Convergence

It's the product, stupid: branding firms and industrial design

In a great essay for Core 77 ("Stepmothers of Invention: Branding Firms Enter the Industrial Design Fray"), Carl Alviani describes a trend that has been emerging for a while now: Not only do digital agencies like R/GA enter the branding domain, branding, marcom, and advertising firms also round out their services portfolio by adding product design capabilities. Alviani expects that "a lot more branding firms will be hiring product designers over the next few years, just as ID firms hired lots of media and identity specialists a decade back (and continue to do)." John Winsor … Read more

Egonomics and the "Recognition Economy"

In May this year, frog design founder Hartmut Esslinger spoke at the German Trend Day in Hamburg. The Trend Day is an influential annual forum that gathers thought leaders from business, media, and academia to discuss emerging social and cultural trends. This year's theme was "Identity Management," and other speakers besides Hartmut included Richard Florida, Danny Choo, and David Bosshart.

The organizers have synthesized the research, interviews, and lectures of the two-day symposium into a manifesto that is worth reading:

http://www.slideshare.net/TrendBuero/identity-management-manifesto-presentation

The paper argues that today's "attention economy" will … Read more

How will Google Chrome change the user experience on the Web?

By Gianluca Brugnoli, Principal Design Analyst in frog design 's Milan studio

Google Chrome was born explicitly as a platform for Web applications. From the first bits I saw I can say that Google's new creation delivers most of the promises and brings new interesting innovations in the user experience realm. Competitors will find them hard to ignore, especially when you look at the tab concept improvements. For a good review of these points, you can refer to this post on Ars Technica.

Many hailed Google's move as a revolutionary step. And indeed, with Google Chrome, the Web … Read more

Google Earth shows cows point north

My grandparents in England had cows on their farm so I've always had a lot of affection for them, and was delighted to read this story from the Los Angeles Times indicating a "hidden cow power." Turns out cows may have internal compasses much like birds and bees do for orienting themselves to magnetic north.

Using satellite images on Google Earth, German scientists were able to see that all over the planet, cows stand with their bodies pointing to magnetic north.

Studying photographs of 8,510 cattle in 308 herds from around the world, zoologists Sabine Begall … Read more

The Obama SMS: (Un-)gratifying instantification

So the SMS went out to hundreds of thousands of Obama supporters. Not everyone got it at the same time (according to Textually.org, it took about 15 minutes for the bulk of the messages to get through the carriers' systems) or, in some cases, at all, but overall, the pre-announcement buzz (including some fake VP announcements -- "Michael Phelps!") was palpable and the word was spread.

"Be the first to know whom Barack picks as his running mate," had been the campaign's promise. The only problem: Those who had signed up to be the … Read more

The new brand continuum

What exactly does a brand manager do? I asked people who carry this title, but I could never quite figure out which responsibilities this most ominous job entails--besides creating hefty brand books with arcane brand architectures and guidelines (usually ignored by employees and vendors), auditing brand equity through some arbitrary tracking mechanisms, and chasing malicious brand violators all over the globe. If that sounds like a valuable job to you, fine. To me, it sounds more like a combination of the worst aspects of legal counseling and a PR internship. If the marketing 2.0 textbook holds that everyone's … Read more

You can only have one brand: advertising by blog ambassador

"We do not trust brands anymore. We trust individuals: friendly, familiar authority figures with whom we feel great affinity. These are the people we trust and those from whom we would always welcome honest suggestions and tips, and when they are spontaneous or clearly disclosed even those of commercial nature."

So says Robin Good in his provocative post on the Brand Ambassador, in which he touts highly credible and authoritative bloggers as the advertising channel of the future.

Good envisions "bottom-up advertising with publishers selecting the favorite brands they would want to endorse." And further: "… Read more

Dog eat dog food: Why the corporate marketing of creative firms is so often so mediocre

"We're doing all the things we tell our clients not to do," admits a strategy director at a renowned design and innovation firm, "it is ironic." He's not alone with his assessment. Other employees of creative firms (let's just use this label as a catch-all for all design, innovation, marketing, brand, and advertising firms) secretly confess that while they go out preaching to their clients about the importance of open innovation, brand consistency, or a distinct, provocative marketing messages, it is the very absence of all of which that often severely hampers their … Read more

Blippr offers micro-product reviews

Definitely Techcrunch material: Can there be a trendier start-up than a site called Blippr that provides "micro-product reviews"?

With its 160-character length limit, the site replicates microblogging sites, and there are good reasons to assume that this format translates well to product reviews, as David Binkowski writes.