Our Brand Is Crisis

A friend of mine works at Nordstrom in design. She posted on Facebook that she and her co-workers received an email from the three Nordstrom brothers condemning the Muslim ban. In it they reiterated their “values of diversity, inclusion, respect and kindness” to their employees of which “thousands…are first and second generation immigrants”. A buoyant and positive brand narrative.

Days later (in a ‘totally unrelated move’) Nordstrom dropped the Ivanka Trump line. The POTUS sent out a condemning tweet. Kellyanne Conway went on FOX News asking the viewers to buy her boss’s daughter’s products. Federal laws were possibly broken. Apologies were made. Then rescinded. Pretty much a PR disaster.

After taking a slight hit as a result of the tweet, Nordstrom’s stock price did something interesting. It went up. A lot. So did sales. It seems that valuing and protecting the people that work for you is good for business. 

Brands that are built on celebrity rise and fall on the actions of the ambassador’s associations. When that persons name becomes synonymous with a chaotic and negative narrative, is it any wonder the brand is damaged?

photo credit: Grégoire Lannoy @flickr.com

Brandbot Voice

Danger Will Robinson. Those were the first robot words I remember hearing. Robbie the Robot on "Lost In Space" with his dryer vent tube arms flailing was a voice you could trust. Always watching out for Will.

I got a text the other day from someone who said they met me on Tinder and wanted to chat. Except that I’m not on Tinder. So that was the first giveaway that she was a chat 'bot. The second was that she wanted my credit card number so she could verify my age. Ummm, no.

Our first painful brand 'bot interactions were likely with voice recognition on customer service phone trees. But everyday the chances increase that when we are interacting with a company online, we are actually talking with a chat 'bot. This presents brands with a new and significant opportunity.

A powerful new touchpoint for reflecting brand personality is appearing. Not only does talking to a ‘bot need to feel “normal” but ideally you want to design a conversational brand voice that aligns with your brand’s positioning. And unlike my Tinder friend, it needs to be one you can trust. 

photo credit: Scott Beale @ laughing squid, http://www.laughingsquid.com

"Design ROI"-Rob Wallace

[The following article is a guest post from my good friend Rob Wallace of Best of Breed Branding. Posted with permission from the author.]

DESIGN ROI

Age of Accountability

While we live in the design age, we also live in the age of information and accountability. Today every business decision is supported by accurate and timely data.  Every effort is scrutinized for its direct impact on the bottom line. The new corporate mantra is, ”if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” In the vernacular, management is asking, “show me the money”.  If you are a design manager, my goal is to help you do just that.

The Proof

I wrote an article for the Design Management Journal that has been described as providing “ground breaking thought leadership” on quantifying design’s return on investment.  Please email me for a copy at Rob@wallacechurch.com

This article represented the culmination of five years of independent research on empirically calculating design’s value.  It was built on an ROI methodology created by statisticians and used data from Wallace Church’s brand identity/package design assignments plus a handful of additional case studies supplied by major cpg corporate package design departments.   The methodology is outlined in Don E. Schulz and Jeffrey Walters’s book, “Measuring Brand Communications ROI” which is available on Amazon.

This article concluded that, on average, every dollar invested in advertising and package design resulted in over $7 in incremental value for the brand.  Great news!   But even more interesting is the data from case studies where there was no advertising and package design was the only element that changed. In these cases every dollar spent in brand identity/package design generated over $400 of incremental profit.  

New Insights From the Forefront of Design ROI

It has been several years since this article’s first publication, and I’m happy to report that the additional data we have garnished further supports design’s paramount ROI.  I’m also happy to report that, independent of this article, the greater business community has begun to recognize design’s paramount value in brand building.  I am however, disappointed to report that we as an industry have yet to embrace a standardized method to measure design’s direct financial impact. And as a result, many design managers still have to fight hard to justify the resources required to fund and manage the design process.

ROI Roadblocks: Reluctance, Fear, and Disbelief

While most design managers believe that proving our value would greatly benefit the design process, many remain skeptical. To some, it’s wrong to extract design from all the other tools that drive purchase behavior. One individual articulately commented, “I have spent so much of my energy convincing marketing to consider design as an integral part of a synthesized branding effort, why would I want to separate it now?  Even if we can, we shouldn’t measure design in a vacuum, but as part of an integrated whole”.  

There are those who consider the $400+ ROI result shockingly high and therefore not believable. This result seems hyperbolic, and therefore, is an easy target for “too good to be true” skepticism.

To those concerned, I say, try it.  Prove or disprove it to yourself before abandoning the notion.  Until we can segment each marketing effort’s specific impact on the bottom line, we’ll never know how to best dedicate limited resources. 

There are a number of prominent design practitioners who are simply reluctant to be quantified. I well remember a discussion with design evangelist Tom Peters, and how he emphatically emphasized that design must never be “relegated to the providence of the bean counter”.  I understand his point. Still, I’m convinced that senior management will no longer allow design to fly below the accountability radar screen. To those who are reluctant to being quantified, I suggest that we designers initiate our own accountability process. We need to set our own standards and develop our own best practices. For if we don’t, surly a process will be thrust upon us.

There are those who are concerned about setting the bar and having to continually raise it. “Congrats! Our last design project resulted in a $400 ROI.  Tomorrow I expect $500, then $750 and then $1,000.” To those who fear this upward spiral of expectations, I suggest that we first establish our own base standard and then embrace a process of constant improvement. We need to continually hone our best practices until we determine design’s ultimate profit potential.

Then there are those who are concerned that the methodology is not universally extendable to all design disciplines. Most, if not all, design disciplines result in a “before and after” that can be measured and compared against costs. Disciplines such as product design, merchandising and promotion all have measurable variables. Some design disciplines have success criteria built into them such as web design “click throughs”.  Even “soft measure” design disciplines such as corporate identity or environment design, can be analyzed against perceived stock price or worker productivity. While there may be no one “magic bullet”, I am passionately convinced that all design initiatives can and should be quantified in financial terms.

Lastly, and perhaps the largest group of naysayers are those who flatly respond, “It simply can’t be done.”  These folks ask, how can you pin point design’s specific impact? How can you control the competition or the market dynamics, or Wall Street, or the rainy Tuesday that discourages shoppers from leaving home?  Until we can isolate design from all of these uncontrollable elements we simply can’t measure it. 

The Moment of Truth

In the last several years, we have discovered that there is a moment in time where all of these ancillary influences can be metered out and package design can be isolated as the only variable. This golden opportunity occurs when launching a major brand redesign effort.

During a redesign initiative, there is always a transitional phase where the new design architecture is “phased-in” to the existing shelf set. New design gradually replaces the old as the product is sold through. This transition often takes a number of months and can be a critical time to measure design’s impact.  Here’s how to take advantage of this moment of truth.

Select one retailer to sponsor the new design. Launch the new identity in its entirety into selected stores in a specific geographic market. Divert the old packaging to the same retailer’s stores in a near-by geographic area with the same consumer dynamics. Keep the pricing and merchandising efforts identical. And then simply measure sales between the test and control stores for a period of several weeks.

During this test period, the brand’s offerings are consistent, the ad campaign and its frequency are the same, and all of the intangible and uncontrollable social and economic aspects are all identical.  The same Wall Street dynamics and the same rainy Tuesdays preside.  Design is the only variable, and the incremental sales that it generates are irrefutable.

The Good and Bad News

These research results have been remarkably higher than expected.  New data shows an average of more than $500 of incremental sales for each dollar invested in design.  In one recent case study for a leading national cpg brand, design’s ROI was nearly twice that.  So what’s the bad news? The results are almost too high to be believed. The results might be more acceptable if they were more like 10 or even 50 to one, but at literally twenty times this rate, they seem “too good to be true”.

Proving the Impossible

The numbers may seem overbalanced because the cost of a package design assignment is so small when compared to other marketing initiatives. The investment in a new identity for a multi-SKU major cpg brand might require a couple hundred thousand dollars in design fees while this same brand might commonly invest millions or tens of millions of dollars in advertising.  If done well, package design architecture can out live two to three ad campaigns. Imagine the media cost if you were required to run an ad that would be seen by all of your possible consumers. In the cases studied, research indicated that only 7% of consumers see an ad before experiencing the product at shelf. Now consider how many possible consumers see your package design. Virtually 100% of your current and potential consumers see your brand’s identity at retail.  With up to 70% of brands in high turn selling environments purchased on impulse, design is the last and most critical opportunity to influence the sale.  Considering all these factors certainly design’s unsurpassed ROI can be justified. 

A New Design Advocacy

If we as an industry are going to prove design’s ROI, then this message cannot come from design consultants, but from corporate design management and independent, impartial and credible associations. Organizations like the Design Management Institute and the American Marketing Association need to take up the cause. In the UK, the British Design Council has maintained a well-respected program called the Design Effectiveness Awards where design is awarded merit based not on arbitrary aesthetics but on marketplace performance. We need its compliment here in the US.

I am calling for a new breed of design advocates to join the fray. I’m looking for a number of passionate professionals to build upon the initial data. I am seeking new advocates to apply this or other methodologies across the entire spectrum of design disciplines. From these ROI results and the processes that drive them, I see best practices emerging, industry-wide adopted standards around the appropriate time and resources dedicated to design so as to generate its highest ROI.  This will be the day that design’s golden age will truly be actualized.

Interested?  Drop me an email and I’ll forward you the methodology and engage you in an ongoing dialogue with other industry thought leaders.  Email me at rob@bestofbreedbranding.com and let's together speed the process to empirically proving design’s value. 

photo credit: Anthony Albright@flickr.com

A Happy Ending

I like the way these jeans fit. So I decided to order another pair online. Same brand, same fit, waist, length, copied right off of the label. So when the order came… whoa, I was in for a big loose baggy surprise! Does this story sound familiar?

What are these, “Mom jeans” for men? How could it be that a giant in denim, one with 50 years of experience in making jeans was so off the mark? I couldn’t help but see it as a concrete illustration of the market share shrinkage this brand has been experiencing in recent years. 

By focusing on winning back it’s customers through advertising, social media, email promotional campaigns and a parade of celebrity spokespeople, they took their eye off the ball. They forgot about the product.

All truly iconic brands deliver one thing: a consistent product experience. Without that, any other investment you make in winning customers is wasted. Get the product right. Give the story a happy ending.

photo credit: Robert Sheie @ Flickr.com

Dying on the Vine: Don't Build Your Brand On Borrowed Land

What are the stars of Vine saying to themselves these days? 

Don’t build your brand on borrowed land. 

Twitter announced recently that they will be shutting down Vine, the 6 second video sharing platform “indefinitely”. But what becomes of the stars that Vine made? Well, some of them have gotten internet-famous enough to have parlayed their multiple 6-seconds of fame into work in independent film, cable, TV, advertising, or are taking on longer-form projects than Vine allowed. Apparently, millennials, just like Bumbles, bounce. (Sorry for the pre-Thanksgiving Rudolph reference…)

But there are scores more not-so-stars who will be hung out to dry. Those with hundreds or thousands of followers cultivated and nurtured over years of posting video content snippets. All them will go poof very soon. 

It’s not like it hasn’t happened before. Think of all the individuals, bands, companies that poured blood and sweat into MySpace internet-eons ago. The volume of content being generated is larger than ever and the pace of change is faster than ever. So when change comes, having your content host and your associated following disappear can be a painful wake-up call. 

Building an email list, a documented following that is independent of any specific platform is the gold standard of content developers, marketers and entrepreneurs. It takes a lot of time, effort and money to get folks to give you their email address. Twitter knows this and is happy to shackle you to it’s platform. It makes gleaning the emails of your Twitter followers all but impossible. 

When Twitter goes belly-up, and it will eventually, all those retweets, hearts and follows won’t mean dookey.

The only thing that will matter are the personal networked connections you have made. The ones where you know each others email addresses. And those you might have, dare I say it, talked to on the phone.

While it’s pretty safe to say that email will be around for while, in cyberspace nothing lasts forever. So when the current circus folds up its tent and drives out of town, you won’t want to find yourself standing around still dressed like a clown.

photo credit: el toro @ flickr.com

Pick A Lane

I met with a woman last week who just patented an invention. It’s incredibly simple. It's the kind of invention that you look at and say “of course!”.

The invention has implications for food and beverage, entertainment, travel, spectator sports, quick service restaurants, for CPG. The list goes on and on. 

She landed a meeting to pitch it to the largest beverage brand in the world. Let’s call them Big Red. She laid out the 50 ways they could use it. They loved it. They said “of course!”. So it was a shock when the meeting resulted in zip. Nada.

The reason wasn’t that it’s a stupid invention. It’s brilliant. The reason Big Red passed was because they were presented with too many options. No one knew where to start. Even Big Red, who has more resources than God.

She learned the hard way that "less is more". Next time she will pick a lane. One consumer, one occasion, one fulfilled need. The next client will know exactly how to put their feet in the starting blocks. They will see a simple picture of what winning looks like. And how to start. 

photo credit: {Robyn} @flickr.com

Out Of Your Comfort Zone

Yoga hurts. That’s what my wife’s t-shirt says anyway. It’s funny because if you’ve done yoga, you know it’s true. What yoga does is make you hold a pose that hurts a little, feels good a little and puts you right on the edge of your comfort zone. 

The goal is to maintain a feeling of peace when you are in the middle of doing something hard. It’s a great analogy for business. Our professional work can be trying. Learning to maintain a sense of balance and calm in the storm is what we all strive for.

However, just outside our comfort zone is where we grow, where we learn, where new things happen and new opportunities appear.

To grow, you have to let go of worrying what people think of you. Let go of perfectionism. Let go of that ego a little. Don’t try so hard to fit in. Because winning in business is about standing out. 

It’s about moving out of your comfort zone.

What Makes You, You?

We are inundated with marketing speak. Jargon like “360º campaigns”, “to the next level”, “world class” and “surprise and delight”. We all use them sometimes. The danger is becoming a business ‘bot, or worse - you may be missing the opportunity to make a human connection with your audience.

I was chatting with an entrepreneur who is having trouble crafting her brand message. She is an avid horse-back rider and was wondering if she should leverage the phrase “unbridled passion” in her communications. Her friends were saying “Don’t do it, people will think you have an equestrian business!”

I encouraged her to embrace it. Her love of horses is what makes her human. It lets us into her soul a little. She approaches her consultancy with the same energy and love that she does her horses. It’s a great story, it’s her narrative and it’s authentic.

What is it that makes you human? Are you bearing your soul a little in your work and in your brand? Tell your story and embrace your narrative. It’s what makes you, you.

And it’s your customer’s way in.

The Moment Brands Dream Of

A few weeks ago, I attended the Virtual Reality Summit in NYC. I was struck, not with how advanced the technology is - but rather with how no one really knows what to do with it.

There is a saying in Silicon Valley, “It’s a technology looking for a problem.” They don’t really know how to use it, or what to use it for. They just know that when someone puts on a VR headset, they don’t want to take it off. And when they do take it off, they all say the same thing, “Wow.” 

I’m reminded of a day eons ago when I took a box-shaped Apple mouse in my hand and clicked around in Mac Paint for the first time. At that moment, I knew I was witnessing a watershed moment in art, design and communication. I knew everything was about to change. This is where we are with VR. It will be huge. For entertainment, education, medicine, design, science, communication, all of it.

This is the kind of moment brands dream of. The opportunity exists for brands to design immersive sensory worlds and architect experiences of unimaginable scope. But amazingly, brands are sitting on the sidelines. They need to get in there and start imagining, experimenting, and pushing pixels around. Because everything is about to change.

The Road To Innovation Is Short

Faster Pussycat

The pace of business today is brutally fast. To compete, it is critical that companies embrace innovation as a core competency. They must engage in it constantly - iterative design, research and development flowing through a never-ending pipeline.

12 Degrees of Separation

In the pre-Industrial Age, the distance between the maker and the product was very short - maybe literally an arms length away. The maker also had a direct line to the person who was going to use it. In fact, they probably lived in the same town. 

But since then, with larger companies, the concept and the final product can be more than a dozen functional divisions removed from each other, all in the same company. Strategy, finance, consumer insights, trend, product development, merchandising, marketing, sourcing, manufacturing, distribution, retail, the list goes on. 

Game of Telephone

For companies, innovation and product development can be like the game of telephone. There are so many people and phases in the process that the original idea gets lost in the chain of communication by the final stage.

Small = Agile

So, how do large companies win in innovation? By mimicking what small companies do. Small equals agile. Smaller companies have shorter chains of command, short decision making matrices. They have shorter timelines. They have limited resources, so they are highly motivated to be efficient. Stakeholders have greater autonomy, so if they want to do something, they just can go ahead and do it. They don’t have to get 15 stakeholders, 5 divisions, and 3 VPs to agree first.

Distance is Death

The problem is distance. Distance leads to crumby innovation. This pertains to physical distance as well as lengths of time. They both lead to the dumbing down of ideas by degrees.

The traditional innovation approach is to gestate an idea in an R&D group, then hand it off to a Product Development team, who in turns hands off to Sourcing and then a Manufacturing group, etc.

As an innovative concept creeps down the road from one functional department to the next, little by little, the purity of an idea is chipped away. Sacrifices are made for materials, cost, factory efficiency, shipping, retail realities. At times the “innovation” that reaches market has little resemblance to the original concept - if it makes it there at all.

To preserve an innovative concept, the distance between the idea and the final manifestation of it has to be as short as possible.

New innovation approaches call for cross-functional teams to be present throughout the entire process. Multiple stages of review and approval can be condensed and happen simultaneously. This constant representation of disciplines in the pipeline insures that the concept remains pristine and that any divergence is immediately apparent to all stakeholders. This increased transparency has been proven to drastically reduce innovation mortality rates.

Idea Sex

Cross-functional teams can also be great for innovation concept generation. An example of this happened at 3M. Cross-functional teams were reorganized to share physical offices and departments. One day, the adhesive product development team, let’s call them “the glue guys”, was looking to develop a stronger glue. In the formulation process they mistakenly developed a glue that was weaker than the original and could be removed very easily.

It just so happened that the glue guys where working in the same room as the “notepad guys”. The notepad guys were looking for new ways to pin up notes on a board. And the glue guys had this new glue that was removeable. But it was just sticky enough to put a note up on the wall. It was because these two groups were shacked up with each other that the Post-it Note was born.

Fittingly, the Post-It Note has since become the go-to tool for innovation brainstorming sessions around the globe.

Start With Why, Not How

Historically, innovation started with what the factory can do. Some new technological invention would happen in machining. Then you would figure out what products you could make with it. It would start with: “we can make this” – “now, what can we do with it”. Pringles came from tennis ball cylinder packaging in just this way.

New theories and processes for innovation are more “needs driven”. They start with a problem that needs a solution and then precipitate the development of machining or technology to bring it into existence. You start with the problem and end with how-to-make it.

Gantt vs. Slinky

There are different ways to get to a given result. Some are linear, some not. Let’s say you are mapping out an innovation project. Start by imagining the project as a Gantt chart. Imagine a linear progression of a project from start to finish encompassing all the sequential stages. The steps are laid out in overlapping progress bars in two-dimensional space.

Now visualize the innovation project as a Slinky. Imagine a project’s progression seen on its side as a curly-que, more circular in structure, continuously overlapping itself. Does it veer up or down? In three-dimensional space, the “end” result may not be in the linear direction out to the right it - might in fact be above or below. Or even behind.

Insight + Context = Innovation

The principles of Design Thinking are also being brought to bear on innovation. Design Thinking employs empathy for the context of the problem. It leverages creativity in the development of insights and concepts, analyzing various solutions and then applies them to the problem.

By using observational techniques, Design Thinking can uncover problems and issues as well as opportunities that are not immediately apparent. This kind of approach to innovation encourages us to believe in possibility and to think in the abstract. It succeeds with a less linear and more iterative approach.

The New Thing

The market is constantly being saturated with re-makes, re-hashes and sequels to established products and services. In order to break through the noise, truly innovative solutions are necessary. Adopting a new approach to how you shepherd your ideas through the product development pipeline will help retain the integrity of your concepts. It will insure that you hit the market with true disruptive force.

Remember, we put a man on the moon before we put wheels on luggage. Innovation is not always linear. But the road to it is short.

Image credit: Christian Heilmann @ flickr.com

It's All About You

I met with a prospective client recently. She’s a Harvard educated powerhouse, an accomplished musician and recording artist, has a wellness brand and is exploring starting a museum - from scratch.

In our meeting she shared the personal motivation and meaning behind her music, her wellness practice, her museum idea. She shared how they were all integral to one another, synaptically connected. Her musical/creative/wellness/education narrative was important to capture in branding them!

While capturing her philosophy does fit into the equation, I am encouraging her to shift her focus. The motivations of the customers for each of these businesses are quite different. One wants to buy a song. Another wants to de-stress with body work. Another wants to take the kids someplace that will fascinate them for an afternoon.

Your brand narrative needs to capture your passions, but what's key is how you will fulfill your customers desires. Great brands weave the two seamlessly together in a motivating and emotionally evocative way.

photo credit: flickr: rafa_luque

5 Reasons Your Brand Should Be On Pinterest

Although only in development in 2009, Pinterest quickly grew to become one of the most popular platforms for sharing visual content. According to Alexa, Pinterest is now the 29th most visited website in the world, (13th in the U.S.) making it second only to Instagram as a visual discovery network. While less than half of online brands include Pinterest in their list of their digital marketing tools, more businesses are investing in the platform every year, particularly those in industries that rely heavily on visual appeal, such as interior design, fashion and travel.

1 - Influence Purchase Decisions

Visual content is a critical part of almost any digital marketing strategy, particularly in the case of B2C businesses. Content such as infographics and other visual presentations have been proven to have a dramatic influence on purchase decisions, and many Pinterest users rely on the platform. Engagement levels with visual media, such as the images and infographics on the virtual pin boards, are particularly high, with the majority of users having made a purchase after viewing a product presentation on the network.

2 - Use Social Selling

Many social networks have chosen to integrate e-commerce features, allowing users to make purchases directly through the network in question. Pinterest is no exception, and the new Buyable Pins feature will allow your customers to make purchases using the Pinterest app, available for devices running iOS or Android in the US. Pinterest provides its own checkout and payment system as well, and it doesn't cost anything for retailers.   

3 - Strengthen Your Brand

Appealing imagery provides a powerful way to strengthen your brand and give people something to recognize and remember you by. Best of all, you don't even need to have a particularly active profile that needs to be updated on a regular basis. You can simply populate your pinboards with as little or as much content as you like but, provided your content is useful and engaging in nature, it will eventually get noticed. Of course, Pinterest is not without its strong social element either, since it gives you the opportunity to comment on pins, particularly those where your brand is mentioned, in order to become part of a fast-growing social community. It’s worthwhile to note that 39% of retailers report that they have changed their social networking behavior in some way due to Pintrest.

4 - Increased Content Exposure

Pinterest has grown incredibly quickly to enjoy millions of views per day, and while it's certainly not up to the level of Facebook or Twitter, it is one of the most far-reaching visual platforms of all. Simply put, there are few better places to get more exposure for your visual content than Pinterest. In fact, some brands even get more traffic to their websites from the network than from Facebook. Pinterest also makes for an invaluable accessory to any blog or website that relies heavily on visual appeal, such as fashion, retail, food or travel. As Pinterest continues to grow at an unprecedented rate, the increased content exposure it affords is hard to pass up.

5 - Boost Search Rankings

Sharing your content and talking about your products on the mainstream social networks can be an effective marketing tactic, but it's not going to do much for your exposure in the search engines which are, after all, where most Web traffic originates from. However, by properly optimizing your Pinterest profile and the content you post, you can make a significant impact on the search engine results pages as well as on the website's own search engine. You can get a better idea of which keywords to target by using the automated suggestions provided when you search for a topic using the on-site search function.

Final Words

As a growing social network with a relatively unique purpose, Pinterest is a promising platform for marketers. A solid visual content marketing strategy, powered by the likes of Pinterest and Instagram, can help foster engagement with your brand and increase conversion rates. Best of all, the platform is also completely free to use, and it doesn't require anything near the time investment demanded by marketing on Facebook or Twitter.