Capital C

In-N-Out Burger: Cult Cuisine

In-N-Out is a Californian restaurant chain that has achieved cult status among the burgerati. The owners opted to keep it privately owned to retain control over the quality and the customer experience. Good move. Estimated revenues are at $216.8 mn, and by staying true to their 'Quality You can Taste' slogan and indie culture they've been able to sidestep the stigma associated with corporate chains (read McDonald's) and become a movement.

My favourite snippets:

• IN-N-Out is the only fast food chain allowed to open up in the fiercely independent Fisherman's Wharf
• An extremely limited menu offering, with only three burgers on the cards
• Host of secret menu items ('animal style', 'veggie burger') that become popular purely through word of mouth
• Gordon Ramsay chose an animal style-burger as his 'death row' meal :)

They kept it simple, kept it scrumptious. Amen

scalpel-sharp insight

 
Just read a superb profile piece on Dr. Atul Gawande- surgeon, health policy expert, and journalist for The New Yorker.

My take-home for the day was how Gawande embraces diverse knowledge streams to inform his medical writing- below is his take on blushing

What is this peculiar phenomenon called blushing? A skin reaction? An emotion? A kind of vascular expression? Scientists have never been sure how to describe it. The blush is at once physiology and psychology. On the one hand, blushing is involuntary, uncontrollable, and external, like a rash. On the other hand, it requires thought and feeling at the highest order of cerebral function. “Man is the only animal that blushes,” Mark Twain wrote. “Or needs to.”

The rich undercurrents of philosophy, history and literature in Gawande's writing transform a routine description into something magical.  It got me thinking-As a marketer, how can I expect to create game-changers if I'm only looking to other marketers for inspiration? I'd do well to leap into fields such as art, design, and medicine to challenge myself, and conjure up new playgrounds in which to discover.

Paranormally Phenomenonal

 I was lucky enough to catch Paranormal Activity last night. The movie is hands-down the scariest thing I've ever seen- go watch it, it's genius. Shot in under a week and with amateur actors, the film explores the most primal cause of fear- a lack of understanding of what's going on.

The preview is composed almost entirely of reaction shots of people watching the movie. Spookily brilliant, it creates an empathy with the freaked out folks and compels you to join them in the experience.

You come home and as soon as you're over the initial terror (which is a while), you can't wait to get out there and discuss and share feelings.

Marketing and the macabre, made my day :)

Toys "R" Us 'Chief Play Officer' means serious fun.

To help celebrate their 25th birthday, Toys “R” Us brought in some experts. The Chief Play Officer (CPO) is an esteemed role and a dream job for any kid. Check out the Toronto Star press here.

The CPO's job is to play for a living, providing insights on the 25 hottest toys of the holiday season as well lending a great deal of nostalgia to toy lovers across Canada by promoting the vote on the Top 25 Toys of all time.

The goal: crown a victor to be deemed the Top Toy of All Time. There are 25 toys on the list that are sure to make you remember the days of playing on the carpet.  As well, TRU is giving away $25,000 worth of toys in an online giveaway.

Here at Cap C we're always thrilled to get involved with Toys "R" Us, and we're proud of how our concept turned out. There’s more celebration details to be announced but if the kid in you can’t wait, come on over to the Facebook page and to be sure you’ll get all the news.

AToMIC 09- A conference loaded with insight and charisma

Some thoughts on the Atomic conference, would love to share them with you. Atomic09conference

Retail now plays in the Digital Space

Cap C partner James Fraser spoke at a CODACAN (Canadian Out-Of-Home-Digital Association) event last week, outlining his vision for the future of retail and its leap towards digital.

Dave over at Sixteen:Nine has done a great review of the speakers' talks, highly share-worthy.

The Awesomeness Manifesto- Visualized

Umair Haque over at the HBS blogs has created a compelling manifesto that deals with the essence of 'Awesome'. His ideas connected with me instantly, so I thought I'd try a mini-visualization with my new toy, Mind Manager. Haque's open-sourced his manifesto and is looking for examples of awesome, so I urge our readers to contribute.

Scouting for Social Media folks

Please check out the available positions on our job page...

Capital Acclaim at the 2009 Promo! Awards

Cap C took home major honours at the 2009 Promo! Awards, with 7 awards including 4 golds. A big thank-you to the CAPMA folks for putting on a snazzy and memorable show.

The list:

GOLD - Best Multidisciplined campaign - Dove Sleepover
GOLD - Best B2B - Nissan/Infiniti Dealer Web program
GOLD - Best Account Specific - Sunlight Eco-Action Kids
GOLD - Best Dealer or Salesforce - Nissan/Infiniti Dealer Web Program
SILVER - Best multidisciplined campaign - Becel Heart Truth
SILVER - Best activity generating brand loyalty - Dove Sleepover
SILVER - Best Cause Marketing - Unilever Go Blue

We're thrilled, humbled, and more committed than ever to creating campaigns that showcase content, creativity, and humanity.

Kanye taps into Murakami Madness

After Kanye West’s outburst at the VMA last night, I visited his site to see if he had attempted to explain his bizarre behavior. No dice, but I was in for a treat regardless. Designed by the Time 100 visual artist Takashi Murakami, kanyeuniversity is a community playground with plenty of amusements such as music clips, videos and a newborn blog. We’ve marveled at Murakami’s work before, loving his ability to capture pop culture in what Wikipedia calls a 'blurring of high and low art'.

Inspiring enough to make me forget what I was looking for.

Creativity is Oranje

I'm reading David Winner’s brilliant ‘Brilliant Orange’, a look at the development of Dutch football (soccer) through the wider lens of national culture. 

Via the awesome COS:
Winner claims that “space is the unique defining element of Dutch football. Other nations and football cultures may have produced greater goalscorers, more dazzling individual ball-artists, and more dependable and efficient tournament-winning teams. But no one has ever imagined or structured their play as abstractly, as architecturally, in such a measured fashion as the Dutch.”

 Total Football exemplifies the Dutch conception of space. It was “a conceptual revolution based on the idea that the size of any football field was flexible and could be altered by the team playing on it” 

Of course, the size of a football field is not flexible. Winner attributes this mentality to the land the Dutch have been given. A small, low-lying country with a long sea coast and a relatively large population, the Dutch have in fact expanded their land through the use of polders and other elaborate water control measures. Winner sees spillover of Dutch attitudes toward land into Dutch soccer. He calls the Dutch “spatial neurotics” and says that “the Dutch think innovatively, creatively and abstractly about space in their football because for centuries they have had to think innovatively about space in every other area of their lives” 

The best design flows naturally out of need. Utility triumphs over glamor, every time. Okay, most times :)

Circulation is not Readership

From KT:

 The largest Hindi-language newspaper in India, Dainik Jagran maintains a circulation of more than 17 million. However, it claims a readership of 56 million, where “readership” numbers account for the Indian habit of sharing newspapers broadly with several friends or relatives :)

Time to question our reach metrics, especially when you think of the effects of the unselfish gene combined with those of the hyperlinked web.

The Human Quotient

Seed Magazine once again triggered thoughtstreams with the ‘Rise of Roboethics’. It touches upon our yen to create increasingly human-like machines “partly as a result of a need for functional, realistic prosthetics, but also because we just seem to be attracted to the idea of making them.”

We’ve previously talked about empathy as a powerful driver of behaviour, and this trait seems to be evolving. Brand loyalty has become a function of a product’s ‘human quotient’; evangelism amplifies as products use computing to become more social. You’d be hard-pressed to find a product in history that has been endorsed with more intensity, volume, and passion than the iPhone; its community-geared AI evokes real emotion.

As products up their human quotient, our strategies to promote and persuade will need serious tweaking. Generous investments in trial and simulation will rise above mass messaging. Community builders will become our new Mad Men.

Marketing Newspeak- Pt. II

As promised, we present Pt. II of Marketing Newspeak- concepts that are currently rocking our world. See Pt. I here.

1. Black Triangles:Accomplishments that take a lot of effort to achieve, but yield little meat. However, they provide the breakthrough for future work to proceed- black triangles are a validation of one's framework and help shine light on the path to the eventual success.

2. Habitability:  The characteristic of source code that enables programmers coming to the code later in its life to understand its construction and intentions and to change it comfortably and confidently”. Applying this principle to brand-building will make it easier for consumers to put their souls into the brand identity.

3. Cyberbalkanization: The idea that the more time we spend online (and the richer our online interactions become), the pickier we become. Our tastes become more particular and our online social circles get more fragmented. Mass marketing becomes impotent.

 
4. Google Juice: "GoogleJuice is the ethereal substance which flows between web pages via their hyperlinks. It's used to describe one's (or company/product) connectedness and visibility on Google.

5. Homo Mimicus: "Many animals mimic each other's behaviour but we do it more often and with greater fidelity. Our compulsive copying encodes collective knowledge into our society, and it is really our society that possesses humanity's 'intelligence' " We should grasp this aspect of behavior when building communities.

-Jason Dojc & Hiten

Digital Digs

For weekly digestible digi-tidbits, check out our 'Cap C's Digital Digs' category in the left column.

Ontario- 'Yours to Create'

Just finished the Martin Prosperity Institute's report, ‘Ontario in the Creative Age’ .Yes. This is what we need, hard facts that tell us where we are and visionary research that will guide us to where we need to be. Over the next decade, Ontario is well-placed to be a creative powerhouse  due to our solid creative base, our tolerance, and our diversity. However, we need focus and re-prioritizing.

Key nuggets:(*Images taken from 'Ontario in the Creative Age' - Martin Prosperity Institute)

 Brawn is Weak: Ontario's relative under-valuation of social & analytical skills doesn't bode well for both its earning potential and creative karma.

 

Remedy: Emphasize creative skills through educational reform and job restructuring.

 Clusters are creative catalysts: Wages are 28% higher in ‘clustered industries’ than in dispersed industries (this gap is even more striking in the US)

To increase clustering and thus take advantages of the 'economies of spike', we need to invest in connectivity (transportation); this will "speed up the movement of people, goods and ideas" Ontario should also become a mecca for top international talent. Our integrative and tolerant social system will be the key to making this happen.

Martin's long-term vision for Ontario is one worth sharing:

1. Ontario becomes becomes the first province in which creativity-oriented occupations account for 50% of all jobs.

2. Increase creativity in all jobs, through autonomy and continual learning

3. Creativity becomes a core tenet of education (a la Sir Ken)

4. Ontario marketed as the 'creative province'

Let's bounce off each other and work to make this happen.Would love your thoughts.

The Enchanted Object

 David Rose, serial entrepreneur and instructor at MIT’s Media Lab, recently rapped with Seed about his professional raison d’être, the notion of the ‘enchanted object’. 
“The functionality of computation and the representation of information and communication will be embedded in many everyday objects. They will seem to be a little bit magical—delightfully easy to use and adding value to our lives a little bit at a time.”
Case in point- Frodo’s LOTR sword, which glows blue when orcs are nearby. Rose was inspired by this to create the Ambient Umbrella.

I'm floored by the idea of utility as bewitchment.

The Cupboard under the Stairs

Human-product interaction is becoming increasingly effortless. Features are spelled out, instruction booklets a plethora of parchment. This is doubleplusgood for fields such as healthcare, wherein the goal is to get the job done and minimize harm. However, with experience-centric brands, it’s best to leave some realms open for discovery. Introduce a sense of playfulness, a little mystery.

JJ Abrams says it best: “Mystery is the catalyst for imagination. Now more than ever, it has special meaning. Because it's the anomaly, the glaring affirmation that the Age of Immediacy has a meaningful downside. Mystery demands that you stop and consider—or, at the very least, slow down and discover. It's a challenge to get there yourself, on its terms, not yours.”
Mystery is why campaigns such as Why So Serious? and Year Zero were such a sensation; they titillated, invited consumers in to be puzzle-solvers, crytographers, discoverers. The gauntlet was thrown, and we couldn’t get enough.
Keep those cupboards messy.

Rypple rocks in real-time

Christa Avampato, a product development manager in NYC, formerly worked as a company manager for Broadway shows and national tours. Her insights into running a theatre production stress the value of dynamic feedback.
In her own words, “theatre involves a hefty amount of collaboration and improvisation. Something is always going haywire in the world of live entertainment, and keeping the train on the tracks requires some fancy manoeuvring.”
When Christa moved into the corporate world, she was taken aback by the lack of dynamic feedback systems. Annual reviews were often irrelevant and did not result in major behavioural changes. Christa remarked that, in theatre, “if I waited 6 months to find out how I was doing in my job, the show would go belly-up in no time. The show and the individual performance of each member of the company are reviewed at every waking moment, and then some. As it should be. Feedback, good, bad, and indifferent, is the basis of our entire professional existence.”
At Cap C, we’re believers in the efficacy of real-time systems. This is why we’ve partnered with Fresh Intelligence – we want to know what consumers are thinking, right now. We’re excited about Rypple for similar reasons. It’s a platform for receiving real-time, honest and anonymous feedback from trusted advisers and co-workers. Users will be able to draft the questions most relevant to their professional development and can decide what to do with the feedback they receive. Definitely worth a gander.

Marketing's mirror box

A mirror box is a box with two mirrors in the center, invented by V.S. Ramachandran to help alleviate 'phantom limb' pain. He believed that this pain arises as a result of ‘learned paralysis’. Pre-amputation, the brain issued motor commands to the paralyzed limb, but received sensory feedback to the contrary. This feedback was etched onto the brain circuitry and persisted even after the limb was amputated.
The mirror box re-trains the brain. The patient sees the reflected image of the good hand moving,  and it appears as if the phantom limb is also moving. Through the use of this artificial visual feedback it becomes possible for the patient to "move" the phantom limb, and thus break out of learned paralysis.

Will social media become marketing’s mirror box? Are consumers going to use it to reclaim concepts long-stolen from them, to smash the core connotations that brands spent millions on hard-wiring? When consumers see their purchase decisions dissected all over the web; will the phantom of 'brand loyalty' be overthrown?

-Hiten