Campbell on Branding and Innovation

A Whole New Mind

Having been out of school for 9+ years, I found it exciting to see that the Institute of Design's intranet allows professors to post assignments, class notes and reference materials online and that students can then submit their assignments. This allows students to look back in archives at previous semesters to see what past students have done for particular class work and what others have submitted for your class.

Well, I quickly noticed the incrediblely well-designed work turned in. I found it funny to compare the elegantly constructed projects, presentations and even written assignments posted by many classmates with my own work. As I fumble around in PowerPoint, Excel and Word - the standard, rough tools of the Fortune 500 - those students with heavy design backgrounds were working in InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop.

Rather than getting down about my assignments with "two left feet" I was actually jazzed about it for one simple reason - it reminded me why I'm here. As Dan Pink points out in "A Whole New Mind," this isn't a left brain sucks, right brain rules argument, or vice versa. It's using the whole gray mass together to create, build and delight. I'm at ID to improve my design-centered thinking to complement my decade of business-centered thinking. And the design-centered thinkers are here to enhance their business-centered thinking. I may struggle with design at this point, but there are surely designers wrestling with financial topics, product positioning, customer segmentation and the like.

So, as I look at our posted assignments I see two groups that complement and will eventually go from an overlapping Venn diagram of different styles to one whole circle. How cool is that!?

Harley Google Gadget

Here's the Harley-Davidson Google Gadget we did for Sturgis with great results. Thanks to Katia Holmes, Sean Scott and the team at Carmichael Lynch we were able to create the first live streaming gadget. Google had to even allocate more bandwidth on the first full day after launch because of the number of downloads. Since Sturgis we started updating it with new content including MY08 bikes and a 105th anniversary video.

It's been well-documented that interruption media can only do so much anymore and the future is looking bleaker by the day. I'm firmly in the camp that permission marketing, including using online tools such as widgets, is how you communicate with (not to) customers and prospects moving forward. This is only going to get more exciting.

Down and Dirty Prototyping underutilized?

I'm taking a class, Prototyping Methods, that covers the full range from paper to foamcore to digital, what the benefits are, etc. A usability expert from a big web site guest lectured and talked about the importance of prototyping new site features. I was surprised/shocked/fascinated that they often prototype site features and enhancements using sheets of paper with basic sketches. Every week they bring in users, sit them down at a desk and proceed to show them their new site upgrades hand drawn on plain printer paper.

The results are great with subjects really getting into it, using their pen as a mouse to tap on links, fill in text boxes and such. Every time a subject "clicks" on a link the "computer" (a research assistant) hands the subject a new sheet of paper representing the new page they're on. This is a great, simple and inexpensive way to get quick and valuable feedback.

Apparently this is fairly common in UI research but it was new to me (I am a student after all). This got me thinking about how simple prototyping can be for companies, regardless of what they sell. Often companies, especially ones with stylists, designers and big-time engineers, think of prototyping as blowing out fancy clay models, fully-functional sites and the like. Taking a prototype this far causes a couple of problems - 1) It's not easy to make rapid, iterative changes as you gain feedback from users and 2) People fall in love with them and start envisioning the blown-out prototype as a final product, or at least close to final.

But, if you're creating something down and dirty, you can avoid these problems and get debate and improvements on the idea going faster.

It's amazing how little down-and-dirty prototyping is used by a lot of companies, whether for a product, service or site. If a major web site uses sheets of paper to get feedback, certainly consumer durables companies can figure out how to throw something together to get discussion going. You just have to use your imagination and ask your users to do the same. Then the next time a user says, "I wish it had a button here" you can take a minute to make adjustments and turn back to them asking, "You mean like this?"

Full Steam Ahead!

You'll notice it's been about two weeks since I posted last.  That's because I quickly found myself doing a full-time job at Harley and being a full-time student at ID, all while commuting back and forth between Milwaukee and Chicago.  Maybe starting a blog should have come a little later, but at any rate, I'll be posting a lot more now, as I just resigned my position as Manager, Prospect Marketing about 45 minutes ago.  I'm sad to be leaving Harley but look forward to putting my full energy into learning everything I can at ID and becoming a more design-centered thinker.

A design-centered marketer?  Now that sounds like where it's at!