Digital Consequentialism

Posted By: Martin Codd

Here’s a post for you to ponder this Thanksgiving weekend (BTW, we highly recommend these TED talks – they are quite thought-provoking):  A colleague recently showed me the TED talk by Dan Cobley entitled “What physics taught me about marketing.”

This set me thinking about the physical principle that applies most to the world of production and logistics. The sociologist Robert K. Merton popularized the “law of unintended consequences.” In very plain terms, it means that intervention in a complex system can have unintended and often undesirable outcomes.

In this connected world the distinction between the online and offline world has disappeared. As we develop more robust, integrated and complicated experiential campaigns the risk of catastrophe is ever present. A simple change in the Facebook application programming interface (API) can derail your Facebook campaign, website, mobile platform and render your on-site activation moot. The importance of planning to mitigate this cannot be underestimated; the agency that does not adequately test for usability, scalability, performance, compatibility and reliability will rue the consequences when that program implodes.

We’ve all experienced the QR code that takes you to a website that hasn’t been optimized for mobile. Being directed to a flash website that won’t play on my iPhone, or a QR code that does nothing discernable leaves me disappointed and aggravated. Interjecting a new mechanism such as a QR code must serve a purpose or the impression on the consumer will be negative, a classic case of the law of unintended consequences!

 

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