DR4WARD

Nature's Lesson on Design

Day 5, Friday and my last day here at the Cannes Advertising Festival. I started off the day with yet another great workshop. This workshop was called designing naturally and was presented by Frederico Gelli of Tatil Design.

"As design makes its debut in Cannes, this seminar takes advantage of the new ground to discuss the role of simple, clean, intelligent design in the industry. In this context, nature is the best place to find stimulation and perfect ideas for low impact solutions that maintain high sensorial impact. Why not observe how the atmosphere packages the earth, or how the rind of fruits protects their insides, in order to create more clever packaging solutions?"

This workshop was really interesting. Frederico discussed natures strategic design and how it must inspire projects in the future. As designers we have the ability to integrate design and nature. We need to start thinking like nature and create solutions out of the problems.

He discussed natures way of packaging. These are things that i had not thought of, like the way a woman's body packages a baby in the womb, the way a peel protects the fruit of an orange.

As designers we need to take the problems and develop solutions out of them.

Lessons from nature
• Optimum-conserve the most amount of energy.
• Cycles—everything that goes in must come out (waves)
• Interdependence (birds living on other animals)

Federico also showed photography by Peter Menzel
Peter photographed families with all their belongings outside of their houses. Americans, on average have 10,000 items in their homes.

a couple other artists were also discussed.
Justin Gignac , Justin sells garbage in air tight containers.
Brian Jungen , Brian creates art out of everday material, such as white plastic chairs.

The engineering of flowers was then brought up. I never had thought of how complex and important flowers were to our being. Architecture is now becoming heavily based on the principles of flowers. There structure and strength provide a great amount of information on how to build. Using shape, texture and color to ignite all senses and alluse the consumer. An example of this is the design of an apple store on fifth ave.

Attached our my notes from the day. Hope they are informative!!

Download cannes_friday.htm

also...please check out Tap Project

until next time...

Kayla

MARKETERS REACH EXCEEDING SCIENCE FICTION

As I was reading the April issue of WIRED I was reminded again that marketers reach is exceeding science fiction and that marketing ethics will become even more important in the future.  In the Steven Speilberg sci-fi film Minority Report starring Tom Cruise, criminals in 2054 are caught before the crimes they commit courtesy of some future viewing technology.  The question the film asks is : can someone be arrested for a crime they have not yet committed?  In George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four the threat in the future is that you are being watched and listened to at all times thus controlling your thoughts and actions through fear.  In sci-fi the escape from marketing and the government is impossible as video cameras, brain scans and eye-scanning technology allow an individual's every move to be tracked. 

Clive Thompson's article in Wired titled "It's All in Your Head - Why the next civil rights battle will be over the mind" discusses a new advertising medium called hypersonic sound.  This technology allows a focused beam of audio sound to be projected so that only a person standing directly in it's path hears the message, giving the effect of a speaker coming from inside your head. A&E has a creepy billboard for their new show "Paranormal State" that uses this "audio spotlight" technology to get inside the heads of people that pass by the ad with a message promoting the show.  What other ways are marketers getting inside our heads?

MARKET RESEARCH FAILS TO PREDICT POLITICAL FUTURE

I have been watching the recent and frequent failures of pollsters to predict presidential primary results and the media and public frustration with these inaccuracies. As a researcher, scholar and marketer I am reminded that data is only a guide and statistics alone cannot accurately predict the future.

Depending on the source, 80-90% of all new products fail despite huge investments in research to understand the consumer.  Why would we expect our political research and predictions to be any more accurate?   

Research is only a snapshot at a given point in time and there are too many changing variables to isolate for all of the possible outcomes. Tom Peters compared research to driving while looking in the rearview mirror. That is not to say that research is not a valuable tool but a friendly remember that marketing is still the intersection of art and science.  Research is often used to support preconceptions rather than to gain new insights.  Do politicians look ahead or focus on the rearview mirror?  Do the polls support your personal view or reflect something completely foreign to your opinions?

Research must be interpreted and creatively applied in an ever changing and highly competitive arena. Often the wrong questions are asked.  A question asked incorrectly or formulated with bias will net inaccurate results. Creativity, luck, and timing combine with skill and the whims of nature, economics, politics, popular culture and global competition to create marketing successes (and failures). With the ever increasing pace of change and ever moving targets, marketing and politics will only become more challenging and more valuable to society. Marketing and political success will become more rare, more fleeting and more difficult to predict than ever.

I look 4WARD to your feedback.

Keep Digging for Worms!

WELCOME TO THE DR4WARD BLOG

My name is Dr. William J. Ward but you can call me Bill, a.k.a DR4WARD.

I have been "Digging For Worms" and applying my "4Ward philosophy" since I was nine when I started my first business selling night crawlers on Cowan Lake in Rockford, Michigan where I grew up.   My business grew by providing my customers with the best, freshest worms and fishing tips around.

The purpose of this blog is to provide diagnosis and prognosis of concepts such as integrated marketing communications / 360 degree branding and to engage readers in a discussion of their impact on society.  I hope we can help each other understand what these terms really mean. Do these concepts have any impact on your life?