Author Archive

  • The iPad: one step forward, two steps back?

    The commonplace view within magazine publishing is that the iPad is going to save the industry. Will it? And in the process, will the iPad become a force of reaction, enclosing a free, open and infinitely connected internet within a landscape of small fences and high walls – the tallest being the ones around the iTunes store?

    I had a short talk to give last week at ‘What’s on your iPad”, a well-attended event organised by the British Society of Magazine Editors and the Editorial Design Organisation. I adopted the role of sceptic and these were my questions.

    What sparked them off was a couple of conversations with @bobbyc and @malbonster against the background of a loud hum of optimistic speculation buzzing up from the magazine industry on both sides of the Atlantic. You can see it here, at Conde Nast, busy iPadding up with Wired and GQ; here, with Sports Illustrated (you’re not allowed to watch the swimwear section**); and here’s Interview on iPad, a magazine of pages on a screen (see four below from the iPhone app), with a little video thrown in.

    Just when we thought the page had gone away....Interview on iPhone app.

    It’s like going back to 1990 in the days of the CD ROM and the ‘electronic magazine’.  So what is it about the iPad that sets editorial lips aquiver?

    I think there’s five key things:

    Read full post

  • Cloudculture, the internet wars and the sublimation of self

    The launch event for Charles Leadbetter’s Cloudculture pamphlet at the ICA last night let loose a rain shower of thoughts about individuality and ownership.
    Charlie’s theme was that we’re moving to a different kind of internet, that its shape would be determined by the “civil war” now raging between old and new media (Murdoch vs Google, Jobs versus the music industry) and between government (security, protection) and citizens (freedom of speech). His gist was that – and I’m paraphrasing wildly now – the outcome would be imprinted in the structure of intellectual property rights that emerges from the fight. The threat is that the battle ensnares the possibilities of creative collaboration, or that cloud capitalists are organising the future landscape to suit corporate and state purposes (I know some, and they are).
    ICA director Ekow Eshun then joined in with a thesis on individuality and the self and ‘who owns the version of ourselves’ that exists in the cloud? “I say”, said Eshun, “it is not ourselves, instead we merge with others”. Hold that thought.
    “So what’s the difference between the network and the cloud?” This was the first question from the audience and it was a good one because it helped pin down the dodgy metaphor of cloud (I could never think of the web as being ‘up there’). Leadbetter’s ironic references to the information superhighway aside: I said, the network connects isolated personal computers and some of the information they hold to each other; the cloud is a set of tools that we can use, collectively, to manipulate the layer upon layer of information and data it holds.
    This raises problems (not really problems, but changes in nature) of authorship, ownership and self. We no longer generate individual work or own discrete cultural artifacts – this blog post might even attract a comment or two that isn’t mine (go on). For people with an old media sensibility its hard to let go of auteur theory and practice: our sense of self is wrapped up in what we make ourselves, attach our name to, and the myth of individual genius that we learn at our mother’s knee. What we lose in individual recognition, though, we gain in a connected sense of self and a realistic understanding of the process of making as public and collaborative, not private.  This is how Leadbetter’s and Eshun’s ideas come together as a new set of relationships between individuals and cultural artifacts and the society of makers (made by many).
    In response to some #cloudculture tweeting about utopian and distopian visions of cloud computing futures I offer McLuhan’s tetrad, or resonating interval. The tetrad plots the points of change on a continuum of past, present and future, by giving a balanced framework for analysing the effects of technical change in terms of what is enhanced, what does it flip into (reverse) when pushed to an extreme, what does it obsolesce and what does it retrieve that was previously obsolesced.
    Here’s my take on a tetrad for cloud computing. Please add to, change or takeaway:

    The launch event for Charles Leadbetter’s Cloudculture pamphlet at the ICA last night let loose a rain-shower of thoughts about individuality and ownership (disclosure: I haven’t read it yet).

    Charlie’s theme was that we’re moving to a different kind of internet, that its shape would be determined by the “civil war” now raging between old and new media (Murdoch vs Google, Jobs versus the music industry) and between government (security, protection) and citizens (freedom of speech). His gist was that – and I’m paraphrasing wildly now – the outcome would be imprinted in the structure of intellectual property rights that emerges from the fight. The threat is that the battle ensnares the possibilities of creative collaboration, or that cloud capitalists are organising the future landscape to suit corporate and state purposes (I know some, and they are).

    ICA director Ekow Eshun then joined in with a thesis on individuality and the self and ‘who owns the version of ourselves’ that exists in the cloud? “I say”, said Eshun, “it is not ourselves, instead we merge with others”. Hold that thought.

    “So what’s the difference between the network and the cloud?” This was the first question from the audience and it was a good one because it helped pin down the dodgy metaphor of cloud (I could never think of the web as being ‘up there’). Leadbetter’s ironic references to the Information Superhighway aside: I said, the network connects together isolated personal computers and (some of) the information they store; the cloud is a set of tools that we can use, collectively, to manipulate and transport layer upon layer of information and data that it holds.

    This raises problems (not really problems, but changes in nature) of authorship, ownership and self. We no longer generate individual work or own discrete cultural artifacts – this blog post might even attract a comment or two that isn’t mine (go on). For people with an old media sensibility its hard to let go of auteur theory and practice: our sense of self is wrapped up in what we make ourselves and attach our name to, and in the myth of individual genius that we learn at our mother’s knee. What we lose in individual recognition, though, we gain in a connected sense of self and a realistic understanding of the process of making as public and collaborative, not private.  This is how Leadbetter’s and Eshun’s ideas come together as a new set of relationships between individuals and cultural artifacts and the society of makers (made by many).

    In response to some #cloudculture tweeting about utopian and distopian visions of cloud computing futures I offer McLuhan’s tetrad, or resonating interval. The tetrad plots the points of change on a continuum of past, present and future, by giving a balanced framework for analysing the effects of technical change in terms of what is enhanced, what does it flip into (reverse) when pushed to an extreme, what does it obsolesce and what does it retrieve that was previously obsolesced.

    Here’s my first take on a tetrad for cloud computing. Please consider, add to, change or takeaway:

    Tetrad for cloud computing:

    Tetrad for cloud computing

  • Plotting a critical path

    I’ve enjoyed following the debate around Manuel Lima’s information visualisation manifesto, published after he spoke here at Kingly Street last month (see Justin’s post below). The manifesto was sparked by a call from a part of the audience for a critical discourse on data visualisation, so that we could stop just going “Ooohhh” and begin to answer the question ‘What makes a good diagram?’.

    Manuel’s response was the succinct and simple yardstick: “form follows revelation”.

    He elaborates: “Form doesn’t follow data. Data is incongruent by nature. Form follows a purpose, and in the case of Information Visualization, Form follows Revelation…. Independently of the subject, the purpose should always be centered on explanation and unveiling, which in turn leads to discovery and insight.”

    This is an essential truth but there’s a lot of filling in to do before being able to apply the maxim in the world, and Manuel begins with these sub-clauses: start with a question; interactivity is key (discuss); cite your source; [use] the power of narrative; do not glorify aesthetics; look for relevancy; embrace time [cf. interactivity]; aspire for knowledge; avoid gratuitous visualizations.

    I have others of my own, but I’ll start by referring back to the origin of the debate which is (I can say with authority, as one of Ian Douglas’ naysayers) that, in half a decade of observing dynamic and interactive data visualisation emerge, there’s a frustration that the critique hasn’t moved beyond cataloging new typologies (of which an excellent job has been done by Manuel’s visualcomplexity.com, the infosthetics blog, and by books such as Data Flow and Else/Where.

    I wrote a review of Else/Where in Eye in 2006 (you can read it here) which took up the theme:

    “Else/where reveals that, whereas the abstractions we use to represent relationships, dimensions and properties in the physical world are universally understood and ingrained in our consciousness, the visual language of intangible landscapes is immature”.

    And In reference to one particular diagram:

    “No matter how much well-researched data the Map of World Government contains within its frame, the message is unclear, the scale wrong, the detail obscured by arcane pictograms and its visual intensity diminished by over-reliance on text. This ‘map’ leaves its reader powerless. Like… Read full post

  • Climate Squad: from social media to social movement

    Made by Many is pleased as punch to announce the launch of climatesquad.org.uk, a platform for joining and organising actions to halt climate change that’s also the first of a series of initiatives by V to change the way youth volunteering works in the UK.

    climatesquadhome1

    V is an organisation funded by the Office of the Third Sector to promote and fund volunteering for 16-25 year olds. V came to Made by Many 8 months ago, asking us to create a vision for future volunteering with the expectation that digital engagement would reduce barriers to young people joining in voluntary action. In May we started working on Climate Squad, joint funded by V and Bank of America, as the first implementation of the strategy we defined with V.

    Read full post

  • Who you gonna call?

    img_0928-crop1

    You’ve left the station, you need a cab, who are you going to call? This lottery of eight choices, seen yesterday in Dinard, north west France, is a poetic demonstration of how lousy customer experience arises out of poor service design.

    So (here’s one to ponder for the weekend) what’s the chances of the person needing a taxi getting a driver who’s free with their first call? At busy times – when, by definition, more people want fewer available taxis -they can’t be much better than winning at roulette in the Dinard casino over the road. It could be eight calls and there’s still no guarantee of a car.

    Dinard taxi drivers are obviously an independent lot. Some chasm in their thinking or idiosyncrasy of behaviour has created a painful and potentially time-consuming dilemma for potential clients. What’s stopping the drivers clubbing together to have one number, a single base and a rota system?

    Is it mutual mistrust? Cost? Lack of demand making it not worthwhile? Or is it just a “sod the customers and make them pay” attitude? And by what stroke of chance or seniority did Michel Loquen come to be at the top of the list? Poor old Luc Tacher, stuck there at the bottom, must be having a hard time of things, or do more people call him on the sensible grounds that he’s most likely to be free?

    There’s got to be a better way, so here’s a challenge everybody: best use of creative technology and design to create the ideal low cost, customer-friendly, fair-to-all-drivers contact system for Dinard taxis. Rest assured all helpful suggestions will be passed on to Michel, Didier, Joseph, Philippe, Laurence, Jean-Michel, Allo (?) and Luc. After all, we have their numbers.

  • Why we don’t subscribe to Rupert Murdoch, and why we need a new kind of money

    New Media Age reports that ‘Times Online and theSun.co.uk are likely to start charging for content after News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch ‘indicated such a model could be in place within a year’.

    And The Guardian is considering charging users to access specialist areas of its site to counter falling ad revenues.

    (I’ll give you a link to the stories, here and here, but with sweet irony N.M.A. has a subscription-only model so you may not be able to read them.)

    No surprises here. Their backs to the wall, display advertising collapsing under the weight of social media, traditional news organisations are retreating to a familiar industrial-era mechanism. Copyright, subscription, advertising: they’ve worked for 200 years or more, why won’t they work now?

    Well subscription won’t work because newspapers are not niche, not strictly professional (like N.M.A) and definitely not exclusive. Hell, the competition’s free and these days it’s as good if not better than organised, editorialised, branded journalism. I don’t buy my internet news in a newspaper, I pick it out from a broad and fast-moving stream of fragments and favourites and recommendations garnered from twitter, blogs, feeds and aggregators and it’s all free. I might want one little piece of the Guardian one day, two little pieces of the Times the next, I don’t want either all the time so why should I buy 12 month’s worth? You can’t buy my loyalty Mr Murdoch, there’s no value in it for me.

    There’s a massive failure of imagination here. We’ve said (again and again) that newspapers and magazine publishers have to make the shift from product to service and until they do that they’ll have nothing to charge for. The web isn’t a walled garden either (with a pay booth) and journalism no longer has to be collected into a proprietorial framework. Spot.us is just one interesting example of an alternative and imaginative approach to making a living out of journalism without the need for Rupert Murdoch’s capital or his distribution network. Spot.us works by popular commissioning. It might fill a gap left by dying newspapers using a business model invented for the social media age. Here’s the elevator pitch:

    Spot.us is a nonprofit project to pioneer “community funded reporting.” Through Spot.Us journalists can pitch ideas or the public can commission investigations that they then fund with tax deductible donations. If a news organization buys exclusive rights to the content, donations are reimbursed. Otherwise content is made available through a Creative Commons license.

    Spot.us aside, it’s not just a question of imagination. There’s also a failure of money. Everyone’s complaining that they can’t monetise social media and one reason is that incremental value is very small. Money’s magic is wearing thin when it doesn’t work as a medium of exchange in a massively fragmented world. How do I buy little bits of things with very marginal value (even bits of Guardian, bits of Times).

    If a credit/debit card is the only option then it’s simple: I don’t. The social web requires something different to ordinary money, it needs a new currency measured in 100ths or 10ths of cents or pennies that allows us to make simple choices with an ambient mechanism, so that people can choose to acquire tidbits with real value at a fair price, with ease and security.

    The debit card, just as it starts to replace cash money on the street, isn’t working on the net. Interestingly, there’s one system that’s already geared up to micropayments (except we need nanopayments) and that’s the billing mechanism for mobile phones. We need Mcash on the net please. Rupert needs it too (truck loads, probably).

  • Temporary Autonomous Zone revisited

    THE SEA-ROVERS AND CORSAIRS of the 18th century created an “information network” that spanned the globe: primitive and devoted primarily to grim business, the net nevertheless functioned admirably. Scattered throughout the net were islands, remote hideouts where ships could be watered and provisioned, booty traded for luxuries and necessities. Some of these islands supported “intentional communities,” whole mini-societies living consciously outside the law and determined to keep it up, even if only for a short but merry life… I called the settlements “Pirate Utopias.”

    I’ve been re-reading T.A.Z, The Temporary Autonomous Zone (Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism) by Hakim Bey.

    A.k.a Peter Lamborn Wilson, the author is an American anarchist/sufi/mystic with a lunatic perspicacity and I’ve been dumbfounded by the clarity with which T.A.Z reveals the landscape of possibility opened up by the web in the two decades since he wrote his essay in 1990. I saw Wilson speak at the second Doors of Perception conference in 1994 and must have been impressed enough to buy the book. Re-reading 15 years later it becomes immediately comprehensible as an analysis of transient freedoms (eg. Twitter as a T.A.Z, now being reeled in and controlled by Wilson’s seething megacorporate state) and ‘islands in the net’, where the shackles of redundant social and economic typologies are torn off. There’s a perfect parallel between his opening historical review of pirate utopias and the downfall of Pirate Bay last month – these guys set up their T.A.Z and stayed in one place too long, forgetting the central tenet of T.A.Z., which is:

    The T.A.Z is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the State can crush it.

    You can get the full text of T.A.Z. online at http://bit.ly/YB36r), but here’s an essential flavour:

    Recently Bruce Sterling, one of the leading exponents of Cyberpunk science fiction, published a near-future romance based on the assumption that the decay of political systems will lead to a decentralized proliferation of experiments in living: giant worker-owned corporations, independent enclaves devoted to “data piracy,” Green-Social-Democrat enclaves, Zerowork enclaves, anarchist liberated zones, etc. The information economy which supports this diversity is called the Net; the enclaves (and the book’s title) are Islands in the Net.

    I believe that by extrapolating from past and future stories about “islands in the net” we may collect evidence to suggest that a certain kind of “free enclave” is not only possible in our time but also existent. All my research and speculation has crystallized around the concept of the TEMPORARY AUTONOMOUS ZONE (hereafter abbreviated T.A.Z).

    …The TAZ is an encampment of guerilla ontologists: strike and run away. Keep moving the entire tribe, even if it’s only data in the Web. The TAZ must be capable of defense; but both the “strike” and the “defense” should, if possible, evade the violence of the State, which is no longer a meaningful violence. The strike is made at structures of control, essentially at ideas; the defense is “invisibility,” a martial art, and “invulnerability”–an “occult” art within the martial arts. The “nomadic war machine” conquers without being noticed and moves on before the map can be adjusted. As to the future–Only the autonomous can plan autonomy, organize for it, create it. It’s a bootstrap operation. The first step is somewhat akin to satori–the realization that the TAZ begins with a simple act of realization…

    We are looking for “spaces” (geographic, social, cultural, imaginal) with potential to flower as autonomous zones–and we are looking for times in which these spaces are relatively open, either through neglect on the part of the State or because they have somehow escaped notice by the mapmakers, or for whatever reason. Psychotopology is the art of dowsing for potential TAZs.

    I love those last two paragraphs (especially the parts in italics – mine) the penultimate one because it’s very agile, very start-up, the last because, if you replace ‘State’ with Convention/Monopoly/Incumbant/Corporation/Old Media we have an apt description of what Made by Many sets out to do – dowsing for potential TAZs.

    Re-reading T.A.Z. reminded me that we didn’t create the web because the technology was available but because we imagined it – the freedom it might create and the disruption it would cause – and wanted it. Wilson and the cyberpunks who preceded him (Gibson, Sterling, Rucker et al) were writing in the time of the bulletin board and list server, well before there was anything really web-like but when what narrow bandwidth did exist was purely social. The reason I guess that we need reminding of this is that the transformation of the web from bulletin board to Great Big Shop in the dotcom boom shattered the link between the imagined world of cyberpunk and the tawdry reality of the bust. Now the link might be worth revisiting, so I’m going to dust off my copies of Neuromancer and Mirrorshades.

    One more word: in a preface to the second edition of T.A.Z Wilson rebutted a lot of his more literal ideas about the web (meaning internet), sometimes with good reason because quite a lot of it is faintly ludicrous – but also because 2003 was a profoundly counter-revolutionary period in the history of the internet. I’ll leave you with this – and especially the bit in bold – so suspend your disbelief and read on:

    At this moment [1991] in the evolution of the Web, and considering our demands for the “face-to-face” and the sensual, we must consider the Web primarily as a support system, capable of carrying information from one TAZ to another, of defending the TAZ, rendering it “invisible” or giving it teeth, as the situation might demand. But more than that: If the TAZ is a nomad camp, then the Web helps provide the epics, songs, genealogies and legends of the tribe; it provides the secret caravan routes and raiding trails which make up the flowlines of tribal economy; it even contains some of the very roads they will follow, some of the very dreams they will experience as signs and portents.

    The Web does not depend for its existence on any computer technology. Word-of-mouth, mail, the marginal zine network, “phone trees,” and the like already suffice to construct an information webwork. The key is not the brand or level of tech involved, but the openness and horizontality of the structure. Nevertheless, the whole concept of the Net implies the use of computers. In the SciFi imagination the Net is headed for the condition of Cyberspace (as in Tron or Neuromancer) and the pseudo-telepathy of “virtual reality.” As a Cyberpunk fan I can’t help but envision “reality hacking” playing a major role in the creation of TAZs. Like Gibson and Sterling I am assuming that the official Net will never succeed in shutting down the Web or the counter-Net–that data-piracy, unauthorized transmissions and the free flow of information can never be frozen. (In fact, as I understand it, chaos theory predicts that any universal Control-system is impossible).

  • Mostly gloom for glossies

    The New York Times reports here on the fall in magazines’ ad pages (and no doubt revenues) and sugars the pill with a cute piece of interactive information design (would have been good to have the year by year between ‘05 and ‘08 though, to see how must was systemic and how much was credit crunch-induced).

    The Times says: “Another day, another closure. Magazines are becoming thinner as advertising pages fall, and publishers are grimly cutting underperforming titles. But the outlook is not dour for all — a handful of magazines are still expanding their ad lineups, some by startlingly high percentages.”

    It so happens that Elle and the Economist are notable risers, but they’re in a very small minority; Business Week, Time, The New Yorker and Fortune are big fallers.

  • Old wine, new bottles (or why it will pay to be young in TV)

    Iplayer, Hulu, Vimeo and Youtube have made it manifestly evident that TV is facing a huge challenge from the web, not just for revenues and mindshare but also as an alternative channel to market. But it’s not just a quantitative ‘cheap and many’ channels issue; there’s likely to be a profound qualitative change in how we watch television that threatens the value of things that conventional TV people hold as given: things like scheduling, channel brands and the primacy of television commissioning.

    I’ve noticed that when TV execs talk about ipTV they focus on the pipe and the device and assume that the content and the viewing experience will stay much the same (a mass media experience). I came away from The Guardian’s Changing Broadcast summit at the Mayfair Hotel last week with the strong impression that they believe that by pushing event-based TV and ‘combining the creative skills of UK TV production with the ubiquity of the UK digital market’ they can confront the multiple threats they face from digital.

    I think it would be interesting to mull over these questions first:

    • How can the value of scheduling and channel brands remain intact when we make decisions about what to watch (whatever, whenever) by what our friends and other people we trust are watching?
    • What happens when national barriers fall down (and I can watch Hulu in the UK and BBC iplayer in France)?
    • How will a long tail of television (with geographic spread, not just historic) change what I watch and how I decide what to watch and the habits I fall into?
    • What will be the impact of more access to shortform have on TV viewing behaviour (just check out five.tv/fwd).
    • When I can respond instantly to what I’m seeing, in lots of different ways to different people or just everybody watching with me, over an interface that’s easy to use, how might my viewing habits and – just as interestingly – TV formats change? (And has the failure of red button created a false sense of security?).

    My guess is that across diverse viewing contexts and audience segments some very wide differences in behaviour, formats, channel branding and tv discovery will emerge.

    It’s easy for the hangover of a lifetime of past perceptions to shroud us from future reality. It’s interesting that most of the people adopting the comforting approach that nothing will fundamentally change were over the age of 40.  At the end of the day there was a panel of thirtysomethings representing Endemol Digital, RDF Digital, Channel 4, BBC3 and Bebo with a completely different mindset because they started their careers at a time when the old models were already looking tired. Here are some refreshing snippets:

    “Everything done on television is done online simultaneously – commissioning is multiplatform” (BBC3)

    “What success is like is really hard to get at” (BBC3)

    “We are experimenting to try to find out which models work” (Bebo)

    “The web allows us to challenge the old model where we got paid by the cost of what we made, rather than by its value” (RDF)

    and most intelligently of all:

    “We’re having to learn very fast to keep up with the audience”

  • The communication IS the product

    Joe Heath at BBH just sent me this link to a deck by Paul Isakson at Space150:

    http://www.slideshare.net/paulisakson/modern-brand-building-presentation/

    It’s a very good slide presentation that says, “The product really is the marketing: make better products first”. IE. planners may have finally got it. It reminded me of the piece below which I wrote a very very long time ago as a result of experiences working with Orange, when at Metadesign. It’s about merging product and brand and service development and the importance of defining narratives in enabling a product or service to realise its true value; apologies for the academic tone – it’s called ‘The communication is the product…’ and it goes like this:

    The idea that communication is the product (and vice versa) has its root in three conditions: the dematerialisation of products and services; the inclusion of networked communications within products and services; the personalisation of services.

    Where products have partial or no material reality we can objectify them in any way that might be desirable. Effectively, we ‘write’ the product’s story upon it. The way in which we communicate what the product does, who it is for, the context in which it belongs and how it is used can determine how valuable that product will be.

    And furthermore, when a product incorporates a system of communication – especially when it is bi-directional – a primary route for marketing communications becomes the point of use and the building of customer relationships becomes intrinsic to the product or service itself.

    When a service is personalized there is an implicit requirement for bi-directional communication. The customer becomes a co-creator, and must be able to 1) understand the scope and value of personalisation, and 2) use the communication tools provided by the vendor to create their personalized service. Again, this is a means of building relationship capital.

    From the user’s point of view the product of networked digital services is almost always information, access to information or a means of control, communication or exchange. The material reality of these services – back end systems, fulfilment systems, cable networks etc. – is entirely hidden from the customer unless it incorporates some form of physical delivery (and that is in itself only a partial manifestation of the customer experience). These services are in many cases entirely novel or subject to rapid adaptations and evolution, and so how their narrative is written and presented at point of use and in marketing communications may contribute substantially to their success or failure.

    The idea is not limited to pure information services, but extends to services added to products. Defining narratives are just as important to physical objects and especially those that are mutable, sensitive and communicative. Digital electronic products are a hybrid of physical and logical systems. They are increasingly dematerialised and unconstrained by physical limitations. The designers’ role is becoming the creation of new object languages that define the things they make, and the establishment of mechanisms for building and sustaining a relationship with the customer. A digital radio interface might be a set of cards with station idents printed on them – throw a different card on the deck to change the station; an answerphone might be a tray of glass phials filled with messages waiting to be poured out (thank you Durrell); a car still has four wheels and an engine and a boot, but the definitive value propositions are shifting from speed, status and performance to comfort, lifetime cost and intelligence – services added to the product that provide real value and differentiation. In the future, we will buy cars more for the information they provide about our destination and the road ahead than for their speed in getting there, and more for the relationship we have with the information provider than for the body, chassis and engine configuration.

    The conclusion drawn is that brand communication and service delivery often reside at the same interface and that the quality of communication determines the quality of the product. This is what is meant by ‘the communication is the product’. The line between brand development and service development and design is becoming increasingly blurred, and the suggestion is that, as brand strategists, we need to involve ourselves in the creation of value itself rather than simply communicating what that value might be through some physically separate medium. This means being involved at the genesis of product development, not after the event. 

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