Cherryflava

What emotions are you selling?

Posted on 10. Feb, 2011 by Jonathan Cherry.

How you make people feel determines whether they look forward to shopping at your store, tell their friends great things about your event or choose something else next time they’re presented with a choice.

So it’s fairly important. Trouble is that the way brands deliver that promised emotion is all too often inconsistent and strangely, not very emotional at all.

As designers of brand experiences for events as well as at retail level – we found this article particularly relevant and spot-on when it comes to the non-tangible side of designing powerful interactions.

To design experiences that are consistent across different contexts and environments we need to focus on the qualities of the experience that do not change, rather than the means through which we enable that experience.

Experiences are a combination of the actions we take; what we perceive through our various senses; and our emotional response to both.

We need to articulate our design intent using the language of emotion so that the same resultant experience can be delivered across the various environments within which customers might interact; working within the constraints of action and perception imposed by each environment.

Ask yourself – is the emotional promise of your TV ad being delivered in your stores? We can think of at least ten companies right now where the answer is certainly ‘no’.

Read more here

State of Grace: Hostage situation plays out over two weeks within large South African company

Posted on 29. Oct, 2010 by Jonathan Cherry.

On 1 October 2010, the employees of one of Africa’s biggest ICT organisations were sent links to a website that promised “a huge leap in business communications” using a projection of a charming client liaison avatar called Grace.

What it really offered was a leap into the deep end of a world of rampaging holograms, umbrella men, slinking LOLcats, stinking hackers, epic battles and a lot of tricky puzzles.

Hundreds of players from Dimension Data made their way through the game, which turned a dry presentation about corporate values into an epic and unforgettable quest to save the world from a hologram avatar turned eeeevil!

We here at Cherryflava are often asked about the type of work that we do in the field of commercial experience design – and this alternate reality game (or ARG) is the perfect example of how we’d turn the mundane content of a typical year-end sales conference into something memorable, engaging and effective; using multi-layered media, a great story [written by the award-winning extremely super-talented novelist Lauren Beukes] and an intriguing game involving a puzzle-filled treasure hunt played out on the Internet and in the real world with fake websites and specially filmed video sequences.

Alternate reality gaming isn’t for everybody, but for innovative brands that are open to taking their event to a far deeper, fantasy level – you should get in touch with us.

Check out the series of videos that were part of the game here.

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Credits:

Conceptualised and produced by: Cherryflava Media

Cherryflava team: Heinrich Hattingh, Jon Cherry & Isabeau Joubert

Story: Lauren Beukes and Sam Wilson

Gaming design: Cherryflava Media & Clockwork Zoo

Video production and direction: Pixel Warrior

Actors: Sarah Terry and Garth Breytenbach

Client: Dimension Data