aesthetics of joy

I don’t know if some animated characters can make reading emails and making calls into a “Joyful Adventure,” but LG Australia certainly hopes so. The website for their GM730 smartphone features games in which personified apps get together to catch flying emails and do “playful multitasking,” whatever that is.

Looking at the graphic above, it’s clear they’re trying to harness elements of joyful aesthetics: the tiny claymation cupcake village, friendly color palette, cutesy language, and glimmering phone. It’s a Childhood aesthetic, designed to trigger playfulness and nostalgia. But the whole thing is just a gloss on what’s presented as an otherwise ordinary smartphone. The characters, with charmingly original names like “Dialing,” “Contact,” and “Office,” do nothing to highlight unusual features of the phone. They’re just the standard apps, often the ones you wished worked better. Seriously, Dialing? Is that even a feature?

The TV ad takes the Childhood aesthetic a step further, with puppets whose style clearly references The Muppets and a brightly-colored set that echoes Sesame Street. Another device from Sesame Street used in the ad is the intermingling of puppets and people. It all combines into an aesthetic designed to stimulate our nostalgia and bring a halo of joy to the phone. The ad ends with the line “Joy. Now in a smartphone.” spoken by a V.O. with a laugh in her voice and spelled out in a friendly, rounded typeface.

But despite the frenzy of action in the ad, nothing suggests this is any different than any other smartphone. Why will this phone, in particular, make me so happy? Answer the question, and it’s a legitimate claim. But until the emotional claim is backed up with benefits, this represents another great example of the increasingly common, increasingly global advertising phenomenon of joywashing.

Thanks Ben, for the great tip.

I would like to drive around in a car called the “Utopian Turtletop,” wouldn’t you?

That was just one of many names that emerged from a brief but joyful collaboration between the writer Marianne Moore and the Ford Motor Company in 1955. Ford approached Moore for help with naming “a rather important new series of cars” and though the names she suggested were all passed over, they still delight. Wouldn’t a “Pastelogram” be nicer to drive than a Focus? Doesn’t a “Fabergé” sound cushier than a Fusion? Ok, to be fair, perhaps the delicacy implied by that last one  doesn’t bolster the crash test rating claims, but surely all of them are better than “Edsel,” the name eventually chosen by the Ford execs.

I love the idea that poetry can lend levity to product naming. Naming in the automotive industry has become beyond bland. In the past few years or so we’ve moved away from the dull, corporate neologisms like Altima and Innova towards peppy party words like Jazz, Beat, and Fiesta that are just begging for exclamation points. They might be more upbeat, but they’re still pretty mundane. Collaboration with people who are used to using language in more joyful and flexible ways would take product manufacturers out of their comfort zone — and that could be a wonderful thing.

NYT: Poetry in Motion via @deepglamour
Image: Old Car and Truck Ads

Today I was interviewed about “joywashing” by Virginia Prescott live on New Hampshire Public Radio‘s Word of Mouth, a show about trends and culture. The interview was great fun — I love talking about joy in its many forms, and especially its rise in popular culture.

You can hear the segment online here after 3pm today. And here are links to the ads from French’s, VW, Clorox, Trident, and BMW discussed.

Previous joywashing posts on this blog include one on Clorox and one on Trident, in case anyone’s looking for a more in-depth discussion of the phenomenon.

One point I didn’t have time to make in the interview that I want to add. . . Unlike greenwashing, joywashing doesn’t present a dangerous threat. I meant what I said when I indicated that an abundance of joy in marketing probably is a good thing, and certainly won’t hurt anyone. But that doesn’t mean it’s right for every brand. Not all products should be marketed as joyful products. And this glut of good vibes will definitely make it harder for any one brand to stand out.

Marketers run a very real danger of poisoning the well by jumping on the joy-wagon without backing up their advertising claims with product design or service gestures. Like any major cultural shift, the rising tide of optimism has the potential to be an opportunity or a threat. For those marketers that realize people are looking not just for sugar-coated messages but for uplifting products and services and experiences throughout their lives, the joy wave presents a good opportunity to leave a deep and powerful impression on their customers. Or it could be a fast-track to being perceived as inauthentic. It’s all in what you make of it.

Thank you to NHPR and Word of Mouth for inviting me on to share these thoughts with their listeners. Have a joyful afternoon!

These pudding packages, all designed for the same brand by Dusseldorf-based Yvonne Nieweth, make a great case study in emotional design. Each one is different from the next in the quality and intensity of emotion it evokes. Which ones seem the most joyful to you?

Via TheDieline. See the images larger here.

My post describing the phenomenon that I call “joywashing” has provoked some interesting discussion online and off. In the meantime, examples keep coming. This morning while catching up a couple reruns of Top Chef Masters, I was struck by this new ad from Clorox Cleanup. The voiceover goes:

When everything’s just the way you want it. When it’s so clean there’s nothing left to think about and nothing left to do. That’s joy. The pure joy of the pure clean that comes with Clorox Bleach.

Then the tagline: pure joy. pure clean.

If cleaning had an emotional territory in the past, it was zen. Cleaning was about calming the storm, taming the flow of mess, getting things under control. The clean home at the end of an ad was a picture of stillness — just Mom and her well-deserved cup of tea, with even the dog neatly groomed and obediently seated. When the economy was good and we worked too hard, the emotional quality of home we aspired to was relaxation and zen-like tranquility. Home was a refuge against the busyness of the outside world. Now, in the days of pink slips and furloughs, all that peace and quiet feels isolating and, honestly, a little scary. Home now needs to be a place of vibrant energy to counter the gloom that surrounds us. The cultural significance of “home” has shifted, and smart marketers will realize that this requires a different kind of emotional content to sell products for this space.

I actually like the ad and I think the territory is a credible space for a cleaning brand to play. Clorox is perhaps a little harsh and I think it would more appropriate to their green cleaning brand or another, gentler sort of product. But there is kind of a joy to the moment they’re describing, when all the work is done and the house is really, truly clean. They’ve backed it up with joyful aesthetics: pops of color that stand out in the white rooms, high energy movements, that well-placed giant bubble, and music that has a soaring quality that matches the tone.

The language may be a little strong. I think that “pure joy” might be an overpromise and it’s risky given the joywashing trend to be so reliant on words like “joy,” “happy,” etc. The reality is that when words like this are so overused in a given time period they become very fluid. We think we know what these words mean because they are so fundamental to our language, but when they are claimed and associated with many different products and experiences in such a short timeframe, their meanings are volatile and susceptible to shift. The word “green” is the best recent example of this.

So, is Clorox’s joy-of-washing positioning joywashing? Perhaps, but my instinct says it will do ok for them. It may require some nimble thinking to maintain differentiation once the rest of the competitive space latches on to the idea. Product or packaging innovation to support the promise would help, because while the aesthetics of a clean home are consistent with joy, the acrid tang of bleach is decidedly not. I don’t know that they can do anything about that (bleach is bleach), but perhaps new scents or gentler formulations could provide sensory support for the joy positioning. It will be interesting to watch how the home space, and especially cleaning brands, evolve in this new emotional context.

There’s a joy wave afoot, and every marketer from here to Timbuktu is trying to get in on the action. We get it. We’re in the midst of the Great Recession, people are gloomy, and if you’re going to flog more sportscars or soda or chiclets right now pretty much the only way to do it is to sweep us off our feet in a haze of good cheer. But all cheery marketing campaigns are not created equal.

“A little piece of happy” should be joyful. After all, that’s one way to define what joy is: little pieces of happiness. But this campaign isn’t joyful. Some of the items are entertaining, like the happy news feed and the Pandora playlist. Others are just dumb, like the pic of the chihuahua wearing goggles or the image of the two starfish holding hands (the caption reads “star crossed lovers” — har har). But my real problem with it is that it just seems like a novelty, a gimmick — all talk, no real emotion. Just because it’s timed to the recession with a peppy vibe doesn’t make it a winner. Would you visit this site more than once or twice? Would you post it on your facebook page or send it to half your address book? Do you now suddenly feel a rush of delight every time you chew a piece of the same old Trident?

I think this campaign is joywashing — the shameless use of happiness or joy to convince us to buy more stuff. Real joy is deep, repeatable, and contagious. And unless there’s something special in the formula, it doesn’t come from a stick of gum.

How’s this for a joyful pizza delivery experience? Place an order with Pink Flamingo Pizza near the Canal St. Martin in Paris, and they give you a pink helium balloon. You take the balloon with you to your chosen picnic spot by the canal and their bike delivery uses it as a floating beacon to find you.

It’s a simple, joyful way to create a magical experience for customers, a gesture that costs very little but pays dividends in the way it makes people feel about your service and your business. Aesthetically, it’s a hell of a lot nicer than those vibrating hockey pucks, both for the user and the surrounding environment. A bobbing balloon gives everyone a little lift.

It costs no more to make something joyful than to make something dull, but it can mean the difference between a ho-hum neighborhood joint and an international destination.

Via Frugal Traveler. Thank you flickr user Antonia Hayes for the image.

The moment I knew joy had “tipped” (i.e. reached its point of mass cultural relevancy) came earlier this month when I received my copy of Dwell magazine. The magazine had an overleaf on top of the regular cover with what looked like colored tire tracks and on the underside a simple link: ExpressionOfJoy.com. Given the name I rushed to my computer and entered the URL. What popped up, as you’ll see if you click through, is a BMW promotional site featuring what looks like a child’s drawing but is actually a giant “car painting” done with a Z4 and gallons of primary colored paint on a giant canvas.

The site shows the making of the painting in elegant time-lapse fashion, from the laying of the special paneled canvas through the creation of the artwork, with the paint spraying out from jets over the wheels. It’s fun to watch, beautiful, and certainly novel, but is it joy?

Joy, in word and intention, has been popping up all over these days, and this marketing gimmick from BMW is only the latest. Recent Pepsi ads have been using the word joy (among other happy words) with the “O” replaced by the new Arnell-designed Pepsi logo. Joy was in evidence on the cover of this year’s New York magazine design issue, featuring a nude woman gleefully throwing a gallon of fluourescent pink paint at a white wall. This week’s New York Time’s T style magazine proclaims that the Milan furniture fair was all about joy. And then there are the new brands that keep popping up with joy in the name or tagline, like Tipjoy, an app that allows you to send money via Twitter.

Of course, joy has always been a theme in our culture — witness Almond Joy, Joy dishwashing liquid, and the Joy of Cooking, as well as the many joy campaigns that flood the airwaves during the holidays — but there does seem to be a rising current of joy right now, and it’s not hard to understand why. When life is uncertain and hardship abounds, happiness may be a difficult concept to grab ahold of, but little peaks of joy are easy to aspire to. You may not be able to afford a the home you’d like, but a sunny day strolling the park is an always-accessible mood-lifter.

All of these examples, new and old, include aesthetic features we associate with joy — saturated colors, bright imagery, expressions of freedom and play — but sometimes looks can be deceiving. The BMW campaign is interesting to me because I feel it falls shy of the mark on joy. It is an enjoyable spectacle, to be sure, a fun example of the inner child let loose. But while it is wonderful on the first watching, on the second and third the emotional impact is noticeably diminished. The pleasure is in getting the joke, understanding how its made and marveling at the process. But the pleasure of the product is lacking in depth, and the piece plays like a novelty. Joy must be repeatable, and perhaps I am cynical, but I wonder if I saw this again in a year if it would inspire any emotional reaction at all.

Which is not to say I don’t like it. I really appreciate when companies engage the arts and try to raise the level of discourse and differentiation around their brands. Kohler and Bombay Sapphire have done this well, in my opinion. I do question whether this particular idea is necessarily on brand for BMW (a subject for another column, perhaps), and whether the naming was well thought out, or merely an attempt to glom on to the current trend towards joy.

One of the questions people ask me all the time when I explain the Aesthetics of Joy is “How do I use this?” The book covers a number of specific strategies relating to designing and marketing more joyfully, but there’s one that’s almost too obvious to write about: having a joyful attitude.

The fail whale, Twitter’s now iconic graphic that appears during unplanned, accidental downtime, is a great example of this. When most sites go down they use a stock standard “We’re having technical difficulties and are working to resolve the problem. We apologize for the inconvenience.” Nothing wrong with that, but nothing joyful about it either. Twitter’s approach, on the other hand, to use whimsical imagery to convey the idea of overloaded servers, creates a small moment of transcendence in the user. By this I mean that the ordinary pattern of behavior (anger, frustration, percussive maintenance) is suspended because the enchanting vehicle of the message takes you out of your narrow prism and makes you consider that stepping away from the computer into the sunshine for a few hours might not be such a bad idea. Fail whale is a disruption that shifts your perspective, mood, and even behavior.

Fail whale seem to fill a cultural need for joy and humanity in our dealings with the corporate world, as evidenced by the craze it inspired, including t-shirts, sculptures, tattoos, and cupcakes. It’s become an emblem of joyful failure, a true disruption of our expectations around the ways in which companies behave.

Joyful design doesn’t change the message. But it can change the way the message is received, and the way users feel about your product. And if you have to disappoint your users, a dose of joy might just be the best way to sugar-coat it.

Fail whale is designed by Yiying Lu. More info here.