I, however, loved this thing more or less like I loved my pet, Skrållan the cat. Completely uninterested in the more comfortable station wagons that my dad drove, my four-year-old heart belonged to the DAF, and I would object loudly to the idea of selling it. I even made a miniature of it using matchboxes, which, thanks to the no-nonsense design of this car, turned out very similar to the real thing.

Cars are among the objects people most often anthropomorphize, according to scientists. With their fronts easily interpreted as human faces, and the fact that they move, sound, smell and respond to your actions, it’s no wonder that they’re given nicknames and get called “unreliable” or “sexy”. In all likelihood, the friendly little face of the DAF was the main reason why I took a liking to it. Just look at its white cousin now as it stands in this promotional photo, a happy and gentle family member – don’t you want to, like the male model here, scratch it a little above its front door?

So, of course, anthropomorphizing cars is a common marketing strategy. Like Max the Beetle.

But does it affect you, treating your car like it’s your friend? Yes, according to Jesse Chandler and Norbert Schwartz, in their article Use does not wear ragged the fabric of friendship: Thinking of objects as alive makes people less willing to replace them (in Journal of Consumer Psychology 20 (2010)). When induced to think about their car in anthropomorphic terms, consumers were less willing to replace it. Also, their decision whether to sell their car depended less on pragmatic considerations, like how well the vehicle actually worked. Instead, they chose to keep or replace depending on whether their car (here, specifically, its colour) was described as “warm” or “cold” – a feature that belongs more in the interpersonal domain.

Why? Well, thinking about their objects in anthropomorphic terms makes people start using knowledge about the social world instead of thinking like they normally do about dead objects. And you don’t discard someone close to you just because they, being old or sick, can’t serve a useful function anymore. You care for them.

This way of thinking is not necessarily good news for either consumers or marketers, say the authors. Hanging on to your hopeless car just because it’s an old friend will mean unnecessary repair costs. And well, brands do want you to change cars on a regular basis. Instead of talking about products as living breathing things, anthropomorphize brands themselves, Chandler and Schwartz suggest.

A smart way to use this phenomenon, however, is used by (the generally smart) Zipcar. When the company named all of its rental cars, they found that it led customers to be more careful with them, putting more effort into cleaning and maintaining them. Not bad.

P.S. I fully support the intention of Dutch art hipsters to bring back the DAF.

From Yiannis Gabriel and Tim Lang ‘New Faces and New Masks of Today’s Consumer’, Journal of Consumer Culture 2008; 8; 321

The consumer, then, is unmanageable, both as a concept, since no-one can pin it down to one specific conceptualization at the expense of all others, and as an entity, since attempts to control and manage the consumer result in a mutation from a stable consumer concept to an unstable one.
[…] Even as they are constantly typecast and pigeon-holed, consumers are becoming more unmanageable, eccentric and paradoxical.

But that’s not how it works.
To make good work, you need to gesso it first.

‘Have you gessoed it?’

Gesso is what you use as priming for paintings.
Gesso makes the surface stiffer.
It prevents paint from soaking into the canvas, paper or wood.
And it gives the surface more texture, so the paint sticks better.
Traditionally made of animal glue – skin, bone or cartilage – mixed with calcium sulphate (a form of gypsum) or calcium carbonate (chalk), it’s pretty, well, intimate stuff.

‘Stop! Have you really gessoed it?’

So, gesso.
The gesso is the client relationship.
It’s the trust you build.
The feeling the client gets that s/he’s in good, professional hands. That s/he can stop being scared – because s/he’s terrified – and with good reason. S/he’s bought something from you that’s so important to get right, something that will define how others see him/her, something that can make or break him/her, without seeing it beforehand. Terrified. That’s why s/he instinctively wants to regain a little bit of control, by telling you to centre the logotype because s/he’s asked around a little and a guy in Sales said he just doesn’t like it to the right. Or by treating your best, bravest ideas like they were a separatist group’s demands for independence: like something that should be negociated down until it’s completely toothless. Handling fears.

That’s why, if you haven’t been covering your canvas with client confidence building, calming gesso, your work will end up an ungessoed painting.
Difficult to get right, those expensive and carefully mixed oil colours sinking into the canvas, turning out dull and uneven.
And the surface cracking.
No matter how great this piece of art was in your mind.
So gesso. Understand, inspire, motivate, involve your client. It’s the groundwork to your masterpiece.

P.S. Obviously, not all client critique is down to bad gessoing. It’s often very insightful stuff. But with proper gesso, it will be easier for the client to find that relevant input. And for you to listen to it.

Clockwise from left: Studded tyres forbidden. Handicraft. Farm shop. Commercial area.

So, I was flicking through a magazine from the Swedish Transport Administration, as you do, and this little notice struck me. New traffic signs, and an image of 2010 all in one. Out of four signs: one brought on by environmental concerns, one telling you where you can shop stuff generally – and not less than two drawing on the craze for craft authenticity.

Interesting for future anthropologists as this collection of signs might prove to be for its subject matter, it’s also a piece of information design. And – a sign saying Farm shop showing a sign saying Farm shop? My first thought was obviously Is this the very best you can do, Swedish Transport Administration? But then I got a little more philosophical about it, and now I’m quite sure it’s not lazy, but a covert critique of modern society. At the Swedish Transport Administration, they’ve read their Bourdieu and their Baudrillard (frankly, with a degree in Cultural Studies, where do you expect to end up?), and they’ve been talking among themselves about how they think buying your food at farm shops is as much about cultural capital as better tasting, more sustainably produced cucumbers. “Really”, they said to each other, “it all evolves around the farm shop as a sign, a symbol, for the educated middle class – the actual act of shopping is subordinated. Let’s make a statement, or actually more like a piece of conceptual art, about this.” And that’s how the Sign of Signs was born.

Similarly, that’s why the craftsman doesn’t actually do any actual hands-on crafting, but is just meekly pointing to something which he has presumably done (or is it an anvil?). “With this gesture”, the STA people agreed, “the constructed nature of authenticity is exposed. This man’s saying to the spectator: ‘Here, look, I’m re-enacting your idea of how craft should be produced, I’m just your dream image of craft made into physical form, I’m the Schloss Neuschwanstein of Handicraft!’”

Poignant stuff.

In “The Counterfeit Self: The Deceptive Costs of Faking It”, (Psychological Science 21(5) 712–720), Gino et al. tell us this: if you give someone a pair of sunglasses and tell them they’re fake Chloe, they will both cheat more in tests, and start judging other people’s behaviour as more deceptive, than if you tell them they’re wearing authentic brand ones. (Of course, they’re all the same, real Chloe glasses.) This is true even if you just randomly assign glasses to people, so it’s got nothing to do with the possibly shady personality of the counterfeit enthusiast.

The determining factor in this, they say, is that people’s own sense of authenticity in the sense of opposed-to-self-alienation is diminished by the (supposed) wearing of fake items. The “Fake Chloe” crowd agree more with statements such as “Right now, I don’t know how I really feel inside”, “Right now, I feel out of touch with the ‘real me’” and “Right now, I feel alienated from myself” than the “Real Chloe”-wearers. (Thankfully, I have no idea how it feels like to be “alienated from myself”. Is this because I’m so wonderfully authentic – well I don’t wear any counterfeit accessories, so I’m making it rather easy for myself – , or because I’ve always lived so completely detached from the Real Me that I wouldn’t know when it was missing? Like a dog with docked tail, happily wagging and wiggling away.)

This idea not something totally new, it rhymes very well with for example this: even the non-religious become more helpful after reading a story from the Bible. But it would be interesting to see if the same phenomenon occurred with brands people think are morally authentic vs inauthentic – would you cheat less after drinking Innocent juice? Or even just craft authentic – surrounded by the furniture made by small Danish ateliers now run by a third generation member of a family of skilled craftsmen etc etc you so desire from the pages of Monocle magazine, would you be a better person than in your current Ikea Hell (for it is Hell, let’s be honest)? Should you splash out, for the sake of Humanity in general?

And in that case, would this truthfulness/anti-self alienation effect actually be a reason for making brands that people deem to be authentic? Utopian in a quite roundabout way, but still. Anyway: don’t you just love people. Such weird creatures.

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Why service design? Basically, service design is all about creating great user experiences. This is quite different than the creation of a product, which is something that still needs the magic of human interaction to be meaningful (a great user experience can very well include the interaction with a product, but that’s another matter). The experience is what moves people, what they seek and what they remember. And the experience is a powerful thing: a strong, positive experience can create a lasting bond to the entity that provided it. Contrary to much market communication, it has value in itself to the user, it does not need to be associated with a marketable product/service in an artificial way. Instead, the service experience is the embodiment of the brand. Additionally, with its insistence on building value for the user, service design seems like the more modern way of building brands in a world where the mass marketing concepts of target groups of consumers being served story telling and randomly attached values seem increasingly out of touch with reality.

But is it that simple, really? No. Focusing on the design of services can mean a too narrow conceptualisation of how people see value and how they make sense of the world. In its most basic form, service design can seem almost obsessed by just simplifying daily life with a nifty service. But if too single-mindedly concerned with the sheer practicalities of a good service, there is a danger of forgetting the emotional aspect of human life. There’s a danger of falling into a service variety of the frankly quite naïve “cut the marketing bullshit, make a good product” rhetoric I ranted about a while ago (here).

This is the power of traditional branding: with its symbolism and metaphors, it talks to the powerful emotional, expressive part of the human brain. The part that dreams, imagines, plays. The part that makes the experience of getting a coffee in a small coffee shop in a tiny Italian village a memorable experience of excellence, even though the same coffee served in a high street chain would taste unremarkable. It seems to me that the real power of service design as a way to build brands lies where its user value focus is combined with a creative way of thinking about what a good user experience is. A way that accounts for both our longing for being told the myth of the Hero’s journey, and for being able to buy our train tickets with the help of an iPhone app.

Authenticity, of course, is considered a general holy grail for 21st century brands. No wonder, as we live in a culture that’s more or less obsessed with authenticity; almost anything under constant threat of being labelled fake. (Authenticity is a concept with a polemic sort of built into it; it’s never as visible as when it’s questioned).

It’s also, a term that is often either taken very literally as a “real” business (un)strategy in a genuine backlash against, well, inauthenticity, or discussed in an almost outraged fashion as a cunning way to trick people into paying a premium. Either making a fan portrait of Innocent Drinks, or “calling their bluff” by pointing to them being partly owned by The Coca Cola Company. For someone involved in branding, though, I’d say it’s important to have a more thorough understanding of authenticity. Seeing how this concept so heavily influences the way people make sense of their world, knowing how it’s created and how it’s maintained (hint: it’s rarely a one-person-holding-strings kind of job) is crucial.

In short, social scientists tell us these about authenticity as it pertains to brands:

Authenticity has many meanings. For example, authentic can be interpreted as being moral (“being true to your values”), or historically accurate, or true to a type (like a music genre).

Authenticity is socially constructed. It does not tell you anything about metaphysical realness, but about how it’s perceived. A brand, a product, a place is interpreted as authentic and treated as such: that’s when the value is created. (That does not mean that it’s arbitrary, though!)

Authenticity is not stable, but always changing – what was perceived as terribly inauthentic can become authentic with time. And what was once authentic can suddenly have to meet other demands on authenticity, the bar has been raised, by other brands or by other factors.

Authenticity is not universal, but individual – what is authentic for someone is not to another. Judging authenticity is very connected with being a member of some kind of social context; being working class, or being a goth for that matter. More specifically, the concept of authenticity changes with the amount of cultural capital a person has.

There is some great literature on authenticity, of course. For example, Michael Beverland has written about authenticity in premium wines, and Glenn Carroll and Dennis Wheaton about restaurants – I’ll get around to both of them in later posts, which will explore different kinds of authenticity, and how it’s is crafted and cared for.

Anyway, as he was talking about his latest film, in which he and chess Grandmaster Leonid Yudasin play a chessboard reworked into a piano, he mentioned this: the game of chess is too complicated for a Grandmaster to learn all strategies and possible outcomes with his logical, rational mind. Instead, what they do is that they train their aesthetic sensibility, they look for what feels and looks “right” to them. This part of the brain copes with those complex and quite mathematical chess problems much better than the rational part, in the Grandmasters’ experience. Rather interesting, wouldn’t you say?