Russell Davies

fun with light sabres

Arthur and I were mucking about with his double-ended, Darth Maul-type light-sabre - taking pictures in the dark. We liked some of the patterns.

how frequent?

The parental warning on King Kong seems to describe the average day at work: "contains frightening elements, moderate violence and frequent peril"

for when you're flying a plane

I always like to find mnemonics and heuristics from other industiries and see if I can apply them to planning, because

a) I like typing and saying both heuristic and mnemonic

and

b) other industires tend to be about proper things that actually matter to people in some important way so they tend to have applied decent thought to coming up with some sound advice.

And I was reminded of the thing pilots in trouble are always told the other day - Aviate. Navigate. Communicate. And this seemed very apposite to the life of the planner. Especially in these days of over-communication and too many pointless meetings. (NB: not too many meetings, meetings are a good thing, but too many pointless meetings.)

What it means ( I believe) to a pilot is : first fly the plane, make sure it's level, not going to crash and you know where you are, then figure out where you want to go, and start heading there, then, and only then, get on the radio and start asking for help etc. Otherwise you'll confuse yourself, miss something vital, screw up somehow and your communications will be useless and/or counter-productive.

I think similar advice might be useful for planners approaching a brand problem. First thing: work out where you are, what's going on, do you know the stuff you need to know to 'keep the plane in the air', second thing: work out where you think you need to go and start heading there, start writing that down, start working towards that solution. Then, and only then, do you start asking the world their opinion - whether it be your colleagues or consumers or whatever.

Because (and I'm a huge believer in lots of conversation and lots of collaboration) if you collaborate too soon you'll end up nowhere. You'll spend so much time exploring so many options and opinions that you'll fly the plane into the ground. People will quite happily throw all sorts of ideas at you because they're not flying the plane, they don't really care if it crashes or not. So you've got to go into those conversations knowing where you want to go. You should look for help with how you get there, how you can land succesfully etc. If they've got a better idea then fine, but you should have something in your head to start with.

So there we have a planning lesson - Aviate. Navigate. Communicate. Anyone else got anything we can steal from other industries? Do think there are any valuable shortcuts in the world of Yellow Fats?

phone party

I walked past this ad on a phone box this morning, quite a smart ad for the army based on their campaign about whether you're up to being an officer.

But in my early morning not quite awake state I initially thought that BT were actually suggesting that this was a good phone box for a tough call, which I thought was a really good idea. And actually I still think it might be. As phone boxes get less neccesary most of the time what if they were re-imagined as great places to make specific sorts of calls?

You could have a 'tough calls' box with posters and advice about how to make difficult calls, perhaps with a hot button to a counseling service and free vouchers for a consoling cup of tea once you've made the call.

Or a 'celebration calls' box with balloons and party music and optics and a little video camera that'll record your moment of triumph.

Or. Or. Something else. You get the idea. Maybe not.

I find this is often the way ideas come. (Good or not). You misunderstand something in the real world (I often get ideas from mishearing words), your brain instantly extrapolate something from that misunderstanding and, in doing that, creates a new idea. So hurrah for vagueness.

sweets of the month - december 2005

These are brilliant sweets. Any company that still has 'works' is alright by me, especially if they're based in Dudley and have a random large dog as a registered trademark.

comics of the month - december 2005

Two splendid comics this month, the first is commercial success by graham annable, from grickle, in a very simple, smart and amiable way he points out the ubiquity of brands in people's lives.

Andy Smith's little book is just energetic, mad and gorgeous and talks about target people. Genius.

warming cockles

A brass quartet has started doing carols and stuff on Carnaby Street. (Ideally I'd have voted for another cornet and a tenor horn instead of the saxes but never mind). The sound of it is so warming and lovely. The sound wafts around the area and makes you feel all Christmassy and glowing.

Christmas carols and brass brands - the Victorians may have been wretched hypocrites but they invented some good material for nostalgia.

broken leon (not really)

There's a great post over at Brand Autopsy about a new book called Broken Windows.

The post splendidly explains and summarises the idea in the book (probably making the book redundant) which is that the broken window theory of crime prevention and policing is also applicable to branding. ie that seemingly small things actually make a huge difference. Not a completely startling thought, but one we should all remember.

So, I'd just finished reading that and saw an example for myself.

I went to Leon for coffee, which is rightly getting rave reviews, it's a fantastic place. Great food, nice design, friendly people. So I went to fill out one of their lovely feedback cards.

I especially liked the way they offered to 'gently update' you via email. Very nice touch. And then I noticed they'd left the apostrophe out of 'here's' and my positivity came to a screaming halt. Which I know is massively, unreasonably pedantic, but that's what happened. The tiniest, smallest, most miniscule of errors, but it made a difference to me (and now I'm blogging about it).

Why does it matter? Firstly, retail is detail, you want people to pay attention to this stuff. Secondly, it's the context. It's on a feedback form. I'm less worried about that kind of thing on a blog (this one for instance is dense with errors) because free-form, unchecked writing is part of the blog-context, but a feedback form is something that should be checked and rechecked and rechecked.

Or am I just being an arse? Probably.

Anyway, read the Brand Autopsy post, it's very good.

intriguing or not

There's a teepee in Soho Square. I like the incongruity of it. Not sure why it's there, slightly intrigued, but I suspect it'll be some disappointing reason. A marketing thing. A protest. An art project. Almost none of those would be good reasons. Ah well.

squidoo

I've been mucking about with a couple of Squidoo Lenses for a few weeks. It's been much fun. I've built one for the Planning School and one about Radio 4. There are another couple in the pipeline but they're not much good yet. Have a look and let me know what you think.