Our Core77 article Shopping for Innovation: What you need to know before hiring a design firm is finally up – and nicely blogged by Bruce Nussbaum at BusinessWeek.com (among others).

Tags: bruce nussbaum, BusinessWeek, core77, design, innovation, Niti Bhan, shopping for innovation

Full story
Mr. Incredible and Elmo said they were taken into custody at gunpoint and driven in handcuffs by police car to the front of the Kodak Theatre. There they claim they were paraded on the Hollywood Walk of Fame before shocked tourists and other boulevard impersonators.
“We were leaving to get something to eat. We had our heads off and were walking about a block away to our car when they pulled up,” said Barry Stockton, 42, who was dressed as Mr. Incredible, wearing a red superhero costume topped with a huge, cartoonish head.
Donn Harper, 45, said he complied, tossing his bug-eyed, furry red Elmo costume head to the ground. “They jumped out of their car with guns drawn. With all of the crime in Los Angeles they pick on us?”
Stockton, of Ontario (San Bernardino County), and Harper, of Los Angeles, were charged with misdemeanor aggressive begging along with the “Scream” character, Bill Stevens, 54, of Hollywood. Police said the three were among those who had been warned that authorities were preparing to respond to growing complaints from boulevard visitors and merchants about the Tinseltown impersonators.
Some tourists have contended that they were harassed for failing to pay the costumed characters for posing for photos with them in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and the nearby Kodak Theatre. Some merchants have grumbled that the impersonators were scaring customers with menacing costumes, fake weapons and props such as phony snakes.
Los Angeles Police Officer Michael Shea said the impersonators — who make their own costumes or buy what they say are licensed suits on eBay — were summoned to a meeting last month at the Hollywood and Highland shopping center and warned that enforcement of solicitation and harassment laws was coming. Sixty-eight of them, many in costume, showed up.
Shea said Mr. Incredible and Elmo were brought back to the boulevard so others could see they had been busted. “Make no mistake about it — I wanted the characters to know what we’re doing,”

Tags: arrest, begging, busted, characters, elmo, hollywood, posing, tinseltown

One of my favorite things to track down, foodwise, on a return trip to Canada, are milk drinks that are flavored like chocolate bars. They are amazing; they capture the exact taste of a specific chocolate bar in a completely different form factor. From a solid to a liquid, with the same mix of tastes. Last trip we tried the Rolo version.

It was as incredible as every other one I’ve tried. It tasted like a Rolo, but it was a liquid. I can’t stop repeating the superlatives and proclaiming the sensorial wonder of it all, sorry.

So it was cool to see that here in the US we’ve got a similar product available now.

Milky Way and Three Musketeers. We bought both but have only tried the Milky Way. It’s good, but not stunning. It has the flavor components of Milky Way, but they don’t replicate the bar experience.

I am hopeful to see this category of product here in the US, though. Maybe we’ll get more of ‘em, especially if they can figure out how to get it right.

Tags: beverage, Canada, candy, chocolate, chocolate bar, food, grocery, milk, milky way, rolo

The Sneeze fantasizes, only to be sadly disappointed, about the scope of the new Mega M&Ms.

Tags: candy, disappointment, m&m, mega, promise, size, supersize

Last month we stayed in Calgary for a few days to attend the Calgary International Film Festival. We stayed at the 5, a newly remodeled hotel that used to be the Hawthorn. Most info about hotels in downtown Calgary referenced the Hawthorn, and we found the website through a redirect. The website seemed pretty nice.

Kinda cool design, palette, nifty logo. Seemed like they were doing the JetBlue/IKEA thing of taking a commodity and adding design and more thoughtfulness to the overall experience, and finding a way to charge less for it. There were photos of the rooms (not currently available on the updated website), descriptions of all the amenities (free WiFi, breakfast), and the price was good. We decided to stay there.

When we booked our shuttle from the Calgary airport, the woman behind the counter growled in an intense Scottish brogue “Yeah, that used to the Hawthorn, and before that the Prince Rupert. I was finally getting used to calling it the Hawthorn and they changed the name. What a stupid name!”

The shuttle drops us off around the corner from the front door (which is not exactly door-to-door service that we paid for, but that’s a complaint for elsewhere). It doesn’t look like it’s the Five.

It looks like the Hawthorn.

The front door, at least, is a little more clear what hotel we’re at.

Unless you happen to look up. Serious naming/branding confusion!

A few days later I find a card in the lobby. The card has the new brand scheme and reads, in part “Over the coming months, Hawthorn Hotel & Suites will transform into 5 Calgary Downtown Suites.” Okay, so this is an ongoing project. But the entire experience is confusing; it doesn’t suggest transition, it is just a mishmash of radically different brands. This card was sorta hidden; one had to be poking around to stumble across it. It’s the only place they acknowledge the transition; the rest of the time the hotel presents all this as if it’s normal. But really, it was just odd.

The room number says we’re at the Hawthorn.

But the apples say we’re at the five. Apples? They took the trouble to order brand stickers for apples, but they couldn’t change the door numbers? I was really surprised.

Finally, I was a total sucker for the website branding, like I said, expecting JetBlue. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was like when we’d visit a distant great aunt in an apartment building in Winnipeg in the 70s. It was seriously dated, and not well-kept.

The kitchen featured a stove from the Mesozoic era.

And really cheesy cupboards.

An access panel in the bathroom was old, dirty, and loose.

Not to mention this disgusting vent in the bathroom.

The living room was typical of the “suite” – outdated, poorly maintained. I think we found some remnants of painter’s tape from whatever remodeling they had done. Who knows how long it had been there.

Anyway, it worked out fine (although their free breakfast was disgusting and they never had enough staff or food to handle the traffic flow even on a weekday), but I was struck by how different the hotel experience was from what the branding had led me to believe – or what I had let myself believe based on that.

Tags: 5, 5 calgary, branding, calgary, downtown, expectation management, hawthorn, hospitality, hotel, naming, sucker, tourism, travel

From Travel Agent Central

Air Canada will no longer offer customers free pillows. Instead, for a $2 charge, the carrier will offer customers a so-called ‘comfort zone’ kit that includes an inflatable plastic pillow and polyester blanket, according to media sources in Canada. Apparently, the kit is a pouch with pillow case, blanket and an instruction card on blowing up the pouch into a pillow.

I can’t help thinking of a prescient series of parody radio ads from the 70s somewhere in Southern Ontario (Hamilton? Toronto?) for Air Harold, where everything, including seatbelts, were extra.

This is such a messed up industry.

Tags: air canada, air travel, airlines, blanket, economy, freebies, pillow, service

Grant McCracken offers up a provocative post entitled Brand theatre and the experiential brand, with some rules to create effective storytelling experiences

1. First, discover [and] obey the local culture. Use its favorite media.
2. Second, proceed as if less is more. Engage their detective work.
3. Third, invite completion. In this case, invite them to tell more stories.
4. Fourth, keep a small footprint (fewer reps better than more).
5. Fifth, practice brand murmur (aka brand diffidence). Don’t go crashing in there.
6. Sixth, engage theatrical resources. In a world saturated with mediated communications, there’s nothing quite like the real thing.) (Besides, we’re Elizabethans, too).

Tags: brand, experiences, Grant McCracken, marketing, stories, story, storytelling

Simon Roberts shuts down Ideas Bazaar, his small UK user research consultancy. He’s off to a job with Intel, no doubt to do amazing things. Interesting to read the above-linked entry (for me, at least) because it describes life in a situation not unlike my own, a very small consulting business. Lots of detail in the long post, including lessons learned (headlines only here):

• That a good accountant is great asset.
  
• Working with other small business usually works really well.
  
• That in this type of business you have to give some stuff away.
  
• That there is a lots of totally crap market, strategic, creative or whatever sort of research out there and loads of companies seem content to put up with it.
  
• That you don’t have to have to have a anthropology degree (or even a social science background) to be an ‘ethnographer’ or even an ‘anthropologist’ anymore.
  
• That you can say “no” to companies that you don’t want to work with if you don’t like what they stand for or what they do.
  
• That these sort of businesses don’t scale very easily
  
• That if you run a blog you should be more outspoken, more often and put more “editorial” or opinion on it.

The latest search engine queries that led people to this blog.

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Tags: blogging, index, query, search engine, searching

This ad from Sonos features Mieko Kusano, director of product management, and Wai-Loong Lim, of Y Studios, their designer. Certainly, as we understand design as a differentiator, it gets talked about in corporate marketing, but the appearance of the actual designer is often limited to someone like Jerry Hirschberg in a Nissan ad. Here we’ve got the consultant with their own brand being interviewed about the product and about design. This is a designer who’s demonstrated value to his clients and who is appreciated for it! (Disclosure: Wai is a former colleague)

Tags: advertising, design, differentiation, sonos, wai loong lim, y studios

WSJ.com has a story [via Techdirt] about all the different services where people can exchange or “flip” their products, in essence you buy something and then resell it, so you’re only owning it for a short time for a small cost. This it the Netflix model (packaged differently). I guess that’s the gold standard now, Netflix-for-X.

But one model they mention is eBay – where the exchange is between individuals, rather than a controlled top-down facilitated exchange via a Netflix. As Dirk pointed out in email, there’s a too-much-stuff semi-conservation thing at root here as well, we can’t deal with any more stuff. That led me to consider a few other services that are out there as part of the “access-not-ownership” trend.

Freecycle is a grassroots organization that sets up local email groups (I run the Coastside group where I live) for people to get rid of stuff they’d otherwise throw out by offering it free (and only free) to somebody nearby. We got rid of an old shed yesterday – someone came and disassembled it and hauled it away. For free. I got service for free; they got a shed for free.

BookCrossing is all about sharing free books.

I think these peer-to-peer models for exchange of extra stuff (whether free, or commercial, like eBay) are equally valid and hold great potential. Instead of trying to be the next Netflix, maybe more companies should try to be the next Napster?!

Tags: acess, consumerism, freecycle, model, ownership, rental

Wonderfully passionate blog entry about making that all-important connection with another person in a user-research setting. This would be great fodder for the workshop I’m leading at EPIC next month.

Last week, after a long long time I had a chance to conduct user interviews again. I loved any minute of it. There is nothing more rewarding (for me) than spending two hours with people I never met before (and probably I will never meet again) trying to understand the world from their point of view.

In those two hours and from the first few seconds, my attention is totally focused on the other person. I observe how they enter the room, how they look at me, and how they shake my hand; I need to understand anything I can about their personality, their level of comfort, and their communication style to be able to be in synch with them. The entire session is a dance, where I ask and listen, probe and observe, with the only purpose of gaining insight in somebody else perceptions, thoughts, and expectations. It’s always a fascinating journey.

….

But I believe that the magic of understanding another person is not just a technical issue. It requires to suspend for a moment our ego-centered way to interpret the world and open up to a different interpretation. In a way, it’s about love.

…

There is something wonderful in experiencing somebody else’s world. You understanding expands, you suddenly see something you could not see before. And there is no going back.

Tags: antonella pavese, connection, ethnographic, ethnography, fieldwork, interactivity, interpersonal, relationships, social, sociality, user research

Kraft Food Ingredients has designed Pan Drippings Flavors, a “new line of home-style flavorings that embodies the aromatic, mouthwatering flavor of meat pan drippings.”

Tags: drippings, flavors, food technology, gross, kraft, pan drippings

There are some amazingly arcane companies out there, like Sethness Caramel Color

In 1880, a 25 year old self-educated immigrant named Charles O. Sethness started a flavor and syrup business in Chicago, Illinois. And from this humble beginning grew the world’s largest and most respected manufacturer of caramel color.

Tags: caramel, color, company, food, ingredient, manufacturer, sethness

[via Pasta and Vinegar]. Technology is clearly the mother of invention here. What else can we customize? How’s about mouthgards!

Tags: design, gumshield, innovation, invention, mouthguard, printing