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!”.
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
Make Your Mark
So often we want to create something new. Something out of nothing. Like a business, or a brand, or a blog. But we are paralyzed.
Long before I entered the design and branding arena, I was a painter. I worked on a large scale, usually about 5' x 6'. I’d sit in my studio and contemplate the expanse of white canvas in front of me. What do I do first? What if I blow it? It could be paralyzing.
Over time I discovered the key to unlock this limbo. You just make a mark. Any mark. You just have to disrupt the white of the canvas. Because after you've made that first mark, you have something to react to. To build upon.
So often we want to create something new. Something out of nothing. Like a business, or a brand, or a blog. But we are paralyzed. The answer is the one I found painting. Make a mark. It doesn't matter if it sucks. Because you're going to keep making marks and over time those first marks will be replaced with something better. Something approaching your vision.
I can't tell you that starting isn't the hardest part. It is. But you just have to make one mark and then the journey of creation begins.
photo credit: Anders Lejczak @ Flickr
What Makes You, You?
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.
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.
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 Un-Sexy Solution
Sometimes the best solution isn't the sexiest. Sometimes sexy can distract you from actually getting the job done.
If you ever want evidence why our species has survived so long, Google Images for the phrase "There, I fixed it." You'll find thousands of pictures of hilarious solutions to some of life's challenges. And a lot of duct tape.
Those pictures always reminds me of my days at Gap. I was amazed when I realized that the $16B goliath ran entirely on Excel spreadsheets being emailed around the globe. Unsexy, but it got the job done.
The tech explosion has introduced myriad apps, sites and hardware that are really sexy - with more features than you could explore in a lifetime. You can get lost in the sea of functionality, interfaces and connectedness. Last week I saw a cutting board that has wifi. Really.
But, sometimes the best solution isn't the sexiest. Sometimes sexy can distract you from actually getting the job done. Sometimes a scuffed shoe doesn't need a rechargeable handheld oscillating brush with a touchscreen. Sometimes it just needs some spit and a rub on the back of your pant leg.
Curiosity Not Passion
Curiosity invites exploration and experimentation. Following fascinations can lead you into new worlds.
I was sitting in a lime green room with a drop ceiling. My guidance counselor said, “You should follow your passion”. I thought, OK, great! The only problem was I didn’t have one.
Passion is a word that carries the weight of certainty. Passion burns with a lot of heat. But passion can also run out of fuel before the destination is reached.
If she had asked me instead, “What are you curious about”? That was a question I knew the answer to. I had a bunch of answers to that one.
Curiosity is evergreen and self-perpetuating. Curiosity invites exploration and experimentation. Following fascinations can lead you into new worlds. One interest fuels another and they expand into the realm of possibility.
Even now, we are prodded from every angle to follow our passion. The media says it. The business book authors say it. They say it on Shark Tank. I am certain that there are thousands of brilliant businesses, products and careers that were never launched because someone hit the “passion” wall.
I'll bet curiosity has launched thousands more.
The Road To Innovation Is Short
The pace of business today is brutally fast. To compete, it is critical that companies embrace innovation as a core competency.
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
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.
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
You Are A Package
These days, the physical and digital worlds are packed with brands to choose from. Your goal is getting picked. Becoming someones favorite. How will you make it from the shelf to the cart?
I’ve done a lot of work in consumer packaged goods. The biggest challenge is getting consumers to choose your product from all the others on the shelf. Recently, in working with entrepreneurs and mid-sized businesses I have noticed how many of the guiding principles of CPG translate directly to their branding challenges. Here are three:
Shelf Pop: When you are on display, as an individual or business, you have to know what your competition looks like. What shape are they? What colors do they use? Iconography or photography? Bottle or box? You need to differentiate yourself in a way that makes you jump off the shelf when a purchase decision is being made.
Communication Hierarchy: At most, you get 3 levels of communication. Brand, variant and flavor. You have to make hard choices about what you want your customer to know. What motivates them? A functional or an emotional benefit? Are you going to make them look sexier? Make them smarter? Define what your label says.
Shopper Journey: How do customers shop for you? Impulse buy at checkout? Always right next to the sunglasses? Are you with your competition or are you charting new territory in a different aisle to stand out? Create an intuitive path to help people find you.
These days, the physical and digital worlds are packed with brands to choose from. Your goal is getting picked. Becoming someones favorite. How will you make it from the shelf to the cart?
Snackable Content + You
All we really want is more time. By creating snackable content, you show your audience you value theirs. And they'll thank you for it.
These days everyone is busy. When people are asked what one thing they want more of, they invariably say “time”.
Things are changing because we are all in such a hurry. Even eating is changing. Studies now show up to 1/5 of all meals eaten in the US are eaten in the car. It’s the decade of the snack!
Because we have less time, content is getting shorter. It started with blogs vs. books, then twitter vs. blogs, songs vs. albums, Snapchat vs. YouTube, Periscope vs. webinars, Vine vs. Vimeo, you get it.
But shorter doesn’t necessarily mean better. In fact Noah Kagan wrote in the Huffington Post that “The longer the content, the more shares it gets, with 3,000-10,000 word pieces getting the most average shares”. Google also ranks longer, more in-depth articles higher in search results. In general, long form content is intended to educate, inform and foster deep thinking while short-form content helps your business connect and engage with its audience.
But there are real benefits for you to be creating snackable content. It takes less time, so you can do it more often. It builds the content creation habit. It’s more shareable, so your chances of broader exposure are higher. Most importantly, consistency increases engagement. By keeping it short, you can publish more consistently and in doing that, you’re showing your audience that you value their time.
And all we really want is more time.
photo credit: flickr.com: Uncalno Tekno
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.
Big Brand Punch: Personal Branding & Brand Personality
We hear it all the time.
“I’m working on developing my personal brand”.
Why are people striving to become more like brands, when corporate brands are desperately looking to humanize themselves. Aren’t these divergent movements?
It‘s about survival.
It used to be a business was a specialist worker, a butcher, a cobbler, a carpenter, a cook. With the industrial revolution, businesses scaled and became companies: Woolworths, Macy's, Proctor & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Ford.
Many companies have emotional equities that grew out of the personality of an original founder. The result of this is an unshakable authenticity. For example, Colonel Sanders of KFC, Martha Stewart or Ralph Lauren.
Brands that don't have visible founders strive to invent brand personalities and archetypes through characters, celebrities or humor like the Marlboro Man, GIECO’s gecko, Tony the Tiger, Ronald McDonald or Michael Jordan for Nike.
Why do they do it?
Brand authenticity is very hard to accomplish without “a face” associated with it. Someone to believe and to believe in. Not having a face creates mistrust. In fact, for most people, the term "faceless corporation" is associated with greed, resource pillage and disregard for human needs and dignity in the pursuit of profit. Think BP, IBM, Citibank, Exxon, Comcast, Merrill Lynch. While brands with faces; Virgin, Apple and Tesla, create a sense of ease, familiarity and foster a deeper level of trust.
When it comes right down to it, people trust and identify with brands with human characteristics. It’s what we do as humans. We anthropomorphize things. What is the value in bestowing human characteristics on a non-human entity? Simple. Studies have found that brands that adhere to brand personality archetypes are twice as successful than those that do not. [Boom, drops the mic.]
So how do companies define a personality?
Science. Corporations and brand strategy agencies use consumer insight research, macro and micro socio-economic trend, focus groups and behavioral audits to uncover the human characteristics a brand possesses. "If X-brand walked into a party, What gender are they? What age? What are they wearing? What are they drinking? Talking about?” “If X-brand was an animal what kind of animal would it be?" Brand strategists have been sharpening these exploratory research techniques for decades and know exactly how to dig into our psyches. I know, I’ve been in the focus group labs where it happens.
Big branding gloves.
Brands also utilize a variety of strategic brand positioning tools. The most common being a “brand pyramid”, where the aspects of a brand are mapped in a pyramid shape. The bottom layers establish the functional attributes and benefits. The upper layers clarify the emotional benefits, brand personality and brand essence, the singular fundamental idea that captures what is at a brands emotional core.
Additional strategic brand foundation tools include mission and vision statements, brand values, positioning statements, aspirational consumer target maps – the list goes on. This work can fill volumes. The purpose of this strategic foundation is to assure the consistency and efficacy of brand equities, messaging, advertising, packaging, visual design – essentially every brand touch point. They also set in stone the ethos of what a brand stands for, who it’s customers are, what it delivers, what problem it is solving.
Focused brand strategies and finely tuned brand personalities resonate with consumers. Brand loyalty and affinity are achieved by making the brand feel like an old friend. This is where brand evangelists are made. If you do it right, it can be very lucrative. Just ask Apple. Nike. Rolex. BMW. Some consumers even associate their own personal identities with brands living in that rarified air.
The game changer.
There was a time when workers used to be defined by their jobs and brand affiliations. It used to be: he’s an IBM man, she’s a P&G gal, those are Met Life guys.
With the changes brought about by the internet and the dawn of the global economy, millions have been swept out of employment with corporations and set adrift. They no longer have a workplace, external brands, geography or affiliations to help them anchor their identity. The only hope of survival is self-employment in a new digital world with no roadmap, no borders and no limits. We are becoming a nation of free agents.
But while it has erased so much security, the internet has also leveled the business playing field. Now an individual can have all the media reach, technological capability and infrastructure any large company.
Fighting above your weigh class.
Reclaiming Americas Soul: Our Social/Industrial rEvolution
I was listening to a TEDx talk by a trend consultant friend recently and she mentioned how she thought that our consumption model is broken and that America is missing its soul. I think she’s right. But, how did that happen? Where are we headed now and what does it mean for the brand landscape?
America came into its own during the Industrial Revolution. Our factories, workers, products and standard of living was the envy of much of the world. Other countries wanted to be us once. Whether they really want to admit that now or not.
We lived the Industrial Model.
But, over time our desire to own more and more things in order to attain our ever-inflating image of prosperity, drove us to need products to be less expensive. Less expensive because Americans middle-class wages have stagnated for the last 30 years, as former Labor Secretary Robert Reich pointed out in his eye-opening video “The Truth About the Economy”. Sadly, our wages have not kept pace with our appetite to own more things.
So, we out-sourced our production overseas. But the price we paid was dear. Entire industries in the US crumbled. Furniture making, textiles, steel production, automobiles, electronics, the list goes on and on. Physically and culturally it decimated our heartland. Look no farther than Detroit, but we all know the list is much longer.
We began to discover that not making things hollows out your soul.
We’ve become a nation of middle-men and service providers. In fact, 86% of jobs in America are in services and 14% are in goods production and manufacturing. But there are huge numbers of our population who don’t have the skill sets or the desire to become white-collar workers. So the collective pride of the worker begins to die along with their cities.
The white collar workers find their work rooted in technology. Entire industries are living in the digital domain. Employees, initially enthralled by the computer and its magic have become surrounded, ruled and overwhelmed by the technology they once coveted.
At the same time, big box stores became the norm and Mom & Pop businesses disappeared from Main Street. Every town in America looking like every other town - the same collection of retailers, only with different weather.
But there is a renaissance happening.
People have begun to want to create something they can touch. Something you can’t send in an email. There is a new makers movement, a movement of people wanting to get back in touch with making actual things. Reviving dying trades, artisan skills, mills and factories. There are printers, wood workers, bicycle makers, textile designers and manufacturers, blacksmiths, craft brewers and jewelers.
People driven by a need to create. Their souls are fed by it. To produce and distribute goods bound by an ethos of sustainability, craftsmanship and local trade. Market places, pop-up stores and curated websites (digital, I know) are springing up with a decidedly anti-chain, pro-Mom & Pop, pro-local personality bent. Consumers want a human face and a name to go along with a product. For it to come from a place that they know how to find on a map. And most importantly, todays consumer wants these products. They value a true story.
Witness the Social/Industrial rEvolution being born.
Big brands are desperately trying to find a voice for themselves that is credible in this new model. Trying to use social media and acquisitions to make themselves appear much smaller, with a human face and a genuine narrative. Take Clorox’s purchase of Burt’s Bees for example. But for the most part the consumer public is seeing through the facade. The only way to sound local is to be local. The way to appear small is to be small. The way to be hand-crafted is to get your hands dirty.
This new model is built on quality over quantity, knowing where its materials came from, knowing where it was made, knowing a little about the person who made it. With all the digital connectivity we have at our disposal, what we have come to miss most of all, and want to get back is connection.
Physical and emotional connection is the heart of the Social/Industrial rEvolution.
This rEvolution is about being true. Brands that embrace this evolution and live by its ethos will win a place of honor in consumers lives. Because we want to feel we are once again makers, doers and creators. We want to truly own our success. We want to play a part in reclaiming Americas soul.
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ADDENDUM: On the flip side of this coin we have the "4th Industrial Revolution" which is the digital evolution of our society and economy. Thanks to John Hawthorne, for sharing this article that comes at our societal evolution from a different perspective.
Image Credit: Anna Zoromski/Miles @ flickr.com
"Brand" is Tired
The word “brand” is tired. It is no longer inspiring to the savvy client. It used to be you could get clients jazzed and hungry for change by merely uttering the word in association with their products. They desperately desired to be a real “brand”.
But “brand” has become a hackneyed term, part of pop culture where every teen on Facebook is nurturing their own personal brand. But I would argue that because of this, having a clearly communicated brand is even more important. The expectations of the consumer have been raised. But “brand” is too small a word to describe what the world expects from a product or service company anymore.
What I see time again, even with Fortune 100 clients, is a brand ecosystem or brand experience that is fractured. Considering the totality of a brands equities and representing them consistently at every consumer touchpoint has gotten harder to achieve as the range of touchpoints has grown exponentially over the last couple decades. Even the biggest brands are often confusing their customers.
What we are really being tasked to do for our clients is “experience design”. This encompasses the whole of a brand, all equities and all consumer interactions. It is our job to come in with fresh eyes and tell them what is broken and what we need to do to fix it. To perform beyond the brief. Show them what could be.
In the world of consumer goods, packaging is the big gun. Experience with a capital “E”. Packaging is a touchpoint that triggers all of the senses. Sight, touch, smell, sound and (in some cases) taste. More than any other, packaging is the equity that keeps on giving. It lives on the consumers home, in their cupboard, on their desk, visible on their shelf long after the purchase decision was made. It is the one equity that can, if well executed, drive trial when a consumer encounters the brand for the first time at a store. We must remember that up to 65% of purchase decisions are made when the consumer is standing in front of the shelf, in that final 3 seconds.
If consumers are overwhelmed and are not choosing our clients offering that is our fault. It is because of an inconsistent brand strategy and an articulation that is not differentiated from its competition. You have to throw a big rock to make a splash these days.
When brands develop, execute and guard focused equities and a clear strategy is when they win. It is our job in design to be bold, be different and create a remarkable “experience”.
Because creating a “brand” is no longer enough.
Credits: Image Source: Flickr.com: Adam Goode
In The Future: All Design Will Be Free
Hear me out on this one. In the future, All Design Will Be Free.
That's right. Free. Anything that can be digitally created: graphic design, music, video, animation, photography, illustration, etc. will be created specifically for you, for free.
Just look at what's happening around us in the branding and design landscape. In the past big branding consultancies could charge top dollar for corporate identities, branding, packaging, collateral, visual media, film, videos, animation. It wasn't uncommon for a Landor, a Pentagram, a Vignelli Associates, to charge $1MM or more from a large corporate ID project. Oodles of research, focus groups, rounds and rounds of explorations and revisions, massive style guides. Don't get me started on advertising. Those dollar figures are sick.
Not to say that those projects don't still happen today, they do. But there is a shift happening.
Those budgets are half what they used to be. Companies are bringing in smaller and smaller agency players that are doing things on the cheap and they are getting cheaper all the time. But corporate ID has taken the smallest hit, all things considered. Where the real bite has come is in the smaller projects. The $50K- $250K projects. "Smaller" being a relative term here.
A couple years ago, I worked on developing a new natural food brand for the biggest grocery store chain in the US. At the last minute, the EVP of private label brands decided to "crowdsource" the brand identity logo. The creative brief was drafted, posted on one of the largest crowdsourcing websites and a prize of $2500 was offered to the winner. We, the agency, were shocked and dismayed, of course. We just watched $100K of our project revenue evaporate. Poof.
Now the design phase of this particular crowdsourcing project saga is a topic for another post. Its long, head-spinning and funny if it wasn't so terrifying. Suffice to say that the client burned 6 weeks of design development time and we were handed a very subpar identity to deal with at the end if it all.
From the point of view of the client, if they could get an identity they liked for $2500 when it was originally going to cost them $100K from the agency, who wouldn't do it?
That's a 97.5% cost reduction, by the way.
We all know crowdsourcing design sites like DesignCrowd, Crowdspring, 99Designs are devaluing design and the design industry as a whole. For example, 99Designs has had 6.5 million logos submitted in the past three years. The company has paid out $20MM - or an average of $3 per design. A sobering figure.
The UK designer Andrew Kelsall posted on his blog a response to a client who decided, after engaging him for a quote, to crowdsource their design project:
"This...is putting hard-working designers out of business. 99% of the designers (on the site)...effectively work for free."
Sadly, this monster was created by the designers themselves. By participating in crowdsourcing, they have driven down prices of design, are promoting pitch-work, and are lowering their own chances of making a living.
But now specifically commissioned creative work is being done for pennies, too.
On Fiverr.com there are literally hundreds of designers who are willing to create work for just five dollars. The site has coders, website builders, videographers, photographers, animators, voice-over artists, musicians, all who offer services for five bucks. In many cases what you get for five bucks is pretty amazing. Granted, designers on the site up-sell for elevated levels of deliverables services, but the precedent is set. And the competition is fierce.
Every day creatives on Fiverr.com are offering more and more for your five bucks.
Hoping to be among the chosen for a project, design hopefuls are doing work for free. Creatives in the developing world economies in particular are making out-sourcing digital creative work incredibly easy and competitive.
In the natural food brand project for the grocery chain I mentioned above, the client received 800 logo submissions to choose from. There were over 250 designers who did work, and some of it very good work, for only the slightest of hope of being chosen. The client saw all the work, evaluated all the work and asked for revisions on a great deal of the work. Then they paid one person for one design.
The rest, 799 designs, they got for free.
Today anything that can be digitally created and transferred: music, design, photography, coding, etc. is being given away for free by talented people who just want their work to be appreciated by someone, somewhere. On Flickr.com, there are currently 58 million photographs available to use under an Attribution Only Creative Commons License. Which means you can use the photos for free commercially, as long as it is attributed to the photographer.
Increasingly, if you want free design work, fonts, video, animations you can get them. Easily. You can use them with the creators blessing. The quality of the work is going up everyday. And it's only going to get better.
And eventually, it will all be free.
Credits:
Image source: "Free Design" http://www.doobybrain.com