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SIGNAL: Carrotmob is an initiative, which could become a globally spreading use pattern. Like in the collective activity of flash mobs people organize in the real world. But not for fun but for a strategic cause – to reward the local shop with the most environment friendly politics.
CONTEXT/PRECURSOR: Consumers know that their shopping behavior is a weapon. Aware consumers use “shop mobs” to lower the price.
We have heard about shop mobs in 2006:
Tuangou, or team buying, aims to drive unprecedented bargains by combining the reach of the internet with the power of the mob. It is spreading through China like wildfire. Economist
On the socio-technical side there is the behavior pattern of flash mobs since 2003 (Wikipedia), enabled by networked people. Flash mobs have started as a kind of rather dadaistic fun thing. Read the rest of this entry »
Coming home from some “field research” in the local Berlin Kreuzberg scene. Pecha Kucha No. 9 was fun. Most people are loaded like a gun with their ideas when presenting and … btw I am always interested in new formats of the social (socio technical) space. 20 seconds per slide – I’d like to see this staccato style at some boring conferences!
Now I just select one nice presentation for confronting it with the newest paper I got from McKinsey Quarterly. Completely different contexts, intentions and so on – for sure.
- The presentation at Pecha Kucha No. 9: “Cäthe Pfläging (Amt für Gestaltung / about girls and motorbikes”.
- The newest McK Quarterly article: “The next step in open innovation” – first you have to register, then McK is open .-(
Cäthe told us about her love for motorbikes and her approach in the subject, which is a bit different for women than for men. Now for my argumentation here I only want to select from Cäthe’s nice slide show (a) the fact that there are no magazines for motorbike liking girls – and (b) what she (as a woman) would like to see in a motorbike magazine. For example: Which bike fits to a certain style type of woman – from enduro to chopper. Most girls e.g. need not: All these technically detailed stuff men can discuss for hours.
McKinseys authors tell us: “The Internet and new social-networking technologies are allowing companies and their customers to interact with unprecedented levels of richness. Some leading organizations are using this opportunity to draw customers into the heart of the product-development process.” (quote from article at a glance)
Now, isn’t that a funny coincidence? To be honest the McK article tells not so much news – the web 2.0, wikinomics and open innovation issues are some years around now, the question I want to pose is just: Isn’t it a bit frightening, that the market has not created a magazine for female bikers in the last decades (while there is a high frequency of newly launched “woman magazines” – at least in Germany). What goes wrong here? Looks like that all the surveys targeted only the demographics, and just did not aim at the interest group “female bikers”. Well, the players in the media business would benefit a lot from open innovation – but they have to simply ask the right questions at the first place.
