Branding Cities

People are attracted by landmarks. From these, ancient monuments, massive constructions, aligned ancient styles, great palaces or thriving castles, play a great role attracting people to countries or cities. On the other hand, wild nature, steep mountains, fast rivers, or amazing beaches play a similar role captivating people to other kind of places. So beyond cultures and tradition which also represent the key elements in attracting people to places, modern landmarks make the big cut in attracting crowds.

Louvre is a wonderful museum, filled throughout the year with amazing masterpieces of great artists, though, I believe a great deal of the people who visit the Louvre (specially most tourists attracted by Paris in general), are first subconsciously pointed to its architecture which also made its mark in films rather than firstly involved with the art collections itself. Ask your friend what is the Louvre and guess that quite probably he will remember its glass pyramid first instead of Mona Lisa (if you do an image search on Google you’ll confirm this aspect as well).

Ask what Bilbao is all about for a lot of people, and the wonderful Guggenheim Museum will probably come up first. Ask then which key exhibitions regularly come up there, and I’ll guess what the answer is. Rome, Istanbul, Barcelona, New York, Hong Kong, Chicago, and other examples as recently Dubai, are all surrounded by something that attracts people: Architecture. People are greatly attracted by buildings or other landmarks that make a difference.

I believe architects are the great masters that lead us to a visual impact that deeply shapes our perceptions and moves the whole experience with a city or place to a different level. When branding a city, giving absolute freedom to creative architects is definitely a one step further to put it on the world map.

Dip

What you do when your company heads towards out of business by a search giant conquering several categories. Google is launching a free sat-nav application integrated with search which you can use it on your phone. Garmin, Tom Tom and other related company’s shares just fell severely in the last days, and figures are not positive.

So what these companies should do? the dip is near and the turn should be strong, but the fact is that the question lies on what should have they done. One of many reasons GM might have failed was that it didn’t spot or believed in the green opportunities of the future auto industry, which could reduced people’s annual spending on cars with a valid reason behind. Yet, they kept insisting building bolder cars with high levels of gas consumption plus launching more and more brands losing focus.

GPS nav companies face the same irony when confronted with such market shift. Google is offering a free app which might be of a superior quality when compared with others charging around 50$ to 100$ US per app. Mobile is concentrating everything, and search is indeed the perfect match for such GPS services. As for the free model, that’s just how Google operates, along the long tail.

Toyota plans hundred years ahead, and as many say today that it is hard to plan next month in such rapid changing markets, I believe companies should definitely plan ahead several scenarios that can happen in the fast moving markets we see today. The key thing here is that they shouldn’t be able to react, but instead drive their industry and product categories as Google keeps on driving. Innovation is staggering and decisive today. If you had a Google next to you as your direct competitor what you would do today?

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A Public’s Company Inertia

RATP is the company behind the transportation service and the metro in Paris. RATP is broken. Every beginning of a month inside the metro stations we can see huge lines of people waiting to solve their problems with their monthly passes to access the metro.

After these huge lines of people we can spot a few unmotivated employees, usually two or four at a small office trying to deal with the crowd demands, which can span from acquiring their passes to technical problems solving or a need for more information in determined issues.

These small offices are present in a few key stations, 28 in fact within the whole Paris area (which has about 400 in total). The recharging machines also see huge lines of people as everyone tries to recharge their passes within the same day to not lose a single dime in the monthly period.

The fact that is a public company might be a strong reason why people from top to bottom actually don’t care that much about what happens. Not only this is normal here but also in many other countries throughout the world, as the key goals that drive state owned companies seem not driven to improve but to maintain. There is a complete inertia in RATP and also a lack of care in fact for the people who use the service.

Now, if we changed the scenario from this essential transportation service natural monopoly by RATP to a product or service fitting in whatever existent category, the result would be interesting to see, I guess in a 6 months’ time the company would have closed.

You don’t have to pay consultants to realize that if you change the configuration on the pass to start-end whatever day instead of first-last day of the month, or add more people for support at peak days, or get more machines rolling at the same days, or divert the crowd by days within increasing timelines, etc. You just have to do it as you would do it if it was for yourself. Effectiveness unfortunately is still very scarce in public companies and just makes Paris in this aspect definitely not a fast moving forward thinking European capital as others nearby indeed are.

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A look at mass outdoor advertising according with three theories of selective attention. Part 3

Neon lights advertisements are seen everywhere in Hong Kong. How they distract car drivers?

Part 3:

Deutsch and Norman, pertinence model

Broadbent and Treisman agree that the selection of a single channel occurs at an early stage before recognition processes begin, and so their models are called – Early selection models.

On the other hand, Deutsch and Norman pertinence model (elaborated after Deutsch and Deutsch, 1963), argue that information from all channels is transmitted to the semantic analysis recognition stage and just then a selection is made (Late selection model). All stimuli are fully analyzed, being the most important or relevant stimulus determining the response.

The content is analyzed semantically, but the words (e.g.) in the unattended channel cannot access consciousness.  This theory places the stated ‘filter’ in processing much more ahead and near the response end of the processing system.

Consequently, there is a complete perceptual acknowledge and analysis of all stimuli, supposedly with no difference in detection rates between two different messages. Hence, only important inputs can be an object to lead to responses. Selection of all stimulus is ‘top-down’ as opposed to Broadbent’s and Treisman’s models which are known as ‘bottom-up’.

This theory lead to a understanding that if neon advertisement, as strong as it is when analyzed closely, would provoke a tremendous effect on the drivers when in contact with such extreme stimulus at the same time they are processing another tremendous amount of stimulus such as driving demands, making the driver extremely busy in their attention thoughts and proving the theory incongruous to the case.

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A look at mass outdoor advertising according with three theories of selective attention. Part 2

Neon lights advertisements are seen everywhere in Hong Kong. How they distract car drivers?

Part 2:

Treisman, feature integration

Treisman agreed with Broadbent that indeed there is a bottleneck in our attention process, but disagreed with its location.

According to Treisman, attention binds different features of an object (e.g. colour and shape) into consciously experienced wholes, and the same filter mentioned could be more accurate and effective if in a different level than what Broadbent had located.

This filter is suggested far over and is mentioned as it will reduce or attenuate the analysis of unattended information, being the “absorbing barrier” more flexible to understand and differentiate various stimuli. Plus, this theory supports that stimulus are processed through a hierarchy, describing a process where each stimuli follows and moves to further detailed information at the same time the unattended information becomes gradually more attenuated throughout the process.

Considering the neon lights when driving in Hong Kong, the same thinking principles mentioned in the Broadbent case can similarly apply, since the driver still might not have ability enough to process instantly such powerful advertising details within a large amount of each billboard information at the first instance. Still, according with this theory, the driver will indeed process all the information presented but through a more flexible and gradually attenuating process, having the chance to understand advertising messages which spark its interest and rapidly choose naturally which will follow the hierarchy to a deeper level of understanding. This allows to better control in some way its various external stimulus when still based on a focus of the main activity of driving – the attended message, and gradually filtering unattended messages, understanding they could or not be of interest at a first instance.

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