aesthetics of joy

I got rid of TV awhile ago (best decision ever, though only partly voluntary) so pretty much the only time I see commercials anymore is when they get sent around via social media. Usually that means they’re pretty good, or at least interesting, halfway between advertising and entertainment. Advertainment, let’s call it, which seems to be the holy grail of marketers these days.

This Dove ad is advertainment, and while I don’t love this blog being a vehicle for furthering marketer’s messages, there is a point I want to make here. If you don’t have time to watch the video, here’s the short version (spoiler alert!): Dove recruits a bunch of women for an experiment. They arrive at a location and are asked to get to know a stranger. Then they’re led into a room with a curtain, on the other side of which is a forensic artist. The artist asks them to describe themselves and uses this as fodder to create a sketch of each woman. Then the stranger who met that woman is led in, and the artist creates a second sketch of each woman using this description. Hung side-by-side gallery-style, the women view the paired portraits and are asked to take stock of the differences.

It is remarkable how much more attractive the second sketches are, universally. And though this a made-for-TV moment (with the music to match), it struck me as a uniquely tangible example of the power of perception. Anaïs Nin famously said, “We don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are.” If we are warm-hearted, open, and generous, we feel embraced by the world. If we are jealous, bitter, or narrow-minded, we interpret others’ actions harshly, and may be threatened by them. Convinced of our own objectivity, we believe this is how the world really is, while in reality we are attuning our senses to the information that affirms our view of the world. Psychologists call this confirmation bias, where we unconsciously look for evidence that affirms our beliefs about the world. But all of this happens in an amorphous way, so it’s hard to notice when we’ve slipped into some kind of negative way of viewing the world, or ourselves.

I love this experiment because it makes manifest the difference between negativity and positivity in aesthetic terms. Cold eyes, a flat gaze, a tight-lipped frown, odd facial proportions: these distortions are self-perception through a lens of negativity. Interestingly, these are also the facial expressions that correlate to negative emotions like sadness and anger. In his landmark study of facial expressions, Charles Darwin wrote about the faces of people in a state of sadness:

…the face [becomes] pale; the muscles flaccid; the eyelids droop… the lips, cheeks, and lower jaw all sink downwards from their own weight. Hence all the features are lengthened; and the face of a person who hears bad news is said to fall.

In other words, when we view ourselves through a critical lens, we are imagining our faces as though they were in pain. By contrast, a joyful face is inviting, with a bright gaze, good color, and contractions of muscles around the mouth and the eyes that make the whole face seem to smile. The same face under the two conditions is totally different.

We are inherently interested in faces, so much so that we have areas of the brain specifically devoted to processing them — scanning the faces of both strangers and intimates for signals that communicate their familiarity, their health, their disposition, and all the implications these things have for us. We invest a lot of energy in the aesthetics of our own faces. We rouge and pluck and paint and do countless other things to enhance the impressions our faces give to others. But I think so often we forget how much of beauty is in the expression, the temperament that emanates from within. This is a nice illustration of the beauty of not focusing on beauty. When asked to be open to getting to know a stranger, to be friendly, to simply engage with another — that’s when these women were at their most beautiful. Yes, there is a message here about being less hard on ourselves, and this is a point well-taken, but it’s not just about the removal of a negative. It’s about finding ways to lose yourself in things or people that kindle this kind of happiness. Beauty is just an outward signal of some kind of inner joy.

ps: For a critical take on the campaign, with some good points as well, read here.

I often take brands to task for “joywashing”: advertising their products or services with a veneer of positive emotion that is either unsupported by the product itself or completely inappropriate to the product. So I was happy to see this ad from IKEA in the UK that uses aesthetics of joy and comfort in a very fitting way. Say what you will about IKEA, its products enable the transitory and the low-income to create a home, in the context of an extremely expensive category. The aesthetics of IKEA products themselves tend to be bright and cheerful, and yet the simple designs have become a mainstay of the DIY community as a substrate for creativity. We giggle at the Swedish names, smile at the clever design touches, and feel at ease about the prices. So the positioning line “happy inside” doesn’t feel like a reach to me.

There are many lovely things about this ad, (you should watch the “making of” too), and several nice uses of aesthetics of joy. I love the jumping shots, especially slowed down and sped up, and the shots among the lighting. There’s a deliberate sense of lightness throughout, both lightweight and illuminated. And it feels spontaneous because these are real cats, untrained, and you can sense their genuine curiosity as they poke through the textiles and drawers and lampshades. I have to say, it’s not unlike how I feel when I first get to IKEA (before the maze has beaten me down) — energized and curious about what I might find. It’s nice that they kept in one of the little fights, because that’s part of a happy home life too — it’s not all dancing and cuddles and naps on the sofa. Good for IKEA and Mother for not overly staging it and conducting this in an experimental way. Altogether, from how its made to how it appears in the end, it does make me feel “happy inside.”

Though assembling the furniture when you get home — that’s another story.

{via Apartment Therapy}

Several things have conspired to get me thinking about the joy of spinning these last few weeks. First there were Kate Spade’s joyful pinwheels, free for the taking and adorning the outsides of their New York shop windows. If any brand out there has embraced the aesthetics of joy and run with it, it has to be Kate Spade. Recent campaigns and store visuals have included cheery colors, hula hoops, polka dots, and artist Rebecca Ward’s colorful striped tape installations — whether by intent or intuition, they have a feel for visual elements of whimsy and delight.

The pinwheel idea seemed particularly clever to me because of its interactive component. Because they were offered up free to passers by, they tended to pop up in all kinds of places. I have one on my desk from the Soho store, which is a few blocks from my office. I have another at home (below), brought to my birthday party by a coworker (photo adorned by late night graffitoists).

In fact, Kate Spade had a contest encouraging people to send in pinwheel sightings, which were then tweeted, resulting in sweetly surprising images like this:

And this:

And then, in the subway recently, among a bag ladies prized possessions, I spied:

There’s a nice visual for me in the idea that the pinwheels are like seeds blown off a dandelion, scattered to the wind. And in fact, they do resemble the seeds with their long stems and wind-philic tops. The wind is of course the critical element in the pinwheel, a form of negative space (or force) that completes the design. A still pinwheel is an elegant thing, maybe even delightful, but it’s the almost-magical spinning movement that brings out the joy.

As I was pondering this, I received an email from a reader about a piece I’d missed in the NYT arts section, entitled, “Junkyard Poet of Whirligigs and Windmills.” A delicious headline if ever one existed, and the piece did not disappoint. The “junkyard poet” in question is Vollis Simpson, an accidental artist who at 91 is still making extraordinary sculptures from fan blades, propellers, and other scrap metal.

Originally a farm equipment repairman, Simpson began making things from scrap as a hobby, but has lived to see his work become highly regarded in the art world. This quote, in particular, struck me because it notes the universality of the emotion triggered by the spinning movement:

…he went to work, eventually coming up with a 55-foot high, 45-foot wide, three-ton whirligig of whirligigs that now towers outside the museum. Built atop a sign pole salvaged from a gas station, topped by a bicycle rider, cats and angels, and incorporating oil filters, milkshake canisters and waffle-iron parts, it prompts incredulous grins from passing tourists and draws locals to watch its wild spinning during thunderstorms…

…In Ms. [Rebecca Alban] Hoffberger, who has become a major figure in the national movement to champion the art of the self-trained, he found a “rabid fan” (her words) who once brought two busloads of his relatives up from North Carolina to admire his masterpiece. She calls Mr. Simpson one of the “true visionaries,” whose wit and genius for color and balance never fails to move people.

“You put one of his freshly painted pieces, moving as he designed it, anywhere in the world, and people will stop what they’re doing and stare and smile and say, ‘Oh, my God,’ ” Ms. Hoffberger said.

I have to give the NYT a little bit of a tough time here for not including a video slide show with this. Fortunately, we have YouTube to let us get a sense of these things the way they were meant to be experienced (minus the wind in your hair feel and the grassy aroma).

Lots of joyful things spin — Ferris wheels, Merry-go-rounds, tops, dogs chasing their tails. When it’s experienced physically, there’s something about the movement, the way it disrupts our balance and creates a transient loss of control, that triggers an unconscious sense of freedom. When it’s experienced visually, it becomes a display of unseen forces (centripetal, mostly), that is enchanting — I’m thinking here of tops and gyroscopes, spinning children and the undulating skirts of dervishes. I wonder, too, if there isn’t something happening with our mirror neurons that makes this a vicarious pleasure, that as we watch there is a part of our brains that feels it is spinning too, which leads to that visceral soaring feeling and Duchenne smile.

The wind adds another layer, another unseen force to the mix that makes pinwheels and whirligigs feel delightful. As humans we are used to power being emitted by things we can see — a hand or a motor — but the mercurial fluctuations of an invisible wind make things seem to be moving by themselves. Depending on the  other elements of the design (color, form, texture) and its context, this can be spooky (Hitchcock-esque) or, as in these examples, it can feel magical and joyful.

Images: policeman image and girls with pinwheels, via @katespadeny. Vollis Simpson images, Jeremy Lange for NYT.

NYT: Junkyard Poet of Whirligigs and Windmills

When I read about Blu Dot’s Real Good Experiment on the Dwell blog, I was intrigued but skeptical. The premise sounded novel — leave 8 25 chairs on the streets of New York City and track them to see what happens — but the whole thing could get seriously gimmicky. With all the unconventional marketing strategies that have popped up in the last few years, there’s a shadow vocabulary emerging to describe the many thinly described efforts at self-promotion. Documentary film is usually code for “long-form ad.” Blog is often a chatty version of a press release. And experiment is typically some kind of product placement via sponsored flash mob. Call me jaded if you will. But a lot of these things are long on self-congratulation and short on sincerity.

So of course I groaned when the video opened with the question “What is good? What is goodness?” in a precisely articulated upper-class British voiceover. I don’t know, but I’m sure, you, lady, are going to tell me, and I bet I can buy it for just $129. So I was pleasantly surprised by the cut to the chair on the back of a motorbike, and by the direction the film took from there. Overall, there’s a high ratio of entertainment value to sales pitch in Blu Dot’s Real Good Experiment video. There is so much whimsy here in the placing and tracking of the chairs, and especially in the delicious subversion of market research language (PUNCOs and INCOs). The categories themselves are actually quite joyful, terminology aside, because they are inclusive. For the purposes of the experiment, Blu Dot segments the world into Potential Unidentified New Chair Owners (PUNCOs) and Identified New Chair Owners (INCOs) and there’s a wonderful universality in this view. No one is ruled out as a potential customer, as the post-hoc interviews make clear. There is no microtargeting, no psychographic profiling, no questionably ethical manipulative strategy. Just chairs and bottoms that go in chairs, all the same and yet all completely individual.

Of course, there’s also joy in the surprise, and with this Blu Dot cleverly tapped into a native ritual in the New York rhythm of life: streetside scavenging. New Yorkers are used to seeing all kinds of things on the streets, but a new designer chair is still a delightful rarity, an implausibility.

I also find joyful all the talk of value in the video — how one man never likes to see a usable thing thrown out, or how another is already talking about giving the chair to his son when he no longer needs it. Joy is recurring, and this streetside recycling we engage in is a way to renew joy, taking one person’s used up experience and turning it into a starting point for another.

Finally… don’t you think it’s refreshing to see good design in real people’s homes? It’s a pet peeve of mine that design is always photographed in such overstyled environments. Of course your chair looks good in a white room with a Saarinen table and three perfect peonies next to it. What wouldn’t look good there? It was an act of courage on the part of Blu Dot, and great faith in the design, to release it into the mismatched, messy, well-loved homes of strangers. It doesn’t happen to be my particular favorite chair, but you can’t deny that the chair comes out looking good — crisp, vibrant, and versatile — in the wide range of homes in the video.

Correction: I’m sorry, I believe it’s actually 25 chairs. I wonder if they all found an INCO..?

If you manage to let your fast forward finger slip from the DVR remote for one second this holiday season, you’re practically guaranteed some joy. I haven’t had much time for TV lately so I’m sure I’m missing about 90% of the joy-filled ads out there, but even the few I’m getting show “joy” penetrating just about every industry.

Hyundai is offering more comfort and joy with their holiday sales. Walgreens is exhorting you to “find your joy” in one of their drugstore aisles. And Kibbles ‘n Bits is weighing in on the question of whether animals have emotions, offering to give your dog “more joy.” These are the ones I’ve managed to catch — have you seen any others?

In some cases, these are just holiday ads, one-offs that use the word joy as a proxy for keeping in tune with the season. In other cases, marketers are using the holiday timing to launch a joy-based positioning for the brand that will endure after the holiday season. It will be interesting to see which ones linger and which ones fade. My hunch is that on balance the joy-space will be a lot more cluttered come January/February than it was in September before the holiday madness started.

I don’t know what to make of this strategy, really. Branding is in large measure about differentiation. Why launch a new positioning at a time when everyone else is going to be saying exactly the same thing? I guess I’ll have to hold this critique until the new year, when we see who is holding fast to their joy taglines. In the meantime, unless you’re a scrooge, you may as well enjoy it. Joy seems to have dollar value this season, with lots of pre-Christmas sales. It doesn’t hurt to be in a good mood as you wander the aisles with the last-minute throngs!

Happy joy-finding!

Last week I wrote about Microsoft’s new ads using a cute little girl and “happy” imagery to sell Windows 7. And now I’m seeing cuteness everywhere. Bunnies, puppies, cats in dresses — it’s all over the marketing world. It’s interesting to me that it’s both high and low, not just a mass market phenomenon. United Bamboo’s 2010 calendar, for example, features cats in miniature copies of dresses from the line’s latest collection. Given many of these dresses are retailing in the $600-800 range, it’s clear even the premium world thinks it has something to gain from cutevertising.

On the canine side of things, Modcloth, a vintage and indie fashion site, use their mascot Winston to promote their eyewear line to comic effect.

But not all furry things in ads are promoting expensive dresses or fancy shades. These guys just want you to make a “sweet million” with the New York Lottery:

I don’t know how long this trend will sustain itself, but it’s certainly fun while it lasts. What’s next? A Karl Lagerfeld kitten? Piglets selling cosmetics? Birds chirping out a car company jingle? Guinea pigs extolling the virtues of Viagra? Well, that one might in poor taste…

{United Bamboo + Modcloth examples via Refinery 29}

Quick! Name the car you think of when I say “joy.”

…VW bug? …Mini Cooper? …BMW?

This new BMW “joy” positioning is being rolled out so softly it’s hard to tell where it’s going yet, but so far it feels like there’s a disconnect between the BMW people know and love and the BMW the brand is selling.

In “The Making of The Story of Joy” video, a behind-the-scenes look at the hero ad for the new campaign, an unidentified BMW rep is quoted as saying:

You buy goosebumps and you buy smiles and you buy adrenaline and you buy speed and you buy stories and experiences and emotion and it makes me smile even thinking about it. And that’s joy, and that’s what you get when you buy BMW, and it’s what the brand has always been about.

Really? Because I thought BMW was always about the cold metallic awesomeness of German engineering. For three decades, BMW called itself the “ultimate driving machine,” a positioning that reinforced ideas of performance, quality, speed, and luxury and kept the focus firmly on the vehicles. A quick browse of BMW’s brandtags is all that’s needed to confirm the clear understanding that rewarded such consistency of message across the company’s design and communications for all those years.

It’s unclear whether the change had an impetus or is just change for change’s sake, but evidently BMW’s brand managers felt they needed a more emotional positioning. They’ve encapsulated this idea in the new tagline “sheer driving pleasure,” which actually feels like a very appropriate evolution from “ultimate driving machine”: symmetrical to the original, with a more emotional and evocative tone that focuses on the response (pleasure) rather than the stimulus (machine).

All good so far. But from pleasure to joy is a much bigger leap, and a less credible one for this very masculine, mature brand. Pleasure is intense, sensuous, and thrilling; joy is childlike, whimsical, charming, cute, and sweet. Heart-racing pleasure makes perfect sense as emotional territory for BMW to own; the sweetness of joy feels like a force-fit.

Which is how it seems in these ads. In the “Story of Joy” ad (still Europe-only, for the moment), the voiceover describes joy as “efficient, dynamic, and unstoppable,” which makes the brand feel about as emotionally arousing as a FedEx truck. In an effort to inspire passion, the ad shows a BMW festival, a little boy surrounded by toy cars in his bedroom, and a bunch of drivers happily “joy-riding”. It does make you smile. But none of it has the humor of most VW ads, the odd charm of the old Sheet Metal Saturn ad, or the irreverent emotional punch of Mercedes nostalgia ads (like this one). BMW gets closer to joy’s quirky sensibility with the just-released “Jump for Joy” ad; but unfortunately this flies the furthest off the mark from the sleekness, aspiration, and power the brand is known for.

There’s no question that BMW is brand with enormous equity. They were probably right to pursue a more emotional tone in their marketing, but at this early stage it’s just not clear they hit upon the right emotion. In pursuit of joy, are they trading something more valuable?

Happy weekend, everyone.

Before I sign off, I just wanted to post this short item on the Brooklyn Flea’s scavenger hunt. I love this idea. They post a couple of photos of items on the blog, and if you find one of them, you get to keep it for free! What a clever, playful way to increase traffic and get people to check out vendors they might normally bypass, without making them feel like it’s being pushed on them.

Enjoy your weekend. I’ll be out and about in Miami for a few more days, swishing my feet in the sand and spending some time with my family. I hope wherever you are, you’re doing something fun!

Who will win this summer’s battle for the title of Joywashiest Soft Drink?

On the one hand you have Coke, with its a ragtag assortment of musicians giddily opening happiness on a made-for-radio corporate-sponsored singalong. On the other you have Pepsi, joywashing its way into the lead in Canada with an effervescent (and slightly frightening) website determined to convince you that dancing birds and suns with sunglasses are the next best thing to mainlining the beverage straight to your forearm.

Upon arriving at the Pepsi Canada “Joy It Forward” website, you are first advised to “See the Joy” and then to “Pass it on,” with the Pepsified, Obamaesque O-replacements smiling at you like the millenial equivalent of the peace sign. It’s not hard to see the joy, being as everything is dancing at you in that toddler-on-a-sugar-high sort of way, and the word joy happens to be appear about once in every five words on the home page, slightly more frequently than on this joy-obsessed blog.

There are many appealing little gimmicks on the site. You can check joymeters that tell you, among other things, how many days are left in summer, how many mentions there are of joy on Twitter, and how many people at Pepsi Headquarters are “hugging it out.” At 9:19 last night that figure was 827,033, more than 4 times Pepsi’s entire global workforce, which prompted me to wonder when and where they do all this hugging. (I’ve worked with some Pepsi people in the past and they struck me as very normal people. I don’t remember an inordinate amount of embracing. But maybe they don’t hug consultants? Anyway, I digress.)

The site also offers a number of silly games, such as a staring contest, a bubble blaster, and a strangely addictive game where the goal is to inflate helium balloons without popping them. The liberal use of tried and true aesthetics of joy — bubbles, balloons, childhood games, etc. — brings a reflexive smile to your face. They do wear thin, but in that sense they’re very much like soda itself. Sweet, refreshing, uncomplicated. Not everything needs to be a deep, multisensory experience.

Yes, it’s over-the-top saccharine, but I give them points for execution. This is what Trident’s A Little Piece of Happy should have been, but unfortunately fell short of. The games are simplistic but well-designed (no Orisinal, but still enjoyable), the Joymeter widget interface is playable and fun, and the integration with social media is decently handled for a mainstream brand. The “Joy Now” button, found on the interactive Joymeters page, is a gem, producing a different infectious stream of laughter at each click.

A tiny but important gripe for me is the glaring TM screaming “I OWN THIS!” over the coined word JOYGLES. Aggressive TMing is anti-joy, a reminder of our me-first, legalistic society, an unwelcome reminder that this moment of pleasure isn’t brought to you by the Pepsi in the can you know and love, but by Pepsico (TM!) with its quarterly earnings and profit margins and corporate BS. Hovering over this otherwise cute nonsense word, it’s like an irritating little mosquito you just want to swat. In the 2000s, this behavior of TMing everything in sight looks a lot like a dog marking its territory — ok for a dog, but impolite verging on unseemly for the rest of us.

That gripe aside, I think it’s wonderfully self-aware joywashing, and actually is appropriately on-brand. Who has license to be this absurdly camp if not a soft drink? I much prefer this approach than a pretense to some higher meaning. Like the HFCS they sweeten the beverage with, it’s fake, sweet, and a little nauseating. But if it’s not your whole diet, what’s the harm?

If the Joywashiest Soft Drink title were a packaging competition, however, I would have to say that Coke is the clear victor, mostly for that Weber grill-inspired can (2nd from right) that is just charmingly, gorgeously summer. For me, that can says Open Happiness 1000x better than some cloyingly chipper extended pseudo-jingle.

Finally, one footnote on the Coke Open Happiness campaign.

The Coca-Cola name in China was first read as “Kekoukela”, meaning “Bite the Wax Tadpole” or “Female Horse Stuffed with Wax”, depending on the dialect. Coke then researched 40,000 characters to find a phonetic equivalent “kokoukole”, translating into “Happiness in the Mouth.”

So maybe we own this whole happiness-marketing race to a lost-in-translation moment? I don’t know, and I have to say, I don’t really care. It’s still summer, for 10 more days at least, and I’m savoring the last sips of this free season and the cheery glow of its over-the-top joywashed marketing.

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.