Object Oriented Concepting

Education, Entertainment, Knowledge, Distraction… all of these can provide value within a communication, but without them, why should any individual or community care one iota about that last ad you produced? Furthermore, entertainment needs to be pure and real — just writing a snappy line of copy around your client’s product or producing “webisodes” that incorporate the client’s service lines doesn’t constitute entertainment. For one thing, puns, visual gags and tired story lines are everywhere — just take one look at the movie reviews or news headlines. Relying upon such 1960’s tricks won’t get you real far when an individual can hop on google or myspace or facebook and be far more entertained by someone they know or find something they seek. You need to provide value to those that might consume that which you are trying to sell. Yes, while the product might provide value, it exists in a big connected boundary-less experience space now, and everything around it needs to build upon that value. Just describing the value is not enough, you need to expand upon that value in a related way.

Now you might be asking “WTF does this have to do with Object Oriented Concepting?”
A lot. To concept, describe, plan and implement customer centric/valuable experiences you need to be able to map all of the components of said experiences. And by components I don’t mean media types, but rather experiential pieces. Just as your browser has things like menus and URL fields and bookmarks, your idea will have experiential pieces that have value to the individuals you are seeking to engage. The goal is to define these pieces in an Object Oriented method, for both consistency and scalability. What does this mean in terms of a concept — perhaps rather than just defining a situation type that might form the basis for several TV spots, you define a set of “classes” that map out the various components of such a situation. Why the hell would you do that “extra” work? Because those classes, and the “objects” that they enable allow you to trancend medium/media with the pieces that provide value. The value is described irrelevant to its deployment in a spot or banner or billboard or widget… and that value can then be scaled and implemented appropriately.

For example, If the idea for Special K is that it is a key component of a healthy lifestyle, then the classes for such a campaign are all of those pieces of the healthy lifestyle — balanced diet, exercise, work life balance, etc. And the objects that are built with those classes are the very things that provide value to the potential special k consumer. They might be a calculator that works in the consumer’s preferred online environment such as their facebook or perhaps hotmail page. It might be a set of humorous episodes that follow the healthy living exploits of a set of special k consumers (actors or real). And it might be a partnership with Nike+ that allows consumers to follow in the feats of others (including those in the episodes.) But whatever it is, the classes and objects are related and built upon the model of fitting into the consumer’s life and needs rather than trying to change their thinking.

Thoughts?
How can this be refined and extended?