Design Beauty Contest

In the last week, I've been invited on two occasions to give my opinion in a "design contest" hosted by 99designs . One contest was for a logo design, the other for a book cover design. The "clients" had whittled down the entries to 5 or 6 designs and had asked their friends and contacts to vote.

99designs is big business, one of the fastest growing crowd-sourcing outfits today. They currently boast a community of 282,249 designers  (although one does wonder exactly how much of a community this is, as they are all in competition with each other.) As a client, you can buy a package starting from €229 for your design project, which will already give you dozens of designs. In addition to logos and book covers, you can have anything else from T-shirts to illustrations to web pages to mobile apps.

This development from what was a somewhat elite industry based on personal connections and contacts to an internet-based democratic platform is an inevitable one, and has obvious parallels with publishing and the book business.

But is the development welcome? Well, there are clear positives. For clients, especially freelancers and small businesses, there are huge advantages. Not to mention all those self-published authors. It's also cheering to think that 99designs may be offering people a chance or a foot in the door - a single mother in a developing country, or a housebound young person in an inaccessible village. However, I would like to know more about how much the designers themselves are getting out of it. I haven't done the sums but if you're pitching against at least 30 others each time, your chances of winning are pretty slim. And you'll only ever be as good as your last pitch.

The emphasis on the website is more on quantity - how many designs you'll have to choose from. I don't know - as a client I'd rather choose from three stunning ideas than thirty so-so ones. And to get a stunning idea, I think that the designer needs to know my brand or my book or whatever it is pretty well, which comes in part from building up a relationship, face-to-face if possible.

Don't get me wrong: I'm pleased that this exists and might even be tempted to give it a go one day.

But you won't catch me signing up for the next step which is called 99strategies.

Bad Behaviours

Behaviour is rather like Communication: the plural used to be just that, but it seems these days you have to stick an "s" on the end of both, so today I'm going to be talking Bad Behaviours on social media. From people and brands.

This is mostly via McCann Truth Central who, in their report The Truth about Privacy, looked at which behaviours from people (I do wish they wouldn't say consumers) and brands are judged to be cool, or anything but, in the US at least.

The cooler things you can do on social media as an individual include posting about major life events - babies, weddings being tops, although de-friending fake friends is also rated as pretty cool. As for brands, well, it's "allowing for in-store purchases using a smartphone" (retailers take note) as well as "putting relevant content on social media." Ah, but what is relevant, you may ask. Perhaps answered most easily by looking at what is not relevant.

For people and brands, the bad behaviours are the 4 Big Bad B's:

BULLYING - pretty obvious for people, but for brands, it's stuff like using your data without permission, such as Facebook's "sponsored stories"

BORING - all those latte macchiatos and "I've run 4.33333km" and for brands, the wonders of your production process on your YouTube channel, unless it's done in a particularly wonderful way

BOASTING - I've just checked in at the Ritz/Guess who got 5 As in her A levels?/my book is Number 56 in the obscure-self-published-fantasy-chart/our Facebook page now has 88m Likes (although we bought most of those...)

BEGGING - be my friend/share my funny cat photo/review my obscure fantasy book/like our nondescript Facebook page/send us a picture of you with Bloggo brand...

So, no surprise that the least cool behaviours on social media for people include adding people you don't know as friends/connections and posting frequent "selfies" on Instagram.

And, for brands, inviting consumers to enter competitions and asking users to share a personal story for fun.

So, when you're looking at your branded content, it's a good start to check that it's entertaining, informative or useful.

And that it's not bullying, boasting, boring or begging.

Empathy or manipulation?

Facebook is littered with them. Personality tests that can reveal which character in literature you most resemble, your ideal career or your core personality type on the basis of which coloured door you'd go through. And no women's magazine is complete without  a check on "which perfume bests suits your personality" along with the usual horoscopes, graphology and numerology features. Some of this stuff is even branded - how you eat your Oreo says more about you than you'd ever guess!

I still love this stuff, even though I know the psychology behind it. Take the example above. I was thrilled to be a "sharp-angled, but curved tip" sort as it means I'm creative, enthusiastic, energetic and all those other desirable traits. But would I have been so disappointed with the "flat top concave" description? Probably not.

The way it works is known as the Forer Effect, after psychologist Bertram R. Forer. In 1948, he gave his students a personality test, the result of which was a "unique personality analysis" for each student. What he didn't tell them was that everyone got an identical analysis. They were asked to rate its personal accuracy on a 1-5 scale and the average rating was 4.26. Forer's "unique analysis" was cobbled together from horoscopes and riddled with phrases of the "at times you are ... but at other times you are ..."

As advertisers and marketers, we make use of this effect in our work, consciously or intuitively. Interestingly, if you read about the Forer Effect, it is associated with manipulation, quackery, deception, gullibility.

I take a different view.

I think it's a great confirmation that, despite our differences, there are commonalities that unite us as human beings. There are universal truths in what qualities are desirable, in how people would like to be seen. Yes, people want to be seen as individuals, but there is also a basic need to belong as part of the human race. And people are not stupid. I'm pretty sure that most people that do these tests sense what's behind them, but go ahead for the fun of it anyway. In the same way that people in group discussions will often state that "I'm not taken in by advertising" before describing how the John Lewis advert made them cry.

One man's manipulation is the next man's empathy.

Snap, crackle and pop!

One of the other strings to my strange bow is that I'm an author. I've had one children's adventure story published so far, and a prequel or sequel (depending on how you look at it) will be launched in April.

But I am not here to blab on about my books. I blogged a while ago about the plight of independent bricks and mortar bookshops in the shadow of that ever-growing behemoth, amazon. Since then, the dark side of amazon has increasingly come to light (how's that for a mixed-up metaphor?) and I am particularly pleased to see one new enterprise go from strength to strength in the South-East of England: Daisy White's Booktique.

In my 2012 blog, I may have missed a trick. I defined the battle as being between 'bricks and mortar' and 'online'. Well, Daisy's Booktique is neither, or both, or more. The Booktique pops up in markets, Arts Centres, festivals, town centres, shop spaces and you-name-it. So as well as having all those advantages of a bricks and mortar indie bookshop - personal contact, a venue for more than selling, part of the community, support for indie authors and publishers, there is an added element that's a combination of pleasant surprise, freshness, flexibility and scarcity (in the sense of if you don't go this Saturday, you've missed it).

In comparison to the surviving bookshop chains, there is no Head Office breathing down Daisy's neck telling her to stock just from the major publishing houses, or demanding that authors doing a signing only speak when spoken to, or pooh-poohing the idea of stocking anything other than books, even if it is a beautiful hamper full of "Literary Lusciousness"- books and everything you need to snuggle up and enjoy them, from choccies to cushions.

Most importantly, the Booktique offers something you can't put a price on: a real experience. Whether it's authors and artists networking with publishers, readers chatting with writers, creative collaborations sparking new ideas - this feels like the future.

Individually the same

The other day, I came across the website of a self-confessed avatar collector who admits to having "too much free time on his hands." The man's name is Albert Huberts, he's from Holland and this is his site.

Next time you have too much free time on your hands, take a look. He's grouped avatars together by theme, from No Forehead Girl to Hair-stache. Fascinating, that we hear so much about social media with its continual parade of selfies being an outlet for individuality and self-expression, but so many of the avatars are similar. Mr Huberts remarks on 'the ease with which we surrender our individuality to the collective identity,' and quips that 'selfies are as individualistic as slices of bread.'

And it's not just a 21st century phenomenon. Albert Huberts points to 1920s family photo albums, which all look remarkably similar. And I don't suppose my 1970s teenage photo booth poses are too different to anyone else's.

Brand logos have the same problem. A lot of logos are interchangeable and are characterised by the design vogue of the decade in which they were created - or updated. There's the famous millennium  swish and swoosh, above, inspired (if one can use that word) by Nike. Or the chunky typefaces and orange/brown look of the 70s, the neon sign on black 80s style or all those badges and petrol blues from the 1930s.

The latest logo trend seems to be to remove the name of the brand. In a world of interchangeability, where will that leave us?

Food, glorious food!

My favourite brand idea of the year so far is one that appeals to my taste buds as well as my sense of zeitgeist. Cooking with Mama has been around for a couple of years, but tickled my taste as to being just right, just now.

The brand is a cookery school, based in London in Berlin so far, which offers unique cooking experiences to individuals and groups representing a range of worldwide cuisines. The clever idea that the founders had was based on an observation - big cities like London and Berlin are increasingly multi-cultural, a trend - people are hungry for cooking experiences, and an insight - there's no cooking like Mama's.

If you mix these ingredients together, you get a great idea: you recruit "Mamas" - super cooks from a variety of cultural backgrounds who have learned the secrets of delicious home-cooking from their mothers before them, and facilitate them to lead cookery classes.

It's a brilliant fusion of the traditional and new: harnessing wisdom, expertise and culinary tips and tricks that might or might not get passed down the generations with the new spirit of sharing, social generosity and community. The backgrounds of the "Mamas" include Sri Lanka, Trinidad, Brazil, Cameroon, Beirut and Mexico.

Best of all, it's empowering for the cooks involved - using food as a force for good.

Graven Images

Most retail or service brands that I worked on in the past sooner or later came up against the dilemma:

How much of my communications budget do I put behind my brand image?

And how much should go on directly driving traffic?

With British Airways, for example, most of the money as well as the blood, sweat and tears went on building the image, with rather less outgoings on advertising special prices and offers, especially in those early days of CRM. However, my colleagues down the corridor who worked on Currys and Dixons spent very little time worrying about anything as lofty and pretentious as image. It was roll-your-sleeves-up-and-get-stuck-in time.

I'm rather pleased that the huge changes in media in the last few years have put paid to this kind of compartmentalised thinking. The point is, that no car, motor-bike, pony-trap or any other kind of traffic (can you tell I hate that word in that context?) is going to drive itself to your store or your website if your brand is a grey nonentity. And conversely, if you spend your whole time pontificating about your Vision to 2030 without letting anyone know what's new this season or when your sale is, people aren't going to turn up in droves, either.

All advertising should be an invitation to your store or website, if you are a retailer - communications that convey some mysterious, ethereal image that is detached from who you are and what you sell are money wasted.

Communications work in three ways - through the mind, through the emotions, through the senses (or persuasion, involvement and salience as laid out originally by Hall & Partners in 1991.)

And modern brands are tangible and substantial, not just a collection of images in "the consumer's" mind.