We don’t do focus groups (…). It’s unfair to ask people who don’t have a sense of the opportunities of tomorrow from the context of today to design.
Here’s the problem: The end user doesn’t care how your company is structured. Customers view brands as a unified entity, and they expect that brand’s value to be delivered across all channels with an equal degree of integrity. The good news is that the digital landscape is forcing all of us to re-think how we work.
Of course it makes sense to gum up Instagram with your awesome thing. It’s not like people have had their fill of your Tweets, YouTube Videos, Facebook status updates, rich media eye-rape, projection-mapped city takeovers, bluetooth phone-jackathons, interactive outdoor-o-matics with busloads of people jumping up and down in front of a Kinect, and that mobile-thingy-you-stuck-in-at-the-end-for-good-measure. Oh and of course a bloody #hashtag.
We have abandoned the idea, still popular in the 1990s, that – to put it in a somewhat sketchy way –Internet users spend their nights chatting with strangers over the Web, and thus they are automatically neglect their friends and loved ones. This was known as the displacement hypothesis. Since the beginning of the 2000s we know that the actual social consequence of the Web isn’t social isolation, but rather a dramatic reconfiguration of the balance between strong and weak ties, between bonding and bridging.
Raw data is both an oxymoron and a bad idea; to the contrary, data should be cooked with care.
— Bowker, G. C. (2005) Memory Practices in the Sciences. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.