Market Research Primer

To Truly reap the benefits of market research, you must know when each method will be most productive

Giving an overview of marketing research, Brianna Sylver gives a preliminary understanding of four methods currently utilized: ethnographic research, listening labs, focus groups, and surveys.

As a preliminary or rough draft, this is a good start. Marketing is a complex field and as a designer it is beneficial to know to conduct the various marketing research methods.

The good of the article is the overview aspects. She offers insight into each of the methodologies while assessing each methods strengths and weaknesses. She give Use, Cost, and average Time needed to conduct each method. In the end she gives a matrix of method versus use which can be used as a tool to quickly assess how to use each method.

But this "primer" for marketing research does not take into account the stated target reader, which would be someone who is unfamiliar with any of the market's terminology. She consistently uses undefined terminology and sometime does not fully explain how a method is actually conducted. One example is she explains Listening Labs by comparison to Usability Tests, but does not define a context for the comparison.

In the comments section many ambiguities are flushed out by the readers which balances out many of the inconsistencies in this primer and as a whole offers a fuller understanding of Market Research.

Published on Core77 on May 2, 2009 by Brianna Sylver

http://www.core77.com/blog/featured_items/spend_it_wisely_a_market_research_primer_for_designers_by_brianna_sylver_13355.asp

Design Week Dates and locations

For those Designers in NYC, May is the month for us with Design Week coming up.
Core 77 has the schedule and locations.

http://www.core77.com/nydesignweek/

What if...

What if you didn't have to buy a new phone every year or two?
What if there were a replacement guarentee, no matter what?
What if the sales stopped being hardware and became only software and service?
But what if the software updates were free for life?

Could you accept the idea that the next new Thing was the last version of it and no Next Thing would be developed for next year?

http://www.core77.com/blog/technology/the_last_iphone_by_robert_fabricant_13727.asp

Politics and Marketing strategy. 1953 Iran

Andy Wibbels writes a great comparison between a Political overthrow of the Irnanian Government and Marketing strategy...

Quite brilliant.

http://andywibbels.com/2009/06/iran-1953-coup-cia/

Copyright Debate

From the economist

http://economist.com/debate/days/view/310

Comic Sans will never grow up

The ground-swell against Comic Sans continues with the re-translation of a bunker scene where Hitler finds out his Marketing Department used Comic Sans for their propaganda posters.

There is a large fraction of people who feel hatred towards this poor simple font, but I believe in Comic Sans' innocents--like the saying goes about Guns killing people:

Comic Sans doesn't kill good design, People kill good design.

What is the environmental benefit of blocking email spam?

The benefits would be the elimination of the consequences.

According to a McAfee report about spam, the consequences of the worldwide spam emails sent in 2008, estimated at a total of 62 trillion emails, has the same footprint as 3 million passenger vehicles on the road for a year.

An important idea to get from the 12 page McAfee report is to clear up a misconception that electronic communications are a truly green method of communication, and this is because the amount of energy used to generate, store, and disseminate the electronic communications negate the positive effects of not using print media to communicate.

The report states, "Spam email accounts for just over one-third of the total emissions related to business and personal email globally because about 80 percent of all email messages are spam messages."

The energy required annually to create, send, receive, store, and view spam adds up to more than 33 billion KWh, approximately equivalent to 4 gigawatts of baseload power generation or the power provided by four large new coal power plants.

View the pdf report here:

http://img.en25.com/Web/McAfee/CarbonFootprint_12pg_web_REV_NA.pdf

Awareness Test

When communicating with the millennial audience, the advertisements need to be more intelligent, more witty or capture the attention interactively and finally should also be meaningful.

I believe this psa for England's transportation authority target the audience well and has personal impact for each of the viewers. There are other videos which do not impact as personally and therefore are not as memorable.

NYC at its best

This has been a 10+ year endeavor which now has parts of it open to the public. Not just a park but a City Park. They have created a balance between the concrete:landscape ratio, which changes from one area to another. But I believe that the central idea behind the High Line is the creation of an Awareness of the intermingling of nature and society. How the plants creep up from railway ties. How the cement gives way to grass with a slatted edge. And how it elucidates the impact of society on nature, for example: the water fountain photo below.

It does not have the usual sink drain where the water disappears. This fountain has the excess water follow a trough, then down the side of the fountain, and finally, the water disappears in a typical street drain. This makes a visual connection between the user and their waste.

http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/NussbaumOnDesign/archives/2009/06/the_high_line_o.html

Alice's Restaurant guy #3

Ancient wisdom from the 60's (although I grew up on this stuff)

Alice's Restaurant By Arlo Guthrie

For those not familiar with the 18 and a half minute song, there is a part about trying to not be accepted by the army draft by singing a bar of Alice's Restaurant to the Army Shrink which goes like this...

You know, if one person, just one person does it
they may think he's really sick and they won't take him.
And if two people, two people do it, in harmony,
they may think they're both fagg*ts
and they won't take either of them.
And if three people do it, three, can you imagine,
three people walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant
and walking out. They may think it's an organization.
And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day,
I said fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of
Alice's Restaurant and walking out.
And friends, they may think it's a movement.

Full lyrics on Arlo.net
http://www.arlo.net/resources/lyrics/alices.shtml


One, two, three, fifty.

Its what Malcom Gladwell writes about in The Tipping Point (a quick, deep, inspiring book). How one person doing one thing suddenly blossoms into a movement through a natural process of interaction.

And this is also what Seth Godin's simple blog about a guy dancing alone becomes a "dance tribe." What is a "Dance tribe" you may ask. Well, you can see what trend forecasting, marketing incentives, and viral video blogging have in common with dancing at a concert. Follow the link below.

Watch how it becomes an UNSTOPPABLE movement. And the first three guys are forgotten!

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/06/guy-3.html



Seth talks about Guy #1 being important/CRAZY
and Guy #3 also being important, but more
that aguy #3 was the brave TREND SETTER.
After that, Seth says, they are all FOLLOWERS. Meaningless.

I agree more with Mr. Guthery. A group of fifty people is a condensed organized bubble of True Believers. A Movement. All the people in the Dance Tribe were already participating in the concert. If this were an experiment in Central Park and the central reason for gathering in the first place was to soak in the sun, be with friends, etc, and a Dance Tribe occured, I still believe that the Fiftieth person, although not so brave, still merits importance. As would the first Mosher in the middle going against the established trend.

Wisdom

Image of Socrates' school of learning from http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/SA.html

What I see in class all the time, with my classmates being mostly Millennials, is that they don't listen to the teacher's advise and it seems that they believe that technology will save them in the end. They value technology over wisdom. We are "knowledge workers" but wisdom comes from experience and understanding the experiences. I'm not knocking the Millennials for their innovation, creativity, and energy. But they seem too impatient to absorb the importance of the verbalization's from their teachers. I attend (Pratt Graduate program for Graphic Design) a trade school, sure, but it should be more a place of wisdom where those of experience and understanding impart value to Knowledge Seekers!

In a pantopicon blog, they discuss the tribal society, where the elders were respected for their wisdom. Which is what photographer and director Andrew Zuckerman has done in The wisdom project. Interviews with wise people about wisdom.
http://www.pantopicon.be/blog/2009/03/10/the-wisdom-project/

NYTimes The moment

http://themoment.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/05/graphic-content-and-the-trophy-for-the-most-generic-trophy-goes-to/

Daily Heller

http://blog.printmag.com/dailyheller/2009/06/04/MakingTypeFromInscriptions.aspx

zettabytes

By the end of 2013, the equivalent of 10 billion DVDs worth of information will cross the Net monthly

By Larry Greenemeier in 60-Second Science Blog

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=soon-there-will-be-so-much-video-on-2009-06-09

But that's the boring part of the blog.

The exciting part is:

The company's report comes one day after Apple announced that its next iPhone, called the 3G S, will be able to record, edit and send video clips (via e-mail or
multimedia message service, MMS).

iPhone 3G S users will also be able to upload an iPhone video to YouTube using voice commands, the Washington Post reports.

ma.gnolia

Citizen Garden is a site of Factory Joe's (I think) who usually does pod casts, but this time he posted a Vimeo session with Larry Halff, the creator of ma.gnolia. For those who do not know, ma.gnolia recently had significant data corruption, and being a site to upload, store and share links with groups or communities, this was a serious crash.
Two significant ideas (among many others) come from the 25 minute video. The first is how a single individual with an interesting idea can create a substantial global community with the tools available today. But the second point is that if a single person can create a site which appears to be run by an organization, because there is no transparency with the site, how do we safeguard against significant disruption of life when the person does not properly backup the site or system, as in the case of ma.gnolia? Should it be mandatory to have transparency in all community based websites?

In the video:

Citizen Garden discussing ma.gnolia's downfall.
Ma.gnolia was developed by a cultural anthropologist as a collaborative qualitative research tool. The site appeared to be a large corporation but it was only Larry with some help from up to 4 other people. Ma.gnolia is testimony that

An individual can build a substantial community with the tools available today...

but it raises a question about our dependence on data storage in the cloud.

If your email went away, what would you
do?

Citizen Garden Episode 11: Whither Ma.gnolia? from Larry Halff on Vimeo.

Link to the Citizen Garden Site:

http://citizengarden.com/2009/02/15/episode-11-whither-magnolia/

Graphic Objects

The technique unleashed an immense range of seismographic marks, symbols, letters, word fragments and phrases that soon spread to the imposing two-sided works she called Graphic Objects. Here multiple sheets of rice paper dotted with regiments of little marks and letters, as well as big press type, are sandwiched between sheets of plexiglass. The disembodied, translucent patchworks and textures suggest different layers of sound caught on scrims — black on white, red on white and white on white.

This is an art show I have been waiting to see for a while. It closes on the 15th and I will be going this weekend.

I believe that Graphic Design does not need to be considered merely a beautification of a communication. We are supposed to be intelligent, good communicators, and have a visual understanding of information, but we are also supposed to be invisible, like a good film director or editor, or a good writer. The "I" in graphic design is supposed to be silent. This can be argued quite easily with the current trend of Rock-star Graphic Designers (such as http://www.sagmeister.com/index.html). But the impression I'm getting from many of my professors is that Graphic Design is a Trade not an Art; only famous graphic designers sign their names.

I believe graphic designers are primarily artists who happen to be expressing the communications of other's.

I believe that one does not need to be a Rock-star to have a graphic design Voice.

I believe that Communication Artists need to embrace their artistic side and their authorship potential, but also to see themselves as teachers; who know the historical lineage of the graphic arts.

Seeing art is essential in grasping your own vision, while gaining an understanding of past voices.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/arts/design/03moma.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&sq=Tangled%20Alphabets&st=cse&scp=3