Wednesday 29 September 2010

Relentless curiosity

Designer’s have a unique mindset was required to sift, sort, assign value and create insights from large amounts of information. Useful skills in this day and age!

Doblin Group consultant Jeff Tull described the explorative design mindset, “even when you’re gathering data you’re inherently analysing it, it’s never discrete, but the challenge is to identify, pick signals, find meaningful patterns” … “most design decisions are done using very subjective, qualitative, intuitive sort of decision-making models. So quite literally you look at one or two things, size them up with either a sensory or aesthetic sensitivity that is very difficult to articulate, and say that’s one better.”

John Seely Brown believed that the design mindset required “an ability to understand how sense making actually happens. How do you come to read something? What are the cues that you actually use? How do you actually shape those cues so that they’re slightly different? For example, a good landscape architect can shape the landscape of the land and it just affords you without even knowing to find your way towards the front door. But you take away that landscaping and you may not be able to find the front door. What’s going on in the landscaping that subconsciously pulls you to the right place?”

I came to describe this behavior during my research as relentless curiosity — an apt description!

How supermodels are like toxic assets

From Ashley Mears


In 2002, a tall and skinny 14-year old girl competed in a dance contest in Vancouver, Canada. There she encountered a modeling agent, who asked her to consider going out for modeling jobs. Today, the 22-year-old Coco Rocha is celebrated as a “supermodel” (however little of its glamazon power the term retains these days), appearing on covers of Vogue and i-D magazines, on catwalks from Marc Jacobs to Prada, and as the star face for Dior, H&M, and Chanel. You might not recognize her name, but the chances are you’ve seen Coco Rocha in the past few years.

Coco is what economists would call a winner in a “winner-take all market,” prevalent in culture industries like art and music, where a handful of people reap very lucrative and visible rewards while the bulk of contestants barely scrape by meager livings before they fade into more stable and far less glamorous careers. The presence of such spectacular winners like Coco Rocha raises a great sociological question: how, among the thousands of wannabe models worldwide, is any one 14 year-old able to rise from the pack? What makes Coco Rocha more valuable than the thousands of similar contestants? How, in other words, do winners happen?

The secrets to Coco’s success, and the dozens of girls that have come before and will surely come after her, have much less to do with Coco the person (or the body) than with the social context of an unstable market. There is very little intrinsic value in Coco’s physique that would set her apart from any number of other similarly-built teens—when dealing with symbolic goods like “beauty” and “fashionability,” we would be hard pressed to identify objective measures of worth inherent in the good itself. Rather, social processes are at work in the fashion modeling market to bequeath cultural value onto Coco. The social world of fashion markets reveals how market actors think collectively to make decisions in the face of uncertainty. And this social side of markets, it turns out, is key to understanding how investors could trade securities backed with “toxic” subprime mortgage assets leading us into the 2009 financial crisis.

When trying to figure out how winners happen in the modeling industry, the first thing to know is that nobody knows. This was one of the most striking things I discovered over the course of researching fashion. Clients—designers, photographers, and stylists—don’t know what makes one model a better choice than another. And how would they? It’s an inherently uncertain task, hinging upon aesthetic preference, unknown consumer demand, and quick turnover—fashion is, after all, by definition change.

Consider the Fashion Week catwalks. There are thousands of models worldwide that vie for a chance to appear in the shows of New York, London, Milan, and Paris, and nearly all of them meet a high bar of tall, slim, and beautiful. As many as 200 models may walk through a casting director’s door in a single day during show season, and typically the shows have just 15 – 40 slots to fill. That’s a lot of models to sort through.

How do the clients know which models to choose for their fashion shows? Plucking the right face from the flock to fit a particular designer’s look of the season is, as Prada casting director Russell Marsh told me, like finding a needle in a haystack. Russell peruses hundreds of images of women and men for potential spots in the Prada and Miu Miu runway shows and campaigns; he’s a key “Mover, Shaker and Style-Maker” according to the London Independent. When I put the question to him—why this model as opposed to that one?—he threw his hands up in the air, and excitedly pointed around his studio, “Why did I decide to buy this chair and sofa? You know, for me, it ticks the box. You know, it’s an internal thing!”

Like dozes of fashion producers I spoke with, Russell doesn’t really know what it is about a kid like Coco Rocha that excites him. He “just knows” if a model is right for him, and further, he “knows it when he sees it.” This instantaneous knowledge is what sociologist Patrik Aspers calls “contextual knowledge” that creative producers tap into as they broker otherwise “fuzzy” values like beauty and edginess. It’s also what sociologist Michel Abolafia has called “gut feeling” in his study of Wall Street traders—on the trading floor, brokers have a kind of 6th sense for what’s hot and cold.

But while fashionistas express this 6th sense as an internal thing, they feel it together. Here we have a paradox: Despite an abundant labor supply and uncertain criteria, there is enormous inequality in who gets to participate in Fashion Week. With my colleague, social networks expert Frédéric Godart, I studied the Style.com show reports from Spring 2007 and found that designers used a total of 677 fashion models worldwide for their shows. Coco Rocha was among just 60 other women in the entire modeling universe to walk in over 20 shows; in fact, she walked in a whopping 55 shows. In contrast, the overwhelming bulk of models, 75% in fact, were used in just 5 shows.

So our plot thickens: What’s at the center of this collective “gut feeling” that happens to land on Coco, ratcheting up her popularity and hence, her economic value? The answer holds parallel lessons for how traders in finance markets were able to assign so much inflated value to relatively worthless mortgage assets now known as “toxic assets.”

Coco could herself be considered toxic, depending on who you ask, and crucially, when. To the average American consumer, Coco isn’t exactly good-looking. She has what industry insiders call an “edgy” look: pale and thin, with long brown hair hanging over a small face with a sharp small mouth and big almond eyes. She certainly is strikingly interesting, but a New York casting director of 14 years explained his initial reaction when he first saw her for show castings back in 2005: “Like Coco, urgh!” Making a sour face, he continued, “Ooh, like she came in and I was like, in my head I was like, ‘What trailer park did she come from?’” (This might sound particularly cruel, but rest assured it’s a pretty routine way for people in the industry to talk about bodies as a car mechanic might review an engine.)

A year after this casting, Coco graced the cover of Italian Vogue shot by powerhouse photographer Steven Meisel, and when Spring runway season concluded, she boasted a resume of 55 shows from Marc Jacobs to Chanel. By the time the next show season rolled around, when Coco made her way back to the initially skeptical casting director, he desperately wanted to book her.

“I can’t just book any girl I want,” he explained. “After I see all the girls, you know, I call the agents up and I say these are the girls that I would like for this show. And they don’t normally give me girls right away. The first thing they ask you is, “Well who else is in the show?” … They want to know who else you’ve got. So I always have to get that one girl. If I can get, I guess this season was Coco.” At this he rolls his eyes, and continues, “You know as soon as I got Coco in the show, it was like, okay now I’ll book whoever I want.”

Today, this casting director still cannot see what it is about Coco that makes her a winner. “But now,” he explained, “it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what I think now. Like she is, you know, it right now.” As in the fable of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” even if one does not believe in the legitimacy of a social order, one obeys the conventions of a social order because one believes that other people find it legitimate and will obey, a classic condition of legitimacy noted by Max Weber. Quite possibly, one may not be able grasp why a model stands out as a winner, but the label legitimates itself as other tastemakers imitate their high-status peers.

Imitation, however, is a funny thing. It’s not so simple as mere mimicry of established players, because in fact, established players are just the best imitators. That is, a successful and powerful fashion client like Russell Marsh also has to know what to imitate, and crucially, the right moment. To do this, they need a little help. I found both formal and informal means of sharing information in the fashion market. Informally, producers talk. They hang out throughout the week at lunches, dinners, parties—at one point I studied booking agents in New York who had a regular karaoke party with clients and models. They talk constantly, facebooking, texting, and drinking; they even date each other. They share social and cultural space, and they pick up on the gossip, or “the buzz,” this way. Naturally, social ties are important for producers to figure out what’s fashionable, since there is so much uncertainty and ambiguity in their work. Lots of industries work this way: publishing, film, art, and even, sociologists have found, financial investing.

The fashion modeling market also has a formal mechanism in place, known as the “option,” to ensure all tastemakers get in on the action. An option is an agreement between client and agent that enables the client to place a hold on the model’s future availability. Like options trading in finance markets, an option gives the buyer the right, but not the obligation, to make a purchase. In the modeling market, it enables clients to place a hold on the model’s time, but unlike finance options trading, model options come free of cost; they are a professional courtesy to clients, and also a way for agents to manage models’ hectic schedules.

While the actual runway casting may take just minutes, the work of optioning models begins weeks before Fashion Week, when agencies send clients “show packages,” akin to a press kit, announcing every model available for hire. Each agency can have 20 – 50 models up for the shows, given that there are at least 12 high fashion agencies in NYC alone, we’re already talking 600 model cards vying for clients’ attention! It’s a familiar site in the months of February and September to see stacks and stacks of these cards lining the walls of casting directors’ offices.

In addition to circulating model cards, this pre-Fashion Week ritual begins the important work of circulating buzz. Options serve the symbolic purpose of “signaling” the model’s popularity to all other clients. During castings, clients are likely to ask models, “Which shows are you optioned for,” thereby letting them know their competitors’ tastes. Modeling agents drum up buzz using options as selling points too, as in, “Russell Marsh just optioned Coco Rocha for Prada!” To most fashion designers’ ears, such words sound like warm honey; they greatly reduce the anxiety of having to sort Coco from 599 other striking teenagers.

These formal and informal mechanisms of gossip result in a classic cumulative advantage effect in which successful goods accrue more success (also known as “the rich get richer” phenomenon, or by Biblical reference, the Matthew Effect). Hence, a model with several show options is deemed to be in high demand, or “hot,” compared to the model with no options. The opposite is also true. Thus, small differences in quality snowball into large differences in popularity—this is how, among a pool of nearly identical Sashas, Dashas, Mashas and Natashas, fashionistas can pick out a supermodel of the moment such as Sasha Pivovarova.

In the language of economic sociology, options are performative; they create what they putatively just describe. In other words, the models have agency (that’s market models we’re talking about, not the fashion models, heaven’s no!). Options enable investors to anticipate other investors’ actions, which spurs herding behavior, where actors decide to disregard their own information (i.e., “That Coco Rocha, urgh!”) and imitate instead the decisions taken by others before them (but Russell Marsh optioned her).


In behavioral economics, Coco Rocha’s success is a case of an information cascade. Faced with imperfect information, individuals make a binary choice to act (to choose or not to choose Coco) by observing the actions of their predecessors without regard to their own information. In such situations, a few early key individuals end up having a disproportionately large effect, such that small differences in initial conditions create large differences later in the cascade. We see such effects in fields ranging from consumer fads (think Atkins—everyone knows a meat-and-cheese diet isn’t healthy for you!), science (like global warming), and technology (VHS beat BETA in the video market, though BETA was a superior machine).

Herding and cascades are rather problematic to financial markets; they leads investors to artificially bid up asset values, thereby leading to bubbles and eventual crashes, even if investors knew better all along, which, it turns out in the housing market, they largely did. But because investors, like fashionistas, react to each other as well as to the aggregate traces of fellow investors’ actions (captured well in signaling instruments like options), they exacerbate systemic risk. Essentially, valuing financial goods is a matter of trying to be in fashion, which is a gamble.


In fact, the economist John Maynard Keynes likened finance markets to casinos, in that both are based in speculation. To illustrate, Keynes drew on newspaper beauty contests from the 1930s, where readers were asked to rate the contestants, but with a catch. The prize would go to the reader that could guess the highest ranked winner. So readers would rate not what they themselves thought was personally beautiful, but what they thought other readers would find beautiful. The sociologist would add that beauty is always in the eye of the socially-dominant beholder, but as a metaphor for financial markets, it should worry us, as it worried Keynes: Finance assets accrue profits not according to their actual worth, which, at the height of the housing boom we know now was vastly inflated; rather, their worth is generated in how speculators perceive what other speculators will perceive. A finance market, like a fashion market, consists of speculators chasing each other’s tails in disregard for what things are really worth.

But perhaps most worrisome in the fallout of the economic crisis is our ongoing commitment to an ethos of individualism to make sense of it all. We chalk the crash up to a few bad apples and “greedy” executives gone astray—not far off, by the way, from individualist rhetoric in the fashion press celebrating the genius new beauty of Coco. Without a view of the market as a social body—composed of individuals acting in concert with each other, aided by financial models, and bound together by conventions to help them anticipate one another’s actions—we can’t see how participants act together. Yet their collectively attuned steps can inflate or deflate the value of assets, thus building economic values from cultural ones. Don’t take Fashion Week at face value; the catwalk delivers an important sociological lesson for free market enthusiasts.

Monday 27 September 2010

Online influencers and gatekeepers role in social media strategy


I sat down with Guilhem Fouetillou from Linkfluence over the weekend and spent some time analyzing a map of influential websites in the fashion and lifestyle sector. It's fantastic to see this information visualized enabling communities and link patterns to be easily understood.

One the interesting learnings was the ability to identify Gatekeepers who held positions of influence in two or more online communities. A good example of this is a French fashion blog written by Illustrator Garance Doré. Already a huge influence in her native France, she has recently started writing in English and has quickly became a darling of the English and American fashion communities.

Below is a detail of the map that demonstrates how she sits in an influential position between the two major global fashion communities with hundreds of people linking to her blog:
The fact she's dating Scott Schuman who writes The Satorialist helps too! As The Guardian says … "Together they are the best thing to happen to style since American Vogue editor Grace Coddington".

Regardless, influencers like Doré now become critical to any outreach strategy for brands wishing to appeal to British/American or French audiences. Social Media Analysis becomes an essential tool for any planner of PR, Marketing and Communications initiatives.

Thursday 23 September 2010

Burberry use social media to disrupt the fashion industry


Amidst the shocks and frocks at London Fashion Week, one story stood out to me. Burberry, once reckoned as the leading provider to Chavs and football hooligans, successfully managed to steal the show not with a dramatic new collection, rather enabling customers globally to purchase select items from the catwalk collection immediately. From runway to checkout to immediate online sales points. 

Innovating in this way reminds me of Doblin Group's "Ten Types of Innovation" framework. Looking at Burberry in this context they innovated with a new chanel, service and customer experience all underscored by a being able to rapidly mass produce garments quicker than other brands.

Tuesday 21 September 2010

Listening to the backtalk


During my conversations with John Seely Brown he provided an lovely insight into the 'design' mindset from his scientific perspective — as he explained it: 

“how do you listen to the backtalk of the situation? So it’s when things don’t quite work out right, I can’t build this material, this new type of invention, new brand or new material. What you learn from the push back? Something is pushing back at what you want to get done. How do you interpret that? How do you get to the root of that? A tremendous number of major discoveries get made by being able to listen and respond to the backtalk. I think of it like a form of Judo where the whole question is, how do you read the context? How do you work with forces rather than against forces?”

Vegetal Chair


One of my favourite chairs of recent times is the Vegetal Chair by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec

"From the outset, our desire to create an original structure, based on a complex and narrative form of construction. Coupled with an inclination for highly advanced techniques, such as plastic injection moulding, which opens the way to mass distribution.The initial designs show a chair that has the fluidity and uniform elegance of a plant: a great unity of form whilst at the same time being, in essence, untamed" Ronan Bouroullec

From my perspective, the subtext in this story is not the aesthetics but Vitra's innovation strategy. The challenge leading manufacturers like Vitra face is they invest enourmous resources into the design, only for their most popular designs are quickly replicated by Chinese manufacturers and sold for a fraction of price.

The Chair's plant-like structure made of polyamide dyed throughout goes to the limits of the technically feasible. It creates an enormous barrier to entry and ensures margins are retained and investments recouped.

Everything about Vitra I like. Vitra's product line consists of designer furniture for use in offices, homes and public areas. Apart from the company's own designs, it also manufactures and distributes the works of designers such as Charles and Ray Eames, George Nelson, Verner Panton, Antonio Citterio, Philippe Starck, Borek Sipek, Mario Bellini, Glen Oliver Löw, Dieter Thiel, Jasper Morrison, Alberto Meda, Ron Arad, Maarten Van Severen and Jean Prouvé.

According to Nils Holgar Moormann, sitting in the basement of Vitra is a private furniture collection of Vitra's owner Rolf Fehlbaum, the company strategy is to gradually drip feed editions of these onto the market over the coming decades. What makes this unique is that the director Rolf Fehlbaum has long since negotiated distribution rights with the estates of each designer. This strategy is enourmously successful as seen in the Jean Prouvé line of furniture that's turned a relatively obscure furniture designer into an iconic name alongside Eames and Nelson.

Another example of Vitra's intuitive approach to building their brand is their ongoing collaborations with the worlds leading architects who're commissioned to design their corporate architecture. After a major fire destroyed the Vitra facilities in 1981, British architect Nicholas Grimshaw was commissioned to design a new factory building. The aluminium factory hall, ready for production in only six months after the fire, was complemented by another production building by Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza in 1986.

In 1989, it was followed by a factory building by Frank O. Gehry. Gehry also constructed the Vitra Design Museum building, which was originally intended to house the private furniture collection of Vitra's owner Rolf Fehlbaum.

In 1993, Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid added a fire station – her first completed building – to the premises. The fire station now houses the Design Museum's international collection of designer chairs. In the same year, a conference pavilion of Japanese architect Tadao Ando was also constructed on the Vitra grounds. It was Ando's first work outside Japan.

From Hadid to Ando, Fehlbaum has successfully predicted these architects will become globally recognised brands in their own right.

This is a business that truly understands innovation, brand building and creating a legacy that will last for generations.

Monday 20 September 2010

Competing for choice


I've just put down an excellent book called Competing for Choice by Lars Finskud. I can't recommend it highly enough it's a real gold mine of insights and logic. I've been using it to help design a consulting offering to tackle the issue of acquisition and retention.

Retention and acquisition is a complex and critical business challenge. The most interesting conversations for me revolve around winning the hearts and mind upstream before consumers make a purchasing decision. What’s more in today’s networked society, dissatisfied customers will not only never buy from the company again, but communicate their displeasure throughout their social network. These dissatisfied customers will rarely convey their displeasure directly and just stop doing business with your company, which keeps brands unaware for some time that there is any problem and how to react.

Current approaches are undermined by failure to accurately interpret the consumer needs, slow response to competitor movements, fact-free decision making, lack of organisation and a high degree of subjectivity and assumptions about the causes.

Finskud asks few key questions that got to the heart of the issue for me:

1. Where should we focus to source growth?
What makes our customers choose our brand?
Which of our customers are defecting and to which competing brand?
How should we divide our resources between acquisition and retention?
Are we sufficiently responsive to market dynamics?

2. How much should we invest in brand building?
Are our brand building investments effective? What returns to they achieve?
Is this a sales, marketing or design issue?

3. Do we have the appropriate systems and structures in place to manage the process?
Do you have the facts we need to make well-informed and robust strategic and tactical decisions?
What are the key indicators and brand performance measures we should be monitoring?

If your brand is struggling with questions like these, Finskud's approach built on a 'resource approach' to management and 'customer choice chain' will provide the basis for a reasoned response.

Best of all it's less than 100 pages! For more information about Lars Finskud visit his consultancy practice Vanguard Strategy.

Friday 17 September 2010

The influence of fashion blogs on trends and fashion


This excellent report delves into the world of Fashion Blogging and seeks to understand how enthusiastic unqualified individuals now have a global fashion presence and enough influence to ensure they have seats at major Fashion shows. It's a great overview of how has Web 2.0 has enabled the rise of Fashion Bloggers.

For more information on this theme check out these excellent articles:

The Impact of Bloggers on New York Fashion Week

Style bloggers take centre stage

The influence of fashion blogs on trends and fashion

Bloggers carry growing fashion industry influence

The Influence of Fashion Bloggers on Retail

(the picture is from Scott Schuman's influential fashion blog The Satorialist)

Thursday 16 September 2010

The value of multi-disciplinary design teams


Whilst researching innovation processes of IDEO, Doblin and John Seely Brown, they were all characterised by an active interplay between creating consensus and diversity of meaning. Throughout my research the most visible signal of this was their preference for multi-disciplinary team structures.

IDEO’s internal structure consisted of seven areas of speciality revolving around a group of design generalists that contribute to each specialty. IDEO’s Ilya Prokopoff commented, “we’re structured around this thing called the ‘design community’ which is far and away the biggest part of our business, and is where all our really talented designers, engineers and human-factor experts … contribute to different practices.”

Doblin consultant Jeff Tull reflected on the multi-disciplinary team on a recent project. “[T]here were about four people on the core team …. There were a couple of other specialists that come in from information design and specialist analysts …. There were probably another group of people that came in at different times. The backgrounds of those folk were … political science, business management … we had a guy who had a background in engineering and product design. I can remember a research specialist, a social scientist and a photographer. One guy came out of management consulting, super-high levels of Procter & Gamble and another graphic design, brand-design development person on that team. So on the client side there were probably about three or four people on the core team, and on the extended team it was much larger which included an executive review and other people from other parts of the business.”

Tull pointed to the benefits of having non-designers on the team, “it is also really important … to have some people who have some social science skill that are actually less inclined to make those quick judgements and more able to draw out information, really good feedback, understand the behaviours, then try and interpret the behaviours.”

John Seely Brown credits himself with pioneering this approach at Xerox PARC. In fact one of the most red-faced moments experienced during this research was singin the praises of a multi-disciplinary approach, only to be gently reminded that he invented it.

Summarising the benefits, Seely Brown commented, “if you put ethnographers together with sociologists, then put them together with computer scientists and a product designer, you begin to have a much richer cross view of what’s going on.”

The rise and rise of the influence of the internet


A new study conducted by Ifop, a French research firm, sought to determine exactly how much of an influence different types of media have in shaping customers’ purchasing decisions. The Internet came first for fourteen of the nineteen product categories examined ahead of television, print and radio.

Most significantly, that study revealed that 87% of participants indicated that their interest in and knowledge of a brand was enhanced as a result of information they found online and 82% indicated that they became more selective about their purchases as a result of information they gathered online. The Nurun-Ifop study goes one step further however in that they correlate the information derived from various media sources to actual purchasing decisions.