The Dishwasher Effect [2007]
This newsletter’s so late it should probably be called September. Sorry. I’ve embarked on a grand new 8 Tribes Research project [which you’re welcome to join by the way] which has eaten up my time.
That and the new laptop I just leased. Just two years on from the last one but it’s a giant leap forward. And also backwards as anyone who has dealt with the Microsoft file sharing system will know. The first task with a new laptop is to wrest control of it back from the evil empire.
So – first piece of free advice – don’t start a grand new project involving a major email-out on the eve of the introduction of new SPAM laws and get a new computer at the same time. It’s the capacity for chaos I don’t like.
The other reason for lateness – not that I’m offering excuses really – is that I tried to premeditate this month’s newsletter. Usually I just sit down with pen and paper and something pops up.
But early in August I decided I was going to write about the “dishwasher effect “ after a client mentioned it in a meeting.
That’s the strange but perceptive observation that even though the dishwasher is usually the last major kitchen appliance to be acquired by people, once the purchase is made, it swiftly becomes the one they would be most loath to get rid of. That’s just soooo true.
TIVO seems to have suffered from the dishwasher effect. [That’s the US version of personal video recorders like My Sky]. It had a tortuously slow uptake there, but purchasers absolutely loved it.
They just couldn’t convince their mates. It was hard for people to realise how great it was going to be for them.
According to Michael Carney’s Marketing Digest [which you can probably access through here http://g2nz.wordpress.com/ ] My Sky has sold about 20,000 units.
I’ve almost bought it a couple of times but . . . not quite. Not to worry – according to Michael there’s a new upgrade coming soon so it’d be silly to leap in now.
So that was one strand of the newsletter – then later on in the month one of my colleagues was reminding us how back in the nineties we used to talk about how the Internet was going to change the world and let us become “tele-workers” and how we’d have “portfolio jobs” and it would all be very futuristic..
And at the time we thought that’d be very hip but a bit lonely and completely overlooked the major benefit – which is the freedom to work at home in your trackies [or even your PJs ] if you want to and nobody knows.
One of my pals who works from home has video-linking through Skype and also a range of charming hats for those days when you’ve just rushed to the office from the bedroom!
Actually there’s a big clothing opportunity there – for outfits that take you stylishly from the bed to the desk, pausing only to gargle, rinse and get coffee.
So then I started to think more about our inability to anticipate the real texture of the changes that will occur over time – or to fully appreciate the differences between what we do have and what we might have – for better or for worse.
It's the whole basis of advertising and communcations isn't it really? The need to be able to paint a picture customers can see themselves in.
To say say nothing of the new industry of "home staging". Yet another example of the effect of rising expectations. Now we want to buy homes that look as if the kind of people we might want to become already live there.
And that thought became the motivation to actually read a book I bought a while ago called Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert – which is misnamed or rather misdirected because while he talks about happiness it’s actually mostly about how people badly use what he calls the greatest achievement of the human brain – its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real.
Our imagination.
So I thought I’d quickly skim through that, find a couple of gems and wind up with a classic Windshift newsletter that starts somewhere and ends up completely somewhere else while maintaining an essential thread.
But unfortunately Stumbling on Happiness fascinates me so much and is so quippy and interesting I’m having to read it properly and think about it. How annoying when you're already late.
But it's beautifully insightful. For instance, when talking about the fact we are happiest when we feel we have control over the future – whether that is true or not - , he says “Perhaps the strangest thing about this illusion of control is that it seems to confer many of the benefits of the psychological benefits of real control. In fact the one group of people who seem generally immune to this illusion are the clinically depressed who tend to estimate accurately the degree to which they can control events in most situations”.
See – there’s benefits in everything. Maybe John Kirwan should leave well alone.
Though I have to say that after all those well-meaning Grey Lynn-style ads trying to re-engineer people’s attitudes to mental illness it’s fantastic to have someone with a simple and compelling story to tell. I’m sure everyone – clinically depressed or not – is learning to take pleasure from the little things just like John’s mother said. Truly brilliant.
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I’m going to stop now because I have to set up Dreamweaver again from scratch before I can actually put this up on the website. .then wrestle with the email system.
I hope those of you who read this newsletter because it makes you think will find something to whet your interest. And the rest of you - well computer schadenfreude's always good.
If I manage to plunder Daniel Gilbert’s book of good ideas and use them to my own ends in time I might write about that in the next newsletter. Or is that being overly optimistic?
Cheers
Jill
PS : If you've done an 8 Tribes profile - or you want to - you can be part of the 8 Tribes Research Project.
Jill Caldwell is Director of Windshift Communications Ltd. Click Here to contact Jill directly This is a free monthly newsletter provided to direct subscribers only. No further use is made of subscriber information. [Copyright Windshift Communications Ltd 2007]
Distribute [unchanged] with impunity. Quote with attribution.
"there’s a big clothing opportunity there – for outfits that take you stylishly from the bed to the desk,"
