Yesterday, I (Anthroguy, aka Hank Delcore) had the pleasure of visiting Jeffrey Scott Agency for a guest lecture to the JSA staff.  The visit grew out of my recent acquaintance with JSA’s Director of Client Strategies, Jim Lowe.  Jim is doing some great strategic work on behalf of JSA clients using a variety of market research methods.  Meeting up — a link facilitated by Travis Sheridan — Jim and I quickly discovered common ground in the use of strategic information to inform the design and marketing of client products and services.

My talk to the assembled staff focused on the use of ethnography to get at the implicit, contextual level of users’ experience of various product and service areas.  I used some examples I’ve laid out in a previous posting, as well as some drawn from the Library Study we did at Fresno State and a recent advance in hearing aid design.  As Jim and I discussed before my visit, the puzzling thing about this kind of work is: how do you translate strategic information into the actual design of effective, experientially rich products and messages.  In other words, what exactly takes place in the space between the collection and analysis of the design/marketing data and the final product.  The data is advisory: it never actually “tells” you what the final design should be.  So, typically, the creatives, ideally in conversation with the data, work their magic and come up with the final message or design.

I don’t think any of us really know what that “magic” is.  Afterall, this is art we are talking about, whether it’s a carefully crafted radio spot or a beautiful product.  What I can say, however, is that the chances of a smooth and effective shift from data to design get better with close collaboration among project managers, research types and the creatives themselves.  This was what I tried to leave with the folks at JSA:

“Product or account managers, researchers and creatives – we need to keep each other close, perhaps even closer than our own kind.  In the Library Study, we had the interior design students attend the design workshops [on the interior spaces of the Henry Madden Library] to see firsthand how we gathered the information.  Afterwards, we all sat together, anthropologists and interior designers, and watched the video we shot of the students making their designs in the workshops.  We hashed out the meaning of the way they placed the blocks and the meaning of their explanations for their choices.  This was frustrating, puzzling, time consuming, exciting and rewarding.  But in the end, we need to be in each other’s business as much as possible.  There is no substitute for crossing boundaries and hashing things out, together, despite (or because of) all of our different specialties and interests.  I am sure that there is no other way to excellence.”

Thanks to Bruce Batti, President of JSA, and to Jim Lowe, for the chance to exchange experiences with the strategic end of client services.  The staff that gathered was attentive and engaged and we had a lively discussion afterwards.  Looking forward to more collaboration with JSA in the future!