Your sitting there with your Gran and she harps on about how she wants to get Broadband for her computer. She is there groaning about the cost of it over a Dial-up connection and how she almost spends £10 a month so if you got her broadband at that price then it might be ok. In that moment that you are there with her you are the ultimate salesman, lets pretend for one moment you are an Orange or BT or Tiscali salesman. You would give your wife up to become that trusted by the customer as the grandchild is by the grandparent, what an easy sell it would be.

Or would it really be?

Does your Gran ACTUALLY want Broadband, even if it was at £10 a month, OR is she just talking to you because she feels neglected and wants some attention. Remember that, to feel important is the ultimate desire that EVERYONE in the world craves, in which case, as a Granchild or as an Orange/BT/Tiscali salesman, she is wasting your time and this sale may never even appear.

That’s a horrible way to look at it, she is yoru Gran, she did loads for you as a kid that you know your completely unaware of, and you love her, so you will do anything, including talking about Broadband to make her happy.

But if this was a business you were marketing, you would have lost time and a sale. Lets take the opposite of Gran, who seemingly has lots of time to choose her product, and concentrate on the engineer running to catch his train from the new St Pancreas station and head back to Derby on the last pre-mega expensive peak train time (4-7pm) and he wants to buy a prawn sandwich and a 500ml bottle of Evian. He doesn’t think twice, he orders as he is approaching the counter, he gets out his £10 note to pay even before they have told him how much. So sense says to sell where people are in a rush and know exactly what they want to buy. This is true, and that is why train station operators can charge such high rents to stall holders in these predominent positions. However, there is one draw back, and that is the human fashion and un-predictibility, as much as Gran will want attention and time spent with her, people’s short term desires and requests will always change, and when they do, they change fast.

In the station, what was the sock-shop becomes the tie-rack, then the coffee shop, then the healthy wheatgrass shots, then the tea shop, then the coffee shop again and then the sandwich shop, then the pannini shop, then the Deli, then the Pizzarea, back to the coffee shop and finally the mobile broadband shop! 

The moral of the story is to know what your Gran really wants and if you set up a stall with high rents, remember, change happens.

On the 10^th July 2008 I headed off to the big smoke to meet with the greatest visual minds working in the commercial consultancy field today. The talk was led by the enthusiastic American Dave Gray who runs www.Xplane.com The aim of the event is to collectively promote Visual Thinking, especially the positive applications of this on society. Individually we were all asked to draw our own interpretation of the meaning of life and then share them with the group of 50. My version, which was based on the conclusions of having travelled around the world looking in people’s handbags, focussed on choosing positive people to surround you on a daily basis. This generated a huge cheer from the audience and then one grumpy old man decided it was only my opinion and that perhaps I should snap back to reality! Bit surprise to hear such negativity in the room, but still, an incredible event and I can’t wait for the next one on the 11th September.

 

Photos of the event and more info can be seen here: www.vizthink.co.uk

Last week I had an incredible meeting with the design driector of a £4billion turnover company - they are considering getting me in to facilitate the human interaction workshops for their inhouse designers. With my history of design coupled with the human element story of the “Around the World in 80 Handbags” there is some scope here for exciting developments.

High on the back of this meeting in London, I went along to a VizThink evening full of Visual Communicators. One of the parts of the evening was to visualise the meaning of life. I was applauded by the encouraging crowd by passing on that I felt that the meaning of life was to “Live within a positive community where you are encouraged to follow your dreams, however unreal they might be.”

Then the next morning I woke up early, drove 2 hours back home and met a hairdresser for a small £400 design job for a flier and 5,000 prints. The lady was new into running her own business and I thought I was doing her a favour by looking at this for her, but I arrived and was told to wait whilst she cut someones hair, which I did for 30 minutes. Then she gave me 5 minutes, tried to bargain me down on price, I reminded her what a great deal I thought it was, and that was that. I was out. Strange. And I’ve called and left messgaes but to no avail.

So I am amazed at how a different group of people can value you in such different amounts of money. One valued me at under £100 a day whilst the other at over £1,000. Yes it is relative to the size of their business and their turnover, but to them personally, I think the hairdressor would see a much greater reward per £ spent.

Effective marketing can do only one of two things - make you feel GOOD or make you feel BAD, with the hope this will stimulate you into buying the product to satisfy your need.

Typical BAD:

Insurance marketing: Marketing should scare the potential customer into a state of fear of what “might happen” should they not take out that insurance for the cat, holiday, dog, house, tree and lately even your cat’s holiday insurance. Of course you don’t “need” any insurance if you believe in fate and accept anything bad that happens in life for a reason, for example if you save the £12 by not insuring your cat on holiday (but then Tabby the cat uses up all of her nine lives at once in a scuba diving accident whilst out spear-diving for sharks), you can then spend the £12 on a mini tombstone and save all the upcoming vets bills and cat food costs, whilst looking fondly at the memory of your precious Tabby fighting off sharks.

Typical GOOD:

Cadbury’s glass and a half full productions of a gorilla playing the drums in tune with Phil Collins. You see - right now, just those words are bringing back memories of listening to a song, closing your eyes, breathing deeply and being at one with your inner self. That’s the feeling you now associate when you pay your 50p on a bar of Dairy Milk.

OVERALL:

Your customer is pretty happy where they are in life right now, after all tehy have spent all their life getting to where they are now. Your job is to decipher how they view life, are the old, are they young. Are they content or hungry. Do they believe they can afford to take a risk or not? Is there a cross over. Your 18 year old student, Phillipa, is unlikely to take out £12 cat holiday insurance because she does not value Tabby as an integral part of her life as much as Sue, a middle aged housewife. Phillipa percieves that it has an infinate time left in life whereas Sueis scared to loose any aspect (cute Tabby teh cat) of the perfect house they have spent all these years creating. On the other hand Phillipa will buy the chocolate bar because it will momentarity elivate her to the hight of grandeur that she believes that she deserves. Will Sue buy the chocolate bar? No, not for herself. She’ll enjoy the advert and understand the message loud and clear but she’ll be fully aware of the reverse side of a short term hightened experience - that of weight gain, irregular sugar levels, but interestingly she will buy the chocolate as a treat for her children.

There is a chance that the half eaten chocolate bar ends up on the sideboard and Tabby’s sister Cathy the cat (who is suffereing from Diabetes) comes along, eats the chocolate and dies too. So the moral of the story from a customers point of view is only buy what you need for long term gain because what will happen will happen, and from a business point of view, when you market your products, decide who your market is and if they are more likely to respond to GOOD or BAD impulses.

Visual communication as the name suggests is communication through visual aid. It is the conveyance of ideas and information in forms that can be read or looked upon. Primarily associated with two dimensional images, it includes: art, signs, typography, drawing, graphic design, illustration, colour and electronic resources. It solely relies on vision. It is form of communication with visual effect. It explores the idea that a visual message with text has a greater power to inform, educate or persuade a person. It is communication by presenting information through Visual form. There exists a variety of ways to present information visually, like gestures, body languages, video and TV. Here, focus is on the presentation of text, pictures, diagrams, photos, et cetera, integrated on a computer display. The term visual presentation is used to refer to the actual presentation of information. Recent research in the field has focused on web design and graphically oriented usability. Graphic designers use methods of visual communication in their professional practice.

Visual communication on the World Wide Web is perhaps the most important form of communication taking place when users are surfing the Internet. When experiencing the web, one uses the eyes as the primary sense and therefore the visual dísplay of a website is important for the users understanding of the communication taking place.

 What do I think? Lets just think about what we are trying to say, paint a pretty picture maked this simple and let people make up their own minds.

I’ve heard that for those who attend Harvard business school the first assignment is that they are asked to write their obituaries which sounds simple at first. But then if you give it a go you’ll find it quite hard to summarise all you wish to achieve with your life in one paragraph. And when you have, you’ll just think - is that it? I must do more.

 I’m fascinated about my own, what legacy will I leave, what is the point of my life and what changes can I make in one life? So I decided to google “the most famous man on earth” and that brought up David Beckham and formerly Michael jackson. Un-content with this I tried “the man who changed the world” and came across Malcolm McLean, who died on 25 May 2001 at the age of 87. I don’t know what’s inscribed on his tombstone, but it might be: “He changed the world.” Mr. McLean invented container shipping and that is a very big deal indeed.

and now I will “CTRL C” and “CTRL V” from www.mondaymemo.net and paraphrase it:

Take a look around wherever you happen to be. Just about everything you see or set your hand on spent some time in a cargo container. In fact, sixty percent of world trade, measured by value, travels in cargo containers. And that number is actually deceptively low. That’s because world trade figures include a lot of things that can’t be shipped in a container, like gas, oil, grain, and just about anything you can pump. Take those out and you get an estimate closer to the one in the Economist-90%.

Mr McLean didn’t make toothpaste. He was a trucker, born the son of a farmer. He bought one truck, shifted stuff, got more orders, 30 years and 20 tears later he ended up with 1776 trucks and then sold that business for $6million (in 1955) around $600million today. During these 30 years he would drive his trucks to the cargo boats where he would wait all day as they unloaded the back of the truck by hand, much fell on the floor as waste and much more was stolen.

With his $6million he bought a Cargo ship, loaded the complete trailer (with wheels) on to the boat and delivered them all over the world. Then he figured he would take the wheels off to save space, and the container was born. This was standardised across the world and by 1969 Malcolm McLean sold his new business, Sea-Land for $160million. He went on to develop a way to move a patient from a stretcher to a hospital bed with less discomfort. He set up a hog farm that was a model of cleanliness. A sort of coming full circle.

That was life for a man who changed the world. There were good ideas and the hard work to make them a reality. And in the end it was those realities that mattered, not whether he was ever the most famous man in the world.

I was driving to work along the A350 past Maiden Bradley in Wiltshire in my Honda Insight this morning behind a Granny in a Peugeot 307.  I followed her as we approached a downhill section with a tight turning just after it. Her right indicator went on, her window wound down, her right arm stuck out and she held her hand out indicating right.

 I knew the corner was tight and I understood why she was making it plainly clear that she was indicating because there have been many crashes on that bit of road, but it got me thinking…

 The clever Granny combined the old and the new when it came to communicating to me what she wanted to do. The new (car indicator) would have worked fine, and the old (sticking her arm out the window) startled and confused me at first, but after a couple of seconds I GOT IT and it rekindled old memories, the glory days of roadster motoring, and I was alert beyond complacency to her upcoming movements.

So surely is we combine the NEW (internet, emails etc…), now taken for granted marketing approached and back them up with the OLD (traditional hand crafted letters) then we would be onto a WINNER.  

I agree that this is not root canal surgery, but brushing your teeth is still important.

Blimey. Well after 3 months of waking up in the middle of the night thinking up new ways to entertain and inspire the crowd at the TNT Magazine Travel show, I have finally completed my talk.

Nerves is not a word that describes how I felt enough. But I put that to one side and started the 20 minute talk infront of a 100 strong crowd by being introduced as the man who was trying to get published - with the intro “Where there is a Will there is a way!”

This then led on to me stripping off to shorts and a t-shirt, setting the stage with incense and Indian sheets whilst moving on to ask the audience how many languages they spoke and where they had travelled. I then moved onto the story of Babu - the show shine boy and then Naeem the 44 year old engineer before Tai the 16 year of Maori New Zealander (where a mad woman in the audience heckled me about my facts about Maori’s in New Zealand whilst someone else walked out in disgust at my comments!)

Finishing off 3 members of the audience came up with great ideas for ice-breakers for travelling, they were: “Whats in your pants?”, “What’s the meaning of your name” and “Where is your hat from?” The latter, Mike from South Africa, won his  own handbag, which he then gave back to me - but then I passed on to runner up Kate, from Australia.

Overall, I feel public speaking is a real challenge but that’s why I love it! 

I’m so excited, it’s only 2 weeks away and I’m even going to be giving a talk at the TNT Magazine travel show this year too.  Written in a far more flued style than I could ever muster - here is the press release:

 Around the World in 80 Handbags

Hear this amazing feature story at the TNT Magazine Travel Show

March 8th 2008

Will Baxter travelled the world visiting strangers by looking at the contents of their handbags – with the variety of bags opening a ‘pilgrimage of discovery’ for him to learn more about the human race and what makes it tick.

He will be speaking about this global adventure at the TNT Magazine Travel Show 2008.

In his travels Will Baxter meets:

A homeless shoeshine boy in MumbaiA bevy of beautiful women in AmericaMaori students in New ZealandAnd many, many more

TNT Magazine Travel Show, which is London’s biggest free travel expo, is taking place at the New Connaught Rooms, Great Queen Street, on Saturday March 8th. Will is available for interview to talk about his travelling experiences.He explained: “Travel is one of my great passions, on the other side of the world you can really be yourself, your best self, the self of the moment, from day to day, from bar to bar, or train to plane.”Seeing the world through the contents of people’s handbags might seem like an unusual way to see the world, but what better way to see what is really going on in people’s lives than through their bags? This offers an open window into how real people are actually living their lives and how they’re different – surely one of the main reasons we go travelling.”

Having recently watched a TV documentary on Channel 4 by Martin Cole I feel I should share his findings.

Martin traveled all over the UK meeting various “cool” people (teenagers to twenty something’s) all portraying different elements of what they call “cool” and he looked at the way brands reflect this. Martin met with sneaker (trainers) obsessed funky city types who loose themselves in their obsessed and end up burning all their branded belongings because they have lost who they are beyond the logo they wear. On to grime hip hop stars MC-ing it up in the nightclub, then to international jet setters who revel in £250 bottles of champagne whilst surrounded by super models, through to packs of skateboarders underage drinking and smoking dope and finally on to the lonesome surfer who chases the eternal “perfect wave”. Martin Cole reflects that to be “cool” is to passionately pursue your own path of happiness, ironically not caring if your cool, and that the results often seem to be that the women will sleep with you, other men will want to be like you, people will photograph you, you might end up making millions in an advert, but if all the wealth disappeared and you continued to do your passion regardless when you became unwanted, penniless and un-photographed then that is “cool”.