Campbell on Branding and Innovation

A Few Interesting Articles

Doing some reading over the past week or so, I came across a few interesting articles I thought I'd share:

In an earlier post on ad agencies as commodities, I mentioned some examples of good/new/different/game-changing/relevant agencies, including Anomaly. Ad Age has a nice write-up of what they're doing well including, most importantly in my opinion, addressing compensation and working on innovation of offerings not communication about offerings.

Spending less on TV, more on worthwhile areas such as interactive, experiences, etc. And make sure and short the stocks of those media giants.

Building off my last post, more on Obama's marketing. Brands that are dynamic and relevant to their audiences generate this kind of work.

Chris Anderson, Wired editor and Long Tail author, on Free and Abundance. Anderson spoke at the Design Strategy Conference last year and previewed this book topic. Smart stuff. And you can get the issue for free.

I was excited to see Lara Lee, former Vice President, Enthusiast Services at Harley-Davidson, with a Business Week article regarding the danger of over-promising on the power of design thinking, lest it come back to haunt you when the economy is down.

Kluster.com - a fantastic concept! Why didn't I do this? (don't answer that) This is sweet and potentially super huge. Any chance they need someone to help integrate innovation frameworks to provide some structure and direction?

And building off my Linkages post, this Business Week article gives me hope that Motorola sticks with mobile phones in spite of themselves.

I hope you enjoy. If it seems like people are getting value out of these types of roundups, I'll post more as I come across good pieces since I'm always reading and harvesting information from all over.

Greetings from Copenhagen!

I am writing from Copenhagen where I'm visiting family and meeting with design people to learn more about the action here in Denmark. I arrived last Friday and have been having a blast visiting with family and such. Yesterday I was able to meet with several super smart people that are on top of design here in Denmark.

In the morning I met with the Technology + Trends team at Innovation Lab. They are doing some very exciting stuff with the exploration of technology and its impact and potential. They cover everything from design and prototyping to educational opportunities - workshops and talks - for organizations, research and trend papers and more. After working on a semester-long Design Planning Workshop project about Gen Y and the future of shopping, it was quite exciting to read about some of Innovation Lab's thoughts and insights on the future of retail as it matches well with what our team uncovered and recommended to the client. I highly recommend spending some time checking out their site.

Underestimating the distance, I then walked, and walked, and walked to get to Kontrapunkt for a meeting with one of the principles and the brand strategy director. Kontrapunkt is one of Denmark's premier branding and corporate identity design consultancies. They were kind enough to spend two hours over lunch discussing the state of design in Denmark, design as strategy for businesses here, and more. In addition, their offices were very cool.

Finally, I met with Tore Kristensen, a professor at the Copenhagen Business School. He filled me in on his viewpoint on design as business strategy and some of the research projects he's working on. Tore was incredibly knowledgeable, providing me an overview of the evolution of Danish design, discussing new areas of innovation and even recommendations of additional design consultancies.

I am trying to meet with ReD Associates later this week, which is a well-known strategy and innovation consultancy.

While each meeting was fascinating in its own right, collectively I got interesting perspectives on Danish design and will post some thoughts later on how this country, known so well for design, is doing in pushing it into business strategy. But for now I'm heading out to visit the Danish Design Center and do some shopping on Stroget. I'll post on how the Center tour goes.

Copenhagen's new Opera House

Further Discussion on Saving Ad Agencies

A few weeks ago I wrote on how agencies are becoming commodities and followed that up with six steps to remedy the situation.

I've seen some interesting articles and posts on this topic recently as well - Business Week profiled Saatchi & Saatchi in describing the potential irrelevance of traditional agencies and the competition from other areas including permission marketers. Fast Company just wrote about Publicis trying to reinvent itself digitally - of course, if their hopes are pinned on Honeyshed I'd recommend shorting them (check out David Armano's initial thoughts on Honeyshed). And my friend Sean Scott, interactive wizard at agency Carmichael Lynch, posted ideas here and here on fixing traditional agencies, over at his blog, twofortyeight. I love the concept of adding an information architect to the traditional art director/copywriter duo. That staid partnership is as archaic as the tactics they have generated traditionally - print and TV. And with the importance of digital it only makes sense to include that position early on in the concepting phase. Excellent idea, Sean.

I Love Gadgets, Widgets and Apps

I caught the tail end of a Harley-Davidson Christmas spot the other day. I didn't get to see the whole thing and, as anyone in advertising knows, once you try to catch a spot you'll never see it and the ones you don't want to see keep showing up. So I was super happy to come across the spot on the Harley gadget on my iGoogle page. It turns out that it's on the h-d.com site as well but I didn't think to look there, it's easier when it's pushed to me. Here's the gadget with the spot:

I think it's pretty good, fits the brand and I like the pipes being left under the tree. Whaddya think?

Anyway, I was just sent a Harley Naughty List gift on Facebook based on the holiday campaign from a buddy of mine. I also just became a fan of Patagonia, Dr. Pepper and Willie Nelson on Facebook. I know when Seth, Tom or David post something new thanks to my Bloglines acount. I've been to 87 cities in 12 countries thanks to the TripAdvisor "Cities I've Visited" app. I know there's 72 days, 23 hours and 39 minutes until Daytona Bike Week thanks to the Harley Countdown to Daytona Google Gadget and I can find a Starbucks and arrange a meeting at the closest one thanks to the "Meet Me at Starbucks" gadget.

Whether it's RSS feeds from your site or blog, gadgets and apps, an offer via Twitter, or basic opt-in, relevant and respectful e-mail, this is where it's at - permission marketing. Finding fans and letting them participate on their terms. I love it. I'm much more likely to learn about new Patagonia Spring products through my Facebook feed or their catalog (which is the original permission marketing vehicle) than through print or TV. If I have a meeting with someone, how much easier is it to set something up through Starbucks - I now know where one is that works for everyone involved in the meeting and can schedule it. And the cost. The cost! It doesn't reach 600 million Americans (which is impossible since there are only 300 million in the US but that's what reach and frequency from your media team or the pass-along rate from your PR team will claim) but it's impactful, relevant, respectful and cost efficient.

So to Scott B., Debbie G., Katia H. and Sean S., keep the Harley interactive goodness coming. And start sending me more gadget content and more Facebook news feeds. After all, I'm offically a fan. :)

A Few Remedies to Avoid becoming a Commodity

So my last post was on how ad agencies are in the commodity business. I’m not sure how to fix the dinosaur Y&R’s, DDB’s and Leo Burnett’s of the world. I suppose the best course for them is a continued slide into irrelevance (along with the holding companies) so that something new and great can be built out of their ashes.

But as promised, here are a few things I would do if I was starting an agency or running a small- to mid-size one:

1. Find a niche. Be the best at online community-building or the only place to call for luxury goods marketing. If you are charged with a crime you don’t want a jack-of-all-trades lawyer. You want the best criminal trial lawyer you can get. If I am running a new museum, I want the expert in museum marketing and if I’m doing search marketing I want someone who knows that space as good or better than anyone else (in this case a small agency, Overdrive, in Boston). This means not pitching any piece of business that comes along. In order to stand for something you have to make choices.

2. Talk to your customers and your non-customers. How do they honestly view you? What you do. How you do it. How you communicate it. I don’t recall a single time anyone at the ad agency I worked at asked current clients or non-clients regularly to provide an honest assessment of the agency and I was never asked by my agencies how I viewed them. You can’t change or improve if you don’t know what your target audience thinks. What’s the first thing agencies recommend when taking on new business? Talk to the client’s target audience.

3. Go strong or don't go at all. If you’re going to truly be media-neutral then make sure you hire and structure yourself accordingly. Don’t hire one direct mail expert and say you offer direct mail expertise. Did you hire production people that know the intricacies of it? Data mining experts? DM copywriters? Are your departments structured to reflect neutrality or are the deck chairs just rearranged on your Titanic.

4. Focus on business results. Hold yourself accountable. Make sure everything you do is tied to results. If the client is being vague, demand clear objectives and how they'll be measured because it protects you and them. If not, don't be surprised when regime change includes you. The point that Morris Hite's quote gets to is that advertising doesn’t exist to drive awareness or win awards.

5. Don’t blame the client for “not letting you.” If you have the greatest idea and it ties back to objectives and business results, then it’s your duty to convince them. If afterwards you were wrong, admit it. If you were right, tout it. If they continue to not “let you,” fire them. They’re only hurting your agency’s brand.

6. Start innovating. The industry is super ripe for this – new business models, new methods, new communication vehicles. If business is a spear, traditional marketing communications is the tip. Agencies have moved back from the tip a bit, into below-the-line marketing communications. Agencies need to move further back into new product/service development, branding environments, and more. This is where real value is today and in the future.

What do you think? Am I on track, way off or missing anything?

Also, Scott asked in my last post who I think are the half-dozen or so agencies that are doing things right and stand for something. In no particular order:

- R/GA - They're interactive, good at it and aren't pretending to be something else.
- Crispin Porter - Trite response, but like it or not they stand for something. They decided to solve problems in new ways that are now taken for granted.
- Zimmerman - They know retail and they are interested in linking to results.
- Anomaly - They're taking a fresh approach to the industry with business models, innovation of offerings, etc.

Any other agencies you're impressed with?

My path to the Institute of Design

Today is the second day of the Fall recruitID, where great companies from all over attend. It’s a fantastic opportunity for students to meet with companies and design consultancies. One question I’ve been asked during interviews is how I ended up at ID. I have been meaning to write on this every since Jamey commented on this blog a few weeks ago.

Jamey wrote:

“Jon - 
David Armano turned me on to your blog. I'm facing the same dilemma it seems you have gone through. I'm considering the my career and agree that design is key to the future of business for innovation and development. I've been exploring MBA versus MDes and will be looking at the MDM program you're involved with. As a fellow Milwaukeean, it looks like Chicago is the location that is leading the way via IIT or Kellogg to achieve that type of education.
I'll be curious to follow your posts and get a better idea of how you reached the decision to go the MDM route and what you feel the future value for you and your career will be.”

So I thought I would share my “journey” to the world of design thinking. Here it goes.

I was working at Cramer-Krasselt as an ad account executive in 2004. At the time, the agency was working on a lot of TV and print and I felt there had to be better ways to engage people than shouting to them through TV spots and cluttered magazines. Media fragmentation was making “mass” media less massive and as you know it’s only getting worse. The end was coming for the Advertising Industrial Complex.

I was working on the WD-40 Company account and we were doing some fantastic work on their core hardware products – WD-40, Lava and 3-IN-One oil. Starting with a clean slate, we went from ideation sessions and concept evaluation to ethnographic research, prototyping through marketing communications program execution. It was incredible! We developed with WD-40 the Smart Straw, solving the number one customer complaint of losing the little red straw, the Lava Pro line and 3-IN-One Professional. There was nothing that got me jazzed like walking through a Lowe’s or Home Depot and seeing a customer putting a product I helped bring to life into their shopping cart.

I came across Seth Godin’s Purple Cow in the Fall of 2004 which helped generate more interest for me. If you haven’t read it, the premise is largely based on the idea that you can’t just yell out marketing messages about a product anymore. You have to build the marketing into the product, make it remarkable from the start.

I got the opportunity to join Harley-Davidson and felt that working on the client side for a while would give me the opportunity to implement some of this thinking since I would be looking at the full business rather than just touching the marketing communications slice of the pie.

I kept reading and talking with people about design and innovation and then in Spring 2006 attended the Wisconsin Innovates conference where Tom Peters was the keynote speaker. During a breakout session I asked Tom, a frequent critic of MBA programs, what his thoughts were on going back to school for an MBA, for design or to keep working. His recommendation was to stay in the workforce and do something remarkable or, if I wanted to go back to school, that something unique like design would be the way to go because you learn to approach problems differently and find solutions in other ways.

That sealed it for me. Here are Tom and I after the breakout session. Kinda cool I got a picture with him. I'm on the left. :)

I had read an article about ID by Bruce Nussbaum in BusinessWeek the year before and started researching schools that taught design with business and only found a couple – ID and Roger Martin’s Rotman School of Management – that really intrigued me.

So it took me a year from talking to Tom Peters to get up the nerve to apply to ID and then take the risk of quitting my job to do something I was passionate about.

And it’s been so super worth it. I’ve been able to interview with companies and design consultancies that get it and have been doing this for years. They understand that all the touchpoints that have been ignored for decades while mass media was the focus are where you create and reinforce brands – product/service development, environments like retail locations, employee dress and signage, interactive, packaging, collateral. All based on insights derived from user-centered research.

So that's my long-winded story, what's yours? Were you always in design? Are you just now getting into it? Are you still in the exploration phase?

Akon and the Essence of Brands

While I’ve always appreciated the power of brands, working for Harley-Davidson brought that to a whole new level for me.

In the book Results-based Leadership a Harley-Davidson executive is quoted as saying, “What we sell is the ability for a 43-year-old accountant to dress in black leather, ride through small towns and have people be afraid of him.”

That’s a clever, simple statement but it’s so much more powerful than that. The passion goes beyond tattoos, leather and customized bikes. There is a community around the brand that is incredible as I luckily got to witness at a dozen rallies in the last couple of years. I don’t know of any other product that brings people together like Harley, where an attorney or investment banker can talk bikes with an hourly worker at Home Depot and any differences in class and status and attitude disappear. It’s just two guys talking about what they love, excitedly explaining about new pipes, a custom paint kit, or a great strip of road to ride.

The music I listen to covers a full range and I’ve been listening to Akon tonight while doing some schoolwork. Akon’s hooks are incredible. They grab you right away and get you tapping your foot.

A brand’s essence, the passion people feel about it, is the hook. Car designer Freeman Thomas, who created the Audi TT and the VW Beetle, said, "The Prowler makes you smile. Why? Because it’s focused. It has a plot, a reason for being, a passion."

So in thinking about your brand, ask what the hook is. If a potential customer comes across your brand will she or he start tapping their foot? Is it clear to them what your reason for being is? Are they into it right away? If not, the brand either has no reason for being or it's not (or no longer) being defined in terms they care about. And that can't be resolved with a bunch of ads. You have to dig in there, pull the song apart, rediscover why it was created to begin with, and then lay the track down again. Not easy but it's been done before.

Thoughts on Marc Gobe’s Presentation, Part 1

Marc Gobe’s presentation during lunch today covered the importance of emotional branding using case studies from his consultancy and references from his new book, Brandjam: Humanizing Brands through Emotional Design. Toward the beginning of his presentation, he had a slide that read,

“Emotional branding is about moving from commodity to experience. Brands can create growth and relevance with consumers. Market share to mindshare.”

He provided a few examples of brands that are commodities and brands that have moved that commodity category into experience and emotion. These included Ivory soap vs. Bath & BodyWorks and Folgers vs. Starbucks.

A couple years ago I came across an AdAge article by John Battelle that basically says:

“Don’t fall victim to Old Railroad Disease - you thought you were in the train business while upstarts created new methods of transportation.”

When I read Battelle’s article I spent some time listing what I thought were Old Railroad companies (Marc’s commodity brands) and the disruptors/innovators (Marc’s experiential and emotional brands). The idea that CSX should have been UPS or Union Pacific should have become Delta.

Here is the list I made:

Corner coffee shops / Starbucks
FM radio / Sirius satellite radio
Compact discs / Apple iTunes and iPod
Ringling Bros. / Cirque du Soleil
American Airlines / JetBlue
Macy’s / Target
Hoover / Dyson
Palmolive / Method
GMC Envoy / Toyota Prius
Safeway / Whole Foods
Blockbuster / Netflix
Visa / PayPal
Allstate / Progressive
H&R Block / TurboTax

There are tons more examples. Pretty much anywhere you find large, cumbersome, risk-averse companies (just scan the Fortune 500) you’ll find natural opportunities they missed (Blockbuster and NetFlix), or outright passed on (Hoover and Dyson). What are other examples? Are they thinking they are in the train business or the transportation business? Curious what you think.

Marc Gobe presenting at lunch

As an example of the great opportunities at ID beyond the classroom, I'm sitting in the 6th floor lecture room awaiting a lecturette with Marc Gobe of world-class branding and design firm Desgrippes Gobe where he'll be presenting and holding a Q&A with students.

I have a dozen or so documents, quotes and manifestos that were posted on my office at Harley and one of them was a PDF designed by former Cramer-Krasselt design head Sam Lutze, distilling Marc's Ten Commandments for Transforming Brands in a Consumer Democracy.

These are the kinds of extracurricular opportunities I drool over - meeting and hearing from top-notch designers and brand strategists.

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.