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The notes from this panel probably won't make much sense to anyone since it was more of a discussion than a structured lecture. Posting these selected quotes for my own record, you marketing types probably know of many of these theories already so it might not be all that interesting.

• Means-end chain theory and the laddering technique
• Imagine you want the consumer / end-user to feel or think a certain way. That would be the top rung, and to get to that top rung, you need to figure out what words or other factors might trigger the user to climb the bottom rung of that ladder. Apparently skilled interviewers can deduce these patterns in language. I can't help but think of Dr. Sweets character in Bones.


• Where you say something is more important than what you say.
• This isn't about product placement, this is about placing your message around specific sources that elicit a certain emotion which promotes emotional contact to the brand. So let's say a beloved child character passes away on a show due to some illness. That would be a perfect time to follow up with a commercial asking for donations to save children from a similar illness because the emotions are already there, riped for picking.


• CEO vs. CMO
• CEO's push big changes while CMO's push incremental changes. This was quoted by a panelist who mentioned a study that produced these results. This statement stumped me since it's definitely not the case with one of my old bosses. The marketing department was always pushing for new services or products to be added since we were always the customers' champion. CEO would always play it safe and 'stay the course' striking down any new service we tried to pitch. I suppose everything we pitched were incremental improvements whereas a CEO might have the big picture handy that could lead to big bets and big gains (or losses). I guess my old CEO just wasn't a visionary.


• Internet: People are measuring what they can right now, not what they should. SO TRUE! And how do you decide on what was a success and a failure since you can't compare it to traditional measurements?


• Noncognitive research (most decisions made on subconscious level)
• I can attest to this, my best ideas come while working out or brushing my teeth. So I guess I might also make my purchasing decisions then too? According to a panelist, getting in touch with unconscious mind is akin to getting in touch with humanity. 85% of decisions are made noncognitively and what people think they think is not what they think =P.


• Set expectations / promise / delivery > meet consumer needs / efficacy!
• Pillar 1: Competition Space
• Pillar 2: Trademarks, positioning
• Pillar 3: Profit pool, shares, how they move over time.


• Companies go from vertical to distributed management every two years.


• Closed loop multi-channel marketing: This PDF is a year old but a Google search didn't turn up much.


• Everyone is still figuring out social media. Companies can't dive into it but they need to experiment / launch pilots in social media.


• Analytics are an excuse when you don't know the answer. Lack of control makes better marketers get in touch with consumers more.


• Brand management is the closest thing to owning your own business in a large corporation.


• Elevate brands in their lives... connect! (Heard this repeatedly, make the emotional / human connection.)


• This wasn't from the panel but for some reason I thought of something David Kelley of IDEO (and CMU alumn!) told me when I visited the d.school at Stanford. All companies value people with broad skills, those able to jump from one role to another and collaborate, but they also need deep dive experience / skill set. Something I don't think I have right now. The whole jack of all trades, master of none metaphor continues to haunt me five years after I left architecture school.


• Marketing is science & art, one of the panelists stated this and I thought to myself so is design, architecture etc. Architecture is engineering & art (if it wasn't why did I suffer through years of statics, structures, statistics, design economics, etc.?). The architects observe people similar to marketers observing their customers. Have you ever walked up to a door and pulled on a handle when you were instead supposed to push on the door? Terrible user-interface, that handle should have never been there...

Finally sat down to type up my notes from two of the more insightful panels I've been to recently.

Behance
The first was held at the Behance offices as part of Creative Week. 'Make Ideas Happen' was a small group session where we discussed issues we were dealing with as creatives. Scott introduced a few concepts that I thought were insightful. According to my notes, I sometimes suffer from idea-to-idea syndrome where I generate a ton of ideas and never take the time to develop them. In the future, to deal with it, I should provide a week of skepticism before I act on it. At that point, I should either reject the idea or commit to it and decide on a ship date and work backwards, breaking it down to action steps. Problem is, I feel like I'm missing out if I don't pursue every single idea...

Related to idea-to-idea syndrome, Scott introduced me to the 'project plateau' when I made a comment about how I loved conceptualizing, but as I work on an idea and bring it through to production I find myself having a harder time concentrating on the project. This is because at the conceptualizing stage, the excitement level is high, but as you go into production, the excitement level drops and plateaus. New ideas start at a high excitement level which takes away my attention from the production aspects of a previous idea.

Another concept Scott mentioned was the categorization of people into three buckets; dreamers, doers and incrementalists. I don't like to call myself a dreamer since I prided myself on getting things done back in high school, college. But as time goes by, I find myself jumping between the dreamer stage and doer stage. So I guess I'm an incrementalist who leans heavily to the dreamer side of things. I need to stop dreaming so much.

I did a quick search and found others who had attended conferences where Scott, the CEO of Behance lectured at. Here are notes from SXSW, a video from SXSW and some background information on Behance and what their Action Method is all about.

Fast Talk: McG
That evening I attended Fast Talk: McG at Fast Company's headquarters. I was lucky enough to be looking over the updates in TweetDeck and saw that @fastcompany was offering tickets to the event to the first ten responders. McG, the director of the upcoming Terminator movie and Fast Company's May 2009 cover story was surprisingly friendly, engaging and full of entertaining stories. Catch clips of the talk here. Looking forward to a sneak preview of the movie on Wednesday night, thanks Visa signature!

Popped in on these two pop-up shops in NYC recently =P.

Both were pretty cool, but I couldn't get past the Vitaminwater10 branding. What a total sham... I took a look at one of the many mini-bottles of Vitaminwater10 that I downed during my visit and saw that the bottle had 15 calories, not 10. It's 10 calories per serving, but a mini bottle has 1.5 servings whereas a regular bottle has 2.5 servings. So... Vitaminwater10 is really Vitaminwater25. Googled it and found the following analysis at Wallet Pop. Anyway thought the wall forming the 10 was cool (see photo on the left). The intake and exhaust fans in the light cabinet made me recall the days of PC building. Never has airflow been so important on a personal level.

The RocPopShop in my neighborhood incorporated a totally different atmosphere than the Vitaminwater one. Vitaminwater was bright, tall ceiling and airy. RocPopShop was dark, cozier and utilized more textures. I really liked the edges of the glass shelves which incorporated the reptilian skin texture that was in the background. The security guards were also very nice and engaging. Definitely +1 to RocPopShop, D-ASH Design did a great job with what they had to work with.

Additional photos on my Flickr stream.

Caught the NYC showing of Objectified a month ago and though I loved the film, I thought it was a bit short. One of the more interesting bits in the movie was their interview with Naoto Fukasawa (I think best known for his Muji CD player while working at IDEO) who described his process for the W11K cellphone.

Deciding that conventional cellphones were uncomfortable to hold, he hit upon the subtly angular shape of the W11K cellphone by remembering the reassuring feeling of grasping a freshly peeled potato in water.

Cool. But what really got me was the faceted form of the phone which totally brought to mind, the HTC Diamond series. Wonder if the W11K inspired the industrial designers at One & Co.

Oh Karim Rashid was also in the audience (and film) and took part in a pretty entertaining Q&A afterwards. Caught his guest curated exhibition, Totally Rad: Karim Rashid Does Radiators at MAD and thought it was pretty neat. Wish I had use for those sick looking radiators.

I've been neglecting the blog for a bit because microblogging all the interesting design-related items I find is so much quicker. And since I've been thinking about developing the Citizen Chan moniker I might just keep all design-related posts separate. For now I'm going to stick with the Facebook Link shares and will incorporate FeedBurner's BuzzBoost in the near future . For the time being, you can grab all my design-related posts via this feed. I should just move this blog over to Layouts shouldn't I? Had some success working on the Ride Qi blog which uses Blogger Layouts.

It's been over a week since I've been back so details are already a little hazy at this point. Rather than go into my usual anal retentive post covering every single aspect of the trip I'm going to borrow Edda's list and merely expand on it. Most of my detailed write-up of each mountain can be found in my Snowbook.

• 100 inches of snow
  
• 3 Broken Ribs (Tim @ Powder Mountain)
  
• 1 Punctured and Bruised Lung (Tim, see above)
  
• Broken Tibia and Fibula (Will @ Snowbird)
  
• 1 Busted Lip (Elmo returning from Brighton)
  
• 100 inches of snow
  
• Busted Arbor board (Jack, not sure which mountain)
  
• 3 runs to the hospital
  
• Did I mention 100 inches of snow!!!
  
• "AMAZING"
  
• Untouched powder... everywhere!
  

On this trip to Utah, though we stayed at an awesome condo at the Canyons Resort, we never rode at that resort or nearby Park City. We did drive up north to the Huntsville area to ride at Snow Basin and Powder Mountain which I feel are the top two mountains in Utah. Big Cottonwood's Brighton Resort is a distant third.

Snow Basin is really glitzy, most amazing lodges I've ever seen and their lift system is impressive. The mountain is no slouch coming in larger than Snowbird and Alta combined. Powder Mountain is the direct opposite of Snow Basin. The lodges look like something you could've built during booth, the lifts are few and slow as hell but the mountain is totally worth it. I also got to do my first CAT tracks there and pulled my first few BS360's on this trip (first one was at Snow Basin).

I was hoping to get a few more days in back on the East Coast but it looks like we are done, so Utah was a fantastic end to the season. The trip also inspired me to pick up a powder board; ended up with the Burton Fish in 156cm and since the Hero was back in stock at Sierra I grabbed a 152cm. Surprisingly, white EST bindings in medium are incredibly hard to find so I ended up buying the Magenta Madness Cartels off of Ashy Larry on the Burton forums.

On a final note, I had to retire my F20s at the end of the trip. The left boot was on its last legs a few days into the trip. The pull string on the tongue snapped on me and portions of the laces were coming apart. The boots served me well, loved the styling and they travelled with me to South America and Japan. Great memories. Have a pair of new F20 SLCT's ready to go for next year though the color scheme is a little wack.

Additional Photos:
Bao's Photo Set, Will's Photo Set, Edda's Photo Set

The gifts keep on coming! In February after I saw all the subway posters for Red Bull's Snowscrapers event I contacted both Red Bull and the NYC Parks department to see if I could get my hands on one of them to put up in my apartment.

NYC Parks hooked me up with a tiny foldout poster. I guess beggars can't be choosers, so props to them for actually responding and hooking me up!

Red Bull's rep, Lindsey also got back to me and though she didn't have luck procuring any posters she sent me a surprise package in the mail consisting of a 4 pack of Red Bull, 4 pack of the Red Bull Cola (which I only recently discovered in a supermarket in Tahoe) and a 2006 Red Bull Winter Sports Compilation DVD. Awesome and totally on message =T.

I've always wondered though how large Red Bull's marketing budget is. They sponsor an insane amount of events and teams. Their two F1 teams is mind boggling when Honda can't even keep one afloat (with the help of other sponsors). And that's not all, Red Bull also fields a NASCAR team, soccer clubs and more. Does anyone have any leads on Red Bull's numbers?

I love the styling of their F1 team. I guess it's a good start when your logo already has a badass bull on it. Not a stretch to apply it to your car but if this is the 2009 design, I think they need to step back and go with the previous design where the bull was a much larger and integral part of the car. There may be hope as 2009 test photos show this livery which retains the large bull design. Perhaps the two cars have different designs? Or does the secondary team, Scuderia Toro Rosso, stay with the large bull and the main team sticks with the more conservative paint job?

They also had a pretty awesome promotion with Star Wars back in 2005 when their pit crew dressed up as Darth Vader and Stormtroopers for the Monaco Grand Prix.

Updates
20090421 Red Bull sent me the poster I requested but with a bonus! Signed by Pat Moore! SICK! Talk about brand engagement...