FInally got the Japan Website wrapped up into a little concept film. It’ll be part of my degree show, so make sure to come along!

The shelter information on should look really nice with all the information filled in.

What do you do for the girl who can do everything?

The answer lied in the approach. What’s the best weapon against complexity? Simplicity.

I think it works rather well. It’s gotten a lot of compliments so far. Going to come up with various applications across various media before the big fashion D-Day in a few weeks time. I just finished off the site, a nice and simple Indexhibit number that will allow her to use the CMS and add projects, but to the outsider looks like a slick showcase of work. Check it out:

Hannah Hill.

Okay, mine is about swapping entire brand characteristics and the linked image is about the brand similarities, but both are interesting ideas. I might do an entire shelf of products to see how well it works across entire ranges.

The effect is rather profound, lots of people who I’ve shown this to said it made them feel rather uneasy. It just goes to show how well rooted in our minds famous brands are.

“We are not here to sell a parcel of boilers and vats,” Johnson opined, “but the potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice.”

This aspirational phrasing did the trick and the brewery fetched £135,000 roughly equivalent to £13M today.

With rich beyond the dreams of avarice Johnson arguably invented the benefit and became an early practitioner in the trade of advertising, an industry that centuries later would think different to him about English grammar.

Some 120 years later, in 1903 King Gillette was faced with a conundrum.

His safety razor was simply too expensive for the marketplace, purchasing one would cost a working man around half his weekly wage.

Until Gillette devised an ingenious scheme to sell each razor at a loss and make his money on the blades.

So Gillette, who did not invent the safety razor, did invent the loss leader, making a considerable contribution to the creation of Marketing, (while pissing off generations of men with the inflated price of razor blades).

And for the next hundred years or so, the separate, but interrelated disciplines of Advertising and Marketing were fairly well-defined.

Advertising was a vehicle for the delivery of a message through paid media; essentially advertising pushed the message towards you.

Even when it elicited an unambigous response, as in the case of direct mail, it was exactly that — a response to a media stimulus.

Marketing, on the other hand, sold you the razor and essentially pulled you towards the blade, it was more about the big picture, more about creating demand through adjusting factors like pricing and packaging, than tailoring a message.

At the risk of over simplifying things, Advertising was a push mechanism while Marketing was a pull mechanism.

(I’m referring to the sharp end of Marketing here –the sales end, and not the broader context of the Marketing Mix.)

And that was basically the status quo until the advent of web 2.0

When social media in particular, blurred the distinction between pushing and pulling, because the internet has the unsettling ability to push and pull simultaneously.

You tweet, or upload a clip to YouTube, initially your tweet or video is simply a message you’re pushing, but if it gains any traction at all, it rapidly starts exerting a pull of its own.

And if it goes viral, the pull becomes cyclonic without diminishing and in fact, accelerating the push.

This almost contradicts the old wives’ tale, about the impossibility of sucking and blowing at the same time. Which goes some way to explaining why as Google’s Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt memorably said, “The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand.”

Because we’re hard wired to sink or swim, not sink and swim.

And the Internet is riddled with contradictions: personal and public, one-to-one and one-to-many, targeted and random.

It’s hard for us to understand anything that performs so many opposite actions simultaneously – it’s just not natural to suck and blow at the same time.

Or it wasn’t until recently.

But there’s a lot of fusion going on.

Are you ready for Marketising?

- from Drown That Puppy

This is one of those “Thought it for a while but never written it down, I should probably write it down” posts. So excuse the rambling.

Think back to when you were little, you know when you turn the light off in the hallway and as you climb the stairs, all the hairs on your back stand up on end and you run up the last few steps. Maybe you still do it now, I do sometimes. You do it because you don’t know whats behind you anymore and it’s scary. We have a hard wired, instinctual fear of the unknown. Even thought it’s 99.9% likely that there is nothing behind you, you think “what if” and panic.

Now if just the darkness at the bottom of the stairs in your own house can do that, imagine living in world with a very basic understanding of “how the world works”. You don’t know why people die, why people are born, why the sun and moon go up and down,what disease is and why it spreads, what earthquakes are, and floods and rain and lighting and thunder.

As humans with the “scared of the unknown” toggle in our brains, that must have been really fundamentally terrifying. In an effort to counteract the fear and explain the unknowns you would probably come to the conclusion “Well, someone must have done it”. Great, it’s instantly more comprehendible. There’s still a why there though and that’s still scary. “Well, someone must have done it to teach us x”. There, that covers it more.

So you’re now in a situation where a ‘being’ is capable of all of these massively scary but now understandable, events. To be capable of this, the being must be incredibly powerful and important, capable of being everywhere at all times and of understanding everything there is to understand. And if you can do that, you are the most incredible being known to man, and in turn be worshipped. Remind you of something?

So now, “God did it to teach us x”. The story is spread, the books are written, the teachings are taught, and everything that was ever unexplained is now explained. Religion self perpetuates and spreads, answering humanities fears.

Except that doesn’t really work anymore. We now know why people die, why people are born, that the earth orbits the sun and the moon orbits the earth, why the world floods and what thunder and lightning is. But it’s not God, it’s science. It’s taught in schools across the world. We are now capable of explaining it all.

I feel now that religion actually harbors fear, it brings the fear of living without religion. For example, it’s why groups like the Westborough Baptist Church are so extreme. They are terrified that their views no longer fit into society as a whole, and they become more over the top in a desperate attempt to maintain their little bubble of ‘normal’. (Rather relevant: Extinction Burst.) If they let go, everything would be unexplained again. I’d be bricking it. It’s a sign that religion really has no place in the modern world.

As an atheist I have no qualms with some things being unexplained. It’s often the first retort when discussing religion “Well science can’t explain THIS”. But the thing is, 200 years ago we had no idea how birds flew and now, theists included, we all get into a metal tube and fly around the world. I have absolute confidence that the work of scientists will, one day, explain everything. They’ve managed well so far….

From that, Mark got in contact with our course director to ask if we could provide any input for an article he was writing about “The role of designers in disaster hit areas”. Recently there has been quite a tepid response to the Japan disaster, with ‘yet another poster’ becoming the standard response. It’s been discussed at length over at the Johnson Banks blog, as well as on the CRBlog.

Jack and I approached the problem from a more ‘strategic’ standpoint. There is a distinct lack of ‘communication’ oriented materials taken out to disaster hit areas, and with the Japan situation the systems put in place are chaotic and non-standardized.

This is perfectly understandable, I wouldn’t expect for a minute that the Red Cross would limit the amount of critical care supplies to take signposts and information boards with them. And there lies the problem, how to improve the transfer of essential ‘communications material’ whilst not affecting any of the existing supply chains.

The answer? What is always taken to disaster areas? Cardboard boxes. By printing on the outside in a fashion that makes the contents obvious, but also when unfolded turns into a sign, information boards etc, we have effectively turned the most common, but most useless, material in something of extreme importance, and removed all waste in the progress. Win win, no?

Boxes acquired from Freecycle, next stop the print room.