Why play is important in the brand experiences we build: excerpts from Playful 09

Last Friday I went Conway Hall to attend Playful 09, an event that brought together a mix of developers, designers, artists, bloggers and thinkers. With speakers from companies from Channel 4 to interactive agencies, the topic for the day was the role of playfulness in media, be it interactive games or the way we effect social change.

Play, and playfulness doesn’t immediately seem an important topic. As the day progressed two things became apparent, 1. The level investment in ‘playful’ media is significant enough to take notice and 2. We underestimate play as a motivator, this is particularly important for creating valuable social experiences which so many brands are striving for.

So, as with the Seth Godin talk earlier this year, I thought I’d share a few points from the day I found useful. Enjoy.

Fun motivates and changes our behaviour

With more marketing campaigns incorporating a social aspect, a big challenge for this medium is answering the question ‘why should a user or customer get involved’, ‘what is in it for them’?

Fun provides an answer to motivating a user. Some examples from Playful 09 were poignant, some bizarre but some showed real results - my two favourite examples being Volkswagen’s ‘Arcade Bottle Bank’ which showed encouraging adoption and shows you recycle more when it’s fun...

...and the Sidekick Studios Voicebox robot, which aims to catch the attention of MP’s by being placed in the upper waiting gallery of the House of Commons, writing out messages on social issues submitted online

The Voicebot pt II from sidekick studios on Vimeo.

Both these cases show taking a playful slant can change behaviour for important topics, and turn mundane tasks into games.

Interactive devices + augmented reality = new opportunities

Chris o’Shea gave a entertaining talk through some of his projects which focus on interactivity and playfulness. The example below is the well publicised augmented reality piece “A Hand From Above” which was staged in Liverpool recently....

Hand from Above from Chris O'Shea on Vimeo.

... but I was more impressed with the less famous, but more powerful “Beacon” installation. Both examples show what great experiences can be created using interactive technologies which marketers should explore for their brands.

Beacon at Lightwave 2009 from Cinimod Studio & Chris O'Shea on Vimeo.

Making an experience fun AND useable is hard

As the piano stairs example from Volkswagen shows, making something fun AND usable is a challenge – the discussion at Playful highlighted that the usability of the stairs would decrease as novelty decreases (and annoyance increases).

Play is great then. It can be an important asset to an experience. How to integrate it within our projects though?

Prototyping to find the fun

- Playfulness is elusive, so a major lesson from the day was that you find the fun and playfulness through learning from prototypes in a process where you’re not afraid to try alternatives.

Awesomeness is important not innovation

- One speaker referenced Umair Haques greatest recent post on The Awesome Manifesto – Umair reasons that what is important today is how awesome a product, experience, service is (in contrast to how innovative it is). Playfulness and Awesomeness seemed good companions.

The role of a high score

- The day showed that if you’re designing a playful experience consider whether there is a role for scoring – what will motivate users to engage with the experience or game, and how using scoring can change behaviour.

Why Spotify Will Beat iTunes And What We Can Learn From Them

It’s an exciting time at the moment as we're seeing existing business ideas made great by new innovations and user experiences. Spotify is one example. I feel it will beat iTunes and further revolutionise the media industry. Or at the very least make iTunes rethink the way they sell music.

If you haven’t used it, a brief introduction. Spotify provides quick access (no buffering means no waiting around for songs to load) to almost any song or album you want to listen to (after using it since January I’ve found I get 80%-90% of the music I want) through a desktop application (which means you can access it offline) which allows you to build playlists quickly. And the quality of the music files it plays is high. In exchange, you get an advert every 20 minutes, or for a small monthly fee, no adverts at all.

It’s great. As a big music consumer myself I can see it will put a big hole in the mp3 market. Spotify have done a number of things well that others should copy, namely;

Finding an unfulfilled customer need – What Spotify is doing is not new at all. Their model has its origins in Napster, Myspace, iTunes and last.fm. The customer need it fulfils is new though. Spotify takes the needs of ‘I want access to all the music in the world through a really easy interface’ (which iTunes has but last.fm doesn’t) and ‘I want free music and a community ’ (which last.fm does really well) and brings them together to exploit an unfulfilled need of ‘I want all the music in the world, for free, and have a great user experience’. This can be applied to be any industry, and perhaps your own. Spotify is a good example of how to do it well.

Understand the power of networks – In his recent book ‘What Would Would Google Do?’ Jeff Jarvis talks about the power of networks, and changing your commercial model from ‘charging the highest fee that the individual customer will bear’ to charging ‘the lowest cost you can charge that the entire network can bear’. His logic is that if you’re doing this the competition can’t undercut you without making a loss. Spotify have understood this – and made their service easy for a wide network of users to adopt with no or very little cost to the user – Spotify have their eye on making a living from the entire network and not the individual.

Make the user experience great – Use Spotify in comparison to last.fm and you’ll be impressed by its ease of use. They understand that users would be impressed by a ‘no waiting’ approach to loading tracks and their interface was familiar and easy to adopt (building an experience based on the design of the iTunes interface that users already knew well).

Get the right blend of advertising – Spotify kept it simple and didn’t overload their service or the users with adverts, and allowed users to opt out of commercial messages for a fee.

Seth Godin London 2009: Marketing Lessons On Remarkableness, Scarcity & Revolution

Last week I attended the Seth Godin talk in London. Seth’s a respected leader in the field of marketing and all things web, and this was a rare opportunity to hear him speak. Staged in the grand setting of Church House behind Westminster Abbey this was a great event and I felt three points stood out for marketers which I’ve paraphrased below.

"Being remarkable" – It sounds obvious, ‘remarkable’ meaning being worthy of making a remark, but how many brands, experiences, products or services are truly remarkable. Many companies before entering into the social media space such as blogs, Twitter, forums or Facebook should take time to think about whether their companies products, services or the brand itself is worthy of customer remarks. Make what you market excellent and people will talk, otherwise the review and forum sections on your newly launched website will be empty

"Scarcity versus ubiquity" – Think about your industry, what has become commonplace, a commodity or ubiquitous; and what is rare, difficult to find, uncommon. Then think about how you market and how you charge for those products and services – a Blog is ubiquitous and common, so make that free – whereas a good speaking event is rare, so you can command a high fee. A good example of this in the entertainment marketplace is Live Nation who have understood that mp3 and file sharing has made recorded music ubiquitous and free, and have focused their business model on making money from what in their industry is rare, outstanding, uncommon and valuable – live music performances.

"If we’re in the middle of a industrial and marketing revolution, what are the new rules?" - During the day, Seth highlighted a vast number of traditional marketing rules were changing, highlighting recent changes brought on by social technologies and the low costs of commerce through the web. This was food for thought, but as well as understanding which rules were now broken, he suggested those who will do well through the recession will be the ones who build new marketing rules, particularly how companies can lead customer tribes.

See Green When Out Of The Red

This week Google launched Google Power Meter which gives consumers detailed information on their power consumption throughout the day by displaying data from smart meters. It's aim is to highlight areas where consumers can cut back, and help them track and monitor this

Google Power Meter is a great example of a significant trend. Until the economic situation worsened, last year saw a growing demand for 'green' or Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reporting. Historically this was driven by multinationals such as Shell and Anglo American who use greater transparency as a way of driving energy efficiency within the organisation and informing stakeholders. But in 2008 we saw detailed CSR information being used for marketing purposes, with pioneers such as Tesco putting carbon usage data on individual products.

Price and brand promotion is king at the moment, but will green be important to marketers when the recession is over? Some companies have fallen into the trap of greenwashing, a term for using general PR statements to pay lip service to green initiatives, but CSR reporting is going to be important because of the comparisons if will provide between rival products, services and companies. Online shoppers will be able to sort a basket of items on their carbon footprint, or compare a manufacturers energy usage or a companies CSR achievements.

If CSR and transparency is going to be an area is differentiation, and the companies who can show the most transparent accurate data gaining advantage, how do you get there? Three steps...

1. Have a ‘real’ CSR policy – Greenwashing is a waste of time and can damage your brand. A genuine focused CSR philosophy with clear targets will bring benefits in areas such as energy saving (which is just one area of CSR) and resonate with consumers and shareholders
2. Plan for a long term project - Reporting on this scale can't be achieved quickly and it's a journey – work with everyone from your suppliers through to customers to bring together this data
3. Get data in front of the public early - You shouldn't need to produce a full set of CSR reports before making them available to the public, pick a metric that your customers care about such as electricity usage and carbon emmisions and grow from there.

So in the current market when many are looking to cut costs and innovate, better CSR reporting can save money and improve your competitive standing.

Look Before You Tweet

Microbloggin’ uber application Twitter has caught a lot of press attention lately and many businesses are wondering how to enter this space. My interest in Twitter has fired up again after seeing a few colleagues using the awesome Tweetdeck. After a bit of setting up (thanks Colm) you can feel the potential of ‘real time web’ technology come alive, from keeping in touch, monitoring buzz topics through to searching for information and people.

Or keeping up to date on celebrities who happen to be stuck in lifts.

For corporations the proposition can seem attractive. An opportunity to foster an Apple like cult in your customer base by feeding them with the latest releases? An option to launch innovative marketing strategies? Engage in one to one dialogues? Respond to angry tweets? On the surface your brand could appear fast moving and progressive.

But corporate brands have a turbulent history when things get a bit social and Twitter is no different. Big corporates like control, uniformity, clear messaging and co-ordination. But this is hard to achieve across thousands of employees who may be Tweeting on every aspect of your business and have different views.

You could have a unified Twitter presence but that would be dry, lack personality and disclude many individuals across the organisation who could help bring the brand to life.

So what’s the answer?

I was reminded of Wally Ollins and his wisdom in ‘On Brand’ on how there should be a shift in thinking around marketing to improve the focus within the organisation itself, in contrast to marketing exclusively to customers or the trade. Under an achingly cheesy slogan of “Bonding, as much as branding” he suggested brand marketing is as important to those within the organisation as it is to traditional customers, particularly in service industries.

Is Ollins right? I think so. Paying attention to getting a true and honest brand message that all members of the business can understand and believe in pays off. It demands less control than an official policy or guidelines for employees using social technologies and lets them be creative and more human, which customers will in the end appreciate and engage with more.

So instead of laying down a corporate Twitter policy, or a unified Twitter account for the brand, think about who in your organisation could be Tweeting and how your marketing teams can support them in being ‘on brand’ when its relevant, and importantly, being themselves.