John Winsor

Kids as a Fashion Accesorry

As a father of two 5-year-olds I'm fairly new to this parenting thing. However, one observation I have made is that it's really hard not to impose your own fears and in-securities on your kids.

Hence, I had to chuckle when I read David Brook's commentary:

I mean, don’t today’s much-discussed hipster parents notice that their claims to rebellious individuality are undercut by the fact that they are fascistically turning their children into miniature reproductions of their hipper-than-thou selves? Don’t they observe that with their inevitable hummus snacks, their pastel-free wardrobes, their unearned sense of superiority and their abusively pretentious children’s names like Anouschka and Elijah, they are displaying a degree of conformity that makes your average suburban cul-de-sac look like Renaissance Florence?

Like their parents who embarrassed them by yelling and screaming at their little league games a generation ago, many of today's parents are living through their kids as little fashionista.

As a dad, one thing I'm certain of is that 5 year old kids don't really care what label they have on their clothes or what they T-shirt says. As my son Harry keeps asking me, "What's my t-shirt say?" Heck, they can't even read yet!

Rethinking Ourselves

To follow up on the Shift Happens post, it seems we need to rethink what it means to communicate and how we define ourselves.

(via ExperienceCurve)

Shift Happens

Karl Fisch and Scott McCleod remind us that the Information Age has a long way to go before it runs out of steam.

Is your brand ready for the radical shifts that are still to come?

Taking Control

I read this a few minutes ago:

Companies now recognize that “if you get people’s obesity down, cholesterol down, asthma down, you save a lot of money,” said Uwe E. Reinhardt, a health economist at Princeton University.

In order to control their own future, businesses need to take control of everything that affects them. Certainly, health care is a big one. Can the issues around sustainablity be next? Let's hope so.

Finding Success in New Media

As someone who grew up in the newspaper business, it's been sad to watch newspapers stumble by focusing on the distribution strategy of putting ink on paper instead of thinking about the relationship with their customers and delivering information the way they want it delivered. To that effect, last year I wrote:

Most traditional media companies take a tactical approach when thinking about the rapid changes that are occurring. Most media companies today are looking outward trying to figure out how to find new technologies, like podcasts or blogs, which can be bolted on to their current media products, acting defensively to protect their current business model.

Unfortunately, the marketplace is too dynamic for such a tactical approach. These times demand that media companies rethink their core values, being medium agnostic and focusing on strategically shifting their business models. Media companies must recognize that their mission is to facilitate a dialogue for their community members including readers, advertisers and retailers. In essence, setting a community table where all members of a community are invited to participate in the dialogue.

It is in these relationships where real value lies. With a community, co-creative perspective it matters not in what form the dialogue appears or in what direction the information flows.

In a world were there are too many sources of media all of us, as consumers, deeply desire a trusted editor that can make sense of the changing world and deliver the information we need to be a part of a community in a form that we want whether that be a magazine, website, blog, podcast, or vblog delivered via cell phone. The big question is: how can traditional media companies shift their paradigm to become a community facilitator?

I was very hopeful when reading Eric Pfannier's story about Shibsted.

One reason Schibsted might have been able to shift gears so quickly was that some of its top managers were from outside the newspaper business, including several executives hired from McKinsey, the consulting firm. Instead of being wedded to print, analysts said, they were willing to cannibalize existing businesses to develop new ones on the Internet.

Factoid of the Day

In January, the Golden Globes drew 20 million television viewers. And within a day of the ceremony, people.com, the Web site of People magazine, drew 39.6 million page views.

(via The New York Times)

Made to Stick

Check out Chip and Dan Heath's interview on NPR's Morning Edition. The Brother's Heath outline the six timeless reasons of what makes an idea sticky from their new book, Made to Stick: Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotional and Stories.

These six principles of making things stick seem to apply well to marketing yet, in this crowded marketplace it is very hard to stay consistent in applying them.

Give it Away, Give it Away, Give it Away Now

Rob Walker pens a wonderful article in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine entitled, Unconsumption and featuring Freecycle.

Here’s a taste:

Getting new stuff can feel really good. Most everybody knows that. Most everybody also knows — particularly in the aftermath of the consumption-frenzy holiday season — that utility can fade, pleasure can be fleeting and the whole thought-that-counts thing is especially ephemeral. Apart from the usual solution to this problem (more new stuff!), it’s worth pondering whether getting rid of stuff can ever feel as good as getting it.

And, talk about a movement. Freecycle has 3911 communities across the globe with over 3,000,000 members.

We are Them

Guy Trebay pens a very good article for the New York Times entitled, Where You Least Expect It. Here's a snippet:

Fashion, like an awful lot of other stuff in the culture, is cracking apart before one’s eyes. You’re doomed if you try to see the field as some powerful system run by chic sadists (“Bore someone else with your questions,” said Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly in “The Devil Wears Prada,” snapping at her simpering minion in the weary tone of a burned-out dominatrix).

While many industries, like fashion, and brands  might see themselves as social arbiters, they are deceiving themselves. The voices have multiplied.

Now we, the people, are them, the arbiters.

The Downside of Outsourcing

I got a call last night to verify a credit card purchase from Visa. Visa has always been great to work with but I had an experience last night that effected the way I look at the Visa brand. When I returned the call a very nice women answered the phone and asked me to answer a series of multiple choice questions to verify my identity for the purchase. It was a big purchase and I was happy to see that Visa wanted to verify it. Yet, the problem was the Visa operator couldn't speak English well enough for me to understand the questions. I had to ask her to repeat the questions several times.

Maybe it's my own experience of once mis-answering a security question only to spend hours on the phone trying to correct my mistake that made me sensitive to the Visa operator's language skills. Yet, I had to wonder if Visa's outsourced operators literally couldn't speak my language, what other short-cuts had they taken in back room operations and what kind of security did my financial information really have.

A brands value resides in the mind of the customer and the value of Visa, in my mind, slid.