The curious mind of Digitalinfant

January 14th 2012 was the last post I put up on this blog.

Since then, Posterous was bought by Twitter, I've been knee deep in crazy work at Sid Lee (which I joined in November 2011 after 4 years at Critical Mass), I helped my author father set-up his own blog on Tumblr (http://wbonnell.tumblr.com/), and I spent a few days down in sunny Austin at SXSW.

A few things interested me this weekend that I wanted to share some thoughts on:

1. A lovely sales event/season print ad from Dyson (above): headline, what it's about, curation of hero products to inspire with ideas, and call to action

2. Decoy brands and price anchoring.
While I've generally understood the segmentation and market share mechanics behind high priced and low priced brands of the same product offered by the same parent company (e.g. Gap and Banana Republic), I've never looked at it in the manner that Huber and Puto did in their paper on Market Boundaries and Product Choice which was published in the Journal of Consumer Research in 1983 (paper can be found here http://tinyurl.com/7p757pq). Hubert and Puto found in studies that by introducing a "decoy brand" into an existing market, they could affect the price and value associations (and ultimately market share) consumers attributed to an existing brand.

The two examples of this are Anheuser-Busch's experimentation with Budweiser in the 1960's and P&G's experimentation with Pampers. In AB's case, Budweiser was once America's best selling premium brand until AB began an aggressive promotion for their super-premium brand, Michelob. The introduction of Michelob, according to Huber & Puto, made Budweiser seem less extreme, less expensive and less elite. Some Budweiser drinkers moved upmarket to Michelob, but this was now countered by former buyers of cheaper beers like Miller moving up to Budweiser. In the end, a win-win for AB.

In the case of P&G, in 1961 they introduced Pampers. While highly convenient, they were perceived as a high priced indulgence over traditional cloth nappies. To counter this, P&G launched Luvs, a higher priced brand of disposable nappies. Luvs presented a contrast to Pampers, convincing hold-outs that Pampers wasn't such a high priced indulgence over cloth nappies after all. To cap it off, in 1994 P&G relaunched Luvs as a bargain brand.

3. 24/7 Barbershops.
Every now and then, I find myself driving along a street near my house quite late at night, and I've always been perplexed to see Babershops open and busy at 2,3 even 4am, so it was quite timely to come across an article in this Sunday's NY Times that does a semi overview of the growth in the late night barbershop trend: http://tinyurl.com/c8vu83a. It's an interesting read.

4. The digital wallet growth and physical wallet transformation
While I've been involved with NFC over the past year and have been covering company forays in to the space, it was an article today that got me thinking about it again: http://tinyurl.com/7rod2tx .Ever since Jack Dorsey unveiled Square and Google unveiled plans for a digital wallet, we've been hailing an era in North America of digital payments and a cashless society. We still aren't there yet and it will take time. And when it does come (aided by digital wallet apps that come stock on every smartphone OS, better retail integration, and Perez Hilton writing a blog post on it) I'll be more interested in what new uses we make of it, rather than simply copying what has been done in Japan and South Korea for years.

Behind the scene of "Lights" using WebGL: a friend of mine and former colleague posted this a few days ago, and it's interesting to see how they brought this to life. link

Trailers in reverse - Dead Island: after showing a colleague of mine the new GTA trailer and talking about how we were impressed that the video game company didn't default to a simple collection of guns and glory shots, he showed me another video game trailer for Dead Island which is quite disturbing but creates a story that draws you in for 3 minutes. link

Mobile UX Content Recommendations from Jakob Neilson: for those that have worked on mobile app projects, they'll agree with Mr. Neilson's statement that you should critically analyze the content you put in app screens or generally present to a user on a mobile device (since content influences the template layout). I also personally find that it is much easier for a user to get disoriented when tapping through your app, making it pertinent to have critical information accessible within a tap and allowing them to re-orient themselves without having to drive back 4 steps. link

Online dating data is giving scientists the data they need to dissect us even more: an interesting article in the Sunday NYTimes that calls out some impressive stats, such as the fact that apparently 21% of heterosexual couples that have formed romantic relationships in the U.S. between 2007 and 2009 did so online. I've always been quite curious about the effectiveness of online dating sites, since I've observed a few of my friends using them in the past. I've personally found that males between the ages 21-27 still find it quite taboo to mention the fact that they met girls through online dating sites, and that any site that charges a fee generally gets abandoned after a few days (a freemium model tends to work better). link

Going local is also going back in time: the NYTimes has cited two cases in the U.S where those who live in small, rural towns have banded together to save their local shops and in some cases actually pooled the money together to re-open and staff the shop. There is something quite authentic and nostalgic about a town coming together to save their local shops. As much as the past 10 years has scene us move away from emotional connections with the places we buy items from, I think it is coming back with a full head of steam. link

One of the rare benefits of overdeveloped areas in the U.S - luxurious student housing: apparently students in Merced, California have been taking advantage of the rock bottom rental rates for 4000 square foot homes near their university, and have been choosing these monster houses instead of 200 square foot dorm rooms. It sounds temporary, but heck, I would have loved to do this while going to uni. link

(A note to begin: I'm hoping to continue this conversation on the Business Model Hub but while I'm waiting to have my admission approved, I thought I would start the conversation now while it was still hot in my head)

Until recently, I spent the majority of my time working on App projects for clients. I learned quite a bit being immersed in the mobile app space, such as:

- IA is incredibly important to mobile app work, and needs to directly feed into the design language that is used

- You need to come to a consensus as a team and with the client on: What is it? Who is it for?What is the unique value prop? And why would someone download it and keep using it?

- You need to figure out what space your app will play in: is it utility? Is it entertainment? etc.

- It needs to have a purpose

- You need to define measures of success for the app (that are realistic)

- and you need to apply "Luke Wroblewski" like scrutiny to the features you try and cram into the app: how do they hit on your biz objectives? How do they deliver on the purpose? How do they address a consumer need?

But, what I took away from my mobile work the most was that in many cases, app creators need to think of their app as a business model.

Now, I only went down this path originally because I had been exposed to Alex Osterwalder's work with the Business Model Canvas. When used properly, it allows you to see the full picture of the business that you are creating. It's simple and brilliant. While working away on mobile projects, I kept coming back to Alex's canvas and thinking how helpful the tool could be to those who create apps for a living or clients who build apps for their brands, primarily as a way to:

1. See the full picture of their app (revenue streams, costs, key integration partners, customer segments, etc)
2. Keep track of all the little things that need to be tracked down (synonymous with a checklist)
3. And "under" and "over" invest where appropriate when it comes to producing an innovative app offering

I naturally wanted to tweak the canvas and include areas for content, such as:  App UX Guiding Principles, Design Tactics, etc. But I've hesitated. I've hesitated because I had an interesting conversation with Alan @thinksmith about my idea, and as he rightly pointed out, it's the product that is the business model, not the channel.

I was satisfied with the answer at the time, but now I'm not sure. For some app creators, their app (the channel) is their business. So, does it help for app creators to think of their app as a business model? Does it necessitate the customization of the canvas to fit the new type of work that is inherent of app development projects?

I'm hoping those who read this can chime in with their two cents, and that we can carry this conversation over to the business model hub.

Sometimes I find reading countless secondary research on eMarketer, Forrester, Mintel, Neilson and Kantar to be a little "uninspiring".

Last week when I was running out of ideas for a brainstorm, I grabbed the first colleague I could find and headed out to a mall to test a few hypotheses, and generally get inspired.

Today, I was able to attend a lecture at Western University, and was startled to see how wired classrooms have gotten over the past few years.

A few observations:

- Tablets, not really. Mobile, not really. Multi-tasking on macbooks, absolutely.

- My observational pie: 1/4 checking twitter, 1/4 on Facebook, 1/4 generally checking out sites, 1/4 asking questions and not on the web

Retailers are having to get a little more explicit these days with qr codes:

1) don't know what a qr code is or have one? here's what it is and where to get one
2) have a qr reader? Here's how to use it
3) heres the benefit of spending your two minutes to read the code