Robert’s Final Submission for 222.453 Reseacrh & Developmentert

WorkingPaper-05-28-Robert-Longuet-Higgins

DesignBrief-05-28-Robert-Longuet-Higgins

BP

DESIGN EXPERIMENTATION – STRATEGY, USER EXPERIENCE AND WEBSITE DESIGN

Preface:

Filling your car up with gas is a experience; though it has yet to be utilized to draw users closer to the brand or the context surrounding the consumption. People spend a lot of mony on petrol and they get nothing in return from the brand, a brand like nike is part of you when you run, but you don’t think “thank you BP for getting me up a hill”. This concept explore the potential of a transformational offerings in the consumption of petrol.

The Concept –

A key chain or other device will keep the user involved and make it easy to engage with this new service.

The idea is to extend the consumption or brand interaction by creating an site that enables people to make a profile and the add cars to it, each car gets its own id.

When the individual fills their car and pays for it they are able to swig the id tag of thier car and the information from what you just filled the car gets uploaded to your cars profile.

This means that when the individual then goes online they are able to track their usage over time. not only usage bu cost, regularity  of visits, the change in price of petrol , the change in your consumption (potentially even who was driving and their efficiency- that would be the next stage where you car holds some information also).

It can also suggest and help inform the user about better ways to be more efficient, and allow the user to follow and engage in conversations of interest around this subject.

This results in a more informed user who has a stronger connection with the brand as it is helping them to build better control over thier driving.

I have not designed this website, however i have had a play with how it may work; It will have a personal space and a community space, community is here because it is the essential way of creating real and live content within the site

The brand

Initially I considered that BP would be a brand that could find this potential within its already developed brand personality. however I am sympateic to the notion that BP  isn’t every where and problems may arise when users must go to other petrol stations – this has lead me to looking at the AA (see previous blogs). The AA brand is about keeping kiwis on the road, so I feel this could also fit within its brand personality.

"For the road ahead"

The AA also already deals with memberships, so this service could be a way of further activating members and gaining new members.

CRAFTBEERNZ.co.nz

DESIGN EXPERIMENTATION – STRATEGY AND WEBSITE DESIGN

Preface:

This concept was born from concept mapping and identification through gap analysis of the craft beer industry in New Zealand. This is a community that I live on the cusp of entering. Many small breweries and bars (retail outlets) are already using social media well to build loyal communities around them (see Tuatara Brewery, Malthouse).

The Community around craft beer

Craft beer brewers and drinkers tend to be very passionate about brewing, and through the experience of making and drinking craft beer there is a significant common shared interest – or shared repitore. The industry are currently connected via by the website Brewers guild of New Zealand, however it is used as a infomation center for the industry,

What has not yet happened, is a connection of brand users and the producers; Pine and Gilmore state that we must connect these two groups because this create authentic relationships that go both ways.

From the My Beers page users are able to see track the beers they like, suggest and recieve suggestions and open / find more information about breweries as they want.

It is important to offer a platform where people can find the most relevant and important information to them. So every beer and Brewery can maintain its own identity which allows real and brewery created (which in this case will be also seen as real) conversation can be shared around the beer itself. It will also keep you up to date with any new beers coming out like this one or new beers from that brewery.

The Concept part ONE

There are hundreds of craft beers to try in NZ and as with craft beers everyone has their own opinion, the concept of this initiative is to develop a platform that provides users with both a transformational / useful service that helps them navigate the vast about of beers as well as create a communication value for users.

The idea is that this enables you to track the beers you try and comment straight away about them (potentially from your current snaptag location- by implementing technology or other similar tech).

It is able to learn and suggest beers that you may like.

It puts your comments and the beers you try into a socail space where your friends can comment and spark new conversation.

Freinds are able to suggest beers directly to you.

The personal home space is a filter of information from the website and from Facebook.

The Concept part TWO

This has been a concept projection into the way inwhich communites can live across or through a platform like Facebook, The majority of the content that is viewed on the CraftBeerNZ website all lives within Facebook also, this means that the community members can choose to sync their accounts with facebook, which means comments made on craft beer NZ live in facebook as well.

ESSENTIALLY, the community website could become a Facebook filter that means if you want only Craft beer conversations you can visit this community and all the other crap is removed, aloowing for a strong communication value. (this has come from analysis of  the Google Buzz release presentation I looked at earleir in my workbook (see this)

What it achieves

The result of this initiative is that the users and industry will use it as a communication platform for everything around this whole industry (consumption, news, production, conversation).

+ please note at this point I am aware that the craft beer industry may be something that will continue to travel better as word of mouth rather than a large scale web home, but this is more a conceptual experiment than any finished designed strategy.

From my essay:

It is currently not an exercise in creating belonging, but an investigation into the potential of a brand hub model as a facilitator to a community of practice.  It is designed to connect drinkers and industry members to enhance the experience of consuming craft beers through an extended participation in an online realm.  It allows users play an active role in creating and sharing their own value by commenting, rating, joining or starting conversations among their friends or the entire community.

Some shots of my workbook! – just the important bits

MY PHYSICAL WORKBOOK, CHECK IT OUT

Roberts Major Workbook

View more documents from Massey University.

Tuatara Shout a Mate – R&D

This was an experiment just exploring possible integrations into social media applications.

• This is designed to live in the individuals space (FB)
• It is only one aspect of what could be a much larger community hive (i.e. this could be a pull out from the main hive)

ANALYSIS

• The idea is that the consumption of a beer with a mate is not just a physical experience but means far more socailly – if I say “lets have a beer” i mean ” can we spend some time together” the conversation with other “mates’ is how people can find a sense of belonging – If im feeling lonely a beer with mate will fix that.
• The concept here is by facilitating a conversation (or starting and helping it take place) can the brand prolong its user experience. Although I have been unable to implement this, the theory I have been reading suggests that this brand consumption extension is one major facet of the new brand paradigm.
• The ideas is that (like facebook, friendster ) the event or conversation is extended arcoss the digital and physical and it becoms a living conversation (not just spoken) as with most of the conversations we are now having online.
• Extending the consumption experience – where consumption is actually the conversation and time with mates over common ground – is what this application attempts to address.

Miller Lets New Craft Brew Speak for Itself – conversational marketing

CHICAGO (AdAge.com) — MillerCoors’ new “craft” beer is so small that it can talk to its drinkers individually.

Colorado Native Lager, which launches this week, comes from the No. 2 U.S. brewer’s A.C. Golden Brewing Co. unit, which brews craft-style beers in small quantities and markets them exclusively through digital and word-of-mouth channels. The marketer says the brand is brewed from “99.9%” Colorado-grown ingredients, a percentage that includes the locally made glass bottles. It will be sold only in Colorado, at least at first.

With Colorado Native Lager, A.C. Golden is using the model that worked for MillerCoors’ Blue Moon: seeding the brand through word-of-mouth and letting consumers feel as if they “discovered” the beer for themselves, which encourages them to introduce friends to it. To do so, it’s putting the entirety of its tiny Colorado Native budget into mobile and social-media channels.

Every Colorado Native label is affixed with a “SnapTag,” which, if photographed on a mobile device and e-mailed to a specified phone number, allows the brand to begin a conversation with its drinkers.

After e-mailing in a picture of the logo, a drinker will first get a reply asking for their birthday. If they say they’re older than 21, they’ll be queried with Colorado-centric trivia about their hobbies and interests, and the database will remember the answers and use them to craft future communications and offers to each individual drinker.

What drinkers don’t know …
Those drinkers could be skeptical about any product brewed by a giant, but Blue Moon Belgian White is evidence that macro-brewers can create craft-style beers that can achieve scale. Belgian White, currently the largest craft-style beer in the U.S. with 1,150 barrels shipped in 2009, according to Beer Marketer’s Insights, was introduced by Coors in the mid-1990s without media support, and the company let it pass for a microbrew of sorts. Progress was slow, and it was nearly shuttered around the turn of the century, but the brand eventually gained traction with consumers.

“Most consumers don’t know or care who brews which brand,” said Beer Business Daily Editor Harry Schuhmacher, pointing to Blue Moon and Anheuser-Busch’s Shock Top. “But it is true that the hop-heads and real-beer enthusiasts do care.”

Regardless, small-scale craft brands have continued to grow robustly through the recession despite being priced higher in many cases, a stark contrast to their pricey imported peers, which have been bludgeoned by drinkers trading down to cheaper brands.

By Jeremy Mullman
Published: April 05, 2010

SNAP TAG TECHNOLOGY

• Im just on a bit of a role with looking at beer as vessel for understating the extension of a product consumption… ITS JUST A VESSEL AT THE MOMENT ( BECAUSE IT HAS INTERESTING CONSUMPTION AND SOCIAL DYNAMICS….)
• SNap tag technology is just something I thought worth playing around with as far as creating an easy way to extend the experience into a digital realm.
• Below is the current Snap tag technology, which currently only offers an extended personal experience (THIS SHOULD BE PERSONAL)

DESIGN IDEA 1

• Just a thought for a poster that is for in this example for a Gig, you can take a pix of the poster snap tag and then automatically upload that to information to facebook by asking your mates “anyone going?” or ” Whos keen?”, that conversation instantaneously becomes live and social.

• This is only a really fast proof of concept… The idea is simple enough ( just not seen in our everyday …. YET)

DESIGN IDEA 2

This just davels back into how it could relate to a craft beer.

Im going to explain this as a personal story because I find my self in the target audience and my desire for this is n some way a proof of concept.

1. I am out for a drink with mates from work and I order a beer I haven’t had before – my mates im with don’t drink beer that much so don’t appreciate the conversation I want to have about this beer -my mate Josh would really be interested and I know he would like the beer
   
2. So I take a photo of the snap tag and it automatically sorts a post ready for my social media hub – you can select to specifically target the conversation or make a general “i had this beer statement”
3. I  can from that spot organize with josh THROUGH THIS COMMUNICATION PLATFORM to catch up for a beer…
4. Not only this It then opens me up to other discussions about the beer where I can learn, hear from the brewers, find out what others think and say what i think.
5. That made my personal consumption at a bar social outside of my current physical placement…

THE COLORADO NATIVE SNAP TAG CAMPAIGN ONLY TRIED TO ENGAGE THE CUSTOMER WITH THE BRAND IN A ONE-ONE CONVERSATION….

THIS CAMPAIGN tries to build a socail conversation around the beer and the brand user. the difference is that they are not just opting into conversation they are choosing to participate and lead their own conversations….

Idea: digital graffiti; adding digital layers to a physical world

graffiti is often seen as an antisocial behavior, and forms of it (such as tagging) don’t add much to the environment, however bombing and other more artistic forms (like the installation graffiti on the wall at uni) can improve an urban environment by adding art to the streets.

the concept i have been thinking of would allow anyone to digitally draw, through an iphone or smart phone, onto the environment around them, by looking at a surface through the phones camera, on a scale from a brick to an entire building. (could be done like in this program, but then aligned and scaled to a physical surface)

the drawings could then be uploaded ‘onto’ the buildings in the digital space, meaning visitors to the physical space could then view other peoples art by looking at the environment around them through their phones camera, in a similar manner to WIKITUDE World Browser

another layer to this could be at sponsered sites competitions could be run where people could submit their own design and/or vote for their favoruite digital tag which would then be physicaly painted or printed onto the wall
(maby done something like this, but im sure there are other ways it could be done)

experiments

heres a couple of things i was playing around with. the first was an idea for planting vegetable gardens in unused public spaces, either by seed bombs or having more of a client focus and writing text with the lines of plants. it plays with themes we are looking at in a digital space within the physical, adding something to the environment that improves it, and then may also improve the lives of the people in the environment if it produces food they can harvest, making the advertising having a disposal mechanism built in.

seeds used

the second one was looking at LED Throwies from http://graffitiresearchlab.com/ was not so sure as to their procticality in advertising terms, but thought they could be another way to insert removable advertising that would be appropriate for a short term message, as the lights fade after 1-5 days, depending on batteries used.

testing longevity of different batteries

used this for another project for a poetry interpretation

assignment for Art Directoin using LED throwies

have now moved away from these areas, particularly impermanence of message, and am now focusing on creating long term initiatives and brand offerings.

Conversation about my project – Active brainstorm

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a cool experiment by some chaps from AgencyNet

[http://lessthanthree.agencynet.com/]