Experience design is just that and far from just that. Dozens of man-years have been spent crafting a definition that still struggles with the difference between art and design, let alone the requirement we have to trap, cagoule and force down the edges of what it is to be experiential or to provide experience. The wooliness of the subject is refreshing and helping get my head out of the structured, problem/solution world that billable work often requires (especially on a Monday!).

From 5 senses, to 360 degree immersive sessions it’s clearly going to be an awesome 10 weeks.

My reading list is whizzing past Hegel, Marx, through terms as diverse as relational aesthetics and dystopian community. It’s been a while since I read something (Harvard biz review tends to pride itself on accessibility!) that had me rubbernecking to google this regularly. Blindingly good stuff, even this early session got me thinking like mad on a stack of plans/briefs/trickies I have in front of me.

In a world where ‘Brand is…’ is cumbersome and ‘brand does’ becomes more central to our planning model - experiential planning is pretty sexy for me. It channel planning with lipstick on, spinning on a table, air thick with perfume.

With HBR continuing to kick sand in the face of goods providers with yet another article on the worth of the experience economy. Joining the greying of the boundaries between sponsorship, co-branding, commissioned design, corporate installation etc. And Josephs Pine conforming that customer value has run away from all the  commodities and goods, towards tailored services or authentic experiences. It it  the time to try and consider how we offer these experiences, planned, proactive and of course with an audience insight bang in the centre.

With crossed fingers, in a dark, endless cold room . I am hoping that experience design and the time spent with the talent at CSM contributes a component  to me working on a structured approach to behavioural change achieved along a considered, multichannel, richer journey.

In the meantime – a rather nice Nokia experience, corporate installation, co-branded event, light show or Son et lumière (your choice).

In recognition of the difficulties young cancer patients face, eyeforpharma are hosting their first annual Mobile Health Competition. Applicants must submit an idea for a phone application that will help teenage cancer patients manage their condition and make their lives easier. To help pick the winning idea eyeforpharma have created their very own super panel, comprised of teenage cancer survivors and charitable bodies.

The competition is open to anyone working for a pharmaceutical company, advertising agency, healthcare organisation, as well as patients themselves. The winner will have the opportunity to develop their application and see it launched. They will also win $5,000, which they can donate to a cancer charity of their choice.

The Teenager Cancer Trust, PatientsLikeMe, LIVESTRONG Young Adult Alliance, and a host of other charitable, patient, and mobile specialist companies have partnered with eyeforpharma for the competition.

Here at Hive we welcome any initiatives aimed at improving patient care and engagement, so we urge you to get involved and spread the word.

The closing date for entries is January 3rd 2012. 

http://www.eyeforpharma.com/mobilehealth/

There are lots of different things you can check but you need to careful when interpreting your results. Experts warn that some effects are due to changes in the language we use to describe things (such as ‘The Great War’ vs. ‘World War I’). Others are due to actual changes in what interests us (‘slavery’ peaks during the Civil War and again during the era of the Civil Rights movement.)

So what can the Ngram viewer tell us about healthcare? Well it seems that the words ‘doctor’ and ‘hospital’ have had a similar cultural presence from 1800 to the present day. In comparison the use of the word ‘patient’ has steadily increased with a massive boost post-1950.  Most interesting is the word ‘health’, which had a huge cultural presence in the 1600s followed by a dramatic slump in the early 1700s. It’s been increasing ever since.

Go and try the tool yourself, or have a look at what other people have searched for on the Ngrams Tumblelog. 

We were lucky enough to be one of the beta babes and we have been curating Patient Centricity News for a couple of months now.  Its dead straightforward, and is backed by a plum algorithm that once seduced helps you find relevant articles and videos. It cracked the automated pitfalls of death by junk content by leaving the curator to choose what’s right for them, and its this for me that has made the Scoop.it experience so fresh.

As “curation” becomes the next buzz word it been a joy to be part of the big beta crowd.  With more than 2 million visits per month, and traffic is growing by 35 percent month, we look forward to reviewing load more healthcare comms publications.

I saw a great candidate last night for a first round interview. Watching this made me think that alongside the CV, interview notes and discussions with people in the know, we are increasingly assessing candidates by who they are online. In the old days we might do a quick university phone around, or chat to someone whose experience had crossed with the candidate’s CV. Later this moved to  a quick Facebook check to see whether the candidate was fun, and you know, well, sociable.

These days we pretty much audit a future one of us online. In days gone by this was prorata by seniority; the bigger the kid the more we would expect but now it’s an even assessment regardless of level. A slot in the diary figuring out who we have in common, what they have worked on, whether we cross over on an occasional dragon and their day to day social media interaction and level of connectedness

This film asks the question whether that is fair, whether its important to know whether a colleagues has a penchant for spending most of their free time drunk in fountains (you know who you are). O

The route to audience, their community of relationships and the purity of our crystal clear, brainstormed messages is under threat. We are midst a revolution, a chance to throw it all in the air and start again. This is a Darwinian moment; those that are adapting fastest will top-trump the dinosaurs. Our ability to do new stuff is now a competitive advantage not a dangerous countercultural diversion. It’s the Wild West all over again, except with worse shoes.

Why idea?

The point of having an idea in communication is straightforward. Ideas are bread and butter to marketers. They seek to be different, striving to connect a product with a defined audience. Find a point of difference, make it come to life and get it delivered to an audience that stands some chance of impacting your bottom line.

Secret ad men

In the days of old, lunches lasted until way past 2.30pm, golf was cool, procurement focused on toilet rolls and agencies had loads of sex. This approach was fine. Ads were king. They ruled. Despite the environment changing the ad as first port of call for ideation has proved a tough, tenacious little sucker to bump off. Despite this tactic proving incredible restricting when looking for broader ideas.

It’s a shame to say that secret ad men still surround us. We still see ‘the ad as the primary brand communication’ touted all over the place. For some it’s an attitude that’s retarding our progress as communicators and as plan makers. We have moved on. Those consumer-focusing guys who piled into healthcare a while ago seem to have ignored the changes that have occurred to their old manor. TV is midst decline and that poster off the M4 has been augmented by permission based and experiential disciplines; by a channel mix that looks nothing like it did 10 years ago.

Not dead just suffering

I don’t want to consider this the death of the ad. I think it’s in manageable decline rather than on the floor choking. History tells us media don’t die, they just become increasingly unloved. After all, we do still carve words into stone, 1000 years after it was our dominant media. But as soon as we considered the requirements of the marketing mix more than the double page spread the end started. Those early days, when marketers, sought integrated campaigns and assessed them by whether all shapes and sizes of tactics spread out on a meeting room table matched or not, make us smile now. Was it all really about 4 key messages and a frequency calculation?

The beginning of the end

The beginning of the end saw agencies strive to find new terminology to cope with the changes. The birth of the horrific word; adcept, summed it up. A sticking plaster over the cracks in the idea generation landscape, a way of getting ad focused teams to come up with bigger ideas than the media booked was capable of holding. Without spilling the beans that their ‘precious’ is looking a bit sickly as the dominant tactic.

Stretch required

Perhaps our world doesn’t need another tweeting digital bore. But the proliferation of channels have done their bit to jump start evolution. One could argue that the evolution of direct mail, or sales forces could have contributed as much to this decline as digital. The ad man didn’t really grasp the requirement for the brand to be pushed into these spaces in a way that it could really work.  Why? Because what makes a great ad – doesn’t often make a good media neutral idea. The interaction that these channels require and the opportunity that they have is vastly different to a 4 second A4 connection required in the BMJ. So why use your lowest common denominator tactic to develop you idea?

It strikes me that to accuse digital of being the cause of this evolution is a bit naïve. Selling has continued to evolve at a startling pace taking in its stride the bicycle, penny post and TV. Digital although arguably more intangible, and certainly fast is not going to change the fundamental way people connect with brands. Humanity is the rate-limiting step. The need and ability to form relationships is cultural and hardwired. The way audiences assimilate attributes, experience and value remains. You could argue that brand strategy has finally caught up with humanity?

The rise of experience transparency

What digital has changed is the control we have as marketers over our messages. We are no longer the only ringmasters. Every customer we have has a platform to communicate their experience, they, are closer and more vocal to other prospective customers.  Consequently we better get our brands anchored in something more than abstract positioning. Ideally anchored in a defined idea, encompassing a need that can be supported and championed by the audience. If our views on the product and the audiences don’t match then it’s going to die. Regardless of the cunning uniqueness of the positioning.

They’re for the journey

To thrive we need to be bothered about our customers not just at point of decision but across a broader space. This means our idea has to work beyond the moment of customer acquisition. It’s not just about a tipping point. We need to make sure that the wider customer experience is known to us. If additional needs exist, we need to see them as service opportunities. Consider them part of our product offer lest they become the low point of our customer’s product experience.

Change the people, or change the people

Thankfully, most of the adcept touters have fallen by the wayside. A new type of creative has emerged – the integrated conceptualiser. Not just an ad award hungry beast but also someone who is as passionate about every opportunity along the customer’s journey. One that knows the ins and outs of channels, how each works and what elements of the story is best delivered in each. These guys are dead easy to spot. They don’t need to draw an A4 box on their pad before conceptualising. The idea is conceptual, not confined to a given media space.

Idea planning

To cope with this change, new forms of idea planning have sprung up. New models force us to consider ideas as an adhesive wrapper for our uniqueness and supporting messages. With this have come some of the most exciting aspects of strategic development. The onus has been placed on marketers to consider their product story, the channels available to them, and deliver it. For products with a package of differentiation rather than one clear superiority this is a huge advantage. We can tell more complex stories and as long as they are based on real need not conceptual space available all is well. Models that look at splitting the story, and delivering it the audience in chunks across the channels are exciting us hugely. And its getting to the stage where you can quite easily see a time where the complete brand story exists only in two places; in marketing and in the mind of the customer. In between it’s fragmented and efficiently distributed by the best channels available. The level of planning is adding a further dimension to brand strategy where implementation and strategy are blending. Creating real challenges for those that consider 4 key messages delivered 4 times to be the best guarantee of behavioural change and early adoption, and really messing up a world where ads come first then your tactical plan.

How we cope with the changes is the next big question.  If you want to embrace these exciting times, like any moment midst change, it’s best to find a partner who is comfortable to tell you that all the answers are out there, but not yet in our grasp. Work towards a real connecting story, ways of delivering it efficiently and be comfortable with informed risk.

Tim is one of the founding partners of Elf, a group of innovative healthcare agencies. Including Hive, Ebee and Pollen that launches in September. Tim blogs regularly at hivehealth.com spend most of his time at Hive partnering a pretty awesomely progressive set of client’s. Any enthusiasm for this article or offers of work should be sent to tim.scorer@hivehealth.com, corrections or points of difference can be made direct by email to ian.busby@hivehealth.com or in person to Jas Hummel.

My bugbear with these multi day extravaganzas is with the foundation icebreaker sessions. This is more rant than thought through critique. (I am sugar rushing from some charity cake from brought over by the guys at The Nursery)

Surely we all get paid to attend, think and deliver. Surely we all consider it a default to work within a team, even an unfamiliar one. Whether that be off the cuff or after permitted thought. At no point is the voicing of ideas, public thinking and discussion considered god given, it’s not easy or natural for anyone. But it is a paid for requirement. The day job.

I increasingly struggle with the rationale for;  sharing the content of my wallet, climbing through imaginary tires, providing public facing previously unknown facts and almost feigned cardiac stress prior to a ‘colleague’ shoulder massage.

Are we all caught up in the entertainment aspect of this lunacy? This initial agenda item is slowly morphing from a simple required introduction into a corporate versions of Big Brother. I wouldn’t be surprised if the next meeting started with us all having to milk a boar. It’s getting a bit unnecessary.

You can’t manufacture or facilitate intimacy, if anything this can achieve the opposite of what’s required. Strangers soon become partners once you are midst a task. Is it unreasonable to consider human beings a social species?

As we haven’t had a poll in a while I though I would take this to you our reading public.

It’s not often that poetry smacks you in the face, seeks an ethical and moral review on your activities. Not since Pam Ayers Battery Hen has something felt this powerful (I was 7 and midst egg mayonaise sandwich).

I chucked this at a group of us last night to discuss in place of a training session on the Value Profit Chain. The crowd were mixed from the ‘it’s just not that simple crowd’ to the ‘our duty is to provide value not just proliferate useless products’.

We do market products to people often in crisis. But are we the target of this poem? It’s important for all of us to be able to hold our head high. I think that consumerism relies on creating needs that aren’t often real needs but manufactured wants. But that this categorisation often differs by person and it much more complicated than the puppet paranoid would have us believe. In this poem the mum sits centre of a manipulative environment, powerless and stupid. Whilst the corporates sit dangling the bright and shiny like fisherman at a trout farm. I am not sure that I am quite to this level of paternalism, or to this confidence in the simplicity of this situation. The mothers I have market researched have all been a little more street wise than this. Capable of identifying commercialism and opportunism. Understanding and rationalising their sometime irrational need for more into a bucket of first time mum stock piling? Or to a reaction to the basic human need to prepared pre chaos. In a capitalist world this means buying stuff, often irrelevant stuff. But acting on impulse.

This cynicism has to be answered by us as individuals. For me it means basing everything we do on a tangible human need, not just a superficial fear driven want. Am I naive? Basing what we do and how we drive genuine value, and maintaining consumer partnership at our core allows me to pass a personal test.

An interesting discussion prompted by creativity and passion.

Around the table sat a social media planner, product designer and a sociologist. Our conversation focused on developing anything to be better than it was . Those ‘things’ that make your competitors spit blood and wish they had made it themselves. I use ‘things’ here as it helps with knitting us together somewhat. Although widgets, products, research papers and communications all seem dead far way from each other our worlds link closely when you need to produce something that connects.

Interestingly what the sociologist called participant observation – which in her field mostly seemed to cover deviant behaviour, the product designer knew as a consumer closeness, and I and the social media planner knew as planning. All involve long periods of either following, viewing and recording interactions with other players, structures or items. It’s all about intimate familiarity with someone and often something. We all seek to view, with permission and learn from it.

The social media planner and I looked on with interest; this approach is something we know really well. We scoffed at the pomposity of the terminology. Participant observation total toss. Surely this is exactly what we do?  Having opened my mouth way before engaging brain. It turns out (most obviously) now that the world of participant observation is pretty old, whilst us lot in advertising hark to Berbach in the 1950s and the rise of planning. Our Sociologist colleagues top trump us with their Bernbach equivalent – the Persian anthropologist Abu Rayhan al-biruni who was collating people patterns in order to solve problems a little further back in 973-1048.

The product designer, seeing me floored with historical accuracy, decided to fill me in with the history of ”industrial design” and the birth in the early 1900s of industrialised consumer products. I sat fascinated (but pretending to be bored) at the world of Deutscher Werkbund, founded in 1907 to establish a partnership between product manufacturers and design professionals to improve the competitiveness of German companies in global markets. It’s apparently this that built the foundation for German user centric design and creativity and placed them on a competitive footing with England and the United States.

Finding myself between established audience centric disciplines. I sought the bleeding edge with the social media planner – an online anthropologist. Her faculty of genius came mostly with names like Wolfsninjaw536, and most notably from a insightnip546 and were at the early days of defining the discipline. Just like the days when Madison Avenue was split between Bill Berbach and ‘the depth boys’ and Rosser Reeves who ran the Ted Bates agency and fronted the ‘find a USP and repeat it loads’ clan. More can be read about this in this brilliant BBC film and article. Her world was splitting into factions all trying to distill a client sellable truth, in a chaotically mobile landscape.

Whats does this all mean? That techniques of all of us are useful to all of us? That terminological transparency would help us all? Perhaps – but simply for me it that what we know to be useful is more often that not being used and bettered by many other disciplines.

A fascinating lunch with a pretty academic discussion and loads of overlap at the least.  A new group of people to borrow stuff for the problems we tackle day to day at the most.

Come back with me to February 1, 2002. The isle is burning in a cold storm. A South African disembarks in Durham City. Note the sleet melting into her clothing as she hauls 20 kg of backpack up a cobbled street. Hey Isle, it’s me! Luugging his own baggage up this hill, quite immune to my whining, is my fellow émigré Greg. Here we are in the picture on a Skype chat.

Greg was newly qualified in medicine and had secured a urology house officer post in Durham’s teaching hospital. I was a copywriter with an ancestral visa (4 years – sweet). We were best mates. We rented a stone cottage. I got a job helping farmers claim foot & mouth compensation. I also waitressed and went clubbing with my new friends. Come July, we had to get serious. I had to write, and Greg had to get on the proper rotation scheme. I was going to Ealing. He was going to Croydon for August intake. We divided our cups and spoons and we parted.

Greg is now almost in his consultant brogues and I’m doing pretty well my stuff too. I offer you this story because it frames the August system in a ten year period, a good time to assess whether it is working.

The firmament of the NHS is its focus on the patient. If the patient is dying, there is the rush of reflexive action. If the patient has died, there is, ideally, calm reflection. Studies like this one will now be pulled into many different shapes. The focus spreads to the carers and the cash. You have to keep the doctor on the most effective, least expensive training path. Staggering teaching would be difficult. If it means more red tape, the government probably doesn’t want to know right now.

You can read this training story here and do some reflection of your own. With all the cuts and punches, note that it hasn’t made the mainstream health news. Remind yourself that in 2012, training will be absorbed into the new Health Education England and NHS Trust Development Authority. And watch this space to see how our little Scottish study stands up in the storm.