PJA Blog: The Complex Brand

Since we don’t like to rely exclusively on the insights of third-party research while examining trends, we often conduct research on our own.

Yesterday we released the third wave of our research study on social media and the Information Technology executive, which we conducted with our friends at ITtoolbox. You can download the research here.

This time around, we decided to get a bit beneath the skin of this audience and go beyond simple demographics. So while it was interesting to see that social media and user-generated content continue to grow in importance, it was just as interesting to discover, for example, that:

• Most IT professionals are drawn to the field by a childhood aptitude.
• Fathers were indicated as the most common key influence on the life of the IT professional.
• The biggest headache IT professionals experience at work is not putting out fires or grappling with technology that doesn’t work as promised, but company politics getting in the way of good decision-making.
• The History Channel was selected as the audience’s favorite TV network.
• Globally, IT’s favorite song is “Hotel California.” (Fashion seems to have been getting its Eighties on of late, but IT still appears to be grooving on its Seventies.)

Most interesting to us, Barack Obama is the global candidate of choice for US President, though John McCain records higher scores on international relations. With the conventions right around the corner, it’s interesting that a news source as broad as CNN already has picked up on this tidbit.

More research to come. In the meantime, we’re rushing to prepare our IT Playlist for iTunes.

As I was reading in this weekend’s Financial Times, we are now at the 34th anniversary of Jonathan Raban’s urban classic The Soft City, which describes the local and universal ability of people to make large cities their own. Raban focused on London, which was a fabulous mix of races, cultures, traditions, and very low rents. These days, of course, it has become what Jane Smiley has decried as a monoculture: a playground of the very wealthy, most of them looking, sounding, thinking, and spending in the same generic ways. Living in London in the mid-80s, I think I experienced some of the tail end of those soft city possibilities. Returning a few years ago, the soft edges were either gone or highly privatized.

What I found partricularly interesting in Raban’s article was its close, which he wrote from his current home in Seattle based on observing his 16-year-old daughter on Facebook. As he notes, “Her time is spent in an elective community of exactly the kind I once sought in the big city….That freedom to experiment with personae, to play out fantasies of self, once the unique gift of the metropolis, is available on everyone’s laptop, as they masquerade anonymously behind screen name and avatars.”

After all the dystopian rants I’ve been reading of late about the dangers and downers of socializing and learning online, Raban’s refreshing take is that the Web “meets, in virutal form, almost all the conditions of a true soft city, and does so on a global scale, as cosmoplitan as any provincial isolate could dream of.”

That’s exactly the spirit we use the Web in these days: a means to connect, to inform and better our lives and make the best of the being both local and, with the click of a mouse, virtually universal.

Anyone who feels their customers are locked up in loyalty and just dandy with their products may want to check out Adaptive Path’s recent presentation at Google headquarters.

The presentation was a bit of a pitch on their new book, Subject to Change, but it’s a lot more than that. If only to see what you can do to take some of the suck out of PowerPoint as a presentation tool it’s worth your while.

If I can take a swing at their core point, the only way to build a “long Wow” into today’s products for customers is to approach products as platforms that continue to get better, often with Web-based updates that take the pressure off trying to predict every new feature that’s needed in the first generation.

My favorite statistic here, from a 2003 Bain study, is that of 362 companies surveyed, 95% felt they were customer-focused, 80% felt they delivered superior experiences, whereas only 8% of those companies’ actual customers felt the same way. Clearly, the bulk of these companies did not (and probably still do not) internalize and operate each day with the goal of superior experience as a customer priority.

Some of their support points:

* Focus on experience and use it as a strategy.

* Focus on the lives of customers and understand people as people (versus stats or even personas).

* Embrace complexity and use systems to support experiences.

* Focus on design as an ongoing activity not an aesthetic practice.

If you have a free hour during August, give it a look.