A sales promotion idea

We've got a 300g jar of Nescafe in the cupboard. It's nearly empty and it causes me real existential pain to try and get a heaped spoonful of coffee from the bottom of the jar because our standard length Ikea tea spoons are just too short. So, Nescafe: why not give away a long handled tea spoon with your big 300g jars? An ice cream spoon would probably do the trick. They have long handles to get the last bits out of your knicker bocker glory (what a great name for a dessert).

You read it here first...

A rather weak pun

New Squids on the Blog

(sorry, I couldn't resist it)

At your service, Sir...

Whilst I was cogitating over a piece of cake this morning, an email dropped into my inbox. This happens from time to time, usually its something to do with work but every so often it's someone trying to sell me something. In this particular case, good old Apple - evidently not happy that they're getting enough custom from me already.

But I suppose they know how this works. People who already buy Apple stuff tend to have a loyalty towards them. These customers fall into two categories:

The most 'hardcore' are The Apple Worshipers. A rather geeky bunch, they're the sort that cheer and applaud and wolf-whistle at Apple's product launch keynotes and would rather like it if they put Steve Job's bottom on a postage stamp just so they could lick it every day, were it not for the fact that putting something in an envelope and giving it to a person to deliver is so passé is this age of technological marvel.

The second category contains those who just believe there are greater and lesser degrees of crap. Windows PCs are crap, Macs are slightly less crap. Oh and they look prettier too... but what's really wrong with a biro anyway?

I guess this email was targeted at the biro contingent. It's primary message being that rather than tapping keys and clicky clicky-ing on the Apple online store, then waiting for the People's Post Office with a big parcel, one could actually visit a genuine bona-fide Apple store, inhabited by real human beings, and stocked with shiny things to buy.

At this point, allow me to quote from the aforementioned email:

We're here to help. Introducing the in-store Concierge, just in time for the holiday season. The Concierge (in the blue shirt) is your guide to finding anything in the Apple Retail Store. If you need any help, just ask and they'll point you in the right direction.

The Concierge! Well I must say I'm glad i found that one out. To think I was going to go and ask an ordinary shop assistant to help me find whatever elusive piece of technical gubbins I was after. Evidently your average common or garden Apple shop assistant isn't capable of such superior service - they must only take the very highest calibre Sixth former/Media Studies Student/2 Star McDonalds Employee and give them a whole extra half hour of training before they can don the exclusive Blue Shirt of a Concierge.

But then, Apple have a history of this. Let's take a completely hypothetical situation: Computer broken? No whirring? No clicky clicky? No amount of swearing or death threats seem to fix it? What you need is some kind of technical support person... or in Apple's parlance, a Genius.

Take it to the Apple Store and find the Apple Genius - that spotty scouser they pay minimum wage to stand there and spout technical mumbo jumbo at you. He's often found, apparently at the 'Genius Bar'. Well, either there or at the Frog and Tadpole Bar, or outside having a fag and scratching his arse. When he's eventually located he will give your machine a cursory glance and say something which is eventually decipherable as "It's %$@&ed mate, buy a new one."

At this point I presume I'm supposed to find my Concierge, to tell me what I need to buy and where to find it. They are apparently the only employee on the premises with this secret magic information.

What the ordinary shop assistants are doing throughout all this, god knows. Maybe they've buggered off to get a job where they wont live in constant fear of getting some stupid job title slapped upon them.

Which brings me neatly around to the question - is that their actual job title? Is is written in their passport?
Occupation: Genius

Not even Einstein had it that good. It almost tempts me to go and work for Apple.

Now I'm not accusing Apple of being the only company in the world to try and fob us off with these ridiculously unconvincing attempts at customer service, but they are one of the few who give them a silly name too. But i suppose it gives me something to laugh at.

Genius? Genie Arse more like.

a shameless plug

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a design problem

The traditional toilet is a classic of design functionality. Design tutors the world over have doubtless spent many a happy moment expounding the simplicity of its design while at the same time marveling at its embodiment of the Bauhaus principle of form following function. Indeed, Walter Gropius is rumoured to have included prunes with every meal during his later years, not only to aid his peristaltic action but also to give him reason to visit one of the true monuments to his life's teachings: the toilet bowl. It cannot be emphasised enough that if you had designed the classic toilet potty you could have retired there and then, content that you had reached the zenith of your intellectual and creative abilities and would never have to worry about earning money again.

And then someone had to go and mention that we use too much water when we flush the toilet.

Now, call me a cynic if you like but we live on an island that has been deluged by floods these past few years. The Saudis can extract water from the sea, desalinate it and drink it without any problem. We, a so called advanced country, leaders of the Industrial Revolution, surrounded by water and besieged by Biblical rains 10 months of the year, can only do what we are becoming world famous for and create an inferior version of something that already performed faultlessly. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the modern water saving toilet.

On the face of it, the water saving toilet is an improvement on the classic design. It serves the same function but spares the Earth's most abundant resource. But is it really an improvement? Let us consider another simple and timeless piece of design: the snooker table. What could be simpler? A flat surface, 6 pockets for the balls to fall down. Marvelous. Imagine if someone decided to improve the humble snooker table by redesigning the pockets. Now, instead of the ball dropping down into the pocket and disappearing, the ball drops onto a small shelf where it sits until you manually remove it or poke it into the hole with a brush. Imagine further, if you will, that snooker balls have a soft brown outer coating and that the shelf that they land upon in this 'new and improved' snooker table is made of white porcelain. Suddenly the act of potting the brown has resulted in you having to perform two further operations: removing it from the shelf and cleaning up any residue it almost certainly left behind.

Now come with me if you will to a world beneath the sea. Here you will never see fish swimming up to the underwater flora and sniffing it. There are two reasons for this: fish don't have nostrils and you can't smell anything under water. That's right, you can't smell anything. However foul. Deposit it beneath water and you are spared the olfactory distress. This was another feature of the classic toilet design. Pretty much 99% of deposits ended up beneath the water line. Introduce a stopping off point on this journey to the North Sea and you lose this benefit.

I trust nobody needs pictures to understand these design flaws...

Courage and creativity part II

‘Courage, also known as bravery and fortitude, is the ability to confront fear, pain, danger, uncertainty or intimidation.’
Wikipedia

There’s one word that really stands out for me in the Wikipedia definition of courage: uncertainty. In business, as in most aspects of life, we are expected to make the right choice, do the right thing, behave the right way. The flaw in this thinking is that it assumes there is a right way and a wrong way and nothing in between. Decision making is not always so clear cut. Often there may be several possibilities where the outcome isn’t certain either way, but the potential for moving beyond the status quo justifies the risk.

What is required is less judgement and more consideration of possibilities. Unfortunately creativity is deemed the preserve of people with long hair and Bench T-shirts, not the bed fellow of enhancing the bottom line. How do you introduce a culture of creative thinking into a company? I’ll ponder that one and get back to you. There are companies who value creativity and courage, to the point where they employ expensive business strategists and futurologists to do what they could be doing themselves. If only they were brave enough.

Courage can be defined as the ability to confront uncertainty. Creativity thrives on the uncertainty of an outcome to generate new ideas. Therefore, it can be said that creativity incites courage. Or put another way, creativity encourages people to be brave.

What are we teaching our kids?

I'm going to my first school parent's evening tonight. Nothing unusual in that except my kids don't start school till next year. So why bother? Well, the school invited mrs pigs & bees and myself along to meet the teachers and ask any questions we might have. This is a lot different to how it was in my day when you presented yourself before the headmaster to receive your school tie and a pep talk on what was expected of you. You're 4 years old, you have responsibilities now. But have things really changed that much? Getting 15 GCSEs at A * grade is easier than getting to £32,000 on 'Who Wants to be a Millionaire?', everyone has a degree in 'Media Studies' or 'Women's Studies' or 'The Study of Studying' yet once they start work people behave the same way they behaved 50 years ago. So what are we teaching them? Or more importantly, what are people learning?

Edward de Bono has spent his life promoting the need to teach people how to think. No, not people who have had an axe stuck in their head and need to relearn the basics. You. Me. Everyone. His argument is that schools don't teach kids how to think yet with a few hours tuition people can really unleash their potential creativity. Ah, but I'm not creative, I hear you say. Well, actually you are. You may not be a Van Gogh or Da Vinci but creativity isn't something bestowed upon the chosen few, like a hump on the back, it's a skill that can be learned just like mathematics and reading and writing. Check out Dr Ed's website for more info: http://www.edwdebono.com

This got me thinking to what else we might never have been taught at school. Now, if there's one thing that anyone in this crazy business needs it's a firm belief that they've got a set of stones on them like a pair of granite space hoppers. (Yes, especially the women.) Yessiree, when it comes to courage creatives are kicking the Army Rangers out of the way. We know no fear. We laugh in the face of failure, sat here in our world of comfy chairs and marker pens that smell like Bakewell Tart. Unlike the people we work for. Clients, we sometimes feel, are bereft of even the smallest plums. A distant cousin to the jelly fish, as my art teacher at school used to say. But can we really be that different? We are all trying to do well. All worried about paying the mortgage.

Is courage something that you can learn? I don't have the answer but welcome comments.