Buying In

Just about to finish reading "Buying In - What we buy and Who we are" by Rob Walker. I good read for anyone that is involved in selling stuff to consumers through branding and marketing efforts. It goes further than a previous book I read about consumer traits (Spent - Geoffrey Millar) and how we buy stuff to show off our individual personalities through evolutionary trait display. This book takes a slightly different view that suggest that we buy stuff more to support our internal narrative about ourselves, and not necessarily about showing off to others.

Lot's of great examples and arguments that support the concept. Found it to be an easy read and insightful. Observations of the current consumer space and the issues that today's marketing has to contend with compared to more traditional approaches. I think some very powerful ideas are put forward about branding and how people are not so much resisting branding but more about adopting the concepts and language of branding to support their own internal self fulfillment, as suggested on Maslow's heirarchy of needs.

Branding is a big focus in the book and definitely it makes you appreciate the power of the branding language, and how much is now part of our culture. It is fascinating how it has become something that we can take part in and add to the conversations, rather than resist as Naomi Klein suggest in her book " No Logo". Brands are being embraced rather than repelled by today's consumers and especially among the youth and new start ups. The main take away message from the book is really that consumer behavior today is and always has been about our stories we tell ourselves, it is about who we are and what we believe, branding is part of that story telling process and is being used as such by today's consumers not rejected.

Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is a fascinating term coined Jeff Howe, journalist at Wired magazine, to describe the use of large groups of people working on a common task in bite sized chunks. His latest book, Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business, is a great overview and summary of the current trend and ideas on group problem solving and content generation. 


Not everyone agrees with the concepts he raises that the group is more potent than the individual creator, but he does raise some interesting talking points around the open source programming model and content sites like iStockPhoto and YouTube. For me the most fascinating aspect of crowdsourcing and what it allows is that someone whom is a professional in one field of work, can lend his skills to another, which has long been recognized as a good way to innovate. Also the concept of people having other interests outside of their chosen career, that can be used and improved by adopting a crowd of interest, seems to fall nicely inline with modern thinking around people being passionate about things that are not necessarily done for money or profitable gain, but more for personal fulfillment and challenge. 


Overall I think crowdsourcing has some very interesting concepts and the examples given in the book are very compelling, whether or not it can be replicated easily across different domains remains to be seen, but at the least I like the ideas of working as a group of passionate like minded individuals to solve bigger problems in smaller pieces. This book is a great introduction to the concepts and is an easy read to get upto speed on the current trend.

Recent Book Review - Lightning in a Bottle

As someone whom works often on new product development and ideation across many areas of business. This book by David Minter and Michael Reid proved to be very insighful and has influenced the way I consider future product development. Their seasoned approach to new product design and development is broken down into 7 steps that are simple and easy to follow, that cover important considerations for any new product or idea. Through their years of working on large brands such as Blockbuster and Barnes and Noble they have accumulated much experience in what works and what doesn't when it comes to new product design issues, such as, focus groups and brainstorming.

Considering how much brainstorming I have been involved with over the years, they captured very well the short comings of such an approach to new idea generation. It has it's place of course in the creative process but as they suggest it can be a distraction to actually producing something concrete and evaluating correctly the great ideas from the bad. They suggest a more methodical approach to idea generation, that doesn't rely on just idea generation. What I liked was the emphasis on researching compiling information from the domain space first, then working out what people are actually looking for to improve their interaction or experience with something. Then after some brainstorming, most importantly interviewing individual consumers one at a time, rather than in focus groups, which they say have been shown to fail in most instances time and again.

Most of their concepts are easy to digest although sometimes lacking some detail, but still a great start to the concept of rethinking new product development.

For anyone involved as I am in new product development I highly recommend this short weekend's worth of  reading - lightning in a bottle.