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  • Perception, media buzz, and what the customer actually wants to buy

    Posted on January 5th, 2010 by Eric Dodds and currently 6 commenting.
    Photo via me, Eric Dodds.

    Photo via me, Eric Dodds.

    What would your gut reaction be if someone asked you why domestic automaker market share has declined over 25% in the last 12 years? Lack of quality? Lack of innovation in green technology? Inferior manufacturing capabilities? Horrible gas milage? Those were my reactions too.

    But it turns out there’s a difference between my perception of whose cars have lasted longest of the people I know, hot environmental topics in the media and what car-buyers actually wanted in the vehicles they purchased over the last decade.

    Quite simply, people wanted cooler-looking cars.

    Woah…what? It’s true. In a recent study from Virginia Commonwealth University, researchers found that, though other variables were important,

    “The positive impact of a restyling dominates the other determinants of demand and accounts for the secular decline in domestic market share. A complete restyling on average has a ten times greater impact on market share growth rate than even a 10 percent reduction in relative price. Furthermore, manufacturers would have to double relative advertising expenditures to achieve an effect comparable to a complete restyling.”

    And one of the researchers, Professor of Economics George E. Hoffer, makes this point in a related video:

    “…re-styling dominates everything else. People like to say well, the Americans haven’t been green, the Americans haven’t been on the safety frontier, the Americans haven’t had the quality. We find, really, that’s not very important.”

    Gut check. Quality, green-ness, gas milage - important, but not MOST important. Popular rationale in purchase decisions usually take a back seat to the emotion that drives the final choice. And as the study shows, if you can’t find that desire, you’ll have to drain your advertising budget to sell a product that people just don’t like as much.

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  • Anchors in a sea of change

    Posted on December 4th, 2009 by Eric Dodds and currently 4 commenting.

    I love my job. I get to work with musicians and study the music industry everyday. I love finding new music and discovering unique ways that bands create, promote, play and interact with fans. I have to tell you, though, keeping a keen eye on the changes that are happening in the music industry can seem to be a daily job. In many ways, the music industry is adrift in a sea of change:

    Giant record labels are losing ground.

    Technology has allowed artists, who would never have had a chance previously, to enter top 40 charts - using only a laptop as their primary instrument.

    Music is being pirated at an alarming rate and physical music sales are dwindling.

    Bands themselves are in a constant state of evolution as they balance their creation of music and its involvement in fans’ lives in an increasing number of new ways.

    And the list goes on.
    The other day I watched an incredibly thought provoking video about changes in the music industry. Blink182 (and Angels and Airwave’s) band member Tom Delonge had some fascinating things to say about where he sees the music industry going. He talked about giving away free music, increasing ease of creating art, new channels of distribution and creating new ways to have a relationship with fans. But the most interesting thing about his perspective were what he saw as necessary components in order to maintain success through change. And many of them weren’t new ideas. In fact, several points he made were time-tested principles in marketing (not only for music): having a fundamentally good product that improves people’s lives, wrapping that product with unique, consistent, ownable branding and maintaining a perspective that it’s not about you.
    • Having a fundamentally good product: “Good songwriting is objective…” Delonge says that you don’t remember a band decades later “because they had good moves on stage…or wore tighter jeans than everyone else,” you remember them because they wrote timeless music. A band that has the best branding in the world who writes bad songs won’t stand the test of time.
    • Give a sound product an amazing identity: “The logo, the artwork, spreads to your merch, your website, and album cover - all of it has to be really good. More than cool, clever - it has to be a window into your mind…[so that fans] start to guess where you are going to go with it.” Represent the unique identity of who your band is across all mediums and consistently involve your audience in that process.
    • It’s not about you: “I always thought that true art isn’t necessarily creating the music, it’s seeing how many people the music can touch…” In the end, it’s about your fans. Your passion for ‘touching’ your fans in a deep way.
    Fascinating. In an industry that is teeming with constant change and turmoil, the ingredients for success, even in the face of mind-blowing technological change and necessary adaptation, are the same.
    And if you’re interested in how Tom Delonge is making this happen, check out modlife. (Angels and Airwaves’ latest film effort looks awesome.) You can watch the interview here.
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  • Dear Creatives, co-created tools are the ones that get implemented

    Posted on November 4th, 2009 by Spike and currently 1 commenting.

    Greg came back from a talk he gave a couple of weeks ago where he presented about bringing word of mouth marketing and identity development together. Having world-class designers in our midst (I’m not one of them, so I can brag on them, okay?), we’re always curious to see how other creatives react to the idea of co-creating online and offline materials/tools for a word of mouth movement.

    And, ultimately, the question arises: “How much of what you present gets actually implemented and produced?”

    Creatives ask this question because most traditional shops are used to presenting all these great ideas and all these great designs…and then they start to get picked apart. For a number of reasons, really. But eventually, unless you have one of those clients that “gets it,” the concepts and accompanying designs get “dumbed down” and what you end up producing looks like everything else out there. It’s something that’s a constant struggle for a lot of shops.

    So what was Greg’s response? That the overwhelming majority of our concepts and designs get implemented when we help ignite a word of mouth movement. Why? Because it’s not coming from a creative team that works in a vacuum. It’s being co-created with the people that will actually use the stuff. (Note that I didn’t say crowd-sourced here, okay??!?)

    When you co-create, subjectivity goes out the window, since items are based on conversations with the customers. So how do we get around the brand police? By showing them not what we want, but what the customer wants. It’s a co-created movement. Shared ownership. And it comes from courageous insight.

    But you have to be ready to accept the truth. Because true participation in people’s lives through courageous insight opens up opportunities for deeper connections.

    So do you want your ideas and creative concepts to see the light of day? Then don’t start with the customer in mind - but actually WITH the customer. When it comes straight from their mouths, it’s hard for anyone to refute.

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  • On killing your ideas

    Posted on July 16th, 2009 by Eric Dodds and currently 4 commenting.

    This is Eric Dodds. Not the Design Wizard.

    This is Eric Dodds. Not the Design Wizard.

    Successful companies don’t produce the best work, they produce the best work efficiently.

    One day when I was in high school my dad drove home from North Carolina in an old, worn out bright orange Jeep CJ7 that he bought off of my uncle for pennies on the dollar. Afternoons for months after were spent taking every nut and bolt off of that rust bucket. When we finally finished tearing her into a million pieces we started to put her back together, replacing the bad parts with new, upgraded parts, and refurbishing re-usable components. As we pieced the to-be-transformed 4×4 back together, I received my first lesson in the difference between building something to be the best it can possibly be and building something that doesn’t break the bank and you actually finish in a timely manner.

    I wanted the Jeep to morph into a gigantic, car-crushing off-road fiend with a wild paint job (my then youthful taste has matured some, thankfully). In his gentle wisdom, my dad explained that we only had a certain amount of money to work with and I would need to decide which features were forgone. I wanted to create the most incredible restored Jeep on the East Coast. My dad knew that in order to have a Jeep that would run and drive before I graduated high school we would have to do the best we could with our budget and timeline.

    I thought about that lesson a few days ago when someone asked our Design Wizard, Eric Whitlock, “How in the world do you create the best work possible, on time, with a limited budget?”

    Over the past few weeks I have had the privilege of watching the Wizard (and veteran Geno Church) answer that question as they’ve tackled a huge project in short order (soon to be revealed), producing some incredible work along the way. So how did they do it?

    You could write a book on efficient creative process (or it might just be easier to go buy one of the thousands that are already out there), and this isn’t the place for a treatise on creative work. One thing that really stood out to me, however, was their keen ability to kill ideas. They are masters at putting amazing, effective ideas to death, quickly. In order to accomplish the task at hand, they constantly exist in the process of pushing really really good ideas aside to make way for the best ideas.

    My problem is that I enjoy drowning myself in good ideas and often find myself tangled in efforts to see how all of the pieces will fit together, as opposed to developing proficiency in determining what the most important elements of a project are and bringing only those to life.

    Lack of amazing ideas is rarely the problem – determining which of them needs to die (or be put on a shelf for later use) is the hard part. I need to get better at watching ideas, many of which are dear to me, die. Time to go see the Wizard for a lesson in sharpening my knife.

    This is the Design Wizard.

    This is the Design Wizard.

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  • Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

    Posted on October 30th, 2007 by Spike and currently 18 commenting.

    There are some new developments at the Brains on Fire lair.

    1) Happy new blog! Yes. It was time. So after ” what ” like 2.5 years, we’ve changed the design on the blog. (And we welcome your comments.) You’ll notice a few new things:

    a) The FIRE CAM is, indeed, our YouTube videos. Here you’ll find many random things, updated bi-monthly (or hopefully more often), included rants, insights and work that happens around these parts.

    b) The PHOTOS are, well, a Flickr gallery of ’slice of life’ images around Brains on Fire, our outings or just complete randomness. There will be two random images pulled from the Flickr gallery, but you have the option to go to the gallery once you open those pics. Make sense?

    c) Yes, you still can customize the blog (scroll down and find it on the right hand bar). But now, along with changing the color to the hyperlinks, it will change the background image as well. Each time you load the blog, the header image will change as well. These are also random images from our lives and the Brains on Fire space.

    d) There’s also a handy calendar of when and where Brains on Fire is speaking around the country (and the globe). Be sure and see if we’re coming to a screen near you.

    BOF_3.jpg2) You might remember the pro bono work we did for Justice for Children International - the organization united to fight the good fight against child sex trafficking. They have announced their new name and rolled out their new identity: Love146. Be sure and check them out ” and you HAVE to watch the video. (Brains on Fire didn’t do the video or the website.) Well, as a big ol’ unexpected ‘thank you,’ they cashed in all their frequent flier bonus points and got us a foosball table. It rocks. And it’s a great addition to our space.

    .

    IMG_0008.JPG3) Partner and lead design rockstar, Greg Ramsey (we call him ‘Ram’) got a-hankerin’ for popcorn. So did he go out and get some popcorn to put in the microwave? Yeah, right. He bought a popcorn maker. So if you come by our office in the afternoon and it smells like a carnival, then you know what’s going on.

    So consider yourself updated on all the goings on at the Brains on Fire.

    P.S. I hate popcorn.

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