Wow! We held another session this evening of Creating Infectious Action at the Stanford d.school. And I have to say that my hat was knocked into the creek.
Two weeks ago the six student teams were charged with the assignment of spreading Firefox to a target population of non-consumers. This was not a fictional project. The masterminds from Mozilla were in class the day we assigned the project, and any marketer out there knows how hard it is to go after people who really could care less about using your offering.
So.
Since this is a class taught in a design school, we asked the students to use design thinking to come up with human-centric solutions that will help spread Firefox to audiences not currently using it. Here are some of the solutions -- remember, these represent just two weeks of work. Done by people who just met each other and were assigned to teams. And who have lots of other classes to attend to.
In the solution category of making Firefox more accessible by linking it to pop culture:
From the school of tipping-point-maven-connector theory:
Targeting a specific, highly connected, maven-centric psychographic lifestyle segment:
Tapping into the "sheep that shit grass" dynamic:
And, one team of students put together an ambitious and compelling paper-based campaign to promote Firefox adoption in a viral, pass-along way: www.firefoxkids.org
Two weeks. That's a lot of innovation and discovery.
