On May 15, 2013 when Nasa announced that the days of Kepler are numbered, the whole scientific community mourned. Geoff  Marcy, [and his team] who discovered over 250 extrasolar planets was of course saddened by the news and he turned to poetry for solace.
When asked why poetry? His answer simply was: "I did not think. I just felt." 
"Kepler was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week, no weekend rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talks, my song;
I thought Kepler would last forever: I was wrong."


When a hardcore scientist combats his sadness with poetry, it makes you wonder of the magic that lies in the echoes of poetry. Often, we are enthralled by its mystery.  Why? you may ask. The short answer is  "Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood." It is the language in which you explore your own wonderment. It gives you "the illusion of having had the experience without actually going through it." It is a powerful vessel that engages your emotion, inspires your will and makes you do.

“Emotion recollected in tranquillity,” gives birth to poetry.

Emotion – once a largely ignored field of cognitive psychology – has become accepted as a major spring of consumer behaviour. So much so, that many advertisers now view the creation of emotional engagement as their primary objective. – David Penn, md, Conquest Research
Major leaps in neuroscience has overturned the traditional view of consumer being driven by rationality to the one being dictated by emotions and subconscious.


The science of the our firing neurons teaches us these key lessons:

• Human brain process at a sub-conscious level, far beyond the conscious awareness.
• Most of this subconscious processing is emotional, not logical. Because, logic resides in the realm of conscious decision while emotional is the seat of sub-conscious or the non-conscious. It is not outrageous to say that we think with our hearts.
• Our sub-conscious form the vast majority of our decision making. Our conscious choice represents only a minority.

Hence, the rush for brand marketers to capture the emotional sentiments of the consumers.
If emotion is the driver in decision making then, our responsibility is to find ways to perpetuate it. And there lies the limitation in traditional approaches.

Because, "When you ask someone about an emotion, you change the emotion." And requesting consumers to quantify or rank emotional responses, such as on a scale of  1 to 10, is even more difficult for them.
Source: Marketing and Neuroscience What Drives Customer Decisions

Here is where memory metric plugs in.
In order for memory to work, you need to be recalling memory and creating memory all at the same time. So, you bombard those neurons with creative repetition and arouse the synaptic nerves with poetry. Yes, Poetry. Let's just try this. Shall we?

Read the poem below and as you are reading be mindful of the visuals that your neurons are formulating to help you digest this information. How do you feel? What do you see?

Every word in this poem strikes me with its' aching beauty. The truth is tender, yet glaring. I am haunted by the words “unanimous blood" – that we are all, even in our difference, part of this complex interconnection. It reminds me of the basics: the oxygen that sustains us and our memories that write the poetry of our tiny lives.

[The Salvadorian revolutionary poet was twice sentenced to death and jailed by the State for his beliefs and both times he evaded fate. The escape would become an essential part of his myth: the revolutionary the dictatorship couldn’t kill, the trickster poet favored by the gods. However, at forty he was eventually murdered. Perhaps he wrote with this eventuality in mind. With eyes wide open, a joke dying on his lips; in this poem and in others, "he expressed the vividness and universality of that which sustains us: poetry and bread."]

What is so special about poetry?

Using fMRI imaging, Professor Adam Zeman, a cognitive neurologist from the University of Exeter Medical School, led an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the fields of psychology and English. They found that emotionally charged writing, like poetry [not prose] aroused several regions in the brain, predominantly on the right side; very similar regions that had previously been shown to produce the “shivers down the spine” emotional reaction to music. Also poetry, not prose, was found to activate areas of the brain associated with introspection and recollection. These preliminary findings does point to the fact that it is poetry that lights up more regions of your brain, thus paving way for more synaptic connections. And we all know, “neurons that wire together, fire together.”

“Biologically we are feeling creatures that think.” --Dr. Jill Taylor Bolte   
If you feel nothing. You do nothing.

And, poetry makes you feel.  It makes you "laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toenails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone and not alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own. All that matters about poetry is the enjoyment of it however tragic it may be all that matters is the eternal movement behind it – the great undercurrent of human grief, folly, pretension, exaltation and ignorance – however un-lofty the intention of the poem…"

Today, you are inundated with insurmountable mount of data—demographic data, purchasing data, search data, social data, and web data. With this data you are able to understand the need, desires and the mindset of your customers based on their behaviour and their journeys.

With your creativity you make the engagement interesting and desirable, not just functional and utilitarian.  And, poetry strengthens you in your creative journey that prevents your brand from fading into mere commodities in both engagement and product experience.

“Creativity is a means of controlling chaos, finding order. Business and poetry draw their waters out of the same well.”  —John Barr, President, Poetry Foundation

In her book, What Poetry Brings to Business, Clare Morgan and her colleagues demonstrate how the steaming creative energy, emotional power, and "communicative complexity of poetry" contributes directly to human innovation and problem solving. “Poems put down their roots in the no-man’s-land between thinking and feeling,.. the borderland where logic shades into the non-logical, where a world defined and delineated by language gives way to the more diffuse territory of what psychologists sometimes call ‘the feeling state’. This is the same strange land, in which twenty-first-century business executives and [marketers]  routinely find themselves, a world in which facts and data are never enough and there is rarely a right or a wrong answer. "

For the first time in the written history of mankind, we are flourishing in a society (i.e the matured economies) of having more than enough. This "more than enough" is being spent on products and services that have more than mere utilitarian function.

As we transition from an Information Society towards a Dream Society, we expect more from the brands and the companies that we do business with. We now value one "human ability that can't be automated: emotion." We want to be inspired. We want products and services that have a design, a story and a heart.

Don't just persuade and promote.
Empower me — Make me dream, make me laugh, make me cry, make me high!

Updated December 2020 with relevant links

“We are not just passing into another historical period or another cultural modification.......But more specifically we are terminating the last 65 million years of life development.” Thomas Berry, historian philosopher

The universe  is constantly coming into being through irreversible steps of transformations; from a lesser to a greater order of complexity, from a lesser to a higher mode of consciousness. [This thinking holds true only if you subscribe to linear theory of evolution, which is opposite of cyclical evolutionary theory...well that is another conversation for another time]. It has been professed by social scientists that genetically we are very different from our forefathers some 200 generations ago as they were different from the Neanderthals. “What we are catching is an exceptional time.”

And of course, good or bad, COVID-19 is doing  it's part in digitizing our evolution.

This growing complexity is evident in our social lives and in our business lives.
Needles to say, if you are a brand marketer you are in for the ride of your lifetime: you have umpteen different social media sites to peddle your stuff and unnumbered “How To” blog sites to master one single craft.

To compound that, new social media tools are launching every day and new marketing best practices are emerging every minute of your waking lives.

If you are feeling overwhelmed, you are not alone.

Get this, 90% of people move between devices to accomplish one single goal.
Talk about a disjointed social culture on the verge of total disarray. It is like we have been handed over the technology of the gods without being primed for it.

As marketers, is sanity an achievable alternative? The short answer is yes.
If we take a step back from this massive marketing permutation and combination that is going on every second of the day and focus on the human currency of our business and cultivate them we create tangible value for ourselves and our businesses. “Hidden in Plain Sight is Today's Greatest Overlooked Growth Opportunity ... It is our Customers.”

Bill Lee, author of The Hidden Wealth of Customers: Realizing the Untapped Value of Your Most Important Asset maintains that once you identify your star customers and nurture them in such a fashion that increases their personal value proposition, you now have re-defined your relationship and transformed your customers into your brand advocates and key influencers in your industry. He calls this community marketing. Because, you are helping your customers build reputation that help them expand their support groups and build communities.

Cash rewards, discounts or 'try it before you buy it' is the game of marketing as we know it.
It is usually tailored towards customer life time value which is based on how much money they are prepared to spend. On the other hand, customer-centric marketing increases customers' life time value.

It helps build their social capital, increases their reputation and gives them access to new treasure trove of ideas. “This new concept of building customer advocates, peer influence-based, community-oriented marketing, hold much greater promise for creating sustained growth through authentic customer relationships.”

How to involve your customers to be your brand advocate?
Each industry is different. However, there are some basic principles that can be enacted across all industries.

Developing a thriving customer community keeps your bottom line on target and makes your top marketing dollars accountable. At the end of the day, your goal as a marketer is to create new opportunities for your business. One, sure fire way to do so, is to sustain your focus on ROR factor as postulated by Ted Rubin  (Return on Relationship) and echoed by  Bill Lee. ROR is a robust virtuous cycle in which you, (the marketer) provide them (your customers) with superior value and they (your customers), in turn, enrich your company. Catch the Ted Rubin's latest interview with Exhibitor Magazine here.

At the end of the day, you have taken control of your sanity. You have stayed true to your focus. Your life is enriched because you have helped another person flourish ... At last, you kick back and as you get to marvel at your own greatness, you come to "admit there is something glorious about being you."

We are living in exciting times. The concept of traditional marketing is being challenged every day. Fresh waves of ideas are consistently hitting the shores.

The blogosphere is inundated with articles describing the fact that brand equity cannot be linked to actual firm equityor any other recognized financial metric. There is a huge uproar that in a world infused with social-media madness; "traditional marketing and sales not only doesn't work so well, it doesn't make sense." A lot of speculation rolls around the market place as to what is going to replace the old medium; new possibilities of peer influence-based, community-oriented marketing hold much greater promise for creating sustained growth through authentic customer relationships.” In the past, marketing would decide how they want their brand to be perceived amongst their potential buyers and then the message would be forced fed to people via advertisements. Now, the dice has rolled in favor of the consumers! Consumers have more and more technologies like DVRs, caller ID, and spam blockers that enable them to avoid unwanted advertising and messages. This means that, in order to get their attention, you have to earn their permission.

How do you earn it?
One such method is being skilled in the Art of Enticement! Not often used in our everyday vocabulary, enticement is a key factor in trade show marketing, media, public relations as a means of persuasion. Persuasion leverages the art of enticement to achieve a set goal.

Focus on your goal. In our case, decide on why are you going to trade shows. Often, I am told by clients that procuring leads is only one of the factors that dictates them to exhibit. Increasing brand awareness and sustaining brand memorability are some of the dominant factors that urges them to engage in this sort of face-to-face marketing.

Enticement starts at the beginning of the design phase. Design your booth with flow, lighting and augmented presentation. Highlight a concept product. Ask for viewer feed back as to how they will improve on the design (to give an example). Have them participate in your social media channel and digitally carry the conversation beyond the venue. As you do so, always keep in mind marketing is always about them (your clients and prospects), not you.

You always offer your prospects an enticing factor to pay attention to your marketing. The enticement may be a prize for playing a game as simple as: turn the wheel and you get something. It could be knowledge about your industry that prospects consider to be valuable. Perhaps it's membership to a privileged group such as, once a month session with the CMO of your company or an entry into a sweepstakes. It might even be a discount coupon from one of your partners. All you ask in return is permission to market to these people. Nothing more.....

The secret sauce. Give people something great to talk about your brand. Trade shows are great venues where you may access each person as a node in a community and this, my friend is the new era of community marketing.

The dynamic blend of a strong brand proposition and a compelling brand personality gives birth to a powerful brand expression. Key brand attributes like: texture, color, imagery, typography, forms, tone of voice, sound and environment play a unique role in defining the proposition and developing the personality. These attributes are then used like a palette to design all touchpoints of the brand to foster the environment necessary to create the desired expectation.

Designed by Artefice Group, Italy, "Coca-Cola offers consumers a special edition of the legendary glass bottle: an original interpretation of the brand personality through a series of three creative subjects. What catches the attention is the movements, the depth of shading, the colors that convey all brand values in a stylish way." The keywords here – movement, depth of shading, colors all substantiates the The Journey to Shared Value: A world where cultural revolution is alive...  "We can’t control how Coca-Cola gets painted on the side of a wall, for thousands of people to see. But we believe that if we engage the market with stories that provoke happiness and inspire optimism, our consumers are going to talk about our brand in a way that is more powerful than we could ever do ourselves." This expansion in brand expression has helped Coca Cola to sell over 1.8 billion servings of its products to consumers in every country in the world, save Cuba and North Korea (officially).

Understood, not all brands have the resources nor the grit "to walk the talk."  However, we can all benefit from the valuable lessons imparted by the slogan, "The Coke Side of Life". Andy Payne, the Chief Global Creative Director of Interbrand, professes the vital role of creativity in creating and managing brand value.

Start with a Great Brand Proposition: "If you have a body, you are an athlete. This proposition taps into Nike’s dedication to human potential, and makes it relevant to its business by grounding human potential in athleticism." Very clever and very consistent with the brand proposition. This visual and verbal expression may vary dependent on culture and country but the brand intent and atttitude is always consistent.

"Great brand propositions and expressions are universally understood, believable, actionable and stand the test of time."

Drive Demand Through Expression: When we see BMW’s brand mark, we don’t think of it in the form of blue and white quadrants. We think of it as the ultimate “driving machine,” and this is because expression has become synonymous with the brand proposition. The Disney brand proposition is built around family-centric entertainment. "The use of characters to create fantasy leads to being able to physically engage similar themes in a physical space, one that immerses the customer in a 360-degree, multisensory, branded experience."

Expression Creates Value: As Andy Payne mentions, consumers and audiences encounter emotion and meaning through personality and storytelling. The journey towards creating a compelling expression of your brand is never complete. Brand propositions, personality, and expressions have to be continually evaluated, evolved, and reevaluated.

In this era virtual reality and digital distraction most brands are yet to explore the compelling territory of emotional enticement. Trade shows and events are the grand avenues for embracing this territory. "Brands that claim powerful emotional propositions and capture them with an exciting world of expression, have the ability to maintain a fond place in the mind of their audiences now and in the future."

Marketing has gone through tectonic shifts, especially in the last decade or so. We have made the shift from print media to online media. We are witnessing the introduction of new tools (almost everyday) that make our communication with potential customers more efficient. We are in the organic valley of social media indulging in a relentless two-way communication loop. As a result, our addiction to real-time communication is simply voracious and our attention to focus is scattered. And, these are only a few of the recent changes that the marketing industry has gone through.

Given this technological dynamics, we as trade show marketers often question the viability of exhibiting at trade shows. The short answer to this concern is: Trade shows have never presented a better opportunity for an exhibitor to get in front of decision makers. Premium level decision makers now walk the show. They are there because they have a need that is not currently being met. I guess, technology has not yet managed to eradicate the desire for the high touch of human interaction.

Now, that we know who are our target audience, let's fashion a booth that will attract their attention and sustain their scrutiny. We have to become skilled in the art of attraction. Here are some few pointers that always work!

Design with a Themed Purpose: In the illustration above, we designed a 50's theme with a flair for high touch modernity. Nostalgic times in stride technologically advanced products! Don't just stop there. Use high appeal promotional giveaway, It is all about perception. How do you want to be remembered? This should be the end game of anything and everything that you do.
Design with a Presence: Your graphics must always be larger than life. Your architecture must be self defining. Always keep in mind of your target audience.
Design with a Flow: Keep in mind about the laws governing spatial arrangement in relation to the flow of energy. Have ample of areas for natural clustering. Have a sculpture or perhaps a multiple screen projection that wows the audience. Again, you are going for the memorability act. In the above illustration, the corner of the booth was highlighted with a car from the 50's.
Design for a Motion: As Tony Robbins says: emotion is always moved by motion. Movement attracts our eyes and turns our bodies. Implant a juggler, blow bubbles or simply play with a yo-yo. Integrate it with your value statement.
Design for the Limbic System: Our sensory receptors reacts to the stimulation from our environment. Make clever use of this proven method for your booth design. Lavish your space with texture, light, sound, smell and color.

Design with color because, "colors answer feeling in man;", design with unique shapes , because shapes answer thought, design with motion, as "motion answers will."

"There’s a collection of Zen koans called the Gateless Gate. Among other things, koans transcend dualism. The traditional sales process is fully dualistic - there’s a buyer, and there’s a seller. We are witnessing the dissolution of the traditional sales role, as recommendation commerce evolves and storefronts become wherever you happen to be, doing whatever you are doing. Which brings us to the Storeless Store and Saleless Sale." Valeria Maltoni.

And my friends, this is the new face of trade show marketing!

Are you ready to communicate with them?

Technology is the language and the fashion of this generation. Extremely savvy and constantly wired this generation could be the most educated in American history (according to a study conducted by Pew Research Center). Being "digital natives", they are on a path of constant learning, upgrading and sharing. In her book, Chasing Youth Culture And Getting It Right, Tina Wells discusses how crucial technology is in their lives. "If you want to engage with Millennials, you must understand the role technology plays in their lives. When we get scared of it as marketers, we tend to disconnect with our consumers. Technology doesn’t kill magazines or newspapers or music. What hurts these media is when we decide to stop innovating. Content is king, and always will be. Create an engaging experience with content, no matter what the platform, and consumers will engage"

Trade shows are ideal environments for face-to face marketing and an opportunity to experience your brand in a very unique way. As Tina Wells points out, communal consumption and existential experience is huge for this generation.
As trade show mavericks what does this mean? Create a designer space that is equipped with wi-fi, internet, ipad and the likes. You do want them to be tweeting and uploading content from your exhibit space, about your exhibiting brand. As a marketer you want your stories to go viral. Arm your millennial visitors with easy user interface to do so. To them it is all about speed and ease to use.

When it comes to existential experience, it is very pivotal for the millennials to have “once in a lifetime experiences.” This could be from a simple “coffee experience” to life changing service experiences in places like Africa. Measure for yourself how does this add up to your exhibit design. Your exhibit design is the home for your brand experience. Design a space to skillfully reflect the nuances of your brand's reputation, memory and product. Provide for a space that intelligently interacts with the 5 senses. Think about smell, sound, touch, lighting, the presentation of products, and everything else that goes into delivering a memorable brand experience. Your exhibit design is the one touch point that your audience actually gets to experience. Give them an experience of a lifetime, one that they can’t wait to share with their friends.

The fact that Pinterest in now the third most popular social media site, beating Linkedin and Tumblr tells us something about the contemporary mass psychological movement.
We are in the Age of Visual Content Revolution. Visuals have become the greatest crutch in the continuity of story telling. Ford, IBM, GE just to name a few have made the transition from stogy boardrooms to being active participants in this mass upheaval of ideas and culture. For artists designers and the creative folks, story boards and visuals were always part of the DNA. Now, visuals are grasping hold of marketers from different industries and they are realizing the forcefulness of visual marketing.

Visuals make your Brand Fluid!
Visual content draws upon your brand heritage and legacy. It helps in the story telling of your brand.  For example, the new Facebook timeline is set up for companies to have opportunity to share their history visually, like Coca-Cola has done below.

Brands like Starbucks, harnesses the power of social media to demonstrate what is going on behind the scenes between employees and customers. This humanizes the brand and promotes brand loyalty and awareness between companies and consumers. They have used visuals to make a powerful statement about their brand's stance on important issues that they believe in.

Visuals make your Brand Captivating!
Visuals capture more than just attention – they capture your heart and drives engagement. In fact, just one month after Facebook introduced timeline for brands, Simply Measured reports that engagement is up 46% percent per post, and visual content (photos and videos) have seen a 65% increase in engagement. Kudos to GE. They have proactively asked for fans to engage with the photos of their products, and the results are phenomenal! Now you know why status updates is loosing the battle to visual updates.

Visuals make your Brand User-Worthy!
If your customers are on at least a couple of the visually-friendly social networks like Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, or Instagram, get them involved in helping shape the story of your brand in a more visual way. Keep in mind that there are multiple industries in which prospects won't make a purchase without first consulting user-generated content. That is the reason perhaps why Dunkin Donuts is encouraging fans to create visual content that gets them excited about their product.

Referral traffic from social media sites to brand websites is on the rise. Shareaholic study revealed Pinterest generates more referral traffic than Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn combined; only Facebook and StumbleUpon generate more.

Bottom Line: Social networks are a direct link to how customers get to your actual website. When brands are communicated through visual mediums, customers are then taking the next step and going directly to your website.
No matter how boring the business of goods that you are in; give it a visual flair, weave a story, include your target audience to participate. And, simply watch how your brand evolves.

"An emotion occurs when there are certain biological, certain experiential, and certain cognitive states which all occur simultaneously."  John D. Mayer: From EQ Today, Spring 1999
Emotional intelligence plays a dominant role in our daily lives. It goes on an over-drive in an experiential setting such as events and trade shows where we are subjected to massive sensory overdose. In such a setting if you are an exhibitor or a presenter you have to maintain a state of steady self-awareness. You have to perceive your emotions in real-time and use this awareness to stay flexible and act positively to direct your behavior, sometimes under challenging circumstances. This skill to sustain and direct your own feeling will enhance your ability to accurately pick up on emotions in other people and understand what is really going on. You will be able to monitor others' mood and temperaments and enlist this knowledge in predicting their future behavior and decision making, giving you an edge in the negotiating lounge. After all, that is all face-to face marketing is. Isn't it?

Perception, Reason, Understanding and Management are the 4 keys to unlock emotional intelligence as modeled by Peter Salovey and John D. Mayer. It is also interesting to note that there are 4 different personality types. Like 4 seasons, human personality broadly fall under 4 quadrants. Different psychologist have labeled them under different names. The one that resonates with me is the science of D.I.S.C. Published in 1928 by psychologist William Moulton Marston and the original behaviorist like Walter V. Clarke and others, the science of D.I.S.C is used across the horizon to study human behavior in any given environments.

D: DOMINANCE, I: INFLUENCE, S: STEADINESS, C: COMPLIANCE 

DOMINANCE:
"This is the element of an individual’s personality that indicates competitiveness, drive and a desire to win. Highly dominant people tend become angry more often than lower dominant types. Dominance is a task oriented trait so once a highly dominant person takes on a task, they become determined to see it through to the end.

These people often appear to be stern and severe. Once they have had an angry outburst, they forget the source of their anger quickly and move on to other things. Highly dominant people will often be seen as intimidating by others."

INFLUENCE:
"This is the element of an individual’s personality that indicates optimism, trust, and a sense of humor. Highly influencing people tend to joke around a lot, talk a lot, and use other people to get what they want out of life. Almost completely people-oriented, they need to be in the company of other human beings as often as possible.

Highly influencing people like .... virtually anything they can show off. They are optimistic to a fault and trust almost everyone a little too much. Highly influencing people will often be seen as the life of the party by others."

STEADINESS:
"This is the element of an individual’s personality that regulates the pace at which they do things. Highly steady people tend to hold off on decision making until they believe the decision is the right one. They like to do research and get the approval of others before they do almost anything.

They are people-oriented and will usually be very sociable with everyone they meet. Highly steady people will take longer to do their work, but because they are very thorough, the work they do is generally of very high quality.

COMPLIANCE:
"This is the element of an individual’s personality that creates a need for rules and regulations in their lives. Highly compliant people tend to approach every challenge or project with caution and concern. Because they are task oriented, they tend not to fall for a sales pitch that is not accompanied by facts and figures.

Of course, we are a blend of the above, just the proportions vary. However, the key to remember is that there are certain experiences that exalts us while others irritates us. One thing is for certain. The unique blend of the head and the heart will give you an edge in the competence of social marketing.

As designers and marketers for trade shows and other dimensional spaces, we often encounter reasons as to why an idea or a concept will not gain momentum.

We are used to hearing phrases like “I am not sure my boss will like it.” “I don't have the authority.” “We can't take the chance.” “We have always done it this way.” “This is just a passing trend.” “I am all for it, but...”.
You get the point. We are too happy to wallow in the safe zone of status quo.

Now, the status quo has been challenged. Covid-19 is forcing us to re-think how we do business. This pandemic has created the kind of chaos that necessitates innovation and adaptation.

Good thing is, designers are taking the matter seriously.  They are using this pandemic as opportunity for a passionate reset. And given the challenging shape of 2020, the design trends of 2021 may offer us the biggest breath of fresh air yet.

The Elusive Dance of Passion and Reason

As human beings we have been endowed with the power to reason.
We use it for the smallest detail in our daily survival to the highest abstraction in conducting business.

“From the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have, comes from one attribute of man — the function of his reasoning mind.”

Ayn Rand was a eternal champion of the power of reason.
The very essence of her philosophy, “Objectivism” stresses the concept of happiness as the moral purpose of a  mans' life, “with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”

However, she also realized that nothing moves without passion. She says,“throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. The great creators, the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors-stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new thought was opposed. Every great new invention was denounced. The first motor was considered foolish. The first airplane was considered impossible. The power loom was considered vicious. Anesthesia was considered sinful. But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered and they paid. But they won.”

What is Reason? What is Passion? Can they Work Together?

Central to Enlightenment movement of the 17th and the 18th century, were the use and celebration of reason, the power by which humans understand the universe and improve their own condition. The goals of rational humanity were considered to be knowledge, freedom, and happiness.

Reason is a process of observing and understanding the world around us, systematically applying rules of logic and experimentation and generating conclusions that others can follow.

For example, during this pandemic, brands had to be relevant to their audience. Else, they would be tuned out. It is this reason for relevancy that compelled them to seek passionate ways to reach out to their audience. They did it in by offering innovative services and often collaborating with competition.

Passion is commonly used to refer to strong emotions of any type.
To me, passion is not one, but a jumble of emotions – excitement, anticipation, curiosity, desire, love, joy, anger, wonder and empathy – that motivate us to venture deeper and deeper into particular avenues of our interest defined by the passion.

For example, the movement of bitcoin and other crypto currencies that evolved from the ashes of the 2008 financial crisis, was a passionate outburst against the traditional financial institutions that found its' manifestation in the novel blockchain technology — a far cry from the 500 year old banking system established by the Medici family.

These emotions motivate us to move beyond our comfort zone, provide us with the dedication and commitment to build capabilities in certain fields over extended periods of time and help us ultimately to achieve the potential that resides within each of us. We become passionate explorers in our life journey motivated by a desire to gain new insight into a particular domain by working with others to drive performance to new levels.

So, how do passion and reason reinforce each other? 
“Think of agency versus structure. Passion provides the first by generating energy and creating a sense of freedom.  Reason provides the latter by imposing constraint and discipline.” 

Without structure, agency becomes an aimless whirlwind of activity, constantly distracted by the bright lights of momentary insights, but unable lend form, function and finesse. And, of course, without agency, structure remains an inert mass, sinking deeper and deeper into the ground below it, seeing but unable to explore the world around it.

It is the job of passion to empower you with a higher purpose. A purpose, that defines and raises your reason of existence.

“When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bonds: Your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction, and you find yourself in a new, great and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties and talents become alive, and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.” Patanjali


Kahlil Gibran in his classic book, “The Prophet”, put it eloquently:

Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul.
If either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas.
For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.
Therefore let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion, that it may sing;
And let it direct your passion with reason, that your passion may live through its own daily resurrection, and like the phoenix rise above its own ashes.

Mind is a powerful mechanism.
“It is the power of the mind to be unconquerable.”

Human beings are limited only by what we allow ourselves to be limited by: our own minds.
In our minds, we participate in this dance of passion and reason — a symphony of fire and ice in varying fahrenheit.

To realize our full potential, we need to integrate passion and reason in our play and in our work. Reason alone, is cold, calculating, confining and “passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.”

Next time, you encounter, “we do not have budget for it” or “we have never done it that way”, be electrified by the passion of your creative solution but be armed by the sword of your reason. Give it 200% - but be prepared for stumbling blocks. Be alert and pay attention to those stumbling blocks. You will see your passion did not fail you.
It has sprout new shoots in the most diffident projects and ideas.


As we oscillate between passion and reason, I leave you with this thought:

Among the hills, when you sit in the cool shade of the white poplars, sharing the peace and serenity of distant fields and meadows - then let your heart say in silence, “God rests in reason.”
And when the storm comes, and the mighty wind shakes the forest, and thunder and lightning proclaim the majesty of the sky - then let your heart say in awe, “God moves in passion.”
And since you are a breath in God's sphere, and a leaf in God's forest, you too should rest in reason and move in passion. Kahil Gibran

Christie MicroTiles can be configured in any size and shape: the limiting factor being the visualization of your mind....so the website says. However, other than the iconic BBC Worldwide Half-Globe umbrella that stands remarkable in  the Media Center of London's White City,
I have not encountered any other organic shapes that has been designed with these MicroTiles.
Nonetheless, with a super-fine pixel pitch of 0.5mm, Christie MicroTiles is a pixel intense projection, touting 70x more pixels than the most popular 4mm surface-mount display LEDs. High brightness, deep contrast and unparalleled color range ideal for high ambient light environments is the hallmark of this advanced optical technology. As far as color reproduction capability goes, it 115% of the NTSC color gamut and exceeds standard LCD flat panels by over 50%. It is light weight modular, with automatic detection system built into each tile for easy reconfigurability.

Whether you are engaged in, broadcast or a broadway play or at a trade show live performance, this is an epic systems that will attract and engage the audience that you have set out to transform.