Christmas shopping season is in full swing, but one retail company stands out for its message: don’t buy our stuff. That’s right, Patagonia is telling its customers that they should NOT buy more of its products. From their blog:

What kind of crazy reverse psychology is this? Is Patagonia trying to fool its customers into buying something? Are they lying? What are they doing?

IMHO, this is the bravest, most honest campaign I’ve seen in…well forever. The company has said repeatedly that it values the environment above its profitability. It wouldn’t exist as a outdoor recreation company, were it not for the amazing natural beauty of the world.

So they decided to put their money where their mouth is. They recognize the true cost of consumerism:

“Think twice before you buy anything….take the Common Threads initiative pledge, and join us in the fifth ‘R’ to reimagine a world where we only take what we can replace.”

Patagonia is appealing to their own, broader vision with this campaign. Instead of stooping to get the easy buck, they stay true to their value of environment over people. Some marketers might say this is a dumb way to sell outdoor clothing. But this approach appeals to the values of the very people who do buy these kinds of clothes.

This is evocative of the model we use with our clients, called the Value Orientation Model, which guides good, values-based marketing. The value orientation model shows us the 5 central values humans use to organize their lives and understand the world:

Value Orientation Model

When your brand’s values are clear, decisions like this are easy. Put the value at the centre of your message, and the campaign writes itself. The hard part is keeping true to that value system. Patagonia has done this, and in so doing, is ensuring the loyalty of its most valued customers.

Value-based marketing isn’t cynical reverse psychology. It isn’t even marketing. It’s about finding a moral centre of where you want to be. This can only be done with deep social insight.

I had the privilege to work under Roger Martin when I worked at the Institute for Competitiveness and Prosperity. Roger’s got much to say about innovation, and I find his take to generally reinforce the “qualitative lens” Copernicus takes to its projects. Roger recently wrote for Harvard Business Review that companies don’t get growth from mere “analysis.” What they need is “appreciation”:

If instead, the core tool is not analysis but rather appreciation —deep appreciation of the consumer’s life — what makes it hard or easy; what makes her (in this category) happy or sad — there is the opportunity to imagine possibilities that do not exist.

He goes on to point out that it was this kind of “appreciation” that lead to great products like The Swiffer and Febreze. What he’s really talking about is the transformative nature of qualitative research. When you really understand (or “verstehen”) the consumer, you can’t help but feel their pain when they get frustrated or annoyed with your current products. You have empathy for them because you deeply understand them.

This is the kind of work that Copernicus does with its clients. We the consumer to the centre of your universe, and show you their needs, wants, desires, and frustrations.

Two of us at Copernicus (Sarah and I) are working on a project, funded through Ryerson University, on smartphone usage. One of the key findings we’ve uncovered so far is that people tend to adopt new communication channels (e.g., text) when they purchase new handsets. This new handset/life change correlation is a symbolic ritual that leads to new ways of communicating.

New phone, courtesy of emotionaltoothpaste on Flickr.com

When do they purchase new handsets? When their lives change in some way. Here’s an example.

We spoke to one young professional who was telling us when he started using BlackBerry Messenger (BBM). He noticed that he started using it more when he got his new BlackBerry handset, but it was also around the time he got engaged to his fiancée (who also had just gotten a BlackBerry). So he wasn’t sure if it was because he got the new BlackBerry or because he got engaged.

This type of life event was a recurrent theme. Participants got new handsets when they went away to university, when they started a new job, when they got a promotion, when they moved house. Or they purchased them for their children when they reached a certain age.

This type of ritualistic consumption is common. We have talked about this before in our analysis of autumn jean buying. People buy certain items to equip themselves for the new season, but also to symbolically mark the shift from one state to the next. There are practical reasons why one would purchase a new handset when one is moving house, for example, but there is also a deeply symbolic transformation taking place.

Participants are hiving off the past by giving up their old handsets. They are preparing for the future (at university, at the new job, with the new partner) when they are upgrading to a new, “futuristic” piece of technology. Just like new jeans are symbolic of a new school year, new handsets are symbolic of a new way to relate to new people or things in your life.

New handsets are not just new phones; they are new ways to communicate. Our participants did not intend to re-invent how they talked/texted/BBM’d but they did intend to change their lives in some way. Texting for the first time seems natural when you’re embracing another life change. Using BBM for the first time makes sense if your new fiance already uses it. Answering email on the bus for the first time is not weird if everyone at the new office does it.

I have argued in the past that financial services providers should only ever look to life changes as triggers for new products. It’s clear that new products go hand in hand with new life events. In this case, new products and new life events correlate with new technology adoption.

Technology designers should consider what events are the triggers, and incorporate these symbolically into their mobile platforms. Advertisers should understand that getting consumers accustomed to new mobile content means understanding their new life situations. Employers should understand that new hires and the newly promoted are adjusting to new ways of communicating, usually because they are given new phones without much discussion. And parents should realize that symbolic ages for their children (e.g., age 16) will often mean new ways of communicating. Just teaching your son or daughter to drive is the start of it — you may also have to learn how to BBM.

I’m thrilled to be managing a research project on mobile technology use through a fellowship at the Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University. I’ve assembled a research team and we have started initial research. Our “ethnographic stretching” exercise lead to some interesting insights:

“Attachment Paradox”: More than one person we talked to said that their mobile phone meant nothing to them. “It’s just a device. There’s no attachment to it,” said one person. Yet, this same person said she’d “panic” if she lost it. How can they be anxious of its loss, yet “unattached” at the same time? Again, more work to be done here.

Check out some of the other insights on the Mobile Work Life project Web site

The bane of many women’s existence appeared in today’s New York Times: irregular clothing sizes. The journalist interviewed one young woman who complained about irregular sizing:

“I can be anywhere from a 0 at Ann Taylor to a 6 at American Eagle,” she said. “It obviously makes it difficult to shop.”

A scanning kiosk advising customers on their correct size - NY Times

The woman used a body scanner, set up in a Philadelphia mall, to give her a more accurate size for the stores she prefers:

This time, the scanner suggested that at American Eagle, she should try a 4 in one style and a 6 in another. Ms. VanBrackle said she tried the jeans on and was impressed: “That machine, in a 30-second scan, it tells you what to do.”

Why are fashion retailers providing such poor sizing? According to the fashion historian quoted in the article, this is partly historical — sizing has never been fully standardized. But it isn’t just the numbers, it’s also the cut. Clothing is frequently cut for a single body type. If you’ve ever seen a catwalk, you’ll know that designers favour the straight-lined boyish look of models over the “apple” or “pear” or “hourglass” shape of average women.

Retailers are missing a key aspect of the fashion experience if they have inadequate sizing. Mary Alderete, vice president for women’s global marketing at Levi’s, seems to get it:

“When we try on 10 pairs of jeans to buy one, the reason you feel bad is because you think something’s wrong with you.”

Women are cramming themselves into inaccurate sizes, cut to fit only one type of body — and they’re feeling bad about it. It’s amazing that fashion retailers, who go as far as scenting the air in their stores, fail to cater to this most basic aspect of the clothing experience.

What does “size” means to women? It is conversation between her and the garment, one which all too often ends with a judgment of the woman.  When a woman takes a piece of clothing to the fitting room, she is asking the garment, “Are you right for me?” The garment “speaks” first in through its listed size. But imagine when that size does not match how the garment fits. It is now telling the woman, “You are too big for me.” This is obviously a touchy subject for most women, as we are expected to maintain a small size. We are trained to take up less space, less food (among other things).

The size is a “normative” expectation, as sociologists would call it. A woman is “supposed to” fit into a certain size, and if she does not, “something’s wrong with you.” Retailers are making women feel there’s something wrong with them, not to mention frustrated, and are also wasting their time.

When the customer is at the centre of what you do, it’s inevitable that you design better products. In this case, fashion retailers are failing to achieve this most basic tenet of design. Levi’s has the right idea by introducing “It’s not size; it’s shape,” campaign. They have several body types and sizes, making it easier for the garment to say, “Yes, you’re exactly right for me.”

I recently gave a guest lecture to the Master’s of Design students at OCADU on how to research culture. Don’t worry if you missed it, because you can now listen to the same lecture and get the presentation!

Below is the audio and presentation from that lecture. Are you interested in more? Consider Culture Coaching, a new service from Copernicus. We offer one-on-one coaching for designers, marketers, and strategists. If you want to improve your cultural IQ, take a look at Culture Coaching

Canadians love spring. If you’re not Canadian, I bet you’re thinking, “Of course they do; everyone does.” Ah but you do not “verstehen” Canada if you say such things. Indeed, I didn’t even “verstehen” Canada growing up on the West Coast — we didn’t even have snow!

Melting Snow courtesy of RicLaf on Flickr

Spring is approaching in Canada, and we feel it. The sun is shining on the frozen piles of yard waste, turning them into mucky, smelly goop. The last piles of snow are slowly melting, revealing the wonders of pre-winter litterbugs including old newspapers, old yoghurt containers, and of course, the ubiquitous plastic bag.

As winter recedes, spring reveals to us what we have happily, sleepily hidden for those long months inside. And it’s not pretty.

Spring cleaning is partly about cleaning up what’s left behind, but it’s also about moving our bodies and expanding the confines of our living space. We move out into our yards once again. We walk outside more frequently. We spend longer periods in semi-heated environments like the garage.

Spring cleaning is the ritual of reclaiming a greater amount of physical space for our human use. This is partly what’s underneath the venerable Canadian Tire’s new campaign called “Bring it.” The hardware retailer is evoking the Canadian ethos of battling the changes in season.

This man is cleaning his sexy, impractical sports car. He is also reclaiming his garage, which has likely be completely uninhabitable for the winter months.  He is ritually reclaiming this car and this space by clearing away the remnants of winter.

Spring cleaning is about re-asserting humans’ power over nature. In theoretical terms, this is one of the “value orientations” of cultural analysis.

Value Orientation Model

Spring cleaning, in a sense, is the ritualistic re-assertion of our power over nature. At least in Canada, it is!

Social media today can take some wisdom from past research into social networks. Mark Granovetter’s famous sociological study of how people hear about job opportunities found that “weak ties” to friends and acquaintances are actually more beneficial than “strong ties” to family and close friends. Social media marketers need to consider who has weak ties and strong ties before designing a social media strategy.

The Individual and The Network: Courtesy of Wikipedia

Weak ties are a product of social and psychological factors. Whether you’re designing an interaction, an experience, a marketing campaign or even an organizational itself, you should know what makes a “weak tie.” Weak ties are the source of precious information, like who’s hiring someone with your exact qualifications, where you can get the best deal on tires, or how good that new movie really is. Weak ties are the source of influence marketing, organizational innovation, and economic growth. In short, weak ties are the ties that matter.

What kind of person develops many weak ties? In his famous study, Granovetter did not measure certain psychological or sociological variables to determine if there was a systematic difference between those with weak ties and those with strong ties. But there are reasons to believe that there is such a systematic difference.

I come from a small town full of people with thick, strong ties have held that community together for generations. Originally a prosperous West Coast Salish Community, Sechelt continues to be archetypical of strong ties. There is economic development there, yet there is little innovation, dynamism or rapid change that occurs in cities.

I came to Toronto, where I knew exactly two people, both of whom were “weak ties” or friends I had known from school. Granovetter’s analysis would show that these were exactly the right kinds of people to help me find economic opportunities. And indeed, he was right; one friend graciously opened her home to me as I started my new job in this new city. 13 years later, I still live in this city (minus a two-year sojourn back home for my Master’s degree and to rack up even more weak ties), and here I am.

I now run this research company by developing and honing my weak ties. Weak ties have brought Copernicus new colleagues, new business, and new ideas. I have many weak ties throughout the city and the continent. What kind of person am I? What are the missing variables from Granovetter’s study?

• I am well educated, with four degrees and armloads of weak ties from each university experience. Did this help me develop a wide social network?
• I have cultural capital, having been trained which fork to use and when by my etiquette conscious mother. Did this help me develop a *quality* social network?
• I am an extrovert, who is comfortable meeting strangers and talking to acquaintances. Did this pre-ordain me to have many weak ties?
• I am a woman, who has been trained to consider social events part of my “gender job.” Does this encourage me to develop weak ties?
• I am white, and have been given white privileges like walking into office buildings, record shops, and convenience stores with nary a blink from a security guard. Has this helped me make new weak ties?

Sociologically speaking, weak ties are likely the result of a combination of social structures like race, gender, and social class. Psychologically speaking, weak ties are likely the result of constitutional personality traits, such as neuroticism or introversion/extroversion. Using both lenses, one can see that social capital is not built without a context; people are born into a personality, a body, and a social location which may — or may not — encourage the development of weak ties.

When you are designing a social media strategy, consider these social and psychological factors. Interaction designers would do well to gather insight around these variables specifically when doing design research, and incorporating them into their personas. Organization designers and HR consultants should consider that innovation does not happen simply because of “social media,” but because of specific social and psychological factors. And marketers should never believe that “if you build it, they will come.” Marketers should instead believe “if you build it, some of these specific types of people will come” to social media applications and campaigns.

I am a new home owner. Like many new home owners, I am both fascinated and repelled by the most terrifying show on television: Holmes on Homes. This show demonstrates a key aspect to understanding social life: normativity or what “should be.”

For those unfamiliar with the show, allow me to summarize the narrative arc of virtually every show. Mike Holmes is a general contractor. He arrives at a home as if he were arriving at the scene of the crime. Like Catherine on CSI, he takes a tour of the “scene.” The homeowners (usually a straight couple, about my age) regale him with the horrible story of their recent renovations, gone awry.

Mike clucks and mutters under his breath. He provides running commentary to the homeowners, assuring them that yes, their instincts were correct: their renovations were not “done right.” He then assures them that when his team arrives on the scene they will “make it right.”

The team duly arrives and as they peel back the layers of the house (the drywall, the floors, the ceiling, the insulation, the roof; Mike stops at nothing to uncover the truth), they discover how bad it actually is. About halfway through the show, Mike is stripped down to his crisp white tank top, with a pair of overalls. He is likely sweating. He is red-faced both with exertion and moral indignation.

“How can somebody do this to a family?” he asks. “They’re good people. They don’t deserve this.”

As the show progresses, Mike and his team make everything right. The magical closing moments of the show is the reveal: when the homeowners are invited back into their now-right home. They are typically overwhelmed. They gasp, whoop, and cry. They hug Mike Holmes. “This is how I get paid,” he tells the camera. The damage is un-done. Their home is now “right.”

If you are a homeowner, you know full well that your house will never be “right.” You have crumbling grout. You have an irritable furnace. Your kitchen faucet drips. Your livingroom window fogs up. You have any number of small or large malfunctions. Your home is “not right.”

What Holmes on Homes does is demonstrate to you what “right” look like. In other words, it demonstrates what sociologists call “normativity” or what “should” be. And you are not what you should be. Until Mike Holmes arrives, that is.

Mike Holmes plays the same role as Dr. Oz. He goes “underneath” the mere appearance of your home. In fact, houses that are well decorated are among Mike’s favourite targets because he can show how “looks can be deceiving.”

Dr. Oz does similar work when he takes blood from an audience member and shows her “the truth” about her blood sugar level, which is not readily apparent from her mere appearance.

Both Mike Holmes and Dr. Oz are showing us what “should” be. The truth is, none of us really notice if our electrical system is sub-par or if we are pre-diabetic. Our houses and our bodies are “asymptomatic” and we are quite happy with that state. Only through their expert intervention can you become “right.” This is what Michel Foucault talks about: experts and what they say in books and TV shows lead us to control ourselves.

Now granted, there may be homes or bodies that need significant intervention to survive. But we all too frequently raise the bar on what is “right.” Our homes are cleaner, drier, and more comfortable than they ever have been in history. Yet, we are continuously told that they are not “good enough.”

Mike Homes tells us what many marketers do: your home does not function properly. There is an entirely new universe of “properly” that you don’t even know existed. Instantly, there is anxiety about being “not right.” There is a compelling need to “make it right.”

Marketers and designers take heed. You may sell or design products based on what “should” be. You may subtly introduce anxiety in your customers without even realizing it. But you are not evoking good feelings or lifetime loyalty. You are scaring people. You are making them uncomfortable. You are making them feel inadequate. And before they met you (or Mike Holmes, or Dr. Oz) they felt perfectly fine.

Selling or designing based on normativity is also morally questionable. Advertising has a long history of selling anxiety, particularly to women. I exhort marketers and designers to eschew normative approaches, and instead, make people feel good about what they already have. Make them feel happy. And invite yourselves to that happy table.

I have mixed feelings about Mike Holmes. I thoroughly enjoy his ritualistic purification of people’s homes. I love it when what was so wrong is “made right.” It feels good to see that transformation. But now that I live in something that is “not right” and I do not have the limitless resources to “make it right,” I am in a constant state of dissatisfaction. I would have preferred to remain relatively ignorant of what “right” might be. I would likely be happier if I didn’t know how woefully inadequate my 60 amp panel is.

But my sociological lens helped me understand that Mike Holmes is just like my former doctor, who told me in one breath that I was very healthy and in the next told me to “lose weight.” Normativity is something we must recognize as just one view of “right.”

I am currently writing a grant proposal for a research project on mobile phones. This is the (very) short version:

All too often, technology designers create systems that unwittingly expose social actors to socially awkward situations. Companies like Facebook struggle to satisfy their users’ needs to present different selves in different social contexts. The dreaded “My mom is on Facebook” problem is so pervasive it was recently lampooned on Saturday Night Live. Such problems persist because technology designers lack an actionable, sociologically informed understanding of how face-to-face social interaction intersects with and co-constitutes online social interaction. Off-line and online social interactions frequently occur between the same actors, sometimes simultaneously, yet we have little understanding of how online interaction affects, and is affected by off-line interaction. I propose to work with a mobile technology company to investigate how material social life intersects with digital social life, which is now increasingly by the use of Web-enabled smart phones.

Further down in the application, I zero in on my specific research questions:

Social actors often simultaneously present a “work” self through their smart phone, while presenting a “domestic self” to their family members surrounding them. These devices, like the BlackBerry, were originally created for business use (Aoki and Downes, 2003), as was the telephone itself (Flinchy 1997). Researchers have already found that mobile phones make the presentation of a consistent “self” tenuous and vulnerable to disruption in various public spaces (Fortunati, 2005). What are the social consequences of a business technology brought into the domestic context?

I will be adding to this proposal in the coming weeks, but in the meantime, I welcome (nay, beg for) comments from the technology design community. Please weigh in!