Balsamiq: Even though it appears to use Comic Sans, I reckon it’s still a ground-breaking innovation
Until now, I’ve resisted the urge to make any predictions for the new decade, but a link posted on Twitter yesterday by 37Signals’ Jason Fried just about broke my resolve. (Besides, I’d already made my predictions in a post at MRM’s site in November last year…)
It’s for a really smart app called Balsamiq, which allows teams to rapidly translate ideas for software, websites or apps into live mock-ups.
So what’s this got to do with brand building?
Well forget what Balsamiq does for a moment and think, instead, of the effect of its application: It completely messes up the formulaic, tried and tested, chartered-institute-of-chartered-charterers dogma that has the tendency to squeeze the life out of great ideas before they’ve seen the light of day.
An application like this offers a tool for genuinely agile design of web-based services; it allows people — especially intended users — to road-test ideas without those countless meetings and documents that are intended to fine-tune a specification (which probably only works in theory anyway).
Balsamiq is further evidence of a shift away from the packaged-up-to-perfection prescription of the mass media model.
Why? Because it enables teams to collaboratively harness the potential of the social web in order to design, build, test and launch an idea more swiftly than would have been possible only a matter of months ago. It cuts out layer upon layer of unnecessary bureaucracy in order to let people use it and — so — improve it.
Just consider how counter-intuitive a traditional marketing approach would seem stacked up against the idea driving Balsamiq.
Last November, I predicted that three vital disciplines would survive the collapse of the traditional mass media model: live events, interaction design and conversation. (I explained why in my ‘How to build a brand…’ presentation).
Like Jason Fried’s own Basecamp, Balsamiq offers real evidence of the emerging significance of these disciplines and the collapse of the mass media model (that’s the model that spawned newspapers, radio stations, television channels, call centres, websites, market researchers, media planners, advertising agencies, event and hospitality agencies, sponsorship agencies and public relations consultants).
In the past 12 months signs of the distintermediation of the traditional mass media model have been remarkable: Ashton Kutcher beat CNN to a million followers on Twitter, Carter Ruck dropped an injunction in the face of popular dissent over its Trafigura gagging order and Rage Against The Machine beat the X-Factor’s Joe McElderry to the Christmas Number 1 in the UK.
Despite the effects of the shift — which will only accelerate in 2010 — I’m still left wondering how many people in the marketing profession have recognised the redundancy of the traditional mass media model and, so traditional promotional approaches?
Tags: brand, collaboration, communication model, culture, design, disintermediation, mass media, social media