Memory Of The Future.

Memory of the future is the provocative phrase that I came across recently that refers to the brain's ability to use memory to picture and plan future events. I term it provocative because of its combination of memory a word that evokes looking back and future that evokes looking forward.

Being ignorant of its neuroscientific origin, I immediately conjured up the idea of memories of what we were told the future would bring - the ones that usually involved personalised-jetpacks and dehydrated food.

Inevitably memories of the future are usually unfulfilled, but the whole concept is so redolent of ambition, aspiration and lost opportunities that it seems to me to be a rich seam for marketing to mine. While it's uniquely individual inasmuch as it combines memory of what we expected the future to look like and what we hoped our own personal futures would become, it taps in perfectly to the whole idea of consumption being about creating that future.

I'm not sure yet where this lead, but if your product/service could promise that our memory of the future is, in fact, our future, that would be a compelling first step.

50 Ways To Leave Your Customer.

The Jet Blue flight attendant who quit his job via the emergency shute and the fake Dryerase resignation video were the big things online yesterday.

Both earned admiration from many quarters, but how many of you thought of the lesson for your business? What was being admired was people who had supposedly fired their customers. Steven Slater had had enough of rude customers while "Jenny" was sick of her customer i.e. her boss.

If you choose someone to be your customer then they are nearly always right and your behaviour should reflect that, but you don't have to accept everybody who wants to be your customer. So, if you admired Steven Slater and/or Jenny then you should surely run your business the same way. You'd feel better about it and you'd have a better business because you'd care more.

Old Spice Addendum.

AdWeek reports that, “According to Nielsen data provided by Old Spice, overall sales for Old Spice body-wash products are up 11 percent in the last 12 months; up 27 percent in the last six months; up 55 percent in the last three months; and in the last month, with two new TV spots and the online response videos, up a whopping 107 percent."

If it's up 11% in 12 months, it could probably only be up 107% in a month if the sales had been negative in the interim so I think my original suspicions seem credible.

App Infatuation.

Briitsh Gas have an iPhone app. They told me so in a press ad. It will show how my consumption has changed year on year, quarter by quarter.

That's interesting information, but I don't need an app for it. I can see it on my provider's bill already - at a time when I'm more likely to be thinking about the issue and where they already have my attention.

Just because you can have an app, it doesn't mean you need one or that your customers' experience will be enhanced by having one.

Customer Survey Dissatisfaction.

Modern life is replete with customer satisfaction surveys impinging on seemingly every digital, telephonic or physical interaction and CEOs citing how x% of their customers were "either satisfied or very satisfied" with the service they received. It's also replete with dissatisfied customers.

So before you undertake one of these exercises, perhaps you should ask what its purpose is. Are you seeking to elicit genuine information or are you box-ticking? Do you want to learn or to obfuscate?

What does satisfaction actually mean? We all have different satisfaction spectra determined by our previous experience, so it's pretty meaningless to survey it. Even if we were consistent in our appraisal, there's the timing issue. Our satisfaction is dependent upon our happiness relative to when we're surveyed because memories fade.

Crucially - the dissatisfied customer, the target you're really trying to find will either have forgotten it happened or more likely will no longer be a customer and their dissatifaction will not be captured.

The key to increasing customer satisfaction is to improve your product and service. It's not to bias a survey.

Make Marketing Cute.

If, in the coming months, you see advertising campaigns featuring sleeping babies in various settings or pictures made out of food, you will know where they got their creative inspiration. From Mila's Daydreams above and Little Food Junction below.


They'll be "cute" and "human" but they'll only work if they're also truthful. It's that final attribute that will make them as authentic as their inspiration.

The Number's Up.

This is not another post about The Old Spice campaign. But it is inspired by the seemingly ubiquitous innumeracy that has spun out of it. Specifically, there is a Nielsen figure being quoted that sales have risen by 107% in the last month. Think about that. Sales have doubled in a month. That would be extraordinary. If it were true.

But while I haven't fully confirmed it, I don't think it is true. What is much more likely to be true is that sales for the past month are 107% higher than for the equivalent month last year. That's also impressive though maybe less so if, as I pointed out in my Cadbury post, it's an increase from a deflated level. Saliently, the fact is that nobody involved with the company or the campaign has even made that claim. They know that they're playing a long game. The blogosphere, however, is less restrained and the virality of online information means that the seemingly false interpretation has spread like wildfire.

Regardless of the previous years of the repositioning and the fact that those videos were only created two weeks ago, the received wisdom will be that the combination of online video and social media doubles sales in a month. Everybody will be switching their budgets into an Old Spice style digital extravaganza because they think something has been proven.

It will take time to determine the undeniable effectiveness of the campaign and its various elements on actual sales, but it shouldn't take time for marketers to understand what basic numbers actually mean.