If you haven’t yet read ‘A Technique for Producing Ideas’, I suggest you buy it today. At 48 short pages, it’ll take less than an hour to read - and it’ll be worth every minute. Written more than 60 years ago, the book is a step-by-step guide to generating ideas by legendary advertising man James Webb Young. The beauty of the concept is it’s simplicity, so here goes:
1. Gather the information
2. Work the information over in your mind to give it structure
3. Incubation - do something else for a while
4. Eureka
5. Shape the idea into something that works
Obviously, the book explains each step, but that’s the basic concept. Oddly, after reading it, I realised that both the good ideas I’d ever had in life followed that same structure. The key is to apply to your everyday life and work.
Manchester United are in Aalborg today for a first round Champions League match - and reading this article from a British reporter in Aalborg, you really notice how respectful the Danish fans are. I can’t think of many other places (and neither, it seems, can the reporter) where an opposing football team is greeted by cheers and placards around town welcoming them. Apparently, even the hotel staff formed a kind of line of honour when the United players walked in.
Since the 80s, Danish football fans have been known as roligans - a mix of rolig (the Danish word for calm) and hooligan, the English word for a football fan [sic] - and this reputation shows no signs of abating. I wonder, though, if the roligans will ever beat the Japanese. At a game I watched in Japan, the fans brought there own rubbish bags and voluntarily cleaned up the stadium as they left!
I usually root for the underdog, but the reaction of the people of Aalborg has doubled my desire for them to cause an upset.
Browsing our old friend Aaron’s blog recently, I came across this post on bike racks designed by David Byrne for NYC. Looks like David has been an avid cyclist for years - and designed his racks for specific locations in the city.
As Aaron says, this seems like a perfect idea for Copenhagen - a city full of cyclists that prides itself on its design. Although, you’ll notice that David’s bike racks don’t have room for that many bikes. Any designer racks in Copenhagen would probably require a little more space.
Early September, ten happy runners and two even more enthusiastic cheerleaders set up camp at Fælledparken for the DHL Relay Race and got ready to compete against some of Denmark’s top companies.
Although it turns out we don’t run quite as fast as we write, we were thrilled with our two teams’ performances.
Out of the 17,876 teams, “Eye for Image 2″ came in as number 2,480 in 2:00:22, and “Eye for Image 1″ as number 3,709 in 2:03:48!
Our leading man, David Hoskin, showed the way forward, finishing the race in about 20 minutes (much to her chagrin, he even ran past Nathalie, who started before him!)
But the award for most impressive performance went to our colleague Dan Elloway who, after having run only three times in his life, ran in 25:11! We think the training conditions in Norway have been in his favor - thin mountain air, intervals up and down the hills…
So next year, we’ll train in Norway. But for now we’re happy to say we all had heaps of fun! Check out the action shots below – and click on the images to enlarge them.
How does a team of writers and marketing folk get ready for a race? Is it with lunges, stretches, and hours of training?
Not so much – unless you count brainstorming as intense mental training. Let’s just say we stretched our creativity instead. It started with one rebellious mind trying to figure out what DHL stood for and coming up with:
Dopey Hoboe Limp (we’re still waiting for a demonstration)
And that just got the ball rolling. Within minutes, the entire office was cracking up as our mailboxes filled with brilliant variations, including:
David Hoskin Lunge (our CEO is known for taking gigantic jumps over tree roots that get in his way)
Ditzy Hooray Line (which the cheerleaders executed with glee that evening in Fælledparken)
Don’t Hurry, Losers (from a skeptic in the writers’ room)
Do Hurried Loping (to lope means to run or ride with a steady, easy gait – an apt description for team Eye for Image, we think)
Det Hedder Løbe, ikke Gå! (addressed to competing teams, of course)
We hope DHL (which is named after its founders Dalsey, Hillblom and Lynn) won’t take offense.
The branding consultant Martin Roll says that Danish companies can use their “Danishness” to their advantage. In an interview with the Danish business newspaper Børsen, he advises Danish companies to stand up for their Danish values.
Denmark has many great values that can be relevant to people outside of Denmark. The challenge as I see it is communicating them in a way that the rest of the world can understand.
It’s not about imposing these values on others, but more about putting them in the context of what is important. Companies are experiencing that, yes, they can use Danish values - but they just shouldn’t call them “Danish values”. Instead, these Danish values need to be described specifically and in context using clear, concise language. This is the big challenge facing many Danish companies.
According to a recent article in Markedsføring, tourists are turning their backs on Denmark. And Denmark’s marketeers are blaming the porcelain-obsessed marketing that pushes Denmark as a fairytale land. Instead, the marketeers would like to see greater focus on Christiania, the gay scene and Denmark’s free-mindedness. This seems like a good idea to me.
Look at one of Denmark’s neighbours and biggest tourist competitors, Norway. Even Norway has a porcelain factory that pumps out exquisite, and expensive, porcelain. And while fairytales may be good for kids, Norway has fjords, mountains and polar bears (not in the streets!).
So the key would be to find Denmark’s unique selling points (USPs) and push these to the hilt. So what are they? As the marketeers say, Christiania is a good one - and regularly comes high on lists of Denmark’s top tourist attractions. But it’s been watered down in recent years.
So what else is there? While Denmark’s gay scene and free-mindedness may not be unique, they certainly appeal to the country’s closest neighbours. And they could be harnessed until Denmark becomes known as Northern Europe’s most open-minded nation. That would have some appeal to certain tourist profiles.
Whatever happens, as the marketeers point out, it has to overcome Denmark’s recent bad international publicity. Take a look at CCN’s Danish section and you’ll see why. It’s all Salmonella and Islamic ire. But according to CNN, Denmark still ranks highest as the happiest place on Earth. Perhaps it’s about time people outside Denmark began to see why - and when they did, they might also discover Denmark’s USP.
At Eye for Image, we see spelling mistakes every day. Some make us cringe, others make us laugh. We cringed and laughed when we saw the job title “Pubic Sector Analyst.” Ooops. Even spellcheck wouldn’t help with that one.
But can you just imagine you are a Public Sector Analyst? You’re at a meeting. You’ve just given out your business cards to each of the 10 people at the table. Then you notice the missing letter ‘l’ in your job title. How on earth do you recover from that one???
Spelling. For some, it’s a cinch. For others, it’s a minefield. It’s one of the very first things we begin to learn at school, and we keep on learning as long as we are reading and writing. Oh, how spellcheck programs have simplified our lives! But those pesky misspellings show up anyway.
Our recent WordSpin article on misspellings in English lists 16 common ones. Check it out and see if you learn something new.
Got a memorable spelling mistake yourself? Post a comment on this blog entry and let us know what it was. We promise to laugh with you, not at you!
Looking for a competent sales director? Wouldn’t you rather have an experienced one? Or successful? Or even well-qualified? Or is just about good enough good enough for you?
Looking for a competent page turner
Danish companies love the word competent. Problem is, it isn’t quite the heavy-weight champion of job ads that it might appear to be – and though it can mean ‘qualified for the job’ in certain contexts, it certainly doesn’t carry the weight of Danish ‘kompetent’.
Look up ‘competent’ in an English dictionary. The issues jump out at you straight away. It has two related, but conflicting, meanings. Dictionary.com shows:
Having suitable or sufficient skill, knowledge or experience for some purpose
2. Adequate, but not exceptional.
So, competent means ‘suitable’ – a skills-set that’s a good fit. Nice. That sounds like just what I’m looking for in my sales director. But ‘sufficient’? Just about good enough to get by? Mmm, not so good…
The second definition, though, really starts to get to the heart of the problem. Adequate. Not very inspiring, is it? I wouldn’t recommend anyone build their job interview strategy on how adequate they are. Kicking off with, “I can guarantee adequate results” in a job interview for any managerial position would be as effective as breaking wind.
Saying “I’m competent,” isn’t quite as bad as saying “I’m adequate”, but it’s not much better. It sounds like you haven’t finished your sentence. And the interviewer would finish it for you: “…but nothing special/not very good/a bit slow on the uptake”. There’s no escaping it, to most people on the street, competent means ‘just about good enough’.
But there’s more.
The negative form of competent – incompetent – is used much more often than ‘competent’ in everyday speech. It’s commonly used to make complaints, especially about people’s work. Calling someone ‘competent’ conjures the shadow of its more popular, darker sibling. And never quite shakes it off.
How do you use ‘competent’? Do you think it’s appealing enough to use in a job ad, or a job interview? Let us know what you think: write a comment.
