Campbell on Branding and Innovation

Don Norman Lectures at ID

Another example of the great opportunities at the Institute of Design - Design guru, consultant and author Don Norman spoke during lunch today for ID's lecturette series.

Don has written several classic books including The Design of Everyday Things and Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things. If you haven't read him, get on it!

His lecture today was refreshing - no PowerPoint presentation, simply an introduction at the beginning that he enjoys thinking through new ideas and wanted to share these topics in the presentation rather than reflecting on what he's already written and covered. And with that he spoke for 1-1/2 hours on service design and operations with great humor and insight.

The overarching topic was that service design is the same as what the business world calls "operations" and that there is so much opportunity in this area. Operations, though, doesn't get this yet. Business-driven operations mostly focuses on optimization and efficiency in driving down costs but this is so often done in silos with short-term profits in mind, leaving huge opportunity to optimize what's most important - profits - by looking at areas for designing meaningful experiences that improve long-term customer retention in the front stage of the service and enhancing the many employee-to-employee interactions in the back stage.

As Seth Godin has also criticized, take a look at any big company's call center operations. Customers are actively engaging with you, a rare commodity in today's media-fragmented, cluttered market, by calling your employees. And the metrics that drive success for this "cost center" are centered around getting you off the phone as quickly as possible. To top it off, the issues raised by them are often opportunities which, predictably, are ignored. Actually, not ignored as that would mean they actually are forwarded to departments and people who can act on them. They just go into a hole.

At any rate, some of the questions Don raised include:

"How can you design a service so when a person wants service you're right there for them, but when they want to be left alone they're left alone?"

For service, citing Disney theme parks as an example, "waiting lines are necessary but how do you make it feel like part of the game?"

A couple of great quotes from the lecture:

- Regarding communication between humans and machines today: "Two monologues are not a dialogue."

- Regarding the ability to solve problems and the importance of first asking the right questions, which design can help do: "As engineers you know how to solve problems. As MBAs you know ho to solve business problems. You don't know what the real problem is though."

I thought it was great and love how being in school exposes us to great thinkers, different ideas and exploration of topics. Very cool.

A Crazy Couple of Weeks at ID

Things have been crazy busy at school. I thought I'd recap the last couple weeks, giving a bit of insight for those considering going to school here:

Two weeks ago we held our Spring recruitID with a whole range of companies coming in to interview students for full-time jobs and internships. I was lucky enough to meet with nine organizations, both companies and consultancies, and came away impressed with them all. Interestingly, there was one company and two consultancies looking to bring innovation and design planning into their organizations for the first time and came to ID to talk to students, learn more about the program and see how they can dip their toe in the water as they look at adding these capabilities. This just helps reaffirm my decision to come to school here, as it reflects the increased interest and opportunity for design thinking.

Last week was the end of our first quarter, or A Session, so all of us were scrambling to wrap up projects and refine presentations for classes. For me, this included a super interesting project for my Design Analysis class focused on the growing car market in India and, in Larry Keeley's Strategic Design Planning, we presented killer recommendations on new functionality to the team at Chicago Public Radio's vocalo.org, a radical experiment in engaging younger people with pubic radio.

This week is Intersession, during which I took Physical Human Factors, taught by Stanford professor Bill Verplank, who is fantastic. Funny, engaging and smart as a whip. He's done some amazing work including at Xerox on the graphical user interface. He's also known for his drawings as he talks and presents, with one of his drawings on the cover of Bill Moggridge's book Designing Interactions. I received permission to write a post about a couple of his drawings he did for us in class, which will be upcoming.

And this morning I got to interview Matt Mason, author of The Pirate's Dilemma, for a project we're working on for the Design Strategy Conference, where Matt will be a speaker.

They keep you busy here at ID but I wouldn't have it any other way. Just recapping all this in a post makes me sit back with a grin on my face at the exposure, experience and knowledge I'm picking up.

How cool is that?!

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

Toolkits

I keep a running document of great quotes that I’m constantly adding to (31 pages so far). It includes quotes on everything from business to life. I recently re-read this one from Roger Martin:

I see creativity as central to design strategy. For me, design is centrally about creating options or possibilities that do not currently exist, not choosing between or among options that currently do. So at its heart, it is about the creation of something new. This highlights the difference between business administration and business design. Business administration entails the intelligent selection from among existing known options and the taking of action on the selection in question. Business design entails the creative production of a new option that is superior to the existing options.

- Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto

It got me thinking about a traditional business administration toolkit and a business design toolkit. I realize these aren’t absolutes, that there are MBAs taking design classes at places like Kellogg, and that designers use hard data as well. But, building off the above quote, I thought it would be an interesting exercise in the different approaches to uncovering problems and finding solutions.

Business Administration Toolkit vs. Business Design Toolkit
Focus groups vs. Ethnography
Statistically-valid surveys of hundreds of customers vs. Interviews of a handful of extreme non-customers
Free-for-all, unfocused brainstorms vs. Focused, calculated ideation sessions
Benchmarking your industry vs. Benchmarking unrelated industries
High-fidelity, functional prototypes shared with management vs. Down-and-dirty, iterative prototypes shared with end users
Mining of hard facts/data vs. Observation and uncovering of emotions and unarticulated needs

This is just a first pass but I’d love to build a thorough list of tools. What else do you think should be added or deleted?

Class projects at ID this semester

I apologize for not writing much in the last week. We’ve been crazy busy. Partly as an excuse but mostly because I think you might find it interesting, I’ve outlined the cool projects my teammates and I are working on. It shows the breadth, the real-world application and the problem-solving ability of design.

Design Planning Workshop
As I mentioned before, the DPW team of eight students is working on a project to help a major retailer better understand Generation Y and their shopping/retail habits. We were lucky enough to visit their headquarters last week where my teammates put together a killer presentation, we got a tour of the offices and were able to meet with members of various departments. This project is a full semester, starting with ethnographic research and ending with design concepts and broad strategic recommendations to the client.

Observing Users
For this class, our team of four chose car-sharing services, specifically IGO. We spent the first part of this semester-long class on learning and practicing the tools and methods of observation. The last ten weeks of the semester are focused on doing user-centered research for our project, gleaning insights and translating those into meaningful concepts.

Design Planning
For Design Planning, we broke into groups and were tasked with choosing a topic related to 19.20.21 – an initiative to address issues surrounding the 19 cities that will have 20 million residents in the 21st century, such as health, food, water, infrastructure, information flow, and more. My team of three is focusing on talent, specifically the migration of knowledge workers across cities and how a platform for tracking these knowledge workers will help cities cultivate, attract and retain talent. Attracting talent is the bedrock of a city, providing a solid tax base, new businesses and industries, culture and more.

Service Design
For this class our group of four students chose FedEx Kinko’s as our topic. We have two professors for this class, one is the vice president of innovation and concept development at McDonald’s, and the other is head of the service design practice at IDEO. They asked the class to find an opportunity to innovate an area within a service business and build that out. We feel FedEx Kinko’s has some great strengths to leverage and areas for improvement.

Of these projects, only the Design Planning Workshop is sponsored by a client. The others we selected. It’s great to apply what’s learned in the classroom and in the readings to the real world. Obviously in some cases we have to make assumptions but it allows us to put methods into practice, learn more, and also create portfolio pieces to share with prospective employers. I'm really getting a lot out of this and my appreciation for the power of design continues to grow. After all, what's great about these projects is the breadth. We're using design to understand Gen Y for a brick-and-mortar retailer; explore services with IGO and FedEx Kinko's; and how to improve the quality of life for people in megacities.

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?

And they're off...

Today’s the first day of B Session at ID. I had six classes in A Session but with the large number of big team projects going on I decided to take five classes this session:

Design Planning
Service Design as a Model for Business Design
Decision Making
Observing Users (semester-long class)
Design Planning Workshop (semester-long class)

I just had my first class for Design Planning taught by Larry Keeley, co-founder of Doblin, the innovation strategy consultancy. I have been super excited to take this class and Day 1 was right on.

Larry covered a bunch on the first day, talking about business planning and design, the field of innovation, the importance of professionalism and more, all in three hours that flew by.

Some quotes and insights he had include:

“I expect when you leave ID that you can go toe-to-toe with any CEO in the world and be confident in what you say.”

He explained that the challenge of planning is “to understand the future a bit sooner than everyone else.” This reminds me of the William Gibson quote, “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” I guess that then means design planners get first dibs.

That what we’re learning at ID can help us understand “what human beings are going through now, finding things that make people’s lives less rewarding in order to get some insights so that relatively soon you can produce something astonishing.”

He talked about the field of innovation and how “design is now an imperative for competitiveness.” He continued, “I would love to be coming at your career now – no one conveniently handed me a framework kit; there weren’t terminology norms; there were no metrics and diagnostic tools. You are coming at the field when some of the basic field bed has been tilled for you. It (the field of innovation) will also become more crowded, increasing the need for personal professionalism. If we are lucky, you and me, you will be the vanguard of a new profession. I think you are at a really lucky time, mastering this topic.”

Rather than limiting this class to design planning frameworks and some examples/case studies, Larry appears to be planning to teach us more broadly - a new way of thinking and approaching problems; the importance of moving beyond "winging it" and to be confident in what you know and what you don't know; how to conduct yourself with a high level of professionalism; how to better interact with corporate decision makers.

How do you not leave that class jazzed about design planning, innovation and all the possibilities in the world?!

I’ll keep you posted on all my classes.

Amazing Grace

BusinessWeek's latest issue includes its 2nd annual global list of design schools. I posted a comment online there that David Armano, digital experience guru at Critical Mass, must've come across, mentioning my blog on his Logic+Emotion site.

I had been following David's blog for several months when he wrote about our Harley Sturgis Google Gadget in August. Then he ended up attending ID's Design Research Conference in September where we got to meet and talk design and marketing for a little bit. I tend to be the enthusiastic type and I thought, here was another person from the business/marketing world who was speaking the language, who I felt was onto the potential! And that's such a huge benefit of attending ID and meeting people at conferences, lecturettes and the like.

I meet people who are as into this as me. Now, I know there are tens of thousands of design thinkers out there that have long known what I'm only now getting a full appreciation of but I'm pretty confident in saying that the majority of people in the business world (big manufacturing companies, small-town offices, traditional ad agencies, white-shoe professional services firms, and a lot in between) aren't there yet on valuing design as a complete gamechanger.

And to meet so many like-minded students, professors, colleagues and businesses that are friends of ID is exhilirating. I'm no longer limited to magazines, books and blogs for daily interaction (if reading is considered interaction) on design's potential on business.

In explaining to several friends how jazzed I am, I quoted Amazing Grace:

I once was lost
But now am found
Was blind but now I see

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.