A Perfect Match

Just when you think you’ve seen everything, you go to a school reunion.  At the last one I attended, we all gleefully got to play ‘who on earth is that?’  An awesome testament to the powers of surgical transformation and personal chutzpa, our mystery classmate commanded the spotlight as she did the mwa-mwa tour of the room, dragging everyone’s helplessly mesmerised gaze with her.  Only when I heard her speak could I work out who she was, and then the game of finding any remotely familiar features was on.  Utterly riveting.  Amanda (appropriately enough, not her real name) had morphed from a scrawny, awkward, unkempt and rather odd girl into a buxom, pouty lacquered vision of… what must have been someone’s vision of a middle-aged barbie doll.  Unreal.  In every sense.

What was particularly striking however was that as fascinating as she was, people didn’t see her as a ‘who’, but rather as a ‘what’ – as a curiosity.  It’s hard to build a meaningful relationship on those terms.  But then brands have been doing that for years.

When I was dragged up through the strategic hallways of JWT, we were instructed to think of a brand as a person, theoretically complete with quirks and foibles to make it warm, unique and accessible.  Of course this was a farce.  Putting aside the debate over whether a concept or construct can ever be that 3 dimensionally human, the process by which this humanity was supposed to be inferred ensured it was a non-starter to begin with.  Rather like expecting Six Sigma  to foster innovation in a corporate environment.   Take a functional product or service, get a committee to fill in forms with laundry-lists of characteristics based on what they thought it ’should’ be or that they thought would appeal to ‘the market, water it down so it will exclude no one, package it up with a nice 30 sec TVC that brings those characteristics to life and presto!  Vanilla Frankenstein Ken Dolls masquerading as psychotically friendly bank managers weaving themselves into the milestones of our lives, Stepford mums twinkling over laundry stains and dirty toilets, and endless immaculate young couples oozing love and dental perfection whilst traveling the world and shopping enthusiastically for insurance.  (Why can’t banks market their perfectly valuable services without having to worm their way into our hearts and bar-mitzvahs?  Particularly since we all know they’ll eat our children if there’s a whiff of financial hardship on the horizon.)

A fascinating feat of strategic surgical engineering perhaps, but hardly magnetically attractive.  ’Perfection’ never is.

Little has changed, which is a pity.  The most magnetic brands are still those like Apple, Maui Jim, or Twitter that are determinedly themselves, that do not emerge slickly formed and beautifully botoxed for mass consumption, but start by standing for something real, then grow organically through interactions with the market (usually niche at first) they naturally appeal to.  They are created – co-created in fact, rather than produced and imposed.  Brands essentially only exist in the minds of the consumer or marketplace.  It is an illusion to think they can be controlled by their ‘maker’ – particularly in an era where on-line word of mouth rules.

Amanda’s perfect plasticity didn’t make her appealing.  But then, perhaps her niche lay elsewhere.  And ‘who’ now lived behind the ‘what’ she’d become was destined to remain a mystery.  Once she finished her whirlwind tour of the room, she ran out of things to say.  Next time I looked around, she’d disappeared.

WorldWarped ©mofox

I  am totally, tragically addicted to WordWarp.

It looks harmless enough. Basic anagram game App: 6 scrambled letters, a list of blank word spaces, 2 minutes, go.  If you don’t get the 6 letter word, it’s all over red rover.  If you do, you go onto the next level and your score accumulates.  SO.  On this fateful evening, I’d managed to scrape my way up the escarpment to a grand total of 17,500.  I had no idea whether this placed me amongst the deities or the plebs.  I didn’t care.  It was about 4,000 more than I’d ever achieved before.  Now in an earlier moment of inspiration, I had ferreted out an Unscrambling App.   I wouldn’t use it, I said to myself, because that would be cheating.  It was kind of a ‘just in case’.  (Love the logic.) So I’m at 17,500, and I could not for the life of me unscramble the rather liberally-vowelled mess.  Feeling the pressure, and knowing how much was at stake, I threw conscience to the winds and scurried to the other app.  The answer?  OUTRUN.  Cool, I thought.  There was even a certain synergy to it.

Next word comes up: another unintelligible mass.  I powered through the list but when it came to the big kahuna I was stumped.  And here the insanity began. read more »

New Broom ©mofox

The worm has officially turned.  The downtrodden rise to overthrow their oppressors, an unfair situation is being reversed, and the soil is being aerated in preparation for new growth.  The business world is being forced to shift from a mechanised, information-based model to a creative, conceptual one.  What’s your stake in the revolution?

It may seem a bit of a stretch to liken creative thinkers as earthworms, yet Darwin insisted the earthworm is one of the most important creatures in history.  By doing what it does naturally, the earthworm transforms nutrient-starved dirt into rich, fertile, arable soil.  And it’s major enemies?  Commercial fertilizers, pesticides and extremely dry soil.  Not so dissimilar then.  The mega tsunami of technological developments, available information and globalisation have created a commoditised market where efficiency rules, and Better/Cheaper/Faster is the order of the day.  Dry soil indeed, for in a commoditised market, information is NOT power – it’s just data.

True power now lies in the ability to make information mean something so people can do something worthwhile with it.  Or to say it posh; the ability to extract insight and leverage it to create value.  Or in worm words, chewing the mulch to excrete the castings that fertilise the soil.

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Symphony in Fish Major ©mofox

Backyard Aquaponics is a Queensland company that combines aquaculture and hydroponics in a way that each not only cancels out the negative aspects of the other, but actually uses it as nourishment.  The fish tank and gravel veggie bed are linked: the fish-poo water gets used to feed the plants, which in turn clean and oxygenate the water for the happy fish. It uses 1/10 of the normal water required, the fish get less lurgies, and a patio-sized system can feed a whole family.

How cool is that?  A completely symbiotic system where the sum of the two combined is greater than the sum of the two individuals.

Symbiosis is of course the key to many business relationships too: supplier/dealer, partnerships, and cross-referring affiliations with shared infrastructures to name a few.  The most obvious example is the employer/employee relationship, but how often is this as healthy and maximising as it can be?  The key to the symbiotic relationship is balance of power – hardly something the classic company situation is renown for.  The rhino may be huge compared to the oxpecker but it still depends on it for its survival – not always the case with commoditised workforces.  But what if we looked at it differently?

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