planning notes

notes from @gotophilk

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A reasonable companion to a beef, though my feeling is that if you’re going to eat more than just a sandwich, why not eat two sandwiches? At least that way you’ll die a hero.

On the fries at Johnnie’s

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Creative Research in Utero

The challenges of planning and executing qualitative research pale in comparison to the challenge of figuring out what you've actually learned in that research. Wendy Gordon:

One of the most frequent expectations of qualitative research is that it should indicate how people will respond to an unborn concept - the fetal advertising campaign, pack design, corporate identity, new product idea, range extension, service initiative or brand to be revitalized with new meanings and values. At the time of the research, the 'real thing' has not yet been born. It is like showing an unborn baby to a whole lot of strangers through a scanner machine: the baby is obviously human, alive and moving but it is also featureless, lacking color and certainly without personality. Taking the analogy further, we are then asking this panel of strangers to tell us whether or not they are interested in this baby, whether or not they might like to babysit for a few days, what his/her personality might be like and how the baby compares to other children and small babies they know!

I wish I'd read this book five years ago.

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A prescient warning against the cargo cult of Big Data, via the great Dave Dye.

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I'm very grateful to be alive, even though I know a lot of dead people.

Stephen Colbert

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Research had found that 68% of global consumers wanted to recognize every ingredient on the label, and 40% desired food made with as few ingredients as possible.

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Some $18 billion in sales have shifted from large to small companies from 2009 to 2014 across all consumer packaged good categories, according to report by Boston Consulting Group and IRI. Credit Suisse recently isolated the changes in market share among food and beverage companies and found that the largest 25 companies saw their control slip from a combined 49.4% share in 2009 to 45.1% share in 2014. 

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"Our heads can't continue down-staring at our screens. Something must be done to fix this, and the basic technologies to do it are already there."

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You and I live in a culture that thinks its pitiable to work in a job that lacks intellectual or artistic fulfillment, but which relentlessly mocks people who try to make it into the jobs that do. Someone who files TPS reports all day is a sad drone; someone who goes to grad school, writes a screenplay, or tries to break into acting is pathetic, pretentious, and bound for failure. We have steadily erased the unhealthy American ideal of Career-As-Self and white picket fences, but we haven’t replaced them with anything that most people can do. We just come up with more ways that you can be a loser. We’re best at that.

Freddie deBoer

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"The good organizations are great at having an informed opinion by constantly going out and meeting their customers, reading what they read and doing what they do.

"I think a great example was when AMV wanted to prove that Sainsbury’s customers sleep shopped, so they filmed a Gorilla roaming about instore, being mostly ignored by customers and showed it to the client."

Andrew Hovells

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The essential difficulty in creating strategy is not logical; it is choice itself

Richard Arumelt

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The only thing brands seem to want to tell me is that impossibly attractive people smile when they use their brand.

George Tannenbaum

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Consensus decision-making, in which everyone’s opinion is carefully sought out and somehow miraculously weighs the same, is all too often the norm.

Jeff Goodby

[ayjay-deactivated20161206]

When you are very young, you think old people must feel inside as old as they appear on the outside. But as you move towards agedness yourself, you realise that this is entirely wrong. People remain young on the inside, no matter how old they appear. The idea of ‘old’ people is therefore a misapprehension of our culture, which sees the split instant of a human lifetime as something elongated, divided into decades and years, persistently defined by a number. But there are no ‘old people’. Everyone is young. The only clue you have about this is your own journey as a subjective intelligence looking out. You wait for a change to descend, some radical shift of thinking which will fit with your balding head or wrinkling face. But it doesn’t come: you get giddier and more childish. I had this insight very strongly at Mount Melleray, when I realised that all these men, like myself, were teenagers, or maybe children, in their heads.

Inside Mount Melleray: ‘The world as you know it is passing away’. I don’t think this misperception is something that only the “very young” have: people of forty or more years tend to believe that somehow, as you age, your inner life comes to match your outward appearance. But as Waters, says, it’s not true. It’s not true at all. (via ayjay)

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“It is the pure arrogance of the newly rich and the newly powerful to think content is easy.”

John Landgraf

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Of course, the dark side of any trend is that once it’s identified, it’s too late to prevent the good aspects of it from being sucked into a black hole with the rest.

"The Rise of Sadvertising"

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Visual images are not so much representations of (a single) meaning as they are generators of (multiple) meanings.

Paul Feldwick