THE 10 MOST ADDICTIVE SOUNDS IN THE WORLD

1. Baby giggle
2. Intel
3. Vibrating phone
4. ATM / cash register
5. National Geographic
6. MTV
7. T-Mobile
8. McDonald’s
9. ‘Star Spangled Banner’
10. State Farm

In our Get Emotional! workshop at HooHa Sensorimix, we worked closely together with Eric Linder alias Polar. He’s a great artist and sound chemist. A part of his song was used in a commercial of “Deutsche Telecom”. He shared with us some of the mystery behind creating powerful sounds and music in general. For us this underlined the importance of matching emotional experience of a brand with that of sounds and/or music used in commercials. Therefore we continued to work on a dedicated tool for emotions and music and/or sound. This would allow you to measure the emotional experience of a brand or product using PrEmo and find the right matching music. We felt that PrEmo as a method would not fully cover the complexity of measuring music emotions.

Sounds and brands
The researchers also presented a top ten of branded sounds:

Branded sounds

1. Intel
2. National Geographic
3. MTV
4. T-Mobile
5. McDonald’s
6. State Farm
7. AT&T
8. Home Depot
9. Palm Treo
10. PC Richard

The list presented by Buyology et. al. is of special interest to us since we have just finished a method to measure emotions of music, called Chartistic. You will definitely read more about that soon. It would be very interesting to see what kind of emotions are being elicited by this top ten of tunes. And do they match the emotional experience of the brand?

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If we all know that buying desicions are based on emotions and not on rational processes, why then are we still asking consumers for their rational opinion in focus groups, online panels and interviews.

Emotions are best treated as a multifaceted phenomenon consisting of the following components:

• behavioural reactions (e.g. approaching),
• expressive reactions (e.g. smiling),
• physiological reactions (e.g. heart pounding),
• and subjective feelings (e.g. feeling amused).

Each instrument that is claimed to measure emotions in fact measures one of these components.

Why do we still rely on consumers’ subjective input on innovative products?

Research by Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University Rotterdam and Delft University of Technology (funded by amongst others BNO), indicates that when there is a lot of attention for design in the development process, a product will sell better. Managers of 163 companies participated in this investigation and was therefore the largest of its kind to date.

Experience design and Functional design

The researchers differentiated between Experience design (design to stimulate the senses and evoke emotional response) and Functional design (design for technology, usability, etc.). New products for which experience design was a major influence in the development performed better with an average of 9 percent. When functional design was the biggest factor, products performed better by 10 percent. When both design aspects were addressed as equally important, products performed even better by 20 percent.

Set them free

Another interesting finding is that several positive effects of design were stronger when designers explored more ideas in the design process that could be considered to be outside of the project. This suggests, that in order to improve, companies would have to provide designers with more freedom to explore. Contradictory to the common expectation: the better the briefing, the better the result.

Designers focus on innovation, clients on familiarity

The positive effect of experience design became weaker once clients were given too much influence in the development/ design process. The researchers state that this effect can be explained by the fact that designers generally focus more on innovative aspects of the design and clients tend to be more drawn to product features and functionality that are more familiar to them.

A writer and veteran consultant to entrepreneurs and executives alike, Joseph Pine’s books and workshops help businesses create what modern consumers really want: authentic experiences.

Joseph Pine’s career as a business coach began at IBM when he did something truly unorthodox: he brought business partners and customers into the development process of a new computer. Taking from this the lesson that every customer is unique, he wrote a book called Mass Customization on businesses that serve customers’ unique needs. Later he discovered what he would coin the “Experience Economy” — consumers buying experiences rather than goods or commodities — and wrote a book of the same name. Since then he wrote “Authenticity” and is now finalizing his latest work – Infinite Possibility: Creating Customer Value on the Digital Frontier – which will be about how to use digital technology to create innovative experiences that fuse the real and the virtual. (source: TED.com)

As one of the first persons to stress the necessity of creating experiences for consumers rather than merely evoking a purchase, it was time to sit down with Joe and talk about his career, his take on design for emotion and his new book.

An ‘experience’ note of my own: Smoking a wonderful cigar with Joe made any formal atmosphere disappear, and forced us to finish the interview by email. The result: Good cigars and a great conversation.

“Good cigars, great conversation”

Joe, everybody knows you as the (co) author of books such as Mass customization, The Experience Economy and Authenticity. These books have in common that they are about people and their drivers to choose, experience and be. You actually have a background in mathematics, what happened? What made you think, write and speak about people and consumption?

Wow, Marco – I’ve never heard it quite put that way, that the commonality in my books is “about people and their drivers to choose, experience and be.” I like that!

So it is a long story in how I got to where I am today, but my Applied Mathematics degree took me to a very technical job at IBM, but I soon decided I wanted to go into management. For the AS/400 minicomputer, I managed a group that brought customers and business partners into the development process for the very first time. I soon learned that every customer was unique, which led me to discover Stan Davis’ seminal book Future Perfect in which he coined the term “mass customizing”.

When IBM gave me the opportunity to get my Masters degree at MIT in the Management of Technology, I studied that entire year on the subject, writing my thesis on it. I found a place in IBM that would give me time to write and then teach and consult on the ideas – the Management Research function of the IBM Consulting Group, managed by Al Barnes – and eventually was able to turn it into my first book.

Because of issues in IBM’s business, in 1993 it offered me six month’s salary to leave, so I decided to see if I could make it on my own, and the rest, as they say, is history.

You talk a lot about how people want to feel good about a brand, service or product. It needs to match their feeling of ‘this is me’. In a way, design for emotion has a similar goal. What would your definition be of designing for emotions?

Well, people increasingly spend their hard-earned money (and harder-earned time) on experiences – memorable events that engage each person in an inherently personal way – rather than the goods and services, which they increasingly view as undifferentiated commodities. Experiences engage people in an inherently personal way, and that is largely through emotion.

And no matter what offering they seek – commodity, good, service, or experience – they want to buy the real from the genuine, not the fake from some phony. That means creating the perception inside them, the feeling, that the offering matches who they are as individuals.

So in each case, designing for emotions is key. It means intentionally creating within the individual – staging, orchestrating, choreographing all good verbs for it – a response that triggers feelings beyond rationality. It is certainly an art form today, but the first step toward making it a science is identifying and understanding what emotions current offerings trigger, which is why I am very enamoured with the SusaGroup methodology.

Where do you get your inspiration? Is there a balance between practice and research in the way you gather your knowledge, or is one of the two dominant?

It is a combination of things, but primarily anthropological; I observe what is going on in the world of business through my life experiences and business interactions – not to mention reading 4 newspapers every day, scores of periodicals every month, and dozens of books every year – and try to make sense of it. Once I have an inkling as to what is going on, then I develop one or more frameworks that describe it so others can see it as well, and then use those models to prescribe what companies should do differently as a result.

Quite often, I still stumble upon resistance to invest in something so obviously logical and natural as improving people’s experiences with their brand. Is this really about money? What is your take on this phenomenon and how do you convince management?

I encounter much less resistance now than when my partner Jim Gilmore and I first started talking about this in the mid-1990s. But understand that is not just about “creating better experiences” with “products and services”. Rather, experiences are a distinct economic offering, as distinct from services as services are from goods. Most companies should shift up from selling goods to services, and from selling services to experiences, which is what people value more today.

So perhaps you will have greater success if you help clients understand that their business is really one, or should really be one, of staging experiences. Ask them if they see forces of commoditization in their industry, and if it is increasingly hard to differentiate their offerings. Then show them that experiences can provide that differentiation by increasing the value created within customers.

What you have been talking about for such a long time is suddenly called service design, or experience design. Nevertheless, I think I have never heard you use these terms yourself. What is your reaction to these emerging fields and does it either make you feel proud (as you coined the basic idea) or cautious (do you think they are perhaps missing something)?

I do find it interesting that the term “service design” came about just as services were being supplanted by experiences as the predominant economic offering. Perhaps it is belated recognition that delivering services needed to be made more science than art – a sign, in fact, that people could see services being commoditized, so cost and efficiency become so much more important.

I have no problem with “experience design”, but do wish that its practitioners realized that I said about – that it is not just about making a good or service more experiential (although that is a good thing!), but that it is about designing experiences as the offering of the company, what it sells to customers.

You and Jim wrote the book The Experience Economy over a decade ago. Since then, the world has changed tremendously. Does the book still stand?

Absolutely! In fact, we are about to sign a contract to do a second edition of the book, twelve years after the first. And we’ve looked at it, and find that virtually all the concepts, all the frameworks, even all the words we used to describe what is going on still hold today. What primarily needs updating are the examples, for as you say the world has changed tremendously and there are so many more exemplars of the Experience Economy who stages experiences so much better now than they did then. There are also a few new frameworks that we want to include, which we believe will help companies better stage experiences.

Also, the book has been referred to as highly influential and important. This is supported by the fact that when I read books, articles or websites about the topic, your book is always cited or referred to. Nevertheless, as the author and creator, do you see a significant change that came out of the awareness you created? Any examples?

Many, many changes, yes. We have seen a tremendous rise in marketing experiences, experiences used to generate demand for a company’s core offerings, with so many manufacturers getting into the experience business (think of the Heineken Experience in Amsterdam, Autostadt in Wolfsburg, Germany, the Guinness Storehouse in Dublin, and so forth). We have also seen the rise of a new position – the CXO, or Chief eXperience Officer, responsible for a company’s experience offerings. We have seen many more companies take to heart our plea to charge admission for the experience, for it is charging for time that economically differentiates an experience from a service. And amongst other changes that could be cited, we have also seen the rise of so many engaging virtual experiences, from games to virtual worlds to social media.

Currently, you are in the process of finishing your latest book, which (so I have been told) will focus on the new worlds that people live and communicate in. Basically, all virtual worlds, right? I believe you refer to it as the Multiverse? This seems like a very new terrain for you to discover and explore. Was this hard to do?

Yes, taking off on the last change above, my next book – Infinite Possibility: Creating Customer Value on the Digital Frontier – will be about how to use digital technology to create innovative experiences that fuse the real and the virtual. The Multiverse is the framework at the core of the book, providing a new way of thinking about how to apply digital technology to experiences.

It is a framework that has been knocking around in my head for almost a decade, but it was incredibly hard to really pin down and see how it could be applied. As a 2x2x2 matrix, the Multiverse is complicated enough (it’s six times more complicated than a normal 2×2, comprising a cube with six 2x2s as its faces, not to mention eight octants that comprise the realms of experiences), but some things just did not make sense to me. I could not find examples of what the Multiverse indicated.

The moment when it all started to come together was when Nintendo announced the Wii, for it finally provided definition and a key example to one of the eight realms, what I now call Augmented Virtuality – where physical, material objects (such as the WiiRemote) augment the virtual experience we have (such as playing tennis).  It then started to come together where I could see a usable framework, and then a book.

In which way is your new book different from previous ones and in what way similar?

One key difference is just one core framework – I am resisting the urge, for example, to find a key framework for every octant, as I would have tried to do in the past. The Multiverse is complicated enough, and its real value will be in helping businesses figure out what they can do. So I am not going to complicate it any further than absolutely necessary.

Another key difference is that Mass Customization came out in 1993 before there was a World Wide Web; The Experience Economy came out in 1999 when the web was still in its infancy, and we had no website for it. When Authenticity came out in 2007, we created the website www.AuthenticityBook.com to promote it, but it was always “sub” to the book. Now with Infinite Possibility, I want to make the book “sub” to the website – I want the website to become a movement, in fact, that grows and deepens our knowledge of the Multiverse far beyond what can be put in a book. I want a community to develop to take the ideas and run with them, and thereby change the world. Or worlds, actually, for it is not a Universe but a Multiverse!

What is the same? It is still a matter of seeing what is going on in business ahead of others, and developing a descriptive framework to explain it to others and let them see what they therefore can do differently.

If you like to give a small promo/scoop for the new book, please be my guest and take the stage.

Well, I have probably already done that, but let me add that there truly is an infinite possibility for how companies can create value for customers on the digital frontier. The Multiverse is a sense-making tool, a map in essence, that helps explorers figure out where the customer value lies, and how to then create it through experiences that fuse elements of both real and virtual experiences.

The two realms that anchor the Multiverse are of course Reality and Virtuality. But in between we find other realms of the Real: Augmented Reality, which uses digital technology to enhance our everyday experiences; Alternate Reality, which provides a virtual overlay of meaning atop physical experiences; and Warped Reality, where we play with time in some way in the real world.

There are also then the other realms of the Virtual: Augmented Virtuality, where material objects enhance our virtual experiences (as again with the Wii); Physical Virtuality, where we design something virtually but instantiate it physically; and finally Mirrored Virtuality, where we create a simulation of the real world tied to real time so we can see what’s really going on.

So, yes, it is complicated, but my co-author Kim Korn and I also provide a set of tools for examining each of these octants, plus the dimensions that define the framework, so that companies can figure out how to make sense of the infinite possibility and determine which opportunities are right for them.

Leaves me with thanking you very much for your time!

My pleasure, Marco! Keep up the good work of designing for emotions – whether the stimuli be real or virtual!

Earlier this week I invited the readers of Design & Emotion to participate in a short Emotion Battle, set up by SusaGroup. By looking at the trailers of each Best Motion Picture nominee for Sunday’s Academy Awards, and indicating how it made you feel, we have put together a short interpretation of results and chosen a most probable winner according to the emotion profile. I would like to thank the 182 participants and invite you to read the short interpretation of the outcome below!

This was originally posted at SusaGroup blog:

And the winner is…! We wish it was that easy, measuring emotions means dealing with the complexity of people. This complexity was nicely reflected in our study using the trailers for the Oscar nominees for Best Motion Picture. 182 People participated in our online experiment using our emotion self-report instrument PrEmo. Each participant was shown the movie trailers of each nominee (ten in total) and was asked to indicate to which extend they experienced the depicted 6 emotions while viewing the clip.

In the above image we have plotted the movies and emotions in a 2D space (correspondence analysis). The distance between the movies themselves represents the relation between the movies. The distance between the movies and the emotions represents the relation between them.

What this graphic shows is that the trailer for Precious is clearly more sad then those of most other movies. Similarly, Up is more joyful than some of the other movies. Also, a number of movies kind of clump together in the middle. This means these movie trailers result in similar experienced emotions.

Looking back at the Oscar winners of a few years back, most movies could be described as mixed emotion movies, being both serious and humorous (see for instance No Country for Old Men in 2007 and Slumdog Millionaire in 2008). So it’s nice to see movies with a more positive one-directional emotion profile, such as Up and Avatar to be nominated.

Does this mean these movies are going to win? Hard to say, since the decision is, at least not yet, based on emotional experience. Also, we used movie trailers in our study which may be somewhat different in there emotional experience as the complete movie.

Still, based on the emotion profiles, some movies stand out, as their essence seems to resemble that of previous winners. As mentioned, complex and emotionally challenging movies seem to be more attractive for the award.

Based on that notion, we would say that District 9 and The Hurt Locker are good contenders. Nevertheless, The Hurt Locker shows significantly more fascination as compared to District 9 which was experienced as slightly more boring. We feel that the mixed character, with a positive edge will point out the winner.

We call out the winner: The Hurt Locker!

Click on the image below to start participating in this stimulating experiment

Recently, popular international websites such as Wired, Wall Street Journal and some popular websites in The Netherlands such as Nu.nl and Tweakers.net published polls to ask their readers whether they would buy the iPad or not.

The polls showed some interesting mixed results between wanna-buyers and don’t-wanna-buyers. At SusaGroup, this made us decide to see how emotion was involved in their opinion about iPad.

We let iPad battle it out versus iPhone, an already established and highly popular and engaging Apple product. A small group of people was asked to evaluate their emotional experience with the products using PrEmo, our emotion measurement instrument.

Read the complete post at the SusaGroup blog for the final results >>

Revision: January 22, 2010

7th International Conference on Design & Emotion, Chicago

October 4-7, 2010 http://www.id.iit.edu/de2010/ Hosted by IIT Institute of Design

The 7th International Conference on Design & Emotion in Chicago, October 4-7, 2010 calls for your participation. This Conference is a forum held every other year where practitioners, researchers and industry leaders meet and exchange knowledge and insights concerning the cross-disciplinary field of design and emotion. The conference calls for your contribution to this exciting international forum of research and practice representing academic, design and business communities.

Full Papers, Short Papers (Posters) and Design Cases

D&E Conference invites practitioners and researchers to submit research papers and design cases. Submissions addressing issues of Design & Emotion are invited from extended communities beyond design studies, such as computer science, HCI, psychology, cognitive science, social science, humanities, engineering, health sciences, marketing and business. Detailed guidelines for proposal authoring are available on the conference website.

Full Papers are expected to contribute widely applicable long-lasting knowledge to the discipline. Accepted papers will be presented in the conference program and published in the proceedings. The paper length is a maximum of 12 pages (approximately 4,000-5,000 words plus figures and tables) in the specified format.

Short Papers (Posters) are expected to describe research that is more appropriate for the interactive poster session. The paper length should be a maximum of 5 pages (approximately 2,000 words plus figures and tables) and an additional page containing a full-page image of the poster in the specified format for the publication in the conference proceedings. The first submission requires a short paper manuscript without the poster page.

Design cases are invited for submission to present design projects that address issues and insights in design and emotion, communicate and discuss your approach to enhance emotional effects. Design case submissions must include a summary description in a maximum of 5 pages (approximately 2,000 words) in the specified format and a maximum of 30 slides illustrating the design, design process and use.

Call for Special Topic Sessions: Topics and Papers

Special Topic Sessions focus on specific emerging areas of research and practical interest concerning Design and Emotion. The topic proposal deadline for special topic sessions is February 15, 2010. The deadline for submission of full paper and design cases is March 15, 2001. (See the detail on the conference website.)

Call for workshops

Researchers, educators and practitioners are invited to submit proposals for workshops. Workshops will be held on October 4, 2010 prior to the main program of the conference. The purpose is to provide a platform for presenting and discussing novel ideas and emerging issues in a less formal and possibly more focused way than the conference itself. The format of each workshop is to be determined by the organizers, but each workshop is expected to include ample time for general discussion.

Submission and Review Process

Submission and review processes will be handled by our conference system. All submissions will have a blind review process with at least two reviewers. All submissions accepted in the second review will be asked to submit the final manuscripts in the camera-ready format. The detailed authoring guideline is available at the conference website.

Topics

Design & Emotion is the overarching theme of the conference. This year, the conference adds a particular focus on Design & Emotion in emerging societal issues of our lives and living environments. Another focus is on strategic roles of Design & Emotion in business. The areas of these foci include fundamental research into Design & Emotion that further enhances our intellectual foundation as well as the emotional aspects of the following topic areas:

Design for Wellbeing

• Healthcare
• Elderly Living
• Food, Health and Culture
• Universal/ Inclusive Design

Design for Environments

Sustainable Lifestyle Product and System Life Cycle

Interaction and Context-sensitivity

• Human-Robot Interaction
• Product Adaptation
• User Learning

Service Design

Modeling Experiences Retail Design

Strategic Design and Business

• Decision-Making
• Business Models
• Branding

Foundation for Design and Emotion

• Temporality, Uncertainty and Polarity of Emotion
• Affordance, Semiotics, Value and Emotion
• Research Methodologies
• Design Methodologies
• Theoretical Foundations
• Philosophical Foundations and Implications to Design

Important Dates

!!! -Revised- !!!

• March 15 – New official deadline for paper, design case and workshop submissions
• May 15 – Notification of acceptance for the first reviewing
• June 15 – Deadline for revised paper, design case and workshop submissions
• July 15 – Final acceptance notification
• July 31 – Deadline for Early Registration—required for authors, to be in proceedings
• August 15 – Submission for camera-ready manuscripts
• October 4 – Tutorials and Workshops
• October 5-7 – Conference

Conference Venue

Spertus Institute 610 S. Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60605 Tel: 312.322.1700 http://www.spertus.edu/programs/special/spertus_architecture_tour.php

The Conference Motto: Blatantly Blues

Chicago is the home of the Blues. The Blues expresses the emotional journey of our life experience. Sorrow and joy, desire and apathy, agony and comfort, and love and despair are woven into the colorful sounds of the Blues. Things and events in our life always have multiple meanings and multiple emotional responses and so do the Blues. The 7th International Conference on Design and Emotion calls for rich discourse on a full spectrum of complex emotional experiences and their implications to Design. During the conference, you will also have opportunities for emotional experiences with the Chicago Blues.

Conference Organizers

Conference Chair: Judith Gregory

Organizing Committee Chair: Keiichi Sato

Program Committee Chair: Pieter Desmet

www.id.iit.edu E-mail: de2010@id.iit.edu http://www.id.iit.edu/de2010/ http://www.designandemotion.org/ Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, 350 N. LaSalle Street, Chicago, Illinois 60654 USA

The workshop features insight into Psycho-Aesthetics, the RKS philosophy and framework for creating emotional connections which will be featured in the upcoming book by Deepa Prahalad and RKS founder and CEO Ravi Sawhney entitled “Predictable Magic” and published by Wharton School Publishing.

Interaction10 is the third annual conference hosted by the Interaction Design Association (IxDA). Each year, IxDA aims to gather the interaction design community to connect, educate, and inspire each other.

Interaction designers and businesses today have to respond to the rising aspirations of people. The diversity of users has made the design of interaction strategy far more complex. “Most corporations are now pursuing customers characterized by vastly different economic conditions, requiring them to look beyond traditional strategic frameworks,” explained Deepa Prahalad, co-author of Predictable Magic. “It’s is now widely understood that users engage interactively for emotional reasons and adopt designs based on rich and fulfilling experiences, yet few companies look at emotion explicitly as a starting point for strategy and design.”

“With Psycho-Aesthetics, it’s possible to systematically understand the emotional reactions of consumers to products, services, and interactive experiences,” says Harnish Jani, RKS Lead Strategist and Researcher. “This understanding creates actionable insight and more effective collaboration amongst cross-functional teams.”

Participants who seek to learn better ways to communicate interaction design proposals with executives and non-designers are especially encouraged to attend. “We’ll be using case studies, the framework from the upcoming book, and hands-on use of Psycho-Aesthetics tools to immerse attendees into this method for developing successful interaction strategy,” says Prahalad.
Workshop attendees will:

• Understand how to use Psycho-Aesthetics Mapping to identify design features that will allow them to emotionally connect with their stakeholders
• Mitigate risk by understanding their users and setting appropriate design priorities
• Learn, with fresh cases, how companies from Fortune 500 to start-ups have used design to create sustained organic growth
• Learn to frame the user experience through the Hero’s Journey for different interactions

If you’re interested in learning how to design interactions that make the kind of emotional connections that create business success, visit the Interaction10 website to signup.

download RKS press release (PDF)

As we age our nostalgic yearnings grow, making us more receptive to advertisers and marketers use of what researchers call “a longing for positive memories from the past.”  In addition to time’s arrow, this desire for nostalgia is further intensified by society’s present circumstance of receding predictability and opportunity.

While science is still struggling to unravel the neuro-dynamics of nostalgia, studies have identified some nostalgic cues that can be exploited and how images and sounds from the past can create favorable attitudes about products.

Despite being obvious, this strategy taps into something fundamental about the human mind and consciousness. Every time we remember a past event it not only evokes the earlier memory, but can re-cast the past into a more pleasing “remembered” version.  Memory, thinking and feeling are an active, shaping process.

Music, Cars, Movies Live On

The music, cars and movies you identified with when you were young stick with you throughout your life.  Take music, recordings that were released when we were teenagers or young adults, are locked into our memories forever, to release a flood of vivid memories and emotions when replayed, especially in ads.  For example, people who were 23 in 1964, when the Beatles appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” will turn 70 this year, are a prime target for nostalgic marketing appeals.

For marketers, the key is finding the right music and images, which do not even need to directly relate to their products, as long as warm feelings are stirred up.  It is the emotion generated from that good feeling that influences people’s evaluation of the advertised offer.  Recollection provides context and context impacts on how we evaluate things.

Moreover, nostalgia can make us feel that not so much time has passed between then and now, making us feel young(er) again and that we still have a long ways to go and have the time to make it “there.”  Nostalgia telescopes time and brings it more under our emotional orchestration.

Notaligic Case in Point -Valentine’s Day

Nostalgia becomes especially potent during holidays, like Valentine’s Day, due to their powerful call to summon up and renew bonds.  Hope is the base coin of holidays, a time of ritual, which tends to reduce cognitive complexity through one’s participation in stylized and oft-repeated enactments.  Through ritual, we play a mental trick on ourselves; if the ritual comes off well then we feel life will be good.

The ritual function of Valentine’s Day is similar to all rituals – to make up for the past and to reaffirm the past.  To show that despite the press of daily routine and slights encountered, love endures, just as it was when two hearts first met.  Most of the time we can be couch potatoes in soiled sweat-suits, but today is different, today is “romance,” a time to symbolically communicate that what we felt and did “then” still lives and will endure.

There is talk of “remember when” (also a song when Boomers were teens).  There are flowers, signifying the bloom of Spring, renewal (and the olfactory sense is primitively / directly tied to memory).  If allowance allows, perhaps a small diamond might appear (itself a sign of indestructibility).

The sounds, smells, and other accoutrements of Valentine’s Day all function in the service of three sentiments that make up the holy trinity of ritual: There is a shared past.  There is continuity.  There is future.  For us!

Marketing Take-Away

In today’s environment of a perceived diminished future, playing up experiences that engender hope may be a good strategy that produces a mature outcome.  A nostalgic approach might just help people see a clearer vision of what is and what is not possible.  And, that’s not puppy love by any means.

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About Dr. Bob Deutsch

From contributing to Military Review magazine (“The Droning of Strategic Communication and Public Diplomacy” (Sept/Oct 2009) to portraying a college professor in a McDonald’s commercial, cognitive anthropologist Dr. Bob Deutsch (founder of the consulting firm, Brain Sells (www.Brain-Sells.com), Boston, MA), breaks the mold.

Bob has worked in the primeval forest, as well as on Pennsylvania and Madison Avenues.  His focus, since the mid-’70s, when he was living with pre-literate tribes and chimpanzees, has been to understand how leading ideas take hold in a culture. Since opening Brain Sells in 1990, he has been applying this understanding to how people attach to products, persons and performances.  He is fond of saying, “Reasoned judgment about attributes is not the issue.  The brain evolved to act, NOT to think.”