Trend observations, analysis and future predictions since 2005
Category: Sources
Books, websites and magazines. Anything you can read. Sometimes very smart people from all over the world write smart papers, say smart things during conferences or say smart things on TV. What you read here are generally no marketing insights, but typically things from outside.
Robert Cialdini: fascination, inspiration and manipulation
Last month social psycologist Robert Cialdini, author of the brilliant book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (of which a milion copies have already been sold) gave an excellent presentation for the NIMA MDG (Marketing of services) at Dialogues house Amsterdam. He showed how you can use simple principles to spectacularly improve the results of of communication with customers, simply by applying factors of social psycology. He explained the six basic principles. Robert's talk was followed by Janine Himpers-Verhoeven, listening consultant at Altution. Here is my personal perspective on the priciples explained by Robert with additions from Janine.
Future vision by Erwin van Lun
It would be nice to see these principles included in dialogue. It’s the way our brains work and will keep working. Brands will play on this to convince people in a dialogue.
Confucius: I do and I understand
Confucius:
I hear and I forget,
I see and I remember,
I do and I understand.
The quote is definitely not new, but it typifies our learning in the future. While older generations just had to listen to the teacher at school (I hear), many people of the contemporary generation had video that made a lot clear (I see), and soon we will have a (school) world in which we can experiment ourselves (in the virtual world). We can travel back in time hundreds of years with our class mates (or others with similar interests). There we get a tour from a virtual tour guide, whom we can ask questions too. And we can run around independently, and explore the city in that time. That is a whole different kind of history class than our generation has ever had.
Nokia’s vision at the future
Nokia shows what the future of mobile phones looks like. Bendable, flexible, color-changing, shape-changing displays which furthermore also work as extra senses for us. For example by being able to smell special substances. All as a result of nano technology which makes it possible to assemble products at a molecular level. Interesting video!
Facial coding: what our facial expression show
Kim Wanten is a Dutch expert in the area of facial coding: what do our facial expressions say? She's written an extensive article (Dutch) of which a (long) summary follows.
Facial Coding originates with Charles Darwin who discovered in 1872 that facial expressions are natural and comparable to those of orangutans. He concluded that we, long before we could communicate verbally, communicated using facial expressions. After that it took until the middle of the 60s before Paul Ekman took up where Darwin left off. Ekman discovered that facial expressions are universal and uniform.
The end of democracy
Winston Churchill has said (among others at bq):
Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those others that have been tried from time to time.
And slowly the end of democracy comes closer, to make place for new forms of government in which civilians are the boss...