Rectangles: now copyrighted

In case you haven’t heard, Apple and Samsung have been swashbuckling around the courtroom over patent battles for quite some time now. One highlight of the romance, concerning similarities between the iPad and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1, has not had Samsung feelin' the love for most of 2011, and recently. Less than a week ago, a judge held a preliminary injunction against Samsung, stating that it had to put sales of its 10.1 tablet on halt in the U.S (for the moment, at least) because it wrongfully infringed upon one of Apple’s patents. Ouch.

Check out the pictures of each tablet above. Pretty similar, right? Do you think it was the right decision? At first glance, I was thinking that Apple certainly has a right to argue, but there are a few things that make me think different. (See what I did there? Amazing).

Symbolic Value

Today’s post is just a little thought-provoker, because it’s something on which I’m not sure to give a definite answer myself. As it’s the start of 2012, this post is dedicated to the Mayans, who probably didn’t put much serious thought into anything. How dare they try to scare my planet?!

The topic: Symbolic value – a champion among advertisers, but possibly a grey area among consumers. Symbolic value concerns value that is associated with a product or service by attaching emotions or meanings to it, rather than value that is purely functional. Diamonds are an example of a product that hold a lot of symbolic value. Completely unrelated to diamonds, today’s topic was actually inspired by an article I saw on the website of Richard Dawkin’s Foundation for Reason and Science. Richard is a good man, and is probably sneering at the Mayans as well right now, but more importantly for my blog, cites a recent experiment that fits nicely into the debate on whether advertising has either been of benefit or detriment to the consumer.

Instant Gratification

Today is the 25^th of December; the day where all hype and buzz surrounds a character that many only believed in when they were young, but grow tired of when they get older. Yes, it’s the birthday of Jesus. For all my Christian friends: “Merry Christmas”. For all my non-Christian friends: “Happy Holidays”. And, for anyone that was offended by that Jesus joke: “I’m sorry”.

Now that we’ve got the formalities out of the way, let me introduce today’s post: Instant gratification. What do I mean by ‘instant gratification’? I mean that people are becoming less and less patient in seeking enjoyment and information, and prefer media outlets that can get them what they want as quickly as possible. Time is precious – people would rather just skim through the bullet points than read a long blog post about…oh…right.

Leveraging of Laddering (LOL)

In market research, the ‘laddering’ interview is often employed to find out consumers’ basic desires, and how they can be connected to a brand or campaign. It’s usually a one-on-one interview where the interviewer gets the respondent to keep answering a series of ‘why’ questions, to get them really freaked out. And also to get a comprehensive idea of their opinions; that’s important too. In my opinion, laddering is essential and often overlooked, and works a lot better than most focus group situations. Here’s what a typical scenario from a focus group sounds like:

Unconscious Processing

Today’s topic is pretty damn fascinating. It deserves much more than a blog post to be discussed, but it’s not going to get what it deserves, because you’ll hurt your eyes looking at the screen for too long. Our topic, unconscious processing, is the Mack-Daddy (capital M, capital D) of getting shit done. Apparently, around 95% of all information-processing is carried out unconsciously, so whatever you’re focusing on now – a duck, the Taj Mahal, the colour Red – is quite insignificant compared to every other thought process that’s keeping you alive and in order (unless maybe you were thinking of the duck; ducks are never insignificant). Try concentrating on each breath you take…now think about the fact that you can’t keep your tongue in a comfortable position inside your mouth, no matter where you move it. Unconscious just became conscious, how do you like them apples?!