Welcome to Stone Mantel Press
The most intelligent companies focus on Human Context
Dave Norton shares four concepts that will help your company grow, your customers prosper, and your technology deliver on your promises.
Application to your industry
A book gives you the argument. It doesn’t run your quarterly planning meeting. The Human Context workbooks take the same four ideas — SDSG, situational markets, modes, time value — and apply them to one industry at a time, module by module, until you have language your team can use on Monday morning. Six modules. Built the same way the research was built: case by case, not theory down. Don’t take the argument on faith. Apply it to your own company.
The Library
Twenty deliverables across ten industries. Each pair is a strategist’s workbook and its companion case study.
The reference set. Six modules built around patient situations, from first symptom to ongoing care.
Twenty-one situations across trip planning, gear selection, and the trail itself.
Money situations, not products. Where customers actually decide, and who they call first.
Twenty-one guest situations, 28 modes, and the value-doubt the combo upsell was built on.
The false-alarm flood, the numb homeowner it manufactured, and the trust that let the sensors inside.
The comforts that crowd out the moments that matter, and the guest a points program made anonymous.
A firm built around the work the machines now do, and the client its own meter wore down.
A program built for the buyer’s dashboard, and the member its own nudge stream taught to tune out.
When the model is a commodity, and the product’s own confidence taught the user to stop believing it.
Record demand spent on a generic pitch, and the household its own advertising taught to rule a cruise out.
The four key concepts
The book builds one argument across four ideas. Join Dave Norton as he describes each one.
The argument in brief. Watch this one first.
SDSG — Stupid, Dumb, Smart, Genius
Most companies think they’re building smart technology. But is it? How do you know? SDSG is the scale that tells you which one you actually built — and what genius requires.
Situational Markets
Demographics tell you who someone is. They don’t tell you what’s about to happen to them. Situational markets are built from the recurring circumstances that create demand. The same person, in a different situation, is a different market entirely.
Modes
A mode is a mindset and set of behaviors that people get into temporarily. It’s a temporary state — of attention, of capacity, of what a person can actually do right now. The consumer juggling three things at 5pm is not the same consumer with thirty quiet minutes at 9pm. Same person. Different mode. Different job for you to do.
Time Value
Every interaction spends a person’s time. Sometimes people save time. Sometimes it’s about time well spent. And sometimes it’s about time well invested. The rarest kind gets compounded. Time value is the final test every one of these ideas has to pass and the way to measure success.
All four concepts, applied to one problem.
A full session on how the four concepts work together.
About Stone Mantel Press
For over 25 years, the Stone Mantel team has been at the forefront of experience strategy. Dave Norton, founder of Stone Mantel, helped to shape the original frameworks of design thinking, The Experience Economy, journey mapping, CX measurement, and many other concepts that strategists today take for granted. He and his team have been advising clients on the near future needs of their customers—and getting it right—for almost three decades.
Stone Mantel Press is dedicated to keeping leaders focused on the near future needs of their customers, the impact that technologies and changing expectations have on business models, and the delivery of meaningful experiences. In the present moment artificial intelligence is a key driver of change in all three areas we focus on. And, true to form, the Stone Mantel team has been studying the impact of AI on consumer behavior since 2017—long before ChatGPT.
Stone Mantel Press is very much connected to Stone Mantel, the consulting group. And we hope that as you go deeper into the concepts we’re sharing, you will engage with our team to help your organization grow and become more profitable.