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Well, ‘in the cur­rent eco­nomic cli­mate’ would be one. It’s becom­ing almost impos­si­ble to pick up a news­pa­per or read any mar­ket­ing copy with­out encoun­ter­ing word­ing to this effect – ‘in the cur­rent down­turn’, ‘in these chal­leng­ing times’ etc.

Of course, the rea­son for using them is empa­thy – we get it, we under­stand, we feel your pain. The prob­lem is that cus­tomers don’t really care that much whether you feel their pain or not. They’re far more inter­ested in actu­ally deal­ing with that pain.

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Sprint has put up a page full of wid­gets to sup­port its This is now posi­tion­ing. It’s a fan­tas­ti­cally eclec­tic mix show­ing every­thing from from the cur­rent world pop­u­la­tion through to the num­ber of cof­fee cups being pro­duced. You can even down­load a pre-determined selec­tion for your own use (shame they didn’t let you sim­ply pick from the whole lot).

There are so many mar­ket­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties with wid­gets right now. Beyond sim­ply using them to reflect a posi­tion­ing, as Sprint has, the oppor­tu­nity to cre­ate stuff that’s really use­ful for cus­tomers is just immense.

NOTCOT points to a pre­sen­ta­tion by designer Chip Kidd who is respon­si­ble for, among other things, some of the loveli­est book jacket designs I’ve ever seen.

In the talk at Uni­ver­sity of Michi­gan, Chip takes the audi­ence through a num­ber of his designs. He talks about the reac­tions they received from his clients (both good and bad), the com­pro­mises and the end results.

As an insight into the cre­ative busi­ness, it’s price­less with some laugh out loud moments.

The pre­sen­ta­tion is avail­able free for down­load via iTunes (sadly not on YouTube so I can’t embed it).

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