Tag Archives: shopping

Local Marketing, More Than Geography?

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There is a belief current amongst marketing professionals that the mass market is starting to break down, and instead of an easy to target homogenous consumer groups in a mass market, the market for many products is dividing into large number of niches, that could make mass market products redundant. Now, I would be disinclined to agree with such a blanket statement (I think it’s flat wrong), but I would be inclined to agree that local marketing and hyperlocal marketing are increasingly taking center stage and will continue to grow in importance in the coming years.  “Local” means a lot in marketing these days, from search rankings and profiles to location-based games and apps.  Hyperlocal further refines this by defining itself as focusing on a very specific area, very close to home (or, your place of business.).  But, what “very close” means is relatives and apps follow us everywhere.  So what is the underlying feature, the truth so to speak, behind localization?  I believe is has less to do with physical proximity than it does with social and cultural proximity.

For example, hyperlocality plays a large role in a homogeneous suburb, perhaps, but within that suburb, and spread across a metro, there will be subgroups that will travel fairly large distances to shop at a store, attend a church, etc. es, they are affinity groups, but with physical location becoming less a factor than social location, and with the advent of being constantly dialed into the network, local and hyperlocal marketing means rethinking demographic data and how we visualize the populations we are targeting.

The important feature is that if people feel a connection to the store, they are more likely to pay attention to its marketing materials.  This is part of a social phenomenon that exists independently of any one individual’s perceptions or experiences. Such a feeling may be derived from the natural environment, but is more often made up of a mix of natural and cultural features in the setting, and generally includes the people who occupy the place. The point is that the stronger the bond at the local level, the more likely the customer is to buy.

When you’re trying to promote a business, regardless of size and reach, every little thing that you do needs to be thought out before hand. You are more than a business, you are part of the community and social fabric. Understanding the complexities of the communities you serve is central to establishing long-term relationships and sales.

Screaming in Retail

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Human beings act toward the things they buy on the basis of the meanings they ascribe to those things. These meanings are handled in, and modified through, an interpretative process used by the person in dealing with the things he/she encounters. Shopping, then, can be viewed through the lens of how people create meaning during social interaction, how they present and construct the self (or “identity”), and how they define situations with others.  In other words, people need emotional connections as much as they need to know about the products you sell.  They may never admit it openly, but they do. Apple, after all, sells computers just like everyone else, but they’ve bridged the gap.

In terms of marketing materials and communication with your customers, this doesn’t mean using clichés and gimmicky messaging. It means conveying the things your products facilitate. By the time most customers actually consider making the move to finding a retailer, they have spent significant time researching specs, consumer reviews and feature lists – they don’t need more of that information from the retailer. Or, regardless of what your interests may be personally and professionally, they may not have cared enough to research a thing.  Consequently, marketing materials that convey how a brand will fit into their daily lives in a realistic way is far more likely to capture their attention than price listings and a list of technical information.

  • Incorporate references to how people might actually use the product in unexpected ways.
  • Don’t explain benefits in a vacuum, provide context and tie the product to other facets of their lives (. Subaru’s ads focusing on what a couple does on vacation rather than the car itself).
  • In addition to listing performance and feature information, list at least one direct connection between these things and an activity a consumer might be engaged in.
  • Limit the amount of text you plan to use and dedicate that text a conveying a story.
  • Talk about what the product is really for (e.g. the original iPod ads showed people dancing and enjoying life, they didn’t talk about the product directly).

 

 

When Technology Strategies Fail

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Lowe’s, Home Depot, the local nursery — they’re all gearing up for the rush on seed, fertilizer and tools with which to till the soil. Our agrarian roots run deep and while people in this century have run to get off the farm, we still see growing things as a noble act.  Thousands of years of our ties to the smell of freshly turned earth can’t be erased.  We may have hunter and gatherer roots, but there is an almost primal joy taken in mastering our environment, even is a small suburban way, rather than simply accepting our fate.  Planting ties us to nature, makes us a partner rather than a master or servant.  I have to wonder how the rush to add technology to every facet of our lives plays into this.

QR codes adorn every plant container and seed packet now, but I saw surprisingly few people using them while shopping in the early morning.  Partly it’s an issue of function; dripping water and the jostling of bodies as they scramble to squeeze through the tight corridors of stacked plants make using your smart phone a potentially dangerous act. But there is also a symbolic disconnect in this environment. Planting, gardening, etc. is still a primitive act and this particular shopping experience lends itself to a symbolically charged return to simplicity. It is, in many way, the antithesis of modern innovation.

We can do practically anything when it come to technologically augmenting the retail experience, but should we? And if we do, how should it be done? All too often, strategies are built around function and form, the symbolic elements dismissed as so much ambiguous fluff. But that is a flawed strategy. Indeed, it borders on being a series of tactics held together by a loose set of intellectual leaps that don’t reflect deeper patterns of human behavior, but the desire to sell more stuff. Unfortunately, if you get the pattern wrong, or ignore it because your cognitive frame won’t allow you to see it, you lose money because you taint the experience.

This isn’t to say technology doesn’t have a role, it is to simply say that shopping is about more than the objects we seek out. Shopping begins in the collective memory and shared symbols of a population. It is pleasure, validation, a reflection of values and a way of creating meaning in our world. A strategy needs to be grounded in those complexities, not at odds with them. You don’t get that knowledge from segmentation schemes and demographic data. You get it from immersion in a cultural process and from seeking out the links between observations.

Gothic Churches and Retail Displays

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The art of the merchandising display is the focus this week at the Global Shop conference in Las Vegas. There are giant bottles of Knob Creek, Zombie Baby Dolls, hair care products, lottery ticket dispensers and an unimaginable host of other products. Some of it is terrific, some of it is terrible and most of it mundane. What strikes me is that while all of it is eye catching, it isn’t always the kind of thing to engage the shopper.  Product features are clear and brand identification is almost always an easy task, but there is little that tugs at the heart strings, little that tells a story. And it is the lack of underlying meaning that has me thinking about history and what we can learn, and apply, from its study. Retail displays specifically have me thinking about the Gothic churches of Europe.

The Gothic age produced the great cathedrals of Europe and brought a full flowering of stained glass windows. Churches became taller and lighter, 
walls thinned and stained glass was used to fill the increasingly larger 
openings in them. Stained glass became the sun filled world outside. Abbot 
Suger of the Abbey of St. Denis rebuilt his church in what is one of the 
first examples of the Gothic style. He brought in craftsmen to make the 
glass and kept a journal of what was done. He truly believed that the 
presence of beautiful objects would lift men’s souls closer to God.

The works served several purposes aside from the architectural. First, for a population that was almost wholly illiterate, the depictions of 
bible stories would serve as illustrations and lessons for the priests and 
bishops to point to during mass. Second, they created a holy ambience that would focus the congregation. The 
stained glass would change the color and quality of the light in the knave, 
giving what to the peasant would seem an ethereal glow. This created an 
atmosphere “primed” for worship, convenient since most of those present 
wouldn’t understand the Latin lessons anyway. Third, symbolically they represented a membrane between the sacred and the 
profane. Through the window was the real world. Sin, hate, pain, suffering. 
The stained glass was a shield from that into the sanctuary of the church 
and instead made the window a symbolic looking glass into the Heavens. Quite a lot of structural and functional utility in such a simple concept.

And so I return to retail and the displays we find in them. What works well lifts the spirit. It does more than catch they eye, it transforms the experience. The pieces that don’t work are simply loud. They impart feature information, but tell no story. They are indeed noticeable at fifty feet, but they don’t invite you to come in.

As with the retail space in its entirety, its elements should, ideally, come together to tell a story that is symbolically charged, drawing the consumer and/or shopper into the story, captivating them and providing information about the human condition, not just the product. For example, the Makita display here at the conference encourages the viewer to physically engage with the tools, but it does far more. It is made of steel, rivets and brushed, beaten metal on proud display. It reflects in every element of its design the idealized imagery of labor, adding a sense of value to the professional construction worker and a sense of mythic masculinity to the novice. The display tells a story about the person viewing it, not just the product, creating a partnership between the customer and the brand.

Just like the experience that the stained glass and sweeping arches of the Gothic cathedral was designed to convey, so to should retail. And this holds true whether you are Frito Lay, Miller Lite, or Sony. That means understanding that shoppers and consumers do more than seek out information and features. They may not be able to articulate those needs in a survey or traditional interview, but they are there. It’s just a matter of uncovering them and turning them into something more than a sign.

Man The Hunter and Other Shopping Myths

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In 1966 Richard Lee and Irven DeVore hosted a symposium titled “Man the Hunter.” The symposium resulted in a book of the same title and attempted to bring together for the first time a comprehensive look at recent ethnographic research on hunter gatherers. The concepts that came out of the work (and work by archaeologists) were streamlined, simplified and led to one of the most endearing myths of the modern age: Men hunt, women gather.  Men are driven be the need to complete a job, that’s about it. Over time, this basic tenet has found its way into how we think about men’s consumption and shopping habits – men are driven by the need to shop ( i.e. to perform tasks) in the simplest, most efficient way.  Simple, tidy theory. The only problem with this simple, tidy formula is flat wrong.

From a purely biological stand point it might make sense. The theory goes that over the bulk of human prehistory gender roles were established wherein men, due to sheer size and strength, hunted large game and therefore were less inclined to use environmental cues and linguistic subtlety to hunt down and kill animals.  Meanwhile, given the task of rearing the young and gathering the bulk of the food that was actually consumed on a daily basis, women became hardwired for language, cooperation and the ability to tease out subtleties in the environment. No doubt there is a shred of truth in all this, but unfortunately it overlooks some major flaws in the logic. The problem is that cooperative hunting is extremely complex and relies on interacting intimately with the environment and other members of the hunting party. On top of that, while men were out hunting for large animals, it might take a damn long time to track it, kill it and then get it back home.  Consequently, men foraged and hunted small game along the way.  In other words, they were doing the same tasks as women and thus, the same evolutionary principles should be in play.  But the real key to all this is the linguistic element.

Bear with me for a moment, because this talk about language is where the myth of male shopping patterns as an extension of “Man the Hunter” breaks down. Human beings are the only animal with the capacity for language.  With have both wonderfully large areas of the brain devoted to it and a general physiology that allows us to create the sounds we do (e.g. the hyoid bone). Why does it matter?  Because language is inherently symbolic.  The sounds in the word “tree” have nothing to do with the object itself, for example.  The long and the short of it is that the human brain and the ways in which we understand the world are hardwired to make use of symbolism.  And shopping is a highly symbolic act.  Overlooks the underlying behavioral structures and you miss tremendous opportunities. It’s all rather heady stuff, but the result is simple. Context shapes everything and whether hunting or shopping, there is more to our behavior than meets the eye.

First of all, men will always say they dislike shopping and that they treat it like a task.  Shopping is a job and all about efficiency and finding the best deal (this is the point at which all of us men are supposed to eat a steak and thump our chests).  Men say it, but is it true?  No, it is not. We say it because as a culture we have been trained to say we hunt, we solve problems and we see shopping as a task.  It is a cultural norm we use to define our masculinity, not a reflection of reality.  As with all shopping, there is an element of performing a task – we shop for groceries because we die if we don’t eat.  Men, and marketers, like to think that’s the end of the discussion, but it is not.  Shopping, unlike consuming, involves a series of subconscious, symbolic interactions and men, just like women, respond to these symbols.  So what are the examples?

First, men often use shopping as a tool to teaching values and cultural norms.  It is most obvious when you see a father and son in a sporting goods store.  It isn’t enough to track down a new baseball glove. Fathers use this time, this shopping time, to teach the boy how to select a good glove, how to be a good and sport and how to bond with the child.  Watch a father shop with his daughter and you see similar teaching moments emerge. The retail environment becomes a stage on which he can impart wisdom and reinforce his role as father.

Which leads to the second example.  Men use shopping to establish and reinforce gender and marital roles. For example, when husbands and wives shop for groceries together, there is more going on than simple provisioning of the household. Men frequently slip items into the cart that are not on the list. The catch is that they do this when their wives can see them. It isn’t about sneaking a treat into the cart. It is about using shopping as a means by which playfulness and sexuality are rekindled. In terms of the general shopping process, men defer to their wives’ expertise in all things domestic, even when they are perfectly capable of selecting the right foods. Body language becomes more timid and responses to question take on more hedges and/or apologies. The shopping becomes a platform for defining household roles.

Which leads to the third example.  Men using shopping to display skills and mastery.  In a retail setting that makes men feel as if they articulating their knowledge and skill to the world, they become more likely to make random purchases.  Watch men in hardware stores or when buying a car.  They tend to exhibit more non-verbal cues of strength (standing straighter, more use of the precision grip, etc.) and tend to spend more time examining objects in detail than they would in other settings.  The catch is that they frequently have no more expertise than anyone else.  In this instance, shopping is a way of establishing status and self-worth.

Finally, though they may not want to admit it, men use shopping as play time.  The retail experience is a playground, plain and simple.  The catch is that the space needs to make men feel like they have license to play and explore.

So, Man the Hunter is a myth but what does it mean to you? Simply, quit thinking about Man the Shopper as if he is exclusively task driven. Take advantage of the symbolic and subconscious triggers that will get him to buy more products and become an advocate for your store.

  • 60% of men are using mobile apps when shopping, so do more than provide deals. Use language that reinforces his role as a good hunter, teacher and/or spouse.  Design interfaces as games.  Provide outlets for displaying his skills to the world. The point is that he needs more than 10% off his purchase.
  • Develop retail environments and signage that reinforce his need to show his prowess and intelligence.  Use language and imagery that can be used as tools for teaching his children, not just as points of information throughout the store.
  • Use signage and displays that make him feel comfortable in a seemingly non-male setting.  Signage should be used as part of the overarching retail design strategy.  Incorporate “hidden” treasures in the retail setting that make him want to explore.
  • Incorporate male-focused elements into your general media strategy. If you sell candles (a traditionally female target audience), consider partnering to set up a display at the meat counter of a grocery (men, after all, are the “expert” grillers in most homes).

The end result in all of this is simple. Stop thinking about men as hunters and you will sell more merchandise. Keep thinking of them in this tired, old cliché and watch an overlooked opportunity pass you by.

Food, Blood and Marketing

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Package it, slap a label on it and sell it for $4.99 a pound. It’s as simple as that when you’re selling groceries, right? Hardly. Food, meat in particular, is tied to cultural sensibilities about production, cleanliness, family values and a host of other topics. Meat, like Norman Rockwell images of the American farm, is myth. We’ve been conditioned to turn away from the origins of our food and respond to blood and death with repulsion. Or have we? With the emergence of a “foodie” nation and a growing movement interested in eliminating those things we deem bad for us (nitrates, high fructose corn syrup, glutens, etc.) we are learning to appreciate where our food comes from again. But how far are most of us willing to go? Understanding what organic means doesn’t mean we’re ready to embrace everything. Take blood.

Blood is one of the least used parts of the pig and it’s a terrible waste.  Not just in resources, but as a culinary experience. And in many cases, it endows the adage “blood is thicker than water” with a wealth of meaning. It, like the butchering, is part of a family tradition — it creates bonds of familial piety, it teaches lessons about the importance of food is the greater social milieu, it pulls people together in a primal understanding of the role of the family bond in survival. It even teaches us about cosmology.  It may look like just a bunch of blood and gore, but it is so very much more. But the idea of selling blood as an ingredient at the local grocery, or even a natural food store like Whole Foods, is probably more than most Americans are willing to stomach, literally and figuratively.

With wealth comes the desire to learn about where our food comes from, how it’s produced and what exactly is in it. But in a postmodern world where our food is often more a badge than an actual need or culinary norm, we have limits to what we’ll accept. The point is that shopping for food is an increasingly complex process as has less to do with securing calories than it does with symbols and meaning. And the same can be said for most products. If you’re a marketer, that means understanding layers of complexity that may have gone overlooked in the past and developing strategies to account for that complexity. Anything less and your plan is a bloody mess.

 

Cognition and Collective Awareness: Creating “Place” in Retail

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Humans favor certain environments that satisfy survival needs. Through millions of years of evolution we are hardwired to seek out environments that signal an increases sense of comfort and  a higher probability of survival.  We seek out evidence of:

  • Abundant resources
  • Minimal threat from predators and aggressors
  • Shelter from the outside world

Much of this is subconscious, but it remains deeply ingrained in our collective psyche. Consequently, humans have evolved a visual preference for spaces that allow us to see without being seen when we so choose.  From a retail perspective, this means developing enclosed spaces that downplay threat and encourage complete emersion in the experience.

Even as we seek out environments that speak to our needs of comfort and survival, humans are inherent risk takers. Enticement and peril are part of the exploration process and without this deep-seated need to explore and take risks, we wouldn’t be human.  Humans need to seek new information and test their skills.

Consequently, we seek out new experiences that can be differentiated from other experiences.  We categorize these experiences, giving them greater meaning and a higher probability of habitual use.  Categorizing and differentiating suggest:

  • Diverse resources
  • Greater stability

Ultimately, this appears to be a contradiction. But there is the possibility of resolution.  Environmental psychologists assume that individuals’ feelings and emotions ultimately determine their behavior. The problem is that people rarely shop as individuals, even if they are alone. On the surface that may sound confusing, but the point is simple. Human beings are cultural creatures, shaped by shared experience and the unavoidable truth that we are part of a complex system of beliefs and interactions. Uncovering those cultural processes and designing a retail experience around them offsets the impact of cognitive responses to an environment.

So what do we do to provide a sense of security while playing to the underlying desire to explore and learn knew things?  We strike a balance.  And we strike that balance by thinking in terms of converting space to place.  Place identity concerns the meaning and significance of places for their inhabitants and users. People create memories within places and form personal and collective connections. The stronger the connection, the more likely they are to frequent the space and to bring new people to that place. The goal is to endow a venue with symbolic meaning, memory and significance.

The sense of place may be strongly enhanced by the setting, or the setting it attempts to project, being written about, being party of stories handed down over time, being portrayed in art or being part of the collective myth.  It can be established through modes of codification aimed at preserving or enhancing places and traditions felt to be of value. All this creates a “database” for framing the socio-physical settings we experience.  By providing customers with symbolic cues in the environment that set it apart from the surrounding area, we cater to the need to delve into the new while subconsciously establishing an element of the known, the safe and the familiar.

 

Purpose, Power, Politics: Barriers to Creative Organizations

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Creativity and innovation are always in demand.  Well, to be more accurate, lip service to the ideas of wanting creativity and innovation are always in demand.  The reality is often far different. Most of us recognize the necessity of creative processes at work, regardless of whether we’re taking about strategic planning, insights development, product design. We, as individuals at least, recognize creative thinking as central to generating new ideas and innovation that in turn lead to greater brand recognition and profits.  We know all this and yet creativity is something that often dies before it can get a foothold.  That begs the question, if creativity is so valuable to an organization, why does he corporate culture regularly frown upon the very pursuits that lead to ground breaking innovation? Why do companies so often suppress creativity, both tacitly or overtly? While there is no doubt room for as many opinions as people, I think it largely comes down to three primary elements: Purpose, Power, and Politics.

Purpose:

Companies hire people tasked with strategic thinking and innovation that they think are smart, inventive and inclined to explore their world. They hire people who tend not to think in terms of perpetuating the status quo or who are inclined to think in a linear fashion.  They hire people who can think in ways others overlook.  While those people are intriguing and exciting during the interview and indeed the first few months of joining the corporate team, they are also disinclined to conform to the standard practices of the organization. They do not sit typing at their desks, revisiting the same spreadsheets endlessly or thinking about to shave 10 cents off the production price of some widget the company makes.  They are the people who find new product ideas while visiting the museum, create new strategies while shopping for organic dog food with people and draw insights that can be applied to messaging through reading a Victor Turner. Unfortunately, these sorts of activities run counter to what many business people believe when observing or talking to these sorts of folks. If the activity can’t be readily quantified or tied to a specific project of the moment, it is a waste of time. If it takes cerebral effort and any degree of time, then the employee isn’t worth the expense. What this boils down to is the idea that if creative thinkers don’t conform to the expected, day-to-day behavior of the organization, they are devalued and ultimately punished, even though it was their non-traditional methods that got them hired in the first place.

Punishment for thinking, learning and doing is the driving force. Curiosity fuels every great innovation, but this is easily forgotten. Innovative thinkers don’t simply solve problems. They are engaged in a process of discovery that is its own reward. If that way of thinking is thought of on an organizational level as something superfluous, then creativity and innovation die. These people have a quality that allows them to identify significant opportunities and to find creative solutions rather than simplistic ones.  If they aren’t rewarded or if they are devalued, they leave. And the organization loses out.

Power:

With power comes, many times, a decline in the ability to step outside your own way of looking at the world and embrace new ideas. While leadership leads to a unified vision and direction for the company, power often also distorts reality. Many leaders come from a traditional system that rewards organizations producing regular, predictable outcomes and profits.  There is a singular focus on how things should be done and a lack of flexibility, both in terms of thinking and control.  Encouraging more creativity means letting go of control and questioning the status quo.  This has two results. First, it means that uncertainty is now part of the business equation.  Business people are typically trained to avoid risk. Creative thinking means embracing a greater degree of uncertainty.  And this goes beyond direct business concerns, it goes to the heart of identity.

Embracing the way creative types think, learn and act often means relinquishing a degree over people. Power can be defined in many ways. Most simply, it is the ability to get what you want.  But what is it people want? Often it is greater power and recognition by the organization of their indispensability. Control leads to greater value and an increase sense of self-worth. Often, embracing creative thinking is interpreted by members of leadership as relinquishing control and opening oneself to personal and professional risk. The result is that creativity is subject to conflicts from the highest levels of the organization, down to the lowest. Which leads to internal politics.

Politics:

For all practical purposes, organizational politics are essentially an extension of the issue of power, but I separate the topic here simply because it is about those in search of power rather than those who have it. Creative thinking means being wiling to think about the big picture, to embrace the whole rather than the parts. Unfortunately, that means people are asked to do things in ways they haven’t before, thus challenging not only their worldview, but also their place in the pecking order – or so they often believe. Once a happy rut has been established, it is difficult to get out of it. We are encouraged by the system to stay within the confines of these ruts, receive our paychecks and maintain the status quo. We guard our kingdoms jealously, even as our borders slowly crumble around us. Consequently, innovation and creativity become subject to internal jockeying and stale thinking.

So What?

So what can be done to foster creativity in an organization? What needs to change? First, reward people for doing things differently and providing new, creative ideas. Encourage teams and individuals to experiment with new ways of learning. Encourage engineers and designers to spend a day at the natural history museum. Promote reading books other than the latest business book – poetry, science, anthropology philosophy, whatever gets the mind running at top speed and in new directions. In other words, give people license to think and act in creative ways rather than tying them to the same chain of behavior they have been tied to in the past.

Second, there needs to be more than temporary excitement at the top. There needs to be long-term, clear, open support by leadership and management at all levels.  It has to be sustained and encouraged throughout the organization. If leadership does not loudly promote its commitment to creative thinking, it will die on the vine.

Ultimately, talking about being a creative organization and actually performing as a creative organization are very different things.

Stories, Invention and the Bottom Line

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The power of a good story, or even a rather mundane one, is truly phenomenal.  In it are wrapped up the hopes, dreams, symbols, and significances that shed light on who we are as individuals and as members of a culture.  But the real power comes not from the explicit statements that emerge during, say, interviews, but from the subtext and patterns of meaning people assign to objects, relationships, and thoughts as they are created by participants through narrative. Not everything can be expressed as matter-of-fact discourse, especially things one cannot really put one’s finger on, or things that do not exist yet. Some of them are central to human experience, such as falling in love or admiring the full moon rising over the sea. If we want to explore this kind of experience, we need means and methods that are suited to communicate it.

I kept thinking about this problem, and one day I decided to see what happens if I explicitly ask research participants to write stories, pieces of fiction, about a topic related to my client’s needs.  Specifically, they were asked to write a story from the perspective of someone shopping for beer.  Much to my surprise, I ended up a wide range of ideas being expressed and a degree of complex language that was poetic, mundane, funny, sad and utterly fascinating.

I have used this method of gathering insights ever since, when I want to learn about things that are beside the topic but nonetheless worth exploring. It is by no means a replacement to fieldwork, but it is another tool that can be used to tease out how people construct their world in ways they may not normally be able to express. These things concern the creative aspects of the cultural context of how meaning is constructed.

Why are stories important for interaction and knowledge? Traditional cultures are storytelling cultures in the literal sense: people tell each other stories. We have often set this fact aside in the post-modern, linear, data driven world of business, but it is still fundamental to who we are.  People do not buy products based on specs alone, they buy based on deeper issues that connect products and places to their humanity. At certain occasions the stories gain a special role, such as at a child’s bedtime or while sitting around the kitchen table (the primal campfire). Stories make it possible for us to share our world, not lists of product attributes. We actively participate in the creation of culture by listening to stories and telling them—and we learn about culture through stories. It is in the context of understanding stories that we uncover triggers and meanings that simply don’t emerge fro surveys and interviews. They supply us with metaphors and meanings that are hidden from view when people are in the participant mode. Stories give them license to explore ideas and create symbols that tap the deepest recesses of a product’s or brand’s subtler meanings.

Stories are aimed at exploring the subjective, but not the individual. They are the collective myth. The point with composing a story is to find a collective level in the invention. It is a kind of inter-subjective reality. Creative solutions and innovative ideas arrive when imagination is actively used by participants, not just the people working for the company in need of answers.