THE XPLORING BRIEF

The digital revolution has made photography accessible to everyone as the digital camera market is developing faster than other creative media, both technically and creatively. People now have an ever-expanding choice of tools to create their pictures while one product innovation is chasing the next. Everybody is able to document their lives and to explore their creative potential without taking any risks. Not only have people been empowered to create more images of their lives but also to share them and collaborate with others. Photographs have become the new social currency that people are trading on social networking sites to influence others and express their identity. It’s a universal language everyone can understand, but the quantity of images has taken over the quality of photos leading to digital inertia. Digital cameras are becoming commoditized in the megapixel and price battle. Consumers are trying to stay on top of the digital camera swamp as they are stuck in a tyranny of choice. What all camera brands are failing to do is to create an emotional connection with people who may not be passionate about photography as such, but use digital cameras in their everyday lives.

The purpose of this Xploring project is to uncover a strategic insight that will help us lift people’s rational barriers and take us to a powerful organizing idea.

Areas of Curiosity:
- The rise of creativity in people’s everyday lives
- People’s hidden creative talents
- How people reportage their lives in pictures
- How people’s see the world through their camera
- People’s passion to preserve their experiences on pictures
- What makes a good camera for ordinary people


THE XPLORING TASK
Xploring is based on a very simple principle:
If you want to understand how a tiger hunts, don’t go to the zoo...Go to the jungle.

Xploring is much more than gathering information, it means going into unknown territory. Taking risks, perhaps taking a wrong turn. It means following your gut and listening, really listening. It means trusting your instincts, over and beyond the facts given. Knowing that when you do, you'll see more, understand more.

We will spend the next weeks with real people in the real world to understand the things that matter to them when taking pictures. Our Xploring journey will take us to people living in Germany, Poland, Russia, Italy, Spain and the U.K. We will go to their homes, spend a day with their families and friends, share their personal memories, connect with them through social networking sites, go on a night out, play with their cameras, listen to their stories, and observe their creative abilities…etc.


23 July 2009

Quality without much effort

Natasha, 27, Moscow, Russia:

Natasha and her husband bought a compact camera – Pentax – 3 years ago. It was the best option available at the time: “It has a simple interface, that is why we use it a lot on vacations. It is really good because it has these different modes – sun mode, night mode. And one option we use the most is similar to MS Office Picture Manager: You take a group picture of people for example and you can crop a picture of only one person and save as a different picture. This is really convenient and easy to use.”
Natasha and her husband also uses the black and white mode from time to time. And if they we need to make a lot of pictures they make the resolution lower. They consider the memory card they bought to be a big one, but it’s only 512 MB and Natasha doesn’t even remember what are the units of measure: “It’s 512 of howdoyacallit”. So they are forced to decrease the resolution and the pictures for them still work out just fine.
They also shoot videos with this camera: “Although we have a proper video camera with photo option, the photos this video camera makes are low quality. So we use the photo camera for videos more often.”
Because they have a son, 2.5 y.o., they make a lot of pictures: “But mostly with son, we don’t like to make self photos if the son is not in there.” They take pictures of all the first moments in the child’s life. But the first steps were shot on the video camera.
“One thing that is bad about having a digital camera is that we don’t print those pictures at all. We don’t have a proper family album. We keep all the pictures on the hard drive, plus we do a DVD back up, and some pictures are kept online on our vkontakte.ru accounts [Russian version of Facebook].”
Sometimes my husband gets really involved in the photography and starts looking at good cameras. But then we realize we are trying to buy a new apartment and can’t afford a new camera. So he remains a passive admirer of professional photography and cameras. We stick with a compact camera.

Insights:
- Family people are looking for the ease of managing their photos (taking pictures, editing, storing) without going into too technical much detail.
- While admiring the quality of professional cameras, people with family obligations have to limit their budget to a compact camera.
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