Hidden in Plain Sight Quotes

“The same can be said about what I like to call the platzgeist, a gestalt sense of the spirit of an environment, whether a neighborhood, city, region, or country. All of the above techniques can help you gain that sense, both consciously and subconsciously, but by capturing it through sensory stimuli, you can create a veritable mood database. And after your sense of platzgeist has faded over time, this database will be your return ticket to that place and its spirit.”
― Jan Chipchase, Hidden in Plain Sight: How to Create Extraordinary Products for Tomorrow's Customers – Understanding Consumer Behavior and Business Innovation

“When you want to know how and why people do the things they do, the best people to learn from are the doers themselves, and the best place to learn is where the doing gets done.”
― Jan Chipchase, Hidden in Plain Sight: How to Create Extraordinary Products for Tomorrow's Customers – Understanding Consumer Behavior and Business Innovation

“The best way to understand how a culture adopts (or doesn’t adopt) an innovation is to go there and see it for yourself. In person, you can gain insight into the social barriers unique to a culture, and whether adoption is purely driven by reflective appeal (status), behavioral appeal (usefulness), or the relative importance of one over the other. If you do the research right, it will allow you to tap into the sentiment of adoption, which you’ll never get from looking at quantified data.”
― Jan Chipchase, Hidden in Plain Sight: How to Create Extraordinary Products for Tomorrow's Customers – Understanding Consumer Behavior and Business Innovation

“A High-(Peer-)Pressure System on the Horizon As we saw in the last chapter, the desire to project social status and affirm peer group affiliation can skew behavior in any context, for example, deciding which parts of our conversations we allow others to overhear, or changing one’s style of footwear to fit a social group’s tastes. But let’s examine how it changes the adoption curve in one of the most social-pressure-packed environments: high school. In 2011 I ran a study in Nigeria, which among many other things is the most populous country in Africa and a rich, if complex, prize for the company that can build market share there. Nigeria, like many countries in Africa, has a relatively young population, with a median age often half that of European or North American countries,* and technology adoption there reflects both a young and relatively price-sensitive demographic. Social networks are an inherent part of teenage life the world over, and in Africa arguably even more so because of the young, socially active demographic.”
― Jan Chipchase, Hidden in Plain Sight: How to Create Extraordinary Products for Tomorrow's Customers – Understanding Consumer Behavior and Business Innovation