Ian Schafer of Deep Focus, Noah Brier of Barbarian Group, Brian Morrissey of Adweek, and Alan Wolk got together at Morgan’s Hotel in Manhattan last fall to discuss current issues in marketing communications.
Thanks to the presence of video cameras in the room, we can now drop in on the conversation.
The Social Media Bubble Part 3 of 3 from Hive Awards on Vimeo.
I don’t agree with them about Apple. Apple’s core loyalty, and i have written about this before, has come from a core group of designers and software developers who never lost the faith. Not five percent of the computing crowd, but more like two percent. This isn’t from the average look-pretty designer or the average geeky programmer but from the designer who understands geometry, bezier curves and the development of vectors in design, and mathematicians and technicians that understand aesthetics.
Now it could be that some of these designers did not fully comprehend the equations of higher calculus, nor the programmers could fully write an eloquent essay on Kant or the Bauhaus school, but they just had an inner understanding. I had this same eye in clothing pattern design using tangents and french curves in flat pattern making 101 where i was able to grasp these concepts readily without the formal math training. It was why i was able to design something in my 101 class that was invited to be in the graduating classes fashion show. I consider it a gift of the mind i was given or, respectively, nurtured. My visual testing scores back up my beliefs.
Most later loyalty that comes to Apple in the Jobs Phase II era comes from wanting to revive this or in the post iPod years in wanting to be a part of that kind of faithfulness. The post ipod era i find a bit “bought into.” i know my loyalty to my g4 is way different to anything post apple store craze, and my satisfaction wains. It’s like trying to create a match made in heaven from a spark left on earth. it still works so very well because that elusive outer realm magic is so elusive and most people really don’t delve that deeply anyway. That’s probably a good thing for apple and for society and for microsoft emulation.
I know this sounds weird, but i have never sat at my intel laptop the way i did when i sat at an earlier pre-intelintosh and said i really get this thing because i see and understand how it just figures differently. I mean can you imagine going home from a day of trying to use the path tool for the first time, and all you want to do is find out about postscript and truetype font history and the mathematic equations of four point bezier curves. All that and only being a granny in 2004 who never bothered to take any further math than trig way back in 1975.
Marketeers trying to explain that core connection isn’t cutting it for me. Them, the marketeers, trying to explain the latter craze phase, I’ll accept and let them explain till the cows come home.