Posts Tagged ‘Cosmetic’
Thursday, July 9th, 2009
This story broke in the L.A. Times a couple of days ago and has been burning up the interwebs ever since. Dave Carroll of the Canadian country music band Sons of Maxwell sings about a problem he has with United Airlines. It’s easy to see how productive this game is for Carroll and the Sons of Maxwell, and how damaging it is to United Airlines, a brand that already has a pretty shabby reputation for dealing with passengers. It is after all, the best customer complaint of the Networked Era.
There are three elements of gamechanging at work in Carroll’s United Breaks Guitars song (with two other ‘complaint songs’ to follow, according to Carroll): (more…)
Tags: brand, Canada, Communication, Cosmetic, Dave Carroll, Emotion, Emotional, Meta, Sons of Maxwell, United Airlines, United Breaks Guitars
Posted in Branding, Emotion, Games, Narrative, Networked World, Objectives | 2 Comments »
Saturday, May 2nd, 2009
I know, huh. A message doesn’t have to be profound to be effective, and nowhere is this more true than in your spam folder. Spams are designed to work on the most visceral and immediate level of human communication. They have maybe one second to get their idea across. For this reason, it’s useful to study their communication strategies.
Like anyone participating in the Networked World, we get our share of spam at GameChangers. Here are some stats on the last 99 pieces of spam we’ve filtered: (more…)
Tags: Communication, Cosmetic, Demo, Disney, Meta Meaning, Miley Cyrus, Paris Hilton, Pharmaceuticals, Porn, Russian, Sex, Spam
Posted in Communication | No Comments »
Monday, January 26th, 2009
One thing I always notice when I’m in a scene with Mark Johnson–the founder and President of JiffyGas and HConverters, complementary brands in the business of converting internal combustion engines to run on alt energy (hydrogen, nat gas, biofuels)–is how observant he is. He notices everything. When you’re speaking, he watches your hands, he glances at your feet, he looks you in the eye, he focuses on your thoughts even as they’re still taking shape in your mind. When he speaks, he speaks with much more than the words coming out of his mouth. Mark Johnson’s kind of communicating transcends spoken language. Yes, words communicate, but only on the Cosmetic level. It’s what accompanies those words on the Emotional and Meta levels that has the power to change the game.
When Mark visited Los Angeles last month, and I got to watch Edwin and Armando, the whiz-bang mechanics he’d flown in from Colombia, convert a six-year-old Lexus to run on hydrogen, spoken language was maybe the least effective communications tool they used during the two days it took to do the conversion. There were four languages being spoken in that shop in Alhambra–English, Spanish, Chinese, and Italian if you count the Italian narration on a DVD promo for the converter kit that Edwin ran for us on one of his computers. Sure, some spoken language was required. But what made the scene go–what got the team on the same page–in improvisation terms, what created the Group Mind–were the elements of communication that transcended words. Here’s where Johnson’s genius as a communicator was clearly in evidence. (more…)
Tags: Alhambra, Alt, Alternative Fuels, Armando, Cars, Communication, Conversion, Cosmetic, Edwin, Emotion, Emotional, Energy, HConverters, Humor, JiffyGas, Listening, Mark Johnson, Meta, Transportation, U.S.
Posted in Communication, Dialogue, Emotion | No Comments »
Sunday, November 16th, 2008
I sometimes answer business-related questions on LinkedIn that can be addressed with the principles of improvisation. This is one in a series of responses that was deemed ‘Best Answer’ by the questioner…
THE QUESTION: I have to run a workshop for a top management team that has recently adopted a new highly matrixed structure. As a result, there is a challenging amount of interdependence and ambiguity. While they have an understanding of the structure, very little work has been done on how it will operationalize, what operationalizing it will mean etc.
One of the activities I want the group to undertake is a scenario building exercise where they will build potential scenarios that will arise in the future, and then based on the scenarios, evolve in advance, an appropriate response to the scenario.
I have never run a Scenario Building activity before. Would appreciate if you could share:
a. A process for how to run it
b. Tips/Techniques
c. Do’s/Don’ts
d. Any other advice/input
Thanks in advance!
Gurprriet Siingh
THE ANSWER: The ‘highly matrixed structure’ you describe, Gurprriet, is in fact one small subset of a much more complex environment in which this management team will perform — and that is the Networked World. Because of the fluid, incredibly complex nature of these networks-within-networks, it is both impractical and impossible to run scenarios that can accurately predict any particular outcome. By the time you have created the scenario, run the scenario, analyzed the outcomes, then ratified and codified the outcomes, the environment will have changed, rendering the results irrelevant and passe’. (more…)
Tags: Best Answer, Business Education, Communication, Cosmetic, Emotion, Emotional, Gurprriet Singh, Improvisation for the Theater, LinkedIn, Management, Meta, Teamwork, Viola Spolin
Posted in Coaching, Communication, Education, Fundamentals, Networked World | No Comments »
Wednesday, May 14th, 2008
A business scene staged by an Industrial Age organization likely as not involved a dispassionate analysis of the data, a detailed identification of the opportunity, and the thoughtful mobilization of resources necessary to capitalize on that opportunity. The absence of emotion was a characteristic of such scenes, and in fact the presence of emotion was usually viewed as a weakness in someone’s game. Players were expected to approach things with the cold, hard squint of Clint Eastwood eyeballing a punk at the receiving end of his .44, or Nicklaus lining up a putt to win the Masters.
Networks and business in the networked world do not work that way. Companies can no longer afford to eliminate emotion from their lexicon. Here’s the big reason why: Networks thrive on meaningful dialogue, and most of the meaningful dialogue between human beings happens on the emotional level. (more…)
Tags: Branding, Cosmetic, Dog, Emo-shun, Emotion, Fear, GameChangers, Industrial Age, Meaning, Meta, Networked World
Posted in Emotion | No Comments »
Tuesday, January 8th, 2008
For the past three years, Geico Insurance has advertised its product in a series of commercials featuring celebrities of a certain demographic ilk ‘interpreting’ the stories of Geico customers. These celebs have included Charo, Vern “Mini-Me” Troyer, Little Richard and Peter “Airplane” Graves, among others. A new series featuring Peter Frampton, James Lipton, Michael Winslow and Joan Rivers, began airing in Q4, 2007.
These ads, created by The Martin Agency of Richmond, VA (more…)
Tags: Advertising, Cosmetic, Emotion, Geico, Insurance, Levels of Communication, Meta, Richmond, Sales, Spots, The Martin Agency, TV Commercials, Virginia
Posted in Communication | No Comments »
