Can Do How Now?

Are the blogosphere and tagspace already fostering an evolutionary response in corporate verbal identity?Looking at the new DHL adverts in the last few week’s editions of The Economist, with their high-impact Hollywood-blockbuster aesthetic, I was intrigued by the organisation’s new corporate positioning statement: ‘The Do-How People’.

The syntax of this sentence jars with me. My first thought was that perhaps it reads better in the original German. The communicative intent is obviously an organisation that combines a ‘can-do’ spirit with some serious ‘know-how’. That the ‘Do-How’ resonates with the D and H in DHL, adds the mnemonic hook that justifies the brand consultant’s fee.

But really: ‘Do-How’? Surely there must be more elegant ways of expressing the desired concept? In these instances I always ask what underlying strategy would inform the decision to agree on that particular form of words?

In this instance, is it possible that this may soon become related to ‘tagging’ the corporate brand? One of the core ideas that I took away from Bruce Sterling’s E-Tech keynote speech was that of naming your concepts so that they are tag-able as much as Google-able. (Bear with me regarding those hyphens.) A quick check against Sterling’s ‘Spime’ meme on Technorati demonstrates how his naming strategy successfully facilitates my joining the conversations about that topic.

By implication, stewarding a brand today also means making it tag-able. Think about the Corporate Marketing function at most large multinationals, their corporate name is a given and unlikely to change soon. When their corporate name functions as a tag in the online environment today, it will be equally denoting critical conversations as well as favourable conversations. (The most clichéd example being the ‘Why X-Corp Sucks’ class of web page.) So in this environment, a novel tactical strapline can become a more useful asset than was previously the case. And, I suspect, the more novel it is then so much the better. We may begin to see a Darwinian evolution of somewhat ungainly taglines as brands compete to put up some bait for the folksonomies.

Getting back to ‘Do-How’ as a novel tag. A quick Technorati tag search for both the ‘Know-How’ and ‘Can-Do’ tags leads to a lot of varied content. Unfortunately a similar search for ‘Do-How’ tags does not yet lead to anything related to what people are saying about DHL today.

Perhaps now is the time to revive the humble word ‘Tagline’? It has fallen out of usage in favour of the more grandiose-sounding and value-added flavours such as ‘Corporate Positioning Statement’.

Delicious Tags: Branding | Corporate Identity | Tagline | Folksonomy | Tags | Do-How
Technorati Tags: Branding | Corporate+Identity | Tagline | Folksonomy | Tags | Do-How

Exhibition for UCD Campus Plan

A short panorama of the exhibition that we designed for UCD to explain their new Campus Plan. The exhibition ran last week in the Quinn School building and will be exhibited again in September.

Delicious Tags: BFK | UCD | Design
Technorati Tags: BFK | UCD | Design

Valiantly. Mining. The. Full. Stop. Mountain.

I saw one of the adverts from IDA Ireland’s recently-launched ‘Irish Mind’ campaign in this week’s edition of The Economist. The first paragraph of body text begins: “The Irish. Creative. Imaginative. And flexible.”

Those sort. Of oddly punctuated. Staccato-rhythm. Emphatic sentences. Seem both. Mannered and dated. To. Me.

I honestly thought that old technique of advertising copywriter’s rhetoric had been parodied so much that it was more or less unusable. It seems. I was. Mistaken. Writing in such Shatner-speak may possibly be effective in short headlines sometimes, but not in body copy.

I do find myself wondering about the creative processes involved when an advert in a campaign that eulogises the literary creativity of the Irish Mind includes an un-sentence like: “Better and faster.” No doubt the agency pitch was something along the lines of: “the unfettered creative celtic spirits of today’s Ireland pay no heed to the narrow-minded strictures of your so-called grammatical rules! Think of the unique cadences of Hiberno-English! Think of capturing that in a forceful written expression of the Passion To Succeed! Think Joyce! Think Beckett!”

What I think of is posting a copy of Eats, Shoots and Leaves to the copywriter...

A Price Comparison

Let us compare these amounts:
— Cost of my early-adopter Sony DVD player in 2001: approximately IR£500.
— Cost of getting that DVD player chipped to play multi-region discs in 2003: €100. (This worked for about six weeks and then packed-in. After driving back and forth across the city a few times getting it looked at, I had to abandon the whole idea and archive my Region One DVD’s.)
— Cost of getting that DVD player fixed to correct the playback heads in 2004: €100.
— Cost of an Aldi own-brand Region Two DVD player in June 2006: €40.
(Why Region Two? It does not happen to play Region One discs by any chance? Yes indeed it does.)

Looks like the combination of Moore’s Law and good old Globalisation has worked in my favour again this time. Although I feel a little bummed that I could have bought fifteen new DVD players for my investment in my original model.

(And let’s not have any comments about the guy who stood in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square being the person who spot-welded the faceplate onto my new super cost-effective DVD player, yadda yadda. I’m over it.)

Boy Bashes Box of Beer Bottles in Ballinasloe

Presented for my mild amusement. (Not simply because Daragh had already posted some video over on his blog.) Not sure why this is appearing sideways here in TP, it is the right way around on the home PC.

First Million Digits Of Pi

I nearly finished Douglas Coupland’s latest novel jPod last night, when I came to the part where he reproduces the first hundred thousand digits of Pi. There is something eerily hypnotic about those pages of numbers that kind of stopped me in my tracks. I was seeing patterns.

In jPod, Coupland states that you have a 97.9% chance of finding your own phone number in the first one million digits of Pi. Which is a fun factoid for a Thursday morning, if it is true. But his book is a work of fiction and it is not like anyone is going to check through the digits. Though no doubt some uber-geekoid will lash-up a Perl Script to hash all the numbers. How long before there is a YourPhoneNumberInPi.com fan site?

Postscript: A quick Google search has led me to the further fact that as Pi is infinite, then it should also at some point contain the complete works of Shakespere in ASCII! OK, that is quite enough infinity for one morning methinks.

Technorati Tags: jPod | Coupland | Pi
Flickr Tags: jPod | Coupland

The Limits Of Human Knowledge

I have been reading The Infinite Book which is both an eye-opener and a mind-twister. One (of the many) novel concepts from the book that has become a particular mindworm for me is the difference between the Visible Universe and the Actual Universe. I am going to have to paraphrase this a lot, but let me run it by you. (Yes, reading Thoughtport can make you smarter, as well as more good-looking.)

Given that the Actual Universe is 14.6 billion years old. Given that light moves at a constant one light-year per chronological year. Given that we know the distant objects, galaxies nebulae etc, that we can observe are moving away from us. Then, from our vantage point here on earth, even if we had a theoretically perfect telescope, the furthest object we could ever see would have to be at most 14.6 billion light-years from earth. Anything more distant than that and its light can never reach the Earth, there not being enough time elapsed from the beginning of the universe. Thus, you can describe an imaginary sphere around the earth with a 14.6 billion light-year radius. This is what scientists call the ‘Visible Universe’, that is the only part we can ever hope to observe directly. Our Visible Universe is constantly expanding, by one light-year per year, or even by a few light-minutes in the time it has taken you to read this post.

If the Actual Universe turns out to be truly infinite, rather than merely being boundless, then no matter how large our own Visible Universe ever becomes, according to the laws of mathematics it could never be any more than an infinitesimally small fraction of the Actual Universe. So while a sphere of 14.6 billion light years radius is a massively inconceivable volume to us, you could just keep on adding-in an infinite number of equally inconceivably-large sized spheres into such an infinite space and never fill it.

This sphere then defines the Ultimate Limits of Human Knowledge. As someone with great belief in the ability of the human mind to explore, discover, rationalise, analyse and expand the sum total of its knowledge, it is disappointing to discover that there are some things that we can not ever know and places we can never get to see.

Time for a rousing chorus of that old Monty Python song: “I am just an infinitesimal dot...”

Technorati Tags: Universe | Infinite | Science

TP_v3.0

I am starting my third year of blogging today. It is a cliche but I am going to say it anyway: where have the last two years gone? Busy doesn't come into it. It really seems like about two months since my first post.
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Thoughtport: bringing you selected contents of Aiden's head since 2004.

Another General Theory Of Design

This somewhat tongue-in-cheek design definition really has the ring of truth to me.
“Design consists of creating things for clients who may not know what they want, until they see what you’ve done, then they know exactly what they want, but it’s not what you did.”
From the Design Matters blog, linked to by Guy Kawasaki.

Technorati Tags: design