donderdag 9 september 2010

Human Insights

Ik heb een leuk stukje gevonden over human Insight. Gezien van de communicatie kant. Het is een kort stukje engels tekst over Communicatie tussen mensen en de middelen die zij gebruiken om te communiceren. zoals de titel aanduid, gaat het over zo dicht bij iemand kunnen komen dat je ze wel kan aanraken.

Human Insights – the importance of getting close enough to touch

In his book, Blink, Malcolm Gladwell talks about people’s ability to make complex, important decisions with just a thin slice of critical information. An often invisible influencer of these excellent ‘gut feelings’ is the information found in faces. Babies study their mothers’s faces like their worlds depended on it, and, according to most psychiatrists, they do. This type of ‘imprinting’ is crucial for their developing the ability to understand the full information provided in social interactions, and form instincts about the appropriate responses. Autistic children’s social interaction suffers from lack of this unconscious skill.

Connectedness is becoming an increasingly multi-gadget, and multi-form experience. In-person one-on-one, in-person group, voice and video, voice, letter, email, text, social network utility public or private message, online ‘wall’ graffiti, and online public testimonials, blogs, blog comments, video, file, music sharing, online gaming are some that come to mind. These communication choices offer gradation of intimacy, commitment, tone, and exposure and certainly allow a broader network, more and novel interactions.

Technology is a catalyst for relevant, timely, and cheaper connectivity. For depth of interaction, though, we are still bound by evolution to rely on our own highly well-developed unconscious processing of sight (reading facial expressions and body language), smell (giving cues to health and compatibility), sound (subtle tonal changes), and touch (babies die without it, adults just suffer).

In the race for brands to connect with consumers in relevant, engaging and emotionally potent ways, Human Insights are essential. To get them, we gather market trends, mine statistics, get quantitative consumer data via online surveys, watch the blogs and public opinion wherever it is forming… but we also have to listen up close to real people. Because, for now, that is where the richness of emotion can be understood.

The chameleon reminds me that another person’s mindset will transfer to me (even momentarily), only if I get close enough to touch. Sometimes, depth of interaction (a single great conversation with the right person at the right place and time) can unveil more than an impressive number of sub-optimal interactions (disengaged or badly led focus groups, for example).

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