Tag Archive for emotional reaction

Branding & Emotional Design: The Culture of Sneakers

How do we spend our money? Well, the first cut goes to survival: essential goods and services that are absolutely necessary to our survival. Food, housing, medical care are all part of the basic necessities of life. Some, of course, are more necessary than others (we might postpone going to a dentist…but not for long), but there’s a core of stuff that we need to live. The next tier up from survival is comfort. This is a very large tier—what’s comfort to some is a necessity to others and visa versa. People use their income to increase their general comfort level. This might mean a large house, more comfortable beds, larger selection of clothing. But generally, when we talk of comfort, we don’t include jet setting to Paris for a nice date out on the town. Comfort is about everyday life needs, but more comfortable. The top tier of our income is the disposable income and it is spent on luxury—the money we have left over from dealing with our needs and comforts; the money we can chose to spend in an extravagant and even wasteful manner. When economists make predictions about the average size of the available disposable income,…

How to brand a disease — and sell a cure

Elliot, C. (2010). “How to brand a disease—and sell a cure .” CNN. Retrieved on 11 October, 2010: http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/10/11/elliott.branding.disease/index.html?hpt=C2 Carl Elliott in his article for CNN cites examples of how pharmaceutical companies sell a cure by disease branding. Drug companies today are embracing the ideology that Edward Bernays’, the father of PR proposed—The public relations business was less about selling things than about creating the conditions for things to sell themselves. Why disease branding works? As Carl Elliott states in his article, disease branding is particularly effective in two types of situations. Let us consider the first situation, a shameful condition that can be de-stigmatized through disease branding. If a condition, however shameful, is prevalent enough in the common population then a ready market exists for the cure. It is the rare shameful condition for which a market typically does not exist where disease branding will help ‘create’ a market. Individuals with this rare condition would need to overcome the stigma attached with such conditions and discuss them with their health care providers. By branding a disease and de-stigmatizing the condition, the pharmaceutical companies act as catalysts and enablers to the process of individuals coming forward and discussing the condition…

Chinese companies ‘rent’ white foreigners

Farrar, L. (2010). “Chinese companies ‘rent’ white foreigners.” CNN. Retrieved on 3 October, 2010: http://www.cnn.com/2010/BUSINESS/06/29/china.rent.white.people/index.html In China, white people can be rented. Chinese companies are willing to pay high prices for fair-faced foreigners to join them as fake employees or business partners. To have a few foreigners hanging around means a company has prestige, money and the increasingly crucial connections — real or not — to businesses abroad. The requirements for these jobs are simple: Be white. Do not speak any Chinese, or really speak at all, unless asked. Pretend like you just got off of an airplane yesterday. Those who go for such gigs tend to be unemployed actors or models, part-time English teachers or other expats looking to earn a few extra bucks. Often they are jobs at a second- or third-tier city, where the presence of pale-faced foreigners is needed to impress local officials, secure a contract or simply to fulfill a claim of being international. Occasionally, these jobs can go awry. A company can hire a white foreigner, swindle millions of yuan out of their clients , and after police shows up tell that the white guy was the one really in charge, White women are…

Intention over Outcome

BBC Staff, (2010). “Morality is modified in the lab.” BBC Online. Visited on October 02, 2010: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8593748.stm. This article highlights a study that proves that human moral judgment can be modified by disrupting a specific area of the brain by applying magnetic pulses. For example, most of us would agree that it is morally unacceptable for a man to let his girlfriend walk across a bridge he knew to be unsafe. If he did not know it was unsafe, and the girlfriend did not make it safely across the bridge, we would not hold the man responsible for letting her cross the bridge. After a magnetic pulse is applied to a certain area of our brains we would think differently—Whether or not the man knew it to be unsafe, we would think it was morally acceptable for the man to let his girlfriend cross the bridge if she made it safely across. If she didn’t, we would feel it was morally unacceptable, regardless of whether or not he knew it to be unsafe. This shows how the judgment can be influenced to become outcome based rather than intention based. On Concept: If the reverse were possible, that is morally questionable…

Re “Wine Study Shows Price Influences Perception”

Svitil, K., (2008). “Wine Study Shows Price Influences Perception.” California Institute of Technology. Visited on October 4, 2010: http://media.caltech.edu/press_releases/13091 This article is a research study about how the region of the brain called the medial orbitofrontal cortex showed higher activity when participants drank wines at a higher price. A wine tasting study was conducted at the California Institute of Technology and Stanford University. Twenty volunteers tasted five wine samples at different retail prices: $5, $10, $35, $45 and $90 per bottle. The volunteers tasted and evaluated which wines that they found more pleasurable. Two out of five of the wines were the same but one was priced at $10 and one at $90. In the experiment the subjects rated and preferred the $90 priced wine more than the $10, although they did not know that they tasted the same wine. Cognitive Design What does the product do? In this study the cognitive design was a wine tasting experiment. The concept of the research was to experiment on the perception of price on different wines.  The setting was controlled in that the subjects did not know that they tasted the same wine but told that the price was different. While tasting…

Working with Clients

We once had a client who made his secretary drive to our studio with a piece of a carpet from his office to be used as a color swatch for his company’s new logo. And while the final logo looked okay (very logo-like), it did little to represent the company’s brand. The company is no longer around today. Having a client who opines on the color of the background, choice of typeface, thickness of line, or layout mars the design process. It’s easy to get lost in details and personal preferences—who is to say that green is better than orange? A good designer has to be able to manage the client, keep the conversation focused on business goals and user needs. But before we can delve into the design process, we have establish trust. Clients need to feel like they’ve been listened to, they have to know and understand that design is hard work, and they have to buy into our expertise. The First Date The initial group meeting between the design firm and their client tends to feel like a first date: this is a chance for everyone to declare their expertise and expectations of each other. And like a…

On “Keeping Kids Safe From the Wrong Dangers” by Belkin

Belkin, L. (2010). “Keeping Kids Safe From the Wrong Dangers” New York Times Online. Retrieved on October 6, 2010: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/weekinreview/19belkin.html?_r=1 Summary: Belkin puts the spotlight on the somewhat irrational behaviors of parents when it comes to protecting their children. With the best of intentions, they worry about kidnapping, school snipers, terrorist, dangerous strangers and drugs, while the most likely things to cause children harm are car accidents, homicide (usually at the hands of someone they know), child abuse, suicide and drowning. So why are parents constantly overestimating rare dangers while underestimating common ones? The author makes the point that evolution may have something to do with it in that our brains are not designed to process abstract or long-term risk, but rather to react to an immediate dangers for instance represented by a sound and make a determination of whether not it presents a danger. In today’s fast-paced world where we are bombarded with all kinds of worst case scenarios and sensationalism, our sense of proportions gets distorted. So, we end up driving our kids to play-dates, when a walk on their own may have been better both health and safety wise. User Groups: So how can parents make more…