Firstly they are paying for it, and secondly their product and brand is at the mercy of it. But the result is all to often that expert craftsmanship and brilliant work is being destroyed and turned into mediocre craft and ineffective communication at the hands of unskilled clients. Affecting all parties negatively.

Is only one party to blame here? Or is the problem more nuanced? With both creatives and companies having to be more aware of their weaknesses and strengths?

In my presentation Designing Identities I mention that:

“We need to include our clients in the articulation of design, if not products will become unsophisticated and conservative (research proves that the will of unarticulated people creates products that people themselves find uninteresting and boring).”

Aaron Winters requested the references to this, and I thought the feedback would be interesting for several readers:

1. The first reference is from the book Emotional Design by Donald Norman, where he mentions an art project where two artists ask people their preferences in regards to visualization and art. Collecting a range of answers these are then used as instructions for a series of paintings, which garnered terrible feedback. Directly externalizing people’s preferences turned ideas of beauty into something expected and boring.

You can find a larger reference to this statement on slide 17 in the slideshow below, or here.

2. The second and third reference are both from Malcolm Gladwell’s, talk at PopTech!

First Gladwell talks about a research project where a group of students were asked to choose their favorite of two posters; one impressionistic and one of a cat. The first group could just take their favorite poster and leave. But the second group had to explain what they liked about the image and then take it. The group that could just take the poster (without explanation) tended to take the impressionistic one, the group that had to explain their preference tended to take the one of the cat. Even more interesting was the fact that when the researchers called these people back after a while to ask them if they still had/liked the posters, the group who chose the impressionistic one tended to still like their posters while the people who picked the cat did not.

3. Secondly Gladwell mentions that some TV stations in the US turned down what would later prove to be some of America’s most popular TV shows after asking everyday people their opinion on the pilots. The interesting thing about this though is that what the focus groups would criticize and dislike was the things that eventually would make these shows a great success – the quirkiness, the odd things out, the exaggerated personality, the unexpected.

Gladwell points to several things:

- Having to explain our preferences changes them, because we start favoring the stuff we can explain.
- Having to explain ourselves changes our preferences to the least sophisticated, traditional and expected.
- Having to explain ourselves changes our preference from something we really would like, to something we don’t.

At the same time as these three references favor the work and craft of the designer or art director there are arguments favoring the clients perspective:

While clients are not skilled in the creative crafts most designers and art directors are not skilled business experts. And almost no one has as good an understanding of the clients business as the business themselves – shooting out brilliant ideas is one thing, solving business challenges and generating value inside a foreign context a completely different one.

Donald Norman in his article “Design thinking: A useful Myth” suggests that designers, in the context of design thinking, do not possess “some mystical, creative thought process that places them above all others in their skills at creative, groundbreaking thought”, but they do offer an outside perspective.

And I would ad; have a greater propensity to push one self out of the excepted and into the unexpected.

People skilled in the creative crafts are indispensible in the role of solving big communication challenges for companies who need disruptive and innovative solutions. But it is not because they, as Norman says, possess some unnatural ability to have all the solutions in the universe – it is because they help clients remove blinders, and push them to explore opportunities in what will initially be perceived as uncomfortable spaces.

And this is the problem; it is not that the creative work is to good or to bad. The root of the challenge is that creative professionals need to understand that their work is as much related to removing blinders and luring clients into the uncomfortable. If they are not able to do that from a business perspective and on a layman’s level in regards to the design craft, then the product or solution they provide will seem natural to them but be without explanation and relevant context to the client.

A descriptive example is the OMO/Unilever campaign being run in Brazil at the moment (read it here: popsop.com / brandchannel.com). Where they are putting a large GPS tracking device into 50 boxes of a new OMO detergent. And then having teams follow customers as they take it out of the store. At home the people are given a small video recorder and asked to video tape personal moments of family happiness.

To me this presents several missed opportunities. First of all having teams following 50 boxes in a large country as Brazil seems like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Secondly the prize seems to small, thirdly asking people to share their private and personal family moments with the world might be difficult (at least when you are only inviting 50 random people to participate). And lastly; this is detergent, people don’t care, and the context surrounding detergent is probably more connected to housework or clean stuff than the universal value of family happiness (I rant, and am not familiar with the target group, but there it is).

What the campaign does unveil though, and is a brilliant example of, is how bad we are in the communications and creative business at using technological innovation to do our own innovation. We seem to spend large amounts of time and resources on picking out a technology, fitting it into a marketing campaign (and avoiding the hurdles it introduces), rather than using it to innovate our own concepts.

What I am saying is that new technology hasn’t brought with it new ideas, we are just using these new opportunities as vehicles for old communication strategies.

Donald Norman suggest that technology always comes first, and then it creates a need. I interpret this as technology in the beginning will always be rudimentary and difficult to use – innovation in application and design follows in the footsteps of the technology (and I might be a bit impatient).

But we need to keep our eyes on the goal, we need to be aware that we are still talking to people in the same old way – even if the format available has changed completely. In a former post I mentioned the mobile industry having been the only industry to see that what they have been doing has been completely wrong – it is time for the other industries to follow suit.

With the energy, innovation and ideas we are seeing from engineers, start-ups and even companies established production and logistical chains, the creative business is presenting itself as conservative and slow to react.

The creative business might be the most boring business.

The presentation discusses some of the challenges and opportunities of design today, as I see them. The content has previously been posted as three articles on popsop.com and linked to from this blog. The presentation tries to put it all together, make it more internet consumption friendly (read: packed with sound bites), and offer it as a pleasant and enjoyable printable document.

As always the individual slides can be found on flickr.com/everythingnewisdangerous

Find the presentation on slideshare.net/helgetenno/designing-identities or below.

One of my personal mantras has always been: “Never stop, as soon as you’ve found a solution – start questioning it”. In an ongoing email discussion William Channer, he asked me to elaborate. I thought the answer would be well worth posting on the blog:

WC: Why is this important to you?:
“Never stop, as soon as you’ve found a solution – start questioning it”

Two reasons:

1. This is not the time for status quo’s. Working in an environment where the pattern of platform usage, media consumption and technology awareness in the general public is in constant development means that the currency of our products needs to meet this change. As we have not yet “landed” on the next big thing but finding our way there (we are currently in between generations), settling down can quickly either leave one stranded or result in the loss of a big opportunity.

For our clients this is the time to gain market opportunities through new business models, utilizing technology and behavior in tailored ways (like Amazon has done for the book industry or Google for the media industry the last fifteen years). If we are not helping our clients discover and develop new opportunities, but milk old ones, are we doing our job?

2. Deconstructing concepts, taking them apart and challenging each fragment is a way of exploring and discovering ideas. Amongst others described by Stephen King in the book A Master Class in Brand Planning: Find one idea and then try to destroy it.

The benefit of this process is both a chance to polish the final concept and make sure every detail is perfect, but also to understand how and why the details work, and uncovering new insight in the process. Deconstructing something you’ve already did that worked gives you great ammunition not for copying it, but for finding out why it was a success, and then understanding which specific details in it made it work and why other details did not.

As an example advertisers have always known what types of communication gave an intended effect, but it is only in the last twenty years brain science has been able to tell us exactly why. Which has led to an offspring of brand new ideas based on the specific knowledge of how the brain works as opposed to just copying known “advertising rules”.

To put it briefly: People constantly adopt and implement new ways of communicating and of fitting technology into their everyday life. By deconstructing our big ideas into smaller fragments we have a better tool for knowing what will work when building solutions on new platforms for new behaviors – and by that the “risk” or “guts” people often talk about when explaining creativity becomes rational and logical – even safe.

This does not make marketing and design boring, but it demands more thinking about thinking. – And it demands as much creativity from the strategic department as from the creative department.

Some arguments:

1. Integration is not merely about offering services where people are, it’s about implementing connected technology within our everyday objects, or designing new objects based on the new opportunities and additional meaning introduced by technology.

Which gives that this could introduce a completely new generation of needs and behaviors: In the words of Donald Norman;

“Need is created by technology, not the other way around.” Link.

2. With integration we are not only moving from destination sites to aggregate sites, from horizontals to verticals. We are moving from screens to objects, from input devices to sensors and from keyboarded instruments to everyday life.

Jesko Stoetzer’s RFID Sleeve prototype for the Betacup project is a good example. Showing how digital technology, using no screens, no keyboards, just an electronic augmentation and a redesign of an existing object, the cup sleeve. Can improve the coffee experience for enthusiasts, create new business opportunities and increase product sustainability.

3. Microsoft put it carefully in its Europe Logs on Report in April 2009:

“The use of Internet on PC’s will decrease from 95% today to only 50% the next five years.” – pdf

But Microsoft was only talking about our connected lives moving from PC’s to mobile, gaming platforms or “connected TV-boxes”. They where not looking into the emerging opportunities from smart objects, SPIMEs or coffee sleeves.

The Europe Logs on report were looking at machines. But the days when only machines were connected to the Internet is already in the past.

There is an important distinction to make in order to arrive at the conclusion that we are moving into a new Internet era, and that is the one between the machine and the object. What Russel Davies, in his talk “Printing the Internet out and squirting it into things” at the Lift Conference calls the device and the object.

Devices are machines where the structure of the object itself affords no utility, but there is a screen and a circuit board in there offering us a range of opportunities. And object is different, it already has an immediate utility, but technology ads a new layer of meaning.

“Devices fool us because they look like objects and do all this stuff, and we are kind of hypnotized by their ability to do all this stuff. Where as when you see an ornament in the shop you know exactly what it is and what it is for. And you don’t except more of it. I think some of the delights that some of these can contain is when it looks like a simple object but contains meaning that you weren’t excepting.” – Russel Davies.

4. Machines are hubs. Take the mobile phone as an example; it should be (and hopefully will be) connecting people to their objects, not filled with an application for each one (object).

Appvertising and applications belong to machines, and are just scratching the surface of connected technology, it is by and far only the answer to the following question: “What do people want access to all the time?”

Integration as a term is not about access, it’s about turning everyday objects into identities, which enables them to organize, create structure and through feedback add a new layer to spaces in our everyday life.

Bill Moggridge mentions in his book Designing Interactions, that there are not only three (spatial) dimensions to an interface, but also a fourth one; time. We are now building a fifth dimension; the digital identity of the physical object.

The digital life of physical objects is what Kevin Slavin discusses in his talk This Platform Called Everyday Life at the PSFK Conference in New York. This quote where he references a video of a cat molesting a Webkinz:

“This cat is completely unaware of the most important thing about this particular stuffed animal. Which is that it has a whole other life online. This is a Webkinz stuffed animal. And this cat has no idea. It thinks it’s actually engaging with the thing, and in fact it has a whole parallell life thats going on, that this cat can’t touch. And I want to make it clear, that this is where we are heading, towards a world in which entities have this physical presence as well as this digital presence.”

Conclusion:
The important shift with integration is not that we put technology into things (devices), but that everyday objects with an existing physicality and purpose, get a new dimension and additional meaning: A digital identity.

With these identities comes data, responsiveness, organization and connection.

The next generation is all about connecting our stuff, offering new layers of meaning to our objects, our situations and the world at large.

The top three answers were all connected with consumer demand, which are all OK points to make, but when compared to the three least popular responses, all linked to business incentives, it seems the focus has been turned a bit up-side-down. It seems businesses are more focused on doing what their customers say, at a cost, rather than doing it for themselves – doing stuff where the company has identified a direct business advantage from having a presence online and want to take advantage of the opportunity.

- This cost-driven strategy might also explain the dreary state of Internet offers today. Where most companies find being just as good as every other brand in their category is good enough – there is no money in it!

THIS IS IMPORTANT, because we are overly focused on talking about people and staring into this black box of consumer habits and behaviors. With extensive demands being added by social media, demand that only a few companies find interesting enough to take on. (It’s more “Lets avoid a mistake”-thinking than “This is an opporuntiny”-thinking as Jon Steel would have said)

But this is hopefully all about to change…

The next generation of online activities will be inherently linked to business advantage, rather than consumer demand. And by that we should also see the real money being poured in, not just marketing pocket lint.

Interesting? This is a good start: Business Model Generation.

Find the presentation below or at slideshare.net/helgetenno.

As always find the individual slides under CC-license here: flickr.com/everythingnewisdangerous

I’ve included the part of the script describing the three areas of retail I’ve concentrated on; product, in-store and business opportunities:

Product opportunities
The product is not just a “brand” living on a shelf or being consumed by a member of the public. It is a character, which within the framework of a strong identity changes its characteristics to fit different roles through the stages of its own lifecycle; from the initial idea, the spark, to its realization (design), its distribution, shelf life, shared product experience and recycling (sustainability). Digital amplifies the characteristics, and helps the identity adapt at each stage.

In-store opportunities
The retail outlet is the most important arena for public choice. It is intense in its range of decisions, and numbing in its range of (similar) products. Inside this arena there are limited opportunities within frameworks. Frameworks put in place by the non-digital, non-organic world of cardboard and floor space. Digital transcends the limitations of the shop infrastructure, serving communication through personal devices controlled by a digital brain in “the cloud”.

In the advertising mindset the retail communication belongs to the “call-to-action” category. But this limits itself both in its expense on resources (financial and labor), scarcity of real estate and limited time span. In the design mindset the goal is rather strength through identity, creating a long lasting top-of-mind preference through establishing an interesting story, sharing values, creating memberships and avoiding the retail rock concerts of advertising.

Business opportunities
There are new business opportunities to be explored and discovered through the extension of digital and organic platforms. From engaging the crowds to taking the store to the world – not limiting access to it by physical destination. In categories where products follow patterns and become remarkably similar, it is digital and organic platforms that not only invite customers to explore and discover new, unique experiences. But also develop more layered identities, establishing thicker product relationships, and unwrap new business opportunities.

—

A special thanks to PSFK which as with a stroke of coincidence launched their brilliant PSFK Future of Retail Report just last week, adding a whole section to my presentation – I’ve been extensively referencing the source.

PSFK Future of Retail Report

I would also ad these brilliant people and publications as they all helped in filtering the cases and surfacing the best ones:

springwise.com
popsop.com
mashable.com
rubbishcorp.com
adverblog.com
Ingmar de Lange
mobilemarketer.com
digitalbuzzblog.com
Zeus Jones
storefrontbacktalk.com
cpbgroup.com
techcrunch.com
Seth Godin
Richard Murray (for giving us the best insight on retail)
and for his brilliant and extensive posts, *Supercollider at geoffnorthcott.com.

During a short talk with Ji Lee at Gulltaggen 2010, he presented a hierarchy where advertising is at the top, then marketing, brand and at the bottom design. I’d never thought of placing these four fields into such a structure, but loved the concept, and it made sense to position them in relation to each other in this way.

Trying to design this idea, I ended up drawing a pyramid and started adding context to each stage…

Advertising
At the top of the pyramid, advertising can be at least three things:

1. Positioning (Al Ries, Jack Trout),
2. Creating an anticipation of the experience outside the experience itself.
3. Direct sales

Advertising is a great tool for selling anything from low interest products to aiding in creating or changing the perception of a brand. Advertising is tangible, but swift and constantly changing. Its stories and messages are focused on getting people to perform an action. Advertising is designed from briefs defined by guidelines, strategies and goals further down the pyramid; it’s top level communication.

Marketing
Marketing is the process of promoting and selling goods and services. It’s executed through individual actions, but fundamentally it’s the overall strategic program, defining, coordinating and executing on all levels of the organization. Marketing is the sum of day to day activities putting products to market and activating people through promotion and sales. Marketing is designed to achieve company goals and is constrained/directed by brand and design.

Brand
There are as many definitions of what a brand is as there are brand experts, from Neumeier’s “gut feeling”, to Yakob’s “The collective perception”. One thing is for certain; brand value exists in the mind of people engaging with it – not the company itself. But still, there needs to be guidance and direction to this value. The brand strategy defines how the company should achieve the right set of values. Branding aims at creating an advantage in a market place filled with identical products, as Helen Fischer quotes George Bernard Shaw: “Love is overestimating the difference between one woman and another”. The brand direction defines a framework and guides the rest of the company’s promotional and sales activities, but it is not fundamental, it is not the core company idea.

Design
The fundamental idea behind the company comes from its design. From identifying how to offer value in a specific situation, to designing the product (or service), how it creates value, its unique, identifiable identity, its story, form, interaction etc. From the initial value proposition to its tangible product the design defines how it creates value, how it performs, and how it remarks itself in the marketplace.

Design in this context is not just the visualization of an engineered product; it’s the comprehensive identity of the company or product – from the ground up.

–

By looking at the pyramid we can identify the role of each field of communication and how it relates to the other fields. (Advertising is created on the basis of the marketing strategy, which is the consequence of the brand and design platform. The brand is an enforcer of, or supplement to, the design – or lack of design).

It’s also important to note that job title does not define which part of the pyramid you are working on. Great ideas come from great groups of people, not labels. The point is: Understanding the role of the job at hand, and how this job is positioned in the greater complexity of the communications strategy.

In his talk on FMCG, brands and product design, Richard Murray suggests that we are better at creating categories than individual brands.

Is the sameness of unoriginal ideas to be blamed on our processes being too similar? If the analysis to the insight, to the design and form follows the same pattern across consultancies, agencies and brands, then everybody follows a similar pattern in order to discover the great insight that leads to the unique idea. The problem is, there is a lack of unique ideas. We are in a hammer and nail situation: “If we think our only tool is a hammer then every problem looks like a nail”.

Organic platforms isn’t only evidence of this, it might as well be the biggest category driven collection of surfaces we have.

A great deal of organic productions are built on an offspring of a model created back in 2000. A brilliant tool with an unfortunate side effect: everybody follows an identical pattern for development, one that engineers the structure in a one-dimensional approach, before adding identity at the end; as some kind of tag.

There are originally two legs to identity: The first one is the understanding that the visual identity and story of the product helps it differentiate itself in the market and create a place in peoples harts. The second one is the experience created around the product which helps the product become unique, by enhancing its identity through experience.

On organic platforms there is a third leg as well: Identity design is not only used to design experiences, it also identifies existing experiences.

What does this mean: Designing identities, on organic platforms, has expanded it’s traditional form, which to a large extent has been focused on visual identities and story. Designing identities now also demands that we identifying existing experiences and redesign / augment / ad value to them.

The result of the existing generic standardization, is that it has created an overwhelming range of sameness. Different brands offering the same services, content and applications online – following a pattern that not only creates a surge to make sure we are offering whatever everybody else is offering (the artificial standard / benchmark), but worse – having everything created, copyable by the competition.

Adding a different color scheme or logic at the end of a process does not create a unique experience, it merely ads a label to a generic offering. This is the result of a mindset where identity takes a back seat and is added at the end.

A generic brand identity is not an identity, its a category.

Unique and identifiable brands on organic platforms comes from doing the opposite to the standard process: It starts with the identity, and employs it to every strategic and creative decision from the first spark to the finale. Resulting in a unique and identifiable experience, which the competition is unable to copy and standardize in the marketplace.

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