beat-box and simultaneous freestyle here — “you just can’t do that.”
Nope. Can’t even think of a notation to demonstrate what he just did. Jay-Z in technician mode is human voice as pure syncopation. On a track like “I Can’t Get With That,” from 1994, the manifest content of the music is never really the words themselves; it’s the rhythm they create. And if you don’t care about beats, he says, “You’ve missed the whole point.”
A moment of reflection for our (hopefully) misspent youth having fun, showing off, making mistakes; storing it all for future fuel.
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“You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits. I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make. You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself…
You can’t wander around. It’s much harder to be surprised. You don’t have those moments of serendipity. You don’t bump into a friend in a restaurant you haven’t seen in years. The loss of anonymity and the loss of surprise is an unnatural state. You adapt to it, but you don’t get used to it – at least I don’t.”
Barack Obama, from Michael Lewis’ Vanity Fair piece
POTUS, expressing essentially the same dilemma of the modern consumer/user/customer. Too many choices. And an organically evolving set of behaviour adaptations.
A few years ago a colleague and I did a competitive pitch, something we are rarely asked to do at IDEO, but because it was for a sector that we believed in (healthcare) for a condition that my colleague’s mother had recently suffered from (cancer) in a market that at the time was fairly flat (Europe) we decided to do it. When we got to the client’s headquarters we discovered, much to our dismay, that the various agencies were being asked to pitch in front of each other, something I had never seen before, nor have ever had to do since. IDEO, we were told, were the last of three to present.
The first two presentations were somewhat similar, both boldly outlining heavily statistical research methodologies, one company proudly talking about how they were going to synthesize thousands of “data points” into a “compelling proposition” and how their “proprietary methodology” was going to win “market share.” I was impressed with their scale and hubris, convinced that we were going to lose this, as one guy brought out an enormous printed collages of images – advertising they had created I think – to woo the client.
When it came to our turn, we did what we always do, which is to not talk about anonymous numbers, statistics or data points, but to show a simple human story, one that hopefully everyone in the room could relate to. I pressed Play on a shaky video that a coworker in our health practice had given us permission to show, where she had, for sake of confidentiality, shot an old lady, crippled with pain from a skin condition that she was suffering from, talk about herself, her fears, how embarrassed she was to be such a burden to her family and her doctor. In this video, you see absolutely nothingbut her withered hands and her badly blistered knee, but you cannot help but feel everything important about this person, their frailty, their anguish and above all, their humanity. She cries in pain, both physical and emotional. It is frankly, quite difficult to watch.
The video played for about a minute, and I pressed Stop. There was a silence in the room. I was convinced we were going to get a polite “Thank You,” and that would be that. Then the most senior client, looked at us, visibly shaken, and said, slowly: “This reminds me of why I come into work every day. I never want to see anyone in this kind of pain when we can help them.” My colleague, clearly deeply moved by his reaction, quietly said: “My mother has just been through cancer and is, I hope, in remission. The most important thing I learned through seeing her go through it is that everybody in your system is still, and wants to continue to be seen as an individual, a person.”
We won the project, and went on to do great work together that I truly hope made a difference.
I am not telling you this story to laud one process over another – both clearly have their merits. What amazes me time and time again in business is how quickly we forget the power of the simple, singular human truth, a truth that can shake us out of our day-jobs where we deal with vast statistics and margins and averages and remind us to be people, to think: “How does this person’s story make me feel?” and “What can I do to make this better?” We find that often one simple story can do the work of a thousand average ones.
This is, to be honest, one of the recurring comments raised by others about IDEO and our work – that we tend to prefer to talk deeply with only a few people rather than talk broadly with many. But experience has taught us that the answer lies in listening deeply to the spaces between the words, the unseen and unheard images and sounds, not the blatant and the obvious.Less, but heard more. Seeing nothing but hands on a video can reveal the soul of the person that they belong to. We firmly believe in the power of a simple human truth, that we as people can relate to, that we as humans can discuss, have personal empathy for and are, like my colleague, able to tell a personal story about, or like our client, something to motivate them to go to work every day. Sitting in the room, actually listening, then talking about how you felt and hopefully passing that on to others, is ironically, statistically the best approach, as prominent American psychiatrist William Glasser says beautifully:
“We Learn …
10% of what we read
20% of what we hear
30% of what we see
50% of what we see and hear
70% of what we discuss
80% of what we experience
95% of what we teach others.”
– Paul Bennett
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//F. Scott Fitzgerald Attends the Alexander Wang Spring 2013 Show//
I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere sit in front of you at the Wang show:
—“So sorry, but the front row is reserved for bloggers. Writers are in the second.”
“I am most certainly a blogger.”
—“What’s your blog?”
“It’s called Tumbler. Keeps my readers in high spirits.”
[A pause; it endured horribly.]
I cannot accept that I’m to be deprived of half the view of a show that endures for a mere five minutes. Not to mention the insult of being told by an intern. In turn, I—
—“Hi, can I take a quick picture of your style for my blog? ”
“Oh, absolutely!”
—“Wait, don’t smile.”
“Oh, no, of course, I’m sorry.”
—“And who makes your suit and shoes?”
“Happens to be a rather confidential sort of thing. You can just put ‘vintage’.”
Dead Authors at Fashion Week: Part I
September 12, 2012 | by Katherine Bernard
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iCal’s leather-stitching was literally based on a texture in [Steve’s] Gulfstream jet
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Want Breakthrough Ideas? First, Listen To The Freaks And Geeks
The stairs to our company’s fourth-floor loft posed a challenge for the dominatrixes. Many were wearing vertiginous Jimmy Choos and Christian Louboutins, and there was a bit of grumbling by the time they got to the top. I suppose they’re more used to dishing out suffering than enduring it themselves. As they made the trek through our building, they raised hardly an eyebrow from our staffers.
At Sense Worldwide, a branding consultancy specializing in working with extreme consumers, we’re accustomed to individuals who are a million miles away from that “regular customer.” You know, the ones who sit in focus groups and fill out online surveys. For us, one day, it’s dominatrixes; the next, it’s obsessive compulsives, teddy-bear enthusiasts, prescription-drug addicts, or Nigerian hackers.
James, Maria, and Jean-Robert do our recruitment. They’re ridiculously sanguine about hunting down rare and extraordinary people. Today, I asked them to find us the top cocktail mixologists in Seoul, Korea. “No particular age or gender?” was all James asked. We seek out these obsessives, maniacs and eccentrics because they can help us get to big, breakthrough ideas. Some of them can show us how mainstream consumers will behave in a few years. Some of them have extreme needs that no product on the market can meet–so they modify them, or make their own. Some of them reject a whole category. You can learn a lot about mobile phones by talking to a power user. You can learn even more by talking to somebody who’s deliberately never bought one.
EXTREME USERS THINK DIFFERENTLY, WORK DIFFERENTLY …
These extreme users have a willingness to experiment that’s far beyond the capacity of any design agency. And because they’re improving the thing that they love, they’re not going to charge you by the hour. We recently worked with some Brazilian transsexuals on hair-removal products, looking at ways of making the process less painful. I can assure you, we had their full attention. Some are still sending us ideas.
… AND THEY LISTEN DIFFERENTLY.
When we get extreme users together in a room, we often sit them down with the top design and R&D wizards from our clients. We ask our clients to bring the ideas they could never sell internally, because radical people appreciate radical ideas.
Every good designer has felt the pang of watching a truly revolutionary concept being pulled apart by the passive-aggressive mouth-breathers who make up most focus groups. “This doesn’t taste like cola,” they said about Red Bull. “Executive chairs are made of leather,” they said about Aerons. “Only secretaries have keyboards on their desks,” they said about PCs. All kinds of great ideas, from the Walkman to nacho chips, died in research with average consumers. That’s because regular people don’t like new things much. You know that, you’ve read Blink.
But what Malcolm Gladwell didn’t tell you is that there are people out there who will buy a great new idea. Perhaps they’ll even have it for you. Clubbers loved Red Bull: It helped them rave all night. A 4’11” lady loved the Aeron chair prototype so much that production was delayed until she was happy she could reach the controls.
FINDING ECCENTRIC CONSUMERS IS 50% OF THE CHALLENGE.
Of course, you need to find the right eccentrics. Then you have to convince them to help you. If you’re Harley Davidson or Nike (full disclosure: we work for Nike), then finding extreme consumers is easy. Just visit the Marathon des Sables and pick up some ultra-ultra marathon runners, or ride your prototype to the Sturgis bike rally every year.
“GREAT IDEAS, FROM THE WALKMAN TO NACHO CHIPS, DIED IN RESEARCH WITH AVERAGE CONSUMERS.”
But what if you’re working on something less glamorous? Like, say, a blister-and-sweaty-foot range? Well, then you have to think a bit more creatively. What kind of person spends a lot of the day in uncomfortable shoes but would have a professional interest in keeping their feet immaculate? Before long, your recruitment people are scouring the Internet for soldiers, dominatrixes, and models. (It turns out that dominatrixes are easy to find on the Web. Who knew?)
BELIEVE IN THE METHOD BEHIND THE MADNESS.
At first, it seemed strange for me to take mainstream brands to fringe people. But it works. Kenyan microlenders and global retail bankers can learn a tremendous amount from each other. Health insurers and medical tourists can create services that benefit both of them. Running shoe design has been revolutionized by studying people who have never worn them. Now it seems strange to talk to regular people. What are they going to tell you that you don’t already know?
If you’re going to get ambitious about your next task, don’t go and talk to normal people about it. You’ll only get normal answers. Get out of your comfortable little world and step into a completely alien one. As we say round here, when worlds collide, transformation happens.
– Brian Millar http://bit.ly/U5jzBe
From a patent Sony filed for videogame advertising. Clever AND hilarious. twitter.com/hollybrocks/st…
— Holly Brockwell (@hollybrocks) September 4, 2012
Wandering Wandering Star 