This outstanding video from TED may be one of the most insightful presentations I've heard on the relationship between culture and consumer choice.

Sheena Iyengar dispenses with the consumer focus group and leaves behind some of the more obsolete but dearly loved quantitative testing methods so popular among marketers today. Instead, she dives deep into the the psychocultural motivations behind the act of choosing. Iyengar's research has been informing business and consumer-goods marketing since the 1990s and has produced material for writers like Malcolm Gladwell. All of which makes me think that her new book, the Art of Choosing is well worth buying.




Sheena Iyengar on the art of choosing | Video on TED.com


Article: Creative Commons License 2010 Gavin Barrett
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 Canada License.







A simple smart advertising campaign can go a long way towards converting drivers to riders.
Luck led me to this posting on sustainable urban transportation blog, The City Fix.

One campaign in particular caught my eye - the comparative, good vs. bad, cars vs. buses Go Metro ads made their point with clarity and immediacy. I went hunting for the rest of the campaign and found a treasure trove at another blog Long Winded and Proud.

Check out the Naughty vs Nice t-shirts they distributed to baristas - a lovely grassroots touch.

Images via The City Fix and Long Winded and Proud.
Article and blog, copyright Gavin Barrett 2010.

Creative Commons Licence
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence.




Züm is Brampton Transit's new bus rapid transit brand, carefully developed through a year-long process that included stakeholder interviews, best practice reviews and town council approvals. Appropriately enough for a transit service, Züm has an origin and a destination. Züm began its journey in the idea of a speedy, urban, world-class, rapid, modern, forward-looking, cosmopolitan rapid transit system. Züm sounds like zoom, the sound of something moving fast, something speedy. Zoom also means to move closer in, to zoom into something for a close-up. Züm’s graphics evoke speed, linkage, modernity, world-class, a certain euro-style sensibility.

Client: Sue Connor, Kim Moser, Brampton Transit
Agency: Barrett and Welsh

Designer: Rob Segovia

Creative Directors: Gavin Barrett and Mike Welsh.
Art Director: Mike Welsh

Writer: Gavin Barrett

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About the ideawallah

Gavin Barrett is Owner/Founding Partner + Chief Creative Officer, of award-winning Toronto agency Barrett and Welsh. In pursuit of big ideas he has: nibbled on pigs' ears (not on a live pig at the time); gone elephant-back in the Thai jungle (no elephants were hurt); gambled in a Macau casino (was utterly destroyed). His ads: have run in 35 countries, helped elect prime ministers, attracted the ire of the lawyers for Dolly the clone sheep, drawn an angry crowd in Lagos, have been studied in business texts in Canada and India and received derisive mention in a John Irving novel. His poems: can be found in Penguin’s anthology of 14 contemporary Indian poets, Reasons for Belonging. He cannot: sing.

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