The Six Secrets Of Demand Creation

Adrian Slywotzky has a nice little teaser on Fast Company for his upcoming book “Demand: Creating What People Love Before They Know They Want It.” This bit really resonated with me:

5. Build a Steep Trajectory of Improvement
A product’s launch is merely the first step in a series of attacks upon the indifference of the market. On launch day, great demand creators jump into the next phase by asking themselves: How fast can we get better? Every improvement they make will unlock new layers of demand, and leave less open space for imitative competitors.

I’ve seen this happen many times. Businesses get so caught up in their daily operations that they stop innovating and improving. The really successful business never seem to loose that desire to offer something even better.

Hat tip, Ron Tite.

Kansas City Library

This is a really clever facade to the Kansas City Public Library. Even more clever, the titles on display change periodically. From their website:

The Community Bookshelf is a striking feature of Kansas City’s downtown. It runs along the south wall of the Central Library’s parking garage on 10th Street between Wyandotte Street and Baltimore Avenue. The book spines, which measure approximately 25 feet by 9 feet, are made of signboard mylar. The shelf showcases 22 titles reflecting a wide variety of reading interests as suggested by Kansas City readers and then selected by The Kansas City Public Library Board of Trustees.

Evolution of Logos

It’s pretty interesting to see how some of the most famous brand identity work has evolved. It’s pretty rare for any of these companies to completely rebrand, usually there are just some some adjustments made in each iteration.

Post-publishing note: I had grabbed this image from somewhere and stuck into my folder of things to blog about. Unfortunately, I didn’t keep very good notes as to where I found this collection. Tineye didn’t turn up any results, but it appears as though this was originally from Inc.com which has some nice notes for each brand and is worth looking at.

How Does Such a Pretty Wife Make Such Bad Coffee

The video’s creator took a series of coffee commercials from the 50’s and 60’s, and pulled together all the moments when the guys were being real jerks.

What’s interesting is that this message was such a common one for coffee brands at the time. It makes me wonder what conventions we’ll find in today’s commercials.

We Start with the Most Noble of Intentions

I kind of like failure. It teaches us important things, and it’s often more interesting to hear about a catastrophic failure than a brilliant success.

I really enjoyed Sean Hood’s answer to the question, “What’s it like to have your film flop at the box office?” The short of it is that like most endeavours, filmmaking is a group effort that suffers from conflict, frustration, exhaustion, and compromise.

And so while everyone intends to make a really fantastic product, something that they can be proud of, sometimes it just doesn’t work out.