Notes on anything

Value is the bridge between technology and customer needs.
Three things need to happen for a new technology to be successful:
1)  It needs to be different and valuable
2)  It needs to have a way to be manufactured at low cost and at high scale
3)  The infrastructure needs to be in place to enable customers to benefit from the different and valuable characteristics of the product.

Aligning the market to be compatible with your new product is not an easy task. You are going to have to persuade other market participants to align their strategies, plans, and roadmaps to the needs of your new product.

1. Clearly articulate the exceptional value you expect to bring to the market.  Exceptional value will translate into market share gains for you; none of the other market participants will want to be left behind.

2. Provide regular development program updates for your new product including test data and market introduction timing. This reinforces your credibility and intent.

3. Ask to see regular status of programs and decisions from market participants that you are counting on to be ready when your new product is introduced.

4. Engage all major market participants and avoid exclusive relationships. Don't risk your product being rejected because your customer's favorite supplier for an adjacent process is incompatible.

-Michael Chase

or 

5. Do it yourself - Michael Rogerson

Visual, Interactive and Persistent = Meaning -

Goal of marketing messaging:  persistent and consistent message over a period of time - Michael Chase
2 ways to do this:  Mandate or Motivate.

Design Process

Design process
Vision

• Who are the entities who will interact with your product?
• What experiences do you want them to have with the product?
• What problem prevents them from having these experiences?  
• What are the ways to solve this same problem (brainstorming session)?
• no answer is wrong - key is to build a list of techniques
• How do each of these ways solve the problem?
• Make list:  Solution, Method/ Strategy
• Given these methods, can we develop a new solution?
• 80/10/10 rule:  80% of steps are from in-house capability, 10% are from third party/ industry capability, 10% are new to industry/ industries
• developing new skills:  1)  take known application and use for new process, 2)  take new application and use for known process.  
• Leverage external industries and look for crossovers
• Draft rough vision of the solution to the problem

Buyer's remorse

• After drafting the vision, wait.  Most likely, you will begin to doubt the vision, and question it
• This is good - it is a sign of emotional attachment to the problem that you are trying to solve
• Take the vision to a focus group of customers (internal or external) for feedback
• This will empower and embolden you to continue if the vision is solid and will give you the direction to modify it if the current one is weak.  

Execution to vision
Bullheadedness backed up with the experience of performing the above tasks properly.
You have the root of the story - believe it and execute to it.
Pick your battles - keep to the core of the product and the core experiences.  Innovate around that core and allow others to contribute.  Don't compromise on the core.

Storytelling

Story generation is not accidental.  Stories begin in the product design process by asking the following question:  What experiences do we want our customers to have and what problems can we solve to enable these experiences.

In the marketing effort, this question changes a bit to:  What experiences do we want our customers to have and how do our product's features enable these experiences for customers.

Once the story becomes part of the product design and the marketing efforts, it will create the core of the messaging that transforms the stories into a brand.  Get the stories, communicate the messaging and build the brand.  It is a process of consistent and persistent messaging that all of sales, management or anyone with customer interactions contributes to by feeding back proof points in the form of case studies and anecdotes of real-world customers experiences.  With a well designed storyline, your customer-facing employees will know what to look for and be better able to provide feedback to the marketing team in support of brand creation.

Elements of a story: Character, something special about the character, problem, a unique fix to the problem that utilizes the character's special ability and a conclusion

Emotional connections made by making the problem or special characteristic similar to the audience.

Presentation

Ask a question. The presentation should be a story that answers this question.

Challenge the audience with a question at key points

And the point is... make the point of each section or argument clear. -state it.

Building rapport:

Humor

Show similar emotional state

Laugh at self

Establish Meaning

: Visual

: Interactive

: Persistent

Visual design principles:

(Critique Spring 2000)

Contrast - Bright / Dark; Big / Small; Close / Far; Color / Neutral; Rough / Smooth; Curvy / Angular

Tension - Relationship; Attraction / Repulsion; Space is primary tool; Similarity of opposites

Rhythm - Visual alternation of similar elements in space or time.

Flow - 

Emphasis - Visual hierarchy, created with contrast and flow; size, weight and form to make the reader focus.  Eliminate all that is not essential to the idea.  

Depth - shadows; black and grey; lighting

Balance - White space/ detail; small color / large grey; 

Scale - contrast in size; small = intimacy, precious; big = bold, in real life

Movement - creates urgency and energy; set on a diagonal, blur or streak visuals, visual vibration, 

Unity - single gestaltic moment of shared cognition, 

Lateral Thinking

Edward de Bono

Human mind can only process a small amount of information at a given time.

Given too much data, the mind breaks apart the data into segments and processes them independently. Some points get overlooked - and then never get looked at again.

The order of this processing is key in determining the resulting cognitive model that is formed about the information.

2 inputs can be held in the mind. They cannot remain separate indefinitely, they will form a connection. Holding them in the mind is key. Instant dismissal is the norm for 2 inputs that do not connect natively.

(Have a coke and a smile - smile is a graphical representation of happiness; Apple's advertising is to combine simplicity with its products - product placed on white background - white background (empty) is graphical representation of simple)

Names: combine different units together. Without a name the units dissolve back into pieces.

-accelerate the process of familiarity and fixing (the concept in the mind)

Polarization establishes categories and reactions to them. They are permanent. New data is categorized and bucketed into the existing categories - new categories are never essential. Allows us to work with little information.

From Jeremy Wolfe MIT Phych 101
4 Objects can be held in the mind -but  each object can have a depth of information attached to it.
About 12-18 basic feature dimensions:
Color
Direction
Weight/ Thickness
Completeness (circle vs. 3/4 circle)
Straightness (vs. curvature)
Shading - shadow direction?

Behavioral Economics

McKinsey:
Making a product's cost less painful

consumers have the option to do nothing.
Allowing consumers to delay payment can dramatically increase their willingness to buy.
- the time value of money makes future payments less costly than immediate ones.
- Payments, like all losses, are viscerally unpleasant.
- emotions experienced in the present—now—are especially important.
“mental accounting” for money obtained from different sources from easiest to spent to hardest: windfall gains, pocket money, income, and savings.

Power of a default option
Perception of ownership - the pleasure we derive from gains is less intense than the pain from equivalent losses.
Defaults work best when decision makers are too stressed, indifferent, confused, or conflicted to consider their options. 

Don’t overwhelm with choice
Choices make consumers work harder to find their preferred option.
Choices increase the likelihood that each choice will become imbued with a “negative halo"
- every option requires you to forgo desirable features available in some other product.

Position your preferred option carefully
Each of us has a maximum price we’d be willing to pay.
Inferences are made from the price about the quality,
Ssecond-most-expensive bottle of wine is very popular—and so is the second-cheapest.

Headphones: consumers buy them at a given price if there is a more expensive option—but not if they are the most expensive option on offer