Communispace Corporation

On my way to a recent conference, a stranger standing next to me in the elevator posed that question to me. Sometimes it’s the off-occurrences in life that stick with you and I’ve been contemplating the question ever since.

I was representing Communispace on a panel at the Wharton Interactive Media Initiative/Marketing Science Institute’s conference on the Emergence and Impact of User-Generated Content. Some of the best academics from across the world were gathering to discuss the collective impact that empowered internet users are having on companies and organizations.

I heard over the course of two days some of the most current thinking on topics like the role online communities play in innovation; the potential for text mining across the web in understanding stock performance; along with the benefits and pitfalls of crowd-sourcing new ideas, just to name a few.

You and I have already heard that we are living in a brave new world of fast, intense, hyper-sharing of information and opinion because of the advent of the internet and social media. But I have to say the excitement at the conference about the potential for better understanding and responding to the needs of consumers, investors, patients…people worldwide was absolutely palpable.

As I think more about it, technology has seemingly always been playing catch up to human expression, whether it was the printing press allowing for an autobiography like Ben Franklin’s to be broadly distributed or YouTube making homemade videos consumable. We now need to not only read text contributions but also evaluate digital images, audio and video that people post to really ‘listen’ to them effectively. We can never stop thinking about the next methods they’ll come up with. 

My initial knee-jerk reaction to the question in the elevator was to laugh but if you think about it in the context of the technology of the time and the innovation in personal expression and message it represented, Ben Franklin may indeed have been our first American blogger.

A few months ago a colleague of mine asked if I had ever heard of Paperless Post. I hadn’t, but was intrigued, so I did a little research and discovered something truly fabulous! Among all the praise, Vogue says that it’s the luxury version of Evite. I even found out that Zac Posen, the showman of fashion, recently used it for a benefit, how cool is that?

I knew I had to give it a whirl, so just a few weeks ago, I sent few invites for my mother’s annual Christmas Eve party. First, I selected the style, a beautiful square red trimmed card with a green satin bow that shined just like the real thing. Then, I used their “wording assistant” to help me write the card and chose the envelope and I was ready to go! Within a few minutes I already had an email back from my sister telling me that this year’s evite was better than year’s past. Of course, there is nothing like getting a card in the mail, but I am pretty sure this comes close.

So why do I like Paperless Post? It’s the fact that I can send out beautiful invites virtually and they actually look and feel real, an element that has been lacking in many e-services. There’s also something to be said about the luxury aspect. Who wouldn’t want to receive a fancy looking invitation in their inbox? Sending out a Paperless Post is also a greener way to invite people to an event, which is something I desperately try to include in my life. I know the first two reasons are a bit superficial, but as Madonna once said, “we are living in a material world.”

Ultimately, Paperless Post provided me with an easy yet unique way to send out my invites this year. I didn’t have to sacrifice the look or the feel of a paper invite just because I created them online. This makes me wonder what other sites and companies will succeed when it comes to creating services that are simple, while still maintaining the visual appeal of something more personal. In the end, are we inevitably giving up something, or is it possible to have our little luxuries sent to us via email?

In both developed and developing countries, birth rates are generally dropping, life expectancies are increasing, the average age at which women have their first child is also increasing, and the needs of the “sandwich generation”—those people concurrently caring for children and elderly parents—are of growing interest to marketers. So when we planned our corporate research agenda at the start of 2009, we thought some exploration as to how this squeezed demographic was thinking and coping could be useful, especially to our clients in financial services, health care, and insurance.

The personal relevance of this research was also inescapable. As we were beginning, it just so happened that I—a married 55-year-old mother of two who uses hair dye almost as liberally as I use coffee—was moving my elderly mother up from Florida to live closer to us, and also helping out my New York City-dwelling daughter with the security deposit and last month’s rent on her new apartment. And Katrina, my 26-year-old colleague in this research, was spending her weekends completing climbs to the summits of New Hampshire’s White Mountains with her 73-year-old father. I was exploring the sandwich situation from the perspective of a boomer whose children were relying on me less for financial and emotional support as my recently widowed mother’s needs were increasing on both fronts. And Katrina, who was facilitating these community conversations with a compassion and wisdom that took my breath away, was exploring the same set of issues, but from the perspective of a “millennial” (a meaningless moniker, I’ve come to believe) looking to what lay ahead.

I was prepared to hear a lot of stories from our community members similar to my own— stories about financial pressures, guilt, stress, etc. What I was unprepared for was the intimacy of the disclosure about the rewards as well as the challenges of caring for elderly loved ones. Our members opened up their lives and hearts, not just to complain, but to reveal how they feel, who they care for, how they cope, what they need, and what messaging they respond to and recoil from.

We learned that the sandwich is not a sandwich. The “squeeze” is not exerted or experienced equally. People are not stressed because they’re caring for kids and parents; it’s because they’re caring for parents and in-laws, period. But we also learned that the “burden” carries intrinsic rewards, that caring for elderly relatives yields moral clarity, a sense of purpose, opportunities to teach and model values for their children, and moments of surprising joy. And we were overwhelmed by the unmet needs that surfaced, by the opportunity for brands across industries to provide products and services that help care for aging parents, now and in the future.

But there was also another, unanticipated outcome to this research effort. It not only caused our members to reflect on their own lives and values, but taught us as facilitators something about the power of empathetic collaboration. I brought age, experience, and immediacy to our analysis, but Kat contributed fresh vision, challenging questions, and a young but wise perspective. And as a result, the output of our work was greater than the sum of its parts.

Here at verbatim, we tend to blog a lot about how passionate and committed our community members are (true), how visionary and strategic our clients are (amen), and how powerful and transformative customer-driven insight and innovation can be (hallelujah!). But the humanity and diversity that our facilitation teams bring to our work is every bit as worthy of celebration.

That’s what Barack Obama said when he gave Bruce Springsteen his Kennedy Center Honor for lifetime achievement in the performing arts. When I heard this I welled up with pride.

Like Bruce, I grew up on the Jersey Shore. Throughout the ‘80s my aunts would play his albums over and over again, telling tall tales of marathon performances at the Stone Pony in Asbury Park. I didn’t understand the excitement at the time and thought it was old people’s music.

In the early ‘90s I attended the same community college as The Boss (I graduated) and frequently surfed next to the very pier that inspired the song, 4th of July, Asbury Park.

In 2000 I moved to California, and eventually became homesick and tired of the lyric-less jam band scene that surrounded me. Turning to my roots, I found comfort in the following songs:

• Spirit in the Night – a song about partying in the Pine Barrens
• Backstreets – a song about friendship
• Independence Day – a song about fathers and sons
• Thunder Road/Born to Run – songs about getting out of small towns

Why am I telling you this? Well if you’re from New Jersey you often hear people refer to your state as the “Armpit of America.” Sure, even I roll up the windows when I drive down the Turnpike, but if you head south on the Parkway that industrial aroma fades and you end up at the Jersey Shore, home to arguably the best songwriter since Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie. Click here for some artists who agree.

At approximately five p.m. on any given Friday you’ll find me paying homage to ‘Happy Hour’. According to the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States’ 2008 Industry Review, I’m not alone; off-premise spirits volume — alcohol purchased in liquor stores — increased by 2.9 percent from the previous year.

While most of the American economy is bottoming out, it’s bottoms up for the alcohol industry. Is it a surprise the sorcerers of spirits have invested heavily in helping remind you to bring a bottle of their booze home with you?

Open the commercial cabinet and drink these down if you would:

• Beginning with bagpipes, Johnnie Walker walks through his history, from barrel one to the bevy of distinct labels featured today.
• Similarly, Jack Daniels shares the long-standing stylings of ‘The Old No. Seven’, pushing you to ponder the sentiment behind its symbol.

Leaving our collective love for liquor on the shelf, how are these spots quenching consumers’ thirst?

There’s something distinctly deliberate in the buzz poured by both; tales told of a storied history of the sultans of shot, decades of delivering a now familiar formula. Both ads place a particular emphasis on pointing out the classic cache of their respective brands, providing some solidarity in otherwise shaky times.

Simply put, there’s something calming in continuity.

These ads speak to more than a consumer’s drive to drown their distress; in a time where volatile economic conditions cause consumers to question their sense of control over their lives, the bottlers of brown liquor offer an opportunity to keep at least one thing static.

Told under the guise of tradition, both ads suggest a sound understanding of the current consumer mindset, placating our desire to keep things simple – effectively stirring consumers’ shaken emotion with sweet stability in every sip.

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As you head home or to a Happy Hour near you, join me in raising a glass in honor of the weekend!