Chocolate Oranges - a Nudge, a Tap, and a Policy Unwrapped...

Terry's Chocolate Orange - tapped and unwrapped
Image by VerseVend via Flickr

Ah, what a gift to political rhetoric the Chocolate Orange is.  In a 2006 speech whilst leader of the opposition, David Cameron criticised 'irresponsible' marketers for placing special offers on chocolate next to tills in retail stores, highlighting the ironic unhealthy/healthy name of the Chocolate Orange and saying '"As Britain faces an obesity crisis, why does WH Smith's promote half-price Chocolate Oranges at its checkouts instead of real oranges?"(BBC, 2006).  Which party does he belong to again?

Well, this week the chocolate orange has reared its tempting, medusa-like head once again, with Ed Miliband dredging up this as an example of Cameron's failure to deliver on the promises made in opposition, telling 'The House' Magazine "If he can't sort out the chocolate orange, he's not going to sort out the train companies, the energy companies, the banks, is he?" (The House, 2012).

Terry's must be wondering what on earth is going on.  They've had quite a year of bizarre and perhaps somewhat unexpected publicity as it happens.  One of their flagship products and a staple in the Christmas stockings for many of us, the Chocolate Orange experienced something of a sales spike last autumn when a 'glitch' in Tesco's computer systems meant they could be bought for just 29p.  A buying frenzy ensued, with happy shoppers posting photographs of them posing with their 'Orange Art' in the form of giant pyramids of the boxed chocs (Huffington Post, 2011).

So, is all this publicity good or bad for the Chocolate Orange?  Well it depends where you stand on the 'all publicity is good publicity' debate.  My view is that anything that gets an old product in the news, particularly an old favourite, is going to have a 'Nudge' effect on sales (although you do have to get your pricing right of course...).  The irony is that a reliance on Nudge politics is exactly what Ed Miliband is criticising David Cameron for: "You know he believes in a nudge philosophy which seems to amount to just asking people to do nice things. But that isn't going to sort out the problem. You've got to change the rules" (BBC, 2012). 

Nudges work in marketing because they remind us of things we like (Barnard and Ehrenberg, 1997).  It's pretty simple isn't it? Reminding us of pleasure makes us more likely to seek it, whereas reminding us of pain and responsibility makes us want to...well...eat more chocolate...

I'll let you unwrap that one.

24Hrs Without Wikipedia - How Did Our Students Cope?

As I'm sure you know, yesterday Wikipedia took all its English content offline for 24hrs in protest at the US's proposed legislation to prevent the misuse of copyrighted material online, the 'Stop Online Piracy Act' (SOPA). This act seeks to give the US the power to impose sanctions on web site owners who contravene copyright laws, and so raises important questions about who is responsible for creative ideas and material online, who owns it and what constitutes misuse.  The scale of the protests against SOPA is a sign of its importance.  Popular sites like YouTube, Wikipedia, Facebook and Flickr, which are populated by 'User-Generated Content' (UGC) are all potentially at risk in the face of this legislation.

I was really keen to discuss this issue with my students as it could have an enormous impact on them, however, it seemed that for many of them the issues at stake were not so much the questions of freedom of speech, ethics and legality, but rather the question of how they could function without Wikipedia as a research tool.

Such is the power of Wikipedia and its influence and reach as a first port of call for information, and yet it is a site that strikes dread in the hearts of many academics who contend that the content on Wikipedia cannot be relied upon as it can be edited by 'anyone'.  I certainly, am one  who stresses that sites like Wikipedia should not appear in a list of academic references for this very reason of source credibility.  I do, however, think Wikipedia is an excellent first port of call for students who need to get a general sense of a topic or the meaning of a particular term.  

Students do, however, seem to place an inordinate amount of trust in what they find through search engines on the web, to their detriment.  I often see essays where it is clear that the student has simply Googled key words and copied in text from the first sites that appeared in the search results.  Time and time again I stress in class that this is not going to get them a good grade, but it seems as though we have a generation of students who are programmed to operate in this way.  Without Wikipedia for a day their world is a difficult place in which to research an assignment as they don't have the skills to find information elsewhere.  It's not that they haven't been shown how, but they've discarded the routes they have been taught (e.g. databases of journal articles accessed through the library web pages).  These routes are not quick or simple enough for them, and result in PDFs of lengthy journal articles that they will never read.  As a marketer by trade I take a marketing perspective on this, so my first point of reference is always the customer.  Therefore, the question for me is not how can we force our students to like our way of doing it, but how can we make credible information easier to find, easier to read and more palatable to students?  

Academic publishing has a lot to learn - there is a change coming, and if we continue to adopt old ways of publishing, old ways of writing and protecting our information, we will quickly be discarded as irrelevant and out of date by our students.  SOPA itself is a sign of a world dragging its feet to catch up with a new way of thinking, a world where ideas cannot be managed and protected, a world where the first person to 'do something' with the idea is the one that reaps the reward.  If creativity is coming up with new ideas, innovation is doing something about them.  So I leave you with two quotes which explain this difference,  and with the thought that I believe now is a time for innovation, and to be part of that we need to stop whinging about protecting our IP and wake up to a world where what you do with your ideas is what matters...

'Often, in common parlance, the words creativity and innovation are used interchangeably. They shouldn't be, because while creativity implies coming up with ideas, it's the "bringing ideas to life" . . . that makes innovation the distinct undertaking it is.“’
    

Davila et al (2006) 

‘Creativity refers to the generation of novel ideas – innovation is making money with them’
 

 Rosenfeld and Servo (1990)

References

Davila, T., Epstein, M. J., and Shelton, R. (2006), Making Innovation Work: How to Manage It, Measure It, and Profit from It, Upper Saddle River, Wharton School Publishing.

Rosenfeld, R. and Servo, J. (1990), "Facilitating innovation in large organisations", Managing Innovation, London, Sage.

Big Breasts are Big Business: Why are we risking our lives for a bigger cup size?

Image via Wikipedia

The recent health scare related to 'PIP' breast implants has reignited the debate about cosmetic surgery, and I'm very glad of it.  It was becoming too accepted, too normal.  Time to wake up and realise that it's not normal.  It's not an everyday thing to consent to have someone cut open your body, place a sack of chemicals in it and sew it up again.  Neither is it normal to inject your forehead with poisonous snake venom, or cut a hole in your thigh so that your cells can be sucked out. 

I feel sorry, of course, for those women who have been misled in terms of the safety of these procedures, and am disgusted by the callous business that has grown up around cosmetic surgery, a business prepared to risk lives for profit it seems.  I am particularly sorry for those women who, following the trauma of cancer and mastectomy, are faced with a second blow in discovering that their reconstructive surgery may have put them at further risk.

Unfortunately, this industry (as any other) is driven by demand, and that demand is being stimulated  constantly by the way in which physical 'perfection' is presented to us by the media.  Now, you can tell me that it is a psychological problem for some people, and that they will only feel better if they have the op - but I have to disagree that this is the best course of action.  It is doing what (in my experience) we as a society have become so fond of doing - treating symptoms not causes.  We provide medical care for smoking-related illnesses instead of tackling the causes; we wait for obesity to create medical problems before working on the root causes of it, we allow people to reach the point of hospitalisation before any offer of treatment for mental health problems is given.

Psychological problems and mental illnesses are not visible on the body unless we make them so, and it is often the case.  Physical signs of mental illness - self harm, dysmorphia, eating disorders, suicide attempts are manifestations of real, serious mental illnesses  - but instead of treating the causes, our society persists in treating the symptoms.  We trivialise these symptoms as a 'cry for help' and perpetuate the view of mental illness as a weakness.  If I had a broken leg it would be OK to express sympathy, if I had depression it would not.  We dismiss what we do not understand and what we cannot see, and what a loss to society it is that we cannot accept and treat mental health problems as real and address the root causes, one of which is, I believe, a society that places unrealistic expectations on its young people.

This isn't just the government's responsibility, or the responsibility of the NHS/mental health professionals, it is everyone's responsibility.  Educators, parents, partners, the media, businesses, designers - everyone needs to take collective responsibility for ensuring that we do not create another generation of young people so disconnected from what the human body looks like that they feel compelled to bridge the gap between what they see in the mirror and what they see in magazines.  We have created a generation of young people who are prepared to undertake risky, costly, time-consuming procedures in the pursuit of an idealised image of perfection that does not, and cannot, exist except with the aid of Photoshop.  What a sorry state of affairs it is when the minds, bodies and creative energies of our youth are being poured into this pursuit of the unattainable.  What a terrible, terrible waste.

My Moment of the Year 2011: Mild-Mannered Matt Baker Fights Back

Matt Baker, my hero of 2011. Image via Wikipedia

Tradition requires some sort of 'best of' or 'review of the year' blog post at the end of the year.  Quite frankly I don't think there's any point in saying what so many others have already said so profusely and far better than I could about a year of environmental, political and economic unrest and upheaval so violent that its reverberations are likely to continue to be felt for many a year.  So I'm just going to pick one little moment that I think says everything about this year as a year of protest.  No big demonstrations, no violence, occupation or rioting, just a small stand made by just the kind of person you'd never expect to care.

When David Cameron agreed to appear on the One Show it would seem to have been a pretty safe bet.  Benign, corporate and cosy - surely there were no sharks here?  But when the normally mild-mannered, middle-of-the road, all-round-Clark-Kent-style-good-guy Matt Baker took his opportunity at the end of the interview to ask the PM 'how on earth he sleeps at night', it struck the kind of blow to the Cameron government that rioting in Peckham just couldn't evince.  It was a blow from within - from just the kind of guy the coalition should be wooing.   Here's the moment:



He didn't push it, but it was just enought to make the point - even if Cameron simply didn't get it...who indeed would have expected such a question from the gentlemanly Matt?

So, well done Matt Baker. Your single, gently defiant question sums up the year for me.  A year when we all started to pay attention to politics again, to reassert our democratic right to critically evaluate our elected leaders, and to find them wanting.

Why it's ok to use the 'C' word...'Christmas' that is...

Source: http://christmasstockimages.com

Some words are so offensive we just can't bring ourselves to accept their use in common speech can we?  Yes, there are 'swear words' that we may feel are inappropriate in certain situations (although Stephen Fry's fantastic documentary series 'Planet Word' certainly made an excellent case for the function of swearing in our language), but other words are becoming taboo in some civic context particularly as they are seen to expose the organisations using them to criticism on the grounds of favouring one particular (religious) culture over another.

The specific 'C' word I'm talking about here is, of course,

'Christmas'.

Several city councils have, in recent years, changed their use of language at this time of year to studiously avoid using this particular 'C' word in order to be more 'inclusive', replacing it instead with 'Winter Festival' or similar.  As a non-religious linguaphile I find this mildly amusing.  Christmas is, of course, a word with Christian etymological roots (although scratch beneath this and you have Christ/Krishna and the Indo-European linguistic heritage of English to consider), and I appreciate the dilemma faced by councils, but really, the meaning of the word has evolved in common speech just as thousands of others have over time.  This is the great strength of the English language, its ability to adopt and adapt.

If you're a Christian you might mourn the loss of the religious connotation of the word in its use by some today; equally, if you are concerned about consumerism, you might think the word has been exploited by business. That's placing a heavy burden of political, ideological and religious thought on one little word. For me Christmas is just a word which we all understand, a signifier (as Saussure called it), which describes a cultural event that many people in the world participate in.  The meaning we each ascribe to the cultural event itself, our views on it and concerns about it, are a separate set of issues.  We need signifiers to be able to discuss the bigger issues, so let's not take them away...

With that in mind, and on a less serious note, earlier this week I made a video for my first year students with the answers to their Christmas quiz.  This little Christmas message from everyone at Swansea Business School was the by-product.  No religious connotations, just a bit of fun :)

The Business of Busyness

Have you noticed how busy everyone seems to be at the moment?  What an inane statement that is.  Everyone is always busy (or at least that's what they'll tell you). Well, I've been one of those people this month.  Too busy to complete anything to my usual standards (pernickity at the best of times), too busy to maintain friendships (bad friend), too busy to get a haircut (slatternly), and too busy to get the new brake discs and pads on my car the garage recommended during my MOT a few months ago (risky and stupid).  These last few months have been so physically and emotionally draining that I may have even considered postponing breathing for a while, I was so busy being busy.

So, this is my first blog post for a month, and I love blogging, so why haven't I been doing it?  Busy.  I had to dust my piano the other day - why hadn't I been playing it? Busy.  My PhD proposal is sitting there beckoning me towards it, but I can't seem to find a stretch of time long enough to do it justice.  Why?  Busy.

Sometimes we get so sucked into servicing the everyday demands placed before us, replying to emails, tweets, knocks on the office door etc., that we end up on a rollercoaster that is just going round and round the same track.  The initial adrenaline soon wears off and we just become sick and tired.  That's what has happened to me;  I've become sick (physically) and tired (emotionally), to the point where I'm desperate for a little Christmas respite.  Not just because it's a break - but more particularly because it's the only break where you know no-one else is going to be stacking up the work for your return.

This is a classic of the self-help book genre, it's a 'don't sweat the small stuff' and a '7 habits' lesson - goodness, it's a lesson the ancient philosophers could have taught us.  Yes, there is beauty in the small stuff, but if you let it prevent you from doing the big stuff, you're never going to get off that rollercoaster (the ancients are, of course, unlikely to have mentioned a rollercoaster - they were good engineers, but I don't think they'd progressed to pointless thrill-seeking at £30 a pop).

So, for two weeks this Christmas, I'm banning busy, getting off the rollercoaster, and taking a train somewhere instead.  Destination?  Who knows.

Has Tesco Resurrected the Tech Salesman?

Image via Wikipedia

Oh the irony...last week I blogged about the decline of the electrical goods salesperson, and this week Tesco launches its cosy 'Ask our friendly Tech Support Team about the perfect Christmas gift' ads.

So, were they listening?  Have they resurrected personal selling? What are the chances someone will be willing to sell me something this weekend if I try again?  And..have they put the staff member nursing a hangover who failed to make any money out of me last week on a course ?  (Not the guy in this picture - I'm sure he's brilliant at his job...although perhaps on closer inspection he looks a little like a robot...) 

Robot or not, I'm willing to believe, Mr Tesco.

Watch this space, I'll report back when I've checked for vital signs...