Ged Carroll

Category: ideas | 想法 | 생각 | 考える

Ideas were at the at the heart of why I started this blog. One of the first posts that I wrote there being a sweet spot in the complexity of products based on the ideas of Dan Greer. I wrote about the first online election fought by Howard Dean, which now looks like a precursor to the Obama and Trump presidential bids.

I articulated a belief I still have in the benefits of USB thumb drives as the Thumb Drive Gospel. The odd rant about IT, a reflection on the power of loose social networks, thoughts on internet freedom – an idea that that I have come back to touch on numerous times over the years as the online environment has changed.

Many of the ideas that I discussed came from books like Kim and Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy.

I was able to provide an insider perspective on Brad Garlinghouse’s infamous Peanut Butter-gate debacle. It says a lot about the lack of leadership that Garlinghouse didn’t get fired for what was a power play. Garlinghouse has gone on to become CEO of Ripple.

I built on initial thoughts by Stephen Davies on the intersection between online and public relations with a particular focus on definition to try and come up with unifying ideas.

Or why thought leadership is a less useful idea than demonstrating authority of a particular subject.

I touched on various retailing ideas including the massive expansion in private label products with grades of ‘premiumness’.

I’ve also spent a good deal of time thinking about the role of technology to separate us from the hoi polloi. But this was about active choice rather than an algorithmic filter bubble.

 

  • #theinternetisdying

    Perhaps due to the febrile nature of the times we live in, the tech-savvy community seems to have become aware of various trends, leading them to conclude that #theinternetisdying. This term itself is imprecise. The internet is a series of abstractions, ranging from physical infrastructure to software and functions upon which communication, messaging, video streaming, app data, transactions, and web pages operate.

    Bovine metaverse

    So technically, #theinternetisdying is actually #thewebisdying.

    So why now?

    I believe the most intriguing question regarding #theinternetisdying is this: why now? What has occurred is more about internet users awakening from their ‘comfort zone’ and abruptly realising how rapidly things have evolved? I believe that a number of inciting incidents are the cause of this sudden wakefulness:

    • Google as regressive ‘tax’ rather than marketing channel exposed.
    • Continued deterioration of Google web search.
    • Link rot.
    • Online media businesses look to make money by selling proprietary and user-generated content to LLMs as a revenue stream.
    • Realisation that a lot of web content is adapted or created using LLMs. The non-English web has been expanded by machine translation of English language content. Secondly, LLMs have been used to create a lot of good enough content in English for publications like Sports Illustrated.

    The reality

    In reality, what’s happened to the web as netizens knew it has happened over time. To use a vintage web phenomenon as an analogy. It’s like the vintage Joe Cartoon interactive Adobe Flash animation Frog in a Blender from the late 1990s.

    A cartoon frog sits in a blender and admonishes the viewer, claiming that they wouldn’t dare to to blend him. The blender has settings from 1 to 10. 1 is mildly agitated water, 10 is instant blended frog. Silicon Valley has slowly upped the power of the blender and netizens realise that things have got weird.

    Google tax bias

    Google search has been on the shit list of websites as engineering documents from inside Google were leaked. They revealed some aspects about how search actually worked that Google had been denying for decades. A few of the key findings were:

    • Google search learns from ‘external devices’, so things like Chromecast dongles. Data from the Chrome browser is used in a similar manner, despite Google repeatedly claiming that it wasn’t in the past.
    • Google values quality, relevant sites, BUT, that value is caveated by restrictions it puts on small quality sites and the benefits it provides to large platforms detailed below.
    • Popular sites receive higher search levels through the ‘Navboost’ system. This reinforces platforms and established sites. Smaller sites would need to spend proportionately more on Google advertising to match their larger competitors traffic funnel. This designed imbalance is the digital equivalent of John Pierpoint Morgan’s nefarious involvement in railroad transportation, or the Vanderbilt and Rockefeller agreement on oil transport in the 19th century, which drove much of the subsequent anti-trust regulation in the US – this is the Google tax. It’s a regressive tax that is levied on smaller businesses and the ‘free web’.
    • It is deliberately set up to hold back small sites, many of whom have seen their traffic drop by up to 91 percent. This adversely affects sights that might have deep domain knowledge, specialist retailers and netizens who host personal sites and blogs like this one.

    Google has even lied in court and in parliaments to hide these facts. Disclosure of these details have rippled through the search engine marketing industry and strongly discouraged numerous web businesses once the truth came out – for a lot of businesses #theinternetisdying.

    For Google the timing couldn’t be worse:

    • It is seen to have dropped the ball on LLMs, despite having developed most of the key technology powering the likes of OpenAI and Anthrophic.
    • Google’s local business advertising for the likes of coffee shops or nail clinics have suffered due to the cost-of-living crisis post-COVID and consumer behaviour changes in various countries.
    • Traditional Google search advertisements for e-commerce are being rapidly eroded by retail media. That is ‘search style’ adverts on the likes of Amazon, Tesco and eBay.

    Google is perceived as having set itself up as the ‘start page’ to the open web, while all the time sticking the proverbial knife in all of which adds an inevitability of the feeling of #theinternetisdying.

    Decline of Google search

    Back in June 2022, The Atlantic complained about the declining utility of Google. This echoed similar themes on discussions that had happened earlier in the year on Hacker News and Reddit. The consensus was that they searched Reddit, StackOverflow, Hacker News or StackExchange as it provided a richer, more relevant base of search results.

    I have been using social bookmarking service Pinboard and photo service flickr for search for similar reasons for the past few decades.

    Pinboard allows me to search 65,000+ web pages that I have found over that time for something that might be useful. My act of saving the page link in pinboard allowed me to categorise the page saved and implied a certain ‘good enough’ quality to it. I also get to search the public links of other netizens that do a similar thing. Pinboard is insufficiently popular to reward spammers, so the quality quotient is relatively high. Reddit offers a more expansive corpus of links and information, without the same level of quality control.

    The reason why Google’s web search has degraded has its roots in Google’s pivot to mobile two decades ago. Google abandoned key areas of interest to web users:

    • Boolean search terms, which would have been harder to do on early mobile devices.
    • Blog search because it was non-mobile content.
    • Google News and RSS, in favour of nascent mobile social platforms that it lost out to.

    And the list goes on, I am less sure why it has suddenly surfaced into the public consciousness now?

    Link rot

    A month or so go my friend Matt in his newsletter recommended a website that allowed you to search Google to find out the oldest mention of a term. So I put my own name in, and nothing came up prior to 2004.

    DECAY

    That meant all records of my early agency work had been expunged from the web. Work that included big brands:

    • BHP-Billiton
    • Ericsson
    • MTV Networks
    • Palm
    • Sony
    • Verizon

    Alongside startup brands that fizzled out almost as quickly as they had started. Maybe there is still some traces locked somewhere in behind LexisNexis or Haymarket Media paywalled databases.

    Author and veteran member of the digerati Cory Doctorow wrote about link rot this year, partly prompted by research from the Pew Research Center. Pew found that 38 percent of content surveyed disappeared over a ten-year period.

    Link Rot google trends

    But link rot isn’t a new concern. Interest in link rot seems to have peaked 20 years ago.

    google books ngram

    Link rot is a subset of a wider concern called bit rot, where digital media degrades over time, or can no longer be read due to issues with software file compatibility. Bit rot as an issue was explored in a series of short stories by Canadian author Douglas Coupland in a book of the same name back in 2016.

    Web of data to walled gardens

    Of all #internetisdying factors, this one surprised me as much as link rot. Closing of Twitter API access was considered to be a defining moment for #theinternetisdying. However it fails to acknowledge that the high point of the web of data was web 2.0 and the comparatively free access to APIs. Facebook with its closed wall by design set the standard for subsequent services like TikTok and Instagram. Like link rot, the awareness timeline feels a decade too late. The closure of Google Reader is an equally big impact back in 2013, stopping mainstream adoption of RSS in its tracks.

    LLMs

    Journalist Steven Levy has been chronicling Silicon Valley for decades. He wrote a few of my favourite non-fiction books including Insanely Great, Crypto and Hackers. In the summer of 2023, he wrote an article for Wired magazine: What OpenAI wants. This became a cover story for the September 2023 issue of the magazine under the header ‘Dear AI Overlords, Don’t Fuck This Up’. Less than a year later, the consensus from netizens seems to be that they already have.

    Dear AI overlords don’t mess it up

    Several things have happened, here are three of them:

    • Imitation became mainstreamed. OpenAI used a female voice that was apparently a copy of Scarlett Johansson’s voice due to Sam Altman’s infatuation with the premise of the Spike Jonze film Her. A Ukrainian YouTuber found her likeness being used as an avatar to sell Russian goods to Chinese consumers.
    • Misinformation had everything from the Pope wearing a designer down jacket and fake black supporters for presidential candidate Donald Trump.
    • Scott Galloway talked about ‘corporate ozempic’ where AI being good enough to reduce human tasks allowing for corporate headcounts to disappear. The CEO of Klarna freely admitted that they used AI to replace 700 employees in customer service roles. AdVon was used to write articles for SportsIllustrated driving anger and anxiety in readers and journalists.

    Automation has eaten blue collar roles for decades, but it has taken the automation of white collar roles to create the panic and sense that #theinternetisdying and AI is killing it.

    The Sky Is Falling In

    Chief Vitalstatistix

    As a child I fell in love the Asterix The Gaul books. In them was the Gaulish village chief Vitalstatistix – who is portrayed as mostly reasonable, well-informed, fearless, (comparatively) even-tempered and unambitious. Vitalstatistix was known for his irrational fear that the sky may fall on his head tomorrow. I was thinking about Vitalstatistix as I wrote this post on #theinternetisdying.

    Back in the late 2000s, Dr Ira Wolfe wrote a book that discussed how online behaviour and Google services were creating irreparable damage in the workplace and beyond. His book was merely the latest in a series of panics about societal destruction:

    Back in March 1997, Wired magazine had their own version of the #theinternetisdying, they believed that web browsing (or web surfing as it was termed back then) was about to be killed off by ‘push technology‘. This episode of The Computer Chronicles gives a good overview of push technology at the time.

    You may already be using push technology without realising it, such as receiving mobile notifications for breaking news or localised weather alerts.

    In conclusion, #theinternetisdying? really?

    Previous technological shifts introduced new challenges, but we adapted and progressed. There’s no reason to think the current ‘#theinternetisdying’ phase is any different from those before. Perhaps in 15 years, I’ll be writing about how people feel the ‘metaverse’ has become closed or some other futuristic concern.

    Posts on related content can be found here.

    More information

    The Internet as You Know It Is Dying | Fabricated Knowledge

    Rot-Com bubble | Ed Zitron

    Pluralistic: Linkrot (21 May 2024)

    5 Reveals From Google’s Leaked Search Docs | AdWeek

    When Online Content Disappears | Pew Research Center

    The Internet: Now you see it, now you don’t | Daniel Tynan

    The Open Secret of Google Search | The Atlantic

    Is Google Dying? | Hacker News

    Geeks, Geezers, and Googlization: How to Manage the Unprecedented Convergence of the Wired, the Tired, and Technology in the Workplace by Dr Ira S Wolfe

    The Trick To Understanding New Media: Nobody’s In Charge | Yahoo! Finance

    Dead tools | renaissance chambara

    Media Companies Are Making a Huge Mistake With AI – The Atlantic

    Meet AdVon, the AI-Powered Content Monster Infecting the Media Industry

    The Japanese knotweed of generative AI is strangling Facebook | Social Warming

    Google messed up Gemini launch, Sergey Brin says | CNBC

    Klarna AI assistant handles two-thirds of customer service chats in its first month | Klarna

    AI makes photos of fake Black Donald Trump supporters | Quartz

    Ukrainian YouTuber found her AI clone selling Russian goods on Chinese internet | Wenhao’s News Blog

    Google Mired in Controversy Over Gemini AI Chatbot Push – WSJ

    Corporate Ozempic | No mercy / no malice

  • Advertising awards

    I got a chance to judge the UK Young Lions advertising awards and Adforum’s PHNX awards. The Young Lions responded to a common brief with the solution viewed through their specialism:

    • A communications activation plan.
    • A creative concept.

    The standard of thinking was high, but I could also see the benefit of more agencies and brand teams tasking younger members of staff to enter the campaign. I was expected to having to wade through dozens and dozens of entries; there wasn’t that many.

    Adforum’s PHNX advertising awards attracted global entries and took a long time to go through the entries that I saw. I got to see a lot of good work and wanted to showcase some examples later.

    PHNX were more complex in nature compared to the UK Young Lions, with many more categories.

    Advertising awards mistakes.

    I saw a few unforced errors:

    • Category -spamming – award entries were submitted for categories that they weren’t appropriate for. You would see the same work turning up category-after-category with no relevance. You could see other judges becoming frustrated in the electronic chat function that ran alongside the entries.
    • Link the work tightly to the challenge that the client faces. You would be surprised how many entries failed to do this.
    • Have your entry in a language that the judges are likely to understand. You can only get so far with Google Lens when trying to tease out winning nuance of advertising awards.

    Advertising awards entries that caught my eye.

    There were a number of Adforum PHNX advertising awards entries that caught my eye and some entries that inspired me.

    Advertising for advertising

    A few years ago, LONDON Advertising (who I have freelanced for previously) ran an advertising campaign to demonstrate the power of advertising.

    LONDON Advertising campaign

    This was possible due to the cheaper media rates available early on during COVID-19 as brands paused spending.

    It’s a very unusual tactic outside of advertising festivals and trade publications. So it was interesting to see a Spanish agency submit a couple of films into the Adforum awards that purely showcased their craft capabilities for use on different aspects of advertising.

    It’s not Studio Ghibli, but still really well done by La Caseta. It was still surprising for me to see it entered for advertising awards.

    Inspiring content

    Grab Thailand

    Uber analogue Grab ran this advert in Thailand to promote its version of Uber Eats, showing how the app is on the side of the consumer in terms of pricing, choice and speed of delivery. It uses thai boxing as a metaphor and features Bella as the main protagonist. Bella is a much loved soap actress beloved in Thailand. Her coach in the corner is a highly regarded former thai boxer.

    Lux

    For me Lux beauty soap was a brand that I associated with my Granny in Ireland, who used to alternate using it alongside Oil of Olay soap.

    I was pleasantly surprised to find that Lux is still alive and well as a brand half-way around the world in Asia and Africa. Lux’s ‘change the angle’ campaign was a collaboration with female athletes to try and change the way they are portrayed in live sports coverage.

    Mistine

    Mistine is a Thai beauty brand founded in 1988. It became the go-to beauty brand in Thailand. The company sold its products via direct sales, wholesale, online, retail, and the export market. In recent years it had focused on expansion into China, but had lost touch with younger generations of Thai women. It was seen as a low-class, outdated brand. The brand team started with a campaign with a film of young generation focus group discussing on societal judgmental issues while having a make-up session. None of them chose Mistine as they were all judgmental to the brand name.The film signed off with an apologetic message to Mistine users and have been insulted by negative associations with the brand name “Sorry that my name is Mistine.”

    It’s a brave move to take that raw insight and build a campaign around it.

    That then drove a six-fold uptake in search volume and media impressions.

    Similar posts can be found here.

  • Collapsing the funnel

    I was prompted to write about collapsing the funnel as a trope that marketers and adtech salespeople tell each other after listening to Jon Evans Uncensored CMO podcast. Jon was interviewing Josh Feldman.

    NBC Universal TV set (3D)

    Josh Feldman

    Feldman is CMO at NBCUniversal’s advertising and partnerships business. He has been a long-time NBCUniversal marketer. Prior NBCUniversal, Feldman started at Turner Broadcasting, where he took on various roles including national and regional advertising sales roles. He managed client relationships for a range of TV channels including Adult Swim, Cartoon Network, TBS, TNT and TruTV. Feldman’s sales orientation partly explains his collapsing the funnel perspective.

    NBCUniversal

    Mr Feldman is no longer just selling 30 second TV spots at NBCUniversal. NBCUniversal is a plethora of media properties:

    • Live events such as BravoCon
    • Five theme parks
    • 1 billion reach across more than 150 countries
    • 200 networks
    • 350 digital properties

    Here’s the way the podcast broke down:

    1. 00:35 – Josh’s Career Story
    2. 02:50 – How does being creative help with sales
    3. 04:17 – B2B strategies that make NBCU successful
    4. 09:41 – NBCU’s iconic programming
    5. 11:05 – The secret to building strong client relationships
    6. 14:21 – Funnel marketing and the importance of end of funnel <—–
    7. 16:34 – The popularity of Bravo
    8. 17:46 – BravoCon
    9. 21:00 – The best brand activations at BravoCon
    10. 22:51 – How brands can work with talent
    11. 24:49 – Being a media partner for the Olympics
    12. 27:59 – Josh’s advice on creativity and landing your message
    13. 31:39 – Helping smaller brands

    Two aspects to collapsing the funnel

    Josh’s comment about collapsing the funnel was emblematic of two separate trends going on that he encapsulated in this one segment of the show.

    • The first is that performance marketers are waking up to the fact that brand matters.
    • The second trend is the fusion of sales and marketing functions in the business-to-business through account-based marketing or what used to be a sales support function now being lionised as a ‘strategic approach’.

    Brand matters

    A classic example of what happens if one focuses exclusively on performance marketing is the plateauing of growth that occurred in ASOS. The ASOS story is now often cited by marketing media mix experts as an example of what happens when brand building isn’t used to support performance marketing.

    In the noughties and 2010s ASOS was a purveyor of trendy clothing for young people. It started as a copycat brand over time became a competitor to Urban Outfitters and an Etsy-type platform for small vintage clothing and design boutiques.

    ASOS review

    ASOS took a performance marketing approach to growing its business. Over time it expanded to eventually ship to 197 countries, but 40 percent of its customer base was still in the UK.

    ASOS customers and orders over time

    Performance marketing drove the customer base, but didn’t drive a significant increase in the number of orders per customer over time.

    ASOS basket size

    When we look at the inflation adjusted average basket value, we see a steady decline each year, with a sharper drop from 2021 onwards.

    Performance marketing failed to increase basket size, and each customer added was less valuable than the last. Especially when one factors in the complexity of global logistics required for customer deliveries.

    This next bit is speculative, but the geographic expansion drove growth as performance marketing based growth in its established markets plateaued.

    The business went into reverse after 2020. The reasons for this reversal are likely to be multi-variant including:

    • Performance marketing plateau.
    • The bifurcation of the market. At the bottom end, Shein, Temu and TikTok commerce. At the top end luxury brand websites and secondary market platforms like StockX.
    • Culture. Like other online properties including Buzzfeed and Vice News, ASOS had a millennial user base that has been somewhat aged out.
    • The cost of living crisis due to post-COVID inflation.

    Let’s next think about advertising, in particular Les Binet’s explanation of how advertising really works. In this explanation summarises the conclusions of decades of Ehrensberg-Bass Institute research, alongside marketing science work by the likes of the IPA into a six line explanation.

    Advertising increases / maintains sales and / or margins

    By

    Slightly increasing the chance that people will choose your brand

    By

    Making the brand easy to think of and easy-to-buy

    And

    Creating positive feelings and associations

    Via

    Broad reaching ads that people find interesting and enjoyable

    And

    Targeted activations that they find relevant and useful

    Les Binet – How advertising REALLY works | YouTube

    ASOS failed to maintain sales and margins because they focused on targeted activations – that consumers found useful. But the utility seems to have changed over time.

    This happened despite ASOS using data science to optimise their marketing with a particular focus on geo-experimentation in performance marketing rather like trialing TV ads in different TV company regions, which marketers have done for the past 70+ years.

    This isn’t because Lilia and Clara are bad data scientists, indeed I think they are good marketers using data to inform their decisions. The problem was that the focus was nearly exclusively on performance marketing.

    ASOS are an example that has started to persuade performance marketers that brand advertising helps performance too.

    ABM

    Account based marketing is a strategic approach to business sales. It depends on account intelligence and analysis. This insight is used when an organisation considers and communicates with each prospect or customer account as markets of one.

    Target selection becomes important and the criteria is usually focused on the most profitable business.

    In existing accounts it is focused on upselling or cross-selling products and services to the customer. The main focus is alignment of marketing tactics with sales management. This moves the focus from individuals as targets to groups of people within an organisation.

    ABM isn’t about collapsing the funnel per se but about melding it and reshaping it in the service of the salesforce rather than short term and long term brand with sales.

    More marketing-related content here.

    More information

    The Josh Feldman podcast episode.

    ASOS Revenue and Usage Statistics (2024)

    ASOS-related coverage on Financial Times

  • Car screens and synthesisers

    The current debate over car screens / car as computer design reminded me a lot of the journey that synthesisers have gone through.

    Charging screen

    I went down this train of thought on car screens thanks to a LinkedIn post by Nic Roope, reacting to an article published in Car Design News in praise of push buttons.

    There is a view in car circles that the reliance on screens to mediate so many of the functions of a car can be a bad thing. I can understand it. For enthusiasts driving a car is still a very analogue experience including the haptics of direct steering connectivity and a manual gearbox.

    I would be remiss if I didn’t share the opinion of Doug DeMuro who argued the case for screens in terms of two reasons:

    • Costs. Buttons cost more money and there would be the associated connectors. Modern vehicles offer such a range of controls, that doing them in buttons rather than soft buttons and car screens would be cost and space prohibitive.
    • Technological momentum. DeMuro essentially articulates a position similar to Kevin Kelly’s concept of the technium in his book What Technology Wants. Kelly uses a biological metaphor of progress as an organism or Gaia type metaphor that keeps growing and moving at its own pace. While Kelly has been accused to techno-mysticism, we do know that the development of key technologies like television or the light bulb were happening at the same time in different parts of the world in isolation from each other – there had become a time when they were inevitable.

    the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us

    Kevin Kelly on the technetium in What Technology Wants

    Colin Chapman versus software engineers.

    DeMuro’s first point is based on the proposition that all this extra control in car screens is a good thing. Do we really need to have car interior mood lighting? And if we do, do we need to have colours that result in night blindness and make the car interior looks like a booth at a bottle service bar in Dubai?

    For some drivers, the answer will be no.

    Different car manufacturers have had different models that do very different things. One of the philosophies articulated most by car enthusiasts is that of Lotus cars founder Colin Chapman “simplify, and add lightness”.

    Chapman’s design ethos was very in-tune with the likes of mid-century thinkers like polymath Buckminster Fuller and those he influenced notably architect Sir Norman Foster.

    Chapman’s world view wasn’t perfect his vehicles were fragile and had quality issues, partly due to his daring use of new materials and techniques influenced by aerospace. It’s also a world away from the Tesla approach, where the vehicle can’t be started up without the screen even as a ‘limp mode’ function.

    Instead the Tesla pickup and car screens are infested with boondoggles including:

    • A video of a fireplace filled with burning logs
    • A game that allows you to break the windows of a virtual CyberTruck
    • Customisable horn sounds including celebrity voices
    • A pre-programmed light show

    Modern car economics.

    Car screens have advanced in tock-step with the move towards an electric car future. A technology transition at the best of times is difficult, but the car industry has other problems that will impact consumer views of vehicles.

    Consumer choice.

    In the 1970s cars cars seldom lasted over a decade, but due to improvements in corrosion treatment and car design that removed water traps the potential life of a car was extended. Given that classic cars are much less damaging to the environment. The average classic emits 563kg of CO2 per year, yet an average passenger car has a 6.8-tonne carbon footprint immediately after production. This means that a new car would need to be run for several years to achieve a similar climate ‘payback’ and older cars can be attractive for consumers, if they meet their needs reliably.

    Vehicle affordability.

    Over the time I have held a driving licence, the secondhand car market went from being the dumping ground for fleet sales to the Alice In Wonderland after effects of the lease agreements that drove new and nearly-new car sales. The financialisation of the car market isn’t without risk and has been considered a possible future risk in the way that consumer finance and home mortgages have been in the past.

    Yamaha DX7II-D

    So what do car touchscreens have to do with synthesisers?

    In order to answer that question, we need to go back in time. Massive steps forward in electronics had inspired research into different ways of creating sounds based on modulation techniques used in radio broadcast signals for decades. In the 1960s digital technology was also moving forward and provided a more stable base for FM synthesis. Stanford University scholars worked with Yamaha technologists to turn FM synthesis into a product.

    The first instrument that it appeared in was the New England Digital Synclavier, who had licensed the technology from Yamaha. The Synclavier, was a couple of racks full of computer storage, a processing unit, cooling and audio interfaces. This was all connected up to a monitor and a keyboard. Over time the Synclavier would evolve into the ancestor of the modern digital audio workstation (DAW) like Apple’s Logic Pro app.

    1983, comes around and Yamaha is finally ready to launch a mainstream product featuring FM synthesis. it also features MIDI, a standard that is still used to control musical instruments (and other studio equipment) remotely. Roland had released a couple of devices that supported the standard.

    But Yamaha’s DX7 proved to be the blockbuster product. At that time electronic music was a niche interest and instrument manufacturers would be very lucky to sell 50,000 units. Yamaha sold over 300,000 units in the first three years of sales over its 7 year life and 10,000s of more devices of the DX and TX families.

    Digital changes the interface

    Analogue synthesisers wer full of switches and dials. This Oberheim synthesiser above, isn’t that different from its analogue predecessors from five decades prior.

    The DX7 was a very different beast, it couldn’t have a dial or button for every parameter, rather like modern car screens with endless settings. So it had a few buttons which changed their function depending on what the synthesiser. A few earlier models had limited sales with a similarly spartan approach, but the DX7 mainstreamed the idea.

    A few things happened that might be instructive for how we now think about car screens:

    • Other synthesiser manufacturers like Roland and Korg copied Yamaha’s approach to interface design. Some of them tried using devices like jog wheels to provide additional intuitive control, in a similar way conceptually to BMW’s iDrive interface for its car screens.
    • Software companies looked to fill the gap to provide a better interface, which eventually begat modern software digital audio workstation applications like Logic Pro. We might see similar developments sold for cars, and this is likely the opportunity that the likes of Apple CarPlay sees. There is consumer demand to support it.
    • Despite the obvious benefit of soft button driven instruments, there still remained a strong demand for analogue controls. Now there is a strong demand for tactile interface controls and old style synthesis. In the car world that would equate to providing car enthusiasts with analogue experiences, while the mainstream goes to Tesla minimalism of the car screen. We can see this in the design of Hyundai’s analogue feeling performance electric cars that try and emulate a manual gear box and Ineos’ switch gear that owes more to aviation than automotive manufacturing.

    You can find similar posts to this here.

    More information

    Average Age of Cars in Great Britain | NimbleFins

    In praise of pushbuttons (and other physical controls) | Car Design News

    Car pollution facts: from production to disposal, what impact do our cars have on the planet? | Auto Express

    MIDI Quest Pro Yamaha DX7 software editor

    Patchbase Yamaha DX7 software editor

  • Coffee shop problem

    One of my friends who I first met when we were working on global brands at Unilever, took a change in career running their own chocolatier and coffee shop at a lovely market town outside London.

    i love coffee (Credit to https://coffee-rank.com)

    Coffee shops for years have had a nice line in selling branded insulated cups. The rationale is that these cups can be re-used and act as branded marketing for the shop. In the past you have had a push on using these insulated cups in the name of going green. There was a mix of take-up, but adoption was increasing over time.

    The barriers to using re-usable cups include:

    • Having a cup big enough to take your drink. Coffee shop chains offer their branded cups. And if you don’t want to be a Café Nero billboard, you can buy cups from the likes of Stanley that will keep your drink warm for up to eight hours.
    • Having your cup with you. For drivers having a cup and a cup holder in their vehicle is easy enough. the challenge is when they take it into the home or workplace to clean the cup. They need to remember to have it back in their car. Public transport users have a similar problem but need a bag to hold their cup and their work ritual paraphernalia. One of the benefits of a single-use cup is not having to remember.
    • Having to wash the cups. Coffee shops have to wash cups used by people drinking in a coffee shop, but customers coming in with re-usable cups would need an immediate clean. I did notice in a Starbucks in a Hong Kong neighbourhood that customers left their cups overnight with the shop. However for most shops relying on customers to clean the cup themselves and a quick blast of steam from the coffee machine cappuccino function should be enough.

    Customer habits

    Pre-COVID the coffee shop problem looked as if it was being slowly but surely being addressed. This was because a significant minority of customers were going to their local coffee shop near work or home with a reusable cup. You are building a smaller habit with a bigger habit as a trigger: taking your reusable cup with you as you leave home prepared for work.

    COVID-19 changed the whole coffee shop experience. Insurance companies had already been pushing store-owners towards cashless transactions. But now hygiene had its place as well. We were divided from baristas with a sea of perspex and reusable cups were not accepted.

    Wider daily routines were broken with working from home, and the atomic habit of a daily caffeine fix was shattered. There were other aspects going on as well. Consumers got used to making coffee at home, or not going into their workplace at all. A regular coffee habit has been more difficult to reform due to hybrid working and the cost of living crisis probably hasn’t. helped the coffee shop problem either.

    Back to my friend’s coffee shop

    So back to the discussion that inspired this post:

    We give a 30p discount for bringing your own takeaway cup, but out of the almost 400 takeaway drinks we’ve served in the last week only 11 times have we been able to give this discount. We’ve started talking about how we can help facilitate this behaviour change more as part of our sustainability drives. One idea being explored is to actually start charging for takeaway cups rather than discounting for bringing your own…

    This equates to less than 2.75% redemption rate. My take on the coffee shop problem is outlined below:

    Reduce friction and doubt: Tell people you will accept any takeaway cup that has room to hold the coffee (if its bigger thats fine).

    Optimise any behaviour change activities that you are likely to implement: a Phil Graves research outlined in Consumerology supports the heuristic that positive reinforcement tends to be slightly better over time. But one thing to remember is that behavioural change is a war of inches. For instance reframe the above statement ‘In just one week we’ve already helped almost 3 percent of our customer base move to reusable cups’. This then becomes a social proof that encourages consumer reading the copy to be part of a growing movement.

    A cup ‘fine’ might be like a sin tax – this paper on late pick up fines at an Israeli childcare centre is often quoted in behaviour change books. Here’s a synopsis of story laid out in the research paper. In day care centres in Israel, economists tried to help schools identify ways to reduce late pick-ups. Economists conducted a study by announcing that any parent arriving more than ten minutes late would pay a $3 fine. After the fine was enacted, the number of late pickups promptly went up by 100%. As soon as parents had the option to pay a small fine and avoid the guilt of making a teacher wait, they took it en masse.

    More posts similar to this can be found here.